 This episode is dedicated to the men and women of our armed forces and first responders. Whether you are currently serving or have served in the past, you are appreciated. It is because of your courage and sacrifice that we enjoy the freedoms and liberties we hold dear. And I, for one, appreciate every single one of you for protecting what many of us take for granted. So thank you. Most of us are familiar with the tradition of scary stories. Usually, while gathered around a campfire, people will swap spooky tales about things that go bump in the night. These fanciful stories were just enough to scare you, without totally pushing you over the edge. But what happens when scary stuff starts happening in real life? Whether you prefer a paranormal activity or tales of adventurous escapes of death's grasp, I'm about to share some true stories that might make your skin crawl or rob you of some of your sleep tonight. I'm Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness. Welcome, Weirdos! I'm Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness Radio, where every week you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, the strange and bizarre, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and unexplained. Coming up this hour, did the light of heaven shine supernaturally onto the body of boxer Lute McCarty when he died in the ring? Thousands of witnesses say yes, as does the photographic evidence. Anna Baker's father would not allow her to marry the man she loved, but that did not stop her from wearing her wedding dress numerous times before her death. But first, the scary folks over at the graveyard shift at Ranker.com have gathered some creepy stories from real people who have survived some terrifying encounters with the strange and paranormal. We begin there. 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 in with you. Recommending Weird Darkness to others helps make it possible for me to keep doing the show. And while you're listening, be sure to follow Weird Darkness on Facebook and Twitter and visit WeirdDarkness.com to find the daily Weird Darkness podcast. Watch streaming B horror movies and horror hosts 24-7 for free. Listen to free audiobooks I've narrated. Send me your own true story of something paranormal that's happened to you or someone you know, and more. You can find it all at WeirdDarkness.com. Now, bolt your doors, lock your windows, turn off your lights, and come with me into the Weird Darkness. A few years ago, I was living in a fairly nice apartment complex, having a cigarette on my balcony around 3am on a Tuesday night. I'm usually on my phone, but I get this weird chill and looked up to see a middle-aged man walking down the sidewalk across the complex. It struck me that he did not belong here, and I realized he wasn't one of our residents. As I was thinking as he suddenly stopped and looked right at me, making eerie, way-too-long eye contact, and then rushed off between buildings in the opposite direction of my apartment. I told my husband about it and joked that if we get a knock on our door in the next 15 minutes, we can assume it's that creeper. Sure enough, 10 minutes later, there is this quiet, faint tap-tap-tap on our door. My eyes probably popped out of my head, and my husband jumped up to grab his gun from the other room. I slowly walked up to the door to look through the peephole, holding my breath, and there was the man that I had seen looking right at me through the peephole. I know he wasn't able to actually see me, but the image of him looking right into my eye still freaks me out to this day. My husband walked up to the door, stared through the peephole, and shouted, What?! in his threatening voice. Apparently the man had his hand on the door knob and jerked back in surprise to hear a man's voice. Dude asked for Jeremy, or some made-up name, and my husband told him to leave. After messing around a little longer, the guy finally walked downstairs, only to peer up into my living room window from the lawn. I closed the blinds, and he moved over to stare at me through the balcony door. He didn't move on until after I shut that one too. We called security and gave a clear description and everything. A few days later we got a report from our complex that an apartment had been robbed around that same time of the night. What keeps me up at night is this question. If you are going to rob an apartment, why would you go to do that on one that you definitely know somebody is awake and home in? My bedroom is on the second floor of the house. There is no patio, porch, overhang of any kind beneath my windows. A couple of years ago, I was watching TV in bed around 2 a.m. and heard a louder than usual animal sound. Not uncommon to hear squirrels running around on the roof from time to time, didn't think much of it, kept on happening, and started to sound awfully close to the window, not on the roof. I ignored it for a pretty long time. After at least 40 to 45 minutes of being irritated by the noise, I banged on the wall in hopes of scaring off whatever it was so I could get some sleep. Just two quick bangs with my fist, which were answered with two bangs on the wall right next to the second story window from outside. Needless to say, I just about crapped my pants and jumped out of bed. My living room has a bay window and is on the other end of the house, so I could take a look out that window from the side and see my bedroom window, so I hustled downstairs to peek out. I see a guy standing in front of my house below my bedroom window. He's got a knife, a small pocket knife in his hand, and he's petting the front of my house. I call the police and wait. He never leaves the front of the house, even when they roll up and ultimately disarm and arrest him without much of a struggle. The Amy Bradley disappearance. She disappeared from a cruise ship and route to Caracas in 1998, and years later photos were emailed to her parents that very much resembled her and looked like she'd been sold into sex slavery. Multiple people have also claimed to see her through the years. The Wikipedia page on her case lists the sightings and an FBI missing persons report, including sketches of people she was seen with in 2005. The whole story is just chilling and terrifying. More true tales from people who survived real-life horror stories when Weird Darkness returns. Coffee. It's a necessity. Most of us can't be bothered to even be civil to our families until we've had our first cup of Joe. I can drink coffee all day and often do, and now I've chosen an exclusive coffee just for the task. Weird Dark Roast Coffee. I love chocolate, I mean who doesn't, so I specifically asked for a blend with at least a hint of cocoa. An Evansville coffee who roasts each bag to order knocked it out of the park when they sent me a bag to taste test for approval. Weird Dark Roast Coffee has deep notes of cocoa, caramel and a touch of sinister sweetness that makes it great hot or cold. Personally, I like to put a little milk in it when I'm drinking it hot, but it is amazing black and poured over ice. But now you can drink it too, and the only place you can find Weird Dark Roast Coffee is at WeirdDarkness.com. Welcome back to Weird Darkness, I'm Darren Marlar. Have you seen the Monster Channel? It has horror hosts, B horror movies, retro television commercials and a whole lot more, and you can watch it anytime, absolutely free 24-7-365 on the Weirdo Watch Party page at WeirdDarkness.com. We continue now with real-life horror stories from people who survived them. We moved into a new house a few months ago. As we were in the process of purchasing the home, the renter who was living in it died unexpectedly of natural causes in his mid-40s. He died right in the middle of the living room. Shortly after, we moved into the house and almost immediately our two-year-old daughter starts talking about the ghost that lives in our house. Now, let's be real here, she is two and two-year-olds are very impressionable. Halloween had recently passed and she had this Halloween-themed picture book that she loved to read, so it is entirely possible that all of this talk of ghosts was just coming from looking through that book on a regular basis. Still, she was always telling me that the ghost was in her playhouse in the basement, or that the ghost was on the stairs, or that the ghost was standing in the corner. She never seemed to be afraid of the ghost and actually considered him to be her friend, so I wasn't all that concerned, even if there really was a ghost haunting our house. If he is a nice and helpful ghost, it could certainly be a lot worse. I would often tell the ghost that he was welcome to stay if he wanted to, but he was also welcome to go, if that would make him happier. I was about thirty-seventy on the ghost being real and she could see and talk to him, versus the ghost being just in her imagination fueled by her Halloween book. Until one day, when we were going out to the car to go to daycare in the morning, it was still dark out and rainy. My daughter told me that the ghost was on the back deck and that she told me today was the ghost's birthday and she wanted to sing him happy birthday. Once again, I mostly disregarded what she was saying as she is birthday obsessed and has in the past made us sing happy birthday to Mickey Mouse, a bowl of fruit snacks, even the bathroom. So we sang and wished the ghost a happy birthday and went on with our lives. Later that day, out of pure curiosity, I looked up the obituary of the man who had died in our house. And wouldn't you know it? That day was his birthday. A fifty-eight-year-old man living alone in Japan started hearing noises at night and noticing things out of place in his house. He installed video cameras. Turns out a homeless man had been living in his attic and cupboards for almost a year in his house, undetected. I lived in an apartment a few years ago, four units upstairs, four units downstairs. I lived upstairs and the apartment below me was vacant. I kept hearing footsteps through the apartment though and I knew I shouldn't have. Nobody was supposed to be downstairs. I asked somebody to come over and listen just to see if I was crazy. Maybe I am just hearing other apartments since it is empty downstairs and everything is just echoing. Wrong. I kept hearing the footsteps. This went on for a solid hour. Finally I called the landlord and the police. Apparently someone had broken in through the windows downstairs and was walking back and forth through the apartment with a knife. It was horrifying. I saw something on National Geographic a while ago about the murders of albinos in Tanzania. There was one case of a family with two albino sisters one of which had her arms and legs hacked off in the middle of the night to sell on the black market. The other albino girl laid next to her sister for the remainder of the night as her sister bled to death but lived in a very secluded hut with no electricity. Albino limbs are reportedly worth a lot in certain parts of Africa for use in traditional witchcraft. I was with my wife and children driving to a local Walgreens when my wife suddenly stopped the car and pointed into the street. I looked and saw two young children in the middle of the road in diapers wandering around and looking confused. My wife ran out as I stayed in the car with my kids, picked up the smaller one and took the hand of the older one to walk them into the parking lot of the Walgreens. Up close I could tell that both diapers were horribly soiled as in not changed in days. They were both dirty and smelled awful. It was fairly cold and was raining some so the children were also cold and shivering. We immediately called the police and waited with the children until they arrived. The younger child was approximately two years old and my wife comforted him. He just kind of laid there and looked happy to be getting some attention. The older child was about four or five and as I stated was still in a diaper. He couldn't speak and looked very frightened of anyone getting near him. He would grunt and whimper but seemed to have no way to communicate at all despite his age. I had to gently keep him in the area as he was trying to run off but finally got him to calm down by wrapping a warm blanket around him and humming to him. The cops arrived after about 10 or 15 minutes and took our statement of what had happened. We told them our story, continuing to comfort the children until a team of paramedics got to the scene to make sure the kids didn't need medical attention for exposure, hypothermia, etc. After a while, maybe an hour after we had first found them, a strung out woman wanders onto the scene and says casually that the children are hers. She is obviously high and tries claiming to the cops that the children were only gone for 5 or 10 minutes. The cop called her on her bull story and spent the next couple of minutes yelling, asking her how she could let her children wander a fairly busy street almost naked in the rain and cold. A man who identifies himself as their dad arrived, shirtless and filthy, also strung out. The cop asked why the older boy was not speaking and they said he never did, not elaborating why that was. When asked where they live, they told conflicting stories, obviously trying to lie to the cop to make it seem the children had not wandered far but from what it seemed, they lived at least several blocks away. The mom tried to take the children but the police stepped in and told her that they were in police care now and would be assessed by a CPS rep at the police station before they be able to return home. Not long after that we were told that we could go as they gathered all they needed from us. I never found out what happened to those kids. I hope they got the help they obviously needed. I am still bothered by the whole event. I wonder what kind of life they led to leave them filthy, mute and alone in the middle of a city street. I drove past a car on my way to class in college. I always took the back roads to avoid traffic, so it was a bit odd to have a car parked on the side of the road. When I came back from class it was still there. I drove by a bit more slowly and saw what I thought was someone sleeping in there. I thought that was odd or still, but maybe someone was traveling and decided to pull off to take a rest and just fell asleep longer than they planned. Nope. Next morning I read in the paper a wife killed her husband and dumped his body and the car on that back road. Occasionally I get mild bouts of insomnia, nothing serious, usually just a delay in my bedtime of an extra couple or three hours. One night I suddenly just cannot sleep. Nothing will get me to relax and I eventually give up and just sit in the front room playing heavy rain all night as if it had come out a few days ago. The next day when I head off to work exhausted with zero hours of sleep I got a text from my roommate. Dude, the police are all over the apartment complex. Apparently nine apartments including our downstairs neighbor were broken into last night with people still at home sleeping. Some people even reported things being stolen from the rooms they were sleeping in. It hit me that had I not stayed up all night and left the light on in the front room we probably would have been robbed or worse. We are still not done with these stories. The folks over at Graveyard Shift have several more creepy tales from real people who have survived some terrifying encounters with the strange and paranormal. We will continue with those stories in just a moment. In the meantime if you like weird darkness and you want to hear even more, you can check out the free audiobooks I have narrated at WeirdDarkness.com. I've got free audiobooks there by Stephen King, HP Lovecraft, Charles Dickens, Robert Highland and more. You can listen to all of the free audiobooks I have narrated on the audiobooks page at WeirdDarkness.com. 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 is 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 I'm Darren Marlar. Welcome back to Weird Darkness. You can get more Weird Darkness seven days a week through the Weird Darkness podcast, which you can find wherever you listen to podcasts, or visit WeirdDarkness.com slash listen and find a list of all the apps where you can listen to the show. That's WeirdDarkness.com slash listen. We continue now with real stories of people who survived true horror stories. We have a few tales left to tell. Centralia, Pennsylvania It was a pretty decent-sized coal mining town, and in the 60s a fire, which I believe was started at a landfill but was not put out completely, caught in exposed coal vein on fire, and the fire burns underground up to this day. In the 80s, the government started paying people to leave and buying up all the land and destroying the houses so nobody would live there. Since they didn't exactly force people to leave, the town still has a population of about 10 people. There's still enough coal underground to keep the fire burning for a very long time. I've been there before, and in person it is really eerie. It's a bunch of empty streets with one or two houses, a church, and some cemeteries. One part of the highway which was closed off and rerouted because of the fire is all cracked and misshapen so the road is really uneven. One of the weirdest things is the steam that comes out through the ground. It almost looks like little hot springs everywhere, but it's really all coming from the fire below. I was out in the middle of nowhere at a musical conference my wife was presenting held at an old church retreat camp. One of her presentations ran way over so the lodge's cafeteria was closed. With no car, no phone, this area was so remote there was no coverage for mobile, and no vending machines, the only resort was to walk into the nearest town and get food. I grabbed a coat and flashlight and had no issue on the trip down, snagged a pizza from a spot along the highway around midnight. On the way back it was a different story. I got a severe feeling of discomfort. I could feel eyes on me. This was out in the middle of the woods so my first instinct is there's an animal following me. Knowing most predators like to hit from either above or behind I turned on my phone light and kept it pointed behind me and swept my flashlight up and down as I walked. The whole walk back I heard rustlings, first along one side then following behind. I kept a steady pace and acted cool even though I was terrified. Shortly before I was back on site the feeling left. No more sounds. My wife and I enjoyed pizza and slept in. Two days later we got a shock from the news. A homeless woman was found less than 1500 yards from our site that had been mauled and partially consumed in what appeared to be a cougar attack. Estimates of the time of death were the same night I went out for pizza. When I was in fifth grade some guy who was mentally ill had a meltdown somewhere in Chicago. Apparently he shot and killed some random guy and stole his car. He drove up I-94 towards my suburb, got off the highway and drove straight into my neighborhood. It's very close to the exit and just started shooting sporadically at people's houses. He somehow wound up in my backyard which is full of trees and was just shooting in every direction. I can still vividly remember brake lights in the middle of the otherwise pitch black woods and sparks from the gunfire going off in every direction. The cops showed up and shot him to death. Luckily no one else was hurt but my neighbors did find a bullet in the middle of their mattress. A few days ago my iPhone would not accept my fingerprint for Touch ID, any of my fingerprints. My dog stayed on the other side of the apartment from me and wouldn't take any treats from me. I trained him not to take treats from anyone except me to avoid poisoning or illness but he wouldn't even take his favorite treats from me or cuddle with me. When I went to hug him he hid in his kennel. My pin number didn't work for my debit card so I wound up running it as credit. I used the same pin for everything. The only websites I could get into were Reddit, Gmail and Amazon, pages where my password is stored. Any website where I had to enter username and password it kept coming back as incorrect. Thank God there is no password to wake my computer up or I wouldn't have been able to do any work that day. The next day though everything was back to normal. Working as a 911 dispatcher I got a call from a house. Call it back. It's been disconnected. This is actually fairly common and happened whenever it rained. The backstory on the house is that it was vacant and used to have an active landline. The theory was that the water was somehow getting to the telephone system to the house and was setting off false alarms. Well, we get one and I thought about just saying screw it but I stuck with protocol and sent an officer anyway. Good thing the vacant house had just caught on fire the day after a rainstorm. Never found a witness and the house was saved. It was winter break, freshman year of college. I drove up to visit one of my friends in northwestern Pennsylvania for New Years. I needed to be back home the next day for work so I decided to drive back at like 2am. I was driving down Interstate 79 and maybe saw two cars in a 60 mile span. I came up around a bend and saw what looked like a black bear in my lane and I swerved and went off the road and crashed into a tree line next to the highway. I was in the middle of nowhere and the bear just booked it into the woods. My car was totaled and I knew I wasn't going to see any cars for hours to help me out. I called 911 and they said they would come in like 20 minutes. I got out of the car and stood up on the shoulder of the highway and waited. After about five minutes I heard some rustling in the bushes. And there it was, the bear. Turns out when I went off the road I hit a cub and mama bear was ticked off. I booked it over to the back of the car and hopped in the trunk. Thank goodness I had a big Ford Expedition so the bear couldn't mess with it too much. For another half an hour the bear tried ramming the car and was trying to get to me in a frenzy. The police showed up and the sirens scared mama bear off into the woods again. It was the most terrifying experience of my life. I grew up in a forestry cottage miles away from any town. We often got toads and birds and other woodland creatures in the house out of the blue. I was seven at the time and suffered from night terrors. My parents would often find me about the house at night speaking nonsense or screaming. Must have freaked them out to no end. For a few nights I had been shouting at my parents, convinced there was something in my bed. I couldn't sleep because of it, but obviously my parents put it down to nightmares. I kept saying something was shaking in my bed and scratching me, so they took all my blankets and toys out to show me there was nothing there but I was still convinced. I was an odd child so people often thought I was just making things up. Turns out a bat had gotten into the duvet cover. I opened it up one night and this thing flew out. My parents ran in and turned the light on to find this bat dinging around the room. Sometimes I am still woken up by that feeling that there is a bat in my blanket. My great aunt died in August of 2012. Six months later, in February of 2013, my cousin was playing in a hockey tournament. He was extremely close to our aunt and was pretty devastated by the loss. His team was never that good. However, in this particular tournament they were doing really well, so well that they made it to the finals. They lost but that's where fate comes into play. All of the runner-up trophies were wrapped in newspaper. My cousin pulled a trophy out of the box and the single piece of paper wrapped around it was my aunt's obituary from six months earlier. Years ago, around Halloween, my family had gathered to watch scary movies. My mom loved these things. My dad didn't care much for them though, so he'd get up every few minutes to go work on something or other. We'd started watching Hitchcock's The Birds and it was getting late, probably close to midnight, and it was getting cold. Not just a late October chill of the foothills we lived in, the house itself was getting cold. At first my mom just asked my dad to turn up the thermostat, but after a couple minutes of the furnace running and the house still not warming up, he realized he needed to go check the furnace. He grabbed a lighter and headed downstairs. A minute later, we hear him shout for us to come down. You have to come see this, he says, with something that sounds part excitement, part nervousness in his voice. We get down there to see him shining a flashlight into the furnace. Peering in, first we just noticed the pilot light was indeed out, but then we saw the reason. A dead bird. Something about the size of the palm of my hand, maybe a sparrow, had flown into the furnace from outside and put the flame out. Up next, did the light of heaven shine supernaturally onto the body of boxer Luton McCartney when he died in the ring? Thousands of witnesses say yes, as does the photographic evidence. An Anna Baker's father would not allow her to marry the man she loved, but that did not stop her from wearing her wedding dress numerous times before her death. These stories are coming up. The Lord of the Elements wants to change reality. He has enlisted the evil Zeltan to help him, and together they will try to recruit Stanley, a man gifted with incredible imaginative capabilities to help them. Unless Edward and his friends can stop them, that is. A tale of white and black magic, quantum physics and a plot that twists in turns. If you like science fiction, fantasy and horror, you'll love The Last Observer, a magic battle for reality by G. Michael Vasey, narrated by Weird Darkness host Darren Marlar. Hear a free sample of The Last Observer on the audiobooks page at WeirdDarkness.com. The 6-foot-4-inch Luton McCartney was a talented young boxer and actually ended up making his full professional debut at the tender age of 18. This debut fight took place on the 7th of January, 1911, and his opponent was a guy named Wat Adams. Luton managed to demolish him within two rounds. Over the next 12 months, Luton skyrocketed to start him as he smashed through every fighter put in front of him. The public began to pin the nickname of Lut on him. Such was the dominance of Lut that a championship bout was arranged for New Year's Day, 1913. This big-time main event was to be against a fighter named Al Pouser, the white world heavyweight champion. Pouser was absolutely smashed during the fight but managed to get out of it with a TKO. He handed over his belt to Lut. The boxing community went wild with this win and promoters started to battle to set up a legendary fight between Lut and Jack Johnson but this fight never took place. Before his big fight with Johnson, Lut took part in a sort of warm-up match against a fighter named Arthur Pelkey. This fight should have been fairly routine for a boxer of Lut's quality. In the very first round of the fight, Lut took a rather feeble punch to the heart area and collapsed instantly. He lay motionless on the floor as the referee counted him out. The referee, Ed Smith, started to panic. Something was not quite right here. Medical professionals jumped into the ring and tried their best to revive the famous fighter but it was no use. After eight minutes, Lut was pronounced dead. As Lut lay on the boxing ring canvas, being counted out, the 6,000 strong crowd all witnessed an amazing paranormal light beam down on the stricken boxer's body. The light seemed to hit him as the referee started to count, then disappear as soon as the count was over. The shaft of light seemed to be the perfect size to cover only Lut's body. There's only one photo image of this strange light, the photo used for the cover art of this Weird Darkness episode, and it's been debated ever since by thousands of skeptics. Most of these people believe the photo to have been somehow faked, but just over 6,000 people at that fight also personally witnessed this heavenly light. A coroner's report later determined that the cause of Lut's death was probably linked to a horse riding accident that he had suffered just days before the fight took place. So what was this strange light? Was it an ethereal sign from a higher power calling Lut home? The perfect man, the perfect dress. What more could a girl ask for? How about her father's approval? In 1836, Elias Baker and his cousin Roland Diller bought the Allegheny furnace in Altoona Blair County, Pennsylvania. This iron furnace would help them amass a fortune from the rich iron deposits in the area. Elias moved his wife Hetty and their two sons, David Woods and Sylvester from Lancaster County all the way to Altoona into a mansion near the furnace. Shortly thereafter, Hetty bore a daughter, Anna, and another girl, Margarita, in 1839. Unfortunately, Margarita died after just two short years. In 1844, Elias bought out his cousin's share in the furnace, and then in 1845, construction began on his new home, the Baker Mansion, which was completed in 1849. Elias was a very proud man and ruled his family with an iron fist. Little did he know, his only daughter, Anna, had fallen in love with one of his employees, a lowly steelworker. She and the steelworker planned to marry in secret. She even had the dress. But her father discovered their hidden love affair, and he forbade her to marry him. Taking after her father, Anna was stubborn and fought long and hard. She didn't care about the comforts money brought her. She did not care about fine clothing or jewelry. She didn't need a big fancy home. Her mother Hetty fought for her daughter, praising the man Anna wished to marry. Unfortunately, Elias would not listen, and it was then that Anna made the decision to remain single for the rest of her life. Elias didn't give up though, and he brought her suitor after suitor. She denied them all, letting her anger win over any chance at happiness. The dress Anna had purchased had once belonged to Elizabeth Bell, the daughter of another iron master in the area. Elizabeth mocked Anna for never being married. By the time Elias Baker died in 1848, it was too late, and Anna's love had moved on. She remained alone in the house, angry and bitter. But there were those occasions when the servants of the household would spot her wearing her wedding dress and dancing under the moonlight until she died in 1914. It is widely known that the Baker mansion is haunted. The county purchased the mansion in 1941 and turned it into a museum. Anna's wedding dress was put on display in what used to be her bedroom. Staff at the museum have noticed the dress moving within its glass case. When the moon is full, the dress would strike violently on the glass case. Some believe the movement of the wedding dress and the glass case can be attributed to old historical floorboards being weak or loose. Others say it's nothing more than drafts. A study was conducted to find out the real reason behind the movement of the dress. Cameras were aimed at the glass case and when no one was present in the museum, the dress could still be seen moving. It must be Anna's spirit living within the dress or trying to get to it. Those same cameras also captured spectral forms and images of a bitter old woman in front of the mirror. Furniture had been spotted moving and the sound of footsteps have also been heard. A music box left in one of the rooms could be heard playing when no one was present inside the room. The spirit of Elias has been spotted in the dining room as well, while a woman in a black dress believed to be heady has been spotted on the third floor. Anna's brother, David Baker, was killed in the steamboat accident in 1852. His body was stored in one of the rooms until the frozen ground had thought enough for him to have a proper burial. People have reported hearing screams coming from that very room. Today, the Baker mansion is still open to the public. However, Anna Baker's wedding dress is no longer on permanent display due to deterioration caused by exposure to light and airborne pollutants. The show is on Facebook and Twitter, and please tell others about Weird Darkness who love the paranormal or strange stories, true crime, monsters or unsolved mysteries like you do. Doing that helps make it possible for me to keep doing the show. If you would like to be a part of the show, you can send in your own paranormal experiences by clicking on Tell Your Story at WeirdDarkness.com. You can also email me anytime at darren at WeirdDarkness.com. All stories in Weird Darkness are purported to be true unless stated otherwise, and you can find links to the stories or the authors in the show notes, which I will upload to the Weird Darkness website immediately after tonight's show is ended. People who survived real-life horror stories was gathered by Rosa Pascarea for graveyard shift. If the light of heaven shined down on boxer Luther McCarty is from real paranormal experiences, and Anna Baker's wedding dress is from the scare chamber, Weird Darkness is a registered trademark, copyright Weird Darkness. Now that we're coming out of the dark, I'll leave you with a little light. 1 Peter 4, verse 8, Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins. And a final thought, if you're bored with life, if you don't get up every morning with a burning desire to do things, you don't have enough goals. Lou Holtz, I'm Darren Marlar. 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Join the Darkness Syndicate at WeirdDarkness.com slash Syndicate. That's WeirdDarkness.com slash Syndicate. Are UFOs real? The answer probably depends on what you mean by real. But whatever those strange lights and shapes in the sky might actually be, there's no denying that the government has spent a surprising or perhaps unsurprising, depending on where you fall with regards to various UFO conspiracy theories, amount of time and energy trying to remove the unidentified from unidentified flying objects. Reports of UFOs have been with us since before the dawn of human flight and exploded into the popular consciousness largely following the Second World War, during which time pylists described encounters with unidentified flying objects that were sometimes nicknamed Foo Fighters, a term thought to have been borrowed, at least in part, from the Smokey Stover fireman comics of the 1930s. In light of recent publicized reports of UFO sightings by members of the Navy from 2014 to 2015, we're cracking open the vault to shed some light on the history of Project Blue Book, the American government, and UFOs. I'm Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness. Welcome, Weirdos! I'm Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness Radio, where every week you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, the strange and bizarre, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and unexplained. Coming up this hour, did Mother Damnable aka Mary Ann Boyer, Seattle's original Taskmistress really turn to stone after her death in 1873? It's easy to consider single witnesses of a big hairy creature as mistaken or confused or even fraudulent as if a practical joke, but add a second witness to the same sighting and suddenly the encounter becomes a lot more believable. Life in Victorian times was considerably more dangerous than now, if the newspaper reports of the time or anything to go by. I'll share the art of dying in Victorian times if there's room left at the end of the hour. But first, ufology might seem like a fringe science, but it's a fringe science our government knows all too well. We begin there. 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 in. Recommending Weird Darkness to others helps make it possible for me to keep doing the show. While you're listening, be sure to visit WeirdDarkness.com and click on Contact Social to follow Weird Darkness on social media. And also, on the website, you can find the Daily Weird Darkness podcast, which comes out seven days a week. You can enter monthly contests, find Weird Darkness merchandise, and more. You can even send in your own true story of something paranormal that's happened to you or someone you know. You can find it all at WeirdDarkness.com. Now, bolt your doors, lock your windows, turn off your lights, and come with me into the Weird Darkness. The first known large-scale study of UFO phenomena by the United States government began in 1947 under the name Project Sign. But even that wasn't the first time a world government had attempted to get to the bottom of UFOs. A year before, the Swedish military had collected more than 2,000 reports of unidentified aerial objects over Europe, referring to the sightings with evocative nicknames like Russian hail and ghost rockets, referring to the fact that many in the Swedish military believed the objects to be Russian tests of German rockets which had been captured during the war. According to some sources, including U.S. Air Force Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, the first director of Project Blue Book, Project Sign's findings were written up in a report known as The Estimate of the Situation, which concluded that many of the flying saucers spotted in the skies were real craft and likely not of this earth. This report was supposedly forwarded to the Pentagon, but was ordered destroyed due to lack of physical evidence. In the years since, USAF officers have denied that the estimate ever really existed, and it's been called the Holy Grail of Ufology. From 1966 through 1968, the United States Air Force funded the University of Colorado UFO Project, informally known as the Condon Committee, under the direction of physicist Edward Condon. The Condon Committee examined not only the data gathered by Project Blue Book, but also information from civilian organizations such as the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena and the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization. The University of Colorado UFO Project released its findings under the formal title Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects in 1968. The so-called Condon Report was more than a thousand pages long, and it's considered by many UFO skeptics to be the definitive word on the Scientific Study of Ufology. In it, Condon writes, our general conclusion is that nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to our scientific knowledge. So, are UFOs evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence visiting earth? According to the Condon Report, probably not. Before the report was even completed, the U.S. Air Force had already tasked the National Academy of Sciences with independently assessing the report's methods and conclusions. Their findings? That the hypothesis of extraterrestrial visitations by intelligent beings provided the least likely explanation of UFOs. Partly as a response to the findings of the Condon Report, Project Blue Book was ordered shut down in December of 1969. While the project, like those before it, ultimately found a few instances of genuinely unexplained phenomena, it shocked most of the thousands of UFO reports it studied, up to the misidentifications of either natural phenomena or conventional aircraft. Though some of those conventional aircraft may have included somewhat unconventional planes that only later went into more common use, such as the then-experimental Lockheed A-12. At the end of the day, the auspices of Project Blue Book were never officially to prove or disprove the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence. Rather, the project was tasked with determining whether UFO sightings were a phenomena that indicated a threat to national security or a heretofore unknown technological development. Their decision on both counts was no. Today, the more than 12,000 UFO reports collected and studied by Project Blue Book are publicly available under the Freedom of Information Act, so dedicated ufologists can look them over and come to their own conclusions. According to FBI records, an organization calling itself the New Project Blue Book contacted the FBI in 1989. On the FBI website are partially redacted scans of several letters concerning this organization, including one which ends with an ominous PS. As a sort of ultimate challenge it said, why not ask President Bush himself? When Weird Darkness returns, did Mother Damnable, aka Mary Ann Boyer, Seattle's original Task Mistress really turn to stone after her death? That story is up next. In 2019, six teenagers tried to rob a Chicago home and it ended with one dead shot by the homeowner. A Minnesota man is confronted by burglars at his home in 2012 and ends up being charged with murder for killing the intruders. In 2023, a man was killed after he broke into a home and the homeowner is charged with murder. As a listener to Weird Darkness, you know how bad things can go in a crime and even when defending yourself against the criminals, sometimes you are the one facing legal problems. That's why you never let the criminals get access to your home to begin with. Home security is no longer recommended, it is essential, and with ADT it's no longer for the elite, it's for everyone. Right now you can get a free home security system from ADT to keep burglars from entering your home in the first place. Just visit WeirdDarkness.com slash ADT. That's WeirdDarkness.com slash ADT. ADT is the biggest and most trusted name in home security and has been since 1874 and they are still equipping people like you and me with the newest and best home security technology with 24-7 monitoring and 24-7 customer service. Whether your home is basic or ultra smart, ADT is the best option for your home security. And again, you can get a free custom-built home security system with the latest technology by visiting WeirdDarkness.com slash ADT. That's WeirdDarkness.com slash ADT. You can stay up to date on everything Weird Darkness and also maybe win some cool prizes at the same time by signing up for the email newsletter. It's free and every month I draw one name at random to win a cool, creepy prize. You can sign up for the Weird Darkness newsletter for free at WeirdDarkness.com. I'm Darren Marlar. Welcome back to Weird Darkness. Mary Ann Boyer was a foul-mouthed woman of the sea. In the 1850s, she sailed with Captain David Bull Conklin on his whaling ship off Alaska until he got tired of her nagging and abandoned her in Port Townsend. She made her way to the tiny village of Seattle and began running the Felker House, Seattle's first hotel, a two-story structure at Jackson Street and First Avenue South whose pieces had been carried here in the hold of a ship. And after she died, Boyer's bones soaked in the flooded earth of the old Seattle cemetery. When they dug her up, the undertaker discovered that her body had turned to stone. At least that's the legend anyway. The real Mary Ann Boyer exists only in the scrawls of old census records, scattered accounts from early historians and the reminiscence of an old admiral. The woman peering out from the balcony of the Felker House in a photo taken around 1868, a small, stout figure in voluminous petticoats, might be her, but we don't know for sure. The Felker House, which some say was also a brothel, burned down in the great fire of 1889. Today, the city's only mark of her is a grave and lake view cemetery, a flat headstone placed close to the road supposedly because the men couldn't carry her petrified body any further. They say she kept rocks in her apron to throw at people, and that she cursed constantly in five languages, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese, plus a smattering of German. That's partly how she earned her nickname, Mother Damnable. There are two main stories told of her life, and both involve her yelling at men. In 1854, Seattle's territorial government held a lynching trial at her hotel, transforming her rooms into a makeshift court. They racked up a large bill for food and lodging, but when the prosecuting attorney demanded a receipt, Boyer flew into a rage. She filled her arms with wood for her stove and began hurling pieces of it at the lawyer, shouting, You want a receipt, do you? Well, here it is. As the pioneers told it, no one ever asked her for a receipt again. The second story dates from the days when the U.S. Navy's Decatur was anchored in Elliott Bay, protecting settlers from hostile Native Americans. As part of their efforts to defend the settlement, the men of the Decatur tried to clear a new road through town, but every time they passed the Felker House, trouble bet them in the form of Mother Damnable. Some say the bushes they tried to chop down were essential for protecting the privacy of her establishment. In his memoirs, the lieutenant of the Decatur, Thomas S. Phelps, called Boyer a, quote, demon in petticoats and a terror to our people who found her tongue more to be dreaded than the entire Indian army recently encamped in our front, unquote. Phelps described his encounter with the demon this way. The moment our men appeared upon the scene with three dogs at her heels and an apron filled with rocks, this termigant would come tearing from the house, and the way stones, oaths, and curses flew was something fearful to contemplate. And charging like a fury, with the dogs wild to flesh their teeth and the detested invaders, the division invariably gave way before the storm, fleeing officers and all, as if old Satan himself was after them. After several aborted attempts, the ship's quartermaster, a man named Sam Silk, and a veritable old-time salt, according to Phelps, confronted Boyer. When his speech about the necessity of the road was cut short by a torrent of abuse and a piece of wood aimed at his head, he changed his tactics. What do you mean, you damned old Herod and raising hell this way? I know you, you old curmudgeon, he said. Many the time I've seen you howling thunder around Phelps' point Baltimore. You're a damned pretty one, ain't ya? As Phelps tells it, the effect was magical. With one glance of concentrated hatred at Silk, she turned and flew like the wind, scattering sticks and rocks on all sides and, with her yelping dogs, disappeared within the house, never again to be seen by one of the Decatur's crew. This anecdote is one of the better pieces of evidence that Boyer was indeed a madame. She didn't exactly keep public records. An article in the Pacific Northwest Quarterly by Lorraine McConaughey notes that Phelps' point was then Baltimore's red-light district. McConaughey also points out that Phelps compares Boyer to a prototypical madame damnable, a French woman living at Calaiso, a seaport in Peru, who seems to have run a bordello there. In fact, while historians usually say Boyer's nickname stemmed from her filthy language, the truth is more complex. The phrase Mother Damnable dates back at least to the mid-17th century in England. There is a ballad called Mother Damnable's Ordinary, recorded by the London Stationers Registry in July 1656. According to the folklorist Steve Roud, a flurry of mentions of Mother Damnables occur around that time, and the term always referred to a madam or a witch. It's worth noting that settlers referred to Boyer as Mother or Madam. When the settlers of Seattle dubbed Marianne damnable, they probably weren't just making reference to her foul mouth, but placing her within a particular tradition of unpleasant women. Boyer's unpleasantness, of course, is part of why everyone loves the story of her turning to stone. It seems like divine retribution, proof that God has a sense of humor. And yet the transformation also seems to prove that her stubbornness, her hard-as-nails attitude, carried on past the grave. While the rest of the city's pioneer dead fell victim to worms, she grew ever more impenetrable. And the tour guides, guidebooks, historians, and librarians who repeat this story aren't making it up. The tale goes back to Undertaker, Oliver C. Shorrie, who founded what later became the funeral home, Bonnie Watson, now the city's oldest continually operating business. In 1884, Shorrie got the contract to dig up the bodies from the old Seattle Cemetery, which was being turned into Denny Park. The cemetery was known for flooding, leading the coffins to bob around in the ground and turning the bodies black. In a Seattle Post-Intelligencer article from August 22, 1884, Shorrie describes what happened when he dug up Boyer. We discovered that the coffin was very heavy, weighing at least 400 pounds, and it took six men to lift it out of the grave. On removing the lid to the coffin, we found that she had turned to stone. Her form was full-sized and perfect, the ears, fingernails, and hair being all intact. Her features were, however, somewhat disfigured. Covering the body was a dark dust, but after that was removed, the form was white as marble and as hard as stone. Shorrie's description makes no mention of the smile that some say beamed from Boyer's face, and which makes her preserved body seem like that of an incorruptible saint. It's also worth noting that he describes her coffin as weighing at least 400 pounds, not the 2,000 pounds that is sometimes recorded. But the real question is, could she really have turned to stone? That's the question we'll try to answer when Weird Darkness returns. If you're looking for Weird Darkness merchandise, you can find t-shirts, buttons, hoodies, office supplies, clothes for your kids, stickers, magnets, coffee mugs, and more with all your favorite Weird Darkness designs. You can find something for you or the weirdo in your life by clicking on store at WeirdDarkness.com. Weird Darkness continues in just a moment. Hey Weirdos, how would you like to receive a box full of scary stuff in the mail full of fear-inducing objects like creepy collectibles, true crime-themed accessories, frightening flair, blood-curdling books, terrifying trinkets, eerie e-downloads, and more? Absolutely free. Every other month, I'm filming an unboxing video of the newest creepy crate that I get in the mail, then I'm boxing it all back up and giving it away by random drawing to someone subscribed to the Weird Darkness email newsletter. And before I close up the box for good, I might toss in a couple of Weird Darkness goodies as well for good measure. You can keep the creepy crate for yourself or give it away to a weirdo friend or family member. To watch my latest creepy crate unboxing video and to register to win a creepy crate of your own for free, visit WeirdDarkness.com slash creepy crate. That's WeirdDarkness.com slash creepy crate. Welcome back to Weird Darkness, I'm Darren Marlar, and we left off with a question. Could Mary Ann Boyer actually have turned to stone? It seems highly unlikely, given that she was underground for only 11 years. It's more probable that her body was coated with adipocere, a substance sometimes called grave wax that can develop when fat decomposes in wet soil. Adipocere is not uncommon and it's often described as gray or white, although it is usually a bit softer than stone, more like clay, plastic or cheese. Yes, corpse, cheese. Shory's description of what he saw might also have been influenced by a peculiar 19th century craze. When his shovel bit into the dirt of the Seattle Cemetery in 1884, reports of petrified corpses had been in the newspapers for years. The most famous case came in 1869, when two laborers discovered what appeared to be a 10-foot-tall stone giant buried on a farm in Cardiff, New York. I declare one of them yelled out, some old Indian has been buried here. The 3,000-pound Cardiff giant was in fact a hoax perpetrated by a New York cigar maker named George Hull. In a vowed atheist, Hull had recently gotten into an argument with a Methodist revivalist who claimed the giants had once walked the earth. Hey, it is in the Bible. Hull had decided to create his own giant out of gypsum, telling the man who cut the stone from a quarry near Fort Dodge that it was for a memorial to Abraham Lincoln. He swore everyone else involved to silence and buried the figure on his cousin's farm. Sure enough, after the discovery, the townspeople beat a path to the farm and Hull started charging admission. Before long, he had sold the giant to a group of businessmen who successfully fended off interest from P.T. Barnum. When his offer was refused, Barnum went ahead and made an exact copy of the giant and exhibited it in a New York museum. The new owner of the real fake giant, one David Hannum, supposedly coined the phrase, there's a sucker born every minute in reference to those who paid to see Barnum's copy. Many people attached that quote to P.T. Barnum himself, but it was actually said by David Hannum. Supposedly P.T. Barnum even eventually tried to buy Ann Boyer's body. A rash of copycat, petrified corpses followed, made of substances such as limestone, concrete, and hardened gelatin. Even Mark Twain got into the act. The October 4, 1862 issue of Nevada's Territorial Enterprise carried an article by Twain, then going by the name Samuel Clemens, reporting the discovery of a petrified man in the mountains south of Gravely Ford. Apparently every limb and feature of the fossilized man was perfect, not even accepting the left leg, which has evidently been a wooden one during the lifetime of the owner it was written. Even though the stony mummy was described as having his right thumb resting against the side of the nose, that is, thumbing his nose, most of the newspapers that reprinted the story gave no hint that it was a hoax, encouraging the discovery of other petrified people across the land. Such tales may go back to an 1858 hoax in the Daily Alt of California, in which a letter from a local doctor described the misadventures of a prospector named Ernest Fluchterspiegel, who turned to stone after drinking the fluid inside a geode. Apparently the man's heart resembled red jasper. Even newspapers of the early 20th century described petrified corpses, although strangely it is not something you hear much about today. The 1860s were a time of intense interest in human origins. Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species was published in 1859, and many of the early petrified corpses were described as mind-bogglingly ancient. One, with the stub of a tail, was even briefly thought to be Evolution's Missing Link. Embalming also started in Ernest's, in America only after the Civil War, and it is possible that some undertakers were not used to seeing the condition of embalmed remains. In any case, Boyer's petrification story reads vaguely like a fairy tale, and it secured her an immortality she might not otherwise have enjoyed. Yet another story has it that Mary Ann Boyer was never moved at all, and she still rests beneath the grass at Denny Park. However, Shory's Yellowed Reburial Register, kept at the Seattle Municipal Archives, records her removal in his careful cursive. Other records show that Boyer's body was moved to the old Washelly Cemetery, which later became Volunteer Park, and then, in 1887, to Lakeview Cemetery, where she continues her slow decay today. That is, unless she really did turn to stone. Multiple witness Yahweh cases are always interesting. It's easy to consider single witnesses as mistaken or confused, but add an extra witness, and that possibility becomes a lot less likely. One impressive dual witness sighting took place just outside Koss Harbor, NSW, in March 2017. Koss Harbor is a small coastal town located around 540 km north of Sydney. The primary witness, who we will call Dave, real name on file with the Cropster and the Australian Yahweh Research Center, also known as AYR, contacted the AYR a few days after his experience, and they interviewed him and his wife shortly afterwards. In September 2016, Dave and his wife Jenny purchased several acres just off a main road around 30 km from Koss. There was plenty of bush nearby and big trees along a creek that ran through the property. The night before the sighting, they were awoken by two large, well-trained dogs barking excitedly. That seemed strange because they normally did not react to native animals. On the following evening, shortly after 7 pm, just before dark, they were walking the dogs on a long strip of crown land that runs up a slope adjoining their property. Over a nearby fence, a horse was grazing in a paddock covered with long grass. Dave takes up the story from here. We walked up beside the paddock, turned around and came back and we were just walking and talking, and I saw this thing. It was running through the paddock and we were trying to work out what it was. It was getting closer, running on a 45-degree angle past us because it was heading for these little trees that are nearby. It was about 100 meters away and all I thought was, what's this thing got around its head? It had this square sort of head and as it got closer, we saw its arms. The grass was quite high so I only noticed the top of its body. And as it was running past, Julia said, it's running upright. What is it? And I'm like, Bigfoot? It looked like Bigfoot. It came running down the hill at 100 miles an hour. It was moving its arms, big, thick arms, big, thick shoulders. It was really thick and wide and it was a light brown color. It was hairy like a long-haired dog that hadn't been brushed. When it got closer, I could see the hair on its arms going over its hands. I didn't see its face, but I could see clumps of hair on it. I'm 6 feet tall. This thing was way bigger than me, but it was so thick, too thick for a human. Huge. It looked like it would have been way wider than a meter, maybe a meter and a half. Hard to tell. It looked square-shaped, out of proportion. It wasn't a human. I'm pretty big, but this thing would have made me look like a chihuahua. It would have been a few feet taller than me, but it's hard to say as it was on an incline in long grass. I wasn't level with it. I felt like we were watching it for a long while, but it was probably 20 seconds or so. It was running from my neighbor's property. He's got a plant nursery up there and might have fruit trees. Dave suspected that the creature was taken by surprise when he and Jenny suddenly turned around and retraced their steps. Had they continued on, it would have crossed the paddock and entered the trees unseen. He insists the strange figure couldn't possibly have been a practical joker in a gorilla suit. He continues, No, he was going too fast, and the details in the hair and for someone to wear a suit and run that quick without falling over would have been impossible. It was running downhill. A man in a suit would have lost balance and rolled down the hill. It was out of proportion to a human or any animal. He was running like Usain Bolt, way too fast for a human. It was just going. And as soon as it hit a couple of trees, it disappeared. And I'm thinking, Okay, we'll get a better look at it when it gets past the trees. Jenny went inside the house. She was a bit freaked out by it. And I stayed outside and just stood, looking at this tree that it ran behind. I waited there until it got dark and didn't see it again. I think it must have been hiding behind that tree. That's why I stood there looking at it. I didn't take my eyes off it, but I didn't see anything. But they are quite big trees. They've been planted in a line and the yaoi just could have found its way back to the bush without being seen. But it sort of disappeared into thin air. As soon as it hit the trees, it was gone. We went to bed and got woken up during the night by a noise that we thought was our alpacas fighting. But they don't make that noise. A weird yelling sort of noise, really loud and right in our backyard, just where the creek is. It was nearly a full moon, but when I got up to look, I couldn't see anyone down there. We went back to sleep and an hour later the same thing happened, the yelling, the dogs barking, so we didn't sleep much that night. We haven't heard it since. I went over to the tree the next day and stood behind it. It was big enough to have concealed the yaoi and found a footprint in some cow crap behind the tree. It was basically human-shaped. There was an impression of a toe, a big toe impression. That's what it looked like to me. You can't really see it in the photos. My girlfriend is the greatest skeptic. I love watching those documentaries about Bigfoot and she makes me turn them off. But when it happened, she said, it's running upright, what is it? And when she said that, I thought, it's gotta be Bigfoot. But when you see these things, it's freaky. And then you think, well, no one really gets close to them and no one gets hurt by them, so they can't be that bad. Although she was previously very skeptical about things like Sasquatches and yawies, Jenny's account of the incident corroborated that of her partner. Jenny continues the story. I'm the biggest skeptic, she said. I've absolutely no time for that sort of thing, previous to this. When Dave looked at something in the paddock and said, oh, look at Bigfoot, I just said, oh, God, and rolled my eyes. But then I looked at the horse in the paddock and saw that it was looking at something. And there was this thing running upright, and I turned to Dave and said, why is it running upright? It was very chunky, a big barrel of a body, big arms. I couldn't distinguish a head sitting on a neck, if you know what I mean. If you see a human at a distance, you can distinguish a head, neck and shoulders, but this thing was just like a shape. The arms seemed to be pumping, swinging. I could see a fur or hair covering. It looked shaggy, longer than, say, a horse's coat. Stringy, shaggy. I interpreted the color to be a caramel blonde. I thought, why aren't the horses and cows freaking out? If I ran full pelt towards any of our animals in the paddock, they generally would spook. But these seemed pretty calm. They were just grazing. They looked at it, turned back and kept grazing. It was really strange. I'm about 5 foot 7. I think it would have been at least 7 foot, but it might have been 8 or 9 feet, but it wasn't the height that got me so much as it was so thick, so wide. It was too big and moving way too quickly to be a man in a suit. I have no idea what it was. I'm as skeptical as they come, but I know I saw something running upright in the paddock, and I have absolutely no explanation for it. I don't like speculating, but it was not a misinterpretation. It was not a cow, it was not a horse, it was not a person. Two witnesses. One opened to the possibility, and another completely closed. Yet both see and describe the same creature. It might be worth noting that the way the huge creature sort of disappeared into thin air as soon as it ran behind the tree is very reminiscent of the inexplicable vanishing of a small yaoi in Jiggy Valley reported in 2003. If you are a skeptical listener and you're ready to pounce gleefully upon Dave's mention of having watched many documentaries about the Bigfoot Sasquatch mystery, I do hasten to remind you that Jenny, who had thought such programs were utter rubbish, also clearly saw the huge hairy biped cross their property. I am running a lot shorter on time than I thought I would, so the art of dying in Victorian times will be a part of tonight's sudden death overtime content in the podcast. Life in Victorian times was considerably more dangerous than now if the newspaper reports of the time are anything to go by. You can hear that story in the podcast tonight after the show is over. Just go to WeirdDarkness.com slash listen and you can subscribe to the podcast absolutely free. That being said, I still have a little time left. I'll find something suitably creepy to come back with. To what lengths will someone go in order to survive? Does the survival instinct override their conscience and allow them to commit not only murder but also the taboo act of cannibalism? What happens when a person crosses the line from dark fantasy to real-life acts of brutal rape, murder and cannibalism? Are these people driven by a desire so insatiable that they're incapable of controlling it? Murderous Mind's Volume 3 stories of real-life murderers that escape the headlines is the latest offering in a series that takes you inside the lives of killers who committed cold-blooded murder for a glimpse at events that drove them to kill. Authored within a historical context, each chapter is an unbelievable venture inside the dark and twisted world of real cannibal killers whose names and crimes might not be familiar to you. By weaving a tale in which dark fantasies become reality, this audiobook invites you to see life from a perspective few ever witness, from that of the killer. Along with a historical look at cannibalism through the ages, these stories beg the listener to answer the question, was the murderer committing cannibalism because he was incapable of resisting the urge to kill and consume or is the explanation simply pure evil? Murderous Minds Volume 3, written by Ryan Becker and Curtis Giles Vasey, narrated by Weird Darkness host Darren Marlar. Here a free sample on the audiobooks page at WeirdDarkness.com. Welcome back to Weird Darkness. I'm Darren Marlar. Remember staying up late on a Friday or Saturday night either at home or at a friend's house and watching your local TV station's horror host presenting a terrible B movie with aliens, monsters, ghosts, alien monster ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and all other kinds of crazy creepy characters? Those were fun nights, weren't they? Well, that's what the Weirdo Watch Party page at WeirdDarkness.com has to offer all day, every day, thanks to our friends at the Monster Channel, and it's free. You can visit WeirdDarkness.com slash Watch Party right after listening to tonight's show and you can immediately be entertained by a horror host and a horrible movie. Or, should I say, horrible movie. And not only can you watch the B movies and hosts streaming their 24-7, but once a month, we all gather together to watch a movie and talk about it in the chat room on that same page. Get your frights and funnies for free on the Weirdo Watch Party page at WeirdDarkness.com. How is this for a newspaper headline? Man, four months dead tries to get out of coffin. This is a gruesome one and it's a true story. You gotta admit, that is an eye-catching headline. This actually came from the newspaper Arizona Silver Belt and it was published on March 31, 1910. Here's how the story was printed in the newspaper. With an eastbound Santa Fe passenger train running at full speed out of needles yesterday, the express agent and baggage man were so badly scared by the movements of a corpse in the baggage car that they would have deserted the car had it not been what is known as a blind baggage, according to the statement of a passenger who arrived here last night, says the press caught courier. The corpse was being shipped from California to Ohio for internment. The body was that of a man who died four months ago. Soon after the train pulled out of needles, the occupants of the baggage car saw the lid of the box encasing the remains move, although it was sealed in the usual way. Aware that the man had been dead four months, they were surprised at seeing such remarkable signs of life. After recovering from the first shock, they approached closer to the coffin casing and were further surprised to see the lid slowly rising from the box as if being pushed up by the strength of the body in the coffin. With the lid open, the corpse continued to rise until almost in a standing position before the next station was reached, when with the aid of the train men, the body was pushed back into its place and unloaded at the depot to be further prepared for shipment to its last resting place. Passengers who saw the body claimed that it was not scientifically prepared for shipment, judging from the odor, and that the box containing the coffin was not hermetically sealed strong enough to comply with the rules governing the shipment of corpses. The queer action of the corpse is believed to have been provoked by the warm weather prevailing in needles and vicinity. That's the newspaper article. When everybody left the train, I really hoped there was a bar nearby. I'm sure they needed a good stiff drink after seeing that good stiff corpse. Thanks for listening! If you missed any part of tonight's show or if you'd like to hear it again, you can subscribe to the podcast in your favorite podcast app at WeirdDarkness.com-slash-listen. Not only will you hear a copy of tonight's show, you'll also hear tonight's sudden death overtime content, The Art of Dying in Victorian Times, which can only be heard in the podcast. Plus, when you subscribe, you'll receive daily episodes of the Weird Darkness podcast. That's WeirdDarkness.com-slash-listen, or search for Weird Darkness wherever you listen to podcasts. You can follow Weird Darkness on social media by visiting the contact social page on the website. And please, tell others about Weird Darkness who love the paranormal or strange stories, true crime, monsters or unsolved mysteries like you do. Doing that helps make it possible for me to keep doing the show. If you'd like to be a part of the show, you can send in your own paranormal experiences by clicking on Tell Your Story at WeirdDarkness.com. You can also email me anytime at darren at WeirdDarkness.com. All stories in Weird Darkness are purported to be true unless stated otherwise, and you can find links to the stories or the authors in the show notes, which I will upload to the Weird Darkness website immediately after tonight's show is ended. The Creature of Koff's Harbor was written by Tony Healy and The Cropster for The Forty-In. Project Blue Book was written by Oren Gray, and The Madam Who Turned to Stone is by Best Love Joey for The Stranger. Weird Darkness is a registered trademark. Copyright, Weird Darkness. Now that we're coming out of the dark, I'll leave you with a little light. Proverbs 12 verse 25. Anxiety weighs down the heart, but a kind word cheers it up. And a final thought, you can suffer the pain of change, or you can suffer remaining the way you are. I'm Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness. Don't go anywhere, weirdos, because sudden death over time is up next. Paranormal experiences, encountering extraterrestrials, extraordinary states of consciousness, spiritual phenomenon, encounters with non-human entities that can't be explained by science. These stories of what people have come across are ubiquitous here on Weird Darkness, and often those who've had these encounters choose to stay quiet and not even tell close friends or family out of fear of ridicule, and they suffer silently, trying to deal with the internal horror of what they've experienced. If I'm describing you or someone you know, there is now a place you can turn to for professional counseling from experts who, unlike others in their field, are open to the paranormal, supernatural, and extraterrestrial experiences of others, and they're not there to explain away your experience, but to help you recover from it and move forward with living. I'm referring to the Opus Network. If you want to reach out for help or learn more, look for the Opus Network towards the bottom of the Hope in the Darkness page at WeirdDarkness.com. The Victorian Era was a quirky one, especially when it came to death. For as obsessed as the Victorians were with vitality and beauty, they were just as fascinated with the art of dying. Cholera outbreaks ravaged England and Europe throughout the late 19th century. Typhoid and yellow fever sunk its claws into parts of America. Child mortality rates were on the rise, and it certainly didn't help when Queen Victoria entered a perpetual state of mourning upon the unexpected death of her husband, Prince Albert. Albert died in 1861, the victim, according to his doctors, of typhoid fever. After his death, Victoria donned her black veil and left it in place until her own death in 1901, 40 years later. With mortality on everyone's lips, it comes as no surprise that the newspapers of the day saw fit to report on the many strange demises that occurred throughout the world. Headlines boasting a strange death or mysterious ending littered papers on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean throughout the late 1800s. Some of these reports are particularly noteworthy for the curious circumstances surrounding the demises. Here are a few of the strange deaths that could be found in Victoria Era newspapers. May the poor souls rest in peace, despite their odd deaths having been forever immortalized thanks to the digital age. It's not every day that someone attempts tarzan-like tree acrobatics, but that's exactly what occurred on August 13, 1912, according to The Times of London. A woman named Brooker was one of 205 patients at a hospital for the mentally impaired outside of London when she snuck away from supervision. At first no one noticed. It was only after the head attendant and nurses began their ritual headcount that they realized Brooker had gone missing. The staff tore across the hospital grounds, searching for her, only to find Brooker up in a tree in the recreational yard. Desperate, they first stretched out a blanket into a safety net to break her fall, yet Brooker refused to budge. The caretakers then placed a fire escape ladder against the trunk and gestured for her to come down. Brooker promptly climbed to the top of the tree, glanced down at the gathering crowd below her, and took a leap of faith. She fell toward the outstretched blanket. Unfortunately, the force of the impact made the blanket touch the gravel beneath, and the woman's neck was dislocated and the base of her skull was fractured. Her death was labeled accidental, and no blame came to the asylum. In 1881, Witness England played host to an unfortunate string of events. One October night, a man called Birchall assigned his servant, Hague, a rather simple task. There was a four-chamber revolver in Birchall's home, and Birchall asked Hague to retrieve it for him. The pistol was to be a gift for a policeman. Hague immediately set off to fetch the gun. He found it on a table, lifted it to his face for close inspection, and promptly shot himself through the mouth. While a neighbor rushed to the scene with the police, a servant picked up the gun with the intention of demonstrating what had happened during Hague's self-shooting. And then, in an absurd case of irony, the servant managed to duplicate Hague's fate. According to the Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette, the firearm went off and shot her through the mouth. Both are dead. Children are prone to placing random objects in their mouths, and Victorian children were no different. On October 1st, 1897, one poor family living just outside of London in the village of Broccoli learned how lethal that habit could be. According to the Blackheath Gazette, a Mrs. Suresh had placed her darling little girl Alice on the floor to crawl around. Not long after, Mrs. Suresh realized that young Alice had snatched something up from the floor and stuck the object in her mouth. The infant began to cough, and Mrs. Suresh began to panic. She called for her local doctor, Dr. Forster, who attempted to extricate the object from the infant's throat to no avail. By 7am the following morning, Alice was pronounced dead. It was not until Dr. Forster performed a post-mortem examination on the child that he discovered Alice's cause of death, a brass paper fastener caught in the infant's windpipe. Most would never think to worry over a little spring cleaning. According to one article from the Church Weekly, however, even the most mundane household task has the capacity to harm. It was a cool spring morning in 1898, and Louisa Marie Landrich, a horsekeeper's wife, said about tidying her house. She entered the scullery to wash some clothing. When Louisa moved a bottle of liquid ammonia to another shelf, it exploded in her hand. The corrosive chemical splattered everywhere, soaking her skin and burning her face. The article cites Dr. Edward Fish, the leading doctor at the local guy's hospital. He had never before heard of ammonia exploding in such a fashion, but surmised that the heat generated by the scullery's copper pot fire had caused the chemical to bubble up and burst from its bottle. Louisa's official cause of death was bronchitis, caused by inhaling the ammonia vapor. One peaceful morning on May 22, 1896, an unnamed French woman tended to her flower garden. While walking back into her house, she tripped and tumbled to the ground, a pair of garden scissors still gripped in her hand. Curiously, as an article in the Westminster budget claimed, she stumbled and fell so that the scissors in her hand went through her neck, severing the jugular vein. The wound was allegedly so severe that the poor woman died not three minutes later from the abrupt blood loss. For one woman, Mary Agnes Lapish, the Australian outback, proved too much to tackle after a long night of drinking. According to an 1893 article in the Sydney Morning Herald, Lapish stumbled her way down the streets of West Melbourne toward her neighbourhood at Abbott Street, Mooney Ponds. She never made it back to her bed. The following morning, locals found Mary's body suspended from a barbed wire fence. The city coroner, Dr. Yowl, remarked that an intoxicated Mary must have been trying to clamour over the fence when she slipped, became twisted in the wire, suffocating over the course of the night. While an actor's career often leads to challenging new roles, it's unlikely that Anando Contreras wished to marry fiction with stone-cold fact when he went to work one night. According to California's The Daily Courier, the deadly performance occurred on April 25, 1888 in Arandas, Mexico. Contreras was putting on the performance of his life. He reached the part in the play in which he was meant to feign his death. He opened his mouth in preparation to declare the words, I die, I die, and subsequently perished of natural causes right there on the stage. It's uncertain how long the crowd sat there thinking that Contreras' slump was just part of the play, nor was it clear precisely when his fellow actors realized something was dreadfully wrong. In either case, Contreras never did leave that stage alive. On a Wednesday night in 1892, Martha Roundtree was at work at a restaurant. She had just finished cleaning her floors when she was struck by a terrible spell of sneezing. In fact, she sneezed so hard her intestinal hernia ruptured, bursting a hole in her stomach. Martha was whisked away to the hospital for surgery where doctors did what they could, but by late Saturday afternoon of the same week, Martha was dead as the operation proved faulty. The Austin Weekly statesman wrapped up the account succinctly. Martha Roundtree now occupies a grave at the cemetery the result of a sneeze. And finally, it was a lovely affair until the champagne arrived. According to a 1903 article in The Scranton Republican, a grand European ball turned deadly for one glamorous partygoer. Varinine was a Russian heiress, attending a ball in Vienna, Austria, which happened to be set in a theater. While Varinine danced and the theater pit below, a partygoer in one of the theater boxes above made a terrible error. He bumped a champagne bottle off the box's ledge and sent it plummeting to the crowd below. The glass bottle fell 60 feet, striking the beautiful heiress as she whirled about the dance floor. According to the article, Varinine died instantly, her life ended by a rogue champagne bottle. Varinine's inheritance subsequently went to a distant relative, as her father apparently suffered a demented condition. Hey weirdos, our August Weirdo Watch Party is Saturday, August 5th with a movie presented by a perfectly named horror host show, The Weirdness Really Bad Movie with Dave Binkley. Dave will be presenting 1962's Dreck of a film, The Magic Sword, starring Basil Rathbone and trust me, Rathbone is the only good part about this movie. The son of a sorceress armed with weapons and armor assisted by six magically summoned knights embarks on a quest to save a princess from a vengeful wizard. That's right, it's not just an awful movie, it's an awful historically incorrect period piece movie. You got a two-headed fire-breathing dragon, cursed shrunken people, a giant ogre that looks like a guy in a werewolf costume, a wicked and ugly witch, you'll see the cone heads from Saturday Night Live. While they look that way at least, you've got dated special effects, terrible acting, and costumes that look like they were ripped right out of a Monty Python skit. The Weirdo Watch Party is always free to watch online with all of us, 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 The Magic Sword, presented by The Weirdness Really Bad Movie Show, Saturday, August 5th, starting at 10pm Eastern, 9pm Central, 8pm Mountain, 7pm Pacific. See a trailer for the film and invite your friends to watch along with you on the Weirdo Watch Party page at WeirdDarkness.com. We'll see you on Saturday, August 5th for The Weirdo Watch Party. Bonus points if you're wearing your Renaissance Festival costume while watching. When Salem Roanoke took a job near his family's new home as a hired hand in the Texas Hill Country, he anticipated learning the rancher's trade, but a series of strange events, shocking murders and unholy revelations divert him down another path. This terrifying trajectory puts him directly into the middle of a struggle between monsters, magic and men. Armed and backed by a militia of ranchers, Salem attempts to combat the creeping tide of evil that threatens to engulf his new home and destroy the people most important to him. Will Salem manage to save his home or have his actions condemn everyone he hopes to save? The Witch Trials A summer of wolves and season of the witch by SR Roanoke. Available in paperback, Kindle and audiobook versions, look for The Witch Trials by SR Roanoke on Amazon or find it on the audiobooks page at WeirdDarkness.com. That's WeirdDarkness.com slash audiobooks. 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 slash listen.