 Stories and content in Weird Darkness can be disturbing for some listeners and is intended for mature audiences only. Parental discretion is strongly advised. Welcome, Weirdos. I'm Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness. Here you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and unexplained. If you are new to our Weirdo family, while listening be sure to check out the website WeirdDarkness.com. There you'll find the Weirdos Facebook group, my social media links, Help for Depression and Anxiety, the Weird Darkness store, my personal blog, past episodes and show notes and a whole lot more. It's all at WeirdDarkness.com. This is a Dark Archives episode, but hopefully you'll enjoy it almost as much as the new episodes. Now, bolt your doors, lock your windows, turn off your lights and come with me into the Weird Darkness. John Babacum Lee was sentenced to be hanged for murder. Executions in late 19th century England were grisly affairs. The preferred method was by hanging and often a prisoner could twist on the rope for 30 minutes or so before death finally came. All of the hangings at the time were grimly successful. Except for one. On February 23, 1885, 19-year-old John Babacum Lee was brought to the gallows for the murder of his employer, Ellen Keese. His trial was swift, but the evidence was fairly circumstantial. Keese had been found stabbed to death in the pantry of her estate house and Lee's room was off the pantry and the knife was allegedly one of his own. There were no eyewitnesses, but John Babacum Lee was condemned to death by the judge anyway. On that February day, Lee was led to the gallows and his arms and legs were bound after he was standing on the trap door. John Babacum Lee continued to maintain his innocence. The chaplain spoke to Lee and then the executioner pulled the lever. Nothing happened. He pulled the lever again. Still nothing. John Babacum Lee remained standing as warders pounded on the trap door with their feet. After six minutes, Lee, still bound, was carried off the trap door. The bolts were checked and some of the wood around the edges of the trap door was shaved down a bit. The heavy weight was placed on the trap door and the lever was pulled and everything worked fine. The chaplain again spoke to John Babacum Lee and then Lee was placed on the trap door and the lever was pulled again, but the trap door failed to open. Once again, John Babacum Lee was removed and a carpenter worked frantically to assure that the trap door was in working order. Again, it was tested successfully. Lee was lifted back onto the gallows for the third time. The chaplain later said, the lever was pulled again and again, but when I turned my eyes to the scaffold, I saw the poor convict standing upon the drop as I had seen him twice before. I refused to stay longer. Clearly frustrated, John Babacum Lee was removed from the gallows. His ropes were removed and he was taken back to a jail cell. Soon after, he was granted a reprieve by Home Secretary Sir William Harcourt. Was the trap door faulty? It seemed to work perfectly for other prisoners. Or was it divine providence that prevented Lee's death sentence from going through? We will likely never know this side of eternity. John Babacum Lee served 22 years in prison, was released, and then moved to America where he died in 1933. Charlie Brandt always seemed like a normal guy until one bloody night in September 2004. At the time, Hurricane Ivan was barreling toward the Florida Keys where the 47-year-old Brandt lived with his wife Terry, age 46. They evacuated their home on Big Pine Key on September 2 to stay with their niece, 37-year-old Michelle Jones in Orlando. Michelle was close to Terry, her maternal aunt, and was excited to welcome her and her husband as house guests. Michelle was likewise close with her mother, Mary Lou, with whom she spoke on the phone almost every day. When Michelle stopped answering her phone after the night of September 13, Mary Lou grew concerned and asked Michelle's friend, Debbie Knight, to go to the house and check on things. When night arrived, the front door was locked and there was no answer, so she made her way to the garage. There was a garage door with almost all glass so you could see in, Knight recalled. I was in shock. There, inside the garage, Charlie Brandt was hanging from the rafters. He had committed suicide, authorities would later learn. But Charlie Brandt's death was just one of the horrible deaths that had happened inside that house. When authorities arrived at the house, they found a scene that looked like something out of a slasher movie. Charlie Brandt had hung himself with a bedsheet. Terry's body was on the couch inside. She had been stabbed seven times in the chest. Michelle's body was in her bedroom. She had been decapitated. Her head placed next to her body and someone had removed her heart. It was just a nice home, lead investigator Rob Hemmer recalled. All of those nice decorations and the aroma of her home was masked by death, the smell of death. Yet with all this bloodshed, there were no signs of a struggle or forced entry and the house was locked from the inside. Thus, with two people killed and one having killed himself, authorities quickly determined that Charlie Brandt had killed his wife and niece before committing suicide. But no one seemed to expect anything like this from Charlie Brandt. Mary Lou said of her brother-in-law whom she had known for 17 years, when they described what had happened to Michelle, it was even beyond description. Likewise, Lisa Emmons, one of Michelle's best friends, couldn't believe it herself. She said he was just very quiet and reserved. He would just sit back and observe Michelle and I used to call him eccentric. Not only did everyone find Charlie Brandt nice and agreeable, they all felt like he and Terry had the perfect marriage. The inseparable pair did everything together, fishing and boating near their home, traveling and so on. No one had any explanation for Charlie Brandt's behavior. Then his older sister came forward. Angela Brandt was two years older than Charlie and she harbored a dark secret from their Indiana childhood that no one knew about until she told the story. In an interrogation with Rob Hemmert, Angela cried before stealing her nerves and telling her story. What you are about to hear is the actual audio from that interview. I haven't told this story. The first person being interviewed is Angela and her last name is Brandt. It was January 3rd, 1971. Charlie was 13? Yes. And Angela, you were how old? 15. Tell me again what took place and what was going on? 9, 10 p.m. Okay. We had just gotten a color TV. Right. So we were all sitting around watching the FBI, you know, references with Junior and all that. Okay. The FBI was over. We went upstairs. I went and got in bed to read my book like I always do before I went to sleep. Okay. My mom ran a bath and read a magazine. My dad was shaving. Okay. So you're in your bed reading and what happened next? I heard loud noises, which I perceived to be firecrackers for the simple reason, not that that makes any sense. That's right. But I mean, you know, I just, what other loud noises there? Popping. Wow. Just a really loud, loud noise. And I just, like I said, I just let it with firecrackers. So I started pulling the covers back to see why on earth, you know, there was all this noise going on. But then I heard my father yell, Charlie, don't or Charlie, stop. And my mom was just screaming and the last thing she ever, the last thing I ever heard my mom say was Angela called the police. So what happened after that? So I, as I said, I was removing the covers from my dad and getting out of the bed and all this took place. It took like seconds. I mean, we couldn't, this has got to be less than a minute, I would think. Okay. And I get up and as I'm getting up, he comes into my room, Charlie, brandishing the gun, a gun. I didn't even realize what it really was. I mean, until he aimed it at me and he pulled the trigger. Okay. So you hear it click? I am going to say, and then I can hear it click. And I guess when he realized the gun didn't have any more bullets, that must be what he threw it on the floor. And as I said, I was lucid enough to kick it under the bed. I didn't throw any bullets in it or not. I don't even know what was going on. Right. And then a physical altercation ensued. I imagine, I think he struck me. I do. I think he, I had blood and just bruises and I thought back, this is the only physical altercation I've ever been in in my entire life. Okay. And I guess I won because I'm here to tell about it. I don't know. Right. Right. And I just still, my brain, I remember I was only 15, my brain was trying to assimilate what was going on and I was trying to get away from him at the same time, he was very strong. The next thing I know that I can remember is I was laying flat on my back, my bed was right here. On the bed? No, on the floor. Okay. Probably knocked me to the floor. I don't know. He was on me and he was strangling me. Okay. Okay. I was drifting in and out. I don't think that I got him off of me physically. All right. I remember the way I remember it is. I saw the weird look on his face, the madness, the glazed over look. Okay. I thought disappear. He just looked more like himself and he said, what am I doing? Or what have I done? I remember perfectly saying, I don't know, but I think you shot dad because I heard my dad yelling, Charlie don't do that or Charlie stop and he said, oh, I did or whatever. I said, I don't know, but get off of me so we can figure it out. Okay. And he did. He got off of me. My next step, I was trying to get out of the house. He goes, you're not going to leave me. Are you? I said no. There was, I thought he was far enough away. Have you ever seen Texas Chainsaw Massacre? Yeah. I saw it once in my life. I could never watch it again. You know the girls screaming, the way she ran screaming. I was running through the snow in my bloody nightgown towards a screen house right across the street. I didn't knock on the door. I turned the knob and it was locked and then I ran to the next house and by the time I got to the next house, my brother had apparently come down the steps. He was outside and all my life I've heard him screaming after me, Angie, you promised you wouldn't leave me. You promised you wouldn't leave me. Some of the interview may have been difficult to hear, so here are the high points. It was January 3, 1971 at 9 or 10 p.m., Angela said. We had just gotten a color TV. We were all sitting around watching the FBI with Ephraim Zimbalist Jr. After the TV show was over, I went and got in bed to read my book like I always did before I went to sleep. Meanwhile, Angela and Charlie's pregnant mom, Ilsa, was drawing a bath and their dad, Herbert, was shaving. Then Angela heard loud noises, so loud that she thought they were firecrackers. Then I heard my father yell, Charlie, don't or Charlie, stop and my mom was just screaming. The last thing I heard my mom say was, Angela, call the police. Charlie, 13 at the time, then came into Angela's room holding the gun. He aimed at her and pulled the trigger, but all she heard was a click. The gun was out of bullets. Charlie and Angela then began to fight and he started to strangle his sister, which was when she noticed the glazed look in his eyes, that terrifying look disappeared after a moment, and Charlie, as if emerging from a trance, asked, what am I doing? What he had just done was walk into his parents' bathroom, shoot his father once in the back and then shoot his mother several times, leaving him wounded and killing her. At the hospital in Fort Wayne, just after the incident, Herbert said he had no idea why his son would do this. At the time he shot his parents, Charlie Brandt seemed like a normal kid. He did well in school and showed no signs of underlying psychological stress. The courts, which couldn't charge him with any criminal offense given his age, ordered that he undergo many psychiatric evaluations and even spend more than a year in a psychiatric hospital before Herbert secured his release. But none of the psychiatrists ever found any mental illness or any explanation at all as to why he had shot his family. The records were sealed because of Charlie's young age and Herbert told his other children to keep things quiet and moved the family to Florida. They buried the incident and put it behind them. Anyone who knew the secret never told and Charlie seemed fine afterward, but it seems he had been harboring dark urges all along. After he killed his wife and niece in 2004, authorities investigated Charlie's house on Big Pine Key. Inside they found a medical poster displaying the female anatomy. There were also medical books and anatomy books as well as a newspaper clipping that showed a human heart, all of which recalled some of the ways in which Charlie had mutilated Michelle's body. Searches of his internet history revealed websites focused on necrophilia and violence against women. They also found lots of Victoria's secret catalogs, which proved especially troubling after they learned that Victoria's secret is the nickname Charlie had given to Michelle. Knowing what he did to Michelle and then finding those things, Herbert said, it all started to make sense. Authorities believe that Charlie had become infatuated with Michelle and that his desires had taken a murderous turn. Hemmert for one believes that Charlie Brant had always had these kinds of deadly desires and that he was probably a serial killer. It's just that his other crimes never came to light. For example, authorities believe that he may have been responsible for at least two other murders, including one in 1989 and another in 1995. Both murders involved mutilations of women in a similar method to Michelle's murder. But no matter how many people Charlie Brant may have killed, he always seemed normal and even the psychiatrists were always fooled. Perhaps if they had seen the truth about Charlie way back in 1971, Terry and Michelle would still be alive today. There is a canal near me that is only accessible by foot or bike because it is a protected area for mangrove tree saplings. To get there I have to walk or ride a mile but it is worth it as the canal has some of the best fishing in the area. One morning I drove my truck there. It was around 6am and though the sun hadn't risen I could see a glow on the horizon. I loaded my gear on my modified fishing bike and took off down a dirt road. About three quarters of the way down I saw the intrusion dam control tower which was surrounded by a fence. I also noticed what I thought was a large white plastic bag hanging from the top of the fence. I stopped my bike and grumbled about idiots who litter. I started to pedal my bike towards the garbage bag and that's when things got freaky. The bag looked like it was dancing. Wind, right? That's what I thought. I stopped my bike again to take a better look. I saw this garbage bag dancing on the fence, left to right, back to front, right to left and back again. It then moved over the top of the control tower and hovered, still dancing. I couldn't believe what I was seeing and thought the bag was tangled on fishing line or something. I started pedaling closer and when I got 40 yards away this garbage bag jumped off the roof of the control tower and took on the shape of a person. I could see the head, the shoulders, an arm and the legs. I kept pedaling but it just vanished when I got near. When I reached the tower there was no garbage bag, nothing, not even a fishing line draped on the fencing. I didn't say anything to anyone for three months until I went back to the spot. I then asked the regulars if they'd ever seen anything weird there before. One of them told me that back in the 80s a jealous boyfriend killed the guy he caught fooling around with his girlfriend during a party. I began to wonder if I'd seen the girl's dancing ghost. After a little digging I learned that the area used to be a hot spot for bad beads. I heard the murder story more than three times from some of the old timers. Wow. I still think about it and wonder. I've gone back several times over the last two years prepped with a camera but I've seen nothing but a raccoon and a few iguanas here and there. Will I ever see the girl again or was it truly her last dance? There's a lot more to come in this Dark Archives episode of Weird Darkness. Ouija boards, also called spirit boards or talking boards, have been a part of various cultures long before the introduction of the game in the 19th century. Ouija, in fact, is the name of the game invented by Elijah Bond. Authentic Ouija boards are known to practitioners as the aforementioned spirit or talking boards. Regardless, these panels all share characteristics. The board itself has each letter of the alphabet dictated, as well as the numbers 0-9. And then, whether or not it is inscribed with hello, goodbye, or other full words depends on the creator of the board itself. Each board has a planchette, an essential piece in the ritual. It is the planchette which the people choosing to communicate place their hands upon in the hopes that the spirit will move it to create a message. Despite the lengthy history of talking boards, modern scientists are highly invested in disproving their use. One of the prominent theories is called the idea motor effect. This effect can occur in two different ways, either someone intentionally moves his or herself to jostle the table, or the audience accidentally moves the table through subconscious muscular twitches. When paired with a strong desire for a supernatural effect, it is easy for spirit board users to believe the spirits are behind the movements. In essence, the idea motor effect is most effective when the participants have a strong source of faith in the board. The idea motor effect is best exemplified in a parlor trick called table tilting. This practice is precisely what it sounds like. The table shifted and moved, thereby allowing the pointer to shift and move as well. This could be a simple actual tilting by a certain person or party, or a more athletic affair. In the Victorian era, when the supernatural and occult were of intrigue to the rich and poor alike, table tilting consisted of the table jerking violently in which the sitters would find themselves chasing around the room trying to keep up with the table. Interestingly, though this practice did prove the falseness of these spiritual claims, experiments revealed it was caused by the aforementioned accidental movements of muscular twitches by the participants. Historically, talking boards find their beginnings in the Chinese Lusong dynasty, the 5th century AD, and was popularized later in a subsequent Song dynasty, the 10th through 13th centuries AD. Called planchette writing, these boards were similarly used to communicate with the deceased. However, it was believed to be a form of necromancy rather than a mere instrument akin to a telephone. In Fuxi, as it was called in China, the writing was created through a sieve to which was attached a short stick. It was held generally by two persons at either side to trace characters on sand or ashes. The characters were supposed to have been produced by the gods. These historical facts are pertinent to the study of talking boards as it reveals the extensive culture surrounding the practice. In the present day, spirit boards continue to be known as a form of telephoning between the worlds of the living and the world of the dead. The board itself has retained the general template of the earlier 19th century patented models, i.e. Bond's game. The modern day Ouija is not all fun and games, and in one particular case its use had a very serious outcome. The convicted double murderer won the right to a retrial on the basis that four of the jury had used Ouija board the night before finding him guilty. Stephen Young of Pembury, England, a 35-year-old insurance broker, was given a life sentence in March 2017 for murdering the newlywed couple Harry and Nicola Fuller at their cottage in Waterst, East Sussex. However, he was given a retrial after four jury members disclosed that the night before returning their verdicts, they had used a Ouija board to contact the spirit of murder victim Harry Fuller, who they believe told them to vote guilty. While talking boards have become less seriously valued among participants today, it does remain an occasional game or, more regularly, a daring challenge. For all the experiments science has performed, few things are more powerful than the beliefs of the mind. One of the low points in the history of spiritualism involves the career of a British medium named Helen Duncan. Some continue to maintain to this day that she was a martyr to the movement, but most see her as one of the frauds that helped to give spiritualism a bad name. Helen Duncan was born in Scotland in 1898, married at the age of 20, and began to develop psychic talents that were much in demand by the 1930s and 40s. She traveled the country during this period and held seances in private homes and spiritualist churches. She convinced thousands of people that the dead could return in various forms, but most often through ectoplasm, that slimy white substance said to be manifested by spirits. In reality, Helen's ectoplasm was found to be nothing more than a mixture of paper, cloth, egg white, and surgical gauze. She was able to regurgitate the substances on demand. Any lingering doubts about this were dispelled by the medium's husband, who gave an interview late in life that admitted he had seen his wife swallowing various things before her seances. In addition to her ectoplasmic forms, Duncan also worked with spirit guides, one in particular was a child named Peggy, who played an important role during the seances. However, in 1933, at a sitting in Edinburgh, a policeman grabbed at Peggy as she passed by her and discovered that the ghostly girl was actually a torn piece of white underwear. Duncan was arrested, charged with fraud, and fined £10. Less than two months later, though, she was back at work. Undaunted by her exposure, Duncan proceeded to give a series of test sittings for the National Laboratory of Physical Research under the direction of its founder, Harry Price. Price had already exposed a number of fraudulent mediums, but was not a debunker of what he considered to be genuine. He was of the opinion that some mediums, including Dee Dee Holm and Yusipia Palladino, had occasionally managed to produce genuine mental and physical phenomena. Price was not forced to classify Helen Duncan as one of these exceptional cases, though. Photographs taken during her sessions revealed that the ectoplasm she produced was a length of cheesecloth whose bound edges, texture, and creases were clearly visible. One of her exposures made any difference to Helen's public. Outside of the laboratories, her fame continued to grow and sitters continued to insist that they recognized departed friends and loved ones in the ectoplasmic faces that she materialized. During World War II, her mediumistic powers were much in demand by relatives of those who had died in the service. She held a number of seances in Portsmouth Hampshire, the home port of the Royal Navy, and one of these, held on January 19, 1944, was raided by the police. A plainclothes policeman who was present blew a whistle to give a signal and other officers burst in. A grab was made for the ectoplasm issuing from the medium and the seance was abruptly brought to an end. Although nothing incriminating was found, Duncan, along with three others who arranged the seance, Ernest and Elizabeth Homer and Frances Brown, was taken to the Portsmouth Magistrates Court and arraigned on charges of conspiracy. At the preliminary hearing, the court was told how Lieutenant R. H. Worth of the Royal Navy had attended one of Duncan's seances and suspected fraud. He bought two tickets for 25 shillings each for the night of January 19th and took a policeman named Cross with him. Cross grabbed the ectoplasm that floated past him, which he believed was a piece of white sheet although no sheet was found when the seance was raided, but he was unable to hang on to it. After the hearing, Bale was refused and as a result, Duncan was remanded to Holloway Prison in London for four days before the case was resumed in Portsmouth. The prosecution seemed to be unsure of what to charge the mediums with. On their first appearance at Portsmouth, they were charged under the Vagrancy Act of 1824, but the charge was then amended to one of conspiracy. When the case was eventually transferred to the central criminal courts, the Witchcraft Act of 1735 was cited. Under this ancient act, the defendants were accused of pretending to exercise or use a kind of conjuration that through the agency of Helen Duncan, spirits of deceased persons should appear to be present. Other charges were brought under the Larsonny Act, which was more accurate, and they were accused of taking money by falsely pretending they were in a position to bring about appearances of the spirits of deceased persons. Needless to say, the Witchcraft Act of 1735 was hopelessly outdated, regardless of the guilt or innocence of the defendant. Spiritualists were dismayed by the use of the Act to bring about prosecution of the famous medium. They believed that she would be found guilty whether or not her powers were genuine. They were angry because they believed that Duncan was an authentic medium and was being persecuted for her genuine gifts. The prosecution, however, clearly believed that Duncan was a fraud, which was why they charged her with Larsonny. The use of the Witchcraft Act remained a bit of an enigma, but it certainly gained the trial a lot of publicity. The trial took place in late winter of 1944 and lasted for seven days. Numerous witnesses testified to events they had seen at Duncan's seances. One of them, Kathleen McNeil, claimed that she had attended a seance where her sister had appeared. This sister had died just a few hours before, after an operation, and news of her death could not have been known to Duncan at the time. At another seance, McNeil claimed that her father strode out of the spirit cabinet, looking just as he had when he was alive. Two journalists, H. Swaffer and J. W. Harries, were also called by the defense. The flamboyant Swaffer told the court that not only was ectoplasm real, it could not have been regurgitated by the medium. That was ridiculous, he stated. Harries claimed that he had seen Sir Arthur Conan Doyle materialize at one of Duncan's seances. He noted the author's rounded features and mustache and recognized his voice, he said. One has to think that Sir Arthur, despite his great belief in the legitimacy of spiritualism, would have been embarrassed to appear at such a shoddy affair as Duncan was offering. The prosecution had to make little effort to convince the jury that Duncan was a fraud. They made liberal use of photographs taken at Duncan's seances, showing blatantly fake ectoplasm emerging from the medium's mouth and nose. One particular favorite was a photo of the spirit child Peggy slithering out of Duncan's nostrils. In the photo, the ectoplasm boasted a face that was obviously that of a child's doll. Attorney counsel John Maud produced a long piece of butter muslin and referred to the report by Harry Price, who stated that he believed Duncan swallowed the material and then regurgitated it. The jury seemed convinced that she was a fraud. At the start of the trial, the defense offered the jury an actual demonstration of Duncan's mediumship, but the judge declined the offer and stated that perhaps Mrs. Duncan should testify as a witness instead. The defense replied, however, that Helen could not testify, as she was at a trance during the seances and unable to discuss what transpired. On the final day, the judge changed his mind and asked the jury if they wanted to see Helen Duncan perform. After a couple of minutes of discussion, they declined the offer. It took just 25 minutes for the jury to return their verdict. They found the four defendants guilty of conspiracy to disregard the Witchcraft Act. They were discharged from giving verdicts on the other counts. The judge deferred pronouncing sentence until after the weekend. But when the court did reconvene, he stated that the verdict had not been concerned with whether genuine manifestations of the kind are possible. This court has nothing to do with such abstract questions, he said. The jury has found this to be a case of plain dishonesty. He sentenced Duncan to serve nine months in prison and the medium was led away moaning and crying. Of the other defendants, Mrs. Brown was given four months, she had previous convictions for larceny and shoplifting, and the homers were each given a small fine and placed on probation for the next two years. Helen Duncan served her sentence at Holloway Prison. The spiritualism movement, shocked by the verdict, called for a change in the law to prevent such prosecutions in the future. They felt that Duncan had been unfairly treated, but they did cool their enthusiasm for her after the trial. Public perception was that a fraud had been exposed and officials in the movement decided to put some distance between themselves and the medium. When she was released from prison on September 22, 1944, Duncan announced that she was retiring from seances, but thanks to the large number of faithful followers that she still had, she soon changed her mind. She continued to offer private seances for years afterward. In 1951, the Witchcraft Act of 1735 was finally repealed and replaced with the Fraudulent Mediums Act. Helen Duncan's trial had certainly prompted this change in the law, but hopes from the spiritualist that they would no longer be subjected to police harassment were short lived. In November 1956, police raided a seance taking place in Nottingham. They grabbed the medium, searched her, and photographed her. They shouted that they were looking for beards, a mask and a shroud, but found nothing. The medium conducting the seance, Helen Duncan. Duncan almost immediately became ill after that raid, possibly from shock, and died five weeks later. The doctors listed the cause of death as diabetes and heart failure, but a certain segment of the spiritualist's worth thought otherwise. Some complained of police brutality and even murder, mostly because the medium had been interrupted during a trance, which all agreed could be extremely dangerous. Even today, Helen Duncan is still seen by some as a martyr to the cause of spiritualism, a victim of the world's intolerance. To most, though, she is seen as another fraudulent medium that, unlike most in the same circumstances, actually got her day in court. Those who point to the egg white and muslin ectoplasm, the phony photographs and the torn underwear spirit guides, would say that, in this case, justice prevailed. I've always believed in ghosts, but I've also tempered my belief with a healthy dose of skepticism. I'm not afraid to call bullocks. I've been ghost hunting with friends before, and while they experienced hair-raising, pinching, electricity over the skin feelings, and even visual manifestations, I experienced nothing, save for my ability to use dowsing rods and pendulums. In short, I could be in a room full of ghosts and not feel a thing. My experience at college was different. It wasn't anything frightening, it was far more playful and humorous. I graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University in historic Delaware, Ohio, in 2001. During my junior year, I lived in Stoyvesant Hall. Stoy opened in 1931 and it's the oldest operating dorm on campus. Naturally, it comes with some ghost lore. According to one campus legend, the dorm was once a hospital slash insane asylum. This is completely false. It has only served as a dorm. The other story I heard about Stoyvesant is one that plays out almost exactly like a well-known urban legend. You know, the one where a roommate returns home without turning on any lights. In the morning, she wakes to find her roommate dead and, aren't you glad you didn't turn on the light, scrawled in blood on the wall. No students can tolerate the room, so the dean stays in the room overnight to prove them foolish and ends up bricking over the door so no one can ever enter the cursed room again. Blah, blah, blah. I called bullocks on that. I had heard that urban legend in middle school. However, in a basement hallway of Stoy, there are a few student rooms, the laundry room and the boiler room. Right next to the boiler room is a former student room which has been bricked up. You can look through the hole left by the missing doorknob and see the bricks. A funny coincidence, I thought. The rooms there are set up with double occupancy rooms separated by a shared bathroom. The room on the other side of my bathroom was directly above the sealed room. My room was above the boiler room. The rooms aren't soundproofed by any means, but you can tell the difference between a sound in the room with you and a sound separated by a wall. I would sit at my desk and watch TV with the bunk beds about 6 inches from the back of my head. After about a month, I began to notice the bed springs creaking as I sat alone in the room. The beds are old and they creak when any pressure is applied to the mattress. You can hear them creaking in neighboring rooms. This creaking was directly behind me on our bunk beds. I wasn't touching the beds in any way. They shouldn't have made any noise, yet there I sat with my roommate's lower bunk creaking like someone was bouncing or moving around on the mattress. I'm glad I had the top bunk. It didn't scare me. I was more amused than anything. It was a daily thing. I told my roommate about it since it was her bunk being occupied by something unseen. She also thought it was funny and was even glad it was her bunk that was being jumped on by our ghost. My roommate didn't spend much time in the room alone and when she did, she sat on her bed with music on. I don't recall her experiencing the noise. One day I was trying to study for a test and the creaking springs 6 inches behind me was just too much. I yelled, get the hell off my bed. The noise stopped and didn't start up again. The next day I didn't hear it, nor the next day or the next. I actually began to feel guilty. Whatever it was making itself comfortable on the bottom bunk had gone away. The following day before my roommate returned from class, I stood in the room and told whatever it was that it could come back as long as it didn't use the bed as a trampoline. The following day as I sat at my desk, the creaking mattress made its familiar noise. It continued the creaking until we moved out at the end of the year. I made sure to say goodbye. Ghost or not, I have no explanation for it. I know the sound wasn't coming from another room. The girl on the other side of the bathroom wasn't well acquainted with us so I never knew if she experienced anything. It was just a fun, weird little thing that happened that one year and never happened again in any of the dorms in which I lived. Make of it what you will. It was the only time I experienced anything personally that I couldn't explain. The lovers who became known as the Sunset Strip Killers were both regulars in the CD Los Angeles bar scene of the early 1980s. He was in these dive bars that Doug Clark gave himself the nickname, The King of the One Night Stand. Clark was an aimless drifter who worked menial jobs around Southern California before he decided to dedicate his life to something he felt he could excel at, murder. Doug Clark met his accomplice, Carol Bundy, no relation to Ted, at a bar they both frequented called Little Nashville in 1980. He also harbored a dark secret. She had the same dark, violent sexual impulses as Doug Clark. The two soon moved in together and embarked on a murder rampage that shocked Los Angeles. After the two started living together, Clark began to bring prostitutes home for group sex. Soon enough, however, Clark grew unsatisfied and he began to tell Bundy how what he really wanted was to murder a woman during sex. Clark's talk soon turned into action. In June 1980, he brought home two young runaways, 15-year-old Gina Norano and 16-year-old Cynthia Chandler. Clark engaged in sexual relations with the two young women before he shot and killed them. Once they were dead, he raped their corpses. Clark then dumped Norano and Chandler's bodies on the side of the freeway, where they were discovered the following day. Three days after Norano and Chandler were killed, the body of another young runaway female was found dead in the San Fernando Valley. The police estimated she had been dead for three weeks, which likely made her Clark's first murder victim. Less than two weeks later, Clark murdered two more women, shooting them in the head and dumping their bodies. This time, Clark took a twisted trophy. He decapitated one of the women and brought her head home to store in his freezer. Bundy put makeup on the severed head and Clark had sex with it before the head was put into a cardboard box and dumped in an alley. The murders began to haunt Carol Bundy and she decided to confide in a friend. He met with an ex-boyfriend named John Murray, who sometimes sang country western music at Little Nashville, the bar where she had met Doug Clark. Murray was understandably shocked by Bundy's confession, and he told his ex-girlfriend that he believed it would be a good idea to notify the police. Bundy panicked. As much as she was disturbed by the crimes she had helped Doug Clark commit, she couldn't go so far as to turn him and herself into the authorities. Bundy spent more time with Murray and attempted to seduce him, eventually convincing Murray to have sex with her in his van. Once inside the van, Bundy shot and killed Murray and then decapitated him. The murder of John Murray made Carol Bundy even more paranoid and distraught. A couple of days after she killed her ex-boyfriend, she confessed the murder to co-workers who in turn alerted the police. She immediately gave the police details of all the murders she and Doug Clark had committed over the course of several months throughout 1980. Clark was charged with six murders, and Bundy was charged with two. Clark tried to proclaim his innocence during his trial, but the jury had none of it. Doug Clark was sentenced to death, and today he still sits on California's death row. Carol Bundy was sentenced to life in prison for her role in the gruesome string of murders. She died in prison in December 2003 at the age of 61. 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Copyright Marlar House Productions. I'm Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness.