 Hey Weirdos, be sure to click the like button and subscribe to this channel, and click the notification bell so you don't miss future videos. I post videos seven days a week, and while you're at it, spread the darkness by sharing this video with someone you know who loves all things strange and macabre. If you want to listen to the podcast, you can find it at WeirdDarkness.com slash listen. Whatever you call yourselves or whatever call sign or moniker is thrust upon you, this episode is dedicated to all you truckers driving the boulevard, keeping our bellies full, shells stocked, septics cleaned, and brains entertained with what you're hauling. In the eyes of this ratchet jaw, I'm honored to have you listening. Maybe once in a while, grab your CB, head to Sesame Street, and tell other drivers how to join this weirdo convoy. Appreciate it. May your brake checks be few, your shutter trouble be absent, and your bear bites non-existent. Keep it cool on the stool. This is Spooky Santa, and I'm 10 and on the side. Stories and content in Weird Darkness can be disturbing for some listeners and is intended for mature audiences only. Parental discretion is strongly advised. The story of Bonnie Lee Scott is a forgotten Chicago tragedy. Bonnie vanished on September 22, 1956. That evening, around 6.30 pm, she left the home where she lived in Addison, Illinois and told her grandmother that she was going to go out and look for a blouse. Bonnie lived with her aunt and uncle, Mrs. Robert Shwallow, their daughter Sue, 15, and Bonnie's maternal grandmother, Mrs. Doris Hitchens. Her parents were separated and in the midst of a divorce. Bonnie was an ordinary girl, a sophomore at York Community High School, and a babysitter for many of the young children who lived in the quiet suburban community. The five-room, newly-built ranch house where she lived was virtually identical to all the others on the street. Before the night of September 22, Bonnie never caused a problem, never drew much attention, and seemed like every other girl her age. But that night, she became a mystery. As the police began tracing her steps, assuming that she was a runaway, they managed to find four teenagers who saw her at a diner in Addison around 7.30 pm that night. She was also seen at a surplus store, located next door to the town's police station. After that, she had apparently vanished into thin air. 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, did lost cosmonauts make it into space before Yuri Gagarin? Don't take a gift from Gracie Watson's grave, or her lifelike statue might cry tears of blood. A latchkey kid comes home to an empty house, or so they thought until they heard footsteps in another room. People often encounter strange and frightening things when they experience sleep paralysis, but in one particular story, the horrors began well before going to bed. Samuel Jocelyn was buried in 1810 in a North Carolina cemetery. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that Samuel was actually dead at the time of his burial. In 1894, Rosa Lochner was a witness to murder, but she had been deaf since birth, and her spoken vocabulary was limited. So how could she testify against the accused? A boy wakes to find his previously closed curtains now open, and the only explanation involves a previous resident of the house he is now living in. Mention the word chupacabra and most people will think of a strange, hairless, dog-like animal. They are never described as having the ability to fly, until now. These UFOs aren't shiny metallic discs or cigar-shaped spaceships. They are humanoid, and they fly without the help of a jetpack, wings, cape, or even a broom to sit on. And the sightings are still coming in all throughout Mexico. The North Carolina Cherokee have a story about how dangerous it can be even near a calm river, where the waters can suddenly foam and a giant beast can appear on the rocks. Supernatural women, shadowy men, odd animal sightings and more, they can all be found at late-night truck stops if you are not careful. First, did Bonnie Scott run away? Was she kidnapped? Murdered, perhaps? All anyone knew was that no one had a clue where she was. She had simply disappeared without a trace. We begin with that story. If you are new here, welcome to the show. While you are listening, be sure to check out WeirdDarkness.com for merchandise, my newsletter, to enter contests, to connect with me on social media. Plus, you can visit the Hope in the Darkness page if you are struggling with depression or dark thoughts. You can find all of that and more at WeirdDarkness.com. Now, bolt your doors, lock your windows, turn off your lights, and come with me into the Weird Darkness. It turned out that Bonnie was not exactly the ordinary high school girl that everyone assumed she was. Her family troubles had made her restless, and the police initially assumed she was a runaway because she had done it before. One weekend, she disappeared with another of her friends and spent the weekend in a city. She also occasionally skipped school. Once, after she was caught in the company of another truant, her friend told her that they had better knuckle down and take their schooling seriously so they wouldn't end up like the Grimes sisters. On September 23, a man named Charles Melquist telephoned Bonnie's home. The 23-year-old stoneworker from Villa Park told Jean Schwalow that he had received two phone calls concerning a man with whom Bonnie Lee had quarreled. Jean called the police and reported the information. Melquist, repeating his story for William Devaney, an Addison police detective, said that Bonnie had called him at 8.15 on the evening of her disappearance, and said that she had misgivings about the man she was with. She hung up on him abruptly after Melquist told her that it was her own problem. Melquist told police that he and Bonnie were friends and that she often consulted him as a sort of big brother and that he regretted not being more patient with her call. He also told Detective Devaney about the second phone call which came that night around 11 p.m. from a young man that he didn't know. The caller said that Bonnie had gotten out of his car near Mannheim Road and U.S. Route 66 after an argument and wanted Melquist to bring her home. Melquist said that he went to the spot but found no trace of the girl. Police detectives continued the search for the girl but what few clues they had led nowhere. They searched for the young man that Bonnie was allegedly out with that night, trying to trace the names that were in a small white address book found in Bonnie's room. They questioned 38 young men, two of them were later given lie detector tests, but the trail soon petered out and went cold. Then, on November 15, 1958, a group of Boy Scouts on a nature hike in the Argonne Woods Forest Preserve made a gruesome discovery in a gully off La Grange Road, the nude, decapitated body of a young girl. The dump site was just a few miles from where the nude frozen bodies of the Grimes sisters had been discovered less than two years before. The body turned out to be that of Bonnie Leescott. She had been killed with a large knife, stabbed several times and then her head had been removed. There was no sign of her clothing. The investigation geared up once again. On top of the interview list for the police was Charles Melquist, the helpful witness who claimed Bonnie had called him for help on the night she disappeared. Detectives spent Sunday afternoon, November 16, trying to track down his whereabouts. When he heard the police were looking for him, he walked into the station voluntarily around 11.30 p.m. to answer questions. He sat down with detectives and he went over his statements. When he left, they told him that he was merely helping with the case. He was not a suspect, they told him, but they lied. While he was kept busy at the station, the police were impounding his 1958 Silver Chevrolet. It was later discovered to be the car that he killed Bonnie in. Melquist was brought back to the station on Monday morning. He told the same story over again and detectives were now convinced that he had memorized it. Chicago detectives offered to send for a polygraph machine and it arrived at the station later that day. Melquist was given the first of two lie detector tests. He failed miserably the first time, and so detectives agreed to a second examination at the offices of John Reed, a polygraph expert and police consultant. On the way to Reed's office, Melquist and the detectives stopped for a meal and while he ate, he made the comment to one of the detectives that the jog was up. He failed another lie detector test and decided to confess to Bonnie's murder. He wrote a seven-page confession and by 10 p.m. that night, he had been officially booked for murder. As word reached the newspapers that Melquist had confessed to the murder, neighbors began to speak out about the man and disturbing information came to light about Melquist's contact with Bonnie and scores of other young girls, whose names and telephone numbers were later found in his possession. His history soon revealed a troubled past, dating back to high school and scores of inappropriate contacts with young women. There were obscene telephone calls, stalking incidents, and worse. A young woman named Arlene Rullo told police that Melquist tried to choke her while she sat in a parked car with him. Two other young women also came forward to allege that Melquist had also tried to choke them while on dates. Both attacks had taken place within the last 18 months. But nothing that the police learned was as chilling as the words that came directly from the mouth of Charles Melquist. On Tuesday, the lanky young man reenacted the gruesome crime, telling the police that he had killed her in the driveway of his Villa Park home. They had been on a date and stopped by his house. When they returned to the car, they were goofing around and wrestling. Melquist put a pillow over Bonnie's face and accidentally smothered her with it. He had then taken off her clothing, stuffed it under the car seat, and set out to find a place where her body could be hidden, where there was little chance it would be found. Driving south and east, he followed La Grange Road, about a mile south of 95th Street, where he dumped her body in a gully, where the Argonne Forest Reserve bordered the highway. He dumped her body over the guard rail, hoping it would be hidden by the brush. But Melquist couldn't stop thinking about it. He came back on the Friday after the murder just to make sure she was there, and then returned three weeks later with a knife and a pitchfork. He said that he planned to dig a grave. Instead, he cut off Bonnie's head and kicked it a few feet away. Then he had an urge to cut and mutilate the corpse. He said that he threw the knife and the clothing into the woods, but they were never found. Melquist signed a 45-page second confession about Bonnie's murder. But then, as soon as he had an attorney, immediately denied it, claiming that he had been hypnotized into confessing by John Reed. The case went to trial in April 1959, and the defense rested its case after Melquist took the stand and testified to being under a hypnotic spell during the confessions. The jury was not impressed with his story. On May 2, they found him guilty of Bonnie's murder, and on June 12, Melquist was formally sentenced to 99 years in prison. Judge Mel Abrahamson of DuPage County Circuit Court imposed the sentence after denying a motion for a new trial for Melquist. The former construction worker gulped nervously several times as Judge Abrahamson ordered him incarcerated at Juliette Penitentiary. When asked if he had anything to say for himself, he whispered, no. Of his 99-year sentence, Melquist only served just over 11 years. He was paroled and later got married and had two children. He died in 2010, 50 years later, than he deserved for the heinous crime for which he was convicted. Melquist was convicted of Bonnie's murder, but did he get away with other murders that he was never even questioned about, including those of Barbara and Patricia Grimes? As far back as 1958, Melquist was being linked to the Grimes' murders. There is no question that there were some eerie similarities in the cases, and some disturbing connections between Melquist and the Grimes' case. Coincidences? Perhaps, but these links cause many to believe that Melquist was also the Grimes' killer. In addition to the basic facts in the case, young girls gone missing, found stripped naked, possibly smothered to death, dumped in a wooded area on Chicago's southwest side, the police also discovered another link. Melquist had the telephone numbers of two girls who were neighbors of the Grimes' sisters. It's a tenuous link, but it's there. Like Bonnie, the Grimes' sisters were found naked and their clothing was never found. Bonnie's body was too decomposed when it was found for pathologists to determine a cause of death. In the Grimes' case, because no cause of death could be found, the autopsy reports were altered to say that they froze to death. According to Melquist, Bonnie had been smothered. It's been suggested that this could have happened to the Grimes' sisters too. The site where Bonnie's body was found is in the same general area on the southwest side as the place where Barbara and Patricia Grimes were found. Not far from both sites is Santa Fe Park, which was searched thoroughly for clues in the Grimes' case. Melquist told investigators that he frequently went to the races in that park. Was Charles Leroy Melquist convicted killer of Bonnie Scott, also the man who killed the Grimes' sisters? Some historians believe that he was, and there are similarities. Whatever else Melquist was, he was a disturbed individual and a coward. He stalked women with anonymous telephone calls. He choked them into unconsciousness so that he could have sex with them, and when the police caught up with him, he fell apart. Investigators weren't fooled by his obviously rehearsed story, and before long he had confessed to everything. Even though he later repudiated the confession, it was the truth, or at least as close to the truth as Melquist could manage. Melquist may or may not have also killed the Grimes' sisters, but who knows what other horrific crimes that he would have committed had he not been sent to prison for a laughably short number of years for the murder of Bonnie Lee Scott. It's too bad that it took the tragic death of one young girl to save the lives of possibly many others. Up next, did lost cosmonauts make it into space before Yuri Gagarin? And don't take a gift from Gracie Watson's grave, or her lifelike statue might cry tears of blood, these stories and more when Weird Darkness returns. You shut yourself in, the lights are out, and you're listening to Weird Darkness, but suddenly you get that feeling you're not alone. You don't know what might be under the bed, or in the closet, or in the attic, or in the room with you. You don't dare try to sleep now, you're too scared to. If you doze off, you might be vulnerable to the creatures who haunt your dreams. That's just one more reason to have Weird Dark Roast copy in the cupboard, because you just never know when you might need it. Weird Dark Roast copy contains deep notes of cocoa, caramel, and a touch of sinister sweetness. Each bag is fresh roasted to order by Evansville Coffee, and delivery is free for your first order. Just use the promo code Weird, you can find a link to it at WeirdDarkness.com. Grab a bag before something else grabs you from the dark. On Wednesday, April 12, 1961, the Soviet Union announced that cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had become the first man to journey into outer space. Overnight, the 27-year-old became a national hero and the most famous man in the world. His achievement recognized in front-page headlines from Washington to Beijing. For the Soviets, this was a spectacular validation of the Communist system. They had beaten the capitalist Americans to yet another crucial space milestone and demonstrated their technological supremacy to the world. Gagarin was the perfect face of the USSR, a committed Communist. He was also young and photogenic. For Russian leader Khrushchev, this major propaganda coup could hardly have gone better. But not everyone was convinced. Right from the first announcement, there were question marks about the story the Soviet press agencies were putting out. Several days previously, Western correspondents in Moscow had been tipped off that a successful flight had already taken place. Soviet state TV cameras had even moved in to film them reporting the news. But the news never came. Not until Gagarin's flight was announced on the 12th, the notoriously secretive Soviets seemed to be spinning the story. Then the daily worker, a British Communist newspaper with connections in the Kremlin, reported on the 12th that the launch had actually occurred the previous Friday. The newspaper claimed, according to its sources, that the flight was a success, but the return to Earth had gone wrong and the cosmonaut had landed far off course and was badly injured. Was this the reason for the cover-up? Unlike their rivals at NASA, the Soviet space program was run on a military basis and operated under intense secrecy. It also had a history of covering up its mistakes. It seemed unlikely the Soviet leadership would want to invite the eyes of the world on its achievement if it had gone partially wrong. If this earlier flight had succeeded in putting the man into orbit, then who was he? Numerous press reports at the time intimated it was a famous test pilot called Vladimir Ilyushin. Unlike the rookie Gagarin, Ilyushin was the USSR's most experienced and decorated test pilot. His father was also a famous aircraft designer with close ties to the Kremlin. Ilyushin, rather than Gagarin, was the obvious choice for such a prestigious mission. But what if the mission was not entirely successful? In a climate of propaganda and secrecy, could the Soviet leadership really countenance such a perceived embarrassment been revealed to the world? It is therefore not far-fetched to suggest that Ilyushin's conjectured and ill-fated flight was therefore airbrushed out of official Soviet space history. But could the truth be far darker than mere Cold War paranoia? Just weeks before Gagarin's supposed first space flight, two Italian brothers based at an experimental listening station in Turin claimed to have picked up something truly chilling. It was the sound of a cosmonaut suffocating to death as his capsule spiraled off into space. If genuine, the first man in space never even made it back to Earth. As for Yuri Gagarin, he never flew into space again. After his initial fame faded, his life begun to spiral out of control. He started to drink and his behavior at official functions was often an embarrassment to the Communist Party. Gagarin died in a mysterious jet crash in 1968, itself subject to many conspiracy theories. Was his sad downfall a consequence of living with a terrible lie? Had a lost cosmonaut beaten him to the crown of the first man in space? Whilst the Soviet Union trumpeted its achievements in space around the world, it was studious in concealing its mistakes. From huge disasters to minor indiscretions, the leadership would airbrush anything regarded as embarrassing, figuratively and often literally out of the historical record. In October 1960, at least 150 people were incinerated on a launch pad after an explosion of an R-16 ballistic missile. The disaster later named the Nettolin catastrophe after the chief marshal of the artillery who was killed in the accident was quickly shrouded in a veil of official secrecy. It wasn't until 39 years later in 1989 as communism began to fall that the truth was finally acknowledged by the Soviet government. The death of a young fighter pilot, Valentin Bondarenko in a fire during cosmonaut training in 1961 was also concealed by the USSR until 1986. At the other end of the scale, cosmonaut Grigory Grigoryyevich Nelyabov was expelled from the program for brawling and his image was subsequently airbrushed out of official photographs. There were also numerous reports of pre-Gigarin cosmonauts perishing in attempted manned space flights. In 1959, renowned German rocket scientist Hermann Oberth, then working for the U.S., quoted American intelligence reports detailing a number of failed manned space launches. According to the reports, at least one cosmonaut died in 1957 or 1958 and possibly others in 1959. This coincided with intelligence coming out of Slovakia which told a similar story. Among the Czech leak, four cosmonauts perished in doomed launches, Alexei Ladovsky, Andrei Matkov, Sergei Shiborin, and Maria Grimova. The possibility that these unfortunate men and women may still be floating in the cold of deep space, their capsules having become their tombs, is a deeply disturbing one. But some extraordinary evidence that emerged from Italy appeared to support this unsettling prospect. In the late 1950s, two Italian brothers, Achille and Giovanni Giudica Cordiglia, became fascinated by the early space endeavors of the Soviets and Americans. The pair, keen amateur radio buffs, were excited about the prospect of trying to capture and record transmissions from these early missions. Using borrowed and scavenged equipment, they set up a listening station in an old World War II bunker on the outskirts of Turin that they dubbed Toroburt. Over the coming years, the station would record thousands of hours of flight telemetry and voice communications from Sputnik, Vostok, Explorer, and numerous other Soviet and American programs. In 1960, the brothers made headlines in Italy and around the world with their claim that they had heard communications from secret clandestine Russian space launches. What made this so sensational was, according to the brothers, the cosmonauts involved had died in space. In May 1960, they first picked up communications from what appeared to be an unpublicized manned Soviet flight. If so, presumably it had failed to return its occupants to Earth alive. Interesting corroboration for this came from writer Robert A. Heinlein, who heard of such a manned attempt from Russian soldiers whilst traveling in Vilinius in May 1960. Later that year, Toroburt tracked a faint SOS signal from a craft that seemed to be departing Earth's orbit. Again, if this recording is genuine, we would have to assume the man had not survived. Then, just weeks before Gagarin's putative flight, the brothers claimed to have captured the forced breathing and rapid heartbeat of a dying cosmonaut as his spacecraft faltered in Earth's orbit. Were these lost cosmonauts, like those mentioned in the earlier American and Czech intelligence reports? The station and Turin continued to pick up broadcasts of apparently doomed Soviet missions for the next few years, including the desperate last words of a female cosmonaut before she burnt up on reentry. In 2001, a senior engineer on the Soviet space program came forward to confirm what the brothers had seemingly caught on tape. Mikhail Rudenko told Pravda that spacecraft with pilots named Ladovsky, Shiboren and Mitkov were launched from the Kapustin-Yark Cosmodrome in 1957, 1958 and 1959. All three pilots died during the flights and their names were never officially published, Rudenko said. But not everything the listening station picked up was so horrific. One transmission seemed to suggest someone else had made it into space and back just days before Gagarin's official flight. Vladimir Sergeyevich Ilyushin was Russia's greatest test pilot and holder of multiple speed and altitude records. For those skeptical of Yuri Gagarin's claim to be the first man to travel into space, Ilyushin is the most likely alternative, or at least the most likely alternative that made it back to Earth alive. Ilyushin was named as the true first man in space by foreign journalists in Moscow in the days surrounding Gagarin's purported historical flight. Denis Ogden of the British Daily Worker and French journalist Edward Bobrovsky were among the first to identify Ilyushin and many others soon followed, supposedly on the basis of inside information. Ilyushin had the perfect credentials for the part. He was the son of a legendary aircraft designer, Sergeye Ilyushin, and a decorated test pilot in his own right. The family also had impeccable links to the Soviet establishment. His whereabouts around the time of Yuri Gagarin's flight were shrouded in mystery. In all the fanfare and pomp surrounding the Gagarin triumph, Ilyushin, one of the country's great heroes, was nowhere to be seen. The official story had it that his absence was because he had a car crash the previous month and was recovering in the hospital. However, this was only the first of many stories. Throughout the aftermath of the Gagarin flight, the Soviet state press agencies, so adept at propaganda, seemed unable to give a consistent account about Ilyushin. In reaction to the foreign press stories that he had been the first true man in space, the Soviets simply denied he was even a cosmonaut. However, in the months before Gagarin's flight, news that Ilyushin was in cosmonaut training had already made it to the Soviet press. There was even a photograph of him in a spacesuit published in the newspapers. The details of Ilyushin's supposed crash also changed numerous times. Now it was so serious that it had put him in a coma for almost a year, making it impossible for him to have undergone the cosmonaut training at all. This too was undermined by another photograph that appeared showing him looking decidedly conscious and healthy during this time whilst receiving the Hero of the Soviet Union award. The reason for his prolonged public absence also evolved. The news story had Ilyushin recuperating from his car crash in China, an explanation that raised many eyebrows among seasoned foreign correspondents in Moscow. The Soviet healthcare system in 1961 was extensive and of a high standard. It sounded deeply unlikely that it would send such a prestigious figure to a foreign country for treatment. Were these unconvincing and shifting accounts simply a cover for the truth the journalists had been reporting all along? And was the strange story of Ilyushin's absence designed to hide the embarrassing fact that whilst he made it into space and back, he had landed miles off course in mainland China? The famous Judekar Kordiglia recordings represent perhaps the most compelling evidence for the theory that other cosmonauts made it into space before Gagarin. The brothers became extremely famous in the Italian press because of their recordings and were subject to many national and international newspaper reports. However, some science writers and space experts who have examined the Italian brothers' evidence have cast doubt on the veracity of their claims. Several aspects of the brothers' recordings did not match known technical and operational details of the Soviet space program, such as the correct communications protocols used by the cosmonauts. Their recording of a craft leaving Earth's orbit was obviously suspect as the Soviets had no ability to leave orbit in 1961. They did not achieve this capability until 1969. The famous tape with an audible heartbeat supposedly from a dying cosmonaut is also unlikely to be genuine as the Russians did not broadcast such information across audio channels. But perhaps the biggest problem with the brothers' claim is the fact nobody else was able to reproduce them. Whilst the setup at Torbert was superb for amateurs, it peeled in significance compared to the far more sophisticated radio monitoring arrays set up by the Americans, British, French and Germans. Yet such powerful installations as Jodrell Bank in the U.K. and the America's huge listening station in Turkey had not observed the Russian failures claimed by Torbert. Bernard Lovell, director of Jodrell Bank, wrote in 1963, we have no reason to believe that there have been any unsuccessful manned space attempts by the USSR. We could surmise that Lovell was lying, but to what purpose? For the West to forego the immense propaganda value of exposing Russian lies and failures at the height of the Cold War seems improbable. By the early 1960s, the Americans were lagging far behind the USSR in the space race, and such an opportunity to exploit the reckless indifference to human life of the Soviets would have surely been taken. The obvious conclusion is that the Judica Cordiglia brothers had, at best, made a mistake. Some have suggested that their recording of a dying cosmonaut was actually one of the many dogs the Soviets sent up into space. A less charitable explanation is the brothers had fabricated the communications and the whole thing was a hoax. Some of the events they claimed to have captured tended to support this. In particular, the recording purporting to be a female cosmonaut's last words as she burnt up on re-entry contains poor Russian, broken grammar and many gibberish phrases. So the cosmonauts were renowned for being extremely well educated and the idea that they would send someone into space with such a poor command of their own language is unlikely. In contrast, the Judica Cordiglia brothers own sister had begun to learn Russian in order to help them with translations of the tapes. Her level of Russian was much more consistent with the voice on the tapes than a genuine cosmonaut. Whilst there is no doubt the brothers had made genuine recordings, had they fabricated the more sensational tapes in order to keep themselves in the limelight? One curious fact seriously undermines the idea that the Soviets had covered up earlier failed manned space flights. If they were so intensely paranoid about even minor failures becoming public would they have alerted the world to Gagarin's flight whilst he was still in orbit? The Soviet space authorities actually announced Gagarin's feet 30 minutes before the landing and even prepared press releases in case his flight landed off course and they would require international assistance. Clearly the Kremlin took a pragmatic view of the prospect that a cosmonaut's re-entry into Earth may go wrong, especially with the possibility that they may end up in a foreign country. It therefore makes little sense that they would have gone to such lengths to cover up Aleutians' supposed off course landing just five days before. Some critics have questioned the original source of the story that Vladimir Aleutian was the real first manned space. Since 1961 almost every version of the theory has been based on the same April 11 newspaper article in the British Communist newspaper The Daily Worker. Journalist Dennis Ogden was responsible for the story and always claimed to have based it on a reliable inside source, but since he refused to name the source it was impossible to verify the information. Many critics think Ogden's source was really a fig leaf to cover the fact that he had jumped to a rather embarrassing conclusion. Ogden was a neighbor of Aleutian and had noted his public absence when a few days before Gagarin's flight he had heard rumors of a launch he simply had a journalistic hunch it was Aleutian on board. The story was little more than a guess on Ogden's part, a guess that was reported around the world and is still cited as evidence of a cover-up fifty years later. That Ogden himself had little confidence in his own scoop is obvious. The very next day he wrote a story in The Daily Worker proclaiming Gagarin as the first man in space after all. Savannah's Bonafenture Cemetery is known for its lush scenery and striking monuments to the dead, yet there is one particular headstone that stops visitors in their tracks. Surrounded by a long iron fence, sitting pensively with her right hand resting on a tree stump, is the statue of a little girl. Her name is Gracie Watson, also known as Little Gracie. She was the only child of Wales, WJ and Margaret Francis Watson. Wales took over management of the luxurious Pulaski Hotel in the 1880s, though the Watsons found themselves largely ignored by the city's upper class. Margaret longed to integrate herself into the community and began giving away food and drinks at their hotel. Soon, the family's social status improved. Numerous parties were held at the Pulaski to which Gracie was often invited. The little girl charmed guests with her lovable personality, taking on the role of an adorable hostess. When she grew tired of mingling with the adults, Gracie would often slip away to play beneath the back stairwell. Her disappearing act became a running joke with the partygoers who would ask aloud, where is Gracie as a way of acknowledging the lateness of the hour. Then, just two days before Easter in 1889, Gracie Watson died of pneumonia. She was six years old. Wales and Margaret were inconsolable. A grief-stricken Margaret claimed that she could still hear little Gracie laughing and playing under the back staircase. Soon thereafter, Wales moved his wife into the newly opened DeSoto Hotel to escape their painful memories. But over the years, different staff members insisted that Gracie's voice could still be heard near the stairs. Other staff members refused to go into the basement due to the ominous sound of low moaning and clanking metal. Wales Watson and a final tribute to his daughter hired sculptor John Walls to carve a life-sized monument of Gracie using a photograph as a reference. The finished work became the marker of her grave in Bonaventure Cemetery. It is said to be eerily accurate, all the way down to the shape of her mouth. And as the years passed, tales of Gracie's life and her haunting gravestone grew. Visitors to Gracie's grave often leave toys and objects for her to enjoy. Some say Gracie's statue cries tears of blood if these gifts are removed. Numerous witnesses have claimed to see what they perceived to be a real girl in a white dress skipping through the cemetery grass, vanishing into thin air. Others have seen little Gracie playing in Johnson Square, a public space near the Pulaski Hotel's former location. At least one person has seen a young girl staring from the window of the building at the corner of Bryan and Bull Street, where the Pulaski stood until it was demolished in 1957. In the spring of 2002, a Savannah tour guide led a group past the Pulaski's former site and began to tell Gracie's story. Suddenly, she noticed an unfamiliar four-story structure reflected in the window of the building she faced. The guide spun around but saw no such building. She continued, however, to see the same reflection in other buildings until she finished Gracie's story. Later, after seeing a historic photo of the Pulaski Hotel, the tour guide went pale and confirmed it was the reflection she had seen. Gracie Watson's grave is one of the most heavily trafficked in Bonaventure Cemetery. The iron fence was specifically added to prevent damage to the sculpture. Yet, if the aforementioned sightings are to be believed, Gracie Watson herself is also watching over her resting place. So if you're ever in Savannah, Georgia, and decide to visit the beautiful 160-acre grounds of Bonaventure Cemetery, keep your eyes and ears open for a little girl in Victorian clothing. She may just be coming out to play. When Weird Darkness returns, a latchkey kid comes home to an empty house, or so they thought until they heard footsteps in another room. People often encounter strange and frightening things when they experience sleep paralysis, but in one particular story, the horrors began well before going to bed. These stories are up next. Your Haunted Lives, True Tales of the Paranormal by G. Michael Vasey, a collection of creepy, often downright chilling, true experiences of the paranormal submitted by visitors to the My Haunted Life 2 website. The tales have been carefully selected and edited and range from apparitions to hauntings to demons through to the downright bizarre. This terrific collection of true stories of the paranormal will keep you looking over your shoulder. Your Haunted Lives, True Tales of the Paranormal by G. Michael Vasey, narrated by Darren Marlar. You're a free sample on the audiobooks page at WeirdDarkness.com. While this isn't the absolutely most terrifying or horrific story, it is the strangest and scariest thing that's ever happened to me. So this happened when I was around 10. I've always taken the bus home from school, and I'd gotten a home key for my eighth birthday. This was because most of the time, neither of my parents were home by the time I arrived. Today was a day like normal. I got home at 245, unlocked the back door with my home key, and walked into the house. I've always felt slightly uneasy about being home by myself, mostly because of many late nights listening to creepy YouTube videos, but today I just felt terrified as I stepped into the house. I brushed off the uneasy feeling, dropping my backpack on the floor and starting on my homework. About 30 minutes in, the longest that my parents had ever been gone, I heard small, faint, footstep-like sounds upstairs, coming from the laundry room and going towards my mom's desk. My mother's office is right by the laundry room, and you can access it through a door. I work at the kitchen table, and my mom's office is on a bit of a balcony above. Then I heard the sound of rustling papers. This terrified me out of my mind. I froze up, my pencil stopped moving, and my entire body froze in fear. I couldn't move a muscle, not even if I had wanted to. It was only 20 minutes more later when my dad came home that I could slightly relax again. Once my dad started on his work, I went upstairs to my mother's office and the site there shocked me. My mother's work papers, generally organized in neat stacks, were scattered across her loft. Freaked out, I quickly stacked the papers and put them back where they belonged, or at least where I had assumed they belonged. That laundry room has scared me ever since. However, the mystery of who or what was up there that day will forever haunt me. For now, however, I'm just glad I don't live in that house anymore. I'm pretty sure many of you are familiar with the term sleep paralysis. I, unfortunately, was a victim of it. Moreover, it happened to me on New Year's Day of 2015. Me and my girlfriend were in Bangkok for a short New Year's Countdown holiday. This trip was actually an impromptu one, having booked air tickets and accommodation on the last week of December 2014. Due to the Christmas and New Year holiday period, most hotels were already fully booked and we had to stay in three different hotels over the six days we were there. This incident happened during our stay on the second hotel, a four-star service apartment at Thonglor area and adjacent to Akimia Road, where all the local hip clubs are. The hotel looks decent enough, not the sort of place you would expect to be haunted. Amenities around the vicinity of the hotel were pretty good, many good restaurants and supermarkets. Reviews were good as well, with minor complaints on the quality of the room and it being a little worn down. It was supposed to be a two-night stay at this hotel until we switched again. We checked into the hotel on 30 December 2014. The receptionist gave us the key to a room on the fifth floor. As I travel quite often, and also being a be safe then sorry kind of person, the first thing I always do before I enter a hotel room is to always knock on the door three times or ring the doorbell if there is one, as a polite gesture to notify the occupants that I will be entering and staying. I vividly remembered immediately after I opened the main door, the door to the bedroom opened itself. I am pretty sure it wasn't because the chambermaid did not close the bedroom door properly after cleaning the room and the draft and pressure from the opening of the main door had caused the bedroom door to creep open, but because I heard the sound of the bedroom door knob being turned. I could have sworn also that I saw a shadow dart quickly into the bedroom instantly. My girlfriend was standing behind me so she didn't see the shadow, but she did witness the bedroom door opening by itself. Both of us looked at each other and both of us had the same thought. We went down to the reception area and after explaining the situation, with dismay and disbelief from the hotel staff of cause, politely requested a room change. But due to the peak holiday period, the only available room left was at the corner on the ground floor, and we were left to no avail but to accept it. Come to think about it, I suspect that that room might be a room most typical hotels leave vacant for regular occupants. The room seemed okay, and after we settled our barang-barang, we headed out for our activities for the day and came back quite late as we went to a nearby clubbed party. Nothing happened during the first night. We woke up in the afternoon, showered, changed, and went out. We ended our countdown at Asiatique and went back to our hotel around 1am. Now apart from the first night which was okay, the first thing I noticed immediately after I entered the room was the warmth and stuffiness I felt. I adjusted the air conditioner's temperature in the bedroom as well as the living room, but the funny thing is moments after that the room would be very warm and then gradually would feel cold again and sporadically feel warm again. Thinking it might be attributed to the fact that we'd been out the whole day and the tiredness was starting to creep in, I shrugged it off as being weary. So to cut the long story short, after we showered and were getting ready for bed, I started to hear faint tapping noises like fingernails tapping on wooden hollow planks or cheap plywood. The tapping noise sounded random and inconsistent. Two taps, pause, then a few short bursts of taps, pause. I cannot pinpoint the location of the tapping. At first, it was faint and distant, and secondly, being in a room situated on the ground floor, the outside ambiance noise was drowning it out. I tried not to think about it, and I also did not wish to further freak my girlfriend out. But I paid close attention to it nonetheless. Within 20 minutes, my girlfriend was fast asleep. But I, on the other hand, cannot sleep at all. I felt very uneasy as if there was something or someone watching us. Furthermore, the difference in temperature made me sweat and froze at the same time. It also felt nauseating just to be in the room. I felt heavy and weighted down. The tapping noises were also beginning to feel or sound louder, and this time I can pinpoint it being on or around the wall, dividing the bedroom and the living room. I was beginning to feel really tired and sleepy, but every time I closed my eyes, I would feel the uneasiness weighing heavily on me, and my inner voice was telling me to stay awake. At around 3 am, I can honestly say that I do not know whether I was sleeping or if it was a dream. It felt as if I was sleeping and awake at the same time. It was a very surreal kind of feeling. In the dream, I awake to find the toilet light switched off, which was actually on with the door slightly ajar. The room was dark, with faint light shining in through the window from the parking lot outside, and I can make out the area in the room. I felt petrified and wanted to get out of the bed to check out what was wrong. This was when the thing appeared. It appeared on the side of my bed on my right. It was dark and shaped like a person. I could shout, I wanted to get up, but it sat on me. It felt distinctly as if it was a person's butt sitting on my stomach, literally feeling the shape and softness of the buttocks and hardness of the hip bone kind of feeling. With my hands on the blanket, I tried to spring myself up from the bed using my elbows on the bed as support. The thing grabbed both my wrists. I swear, I literally felt fingers digging into both my wrist and its grip tightened and pushed me down on the bed. I panicked and uttered so loudly Buddhist chants that I woke up. Or was I already awake? To find my girlfriend, eyes wide open stunned, pale face staring at me. That thing was nowhere in sight, and I could move again. I did not tell her my experience immediately, but instead got up, switched on all the lights of the bedroom and living room and started cursing and swearing. I read somewhere, or was it someone who told me, can't remember, that if you do that they will be scared off by the anger and the earthly presence. While pacing up and down the living room and searching through Agoda for hotel rooms, I booked a new hotel and managed to pacify my girlfriend back to sleep. Packed our bags and I stayed awake until 6am in the morning. We checked out and left the place. The receptionist still asked me if everything was okay. I didn't even bother to explain, I just wanted to get out. After we checked into the new place, I told my girlfriend what happened. Guess what? She also felt uneasy but did not want to alarm me as she thought it might be due to her weariness as well. Furthermore, she said while she was asleep, she could feel hand or hands caressing her body in a sexual way. She thought it was me being cheeky. After what she told me, the fear actually turned to anger. The creepy things I am about to share have been seen at truck stops that were described on Reddit and they include the paranormal, the bizarre and the downright strange. Like rest stops and the murders they get associated with, truck stops do sometimes live up to their reputations as places you might not want to find yourself alone. With tales about other truck drivers committing crimes, supernatural women, shadowy men and some odd animal sightings, these creepy truck stop stories will ensure you use the restroom before you leave the house. I had just pulled into a truck stop inside Billings, Montana. I was playing slants and a beautiful American Indian girl was serving drinks. After quite a few drinks, I started chatting with her on a more personal level. She told me that her shift ended in a few hours and that she'd be behind the truck stop with the case of beer if I felt like partying. I did. I hung around the front of the building and when everyone started filing out the doors, I went around back to meet her. I couldn't find her but I found an older Mexican woman who seemed to know my name and acted as if I had just been talking to her inside. I was buzzed but not drunk or stupid. I knew this wasn't the same person. What also struck me as odd is that she had no personal belongings besides the clothes on her back, no purse or key ring, nothing. I started to feel a little tripped out because of this and began to act like I didn't know her and didn't want anything to do with her. She became cold and stopped talking to me. Okay, well, that was freaking weird. I walk all the way back out to my truck, climb in the back, change into my sleepwear and laid on the bunk to re-read a book. Only a few minutes into the book I hear three loud bangs on the side of my sleeper. I'm talking, holy crap, your truck's on fire, you have to get out now loud. I opened the curtains and rolled down the window and saw that the young American Indian woman I had been speaking with was standing next to my truck. I immediately picked up something wrong about her though. It wasn't her lack of speech, odd disheveled look or rigid body movements, it was her eyes that got to me, solid black. I could say that the dark night coupled with a few drinks could make me think her eyes were black, but I'm not. When I hit a switch in the back of my truck, the inside lights up like a baseball stadium. Her eyes seemed to be pulling the light into them like miniature black holes. It reminded me of when a woman wearing mascara cries and she kind of looks like a raccoon afterwards. It looked like she had rubbed charcoal around her eyes. It also felt like my body was acting of its own accord, like my body was screaming at my fragile psyche to open the door and let her into my truck, despite the fact that she looked freaking terrifying and hadn't said a single word to me since meeting her again. I remember having to choke out the word no. It reminded me of when you're on the verge of tears but you choke through them to speak to someone. I was too terrified to look out the side vents to see if she was still standing outside. I was too terrified that I might have ended looking back into darkness only to know in my mind's eye that she could be staring right back at me. I've got the shakes just from remembering that. I live in a smallish town about an hour south of Salt Lake City, Utah. I'm a 15-year-old male and professional mountain biker. I live on the south side of town. But the town is small enough I can ride my bike from one end to the other in around 30 minutes. Anyway, this story happened about a year ago. I got in a fight with my parents about not being able to have a sleepover that night and rode off to help get over it. As I rode up the hill to the road that goes all the way through town, I thought of where to go. I decided I was going to go to a closed-down Flying J on the other side of town. I took off and got there about 30 minutes later. As I was approaching the Flying J, I got an uneasy feeling. I didn't think much of it and shook it off but as I rode onto the property I had another uneasy feeling. Trucks still parked there at night and I'd seen drivers in them as I drove past several times. The first thing I noticed was none of the trucks were running and none of them had lights on. Now note, it was only about 8.30pm so it was just past dark and that's when most trucks pull in. I know this because my dad's a truck driver and I'd spent two months with him on the truck that summer. I started just riding around to the back of the parking lot with that uneasy feeling getting stronger the further I went into the parking lot. About half way through I noticed a dark figure standing by one of the trucks. I couldn't tell if it was looking at me or not but I thought it was just a driver getting some fresh air. As I started getting closer, I noticed I could see through the figure and see the air intake on the side of the truck. For those of you who don't know where that is, it is right in front of the doors on both sides and looks like a big barrel. As I got even closer to the figure, I suddenly felt like someone had slugged me in the gut with dread. I looked back up at the figure and it was gone. I looked back where I was going and a seven foot tall completely black figure stood in front of me and had red eyes like fireballs floating in mid-air. My quick mountain biking reflexes made me swerve to the side of the figure. I started pedaling as fast as I could and went around a row of trucks. I looked back and the figure was chasing me. I changed to a higher gear and started to get away from the figure. As I rode past the fence, I looked back and it was stopped right behind the fence. I rode back home as fast as I could. I didn't tell my parents because they wouldn't believe me. The next day I was hanging out with some friends and told them about it. One of them said they knew kids who used Ouija boards and did really bad stuff there at night. I shook it off until this year when my dad's trucking company bought the lot. I have to go there late at night to help my dad unload and tarp trucks. Almost every time I'm there, I see that figure standing by something staring at me. My uncle was a truck driver for many years. He spent several years doing cross-country trips, often loading up his trailer in the middle of the night. While he waited for his trailer to be loaded, he'd make his way over to a nearby truck stop, have a late-night meal and talk with other drivers there. After a while, he'd make friends with drivers that were on a somewhat similar schedule. He befriended this particular guy that he would run into about once a month or so. One night, the guy invites him back to a semi. He wants to show him something he's built. This guy's semi has a sleeper on the back, so it's pretty big. Basically, it's a semi truck with a small room right behind the driver to sleep in. My uncle is intrigued by what kind of custom work this guy had done, so he goes along with him. Once they're in the truck, the guy shows him what he is built in the sleeper of a semi. It is a big, heavy-duty box. Apparently, it has hydraulic arms on either side, so he can open and close it with the push of a button. He says once he pushes the button, it seals shut and it can't be opened. My uncle is kind of weirded out by this and cracks a few jokes about the box. The guy starts to get a little agitated. My uncle realizes this and decides it's time to leave this guy's semi. A few months later, he finds out that the guy was a serial killer stuffing truck stop hookers and others into this custom hydraulic box. At this point in the story, his hands start shaking. He can barely drink his beer. That guy was massive, he says. His hand could cover most of my head. He could have stuffed me in the box and there's nothing I could have done to stop him. Shoot, maybe there was somebody in there already. He still has nightmares about it years later. Given the nature of their work, truck drivers can be pretty unhealthy and sometimes die in their sleep at rest stops. The sad and gross thing is that they can go unnoticed for a decent amount of time. There was a story I read a while back by a trucker who shared his creepiest experience while out on the road. It was getting very late and very dark, so he pulled into a rest area off the highway in the middle of nowhere. The place was totally empty, meaning there weren't any other vehicles or people there. While he was getting some shut-eye inside his truck, he heard a faint sound of a barking dog that seemed to get louder and louder as time went by. Eventually, the nasty barking sound was coming from right outside his driver's side door. As he got up to look out the window, he didn't see a rabid dog, but instead it was some crazy-eyed person looking directly at him, growling and trying to get in. He started the engine and got the heck out of there. Pulled over to stay the night near the Arizona Welcome Center on I-40. I hear a light knocking on my door. An old lady wearing nothing but an oversized sweatshirt is standing outside. I roll down my window and ask what's up. In the tiniest creepiest little voice, she says that there's something in her making a weird noise and that she needs help with it. I didn't help her. All growing up, my dad was a semi-truck driver. He drove full-time, all over the country. We didn't get to see him very often, but he used to call home almost every night, and in the summers, my sister and I got to travel with him for a week or two. We called it trucking. This story happened when I was really little, probably four or so, and I don't really remember it. I was trucking with my dad, and he was experiencing some minor engine trouble. Before he was a truck driver, my dad was a mechanic and did most of his own truck repairs. He had pulled over and a small truck stop to work on the truck. There was a tree next to the parking lot, so he sat me down underneath it with my doll, and he worked on the truck right next to me. It was really hot, and while he was laying underneath the hot truck, my dad blacked out. Who knows how long he was out. He was having a heat stroke. He finally came to with a splitting headache. He looked over to the tree to check on me, and I was still just sitting there playing with my doll. But there was a guy creeping up behind me, reaching out to grab me. I don't know how, but with the little energy my dad had left, he jumped out from under the truck, yelling and swinging whatever tool he had nearby. The guy ran off, and my dad collapsed. A lady working inside the truck stop saw the whole thing and came running out. She got me and my dad inside and took care of me while he cooled down. I don't know what would have happened if my dad hadn't woken up when he did. My friends and I drove out to the Greyhound station along the highway to drop a friend off. There were five of us in total, with me sitting in the middle seat in the back. The station is adjacent to a truck stop, with the parking spots for the station perpendicular to the spots for the trucks. It just so happened that the spot we were parked in was in line with the cab of the truck parked perpendicular to us. We were just sitting there in the car, waiting for the bus, and my two friends in front of me were turned so that they faced us in the back. Nothing special was going on, just general chit chat. With me being the only one with a clear view out the windshield, I happened to look up at the cab of the truck in front of us. I noticed a blinking little red light that seemed out of place at the bottom of the window. I looked a little closer and realized that the little red light belonged to a camera the trucker was holding that was pointed unmistakably directly at us. After I pointed this out to my friends and all attention turned to him, the camera and creeper holding it quickly disappeared from sight. Needless to say, we also disappeared from sight, moving to a space as far away from truck parking spots as possible. Not the worst thing that could have happened, but definitely creepy. I just don't understand what he was wanting to get out of filming us. I mean, we were just sitting in a car, chatting. I just don't get it. When I was a fresh-faced 18-year-old college student, I worked at a fast-food restaurant near a truck stop. I had just moved from a relatively small town of around 3,000 to a city of around 65,000, not including the college kids. Somehow I was not familiar with creepy men. So it's my second or third week there on cashier duty and it's busy dinnertime. Everything's going fine and I'm doing pretty well because I'm a relatively friendly person while still making sure the line went through smoothly. A lot of truckers come in and a relatively heavy-set gentleman with the typical trucker's outfit, jean jacket, dirty jeans, so much denim, is next at my register. He's at least 45 and smells like the worst BO ever. He orders and I tell him it'll be a few moments. I look behind him indicating that it's time to move on because I'm going to help the person behind him. Then it starts. You look pretty young to be working. Yeah, this is my first college job. Nah, no way you're in college, you're just a baby. I spread out more awkward laughing and addressed the person behind him. The guy still doesn't move. You look tired. Yeah, had a long day of classes. I'm tired too. I'm going to take a nap with me in my truck bed. Yeah, okay, moving on. I readdressed the person behind him and even moved a little to the side so the customer can see me. Luckily his food comes up and he disappears. Good thing too, because he was making me uncomfortable. My manager who saw the whole thing started asking if I knew that guy and if he was bothering me. I told him that I didn't know him but he's gone now so it's no big deal. I figured that would be that. Nope. We begin clean up around 10 pm as we close at 11. I'm doing some light cleaning up when we get a drive through. I have a headset and my manager has another along with the grill cook. Right now it's just us three there for the night because our store was famous for being understaffed. My manager takes the order and does the standard greeting. Instead, we get the familiar voice of the trucker. What time's the cashier girl done? My manager turns to me. I'm completely frozen and not sure what to say. My manager turns the headset off and asks again if I know this guy. I say no and I can tell he is immediately in attack mode. I'm sorry sir, we have many females on registers throughout the night and I'm not allowed to give out the baby-faced girl. I know she's still there. I told her I'd give her a ride. I cannot give out that information. Tell her I'll be waiting. He then drove off. My manager immediately runs in back and leaves me and the grill cook standing there confused and scared. In 15 minutes the GM comes in and asks me various questions such as if I'm sure I don't know this man and then tells us to shut down the lobby and just keep the drive through open. They both go in the back room and shut the door. At around 10.45 the grill cook who came up to talk to me as I was visibly shaken notices an unmarked police car sitting in our parking lot. At 10.55 my manager comes back out and tells us to shut the store down. Around 11.45 we're finished and I grab my coat from the break room. Normally just myself and the grill cook would have just walked out together, but instead both the manager and the GM walk us out. Sure as hell there's an 18-wheeler with his lights off waiting outside of the normal parking in the truck stop and instead in our parking lot as if no one would notice the big truck. As we make our way to our cars the trucker turns his lights on and starts his engine. The undercover officer gets out and walks up to us and then walks us to our cars. Trucker must have seen the cop and the manager and GM and instead drove away. Although nothing happened it changed our store's policy on how the closers could leave the store. Now they had to go in packs of three and couldn't leave until everyone's car started and their lights were on. I'm not a trucker but my neighbor's son was. One night he was parked in a sleep in his cab when someone stole his load. They then set fire to the truck with him in it still asleep. He didn't get out in time. Just an empty bathroom with a wheelchair inside. I stop one day and I need to take a piss. I don't know why I didn't stop in Van Horn so I pull off and I roll up to the empty lot across the street. Kent, Texas. It's an abandoned town. I walk up to the bush line and notice a makeshift fire pit. The wood is somewhat burnt but not all the way. The weird thing is there's a perfectly crisp clean dollar bill stuck in the wood. For a second I was like ooh a piece of candy but then this sudden feeling of nope came over me so I left alone and pissed in the bush. As I'm walking back I get a real negative feeling. I look to the ground in front of me and bam there's a rattlesnake looking right at me. I stop dead in my tracks and walk carefully around it and it keeps staring at me. I ran as fast as I could back to my truck feeling like somebody was behind me. I kicked up a lot of dust getting out of there and have never stopped in Kent since. I had a hooker climb into my truck while I was sleeping. My truck's passenger side door wasn't locked as well as I thought. I'd been hit in a parking lot by another truck and bent the door in a little. I tested the lock and it seemed to lock and unlock fine but that turned out to be wrong. It was around 1am and in my sleep I vaguely heard my door open so I was already starting to wake up and then someone shook me by the shoulder. I jumped up and hit her in the face with my laptop. We got in this weird hair pulling slap fight and physically pushed and I kicked her over the passenger seat and out the door onto the pavement. I stood there half awake blinking at her through the windshield when she jumped up, flashed me her boobs, flipped me off and ran away. I went back to sleep, sort of. Woke up an hour or so later with someone knocking on my door. It was the police. She called them. It told them that she was my girlfriend that I'd beat her up and thrown her out of the truck stop. I believed they were getting ready to handcuff me when a few drivers from other trucks came over to explain that she'd been knocking on truck doors all night and was there most weekends either knocking on doors or trying to climb into unlocked trucks. The cops didn't really say anything else to me, they just handcuffed her and drove away with her in the back. Plot twist, I'm female and I look nothing like the stereotypical ideal of the manly female trucker. She looked like a greasy beach ball with dead caterpillars for eyebrows. I was waiting out front of a truck stop back in the mid-80s, sitting on a park bench with a guy that has a big rottweiler kind of dog on a leash with him. I tried to make small talk, but he was kind of a sourpuss. So we sit in silence for a few minutes until the most unexpected thing I've ever seen happens right before my eyes. While we were sitting there, a big 18-wheeler pulls in without a trailer, we call it a bobtail, so he parks right up front like a normal car would. Inside the cab of the truck, with the driver, is a little monkey, the dance for the organ grinder kind. I think they're called Reese's monkeys. Well, the dog spots this little monkey and proceeds to go ape-crap over it, lunging at the end of his leash and barking at the top of his lungs, generally making a real spectacle of himself to say the least. The driver is obviously upset, but not nearly as much as the monkey is. Actually, upset may be the wrong adjective to use for the monkey. In retrospect, I think eagerly aggressive may be a more appropriate description for his disposition. He was pacing the dashboard back and forth, never taking his eyes off of this very aggravating dog. The driver opens his little triangle window that they don't make on cars anymore, the ones made for smokers back in the day. He yells out to this jerk to call his dog off because it's upsetting his monkey. Guy laughs and says, no way, says this dog ain't bothering anybody. The dog hasn't shut up since he laid eyes on the monkey. I promise you, he is bothering everybody for several blocks around. Now, here's where things start to get interesting. The driver says that if he doesn't call his dog off, he's going to let his monkey loose on that dog. My bench partner laughs and says his dog would eat the monkey alive. Upon hearing this, the driver leans over and reaches into his glove box, I guess, pulls out one of those tiny baseball bats like you used to get at Astro World or Carnivals and places it in the monkey's hand. The monkey obviously knows what's about to go down because he is now trying to squeeze out of that little triangular window that I mentioned earlier. This monkey has murder in its eyes, if I've ever seen it. Driver hollers, last chance to save your dog, man. In response, the guy sitting next to me lets his dog off the leash. Now, we have a situation that's escalated to the point where we have a dog jumping up at the window and a monkey screaming profanities right back at him. Well, the driver finally rolls down the regular window and outleaps all kinds of miniature primate hell. The dog never knew what hit him. Quick as a flash, this monkey is riding on the back of the dog's neck. His two back feet all wrapped up in his neck fur with one hand hanging onto an ear. The other hand, as you may have guessed, is now steadily and mercilessly raining down blows about this dog's head and face with the bat. I mean hard blows. You can hear him. Wap, wap, wap. Well, that only takes a moment for the dog to realize he is way over his head. He bolts, yelping bloody murder as he runs away at full speed. I mean, this dog is running so hard he's throwing up tufts of grass and dirt as soon as he leaves the pavement. The monkey is still riding him and beating on him the whole time. The monkey's owner acts like he wants to fight now, but several people, including myself, stepped in to stop that nonsense. In a couple of minutes or so, the little monkey comes loping back with his little bat still in hand and leaps up into the still open window of the truck to await his master who has gone on into the store. The guy ran off to try and find his dog, but I don't know if he ever did. My ride shows up and I go. Never again in this lifetime will I see something so totally crazy and unexpected like that. I am both fortunate and humble to have been so privileged to be present for such an event. Up next, Samuel Jocelyn was buried in 1810 in a North Carolina cemetery. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that Samuel was actually dead at the time of his burial. In 1894, Rosa Locter was a witness to a murder, but she had been deaf since birth and her spoken vocabulary was limited, so how was she going to testify against the accused? And a boy wakes to find his previously closed curtains now open and the only explanation involves a previous resident of the house that he is living in. These stories and more when Weird Darkness returns. Are you more than just a fan of Weird Darkness? Would you consider yourself a loyal listener of the podcast? Do you want even more content? Take your dedication to the next level by becoming a member of Weird Darkness's syndicate. As a member of the Darkness Syndicate, you receive exclusive Weird Darkness merchandise, yet daily episodes of the podcast, Commercial Free, along with commercial free recordings of the weekly radio show. Listen to chapters of audiobooks I narrate, even before the publishers or authors hear them. Get video updates about the Weird Darkness podcast and future projects that I am working on before anyone else, and share your opinions on ideas to help me decide what to do in the Weird Darkness podcast in the future. You get all of these benefits starting at only $5 per month. Join the Darkness Syndicate at WeirdDarkness.com slash syndicate. That's WeirdDarkness.com slash syndicate. In Wilmington, North Carolina, there is a small historic cemetery located behind St. James Episcopal Church. You won't find a tombstone with his name on it, but records indicate that a young man by the name of Samuel Jocelyn was buried in the cemetery back in 1810. Samuel came from a wealthy family which afforded him the opportunity for a good education and the leisure time to get together with young men of similar means and discuss philosophical and academic ideas. One rainy evening, the discussion turned to the topic of the afterlife and the survival of the soul after death. Samuel and his best friend Alexander Sandy Hossler made a pact. Whoever died first would come back and contact the survivor. The two young men probably weren't thinking much about that pact on July 4, 1809. On that date, Samuel married Mary Ann Sampson of another wealthy Wilmington family and settled down with the intent to open his own law practice in town. Unfortunately, his marriage would be a short one. On March 16, 1810, the Jocelyns and several other wealthy families were vacationing at one of their nearby hunting lodges. Mary Ann and Samuel apparently got into a fight that evening when Samuel, in a rage, fled the hunting lodge wearing only a thin coat. Due to the poor weather and Samuel's apparently poor state of mind, a search party went looking for them. It wasn't until two days later that he was found in the swamp, lying in four inches of icy cold water. He had apparently fallen or was thrown from his horse. Family and friends were distraught as Samuel was laid to rest at St. James graveyard soon afterward. Sandy Hossler took the loss of his friend especially hard. The grieving Sandy was horrified when on the night of Samuel's funeral, an apparition of the deceased young man appeared before him. The apparition spoke, imploring Sandy to dig up my body. Sandy, shaken by the vision, assumed the ghost was nothing more than a product of his grief and sleeplessness. And then the apparition appeared twice more. At a loss of what to do, Sandy sought the advice of Lewis Tumor. Lewis reminded Sandy of the pact that Sandy and Samuel had made, which Sandy had completely forgotten about. Lewis further theorized that Samuel had somehow hidden in the coffin some sort of proof of life after death, and that's why he was so insistent that Sandy opened his coffin. So, after much deliberation, the two young men decided that it had to be done. They would exhume their friend's body themselves. The night came and the two met just outside the graveyard's gates. As they completed their grisly task, it finally became apparent that Samuel had not hidden any proof of the afterlife in his coffin. It was much, much worse. Samuel's ghost did contact Sandy that first night, and on two subsequent nights. But it wasn't to share proof of an afterlife. It was an attempt to save his life. Samuel's face bore a twisted look of sheer terror. His fingers had scratched the coffin lid until they were nothing but bloody stumps, bones exposed. Samuel didn't die in a swamp. He had died a horrifying death, buried alive. Perhaps by the time his apparition had come to Samuel, it had already been too late. Or perhaps what was his ghost was actually his soul temporarily leaving his body in order to seek help. Sandy is also long gone now, but Samuel's ghost is still scaring the residents of Wilmington. Before the fence and security cameras, locals would scare themselves by daring each other to lie atop of Samuel's grave, ear to the ground for one hour. Legend states that no one has ever been able to last the entire hour without fleeing. Others refuse to even walk past the graveyard at night, fearing they might hear the muffled cries of Samuel Jocelyn, reliving the horror of being buried alive. Lisa Lockner returned home from a night on the town some time after midnight the morning of June 2, 1894. Her husband Joseph, who stayed home with the children, four-year-old Rosa and her infant brother, berated Lizzie for her coming home so late. They began to loudly argue the matter as they had done so many times before. Their lodger, Gus England, was used to being awakened by the Lockner's arguing, but this night was different. The voices grew to a crescendo, followed by a few minutes of silence, then the sound of a gunshot. Joseph Lockner burst into his room and said, Oh, Gus, Gus, I've done it. I've killed my wife. He then ran out of the building by the back door. England went into the other room and found Lizzie Lockner lying on the floor, a puddle of blood by her head. The baby was still in her mother's arms and Rosa stood over her dead mother, trembling in fear. England sent for the police and the children were taken to the home of Lizzie's half-brother, Abe Slupsky. Rosa Lockner was a witness to the murder, but she had been deaf since birth and her spoken vocabulary was limited to the words mama, papa, baby, and bye-bye. It appeared that she would not be able to supply any information. However, after she regained her composure, Rosa gave Mrs. Slupsky a detailed account of what happened in pantomime. Her mama rocked the baby to sleep, then papa woke up, pointed a revolver at her head, and fired. Mama fell dead on the floor, papa took off her rings, then fled. Mrs. Slupsky notified the police and after some coaxing, Rosa repeated the show for the police and reporters. The St. Louis Post sent an artist who drew Rosa's motions and his series of pictures was printed in the paper. The police found Joseph Lockner at his brother's house at around 2.30 in the morning of the murder. He surrendered quietly to the police and admitted to killing his wife, but said she was unfaithful and he had no regrets over shooting her. Lockner was 38 years old and had come to America from Bavaria as a young boy. He had worked hard and saved enough money to open a small bakery in St. Louis. Around the same time, he married Lizzie Rosenstein, 10 years his junior and daughter of a well-to-do painter. Lockner's business failed and his marriage grew cold. Lizzie was young and full of life, but Joseph had not the time, money or inclination to take her out. Despite his admonitions, Lizzie went out anyway and came home late. While in police custody, Lockner gave a sworn written confession to the murder of his wife. She had gone out that night as she did very often, leaving him at home with his heart full of anger and sorrow. When she returned, he asked where she had been and she told him it was none of his business. He responded, Lizzie, if you go on like this, I will leave you in the morning. Good, she said, I'm glad. Go tonight for all I care. She began singing and dancing in joy. Lockner was outraged, became crazed and determined to kill her. When she sat down and began to rock the baby, he took his revolver and shot her in the head. Lockner was now remorseful and sorry that he killed her, telling the police that he wanted to hang, as he had nothing more to live for. It looked like an open and shut case of first-degree murder. The prosecution had Lockner's sworn confession, the testimony of Gus Englund and Rosa's eyewitness account. Rosa Lockner's pantomime of the murder was sure to gain the jury's sympathy. But there was sympathy for Joseph Lockner as well. His friends in the Bohemian community raised $4,000 for his defense and hired Colonel Robert S. McDonald to represent him. Not to be outdone, Abe Slepsky retained Judge Chester H. Crumb to assist the prosecution. Lockner agreed to plead guilty to second-degree murder. Without consulting Crumb or Slepsky, circuit attorney Zacharitz accepted the plea and sentenced Lockner to 10 years in prison. There would be no trial. Crumb and Slepsky were livid. Lockner's sworn confession had mysteriously disappeared from the police station, prompting Slepsky to publicly question who had received the $4,000 raised for Lockner and how it was spent. However, nothing could change the outcome. On a positive note, Abe Slepsky agreed to adopt his half-sister's children and planned to take Rosa to Chicago, where he was confident that her deafness could be cured. This experience goes back to when I was about 12 years of age, living back in my hometown of Liverpool, Merseyside. We had moved into a council house in Fezakerley sometime around 1974. The house was fairly new and, to my knowledge, only had one previous occupant who had left sometime before we took up occupancy. The house was fairly unkempt when we moved in and it took a few weeks decorating it before it was habitable. I got an eerie feeling from this house the moment I walked into it and never liked the place at all. Anyway, we had been living there some time and I'd usually go to sleep at night leaving the whole light on and keeping my curtains closed in the bedroom and window due to the night noises. I would hear there something like footsteps walking up the stairs and noises in the garden. It was summertime and I went to bed in the usual fashion leaving the whole light on and making sure my curtains and window was closed in my bedroom. Subsequently, I fell asleep. I remember waking in the early hours of the morning. It must have been about 2 or 3am when I woke up. To my utter shock, my curtains were drawn back, window wide open and the net curtains were blowing gently in the summer night breeze. I could see the silhouettes of the houses at the back of the house and the light which was broken and partly lit from the police station also at the back of the house. I managed to run into my dad's bedroom and wake him up telling him that I thought we had an intruder. He suggested I go back to bed but I was so persistent that he came with me. He did. When I got back to my bedroom everything was normal. Curtains closed and window also closed. I was shattered, anxious and afraid. I managed to peep through the curtains and there I could see the silhouetted houses and broken light at the police station. That night I think I cried myself to sleep. When I was chatting to our next door neighbor's girl about these strange manifestations, she was telling me that the family before had a little boy who, by accident, fell from an open window with the back of the house. My bedroom. Whether it was a fatal accident, I do not know. I never got around to discussing it any further. The house though was never right. I would even hear piano and harp music night being played. My mother would tell me it was the wind blowing in the plumbing. My dad would account for the footsteps on the stairs as, of course, the house settling. I always had the impression that I was being watched, never alone. I was a fairly sensitive child but the room incident was not a result of a dream. I was wide awake and know exactly what I felt and saw. When Weird Darkness returns, mention the word chupacabra and most people will think of strange, hairless, dog-like animals. They are never described as having the ability to fly, that is, until now. These UFOs aren't shiny metallic discs or cigar-shaped spaceships. These are humanoid and they fly without the help of a jet pack, wings, cape, or even a witch's broom to sit on, and the sightings are still coming in, all throughout Mexico. And the North Carolina Cherokee have a story about how dangerous it can be to be even near a calm river where the waters can suddenly foam and a giant beast can appear on the rocks. These stories are up next. Hey, truckers! If you're on the road behind the wheel of a tractor trailer for a living, I have a contest just for you. Every month, I'm doing a random drawing from entries I receive in the Deadhead Truckers Contest. Go to WeirdDarkness.com slash truckers and register to win. If I draw out your name, you'll win two Weird Darkness trucker t-shirts, two travel mugs, a large pillow, and a blank hardback journal. If you listen to Weird Darkness because handling 18 wheels alone on the road by yourself just isn't scary enough, then this monthly contest is for you. Register to win at your next 10-100 and visit WeirdDarkness.com slash truckers. That's WeirdDarkness.com slash truckers. Chupacombra When I say that, you probably picture some sort of strange, hairless, dog-like animal mainly seen in the southwest area of the United States. There are actually coyotes with a few genuinely odd issues that go beyond just mange and that could be part of the Chupacombra sightings. It should be noted, however, that what passes for the Chupacombra today is very different to the original Chupacombra that surfaced in Puerto Rico in the mid-1990s. One of the most striking things about the Puerto Rico creature is that, in more than just a few cases, it was described as having wings. This is, of course, nothing like what's being seen in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. I'll share with you a few examples from my own files. In 2004, I headed out to Puerto Rico with a team from the sci-fi channel to make a show on the Chupacombra. The show was titled Proof Positive. One of the witnesses was a woman named Norca whose encounter occurred midway through 1975, 20 years before the Chupacombra phenomenon began. It was dusk on a stifling, hot, weekday night, and the atmosphere as day began to surrender to nightfall was as normal and tranquil as it had ever been. It wasn't long though before normality and tranquility gave way to something hideous. As Norca drove carefully and slowly along the twisting, climbing road, something suddenly surfaced from the huge, dense trees that stood proud and tall, like gigantic green curtains and which dominated each side of the road. Doing barely 20 miles an hour to begin with, Norca was easily able to slow down as a curious beast loomed into view. Norca, looking into the cameras of the sci-fi channel, said that only about 20 feet in front of her was the strangest, most terrifying animal it had ever been her misfortune to encounter. For all intents and purposes, it looked very much like a bat, except that is for one astonishing thing. The abomination was around four to five feet in height. Not surprisingly, Norca could scarcely believe her eyes as the monster shuffled slowly across the road, its muscular legs taking slow but deliberate strides across the hot tarmac. With her eyes transfixed on the beast, Norca could see that its body was dark brown in color. Two large wings were folded tight against its back. The clawed fingers on its hands that drooped in curious limp fashion from its bony wrists were of a distinct white-yellow hue. Of a near identical color were the two enormous fangs that protruded from its gaping, almost slack jawed mouth. Most frightening of all to Norca were the eyes of the creature. Focused intently on Norca herself, they were almost blazing like red-hot coals. It was soon gone from sight. While I was in Puerto Rico in the summer of 2004, I gave my phone number to all of the Puerto Rico-based crew members on the proof-positive shoot, just in case any of them got any leads of the Chupacabra variety. As a result, and late one morning, not long after I returned home, I received a phone call from the woman that I'll call Rosa. I listened both carefully and intently as Rosa told me how, on a Friday night, around 13 years previously, she was having a night on the town in Old San Juan with one of her girlfriends. The evening was normal, fun and just like any Friday night anywhere on the planet. At least it was until they decided to head home. For reasons which neither Rosa nor her friend could ever fathom, both developed a sudden and overpowering urge to drive to El Yonke. It was, said Rosa, as if the pair was in a kind of hypnotic haze. Around 1 a.m., they arrived at the base of the rainforest and took a long and winding road, one that I know very well into its depths. They had driven along the compact coiling road for around 15 minutes when they encountered something that was as remarkable as it was terrifying, a very strange animal making its slow way across the road. Whatever the creature was, it was certainly no regular resident of Puerto Rico. Somewhere in the region of four and a half feet in height, its color was gray, it moved across the road in a curious, tentative fashion. As if, said Rosa, it wasn't even used to walking and sported a pair of what were undeniably wings on its hunched back. The wings she added were so long they dragged on the ground for a couple of feet behind the beast. There was one more thing. The animal had a pair of self-illuminating red eyes. That much was apparent when it stopped at its tracks and gave the friends an icy stare, after which it continued on its odd, clumsy, penguin-like walk to the left side of the road and vanished into the trees. Then there was my 2005 trek around Puerto Rico with Paul Kimball's Red Star Films team from Canada, a resident of a small village that was home to a cool-looking church, one which rather reminded me of an old English castle. Our source had an encounter in early 2005 with, well, something. It clearly wasn't your average Chupacabra, but it did end with multiple animal mutilations, so in that sense the story has relevance. The month the man thought was February and the time definitely late evening. He was walking past the old church when an ear-splitting roar filled the air. It came from an area dominated by tall, thick trees and barely 50 feet away. Frozen, rigid in his tracks, he stared intently at the woods. Suddenly, something terrifying happened. A huge, feathery beast burst through the trees and took to the skies. Whatever the creature was, it was no ordinary bird. The incredible size of it, somewhere in the region of a man, made that abundantly clear. The man could only stare in awe as the infernal thing flapped its mighty wings and vanished into the distance. To keep matters balanced, it is very important to read the words of Ben Radford on the matter of the Puerto Rican Chupacabra. He said that the origin of the mysterious Vampire Beast, El Chupacabra, can be traced back to Puerto Rican eyewitnesses who saw the 1995 film Species, which featured a nearly identical monster. Though both vampire legends and mysterious animal predation date back many centuries, there seems to be no evidence of any blood-sucking Chupacabra before the 1990s. Ben also says the Chupacabra has two origin stories invoked to help explain its sudden appearance. The first is that the creature is an extraterrestrial, brought here by visiting aliens. The second is that the Chupacabra is an escaped entity created in a top secret U.S. government genetics laboratory experiment gone wrong, essentially a classic conspiracy laid in Frankenstein's scenario. Not coincidentally, these two origin stories are identical to those of Sill, a Chupacabra-like monster in the film Species. Ben notes too that in some cases wings have been reported, as have feathers on the backs of the animals. Ben however is strongly of the opinion that Species played a major role in the development of the phenomenon. I'm not so sure, primarily because a. There are cases that predate the 1990s by not just years but by decades and b. During the course of my now 11 trips to Puerto Rico, I've had the good fortune to speak to a lot of witnesses to the Chupacabra and who come across as very credible. What's important though is that whatever your opinion on the undeniably controversial matter of winged things versus odd-looking coyotes, the Puerto Rican beast is nothing like the one that roams the southwest. And it never has been. A very odd phenomenon that appears to stretch back well into history from places all around the world is that of flying humanoids. I'm not talking of bat-like creatures or winged avian anomalies, but rather, exactly as I just said, human figures just up there flying about, with seemingly no means of doing so and not a care in the world. It seems almost ludicrous, but there have been many, many reports of flying people, often by very reliable witnesses, and one place where flying humanoids seem to reign supreme is in the country of Mexico, where they have long been a feature of the world of the weird. The whole bizarre phenomenon goes back to the year 2000, when witness Salvador Guerrero saw something strange indeed over the Mexican town of Colonia Agricola Oriental in March of that year. Guerrero had actually been out on a rooftop that evening for the purpose of sky-watching for UFOs, but what he ended up seeing that night was perhaps every bit as weird, if not weirder. As he gazed out over the darkening sky, his attention was drawn to something very odd out there floating about, which seemed to be neither bird, plane, nor a typical UFO, and he used his video camera to zoom in on the anomalous object. Upon zooming in, it became very evident this was not a typical unidentified object, as it seemed to be in fact a humanoid figure inexplicably hovering in the air. There were no wings, no parachute, no obvious means of propulsion or way this mysterious individual could have possibly been keeping himself aloft, yet there he was, suspended in mid-air, reportedly spinning slowly while holding his arms outstretched. As Guerrero stared in awe, the figure began to move off until it was out of sight behind a building, its origin and destination unknown. The whole enigmatic thing was dutifully captured on video and has proven to be an off-debated and controversial piece of footage. When the story of this apparent flying man came out, there were almost immediately other reports of something similar in the skies of Mexico, and the sightings began to come in steadily from all over the place. One particularly well-known such report that technically occurred before the Guerrero sighting was that of Amado Marquez, who came forward to claim that he had also seen something very peculiar in February near the town of Cuernovesa. Marquez believed that he had been out one evening and noticed a dark shape bobbing through the sky. As with Guerrero, he zoomed in with a video camera and saw that it was a humanoid figure cruising along through the air in a horizontal position, with his legs outstretched. Again, there were no signs of wings, glider or any way to remain up in the air, yet he steadily moved along nevertheless until he was out of sight. Marquez claimed that he kept his sighting and the video he took of the event secret, finally deciding to come forward when Guerrero made his report. Later that year in July there was another report in which the witness, Gerardo Valenzuela, filmed a tall, dark humanoid object descend from the sky located between the Navado de Toluca and the Popacata Petal Volcanoes. The strange flying man was filmed and again the video has been picked apart and debated as to its ferocity. Then in October there was a sighting made by an airplane pilot and co-pilot while preparing to land in Mexico City. The figure was described as a little flying man, wearing what appeared to be a backpack and who matched the altitude and speed of the aircraft for some time before flying off. This is a notable sighting in that these were trained pilots who would have been familiar with aerial phenomena and not prone to making up wild tales. A particularly bizarre report that seems to deviate from the typical report yet seems as if it may be connected occurred on February 14, 2004, when an Ana Luisa Sid and two others witnessed a decidedly unearthly sight above Mexico City. They saw in the sky a rather strange object that at first looked to be some sort of mechanical vibrating machine on top under which dangled what looked like a large black humanoid shape, the whole of which seemed to be hovering in the same position. To make matters more bizarre, a smaller object was allegedly seen to drift up from below to merge with the larger figure, after which it detached from the upper structure and revealed itself to be what appeared to be some sort of humanoid wearing a cloak or a cape of some sort, while the thing above it now in fact looked like a living winged beast of some kind. It is then reported that the smaller object broke off from the cloaked creature to fly off, after which the cloaked one reattached to the winged monster and the whole surreal thing took off out of sight. What in the world was this thing? Whatever it is, what has come to be known as the entity reunion in the sky remains one of the strangest sightings ever to take place in Mexican skies. In 2004 yet another video of these things emerged from near Cerro de la Silla which showed a dark object with a humanoid form floating through the air at great speed while hunched over. The video of course has generated a whole bunch of debate as to what it could be with many saying that it is merely a cluster of balloons or some garbage blowing through the air. The next year on June 17, 2005, witness Horatio Roquette would also film a flying humanoid in a seated position atop some type of device over Mexico City. Roquette was out with his sister in the middle of the afternoon on a clear day when they both saw a tall humanoid figure cruising through the air and leering at them menacingly. In this case the figure seemed to be perched atop some sort of gravity-defying vehicle that emitted a strange red glow with its legs dangling underneath. The video they took has become one of the most famous pieces of footage ever taken of one of Mexico's flying humanoids. Also in 2004 we have perhaps the weirdest and most harrowing encounter of them all. A police officer in the city of Monterey by the name of Leonardo Someniego claimed that he had been out on patrol in the early morning hours of January 16, 2004 when he had a rather violent encounter with something not quite of this world as we know it. His patrol that evening had taken him to the Benito Juarez borough of Mexico City where he had turned on to a quiet treeline street to see something large black fall from a tree yet then begin to levitate right before it hit the ground. The puzzled officer drove his patrol car closer and that was when he could see that this dark shape was in fact a flying humanoid entity that looked like a floating old woman dressed all in black and with dark skin and eyes that were just black sockets without eyelids. This startling apparition then apparently flew over to hover right in front of his vehicle and the stunned occupant within. He could see it better at this time and noted that it was a hideous old woman that resembled a witch. Apparently annoyed by the car's high beams, the wench then reportedly covered her face with some sort of cloak and then flew right into the vehicle's windshield causing the dumbfounded officer to go speeding back in reverse. He would explain the terrifying events thus. As soon as I realized it was a kind of woman being or a witch, very strange standing there trying to cover her face she threw herself against my car very fast falling on the car and hitting the windshield. She was flying very fast and it took only a second to hit the windshield glass. I was so shocked by this action that I put the car in reverse and pushed the accelerator trying to get away while requesting backup assistance by radio. It was a woman with big black eyes, everything was black, no eyelids, her skin was dark brown and her expression was horrible. She was furiously trying to get me with her claws while I was running away in reverse calling desperately for backup assistance to any units around. He was able to shake the ferocious witch off the car before smashing into a wall and losing consciousness. When he next awoke it was to the sight of other officers who had arrived to assist him, none of which had seen the surreal entity that had attacked him. San Diego told them all what had happened and he would subsequently be put through drug tests and psychiatric tests as no one believed him which would turn up negative. Some people obviously did believe him because other reports would filter in after he had come forward with his own from people all around the vicinity. One witness named Norma Hernandez claimed that just two weeks before San Diego's strange account she had been hanging laundry when she saw the black form of some humanoid figure flying about in the sky above. Other locals would claim to have seen a similar entity stalking about through the air. In 2006, another police officer came forward with his own odd encounter. When in September of that year, an officer, Gerardo Garza Carvigal, was on patrol in his hometown of Santa Catarina when he had seen two witches with faces like old women with black hats flying around near a local cemetery. He would describe one of the entities thus. Her height was a meter, meter and a half at most. She was dressed like a bird with feathers, you know, she had feathers. Seeing her face it was an old lady's face, wrinkled, red eyes, black hair. What I really noticed was her black claws and the hair. In other words, that's what shocked me the most. It was a bird's body and a face like a human's. The witches flew off but the police officers who came to my aid saw what I saw. The sightings of such strange entities continued to come in and no one is really sure of what we could possibly be dealing with. The rational explanation is that these are hoaxes or misidentifications of balloons or some aerial phenomenon, but this doesn't seem to be adequate to explain all of the cases and some have even been given by traditional reliable witnesses such as police officers and airline pilots. Considering the nature of these things being basically flying humanoids, they don't seem to fit in with cryptozoology as it's unlikely they are some undiscovered species or creature. Theories have ranged across the spectrum that they are aliens, witches, warlocks, interdimensional beings or some sort of mad inventors testing out some inscrutable tech, but we don't have the slightest idea. All we know for sure is that something very strange seems to be going on in the skies of Mexico. This story is adapted from James Mooney's 1900 Myths of the Cherokee. Mooney was an anthropologist who worked for the Smithsonian Institute's Bureau of American Ethnography. Mooney learned to speak, read and write in Cherokee and spent years among the eastern band in North Carolina compiling books of the religious and cultural practices of the Cherokee Nation. It's a true story related to him by the Cherokee people. There is a spot near Murphy at the far western edge of the state that the indigenous Cherokee named Telannousie, which means the Leech Place, because this seemingly quiet spot on the Valley River was where something dangerous and strange could be found. The story begins a long time ago at a place in the Valley River just before it joins the Hwasi. Here there is a thin ledge of rock running across the river which is just passable as a bridge, but just below this natural bridge there is a deep hole in the river, a place where the water disappears into cold darkness. All of this is overlooked by a high ridge on the south bank with a trail running across it that offers a clear view down into the river. It's along this path that one day a small group of Cherokee men were walking. As they looked into the river below they noticed something strange. It was a large red something as large as a house sitting on the rock ledge in the river. As they wondered what it was they saw it slowly begin to move and unfurl. It stretched out its long flat fleshy body along the ridge like a ribbon until they could see that it looked like a leech, a giant leech whose body covered almost the whole of the ridge that bridged the river. It was a bright red with white stripes running along its body. The thing laid on the rocks for some time and then slithered down into the deep hole in the river. The men were astounded and even more so when the water beneath them began to bubble and foam almost as if it were boiling and then a giant waterspout shot up from the pool strong enough that it would have swept the men into the river if they hadn't been wary and ran as soon as they saw it coming. This was the leeches trap. It would wade in the depths for unsuspecting people to walk along the ridge and then send out the waterspout and suck them down into the river. Many unwary people died this way and their bodies would be found later lying by the side of the river with their noses and ears eaten off. The Cherokee who lived in the area soon began to avoid taking that path out of fear of becoming the creature's next victim. But not everyone was so cautious. There's the story of a young woman who was walking with her baby by the river and decided she wanted some fresh fish to eat. She walked out along that ridge in the water and sat her child down on the exposed rock, preparing to cast her line into the water. But the river began to bubble and foam and she grabbed her child and ran out of the way just as the whole ridge was engulfed in angry, foaming water. Another story tells of a young man who wasn't so lucky. He laughed at the story and said he would show everyone in the town that it was nonsense. So he set off towards that spot on the river, singing about how he would wear leech skinned leggings when it was all done. He walked boldly across that ridge overlooking the river with many people from the town gathered to watch to see what would happen. He got halfway across before the water started to bubble and foam and a waterspout shot up, dragging him down into the river. He was never seen again. The place that Cherokee call Talanuji is still there. It's said that even today you can look down into the river and see something moving in that deep hole in the water. But if the water starts to bubble, best to move out of the way and fast. 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. Darren is D-A-R-R-E-N. WeirdDarkness.com is also where you can find all of my social media, listen to free audiobooks that I've narrated, visit the store for Weird Darkness t-shirts, hoodies, mugs, phone cases and more merchandise. Sign up for monthly contests, find other podcasts that I host, and find the Hope of the Darkness page if you or someone you know is struggling with depression or dark thoughts. Also on the website, if you have a true paranormal or creepy tale to tell of your own, you can click on Tell Your Story. You can find all of that and more at WeirdDarkness.com. All stories 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 tombs in space was posted at The Unredacted. Gracie's Ghost was written by Gary Sweeney for the lineup. The murder of Bonnie Lee Scott is by Troy Taylor for American Haunting's Inc. The laundry room was submitted anonymously to Weird Darkness. Sleep Paralysis in Bangkok was written by Marky O for YourGhostStories.com. Truck Stop Horror Stories is by Aaron McCann for Ranker. Buried Alive in Wilmington is by Teresa H-P-I-R for Teresa's Haunted History of the Tri-State. Murder in Panamime was written by Robert Wilhelm for Murder by Gaslight. Strange Manifestation is by Brian Abraham posted at My Haunted Life 2. Winged Chupacabras was written by Nick Redfern and The Flying Humanoids of Mexico was written by Brent Swancer, both for Mysterious Universe. James and the Giant Leech was written by James Mooney from the book Myths of the Cherokee. Weird Darkness is a production and trademark of Marlar House Productions, copyright 2023. And now that we're coming out of the dark, I'll leave you with a little light. Psalm 18, verse 30. As for God, his way is perfect. The word of the Lord is flawless. He is a shield for all who take refuge in him. And a final thought. Today will only be as bad as you want it to be. I'm Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness. Paranormal experiences, encountering extraterrestrials, extraordinary states of consciousness, spiritual phenomenon, encounters with non-human entities that can't be explained by science. These stories of what people have come across are ubiquitous here on Weird Darkness, and often those who've had these encounters choose to stay quiet and not even tell close friends or family out of fear of ridicule, and they suffer silently, trying to deal with the internal horror of what they've experienced. If I'm describing you or someone you know, there is now a place you can turn to for professional counseling from experts who, unlike others in their field, are open to the paranormal, supernatural, and extraterrestrial experiences of others. And they're not there to explain away your experience, but to help you recover from it and move forward with living. I'm referring to the Opus Network. If you want to reach out for help or learn more, look for the Opus Network towards the bottom of the Hope in the Darkness page at WeirdDarkness.com.