 adds her to during the podcast that are not in my voice or placed by third-party agencies outside of my control and should not imply an endorsement by Weird Darkness or myself. Time is a funny thing. There never seems to be enough, yet there is an infinite amount. Time slips through moment upon second into eternity past, yet present to begin the future. Time is thought to be unstoppable in its relentless push towards the future. Humans perceive themselves as bound up in time as an insect and amber, forever imprisoned and forced to reckon as an Azir from Irvavarra. Her man is fascinating as a moth in the unknown. 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, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and unexplained. If you're new here, welcome to the show and if you're already a member of this Weirdo family, please take a moment and invite someone else to listen. Recommending Weird Darkness to others helps make it possible for me to keep doing the show. And while you're listening, be sure to check out WeirdDarkness.com where you can find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and more along with the Weird Darkness Weirdos Facebook group. Coming up in this episode. Sadly, the past is gone and cannot be changed. Nor can we see into the future to prepare for what's to come. We live in the here and now and that is a constant. Or is it? We'll look at the mystery of time slips. Edward Munch's painting, The Scream from 1892 is a masterpiece of the macabre and when you hear him describe the piece and his inspiration for it, you'll realize the painting is a lot closer to the artist's life than anyone would want. Have you ever wondered why ghosts in the movies are so often female? What makes female ghosts scarier than male ghosts? Aside from that whole a woman scorned thing. We'll look at some famous and infamous female ghosts and urban legends from around the world. Now, bolt your doors, lock your windows, turn off your lights and come with me into the Weird Darkness. Time is a funny thing. There never seems to be enough, yet there is an infinite amount. Time slips through moment upon second into eternity past yet present to begin the future. Time is thought to be unstoppable in its relentless push towards the future. Humans perceive themselves as bound up in time as an insect and amber, forever imprisoned and forced to reconcile with the regularity and inevitability of change. The past is gone, the present fleeting and the future is unknown. Or is it? If a mercy side policeman by the name of Frank was asked, he may have an entirely different opinion on the subject of time. On a sunny Saturday afternoon in July of 1996, Frank and his wife Carol were visiting Liverpool's Bold Street area for some shopping. At Central Station, the pair split up. Carol went to Dillon's bookshop and Frank went to HMV to look for a CD he wanted. As he walked up the incline near the Lyceum Post Office slash cafe building that led onto Bold Street, Frank suddenly noticed he'd entered a strange oasis of quietness. Suddenly a small box fan that looked like something out of the 1950s sped across his path, honking its horn as it narrowly missed him. Frank noticed the name on the van's side, Kaplan's. When he looked down, the confused policeman saw that he was unexpectedly standing in the middle of the road. The off-duty policeman crossed the road and saw that the Dillon's bookshop now had the words, Crips, over its entrances instead. More confused, he looked in to see not books, but women's handbags and shoes. Looking around, Frank realized people were dressed in clothes that appeared to be from the 1940s. Suddenly he spotted a young girl in her early 20s dressed in a lime-colored sleeveless top. The handbag she was carrying had a popular brand name on it, which reassured the policeman that maybe he was still partly in 1996. It was a paradox, but he was relieved and he followed the girl into Crips. As the pair went inside, Frank watched in amazement as the interior of the building completely changed in a flash to that of Dillon's bookshop of 1996. The girl turned to leave and Frank lightly grasped the girl's arm to attract attention and said, Did you see that? She replied, Yeah, I thought I was a cloth shop. I was going to look around, but it's a bookshop. It was later determined that Crips and Kaplens were businesses based in Liverpool during the 1950s. Whether these businesses were based in the locations specified in this story has not been confirmed. Frank's experience is not that unusual in the realm of strange phenomenon. There's even a name given to such events. Timeslips A timeslip is an event where it appears that some other era has briefly intruded on the present. A timeslip seems to be spontaneous in nature and localization, but there are places on the planet that seem to be more prone than others to timeslip events. As well, some people may be more inclined to experience timeslips than others. If time then is the unmovable force that physicists say it is, why do some people have experiences that seem to flaunt this concept? Much of ancient Greek philosophy was concerned with understanding the concept of eternity and the subject of time is central to all the world's religions and cultures. Can the flow of time be stopped or slowed? Certainly some mystics thought so. Angeles Cilicia, a 17th century philosopher and poet, thought the flow of time could be suspended by mental powers. Time is of your own making. It's clock ticks in your head. The moment you stop thought, time too stops dead. The line between science and mysticism sometimes grows thin. Today's physicists would agree that time is one of the strangest properties of our universe. In fact, there is a story circulating among scientists of an immigrant to America who had lost his watch. He walks up to a man on a New York street and asks, please sir, what is time? The scientist replies, I'm sorry, you'll have to ask a philosopher, I'm just a physicist. Time travel, according to modern scientific theory, may still be beyond our grasp. Yet for a number of people who have had unusual timeslip experiences, time may be easier to circumnavigate than expected. A classic example of a timeslip could be seen in a note from Lynne in Australia. Lynne had read the book Time Travel, A How-To Insider's Guide from Global Communications, published 1999, and she thought her experience was similar to others featured in the book. In 1997, Lynne lived in a small outback town that was built in 1947 and had changed little since that time. I was driving toward the main intersection of the town when suddenly I felt a change in the air. It wasn't the classic colder feeling but a change like a shift in atmosphere. The air felt denser somehow. As I slowed at the intersection, I seemed to be suddenly transported back in time to approximately 1950. The road was dirt, the trees were gone, and coming toward me to cross the intersection was an old black car, something like a vanguard or old FJ Holden. As the car passed through the intersection, the driver was looking back at me in total astonishment before he accelerated. From what I could see, he was dressed in similar 1950s fashion, complete with hat. This whole episode lasted perhaps 20 seconds and was repeated at least five times during my time there, always at the exact spot. I tried to make out the registration plate number but the car was covered in dust. Lynne wondered if there is someone out there still living who remembers seeing a strange sight at the intersection back in the 50s of a weird car with a bug-eyed woman at the wheel. Derek E. tells another interesting time slip story. When he was a child, his father was a taxi driver in Glasgow, Scotland. One day in the late 1960s, Derek's father was driving in the north of the city along Maryhill Road, near Queens Cross, one of the older parts of town and once its own separate community outside the city. One minute it was now, Derek wrote, cars, buses, modern clothes, tarmac roads, etc., and the next thing my dad knew, he was in some earlier time. It was certainly pre-Victorian given the clothes he described people wearing, horses, rough road, lower buildings, people in rough clothes and bonnets, etc. It lasted as long as it took him to be aware of it and then it vanished and he was back in now. Derek also reported that in the 1980s he and his wife were on a driving holiday in the North York Moors in England. They went to a tiny coastal village called Stathis, which had a steep, winding and narrowing road down to the harbour with the entrance to the houses and narrow footway at a higher level of three or four feet. We parked at the top of the village, Hamlet really, when the tourist buses and cars had to stop and made our way down on foot. What I remember is a brilliantly sunny day with lots of other people around, but as we made our way down it just suddenly seemed as if no one else were there but my wife and me. An old woman appeared on the footway opposite us. It became cooler and duller. She asked in what seemed to be an old fashioned and very polite way what year it was. Now lots of old people get confused and it could have been that, but what I remember vividly is her black clothes, handmade, rough and with hand sewn buttons, really big compared with modern ones. Her shoes were very old fashioned with much higher and chunkier heels than you'd see an older person wearing nowadays. In the time it took me to turn to my wife and say, did you see that? She was gone. The sun was back and so were all the people. My wife had also seen the same old woman and felt the same chill. Derek's experience seems strikingly similar to traditional ghost stories. Many ghost sightings are readily explained as individuals who appear out of their normal location or time, but often the ghost also seems to change the surroundings of the witness, giving the impression of a time slip. What is open to question is whether these are glimpses into another time or does the witness or the ghost actually travel in time? Perhaps it's simply different sides of the same coin. Martin Jeffery, co-editor with Louise Jeffery of the website MysteryMag.com, speculates that time slips can be recreated or induced using a trigger factor, which occurs when one is interested in his surroundings but is not concentrating on them. A slip occurs at a precise place and moment and the witness is thrust seemingly into another time. Jeffery cites the case of Alice Pollock, who at Leeds Castle in Kent experienced what could be called a classic time slip. Alice was experimenting in Henry VIII's rooms by touching objects in an attempt to experience events from another time, after a period of receiving no impressions whatsoever, the room suddenly changed. It lost its modern comfortable appearance to become cold and bare. The carpet had disappeared and there were now logs burning on the fire. A tall woman in a white dress was walking up and down the room. Her face seemed to be in deep concentration. Not long after, the room returned to its original state. Later research found that the rooms had been the prison of Queen Joan of Navara, Henry V's stepmother, who had been accused of witchcraft by her husband. It could be that the witness triggers time slips, whether they blank their mind at a precise moment and the slip occurs or the witness touches something that holds the memory of a previous time. The simplest explanation is probably the psychometric hypothesis noted Colin Wilson and John Grant in the Directory of Possibilities. In the mid-19th century, Dr. Joseph Rhodes Buchanan of the Covington Medical Institute performed experiments that convinced him that certain of his students could hold letters in their hands and accurately describe the character of the writer. He became convinced that all objects carry their history photographed in them. Buchanan wrote, The past is entombed in the present. The discoveries of psychometry will enable us to explore the history of man as those of geology enable us to explore the history of earth. Clearly, psychometry may be seen as a form of time slip. The classic of time slip tales occurred in August 1901, when two English women on holiday, Annie Moberly, principal of St. Hughes College in Oxford, and Dr. Eleanor Francis Jordane visited Paris. After a short stay in the capital, they went to Versailles. After visiting the palace, they began searching for the Petit Tryonon but became lost. As they wandered the grounds, both women began to feel strange as if a heavy mood was oppressing their spirits. Two men dressed in long grayish-green coats with small three-cornered hats suddenly appeared and directed the women to the Petit Tryonon. They strolled up to an isolated cottage where a woman and a 12- or 13-year-old girl were standing at the doorway, both wearing white kerchiefs fastened under their bodices. The woman was standing at the top of the steps, holding a jug and leaning slightly forwards while the girl stood beneath her, looking up at her and stretching out her empty hands. She might have been just going to take the jug or have just given it up. I remember that both seemed to pause for an instant as in a motion picture Dr. Jordane would later write. The two Oxford ladies went on their way and soon reached a pavilion that stood in the middle of an enclosure. The place had an unusual air about it and the atmosphere was depressing and unpleasant. A man was sitting outside the pavilion, his face repulsively disfigured by smallpox, wearing a coat and a straw hat. He seemed not to notice the two women. At any rate, he paid no attention to them. The English women walked on in silence and after a while reached a small country house with shuttered windows and terraces on either side. A lady was sitting on the lawn with her back to the house. She held a large sheet of paper or cardboard in her hand and seemed to be working at or looking at a drawing. She wore a summer dress with a long bodice and a very full, apparently short skirt which was extremely unusual. She had a pale green fichu or kerchief draped around her shoulders and a large white hat covered her fair hair. At the end of the terraces was a second house. As the two women drew near, a door suddenly flew open and slammed shut again. A young man with the demeanor of a servant but not wearing livery came out. As the two English women thought that they had trespassed on private property, they followed the man toward the petite tryonon. Quite unexpectedly, from one moment to the next, they found themselves in the middle of a crowd, apparently a wedding party, all dressed in the fashions of 1901. On their return to England, Annie Moberly and Eleanor Jordain discussed their trip and began to wonder about their experiences at the petite tryonon. The two began to wonder if they had somehow seen the ghost of Marie Antoinette, or rather if they had somehow telepathically entered into one of the queen's memories left behind in that location. As if to confirm their suspicion, Moberly came across a picture of Marie Antoinette drawn by the artist Workmueller. To her astonishment, it depicted the same sketching woman that she had seen near the petite tryonon. Even the clothes were the same. Intrigued by the growing mystery, Jordain returned to Versailles in January 1902 and discovered that she was unable to retrace their earlier steps. The grounds seemed mysteriously altered. She then learned that, on October 5, 1789, Marie Antoinette had been sitting at the petite tryonon when she first learned that a mob from Paris was marching towards the palace gates. Jordain and Moberly decided that Marie Antoinette's memory of this terrifying moment must have somehow lingered and persisted through the years, and it was into this memory that they had inadvertently stumbled. What can be concluded then from these anecdotal tales? Did these people actually travel, albeit briefly, into the past to glimpse scenes that once were, or were they caught up in a form of haunting where, like an old movie, they saw a scene that had somehow been implanted in a location and allowed to play back again for those sensitive enough to pick up the lingering impressions? However, if time slips are a form of haunting, what explanation can be offered to the experience of a Mr. Squirrel who in 1973 went into a stationer's shop in Great Yarmouth to buy some envelopes? He was served by a woman in Edwardian dress and bought three dozen envelopes for a shilling. He noticed that the building was extremely silent, there was no traffic noise. On visiting the shop three weeks later he found it completely changed and modernized. The assistant, an elderly lady, denied that there had been any other assistant in the shop the previous week. Even though the envelopes disintegrated quickly, Mr. Squirrel was able to track down the manufacturers who said that such envelopes had ceased to be manufactured 15 years before. How can a haunting produce such physical evidence? Time slips are often accompanied by feelings of depression, eeriness, and a marked sense of silence, deeper than normally experienced, posits author Andrew McKenzie in his book Adventures in Time, Encounters with the Past, drawing this conclusion based on the precise time slip accounts as well as his own interviews with people who have experienced the phenomenon. It is interesting to note that on August 10, 1901, the day of Annie Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain's experience, electrical storms were recorded over Europe and the atmosphere was heavy with electricity. Could this have led to an alteration in the local temporal field around Versailles? Perhaps there is a natural phenomenon that under the right conditions and location can produce briefly a doorway to another time and place. Even though this may sound outrageous, this natural time machine could show that modern concepts and perceptions of time need to be seriously reconsidered. It may be that the past and even the future might be closer than thought with current scientific theories. With the right frame of mind and the right natural conditions, the barriers of time and space that have traditionally kept mankind locked into place may finally be broken, allowing the mysteries of the world and the universe to be finally revealed. Coming up, have you ever wondered why ghosts in the movies are so often female? What makes female ghosts scarier than male ghosts? I mean aside from that whole a woman scorned thing. We'll look at some famous and infamous female ghosts and urban legends around the world. But first, Edward Munch's painting, The Scream from 1892, is a masterpiece of the macabre, and when you hear him describe the piece and his inspiration for it, you'll realize the painting is a lot closer to the artist's life than anyone would want. That story is up next on Weird Darkness. Are you a member of the Darkness Syndicate? The Darkness Syndicate is a private membership where you receive commercial-free episodes of the Weird Darkness podcast and radio show. Behind the scenes, video updates about future projects and events I'm working on. You can share your own opinions on ideas to help me decide upon Weird Darkness contests and events. You can hear audiobooks I'm narrating before even the publishers or authors get to hear them. You also receive bonus audio of other projects I'm working on outside of Weird Darkness. You get all of these benefits and more, starting at only $5 per month. Join the Weird Darkness Syndicate at WeirdDarkness.com slash syndicate. That's WeirdDarkness.com slash syndicate. I was walking along a path with two friends. The sun was setting. Suddenly the sky turned blood red. I paused, feeling exhausted and leaned on the fence. There was blood and tons of fire above the blue-black fjord in the city. My friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety, and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature. In describing the sensation that inspired his iconic masterpiece The Scream in 1892, Edward Munch might well have been talking about his own tragic life. Not only was his childhood marked by the death of his mother and his favorite sister from tuberculosis, but Edward was often sickly himself. His father, Christian Munch, raised his surviving children in an extremely religious environment, including telling his children that their mother was looking down from heaven at them whenever they misbehaved. There was also a history of mental illness in the family. One of his younger sisters was diagnosed with mental illness and spent much of her life in an asylum. Edward would eventually comment that I inherited two of mankind's most frightful enemies, the heritage of consumption and insanity. Starting from adolescence, Edward's art came to dominate his life. He disappointed his father by becoming a painter, which his father considered to be an unholy trade. Over the next several decades, Edward Munch's artistic talents were increasingly recognized. Unfortunately, the troubles in his life increased as well. The death of his father left his siblings destitute, and Edward went into debt to support them all, including his sister in the asylum. As he grew more prominent in art, he became more self-destructive as well. In addition to his chronic alcoholism and tobacco use, he also began taking a bizarre cocktail of nerve and pain medications to keep himself going. His health was never good, so his drinking and hard living sent him into a downward spiral. Munch's relationship with his mistress, Tula Larson, ended after an accidental shooting that permanently damaged two of his fingers. He was frequently given to public brawls and drunken binges that alarmed his friends and family. Although he was getting frequent commissions and public honors, Munch hit rock bottom by 1907. Actively delusional, he initially checked into a clinic in Copenhagen but fled during the admission interview. Due to Munch's worsening condition and failure to seek help on his own, his friend, Emmanuel Goldstein, forced him into the private clinic of Dr. Daniel Jacobson in Copenhagen. Although his medical reputation wasn't the best, Dr. Jacobson ran a successful clinic that catered to well-to-do patients. On admission, Jacobson diagnosed Munch as suffering from dementia paralytica, linked to his alcoholism. Nowadays, he'd probably be diagnosed as either delirium tremens or warnex encephalopathy. As it was, he was lucky not to get a diagnosis such as general paracys or neurosyphilis, which might have led to him being locked up for life, which was why Munch had been afraid to seek help in the first place. In many respects, the rest cure that Jacobson prescribed for Munch was, if you'll pardon the expression, just what the doctor ordered. On admission, Jacobson had Munch placed in a locked room for eight days until his hallucinations and other symptoms came under control. Jacobson took Munch off the cocktail of drugs and alcohol that he had been taking for years and gave him no other medication except for sleeping drops, probably chloral hydrate. During his stay at the clinic, Munch was given ample bed rest, good food, fresh air, and regular sun baths that helped him immensely. Some of the other treatments that Jacobson prescribed were a little more bizarre, however. In addition to electrification, which basically amounted to running mild electrical currents through the patient's body using a special generator, the Jacobson clinic also specialized in special treatment baths. These baths involved diluted carbonic acid with extra ingredients including, among other things, iron fillings, salt, soda, potash, sulfur, fur needles, oak bark, malt, and bran. For patients suffering from hallucinations, the baths could also include milk or bullion and even blood from freshly slaughtered animals, and I'll bet you thought that blood bath was a figure of speech. Munch was fortunately spared the blood baths but otherwise had the full course of treatment that Jacobson's clinic had to offer. Munch actually enjoyed the electrification sessions. At one point he drew a cartoon of himself wired up to the electrical apparatus with the caption, Professor Jacobson passing electricity through the famous painter Edward Munch, changing his crazy brain with the positive power of masculinity and the negative power of femininity. While he was fond of the female staff, with whom he often flirted, his relationship with Jacobson was always lukewarm. When Jacobson suggested that Munch paint his portrait, Munch complied by representing him in the painting as a somewhat domineering figure, though Jacobson actually didn't like it that much, although the portrait is now considered one of Munch's best. Along with other paintings, Munch also completed a journal of his stay at Jacobson's clinic which was later published as The Mad Poet's Diary. While Munch had initially planned to stay only eight months, he didn't actually leave the clinic until 1909. It was an expensive stay for him, no socialized medicine back then, and he needed to borrow money to cover the costs as well as continue caring for his surviving family members. Still, when he finally left the clinic, Edward Munch made quite a spectacle of it. He dressed up in formal wear and made his elaborate goodbyes to the other patients, stating that, Peer Gent bids farewell to his fellow lunatics. Daniel Jacobson offered to accompany him to Oslo and capitalize on some of the publicity over his star patient, but Munch refused. After leaving, Munch never returned to the clinic and rarely referred to it in later years. When Jacobson later sent him a number of sketches that Munch had drawn at the clinic and asked him to autograph them, which would have raised their value considerably, Munch kept the drawings instead. Edward Munch spent the last two decades of his life in relative solitude at his estate in Oslo. He followed enough of Daniel Jacobson's lifestyle recommendations to avoid a repetition of that terrible breakdown of 1907, including avoiding tobacco, alcohol, and poisonous women. Despite a bout of Spanish flu in 1918, he remained relatively healthy throughout his old age, but was overshadowed by the Nazi occupation of Norway in 1940. Ironically, while the Nazis denounced his art as degenerate, many of his paintings were confiscated and some of his great works, including The Scream, had to be kept hidden. When Munch died in 1944, he received a state funeral, organized by the Nazis, which gave him an unfair reputation as a collaborator. Today, many of Edward Munch's paintings still invoke themes of life, love, angst, death, and depression. He probably wouldn't have had it any other way. Have you ever wondered why so many ghosts in horror films are female? What is the reason for this? Do they appear to be scarier? If you try to think of two famous film ghosts, you'll probably come up with Samara from The Ring and The Old Woman from The Shining. Female ghosts have far more interesting stories than male ghosts. They're grieving the loss of their children. They're a wrathful darling. They're mourning the loss of their energetic excellence, or they're attempting to resurrect themselves by engaging in sexual relations with a living person. But before we look at the famous female ghosts and urban legends from around the world, let me tell you a quick story of unfinished business. There's a ghost in town, you know? And not one of the harmless ones either. She died of a broken heart after the loss of her daughter. If you're sensitive, you can see her walking the streets, screaming and rending her clothes. She says she won't rest until she's found out who murdered her child. And she means it. Her daughter's boyfriend, thrown out of the window over and over. Her school rival's face pressed against an iron. Her father, the ghost's husband, nearly drowned in a bathtub. She appears hurling accusations and hurts you until you confess. It usually doesn't take long, but she still doesn't move on and realizes it's a lie, so she leaves and finds the next person on the list. Sometimes her screams become sobs. What if it was some wandering vagrant who left town weeks ago? Some serial killers who picked a random target they have no connection to. What if she never learns who took her daughter away? I try to tell her. She does know, of course. I point to the note. I tell her over and over. No one killed me. I took my own life. You don't need to keep hurting people. It was all my fault. And she leans down and gently takes my skeletal face and bony hands and shakes her head. Of course you didn't. I know my daughter. I always accepted you. I did everything I could to make you happy. You wouldn't do this. Someone faked the note. I know it. I was a good mom. You wouldn't have done this. I try to explain over and over, but she's not listening. The suspect's the local priest now. She never quite trusted him anyway. My guilt is no match for her rage, so all I can do is watch as she floats away. Shortly, I hear screams from the church. There's a ghost in town, you know, and not one of the harmless ones either. Some of the scariest ghosts and urban legends are female, from Bloody Mary to the White Lady. Have you seen any of these women? The Vanished Hitchhiker This one appears to be straight out of terrifying stories, and it is one of the most well-known urban legends of all time. The story tends to differ from teller to teller, but the basic premise is that the vanishing hitchhiker is an urban legend in which people traveling by vehicle pick up a young, beautiful hitchhiker. They drive her home and notice that she's vanished when they park. The person who answers the door informs them that the girl died many years ago. There's a similar story, which is about two travelers sitting next to each other on a train. Normally, a man and a woman, one of them is reading a book, the other person asks what the book is about, the first person says that it's about ghosts, and then they have a conversation about ghosts. The second person then asks if the first person believes in ghosts or has ever seen one, to which the first person says that they've never seen or believed in ghosts at all. The second person then says that this is doubtful, and with that the second person vanishes. This was the version used in the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark book series. La Llorona or La Llorona, weeping woman, the wailing woman or the crier, is an oral legend about the ghost of a woman who steals children to drown them. La Llorona is always crying when you see her. She's crying because she killed her children. There are multiple versions to this story as well. The legend states a lady was unloved by her husband, but the husband adored their two children. She caught her husband with another lady and drowned her children in a river. Out of pain and outrage, she at that point drowned herself. She was denied passage to paradise until she found the spirits of her two children. She cries and moans and takes youngsters and suffocates them in the stream that she and her children suffocated in themselves. The legend represents La Llorona as an individual or as a ghost. In one variation, the lore states that after giving birth to and raising two sons, an aging wife felt that her husband fell out of love with her and only loved their sons. After catching her husband cheating on her with a younger woman, she was consumed by grief and anger, so she drowned her sons in a river to punish her husband, then drowned herself as well because of what she had done. She was tricked by a demon that told her her son's souls were lost, but she'd be granted entry to heaven if she found their lost souls and brought them to heaven where they belonged. The demon knew that her son's souls were already in heaven, so the woman would be stuck in the land of the living trying to find her sons forever, crying constantly for the sins she committed. After having spent a long time without finding her sons, her grief and her desperation to just be able to die and be at peace caused her to start taking other children's souls by drowning them. The Slit Mouthed Woman This famous Japanese ghost is a woman who targets children. She's usually wearing a mask over her lower jaw. According to the legend, she asks her victims if they think that she's attractive. If they respond with no, she will kill them with her weapon. If they say yes, she will reveal that the corners of her mouth are slit from ear to ear and she will then repeat her question. If the individual then replies with no, she will kill them with her weapon. If they say yes, she will cut the corners of their mouth in such a way that resembles her own disfigurement. While as horrifying as she sounds, there are some methods to escape from the Slit Mouthed Woman, methods including answering her question, am I pretty, by saying average, or by distracting her with money or hard candy. As per legend, Kuchisaki Ana, the Slit Mouthed Woman, was mutilated during her life, with her mouth being cut from ear to ear. In certain variants of the story, she was the double crossing spouse or courtesan of a samurai during her life. As disciplined for her unfaithfulness, her better half cut the edges of her mouth from ear to ear. Other forms of the story incorporate that her mouth was ruined during a clinical or dental method, she was mangled by a lady who was desirous of her magnificence or that her mouth is loaded up with various sharp teeth. Ann Bolin Ann Bolin was famously beheaded on the orders of her husband, Henry VIII, when he was frustrated that she didn't bear him a son and heir. The ghost of Ann Bolin is said to haunt the Tower of London, where she was imprisoned before she died. The king divorced her and beheaded her for not giving him a male heir and accused her of black magic and incest. Ann's ghost has her head, thankfully, but she is still said to frighten passersby as she wanders through the halls. She's even been seen in other historic buildings. She's probably looking for justice, poor Ann. The ghost of Sir Thomas Ann Bolin's father is also believed to haunt the Tower of London, having been cursed for taking no action to prevent two of his children being executed by Henry VIII. La Planchata La Planchata in Spanish means the ironed lady, assuming that I am saying it correctly. La Planchata is a well-known ghost legend in Mexico and the southwestern part of the U.S. It's a story of a ghostly nurse who was seen in hospitals in central Mexico in urban areas. The nurse is seen wearing an old-fashioned nurse uniform. Here's the backstory. In the 1930s, a nurse named Eulalia worked at the hospital. She always wore a clean, crisply ironed uniform. She was an excellent nurse and her patients were lucky to have her. Soon this changed when a handsome doctor entered her life. They got engaged and started living a happy life. Shortly after the engagement, the doctor left to attend a seminar and, to Eulalia's concern, he did not return the following week. Several weeks later, she found out that he found another woman while there and married her. This left her heartbroken and she lapsed into depression. She was so distracted by the pain that she became ill herself and died in the hospital where she worked. After her death, multiple staff members started experiencing strange things in the emergency room. Some believed that she glows and floats in the hospital corridors, while some believed that she walked normally but her footsteps are not heard. Hospital staff started to call the ghost Laughlinchata because she always appears wearing a clean, freshly pressed uniform. And there are various versions of this story as well. In one of the versions, Eulalia was a cruel nurse who didn't treat her patients right and due to that she was being punished to take care of the patients for eternity. Kate Bats The legend of the bell witch is probably one of the most famous pieces of Southern lore. It's a story of a spirit who tormented the bell family. In 1817, a man named John Bell and his family began experiencing ghostly happenings in their Tennessee home. The poltergeist like activity, things being thrown, strange sounds, sugar being taken from the bowls, ghostly laughter, spooked animals, it was all thought to be caused by a witch named Kate Bats. However, it was later found that daughter Betsy was probably causing the activity. However, the bell witch lives on. The Blair Witch Project was based in part on the bell witch legend. Bloody Mary Standing in the dark bathroom facing a mirror and chanting her name three times, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary and Bloody Mary's ghost is said to appear right behind you, sometimes holding a baby, other times telling you how she will come after you. Bloody Mary is a folklore legend consisting of a ghost phantom or spirit conjured to reveal the future. She said to appear in a mirror when her name is chanted repeatedly. Bloody Mary appearances are mostly witnessed in a group participation play. Bloody Mary's story originated with Queen Mary the First being childless, and thus she was replaced by her husband with another woman. When you dim the lights and repeat her name in the mirror three times, she thinks you are taunting her for being childless. When Weird Darkness returns, I have a story from one of our Weirdo family members. If you or someone you know is struggling with depression, dark thoughts or addiction, please visit the Hope in the Darkness page at WeirdDarkness.com. There, I've gathered numerous resources to find hope and solutions. For those suffering from thoughts of suicide or self-harm, there is the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, as well as the Crisis Text Line. Both have trained counselors at all hours to help those in need, and the page even includes text numbers for those in the U.S., Canada, United Kingdom, and Ireland. Those struggling with depression can get help through the Seven Cups website and app. And there's information for anyone to read more about what depression truly is and how to identify it through our friends at ifred.org. There are resources for those who battle addictions, be it drugs, alcohol or self-destructive behavior, along with help for those related to addicts. The page has links to help you find a therapist or counselor, to find help for those who have a family member with Alzheimer's or dementia, help for those in a crisis pregnancy, and more. These resources are always there when you or someone you love needs them on the Hope in the Darkness page at WeirdDarkness.com. One of our Weirdo family members sent this one in, and they only wanted to share their first name for credit. It's titled Something Above Us, written by Norman. When I was around 10 or 11 years old, I went on a road trip with my mother, her close friend, and her daughter. Jenny, the daughter, and I were about the same age. We grew up together and were childhood friends. My mother and her mother were close friends, that's how we met. I used to go to her house after school and watch TV, play video games, go swimming in her pool while our mothers caught up to chat and have coffee. I remember one day my mother told me, we're going on a trip with Jenny, and I was pretty excited about the news. The trip was from Cairns to Townsville, which was around a four-hour drive in far north Queensland. We were going to stay the night with some friends of my mother's. I slept for most of the drive, and remember being woken up by Jenny. We're here, we're here! I remember looking through the front windscreen of the car from the back seat. I saw a driveway leading to a very modern looking house with large trees to the side and behind it. We got out of the car and made our way inside the house. I didn't know anyone who lived there. I was introduced to a couple who had a daughter around the same age as us and also a baby. That night our parents all went out for dinner. Jenny and I stayed home to watch movies with our new friend and to also babysit the baby. It was getting late and we all decided to go to bed. I was woken up by a terrified Jenny she was freaking out and couldn't keep still. She seemed to have lost all composure. There's something above us, she told me. I wasn't fully awake when she told me. I sat up on my bed and wiped my eyes to try and understand what she was really saying. When I gathered myself I was in shock. What I felt and saw was nothing I have ever experienced in my life. The room I was sleeping in was shaking like a small earthquake but it seemed to be vibrating rather than shaking. We both were too scared to leave the bedroom. We laid on the floor and hid beside the bed away from the window. We could hear a buzzing sound. We could feel the buzzing sound through our bodies. The buzzing came and went in intervals. When the buzzing got louder, we saw a light outside illuminating the backyard, like it was daytime. Jenny and I both saw it and were puzzled. It must have been around 11 PM at night. When the buzzing went quiet, the light disappeared and it was nighttime again. This happened for quite some time. We had enough. We both ran out of the bedroom to try and find the other girl and the baby. When we opened the door, we could see the living room. There was a window next to the front door overlooking the front yard. What we saw was the most frightening thing ever. We were standing right in between our bedroom and the front door window just across from the living room. We noticed that when the buzzing sound got quiet from our bedroom and the blinding light was gone, it actually went from the backyard to the front yard. It was like the front yard was daytime and the back yard was nighttime and it kept on switching back and forth along with the very disabling buzzing sound going through our bodies. We didn't believe our own eyes. We went to the other room where the girl was sleeping in. She was crying and didn't know what was happening. She was worried about the baby in the other room. All three of us went to the baby's room to make sure the baby was safe. We opened the door to the room and couldn't believe our eyes. The baby's cot was swinging back and forth by itself and the baby was crying. We were frozen with fear. Then we all lost time. I woke up in bed. It was the next morning and I couldn't remember the moments after I went into the baby's room. I could still remember the buzzing sound and the blinding light shining over the yard. Jenny and I didn't tell our parents about what happened. We were too shocked and we couldn't describe exactly what happened that night. We went outside to the back yard to see if we could see any changes or any signs of what happened. As we were walking around, we saw the lawn was burnt. It was a black circle and the green grass had turned brown and dry to the touch. We were freaking out. We knew something happened and it wasn't just our imagination or some dream. The house next door was being built and basically was a construction site. It had the walls up but only the framework. After we checked the backyard, we decided to go and have a closer look at the construction site next door. There was a weird feeling coming from this site. We thought maybe there could be some evidence from what happened last night somewhere here in this half-built house. We started walking towards the house and then I stopped. I saw something run from behind a wall to another wall. We ran back to our house as fast as we could. I didn't look back. It looked like a small human, skinny and white, no clothes on. Jenny and I never really talked about this as we got older. I'm 35 now and I will never forget that night that we had something above us. Thanks for listening. If you like the show, please share it with someone you know who loves the paranormal or strange stories, true crime, monsters or unsolved mysteries like you do. You can email me anytime with your questions or comments at Darren at WeirdDarkness.com. You can find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the show's Weirdos Facebook group on the Contact social page at WeirdDarkness.com. Also on the website, if you have a true paranormal or creepy tale to tell, click on Tell Your Story. All stories in Weird Darkness are purported to be true unless stated otherwise and you can find source links or links to the authors in the show notes. On the edge of time was by Tim Swartz for UFO Review. Curing Edward Munch is by Dr. Romeo Vitelli for Providencia. And infamous female ghosts and urban legends was posted at BuggedSpace.com. Weird Darkness is a production of Marlar House Productions. Now that we're coming out of the dark, I'll leave you with a little light. Deuteronomy 4, verse 29, But if from there you seek the Lord your God, you will find him if you look for him with all your heart and with all your soul. And a final thought by Eleanor Roosevelt, no one can make you feel inferior without your consent. I'm Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness. Horrible Henry and Mad Marty are presenting 1950s Quick Sand, starring Mickey Rooney and Peter Laurie. In the film, a man takes $20 from his employer to go on a date, planning to replace the money the next day. But he falls increasingly into more disastrous circumstances and further in need of more money, and it spirals out of control. Did you ever hear anybody say money talks? Join us Friday, February 9th for Quick Sand. It's free to watch online, and you can chat along with the rest of us weirdos as we watch the movie together. The show begins at 8 p.m. Eastern, 7 p.m. Central, 6 p.m. Mountain, and 5 p.m. Pacific. You can watch a trailer for the film and watch horror hosts and schlocky B-movies anytime, day or night on the Weirdo Watch Party page at WeirdDarkness.com. And I'm going to get it for $2,000 for whatever it takes. 1950s Quick Sand, starring Mickey Rooney and Peter Laurie. Friday, February 9th on the Weirdo Watch Party page. Hey Weirdos, be sure to click the like button and subscribe to this channel, and click the notification bell so you don't miss future videos. I post videos 7 days a week, and while you're at it, spread the darkness by sharing this video with someone you know who loves all things strange and macabre. If you want to listen to the podcast, you can find it at WeirdDarkness.com.