 Stories and content in Weird Darkness can be disturbing for some listeners and is intended for mature audiences only. Parental discretion is strongly advised. Welcome, Weirdos, I'm Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness. Here you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, solved and unexplained. While you're listening, you might want to check out the Weird Darkness website. At WeirdDarkness.com you can find paranormal and horror audiobooks of narrated, the Weird Darkness store, plus you can visit the Hope in the Darkness page if you're struggling with depression, anxiety or thoughts of suicide. Coming up in this episode of Weird Darkness. In 1882, the Maimtrasda murders the brutal killing of several members of the Joyce family and rural Galway caused outrage in Irish society and remains one of the most notorious homicides in Irish history. However, a few years later, Cork was rocked by an equally heinous case which has largely been forgotten. We'll look at the brutal murders of four family members that took place in Castletown, Roche, Ireland. An Arizona family encounters a creature from the dark side of a Navajo legend. John Blair liked to keep things in the family, but in his case it wasn't just a saying. It was literal because John was infamous for being bigamous. First, dozens of Korean war GIs claimed an unidentified flying object made them all sick. Theories range from high-tech Soviet death rays to extraterrestrials studying how we engage in battle to combat stress-induced hallucinations. What actually happened? We begin there. Now bolt your doors, lock your windows, turn off your lights, and come with me into the Weird Darkness. In May 1951, one year into the Korean War, CFC Francis P. Wall and his regiment found themselves stationed near Chorwann, about 60 miles north of Seoul. As they were preparing to bombard a nearby village with artillery, all of a sudden the soldiers saw a stream sight up in the hills like a jack-o'-lantern come wafting down across the mountain. What happened after, the pulsing, attacking light, the lingering debilitating symptoms would mystify many for decades to come. As the GIs watched, the craft made its way down into the village where the artillery airbursts were starting to explode. We further noticed that this object would get right into the center of an airburst of artillery and yet remain unharmed while later told John P. Timmerman of the Center for UFO Studies in a 1987 interview. Suddenly, the object turned, Wall said, and whereas at first it had glowed orange, now it was a pulsating, blue-green, brilliant light. He asked his company commander for permission to fire at the object with armor-piercing bullets from an M1 rifle. As the bullets hit the body of the craft, he recalled, they made a metallic ding. The object started behaving still more erratically, shunting from side to side as its lights flashed on and off. Paul's recollections of what happened next are stranger still. We were attacked, he said, swept by some form of array that was emitted in pulses, in waves you could visually see only when it was aiming directly at you. That is to say, like a searchlight sweeps around and the segments of light you would see it coming at you. He remembered burning, tingling sensation sweeping over his body as if he were being penetrated. The men rushed into underground bunkers and peeped through the windows, watching as the craft hovered above them and then shot off at a 45-degree angle. It's that quick, he said, it was there and was gone. Three days after the incident, the entire company of men was evacuated by ambulance with special roads cut to haul out those two weeks to walk. When they finally received medical treatment, they were found to have dysentery and an extremely high white blood cell count. To me, says Richard F. Haynes, a UFO researcher and former NASA scientist, they had symptoms that sounded like the effects of radiation. In the wake of the Korean War, which ended in July 1953, dozens of men have reported seeing similar unidentified flying objects over the course of the 37-month conflict. The craft often resembled flying saucers. According to unofficial reports, as many as 42 were corroborated by additional witness reports, an average of more than one a month in just over three years. At first, according to Korean War historian Paul M. Edwards, many researchers believed that the sightings were Soviet experiments based on German technology and foreign research in anti-gravity. These were supposedly so large that they could carry 50 tons of weight and were powered by electromagnetic propulsion, he writes, in unusual footnotes to the Korean War. What was being cited, it was suggested, were disks the Russians were testing over the Korean skies. But in the years since the fall of the Soviet Union, a number of Soviet reports of sighting UFOs over Korea have trickled in, discrediting these theories. Why were there so many UFO sightings throughout the Korean War? Were they the product of thousands of exhausted men under incredible stress? Or a sign of something more mysterious? From 1947 until 1969, the United States Air Force ran Project Blue Book, a systematic study into unidentified flying objects and their potential threat to national security. When it was shuttered in December 1969, the Air Force announced they had found nothing of note and terminated all activity under the auspices of the study. But many believe that the project ended abortively and that there was more work to be done, leading to similar interviews with witnesses and other investigators being done by dozens of volunteers for decades after the project ended. Haynes is one of them. He describes himself as a scientist with an open mind, rather than someone with something to prove. I don't believe in them, I don't not believe in them, he says. I'm trying to let the data convince me one way or the other, which is the scientific approach. But, he says, it's striking how many accounts there are of similar sightings in the Korean War and other conflicts. In the early years of the Cold War, it was often theorized that these crafts might be Soviet or Chinese vessels with technology unknown to American troops. Haynes believes this theory has been conclusively disproved. If they were, he says, they would have been building those crafts for use in later wars, like the Vietnam War, for instance. The Soviet UFO sightings Edwards describes makes it similarly unlikely, as do the impossibly high-tech specifications of some of the sightings. In Wall's case, for instance, he described a kind of force field taking effect a while after he began shooting, whereas bullets simply ricocheted away from the craft. Haynes, for his part, believes the rash of sightings across the Korean War might suggest that something in the universe is especially interested in how human beings behave in the throng of military action. We tend to be very creative to fight a war, Haynes says, listing off the various sciences and technologies that might come into play in military action. If you were interested in how another country or another race of people fought their wars, you'd want to collect information on that, wouldn't you? He trails off. That's one possible explanation. There may be others. But the vast majority of UFO sightings, as much as 80%, are later found to be totally ordinary phenomena, like clouds or human crafts rather than anything otherworldly. In Wall's case, precisely what he saw that day has never been conclusively proven or disproven. Without the testimony of other men in Wall's regiment, it's hard to ascertain whether they too had the same strange experience, even if it can be corroborated that many did get very ill. In the years following the war, Wall lost contact with many of the men in his regiment. After the experience, he remembered his company agreeing that they would not file a report, because they had locked every one of us up and think we were crazy, he told Timmerman. The medium chews to make a testimony, however, was the lasting after-effects of his illness, including permanent weight loss from 180 pounds to 138. Stomach problems and periods of disorientation and memory loss after returning to the United States. He retired in 1969 at the age of just 42, his daughter Renee Denney says, and spent 30 years out of work, struggling with the after-effects of the war. Back then, they didn't know the name of it, but I guess you could say it was a form of PTSD, she says. Over the years, he would tell and retell the tale of his strange UFO sighting. The story was always the same, says Denney. It never changed through the years. But there was other fallout. He was especially affected by the sounds of airplanes and once knocked his mother and sister to the ground after mistaking them for enemy troops. I guess he would have flashbacks, his daughter says. Michael's recollections of the UFO sighting were consistent and acute. But whether what he remembered actually happened is harder to prove. Fighting conditions were almost intolerably stressful and it's entirely possible that he may have experienced some kind of hallucination brought on by the terror of the situation where he regularly feared for his life. It might also have been a moment of feverish delirium. Even a raised white blood cell count that surprised Army doctors and Haynes is consistent with many of the bacterial infections which might also cause severe dysentery, as are hallucinations. In a later interview with Haynes, Wall described how he had discussed what he saw with some 25 other men, but none ever came forward or could later be traced. In 2002, British researchers demonstrated a link between UFO sightings and Cold War hysteria and pointed out how the number of sightings had nosedived as radar improved. That cannot be a coincidence, David Clark told The Guardian. Those early confirmations were just a product of a primitive radar system. The flurry of UFO sightings, Haynes describes, may have been the dual effect of these two threats, a potentially world-destroying war on the horizon and the incredible pressure of being in the military. Wall had experiences in those years in Korea that would scar him until his death in 1999. One night, Denny says, he managed to make his way through a pitch-dark minefield, praying for his life as he went. Others who made the same journey were not so fortunate. When he went into the war, she says, he was happy-go-lucky, just a totally different person to when he came out. Whether the UFO sightings that Wall and so many other men reported were a product of this personality-altering trauma or the effects of something requiring much greater investigation remains a mystery. When Weird Darkness returns, we'll look at the brutal but mostly forgotten murders of four family members that took place in Castletown, Roche, Ireland. And an Arizona family encounters a creature from the dark side of a Navajo legend. Might it have been a skinwalker? These stories and more up next. Weird Darkness is celebrating its eighth birthday this month, and our way of celebrating is to raise money for organizations that help people who struggle with depression, anxiety and thoughts of suicide and self-harm. It's called Overcoming the Darkness, and you can make a donation right now at WeirdDarkness.com slash Overcoming. That's WeirdDarkness.com slash Overcoming. A gift of any amount will bring us that much closer to our goal, and your donation helps that many more people who are affected by depression, so no gift is too small. Our goal is to raise at least $5,000 this month. If you've not donated yet, or if you'd like to give again, or maybe you'd like to grab the link and share the fundraiser on your own social media and challenge others to give, visit WeirdDarkness.com slash Overcoming. That's WeirdDarkness.com slash Overcoming. The fundraiser ends on Halloween, so please give right now while you're thinking about it. WeirdDarkness.com slash Overcoming. In 1882, the Mantrasna murders, the brutal killing of several members of the Joyce family in rural Galway, caused outrage in Irish society and remains one of the most notorious homicides in Irish history. However, a few years later, Cork was wrought by an equally heinous case, which has largely been forgotten. The deaths of four members of the Sheehan family outside Castletown Roche in a dispute over land revealed was at times a dangerous obsession with land in Irish society, but also a community willing to turn a blind eye to extreme violence. On January 20, 1886, William Sheehan was taken from his cell in Cork jail. He was brought to short distance to the prison chapel for a brief mass before dawn. Then he began what was his final journey to the execution chamber in the prison where he was hanged at 8 a.m. William Sheehan suffered a lonely death. This was unsurprising. He was among the most reviled men in Ireland at the time. One journalist commented that if there was an argument in favor of the death sentence, it was in the case of this cold-blooded triple murderer. Sheehan's downfall began when he was evicted from his farm during the land war after which he had been forced to emigrate. He had relocated to New Zealand where he and his wife Mary Ann started a new life. However, within a few months a gruesome discovery back in Ireland had changed everything. Less than a year after Sheehan had emigrated, his former neighbors were cleaning out an old disused well. Over 70 feet beneath the surface, they discovered the decaying remains of William Sheehan's mother, Catherine, his sister Hannah, and his brother Thomas. Arrests were made in the local area. However, the RIC quickly identified William himself as the main suspect. Somewhat remarkably he was tracked down in New Zealand and William Sheehan was brought back to stand trial for the murder of his mother, sister and brother in Cork. While he protested his innocence throughout his trial, he admitted to the crime after he was found guilty. In his admission he claimed that he had murdered his family members because his mother would not allow him to marry a woman of his choosing. The case was not simply an ill-fated romance that had gone terribly wrong. It revealed the dark underbelly of a society that was obsessed with land and property. William Sheehan was born into a relatively well-off farming family at Caring Downen outside Castletown Roche on the eve of the Great Famine. Along with a farm of over 20 acres of fertile land at the edge of the Golden Vale, the Sheehans also owned a pub in the nearby village of Rock Mills. This shielded the family from the worst deprivation of the Great Hunger. Indeed, while the famine devastated Irish society, the Sheehans were among those in a position to take advantage as the economy recovered in the following decades. Despite the death of his father, the family farm tripled in size by the 1870s. When William's mother decided to settle the matter of inheritance in 1877, this inevitably led to growing tensions. With several children, the arrangements were complex. William, as the oldest son living at home, was set to inherit the farm. In what was a common custom, his mother Catherine, along with the siblings Thomas and Hannah, both in their 20s, planned to leave the family home in order to allow William to start his own family. Therefore, given Catherine, Thomas and Hannah faced an uncertain economic future, William had to compensate them. To finalize this complex arrangement, William himself would marry and his wife's dowry would be used to pay off his family members. Such in this situation was little more than an economic transaction between the respective families, where love for the land ended and affections for a future wife began was impossible to determine. Attraction and love was very much a secondary issue. It was the size of his future wife's dowry that mattered most. William Sheehan began courting Mary Ann Brown, a woman he appeared to have genuine feelings for. But crucially, her family were also wealthy local farmers. Negotiations over the marriage began with William's mother Catherine insisting on a dowry of £300. However, Mary Ann's father James was unwilling to pay more than £170, and with neither willing to compromise, the negotiations collapsed. The entire marriage was cancelled. This not only jeopardized William's relationship but cast his entire future in doubt. If his mother insisted on a dowry of £300, he might struggle to find anyone willing to marry him, and he would be unable to inherit. From his mother's perspective, she could not concede to her son's demand that she lower her price. With two other children and her own future to consider, a small dowry would leave her impoverished. It was in this increasingly tense situation William set his mind on his deadly course of action. Before midday, on October 22, 1877, he committed the cold-blooded premeditated triple murder. He attacked his brother Thomas in the farmyard before going into the house where he killed his mother Catherine and sister Hannah. Later that night, the bodies were dumped into the disused well and covered in lime where they would remain until they were rediscovered in 1884. William claimed his family had moved away, and less than a month later, he married Marianne Brown. His happiness did not last, however. In the following years, Ireland was hit by a deep recession. The shehans fell into deep debts and were evicted by their landlord in 1882. In the following year, he and his wife Marianne emigrated to New Zealand. However, within months of their departure, their neighbors discovered the remains of his family members in the well. This led to a sensational trial in December in Cork in 1885 where he was found guilty and sentenced to death. Shehan was executed in Cork prison on January 20, 1886. However, the entire case left many asking questions of the wider community of Kareg Downing. After the murders, William Shehan had been pressed about what had happened to his family. His answers were unconvincing and suspicious, yet in the small, tight-knit community of Kareg Downing, the friends and neighbors of Catherine, Thomas and Hannah Shehan ignored the evidence that suggested something nefarious had taken place. Furthermore, John Shehan, whose mother and siblings had vanished, reacted in a very odd manner. When pushed on the matter, William claimed they had moved to Neenah to open a pub there. Remarkably, John never traveled to the north-tipperary town to investigate this further. He had reasons to turn a blind eye. John Shehan also benefited from his brother's crime. After the death of his mother, he was able to transfer the family pub in Rock Mills into his name while he also received a share of Marianne Brown's dowry. The Castletown Roche murders have been almost entirely forgotten, eclipsed by events like the Mamtrasna and Phoenix murders. No less sensational, the events in Cork, however, struck a nerve deep in Irish society, reflecting similar tensions that existed in many families. In Navajo legend, a skinwalker is a medicine man who has gone to the dark side and is able to shape-shift into animals and other people. By night, they transform and inflict pain and suffering. Did an Arizona family encounter a real skinwalker on an eerie, deserted highway through Navajo country? All of her life, Francis T., as we will call her, has seen things, heard things, and felt them. Born into a family of sensitives, this was rather normal. In my family, you were considered odd if you didn't experience abnormal things, Francis says. We never talked much about our experiences or our feelings about them, we just accepted them as normal, which in fact to us, they are. But nothing could have prepared her family for what they encountered on a dark, desolate road in Arizona twenty years ago. It's a mysterious and traumatizing event that haunts them to this day. Francis' family had moved from Wyoming to Flagstaff, Arizona in 1978, shortly after her high school graduation. Sometime between 1982 and 1983, twenty-year-old Francis, her father, mother, and her younger brother took a road trip back to Wyoming in the family pickup truck. The trip was a vacation to visit with friends in and around their old hometown. The only member of the family not present was her older brother who was in the Army and stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The course along Route 163 took them through the Navajo Indian Reservation and through the town of Cayenta, just south of the Utah border, and the magnificent Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park. Anyone who has lived in Arizona for any length of time knows that the Indian Reservation can be a beautiful if harsh place for non-natives. Many strange things happen out there, Francis says. Even my friend, a Navajo, warned us of traveling through the Reservation, especially at night. Along with the warning, however, Francis' Native American friend blessed the family and they were on their way. The trip to Wyoming was uneventful, but the trip back to Arizona along the same route more than justified the warning from Francis' friend. It still gives me goosebumps, she says. To this day I have major anxiety attacks when I have to travel through the North Country at night. I avoid it at all costs. It was a warm summer night about 10 p.m. When the family's pickup was heading south on 163 about 20 to 30 miles from the town of Cayenta. It was a moonless night on this lonely stretch of road, so pitch black that they could only see just a few feet beyond the headlights. So dark that closing their eyes actually brought relief from the fathomless black. They'd been driving for hours with Francis' father at the wheel, and the vehicle's passengers had long ago settled into quiet. Francis and her father sandwiched her mother in the truck's cab while her brother enjoyed the night air in the back of the pickup. Suddenly, Francis' father broke the silence. We have company, he said. Francis and her mother turned around and looked out the back slider window. Sure enough, a pair of headlights appeared over the crest of a hill, then disappeared as the car went down, then reappeared. Francis commented to her father that it was nice to have company on this stretch of road. If something went wrong, neither vehicle and its passengers would be alone. Thunder began to rumble from the vast, clouded sky. The parents decided that their son should come into the cab before he got soaking wet from any rain that might fall. Francis opened the slider window and her little brother crawled in, squeezing between her and her mother. Francis turned to close the window and again noticed the headlights from the following car. They're still behind us, her father said. They must be going either Flagstaff or Phoenix. We'll probably meet them in Cayenta when we stop to fuel up. Francis watched as the car's headlights crested another hill and began its descent until it disappeared. She watched for them to reappear and watched. They didn't reappear. She told her father that the car should have crested the other hill again but hadn't. Maybe they slowed down, he suggested, or pulled over. That was possible, but it just didn't make sense to Francis. Why in the hell would a driver slow down or worse yet stop at the bottom of a hill in the middle of night with nothing around for miles and miles? Francis asked her father. He'd think they'd want to keep sight of the car in front of them in case anything happened. People do weird stuff when they're driving, her father replied. So Francis kept watching, turning around every few minutes to check for those headlights. But they never did reappear. When she turned to look one last time, she noticed that the pickup was slowing down. Turning back to look out the windshield, she saw that they were rounding a sharp bend in the road and her father had slowed the truck to about 55 mph. And from that moment, time itself seemed to slow down for Francis. The atmosphere changed somehow, taking on another worldly quality. Francis turned her head to look out the passenger window when her mother screamed and her father cried out, what the hell is that? Francis didn't know what was happening but one hand instinctively reached over and held down the button for the door lock and the other tightly grabbed the door handle. She braced her back against her small brother and held firmly onto the door, still not knowing quite why. Her brother was now yelling, what is it, what is it? Her father immediately flipped on the interior cab light and Francis could see that he was petrified. I have never ever seen my father that scared in my whole life, Francis says, not when he came home from his tours in Vietnam, not when he came home from special assignments, not even when someone tried to fire bomb our house. Francis' father was as white as a ghost. She could see the hair on the back of his neck standing straight out like a cat's and so was the hair on his arms. She could even see the goosebumps on his skin. Panic was filling the small cab. Francis' mother was so frightened that she began shouting in her native Japanese in a high squeaky voice as she frantically rung her hands. The little boy just kept saying, oh my god. As the pickup sped around the bend in the road, Francis could see that the shoulder dropped off deeply into a ditch. Her father slammed on the brakes to prevent the truck from swerving into the ditch. As the pickup was slowing to a stop, something leaped out of the ditch at the side of the truck and now Francis could clearly see what had started the panic. It was black and hairy and was eye level with the passengers in the cab. If this was a man, it was like no man Francis had ever seen. Yet despite its monstrous appearance, whatever this thing was, it wore a man's clothes. It had on a white and blue checkered shirt and long pants, I think jeans Francis testifies. Its arms were raised over its head almost touching the top of the cab. This creature remained there for a few seconds, looking into the pickup, and then the pickup was past it. Francis could not believe what she had seen. It looked like a hairy man or a hairy animal in man's clothing, she says, but it didn't look like an ape or anything like that. Its eyes were yellow and its mouth was open. Although time seemed frozen and distorted in this moment of fantastic horror, it was all over within a few minutes, the headlights, her little brother coming into the cab and the thing. By the time the family reached Cayenta for gas, they had finally calmed down. Francis and her father climbed out of the pickup and checked the side of the truck to see if the creature had done any damage. They were surprised to see that the dust on the side of the truck was undisturbed, and so was the dust on the hood and roof of the truck. In fact, they found nothing out of the ordinary. No blood, no hair, nothing. The family stretched their legs and rested at Cayenta for about 20 minutes. The car that had been following them never did show up. It's as if the car simply vanished. They drove home to Flagstaff with the cab light on and the doors securely locked. I wish I could say this was the end of the story, Francis says, but it's not. A few nights later, around 11 p.m., Francis and her brother were awakened by the sounds of drumming. They looked down his bedroom window into the backyard which was surrounded by a fence. At first, they saw nothing but the forest beyond the fence. Then the drumming grew louder, and three or four men appeared behind the wooden fence. It looked like they were trying to climb the fence but couldn't quite manage to bring their legs up high enough and swing over, Francis says. Unable to get into the yard, the men began to chant. Francis was so scared she slept with her little brother that night. Some time later, Francis sought out her Navajo friend, hoping she could offer some explanation for these strange incidents. She told Francis that it was a skinwalker that had tried to attack her family. Skinwalkers are creatures of Navajo legend, witches that can shape-shift into animals. That a skinwalker attacked them was quite unusual, Francis' friend told her, as it had been a long time since she had heard of any activity about skinwalkers and that they normally don't bother non-natives. Francis took her friend back by the fence where she had seen the strange men trying to climb in. The Navajo woman considered the scene for a moment, then revealed that three or four skinwalkers had visited the house. She said they wanted the family but could not gain access because something was protecting the family. Francis was astonished. Why? She asked. Why would the skinwalkers want her family? Your family has a lot of power, the Navajo woman said, and they wanted it. Again, she said that skinwalkers usually don't bother non-natives, but she believed that they wanted the family enough to expose themselves. Later that day, she blessed the perimeter of the property, the house, the vehicles, and the family. We haven't been bothered by skinwalkers since then, Francis says. Then again, I haven't been back to Cayenta. I've gone through other towns on the reservation, yes, at night, but I'm not alone. I carry a weapon, and I carry protective ambulance. Up next, John Blair. Not only was he infamous, he was also bigamous when Weird Darkness returns. Central Massachusetts is a land of oddities and 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 audiobooks page at WeirdDarkness.com Sometime in 1850, a 19-year-old medic called John Blair Wills fell in love at first sight with a beautiful girl he spotted on a London omnibus. Following the girl home, he asked her mother, who was very surprised, for her daughter's hand in marriage. He explained that he had good prospects and was of respectable stock. His late father had been a dissenting minister in Bassingstoke, and his mother, a lady of property, lived in Clapham with his brothers and sisters. Mrs. Catherine Sarah Maxwell, usually known as Kate, refused his request. The reason she gave was that a marriage would not be possible, as her daughter was merely 12 years of age. Nursing his disappointment, John returned to Clapham. In the years that followed, John decided to switch from medicine to architecture, which, as it happened, was the chosen profession of his older brother James. Then, one day in 1855, while taking his leisure in the Surrey Gardens, quite by chance, he saw the lovely girl again. But charming, Ms. Mary Ann Maxwell, who was now not only more beautiful but also of marriageable age, agreed to wed John Blair Wills as long as her mother gave her permission. Mary Ann Maxwell, who was sometimes known as Marion, was born in Ilford, in Essex, and baptized on the 8th of March 1838. Her father, William Stephen Maxwell, was a farmer. He appears to have died by 1851, leaving Kate with three children, namely Mary Ann, William, and Charles. Kate is later described by contemporary newspapers as living in Bath as housekeeper to a rich family, but all the records found so far show the family living in Greenwich and other parts of South London. Kate Maxwell duly gave John Blair Wills permission to Mary Mary Ann, who was then barely 17 years old, and on the 24th of March 1855, at St. Mark's Church in Kennington, they were pronounced man and wife. Their initial happiness was not to last. A daughter was born in the summer of 1856, and soon after, Mary Ann became ill with what's described as milk fever. Her condition was obviously more than the average case of mastitis, as she was sent to the Bethlehem Hospital, what was commonly known as Bedlam, in St. George's Fields in Southwark. Generally, doctors recommended that women be treated at home. The treatment might include perjatives, warm baths, and opiates. Restraint might be employed if a woman was violent. Dr. Alexander Morrison, who worked at the Bethlehem Hospital, warned in his outline of lectures on the nature causes and treatment of insanity, that removal from home in cases of recent delivery may not be practicable, and where not required by the features of the case is hardly advisable. A year later, the hospital decided that Mary Ann should be discharged to her family, although it was admitted that she was not completely better, perhaps because nobody was paying for her keep. Mary Ann must have been surprised to find James Fenton, her mustachioed brother-in-law, waiting to take her home on Monday 3 August 1857. James may have been a stranger to the girl, as he appears to have traveled to Australia, where he married a woman called Carolyn Grignier in 1856, and only returned to the family home as a widower in 1857. Back in her mother-in-law's house, Mary Ann asked the obvious question, where were her husband and daughter? No answer was forthcoming from her mother-in-law Janet or from her brother-in-law. After a few days of demanding an answer, she was summoned by John Blair Wills to an address in the city. He coldly told the poor girl that he did not want her, and that she was not actually his wife, as he had been married to a woman called Anne Good since 1851. This terrible and shaming news would have devastated Mary Ann not only because she would be judged as someone guilty of fornication and living in sin, but also because her poor child was illegitimate. Helpfully, John Blair Wills suggested a solution, namely that the best thing she could do was to marry his brother, James Fenton, he of the mustaches, who seemed to be quite fond of her. To prove that there was no reason for them not to marry, John produced his and Anne's marriage certificate from 1851. Although some might think that Mary Ann was sullied, she was still a free woman, and as James was a widower, they could make a bad situation better. James's motives in all this are hard to discern. Possibly he was genuinely in love with Mary Ann, her physical charms are frequently mentioned. Perhaps he was completely under John's thumb, and he was just doing what he was told. He was obviously aware that there was something not quite right as he registered the marriage as between him and Mary Ann Wills, a spinster aged 20. Mary Ann was in fact 19. He also lied in saying that Mary Ann's mother had given her permission for the nuptials. On Friday, 21 August 1857, barely three weeks out of a lunatic asylum, not yet cured, abandoned by her seducer, deprived of her child, Mary Ann married James. Ironically, a week later, the Matrimonial Causes Act made it legal to get a divorce in the United Kingdom without needing parliamentary approval. The murky truth began to be revealed when Mary Ann's family were told of the new marriage and objected to it. They challenged John's claims that he was not legally married to Mary Ann and questioned the propriety, even if they were not married, of marrying the brother of her seducer and father of her child. Not surprisingly, Mary Ann was taken ill again and was admitted to the infirmary attached to the Lambeth Workhouse. When James was asked to pay for his wife's treatment, he refused. Mary Ann must have felt that she had not escaped Bedlam after all when she was told that a second Wills brother denied being her husband, not because he was already married, but because she was. John's claim to have married in 1851 was found to be untrue. His marriage to Mary Ann was not bigamus. She was his legal wife and her child was legitimate. But in the meantime, encouraged by the black-gardedly John Blair Wills, she had contracted a bigamus and incestuous relationship with his brother James Wills. The 1835 Marriage Act made it quite clear that even marriage to a dead woman's sister was illegal, so marriage to a living man's brother most certainly was as well. When James was summoned before the court for making untruthful statements, it was obvious that he was not the most wicked of the Wills' brothers. While Mary Ann had been locked in Bedlam in 1856, not in 1851, John had made the acquaintance of a young woman called Ann Good Matthews, and in April 1857 he had married her. Ignoring the fact that he had a living wife, he had described himself as a widower, indicating that he had no intention of returning to Mary Ann. To complicate matters further, Ann said that she was a widow. She was not. Her husband, Edgar, a policeman, was also still alive. In 1858, not to be outdone, Edgar himself appears to have married bigamously. So we have three bigamus marriages, John to Ann, James to Mary Ann, Edgar to an unknown woman and an incestuous marriage, James to Mary Ann. No wonder the newspapers of the day reported this case in detail. When summoned to court, neither John nor James appeared, and they forfeited the £160 bail that they had put up for James. What happened to John Blair Wills is a bit of a mystery. The newspapers said that he traveled to Philadelphia by way of New York on the 22nd of November. Taking the name of John Goddard, and passing himself off as a surgeon, he was accompanied by a woman who answered to the description of Ann Good, and a three-year-old child. James Fenton Wills avoided connection with the scandal by returning to Australia. He married his third wife Maria in 1862, and with her had three children. He probably never saw his mother Janet again. To avoid the scandal, she moved north of the river to upper Holloway with her daughters. She died in 1875, leaving under £450. The deserted and destitute Mary Ann was visited in Lambeth Infirmary by Lord Rainham and his mother, the Marchioness of Townsend. Touched by her terrible experiences and representing a charity, Rainham gave her an allowance of ten shillings a week. Afterwards, Mary Ann went back to live with her mother in Norwood. The bath connection may have been put about as a red herring to protect the family's privacy. In 1861, they were living in Crown Cottage in semi-rural Norwood, where Kate was working as a dealer in fancy glass in China. One might think that after all that had happened to her, Mary Ann would not trust another man enough to Mary Ann. But she was made of sterner stuff and some time later, she met a widowed solicitor by the name of Thomas Hill. Possibly family connections played a part as Mary Ann's paternal grandfather and Thomas' father-in-law were both shipwrights. That again, Thomas might just have spotted her in the street, as Mary Ann is always described as being exceedingly attractive. In 1865, Mary Ann became Thomas' wife. They traveled to Jersey and married by license, perhaps to avoid any unfortunate publicity, or possibly because Mary Ann was actually still married to John. I have not found any evidence of a divorce or annulment. Mary Ann was stepmother to Thomas' five children, and three years later, she had a son of her own, Thomas Herbert Maxwell. Sadly, Mary Ann did not live a long and happy life. She was dead before 1881, when Herbert was only 12 years old. If you made it this far, welcome to the Weirdo Family. If you like the podcast, please tell your friends and family about it however you can and get them to become Weirdos too. 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 and you can find source links or links to the authors in the show notes. The Korean War UFO is by Natasha Frost for history.com. The Castletown Roche Murders is by Finn Dwyer for the Irish Examiner. The Arizona Skinwalkers by Stephen Wagner for Live About. And Bigamous Blair is from London Overlooked. Weird Darkness Theme by Alibi Music Weird Darkness is a registered trademark. And now that we're coming out of the dark, I'll leave you with a little light. 1 John 1 verse 5b. God is light. In him, there is no darkness at all. And a final thought. Every day is a new beginning. Take a deep breath and start again. I'm Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness.