 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 Terran Marlar and this is Weird Darkness. Here you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, solved and unexplained. If you're new here, welcome to the podcast and be sure to subscribe so you don't miss future episodes. If you're already a Weirdo, please share the podcast with others. Doing so helps make it possible for me to keep creating episodes as often as I do. Coming up in this episode… The first witch trial in the Americas took place in 1626 and I'll tell you the story of how poor Joanne Wright came to be accused and what the verdict came down as. In 1938, 34-year-old Alma Fielding reported objects mysteriously flying around her home. In 2017, Kate Summerscale, author of the true crime classic The Suspitions of Mr. Witcher, set out to investigate the unexplained case of the Croydon poltergeist. When you hear a knocking in the closet or footsteps in the attic, when you hear a door to the basement creak open or a plate crash to the floor in the middle of the night, is it a ghost, an intruder or could you be dealing with a darkling? But first, what do you get when you mix auto theft, disappearances, amnesia, murder and far too many tattoos? You get one of the craziest true crime cases you'll ever hear. It's the disappearance and apparent murder of James Eugene Harrison. But just wait for the twist. While listening, be sure to check out the Weird Darkness website. At WeirdDarkness.com you can sign up for the newsletter to win monthly prizes, find paranormal and horror audiobooks I've narrated, watch old horror movies for free. Plus, you can visit the Hope in the Darkness page if you're 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. No life of a true crime enthusiast would be complete without hearing this next story as it is so incredibly nuts, yet unbelievably true. At the center of our weird little saga is James Eugene Harrison of Indian River City, Florida. He was the owner of a successful window sash plant, happily married, a father of two young children, a perfect example of a solid middle-class citizen. On October 7, 1958, the 32-year-old drove to Cocoa Beach, about 15 miles away, to conduct some routine business, and promptly disappeared. When he failed to return home that night, his wife Jean immediately knew something was very wrong and she phoned police. However, their investigation found no trace of Harrison. No clues emerged regarding Harrison's disappearance until a week later when police in Jacksonville, about 150 miles from Indian River, found his abandoned station wagon. It had been sitting there since the morning after Harrison had last been seen. Ominously, the front seat was saturated with blood. Somebody was murdered in that car, a Jacksonville officer concluded. When the blood was found to match Harrison's type O, the natural conclusion was that the somebody was the missing man. It was presumed that Harrison had been unlucky enough to pick up a hitchhiker who robbed and murdered him, then buried him in some obscure place and ditched the car. However, the only fingerprints found in the car were Harrison's. Poor Jean Harrison was naturally distraught and at a loss of what to do next. As she had no idea how to run her husband's business, she felt she had no choice but to liquidate everything and she and her children went to live with James' mother in Miami. To support her children, she took a job as a receptionist while waiting in an agonizing limbo, not knowing if her husband was alive or dead. On January 18, 1959, Mrs. Harrison finally received news about James. Unfortunately, it was the worst news imaginable. The Californian, named Roy Victor Olsen, who had just been convicted of the murder of television announcer Ogden Miles, confessed to killing James Harrison as well. According to Olsen, before stabbing Miles, he had murdered a Seattle man named John Wheeler. After the Miles murder, Olsen fled to Florida where he fell in with a young Kentuckian, James Leach. The pair spent several days hitchhiking together. Olsen went on to say that on October 7, 1958, he and Leach were walking along Highway 90 between Lake City and Jacksonville when they were picked up by a man in a station wagon. He seemed like someone who would have money on him, so when the driver stopped to stretch his legs for a few moments, the pair attacked him. Olsen told his interrogators, I stabbed him while Leach stood by with a rock in his hand. We robbed him of $500. We took a shovel, we found in his car, dug a grave, and put him in it with his business cards. We filled it in, then drove up to Jacksonville and left the car. His name was Harrison. Olsen did not know Leach's current whereabouts, but said that he shouldn't be too hard to find, saying he's just about the most tattooed fellow in the country. Olsen added more details. He and Leach covered their victims' body with two bags of something they found in the car. I think it was lime, he said. He described minutely the wooded area south of Jacksonville where they buried Harrison. Olsen concluded with, well, that's that. I wonder how many more I've killed. He was, in the words of Jacksonville officer Roy Sands, the coolest killer I've seen in 17 years of police work. Everything the police found corroborated Olsen's horrifying story. Harrison had bought two bags of fertilizer just before he disappeared. He did indeed carry a shovel in the car identical to the one described by Olsen. Two fertilizer bags were found in the area where Olsen said the body was buried. To wrap up the murder case, all that was needed was to find the body. And of course, the other murderer, James Leach. The FBI issued a warrant for the tattooed Kentuckian. Florida Governor Lee Roy Collins sent extradition papers to California to bring Olsen back to the state. On January 23rd, Leach was apprehended in Knoxville, Tennessee, and his captors quickly noted that Olsen had not been exaggerating about his co-horse body art. Leach had the words, the Kentucky kid tattooed on his right leg. The phrase, six months I lived and lost, was tattooed on his right arm. His chest sported a panther and the word crime. His left shoulder read, born to raise hell. His left arm was adorned with born to lose and death. His left leg featured a skull wearing a top hat. If Mr. Leach's the prize for suspect least likely to be overlooked in the identification parade, the 21-year-old Leach, who previously had never been found guilty of anything beyond vagrancy, protested his innocence. He admitted that he had spent a few days hitchhiking with Olsen, but he had no idea the man was a murderer, and he himself certainly had no role in killing anyone. I have no idea why he implicated me in something neither of us did, he declared. Given what the police had uncovered, it was a small wonder no one believed him. It was then that this seemingly straightforward murder took a bizarre twist. In Phoenix, Arizona, on the same day Leach was arrested, a well-dressed, freshly shaved man stopped a car backing out of a residential driveway and asked the driver to take him to the police station. This driver, understandably wary of this odd request, declined, but agreed to telephone the police to come and get the man. The Arizona man did contact police informing them that either a robber or a lunatic was standing in his driveway. When officers arrived, they found a man seemingly in a great state of confusion muttering, �How did I get here? How did I get here?� At the station house, he informed them that he was James Eugene Harrison of Indian River City, Florida. You know, the guy who was supposed to be dead and buried, the guy whose car was left behind, covered in his blood type? He was stunned to find that it was now January 1959, not October 1958, and he had no idea at all how he came to be in Arizona. According to Harrison, �Yesterday, at least I thought it was yesterday, I was driving to Cocoa Beach.� When he stopped at a traffic light, a man with a gun forced his way into the back seat. This man said, �I want to go to Jacksonville. Take me there and you won�t get hurt.� When they arrived in Jacksonville, the gunman ordered him to pull into a parking lot. After that, he said, �The lights went out.� He explained, �I woke up just a little while ago. I was lying on a parkway beside a street. My clothes were dirty and this t-shirt that I was wearing wasn�t mine. I never wear them. My $300 was gone. So was my watch and my Masonic ring. I found I was still wearing my wedding ring and I had $0.67 in my pocket. I started walking. I thought I was in Jacksonville.� The police, eyeing the man�s dapper appearance, felt a bit skeptical of his story. They warned Gene Harrison that this Phoenix oddball was almost certainly a fraud. However, as soon as she spoke to the man on the telephone, she began screaming in joy. �It�s Jim! It�s Jim!� she cried. Still unable to believe the man�s story, investigators showed her a wire photo of the mystery man. �It�s Jim!� Gene insisted. �I don�t care what happened as long as he�s alive.� The ecstatic woman wired her husband the money to fly home. �It would be like starting our life all over again,� she said. The law enforcement saw their nice, tidy murder case suddenly turn into an inexplicable muddle. Somebody had left all that blood in Harrison�s car, and judging by the quantity of it that was found, that somebody just had to be dead. But who was this person? Did Harrison kill his carjacker? Or did his assailant attack Harrison and steal his wallet and papers only to be murdered by Olson? As for Olson, he now repudiated his confession, claiming that he only admitted to killing Harrison in order to get a �free trip� to Florida. As the erstwhile murder victim enjoyed the reunion with his family, authorities began compiling a long list of questions for Harrison. His whole story struck them as, in a word, fishy. They noted that Harrison bore no signs of any injuries, old or new. Police also found it odd that he had a reddish streak in his hair that appeared to be died. However, his family insisted that the red spot was natural, and Harrison himself maintained that he had no memory of what had happened to him. Harrison�s return from the dead forced police to drop the murder charges against a leech. However, they continued to investigate his confession, along with the riddle of Harrison�s disappearance. During the three months when everyone assumed he had been murdered, where was the window sash king, and what had he been doing? No one could say. Although his photograph was published in newspapers across the country, no one came forward claiming to have seen Harrison during the period when he was missing. When asked to take a lie detector test, Harrison declined, stating that �I�ve been pushed around enough.� He and his family went into seclusion, refusing to say any more to anyone about the whole ordeal. On February 4th, a Phoenix woman who had seen one of the published photos of Harrison contacted police. She claimed that he had been her seatmate on a bus trip from Los Angeles to Phoenix. This witness said that she had chatted with him and he seemed perfectly rational, showing no sign of distress or confusion. The man carried no luggage with him and left the bus in Phoenix on January 23rd just a few hours before Harrison went to the police. Frustratingly enough, there the matter rested, and the main questions surrounding this mystery have never been resolved. Police never learned how or why Harrison vanished or where he was for those three missing months. If, as authorities continued to suspect, Harrison knew more than he was saying, the Floridian kept his secrets to himself. The identity of the person who left all that blood in his car was faded to remain equally mysterious. Police were able to validate at least one part of Olson�s confession. He had indeed murdered a Seattle restaurateur named John Wheeler. It was said that perverted sex acts figured in the stabbings of both Wheeler and Ogden Miles. He was sent to Washington State long enough to be tried and convicted, after which he was transferred to California�s Folsom Prison. In the 1970s he was paroled, only to begin serving his 75-year sentence for the Wheeler murder in Washington. In the mid-1990s, Olson, who had a religious conversion in prison and claimed to be a reformed character, was released on parole. He seems to have lived a law-abiding life until his death in 2001. In 1960, the skeleton of a man was found near the Jacksonville Expressway in the general area where Olson claimed to have buried his victim. It was speculated that this man, whom was never identified, was the victim stabbed to death in Harrison�s car. But that, of course, was impossible to prove. All in all, this story is like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle when you�re missing most of the pieces. And the pieces you have are drenched in type O blood. Coming up, in 1938, 34-year-old Alma Fielding reported objects mysteriously flying around her home. It became known as the Croydon Poltergeist. But before that, the first witch trial in the Americas took place in 1626, and I�ll tell you the story of how poor Joan Wright came to be accused and what the verdict came down as. These stories and more when Weird Darkness returns. He has been spotted all over the world, but photographic evidence is lacking as is any scientific proof. But he still exists and is still seen. And now you can search for Bigfoot every month in the Find Bigfoot calendar by Timothy Wayne Williams. Each month you�ll be captivated by an original Timothy Wayne Williams painting, beautiful and captivating. But within each painting hides a monster. Bigfoot is hiding somewhere in each painting. Search for Bigfoot and invite others to do so as well with the new Find Bigfoot calendar available now at WeirdDarkness.com slash Bigfoot. That�s WeirdDarkness.com slash Bigfoot. American Witchcraft has a long if not particularly proud heritage. In fact, colonial history gives the strong impression that the minute passengers stepped off the Mayflower, they couldn�t wait to start accusing each other of sorcery. America�s first witchcraft trial took place on September 11, 1626, in front of the General Court of Jamestown. The woman unfortunate enough to star in this historical milestone was Joan or Jane Wright, a midwife who lived in the community of Elizabeth City, Virginia. Goodwife Wright�s chief accuser was one Lieutenant Giles Allington. He claimed that a Sergeant Booth reported that Wright had asked Booth to share some of his meat with her. When Booth declined, Wright put a curse on him that completely ruined his skills as a hunter. In fact, Booth had not been able to so much as wound a deer ever since, despite having very fair game to shoot at. Allington went on to say that when his wife went into labor with their latest child, he had brought in Wright to act as midwife. Mrs. Allington was not happy with this as she had heard rumors that Wright was a witch. When she realized that the horror Wright was also left-handed, she insisted on a new midwife. Wright, Allington added ominously, left their home very much discontented. The birth of the Allington baby did not go well. The mother's breast grew dangerously sore of an imposture. Her husband came down with a strange illness that lasted for weeks and, most tragically of all, the infant sickened and died after only five weeks of life. You guessed it, their discontented former midwife had obviously placed a curse on the household. Further trial testimony revealed that Goody Wright had a disconcerting habit of declaring that certain people would soon die, and many of these predictions came to pass. A prediction that anyone will die will inevitably come true, but never mind that. After quarreling with a neighbor's servant girl, Wright threatened she would make the girl dance stark naked. Regretfully, it is not recorded whether this came to pass as well. When a neighbor refused to sell Wright any of his chickens, shortly after, the chickens died. Wright's husband, Robert, took the stand, but all he had to offer was the old, how should I know if my wife's a witch, defense. Court records recorded more of Goody Wright's diabolical doings. She herself boasted that back in her hometown of Hull, England, she was acquainted with a witch, who had taught her all manner of magical spells. Wright boasted of using her powers to keep a woman's hand stuck inside a butter churn for hours. On another occasion, she had sickened a rival sorceress. If you're curious, this particular spell involved throwing a red hot horseshoe into urine. After she emigrated to Virginia, Wright made no secret of her magical practices, relishing the fear and awe she was able to inspire among her neighbors. According to one witness, Wright was a very bad woman and was a competent witch among all. Given all this testimony, Wright was considerably luckier than most accused witches. Although surviving records are vague on how she was punished, it is believed the court did nothing more than impose a small fine. By way of comparison, some years earlier, she had been publicly flogged for improperly hemming a shirt. The court ruled that Wright was not really a witch, but only a contentious woman. Unfortunately for her, Wright's folk magic was not enough to make her prosper in the new world. Robert Wright was repeatedly jailed for debt and he died in poverty in 1629. What became of Joan Wright after her trial is not recorded, which is a shame. America's first official witch deserves a larger place in history. On February 20, 1938, the Sunday pictorial carried a report of a haunting in Croydon. A 34-year-old housewife had called to tell them about strange events at the home she shared with her husband Les, her son Don, and their lodger, George Saunders. Come to my house on the fielding implored the pictorial's news desk. There are things going on here I cannot explain. The Sunday pick, as it was known to its readers, dispatched two reporters to Croydon. As Alma opened the front door to them, they saw an egg fly down the corridor to land at their feet. As she led them to the kitchen, a pink china dog rattled to the floor and a sharp-bladed tin opener cut through the air at head height. In the front parlor, a teacup and saucer lifted out of Alma's hands as she sat with her guests, the saucer spinning and splintering with a ping as if shot in midair. She screamed as a second saucer exploded in her fingers and sliced into her thumb. While the wound was being bandaged, the reporters heard a crash in the kitchen, a wine glass that apparently escaped a locked cabinet and shattered on the floor. They saw an egg whirl in through the living room door to crack against the sideboard. A giant chunk of coal rose from the grate, sailed across the room inches from the head of one of the reporters and smacked into the wall. The Fielding's house seemed to be under siege from itself. Less Don and George were at home, but as far as the pictorial men could tell, none of them was responsible for the phenomena. The objects were propelled by an unseen force. The pictorial published its piece the next morning under the slogan, This is the most curious front-page story we have ever printed. In an ordinary terrace in Croydon it declared, Some malevolent ghostly force is working miracles. Poltergeist, that's what the scientists call it. The spiritualists, they say it's all caused by a mischievous earthbound spirit. Here's the article. In January 2017, I visited the Society for Psychical Research Archive in Cambridge to look up some references to the ghost hunter Nander Fodor, who had investigated the case of Alma Fielding and the Croydon poltergeist. I didn't expect to find anything directly relevant. Fodor had been working for a rival organization, the International Institute for Psychical Research, whose papers were said to have been destroyed by German bombs. But when the documents were delivered to the university's library manuscripts room, I discovered that they were Fodor's original records. The SPR must have acquired the International Institute's archive when the smaller organization was disbanded in the 1940s. To my delight, one of the files turned out to be Fodor's dossier on Alma, mistakenly catalogued as a holding on Mr. Fielding. The manila folder contained transcripts of Fodor's interviews and seances with Alma, lab reports, x-rays, copies of her contract, scribbled notes, sketches, photographs of the damage wrought by the poltergeist in Alma's house and on her body. From Alma's story, Fodor had deduced to the horror of his colleagues that repressed memories could generate terrifying physical events. A Jewish Hungarian emigre, Fodor had thrown himself into the 30s supernatural scene. He joined the Ghost Club and the London Spiritualist Alliance, befriended members of the Fairy Investigation Society, contributed articles to the Spiritualist Weekly Light. Spiritualism was big business in Britain. The faith offered something tremendous, said Arthur Conan Doyle, a breaking down of the walls between two worlds, a call of hope and of guidance to the human race at the time of its deepest affliction. After the terrible losses of the First World War and the influenza pandemic of 1918, thousands of spiritualist seance circles had been established by the bereaved. In effect, seance was a voluntary haunting, a summoning of ghosts at which the dead would speak through mediums, wrap on tables, sometimes even let themselves be touched, smelt, or seen. These forms of contact seemed hardly more outlandish than methods that had become commonplace since the war. Soon, predicted Fodor, the mechanism of psychic communication would be understood and used with the same facility as the wireless and the telephone. Scores of seances and private consultations were advertised in the Spiritualist Press, along with lectures at Psychical Research Societies, books and pamphlets on the occult, displays of clairvoyance and levitation. Some spiritualists believed that there was so much supernormal activity because the dead were straining to come closer. The boundary between the two states, the known and the unknown, is still substantial, wrote the renowned physicist and radio pioneer Sir Oliver Lodge, who had lost a son in the war. But it is wearing thin in places and, like excavators engaged in boring a tunnel from opposite ends, amid the roar of water and other noises, we're beginning to hear now and again the strokes of the pickaxes of our comrades on the other side. But Fodor, having read the work of Sigmund Freud, was becoming skeptical about spiritualism. He believed that supernatural phenomena might be caused not by the shades of the dead, but by the unconscious minds of the living, and he sensed that Alma Fielding was the perfect subject on whom to test his theories. When Fodor took Alma to the International Institute in Kensington, he and his colleagues saw a brooch materialized from thin air, then an ancient oil lamp, a white mouse, a scarab beetle, a Japanese sparrow. She seemed able to astrally project herself from Croydon to Kensington and back again, and to open herself to spirit possession. To assess her powers, Fodor used all the modern methods at his disposal, voice recorders, telephones, cameras, x-rays, chemical analysis, hypnosis, and word association tests. He gathered witness statements and transcribed Alma's dreams, sent investigators to track her movements. He laid traps. If Alma's phenomena were tricks, he wanted to know how she was pulling them off. If not, he needed to understand the psychic mechanisms by which they were generated. There was a door which leads from the mind we know to the mind we do not know, he told the Daily Mirror in March 1938. Now and again that door is open. Strange things happen. There are manifestations, queer phenomena, transfigurations. As the door to the unconscious swung open, Fodor reasoned a suppressed feeling might escape its human host in material form. He speculated that mediums discharged electromagnetic rays from their fingers and toes or extruded invisible semi-metallic psychic rods or ectoplasmic threads like cobwebs. There are, it is plain, strange forces about us, of which we know practically nothing, he said, just as once we knew nothing of electricity. Fodor noticed that Alma often seemed detached from herself when a weird event took place, and he wondered if at such moments her buried life surged to the surface and broke out. He was intrigued by the phenomenon of mental dissociation which had been observed both in mediums and in victims of shell shock. The subject fascinated novelists too. Agatha Christie featured characters with split consciousness or dual personality in her short story collection The Hound of Death. The protagonist of Patrick Hamilton's novel Hangover Square is helplessly besotted with a woman who spurns him and at a click in his head, or with the word snap or crack describe it better, he wonders, his yearning humiliated self is replaced with a numb, impeccable Avenger. Fodor wondered whether Alma's psyche had fractured under pressure of a forbidden emotion. Perhaps she underwent spells of amnesia in which she unconsciously carried out supernatural tricks, or perhaps her estranged alter ego was escaping her body altogether, snapping and cracking itself into being as an external physical force, ping. In March, Fodor arranged a day trip to Bogdaregis with Alma and four members of the institute. Alma, in skittish spirits, agreed to see if her poltergeist could spirit a ring from the local branch of Woolworth's. At the jewelry counter in the Bogdare Woolies, Fodor and his party watched Alma select a ring with two stones on a curved bridge, examine it, then return it to the assistant. It was the nicest ring there, Alma said, but she did not want to buy it today. The shop girl eyed them suspiciously as they moved away. It looked fishy to her, wrote Fodor. She followed us, we began to feel uncomfortable. As the group turned into a road near the stop, Alma said that she heard a rattle in the box that she was carrying. Fodor took the box from her, opened it, and found the ring she had handled. My flesh creeped, he said. Everyone was staggered, all swore that they had seen the ring still on the jewelry counter as they left. The experience was rather alarming, Fodor said. We had committed psychic shoplifting. A few of the hauntings that Fodor investigated took place in crumbling old manor houses with creaking stairs and hidden priest holes, but most were in ordinary towns and suburbs such as Bogdnor and Croydon. He had become familiar with the consumerist, aspirational, working-class culture of post-war Britain. This is the England of Arterial and Bypass Roads, wrote J.B. Priestley in English Journey, of filling stations and factories that looked like exhibition buildings, of giant cinemas and dance halls and cafes, bungalows with tiny garages, cocktail bars, Woolworths, motorcoaches, wireless hiking, factory girls looking like actresses, greyhound racing and dirt tracks, swimming pools and everything given away for cigarette coupons. You need money in this England, Priestley added, but you do not need much money, it is a large-scale mass-production job with cut prices. Poltergeists were a Woolies brand of phantom, vulgar copies of the ethereal phantoms of old. According to the Daily Mail they were altogether different from the honest, upright ghosts of decaying castles and ancient halls. They displayed low cunning and nasty intention and mean underhand ways. Poltergeists were domestic hoodlums, destructive, subversive, uncouth. Fodor's fellow ghost hunter, Maude Fawkes, said that she longed for ghosts in the same way that she yearned for the unspoiled country of yesteryear, a land untainted by roadhouse pubs and electricity pylons. But Fodor was not bound by the snobbery or nostalgia of his adopted country. Far from sneering at poltergeists, he liked them, and where others might see Alma as typical of her class and gender, irrational, opportunistic sly, to Fodor she was ingenious, complex and fun. He guessed that she sometimes faked phenomena in order to retain the researcher's interest, but he forgave such lapses. He had no doubt that her terror at the original poltergeist activity was genuine, and he understood why an imaginative working-class woman might resort to supernatural hoaxing. Almost days were a repetitive round of domestic chores, relieved only by forays to the shops and cups of tea with friends. She had to dust and polish to darn, sew and knit, launder and iron, cook meals for her family, sweep hearths and floors, fetch coal and lay fires, scrub pots and pans. British women had enjoyed a spell of freedom during and immediately after the war when many of them went out to work, but the popular press now encouraged them to keep to the home. They were urged to tend to their appearance, what men hate about your hair the mirror revealed in March and their family's health. A Daily Mail warned female readers against having too lively a relationship even with their belongings. Don't wear a necklace if you are tempted to twiddle it, advised the paper. Keep your hanky in your bag, it's not meant to be twisted. The ideal woman was contained, composed, restrained, but for a woman with psychic powers different rules applied. A medium could undertake extravagant feats of mobility, astral projection, transfiguration, time travel, levitation and in doing so escape the constraints of her gender and her class. Almost poltergeist not only twiddled necklaces but sprang them from shop counters, it whipped saucers across rooms, upended iderdowns, spun rings onto fingers, it took gifts to the researchers at the institute as if to charm or trade its way into their world. The American writer Charles Fort noted that poltergeists often emanated from those who had no direct power, women, servants, adolescents, children. In the event of a world war, Fort suggested in Wild Talents, published in 1932, a squad of poltergeist girls might be deployed against enemy troops. He imagined the scene, both futuristic and archaic, in which the girls combined their violent gifts. A regiment bursts into flames and the soldiers are torches, horses snort smoke from the combustion of their entrails. It struck me that Alma's haunting, like other supernatural events of the 30s, was an expression of national as well as personal dread. The poltergeist story of February 20, 1938 shared the front page of the Sunday pictorial with a giant photograph of Edolf Hitler so that the headline seemed to issue from the furor's shouting mouth, Ghost Rex Holm it read, Family Terrorized. Every week that spring the press carried warnings about Hitler and Mussolini's belligerence and reports of the British government's frantic efforts to shore up the country's defenses. The threat of war touched everyone. Alma's husband, Les, had been injured in the last conflict. He still woke in terror from trench dreams, and the early son Don was likely to be called up in the next. As summer approached, Fodor intensified his efforts to unearth the childhood drama that might explain Alma's poltergeist. In his desperation, he stepped up his surveillance and he resorted increasingly to deception. He was convinced that a repressed memory was responsible for the storm of violence in Alma's home. Supernatural events, he believed, embodied the splintering and contradiction of a traumatic experience. A ghost conjured the uneasy sense that something both was and was not real, that an event recurred as if it were outside time, undead. Fodor's colleagues were appalled when they learned of his conclusions about Alma's haunting. In the autumn of 1938, they expelled him from the International Institute and confiscated his papers. These were the papers that I found in the Cambridge archive. The fat folder of evidence seemed to me a wonderful object, a documentary account of fictional and magical events, a historical record of the imagination. Some of Fodor's methods were troubling, but I was moved by his refusal to condemn Alma as a maniac or a fraud. By the time that Fodor's book about the Thornton Heath poltergeist was published in 1958, psychical research was no longer taken seriously by most scientific thinkers. Yet his ideas about poltergeist psychosis found expression in fiction. In The Haunting of Hill House, a novel of 1959, Shirley Jackson explores the possibility that a disturbed individual can trigger supernormal events. She describes a ghost hunt conducted under the aegis of the psychical researcher Dr. John Montague, in which weird incidents seemed to emanate from a young woman called Eleanor Vance. When Fodor was invited to serve as a consultant on the film adaptation of the novel in 1963, he asked Jackson if she had read his work, and she confirmed that she had. The filmmakers proposed to Jackson that they present the events in her novel as the hallucinations of a woman in a mental asylum. But she discouraged this approach. The story was about real supernatural happenings, she said. Like Fodor, she chose not to explain away psychic experiences as madness or lies. Fodor wrote an article about The Haunting of Hill House shortly before his death in 1964, in which he observed that Jackson had adopted the modern approach to the supernormal. The creaks and groans of furniture, the imbalance of a spiral staircase, and the abnormally cold spots are objectifications of the mental anguish and chill of Eleanor's soul. The violent slamming of doors are explosive manifestations of inner conflicts. This strand of psychological gothic emerges again in Stephen King's novels, Carrie, in which a humiliated teenager's suppressed feelings erupt in supernatural violence, and the shining in which ghosts are awakened by the obsessions of the living. It runs through books and films, such as Barbara Common's The Vet's Daughter, Daphne du Marier's Don't Look Now, Toni Morrison's Beloved, Hillary Mantle's Beyond Black, Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger, Jennifer Kent's The Babadook. To the question of whether a haunting was real or fantasized, psychological or supernatural, the answer given by such stories was both. A ghost could be imagined into being, from a feeling repressed so forcefully that it acquired uncanny power. Our irrational darker selves, wrote Elizabeth Bowen, demand familiars. When Weird Darkness returns, when you hear a knocking in the closet, or footsteps in the attic, when you hear a door to the basement creak open, or a plate crash to the floor in the middle of the night, is it a ghost, an intruder, or could you be dealing with a darkling? There have been monsters among us lurking in the darkest corners of America, preying on children since the first settlers arrived on our shores. They've always been with us, stalking the innocent, from the days of the original colonies to the gilded age, the depression, and beyond. These monsters are not the stuff of fiction. They are bloodcurdlingly real and they still walk among us, always looking for their next victim. In the chilling book Suffer the Children, Troy Taylor shines a light on the darkest tales of horror and hauntings from American history and presents a terrifying collection of dark crimes perpetrated against our most tender victims, our children. His most disturbing book yet includes Nightmarish Tales from the 19th century, when the good old days were never good, like the Monster of the North Wood, the Pocassette Horror and the Girl in the Cellar, and continues into the modern day with accounts of the Clarkson Woods, America's first school massacre, Wineville Chicken Coupe Murders, Babes of Englewood, Suzanne Degnan, the Girl Scout Camp Massacre, the Perfect Murder of Bobby Franks, and many more. Be warned, this is not a book for the faint of heart. These are tales containing brutal, agonizing, and terrifying scenes of horror. Suffer the Children, American Horror's Homicides at Hauntings, Dead Men, Do Tell Tales series book 15 by Troy Taylor. Here a free sample on the audiobooks page at WeirdDarkness.com. I have heard many things in my life and probably you have also. Strange sounds like crashes in the attic, to the sound of plates and dishes crashing in the darkness. But in my extensive search throughout my home that night and the next day, nothing is found, damaged, or destroyed. Was it a darkling come to call? I often think it's a small earthquake rattling the dishes in the closet. We cannot predict earthquakes in the sense of being able to tell exactly where, exactly when, and how big. Even a tiny one that we can't feel will vibrate or knock something over. When it happens, too many blame it on a real ghost, not understanding that the earth moved. According to pages 133 through 137 and 2008's Mental Health Aspects Developmental Disabilities, movement disorders are complex phenomena that frequently create confusion among mental health clinicians working in the field of dual diagnosis. Some of the confusion arises from uncertainty about whether movements are voluntary or involuntary. Because abnormal movements are exacerbated by stress or other anxiety-provoking situations, wax and wane and severity and are associated with other disruptive behaviors, they are frequently confused with other repetitive behaviors as well as primary psychiatric disorders. This first segment of a series of Ask the Doctor provides a basic overview of the neuropsychiatry and the behavioral pharmacology of abnormal movements. I tell myself after I read things like that, hey, that could be the truth, but what if it was really a ghost or something actually worse, like the dark? We fear the dark, because we never know what lurks in the blackness. The fear of the dark is a common fear among children and to a varying degree is observed for adults. The pathological fear of the dark is sometimes called nictophobia, scotophobia or ligophobia. Some researchers beginning with Sigmund Freud consider the fear of the dark as a manifestation of separation anxiety. In the 1960s, scientists conducted experiments to discover molecules responsible for memory. In one experiment, rats, normally nocturnal animals, were conditioned to fear the dark and a substance called scotophobia that was apparently responsible for remembering this fear was extracted from rat's brains. Subsequently, these findings were debunked. The fear of the dark is heightened by imagination. Stuffed toy may appear a monster with many teeth and bulging eyes in the dark. Nightmares contribute to the fear of the dark as well. After waking up because of a nightmare, the child may refuse to go to bed without the lights on. Fear of the dark is a phase of child development. Most observers report that fear of the dark seldom appears before the age of two years. Fear of the dark is not a fear of the absence of light, but fear of possible or imagined dangers concealed by the darkness. The dark, in the mind of some, is actually a creature, a monster of unlimited proportions. It has the power to scare us, unnerve us, set us on edge. The dark can scare you. It will drive you to madness and take away any hope of tomorrow. Darkness is technically the absence of light. Scientifically, it is only possible to have a reduced amount of light. Darkness doesn't exist. The emotional response to an absence of light has inspired metaphor in literature, symbolism in art and emphasis. Today, many in the world enjoy researching and exploring dark tourism. Travel decides associated with death and suffering, ghosts and the paranormal. As a poetic term, darkness can also mean the presence of shadows, evil or depression. Darkness can have a strong psychological impact. It can cause depression in people with seasonal affective disorder, fear in nyctophobics, comfort in legophilics, or attraction as in gothic fashion. These emotions are used to add power to literary imagery. Religious texts often use darkness to make a visual point. In the Bible, darkness was the second to last plague in Exodus 10, verse 21, and the location of weeping and gnashing of teeth in Matthew 8, verse 12. The Koran has been interpreted to say that those who transgress the bounds of what is right are doomed to burning despair and ice-cold darkness, nab 7825. In Greek mythology, three layers of night surround Tartarus, a place for the worst sinners as far beneath Hades as heaven is high above earth. The Hindu goddess Kali, black, dark-colored, is also closely associated with darkness and violence, though she is equally associated with motherhood and benevolence. In Chinese philosophy, yin is the feminine part of the Taijitu and is represented by a dark lobe. The use of darkness as a rhetorical device is a long-standing tradition. Shakespeare, working in the 16th and 17th centuries, made a character called Satan the Prince of Darkness in King Lear, and gave darkness jaws with which to devour love in a Midsummer Night's dream. Chaucer, a 14th-century Middle English writer, wrote that knights must cast away the works of darkness. Dante described hell as solid darkness stained. Even in Old English, there were three words that could mean darkness. Hailstor, Genep, and Skadu. Hailstor also meant hiding place and became holster. Genep meant mist and fell out of use like many strong verbs. It is however still used in the Dutch saying in Het Geniepe, which means secretly Skadu meant shadow and remained in use. The word darkness eventually evolved from the word derk, which meant dark. The dead's great inconsolable grief. In many cultures, wearing of dark colors shows grief and attracts it. In the dark objects that are familiar to us take on different shapes and sizes. They also reveal the qualities in them that are truly paranormal and actually supernaturally in their nature. Call it evil or the work of the devil, but the inanimate becomes alive in the black of night. The dark links, the shadows, the dead sneak near to you as you breathe evenly and sound asleep. Accounts of the dark as a being typically describe them as being deep, non-reflective, black humanoid or creature-like silhouettes. Sometimes with no discernible mouths, noses or facial expressions, though at times those features might be all that you actually see in the darkness. Many lurid accounts also exist of these entities being child-sized humanoids or shapeless masses that sometimes change to a more human-like form or animals. The eyes are usually not described as being discernible, but in some reports glowing red, white or blue eyes are mentioned. The color of the eyes, if any, is typically given as red. Their specific form is described variously as two-dimensional shadow to a vaporous or distorted three-dimensional body as though made out of smoke, fabric, water-like or steam. Movement is often described as being very quick and disjointed. Some witnesses describe this movement as though the shadow entities they have seen danced from one wall to the next or as moving around the room as if they were on a specific track. Rarely are they seen standing in the middle of doorways or off the wall. Often they are described as being seen staring at the floor. Some accounts describe what appears to be the outline of a cloak and in some instances the outline of a 1930s style fedora hat. This last type is referred to as the dark hat man or the darkling king or simply the hat man. The dark has also been called the white, from an old English word white. It is a middle English word used to describe a creature or a living being. It is akin to old high German white, meaning a creature or thing. The evil of the darklings over the centuries are based on shadow people, also known as shadowmen, shadow folk or shadow beings, are supernatural shadow-like creatures of both modern folklore and traditional Native American beliefs. They sound very similar, if not precisely, like shadow people that we have covered here on Weird Darkness on numerous occasions, but these seem to be much more malevolent. These creatures are known to pull you and your bed at night violently, strangle you, even rape you. The darklings can also bite you, hit you, hurt you. They are known to poke your eyes out as you sleep. They have been known to kill infants as they sleep in their mother's arms or suckle at their breast. They can scratch you to the bone, and there are tales of them even stealing kidneys, thought to be what they love to eat, from sleeping victims. A darkling is best known to take the shape of cats, especially large black cats. They can roam highways and slip into your home and kill all that live there. In the darkness, they are the strongest paranormal entity you can encounter. They can change shape and even talk to you in the thick black night. According to folklore, they appear as dark forms in the peripheries of people's vision as they begin to haunt them. If they find no reason to haunt you, then they seem to disintegrate or move between walls when noticed. Reports of shadow-darkling people occupy a similar position in the popular consciousness to ghost sightings, but differ in that these types of shadow people are not reported as having human features or wearing modern or period clothing or attempting to communicate. Witnesses also do not report the same feelings of being in the presence of something that was once human in what a shadow person entails. A darkling has never walked the earth as a human. Some individuals have described being menaced, chased, or in some rare instances, attacked by shadow-darklings. There have also been reports of huge, menacing darklings appearing in front of witnesses and lingering for several seconds before disappearing. Witnesses report that encounters are typically accompanied by a feeling of dread. Darklings have been known to hide at the sight of any type of light. Their favorite spots to hide in are dark cracks or inside a child's toys like bears, dolls, stuffed animals, or closets. Robert the Haunted Doll is thought to be a darkling trapped in a stuffed body by a voodoo voodoo spell. In New Orleans voodoo, darklings are creatures that prowl the city looking for innocence to possess. They will take a person and make them act and turn into someone they are not. They who are possessed by a darkling have been known to kill or hurt their family members during daylight hours. They are aptly called, since the late 1800s, the dark darklings. The great voodoo queen, Marie Lavaux, described them as the evil thoughts that good church people have that they don't act upon coming to life. They carry out evil deeds that no sane man would do. The actual belief is that the darkling enters a person through their mouths as they sleep and are trapped inside them until they fall asleep again. The person is like a zombified demon acting only on its primal instincts, kill or be killed. Marie Lavaux is said to have used ground-up monkey and cock statue powder, red brick, and a secret ingredient to chase them off. Small children between the ages of three and nine are more apt to encounter these beings and see them more clearly. Though those who have psychic powers have been known to see them as sparkling dark shapes in the blackness. Thanks for listening. If you made it this far, welcome to our Weirdo Family. If you liked the podcast and you haven't already subscribed, be sure to do so now so you don't miss future episodes. And also, please, tell somebody else about the podcast. Recommend Weird Darkness to your friends, family, and co-workers who love the paranormal, horror stories, true crime, or just the weird like you do. Every time you share the podcast with someone new, it helps spread the word about the show and a growing audience makes it possible for me to keep creating episodes as often as I do. Plus, telling others about Weird Darkness also helps get the word out about resources that are available for those who suffer from depression or dark thoughts. So please, share the podcast with someone today. Do you have a dark tale to tell of your own? Fact or fiction, click on Tell Your Story on the website and I might use it in a future episode. All stories in Weird Darkness are purported to be true unless stated otherwise and you can find source links or links to the authors in the show notes. America's first witch is from Strange Company. The housewife, the ghost hunter, and the Croydon poltergeist was written by Kate Summerscale for The Guardian. The Dark Darklings is by Mason Felinity for Haunted American Tours, and the man who wasn't murdered is from Strange Company. Weird Darkness theme by Alibiomusic. Weird Darkness is a registered trademark. And now that we're coming out of the dark, I'll leave you with a little light. 2 Corinthians 4 verse 6 For God who said, Let light shine out of darkness, made his light shine in our hearts, to give us the light of the knowledge of God's glory displayed in the face of Christ. And a final thought. Be sure to taste your words before you spit them out. I'm Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness. In 2017, Kate Summerscale, author of the true... Kate Summerscale, author of the true... She claimed that she had been her seatmate on a bus trip. She describes a ghost hunt conducted under the... I guess that's a $10 word. Our irrational, wrote Elizabeth Bowen. Our irrational, darker selves, wrote Elizabeth Bowen. Demand familiar. Our irrational, darker selves, wrote Elizabeth Bowen. Bowen. In Greek mythology, three layers of night surround Tartar. Okay. Yeah, I can't really turn around. To the side. I'll wiggle for you. I love you, baby. Goodnight, baby.