 adds her to during the podcast that are not in my voice or placed by third-party agencies outside of my control and should not imply an endorsement by Weird Darkness or myself. Stories and content in Weird Darkness can be disturbing for some listeners and is intended for mature audiences only. Parental discretion is strongly advised. When she was 16 and still in high school, Annalise began to suffer from convulsions. An urologist diagnosed her with epilepsy, but soon she started experiencing devilish hallucinations while praying. She began to hear voices which told her that she was damned, that she was going to hell. Convinced that she was possessed, not epileptic, she and her mother gave up on the doctors and the psychiatric clinic. They chose instead to rely solely on the church and exorcisms for healing. And that is when things got horrifyingly worse. I'm Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness. Welcome, Weirdos. I'm Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness. Here you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, the strange and bizarre, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and unexplained. Coming up in this episode Ever since the beginning of the 16th century, Pankat Castle has been the scene of a number of unexplained mysteries and people who visited this old, lonely Scottish castle have had some terrifying experiences. When they knock on your door and say, Let us in or we need to use the phone, do not let them through the door if you notice their eyes are completely black. I'm talking about black-eyed children. Have you ever wondered what happens if they do get through the door? The answer is not pretty. Is it possible that a tribe in the Amazon found a way to travel to another dimension thousands of years ago and still do so today through something called DMT? Why do ghosts haunt us? Author and researcher Brian Houghton has a few thoughts on the subject and takes us through a short history of ghostly folklore and some theories as to why there are hauntings in the first place. Things begin to feel or sound wrong. You feel you are the size of a mouse or the size of a mountain or the object that you are looking at or the wrong size. The whole concept of time might become meaningless and confusing to you. You will have no way to control it. Your doctor won't be able to help and you will never see it coming. With a name like Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, it might sound harmless, but once you know what it is, you will hope you or your children never get it. Most horror film fans will either have seen or at least know about the 2005 movie The Exorcism of Emily Rose. The story follows a woman who acts as a kind of defense attorney for a priest who is on trial for murder after a girl dies when he performs an exorcism on her. The film is loosely, very loosely based on a real story of a girl named Annalise McKell who was so demonically possessed that in the span of only 10 months, she was forced to endure 67 exorcisms. If you are new here, welcome to the show and if you are 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. And while you are listening, be sure to check out WeirdDarkness.com where you can find me on Facebook, Twitter and more along with the Weird Darkness Weirdos Facebook group. Now, bolt your doors, lock your windows, turn off your lights and come with me into the Weird Darkness. Though many may not know it, the horrifying events of the 2005 film The Exorcism of Emily Rose were not entirely fictional but rather were based on the actual experiences of a German girl named Annalise McKell. Annalise McKell grew up devoutly Catholic in Bavaria, West Germany in the 1960s where she attended Mass twice a week. When Annalise was 16, she suddenly blacked out at school and began walking around dazed. Though Annalise did not remember the event, her friends and family said that she was in a trance-like state. A year later, Annalise McKell experienced a similar occurrence where she woke up in a trance and wet her bed. Her body also went through a series of convulsions causing her body to shake uncontrollably, but what happened next was even more disturbing. After the second time, Annalise visited a neurologist who diagnosed her with a temporal lobe epilepsy, a disorder that causes seizures, loss of memory, and experiencing visual and auditory hallucinations. Temporal lobe epilepsy can also cause Geshwin to syndrome, a disorder marked by hyper-religiosity. After her diagnosis, Annalise began taking medication for her epilepsy and enrolled in the University of Würzburg in 1973. However, the drugs that she was given failed to help, and as the year progressed, her condition began to deteriorate. Though she was still taking the medication, Annalise began to believe that she was possessed by a demon and that she needed to find a solution outside of medicine. Things began to take a strange turn for Annalise in 1973 when she began to hear knocking sounds in her bedroom, which her sister also heard. She began to see the face of a devil wherever she went and said that she heard demons whispering in her ears. When she heard the demons telling her that she was damned and would rot in hell while she was praying, she concluded that the devil must be possessing her. Annalise's mother became alarmed when she saw her daughter furiously staring at a statue of the Virgin Mary with eyes turned black, jet black, and her hands seemed to turn into thick paws with claws. Annalise sought out priests to help her with her demonic possession, but all the clergy she approached rejected her requests, saying that she should seek medical help and that they needed the permission of a bishop anyway. At this point, Annalise's delusions had become extreme. Believing she was possessed, she ripped the clothes off her body, compulsively performed up to 400 squats a day, crawled under a table and barked like a dog for two days. She also ate spiders and coal, bit the head off a dead bird, and licked her own urine from the floor. She began to exhibit strength that her parents described as close to superhuman as she threw her sister as if she were a ragdoll, all during a time she barely slept and prayed fervently all night. Finally she and her mother found a priest, Ernst Alt, who believed in her possession. He stated that she didn't look like an epileptic in later court documents. Annalise wrote to Alt saying, I am nothing. Everything about me is vanity. What should I do? I have to improve. You pray for me. And once told him I want to suffer for other people, but this is so cruel. Alt petitioned the local bishop, Bishop Yosef Stangel, who eventually approved the request and granted a local priest, Arnold Rens, permission to perform an exorcism, but ordered that it be carried out in total secret. Exorcisms have existed in various cultures and religions for millennia, but the practice became popular in the Catholic Church in the 1500s with priests who would use the Latin phrase vareretro satana, or go back, Satan, to expel demons from their mortal hosts. The practice of Catholic Etrusism was quantified in the Ritual Romanum, a book of Christian practices assembled in the 16th century. By the 1960s, Etrusisms were very rare among Catholics, but a rise in movies and books like The Exorcist in the early 1970s caused a renewed interest in the practice. Over the next ten months, following the bishop's approval of Annalise's Etrusism, Alt and Rens conducted 67 Etrusisms, lasting up to four hours each on the young woman. In the recordings, Annalise reveals that she has six spirits inside her, which she names Lucifer, Cain, Judas Iscariot, and Hitler. Valentin Fleishman, a priest in the 1500s who was kicked out of the Church for bad behavior, is also mentioned as one of her demons, and she gives accurate details about the real Fleishman. Father Alt was taken aback when he heard the name Fleishman because the girl couldn't possibly have known who he was. All of these spirits would jostle for power of Annalise's body and would communicate from her mouth with a low growl. Here's just a short sample of what she sounded like. This is an actual recording of one of the Etrusisms that was performed on Annalise. Warning, it is very disturbing to hear. The full length version is approximately 18 minutes in length. If you think you can stomach it, I'll place a link to the audio in the Weird Web section at the Weird Darkness website. It includes English subtitles, so you'll know what she's speaking. The demons argued with each other, with Hitler saying, People are stupid as pigs. They think it's all over after death. It goes on. And Judas Iscariot saying Hitler was nothing but a big mouth who had no real say in hell. Throughout these sessions, Annalise would frequently talk about dying to atone for the wayward youth of the day and the apostate priests of the modern Church. She broke the bones and ripped the tendons in her own knees from continually kneeling in prayer. Over these ten months, Annalise was frequently restrained so the priests could conduct exorcism rites. She slowly stopped eating, despite weighing less than 80 pounds. She refused to do so, stating that she was not permitted to eat by the demons. She and her family ultimately placed all of their faith in the exorcisms for recovery. Annalise had her final exorcism on June 30th. During the exorcism, she only said, Please, Absolution. Annalise eventually died of malnutrition and dehydration on July 1, 1976. She was only 23 years old. After her death, Annalise's story became a national sensation in Germany after her parents and the two priests who conducted the exorcism were charged with negligent homicide. They came before the court and even used a recording of the exorcism, as I shared earlier, to try and justify their actions. The court, however, never seemed to take it seriously. After the defense was chastised for not seeking medical help, Father Alt claimed that his friend Dr. Richard Roth came to see Annalise out of scientific curiosity rather than as a doctor. Dr. Roth claimed Annalise McKell had no external injuries during his visit, but Father Wrens noticed that she had several bruises, a swollen cheek and black eyes which contradicts Dr. Roth's claim. Despite the demons and priests' attacks, an autopsy revealed Annalise had a healthy brain with no brain damage capable of causing epileptic seizures, not even on a microscopic level. Many things about Annalise stood out, including the fact that her pupils were unusually dilated and the lack of ulcers on her body which are common in starvation victims. The prosecution claimed that Annalise suffered from epilepsy and psychosis and that her parents and two priests were responsible for her death by failing to intervene. They questioned Father Alt's credibility based on the conclusion of two experts that he showed signs of schizophrenia. The prosecution also claimed that the medications suppressed epilepsy-like seizures and that this suppression progressed to a delusion psychosis associated with epilepsy. It is still unclear why she behaved normally in between exorcisms, implying that the seizures were suppressed by medication or if they simply stopped on their own, but Annalise's psychotic vision predates the alleged medical suppression. In the end, the court sided with the prosecution. The two priests were found guilty of manslaughter resulting from negligence and were sentenced to six months in jail which was later suspended and three years of probation. Her parents were exempted from any punishment as they had, quote, suffered enough, a criteria for sentencing in German law. Since Annalise Backell's death, a number of films have been based on her story including the well-known horror film The Etchricism of Emily Rose which was released in 2005. Loosely based on Annalise's story, the movie follows a lawyer played by Laura Linney who takes on a negligent homicide case involving a priest who allegedly performed a deadly etchricism on a young woman. Set in America in the modern day, the film was both praised and panned by critics for its depiction of the sensational court case that followed the death of the character Emily Rose. Although much of the movie focuses on courtroom drama and debate, there are plenty of scary flashbacks that depict the events leading up to Emily Rose's etchricism and her untimely death at the age of 19. Perhaps one of the most memorable scenes from the film is the flashback of Emily Rose screaming the names of all the demons to her priest. While possessed, she shouts out names such as Judas, Kane, and most chillingly Lucifer, the Devil in the Flesh. While reviews of the etchricism of Emily Rose were decidedly mixed, the film did pick up a couple of awards, including an MTV Movie Award for best-frightened performance by Jennifer Carpenter who played Emily Rose. Other than her inspiration for a horror film, Annalise became an icon for some Catholics who felt modern secular interpretations of the Bible were distorting the ancient supernatural truth it contains. The surprising thing was that the people connected to Michele were all completely convinced that she had really been possessed, remembers Franz Barthel, who reported on the trial for the regional daily paper The Main Post. Buses, often from Holland, I think, still come to Annalise's grave, Barthel says. The grave is a gathering point for religious outsiders. They write notes with requests and thanks for her help and leave them on the grave. They pray, sing, and travel on. While she may be a source of inspiration for some religious people, the story of Annalise Michele is not one of spirituality triumphing over science, at least not on the surface. But then we have no idea of the outcome of Annalise's eternal soul. She may very well have conquered those demons through the Exorcisms, just in time to be ushered into a heavenly eternity so as to not spend it with Cain, Judas Iscariot, or the disgraced Father Valentin Fleischmann. Coming up, ever since the beginning of the 16th century, Pancake Castle has been the scene of a number of unexplained mysteries, and people who visited this old, lonely Scottish castle have had some terrifying experiences. Plus, when they knock on your door and say, let us in or we need to use the phone, do not let them through the door if you notice their eyes are completely black. I am talking about black-eyed children. Have you ever wondered what happens if they do get through your door? The answer is not pretty. These stories and more when Weird Darkness Returns. No matter the time of day or season, sometimes you need to find a way to rid yourself of those ghostly chills that bring raised hairs and goosebumps to your skin. Other times you are looking for those ghostly chills. Either way, it sounds like you need a mug of Weird Dark Roast Coffee. Weird Dark Roast Coffee has deep notes of cocoa, caramel, and a touch of sinister sweetness that will send shivers down your taste buds. This is an exclusive coffee that I selected specifically for you, my Weirdo family. Weird Dark Roast is not available in stores, coffee houses, mad scientist labs, or even the dark web, but you can find it at WeirdDarkness.com slash coffee. Weird Dark Roast Coffee, fresh roasted to order so it's as fresh as it can be when it lands on your doorstep and knocks three times. Grab yours now at WeirdDarkness.com slash coffee. That's WeirdDarkness.com slash coffee. Weird Dark Roast Coffee, it's not actually knocked on your door because it doesn't have arms or hands, so if you hear knocks at the door and no one answers when you ask who it is, it's probably paranormal and you should just leave the door shut and locked. Is there something evil lurking in the old, large Scottish house known as Pencate Castle? Some bizarre things seem to occur there, as well as things so frightening it leaves people in terror. No rational explanation of all strange events that took place here has ever been found. Pencate Castle is located near Haddington, Lothian Scotland. Ever since the beginnings of the 16th century, there have been reports of unusual phenomena taking place in the castle. In the early 1920s, the castle was bought by Professor and Mrs. Holburn. It did not take long before they started to hear strange sounds in the large house. When we first came here in 1923, we were often disturbed by the sounds of heavy footsteps going about the house and the sound of something heavy and soft being dragged along. Various people occupying the house in our absence complained of hearing shrieks, heavy footsteps and groans and the doors which were shut and even locked at night were often found open in the morning. One girl was so terrified that she refused to sleep alone. Mrs. Holburn reported in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research. According to an old legend, the former owner, John Cockburn, killed his relative John Seton and his troubled conscience is said to cause his ghost to haunt the place. Another legend tells that many years ago, Alexander Hamilton, the local beggar, came to Pencate Castle but was turned away empty-handed. It is said that Hamilton returned to the castle on the night of the dead. In revenge, he bound the gates with blue thread and active witchcraft. Two days later, Lady Ormiston, the lady of the house and her eldest daughter, were both dead as a result of a mysterious illness. As time passed, Hamilton was eventually brought to trial and confessed to being responsible for the two deaths. He was hanged for witchcraft at Castle Hill, Edinburgh. On certain nights of the year, Hamilton's ghost returns to Pencate, his shadowy form being seen hanging around the gates. People who spent the night sleeping in the bedroom below the King Charles room have heard sounds of movement from the room above that was supposed to be empty. Many of the bizarre happenings at the castle were connected with the room belonging to King Charles II. It sounded as if the furniture was being moved around. Sometimes it sounded as if someone was stumbling and grouping about the room. King Charles II had reputedly slept in one room at Pencate Castle. The room became later known as King Charles Bedroom. Many of the paranormal happenings at the castle were connected with this room. In Christmas 1923, a piece of wood carved with the family crest was seen to lean forward from the wall and then return to its former position. Two years later, a friend of the professor and his wife visited the castle. She slept in the room containing the King Charles Bed. Late at night, she could clearly hear the sound of someone moving on the ground floor. She went downstairs accompanied by the professor, but there was no one there. On their return to the first floor, they heard the sound of someone turning over in the bed that the friend left. Ten years later, another guest, Mrs. Holburn's brother, visited the house. He was sleeping in the bed, once used by King Charles, when he was suddenly awakened by loud knocks coming from the room above. He first thought that something had happened to Mrs. Carstere, another visitor who was recovering from an illness. He hurried upstairs, only defined Mrs. Carstere sleeping peacefully in her bed. So, who had knocked on the floor? On another occasion, a cousin who visited Mr. and Mrs. Holburn while the couple were away found the bed clothes in King Charles' room ruffled. At the time, nobody was sleeping in the bed. The cousin spoke to Mrs. Anderson, the gardener's daughter. It was her job to make the beds, but she was very surprised when she heard what had happened. She said that she had in fact made the King Charles' bed that same morning. Some days later, when the cousin took a visitor to see the room, the same thing happened again. They took a photograph of the bed, and Mrs. Anderson had to remake the bed. The visitor took his camera and left the castle. Then he returned a day later and informed that the photograph had been underexposed. Elborn's cousin went upstairs to the bedroom so that he could take another photo of the bedroom. Once again, he discovered someone or something had played with the bed clothes. By now, he was so scared he decided to seal off the room. He closed all windows, locked the two doors and placed heavy bricks against the main door. It was impossible for anyone to enter King Charles' room. Yet the next day, he discovered that the bricks had been moved and the bed clothes were once again rearranged. It was a creepy feeling because he was the only one living at the castle. Another curious incident occurred in the summer of 1925 when Professor Holborn's son was working late one evening in the workshop on the ground floor. It was 11 p.m. and it was getting dark. The professor's son took some of his work outside to look at it in the fading light. While being outside, the housekeeper, Betta Ledbetter, came to him and said that somebody was taking a bath. Apparently, she heard the taps running and somebody splashing in the water. It seemed strange because his wife had been in bed since 9 p.m., so he went to investigate. When he entered the bathroom, it was full of steam. The mirror in the windows were completely missed it over. Strangely enough, the bath itself was dry and apparently no one used it. He asked everyone in the house but no one admitted to having used the bath. Perhaps the most bizarre feature of the incident was the soap. It was custom for large houses to order soap by half-hundred weight. The soap used in the castle was all of one color. However, the soap he discovered in the bathroom was entirely different from anything he had previously seen. Strange events continued to happen at Pancake Castle. When a paranormal research group visited the castle in 1964, a glass dome covering a model of Pancake suddenly disintegrated in the library. Were unknown evil forces lurking in the house? Was Pancake Castle haunted by the ghost of John Cockburn? Was some kind of bad energy present in the house? It is not unusual to hear people say that they can feel bad energy when they enter a place. Many visitors heard footsteps coming down the path outside the house although no one was walking there. Clocks placed on the wall between the dining room and the next room all stopped working for no apparent reason. People kept reporting shrieks, groans, heavy footsteps and the sound of something being dragged around. Many bizarre things happened at the Pancake Castle which to this day remain unsolved. This next story actually begins with an email that I received a few months ago from one of our Weirdo family members, Eleanor. She says, Hello Darren, I'm not sure if you received an answer to the question about someone letting the black-eyed kids in but thought I'd send you this one. I'm pretty sure I first heard you tell it on your show a few years ago. I've told a few people about your podcast, keep up the great work. Lots of love, signed Eleanor. Thank you, Eleanor. I actually was looking for this story in my archives recently and I couldn't find it, so I'm glad you sent me the link. I've had a few people ask the question, what happens if a black-eyed kid gets in your house? So even if I have shared it before, it's something I don't mind covering again. So here is the story. Let me start by saying that I know how hard this all will be to believe, but now that things have taken a turn for the worse, I started looking for stories similar to mine. I feel like I should share this story with someone and your website seems like the right place. I made the mistake of letting the black-eyed kids inside, and now I'm worried that I might die because of it. I hope this will be a warning to everyone who is ever in the position to make the same mistake that I did. I live just outside of a rural town in Vermont. It's a tight-knit community where everyone knows one another and people don't lock their doors at night. There has never been any need to. A little over a year ago, I woke up because I heard loud banging on my front door. At the time, my husband and I lived in a small home on a dirt road just off the rural route into town. It was the middle of a snowstorm, and the nearby hills get very slippery in the snow, so I thought that someone might have been in an accident and broken down. It's happened before. When I looked out the window, I could see that our motion spotlight was on. I could see that there were footprints in the snow that had come from our road and into our driveway, but there was no car anywhere. The snow was still covering the road, and no one had driven on it for at least a couple hours. Our front door was obscured from the window, but I could see that someone was standing there. I wasn't sure what to think, so I woke my husband up just to feel safer. While I was telling him what was going on, the banging on the door started again, and my husband went to answer it while I stood in the hallway. When he opened the door, there were two children standing in the snow looking toward the ground. They were a boy and a girl and could not have been more than eight years old. They were dressed strangely and had odd haircuts. The girl's hair was very long and straight, and the boy had a dated haircut that looked almost like a bowl cut. They were not dressed for winter, and my first thought was that they must have been Mennonite children, but as far as I know, there was never a large community of Mennonites near us. Thinking back on it, I know that my normal reaction to seeing children in a snowstorm would have been to rush them inside and bundle them up with some blankets and hot cocoa, but that's not how this felt. The children were very unnerving. They would not make eye contact, and when my husband asked them if everything was okay, they asked if they could come in. My husband looked at me like, what do I do? And I asked the kids where their parents were. They'll be here soon, is all they said. It was around two o'clock in the morning at this point, so the only reasonable thought in my head was that there must have been an accident or these kids got lost. As much as my instincts told me not to bring them inside, I did it anyway. I went into the kitchen to make them some hot cocoa while my husband took them into the living room. While I was fixing the kettle, I could hear my husband talking to the kids. He was asking them if they were okay, where they came from, how far they walked, if their parents' car was broken down, things like that. But they always answered, our parents will be here soon. They spoke in a sing-songy voice. They weren't afraid to be in the stranger's home at all. I started to notice that our cats we had four were all hiding except Pigeon who was in the kitchen with me. Normally our cats are very curious and friendly. We have to be careful they don't run out the door when we leave. This time none of them even tried to see who was here, which I thought was very strange. All of the hair on our cat Pigeon's neck was standing up and his tail was puffed up while he looked in the living room. While I bent down to pet him and see what was wrong, he hissed and started growling and backed up until he hit himself under the kitchen island. I've never seen him do that before. When I walked back into the living room, the kids were sitting on the couch as still as can be, but my husband was holding his head in his hands. I asked him what was wrong and he said that he just felt dizzy all of a sudden, but that he was fine. I turned back to the children to give them their cocoa, but when they looked at me I gasped. It took everything inside of me not to drop the mugs and run away. When they looked at me their eyes were completely black. They had no whites, just giant black pupils. When they saw that I was scared they stood up and asked if they could use the bathroom. I tried to be as composed as I could be and showed them down the hall. They went into the bathroom together and I hurried back to my husband to ask him if he had seen their eyes. He had seen them too and said that it looked like his brother's badly bruised eyes after a car accident. We were in the middle of talking about whose children they could be when my husband's nose started to bleed. He had never had nosebleeds as long as I had known him. I just knew inside myself this had something to do with the kids in the bathroom I started crying while I ran to get my husband some tissues. That's when the power went out. I heard my husband yell my name from the living room and as I started to walk back through the hallway I stopped dead in my tracks. The two children were standing at the end of the hallway. They weren't moving and I have never been so scared in my whole life. They just stood there in the dark. After what felt like forever the boy said our parents are here. As they walked to the door opened it and walked out leaving it wide open. My husband jumped up to go close it and almost fell over. We looked out the window and saw two men standing by a black car idling at the end of our driveway. The man looked like they were wearing black colored suits and were very tall at least six feet. When my husband waved at them they just stared at us, got into the car and drove off. Our power came on about a half an hour later but nothing was the same after that. Over the next few months three of our cats went missing. We can only assume that they ran away somewhere and never came back but the worst thing was coming home to find pigeon in a puddle of blood on the living room floor. He looked like he had been vomiting blood. The vet told us that he had had some kind of hemorrhage. After my husband's nose bleeds became a regular occurrence we went to see the doctor. He didn't know what to make of it other than dry nasal passages but my husband was diagnosed with an aggressive skin cancer. When the doctor asked us if he used tanning beds we both thought he was joking but apparently this kind of melanoma is linked to overuse of indoor tanning. The doctors think he'll recover but they don't understand how it got so bad so quickly. My husband has never worked an outdoor job and spends relatively little time in the sun. Since we let the black eyed kids inside our home I have also suffered from regular dizzy spells and nose bleeds on a regular basis. I've had other issues which I will not mention here but trust me when I say that I am suddenly in the worst condition of my life and no one can do anything about it. I know all of this is because I let the black eyed children into my home. We've told everyone we could about the strange kids that showed up that night but no one else saw them and some laugh at how scared we were of the Mennonite kids but we know what we saw. I wish my husband had never opened the door. Feel free to publish this as a warning to others about the black eyed kids. My advice would be to lock your doors, call the police and wait for morning. Don't make the same mistake that I did. The Weird Darkness Returns Why Do Ghosts Haunt Us? Author and researcher Brian Halton has a few thoughts on the subject and takes us through a short history of ghostly folklore and some theories as to why there are hauntings in the first place. And is it possible that a tribe in the Amazon found a way to travel to another dimension thousands of years ago and they still do so today through something called DMT? That story is up next. And later we'll find out what it's like to have the strange condition called Alice in Wonderland Syndrome. What kind of person does it take to build a civilization from the ground up? Astronaut Nick Burke will have to learn how to be a leader if he wants humanity to survive on a new planet, even if he himself is no longer human. Nick Burke dreams of successfully creating the first sustainable space colony in human history. After a third failed mission on Mars, Nick returns to Earth heartbroken. But during the trip home, he has an epiphany caused by a near-death experience on how to truly accomplish his dream. Nick launches a billionaire-funded start-up company that solves the interstellar travel problem, transporting people in a spaceship without any people aboard. After Nick lands on his new distant planet, he has to combat his greatest trials yet, including raising children and goats while becoming a colony-building survivalist. Fans of Andy Weir's The Martian and Dennis E. Taylor's We Are Legion, We Are Bob, will find familiar themes of innovative science fiction ideas with plenty of humor and pop culture. The hard science fiction novel Seed by Matthew G. Dick, narrated by Darren Marlar. You are a free sample on the audiobooks page at WeirdDarkness.com. Psychedelics, the pineal gland, water fluoridation, the third eye and interdimensional portals, this theory has them all. The main psychoactive in ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic brew used by Amazonian tribes for thousands of years is dimothetryptamine, commonly known as DMT. A process of successfully brewing this ritualistic drink requires a basic understanding of human biochemistry, so it is unclear how the indigenous people of the Amazon rainforest managed to discover the hallucinogenic properties of the ayahuasca brew. At the beginning of the 20th century, as the deepest parts of the Amazonian jungle were slowly being discovered, modern society gradually became aware of the existence of remote tribes and their shamanic practices permeated into Western culture. As a consequence, DMT was first synthesized in 1931 by Canadian chemist Richard Manskey in 1965. French pharmacologist Jacques Poisson isolated the compound from vine leaves used by the agaruna Indians that inhabit the jungles of Peru. Since then, many of those who have studied or ingested DMT themselves reported that it was an astonishing substance and its implications stretched far beyond our comprehension and almost certainly beyond the boundaries of our visible universe. One of the most interesting aspects regarding DMT is that it is naturally found in many species of plants and animals and despite the fact that it also exists in the human body, no one knows its exact function. Dr. Rick Strossman conducted DMT research at the University of New Mexico in the 1990s, administering more than 400 doses to 60 volunteers. He believes that near the time of death, the pineal gland, tiny organ in the center of our brains, releases a massive dose of DMT which might account for the near-death experiences or NDE phenomenon. Throughout history, the pineal gland has been called the principal seat of the soul by Descartes, while various spiritual philosophies have linked it to the mystical third eye responsible for awakening and enlightenment. In 2013, researchers conducted a study that showed DMT was found in the pineal gland of rodents enforcing Dr. Strossman's controversial hypothesis. It was even suggested that DMT might play a role in escorting the soul into the human body before birth and out of it during death. The visions of out-of-body experiences of those who took DMT seem to solidify this claim. They reported being transported to entirely different yet somewhat familiar dimensions. These dimensions seemed to be governed or at least inhabited by humanoid beings that were always labeled as otherworldly. Terrence McKenna, a pioneer in the field of entheogens, once described these entities as self-transforming machine elves. Others reported contact with other beings, alien-like, insectoid or reptilian in nature in highly advanced technological environments. Interactions with these creatures varies from person to person, while some have reported being probed, tested or even dismembered, others described being loved and taught, receiving crucial information regarding higher states of existence. Are these encounters with machine elves nothing more than the product of a hallucinating brain, or is DMT really the spirit molecule as it was called? Can it lift the thin veil that allegedly separates dimensions, or is it nothing more than a glorified psychedelic? In an interview with David J. Brown, Dr. Rick Strossman made it clear which side he's on. I myself think so. My colleagues think I've gone woolly-brained over this, but I think it's as good a working hypothesis as any other. I tried all other hypotheses with our volunteers and with myself. I tried a thought experiment asking myself, what if these were real worlds and real entities? Where would they reside and why would they care to interact with us? This led me to some interesting speculations about parallel universes, dark matter, etc. All because we can't prove these ideas right now, lacking the proper technology, doesn't mean they should be dismissed out of hand as incorrect. Many thinkers share Dr. Strossman's views. Author Graham Hancock believes DMT is a common denominator for phenomena such as hallucinations, angels, aliens, dreams, and near-death experiences. His own research has turned up evidence for the use of DMT in many ancient cultures and it can be found in religious symbols from all over the world. In the U.S., DMT is a Schedule I drug and can only be legally used by certain religious organizations, such as the Church of the Holy Light of the Queen, or the Brazil-based Unha de Vegetal, or UDV. Conspiracy theorists are convinced that DMT is illegal because of its third eye-opening properties. Moreover, some believe that the fluoride present in tap water is specifically designed to inhibit the function of the pineal gland and thus prevent any relevant means of communication with other dimensions. At the moment, it appears that any scientific studies centered on DMT tend to produce more questions than answers and the lucid hallucinations caused by high doses of this psychoactive compound have yet to be properly explained. The work of Strossman and other open-minded researchers could be the first modern steps toward establishing communication channels with beings from higher dimensions. If their efforts turn up something, it will only strengthen the idea that present-day science is only rediscovering knowledge that the ancients possessed thousands of years ago, the knowledge that was perhaps handed down by the machine elves. Ghosts are perhaps the most controversial and widely reported of all unexplained phenomena. But although ghostly visitors are cited in their thousands all over the world and true ghost tales are hugely popular, the whole subject of ghost lore is widely misinterpreted and misunderstood. The majority of people are familiar with at least one local or national ghost story, but the role of folklore, folk tales and urban legend in connection with the supernatural is rarely touched upon outside of academic journals. But the connection between folklore and allegedly true accounts of the supernatural is an important and extremely relevant one. Does this mean that we can interpret the endless streams of headless horsemen, phantom nuns and monks, spectral armies, ghostly Roman legionnaires, vanishing hitchhikers, black dogs and white ladies as figures of folklore and urban legend rather than physical reality? Perhaps this is to oversimplify a complex phenomenon, but certainly the development of folk beliefs over the centuries has affected the way in which we report and interpret ghostly phenomena. Every culture has its own particular kind of ghost lore. Some, like England, have a history of phantom reports stretching back to pre-medieval times. Generally true accounts of ghosts and hauntings can be dated back at least as far as classical Greece, the 5th and 4th centuries B.C. and the genre shows no signs of waning in the 21st century. But what exactly is a ghost? In general, the term is used to describe the appearance of the souls or spirits of the dead before the living, while the word haunting signifies the recurring manifestation of a ghost witnessed by someone in a certain location. A ghost is usually described as similar in appearance, if not identical to the dead person when they were living. However, not all hauntings involve apparitions. They may be auditory relating to the sense of hearing or olfactory relating to the sense of smell, types of phenomena most frequently reported in poltergeist cases. But even with such apparently safe definitions, we are not always on sure ground. As Owen Davies points out in his authoritative The Haunted, a social history of ghosts printed in 2007, in the past it was fairies that were believed to haunt certain locations, which would seem to indicate an origin and folklore and legend for the idea of haunted spots. Writing his classic work on fairy lore, the secret commonwealth of elves, fawns and fairies in 1661, the Scottish antiquarian, the Reverend Robert Kirk, noted that it was a popular idea among some people at the time that fairies were the souls of the dead that remained on earth. Indeed, looking at accounts of hauntings from the 16th to the 18th centuries, it is notable that ghosts, fairies, angels and demons exhibit extremely similar characteristics. It was usually only the context in which they appeared which allowed them to be identified as one or the other. There have been a number of reasons put forward for why the spirits of the dead would want to haunt the living in the first place. Before the Reformation in England, during the reign of Henry VIII, 1509 to 1547, many ghosts returned to request masses to be said for their souls, bemoaning the fact that they could not otherwise enter heaven. In later centuries, somebody might come back as a ghost because their personal affairs had been left in confusion when they died. Legal injustices were another reason for the dead to return. Perhaps the most dramatic motif for a haunting was that of revenge, the ghost often taking the form of the victim of a murder seeking retribution from their killer. Other hauntings were said to be caused by those whose life had been so wicked that they were condemned to wander the earth as lost, imprisoned spirits. Other common candidates for a return from the grave were those who had died tragically, especially suicides. Some ghosts could not rest because their remains had not been buried with the correct rites, a particularly common motif in classical tales, others due to the disturbance of their graves by some unfeeling mortal. A number of ghosts, though, were far less sensational, returning merely to continue the routine that they had enjoyed on earth, perhaps visiting a favorite place or pursuing their former employment as if they had never left it. It is impossible to separate the reasons for and functions of ghostly visitors from the purpose and motives of those who have recorded apparitions and hauntings over the years. Any examination of stories of hauntings from the ancient world up until the present will reveal how the reports are manipulated to reflect contemporary events and concerns. Indeed, it would be true to say that every era experiences its ghosts according to the defined set of traditions and expectations, most frequently based on religious doctrine regarding the afterlife and social conventions. There were a number of important studies of hauntings made in the 17th century which still exerted an influence on the way we see, research and record ghosts today. Probably the most significant of these was Joseph Glanville's Sadusimas Triompatis in 1681. In this book, Glanville, a clergyman and philosopher who believed in the malign power of witches and magic, advocated the investigation and examination of supernatural occurrences in order to prove their existence. Glanville vehemently attacked those skeptical of demonic powers and maintained that the denial of such spirits and demons was ten amount to atheism. Other writers of the same period, including English Puritan Church leader and theologian Richard Baxter who lived from 1615 to 1691 and Richard Beauvais, the author of Pandemonium or The Devil's Cloister published in 1684, recorded accounts of hauntings and witchcraft with the express purpose of demonstrating and maintaining a religious system where ghosts and angels revealed the hand of God in human affairs, whilst witches and demons were proof of the very real existence and influence of the devil. The arch enemy of the Christian faith. Similarly, the rise of spiritualism in the mid to late 19th century reflected the desire of many people for proof of an afterlife. In the more materialistic Victorian society, people naturally required tangible proof of spirits rather than mere tales, hence the appearance of the darkened seance rooms and such things as spirit photographs, ectoplasm and scientific experiments into alleged spirit manifestations. Nowadays, there are a myriad of different reasons why a ghost is thought to appear and why such stories are recorded. The media, especially the internet, has a huge role in collecting, exaggerating and disseminating ghostly tales of varying degrees of reliability. Local books on ghosts and the supernatural are hugely popular, though similar works about regional folklore are much less well known, which is surprising since many of them contain the same tales, though told in a less sensational manner. Ghost tours and ghost walks, as well as haunted pubs have been a significant part of the tourist industry, both in the U.K. and in the U.S. Though, as Owen Davies notes, in the classic work of the English pub, Thomas Burke's The English Inn published in 1930, there are only a few stories of ghosts, though plenty about murders, highwaymen and the visits of various kings and queens. But do ghosts exist? Those skeptical of ghosts and the paranormal in general object on many levels to the reality of the numerous hauntings and apparitions recorded over the centuries. They point out that second-hand anecdotal evidence is not scientific proof of the existence of spirits of the dead or any kind of phantom. Rather than indicating the existence of an afterlife for a fourth dimension, skeptics argue that all tales of ghosts can be explained by errors in human perception and misunderstood ordinary natural phenomena. While these explanations may very well be true for the majority of sightings, the ghost is such a complicated phenomenon that one or two relatively simplistic explanations cannot hope to account for the whole range of variations within the subject. In one sense, ghost stories are certainly true. They give us an important insight into the major concerns, the traditions and the psychology of the individuals and the societies in which they circulate. This alone makes them a vital and constantly developing aspect of popular belief. Most people know the story of Alice in Wonderland, either from the movies or the books. Well, do you remember the part when Alice grew and then shrank? First, it was the drink me bottle. Then it was the mushrooms. Either way, she just couldn't seem to get to be the right size again. While it turns out there is a particular disorder based on those scenes of the story called Alice in Wonderland Syndrome. It is a fairly recent discovery and you might be wondering what having Alice in Wonderland Syndrome is like. Well, the good news is, I am here to tell you, Alice in Wonderland Syndrome symptoms vary from person to person, depending on your age, your brain chemistry, your gender, and other factors, you could experience the disorder in different ways. Other things stay the same. You don't feel your correct size. The main symptom of Alice in Wonderland Syndrome is feeling that your body or parts of your body are not the size that they should be. Imagine you are sitting calmly when you suddenly become aware that your hands feel very, very small. Even physically touching them does not shape the feeling that they are abnormally tiny. They even look small to you, or far, far away. This sensation is what someone with Alice in Wonderland Syndrome might feel. In extreme cases, you might feel like your entire body is tiny, or even just a few inches tall, or that you are so huge you can barely fit inside a room. Basically, you are just like Alice after she drinks from that shady little bottle in the story. Besides your own body not feeling quite right, the physical sensation of other objects as well as sounds might seem warped or altered. Things that are solid may feel spongy to you or sharp. This is again your mind playing with how you perceive things. Even if what you are touching is a solid block of wood, your mind might be telling you that it feels like you are holding a chunk of pound cake. Even the ground might feel soft. As far as noises go, things might sound very distant or at an abnormal pitch. These are both rarer symptoms than feeling your body is out of whack, but they can be extremely disorienting. There are times when people with Alice in Wonderland Syndrome retain an accurate sense of their own body, but the world around them is all sorts of twisted. Object sizes may be wrong. Things may feel very far away or just tiny. Your brain may not understand that the table in front of you is not several stories tall, or that the fork that you are reaching for is actually closer than it appears. This can be stressful, especially if you are walking because a hallway that in reality is only a few steps long may appear to stretch on forever. Though the feeling that time is off kilter is rare for Alice in Wonderland sufferers, it too is possible, and very disconcerting when it happens. As you go about your day, you may have a sense of zooming through time or of time not passing at all. Time that is already passed may feel absurdly short, and a single day may feel like mere hours. This again seems most prevalent in children, particularly in boys. Alice in Wonderland Syndrome in itself is not dangerous, but your brain and your body doesn't always recognize that. Bouts of this syndrome can be highly stressful, even frightening. Those with really bad cases may sometimes feel so small in comparison to other people that they feel they might be crushed or worried that they are going to fall a great distance off of the chair to the ground. Alternatively, sufferers may feel that other people are very small and that they themselves are so huge and are afraid that they might injure those around them. This confusing and stressful experience that would be bad enough if you had to only endure it for a little while, right? Well, instead, imagine this happening to you multiple times every day at random. This is a reality for people with Alice in Wonderland Syndrome. The symptoms may come and go at any moment, and when it starts happening, it is more than likely bound to happen more than once in a 24-hour period. Alice in Wonderland Syndrome is a fairly new discovery. In 1955, a man named Dr. John Todd discovered that certain people with severe headaches, including children, started having warped perceptions of reality, mostly relating to size. The condition is therefore often called Todd syndrome as well. The fact that some of the people he looked at were children is probably no coincidence. The majority of cases of Alice in Wonderland Syndrome are seen in children, so if you hear a kid saying that their head is giant or their hands are tiny or that the room is weirdly shaped, don't be so quick to dismiss them and may not be just their imagination. They might really be seeing things that way. So how exactly does Alice in Wonderland Syndrome work? To be honest, we're still not entirely sure. What we do understand is that it happens when there is an abnormal volume and flow of electricity in your body, which can then cause a change in the flow of blood to and through your brain. Because of that change, some signals sent from the brain to the eyes become distorted and misunderstood. Drug use, the Epstein bar virus, epilepsy and brain tumors can all cause Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, but often there is no explanation at all. Alice in Wonderland Syndrome and migraines above all else seem to go hand in hand. This actually has a lot to do with how the syndrome got its name. There are accounts of Lewis Carroll who wrote Alice in Wonderland having to see a therapist because he reported terrible migraines as well as feelings of his environment being warped in size. People have theorized that this is one of the earliest recorded cases of Alice in Wonderland Syndrome. Migraines themselves seem to nearly always be present when Alice in Wonderland Syndrome displays, so there is a good chance the two are strongly linked. In other words, if you have Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, you are unfortunately bound to have a killer headache or two as well. Although these feelings may happen at random, there is one time when they tend to be most common and that is right before bed. Just as you are about to go to sleep, you might suddenly have the feeling that your body is very small in your bed or that your limbs are very tiny. Maybe your room will feel absurdly large or very tiny to you. This seems to happen for both children and adults. Perhaps this is why some kids are more prone to nightmares. Although it is more likely at night and although it is often accompanied by migraines, the honest truth is that there is really no way to predict when an Alice in Wonderland Syndrome episode is going to hit you. It won't happen with every migraine and it won't happen every night and it could happen without either of those two precursors. The fact is, there is not a lot you can do to figure out when you are suddenly going to feel like Alice in Wonderland. The sad fact is, many doctors have no idea what Alice in Wonderland Syndrome is or why it is happening. Once doctors recognize that something is wrong, they will likely send you in for a CT scan to check for tumors. As it turns out, Alice in Wonderland Syndrome is sometimes linked with brain tumors, so that is not a bad call. But don't worry, most of the time there are no tumors to be found. Generally speaking, Alice in Wonderland Syndrome is completely, physically harmless. Even if your doctor knows what Alice in Wonderland Syndrome is, there still really isn't much they can do about it. They can recommend a better sleep schedule, a different diet, they can treat your migraines, but unfortunately beyond that there is really no known treatment or preventative measure for Alice in Wonderland Syndrome and there have not been any scientific breakthroughs concerning the condition. As for you, well, you can try and make yourself as comfortable as possible, but you can't cure yourself and you cannot make it stop once it starts happening, even if you know what is happening. Don't panic though, there is some good news. All this might sound pretty daunting, but there is actually an upside here. Most cases of Alice in Wonderland Syndrome happen in childhood and spontaneously vanish as you grow older. Alternatively, if you have the condition as an adult, it still sometimes manages to go away on its own without any treatment or lifestyle changes. So the bright side is, it might only be feeling little for a little while. Thanks for listening. If you like the show, please share it with someone you know who loves the paranormal or strange stories, true crime, monsters or unsolved mysteries like you do. You can email me anytime with your questions or comments at Darren at WeirdDarkness.com. Also on the website, if you have a true paranormal or creepy tale to tell, you can click on Tell Your Story. 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 67 exorcisms of Annalise McKell is from bugged space horror stories and from Gabe Peoletti for all that is interesting. The peculiar happenings at Panquaked Castle is by A Sutherland for ancient pages. The DMT mystery was posted at Animalion. Ghosts and Folklore is by Brian Houghton. What happens when you let a black-eyed kid inside your home is by Laura Cucieri for Horror Movie Blog. What is it like to have Alice in Wonderland Syndrome is by Laura Allen for Ranker. Again, you can find links to all of those stories in the show notes. Weird Darkness is a production and trademark of Marlar House Productions. And now that we're coming out of the dark, I'll leave you with a little light. Psalm 42 verse 11 And a final thought from Anthony L. Sardella. Life is good if we allow it to be. There is nothing permanent about the path we are taking. Living in the present moment will keep us grounded and connected. I'm Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness. Barbara Rush and Bradford Dillman. After several locals are viciously murdered, a Louisiana sheriff starts to suspect he might be dealing with a werewolf. Our weirdo watch party is always free to watch online, so grab your popcorn, candy and soda and jump into the fun and even get involved in a live chat as we watch the movie. It's Moon of the Wolf on Saturday, March 2nd, hosted by Hexen Arcane. The show begins at 10pm Eastern, 9pm Central, 8pm Mountain and 7pm Pacific. You can watch a trailer for the film and watch horror hosts and schlocky B movies any time day or night on the Weirdo Watch Party page at WeirdDarkness.com. Hope to see you March 2nd. Doing so is holding us back from what could truly be a great life! That's the message in this week's Church of the Undead. Listen to it now by visiting WeirdDarkness.com slash church. That's WeirdDarkness.com slash church. If you want to listen to the podcast, you can find it at WeirdDarkness.com slash listen.