 ads heard during the podcast that are not in my voice are placed by third-party agencies outside of my control and should not imply an endorsement by Weird Darkness or myself. Stories and content in Weird Darkness can be disturbing for some listeners and is intended for mature audiences only. Parental discretion is strongly advised. Welcome Weirdos, I'm Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness. Here you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, the strange and bizarre, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and unexplained. Coming up in this episode... Margaret Allen was hanged to death, but it's the strange life she lived and the odd nature of her crime that still interests people in her case. 12-year-old Gabriel enjoyed playing games with an online friend, but when he borrowed less than $2 for an in-game purchase from this friend, then ignored his requests to continue playing, he found himself dying the most horrifying murder you can imagine. And despite law enforcement knowing who the murderer is, he's free now and no one knows where to find him. It is a brutally horrible story you do not want children in the room for. Being the victim of a stalker is terrifying, not knowing when or where the person might show up next or what they'll do to you when they do show up. But there are those who have an even more terrifying situation, where the stalkers follow them their entire lives and there's nothing they can do to stop it because the stalker is paranormal. But first, the 1725 newspaper headline read, Bloodsucker Devastates Village, and thus began a great vampire epidemic. We begin with that story. If you're new here, welcome to the show. While you're listening, be sure to check out WeirdDarkness.com for merchandise, to visit sponsors you hear about during the show, sign up for my newsletter and our contests, connect with me on social media, listen to my other podcasts like Retro Radio, Old Time Radio in the Dark, Church of the Undead, and a classic 1950s sci-fi style podcast called Auditory Anthology. Plus, you can visit the Hope in the Darkness page if you're struggling with depression or dark thoughts. You can find all of that and more at WeirdDarkness.com. Now, bolt your doors, lock your windows, turn off your lights, and come with me into the Weird Darkness. Even the least superstitious person in the world would not be able to ignore the headline Bloodsucker Devastates Village. But that was the news spreading like wildfire across the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the late 1720s. Mysterious epidemics had been linked to chilling reports that captured the imagination. Across language divides from poor villages to mighty imperial cities, whispers spread of long-buried corpses with fresh blood in their mouths, savage attacks and communities shattered by individuals thought to be deceased. The ingredients to this story sound familiar for a reason. Somewhat incredibly, two small-town calamities in what is now rural Serbia ignited a worldwide phenomenon. From Dracula to Edward Cullen, vampires all derive from the combination of folklore and coincidence that drove the world's first Bloodsucker craze. It started in 1725 in a tiny village called Kisilova, which is now Kisoljevo. Life was already hard for Kisilova's poor residents who endured harsh winters and had recently been occupied by the Ottomans. God seemed very far away among a slew of problems, all of which were about to show up in the form of a monster with a familiar face. Local Peter Blagojevic knocked on his wife's door and demanded she hand over his shoes ten weeks after he had died. That's the account that panicked villagers related to a military representative. Needless to say, he was a little skeptical, but what followed was no joke. Within days of Blagojevic's reported reappearance, eight villagers died after short, brutal illnesses. Supposedly, Blagojevic crept into their homes at night, laid on top of them and crushed the breath from their lungs, thus sealing their fate. It sounds like fiction, but the reaction of Kisilova's residents made sense at the time. Illness was a terrifying prospect after the village's ordeal of occupation and hunger, and a monster was easier to blame than God. After a heated debate, the whole of Kisilova decided to march to the graveyard and dig up Blagojevic's body. According to the amazed military representative, there was not the slightest smell of death. The face, hands and also feet and the whole body were so recreated that they in his lifetime could not have been more complete. And here comes the scariest part. Quote, in his mouth I did see fresh blood, which after the general opinion he had sucked from those killed by him. No one had a name for what this monster was, but what the villagers did next, perhaps prompted by medieval Balkan folklore about the walking dead, set the precedent for hundreds of vampire movies to come. They sharpened a stake and drove it through Blagojevic's heart. Witnesses said blood gushed from the corpse's mouth and ears, signaling an end to his brief reign of terror. A few years later, a highway man named Arnold Pale was entertaining the locals in his central Serbian village with tall tales about a Turkish vampire he'd known. The vampire had bitten him, he claimed, but not to worry. He'd taken precautions against infection by eating dirt from the vampire's grave. Garlic and holy water it seems had not caught on just yet. Despite Pale's efforts, his untimely death and a farming accident led him to rise from the grave as a vampire. His killing spree was even deadlier than Blagojevic's, with more than two dozen people dying within just a few months. As with Blagojevic, the villagers dutifully dug Pale up to be rewarded with another ghastly sight, the apparently recomposed Pale gasping as they drove a stake through his heart. These stories were certainly enough to make headlines and made for great folk stories, but Europe has been full of strange folklore for centuries, so why did these accounts take hold so thoroughly? The answer historian Gabor Klinigseh writes might be the clue to the vampire's lasting appeal. Medieval Europe had been preoccupied with witch trials. A few hundred years later, though, they'd lost some appeal. Vampires were distinctly more modern and therefore scarier, supernatural beings. And people only tangentially aware of the rise of technology and medicine, vampires seemed a plausible mystery for the new field of science. In other words, vampires represented what seemed weirdest and most frightening about the present for 18th-century peasants. Today, says author G.K. Hansen, they've become a tool for exploring oddities and unknowns in our ever-shrinking world. Series like Twilight and True Blood suggest that vampires have a whole other world that we humans don't know about, tantalizing possibility in our high-tech present. Vampires are a fertile playground, and once Stephanie Meyer let absurdity creep in, for vampires sparkle. People started finding it everywhere, Hansen says, noting that there's so much territory left unexplored. The undead might not be killing Serbian peasants anymore, but vampires will likely survive, stakes are not, to reveal more about the stranger side of the human imagination for years to come. When Weird Darkness returns, Margaret Allen was hanged to death. But it's the strange life she lived and the odd nature of her crime that still interests people in her case. That's up next. Are you a member of the Darkness Syndicate? The Darkness Syndicate is a private membership where you receive commercial-free episodes of the Weird Darkness podcast and radio show. Behind the scenes, video updates about future projects and events I'm working on. You can share your own opinions on ideas to help me decide upon Weird Darkness Contests and events. You can hear audiobooks I'm narrating before even the publishers or authors get to hear them. You also receive bonus audio of other projects I'm working on outside of Weird Darkness. You get all of these benefits and more, starting at only $5 per month. Join the Weird Darkness Syndicate at WeirdDarkness.com-Syndicate. On January 13, 1949, 42-year-old Margaret Allen was hanged at Strange Ways Prison, now the H.M. Prison Manchester. Not only did this make her the first woman to be hanged in the United Kingdom in 19 years, but the very circumstances of her life as well as the nature of the murder she committed has given her a unique place in Britain's forensic history. Born in 1905, as part of a very large family, she was the 20th of 22 children, Margaret apparently knew that she was different from an early age. Not only did she refuse to do female chores, preferring more masculine tasks such as shoveling coal and doing household repairs, she also hated wearing dresses. Instead, she insisted on more masculine clothing, the same as her brothers. While this would be much more acceptable today, her unbehavior made her into a virtual outcast as far as her family was concerned. Never having married, she embraced a completely masculine lifestyle, including cutting her hair short, wearing men's clothing exclusively and insisting on being called Bill instead of her given name of Margaret. She also told friends that she had undergone an operation to change her sex, something that was highly unlikely in that era, though a female to male sexual reassignment operation had taken place in the UK just two years earlier. Despite being largely estranged from her family, Margaret took her mother's death in 1943 especially hard. Not only did she begin smoking heavily, but she sought medical treatment for depression and anorexia. To support herself, Margaret, or Bill, worked as a bus conductor, though she eventually lost this job due to her tendency to strike passengers on the back of a head if they weren't seated fast enough. In any event, by 1948 she was in financial trouble. Not only could she not afford her rent or her electric bill, she apparently couldn't even afford cigarettes. This will become important later. That brings us to the events of August 29, 1948, when a neighbor, 68-year-old Nancy Ellen Chadwick, came to Margaret's door to borrow a cup of sugar. Chadwick was a wealthy widow with a reputation for being eccentric but largely harmless. Unfortunately Margaret considered her annoying, so they didn't get on particularly well. For reasons that aren't quite clear, Margaret viciously clubbed Nancy Chadwick to death using a coal hammer. She then placed the body in her cellar before going out with her only friend, Annie Cook. After sharing a couple of drinks together, Margaret returned home to deal with the problem of the body. First she poured great ashes on the face of her victim and then dragged the body outside to leave in the street nearby. She apparently hoped that the soot on Chadwick's face and the injuries to her head would convince police that she'd been a victim of a hit and run. When bus driver Herbert Beaumont found the body at 3 a.m. on the following morning he immediately called police who launched an investigation. Another bus driver insisted that he had passed by that same spot 15 minutes earlier and saw no body at the time. Since it seemed unlikely that Chadwick had been walking outside at that time of morning, they quickly dismissed the possibility of a hit and run. They also found the woman's purse floating in the nearby River Irwell, though all the money had been removed. Since Margaret Allen seemed to be taking a keen interest in the investigation, police came to question her about the death on September 1st. They quickly discovered blood stains on the inside of her front door as well as a shopping bag filled with great ashes in one of her closets. As she was being questioned, she confessed to the killing almost immediately but added that she didn't do it for the money, I was in one of my funny moods. She told them I just happened to look around and saw the hammer in the kitchen, then on the spur of the moment I hit her with it. She gave a loud shout and that seemed to start me off more and so I hit her a few times more. I don't know how many. Margaret later insisted that being unable to smoke had made her especially irritable. The fact that she was heavily in debt and that she had apparently been hoping to rob her victim seemed a likelier explanation, however. Though a murder would not ordinarily generate much interest from the press, many of the details of Margaret's life helped ensure that her case would receive international coverage. Virtually every newspaper played up Margaret's mannish appearance, including her refusal to wear female clothing and her previous claims that she had undergone a sex change operation. The papers also played up her spinster status, though Margaret largely remained silent throughout the trial. What was likely even more upsetting to her was that she was kept in a woman's prison, despite insisting she was a male. While in prison she only received one visitor, a woman named Anne Cook, though the exact nature of their relationship is still debatable. As for the trial itself, it was held on December 8, 1948 and only lasted five hours, given that Margaret had already confessed to the crime, there really wasn't all that much for the defense to do in her case. Though her lawyer, William Gorman KC, tried to argue for the insanity defense, the jury rejected that completely. They seemed completely swayed by the argument of the prosecutor, E.G. Roby, that Margaret's sole motive for the murder was robbering, and it only took 15 minutes to hand down a verdict of guilty. Then again, Margaret's wearing a man's suit for the trial, she insisted on that, probably worked against her as well. Once the verdict was in, the judge, Mr. Justice Sellers, sentenced her to be hanged. Despite a last-minute attempt to have the sentence commuted, including a petition with 162 signatures, the Home Secretary denied any reprieve, and Margaret's execution date was set for January 12. Though she had been cheerful at first, while still hoping for an appeal, her mood quickly changed when the prison governor told her her execution would go on as scheduled. At her final meeting with Annie Cook, Margaret told her not to come to the hanging but instead to go to the corner where they usually met at 9 a.m. at the hour of execution. Irritable to the end, Margaret kicked over her breakfast on the morning of her hanging, saying, I don't want it and no one else is going to enjoy it. Even worse, the prison refused to allow her to wear men's clothing to the hanging and she was forced to wear a prison dress instead. She was hanged at 9 a.m. on schedule by Alfred Peerpoint, assisted by Harvey Kirk. The only real mourner she apparently had was Annie Cook, who was seen crying at the corner where Margaret had asked her to wait. While Margaret, or Bill, was evidently a pre-operation transgender male, the fact that she lived in an era before such operations were widely available certainly made her life more difficult than it might have been. As it happens, the case of Christine Jorgensen only a few years later would help open the floodgates, though it would be 20 years before Sweden became the first country to allow people to legally change their sex. Despite there being no real indication that Margaret's transgender status played a role in her crime, she may well have been treated more harshly by the court as a result of her mannish appearance and general refusal to abide by the accepted sexual stereotypes at the time. It would take a very long time for these attitudes to change. Here's a story from one of our Weirdo family members, Brian Barnes, sent this banana, it's called Mysterious But Appreciative. In April 2010, my wife and I decided to purchase a beautiful home just outside of Milwaukee. This community was one of the earliest suburbs of Milwaukee and was home to some of the wealthier residents back in its day. Today it's still a community made up of middle-class residents, many of them being educators, first responders, or professionally unemployed. We chose this community because of the variety and beauty of the homes in the community. Many multi-story brick homes from the 1920s to the 1940s. Our home is a 1927 brick with stained glass and lead-pain glass doors and windows, hardwood floors, fireplace, and a grand staircase. It was a beautiful home and my wife and I fell in love with it immediately. After the purchase, we got to know our next-door neighbors, Rick and Joanne, who had lived in their home for more than 40 years. Rick was a retired surveyor for the city. Joanne was a retired teacher. Hanging in the backyard and talking with them over the summer, my wife and I learned a great deal about the original owners of our house. It was originally designed and built by the homeowner, who was an architect. That explains why our home had so many custom design features for the home. It was later sold to a gentleman who was a dentist. His wife had died and for the longest time it was just the dentist and his younger daughter, Dina. After Dina's father passed, she inherited the home and lived in it until she was in her 80s, putting it up for sale and moving to Florida where she eventually passed away. Noticing how much my wife and I were landscaping and planting new flower gardens, Rick shared with us how it reminded him of Dina. She loved gardening. She loved this home and would have loved what we were doing. Fast forward about a year. My wife and I were working in our backyard. I was busy trimming some hedges that had not been trimmed in some time and were severely overgrown. These things were over 10 feet tall and easily four foot wide. They were huge and took a lot of work to get them trimmed. These hedges have been here since the mid 1930s. I know this because the previous owners would write the date and height from 1933 to 1938 on the wall in the garage. I like the history of it also. I left the original writing in the garage as it was. While working, I noticed a lady walking up our alley and into our parking space. She was average height and weight with long curly reddish brown hair. I'd say that she was in her mid to late 40s. Excuse me, she said. I don't mean to be a bother, but I used to live here when I was a young girl. I happened to be in town on business and thought it'd be fun to stop by and see the old place. Intrigued, I invited her up the steps into our yard. Well, hello, I said. My wife and I have always been curious about the history of the house, so we'd enjoy the opportunity to hear about your time living here. We stood and talked for a while, her sharing her stories of playing hide and seek with her best friend and providing all kinds of very specific details about the house that only somebody who has spent a great deal of time there would have known. She knew everything about the house and its history. Her mother, Dina, had grown up in the home just like Rick had told us, and she shared all kinds of stories about past holidays and backyard parties with the neighbors. She was very nice and politely asked if we wouldn't mind if she peeked inside just to see the interior one more time. I agreed and walked her up to the back door where you'd enter the kitchen and access the back service staircase. Once she entered the home, I immediately noticed a change in her demeanor. She went from a very animated, talkative person to a very somber, quiet, even serious person. She walked from the kitchen to the dining room, which then flows into the living room as the largest portion of the downstairs was all an open concept. As she peered at the house, she never said a word and she looked at different parts of the downstairs. She seemed almost like she was in a different time and place. I assumed she was just remembering how the house looked when she was little, or maybe picturing a holiday gathering and remembering the home at a different time. Weirdly, she never said anything, not one comment on the house or how we had furnished it, or recalling any moment in the house, not a single word. She just walked around gazing at different parts of the house. I didn't say anything, I just gave her a little space and let her take it all in. She then looked to the grand staircase and asked if she could go upstairs, never looking at me or in my direction. I said, of course, stop yourself. And watched as she made her way up the stairs. I moved toward the bottom of the stairs, watching her make her way up. I was just about to follow her up when she suddenly stopped and just stared down the hallway. She wasn't looking around at the pictures and art that we had on the wall. She was staring down the hall almost like she was seeing someone else on the other end. It was really weird. She never went into any of the bedrooms. She turned slowly and made her way back down the stairs again with this very somber look. She never made eye contact with me, nor said another word. She walked right past me at the bottom of the steps. She started to make her way back to the way we came in. I began walking slowly behind her until we walked outside to the back porch. Once we were outside, her demeanor changed once again, back to that pleasant, smiling, and talkative person. She thanked us for trusting her and giving her the opportunity to see the home again. She also spent some time with my wife looking over the garden and telling my wife how much her mother would have loved to see what we had done with the garden. Gardening was everything to her mother Dina. She apologized for interrupting our Saturday, but thanked us again. She started walking back down our carport into the alley. I followed slightly behind her just to watch her safely leave. I only lost sight of her for a few seconds when she rounded the corner of my neighbor's garage. I followed behind by about ten seconds. As I rounded the corner, she was gone. I expected to see her car in the alley or at the end of the alley parked on the street, but there was nothing there. I could easily see the end of the street with a stop sign. Nothing. The end of the alley from my house is a good forty yards. There is no conceivable way she made that distance without me seeing her. If her car was parked in the alley, she would have had to drive past me or back up forty yards to the end of the alley. Either way, I had no idea where she went. I basically shrugged it off and got back to work on my monstrous hedges. A few days later, I was outside talking to my neighbor Rick and told him about our visitor and all the things that she told us about the house and its past. As I was talking, I noticed he had a perplexed look on his face. I'm sorry, he said. You said the lady who visited said she was the daughter who lived here? Yes, I told him. She said her mom lived here with her until she moved out when she left for college. Again, Rick looked confused. How old was this lady you talked to? Rick asked. I don't know, mid-forties maybe? I provided him a description of her, thinking it might jar his memory. That can't be right, he said. Dina lived in this house her entire life. She didn't sell until she was in her eighties, and she never married nor had any kids. Are you sure she said she was the daughter? Yes, 100%. She told us all kinds of things about the house that only someone who lived there would have known. She knew Dina and her hobby of gardening, etc. About that time, his wife Joanne came out, and Rick proceeded to tell her about our visitor. Joanne responded confidently, Dina never had any children. She never married nor had any kids. Both Rick and Joanne were very close friends of Dina. Now I'm confused, but I just reiterated what she had told me. Rick asked me to wait a second and went back into the house. Joanne and I continued talking about the experience, and all the daughter told us. A few minutes later, Rick returned with an old picture. It was a group of people consisting of 10-12 people gathering for a barbecue or a party standing in front of the garage in the backyard. Rick indicated this was one of Dina's many backyard parties that she'd host for the neighbors. The date on the picture was 1977. As I looked at the guests, I suddenly felt a cold sweat coming over me. In the picture was a lady that looked exactly as the lady who just visited us. I pointed to it and showed it to Rick. Who's this lady? I asked with a shaky voice. Rick looked at me with a slight concern in his eyes. That's Dina. I responded that there's just no way. This lady was just here. My mind scrambled to come up with a reasonable explanation. Maybe it was her daughter who looks a lot like her. Rick and Joanne looked at each other though and then back to me with a confused look on their faces. I'm not sure who visited you the other day, Rick said, but trust me, Dina never had any children. They lived by her for 40 years. Rick would often help her with things like moving furniture or hanging things that she couldn't do herself. He never saw anyone in the house other than her. So who was this lady that visited us? Was she the long lost daughter that no one ever knew about? How does she have all of this intimate detail about our house and know the entire history of the house? If this was not the daughter, was this Dina who stopped by to make sure that we were caring for the home? I have no explanation for it. I know the lady my wife and I saw was real. I know the lady in that picture looks exactly like the lady who visited us. What I don't know is who it was. We've had no additional visits from this lady, nor have we ever had any other weird happenings since that time. So I like to think maybe it was Dina checking to make sure the new owners loved the home as much as she did and felt that we did. I don't know. But it was the weirdest experience I have ever had. Coming up, being the victim of a stalker is terrifying. Not knowing when or where the person might show up next or what they'll do to you when they do show up. But there are those who have an even more terrifying situation where the stalker follows them their entire lives and there's nothing they can do to stop it because the stalker is paranormal. That's up next on Weird Darkness. Nothing goes better with chocolate than vanilla, and nothing goes better with the darkness than vampires. So we have combined all of them into a new blend of weird dark roast coffee called Very Vam Pilla. This bloody good blend combines a medium dark roast coffee with hints of chocolate, vanilla and just a tad bit of dried cherry too. So good, you'll want to sink your fangs into the fresh roasted bag itself. Weird Dark Roast Very Vam Pilla, the only thing at stake, sorry, not sorry, bad pun, is your dissatisfaction with your old coffee. Sip it while the sun is down if you're one of the undead, or when the sun is up if you just feel dead and need a bit of a boost. Get your Weird Dark Roast Very Vam Pilla at WeirdDarkness.com slash coffee. That's Weird Darkness.com slash coffee. Have you gone your entire life without seeing a ghost, ghoul or specter? Are you jealous of your friends who've woken up to something standing over them in bed? You might change your mind after you hear about some of these real-life people who have suffered lifetime hauntings. Ghosts that attach themselves to people always seem to have some kind of agenda. If you're lucky, the ghost acts as a sort of protective, invisible friend. But if your forever ghost is like most of the creepy crawlies I'm about to tell you about, you're in for a lifetime of chills every time you go to the bathroom, close the kitchen cabinet, or walk down to the basement to do laundry. People who have their own ghost can never lead a normal life. Not only do they spend every waking moment looking over their shoulders for the next scare, but it must be impossible to let someone into your life, be it a friend or a lover. How do you casually explain the presence of an old man in your bathtub or the shadow that lingers in the closet every time you invite somebody over to your house? Keep listening for a few stories about people who grew up dealing with something spooky attached to them. Hopefully they'll help you begin to understand the intense mental anguish that these individuals are under at all times. The next time you meet someone who has a house ghost, you'll be able to be a little more sympathetic. Amanda wrote into a website Your Ghost Stories to share about a dark presence that had followed her throughout her life. She notes that since she was a child, she'd see a figure looming in her bedroom doorway until it zipped into her closet. The entity would come and go as she got older, but she always knew when it would be around, almost as if her body was in tune with whatever it was. Her most recent run-in with the thing occurred while she was in bed. She heard the presence, rifling through her essential oils and felt it lean over her. Amanda fears that it wants to drive her to hurt her family. I think it attacks me mentally. I'd get images of hurting someone or seeing them suffering. I would never hurt anyone like in the images it showed me. It actually did this before, years ago. It showed me hurting my son. I snapped and took pills. A man from Australia describes a lifetime of paranormal activity that not only got him into trouble with his parents, but also seems to have ruined at least one of his relationships. The ghosts started their mischief when he was a child, manifesting themselves as a white cat and splattering black paint over his bedroom walls. Years later, this man's clairvoyant fiancee told him that he was being followed by two spooky children and a sinister spirit who gave her the heebie-jeebies. The storyteller fast-forwards 18 years and notes that his engagement had been called off. Then, one day, a stranger approached him to say that it looked like he was being followed by three spirits that gave her the heebie-jeebies. Redditor Zach1392 has had a lifelong hate-hate relationship with a brood of ghosts following him from home to home under the leadership of an oppressive demonic ringleader. His first supernatural experience began when he was a child and his mother heard an old woman talking to him in his room, but of course he was all alone. Following that experience, Zach saw that what he describes as a shadow trying to break into his third-story window and a presence that would make everyone uncomfortable in one particular room in the house. Even after his family moved to a new house, he believed the hauntings continued. He even thanks the ghosts talk about him. Since I worked night shift, he said, I'd come home around four or five in the morning. I've walked in and heard someone say, Hey, I've respond and get nothing. I've seen a woman in the kitchen who looked like my great aunt. My mother was sick and sleeping downstairs, and when I walked in, a voice whispered, She's sleeping. I've had the front door yanked out of my hand. I've even seen the deadbolt turn by itself. I've walked in on conversations only to hear, Shhh, he's here, be quiet. One of the most frustrating things about true ghost stories is that the people who live through them rarely get any answers when it comes to their haunting. Kelly, a woman who has moved around quite a bit, has been followed by the spirit of a young girl since she was only 15. Their interactions range from full-on attacks on her ex-boyfriends to silent appearances in the kitchen to haunting whispers telling Kelly not to be afraid. Kelly doesn't know where the little girl came from, but wonders if she is something of a protector. The young woman in Florida feels certain that either a French ghost or possibly a demon has been following her since she was a baby. According to her parents, when she was an infant, they would hear the sounds of people speaking in French over the baby monitor. Not that she's older, she believes that something is waiting for her in the dark rooms of her house. I'm uncomfortable being in any room by myself, she says, when the lights are off. It just feels like someone's watching me. When I sleep on the couch, it feels like someone's standing about 10 feet away from me just watching me. It's very uncomfortable, and I could have sworn I saw someone standing literally right next to my shins when I looked down at my feet. Another Florida woman, Angela, has been living in the same home since she was a child, and in her account of the ghostly happenings that occur around her, shadow men, giggling children, etc., it seems like she and the ghosts have grown used to each other. But then her fiance moved in. The moment he did, the haunting took on a malicious quality. Things began to be thrown across rooms. Something started banging on the walls, and one night, Anton, her fiance, took the brunt of the ghostly force. As Angela tells it, one night they were in bed when, quote, the ghost literally grabbed him and threw him. He flew out of the bed and hit the wall next to the bed and whacked his head on my nightstand. I started screaming, and he was awake now and understandably pretty freaked out. He flew off that bed like someone had shoved him and he hit that wall with a lot of force. He actually chipped some of the plaster off the wall. Samantha's haunting began when she was still in the womb. Her mother was set up on by what she described as a shadow of what to her looked like a big dog at the foot of the bed that ended up sitting on her stomach until her mother was able to work up the courage to get out of her bed and run away. Years later, Samantha would have to deal with a similar, shadowy presence that would hold her down in the middle of the night in between her horrific nightmares. An anonymous young woman who will call Amy claims that she has been followed by something malevolent since she was about five years old. Her first run in with the entity came when she recorded a radio show with her sister. After I was done, she said, I rewound the tape and began to listen to it before going to play it for my parents. Mid session, however, I heard a sound. It was a long, drawn out sigh in a deep register. It sounded as though a man were standing in the background and was very annoyed with the talking and expressing his frustration with it. But then, when she was in college, she experimented with recording the entity again and things got creepy. On the tape, things are quiet until Amy's mother leaves the room. So my mother gets up and walks down the hall and into the room where my nephew was hanging out in his crib, Amy says, not trying as hard to nap as I would have liked. On the tape, you hear her leave and me say to one of the dogs, Lex, leave him, one of the other dogs, leave him alone. Then you hear me sigh and immediately after you hear this deep, raspy inhale like something is sucking all the air out of the room. I make no comment on it, but you can hear me flipping through the magazines. I hadn't noticed anything. From down the hall, you hear my mother talking to my nephew, trying to get him to say, I love you. So she's saying that very slowly, I love you. On the tape, you hear this very odd hissing laugh and suddenly you hear a very, very deep man's voice say very loudly and clearly, I love you, Amy. When you think about something following you, would you rather it have a recognizable form or not? One woman has been dealing with a shadow person for close to a decade. One night, it appeared in her room. I laid there for what felt like hours just watching it, she says of the experience. I was about to fall asleep when I saw it move. I just kept staring at the mirror, too afraid to turn around. I felt the bed shift like someone was laying down. It happened so slowly and I've never felt more scared than I was at that moment. I closed my eyes out of fear and when I opened them back up, it was morning. She got older, the figure would occasionally stand directly behind her while she cooked and once even pushed her down the stairs while no one was home. Luckily, the woman says the activity has died down somewhat in the past few years. A Redditor who goes by the name Smittisab writes that he has been haunted by the same ghost throughout his life. In fact, he says it's gone so far as to cause his vasovagal syncope to flare up and give him seizures. The paranormal activity began when he was three, when voices began to tell him to stab his mother. Then the haunting died down until he was eight, when something began walking around in his room and opening the cabinets in the bathroom while he showered. The activity in the bathroom only got more intense. That night, he says, I convinced my brother to sleep in my room. As we were talking around one a.m., something hits the other side of the wall near my head. Note, the bathroom shares a wall with my room. It sounded like a fist and then nails dragging down the wall, screamed and cried. Brother hates ghosts, refuses to talk about it. This next young woman is seriously haunted. She believes that she has been followed by an entity her entire life and that it, as she calls the presence, made one of her ex-boyfriends afraid of his own apartment. Another house she lived in was said to host the ghost of an old man who would throw things from the bathtub. Could hauntings be passed down from parents to their children? One woman thinks so. She saw many spirits as a child, including a sinister man in a black hat and a girl who floated above her head. Now her young son seems to be experiencing similar paranormal activity. She says, Today we live in a house where there are footsteps walking around upstairs and knocking on the closet doors. My husband has woken up to someone clicking their tongue at the side of the bed. I've walked in on my four-year-old talking to the closet door and saying he's talking to his friend. I turned to walk out of the room and someone had very distinctly knocked on the closet door from the inside. Linda's haunted life began with a Ouija board at a New Year's Eve party and a ghost who told her that one of her children would die. Her chilling story has continued until she had grandchildren. According to Linda, she lost one child four hours after it was born and her house contained something that liked to play with her husband's feet and annoy her dog. The entity in her home has even shown itself to her grandchildren. She said, That night I put both kids upstairs in the same bed to sleep. It came running down the stairs white as a ghost. Grandma, there's a ghost right by the fan on the dresser. They had never heard any of what went on in the house. I kept it quiet because they were small kids. I didn't know what to say. A self-described simple man from Florida has been dealing with something for over 20 years and it doesn't show any signs of stopping. While living in Kissimmee, Florida, the father of three began to be haunted by a series of knocks that would wake him up while he was sleeping. On numerous occasions, I was awoken by the sound of three knocks on what appeared to be a window or door, he says. I cannot remember whether I opened a door or not on any occasion, but I do know that it was a very real and convincing knock that was always in rhythm and always only three knocks. The story continues after even moving. We then built a home in St. Cloud, Florida. The knocks did not stop. After living in St. Cloud for a while, the dad woke up to a deep, cat-like scratch on his inner thigh. Then, when he moved to Kentucky, something extra weird happened. Quote, While standing in my bathroom door in my bedroom last night and watching a Little League baseball game on ESPN, I witnessed my work desk I have in the bedroom lift up about one inch and then drop back to the floor. This happened two feet in front of me. I did not get scared or jump up and down but instead stood there in disbelief. I then went to understand and was wondering what could have caused this other than what's been historically following me around for the last twenty years. Fortunately, not all stories of lifelong hauntings are dark. One Redditor actually has a nice story about their ghost. They believe that the spirit is watching out for them in every situation. He says, It's not annoying or frightening. It almost seems like it's protecting me. Every time I start to get involved in something I probably shouldn't, I feel a tug at my sleeve or a hand on my shoulder. Every time I tick someone off and at risk of starting a fight, I feel something pressed up against me, like it's shielding me or telling me to back down. When Weird Darkness returns, twelve-year-old Gabriel enjoyed playing games with an online friend. But when he borrowed less than two dollars for an in-game purchase from this friend, then ignored his friend's requests to continue playing, he found himself dying the most horrifying murder you can imagine. And despite law enforcement knowing who the murderer is, he is free now, and no one knows where to find him. It is a brutally horrible story you don't want your children in the room for. Coming up next. It is the dark and lonely road. You drive, you're tired, and falling asleep behind the wheel. The windows are down, the cool air blowing through your hair as you crank up the stereo. AC DC blares on the radio, and you're screaming out the chorus. Then, a set of headlights emerges from the darkness, and your night has become a nightmare. Welcome to Last Exit, an anthology of seventeen horrific tales where life on the road can sometimes take a dark and unexpected turn. Last Exit by Jason R. Davis, narrated by Weird Darkness host Darren Marlar. You're a free sample on the audiobooks page at WeirdDarkness.com. Imagine for a moment that you're twelve years old. Things in your life are in a constant flux. Money isn't easy to come by, not for you and not for your parents. And the problems this causes in your young life are just starting to register. Add to that a mix of hormones and social pressure, and what you end up with is a cocktail of adolescent angst. So you seek an escape. You go online and start playing a game, meet some new friends. What should have been just a fun way to spend an afternoon, maybe forget real life for a while, would end up opening the door for murder. Daniel Petrie was by all accounts a messed up kid. Even at the age of sixteen he had a history of violent outbursts so bad that his parents had sent him to several psychiatrists throughout Brazil. These sessions didn't go well and Daniel eventually stopped going to them, as well as school. There is some speculation that he was also institutionalized for a brief period around this time, but those claims have not been substantiated. No longer in school and unemployed, Daniel Petrie spent most of his time playing the online multiplayer game Tibia. There he would spend hours upon hours grinding levels against monsters, making trades and interacting with other players. One of these players was a local boy named Gabriel Coon. Gabriel was twelve and an avid player. While Tibia was considered a free-to-play game, meaning it didn't cost anything to initially play, it was loaded with microtransactions and its own in-game currency. The currency coins were used to buy anything from full characters to in-game pets. Coon and Petrie would play together on a private server set up by Coon. After one of their gaming sessions, Gabriel explained that he wanted to buy an item from Tibia's shop but he didn't have enough coins. He asked Daniel to borrow 20,000 coins, which would be the equivalent of $1.75 in the U.S., with the promise to pay him back in a few days. Petrie agreed, but when it came time for Gabriel to pay him back, instead, he banned Daniel from the server. This act filled Daniel Petrie with a murderous rage. That history of violence came rushing back into his present day and he found himself at Gabriel Coon's door. The boy was alone, but Daniel was able to convince him to open the door and let him in so that they could patch things up. Instead, Petrie began beating Coon and violently abusing the boy sexually. As he lay bleeding and sobbing on his bed, Daniel mocked him, assaulted and ridiculed the child's mind, ran to the only protection it had known. Coon stated that he would tell his mother what Petrie had done. This incited Daniel again, who unplugged Gabriel's computer and began to choke the boy with it, while again sexually abusing him. Once he thought Coon was dead, he realized that he would have to hide the body. Petrie tried to force Gabriel into a crawl space, but the door wasn't wide enough. Thinking quickly, Daniel found a hacksaw and began to cut at Coon's torso. Then, Gabriel Coon regained consciousness and began to scream from the pain. Mutilating his victim's body, excited Petrie, so he continued to saw Gabriel in half while he was still alive. He also carved symbols from Tibia into Gabriel's body. Still unable to fit the body into the crawl space, he left it there in the hall for Gabriel's mother to find later that day. It didn't take the police long to track down, Petrie. They uncovered his argument with Gabriel on Tibia. Daniel didn't show any remorse or any emotion at all really, as he recounted in detail to the horrified police just what he did. The only time Petrie reacted with anything other than contempt for Coon was when the police brought up the sexual assault, at which point he angrily lashed out at the insinuation of homosexuality. In a gross miscarriage of justice, the Brazilian court only sentenced Daniel Petrie to three years in a juvenile detention facility. He was released in 2010, and from then on, all reports indicate he just disappeared. No online presence, no lasting consequences for murdering a child. Petrie was by many indicators a sexual sadist. He was aroused at the act of beating Gabriel, sawing into him while he was still alive. A sadist enjoys hurting others, not always in a physical way, but the fact that Petrie raped his victim twice indicates it was the suffering that turned him on. His past history of explosive outbursts may also indicate psychopathy, as would him escalating a small slight of $1.75 to the point of murder. If Petrie is still alive today, it would not come as a surprise to find he has other victims. You can find information on any of the sponsors you heard about during the show, find all of my social media, listen to free audiobooks that I've narrated, sign up for the email newsletter, find other podcasts that I host, including Retro Radio, Old Time Radio in the Dark, Church of the Undead, and a classic 1950s sci-fi style podcast called Auditory Anthology. Also on the site, you can visit the store for Weird Darkness t-shirts, mugs, and other merchandise. Plus, it's where you can find the Hope in the Darkness page, if you or someone you know is struggling with depression or thoughts of harming yourself for others. And if you have a true paranormal or creepy tale to tell of your own, you can click on Tell Your Story. You can find all of that and more at WeirdDarkness.com. All stories on Weird Darkness are purported to be true unless stated otherwise, and you can find links to the stories or the authors in the show notes. The Vampire Plague of 1725 was written by Jack Doyle for OZ.com. The hanging of Margaret or Bill is by Romeo Vitelli for Providencia.com. A deadly gaming friendship is by R.A. Brewster for R.A. Brewster.com. And Phantom Stalkers was written by Jacob Shelton for Ranker's Graveyard Shift. Weird Darkness is a registered trademark. Copyright Weird Darkness. And now that we're coming out of the dark, I'll leave you with a little light. Psalm 62, verse 1, My soul finds rest in God alone. My salvation comes from Him. And a final thought. Choose the words you say to yourself wisely. They are creating your reality. Sean Stevenson I'm Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness. Stake and drove it through Blagojevich's heart. For those of you who live in Illinois, you probably aren't surprised that Blagojevich was a vampire. Moving on. All right, let's try that again. They sharpened a steak and drove it through Blagojevich's heart. Hey, Weirdos, our next Weirdo Watch Party is coming up fast. It's Friday, February 9th. The gruesome two-some of Graveyard Cinema, Horrible Henry and Mad Marty are presenting 1950s Quicksand starring Mickey Rooney and Peter Laurie. In the film, a man takes $20 from his employer to go on a date, planning to replace the money the next day. But he falls increasingly into more disastrous circumstances and further in need of more money, and it spirals out of control. Join us Friday, February 9th for Quicksand. It's free to watch online and you can chat along with the rest of us Weirdos as we watch the movie together. The show begins at 8 p.m. Eastern, 7 p.m. Central, 6 p.m. Mountain and 5 p.m. Pacific. You can watch a trailer for the film and watch horror hosts and schlocky B-movies anytime, day or night on the Weirdo Watch Party page at WeirdDarkness.com. 1950s Quicksand starring Mickey Rooney and Peter Laurie. Friday, February 9th on the Weirdo Watch Party page. Hey Weirdos, be sure to click the like button and subscribe to this channel, and click the notification bell so you don't miss future videos. I post videos seven days a week, and while you're at it, spread the darkness by sharing this video with someone you know who loves all things strange and macabre. If you want to listen to the podcast, you can find it at WeirdDarkness.com.