 ads heard during the podcast that are not in my voice are placed by third party agencies outside of my control and should not imply an endorsement by Weird Darkness or myself. 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 a show. And while you're listening, be sure to check out WeirdDarkness.com where you can find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and more. Coming up in this episode... Have you ever noticed there seems to be something special going on with railroad tracks and Bigfoot? A man in Oklahoma reports of being on the side of the road that looked human except it had the head of a snake and the Native American population there have an answer to what it might be. What do you do if you're a woman living in the 1800s whose husband was just tossed into prison for grave robbing? Well, if you were anything like Helen Miller and he begged me, you might decide to continue the family business on your own. And later, an author seeks out an alien abductee in order to try and get abducted himself. Now, bolt your doors, lock your windows, turn off your lights and come with me into the Weird Darkness. There is a rare story on the elaborated, tidbit of which is currently being investigated by strange Maine author Michelle Solieri that tells of the finding of an ape man near the railroad tracks at Greenville, Maine in 1856. It holds the promise of further intrigue. This item is brought to mind the quite frequent place that railroads fit into such stories. You ever noticed there seems to be something special going on with railroad tracks and Sasquatch? For anyone who reads the hominological and cryptozoological literature, you'll be quite familiar with the notion that railroads keep popping up in citing accounts. Cases like the Enfield Monster of Illinois, 1973, mention the railroad tracks almost as if they're being used as the avenues of movement for the creature. In the midst of a series of Bigfoot sightings on January 15, 1980, near Manchester, Iowa, railroad engineer Ciri O'Brien, who was on a train at the time, saw a strange creature on all fours eating a carcass. Weird, six towed tracks were found in the area later. Railride of ways are natural green belts for animals to employ for ease of travel. Is it any wonder that railroads are so often involved? Railways, of course, have been used as a form of explanation too. Various threads have been linked to the railroads in Bigfoot stories in the same fashion that the wrecked circus train myths were used by early news reporters to explain away unknown mystery cat sightings. Those circus trains needless to say rode the rail lines. It'll be recalled that during the white wild man sightings in British Columbia in 1922, it was written at the time that the wild men running at large, more or less, have been sighted ever since the advent of the GTP and we're supposed to have been working on the railroad construction afterwards squatting on the wild lands abounding in the district until they in turn became wild themselves, according to the remoteness from supplies or from other human companions. The stray people became the feral or wild people who became Sasquatch who were told. The theme has been used before. One of the most discussed historic Bigfoot railroad cases, of course, is the Jack-O incident. The story of Jack-O, that of a small ape-like young Sasquatch said to have been captured alive in the 1800s, is a piece of folklore that refuses to die, despite a superb investigative article published in 1975 co-authored by John Green and Sabina W. Sanderson. The investigation into the Jack-O story did not begin until decades later. During the 1950s, a news reporter named Brian McKelvie became interested in the then-current stories of the Sasquatch being carried by his local British Columbia newspapers. McKelvie searched for older reports. What he found was the Daily British Colonist from July 4, 1884, an article about Jack-O. The account detailed the sighting of a smallish, hairy creature, something of the guerrilla type supposedly seen and captured near Yale, British Columbia on June 30, 1884, and housed in a local jail. McKelvie shared the Jack-O account with researchers John Green and Renata Hinden. McKelvie told them that this was the only record of the event due to a fire that had destroyed other area newspapers of the time. In 1958, John Green found and interviewed a man, August Castle, who remembered the Jack-O talk of the time, but he said his parents did not take him to the jail to see the beast. Other senior citizens remembered the talk of the creature, but no one could produce any truly good evidence for or eyewitness accounts other than the British colonist story of Jack-O. The story's appearance in Ivan T. Sanderson's 1961 Abominable Snowman Legend Come to Life propelled the Jack-O incident into history. Meanwhile, some of the older accounts are merely short references to the sightings of wild people, whatever that means. For example, the appearance of a black wild man is noted in one old article as having been seen near a railroad station in 1870 at Chattawa, Mississippi. This seems similar to the Vincennes monster also said to look like a wild black man seen near a railroad bridge in Indiana in 1885. But the question for today is, what happened in Greenville, Maine in 1856? By the way, when is an old report of a wild man in Maine not really in the state of Maine? When it's an account from Maine, New York, of course. In Robert Bartholomew's and Paul Bartholomew's Bigfoot Encounters in New York and New England from 2008, the authors detail wild man sightings occurring between August and November 1883 at just such a location. They write that these encounters took place in extreme south-central New York near the small town of Maine, New York, on the western border of Broone County, northwest of Binghamton. This Maine, New York creature was described as low in stature, covered with hair, and running while bent close to the ground, with no forearms as its arms ended at the elbows. That is one weird-looking Sasquatch. When Weird Darkness returns, what do you do if you're a woman in the 1800s whose husband was just tossed into prison for grave robbing? Well, if you were anything like Helen Miller and E. Begby, you might decide to continue the family business on your own. But first, a man in Oklahoma reports a being on the side of the road that looked human except it had the head of a snake, and the Native American population in the area have an answer to what it might have been. That story is up next. Join us Friday, January 26th for our next Weirdo Watch Party as we watch Black Dragons, presented by Horror Hotel's resident vampire Lainia Queen of the Dark, bringing us trivia about the film, the actors, and all things horror-related in-between segments of the show. And then stick around after Black Dragons because Doc Dredd will be with us with one of his popular and fun movie reviews, giving his opinion of 2023's award-winning horror flick Beneath Us All. The Weirdo Watch Party is always free to watch online with everybody, so grab your popcorn, candy, and soda, and jump into the fun and even get involved in the live chat as we watch the movie. It's Black Dragons, starring Bella Legosi from 1942, presented by Horror Hotel's Lainia Queen of the Dark, then Doc Dredd's movie review talking about Beneath Us All. Friday, January 26th, starting at 10pm Eastern, 9pm Central, 8pm Mountain, 7pm Pacific. See a few clips from the film and invite your friends to watch along with you on the Weirdo Watch Party page at WeirdDarkness.com. It will see you Friday, January 26th for the Weirdo Watch Party. Adam Myers of Kansas, Oklahoma, another in a long line of creative, oaky names, had an encounter of the solidary kind in the summer of 2005. Kansas, Oklahoma is a small town in Delaware County, just off the Cherokee Turnpike. It has a population of 685, according to The Last Census. Myers states, I was riding my four-wheeler at Dusk, behind my uncle's house where there's a lot of trees. Back behind this house, there's a dip that leads to a pond that he also owns and before you reach the pond, there's a turnaround point. It was Dusk and Myers began to get spooked. He continues, I turned around and right at the dip, my four-wheeler immediately shuts off. I'm trying to pull start it and I started getting a little more freaked out because I heard some rustling off to the side. I look over and see a human-like shadow standing off to the side, but instead of being a normal human, he had a snake-like head. The being approached Myers, who struggled more and more frantically to start his vehicle. I gave one final pull on the starter while pressing on the gas at the same time and my four-wheeler starts, and I haul out of there and go tell my friend Joe what I've seen. Joe took the four-wheeler and returned to the site, but headed back to the house after hearing a noise that did not seem normal. The most interesting thing about Myers' snake-headed humanoid is the resemblance it bears to the Seminole Tribe's human-snakes legendary malevolent creatures that lived in dens full of giant snakes. I asked Myers if he was familiar with the legend and he said that he was not. Human snakes are either half-snake, half-human, or they can shape-shift between the two. Human snakes aren't the only breed of strange snake the Native Americans believe in. The Cherokee tribe tells of Ukenna. Giant horned reptiles that live in the water and perhaps most interesting are the creek's Thai snakes, strong, dark snakes that live in caves alongside riverbanks and are capable of pulling unsuspecting humans to a watery death. Of the 46 species of known snake native to Oklahoma, only a few are aquatic and none are powerful enough to prey on humans. The western diamond-backed rattlesnake and the coach whip hold the title of Oklahoma's largest snakes, both plucking in just shy of 7 feet long. But could there be monsters hiding in the forests and lakes as the Native legends hold? Snake Creek, near Ten Killer Lake in Oklahoma, appears to have been named for a good reason. Edna Stubblefield recalls in the Stubblefield Memoirs that sometime in the 1890s, she and her family spotted a snake at the creek that looked like a big old fence post crawling across the road. A 9-foot Burmese python turned up in a Tulsa driveway, and on October 25, 2001, another Burmese python, this one 7 feet long, appeared in a still water neighborhood. While we are on the subject of out-of-place reptiles, how about rampaging alligators? The official range of the American alligator is restricted to extreme southeastern Oklahoma, particularly Choctaw and McCurton counties, and yet they just seem to keep turning up in other parts of the state. In August 2002, a South American caiman of all things was netted in Lake Ten Killer. Another caiman, this one 2 to 4 feet long, appeared in a Tulsa backyard in February 2004. And in July 2006, animal control officers spent two days trying to capture a 4-foot long alligator that appeared in the Battle Creek Golf Course in Tulsa. The gator was never caught and apparently vanished. Quick note of interest here, the Battle Creek Housing Edition was also home to another out-of-place creature in 2005, a mountain lion reportedly terrorizing the neighborhood, preying on household pets. It also was never caught and eventually just faded away. And of course, the strange case of the fugitive gator. In the summer of 2003, a 350-pound reptile dubbed the Truck Traveling Alligator was caught in a pond, sent to a breeder, and then sent to Safari Joe's, a wildlife sanctuary in Adair. The gator promptly vanished from its pen and reappeared in a pond just south of Interstate 44, and then turned up in yet another pond, this one behind the Big Cabin Truck Plaza where he was finally recaptured. He was relocated to Prime Gator Habitat in McCurton County. Granted, giant reptiles are nothing new to Oklahoma. The same noble museum and Norman hosts the world's largest apotosaurus, 93 feet long, found in the Panhandle. And if that's not big enough for you, the world's largest dinosaur to date also once called Oklahoma home. In 1994, fossils that were first thought to be tree trunks were discovered. The trunks turned out to be neck bones, each four feet long. The sauropod the bones belonged to stood an estimated 60 feet tall and weighed 60 tons and was dubbed Sorrow Poseidon, the earthquake god lizard. This monster supposedly went extinct 110 million years ago, but you just never know. Ah, last wait. Set in the beautiful countryside of Midlothian, Scotland, once with a penchant for growing strawberries and an excellence at paper making and carpet manufacture, who'd have thought the tranquility would come to a screeching halt in 1829. With a rising population and the old Kirk closing its doors to the congregation in 1793, it is perhaps with some surprise that the site here was ever targeted at all. But targeted it was, mainly due to the Miller woman who wouldn't keep her mouth shut and needed to make a penny or two to survive while her own grave-roving husband was serving time for snatching a cadaver back at Lannark. Life in the rural village of Laswade was ticking along relatively smoothly in the early 19th century and with its steadily increasing population, 3,348 inhabitants in 1801 rising to 5,022 40 years later, the graveyard was being suitably refreshed on a regular basis. The old Kirk, once dedicated to St. Edwin, had been slowly turning into a ruin since 1793 when, with a congregation over a thousand, a new church was needed elsewhere in the village. The three-story high bell tower used as a watchtower against resurrection men would not fall down until 1866 when repairs to make the structure safe backfired. Interments at the old Kirk still continued as week after week the deceased of the parish would be laid to rest among the gravestones of earlier inhabitants. The fact that Helen Miller Nebegby was married to a resurrection man, grave robber, would perhaps have put her on high alert when it came to burying the parish dead. It was her husband's livelihood after all and, well, it pays to keep these things in the family. But when her husband was imprisoned for stealing cadavers from the graveyard in Lannark, Helen's living allowance suddenly dried up. The likes of Helen Miller didn't get handouts from the surgeons like body snatchers wives did in London with their men were sent to jail. No, she had to make her own way for the next few months and there was only one way in which she knew how. Urged on by the fact that she also needed to fund a liquor habit, Helen came up with a plan that was about to help probably all of the resurrection men working in and around the city of Edinburgh. Her plan was pretty straightforward. She would tell them where and when a fresh cadaver was available and get paid for providing the information. Simple. And so it was that Helen Miller Nebegby turned informant. Her first target was known counterfeiter and thief, James Gow. The 25-year-old, by all accounts, sounded as though he'd turned his hand to anything. So when Helen gave him information as to where he could find a cadaver and a fresh one at that, he wasn't going to miss the chance of earning a quick buck. The going rate for fresh subjects was 10 pounds, at least that's what Dr. Knox was paying. And so while Burke and Hare were still quietly knocking off unsuspecting folk from the city streets in Edinburgh, James Gow grabbed his painter friend and sidekick James Hewitt and made a beeline for Last Weight. It's not every counterfeiter and painter that already have their own equipment for extracting cadavers, as so. Before leaving Edinburgh, the pair paid a visit to anatomist John Lazarus, offering him first refusal of the cadaver if he had given them some money for a spade. The criminal fraternity aren't really known for keeping their word, and so it was perhaps of little surprise when Lazarus refused to help on this occasion. He was, however, still interested in purchasing the cadaver once they'd got it out of the ground. This was of little, in fact, if any, help to the two Jameses, and so off they went to try their luck with Thomas Aitken instead, surgeon and lecturer at Surgeon's Square. Again, they were rebuffed. There perhaps wasn't an anatomist in the whole of Edinburgh who'd be stupid enough to give a body snatcher money before seeing the corpse, but whether this was Gal's first time at snatching or he was merely trying his luck, he was going to have to try to find his own spade. The first cadaver that Helen let slip that had just been freshly buried was that of a female corpse, highly prized amongst surgeons and guaranteed to bring a fair price. Two days later, Gal and Hewitt turned up with the cadaver of Joan Swan, stuffed into a sack at the back door of Surgeon's Square, corpse stripped, and with their hand out, waiting to be paid. Things were finally going to plan. More news was coming from Miller that even more cadavers were ready for snatching at last wait, and so the pair returned, only to be met with a scene no one had quite anticipated. In her desperation, either for drink or some other commodious item, Miller had worked her way around a number of resurrectionists in Edinburgh, one by one, telling them of the bounty available in last wait. When Gal and Hewitt returned to the site, they weren't the only ones visiting the Kirkyard. By the time Helen had finished spreading the news of the spoils to be had on the outskirts of town, a total of eleven body snatchers and surgeons were involved in the plot to strip last-wait clean of its dead, and amongst them was notorious Edinburgh body snatcher, Andrew Merleys. Andrew Merleys, alias Andrew Leys, was a regular on the anatomist circuit, and at the time had dealings with Dr. Knox, the anatomist who was also getting a steady supply of cadavers from murderers Burke and Hare. It was to be another nine months before their last victim, Mary Doherty, was to be discovered, and quite frankly, the consequences of their actions had yet to be considered. Originally from the country, Leys was the head of a small band of resurrection men who often descended on Edinburgh's Kirkyards for its dead. The men and women, let's not forget Helen Miller in this tale, were charged with violating the sepulcher of two graves in last-wait. Accounts mentioned three cadavers being sold to the anatomists that January in 1829. After a little research, I believe these to be John Braid, Joan Swan mentioned earlier, and the body of an unknown child. When the trial was finally held in July, three of those accused were immediately outlawed for not appearing, one of these included Andrew Leys. Although there were three people who were outlawed and the instigator of the whole affair, Helen Miller, wasn't prosecuted, that still left a number of individuals still to deal with. The anatomists involved weren't prosecuted, and the only men punished for their part in the last-wait raids were three body snatchers by the names of Kerr, Barclay and Cameron. John Kerr, a known resurrectionist on the streets of Edinburgh, was sentenced to nine months' imprisonment with hard labor in the Bridewell on Colton Hill. He was to be joined for six of those months by James Barclay and George Cameron. Having had a lucky escape at the trial in July, Gao had learned nothing from his recent brush with the law. One year later, he was once again being accused of stealing a cadaver, but this time things were about to take a slightly different turn. Having previously made a deal to acquire a cadaver for lodgings in Old Assembly Close, tucked tight off the royal mile in the heart of Edinburgh City, on arrival the door was found to be locked. Instead of returning at a later date, James Gao, together with accomplice Daniel Grant, broke down the door, now escalating their crime from a misdemeanor. I have read that James was transported for this crime, but I don't believe that to be true. Instead, I believe he was sentenced, along with Daniel, to nine months' imprisonment in the Bridewell on Colton Hill. Take a trip to Laswade today and you'll find remnants of its body snatching past. Fear of a visit from these ungodly men had brought a genuine fear into the lives of the inhabitants of Laswade, and this can be seen throughout the old courtyard today. As you walk into the site, look up and over to the left. The caged lair you see is in the Calderwood enclosure, lying in the Calderwood of Poulton Isle of the Old Kirk. Its iron-barred roof would have created a barrier between the body snatcher and the anatomist's table. If you're lucky, the door to the lair might be unlocked. I find these places incredibly eerie when walking inside. Laying on the grass near what is known as the Elden Isle is a large lump of rock, properly referred to as a mortestone. This would have been shared amongst the parish and placed over the top of the coffin until the corpse inside was no longer useful to the anatomists. To get a better understanding of mortestones, you might want to read an article from diggingup1800.com called Mortestones, Protecting Yourself from the Resurrection Men. You can find it in the Weird Darkness blog. The final type of body-snatching prevention is sadly no longer here, for it collapsed in 1866. In the former bell tower to the original Kirk was a watch house, taking up the lower floor of this three-story high structure. It would have been there in 1829 when the site was being raided by a gal and his fellow body snatchers, and it remains a mystery why no watch was on duty that particular January in 1829. Even Helen Miller mentioned that the coast would be clear for there was no watch, a grave mistake indeed. When Weird Darkness returns, an author seeks out an alien abductee. Why? To try and get abducted himself. What makes someone kill? Not only innocent people, but sometimes the very people who loved and trusted them. What imagined wrongs could drive a deluded individual to seek revenge by taking another person's life? What lengths will people go to to get what they want? Murder Respinds, Volume 2, stories of real-life murderers that escaped the headlines, is the latest offering in a series that takes you inside the life of killers who committed cold-blooded murder for a glimpse at events that drove them to kill. Each tale is sorted, twisted, and worthy of newspaper headlines. By weaving a tale in which dark fantasies turned reality, this book invites you to see life from a perspective few ever witness, that of the killer. Paired with an in-depth account of each case, it will be a nightmarish journey to the darkest reaches of the mind of these real-life murderers. Murder Respinds, Volume 2, written by Ryan Becker, narrated by Weird Darkness host Darren Marlar. Here are free sample on the audiobooks page at WeirdDarkness.com. I get these messages from other planets. I'm apparently some kind of agent from another planet, but I haven't got my orders clearly decoded yet. William S. Burroughs In 1989, the American author William S. Burroughs wrote to Whitley Stryber, a writer previously best known for his successful horror fiction, such as The Wolfen and The Hunger, about his alleged experiences of alien contact and abduction. In his first supposedly nonfiction book, Immunion, published in 1987 and its sequel Transformation, published in 1988, Stryber asserts that he was abducted from his cabin in upstate New York on the evening of December 26, 1985 by non-human beings. Although the books are generally thought of as accounts of alien abduction, Stryber draws no conclusions about his alleged abductor's nature, referring to them as The Visitors, a name he chose to be as neutral as possible. Burroughs read both Stryber's first two books on his experiences with The Visitors and wrote saying that he would very much like to contact them. Stryber's wife, Ann, wrote back, saying that they received a lot of crank letters and had to be sure he really was who he said he was. His next letter, in which Burroughs assured the Strybers, I am indeed really me, convinced them, and they invited him to spend the weekend at their cabin in upstate New York, where the experiences were alleged to have occurred. Burroughs later said, I had a number of talks with Stryber about his experiences, and I was quite convinced that he was telling the truth. He told me this, when you experience it, it is very definite, very physical, it's not vague, and it's not like an hallucination that they are there. For his part, Stryber said Burroughs was almost overly polite during his visit, but was clearly genuinely interested and very curious about details of his experiences. Although the visitors he describes do travel in what appear to be nuts and bolts physical craft, which manifest very much in the classic flying saucer mode, and as for the beings themselves, roughly humanoid mammalian beings wearing at one point would appear to be blue overalls, Stryber himself had not ruled out the possibility they may not be extraterrestrials at all, but rather exist in his mind. Burroughs himself, no stranger to altered states, other realms of perception and psychic manifestations, and a lifelong champion of Count Alfred Korzybinski's general semantics, which opposes the so-called Aristolian street jacket of either or thinking, could certainly concur. Regrettably, the visitors did not choose to manifest themselves when he was around, but he remained open-minded about the possible reasons for this. It may mean that it was not propitious for them to come and pick me up at that particular time. It may mean they would contact me at a later date, or it may mean that they regard me as the enemy. We have no way of knowing what their motives are. They may find that my intervention is hostile to their objectives, and their objectives may not be friendly at all. Stryber referred to the visitors in his books also by the name Grace, a meme which took on a life of its own and has become very much the standard way of referring to at least one type of alien that is apparently a regular visitor to our small world, roughly humanoid with a large bald domed head and usually large black wraparound eyes. This idea and image soon found its way into Burroughs' personal cosmology. He continued to be fascinated by them, and in a diary entry, February 3, 1997, written just five months before his death and later published posthumously as part of Last Words, the final journals of William S. Burroughs, he wrote, The greys apparently are control aliens who have lost the ability to create, a dying race that needs blood and semen from humans. Bad folks, those greys. I recall that Whitley Stryber was accused of working for the greys. Why are abductions and contacts always to mediocre or inferior minds? Why don't they come and see me? Because they don't want to, are afraid to contact anyone with advanced spiritual awareness. The greys want to make people stupider. Anyone with real perception is a danger to them, a deadly danger. In an official interview, David Oll, a friend of Stryber, asked William S. Burroughs about his experiences, asking, You went to New York a few weeks ago to see some aliens. What happened? Burroughs replied, I talked to Whitley Stryber, who wrote Communion, and he invited me up to his cabin. I just read his book Majestic, about the cover-up that followed the alleged crash of an alien ship, referring to the infamous Roswell, New Mexico case of 1947. They recovered a body which was taken to Los Alamos for autopsy. It had no stomach. Apparently, these creatures are nourished by some kind of very sophisticated photosynthesis. Chlorophyll people. They also have very large eyes, and they cluster together in their spaceships, which are like hives. All this upset, then-president of the United States Truman, a great deal. They live in hives, he said. It makes my blood run cold, got no stomachs, and their genital organs are vestigial. Are they Communists? He wanted to know, my God, the dumbness to alienate the aliens. The fact that the recovered alien body was allegedly taken to Los Alamos would have been a particularly portentious detail for Burroughs. It was where he had been sent to a Boy Scout-style ranch school as a boy, which he had hated, and was the facility later taken over by the U.S. military to be used as a top-secret base for the development of the atom bomb. Details that recur with ominous significance throughout a number of his works. Later, towards the end of the same interview, Oll asks, Is there something out there? And Burroughs' reply shows, among other things, an interesting knowledge of UFO lore. He said, There's something out there. It may be far away in space and time, but remember, time itself is a human invention, as are measurements. Remember Betty and Barney Hill, the two people abducted by aliens in Exeter, New Hampshire? Well, the aliens noticed that Barry had false teeth. They asked about this, and Betty said, Well, they've worn out. Age, you know. Length of time. And the aliens said, What is time? What is age? They had no concept of it. Time is both a human invention and a human affliction. In a collection of essays published in 1986 as The Adding Machine, Burroughs summed up a lifetime of musing on the intricate and mysterious relationship between the creative impulse he'd explored, both as a writer and in later years increasingly as a painter, and the mysterious other realms of altered perceptions and expanded consciousness that he had long sought to come to terms with, characterized in terms of the impulse to get into space, in which he contrasts the nuts and bolts efforts of the space program with perhaps more subtle and creative methods. He said, We're not setting out to explore static, pre-existing data. We're setting out to create new worlds, new beings, new models of consciousness. As Brian Gison, painter, poet, and Burroughs' long-term friend and collaborator said, When they get there in their trillion-dollar aqualong, they may find that artists are already there. What you experience in dreams and out-of-body trips, what you glimpse in the works of writers and painters, is the promised land of space. Towards the end of the 1980s, not showing any signs of slowing down and still reaching out to new forms of creative expression, Burroughs collaborated with American avant-garde theater director Robert Wilson on an opera called The Black Writer. It was based on a German folktale, Der Freischütz, in a version that had come down via English opium eater Thomas de Quincy, and Burroughs wrote the libretto to accompany music by Tom Waits. Flushed by the apparent success towards the end of 1991, Wilson approached Burroughs about a further collaboration, and Burroughs put forward an idea he was calling Paradise Lost. I had an idea of an opera based on Paradise Lost where Lucifer and the fallen angels had been the victims of an atomic attack and they are picking themselves up out of the ruins of Hiroshima. Based in part on Milton's original poem, it would also include material to do with aliens, abductions, UFOs, and in particular, the infamous crash alleged to have taken place at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. Although nothing came of this at the time, following Burroughs' death, his former companion and manager, now literary executor, James Grohaltz, gave the material to former Husker do-drummer Grant Hart, who used it as the basis for his 2013 album, The Argument. As part of the promotion and publicity for The Black Rider, Burroughs was interviewed at home in Lawrence, Kansas on June 10, 1991 by Nicholas Zerbruk. Asking him about his current interests and reading material, Burroughs showed the interviewer some books on Native American Indian shamanism, and then explained, So I'm interested in shamanism. I'm also very interested in all of these space aliens. They're flying saucers and all that. I'd just like to see some myself, that's all. As a matter of fact, there's been sightings in Kansas and some out at the lake, where I have my house on the lake, but I have not been favored. That same year, the writer Victor Bacchris visited his old friend at home in Lawrence to talk with him for Interview Magazine. During a discussion about Stryber's alleged experiences and how Burroughs was finding the 90s a very unfunny, very grim decade, at one point Bacchris was very upset about a sense of being invaded, and the reply shows that for William S. Burroughs, many of the old concerns about control and possession had not gone away. You are no more invaded than the rest of us. When I go into my psyche, at a certain point I meet a very hostile, very strong force. It's as definite as somebody attacking me in a bar. What you have to do is confront the possession. You can do that only when you've wiped out the words. For Burroughs, any escape into the altered state of consciousness that he saw represented by the freedom of space would always be achieved in silence. Back in the 1960s, amid the all-too-often drug-fueled paranoia of sci-fi conspiracy theories, in which he seriously considered the possibility women were an alien species, and that famously language is a virus from outer space, Burroughs had written, To travel in space, you must leave the old verbal garbage behind. God talk, country talk, mother talk, love talk, party talk. You must learn to exist with no religion, no country, no allies. You must learn to live it alone in silence. Anyone who prays in space is not there. As the decades progressed and the space race failed to deliver on its promise of brave new worlds on the high frontier of the stars, Burroughs' interest waned in the possibility of nuts-and-bolts solutions to getting out of the body and off the planet. His already long-standing interest in magic, the occult, and psychic phenomena took him further in the direction of astral projection, dream control, remote viewing, and the like, as well as actual forays into ritual magic. During his final years in the Midwest, as well as his interest in UFOs and possible alien contacts, such as those written about by Whitley Stryber, Burroughs explored the possibilities offered by an encounter with an anthropologist neighbor who was working with a Lakota Indian medicine man, Black Elk, and was also initiated into the Chaos Magic Order, the Illuminates of Thanateros. All of this is detailed at length in Matthew Levi Stephen's book, The Magical Universe of William S. Burroughs, by Mandrake of Oxford, published in 2014. I'll place a link to that book in the show notes. Later in the collection of notes from his dream journals and related musings that were published as My Education, A Book of Dreams, Burroughs wrote, I was convinced that the aliens, or whatever they are, are a real phenomenon. The abductions in several accounts involved sexual contacts. Indeed, that would seem to be their purpose. After some consideration, Burroughs came to the opinion that the aliens, if the visitors were indeed beings that originated physically outside of the collective unconscious or some other such physical realm, were in fact abducting people primarily to have sex with them. He was struck by the fact that in one of Stryber's accounts of just such a close encounter, the beings wanted him to get a bigger erection than the one that they had somehow been able to induce in him. In an attempt to attract them to his home in Lawrence, Kansas, Burroughs decided to let the grass grow long on his lawn and then had somebody cut a patch of it into the shape of an erect penis, like making a crop circle, I guess, in the hope that that would attract their attention. Although Whitley Stryber continued to receive further visitations, which he would write about in subsequent works such as Breakthrough, The Next Step, and, laterally, Solving the Communion Enigma What Is To Come, the visitors never did come for William S. Burroughs. Let's end this episode with a story from one of our Weirdo family members. This comes from Megan Campbell. This just happened earlier this week and I can't stop thinking about it. I'm sorry if I write too much, I just keep processing what happened. I worked the overnight shifts in a group home for youth with special needs. Nights are typically pretty quiet, aside from the odd snore or kid quietly singing to himself. I've worked in this particular house for just a couple of months now and have noticed the sound of light footsteps, often coming from upstairs if I'm downstairs. When I go up to check on the residents, they're all asleep. The house can't be more than 30 years old if I had to guess, but I'm sure all houses both old and new make noises. No big deal. The other night, while I was using the washroom on the main floor, listening to Weird Darkness, I was suddenly startled by a loud, streamed sound directly above my head. It was as if someone was dragging furniture across the floor. I started rushing to finish up, thinking a kid was out of bed or something, but I then realized what room was right above me. Another staff sleeps in a small room located directly above the main floor bathroom. Specifically, the first third or so of the sleeping room is above the bathroom, where no furniture is located. Further back in this room is a bed and a dresser. This was 5am and I figured the staff would have no reason to be moving any furniture, let alone moving it close to the door. The sound lasted for about 10 seconds at least as I listened perplexed. I washed my hands and crept up the stairs. The kids were asleep. No sound came from the staff's sleeping area. The air felt heavy and I instantly felt light-headed. I immediately went back downstairs and tried to think of a logical explanation. It was a little bit windy out and perhaps a branch was scraping against the side of the house. No, there aren't any trees near the sides of the house. Nothing leaned against the side of the house. About an hour later, there was some thunder and rain that lasted a short time, so I thought maybe it was just unexpected thunder. I took comfort in that thought, but still couldn't shake the feeling that this sound was so loud and so close to me and a very negative and unsettling feeling came with it. Suddenly it occurred to me that I drew a pentagram on my hand earlier in the shift with Hena that another staff member brought. It was upright and I don't even believe in the devil or demons. In my Neopagan belief system, the symbol represents the elements, but I realized that the star could be perceived as being inverted so easily depending on the position of my hand. I told myself this was a silly coincidence, but I was truly disturbed. The next day I felt the need to make a cleansing spray to bring to work. I mixed various herbs and small crystals in a spray bottle with water that had been charged under the full moon. I envisioned a white light pouring into the bottle as I filled it. I tested the sprayer, it worked and was ready to go. Shortly after arriving at work, I took the bottle upstairs with the intention of spiritually cleansing every room before the kids went to bed, but the bottle would not spray. I tried adjusting the nozzle, rinsing it out, shaking it, nothing would come out. Logic told me that the nozzle was clogged with herbs. My gut told me that whatever negative energy was in this house was not allowing the bottle to spray. I'd be damned if I let that stop me. I took the top off, splashed my hand with the water and flicked it around each room and on every window and door. I said firmly but quietly in each room, if you are not of love and light, you are not welcome here. I still felt uneasy about the whole situation, despite the calming smell of lavender and eucalyptus all around, but it was a quiet night aside from some crazy winds that shook the house for a bit, and then all was calm. I felt much more at ease. I think that sometimes your gut feeling is more important than logic. 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. While on the website, if you have a true 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. Writing the Rails with Bigfoot was written by Lauren Coleman for Cryptomundo. The Oklahoma Snake Man was posted at Cryptook. Invasion of the Last Wade Body Snatchers was written by Susie for DiggingUp1800.com, and an author's search for extraterrestrial visitors was posted at Animalian.com. Weird Darkness is a production of Marlar House Productions. And now that we're coming out of the dark, I'll leave you with a little light. Isaiah 41 verse 10. Do not fear, for I am with you. Do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you. I will uphold you with my righteous hand. And a final thought. Your mind always believes everything you tell it. Feed it with faith, truth and love. I'm Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness.