 Stories and content in Weird Darkness can be disturbing for some listeners and is intended for mature audiences only. Parental discretion is strongly advised. The haunting of the Stocks Bridge bypass began even before the stretch of road was finished being built. The first incident took place September 8, 1987. Two security guards were employed by the McAlpine Construction Company during the building of the bypass. That night, their supervisor Peter Owens received a frantic call from them. He arrived at the site to find two big, tough men in a state of hysteria. They told him of what had happened the night before, shortly after midnight. They had been driving along Pierroyd Lane close to the steelworks. They noticed some children playing on the construction site they were tasked with guarding. The children were close to the electricity pylon and far from any houses. They decided to investigate and parked the car, pausing to watch the kids skipping and playing. While doing so, they noticed the children were oddly dressed, wearing strangely out-of-date clothing. As they approached the children, they unexpectedly vanished, leaving no trace behind. Even after investigating the spot where the children were playing, the men could find no footprints on the muddy ground. The following morning, they talked to other workers on the site and were told that others had heard children's voices during the night while they were resting in the caravans provided for them. The following night, these two men were once again on patrol, when this time, they encountered something more frightening. As they approached the Pierroyd Lane site once more, they saw a tall, dark figure that they described as a monk who then promptly vanished when the headlights reached him. It was this that caused them to ring Peter Owens once again, and Owens was so concerned about their state and their story that he called the local police station. The officer on duty, P. C. Ellis, said they sounded like they needed a priest rather than a policeman. Later in the day, the same officer received a phone call from a priest named Stuart Brinley. He was asking for help with two security guards from the building project who were in his church, demanding that he perform an exorcism at the Pierroyd Lane construction site. I'm Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness. Welcome, weirdos. This is Weird Darkness. Here you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved, and unexplained. Coming up in this episode of Weird Darkness. Experiencing something strange is one thing. Experiencing two strange things in two different places might be called a coincidence, but when you experience three strange things in three different places, as Chet Guthrie did, you have to wonder if maybe the weirdness is following you around. The Georgian Britons were obsessed with clean air, which was not surprising because there was practically no clean air to obsess about, even less so in and around the cemeteries. A woman typically carries a baby for nine months before pregnancy. Sometimes a bit longer, sometimes a bit shorter, but that's the average. Technology has made it possible for the baby to be born much sooner if complications were to arise and still survive to be a healthy child. But we might have a new record on shortest pregnancy. One woman in Indonesia is claiming she gave birth after being pregnant for only one hour. Heavy fog is commonplace in London, and in 1952, one particular fog rolled in for a full five days, hovering over the city. But when it finally dissipated, over 12,000 Londoners lay dead. A borrowed gun, romantically linked cousins, and a rigged jury, all the makings of a great murder trial in 1887, New Jersey. Here's an idea on how to fight the Black Plague. Throat lozenges made from toad vomit. Hey, it was good enough for Isaac Newton, it was his own recipe. But first, it's a stretch of road that only opened in 1988 to connect two existing roads. But it's known for being one of the deadliest roads in all of Britain, and one of the most haunted places in all the world. The official designation is the A616, but most people know it as the Stocks Bridge Bypass. We begin there. While you're listening, you might want to check out the Weird Darkness website. At WeirdDarkness.com, you can find paranormal and horror audiobooks I've narrated. 24-7 streaming video of horror hosts and classic horror movies. You can find my other podcast, Church of the Undead. Plus, you can visit the Hope in the Darkness page if you're struggling with depression, anxiety, or thoughts of suicide. And you can also shop the Weird Darkness store, where all profits go to support depression awareness and relief. You can find all of that and more at WeirdDarkness.com. Now, bolt your doors, lock your windows, turn off your lights, and come with me into the Weird Darkness. Cutting through the north part of England, stretching from Newark to Huddersfield, is the road called A616, and one area in Stocks Bridge near Sheffield holds a section of the highway called the Stocks Bridge Bypass. This portion of the road opened in May 1988 in order to connect the M1 motorway with the Woodhead Pass and the A616, passing through Quaint Hills and Moorland on the way. It is most well known for being one of the deadliest roads in the country, as well as one of the most haunted places in the world. The bypass purportedly has had high strangeness revolving around it ever since construction began in 1987. Construction workers at the time frequently reported hearing strange sounds as they worked, including anomalous bangs, voices or the laughter of children which seemed to skirt about the periphery of the site. Most dramatically were the sightings made of ghostly apparitions around the construction site, with one of the first and perhaps most notable case being that of the two site security guards by the names of Stephen Brooks and David Goldthorpe, who were on patrol at around midnight one night of September 1987 when they saw a group of mysterious children playing in the construction site in a muddy field near an electricity pylon at a place called Piroid Lane. This was obviously not a place for children to be playing, especially at that hour, so the guards approached to see what was going on. As they did, it became apparent that the children were wearing very old-fashioned clothing, which seemed very odd to the guards, but that was not enough to cause any concern at this point. The children seemed to be dancing about, holding hands in a circle, and did not seem to notice the approaching men. However, as they drew closer, the kids allegedly just blinked out of existence, simply there one second and gone the next. An inspection of the area showed no sign of any footprints or disturbance in the mud, which should have certainly been there, considering all the dancing and playing the kids had been doing. This was startling and odd enough that the next day they asked around to some of the construction workers who slept in caravans nearby, and they too confirmed that they had also heard the laughter of children the night before. The two guards were definitely spooked, but returned to their duties that evening. Once again, as they passed the very same area, they experienced something very unusual, although this time it was a bit more sinister than a bunch of phantom kids. On this occasion, they were driving past when they suddenly appeared in their headlights the tall dark figure of what looked like someone in robes, reminiscent of a medieval monk. They slammed on their brakes and noticed that the headlights seemed to pass right through the stranger. It stood there, glaring at them for a moment before suddenly vanishing right before their eyes. The odd incident was terrifying enough for them that they called their supervisor in a state of panic, although no sign of the figure they described would be found. The supervisor was skeptical of this talk of ghosts, instead suspecting that it was some trespassers messing around, and called in two police officers by the names of P. C. Ellis and special constable John Beat. The two men then went about conducting a stakeout to try and catch the intruder in the act. As they sat there, spacing out in the dark, not really expecting to see anything at all, something then pressed up against the side of the car that they were in, appearing to be the torso of a person wearing some kind of cravat and a waistcoat. As the startled policeman looked on, the figure then instantaneously appeared on the other side of the car and just stood there, peering in at them. As they got out to confront the stranger, the figure just vanished, leaving them completely dumbfounded. As they stood there, wondering where the man had gone, they claimed that their car had then been banged and jolted by an unseen force enough to send it rocking. At that point, they said that they had been overcome with a palpable dread and quickly drove out of there. In the days after these encounters, the ghostly children and the dark figure of the monk would be reported by numerous construction workers at the site to the point that some of them supposedly refused to even come to work. Brightened locals claimed that the children were the spirits of kids who had died by falling into the numerous abandoned mineshafts that dot the area, while the monk was said to be the ghost of a monk who had been buried there, his grave defiled by the building of the road. Whatever the case may be, even when the road was completed, there were frequent sightings of these phantom children and the sinister monk at the side of the road bypassing motorists, as well as a phantom black dog and a mysterious woman in white. Some cases of paranormal encounters along the road are particularly spooky, or harrowing, such as one involving witnesses Graham Brooke and his son Nigel. This allegedly happened in 1987 when the bypass hadn't even been finished yet, and at the time Graham was in training for an upcoming marathon race, taking regular runs through the area. On this day, his son joined him, and they were taking his regular route right past the bypass. Mr. Brooks would tell researcher Dr. David Clark of what happened thus. I could normally complete the run in about 30 minutes, but on this occasion my son asked if he could come with me. We reached the church in about three quarters of an hour, but Nigel kept getting the stitch, so on the way back I ran on to make time until he caught me up. I was not tired because I was not running at my normal speed, and it was dusk at the time, but not dark. As we approached a lay by coming towards Worley Village, I suddenly saw a chap walking with his back toward oncoming traffic. I looked at this figure, and my brain just could not take in what I was seeing. He was dressed in what I would say was 18th century costume and wore a dark brown hood with a cape covering his body. He was walking in the ground, not on the level of the road itself, and I just could not make out what I was seeing. Then I looked at him directly and saw his face. He was carrying a bag and it was slithering along the surface of the road. It was a dark colored bag with a chain on it, and Nigel said he could hear the chain rattling on the ground. I just gasped and said, Who is this silly person? And realized my son was seeing him too, and at that moment the hairs on the back of both of our heads just stood on end and we could smell something really musty, just like we were standing in an antique shop. I saw him clearly and was looking directly at him, probably no more than 50 yards away from me with his face towards me and his back to the traffic. He was so close I could see that every half inch down the cape there was a button. It was that clear. It was a long cape, dark brown and color and very worn with a lived in look about it. It was so real you could have walked up and touched it. You walked straight past us as we stood there amazed in the middle of the road. Then a lorry came with its lights on and he just disappeared. I will never forget that musty smell the cape he wore and the blank face. I looked right into the face and everything was black just like a miner's face but without any eyes. It was the strangest experience of my whole life. With all these supposed ghosts and paranormal phenomena startling drivers along the road one might get an impression that this would not be a safe place to drive and one would be right. The bypass has an unusually high concentration of traffic accidents for just this one stretch of road to the point that it's often nicknamed the death road an accidental black spot and the most dangerous road in Britain. Many of these accidents could be just a symptom of the heavy traffic the road sees but others have been blamed on ghosts. There have often been reports of these specters appearing right in front of cars to cause them to veer or careen about such as as a case from 1990 when a Judy Simpson was traveling the road with her husband David when they had a rather frightening experience of which she would explain I couldn't actually see an outline or any facial expression and there were no clothes as such it was just a gray outline of a person I could see ahead in shoulders with arms and legs flying everywhere. It was just running aimlessly across the field and I thought it was a jogger until I realized that it wasn't actually touching the ground. It was around three feet above it. There's an embankment that comes up to the road and it leapt from the field over the embankment and landed in the middle of the road in front of us. It seemed to hit the car and just vanished. I just screeched to a stop and it just seemed to melt into the car and all of a sudden it was gone. I looked at David and said what's happened it's just gone and we got out and looked around but we could not find any trace of anything. We were both left really shocked and upset and I could not believe what had happened. All I could think was that it must have been a ghost whatever a ghost is. A similarly scary encounter was experienced by a couple by the names of Paul and Jane Ford in 1997. On New Year's Eve of that year they were driving along the bypass when they were confronted by one of the highway's ghosts and almost had a serious crash as a result when they veered to try and avoid it. Paul Ford would say of the encounter, From a distance it looked like someone trying to cross the road but as I got nearer I could see it was like a man in a long cloak. Then I realized it had no face and it was just hovering above the road. I just slammed the brakes on and swerved to avoid hitting it and it was only through Jane grabbing the wheel that we managed to stop the car from crashing. In some cases, phantoms have even appeared inside of vehicles. Such as is a 2002 case in which a woman claimed that she had smelled a horrific odor pervade the car like a rotting body, after which she looked around to see a robed figure sitting right there in the back seat of her vehicle. The Wraith then glared at her with glowing eyes before vanishing into thin air. There are also reported loud bangs of thuds on cars passing through, often described as sounding almost as if someone had landed on the roof, cars being shaken when there is no wind and various vehicular malfunctions, all of which add to the speculation on the real reason behind the road's deadly reputation. In recent years, the news of these hauntings and the ominous rumors orbiting the Stocks Bridge bypass have attracted media attention and garnered appearances on supernatural TV and radio programs, and the area has become a magnet for paranormal researchers, some of whom have had strange experiences of their own here. In 2017, paranormal investigator Phil Sinclair decided to make a trip out to the bypass to do a little ghost hunting and got more than perhaps he even bargained for. Sinclair approached his endeavor with the perhaps not necessarily subtle technique of wandering blindly about in the dark, calling out to any spirits that might be lurking nearby, which seems silly but seems to have worked. As he and his colleagues walked along videotaping the whole thing, he claims that they could sporadically hear the faint sound of children's laughter from out in the woods, and an electronic device he was carrying started to blurt out voices, saying various things such as erase, hate, get out, and more ominously, need your soul. Particularly scary is when he noticed a dark, shadowy figure standing in some nearby trees. Shortly after which, he heard a terrifying growl. The ghost hunter says in the video, I saw a effin man there. Who was that? There was a man. There was something there. Is there something evil here? I'm a little bit shook up to be honest. Definitely saw a man but can't explain it. What is that growl? There's something not very nice around here asking me for my soul. Something is mocking me around here. Sinclair would later pose the entire 15-minute episode to YouTube, and while he does seem genuinely terrified in the video, it's hard to tell if the footage is actually genuine or not. It's too dark to tell exactly what's going on and there is very little information on the specifics of the circumstances the footage was taken in. Is it real or is this a fake Blair Witch style video? It's hard to say, but whatever the case may be, it is compelling viewing nevertheless, and you can see the video for yourself. I'll place a link to it in the show notes. For his part, the investigator himself remains adamant that it is all real, saying, I literally struggled to find the words to describe what I witnessed during this investigation. I will be left with an image I will never forget. I feel I was making contact with multiple spirits, either children or that of a male. I can't help to think I was dealing with an evil presence which ultimately told me to get out. What secrets and mysterious forces does this stretch of road hold? Are there really spirits here or is this all urban legend and spooky campfire tales? It is interesting to note that many of the paranormal experiences reported from the Stocksbridge Bypass have been witnessed by more than one person, making it harder to write off as delusion or the hallucinations of a tired mind out on the road at night. Could there be anything to any of this? And if so, why should these lost souls be tethered to this place? Whatever the answers to these questions may be, the Stocksbridge Bypass remains one of the eeriest and most haunted roads in all of England. Up next, the Georgian Britons were obsessed with clean air, which was not surprising because there was practically no clean air to obsess about, even less so in and around the cemeteries. A woman says she gave birth after being pregnant for only one hour, and a heavy fog covered London for five days and when it rolled out, over 12,000 lay dead. What happened? These stories and more when Weird Darkness returns. Just because spooky season is over doesn't mean spooky season is over. Here at Weird Darkness we go from Happy Halloween immediately to Nightmarish Noel, and that includes the Weird Darkness store. Right now all of our designs are available at a dramatic discount. Drink your hot cocoa with a mug that says I'm dreaming of a fright Christmas. Get a laptop case for your computer or a phone case that says have yourself a scary little Christmas. Be cute with your newborn and get them a onesie that says I'm the ghost of Christmas present. All of these designs are available on any product, any size, like t-shirts, totes, sweatshirts, wall art, pillows, tapestries, notebooks, hoodies, buttons, magnets, tank tops, stickers, and more. Right now they are all available at a discount just in time for some creepy Christmas shopping. Grab some holiday horrors for yourself and for the weirdos on your gift list at WeirdDarkness.com It was cold and clear the morning of December 5, 1952 in London. People were hunkered down in their homes, huddled around their fireplaces waiting out an unusually early cold snap. The skies soon began to fill with cold smoke and soot and as the day progressed a fog rolled in limiting visibility throughout the city. The chimney smoke mixed with the fresh fog turning it a sickly yellow-colored pea soup. Londoners went about their day as usual. Heavy fog was very common place and there was no need for alarm yet over the next five days this fog hovered over the city. The lack of wind and a high pressure system combined to keep the fog cloud from moving. It continued to grow during those five fateful days, nearly covering 30 square miles, growing more dense with each passing day until people literally could not see their hands in front of their faces. Transportation came to a standstill, air travel was impossible, no ships could safely move along the waterways and driving a car was impossible. Even the dependable British railway system was unable to operate. Those souls who dared to step outside found themselves slipping and sliding as the walkways were covered with a greasy black film. Upon returning to their homes, those same travelers found that greasy black film also covered their exposed skin and clothing as if they had been working in a coal mine. The local citizens called the thick haze the great smog and soon found themselves having difficulties breathing. Family pets and farm animals started dying due to respiratory failure. Wild birds either avoided the area or simply fell dead from the skies and the entranceways to buildings became more blackened with soot each time the door was opened. The fog then turned its attention to the human population with those already in respiratory distress succumbing to the deadly cloud first. Babies and young children in the elderly also fell victim to the cloud, which after several days began to stink like rotten eggs. Undertakers found themselves suddenly overwhelmed with corpses so much that they ran out of available caskets. Each day more people slipped away and yet no action could be taken to alleviate the now poisonous environment. People tried to make crude gas masks, however they were ineffective. It seemed that many were about to give up hope when, without warning, a brisk wind rolled in from the west breaking up the thick fog and pushing the remnants far out to sea. The casualties from the five-day fog were unbelievable. Over 150,000 people were hospitalized for breathing-related issues and the human death toll surpassed over 12,000. No accurate records were kept of the number of animals that died, but without the protection of a house to at least shield them somewhat, most assumed that nearly all exposed animals died. The aftermath was an eye-opening message for the British government with so many dead. Some likened it to the aftermath of German bomb attacks made during World War II. Bodies were discovered in unexpected places as many of the victims simply stopped breathing and quietly dropped in their tracks. The British government, after some investigation and reviewing the death toll, realized they needed to act. A few years later the Clean Air Act of 1956 was passed by parliament. This act put restrictions on burning coal within areas of high population and established smoke-free zones. Those with coal fireplaces were forced to switch to alternative heating systems. This piece of legislation was the beginning of the end for the coal industry as oil and natural gas systems became the norm. Even with the new law, the change was slow and not everyone could afford to simply invest a large sum of money into their dwelling. A smaller event in 1962 killed an additional 750 people, reinforcing the validity of the law. It was believed that the fog became toxic due to sulfates. Sulfuric acid particles formed from the sulfuric dioxide that was released from the burnt coal. At the time no one knew how this chemical change occurred and the event went as unexplained for nearly 50 years. Modern scientists studying air pollution ascertained that the natural fog was the catalyst for the change. Nitrogen dioxide, another byproduct of burning coal, was introduced to the naturally occurring fog. Another key aspect in the conversion of sulfur dioxide to sulfate is that it produces acidic particles, which subsequently inhibits this process. Natural fog contained larger particles of several tens of micrometers in size and the acid formed was sufficiently diluted. Evaporation of those fog particles then left smaller acidic haze particles that cover the city. In simpler terms, the combination of the coal smoke and a natural fog produced a rare moment for the chemical change, which in turn made the air turn deadly. The lack of wind kept the killer concoction suspended over the city and allowed the reaction to continue for several days with terrifying results. The Georgians were obsessed with clean air, which was not surprising as there was so little of it about. There were bad smells, effluvium everywhere. The most offensive were decomposing animals on the street, in the rubbish heaps or at the slaughterhouse. These hazards to health were well known and did not only extend to animals. The other health hazard was the decomposition of human remains buried a few feet into the ground and the graveyards of parish churches that could not cope with the explosion of birth in the late 18th century and the concomitment blooming of death a generation later. This problem was known but not solved in the Georgian period. It was the Victorian social reformers that dealt with the problem of the overstuffed graveyard, but the Georgians did go as far as to worry about it a little. Experts gave out warnings, Joseph Taylor's The Danger of Premature Internment 1816 condemned the use of over-full graveyards, but reserved special scorn or the burial of corpses indoors in large, damp, unventilated buildings where windows were never opened and fires were never lit that were occupied very rarely during the week, but often full when it was in use. That is, a church. There was nothing sacred about this, he said. No other civilization, ancient Rome or Greece, modern Jewish or Islamic did such a dangerous thing. Only the most conscientious cleric would meet the corpse at the Lich Gate if it had died a fever. The only thing that prevented a diseased disaster was that the church and cathedral were not heated. Dr. Buchan in his widely read domestic medicine condemned large crowded funerals. Infections, especially fevers, did not die with the patient. If you attended the funeral of somebody who had been laid on a buyer from a week in a crowded house, there was a chance that you would die of the same thing they did. The poor and desperate would often be in danger from the recycling of the dead person's clothes, so it was thought. The rich and famous had to wait even longer to go to their grave. In 1805, the Duke of Gloucester had been lying in his lead-lined coffin for five days, delayed by the desire for intricate decoration of the outer one. As he was about to be lifted in, the effluvia was obvious, caused by the smallest of cracks in the lead. The two coffin solution for the rich was designed to solve this problem of offensive decomposition during the long drawn-out ceremonies, and mostly did. However, in the average parish graveyard, it was common for gravediggers to smash through earlier burials or for the sexton to check the ground beforehand to make sure it was empty. Graveyards were full, but the desire to treat the consequences as a social rather than a religious problem were not present. Some Georgians were defending unhealthy burial practice until the end. William Reader, defending burials in church in 1830, pointed out that a building with secure foundations and large ventilated upper stories could deal with the inconvenience. Led coffins, for all, would solve the problem, he thought, although metal-lined coffins actually slowed down decomposition. The fact that Jews and Muslims did something different was turned on its head. Perhaps they were wrong, like they were on other things. This was Reader's conclusion. But the custom renders our solemn assemblies more venerable and awful for when we walk over the dust of our friends or kneel upon the ashes of our relations, this must strike a lively impression of our own mortality and what consideration can he more effectual to make us serious and attentive to our religious duties. Your ancestral dead were performing one last function for you, according to Reader, and perhaps he had a point about the degree of danger. The mold on the walls of an unheated old church probably caused more death and suffering than the bodies buried beneath. It was horrible, but the threat to health of buried corpses was overestimated. Noxious effusions from the lungs of the living were a much bigger problem, and in many parts of newly industrialized Britain, a row of slums smelled worse than a cemetery. There were occasional horror stories in the newspapers. Sextans were being poisoned when they tapped a vault to release Noxious gases, which had to be done in the first months after a death to avoid explosions. Cleaners who had found a decomposing body in the bottom of a well and had died breathing in the effluvia. Body snatchers who had been directed to the wrong grave and opened up the wrong one. Deaths in households where a murdered body had been hidden or a funeral that took too long to organize. Nothing serious was done about the problem until the 1840s. The Georgians did not have the benefit of the germ theory of disease and relied in the belief that bad air in itself caused disease. When improvements were made in public health, it was the smell that motivated reformers. All smell is disease, said Edwin Chadwick, and introduced effective reforms on the basis of a wrong analysis. It was hard to prove scientifically that ineffective burials caused anything more than inconvenience, and some scientists disagreed with Chadwick. Some suggested that liquefying corpses could pollute water sources, but the evidence was not conclusive, but was believed. You could not see germs with your eye, but your nose could smell decay, which was fortuitous. In 1823, the Ennin Chapel was built near the Strand, which consisted of a place of worship, social space above, and a palace of burial below, separated by now more than a floorboard. The problem of the Ennin Chapel was not solved until the 1840s, for the previous 20 years large numbers of cheap, unregulated burials meant that at least 12,000 corpses were crammed in. Customers who used it as a dance hall could taste something nasty on their sandwiches, and worshipers took to praising the Lord with a handkerchief pressed to their nostrils. If you would like to read more, I'll place a link to the book this story came from, The Dark Days of George and Britain by James Hobson in the show notes. Human pregnancies normally last around nine months, but one Indonesian woman has been making news headlines in her country for claiming that she gave birth just one hour after experiencing pregnancy symptoms. Hene Narani, a 30-year-old woman from Mandalasari, a village in Indonesia's Tasik Malaya Regency, has become the main topic of conversation in her country after it was revealed that she gave birth to a baby boy after allegedly experiencing pregnancy symptoms for about an hour. Hene claims that on Saturday night, July 18, 2020, her belly started growing and she started experiencing painful cramps, which she immediately associated with childbirth, having previously given birth to two children. The problem was that not only had she been oblivious to the pregnancy, she also hadn't made love to her husband in 19 months. I was at home and nothing was out of the ordinary, Hene recalled about the night of her childbirth. Suddenly, I felt something moving on the right side of my abdomen and the cramps started. I asked a neighbor to take me to my father's house and about an hour later, we called a midwife and I gave birth. Despite gaining some weight in the months leading up to the childbirth, the 30-year-old woman claims that she experienced none of the symptoms she had when she gave birth to her other two children, including morning sickness, protruding belly, or even the ceasing of her monthly menstruation. Nirani insists that she had her period every month for the last nine months, which doctors attribute to a hormonal imbalance. But the most incredible part of this already-incredible story is that Hene Nirani and her husband Eric hadn't been intimate for 19 months since she gave birth to their daughter. They had apparently abstained from sex after the birth of their second child for medical reasons, which was confirmed by Zal Cap Drasman, the head of Pospiang sub-district. It is this small detail, a lack of intercourse, that makes the doctors reluctant to provide the simplest explanation, the case of cryptic pregnancy where the mother doesn't know that she's pregnant. This is what makes this incident strange but true, but we are grateful because with God's will anything can happen, said Zal Cap. Hene Nirani's alleged one-hour-long pregnancy has been garnering a lot of interest with reporters, medical experts and officials from all over Indonesia, visiting the young mother to learn more stories about her seemingly miraculous childbirth. All the attention has apparently caused Hene a lot of stress and her family has asked for some privacy. When Weird Darkness returns, experiencing something strange is one thing. Experiencing two strange things in two different places might be called a coincidence, but when you experience three strange things in three different places, as Chet Guthrie did, you have to wonder if maybe the weirdness is following you around. A borrowed gun, romantically linked cousins and a rigged jury, all the makings of a great murder trial in 1887, New Jersey. And here's an idea on how to fight the Black Plague, throat lozenges made from toad vomit. Hey, it was good enough for Isaac Newton, it was his own recipe. These stories are up next. Central Massachusetts is a land of oddities in apparitions. Stories of the strange and paranormal have been passed down from generation to generation, and only the local populace has any idea of just how vast and deep their superstitions run. The world around you is much more than you can touch, taste, smell, see, and hear. Some of the stories are funny, some are sad, but all of them give you a taste of what it's like to be from the oddest part of the United States. You can't have a region of the country that has been settled for centuries without getting a few odd tales out of it. Open up a whole new world of fact and fiction that'll leave you with a deep appreciation for the strange and bizarre ghosts and heroes await, and the only thing they need to live on is you. Slightly Odd Fitchburg by Ed Sweeney, now available on Kindle, paperback, and audiobook versions on the audiobook page at WeirdDarkness.com. As a resident of Cleveland and part-time ghost hunter, I've seen and heard several things that most people would say I'm crazy if I told them. The truth is, ghosts, demons, spirits, all of them are very much real, especially when you've been attacked by one. I will recount three different stories that have happened to me and my friends. The first is an apartment my best friend lived in for a year. I will not give the address of the apartment, although it is not far from M&M Mars. Nothing terrible happened at first. My best friend was happy with his selection. He was good friends with the landlord, just as I was, and after about three months of him living there, we're walking the green way and he says to me, I think there's a spook in my apartment. And I said, what do you mean? I was making coffee after work and fell asleep with the coffee maker on and when I woke up, someone had turned it off. My best friend was the only person who lived there. I brushed it off and nothing much else happened for a month or two until my best friend started noticing that stuff was disappearing and reappearing in other parts of his apartment without his doing. I asked him if he thought about moving out because after knowing him for 13 years, I knew that stuff had bothered he and his family before. I'm waiting until the lease is up, he said, which was understandable. He and the landlord were good friends and he didn't want to break that lease early. Knives would go missing, keys would go missing, and then his cat started acting strange. His cat Scrappy would never enter my best friend's bedroom. In fact, he would stand in a doorway with an ominous look on his face and he would hiss at empty corners of the room. Scrappy also stopped eating and was acting off, considering I had known that cat since I was in high school. And that's when stranger things began to happen. My best friend told me that he was hearing children's laughter and a woman's crying and knocking in threes. Now, our friend, the landlord, who was Catholic, was hanging out one night about three months earlier and he told us about the knocking of threes, which was mocking of the Holy Trinity. If you've seen the conjuring, you know what I'm talking about, that is very much real. Then I start hearing from his brother and another friend that a tall shadow has appeared to them on different occasions, and then I started to worry. But the next few things I'm about to tell about had me in terror and worrying for my best friend's safety. Whatever this thing was was growling in his ear at night. And one night while we were watching TV we heard a loud knock at the door. We checked it and there was a large handprint coming from the inside of the glass door. We checked and that glass door was locked. Another night Scrappy was sitting in my lap and out of nowhere he started hissing between me and my best friend. There was nothing there, but knowing that something was only a couple inches away from us made me very uncomfortable. And then there's the kicker of all this. It was New Year's morning and I was trying to sleep on the couch. I began to feel something tall standing over me and heavy breathing as if it were waiting for me to do something. After the year was up my best friend moved out, and a few days before we left his landlord asked him, Have you seen anything? Whatever it was was playing with his son. Later we found out from the neighbor next door that two people on the second floor died about twenty years before. It was a man and a woman. The man was married to this woman and they had a son who died early on and the man was very abusive to his wife. We don't know how they died but they were haunting my best friend who was just below them. The second experience was from the Hale's Bar Dam. This one was caught on camera while filming an episode of Adventures United and to this day I don't know how to explain it. After finding a hand-painted sign while diving the flooded generator rooms, getting a small cut on my knee that swelled to the size of a nickel and getting a shower in the Marina showers, one of the teammates had a thermal detector and on the far end of the dam you could see a figure of what I can describe was a little girl in a dress. We went up the stairs where it was and there was no heat detected and we couldn't find any source where there may have been a reflection of heat. The same teammate who had a double battery attached to his phone and was in the same area noticed his phone and the battery which were at 81% dropped all the way to zero in 15 minutes. And the scary part was that after we left their phone was working just fine. Another time while filming at the dam for the same episode Nathan and John heard what sounded to be Cherokee chanting which they recorded as well. The lore behind that is that the Cherokee referred to that area as cursed land. They didn't put a curse on it but because of all the bloodshed in that area over the years it had stirred something. The old South Pittsburgh Hospital is only 15 minutes away from the dam which may explain why it's such a hot spot for paranormal activity. Shout out to Jeff and Vicky Holder who run the tours of the dam and Stacey Seivley who formerly ran the tours at the hospital. And the third story which is less malevolent but is still scary. Happened when I was living with my dad. This only happened for a few months until one day I really started praying and finding my relationship with God again. One night I was sitting downstairs working on a novella of mine and a light in the kitchen just randomly came on. That's weird, I thought. I turned it off and went back to what I was doing and the same thing happened again. I would have said it was an electrical glitch but the light switch had moved. I said hell no and went upstairs. I came back down later to find that my shoes that had been sitting next to the garage had been moved to the guest room about 40 feet away. Dad and I were the only ones in the house and I was sitting next to him before I went down there. I heard someone moving and heard the door to the guest room close and I asked Dad who was in the bathroom then if he had gone downstairs and he said no, why? I don't know why it just stopped after that. Unless maybe rekindling my relationship with God scared it away. Mary Catherine Anderson. Katie, to her friends, was in good spirits when she went out the evening of Monday, February 7th, 1887. 16-year-old Katie Anderson was a domestic servant living at the home of her employer Statt Colquitt on his farm in Mount Holly, New Jersey. She said she was just going out for a walk but Katie was not seen again until Tuesday morning when a neighboring farmer found her laying down an embankment alongside a public road barely clinging to life with a gunshot wound to her temple. She was recognized by people at the Colquitt House and was taken by wagon to her uncle's house. A doctor from Mount Holly was summoned. Around dawn that morning another neighbor, Mrs. Brewer, on her way to Colquitt's house saw some vomit on the road and near it a pistol with one chamber discharged. At the Colquitt's house a young man named Whitcraft recognized it as the pistol he had traded to Barclay Peake the week before. 19-year-old Barclay Peake was the cousin of Katie Anderson and was also said to be her lover. When told of her wound, Peake said he believed Katie had committed suicide. She had been despondent over trouble with her employer. He admitted that the pistol was his and said that Sunday night he and Katie had been using it for target practice. After he reloaded the gun, Katie took it from him. When he asked for it back, she said he would get it back when she was through with it and took it home with her Sunday night. He stayed at home all day Monday and did not see Katie at all. Peake's story was contradicted by four people who had seen him on Monday walking down the road where Katie was found. Another damning statement came from Andrew Brewer and his wife who lived near the Colquitt's. Katie was with them a week earlier and they were talking about Barclay Peake. Both heard Katie say of Peake, if a girl would refuse him he would take her life. Most people believed that Peake had tried to assault Katie and either succeeded then shot her to keep her from talking or had failed and shot her out of anger. Katie was kept under constant medical observation but with a bullet lodged in her brain she was not expected to live very long. Remarkably, she began to recover. When she regained consciousness and was conscient enough to speak she was asked who would shot her and she replied, Barclay Peake. Peake's hearing was postponed until Katie was healthy enough to testify. Though she showed signs of improvement and gave her relatives hope that she might recover, on March 12, five weeks after the shooting, Katie died. The coroner held an inquest the following day and the jury charged Barclay Peake's with first degree murder. The murder trial in Mount Holly opened on May 25, 1887 to a courtroom filled to overflowing with spectators. Peake's stuck to his original story and most of the witnesses contradicted him. After three weeks of testimony, the jury found Peake guilty. On July 9 he was sentenced to hang on September 1. Peake's attorney appealed to the state supreme court for a new trial, citing numerous exceptions in the Peake's trial, including invalid jury selection, admission of the dying girl's statement, and admission of a physician's expert testimony. The supreme court rejected all but the exception regarding jury selection. The jury pool should have been 60 men selected at random. Instead it was 45 men handpicked by the sheriff and prosecutor. Peake was awarded a new trial. The second trial began on May 21 and proceeded much the same way as the first trial. Then on the fifth day of testimony it was announced that following a meeting between Peake's attorney and the prosecutor, Peake pled guilty to second degree murder and the prosecutor accepted his plea. Barclay Peake was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Sir Isaac Newton, famous for developing the three laws of motion and advancing calculus, apparently had a far out idea for how to treat the plague, also called the Black Death. Toad Vomit Lawsenges In addition to recommending a number of gemstone amulets against the plague, he gave detailed instructions on how to make the Putrid Toad Vomit treatment, according to two unpublished pages handwritten by Newton. Newton describes in detail how to suspend a toad by its legs in a chimney for three days until it vomits up earth with various insects in it. This vomit must be caught on a dish of yellow wax, he added. After the toad dies, its body should be turned into powder, mixed with the vomit, and a serum and made into lozenges and worn about the affected area. This treatment would drive away the contagion and draw out the poison, Newton wrote. The toad treatment was best, but if someone was in a pinch, then amulets made out of the gemstone's hyacinth sapphire or amber could also serve as antidotes, he wrote. Newton and his contemporaries didn't know that the plague doesn't respond to Toad Vomit or gems. It wasn't until 1894 that the French-Swiss scientist Alexandre Yersin learned that the disease is caused by a bacterium, which was later named Yersinia pestis in his honor. These days, plague is treated with antibiotics, not vomit from toads that were hung upside down. Newton likely wrote these notes on the plague shortly after returning to the University of Cambridge in England in 1667. The plague had just swept through Europe, forcing the University of Cambridge to temporarily close its doors in 1665. During that time, Newton quarantined at Woolsthorpe by Colsterworth, a hamlet in Lincolnshire, England, where he investigated the laws of gravity and motion. The year 1666 became known as his Anus Mirabilis, Latin for Wonderful Year. However, while the polymath's laws of motions became blockbusters, his writings on the plague's causes, symptoms and treatments did not enjoy world renown. In truth, these notes weren't entirely his own. Rather, Newton had been reading Tumulus Pestis, the Tomb of the Plague by Jan Baptist Van Helmont, a chemist, physiologist and physician from the Spanish Netherlands, a collection of Holy Roman Empire states also run by the Spanish Crown. Newton's notes are not verbatim transcriptions of Van Helmont's text, but rather a synthesis of his central ideas and observations through Newton's eyes. Not everything Van Helmont wrote was dismissed by later generations. For instance, he found that chemical reactions could produce substances that were neither solids nor liquids, which led him to invent the word gas, according to the Science History Institute in Philadelphia. But religious zeal led to some unusual medical treatments. A verse in the King James Bible at the time proclaimed, The Lord created medicines from the earth, and a sensible man will not despise them. Ecclesiasticus 38.4. Van Helmont interpreted this line to mean that doctors were ordained by God and spent the rest of his life convincing others that this was his role, according to the Science History Institute. In 1936, Newton's plague manuscript was sold along with a vast trove of his other writings in Sotheby's Portsmouth sale. But these two pages with the toad vomit lozenges were uncovered only recently, after being lost for more than 70 years. But were shortly thereafter sold at auction. Thanks for listening. If you like the podcast, please share a link to this episode and recommend Weird Darkness to your friends, family and co-workers who love the paranormal, horror stories or true crime like you do. Every time you share a link to the podcast, it helps spread the word about it, growing our Weirdo family and also helps get the word out about resources available for those who suffer from depression. So please share the podcast with others. Do you have a dark tale to tell of your own? Fact or fiction, click on Tell Your Story at WeirdDarkness.com and I might use it in a future episode. All stories in Weird Darkness are purported to be true unless stated otherwise, and you can find source links or links to the authors in the show notes. Toad vomit lozenges was written by Laura Gagel for Live Science. The three events in three places of really weird happenings was written by Chet Guthrie for Cleveland Banner. The deadly fog of 1952 is from the Gypsy Thread. The one-hour pregnancy is by Spooky from Audity Central. The stench of Georgian graveyards is by James Hobson from his book Dark Days of Georgian Britain. A Mount Holly Tragedy is by Robert Wilhelm from Murder by Gaslight. And the deadly Stoxbridge Bypass is by Brent Swancer from Mysterious Universe. Weird Darkness theme by Alibi Music. And now that we're coming out of the dark, I'll leave you with a little light. 1 Timothy 4, verses 4 and 5. For everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, because it is consecrated by the Word of God and prayer. And a final thought. Respect yourself enough to walk away from anything that no longer serves you, grows you, or makes you happy. Robert Too. I'm Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness. People were hunkered. People were hunkered. People were hunkered. People were hunkered. Why does that sound strange to me? People were. People were hunkered down in their homes. The skies soon began to fill with coal, smoke, and soot. Soot? Soot? Yes, they're wearing men's dress suits. No. The skies soon began to fill with coal, smoke, and soot.