 Stories and content in Weird Darkness can be disturbing for some listeners and is intended for mature audiences only. Parental discretion is strongly advised. There is a legend told at Rideau Ferry of Murder Most Foul, of Travellers Disappearing, of Human Bones Found. In the early 1800s, a Mr. Oliver set up a ferry business at today's Rideau Ferry. His ferry, a rough, hewn raft, linked roads leading from the Brockville and Perth. Mr. Oliver had won unusual quirk. He would refuse to take travellers across to the far side after dark, preferring to put them up in his house overnight and send them on their way at first light in the morning. His neighbors seldom saw the travellers in the morning. When asked about them, Mr. Oliver would simply say they went on their way at first light. You must have been asleep. Some strange thing kept happening, though. Many of the travellers who had stayed overnight at Oliver's house did not arrive at their destination. Victims, perhaps the neighbor's thought, of murderous highway robbers. Years later, long after Mr. Oliver had passed away, a bridge was to be constructed to replace the ferry service. When the outbuildings on the Oliver property were dismantled to make way for the bridge, human bones were found under the floors and in the walls. The travellers had never left. I'm Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness. Welcome, Weirdos. This is Weird Darkness. Here you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and unexplained. Coming up in this episode of Weird Darkness. A 178-year-old mystery comes to the surface in a Philadelphia suburb. Last April, a wrecking crew began tearing down an old building in Rhode Island, but the big burly men on the crew got so frightened they refused to continue the work. Does reconstruction of a home or building anger the souls who once lived there? The way life is grown on our planet requires that all living things feed off of each other and must kill others in order to survive. That's the way of the world if you want to live for any more than a few days, but some people are now claiming they can live without food at all indefinitely. Three men were in a shed selling gardening supplies when some strange powder suddenly hit the ceiling. Before they had time to react, a small jug on a shelf abruptly flew across the room. One man picked up the jug and placed it in a covered box. Instantly, the jug was somehow back on the floor. And that was just the beginning of the strange haunting of a community's garden shed. In the movie Salt, Angelina Jolie plays a double agent who is mind-controlled by scary remnants of the USSR Secret Service. And in real life, the 1940s bombshell Candy Jones was apparently brainwashed with drugs and used as a CIA covert operative. No one knows exactly when she was born. Some think maybe she was a gypsy. Others say she was a seventh daughter of a seventh daughter. The life of Elizabeth Barnes is a mysterious one filled with many loves, losses and prognostications. But first, some travelers arriving late at night to board Oliver's ferry the next day stayed in Oliver's house, but they were never seen making the ferry crossing the next morning. Is it possible that the legend is true that they never left his house alive? We begin with that story. Now, bolt your doors, lock your windows, turn off your lights, and come with me into the weird darkness. The truth behind the legend is perhaps even more interesting than the legend itself. In 1816, John Oliver, a Scottish pioneer, set up a ferry business on the south shore of First Narrows of Rideau Lake, the location of today's community of Rideau Ferry. This was a narrow section of the lake and the ferry linked a rough trail that led from Coil's Bridge near the head of Irish Lake connecting with the road to Brockville to the newly formed community of Perth. The trail in the area of Oliver's ferry was described as an avenue cut through extensive forest where the traveler had to pass over rocks and wade through swamps and surmount all the inequalities of the ground in its natural condition. When Reverend William Bell passed this way on route to Perth in 1817, he noted, at the ferry house Mr. and Mrs. Oliver showed me every attention and sent their son William with me to the house of Andrew Donaldson, Esquire, a next-door neighbor of the Oliver's, where I remained the night. John Oliver appears to have had a somewhat unstable personality, which culminated in his death by suicide, shooting himself in about 1821. Reverend Bell noted that Oliver had forsaken all professions of religion and succumbed to his lunacy. His neighbor, Donaldson, didn't fare much better. Originally a devout Presbyterian, he seems to have degraded over time. Bell noted that Donaldson had a most outrageous temper and a malicious disposition. Donaldson died in 1826. Personality issues were passed on to John Oliver's son, William, who took up the reins of the ferry business. William was almost universally disliked. He had many disagreements with his neighbors which often turned violent. He made attempts on the wife of William McClain from across the river. On July 19, 1842, his violent nature caught up with him when cattle from a neighbor, the Tummies, trespassed on to Oliver's property. Oliver confronted the two Tummy brothers in a rage and struck one of them. The Perth courier in its July 26, 1842 edition reported that the Tummies retreated to their home and that Oliver followed them there. One of the Tummies grabbed a loaded gun and told Oliver to get back. As Oliver tried to wrestle the gun from Tummy, the gun discharged, shooting Oliver through the heart. He was killed instantly. Reverend William Bell of Perth noted the tragic death of William Oliver at the Rideau ferry on the 19th, breeding at this time a universal thrill of horror. It was dreadful to think of a man so profanely wicked as he was being sent into eternity in a moment. Word spread fast. On July 20, Peter Sweeney, the lockmaster at Jones Falls, wrote in his diary, heard that Mr. Oliver was shot by a neighbor at Oliver's ferry. The Tummies were jailed and later convicted of manslaughter. William's death, however, wasn't the end of the story. As related at the beginning of this episode, stories grew over time that some travelers arriving late at night stayed at Oliver's house, but they were never seen making the ferry crossing the next morning. These stories developed into the legend that William killed these poor souls, took their possessions, dismembered their bodies and hid those remains. The legend says that when his buildings were torn down to make way for the new bridge across the narrows in 1874, human bones were apparently found in the walls and under the floors. Reporter Rob Tripp of the Kingston Whig Standard looked into the truth behind the legend in 2007. The papers of the era never actually reported bones being discovered when the buildings were torn down to make way for the bridge. However, the Perth Courier in 1873, the year when bids were being assembled for the construction of the bridge, did run a story reporting the discovery of a human skeleton under the platform of a house near the wharf that was undergoing repairs. Dr. Dislang's of Perth was asked to examine the bones, which he reported to have lain in the ground for as much as 25 to 30 years. Hence the kernel of a legend, a human skeleton, the right time period, a profanely wicked man, the legend of lost travelers of Oliver's ferry grew over time. In the Kingston Whig Standard article, Tripp points out a problem with the legend, though. The discovery of a human skeleton actually took place in Petawawa, hundreds of miles away. Dr. Dislang's of Perth just happened to be visiting at the time and was asked to examine the bones, hence the report in the Perth Courier. No human bones have, as yet, been found in or under the buildings at Oliver's ferry. This is a mass grave, Bill Watson said as he led the way through the thick Pennsylvania woods in a suburb about 30 miles from Philadelphia. Duffy's cut, as it is now called, is a short walk from a suburban cul-de-sac in Malvern, an affluent town of the fabled Main Line. Twin brothers Bill and Frank Watson believe 57 Irish immigrants met violent deaths there after a cholera epidemic struck in 1832. They suspect foul play. This is a murder mystery from 178 years ago, and it's finally coming to the light of day, Frank Watson said. The brothers first heard about Duffy's cut from their grandfather, a railroad worker who told the ghost story to his family every Thanksgiving. According to local legend, memorialized in a file kept by the Pennsylvania Railroad, a man walking home from a tavern reported seeing blue and green ghosts dancing in the midst of a warm September night in 1909. I saw with my own eyes the ghosts of the Irishmen who died with the cholera a month ago, a dancing around the big trench where they were buried. It's true, Mr., it was awful, the documents quote the unnamed man as saying, why they looked as if they were a kind of green and blue fire and they were a hoppin' and a bobbin' on their graves. I had heard the Irishmen were haunting the place because they were buried without the benefit of clergy. When Frank inherited the file of his grandfather's old railroad papers, the brothers began to believe the ghost stories were real. They suspected that the files contained clues to the location of a mass grave. One of the pieces of correspondence in this file told us X marked the spot, said Frank. He added that the document suggested that the men were buried where they were making the fill, which is the original railroad bridge. In 2002, the brothers began digging and searching. They found forks and remnants of a shanty, and in 2005 what Bill Watson calls the Holy Grail, a pipe with an Irish flag on it. They knew they were close, but Bill said they needed hard science to get them to the next step. The science came from Tim Bestel, a geophysicist who learned about the project from a colleague at the University of Pennsylvania who had heard the Watson brothers speak. The friend knew Bestel could provide the missing link in the brothers' excavation efforts. Bestel's work included earth scans, which can help detect what's underground without digging or drilling. By shooting electrical current through the slope, Bestel said he learned that there were oddball areas or places where the current wouldn't pass through. We saw areas in the slope that were very electrically resistant, Bestel recalled. This was an initial indicator something might lie beneath the surface. After further digging, Bestel and the Watsons detected air bubbles above the coffins. Bestel helped pinpoint key areas to dig, and on March 20, 2009, Bill Watson said the team made a startling discovery. One of my students came running over at about two in the afternoon with something that was a clearly discernible human bone, Bestel said. It was just the beginning of the many puzzle pieces to surface at Duffy's Cut. The pieces led them to suspect that something other than cholera was responsible for the deaths. A teeny weeny little fragment like that is so chock full of information said Janet Mung holding up a jawbone and teeth found at the Duffy's Cut site. She believes the teeth, because of their irregularities, could someday be linked through DNA to living descendants of the men on earth at the dig site. Mung, an anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania, joined the forensics team when Bestel looked her up in the campus directory and asked for help separating the human bones from any animal bones. Since then, she has collected bones from seven skeletons unearthed at Duffy's Cut, including four skulls. The trays and containers of bones occupy a long, wide table in the back of a lecture room at the University of Pennsylvania Museum in Philadelphia. Pouring over the bones with her green spectacles sitting low on her nose, Mung said she's focused her attention on the skulls, adding that they've provided crucial clues to what might have killed the Irishman at Duffy's Cut. This skull has a little divot on what would have been the side bone of the skull, she said, holding it up. That little divot is something that didn't happen when they excavated it out of the ground. With just one divot on one skull, she was reluctant to jump to conclusions. But as more skulls surfaced, a pattern started to form. Holding the second skull, Mung said with confidence this person was clunked on the head around the time of death. Recently, a new piece of evidence came up from the ground at Duffy's Cut, a skull with a perforation that could be a bullet hole. In fact, we can see some nice cracked edges that do look very much like a bullet hole, Mung observed. Mung and the team will soon test the skull for the presence of lead. The source could be a bullet or an axe. Either way, she said, if they had cholera, it didn't kill them. I'd say something else killed them, but they might have had cholera too. Why is the mystery so important to the team? It could have been us, Bill Watson said. These guys came over here with nothing looking for the American dream like countless people have done. They thought they were going to make it and within six weeks of arrival, they're literally buried in the fill here. Although they've unearthed seven individuals remain so far, the Duffy's Cut team labors on to find the 50 more they believe are still under the surface. The brothers said their goal is to preserve the memory of the Irish workers and to put the story in textbooks to be remembered for years to come. It's a story that transcends nations, transcends history in a sense. It's the story you hear of workers that were exploited anywhere in the world, Frank Watson said. How do we treat our employees? How do we treat people who immigrate for a new life? Every human being deserves to be remembered. Coming up, does remodeling your home disturb the spirits who died there? Some construction workers would say yes. Some people are now claiming that they can live without eating any food ever. We'll look a bit closer at those claims and you expect poltergeists in old homes or castles, maybe a suburban house built on top of a bunch of dead people. I'm looking at you, Mr. Spielberg, but the last place you'd probably expect to find a poltergeist would be a garden shed. These stories and more when Weird Darkness returns. October is the anniversary of Weird Darkness and we celebrate by raising funds to help people who suffer from depression. Catherine sent in a donation during a previous overcoming the darkness campaign and said, I wish your podcast had been around several years ago. My brother would have loved it and maybe he wouldn't have felt so defeated. Rob committed suicide in October 2012, leaving devastated family and friends. I hope this donation gets the help and support they need and understand others want them to stay in their lives. We all know someone who's been affected by depression or suicide and Catherine's message is the perfect reason for you to give whatever you can this month during our overcoming the darkness fundraiser where 100% of the proceeds are donated to organizations that help people struggling with depression. You can learn more about these organizations and make a donation of any amount at WeirdDarkness.com slash overcoming. That's Weird Darkness.com slash overcoming. Just as dust lies on the floor of a long abandoned house, the energy of those who once lived in that house could be absorbed into the building's walls. This energy can be awakened by disturbances such as new owners who begin remodeling and changing what the spirits still think of as their home. The paranormal field is filled with stories of hauntings that come about suddenly when home or business owners begin to demolish, construct or change the layout of a structure. Recently a wrecking crew began tearing down the old French Worstead company building in Woonsocket, Rhode Island. The construction crew made up of big tough rugged fellas got so spooked on the site they refused to continue the demolition. Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management hydrologist Sophia Kizor said the men were legitimately frightened and the work stopped. According to members of the wrecking crew and onlookers, one of the cranes being used to demolish the building would go haywire every time they got close to tearing away part of the building. Kim Bakari, daughter of John Bakari, the crane operator, took a photo which she said shows what looks like apparitions in a window of the building. Another incident involved a large beam that fell and seemed to aim itself directly at the crane's cab, missing John Bakari by mere inches. Kim Bakari called on Andrew Lake, a paranormal investigator who agreed to come to the site. He brought along two mediums to assist in his investigation. The trio entered the building and had a conversation with the spirits, explaining that the deceased needed to move on because the building couldn't be saved. After their visit, the activity stopped and demolition continued without incident. Doug Hogan Jr., CEO and founder of Jersey Unique Minds Paranormal Society said in his opinion, spirits may get upset that their home is being changed. Imagine being at your house and someone comes in and starts tearing walls down and remodeling, Hogan said. They could be thinking, this is my house. What are you doing to my house? What investigation, Hogan remembers that could have been caused by construction was at Johnson Hall in Salem. They said a lot of activity stirred up while they were remodeling the first floor, he said. Jumps investigated the building three times and recorded the most activity on the first floor just as construction was being completed. That is a prime example, Hogan said. There are other explanations of why remodeling could conjure up strange activity in a home, such as replacing plaster walls with more modern drywall, which is a much weaker sound barrier, and even exposing molds that could contain toxins which could affect a person's perception. But is it also possible that a spirit who has resided undetected in a certain building for hundreds of years could become more active in order to express his or her disapproval of the changes? The next time you replace a window or build a partition, keep an eye out for someone who might want you to leave the room exactly as it is. The way life has grown on our planet, it requires that all living things feed off each other and must kill others in order to survive, even as a vegetarian, you're killing a plant. One could say that as a result of this arrangement, life in a sense is a tragic phenomenon. The idea of a life form that has transcended the need to kill would strike a new note in our idea of life on earth. Apparently, some Catholic saints lived for prolonged periods with little or no food or drink, and in some cases without that sure sign of nature elimination. In Adiacs, people who live without eating, like Lucy Latau or Molly Fancher, are often bedridden and afflicted with numerous abnormalities. But the most famous in Adiac of the 20th century was quite different. Therese Newman, a Bavarian Catholic who lived through the Nazi era, was a visionary who displayed the stigmata. Because of a muscle spasm in her throat in 1922, she stopped eating solid food. By 1926, all she could manage was to drink a few drops of water. On August 6, 1926, she had a vision of Christ's transfiguration. Hunger and thirst permanently left her. By 1927, she quit all forms of nourishment, except a daily eighth of a communion wafer. She stopped eliminating and continued in this state for the remaining 35 years of her life, according to the official account. Exceptionally, she was not bedridden but healthy, energetic and robust. She lived very much a public life, made herself accessible to visitors and was fond of nature and sightseeing excursions. Friends, family and religious confessors never saw her eat despite spending hours working with her in the fields or going on outings with her that lasted for days. Her brother said that despite the heat, she never drank or showed signs of fatigue. Witnesses swore to all of this under oath, and there are no reasons I'm acquainted with that suggest they conspired to mislead the public or were driven by unconscious forces to revericate. Naturally, one wonders whether Cherise ate or drank on the sly. To make sure this was not the case, and in response to widespread requests to test her, she consented to being observed in July 1927 by a medical commission and four Mallersdorf nurses whose feracity was placed under oath. She was intimately probed and carefully observed for 15 continuous days and nights. At all times, she was under observation by at least two nurses. Powerful arc lamps beamed 5000 watts in her eyes to test the authenticity of her ecstasies. She showed no reactions. She lost about 8 pounds after her stigmata bled, but by the end of the experiment, her weight was somehow restored. Only by assuming a wildly improbable conspiracy can you doubt the conclusion. For 15 days, she drank and ate nothing but tiny shards of the Eucharist wafer. So well-known was her an adiac lifestyle that during the war, the Third Reich gave her no food rations. There are other spectacular cases of impossibly long fasts in other cultural traditions. The aim here is to give one example of a so-called miracle that is part of a pattern. The pattern of these miraculous phenomena is the real story and what it suggests for our dietary future. At this juncture of life on planet Earth, being menaced by climate catastrophe and global wars, any grounds for hope in the creative advance of our species should be of some interest. Generally speaking, poltergeists are the bratty kids of the paranormal world. They create a lot of noise, cause some damage, and make obnoxious spectacles of themselves, but they are on the whole seemingly helpless to do any real harm. Their antics are tiresome rather than evil. On occasion, however, polts exhibit threatening even fiendish behavior. Reading these accounts, one understands why our ancestors attributed such sinister visitations as the work of the devil. One of the more well-known cases of such malevolent hauntings took place in Bromley, England in the early 1970s. It is also, fortunately for paranormal researchers, among the more well-documented poltergeist accounts. Of all the places where you'd expect hellish forces to erupt, an allotment shed probably rests at the bottom of the list. The Kentish garden guild of Bromley, England consisted of three pensioners, Alfred Taylor, Tony Elms and Clifford Jueus, who managed two sheds in the city's Grove Park allotments which they used to sell gardening supplies to other allotment holders. It was a modest little enterprise run by the retirees mainly as a way of keeping active. It was on April 26, 1973 that these sheds began inspiring something considerably weirder than flowers or vegetables. The three men were in one of the sheds when some strange powder suddenly hit the ceiling. Before the trio had time to digest this occurrence, a small jug on a shelf abruptly flew across the room. Jueus picked up the jug and placed it in a covered box, but instantly the jug was, somehow, out of the box back on the floor. Flying jugs are quite bad enough. Ones that teleport themselves through solid matter are really too much. That was just the beginning of any number of unexplainable and increasingly disruptive incidents. Fertilizer would shoot out from its bin, spraying anyone in the vicinity. A seven-pound weight sailed through the air, circling Taylor's head menacingly. Any and all items in the shed would be seen, as Taylor put it, going around the hut like skittles. Bottles would mysteriously become unscrewed and their contents dumped on the floor. Large amounts of fertilizer would vanish from their storage containers. Once, when Elms was about to drink coffee, he noticed, fortunately, just in the nick of time, that its contents had been replaced with fertilizer. Half-ton bags of fertilizer would move on their own accord. At times, the sheds themselves would shake as though an earthquake had hit. Coins would fly throughout the rooms. One of their customers, George Bentley, summarized the situation quite nicely. There were some rat-queer goings-on. The men were not only baffled by these events, but increasingly frightened. They sensed that whatever was causing these phenomena was not just mischievous, but hostile. Unsurprisingly, they lost customers. Who wants to shop for a rake only to be hit in the head with a bag of fertilizer? And the trio began to fear their personal safety was threatened. Elms decided to try fighting a cult with a cult. One night, after consulting with a group of white magicians, he performed an exorcism in one of the sheds. Those waiting outside heard chaos. The walls thudded loudly and the heavy iron door repeatedly swung open. When Elms finally staggered out, he was bruised and bloody from a cut on the head. Next morning, when the men returned to the shed, they saw what the entity thought of their spiritual efforts. As one of the men said, it looked as if it had been hit by a bomb. Items which had been on the shelves were now circling in the air. Creepiest of all, the sign of the cross was painted or scratched everywhere inside the shed, on walls, on chairs, on bins everywhere. The thing, whatever it could be called, was laughing at them. The poltergeist began pursuing the men even when they were nowhere near the sheds. Taylor was in the presence of witnesses tormented by the entity in his own home. On another occasion, when he was in an office building, he felt invisible hands give him a strong shove. It seemed that there was no getting away from the harassment. In September 1973, Taylor contacted the Society for Psychical Research. Perhaps professional assistants could finally rid them of this costly and dangerous pest. Two society members, Pauline Ronells and Manfred Kassier, made several visits to the sheds and immediately saw that it was no hoax. The poltergeist treated its guests to its whole bag of diabolical tricks. Items flew about the room or were suspended in mid-air or simply inexplicably disappeared. Security bolts on the windows vanished before their eyes. The buildings shook from the force of violent blows on the walls. They witnessed the entity ripping Elm's shirt and sticking a saw down his back. Later, a flower bulb was forced into Elm's mouth. For whatever reason, Elms seems to be a particular focus for the spirits wrath. During one visit, money belonging to Elms vanished. Ronells asked the entity to return his cash. Two coins suddenly appeared from nowhere, hitting her on the head. The presence of the psychic detectives seemed to inspire the entity to new heights of high strangeness. The number 1659 suddenly appeared on a wood panel. This was followed by more automatic writing. A question mark, various random letters, the name of one of Alfred Taylor's friends. Perhaps the eeriest features of the entire haunting came next. On a shelf, the impression of a child's face began to appear. Then a piece of brass with M-N stamped on it suddenly dropped on the floor. Nobody present had ever seen such an object before, and what did the letters M-N mean? That was for the poltergeist to know, and none of them to find out. Two chemicals stored in the shed, white sulfite and brown maxikrop were used by the entity to outline a skull on the counter. It appeared almost instantly too fast for human hands to have created it. Then the sinister face gradually vanished. The whole unnerving business kept going for nearly two years, an unusually long time for poltergeist visitations, until it suddenly stopped, as unaccountably as it had begun. It was noted that the activity ceased when work on a nearby block of garages had finished, but it's anyone's guess if there was any possible connection. Everyone who visited the allotment sheds during those two hectic years agreed that something very strange went on, something that was not capable of being created by any human trickery. But what did create it, and why? We'll almost certainly never know while we're on this side of the grave. When Weird Darkness returns, Candy Jones was such a looker she became a supermodel, but there was the other side of her life as a CIA spook. And we'll look at the story of Elizabeth Barnes, who was better known in her community as the Witch of Plum Hollow. Here at Weird Darkness, I celebrate Halloween year round, as I'm sure a lot of you weirdos do, so I'm not cutting off the festivities after October 31st. In fact, I'm heading to Halloween Central, Salem, Massachusetts, at Salem Paracon, November 11th and 12th. They've invited me to be a special guest for the festivities, introducing some of the celebrities and guests, moderating Q&As, and well, other things that they refuse to tell me until I arrive and then it's too late to back out. Apparently, they like to scare everybody, including me. At Salem Paracon, you can meet numerous paranormal groups, see creepy art and the artists who create it, speak with cryptozoologists, meet horror and sci-fi authors and podcasters, grab spooky crafts, jewelry, clothing, costumes and other merchandise, and meet the guest of honor, the one and only legendary, amazing Kreskin, the world's most famous mentalist. He'll showcase his mind reading and psychic powers right before your eyes. And there are tons of other celebrities being announced as the day gets closer. Visit weirddarkness.com slash Salem to see other special guests, celebrities as they're announced, and to get your tickets. That's weirddarkness.com slash Salem, and I'll see you in Salem, Massachusetts November 11th and 12th for Salem Paracon. In the movie Salt, Angelina Jolie plays a double agent who is mind-controlled by scary remnants of the USSR Secret Service. And in real life, the 1940s bombshell Candy Jones was apparently brainwashed with drugs and used as a CIA covert operative. Candy Jones was a successful model, author and modeling agency owner who had married Long John Neville, a popular late-night talk show host on New York radio station W.O.R. Candy told Neville that years earlier, the FBI had asked her to use her office as a mail drop and that she'd agreed to deliver mail for the FBI when traveling on business. Candy was prone to insomnia and suffered from abrupt changes in her normally congenial disposition. Neville, an amateur hypnotist, offered to hypnotize her. During their first session, Jones easily fell into a hypnotic trance and began speaking in another voice who identified herself as Arlene Grant. This second personality revealed that Jones had once delivered a package for the FBI to a man in San Francisco while she was on business there. The man was Dr. Gilbert Jensen, a doctor she knew from her U.S.O. days. Candy had dinner with Jensen on November 16, 1960. Jensen said that he now worked for the CIA and had an office in Oakland across Bay Bridge. He said that if Candy wanted to, she could get far deeper into the covert intelligence business, adding that it could prove lucrative for her. With three sons at private schools, Candy was short of cash and accepted. The first thing Jensen did was to hypnotize Candy. Under hypnosis, Jensen told Candy that she was to be a messenger for a secret CIA unit and she would sometimes be required to travel abroad, that she would be given a passport under the assumed name of Arlene Grant. Using mind-altering drugs, Jensen reinforced the Arlene personality so that she could take Candy over almost completely when triggered by a telephone call that played a recording of particular sounds. This done, he was able to send Candy with Arlene's voice and manner on various experimental missions at home and abroad. Candy would change into Arlene in appearance too, wearing a wig and using a different makeup style. Jensen aimed to create a perfect messenger, one who could not reveal even under torture anything about the message she carried, where she came from or who would send her. Jones was then supposedly sent to a CIA training camp where she was trained to kill and learned how to hide code numbers under her fingernail polish. After each mission was completed, Candy would remember nothing. Jensen's piece de resistance was to demonstrate that his conditioning was so deep that Arlene would kill herself on command. As a means of demonstrating the psychiatrist's control over her, Candy was once supposedly even tortured in front of 24 doctors in an auditorium at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Candy Jones story sounds like the wild fabrications of a deranged mind. However, there is some evidence that this bizarre tale is true. Candy told Joe Bergera, her book editor at Harper and Row that she sometimes worked for a government agency as a courier and might disappear occasionally for weeks at a time. She also wrote a letter to her attorney William Williams, instructing him that if she were to die or vanish under unusual circumstances, he was not to reveal the details of the event to anyone, especially the press. Also, when writer Donald Bain was talking to Candy about publishing a book on the story of her life, she showed him a passport issued in the name of Arlene Grant, bearing a photo of Candy in a dark wig. Freedom of information requests have also revealed that the CIA does have a substantial file on Jones, but they refuse to release it. Rural Ontario, Canada has always had its mystics. In Ontario's Leeds County, it was Elizabeth Barnes, better known as Mother Barnes, the Witch of Plum Hollow. Her date of birth is unclear. Some sources say 1794, others say 1800. She was from Cork, in Ireland, where she fell in love with a young sergeant named Harrison, her father, a Colonel in the British Army, disapproved of the relationship. So the couple eloped and moved to what was then Upper Canada. When Harrison died a few years later, Elizabeth married David Barnes, a shoemaker who had moved up from Connecticut. The couple ended up having nine children, six sons and three daughters. In 1843, the family relocated to Sheldon's Corners in Kittley Township, north of Brockville, not far from Lake Aloida and the village of Plum Hollow in the amusingly named Bastard Township. Barnes eventually left his wife and Elizabeth needed money to support her large family, so she turned to fortune-telling, reading tea leaves and charging her customers 25 cents each, a large son in 19th-century Ontario. Her talents earned her the title The Witch of Plum Hollow, even though she did not live in Plum Hollow itself. She was the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter and was also alleged to be part Spanish Gypsy, which was credited as the source for her sixth sense. Mother Barnes was a diminutive woman, barely five feet tall. She did tell a few tall tales, though, when it came to fortunes. People traveled from all over Canada and upper New York to consult with her. Her more local cases involved finding lost livestock and solving crimes. A man named Morgan Doxeter disappeared in Charleston Lake. Mother Barnes directed the searchers to the place where his murdered body was found. Her most famous customer was a lawyer from Kingston and aspiring politician named John A. MacDonald. The Witch of Plum Hollow told him that he would become the leader of a new country and that its capital would be what was known as Bytown, in those days a gritty lumber town. In 1867, the Dominion of Canada was formed. Bytown is now Ottawa and the capital city, and Sir John A. MacDonald was the first prime minister of the new country. Mother Barnes had earned her a quarter. Elizabeth Barnes died in 1886 and was buried in an unmarked grave in the Sheldon's Corners Cemetery. In 1892, local rider Thaddeus William Henry Leavitt published his short novel, The Witch of Plum Hollow, featuring Mother Barnes and her sixth sense. Today, her little cabin still stands behind a rail fence along Mother Barnes Road, just west of County Road 29. It's on private property and it's posted with no trespassing signs. Visitors cannot go inside, but they can park beside the road and have a look at this piece of the past along the back roads of Leeds County. All stories in this episode are purported to be true and you can find source links or links to the authors in the show notes. Grandfather's ghost story leads to Mass Grave was written by Megan Rafferty for CNN. As remodeling your home disturbed the spirits who died there was written by Kelly Ronsace for nj.com. Life Without Food was written by Michael Grosso for Consciousness Abound. The poltergeist in the allotment shed is from Strange Company. The supermodel who was brainwashed into becoming a spy is by Annalie Newitz for Gizmodo. The Witch of Plum Hollow was written by James Morgan for North Country Public Radio. And The Frights of Oliver's Ferry was written by Ken Watson for Rideau Info. Weird Darkness Theme by Alibi Music. If you visit the website WeirdDarkness.com you can find the Weirdo's Facebook group, paranormal and horror audiobooks that I've narrated, the Weird Darkness store, plus you can visit the Hope in the Darkness page if you're struggling with depression, anxiety, or thoughts of suicide. Weird Darkness is a registered trademark. And now that we're coming out of the dark, I'll leave you with a little light. Proverbs 3, Verses 5 and 6. Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him and he will make your path straight. And a final thought from Robert too. Trust yourself. You've survived a lot and you'll survive whatever is coming. I'm Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness. October is birthday month for Weird Darkness and this makes eight years of doing the show. But while it's our birthday, we want the gifts to go to those who help people who suffer from depression, anxiety, or thoughts of suicide or self-harm. That's what our Overcoming the Darkness campaign every October is all about. You can bring hope to those who are lost in the darkness. You can make a donation right now at WeirdDarkness.com slash Overcoming. That's WeirdDarkness.com slash Overcoming. I'll close out the fundraiser at the end of October and announce how much we raised. Our goal is to raise at least 5,000 this month. But the more we raise, the more people we can help to climb out of their own personal darkness. If you've not donated yet or if you'd like to give again, visit WeirdDarkness.com slash Overcoming. That's WeirdDarkness.com slash Overcoming. The fundraiser ends on Halloween, so please give right now while you're thinking about it. WeirdDarkness.com slash Overcoming. 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