 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, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and unexplained. If you're new here, welcome to the show and if you're already a member of this Weirdo family, please take a moment and invite someone else to listen. Recommending Weird Darkness to others helps make it possible for me to keep doing the show. Coming up in this episode... Air Force veteran Charles Moody drove out into the desert to watch a meteor shower. But he found a lot more than he bargained for when he was abducted by extraterrestrials. We'll fire up the flux capacitor and take a look at the past, present and possible future of time machines. Nearly every place has its legends, stories that have passed from person to person, generation to generation, down to the present day. Some are based on facts and are further embroidered in the telling, while others seem to have come from next to nothing at all. Such is the mysterious case of the Witch of Scrap Faggot Green. Some say the story itself is true, others say it is pure science fiction. Either way, just the circumstances behind the story of the Shaver mystery are enough to scare the goose bumps out of you. But first, just because a guitar is the only thing to survive a building fire doesn't mean that guitar is lucky. In fact, it might be the exact opposite, as Patrick Cross found out when he bought the guitar in 1995. We begin with that story. Now, bolt your doors, lock your windows, turn off your lights and come with me into the weird darkness. In 1995, Patrick Cross, who is also an accomplished musician, bought a white electric guitar in the shape of a V, a copy of the more famous guitar made by Gibson called a Gibson Flying V. The guitar purchased by Cross was made of heavy maple wood and looked like it had been passed down by various musicians. He said it was made in 1989 and it was in very good shape considering it was used. Other than a slight crack on the top of the neck of the guitar as if it had been dropped it played well. The mysterious part is the guitar had survived from a fire in a Michigan bar where a band was playing and all of a sudden a fire broke out. Everything in the bar was burned to a crisp. All except the guitar which survived without any burn marks and fully intact. Apparently someone in the band had died in the fire and the guitar was sold ending up in Oakville, Ontario. Cross recalled that he was strangely drawn to the guitar. It was as if it called him saying, play me. As soon as he picked it up to play he felt a tingling electric sensation like it knew he wanted it and it was right for him. He didn't even check out the other guitars since he couldn't put this one down. It was an odd feeling but most musicians will understand, he said. The guitar played fine in the store jamming to some bluesy rock riffs and some classic chords but when he got it home it seemed to go out of tune when he picked it up to play it. He thought this was odd since it played fine before and now it started detuning itself. When he started playing something like Smoke on the Water by Deep Purple and Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix the guitar played back in tune. It felt like it really liked a dark heavy sound and it played better than ever. After two days Cross began to hear weird sounds in his apartment. The noises seemed to be coming from the closet in the second bedroom where the guitar was stored. He opened the closet door, heard nothing, looked at the guitar, looked around, didn't see anything but he heard what sounded like men's voices arguing with each other. It was as if an argument was going on in the closet between two men. One sounded Spanish, the other Mexican and they were talking about money. He heard this from the front room then went into the bedroom to the closet to look. Again suddenly everything stopped. As the days passed weird things started happening around the inside of Cross's apartment. His car keys would disappear then reappear some time later. He saw shadows move on the wall, heard footsteps and bangs or knocks. Covered doors opened and closed on their own. Lights turned back on after he shut them off. The television set was on when he would come home even though he remembered turning it off before he went out. His cat would look in the air as if she saw something move in the air and then look in the other bedroom as if she could see someone walking around. If the guitar was left out he could feel a chill around it like cold air or cold wind. As Cross began to use the guitar in his rock band, sci-fi prodigy, strange things would also happen at music rehearsals and band performances. They experienced power failures on their equipment and heard weird voices coming through the music amplifiers. Lights would go off and on and blow out on several occasions. Actual fires started from the floodlights in the room for no reason. The drummer experienced his cymbals falling off and his drums going out of tune every time he started to play. The band members also heard other people talking in the room around the guitar when they were out of the room. The guitar could not be played and would detune itself when anyone would try to play it except for songs of bad or loud negative music such as heavy metal or aggressive rock songs with death and destruction meanings. The guitar particularly liked one song Dave Roten played entitled Something Is Out There which is about ghosts and evil entities and fear of the unknown with a heavy X-Files type edge. This was one of the very few songs the guitar would stay in tune for. The guitar had a presence of evil, a bad aura around it. It seemed to be three feet of cold presence. Other people including Rob McConnell from the X-Zone radio show and Janet Russell from Beyond the Unexplained also felt this said Cross. Other things of a paranormal nature occurred to Cross as time went on. He said he had a series of bad luck which he believed was related to the guitar being in his apartment. He lost his job. His health started to suffer. Rashes and sores appeared on his legs for no apparent reason. His car would shoot out flames from the top of the engine every time he started it even though there was no mechanical reason to account for this. One day there was a horrible stench that seemed to come from the guitar like a burnt dead smell. Then the terrible odor would go away as quickly as it appeared. Cross began to take pictures of the guitar and investigate why all these bizarre happenings and bad luck occurrences should be taking place. He captured some ghost orbs around the guitar many times and on occasion he could see a misty presence. It always felt cold when he would pick up the guitar and he would get small electrical shocks even when it wasn't plugged in. He said everywhere he went with the guitar it seemed to cause things to happen. On one occasion in Ontario where his band was performing a fire broke out in the bar area. Glasses filled with water would shatter as they passed near the table where the guitar lay. On May 16, 1999 Cross was a guest speaker at a UFO ghost conference, the X Zone Symposium in St. Catherine's, Ontario. He brought his devil guitar, also known as Haunted Guitar along, to see if he could find some individuals who could psychically channel anything that might explain the phenomena surrounding it. Psychics said they felt weird around the guitar and expressed their opinion that it contained an evil presence, Cross recalled. Two people who said they could help were psychic sensitives Janet Russell and Eugenia Macer's story. Eugenia proceeded to channel the guitar and found out it had a living entity attached to it. The entity was inside the wood of the guitar. She found it had a controlling effect on Cross and anyone who touched or felt it. It seemed to have intelligence and was clearly talking to Eugenia, saying it did not wish to be put on display but wanted to cause evil and destruction. It wanted to fly like a condor with large wings and it called itself Eye of the Condor. They later found out this was a popular song in Mexico and South America where condors do live. The guitar wanted to start fires. It wanted Cross to kill with it, actually use it to kill swinging it like an axe. Cross felt sickened when he heard these words being channeled by Eugenia for many times he had frightening images and in his mind of wanting to kill when he was around the guitar. He had also experienced very vivid dreams of going out to commit murder using the instrument as if it were an axe. The entity that possessed the guitar went on, saying that it had started many fires and survived while all else burned. It said it had been spawned by the devil and it was here to rise up to do its father's bidding in the world. It wanted to fly free like a condor spreading evil throughout the world. Eugenia found the guitar had the most powerful of voodoo hexes, exhu placed on it by previous musicians who had owned it. The hex was supposed to bring wealth to anyone who owned it and did its bidding. The exhu hex backfired on the owners who were involved with drug money and they were killed. The spirit inside the guitar wanted to be released into human form in order to kill and destroy. It liked Cross to play only dark, evil music and said it detuned itself if the music was good, happy or uptempo. The entity said that it never wished to become good, it only wanted to commit evil acts. It used profanity, swearing and vulgar language as it spoke to Eugenia trying to latch onto her. The spirit said that it wanted to come into her body and kick out her soul. Eugenia felt the presence coming into her and she let go and moved away from the guitar as it tried to possess her. After a two hour psychic talk with the spirit, Eugenia suggested the guitar be destroyed or re-blessed to change the evil inside. When she asked the guitar if it wanted to be blessed, the entity responded by saying no and speaking Spanish, it began blaspheming Christ in God. On the advice of Eugenia, Cross did destroy the guitar by taking it to a remote park, putting it in a steel garbage can and dousing it with gasoline and lighter fluid. Before lighting the guitar a flame, Cross put a circle of salt around the container to stop the evil entity from escaping or attaching itself somewhere else. He recited the Lord's prayer three times and told the evil entity to go back to its source. After that, he saw a misty cloud of air rise up inside the garbage can. There was wind all around him. Minutes before, it had been calm. He attempted to light the guitar on fire but the fire kept going out. He poured more gasoline all over it. He also found some wood to put around it. It took a while to light the fire and a while to get the guitar to burn. Obviously, the entity did not want to be destroyed. As the flames went higher, Cross heard a high-pitched shriek coming from the burning guitar. It sounded like a sick, wounded animal. He was standing there, watching it burn, adding more gasoline to the fire when some of the flames jumped onto his arm. Now, he was on fire. As he tried to put it out, he dropped the full can of gasoline. He was horrified because now the whole can of gas could explode and engulf him in flames. Cross said at that time he was panicked, but somehow he managed to put out the flames that had begun to burn his clothes. He breathed a sigh of relief as he watched the guitar burn away into a charred chunk of wood. After an hour, he made sure the flames had burned out. He poured more salt over the burned-up guitar just to make sure it would contain whatever spirit energy was still left. He left the guitar in the garbage can and took the case, closed it up with salt inside it, and wrapped the blue cloth back around the case. He was shaking, but he felt good that he had destroyed the evil entity. Hoping that it wouldn't haunt or possess anything else again, he left the park around 10.30 p.m. Immediately after returning home, Cross felt a sense of relief. He didn't hear any voices or see or feel any more ghostly activity around him. The next day, Monday, everything immediately changed for the better. He had a phone call for a new job, his health was coming back, his sores and rashes had all disappeared, and his plants came back to life, he said. Also, he won $150 on a bingo scratch ticket. There were no more power failures on his TV and his car started normally. Miraculously, everything that had been going bad changed overnight, since getting rid of the haunted guitar. Since 1999, Cross has investigated all sorts of hauntings and ghost activity, but he has never had anything happen as bad or bizarre as when he owned the haunted guitar. Coming up, Air Force veteran Charles Moody drove out into the desert to watch a meteor shower, but he found a lot more than he bargained for when he was abducted by extraterrestrials. We'll fire up the flux capacitor and take a look at the past, present and possible future of time machines. Plus, despite its very odd and cringe-worthy title, you'll want to hear the story of the witch of scrap-faggot green. Least stories and more when Weird Darkness returns. My doc agrees that I need to lose a few pounds. I knew that going in, but he also told me that the meds I'm taking for my type 2 diabetes aren't going to do me much good if I finish each meal with ice cream or cheesecake. I kind of knew that in advance, too. But cutting back on carbs and sugars is a lot easier said than done. I've tried a lot of protein bars while on the road, but I swear it's like eating non-sweetened chocolate-dusted particle board. But now, I travel with built bars. Built bars taste like candy bars. In fact, I'm now using them for my dessert, and at about 150 calories per bar, less than 3 grams of sugar, up to 19 grams of protein, I can satisfy my sweet cravings guilt-free. Visit WeirdDarkness.com slash Built in Try a Box. You can go for a variety pack of several flavors to try or pick and choose to build a box of your own. Use the promo code Weird Darkness at checkout and get 10% off your entire purchase. That's WeirdDarkness.com slash Built. The song White Christmas used to be one of my favorite holiday tunes. Until the year of the ice storm. One December Robin and I heard a loud crash outside, and not only did the ice cause a large tree to fall onto our house, but it ripped out the power lines. We were suddenly in sub-freezing temperatures with Jack Frost nipping at our noses thanks to zero heat or electricity. Talk about baby, it's cold outside. If this happened today, I'd be hooking up my Patriot Power Generator 2000X. This solar-powered monster can power your lights, TV, medical equipment, like my CPAP machine, even keep your refrigerator running, and possibly root all snows, although I can't vouch for that last one. Plus, it's expandable and comes with a free solar panel, so you can begin using it immediately. And because it's solar and portable, you can use it indoors without having to worry about deadly carbon monoxide fumes, and you don't have to spend money on gasoline to power it, because solar power is free. That's something even Ebenezer Scrooge could smile at. 4Patriots.com has a ton of great gift ideas, and they're always offering special deals, and we've set up a special page for weirdos just for that purpose. Visit 4Patriots.com slash weird. That's the number 4, Patriots.com slash weird. Just like the holidays, though, these deals never last long, so you'll want to check this daily to see what the latest special deals are. That's 4Patriots.com slash weird. On the evening of August 13, 1975, approximately at about 1.20 am, a veteran Air Force Sergeant Charles L. Moody drove out into the desert of Alamogordo, New Mexico to watch a meteor shower that was due to occur. However, he got much more than he bargained for. As he was watching for shooting stars, a glowing 50-foot-long with 18-20-feet-wide metallic, saucer-shaped craft landed about 70 feet away from him. Moody could hear a high-pitched humming sound. He also noticed a rectangular window in the craft, through which he could see shadows resembling human forms. Frightened, Sergeant Moody jumped into his car and attempted to drive away, but for unknown reasons his car would not start. Then his entire body became numb. Just when his fear increased, the object suddenly took off. Moody raced home to tell his wife. He was shocked to find it was already 3am and that two hours had passed. Had he been taken on board? Within a few days, a rash broke out over his lower body. Upon the recommendation of a physician, he began to practice self-hypnosis in an effort to recall what had occurred during the lost time period. At first, he didn't remember, but over the next few days and weeks, he eventually recalled everything that had happened. He remembered that he was in fact taken on board. He was sitting in his car when the numbness came over his body. Next, he had observed several beings exit the craft and approach his car. Says Moody, the beings were about 5 feet tall and very much like us, except their heads were larger and hairless. Their ears were very, very small, eyes a little larger than ours. Nose small and the mouth had very thin lips. I would say their weight was maybe between 110 and 130 lbs. They have speech, but their lips did not move. Their type of clothing was skin tight. I could not see any zippers or buttons at all. The color of their clothes was black except for one of them who had a silver-white-looking suit on. The alien leader asked Moody telepathically if he was prepared to behave peacefully. When Moody agreed to do so, the leader applied a rod-like device to his back which relieved the paralysis. Later, Moody was taken into a very clean room with white, rounded walls and indirect lighting. One of the beings examined him and told him, I will not hurt you. We are not meant to hurt you. Moody asked if he could see the engine room. They agreed and took him to a lower level. He saw a complex machine involving long, metallic rods and large, crystal-like spheres. The ETs explained that the ship operated using the principle of positive and negative magnetic poles. They told him that they had a much larger mothership and that there were many other races of ETs who were also observing and studying the planet. They warned him against the use of nuclear weapons. He was promised a future meeting with the ETs but warned that closer contact with earthmen would not be attempted for another 20 years. They also said they would one day reveal their existence publicly to the world. Finally, he was told that it was time for him to go and that he wouldn't remember what happened until a few days afterwards. Moody was then placed back in his car where he watched the UFO takeoff. After remembering the onboard part of his experience, Moody realized how important his story was and he contacted local UFO investigators. However, a thorough investigation by an investigator named Jim Lorenzen revealed a couple of contradictions in Moody's account about the incident. Today, Moody's case remains undisputed. The dream of time traveling to the past or future is probably as old as the human imagination. When H. G. Wells published the Time Machine in 1895, he called it a scientific romance because no one knew whether time travel was possible. A mere 10 years later, Albert Einstein would put forth his theory of special relativity and part of the question would be answered to the astonishment of many in the affirmative. One of Einstein's predictions, now verified by countless experiments, is best illustrated by the parable of the twins. One twin stays home while the other makes a round-trip voyage into outer space traveling at nearly the speed of light for 10 years as measured by the stay-at-home twin. When the traveled twin returns, she finds her sister has aged 10 years while she has hardly aged at all. The traveled twin has jumped 10 years into the future. This is the time dilation effect of special relativity and although it is most noticeable when extreme velocities are involved, it is happening around us all the time. As we move relative to each other, we are, all of us, traveling into the future at different rates. The differences in these rates are very small, sure, but they are real. Time travel into the future is inescapable, consequence of the structure of the universe. Time traveling to the past or returning back from a trip to the future is a somewhat more challenging proposition. Until a few decades ago, the subject was consigned to science fiction. In fact, a query from a first-time science fiction author provoked the beginnings of the first serious and sustained study. In 1985, astronomer Carl Sagan was working on the manuscript for his novel Contact. The book's heroine required some means of rapid interstellar transit and since Sagan wanted to get the physics right, he solicited advice from his friend Kip Thorne, a Caltech theoretical physicist. Thorne recommended the use of a wormhole, a tunnel-like shortcut through space and time predicted by Einstein and well known among science fiction aficionados. Sagan dutifully incorporated the suggestion. That same year, Thorne realized that if you treated the two mouths of a wormhole as you treat twins, keeping one mouth fixed, moving the other at a velocity near the speed of light and then returning it to the vicinity of the fixed mouth, you could create a time machine. If the traveling mouth had been moving for 10 years as measured by the fixed mouth, then Thorne could jump into the traveling mouth and emerge from the fixed mouth 10 years into the past. Physicists had been skittish on the subject of time travel considering it science fiction, but Thorne's work was licensed to take it seriously and suddenly there appeared a torrent of papers, many of which were published in the most prestigious journals. By the mid-1990s, there were at least half a dozen ideas for other ways to twist and fold space-time like origami. All this thinking was decidedly theoretical, no one was building a time machine in his basement. One reason was that in most cases, the plans required a kind of anti-gravity called negative energy to sustain the warping of space and time. Negative energy is difficult if not impossible to produce in the quantities necessary. Still, the idea of time travel was getting serious attention. Naturally, not all that attention was enthusiastic. Stephen Hawking, for one, suspected that by some as yet undiscovered mechanism, nature prohibited traveling back in time. One sticking point was the grandfather paradox. If I traveled back in time and killed my grandfather, I could not have been born, but if I have not been born, I cannot live to travel back and kill my grandfather. The Russian-born physicist Igor Novikov, an enthusiastic investigator into the subject of time travel, has suggested that the paradox doesn't apply because space-time is probably self-consistent. That is, I may be able to travel back in time and somehow become interwoven into a past of which I was already a part, but I will not be able to kill my grandfather quite simply because I have not killed him already. Novikov has also thought a good deal about the other time travel conundrum, the bootstrap paradox. Suppose I travel to 2009, find a design for a zero-emission automobile engine and return with it to 2008 and patent it. Suppose further that the patent is developed into the design that I find in 2009. The obvious question, who would have invented the zero-emission engine? The answer is no one would have invented it. The design would have been generated quite literally from nothing, courtesy of a time machine and perhaps a skirting of some yet-to-be-written intellectual property laws. British physicist David Deutsch, invoking the many universe interpretation of quantum mechanics, believes that past-word time travel would require travel to another parallel universe, one in which I could kill my grandfather and in which I therefore would never be born. Via a time machine, I would have removed myself from this universe to take up residence in that one. The idea has some interesting implications. Deutsch has suggested that one reason we have detected no extraterrestrial civilizations may be that, using time machines, they have left this universe preferring to live in another. Metaphysical and philosophical questions aside, exactly how realistic is the physics of past-word time travel? Each of the several schemes for making a time machine creates a region in which past-word time travel is possible and separates it from a region in which time travel is impossible. The boundary between these regions, the chronology horizon, has remained a mystery, in part because its nature depends upon the characteristics of space-time on the smallest possible scales. We have, at best, a dim understanding of these scales and we will not have a real understanding until we have developed a full theory of quantum gravity. This is the holy grail of theoretical physics, the so-called theory of everything that would eliminate disparities between relativity, which explains nature on very large scales, where gravity becomes important, and quantum mechanics, which explains nature on very small scales, where quantum effects become important. Some physicists think the theory of everything is ten years away, others suspect it is a good deal further off. For the moment then, the question of whether time travel is possible has been put on hold. The recent and no doubt temporary decline of interest in traveling to the past is welcomed by physicists who argue that work in less fanciful areas might yield a greater intellectual profit. New Zealand physicist Matt Visser, himself the architect of a number of theoretical time machines, calls that attitude overtly cautious and boring. More than two decades after Thorne's seminal work, we still don't know whether time travel is possible. But one thing is certain, even as an idea, it is anything but boring. A couple of hundred years ago in the Essex village of Great Lees, a witch named Anne Hughes was burned at the stake for the crime of bewitching her husband to death. Denied a Christian burial, her charred remains were buried at a place known as scrap faggot green, and a large stone was placed on top to mark the site. Still greatly feared, Anne's resting place remained undisturbed for the next two or three centuries. During World War II, however, the road that passed by the green needed to be widened in order to accommodate the new Borum airfield. The work was not as careful as it should have been, and bulldozers displaced the stone, something that would have serious repercussions. Strange events began to be reported soon afterwards. The bells of the local church rang at midnight, with no one there to ring them. Sheep were found out in their fields with no sign of how they had got there. Strange noises were heard in the night. Painting supplies were moved from one room to another by unseen hands. Haystacks were blown around without wind. Scaffolding poles were scattered about a yard in an impossible fashion. Reputable folk who were known for their level-headedness and taking no nonsense were reporting these and other fantastical things, and the strangeness at Great Lees showed no sign of abating. In desperation, Harry Price, the distinguished paranormal expert, was called in. The cause of the disturbances was glaringly apparent to this seasoned investigator, and he diagnosed a poltergeist, angered by the moving of the stone. The solution was, thankfully, simple. Following Price's advice, the stone was replaced in its original position, and the remains of the witch buried with due ceremony in the local churchyard. From that point on, the inhabitants of Great Lees and nearby villages were disturbed no more. The witch once again at rest as she remains to this day. Although this is the basic legend of the witch's stone of Great Lees, there are many variations and facts that both help and hinder when trying to unpick the fascinating tale. The most obvious place to start is to attempt to ascertain the identity of the witch in question. There was indeed an Anne Hughes accused of witchcraft on March 12, 1621, Anne was before the plemsford-lent session of the Essex Assizes on the following indictments, Anne Hughes of Great Lees, widow on 24 June 1615 at Great Lees bewitched John Archer, who languished until 24 June following when he died. She was also guilty of bewitching Thomas Mead and Margaret Bright, both of whom were wasted and consumed and who continued in that sorry state at the time Anne came to court. On top of that, Anne had also bewitched to death a cow belonging to Richard Edwards that was valued at three pounds. It would seem a clear-cut case that our witch had been found, apart from two rather important details. Firstly, despite a hugely popular misconception, English witches were very, very seldom burned. In fact, there are only one or two verifiable cases throughout the entire period of the witch trials where a witch went to the flames and then it was for the crime of petty treason, killing her husband rather than for witchcraft itself. And perhaps the most pertinent to this case, Anne Hughes was acquitted. As with the case of Anne Wag of Ilkeston in Darbyshire in 1650, modern sources delight in repeating how Hughes was hanged for her crimes. However, a perusal of the parish registers for Great Lees revealed that in December 1669, Anne Hughes, widow, was buried. Although Anne is therefore ruled out as the witch behind the disturbances, there is however another potential candidate. Elizabeth Brooke of Great Lees was accused of witchcraft several decades previous, brought before the Chelmsford Assizes on the 2nd of March 1584. Her crimes had taken place in 1587 and in that year she was said to have been guilty of murdering Margaret Cleveland, wife of John Cleveland, by witchcraft. Elizabeth was also indicted for bewitching six cows and six horses belonging to James Homestead, a cow, five heifers and four hogs that were worth ten pounds belonging to James Spielman, two cows and two mares worth five pounds of Thomas Quarch, and some sows of George Fyches that were worth 40 shillings. All of the above animals died. Not as fortunate as Anne Hughes, Elizabeth Brooke, who confessed to the 2nd of the charges against her, was found guilty under the 1563 Witchcraft Act, which stated categorically that murder by witchcraft was a capital offense, and she was condemned to die by the noose. It is highly probable that these two witches became conflated over time in local telling and that the ever-popular witch trial tropes of fire and husband murder were added for good measure as the legend developed over the years that followed. Witches were known to be vengeful, spiteful creatures, and that one would return from the grave to wreak havoc on the descendants of her neighbors would have been easily believable, both to their contemporaries and down to the present day. What of the stone itself? Sources, such as they are, are decidedly vague on not only the location of the stone but also what happened to it. Stones have been mentioned in relation to St. Anne's Castle, a local pub that is also said to be haunted by the ghost of Anne Hughes, Borum Airfield itself, and the aforementioned Scrap Faggot Green. Over the years it has become increasingly difficult to determine which stone was the original and where it had originally been located. Intriguingly, and perhaps most pertinent to the known facts, there is mention of a stone marking the place where an unlucky gamekeeper was murdered in Duke's Wood, resting to the south of Great Lees and Borum. The wood was cleared to make way for the building of the airfield in 1943, and it is possible that the airfield, the story of a moved stone and the local witch, were further merged together over time. Although the story has been much repeated, sources from the time these events were supposed to have occurred are scant indeed. None of the local papers seem to have reported the strange events or the re-enterment of the supposed remains, a curious state of affairs for something so newsworthy. The only known contemporary report was an article run by the Sunday Pictorial in October 1944 relating the strange events at Great Lees and attributing the phenomena to the Scrap Faggot Green Witch. There was also potentially a cartoon in an American magazine from around the same time that gave a humorous account of what was said to have taken place. Another source close to the time was Harry Price, the ghost expert who had aided with the diagnosis of the problem and replacement of the stone. Price was in fact the founder of the National Laboratory of Psychical Research, the great nemesis of medium Helen Duncan, and most famed for his investigations into the hauntings at Borley Rectory. In his own account of what took place, Price was less forthcoming than he is often attributed to be, and in his 1945 publication, Holtergeist over England, he states that, quote, the villagers declare that their misfortunes dated from the day when American bulldozers widened the road at Scrap Faggot Green, the center of the village thus displacing a two-ton stone that marked the remains of a seventh-century witch who had been buried with a stake through her chest at the crossroads there. They asked me what they had better do about it. I told them that if they believed the witch to be responsible for their troubles, the logical thing to do was to restore her tombstone to its original site. This they did, ceremonially, at midnight on October 11th and 12th, placing the stone east and west in the traditional manner. The phenomena ceased, unquote. That real events were cobbled together in the public imagination, both at the time and in the years that followed, seems the most likely background to this compelling story, with witches and stones woven inextricably into the fabric of the history and folklore of Essex and ripe for the picking. As for the strange events reported in Great Lees themselves, however, things are less clear-cut. Did things really happen as reported, with haystacks demolished and bells ringing unbidden? Or is there a simpler explanation? For along with the believers, there are those who maintain that the strange happenings were nothing more than villagers having a joke at the expense of a two-trusting reporter from the Sunday pictorial. In this telling, the supposedly incredulous locals and the witch of scrap-vegged green have the last laugh after all. Some say it's a true story, others say it is purely science fiction. Either way, the story of the Shaver mystery is incredibly freaky, as you'll find out when Weird Darkness returns. Do you keep a journal or diary? If not, maybe you should consider it. It's been shown that journaling can help you reduce stress, help relieve depression, build self-confidence, it boosts your emotional intelligence, helps with achieving goals, inspires creativity and more. In fact, my friend, S. N. Lanisse, has created a Weird Darkness-themed journal just for you. Full of blank pages for you to use as a diary, make notes for class or office meetings, jot down ideas for that novel you want to write. Use it for keeping a mileage long if you travel for business, whatever you want. In fact, she has numerous styles of journals to choose from. Along with the Weird Darkness journal, there's one for dealing with grief or teachers' notes for medical residencies, keeping track of your meds or health routine and several others. Journals make a great gift for others, but it's also a great gift for yourself and your own mental health. No matter what you might want a journal for, my friend Anne has it, and you can see all of her journals, including the one for Weird Darkness, on the sponsors and friends page at WeirdDarkness.com. The Lord of the Elements wants to change reality. He's enlisted the evil Zeltan to help him, and together they'll try to recruit Stanley, a man gifted with incredible imaginative capabilities to help them. Unless Edward and his friends can stop them, that is. A tale of white and black magic, quantum physics and a plot that twists in turns. If you like science fiction, fantasy and horror, you'll love The Last Observer, a magic battle for reality by G. Michael Vasing, narrated by Weird Darkness host Darren Marlar. Here a free sample of The Last Observer on the audiobooks page at WeirdDarkness.com. Have you ever looked out at the craziness of the masses and wondered, what possesses people? How do wearing a face mask during a contagious pandemic become a political issue? Why are there anti-vaxxers? Why do some people insist on a flat earth? Why do others insist on a hollow earth? Why are these delusions so contagious? Come here, weirdos. You want to hear a real freaky story? Your Uncle Darren has one for you. Some say the story itself is true. That is neither here nor there, but I do know that even the circumstances behind the story are enough to scare the cupcakes out of you. The year is 1932, the peak of the Great Depression. The place? A Ford auto factory somewhere in the Rust Belt region of the United States. A factory worker named Richard Sharpe Shaver has an undefined accident and soon after begins to report strange phenomena. By his account, a welding gun somehow allows him to hear the thoughts of his co-workers. He then claims to have received a telepathic record of a torture session conducted by evil beings who live deep within caverns under the earth. Richard Sharpe Shaver quit his job at that factory not long after this event and became a drifter for a while. His subsequent misadventures are unknown until 1943 in the thick of World War II when he wrote a letter to a then obscure sci-fi pulp magazine called Amazing Stories. Shaver's letter claimed that he had discovered a hidden language called Mantong which was a system of sounds with hidden meanings embedded in them and supposedly the origin of all human language. Shaver claimed that Mantong could be mapped over any other language to reveal hidden meanings. That letter arrived at the desk of Ray Palmer, editor at the magazine, who applied a few examples of Mantong in Shaver's letter and thought the theory sounded pretty airtight. Palmer wrote back to Shaver, asking for more detail about this language and in response, Shaver sent back a longer letter narrating his experience in uncovering the secret underground society of inhuman monsters who lived in caves under the earth's surface. These monsters, called Daros, made periodic treks to the surface to abduct humans and take them back to their lair to conduct torturous experiments. Editor Palmer liked this story enough that he edited it into a fictional account and published it in the magazine. Already, it seems unlikely that a person clearly suffering from some form of mental distress could pawn off this rant to any magazine at the time without being dismissed as a kook, but we're just getting started. What happened next defies all explanation. Thus was launched the Shaver mystery franchise, beginning with the first story, I Remember Lemuria. This story sold out the magazine and became so hugely popular that a series of stories produced by Shaver continued to run in amazing stories until it almost crowded out every kind of other content. Shaver continued building this universe of the Subterranean Daros, a race of proto-humans who had gone underground because they found direct exposure to sunlight to harsh. Later, most of them would build spaceships and flee to other stars, leaving their most derelict members behind. The universe of the Daros grew to include rare noble Taros, good aligned reformed Daros who tried to help humans escape. There were also increasingly fanciful elements of underground hangers, spaceships, robots, bands of human mercenaries leading a resistance and whatnot, all the elements of a good sci-fi adventure series. The series sold the magazine. Amazing stories and subscriptions rose from 135,000 to 185,000 over the course of the series, running from 1945 to 1948. Thanks to Shaver's stories, be they fact or fiction, amazing stories was now outselling every other sci-fi publication. And there could be no doubt that the extra subscribers came from fans of Shaver's stories because they wrote in to say so. First dozens, then hundreds of letters poured in from readers who, one after another, confided that they too had encountered telepathic violence from the underground Daros, a few even claimed to be some of the surviving humans the Daros kidnapped. Several readers in their letters winked slyly at amazing stories for telling the truth and disguising it as fiction, what a clever ruse they would write admiringly to throw the Daros off. Furthermore, Shaver and his fanbase shared enthusiasm over the Montaigne language, extending to Shaver's new discovery of Taros and Daros hieroglyphics, which were written in the very rocks of the earth. Clubs of Shaver fans began to form, dubbed Shaver Mystery Clubs. One woman claimed to have gone down a secret elevator in a subbasement of a building in Paris, France and found a Daros enclave which kidnapped her, raping and torturing her for a month until a heroic Tarot rescued her. The magazine staff, then eventually most of the science fiction community, became first fascinated and then horrified by this phenomenon. As fans became more and more insistent that the Shaver stories were true, the science fiction community around amazing stories began to pressure editor Palmer to discontinue the series and denounce it as a hoax. By 1948, Palmer caved to the outraged masses' demands and stopped publishing the stories. While he also quit working for amazing stories and started his own shoebox publishing title, The Hidden World, where he continued to run Shaver's ramblings. Palmer, the definition of a number one fan, stayed loyal to his muse, Shaver, until the bitter end. The Shaver cult followed them. So what was going on? It's difficult to say. Even today, Shaver Mystery Club chapters continue to thrive as historians re-examine the phenomenon. Shaver had not only started a fiction universe based on funny noises he heard in his head, but had inadvertently founded a cult dubbed Shaverology. Contained within this story is an intangible common hook to a well-documented instance of contagious craziness, politically dubbed the influencing machine. It seems that within the subjective symptoms of those suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, a specific kind of hallucination recurs from one individual to another, whereby a machine is used to insert torturous and bizarre thoughts into the victim's mind. The machine is always operated by a gang of unsavory villains who persecute the victims for their own twisted ends. The gang is inevitably an organized party of a group, such as the CIA, the mafia, or the Freemasons. Recall Shaver's version of the machine was a malfunctioning welding gun. This is a very well-documented phenomenon by now. It is included, for example, in the psychological record of James Tilly Matthews, considered to be the first recorded case of paranoid schizophrenia. Matthews' version of the influencing machine was called an heirloom, and it was operated from a distance by a group of spies named the Middleman, the Glove Woman, Sir Archie, and Bill, also known as the King. The machine's torments included reading minds, inserting unwanted thoughts, and doing inconceivable things to the body, such as blocking blood flow with magnetism. Pirinoid schizophrenics report an almost identical pattern of delusions, as if multiple minds had the exact same nightmare. There is always a shadowy group with psychic weapons who are blamed for nearly all of society's ills. Both the tormentors of Mr. Matthews and the deros of Shaver's stories were supposed to be bent on taking over the world and destroying humanity, using their thought-bending powers to cause assassinations, wars, and huge tragic disasters. Yet another version of an influencing machine setup appears in the later works of legendary sci-fi author Philip K. Dick. Starting around the time of the novel Valus, Dick asserted that an alien consciousness was communicating telepathically with him through a vast active living intelligence system, Valus. The fact that P.K. Dick wrote so many revered works of classic sci-fi, including the novels that became the basis for the blockbuster film's Blade Runner and Total Recall, it indicates that maybe he had a tinge of schizophrenia enhancing his imagination the whole time, and certainly that his lucid awareness of sci-fi genre tropes allowed him to recognize the fabric of this delusion, and yet cruelly was not enough to prevent his succumbing to it. If you are beginning to suspect that at least as far as the Hollow Earth conspiracy goes, we finally now know how one popular delusion got started. Ding! You're correct. In fact, we have ready evidence of more collective shared delusions taking form right now. The Internet infamous Mandela Effect, which manifests itself in huge collective false memories of Nelson Mandela dying in jail he didn't, mistitling of the children's book series The Bernstein Bears. It wasn't. And the existence of a 90s comedy movie called Shazam, where the comedian Sinbad played a genie. Nope. The thing is, even when confronted with hard evidence that a memory is false, people will double down and insist, nope, time travelers must have changed it. After Palmer had quit his editor job in Solidarity with Shaver, he went on to take up interest in Dairos encoded hieroglyphs on rocks, which in Shaver terms form a rock book. Collecting these rock books, he formed a lending library for true believers. As for schizophrenics and their influencing machines, well, they're still out there, as are the Shaver true believers. Doubtless we're all familiar with some of the more modern-day interpretations of the same base ideas spread more easily through the Internet now than ever before. Some even go so far as to mobilize together in groups to insist that they're the sane ones and the rest of us live in delusion. The Shaver story and the prevalence of influencing machines suggests only two possibilities. Either the human mind can be affected by a disease whose symptoms are so precise that identical delusions occur in multiple patients, or else there really are lizard people and what's not assaulting us with psychic weapons and we treat our few woke individuals like the crazy people. Both of those possibilities are eerie. By one account, Shaver during his wandering years was arrested for vagrancy, but the hallucination of the beautiful woman that he'd been experiencing also appeared to a jail guard who was persuaded to release Shaver. Are shared delusions that powerful? Somewhere between psychedelic drug effects, hypnosis and very good storytelling could lie a kind of magic power to conjure hallucinations in another person's mind, yet make them so indelible that they stay there. Us creative people worry about this sort of thing. It's a power that's fun to play with for about five minutes until Sorcerer's apprentice gets out of control. Maybe it was never under our control to begin with. It's things like this that can make the rest of us begin to doubt our grip on reality. Shaver wasn't the only one with a cult. Let's not forget two other sci-fi authors who had an unusual effect on their fans in the mid-20th century. One was Robert A. Heinlein who came this close to founding a cult in his book, Stranger in a Strange Land, and the other science fiction author who influenced a wide audience to adopt his unique vision of reality. You might have heard of him. He was L. Ron Hubbard, founder of the Church of Scientology. Thanks for listening. If you like to show, please share it with somebody you know who loves the paranormal or strange stories, true crime, monsters, or unsolved mysteries like you do. You can email me anytime with your questions or comments at Darren at WeirdDarkness.com. Darren is D-A-R-R-E-N. Do you have a dark tail to tell of your own? Click on Tell Your Story on the website and I might use it in a future episode. All stories in Weird Darkness are purported to be true unless stated otherwise, and you can find source links or links to the authors in the show notes. The Alien Abduction of Sergeant Moody was posted at Animalian. The Shaver Mystery is by Penguin Pete for geekydomain.com. The Witch of Scrap Faggot Green is by Willow Winsham for Folklore Thursday. A Brief History of Time Machines was posted in Forbes and Patrick Cross and his Devil Guitar was posted at Animalian. And now that we are coming out of the dark, I will leave you with a little light. Hebrews 13 verses 5 and 6. Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said, Never will I leave you. Never will I forsake you. So we say with confidence, The Lord is my helper. I will not be afraid. What can mere mortals do to me? And a final thought. If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or things. Albert Einstein. I'm Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness.