WEB OF TERROR: Do Giant Spiders Truly Exist?

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Thoughts of giant spiders eating birds, creeping over your bed
at night, throwing hairs into your flesh, and sinking their
fangs into your flesh have invaded the human mind for ages.
Urban legends about these giant spiders flourish, but are they
really legends. Urban legends, after all, are usually based on truth,

(00:26):
many times largely exaggerated from story to story. Spiders, giant
or tiny, have played an integral part in the origin
of many cultures. For example, a Nansi the spider is
prominently featured throughout Africa as a trickster or a great god.
The Japanese believe that spider Woman can ensnare careless travelers,

(00:48):
and many southwestern Native American tribes believe that spider Woman
created the universe. Iktomi, the trickster spider of the Lakota,
is associated with the fan famous legend of the DreamCatcher.
In addition, the Greeks and Norse looked upon spiders as
connecting the past with the future and with weaving the

(01:09):
fates of people. Around the world. People have told legends
of giant spiders measuring up to five feet across, but
the largest monster spiders have been sighted mainly deep in
the Amazon jungle, the legendary location for lurking creatures such
as the poisonous dart frogs and anaconda snakes. Among the

(01:31):
monster spider sightings across the world, sizes and descriptions vary,
but on the extreme end of the spectrum, eyewitnesses have
described specimens up to five feet long. They're said to
have huge fangs and hairy bodies the size of small dogs.
The largest monster spiders are said to have fangs as

(01:52):
long as eight or nine inches. The predatory monster spiders
are said to viciously attack animals. In the small town
of San Rafael on the border of Columbia and Venezuela
apparently witnessed a giant tarantula creep out of the jungle
and into the village, where it caught a small dog.
The spider delivered a fatal dose of poison and then

(02:15):
dragged the dog into the jungle. It could just as
easily have been a human child. Monster spiders myth, urban legend,
or terrifyingly real. I Darren Marler, and this is weird Darkness.

(02:41):
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, something came

(03:03):
out of the river near New Richmond, Ohio. Those who
saw it said it was a kind of alien life
form and utterly indescribable. What was the strange creature that
has come to be known as Octoman Drivers were convinced
they had spotted the infamous Bluebell Hill Ghost on the
A two two nine and February of twenty nineteen. That

(03:26):
was the last time the ghost was spotted, and some
believe it wasn't really the ghost at all, but something else.
There are plenty of ghost stories in the Lake Placid area,
but probably the most unique and mysterious is the story
of the Lady in the Lake. So mysterious is this
ghost that it has inspired many authors and filmmakers, but

(03:49):
the true story is more creepy than any ghost story.
In the early days of those reaching the New World,
superstitions and unusual beliefs about others, even your own neighbors,
were commonplace. Most anyone could be accused of being a witch,
and I do mean anyone. Be thankful you weren't one

(04:10):
of the first settlers to live in America, but first.
Gigantic spiders are reported worldwide, Yet we have yet to
actually capture one to prove their existence or study them
to see how they grow so large. Is it possible
that giant spiders don't exist? Or could it be a
different creature we have yet to identify? We begin there now.

(04:34):
Bolt your doors, lock your windows, turn off your lights,
and come with me into the weird darkness. Monstrous spiders

(04:55):
of gargantuan size are perennially popular subjects in fiction b movies,
as well as in classic fantasy novels such as J. R. R.
Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit,
But could such beasts exists in reality? The current record
holder for the title of the world's largest spider is Rosy,

(05:18):
a twelve year old captive female specimen of South America's
goliath bird eating spider Theraphosa blondei. Rosie boasted a leg
span of eleven point two five inches, big enough to
cover a dinner plate, a body weighing six point one
seven ounces, which is as heavy as six house sparrows
Passer domesticus, and as big as a tennis ball, plus

(05:41):
a total body length of four point seven to five inches.
Although these are impressive statistics, they are far from monstrous.
In contrast, there are some remarkable, yet currently unresolved, modern
day reports on file hinting that certain truly astonishing anids
whose size very dramatically surpasses this latter species stature lurk

(06:05):
in shadowy zoological anonymity within various regions of our world.
The Kokoda Track or Trail is a predominantly straight, single
file foot thoroughfare running sixty miles through inhospitable terrain across
the Owen Stanley Mountain range of Papua New Guinea, and
from July nineteen forty two to January nineteen forty three

(06:28):
it was the site of a series of World War
II battles between Australian and Japanese forces known as the
Kokoda Track Campaign. In two thousand and one, Australian cryptozoologists
Peter and Debbie Hines revealed that it was also here,
while serving as a soldier in the Australian Army, that
the father of one of Debby's friends had a brief

(06:50):
but unforgettable encounter with a mystery mega spider. One day,
he had to take himself off into the scrub in
answer to a call of nature. While thus engaged, he
noticed he was crouched down next to a very large cobweb,
not the classic fishing net sort, but the fine snow
white cottony stuff that spread all over the ground and

(07:12):
tree trunks, etc. His eye followed it one way and
then the other. Seems it was very extensive, like ten
to fifteen feet either way. Then he noticed the spider itself,
only a foot or so away from his face. It
was a real horror. The body i e. Thorax and
abdomen he described as the size of a small dog

(07:33):
or puppy. It was colored jet black. The legs were
thick and hairy, but not as long as the classic
dinner plate tarantula type spider that owes its size to
the spread of its legs. This thing had more body
bulk than spread. Needless to say, he backed out of
there very slowly and carefully. In spiders, the body is

(07:56):
actually just the abdomen, not the thorax plus abdomen, although
it can look like that to layman unfamiliar with spider anatomy.
Because the thorax section is combined with the head yielding
the persona or cephalothorax, So, judging from the description, the
popun puppy spider must have been at least the size
of an adult chihuahua. This is not the only report

(08:19):
of a giant mystery spider encountered in New Guinea during
World War Two. During an interview with cryptozoologist Rob Morphy
of Americanmonsters dot Com on the US radio show Coast
to Coast AM a couple of years ago, a telephone
caller named Craig recounted how his grandfather, while serving in
New Guinea during World War II, encountered a monstrous spider

(08:40):
in a web that scared him so much he hacked
it to death with his machete. According to Craig's grandfather,
the spider measured and immense three feet from tip to tip,
and unexpectedly was not hairy like many big spiders are. Instead,
it was shiny and was emerald green in color. This
nightmarishra it was encountered near Port Moresby, the capital of Papa,

(09:03):
New Guinea. Yet even this monster pales into insignificance alongside
the horrifying Jabbafufi or great spider, claimed by the Baca
Pygmy tribe and also the local Bantu hunters to exist
amid the Central African jungles of Cameroon and also the
Democratic Republic of Congo formerly the Belgian Congo. This eight

(09:25):
legged terror was first brought to attention in two thousand
and one when cryptozoological explorer Bill Gibbons told of a
very frightening close encounter that had occurred one day back
in nineteen thirty eight. This was when explorers Reginald and
Marguerite Lloyd were driving along a jungle path in the
Belgian Congo's interior. Suddenly a figure stepped out onto the

(09:48):
path just ahead of them, resembling a monkey or a small,
stooped human. Reginald Lloyd stopped the car to let the
figure pass and was astonished to see that it was
a huge brown tarantula like spider with a leg span
of three to four feet. As he turned to grab
his camera, however, the giant spider scuttled into the undergrowth

(10:10):
and disappeared. In November two thousand three, during an expedition
to Cameroon seeking a mysterious long necked water beast called
the muchelimabembe gibbons mentioned to the Vaca Pigmies the Lloyd's
sighting originally recounted to him by their daughter Margaret. They
were familiar with such creatures and provided him with additional information.

(10:32):
The Baca claimed that these colossal spiders were once quite
common in the area, but are rarer now due to
modern deforestation there possibly, although one was reputedly sighted by
them as recently as June two thousand and three. They
used to construct hot like layers from leaves near the
epigmy's villages, and by spinning mighty webs between adjacent trees

(10:55):
with trip lines running across game trails, they ensnared and
devoured victim as sizeable as duiker or small antelopes. Moreover,
they were said by the Baca to be powerful and
venomous enough to kill humans too, but are themselves killed
by the pygmies if encountered by them. The Jabafufi supposedly
lays white, peanut sized eggs, from which yellow spiderlings with

(11:19):
purple abdomen emerge, turning brown as they mature. Reports of
comparably massive spiders have also been recorded from the rainforests
of Venezuela in South America. In two thousand and eight,
the American television series Monster Quest sent tarantula expert Rick C.
West to investigate such stories in the field via a

(11:40):
short filmed expedition to some Venezuelan jungle villages near the
Orinoco River and the border with Columbia. During his three day, fouray,
he was accompanied by a team of local helpers and
an experienced Amazon guide, Juan Carlos Romerez, who had worked
here for over twenty years. West began his quest by
visiting the village of San Rafael de Mantoir. Here, one

(12:02):
villager attested that as a child, he had seen a
giant tarantula like spider capture a small dog from the
village and drag it off into the jungle. Its abdomen
was as big as a basketball, and when it reared up,
it was the size of a human. If such a
gigantic spider existed, and its fangs were in proportion to
the rest of its body, they would probably measure six

(12:24):
to nine inches long. Although such claims would incite considerable
scientific skepticism, Ramirez was convinced of the villager's veracity, stating
that they know the local fauna very well and would
not mistake something familiar such as a monkey or a
sloth on the ground for a giant spider. West and
his team also visited Pandari, a village deeper in the mountains. Here,

(12:48):
two inhabitants, Antonio and his son Simoni, spoke of a
small child who had disappeared, never to return, which had
been blamed upon giant spiders. Addition, so real as the
Pandari villager's fear of such creatures, they even engineer their
huts specifically to keep them out, building thatched roofs that

(13:09):
extend all the way down to the ground, thus yielding dense,
tightly inner woven barricades. On the third day of West's expedition,
they headed back into the jungle and found an extremely
large spider layer in the ground, inside which they placed
a videoscope. This revealed the presence there of a very
big tarantula, which they captured alive. Although nothing like as

(13:32):
sizable as the reputed chicken killing, dog, devouring child abducting
specimens feared by the villagers, it was roughly the same
size as the biggest tarantulas on record and was two
ounces when weighed inside a plastic specimen bag. Sadly, West's
expedition ended without finding conclusive evidence for Venezuela's fabled giant spiders. However,

(13:53):
he was sufficiently impressed by the size of their captured
spider to consider it possible that bigger one did exist
in the jungle, and stated that he planned on returning
to continue the search for one. In twenty eleven, British
cinematographer Richard Terry sought horse, killing, child abducting giant spiders
in Columbia's rainforest for the television series Man v. Monster.

(14:17):
He didn't find any either, but villagers claimed that these
dreaded beasts inhabited subterranean layers, opening onto the forest floor
via huge holes. On April eighth, twenty thirteen, American cryptozoologist
Craig Woolheater posted on the Cryptomundo website a fascinating communication
that he had lately received from an American correspondent publicly

(14:39):
identified only by their Cryptomundo username mister Maxima. This person
stated that their father in law claims that while serving
in the jungles of Vietnam during the Vietnam War as
part of a five man unit conducting scout work. There,
he encountered spiders with bodies the size of dinner plates
and with their legs yielding a total span of twenty

(14:59):
to thirt inches. These terrifying eractids were always spied near
to creeks or other water sources, and were so tough
that even after being shot by him and the other
men with their m sixteens and unloaded full magazines, they
were still moving around. One of the most startling giant
spider reports comes from Leesville in Louisiana, USA. According to

(15:23):
William Slayton, it was here, while walking northwards along Highway
one seventy one to church one cool night in nineteen
forty eight, that he, his wife, and their three young
grandsons had spied a gigantic spider, Harry black and memorably
described as the size of a washtub. It emerged from
a ditch just ahead of them and crossed the road

(15:45):
before disappearing into some brush on the other side. Not surprisingly,
the family never again walked along that particular route to
church night, nor is that the only report of a
giant spider in suburbia. On February eleventh to twenty thirteen,
Adam Byrd from Nottingham, England, shared the following remarkable, never

(16:05):
before publicized account on Facebook. It was related to him
by a local librarian, Sheila, who had encountered the spider
in question about twelve years earlier. One evening, Sheila was
driving along Nottingham's stone Bridge Road, on one side of
which was a farm still there today, and on the
other side a disused factory now demolished. As she approached

(16:27):
the factory, her car's headlights lit up what she thought
at first was a hedgehog crawling towards the factory site.
As she drove nearer, however, she realized to her horror
that it was a huge, hairy, tarantula like spider. Sheila
estimated that its body alone was the size of the
large dinner plate, and when the length of its legs

(16:47):
were added, she deemed its total width to be about
two feet. She continued to watch as it scuttled across
the road and through the fence into the factory. Then
she quickly drove away, But not surprisingly, the memory of
this spine chilling encounter has remained with her ever since.
So could immense spiders truly exist other than Leesville and Nottingham,

(17:12):
the areas where they have been reported, are all sufficiently impenetrable, inhospitable,
and little explored to be potentially capable of hiding some
notable zoological surprises. However, the fundamental problem when considering giant
spiders is not one of zoogeography, but rather one of physiology.
Their tracheal respiratory system, consisting of a network of minute

(17:36):
tubes carrying oxygen to every cell in the body, prevents
insects from attaining huge sizes in the modern world, because
the trichia could not transport oxygen efficiently enough inside insects
of giant stature. During the late Carboniferous and early Permian periods,
huge dragonflies existed, but back in those primeval ages, the

(17:57):
atmosphere's oxygen level was far greater than it is today,
thereby compensating for the tracheal systems inefficiency. Moreover, until quite recently,
prehistory offered a truly spectacular, fully confirmed super spider too,
the aptly dubbed Mega Rockney Servini, formerly described in nineteen
eighty from a three hundred million year old Upper carboniferous

(18:20):
fossil specimen discovered by Argentine paleontologist Mario Heunichan in the
Bajo de Lolese formation at San Luis, Argentina. Its body
measured roughly sixteen inches long, and it's estimated to have
possessed a leg span of some twenty inches. In two
thousand and five, Conversely, the identity of Megaakney as a
mega spider was challenged in a Biology Letters of the

(18:43):
Royal Society paper by Manchester University zoologist doctor Paul Selden
and Eunichan, who proposed that it had actually been a
very different calorate creature, not a spider, but rather a
sea scorpion or eurypterid. This identity has since been confirmed
exit Mega Arachneus a giant spider. Some of the modern

(19:03):
world's largest known spiders utilize a trachial respiratory system, whereas
smaller spiders employ flattened organs of passive respiration called book lungs.
Yet neither system is sufficiently competent to enable spiders to
attain enormous sizes based upon current knowledge at least, so
if a giant spider does thrive in some secluded, far

(19:26):
off realm, it must have a radically different, much more
advanced respiratory system, not just a greatly enlarged body. Interestingly,
there is a notable precedent for the development of a
novel respiratory organ among large land dwelling arthropods. The largest
of all such species living today is the coconut crab

(19:47):
Burgos latro, which sports a body length of up to
sixteen inches, a weight of up to nine pounds, and
a leg span of more than three feet. Indigenous to
various islands in the Indian and Pacific oace, Despite being
a crab, it is exclusively terrestrial. It cannot swim and
will even drown if immersed in water for over an hour,

(20:08):
and has a unique respiratory organ known as a bronchiostegal
lung that enables it to exist entirely on land. So
who knows if crustaceans, which are predominantly aquatic arthropods, can
achieve this in nature. May be spiders, which are predominantly
terrestrial anyway, have also achieved something comparable. Moreover, it has

(20:30):
suggested that perhaps some reports of so called giant spiders
are actually sightings of giant land crabs. The crabs are
very different in appearance from spiders do in no small
way to their instantly visible pinchers, and no such crabs
are known to exist in any of the regions from
which the giant spiders documented here have been reported. In

(20:51):
any case, all of this is sheer speculation and is
likely to remain so, unless, for instance, in the not
too distant few, a buck up pygmy should happen not
only to kill a jabafufi, but also preserve its body
afterwards and duly alert scientific attention to it. Then at
last we might have the long awaited solution to this

(21:14):
fascinating mystery, although arachnophobes might be more than happy for
it to remain unsolved indefinitely. When weird darkness returns, something
came out of the river near New Richmond, Ohio. Those

(21:35):
who saw it said it was a kind of alien
life form and utterly indescribable. What was the strange creature
that has come to be known as octoman? But first
drivers were convinced they had spotted the infamous Bluebell Hill
Ghost on the A two two nine in February of
twenty nineteen. That was the last time the ghost was spotted,

(21:57):
and some believe it wasn't really the ghost at all,
but something else that story.

Speaker 2 (22:03):
Is up next.

Speaker 1 (22:21):
Kent is home to some of the most spooky places
in the United Kingdom, and the county is renowned for
its ghost stories. From the famed Pluckley, which has been
known as the most haunted village in England, to the
ghost of Rochester Castle, there are many a tale to tell,
but perhaps most notoriously, Bluebell Hill, a main road which

(22:44):
runs between Maidstone and Medway, is one of Kent's spookiest locations.
Ghosts have often been spotted on the road, but hadn't
been for quite some time, more than twenty years ago.
In fact, until twenty nineteen. Most recent known sighting of
paranormal activity on the stretch of road came on February first,

(23:05):
twenty nineteen, when many were convinced they saw a spirit
on the A two two nine. Bluebell Hill was embroiled
in chaos on a Friday night after unexpected snow had
brought traffic to a complete standstill. Hundreds of cars were
left at the side of the road, with some abandoned,
leaving passengers including pregnant women and children, stranded for hours.

(23:28):
As pictures emerged of the carnage that had erupted during
a sudden downpour of snow at around five pm. One
in particular caught the eye of drivers and readers alike.
This one particular picture, which I have linked to in
the show notes for you, showed a blurry outline of
what looked to be a person, some say with a child,
looking over the busy traffic and standing next to the

(23:50):
central reservation. Not everyone was convinced it was a ghost,
and some said it was a distorted view of a
road sign illuminated by car lights. Some others were still
convinced it was a spirit. Either way, there are numerous
conspiracy theories surrounding Bluebell Hill. The most notorious and the

(24:10):
one many believe is in the picture from twenty nineteen,
is the appearent ghost of bride de b Suzanne Brown,
who was killed on the eve of her wedding in
nineteen sixty five. The twenty two year old was killed
with two friends and a road traffic accident near the
bridge over the Old Chatham Road the day before she
was due to get married on November nineteenth of that year.

(24:33):
The significance of this young woman's death was the reported
sightings afterwards and the similar pattern they carried. Most of
the reported sidings took place in the nineteen sixties and seventies,
but some of the last were reported. In nineteen ninety three,
four years after the accident, a man on his way
home to Rochester late at night saw two pedestrians walking

(24:56):
toward him, then suddenly disappeared. On another ocasion, he witnessed
the pedestrians again walking across the road. However, this time
a car drove straight through them. In nineteen seventy one,
James Skeen was driving home from work when a girl
in her twenties suddenly appeared in front of his car.
He gave her a lift to Chatham, but when she

(25:18):
got out, he said that she disappeared into thin air.
The bride is not the only ghost of blue Bell Hill.
Other motorists reported hitting a woman wearing a red scarf
near the robin Hood junction who stares intently at the
driver before disappearing under the bonnet. This could be a
young Rochester maid who was allegedly murdered in the early

(25:39):
twentieth century. The maid, named Emily Trigg, visited her mother
in blue Bell Hill every Sunday, and she was last
seen walking with a soldier on blue Bell Hill in
nineteen sixteen. In nineteen thirty four, a young woman named
Renee was riding home along blue Bell Hill on a
gloomy autumn's evening. Haunted Kent claims with quieter roads, she

(26:03):
attempted to freewheel down the hill before being confronted by
a dark mist. This, it said, made her appear to
hit something solid and caused her to fall off the bike,
but when she got up and dusted herself off, there
was nothing in sight. It was that same year, on
a cold winter's night, that a man was traveling home

(26:23):
when he saw a young woman standing in the middle
of the road. He stopped and offered her a lift.
She asked to be taken to Church Street, close to
the cemetery. As they approached Church Street, the man turned
around to speak to her, but she had disappeared. Some
years later, in nineteen ninety two, three drivers reported hitting

(26:43):
someone who ran into the road at night, but there
was no evidence or a body to be found. Coach
driver Ian Sharp fifty six saw the ghost only just
over a week before the anniversary of the car crash.
He told the son, I'd come out to the blue
Bell Hill slip road from the village coming down the hill,

(27:03):
I saw this woman and I thought, oh, she'll go back,
she won't come across. But then she just ran straight
in front of the car and I hit her on
the left side. She was looking at me all the time.
I honestly thought that I had killed her. You can't
imagine how I felt. I was so scared to look underneath,
but I knelt down and looked straight through. There was

(27:24):
nothing there Until twenty nineteen. The most recent sighting was
witnessed by a family who were driving in the area
in January nineteen ninety three. Haunted Kent said driver Malcolm
Maiden slowed up as he could see a figure standing
in the road. When the car got closer, they realized
it was an elderly woman wearing old fashioned, worn out clothes.

(27:46):
It said an air of malevolence surrounded her, and as
they approached the grotesque figure, her face contorted with anger.
She began to shake a bundle of twigs at the car.
When the car began to fill with an evil black fog,
the family sped homewards. The Ohio River and its many

(28:10):
tributaries are a hotbed of odd and occasionally dangerous cryptozoological activity,
but one of the weirdest creatures ever to have emerged
from their murky depths has got to be this hulking,
gray skinned quasi cephalopod, which at least five terrified eye
witnesses claim to have seen during the winter of nineteen

(28:31):
fifty nine. The world at large first learned about this
moist monstrosity on January twenty ninth, nineteen fifty nine, in
an article published in the Cincinnati Post and Times Star,
tantalizingly titled what is it? Monster churns up the Ohio
beneath it? The equally intriguing subheading read anyone missing an

(28:53):
indescribable monster that swims? Thus begins the fascinating and all
too shortt saga of the insidious yet little known indescribable octoman,
often and inexplicably lumped in with hairy hominid accounts from
the same region and era. This ostensibly amphibious beast was

(29:14):
first reported to Ohio's Clarmont County and New Richmond police
by an unnamed man who claimed that quote something came
out of the river unquote, approximately four miles from New Richmond.
According to the spookedye witness, the alien life form he
saw was utterly indescribable. Needless to say, police took this

(29:34):
anonymous report with a proverbial grain of salt, But they
changed their tune when a second concerned color, this time
a truck driver and route to Indianapolis, phoned from a
gas station located on Kellogg Avenue, near a bridge on
the Little Miami River. The trucker claimed that as he
drove from Mount Washington towards Cincinnati, he had spired an

(29:56):
unclassified identity unlike anything he had ever seen. In the
first of two stories published by the Cincinnati Post and
Times Star regarding this inscrutable creature, a dispatcher from Station X,
the code for one sergeant, and a radio operator housed
at Central Station and City Hall Cincinnati confirmed that the

(30:16):
voices of both witnesses were distinct. Of course, just because
local police were pursuing the case doesn't mean that they
took it seriously. In fact, another again unnamed officer sarcastically
speculated that this thing might be an alien. He was
quoted as saying, it really was a riot here. We
kept waiting for someone to say, take me to your leader.

(30:39):
Regardless of how amused some officers were by the rampant
monster reports. Most of the dispatchers who responded to the
witnesses calls, including one Frank B. Heisler, agreed that those
making the reports sounded legitimately shaken and sober, as if
this situation were not already strange enough. D After the

(31:00):
creature reports started filtering in, all of the street lamps
along Kellogg Avenue from Lunkin Airport to Coney Island, Ohio
were extinguished simultaneously. While many of the officers were disdainful
of the entire affair, some of their more diligent cohorts
were in the field legitimately concerned that what folks were

(31:20):
reporting was not a monster but a victim of an
automobile accident. The following day, on January thirtieth, nineteen fifty nine,
the Cincinnati Post and Time Star once again fed the
creature hungry public more details about the roving monstrosity. This
article was titled driver swears it happened River monster takes

(31:40):
a stroll on bridge. The piece went on to report
that high winds had caused the power outage, despite the
fact that the police had already revealed that the lights
were on two different circuits. They also stated that additional
reports of the monster came in early on Friday. The
January thirtieth article also included testimony from a man who

(32:01):
has identified simply as a scientist. The scientist asserted that
on the morning following the uproar, he was driving along
the Licking River, a tributary of the Ohio River that
flows into Kentucky, when something leaped on the bridge. That
same morning, or perhaps the night before, the accounts are
exasperatingly sketchy about correlating specific times and sightings. A young

(32:25):
woman claimed to have seen the thing in a creek
near the Fort Thomas pumping station near the Ohio River
in Kentucky. She was the first witness to compare the
creature to an octopus. Considering the lack of specific details
reported in local papers, it is difficult to discern just
what this witness saw that compelled her to compare it

(32:45):
to an octopus. Did the beast have tentacles, a bulbous
octopoid head, or both or additional attributes. Unless the eyewitness
comes forward, will likely never know for sure. Another unidentify woman,
who may or may not have been entirely serious, allegedly
shouted at a Cincinnati Post and Time Star reporter, we

(33:07):
saw that thing this morning. Now you're going to put
my name in the paper and call me a crackpot.
The same day, less than five miles away in Covington, Kentucky,
another woman who clearly saw the creature gave what is
by far the most thorough description of the creature in question. Sadly,
her story would not be published for nearly twenty years.

(33:28):
According to respected cryptozoologist Lauren Coleman, all public accounts of
this monster dried up until nearly two decades later, when
ufologist and bigfoot investigator Dennis pilches published a booklet titled
Bigfoot Tales of Unexplained Creatures in nineteen seventy eight. Pilchus,
a native of Rome, Ohio, who may have had access

(33:49):
to local witnesses, added some essential details regarding the creature
which were not covered in the newspaper accounts of the sightings.
Pilchis wrote that the woman from Covington saw the saying
bent over, and then she went on to describe it
with cellulite lobes running up its bare skull. This slimy, shuffling,
colossal mass of organic matter must have been a traumatizing

(34:12):
sight to behold. A testament to just how frightening this
brief flap was, especially to the children of the region,
was published in the Cincinnati Post and Time Star. In it,
they stated that an eleven year old phoned to ask
if the green men really are coming out of the
river in groups of twelve, as his teacher said they were.

(34:33):
By Saturday, the police said the phone calls had ceased
and that the monster has left town, but that declaration
might have been a little premature. In nineteen eighty two's
The Bigfoot Casebook, authors Janet and Colin Board report that
a motorist by the name of George Wagner claimed to
have seen a huge, two legged creature walking on a

(34:55):
bridge over the Ohio River sometime in February of nineteen
fifty nine near Covington, Kentucky. One can only assume that
this was early in February. With that final report, the malformed, hairless,
tendril bearing bipedal behemoth seemed to have vanished off the
face of the earth, or perhaps just slipped back into

(35:17):
the hole into the muddy depths of the Ohio River
or one of its seemingly innumerable tributaries. Just waiting for
a time when it can rise again to recavoc In
the thick of a monster panic, the Claremont County dispatcher
Heisler speculated that the eyewitnesses might have seen a tree
bobbing up and down in the water. The tree bobbing

(35:37):
theory was shared by local dan lockman William Sprague. Sprague's
seemingly plausible driftwood supposition might help to explain the youthful
Lady's Fort Thomas surging octopus sighting, but it clearly does
not take into account the facts that neither trees nor
waves have feet, fat rolls, or tentacles, nor does it

(35:58):
address the testimony of the eye witness who saw it
jump onto a bridge. Is this some kind of amphibious
animal hitherto unknown to science that was able to burrow
deep into the river mud and hibernate undetected for inordinately
long stretches of time. This might explain why sightings are
so rare. But if the octoman were ecdothermic, with a

(36:20):
body temperature that fluctuated wildly depending on the environment, then
why would it have lurched out of the river in
the dead of winter. Descriptions of this ostensibly hybrid beast
are not entirely unlike those of the hairy, upright and
diminutive by comparison stephalapoden critter lovingly dubbed octosquatch by your

(36:40):
friends at American Monsters. This was allegedly seen by a
pair of eye witnesses in Spain, less than two years
after the Octoman encounters. That having been said, the fact
that this shaggy, big eyed varmint was said to be
just over three foot tall and smothered with a thick
coat of rust colored hair pretty much gates any further comparisons.

(37:02):
There's also the intriguing possibility that this lumbering aberration of
nature might be a combination of animal and plant tissue.
This is considered to be a biological impossibility, but there
are rare cases, such as the Florida moss Man, that
seem to indicate the very real possibility of human animal
plant hybrids lurking in the vast, uncharted swamps and other

(37:25):
remote water logged regions of the world. The fact that
this creature was seen by so many witnesses in such
a brief window of time has also led some to
speculate that it might just be a lost alien. They
surmised that the creature's craft may have crashed into a
larger body of water, and that the stranded thing, not

(37:46):
unlike poor Et, was just looking for a way to
contact home. The dearth of local UFO sidings that night,
combined with the lack of any reported air crashes in
the area, seem to pretty well wrap that theory up well.
More terrestrial minded folks, including a handful of crypto authors
like John Green, writer of Sasquatch, The Apes among Us,

(38:09):
and the aforementioned Colin and Janet Board, have lumped these
sightings in with more traditional bigfoot reports, but based on
the witness descriptions of a lopsided, hairless octopus like beast,
it would seem that this deduction is at best counterintuitive.
Another perhaps more plausible hypothesis is that this huge creature

(38:29):
might be linked to tales of the terrifying yet skittish
Loveland Frogman. The first sighting of these creatures occurred in
nineteen fifty five, when an unnamed businessman claimed to have
witnessed three bipedal, semi amphibious creatures assembled by the side
of a road that travels along the Little Miami River.
These strange beings stood between three and four feet tall,

(38:52):
were covered with leathery skin, and had webbed hands and feet.
Their most distinguishing characteristic, however, was their distinct frog like heads,
which the man claimed bore deep wrinkles. The report of
deep wrinkles on the foreheads of the Loveland frogmen invite
inevitable comparisons to the horizontal rolls of fat described by

(39:13):
the Octoman witness during the Covington encounter. Another frogman observer
claimed that the critters had pale, greenish gray flesh. This
also corresponds roughly to the description given by one of
the Covington witnesses. Alas all frogmen reports state that the
animals were no more than four feet tall. This stands

(39:34):
in stark contrast to the Licking River witness, who claimed
the thing that he saw was three or four times
the size of a man and much bulkier. Still, one
can't help but wonder whether or not the infamous Octoman
might possibly be at least a distant cousin to these
frog like fiends. Arguably the most dangerous Ohio River cryptid

(39:54):
on record is the notorious green clawed beast on August
twenty first, nineteen five fifty five, Naobi Johnson, while enjoying
a leisurely swim with a friend, had a terrifying encounter
with what she believed was a hideous creature beneath the
surface of the Ohio River near Evansville, Indiana. Johnson and
the other witnesses at the scene swore that she was

(40:16):
suddenly clutched around her knee and dragged beneath the waves
by a large clawlike hand, which left an imprint that
lasted for days. Unfortunately, Johnson never got a good look
at the creature, as it remained submerged in the murky
river water for the duration of the attack. Needless to say,
she never swam in the Ohio River again. While there

(40:38):
is no hard or even circumstantial evidence to link the
Octoman with the unseen creature that grabbed the recreational swimmer
in nineteen fifty five, it's difficult not to at least
entertain the possibility that this tentacled terror, seen both in
and out of the Ohio, Little Miami, and Licking Rivers
just four years later, may have been responsible for the

(40:58):
aquatic assault. On a more fanciful note, as I delved
deeper and deeper into this intriguing case, I began to
wonder if reports of this gargantuan gray varmint might have
inspired one of the coolest cinematic mutations ever to lurch
across a drive in movie screen during the halcyon days
of schlock'xploitation known as the nineteen seventies. I'm, of course,

(41:21):
referring to nineteen seventy one's not so classic movie Monster Octoman,
which was created by the imitable special effects guru Rick Baker.
No less, this bizarre bipedal offshoot of an octopus and
a human being both delighted and scared the heck out
of me as a kid when I caught it on
a Saturday afternoon creature feature up next. In the early

(41:48):
days of those reaching the New World, superstitions and unusual
beliefs about others, even your own neighbors, were commonplace. Most
anyone could be accused of being a witch, and I
do mean anyone. That story and more when weird Darkness returns.

(42:26):
The extraordinary delusion recorded as Salem Witchcraft was but a
reflection of a kindred insanity in the old world that
was not eliminated until its victims had been counted by thousands.
That human beings should be accused of leaguing themselves with
satan to plague their fellows and overthrow the powers of
righteousness is remarkable, but that they should admit their guilt

(42:51):
is incomprehensible. Albeit, the history of every popular delusion shows
that weak minds are so affected as to lose control
of themselves, and that a whimsy can be as epidemic
as smallpox. Such was the case in sixteen eighty eight
when the witchcraft madness, which might have been stayed by
a seasonable spanking, broke out in Massachusetts, the first victim

(43:15):
being a wild Irish woman named Goody Glover, who was
hanged in Boston, which within a few years involved the
neighboring community of Salem Village. The mischief done by witches
was usually trifling, and it never occurred to their prosecutors
that there was an inconsistency between their pretended powers and

(43:36):
their feeble deeds, or that it was strange that those
who might live in regal luxury should be so wretchedly poor.
Aches and pains, the blight of crops, disease of cattle
were charged to them. Children complained of being pricked with
thorns and pins. And if hysterical girls spoke the name
of any feeble old woman while in flighty talk, they

(43:59):
virtually said, entenced that woman to die. The word of
a child of eleven years sufficed to hang, burn, or
drown a witch. Giles Cory, a blameless man of eighty,
was condemned to the medieval pain Forte at Dour, his
body being crushed beneath a load of rocks and timbers.

(44:19):
He refused to plead in court, and when the beams
were laid upon him, he only cried more weight. The
shade of the unhappy victim haunted the scene of his
execution for years, and always came to warn the people
of calamities. A child of five and a dog were
also hanged after formal condemnation. Gallows Hill near Salem Town

(44:41):
witnessed many sad tragedies, and the old elm that stood
on Boston Common until eighteen seventy six was said to
have served as a gallows for witches and quakers. The
accuser of one day was the prisoner of the next,
and not even the clergy were safe. A few escapades
were made, like that of a blue eyed maid of Wenham,

(45:03):
whose lover aided her to break the wooden jail and
carried her safely beyond the Merrimack River, finding a home
for her among the Quakers, and that of Miss Wheeler
of Salem, who had fallen under suspicion, and whose brothers
hurried her into a boat, rowed around Cape Ann and
safely bestowed her in the witch House at pitchin Cove. Many, however,

(45:24):
fled to other towns rather than run the risk of accusation,
which commonly meant death. When the wife of Philip English,
Mary was arrested, he too asked to share her fate,
and both were, through friendly intercession, removed to Boston, where
they were allowed to have their liberty by day, on
condition that they would go to jail every night. Just

(45:46):
before they were to be taken back to Salem town
for trial, they went to church and heard the Reverend
Joshua Moody preach from the text, if they persecute you
in one city, flee unto another. The good clergyman not
only preached goodness, but practiced it, and that night the
door of their prison was opened, furnished with an introduction
from Governor Phipps to Governor Fletcher of New York. They

(46:09):
made their way to that settlement and remained there in
safe and courteous keeping until the people of Salem Town
had regained their senses when they returned. Missus English died
soon after from the effects of cruelty and anxiety. And
although the Reverend Moody was generally commended for his substitution
of sense and justice for the law, there were bigots

(46:30):
who persecuted him so constantly that he removed to Plymouth.
According to the belief of the time, a witch or
wizard compacted with Satan for the gift of supernatural power,
and in return was to give up his soul to
the evil one after his life was over. The deed
was signed in the blood of the witch, and horrible
ceremonies confirmed the compact. Satan then gave his ally a

(46:55):
familiar in the form of a dog, ape cat, or
another animal, usually small and black, and sometimes an undisguised imp.
To suckle these familiars with the blood of a witch
was forbidden in English law, which ranked it as a felony,
but they were thus nourished in secret, and by their
aid the witch might raise storms blight crops, abort berths,

(47:20):
lame cattle, topple over houses, and cause pains, convulsions, and illness.
If she desired to hurt a person, she made a
clay or waxen image in his likeness, and the harms
and indignities raked on the poppet would be suffered by
the one bewitched, a knye or needle thrust in the
waxen body being felt acutely by the living one, no

(47:43):
matter how far distant he might be. By placing this
image and running water, hot sunshine, or near a fire,
the living flesh would waste as this melted or dissolved,
and the person thus wrought upon would die. This belief
is still current among some affected by the voodoo superstitions
of the South. The witch too had the power of

(48:04):
riding winds, usually with a broomstick for a conveyance, after
she had smeared the broom or herself with magic. Ointment
and the flocking of the unhallowed to their sabbaths and
snaky bogs or on lonely mountaintops had been described minutely
by those who claimed to have seen the sight. Sometimes
they cackled and gibbered through the night before the houses

(48:25):
of the clergy, and it was only a Christmas that
their power failed them. The meetings were devoted to wild
and obscene orgies, and the intercourse of fiends and witches
begot a progeny of toads and snakes. Naturally, the Native
American Indians were accused, for they recognized the existence of
both good and evil spirits. The medicine men cured by

(48:47):
incantations in the belief that devils were thus driven out
of their patients, and in the early history of the country,
the Red Man was credited by white settlers with powers
hardly inferior to those of the Oriental and eu magicians
of the Middle Ages. The Reverend Cotton Mather detected a
relation between Satan and the Indians, and he declared that

(49:09):
certain of the Algonquin tribes were trained from boyhood as
poahs or wizards, acquiring powers of second sight and communion
with gods and spirits through abstinence from food and sleep
and the observance of rights. Their severe discipline made them
victims of nervous excitement, and the responsibilities of conjuration had

(49:30):
on their minds an effect similar to that produced by
gases from the rift in Delphos on the Apollonian oracles,
their manifestations of insanity or frenzy passing for divine or
infernal possession. When John Gibb, a Scotchman who had gone
mad through religious excitement, was shipped to this country by
his tired fellow countrymen, the Indians healed him as a

(49:52):
more powerful wizard than any of their number, and he
died in seventeen twenty admired and feared by them because
of the familiarity with spirits out of Habamacco or Hell,
that his ravings and antics were supposed to indicate. Two
Indian servants of the reverend mister Purvis of Salem, having
tried by a spell to discover a witch, were executed

(50:15):
as witches themselves. The Indians who took Salem witchcraft that
its worth, were astonished at its deadly effect, and the
English may have lost some influence over the natives in
consequence of this madness. The Great Spirit sends no witches
to the French, they said. Barrow Hill, near Amesbury was
said to be the meeting place for Indian powwows and witches,

(50:38):
and at late hours of the night, the light of
fires gleamed from its top, while shadowy forms glanced athwart it.
Old men say that the lights are still there in winter,
though modern doubters declare that they were the Aurora borealis.
But the belief in witches did not die when the
Salem people came to their senses. In the maa Mac Valley,

(51:00):
the devil found converts for many years after. Goody Mose
of Rocks Village was thought to have sant a beadle
to disrupt a nearby party. The beetle flew into the
faces of the guests, relentlessly, buzzing its wings angrily. Finally,
one of the partygoers swatted the insect and crushed it
with his foot. At that very moment, Goody Mose, who

(51:22):
had a sinister reputation, fell down the stairs in her house.
Goody Sloper of West Newbury, who had a reputation as
a witch, went lame after a man struck his axe
into the beam of a house that she had bewitched. However,
she later redeemed herself when she rescued two people from
drowning in the river. Goody Witcher of Amesbury, whose loom

(51:45):
kept banging day and night after she was dead, Goodben
Nichols of Rock's Village, who cast a spell on a
neighbor's son, compelling him to run up one end of
the house along the ridge and down the other end,
troubling the family extremely by his strange seas Susie Martin,
also of Rox Village, who was hanged in spite of
her devotions in jail, but not before the rope moved

(52:08):
so much that it could not be tied for some time.
The hill below eastern Pennsylvania called Hexin Cup, which means
witch's head, was described by German settlers as a place
of nightly gathering for weird women who whirled about its
top in linked dances and sang in deep tones mingled
with awful laughter. After one of these women in William's

(52:33):
Township had been punished for enchanting a twenty dollars horse,
their celebrations were held more quietly. In Newburyport, good wife
Elizabeth Morse was accused of witchcraft in sixteen seventy nine
by neighbors who had grudges against her. One neighbor even
claimed that she made his calves dance on their hind
legs and roar. They also said she had baskets and

(52:56):
pots that danced through her house and had been seen
flying about the sun. She was sentenced to death, but
ultimately pardoned by the Governor Juan Perea of San Mateo,
New Mexico. Would fly with his chums to meetings and
the mountains in the shape of a fireball. During these sallies,
he left his own eyes at home and wore those

(53:17):
of some brute animal. It was because his dog ate
his eyes when he had carelessly put them on a table,
that he had always afterward to wear those of a cat.
In the eighteen hundreds, an old woman who lived in
a hut on the palisades of the Hudson River was
held to be responsible for local storms and accidents. As
late as eighteen eighty nine, two Zuni Indians were hanged

(53:40):
on the wall of an old Spanish church near their
pueblo in Arizona, on a charge of having blown away
the rain clouds in a time of drought. It was
held that there was something uncanny in the event that
gave the name of Gallows Hill to ineminence near Falls Village, Connecticut,
for a strange black man was found hanging dead to
a tree near its top one morning mall Pitcher, a

(54:03):
successful sorcerer and fortune teller of Old Lynn, Massachusetts, has
figured in obsolete poems, plays, and romances. She lived in
a cottage at the foot of high Rock, where she
was consulted not merely by people of respectability, but by
those who had devilish schemes too, and who wanted to
learn it advanced the outcome of their designs. Many a

(54:26):
ship was deserted at the hour of sailing because she
boded evil of the voyage. She was of medium height,
big headed, tangle haired, long nosed, and had a searching
black eye. The sticks that she carried were cut from
a hazel that hung about a brook where an unwetted
mother had drowned her child. A child who went to

(54:47):
her for news of her lover lost her reason when
the witch, moved by a malignant impulse, described his death
in a fiercely dramatic manner. One day, the missing ship
came bowling into port, and the shock of joy that
the girl experienced when the sailor clasped her in her
arms restored her erring senses. When Malpitcher died, she was

(55:09):
attended by the little daughter of the woman she had
so afflicted. John or Edward Diamond, grandfather of Malpitcher, was
a benevolent wizard. When vessels were trying to enter the
port of Marblehead, Massachusetts, in a heavy gale or at night,
their crews were startled to hear a trumpet voice pealing
from the skies, plainly audible above the howling and hissing

(55:31):
of any tempest, telling them how to lay their course
so as to reach the smooth waters. This was the
voice of Diamond, speaking from his station miles away in
the village cemetery. He always repaired to this place in
troublous weather and shouted orders to the ships that were
made visible to him by mystic powers as he strode

(55:51):
to and fro among the graves. When thieves came to
him for advice, he charmed them and made them take
back their plunder, or caused them to tramp helplessly about
the streets bearing heavy burdens. Old Mammy Red of Marblehead,
a notorious witch, could curdle the milk as it came
from the cow, and afterward transform it into blue wool.

(56:15):
She had the evil eye, and if she willed her
glance or touch, could blight like palsy. It only needed
that she should wish a bloody cleaver to be found
in a cradle to cause the little occupant to die.
While the whole town ascribed to her the annoyances of
daily housework and business. Her unpleasant celebrity led to her

(56:36):
death at the hands of her fellow citizens, who had
been worreted by no end of queer happenings. Ships had
appeared just before they were wrecked, and had vanished while
people looked at them. Men were seen walking on the
water after they had been comfortably buried. The wind was
heard to name the sailors doomed never to return. Footsteps

(56:56):
and voices were heard in the streets before the great
were to die. One man was chased by a corpse
in its coffin. Another was pursued by the devil in
a carriage drawn by four white horses. A young woman
who had just received a present of some fine fish
from her lover, was amazed to see him melt into
the air, and was heartbroken when she learned next morning

(57:19):
that he had died at sea. So far away at Amesbury,
the devil's power was shown by the appearance of a
man who walked the roads, carrying his head under his arm,
and by the freak of a windmill that the miller
always used to shut up at sundown, but that started
by itself at midnight. Evidently it was high time to
be rid of Mammy Red Margaret Wesson. Old Meg lived

(57:45):
in Gloucester, Massachusetts, until she came to her death by
a shot fired at the siege of Louisbourg, five hundred
miles away in seventeen forty five. Two soldiers of Gloucester,
while before the walls of the French town, were annoyed
by a crow that flew over and around them, cawing
harshly and disregarding stones and shot, until it occurred to

(58:07):
them that the bird could be no other than Old
Meg in another form, and as silver bullets are in
esteemed antetote for the evils of witchcraft, they cut two
silver buttons from their uniforms and fired them at the crow.
At the first shot, its leg was broken. At the
second it fell dead. On returning to Gloucester, they learned

(58:27):
that Old Meg had fallen and broken her leg at
the moment when the crow was fired on, and that
she died quickly. After an examination of her body, was made,
and the identical buttons were extracted from her flesh that
had been shot into the crow. At Louisbourg, as a
citizen of Newhaven was riding home, this was at the

(58:47):
time of the goings on as Salem, he saw shapes
of women near his horse's head, whispering earnestly together and
keeping time with the trot of his animal, without effort
of their own. In the name of God, tell me
who you are, cried the traveler, and at the name
of God they vanished. Next day, the man's orchards were
shaken by viewless hands, and the fruit thrown down. Hogs

(59:11):
ran about the neighborhood on their hind legs. Children cried
that somebody was sticking pins into them. One man would
roll across the floor as if pushed, and he had
to be watched lest he should go into the fire.
When housewives made their bread, they found it as full
of hair as food. At a city boarding house, when
they made soft soap, it ran from the kettle and

(59:32):
over the floor like lava. Stones, fell down chimneys and
smashed crockery. One of the farmers cut off an ear
from a pig that was walking on its hind legs,
and an eccentric old body of the neighborhood appeared presently
with one of her ears in a muffle, thus satisfying
that community that she had caused the troubles. When a

(59:53):
woman was making potash, it began to leap about, and
a rifle was fired into the pot, causing a sudden calm.
In the morning, the witch was found dead on her floor.
Yet killing only made her worse, for she moved to
a deserted house near her own, and there kept a
mad revel every night. Fiddles were heard, lights flashed, stones

(01:00:15):
were thrown, and yells gave people at a distance a
series of cold shivers. But the populace tried the effect
of tearing down the house, and quiet was brought to
the town. In the early days of the nineteenth century,
a skinny old woman known as Aunt Woodward lived by
herself in a log cabin in Menow Corner, Maine, enjoying

(01:00:36):
the awe of the people in that secluded burg. They
moved around but little at night on her account, and
one poor girl was in mortal fear lest by mysterious arts,
she should be changed between two days into a white horse.
One citizen kept her away from this house by nailing
a horseshoe to his door, while another took the force

(01:00:58):
out of her spells by keeping a ranch of round
wood at his threshold. At night, she haunted a big
square house where the ghost of a murdered infant was
often heard to cry, And by day she laid charms
on her neighbour's provisions and utensils, and turned their cream
to buttermilk. Uncle Blazedell hurried into the settlement to tell

(01:01:20):
the farmers that Aunt Woodward had climbed into his sled
in the middle of the road, and that his four
yokes of oxen could not stir it an inch, but
that after she had leaped down, one yoke of the
cattle drew the load of wood without an effort. Yet
she died in her bed when weird darkness returns. There

(01:01:49):
are plenty of ghost stories in the Lake Placid area,
but probably the most unique and mysterious is the story
of the Lady in the Lake. Possibly more creepy than
the ghost story, though, is the true events that inspired it.
Up next. On September twenty first, nineteen thirty three, Mabel

(01:02:31):
disappeared while rowing on Lake Placid. She was a successful educator,
creating and serving as the first dean to the New
Jersey College for Women at Rutgers, which was later renamed
Douglas College in her honor. Her family was about to
close up camp Onondaga for the season and head back
to New Jersey the next day when Douglas went out

(01:02:53):
for a paddle. She wasn't seen again for just a
week short of thirty years. Scuba divers found Mabel's body
on September fifteenth, nineteen sixty three, in the depths of
Lake Placid near Pulpit Rock, named so because it looks
like a clergyman could preach from the top of it.
The first two divers followed Pulpit Rock as it plunges

(01:03:16):
straight down through the depths of the water, finding an
old guide boat on a rock shelf, then continuing down.
As they approached the bottom one hundred five feet below
the surface, they saw what they thought was a mannequin
put there as a practical joke. It wasn't until one
of them grabbed its arm and it detached from the
rest of the body that they realized it was human,

(01:03:40):
perfectly preserved due to the depths and cold of the water.
The chemical makeup of the water and the conditions were
just so that the outer layers of tissue of Mabel
Douglas's body slowly started to turn into soap, giving her
skin a hard, waxy white look that gave the divers
the initial impress that she was made of plastic. She

(01:04:02):
lay on her right side with her legs together in
a crouching position, and she looked like she had just
died five minutes ago. The divers noticed a rope tied
around her neck, which was attached to an anchor. One
of the divers, Air Force staff Sergeant Richard Niffenegger, motioned
for the other, eighteen year old Jimmy Rodgers, to stay

(01:04:22):
with the body as he returned to the surface, where
he intended to get rope to mark the spot where
the body lay so police could investigate it. As Jimmy
waited with the body in the deep, dark water, though
he grew disconcerted by the way Mabel looked like she
could wake up at any second, he decided to bring
her body to the surface himself. As he rose through

(01:04:43):
the water with her, Mabel's face disintegrated before the eyes
of the divers who were coming down to help Jimmy,
her arm, her other hand, and her head all fell
off in the process of getting her body out of
the water, and all that was left by the time
it was brought to the funeral home was a body
that resembled little more than a sculptor's rough clay form

(01:05:05):
of an unfinished human statue. According to the book A
Lady in the Lake, which was written about the incident,
it didn't take long for investigators to find out that
Mabel was the only person to have disappeared on Lake
Placid and never have been found. They also learned that
Mabel's husband had died and her son had killed himself,

(01:05:25):
and she had run into professional issues the year before
she died. Combined, those circumstances caused her to have a
nervous breakdown, and she spent about a year at a
mental health facility before her daughter brought her to their
Lake Placid camp for the summer. Years after Mabel's death,
her daughter Edith, also committed suicide following her own husband's

(01:05:47):
untimely death. With that background and the story that her
neck was tied to an anchor, many have drawn the
conclusion that she killed herself. Perhaps the idea of heading
back to New Jersey and figuring out how to enter
back into the real world was just too much for her.
Yet the coroner declared the official cause of death to

(01:06:07):
be accidental drowning. The type of boat Mabel was in
is notoriously unstable and dangerous for beginners, so there's always
the slight possibility that she slipped and fell, and somehow
she became entangled in the anchor's rope as she fell.
Whatever the true story is, the mental image of Mabel's
perfectly preserved body frozen in time for thirty years has

(01:06:30):
ignited the imaginations of many over the decades since it
was found. Bernard F. Connors, a retired FBI agent who
lived in Lake Placid at the time she was found,
wrote a fictionalized account of the story called Dance Hall,
which was published in nineteen eighty three. Connor's changed to
the fifty six year old woman to a younger one,
and he made the cause of death a violent murder,

(01:06:52):
but he kept the elements of the woman's body being
preserved in the water, only to be found decades later.
A movie version of Dance Hall is said to be
slowly making its way through the production process in nineteen
eighty five, George Christian Ortloff, another prominent local, published A
Lady in the Lake, an attempt at telling the true

(01:07:13):
story of Mabel Smith Douglas. In the end, he notes
several conflicting facts in the story that could lead people
to draw varying conclusions about how Mabel ended up at
the bottom of the lake, but he tends to lean
toward the suicide explanation. Thanks for listening. If you like

(01:07:37):
the show, please share it with someone you know who
loves the paranormal or strange stories, true crime, monsters, or
unsolved mysteries like you do. All stories in Weird Darkness
aren't purported to be true unless stated otherwise, and you
can find source links or links to the authors in
the show notes. The Ohio Optoman is from It'smith. The

(01:07:58):
Actuality of Enormous Arthur is by Carl Schucker from the
book Mirabilis a Carnival of Cryptozoology and Unnatural History, and
the introduction to this episode was provided by Unexplained Monsters
dot Com. The Ghost of Bluebell Hill is by Victoria
Chessum and Ben Ashton for Kent Live. The Lady in

(01:08:18):
Lake Placid is by Jess Collier for Lakeplacid dot Com.
American Witches was written by Charles Skinner, gathered and edited
by Kathy Weisser for Legends of America. And now that
we're coming out of the dark, I'll leave you with
a little light Proverbs thirteen, verse three. He who guards
his lips guards his life, but he who speaks rashly

(01:08:42):
will come to ruin. And a final thought, today is
the oldest you've ever been, and the youngest you'll ever
be again. So live life to the fullest today and
have no regrets. I'm Darren Marler. Thanks for joining me
in the weird darkness. Welcome to Marshport, Maine, a quaint

(01:09:14):
little coastal town preparing for their annual Winter Wonderland Festival.
But beneath the lights and holiday cheer, something evil is
stirring and it's not a mouse. When a mysterious package
arrives on the doorstep of veteran police officer Matthew Kleine
and his family's home, it seems at first like a

(01:09:34):
harmless holiday gift. However, there's no tag and no sender.
Inside lies an antique wooden advent calendar with strange engravings
and twenty four doors that each shelter something dark and unspeakable.
The line between reality and nightmare quickly becomes blurred as

(01:09:55):
Matthew races to figure out the calendar's origin and who
sent it. But as each door is opened and Marshport
is thrust into a sinister nightmare, Matthew realizes the terrifying
truth and is forced to relive the horrors from his
past that refuse to stay buried. The countdown has begun,

(01:10:16):
and once that first door is opened, there is no
turning back. We're Darkness presents Advent of Evil, a twenty
four episode audio saga beginning December first. Listen each day
for a new chapter through Christmas Eve, and if you'd
like to follow the story in print. The full novel
is now available in paperback and hardcover editions, as well

(01:10:39):
as on Kindle. Grab the novel now for yourself or
for someone else and be ready to follow along. December first,
and for a limited time only, you can also grab
an Advent of Evil gift back, including a signed copy
of the novel by the author Scott Donnelly, wrapped up
with an Advent of Evil bookmark, pen, highlighter, hot chocolate
Chai tea chocolates, a candy cane, and some horror stickers.

(01:11:04):
The gift pack is in limited supply, so act fast
if you want to take advantage of it. You can
find links to purchase the book or the gift pack
at Weirddarkness dot com, slash Advent of Evil. That's Weird
Darkness dot com slash Advent of Evil, and then be
ready as the first episode comes your way December first,

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang

Crime Junkie

Stuff You Should Know

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}WEB OF TERROR: Do Giant Spiders Truly Exist?

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang

Crime Junkie

Stuff You Should Know

All Episodes

WEB OF TERROR: Do Giant Spiders Truly Exist?

Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang