 The English Civil War was a vicious contest between the roundheads led by Oliver Cromwell and the royalists who backed King Charles I. The first and bloodiest battle of the war was fought on a field called Edge Hill on October 23, 1642. The battlefield of Edge Hill was just seven miles outside the English town of Banbury. It was here that two armies, each 20,000 strong, fought bitterly for hours, leaving 4,000 soldiers dead on the field. Neither side actually won the battle, although both sides claimed victory. The result of the battle was simply that the roundheads were not able to stop the royalists on their march towards London. The battle was over, but 4,000 dead men still wanted to have their say. Two months after the event, on Saturday morning, Christmas Eve, 1642, the armies met again to continue the battle. But these were not the soldiers of Charles I and Cromwell. These were phantom armies, drums beating, muskets firing, horses neighing and cannons roaring all in the skies over the battlefield. Several shepherds and other country folk were the first witnesses to this ghostly re-enactment. They stood rooted to the spot in terror for three hours while the phantom battle raged above them. When the armies vanished, the witnesses raced to the nearby town of Kinniton to find William Wood, the magistrate, and a minister Samuel Marshall just to be on the safe side. Wood and Marshall listened to the incredible story, but they wanted to see this phenomenon for themselves. That night, the night of Christmas, the two men went to the Edge Hill battlefield, accompanied by the original witnesses plus most of the townspeople. Half an hour after they got there, the spectral battle started up, just as fiercely as the night before. The witnesses, all terrified at the tumult of the raging battle, scattered and rushed home and locked the doors behind them. The rest of the week was quiet, and the townspeople dared to think that the haunting was over. But the next Saturday night, the phantom armies fought for four hours. Sunday night brought them out again. The minister, Mr. Marshall, had to move out of town. The continuous battles were simply too much for him. Others left too, but Wood, the magistrate, and most of the other townspeople stayed. Sure enough, the next weekend there was another double feature. News of the repeating apparition reached the ears of King Charles I. He was immediately curious. After all, it was his army that was tearing it up in the skies over Edge Hill. He sent six trusted men to Kinniton to investigate the phenomenon. The men listened to Wood and others tell of the amazing sights they had seen, and that Saturday and Sunday nights they saw the vicious battle for themselves. Staring up at the sky, the men even recognized personal friends of theirs who had fallen during the actual battle in October. The six investigators returned to the king and testified under oath as to what they had seen. Within days of their report, the king ordered a pamphlet written up, containing all of the eyewitness testimony of the recurring battle of Edge Hill. The phantom armies that fought so bitterly for so many nights gradually disappeared, but reports still come of the noises of battle, of the pounding hooves of hard galloping horses, of phantom riders heard thundering across the deserted battlefield, of cannons still discharging their deadly loads. For centuries after the battle, long after promwell's victory, long after Charles first lost his head, the ghosts of Edge Hill still could not find rest. Welcome, Weirdos. Merry Christmas. I'm Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness. Here you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and unexplained. If you are new here, be sure to subscribe to the podcast on Apple or Android so you don't miss future episodes. This is a special 12 Nightmares of Christmas episode. Each day from December 13th through today, December 24th, I've been posting a new episode of Weird Darkness featuring material from the new book The Spirits of Christmas, The Dark Side of the Holidays by Sylvia Schultz. And if you missed any of the 12 Nightmares of Christmas episodes, you can find them all at WeirdDarkness.com. Now, bolt your doors, lock your windows, turn off your lights, put another lug onto the fire or yourself an eggnog and come with me into the Weird Darkness. The old man had retired from the Baltimore and Ohio rail line. The engineer had been known for his love of the Christmas season. Every December, he'd buy sacks of candy to toss to the children who lived in the houses along the tracks, like a rolling Santa Claus, and he would bellow Christmas carols as he worked, filling the railroad cars with cheerful song. His retirement package had allowed him to buy a phonograph and start a collection of records. Most of them, predictably, were of Christmas music. The old man got a few visitors during the Christmas season, even with his house tucked away in the woods. Any time a friend or a family member stopped by, the old man would cheerfully invite them in to sip coffee and enjoy his small collection of records. When the old man passed away, his relatives came to clean out his tiny house. They took his records and his cherished phonograph and the house was left empty. In 1968, the old V&O tracks that ran past the house were taken up and not replaced. The old man's house fell to the wrecking ball as well. No sense in leaving it if no one lived there and the tracks were gone. All that was left was the old track bed. Hunters found it a useful trail into the deep woods. Years after the old man died, not long after his house was demolished, a hunter was in that part of the woods. It was two days before Christmas. The hunter was driving carefully down the track bed, mindful of the noises of the forest around him, when he heard a sound that had no place in that part of the woods anymore. It was the sound of a Christmas carol coming from a well-worn and well-loved record, pops, scratches, hisses, and all as the needle coaxed the tune from the aging vinyl. The hunter stopped his car and turned off the engine to make sure his imagination wasn't playing tricks on him. All around him, the music rose, threading through the trees. The hunter shook his head at the weirdness of it and turned the key in the ignition. His car wouldn't start. Frantically, he stomped on the gas and twisted the key again. The motor just wouldn't turn over. Then the hunter saw movement ahead of him. An old man was crossing the track bed. The man walked slowly up to the front porch of a house that had shimmered into view next to the phantom train tracks. The hunter watched the man open the front door of the tiny house as the music got fainter and fainter. The house, the old man, and the last strains of music all faded away together. This time the engine caught and the hunter wrenched the steering wheel around and slewed through the woods to get out. On his return to town, he stammered out his tail. He was astounded to find that some of his audience, the older folks, actually believed him. They remembered the old engineer who lived in the house in the woods and loved the Christmas season so much and who invited visitors in to listen to his favorite records. The next night, Christmas Eve, 13 boys sat out for the woods in three cars. They wanted their own experience in the dark of the forest. They drove on the track bed out to where the old engineer's house had once stood. They parked, shut off their cars, and waited. The boys' experience was just a little different than what the hunter had reported. They didn't see the phantom house and they didn't see the old man crossing the tracks to get to the house, but they heard the music rising among the trees, sounding just like an old Victrola cranked up to wheezy full volume, and their cars would not start until the music faded away. The boys went back out for a few nights after Christmas but nothing happened on those visits. Legend has it that the music can only be heard in the days leading up to Christmas. After Christmas Day, the old phonograph falls quiet and silence returns to the woods along the tracks. Until the next Christmas season comes around. The town of Crompton, Rhode Island, now part of West Warwick, began in 1807 when a cotton mill was built on the Pawtuxet River. The town thrived with the success of the mill. In the 1840s, the potato famine struck Ireland and Irish immigrants skilled in textile trades emigrated to America. Many of them were drawn to the employment offered by the mill at Crompton. Unfortunately, the area had originally been settled by English Protestants. The Irish Catholics who moved into the area a generation later found a firmly entrenched intolerance. The closest Catholic Church was in Providence, which was a good ten miles from Crompton. Few of the mill workers could afford wagons and a ten-mile walk every Sunday soon became onerous. The Irish were desperate to build a Catholic Church of their own in town, but the Protestants refused to sell them the land on which to build. The Irish Catholics finally found friends in Paul and Mary Doran. The Dorans bought a one-acre lot, then turned around and deeded it to the Roman Catholic Bishop of Hartford. In 1844, the ground was broken for the construction of a church. Mary Doran died young. In fact, she died soon after work was begun on the church. There were whispered rumors that her death was the result of a retaliatory curse flung by the enraged Protestants. But whether Mary Doran's death had a supernatural aspect or not, it seems pretty clear that she is still very much a part of the church she helped to found. A small church holds an air of eerie mystery. Many members of the congregation, especially children, feel uneasy within its walls. Even today, some parishioners refuse to go into the church alone at night. Father Edmund H. Fitzgerald, who was pastor of St. Mary's from 1984 to 1992, readily admits that he believes the church is haunted by the spirit of Mary Doran. He has been alone in the church countless times, and many times he would hear footsteps on the hard cedar floor. The footsteps would come up right behind him, but when he turned around, there was no one to be seen. Sometimes the church organ's majestic tones would ring out, even when the instrument was closed, locked and covered with its cloth. As unnerving as these episodes may have been though, Father Fitzgerald says he never felt uncomfortable in the church or frightened of the invisible presence. Father Fitzgerald experienced a very special aspect of the haunting one Christmas Eve in 1989 or 1990. He had offered the mass of the Christ child that afternoon. By 5 p.m. the last of the parishioners had left, and Father Fitzgerald was locking the church to leave himself. Suddenly the tower bell began to ring on its own, peeling out over the church grounds. Father Fitzgerald immediately went back into the church to investigate. The bell rope was moving up and down all by itself, but there was nobody in the church, he wrote later. That bell can only ring from someone pulling the rope. Even recent hurricanes did not cause the bell to ring in this way. But Father Fitzgerald wasn't alarmed by the spectral bell ringer. What better time for it to ring, he said, than to celebrate the birth of the Christ child. On Christmas Eve in 1885 a Canaan living in Kahn's half-Hireland was relaxing at home in the rectory when his cook came into the room. Nervously she pointed out that there was a strange noise going on in the kitchen. It sounded to her like the noise of a heavy wagon rolling past a rickety house. The Canaan had no idea what to make of this, but his cook was obviously alarmed. So he called another servant, and the three of them, Canaan, Cook, and Manservant, went down to the kitchen, which was in the basement. By the time they got to the kitchen, the house was vibrating, as if in the grip of an earthquake. But none of the furniture or dishes were being chostled. They were all perfectly still. The two servants were on either side of the Canaan, each holding on to an arm terrified at the eerie disturbance. Suddenly the vibration stopped. But beyond the closed pantry door, the three of them could hear a tremendous racket. It sounded like someone was throwing every china plate, bowl, and glass onto the flagstone floor. Crash after crash came from behind the locked door, while the servants clung to the Canaan for dear life. The door was locked, but the key was in the lock, and the Canaan decided to open the door and investigate. He reached for the door, but before he put his hand on the key, the locked door of the pantry swung open. A tall woman glided out of the pantry. She was wearing a loose white dress with a short black cape around her shoulders. The Canaan was paralyzed with fright, and his two servants were holding onto his arms so tightly in their own fear that days later, the Canaan had bruises from the panicky grip of their fingers. The Canaan wrenched away from the servants to follow the ghost who had moved across the kitchen to the stairs. When the ghost reached the bottom of the stairs, it vanished, and the Canaan's two small boys in their bedroom, three stories above, started screaming. The three thundered up the stairs to the boy's bedroom. The boys were shaking, terrified at the ghostly intrusion. The older boy, who was 10, told his father that he'd been lying awake in his bed waiting for Santa Claus, but instead of the jolly old elf, a strange lady glided into the room and then went back out, and she hadn't left any toys. The Canaan and his servants searched the rectory from top to bottom, but they found no trace of the lady in white, and when the cook opened the pantry door, which was still locked, she found no broken china, and nothing was disturbed. The dead must leave us for a while, it's true, and sometimes our grief at losing them can feel overwhelming, but if we're lucky, our loved ones will find a way to let us know they still care for us, even beyond death. Dr. Eustace's wife died early on Christmas Day 1932. The widower was devastated by his loss, but he believed that his wife's spirit lived on, and that they would someday be reunited. But as the bleak days and weeks without her wore on, Dr. Eustace drew his grief around him and resigned himself to her loss. About seven weeks after his wife's death, Dr. Eustace was taking an evening stroll in his garden. Suddenly, he stopped in his tracks. There, in the fading light of the setting sun, stood his beloved wife. Dr. Eustace later wrote about the experience. She stood looking straight at me as though she had been expecting me. Her face and figure were as distinct and clear cut as in life. She gazed intently at me. Translated into words, her expression would have been well rendered by, how stupid of you, why so foolish? I believe that I smiled and that my face reflected my joy. But the surprises were not yet over for Dr. Eustace. His wife's friend, Mrs. Welch, came by to offer her condolences. During their conversation, Mrs. Welch claimed to have seen Mrs. Eustace on Christmas Eve the night before her friend had died. Mrs. Welch had attended the midnight service at the convent of Poor Clairs. She'd gotten to the church at five minutes before midnight, and she said Mrs. Eustace had been at the church too. Mrs. Eustace had greeted her friend and taken her by the arm, helping her to her seat with a smile. When Mrs. Welch had learned the next day of her friend's passing, she realized that, of course, it hadn't really been Mrs. Eustace at the church, but that her friend's spirit had been the one to help her to sit. As Mrs. Welch spoke of her experience, Dr. Eustace recalled something else about that Christmas Eve. As he stood by his wife's bedside, he had noted that she lost consciousness at 11.55 p.m. The exact time, her spirit was guiding Mrs. Welch to her seat at the church. The winter of 1894 was a very bad time to work at the Mamie R. Mine on Raven Hill at Cripple Creek, Colorado. Three men had already died at the mine over that year. In the darkness, any misstep had the potential to kill. One miner had been killed in an unexplained blast. Another miner had the bad luck to be standing under the bucket used to transport workers to the surface when the new cable broke. The falling bucket smashed the miner into an unrecognizable mass. Outside the mine, things were no less dire. A man named Garson, who ran the mine's boarding house, came down with mountain fever. Nine days later, he was dead. On November 15, 1894, E.D. Blake was appointed manager of the boarding house. On Thanksgiving night, Blake was working at the top of the mine along with a foreman named Fatty Root and two other men. They were all working near the hoist bucket. Suddenly the signal bell rang three times than once. This was the signal for man aboard hoist away. The hoist man started the bucket up on its upward climb, but before it got all the way to the top, the bell rang once. The signal for stop. Then it rang twice for lower away. Then the bell started ringing randomly, throwing out a bizarre contradictory mix of signals. This was all kinds of wrong. The bucket and windlass were the miners' lifeline to the surface. It was far too serious of a piece of equipment to waste the operator's time with silly games and mixed signals. Blake and Root decided to put a stop to the shenanigans, ignoring the bell's signals. They hauled the bucket up and climbed in. They bumped and clanged their way to the bottom of the shaft. Grabbing lanterns, they both went all the way through their workings. There was no one down at the bottom. When the two men came back up, the hoist operator said that no one had come up before them either. A few nights later, a miner was working at the 375-foot level. He came up to the top, ashen-faced. A man, he said, had just been killed. The miner said he'd been placing charges for blasting. As he worked, someone had walked right past him straight into the middle of the blast zone. He had yelled at the man to get out, but whoever it was had ignored him. The charges had detonated. As soon as the smoke from the blast had cleared, the four men sent the workers down to investigate. When they got down to 375 feet, they were met by a horrifying sight. A man stood in the lantern light, blood streaming from several ugly gashes on his head. One of his arms had been blown off. He stood with its slunks smartly over his other shoulder like a rifle. The men were appalled at the sight of the mutilated miner, but they were astounded he was still alive. They yelled at the man, but he ignored them. Perhaps, and quite rightly, he was in shock. One of the rescue parties stepped forward to take the miner's good arm, and his hand went right through the injured miner. The shift boss grabbed a drill and poked at the man, and the drill swished through the spectre, as though the man was made of smoke, not flesh and blood. The ghost brushed past the man, headed for the bucket, and rode up to the top. The rescue party waited until their racing hearts had calmed down. Then they too rode the bucket up to the surface. The hoist operator at the surface swore he hadn't pulled the bucket up but once for them. The hauntings continued. On Christmas Eve, Blake, Root, and two other workers were once again at the top level of the mine near the bucket. The bell sounded three times than once. Who's down there? Root, the foreman, asked. There isn't anyone down there, the hoist operator said, but he couldn't just ignore the signal. Better safe than sorry, after all. He started up the hoist. What happened next, according to E. D. Blake, was recorded in a WPA Writers' Program report dated 1936 to 1942. All three of us started back and the blood curled in our veins. I hoped to be spared ever seeing such a sight again. Garson got out of the bucket first. Garson, with his yellow pinched face and staring eyes, just as he looked the night I saw him die of mountain fever. Then came the one armed man with the blood splattered over his features and the shattered stump of an arm. Between them, they lifted out the body of a poor fellow lashed to a plank and laid it on the platform. Then the one armed man reached down in the bucket and brought out his arm. As he rose from the stooping posture he looked toward us, the most ghastly object I ever beheld, his face all cuts, his clothing torn to shreds. He laid the arm on top of the body that was lashed to the plank and the two raised the whole horrible thing to their shoulders and walked out into the night. For a minute no one spoke and then we all rushed to the door and as true as I live we saw the two dead men, ghosts or whatever they were, walk over the edge of the dump and disappear in the darkness. But the maybe R wasn't finished claiming its victims. That night the mine flooded. The next day, Christmas day, the miners had to work on emptying it, one hoisted bucket at a time. Around midnight, Fatty Root relieved the bucket dumper and was working the hoist. The men on that shift had brought up dozens of buckets of water and the 13th was nearing the top when the winding spool slipped out of its own frame and the cable whipped out in great deadly loops. One of the cable loops caught root around the neck and lopped his head right off, quick as thought and as cleanly as a guillotine. Many of the mines in the American West were worked by Welsh, Irish and Cornish immigrants. Men descended from miners themselves, men who brought with them generations worth of expertise in working underground. The immigrants also brought with them a rich tradition of folklore, tailored to their specific calling of working deep under the earth. The Tommyknockers were a fairy race who lived underground. Sometimes these pixies were helpful, locating miners lost tools, leading them safely out of the tangle of mineshafts or warning them of impending cave ends. But sometimes the Tommyknockers would be maliciously manipulative. They would steal tools and lunches. They would tap a miner on the shoulder and laugh at his confusion. And sometimes their tricks were deadly. The Tommyknockers would toy with senses gone dull in the unrelenting darkness. They would pretend to be a lost child crying for help, luring miners deep into an unshored shaft, leading them into the very real danger of a cave in. The miners claimed they could tell when the Tommyknockers were around. They spoke of a feeling of being watched, but if a miner whipped around to catch the culprit, all he would see was a skittering shadow, a shadow that would disappear right into a rocky wall. The miners also spoke of hearing voices, unintelligible whisperings that would melt away maddeningly into the dark. When they did catch glimpses of their tormentors, it was a horrifying sight. The evil imps were said to be two to three feet high, thin and wiry with eyes that glowed a sullen red in the black shadows of the mineshafts. The Maniair mine closed shortly after the Christmas Day tragedy of 1894. There is no record of that particular mine as the mining records of the State Bureau of Mines for Colorado only begin in 1895. But perhaps in an abandoned mine somewhere in the rocky wilderness of Cripple Creek, Tommyknockers still chatter in the darkness, and dead miners still travel up and down in the derelict hoist, still toiling in the mines decades after the accidents that stole their lives. The year was 1778. The young country of America had declared its independence from Britain just two years before. King George III wasn't about to let his colonies go without a fight. The American militia needed all the help it could get. In December, the Brigantine General Arnold set sail from Boston. She carried 20 guns with a crew of 106 to man them. The brig was a privateer, meaning that she was privately owned and outfitted as a warship by her owner. Ships like this were issued letters of Marquis by the Providence of Massachusetts, allowing them to legally chase down British ships and plunder them. With these letters of Marquis, the ships and their crew rode the fine line between legitimate raiding in a time of war and outright piracy. By Christmas Day, the ship had gotten as far as Gernet Point outside of Plymouth Bay. The captain, James McGee, anchored there and signaled for a pilot to take the ship safely into the harbor. But a storm was brewing up fast, and no sane pilot would risk his life in such nasty weather. Without a local mariner to guide the Brigantine into the harbor, Captain McGee would have to take his chances navigating the unfamiliar shoals on his own. McGee decided to ride out the storm in Cape Cod Bay for the night and hope a pilot made his way out to the brig the next morning. That turned out to be a cataclysmically bad decision. The storm grew worse during the night. The General Arnold already dragging anchor went aground on white flats in Plymouth Bay. The ship was still a mile off Plymouth shore and being forced further into the sand. Then the tide went out, leaving the ship stranded and listing in very shallow water. And a storm that had been menacing the ship turned into a deadly nor'easter. For three days wind and snow pummeled the General Arnold, with temperatures plummeting, the snow froze to the sails and lines of the ship. Captain McGee ordered the men to chop the masts down to lighten the ship in hopes of floating her off of the sandbar. His plan didn't work. Also, the men once they had axes in hand used them to break into the ship's casks of rum. The men went below decks to wait out the fury of the storm. But under the force of the pounding waves, the seams split and frigid water poured into the ship. The men were forced back up onto the deck into the wind and snow. Then the tide came back in. Waves washed over the deck, adding to the misery of the already freezing crew. It was one small boat on board. Three of the men decided to take the yaw and row to shore for help. They risked being battered to pieces by the pounding waves, but they decided it was worth a try. It's unclear whether they came up with this plan on their own or if they had Captain McGee's permission to make a run for it. The men piled into the yaw and were able to row to a frozen part of the bay where they walked across the ice to a schooner that had gotten trapped. The three men who made their escape never did come back. Around sunset, on Saturday, December 26th, the tide went out again. The brig was no longer battered by the pounding waves, but during the night the wind shifted to the northeast, bringing bitterly cold temperatures. Soon enough, the tide came back in with accompanying waves. Unable to seek shelter below decks, the men were exposed to the cold on deck. Sailors clinging to their ropes of the rigging to avoid being washed overboard froze to death where they were. By the next morning, 30 of the men were dead. The survivors stacked the frozen bodies to provide a windbreak as the storms fury and lashed the decks. As the snow continued to fall thick and fast and waves battered the decks, the stacked corpses froze into a solid wall of flesh and wet clothing. By Sunday, December 27th, the townspeople of Plymouth realized the rig was stranded on white flats. They tried time and again to row out to the foundered ship, but the storm was still too strong and Plymouth Bay was a churning mass of ice flows. The crew was forced to wait another agonizing night. The morning of December 28th brought hope. The people of Plymouth desperate to provide some help to the suffering crew of the ship had worked through the night piling ice flows together to form an enormous bridge out of the sandbar. After three days of bitter cold and howling winds, the storm broke. The people of Plymouth cautiously ventured out onto white flat. The storm had brought such vicious cold that the saltwater in the harbor was frozen. The townspeople bundled against the cold, walked over the bridge of ice to see if anyone was still alive aboard the stricken ship. 70 men were dead. The townspeople dragged sleds over the ice bridge to rescue the survivors. Thirty-three survivors were led, shivering to warmth and safety on shore. Of those men, nine died later. Then the gruesome task of recovering the frozen bodies began. Here was presented a scene unutterably awful and distressing, wrote a witness. It is scarcely possible for the human mind to conceive of a more appalling spectacle. The ship was sunk 10 feet in the sand. The waves had been for about 36 hours sweeping the main deck. 70 dead bodies frozen into unimaginable postures were strewed over the deck. The townspeople of Plymouth decided to lay the bodies in the courthouse, as it was one of the largest buildings in town with plenty of floor space. There was however one horrifying flaw in this plan. The bodies of the sailors that had been stacked to provide a grisly windbreak on the general Arnold's deck were now frozen into a solid chunk far too big to fit through the courthouse door. No one wanted to hack the frozen meat apart, so the mass of bodies was put into the town brook to thaw. The town's water supply was a fresh water spring that bubbled up in a constant stream so it was slow to freeze. The fresh water helped to thaw the bodies enough that they could be pried apart. The bodies were arranged in rows on the courthouse floor. While thawing the bodies, the rescuers noticed something odd about the corpse of Barnabas Downs, the 12-year-old cabin boy. A fresh tear seemed to leak from his open eye. Suddenly, the boy blinked. He was still alive, although paralyzed with hypothermia. Downs was saved, although he lost both of his feet to frostbite. He lived into his 50s and wrote a memoir of his experiences. In the book he wrote that as bad as losing his feet was, the pain of getting thawed out was many, many times worse. In the end, several of the bodies were claimed by relatives, but many of the sailors had simply signed on to the ship in Boston and Captain McGee hadn't yet had time to add them to the ship's log. They remained unknown and no one came to claim their bodies. After a couple of weeks, the townspeople realized that, even in the cold weather, the corpses had to be buried and soon. Around 60 unclaimed bodies were buried in a 10-by-20-foot pit on Burial Hill. The pit, probably a rubbish dump that had been dug before the ground froze, was pressed into service as a mass grave. Captain James McGee lived on and had a successful career as a merchant captain. He died in 1801 and, at his request, his body was buried in the mass grave that held the bodies of so many of his comrades. This tragedy left a stain on the courthouse in Plymouth, both figuratively and literally. It's said that the floorboards were so saturated with blood and body fluids, they had to be taken up and turned over, and the psychic residue has led to active hauntings and continues even today. Janice Williams, leader of Dead of Night Lantern Tours in Plymouth, tells the story of the wreck of the general Arnold with ghoulish relish. Of course, that's the way she tells all the stories on her tour. She describes the sound you might hear if you stand in the ladies restroom, which is located in the basement of the courthouse. It's a shuffling, sliding sound, the sound of freshly thawed bodies being dragged across the courthouse floor and arranged in row after row. She will show you the picture on her phone that shows three young cabin boys peering out of one of the courthouse windows and another picture of one of the dead sailors. And Janice will warn you with glee that if you are a woman visiting the courthouse museum, you might feel a friendly arm slide around your waist in an affectionate hug, but it's not anyone you know. When you turn around to smile at your companion, there's no one there. Just the spirit of a lonely sailor looking for warmth and maybe a smile from a pretty girl. Every family has their own way of celebrating the holidays. Some gather with friends for a big meal on Christmas Day. Some celebrations are a little smaller, more laid-back. For the Roonies, a couple in their 70s living in Seneca, Illinois, Christmas Eve 1885 was a time to sit back and relax with a drink or three. Patrick and Matilda Rooney, both 72 years old, owned a small but prosperous farm just north of Seneca, about 75 miles southwest of Chicago. Joining them for the festivities was John Larson, their hired hand. Neither Patrick nor Matilda were shy about lifting a glass. Patrick kept his little brown jug of whiskey topped off once a week. Andley, his son-in-law, Michael Murphy, who lived nearby, owned a saloon and was happy to keep his father-in-law in booze. That night Larson came in from doing his chores. Patrick and Matilda were already enjoying a cup of Christmas cheer. Larson had two glasses of whiskey, then went off into his bedroom which was on the second floor of the house just above the kitchen. He had chores to do in the morning but the Roonies decided to stay up for a little while longer. Larson woke up in the middle of the night. His eyes itched, his throat was scratchy and raw and he had a hard time catching his breath. He thought miserably that he must be coming down with a cold. Before he could get up to get a drink of water to soothe his parched throat, he drifted back to sleep. The next morning Larson got up and went downstairs to start in on his chores. He went to Mr Roonies room to wake him. He found Patrick Rooney unresponsive in his bedroom. Larson concerned that Rooney had passed out after a night of drinking tried to wake Rooney to help him to his bed, but after shaking Rooney a few times Larson realized that the old man was dead. Larson hurried to Matilda Rooney's room but his boss's wife was nowhere to be found. Larson began to work out what had happened. He figured that maybe the Roonies had had a fight. Matilda had killed Patrick then run away. Larson walked to the Murphy home and told the family of his theory. Michael Murphy came back with Larson to the Rooney home to investigate further. The two men searched the whole house trying to find any clue as to where Matilda might have gone. As they passed Larson's bedroom, Larson glanced in through the open door and noticed something that had escaped his attention in the grogginess of first waking up. His pillows were black. Larson picked one up and looked closely. The pillow cases were covered with greasy black soot. Larson humphed thoughtfully. This was probably why he had woken up coughing and short of breath in the middle of the night. The two men's search for Mrs Rooney ended in the kitchen. The stove, the table, the chairs were all covered in the same black slick of soot and in the center of the room there was a hole in the floor charred around the edges several feet wide. Second Larson and Murphy made their way to the edge of the hole and looked down. On the cellar floor beneath the kitchen one floor below lay all that was left of Matilda Rooney. Part of her spine, her skull, one hip bone and a pile of white ashes. Her left foot was still in the kitchen standing at the edge of the hole in the floor. Her leg had burned through with the ankle and when her body had fallen through the floor the charred bone had snapped. Her foot with the shoe still in it had toppled upright on the kitchen floor. It was the only part of Mrs Rooney that wasn't incinerated. Besides being covered in soot like the glass chimney of a smoky oil lamp the only damage to the kitchen was that the edge of the tablecloth had been scorched. Well that and the charred gaping hole in the middle of the floor. The LaSalle County Coroner Dr. Floyd Clinton had only one body to autopsy. He determined that Patrick Rooney had died of smoke inhalation. John Larson, since he slept with his bedroom door closed had been lucky to escape the same fate. As for Matilda Rooney the coroner just scraped the ash up from the cellar floor along with the bone fragments. He later reported that it would have taken a fire burning at over 2500 degrees Fahrenheit to incinerate Matilda's 160 pound body so completely. He was at a loss however to explain how such an intense fire could burn only her body and not the rest of the kitchen or the house. John Larson was briefly considered a suspect in the deaths of Patrick and Matilda Rooney but a couple of months later he was exonerated on the strength of his character. Matilda Rooney's death is one of the best known cases of spontaneous human combustion but it is by no means the only one. There have been over 200 reports of people mysteriously bursting into flames. One of the earliest recorded in Paris in 1673 involved a woman who caught fire and exploded on the street. Witnesses said she had been drinking which seems to fit the pattern of alcohol involvement in cases of spontaneous human combustion. Victims are also usually heavy set and they are often female. Strangest of all, nearly all of the reported cases have occurred in the Northern Hemisphere, many of them during the winter months. Sadly, the Rooney's reputation suffered after their grisly ends. The Ottawa Republican Times ran their story on December 31st, 1885 with the judgemental headline, tragic end of an old couple whose weakness was the cause of their sad demise. Even some of their descendants believe that the deaths were the result of divine retribution for the Rooney's excessive drinking on Christmas Eve. Some houses just seem to exude an air of evil. They don't have to be crumbling stone castles with ghosts from centuries past. Some, like Borley Rectory in England, seem to be repositories of creeping horror with poltergeist activity off the charts for no known reason. Some, like the Lutzhum in Amityville, were the scene of some ghastly crime in years past, the scene of which still clings to the walls and permeates the air. And some houses are just plain creepy for no reason. A shut-in died in the house decades ago, or a mass murderer who was rumored to bury the bodies of his victims in the cellar floor. For whatever reason, real or imagined, people talk about certain houses in hushed tones, and kids cross the streets to avoid walking past them on their way to school. 50 Berkeley Square is such a house. Built in the late 18th century, the home was in a fashionable district of London, but there was always something unfashionably off about the house. Prime Minister George Canning, who lived in the house until his death in 1827, complained of hearing strange noises in the house. The hauntings really began, as far as anyone can tell, in the 1830s. Apparently a maid went mad with fright when something suddenly appeared in her bedroom. One account published in a magazine of the day said that she was found standing in the middle of the room rigid as a corpse with hideously glaring eyes unable to speak. She was taken to St. George's Hospital, an insane asylum, where she died the very next day. After this disturbing incident, the family who lived in the house refused to go into the maid's room. They said that when they touched the walls, they were found saturated with electric horror. The house became plagued with poltergeist phenomena, all the standard issue creepiness of a haunted house, rattling chains, rapping noises, eerie blue lights that drifted from room to room, and unearthly screams. Lord Littleton heard of the maid's haunted room and showed up at the house asking to spend the night there. He armed himself with two blunderbusses loaded with buckshot and silver coins, easier to come by than silver bullets. Littleton came down the next morning, his cocky attitude shaken right out of him. He claimed that something horrible had come into the room and launched itself at him. He was able to fire one of his guns at it, and it disappeared. Littleton couldn't describe what it was that he had seen in the room. Another visitor, Sir Robert Warboys, was deeply skeptical of the whole idea of a haunting. He demanded to be allowed to spend the night in the haunted room. He too was armed with a pistol, and he took a bell with him just in case he needed to summon help quickly. Sometime after midnight, the family was jolted awake by the violent ringing of the bell. They raced up to the maid's room, listening all the while for the shot of a pistol. It never came. They burst into the room and found Sir Robert sprawled half on the bed. The pistol lay on the floor, unfired. Sir Robert was dead, but he had not died peacefully. His wide-open eyes stared unseeingly at some unspoken horror, and his lips were drawn back over his teeth at a feral grin of fear. Sir Robert Warboys, read the coroner's report, had been frightened to death. In the 1850s, reports of the haunting began to circulate more widely in the neighborhood. In 1859, a man named Myers bought the house at 50 Berkeley Square. The story goes that he had been jolted by his beautiful fiancé. He retracted to an attic room of the huge house and slowly went mad as the once gorgeous home fell into disrepair. He was rumored to walk the house at night, candle in hand to light his dismal way, weeping and calling out his faithless fiancé's name. During the day, he shut himself up in his tiny attic room, only answering the door to his servant who brought him food and drink. In the 1870s and 1880s, long after Myers was gone, the house sat empty. The stories of fatal hauntings and a brooding homeowner worked their dark magic on the imaginations of many in the neighborhood. The neighbors spoke of ghostly phenomena disturbing the peace of Berkeley Square. At number 50, windows were thrown open, bells rung stridently at all hours of the day and night, stones and books were tossed outside, and the furniture was thrown around the house. The owners tried to rent out the vacant property, but nobody in the area wanted anything to do with 50 Berkeley Square. The house sat empty until Christmas Eve of 1887. Two sailors from the frigate HMS Penelope were on shore leave, carousing their way through London. Edward Blunden and Robert Martin had drunk all their money and were stumbling through the streets in search of a warm place to sleep. It was starting to snow when they reached 50 Berkeley Square. Seeing the for-rent sign on it, the sailors decided no harm would come of their spending the night there. They staggered their way up to the second floor bedroom. Martin soon fell fast to sleep, but Blunden tossed and turned two keyed up to sleep. Also, he kept hearing scratching, dragging footsteps in the hallway outside the room. At around two in the morning, Robert Martin canned out of the front door of the house. Jibbering and hysterical with fright, he stared wildly around the square. He caught sight of a policeman walking his beat and raced over to him. Martin stammered out a nearly incoherent story about how he and Blunden had broken into the empty house to spend the night. They had been attacked by something horrible, but Martin couldn't describe what it was. He could only jibber about some dark and shapeless thing with a gaping mouth. He begged the policeman to come back to the house with him. He had escaped, but he was afraid for Blunden. The front door of No. 50 was open. The policeman cautiously went into the house with Martin following fearfully behind him. They searched the house, but found no monster. They found Blunden's shattered body impaled on the decorative iron railings of the basement steps. He had made it out of the house, right through the second floor window. Edward Blunden's neck had snapped in the fall. His face was frozen in a rictus of terror. The sight of that face followed the policeman in his dreams for the rest of his life. If you enjoyed this episode, consider sharing it with others and build the weird darkness community by converting your friends and family into weirdos as well. You sharing this on your own social media and on Reddit really makes a huge difference and I appreciate it. Also, leaving reviews and ratings on iTunes is a great help and thank you in advance for doing so. This special episode is the final submission in my 12 Nightmares of Christmas series, a collaboration with paranormal blogger and author Sylvia Schultz. The stories I used in this episode are all from her book The Spirits of Christmas, The Dark Side of the Holidays, and you can find a link to that book in the show notes. And if you missed any of the 12 Nightmares of Christmas episodes, you can find them all at WeirdDarkness.com. Do you have a dark tale to tell? Share your story at WeirdDarkness.com and I might use it in a future episode. Music in this episode is provided by Midnight Syndicate. You can find a link to purchase and download this dark, creepy Christmas music in the show notes. You might want to play it in the background of your holiday parties this year. I'm your creator and host, Darren Marlar. Merry Christmas, happy new year, and thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness. 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.