 Stories and content in Weird Darkness can be disturbing for some listeners and is intended for mature audiences only. Parental discretion is strongly advised. Urban Legends – those unsubstantiated stories of terror that allow us to use our imaginations to fill in increasingly horrifying details with each retelling have been with us forever. While the Internet has made dissemination of them easier, humans have been goading one another with spooky anecdotes for centuries. Psychologists believe we respond to these tales because we have a morbid fascination with the disgusting. We also can't help but enjoy gossip. Put those two things together and it makes for an irresistible mix. These legends often come with a dose of skepticism. No, a killer with a hook hand has never terrorized necking couples. But sometimes, as you'll hear in this episode, these stories do turn out to be true. 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. If you're new here, welcome to the podcast and be sure to subscribe so you don't miss future episodes. If you're already a Weirdo, please share the podcast with others. Doing so helps make it possible for me to keep creating episodes as often as I do. Coming up in this episode Unidentified flying objects have been around much longer than Roswell. Four centuries ago, before flying vehicles were known to even be possible, ancient Russia had quite a shock when they looked into the sky. In St. James Episcopal Cemetery in Marietta, Georgia, there is a grave that people say began to weep tears of blood when they got too close. A man believes he hears the sound of a car crash, but it should not be possible from where he lives. While serving a life sentence for the murder of 14-year-old Mary Ellen Deener, Lester Eubanks was granted a trip to an Ohio Mall. Then he vanished without a trace. But first, from monsters to ghosts, some scary urban legends and myths have been spooking out the masses for years and for good reason as they have backstories based on real figures and events. From Candyman to Slenderman, we'll look at a few of the most terrifying urban legends that are based on true tales. And we'll look into what it takes to create an urban legend of these magnitudes. We begin there. While listening, be sure to check out the Weird Darkness website. At WeirdDarkness.com you can sign up for the newsletter to win monthly prizes, find paranormal and horror audiobooks I've narrated, watch old horror movies for free. Plus, you can visit the Hope in the Darkness page if you're struggling with depression or dark thoughts. 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. Urban legends have existed as long as people have been telling stories. In hushed voices, humans would warn others of nefarious forces and bloodthirsty entities like the bloodsucking chupacabra of Puerto Rican lore or the horse-faced and bat-winged Jersey Devil of the New Jersey pine barons. Though urban myths are naturally imaginative, some of these scary urban legends have been supported by the sincere accounts of multiple people. Take the case of Mothman, for example. In 1966, a slew of rural West Virginians all separately witnessed a 10-foot tailed creature flying between the trees. These accounts suggested that the legend was perhaps more than just a fantasy. Perhaps most horrifying about these legends, however, is how they take on a life of their own and inspire real fear or even violence. Slenderman He is a unique urban legend. Unlike the others I'll tell you about, Slenderman was born on the internet as a so-called creepypasta or scary urban legend that was built online before it evolved off-screen into real life. The urban myth of Slenderman was created for an innocuous June 2009 Photoshop contest held by a website called Something Awful. Users were challenged to take mundane pictures and make them scary by adding realistic imagery of the paranormal. Inspired by these surreal imaginings of HP Lovecraft, one contestant named Eric Nudson designed a tall, thin, eerie figure and Slenderman was born. Nudson's harmless creativity was quickly co-opted by countless internet users. Mere days later, someone made a horror film with a found footage aesthetic that told of young students being stalked by a Slenderman-like figure. New images were made and a spooky mythos that lived offline was created as well. According to the stories that littered creepypasta forums, Slenderman beckoned children into the forests where he then ordered them to kill in order to become his proxies. What should have remained an internet meme quickly devolved into real violence. On May 30, 2014, two 12-year-old girls named Morgan Geisser and Anissa Weir, who believed in the scary urban legend, lured a friend into the woods outside their Milwaukee suburb where they planned to kill her and leave her as an offering to Slenderman. They stabbed their 12-year-old friend Peyton Lightner 19 times and left her in the woods to die. But Lightner managed to survive. Bleeding from her torso, arms and legs, she dragged herself to a nearby path and was discovered by a cyclist who called 911. Geisser and Weir were arrested shortly after Lightner was rescued. Geisser and Weir later admitted to police that they had planned the attack for months beginning in December 2013. Weir claimed that Geisser proposed the idea which they both believed would earn them entry into Slenderman's home and a position as his proxies. Their belief in the scary urban legend was so complete and their dedication to please it so powerful that they used a kitchen knife to try and murder their friend that they had known since the fourth grade. The state of Wisconsin chose to try the two girls as adults and Geisser was diagnosed with schizophrenia and a jury found Weir not criminally responsible because she suffered from a shared delusional disorder. Geisser has since been sentenced to 40 years under institutional care and all because of an urban myth that began online. Rats in the toilet bowl. You stagger into the bathroom at 3 a.m. to relieve yourself. Groggy with sleep, you lift the lid and position yourself over the toilet. You hear splashing. Turning on the light, you see a rat looking back at you from the bowl. You are never the same again. Many legends about animals in sewers have been a staple of scary stories, particularly the one about baby alligators being flushed down toilets and then growing to adult size and waist channels. Most often told about New York. Not true. While alligators and crocodiles have been found in New York, they are generally released and found above ground and it's thought that New York is too cold for them to survive for very long anyway. But finding a rodent in your toilet inches from very vulnerable areas of your body is a particular kind of domestic terror and one that happens to be possible. Drain plumbing for toilets is typically three inches in diameter or more. Plenty of space for a rat to climb up. The animals are attracted to sewage lines due to undigested food in feces and can travel through pipes before emerging through an opening and into your bathroom. And yes, rats can be somewhat testy when they complete their journey. One aquatic rodent bit the rump of a female victim in Petersburg, Virginia in 1999. In Seattle, the issue is common enough that public officials have given advice on what to do in case you encounter one, which is, by the way, close the lid and flush. La Llorona A tragic figure in Mexican folklore, La Llorona, or the weeping woman, is a ghostly apparition that wears white and wanders the country's watersides in profound grief. Some say she steals children only to drown them in a nearby body of water. The paranormal entity recently garnered renewed attention in the wake of Hollywood's horror film The Curse of La Llorona, though her story is possibly centuries old. There are several origin stories for the urban myth of La Llorona and the earliest recorded ones date back 400 years. Some believe that La Llorona is actually just the conflation of two Aztec myths or perhaps that she is based off of these as well. The Aztecs described a similar, willowy and white figure that was one of ten goddesses or omens which heralded the conquest of Mexico. She was known as the Snake Woman and was described as a savage beast and an evil omen who walks about at night and cries into the moonlight. Another goddess, whose name I will not even try to pronounce, means the Jade-skirted one, and she oversaw the waters and was said to drown people, and the Aztecs sacrificed children in order to honor her. But there is a more modern version to explain where the myth of La Llorona may have come from. As legend has it, a beautiful young peasant woman named Maria married a wealthy man. The two lived happily and had two children, but Maria's husband became unfaithful. One day she and her children caught him romantically engaged with another woman by the river. Enraged, Maria threw her children into the river and drowned them. After her anger subsided and reason kicked in, she spent the rest of her life in profound grief, hopelessly wandering the waterside to find her children. The scary urban legend of La Llorona could remain just that, were it not for the chilling accounts of those who claimed to have seen her. Patricio Luzon claimed to have first encountered the wailing woman when he was a young boy in 1930s New Mexico. According to Luzon, even his parents spotted the strange woman near their Santa Fe property, drifting toward the local creek in a white dress that covered her tall slender body. When she reached the water, she disappeared. She just seems to glide as if having no legs, Luzon recalled. Luzon wasn't the first nor last person to describe such an encounter with the weeping woman who was said to be drawn to water where she wails for her dead children. The urban legend is popular throughout the southwestern U.S. and Mexico and many have been convinced to have witnessed it for themselves. The Legend of Polybius Vintage video gamers have long traded stories about a coin-operated arcade game circa early 1980s Portland that had strange effects on its players. The game, titled Polybius, was alleged to have prompted feelings of disorientation, amnesia, game addiction, and even suicide. The machine's cabinet was said to be painted entirely black and it was rumored that stern looking men would sometimes visit arcades to collect information from the machine before disappearing. Was it a CIA experiment spun off from MKUltra, the psychoactive drug study conducted on unsuspecting subjects? While the entire story doesn't hold up to scrutiny, individual pieces are actually based in fact. Brian Dunning, host of the Skeptoid podcast which I can highly recommend by the way, did some investigative work and found that a 12-year-old named Brian Morrow had become sickened during a 28-hour marathon video game contest in Portland in 1981. He apparently drank too much soda and experienced stomach discomfort. Just a few days later, Portland-area arcades were raided by federal agents who seized cabinets that were being used for gambling. Coupled with the existence of a real arcade game named Poly Play, these memories seemed to amalgamate into the Polybius legend. The Mothman Number 12 1966 marked the very first report of the elusive Mothman, a creature so bizarre that it can only be considered the stuff of urban myths. But multiple sightings of the monster that year challenged the notion that it existed only in the imagination. On that fall day in 1966, a clendenin West Virginia gravedigger claimed to have seen an unsettling creature that looked like a brown human being soaring over his head and moving from tree to tree at rapid speeds. Three days later, four people driving through the nearby town of Point Pleasant saw a gray-winged entity seven feet tall standing in front of their car. Roger Scarberry and Steve Mallet told the Point Pleasant Register that the creature had bright red eyes and a wingspan of ten feet. All the witnesses commented on the creature's speed. One of them claimed that it fled at up to a hundred miles per hour and seemed to dislike the car's blinding headlights. The witnesses also claimed that the being chased their vehicle to the outskirts of town before vanishing into a nearby field. If I had seen it while by myself, I wouldn't have said anything, said Scarberry at the time, but there were four of us who saw it. The following year saw an ominous increase in sightings across the state of West Virginia. The Gettysburg Times reported on the elusive creature eight times within the first three days of the gravedigger's initial report, which included two firefighters describing a very large bird with large red eyes. In another reported sighting, Salem, West Virginia resident, Newell Partridge, claimed he spotted two red eyes staring back at him after his television displayed bizarre patterns and he went outside to investigate a strange noise. That was the same night that his dog vanished. But there are, of course, skeptics. West Virginia University Professor of Wildlife Biology, Dr. Robert L. Smith, dismissed the urban legend as a misidentification of the Sandhill Crane Bird. Others are convinced the urban legend was intentionally spread by a committed prankster. There are also those who believe that the Mothman was a harbinger of doom, an idea that was only reinforced when on December 15, 1967, Point Pleasant's Silver Bridge collapsed. Cars and pedestrians were plunged into the icy Ohio River waters below and 46 people died. Author John Keel forever linked the bridge collapse with the Mothman's sightings in his 1975 book, The Mothman Prophecies, which was later adapted into a film of the same name. Point Pleasant hasn't shied away from the eerie urban legend either. To the contrary, the town created a historical museum on the scary urban legend and even constructed a 12-foot tall chrome polished statue of the beast and to this day they celebrate the Mothman annually with a festival, Cropsey. For years, kids living in and around Staten Island raised goosebumps by relating the tale of Cropsey, a boogeyman who lived in the woods and made a nocturnal habit of disemboweling children. Parents no doubt eased their kids' fears by telling them no such monster existed. But as a matter of fact, he did. In 1987, Andre Rand was put on trial and convicted for a child abduction. Rand, it turned out, may have been connected to a rash of child disappearances in the 1970s. He had once worked at Willowbrook, a defunct mental institution. While he denies involvement in other cases, it's clear Rand's activities had a heavy influence in the word-of-mouth stories that followed. The Chupacabra. It's the size of a small bear with scaly skin, a spiked tail, and it drinks the blood of livestock across the Americas. At least that's how the Chupacabra, or goat sucker, has been described since 1995. A staple in Puerto Rican folklore, the Chupacabra has been said to feed on everything from chickens and sheep to rabbits and dogs. While skeptics are quick to dismiss the Chupacabra as an urban legend, many claim to have lost their farm animals to the strange beast and to have found the inexplicably bloodless corpses of these animals to prove it. One of the earliest recorded sightings of the Chupacabra happened in the small town of Moca in 1975 when livestock were found completely drained of their blood with just a few small puncture wounds found in their chests. Many suspected that a local satanic cult was responsible as more farms reported dead animals all blood-dry through a series of small circular incisions. Then in 1995, Madeleine Tolentino watched from a window in her Canavanas Puerto Rico home as a bipedal creature hopped about her property. She said it reaped of sulfur. Others corroborated her description, but added that the creature they had seen was hairless. That same year, eight sheep were discovered dead, each with three puncture wounds in the chest and reportedly completely drained of blood. As many as 150 farm animals and pets were reportedly killed in this manner in Tolentino's town that year. But the carnage didn't end there. Sightings continue into the modern day and across the world. In October and December of 2018, there came many reports of suspected Chupacabra attacks in Manupur, India. And in October 2019, a man named Mundo Ovni allegedly recorded an attack on chickens in the Suburukwio sector of Lares, Puerto Rico. I was of course initially skeptical of the creature's existence, said American writer Benjamin Radford. At the same time, I was mindful that new animals have yet to be discovered. I didn't want to just debunk or dismiss it. If the Chupacabra is real, I want to find it. Radford thus embarked on a years-long quest to find or disprove the existence of the Chupacabra. However, he eventually came to conclude that the urban legend was merely spurred by anti-U.S. sentiment with Puerto Rico. He believed that locals feared that Americans had set up a top-secret experimentation program in the El Yonke rainforest, unleashing a hairless beast onto them. There was also the matter of Species, a sci-fi horror film about an alien human hybrid that ravaged the land and feasted on blood. Not only was the film partially filmed in Puerto Rico, but Tolentino herself had seen it the very same year that she reported her Chupacabra siding. It's all there, said Radford. She sees the movie, then later she sees something she mistakes for a monster. Nonetheless, reports of Chupacabras across the U.S. continued into the 2000s. Farmers found bodies of hairless, four-legged creatures with burnt-looking skin. But authorities identified these creatures as dogs with sarcoptic mange, which rendered them patchy, scaly, and largely hairless. Despite this explanation, the scary urban legend has yet to be fully dismissed. The Leaping Lawyer Sooner or later, Toronto residents hear the tale of a lawyer who had a peculiar fondness for running full bore into his office windows to demonstrate how strong they were. This practice caught up with him, eventually, as he crashed into a window and went sailing to his death. This hobby was actually practiced by Gary Hoy, a senior partner in an area law firm with an office on the 24th floor. On July 9, 1993, Hoy made his signature tackle against the window to impress some visiting law students. The pain finally broke and sent him plummeting to his death. In a eulogy, managing partner Peter Lowers called Hoy one of the best and brightest at the firm. The Moppongari This is one I must admit I had not heard of until I began putting this episode together. Brazilian folklore has described the Moppongari as a monstrous entity that dwells deep within the Amazon rainforest. Depictions of the mythical beast have varied from a hairy humanoid cyclops that walks on two legs to something closer to a giant ground sloth that's been extinct for thousands of years. Skeptics claim that the beast is but an urban legend, but a mention of the Moppongari to those who live around the Amazon is sure to cause shivers. Nearly every native tribe in the Amazon has its own version of the beast. Even tribes that have not encountered each other have similar descriptions of the Moppongari, which translates to the roaring animal or the fetid beast. The being is said to be bipedal, seven feet tall with long curling claws. Others have claimed that the creature has a gaping mouth on its stomach that's large enough to feast on anything it encounters. These tales have led scientists on countless expeditions to find it, while the endeavor has remained fruitless before a director of research at the Gold Institute and Bellum, David Oren, has a theory. It is quite clear to me that the legend of the Moppongari is based on human contact with the last of the ground sloths thousands of years ago, he said. We know that extinct species can survive as legends for hundreds of years, but whether such an animal still exists or not is another question one we can't answer. The elephant-sized prehistoric sloth is known as Megatherium, and it lived in South America for nearly 5.3 million years until it went mysteriously extinct at the end of the Pleistocene era. Scientists have found fossils of the giant ground sloth from 11,000 years ago, suggesting it did cohabit with humans. It is said to have emitted a fowl stench and fed on large animals like cattle with ease, but some believe the creature lives on. Lucas Caritiana of the Caritiana tribe in Brazil is adamant that his son encountered one in the forest. While the young man escaped, the Moppongari left the area in ruins as if a boulder had rolled through and knocked down all the trees and vines. Reports like Caritiana's remain a curious and frustrating anomaly. Either scientists are correct and the urban myth exists as the remnants of prehistoric man's imagination, or the ravenous beast isn't extinct, and has survived for millennia, secretly dwelling in the Amazon to this day. Bloody Mary Virtually every young child raised in the western world is familiar with the scary urban legend of Bloody Mary. Myth has it that repeating the name Bloody Mary in a cramped closet or into the mirror of a dark bathroom will summon the vengeful spirit of a real woman, Queen Mary I of England in most cases. Some are adamant that Mary's name must be uttered 13 times, whereas others claim 3 times will suffice. Some claim that her spirit appears as a woman holding a dead baby, while others insist that she will come after you or your own children. But the terrifying tale is rooted in medieval history and begins with the birth of the first Queen Regent of England, Queen Mary I. The eldest surviving child of King Henry VIII, Mary did not fulfill her father's desperate lifelong hope for a male heir. She was thus ignored by him and declared illegitimate by parliament. Her life was plagued by pain in addition to isolation. According to Giovanni Michele, the Venetian ambassador to her court, Mary experienced terrible menstrual pains and irregularity in her cycles as well as deep bouts of depression. Nonetheless, Mary managed to take the throne at the age of 37 after marrying Philip of Spain and became pregnant with his child. But when her due date came and a baby did not, the country was in shock. Mary had appeared pregnant, but after her due date came and went, her pregnant belly disappeared as well. The inexplicable false pregnancy coincided with Mary having just signed an act into law, known as the Mary in Persecutions, in accordance of which 240 men and 60 women were burned at the stake for being Protestant. The despondent monarch came to believe that she had been punished by God for her actions and died childless at the age of 42. Besides the sad story of the real Bloody Mary of England, there are other more paranormal tales that inspired the scary urban legend of Bloody Mary. Perhaps most famous is the tale of a witch named Mary who was said to have been executed for studying black magic. According to this legend, Mary would appear in a mirror during divining rituals and medieval times to seek vengeance. Some believe this ethereal mirror witch kills her summoner upon arrival, while others claim that she drags her victims through the reflective portal into her world. Verifying the legend of Bloody Mary, however, is easy enough. Simply look into the mirror and chant her name. If you dare. The body under the bed. Vacationing couples, newlyweds, Disneyland guests, all have been the subject of an urban legend involving hotel occupants who fall blissfully to sleep only to wake up to an awful stench coming from either under the bed or inside the mattress. Closer inspection reveals that a dead body has been stashed away there. Presumably not anyone who has died of natural causes. This traveling tale has been confirmed multiple times over. At least a dozen newspaper stories have detailed hotel rooms that have doubled as body disposal sites. While the smell is usually apparent right away, at least one couple slept on a mattress containing a body in Atlantic City in 1999. Cases in Colorado, Florida, and Virginia have also been reported. In 2010, guests at a budget lodge in Memphis were horrified to discover that they had been sleeping above the body of Sonny Milbrook, a missing person. Fabric softener had been stuffed in the ceiling tiles to try and mask the smell. At least three other occupants had also rented the room since Milbrook's disappearance. A court eventually convicted Milbrook's boyfriend, LaKeith Moody of the crime, The Candyman. Though the urban legend of Candyman largely begins and ends with the eponymous 1992 horror film, it does have a terrifying basis in history. The urban legend that the film is based on is said to be inspired by Chicago's inner-city violence, segregation laws, American slavery, and systematic racism. The film is also based on Clive Barker's 1981 short story, The Forbidden, in which Candyman was originally depicted as a white man dressed in a patchwork outfit. Set in the slums of Liverpool, England, the story centers on a young woman studying graffiti who finds herself hunted by a deadly figure. The same year that Barker's story was published, the Cabrini Green Housing Project in Chicago recorded 11 murders and 37 murders by gunfire, all in the span of three months. The combination of Barker's short story and America's bloody, racist climate all worked to inspire the scary urban legend behind the 1992 film of the same name. In the film, there is an urban myth that revolved around a former slave named Daniel Robatale. A successful shoe manufacturer, Robatale eventually became a respectable painter and was commissioned to paint a portrait of a white woman named Caroline Sullivan. The pair fell in love and Sullivan became pregnant out of wedlock. An enraged white mob subsequently hacked Robatale's right handoff, smeared it in honey, and let a swarm of killer bees sting him to death. But Robatale returned as an angry ghost and vowed to kill anyone who uttered the name Candyman five times in a mirror. He'd appear behind them and kill them with one stroke of a hook fixed to his hand. The film took cues from Chicago's violent realities throughout the 1980s and was shot in Chicago at the Cabrini Green Projects specifically. In fact, one particularly chilling murder at the Cabrini Green Project inspired Candyman the movie. On April 22, 1987, a mentally ill Chicagoan named Ruthie Mae McCoy dialed 911, begging for help, claiming that somebody was trying to invade her home through the bathroom mirror. Despite neighbors reporting gunshots thereafter, it took police two days to report to the scene, where they found McCoy shot to death and a hole in her bathroom wall. The urban myth of Candyman is a disturbing example of how the horrors of reality can inspire fables. The Maine Hermit. For decades, people who vacationed in Central Maine's North Pond area were puzzled by items that would go missing, batteries and food from cabins, flashlights from camping tents. Rumors spread that a permanent fixture of the area would forage for sustenance and supplies. They were right. For 27 years, Christopher Knight lived alone in the woods, keeping tabs on the hikers, canoeists and other temporary residents of the grounds. When he was confronted by a game warden in 2013, Knight admitted he was responsible for an average of around 40 robberies a year. Despite the likely protests of family and friends who dismissed tales of a hermit lurking somewhere in the woods, his identification proved that someone had been watching and waiting for nearly three decades, England's phantom social workers who steal children. Here's another urban legend I wasn't aware of previous to this episode. The most upsetting urban myths typically involve children, and England's phantom social worker phenomenon is a prime example. The legend began in the 1990s, when British newspapers started reporting on unidentified men posing as social workers and taking children from their homes for an evaluation. According to legend, one man who would be accompanied by several women would masquerade as a social worker. He would enter and inspect homes for safety and examine children for signs of abuse and then whisk the children away, never to be seen again. The urban myth spawned such hysteria that it spurred local law enforcement in South Yorkshire to create a task force to investigate the claim in 1990. The so-called Operation Childcare received more than 250 reports of this type of abduction as a result, though only two proved to be valid. One of those was the report of Ann Wiley, who claimed that a woman pretending to be a social worker suddenly appeared at her home after her 20-month-old son had been hospitalized for asthma. The woman had no identification and was accompanied by a man waiting outside. Suspicious, Wiley demanded more information. A strange woman placed her son's medical records on the table, but after the couple left, Wiley was able to confirm that they were not social workers after all. Despite this chilling account, in its four years as an active task force, Operation Childcare did not make a single arrest. Instead, authorities blamed the press for hyping a small, legitimate problem into a large-scale paranoia that then spawned an urban legend. Nonetheless, there were at least two groups of individuals who abducted children by posing as social workers. Authorities believed these were vigilantes who believed that it was their duty to protect children from abuse in the wake of a major child abuse scandal in the 1980s. That scandal involved pediatricians Marietta Higgs and Jeffrey Watt. The two doctors had developed a diagnostic test to detect sexual abuse in children, which involved probing the area around a child's anus. Naturally, this traumatized more subjects than it saved. Dozens of children were referred to a Middlesbrough Hospital as a result, with the record 24 children being admitted in one day. In total, they had removed 121 children from their homes and incorrectly identified 94 of them as abuse victims. It is no wonder that in 1991, a year after the Phantom Social Worker Scare, the legislators implemented the Children Act, which enforced strict regulations for social workers. At least this urban myth spawned positive real-life action. The Fake Cup You may have had an overly concerned parent or friend warn you of people impersonating police officers, using that veneer of authority to attack victims who have let their guard down. While there aren't many who are in full patrol uniform or traveling in marked vehicles, there have been many documented cases of assailants posing as law enforcement, at least two this past summer alone. In Bloomington, Illinois, a man using flashing lights to get a vehicle to pull over. After walking up to the vehicle, the man tried, unsuccessfully, to overpower the driver before they managed to get away. In Fayetteville, Georgia, a man donned a uniform and pulled over a teenage boy on a bike, forcing him to empty his pockets. Talking to real police later, the boy told them a second car had pulled up with a man matching the description of someone who'd been caught impersonating an officer two weeks prior. The Jersey Devil New Jersey is home to far more frightening elements than its record number of shopping malls, including a creature described as a kangaroo-like demon that was designated in 1938 as the country's only state demon. Meet the Jersey Devil, the legend of which has kept New Jersey residents awake at night for more than 300 years. The beast has many descriptions, ranging from a horse-faced demon with bat wings to a dog-headed entity with the talons of a dragon. As one of America's oldest urban myths, the origins of the legend of the Jersey Devil vary. What is inarguable, however, is that the urban myth first appeared in the Jersey Pine Barons. Some say that the Jersey Devil, also called the Leeds Devil, dates back to 1735, when a poor woman named Mother Leeds learned that she was pregnant with her 13th child. Desperate, Mother Leeds cursed the unborn child, and when she gave birth nine months later, a winged creature slithered out of her body and escaped through the chimney. Some versions of the story cast Mother Leeds as a witch who was impregnated by the devil on purpose. Early versions of this urban myth described the Jersey Devil swooping across the land, killing local children. The myth only grew stronger over time and even Emperor Napoleon's older brother Joseph once reported a sighting in New Jersey in 1820. Then, in 1840, a mysterious killing of numerous livestock were attributed to the elusive beast. Newspapers around New Jersey began reporting on a plethora of sightings in 1909 when people saw mysterious footprints on the ground, strange shadows that fell across their windows, and unidentified and decomposed carcasses in the woods, terrified citizens, closed schools and work for a week in January of that year, and the Jersey Devil became the creature's official name. From a Greenwich, New Jersey farmer who shot at a mysterious creature matching the Jersey Devil's description in 1925 to a group of Gibson boys spotting the beast in the woods in 1951, it seemed as though the entity had survived for centuries, and the 1960 reward of $10,000 on behalf of Camden merchants for anyone managing to capture the beast has yet to be claimed. The Legend of the Bunny Man If you lived in or around Virginia in the 1970s, you were probably exposed to the story of the Bunny Man. In the tale, an escaped mental patient takes to gutting bunnies and hanging them from a bridge underpass. Later, the maniac is said to have graduated to gutting and hanging teenagers in a similar manner. Locals were cautioned to never be caught near the underpass, which is now known to most people as Bunny Man Bridge on Halloween night. This story likely spawned from the very real presence of a roving madman in the area. In October 1970, a couple reported seeing a man dressed in a white suit and wearing bunny ears who began yelling at them that they were on private property. To punctuate his point, he threw a hatchet at their windscreen, apparently shattering it. There was a second sighting of Bunny Man two weeks later when a security guard spotted a hatchet-wielding man chipping away at a porch railing. Police tried unsuccessfully to locate the man. While he didn't disembowel anyone, the thought of an adult wielding both a hatchet and a pair of rabbit ears somehow manages to be just as disturbing. The Story of Edward Mordrake Edward Mordrake was said to be a man doomed with a second face on the back of his head. His disturbing situation was popularized by George Gould and Walter Pyle in an 1896 science textbook. But as it turns out, Mordrake's story is a complete fabrication turned urban legend. A story published on December 8, 1895 in the Boston Sunday Post titled The Wonders of Modern Society described how a man named Edward Mordrake had a second female face as lovely as a dream, hideous as a devil, on the back of his head. The face would whisper such things as they only speak of in hell to poor Mordrake at night and sneered at him whenever he cried. Driven insane by the face, Mordrake was said to have taken his own life at 23 years of age. A suicide note begged for the face to be destroyed lest it continues its dreadful whispering in my grave. Then Gould and Pyle popularized the tragic tale in their anomalies and curiosities of medicine which was published the following year. Mordrake's story became fodder for countless publications and beget callous writing about physical deformities and weird wonders of the world. While craniofacial duplication is a real biological phenomenon, those born with an extra face rarely live long and none are capable of independent speech as there is only one brain. It was only in 2015 that the Museum of Hoaxes uncovered that the original Boston Sunday Post article about Mordrake was actually written by a science fiction author and was otherwise utterly baseless. Though the writer's predilection for genre doesn't disprove the claims in his article, the sources he employed, which were not later verified diligently enough by Gould and Pyle, certainly seemed to. The post article cited the Royal Scientific Society as one of its most substantial sources, but this organization didn't exist. Furthermore, the writer's additional references to the fishwoman of Lincoln, a mermaid type of creature, and the Norfolk spider, a human head with six legs, were entirely fabricated. No literary or scientific database yielded anything remotely similar to these creatures. Nonetheless, the urban myth of the two-faced Edward Mordrake has endured. It was most recently chronicled in an episode of the television show American Horror Story to chilling effect. Perhaps what is most ghastly about this urban legend is how quickly an unfounded narrative can take hold and reverberate in popular consciousness for centuries. Charlie No Face Imagine finding yourself outside and alone in the dark on a residential street. You hear footsteps approaching. Suddenly, a man with a misshapen face appears. You run terrified beyond words. You spread the story of the man with no face throughout Pennsylvania. Charlie No Face, also called the Green Man, was actually a man named Ray Robinson, and he was no figment of anyone's imagination. Born in 1910, Robinson was disfigured as the result of an electrical accident at the age of eight. He touched active wires which effectively maimed him. Knowing his appearance could be disconcerting, Robinson chose to take strolls after dark. He often walked a path along Route 351 in Beaver County, Pennsylvania. While his intentions were honorable, encountering Robinson in the dead of night inevitably led to spreading stories about a boogeyman haunting the town. Robinson died in 1985. The Navajo Skinwalker The Navajo Skinwalker is described as a humanoid shapeshifter that can transform into a four-legged beast and terrorizes families in the American Southwest. While it sounds like the stuff of urban legend, the Skinwalker has deep roots in Native American lore. Mainstream America first heard about these entities in 1996 when the Deseret News published an article on a Utah family's harrowing experience with a ferocious beast that ravaged its cattle. Only 18 months after moving on to their new ranch, Terry Sherman, the father of the family, spotted the creature for the first time. Sherman claimed the beast was three times bigger than a wolf with glowing red eyes. Perhaps most disturbingly, it appeared unfazed when he shot at it. The Shermans moved out shortly after the incident, and several new owners of the ranch reported similar encounters. Today, that property is known as Skinwalker Ranch, and it is believed to be a curious hub of paranormal activity. According to Navajo English Dictionary, Skinwalker, which was translated from Navajo Yinald Lushi, which literally means, by means of it, it goes on all fours, Navajo folklore describes a variety of these creatures, and the Pueblo, Apache, and Hopi people all have their own origin stories for such beasts. Some traditions claim that Skinwalkers are born of Navajo medicine men who, initially benevolent, abuse their magic for personal gain. Estowed with mythical powers of evil, these tribesmen can then transform into any animal or person of their choosing. But a ravenous bloodlust will follow their newfound abilities. They are reportedly near impossible to kill unless with a knife or bullet that was dipped in white ash. The Navajo, meanwhile, are vehemently opposed to discussing the creature with outsiders, and even amongst their own. Since the inexplicable sightings on the Sherman's ranch, the area has become a purported hotbed of paranormal activity. On March 12, 1997, biochemist Dr. Colm Kelleher reportedly spotted a Skinwalker on the property, perched 20 feet off the ground and about 50 feet away from him. Kelleher said it was hard to see clearly but that the creature was undoubtedly non-human. The large creature lay motionless, almost casually in the tree, he later wrote, The only indication of the beast's presence was the penetrating yellow light of the unblinking eyes as they stared fixedly back into the light. Whether or not Skinwalkers are indeed real, there will perhaps always appear to be elusive creatures with qualities science has yet to assess. What is clear, however, is that the urban myths of creatures like these continue to mesmerize people from all walks of life and take on a life of their own through storytelling, time and fear. And finally, the real corpse decoration. Notorious outlaw Elmer McCurdy took on a second life following his death. In 1911, the embalmed corpse of McCurdy became a grim sideshow attraction throughout Texas, with people eager to see the famed criminal on display in funeral parlors and carnivals. Now, it is hard to document all of his travels. He eventually wound up in Long Beach, California, where someone apparently mistook him for a prop. McCurdy was hung in a funhouse at the New Pike amusement park, his humanity discovered only after a crew member on the TV show The Six Million Dollar Man, which was filming there in 1976, tried to adjust his posture, dislodging his very real arm. The following year, his corpse was put to proper rest. Coming up, what does it take to create urban legends like these? Stories that seem to create a life of their own and spread like wildfire from mouth to ear, terrifying those who hear of them. Up next, we'll look at what it takes to create an urban legend. Plus, unidentified flying objects have been around much longer than Roswell. Four centuries ago, before flying vehicles were known to even be possible, ancient Russia had quite a shock when they looked into the sky. These stories and more when Weird Darkness returns. Urban legends are thought by most to be tall tales passed down through the ages. Some of the stories are obviously make-believe, while others, as strange as they may seem, have their origins in actual events. Do alligators roam the dark tunnels deep beneath New York City? Do boogeymen who terrorize those afraid of the night really exist? Are killer clowns a myth born from our fear of the unknown? Or could such evil truly walk among us? These are just a few of the urban legends that are explored in this book. After hearing some of the history for yourself, maybe you will be able to answer the age-old question, could it be true? Could it be true? Volume 1, Urban Legends by Cindy Parmitter, narrated by Weird Darkness host Darren Marlar. Hear a free sample on the audiobooks page at WeirdDarkness.com. You've already met Slenderman, the preternaturally tall, spectral being wearing a black suit and tie with a white and featureless face. He's often seen in the shadows of photos, stalking small children, and some say that he can drive you insane with terror. One of his first sightings came at an asylum, after a bloody rampage in a hospital. A photo emerged of his ghostly but silent presence, hiding in the stairwell while the chaos erupted around him. Rising from humble internet forums, this modern urban legend has now inspired a slew of fan fiction, best-selling computer games and a series of short movies. But the tale has also taken a darker turn as the line between myth and reality became blurred. Some are convinced that they have spotted Slenderman lurking behind trees and scaling the sides of buildings, and in January there were more claimed sightings in the UK reported by the British tabloids. Jamie Tehrani at the University of Durham said, I find it fascinating because it really shows how folklore is always adapting to new technologies and media, rather than being some kind of relic of the past. The question is, why did this particular story infect people's minds in a profound way? Assuming such widely shared tales are not actually true, what makes them endure? During the last decade psychologists have started to sift out some of the features that make certain stories contagious, potentially explaining the appeal of everything from urban legends to little red writing hood. To understand the appeal of tales like Slenderman, it makes sense to begin with his first outing. Starting on the Something Awful Forum in 2006, a user, Victor Surge, posted two photos, doctored with the ghostly figure in the background. Beneath, he wrote some short enigmatic captions implicating the shadowy figure and the mysterious abduction of 14 children. One caption read, One of two recovered photographs from the Stirling City Library blaze, notable for being taken the day which 14 children vanished and for what is referred to as the Slenderman. Deformities cited as filmed defects by officials. Fire at library occurred one week later. Actual photograph confiscated as evidence. 1986 photographer Mary Thomas, missing since June 13, 1986. And the other photograph with the caption, We didn't want to go, we didn't want to kill them, but its persistent silence and outstretched arms horrified and comforted us at the same time. 1983 photographer unknown presumed dead. His descriptions are chilling for sure, but perhaps part of the appeal lay in the gaps of Surge's story, which leaves space for us to project our own imagination. Victor Surge's original post provides tantalizing hints of a larger narrative involving a terrifying creature, notes semi-etician Jeffrey Tolbert. It suggests the being's unique power to induce violence and indicates that the photographers responsible for the images are missing or dead, and thus sets the stage for the processes that would lead to the communal construction of an entire narrative tradition. It's probably no coincidence that within that skeletal framework, Slenderman also evokes some familiar fairy tale elements. Psychologists are finding that there's a good reason that those stories often follow certain set formula. Firstly, tales of the supernatural may be especially appealing since they are minimally counterintuitive, combining both the familiar and the bizarre. They depart from what's expected and as a result, push us to process the information more deeply, says Aran Oran Zion at the University of British Columbia. So we remember more and are more likely to retell them. Counterintuitive elements could include a talking animal or a pumpkin that turns into a chariot, but it's not so much the nature as the number of these narrative devices that seems to be crucial. Oran Zion's analysis of Grimm's fairy tales found that the most popular stories, as measured by the number of times that they have been cited online, only have two or three supernatural surprises. Our brains, it seems, have only so much room for the bizarre before it becomes too confusing to be enjoyable. Consider Little Red Riding Hood. There are only a couple of things that don't make sense, such as the talking wolf and her and the grandmother being rescued from the stomach, says Tehrani. But the idea of a girl visiting her grandmother, that makes perfect sense. Yet the lesser known tales, such as the donkey lettuce, flout those constraints. Honestly, if you wanted me to summarize it, I couldn't. There's just so much weird stuff going on. The same goes for contemporary urban legends. Tehrani recently examined the evolution of the Bloody Mary myth, that if you chant an incantation into the mirror, a mutilated face will appear before you. There are many different variants involving different characters and events, but as with Grimm's tales, the most popular almost always contained just two or three unsettling events. Crucially, Slenderman seems to titillate the brain's senses of surprise in exactly the same way. Slenderman is minimally counterintuitive because, on the one hand, we can attribute psychological motivations to him just as we would any other person, says Tehrani, but on the other, he appears to be able to violate the laws of physics by appearing out of thin air and the laws of biology. He can stretch and shrink his body and grow tentacles. In other words, the tale offers just enough hints of the eerie to pique our curiosity without leaving us feeling too alienated. In terms of the wider themes, psychologists have found that perhaps unsurprisingly the most popular tales also tend to evoke strong emotions, and the feeling of disgust seems to make a story particularly potent. Julie Kultus at the University of Sussex recently asked subjects to read and share different versions of common urban legends, some more disgusting than others. One in particular seemed to stay in her student's mind about a woman who takes her poodle to Vietnam. As the woman fumbles with her order for a delicious steak, the dog trots into the kitchen. It is only when the bill comes minus the cost of the meat that she realizes she has eaten her beloved pet. Even a year later, the students were still struck by the tale, she says. It was amazing to see the difference in recall between the high and low discussed content stories, says Kultus. Perhaps that can explain why urban legends are so often in very bad taste. We are also drawn to themes of survival, which is why many stories deal with life and death. That makes sense given our evolution, stories have been an important way of transmitting valuable information that could save our skin at a later point. But the most memorable tales, according to Tehrani's recent lab experiments, involve some kind of social connection. We just can't forget a piece of lurid gossip. His participants were given a choice of tales and asked to choose one to read, remember, and then pass on to another person. Each tale reflected the above biases in a different way, and it seemed to have a big effect on their popularity. One told the story of a woman who died after a poisonous spider made a nest in her unwashed beehive haircut. Dealing with death, it was a classic survival tale. But although it peaked people's interest, it proved to be less easily remembered than some of the others. In contrast, a more memorable story concerned a woman who had cyber sex with an unknown man only to find out months later that it was her father. It's hardly Jane Austen, but the story requires you to consider others' motives and decisions, tapping into our social bias. Others, along a similar vein, might include the story of the inadvertent biscuit thief that ends in excruciating embarrassment. If you've not heard it before, here it is. An elderly woman, traveling by bus, had a layover during her journey. She purchased a package of Oreo cookies from a vending machine in the bus terminal and located a table. She placed her cookies on the table, sat down and proceeded to read her newspaper. She was joined by a young man who, to her surprise, opened the package of Oreo cookies and began to eat them. The woman, saying nothing but giving him an icy stare, grabbed cookie. The young man, with a funny look on his face, ate another cookie. The woman again glared and grabbed another cookie. The young man finished the third cookie and offered the last to the woman. Completely appalled, she grabbed the cookie and the young man left. Outraged, the woman threw down her paper, only to find her unopened Oreos on the table in front of her. Appealing to both the social and survival biases, the story of a serial killer who lures women to their death with the sounds of a baby crying proved to be the most popular of all. Tehrani thinks this too can be explained by considering human prehistory. As we lived in bigger societies, our survival depended less on environmental dangers and more on other people, so we are primed to take notice of quirks in other people's behavior, as much as more immediate dangers. Surprisingly, Slender Man only partially confirms these findings. There are elements of these memes that exploit our survival bias, such as the fact he targets vulnerable children in a typical woodland setting and our emotion bias, fear and disgust, Tehrani says. Yet the story is almost completely lacking in social information. Even something as simple as Little Red Riding Hood, he says, asks us to exercise our ability to understand that the wolf is lying as he builds up the girl's trust. Slender Man, in comparison, simply entices his victims using some kind of paranormal power. There is no social conundrum for us to crack. One possibility is that Slender Man is just a fluke, the exception that proved the rule. More intriguing, however, is the idea that it instead reflects a deeper change in the way that we craft folktales thanks to the internet. Tehrani points out, for instance, that social stories may be more memorable, but they weren't necessarily more enjoyable, according to his participants. Memorability would have been crucial when stories were passed mouth to ear, but with the cut and paste buttons on our desktop, it perhaps plays less of a role now. We may find social content easier to remember, but actually, we're just as likely to want to hear about stories relevant to survival and to pass them on, so the advantage of social information over other biases disappears, Tehrani says. In other words, as more stories are shared on the internet, our stories may lose some of their social nuances and become even more ghoulish. It is certainly feasible that storytelling in the digital age may evolve in a very different way from the fairy tales of the past, which were shaped by the cognitive constraints of oral transmission. These are just musings, of course. Tehrani has yet to study the appeal of Slenderman formally, though he does plan to look into the stories on Creepypasta.com, a website that allows users to share and contribute many of these modern urban myths. It's very much on our to-do list, he says. Storytelling is, after all, a craft like any other, evolving with tools and technology. Our entertainment has already seen monumental changes in literature and cinema. But perhaps those transformations are trickling down to the myths and legends we tell each other to. The humble stories that form a substantial, though neglected, contribution to our culture. It is an intriguing thought that the elements forged by storytellers from across the millennia are now being cast into a very different folktale. The beginning of a tradition that our descendants may be reading and sharing on their tablets in centuries to come. It is the most famous sighting of an unidentified object in the history of ancient Russia. This flying object would not be observed over the area of Robozero Lake, approximately 80 miles southwest of Bolazersk, or White Lake Town. Officially no flying vehicles were present in the sky almost four centuries ago, they did not even exist. Still, this amazing event, witnessed by many people, took place, and it cannot be explained as a missile, ball lightning, or an airplane. An official document describing the incident originates from the files of the Archaeological Research Service and was first published in Historical Files Compiled and Issued by the Archaeological Commission, Part 4, St. Petersburg, 1842. The document's authenticity is unquestionable. Today, many newspapers worldwide would feature large headlines on their front pages like, Enormous Ball of Fire Creates Panic, or Ball Lightning or So Something Else Over the Lake. Three centuries ago, there were no newspapers. What did people observe that day? On this Saturday, between 10 and 12 o'clock their local time, inhabitants of the district of Bolazero went to their local parish church in the village of Robozero. While they were there, an object emitting fire and a loud noise appeared in a clear blue sky. It had a diameter of around 40 meters or 131 feet, which is the approximate height of a modern 12-story building. The objects traveling from south to west suddenly stopped over Robozero Lake, which surfaces about 2 km by 1 km. It gave out blue smoke and had two beams of fire about 20 Zossans. One Zossan means about 7 feet, coming from the object's front. When a great crash sounded, many people left the church to see what was happening outside. According to the report, the object appeared from the direction from which we get winter and moved across from the church to the lake. Then the observed object suddenly vanished out of sight some distance above the lake in order to reappear over the lake less than an hour later. The people again came out to the square and the same fire suddenly reappeared over the same lake from the same place where it first disappeared. It darted from the south to the west and must have been 1500 feet away when it disappeared, but it appeared in a short while back again from that another place, moving this time to the west. The third time the same fireball appeared more terrific in width and disappeared having moved to the west and it had been remaining over Robozero over water for an hour and a half and the length of the lake is about 7,000 feet and the width is 3500 feet. The incident was observed by multiple witnesses, now experiencing yet another reappearance of the mysterious flying vehicle. It went from the south to the west and was about 500 meters away when it vanished again. The last time the object returned it was traveling westwards and then stopped. Its size appeared to be much larger than before. It stayed over the lake for one hour and a half. A group of fishermen in their boat located on the lake approximately a mile away were seriously affected, suffering severe burns because of the scorching heat. The lake water, according to the witnesses, also looked strange. It was illuminated to their greatest depth of 30 feet and the fish swam away to the shore or fleeing to all directions. They all saw that. And where the fireball came, the water seemed to be covered with rust under the reddish light and it was then scattered by the wind and the water became clean again. In his book Astronomical Phenomena in Russian Chronicles, the Russian astronomer Dysvatsky wrote that the eyewitnesses saw only pieces of a meteorite that flew apart after an explosion. The explosion of the meteor on 15 August 1663 probably occurred in a southwesternly direction during the morning before 12 o'clock and in clear skies. Two fragments were projected in a southerly direction over the lake whilst a third and fourth came down in the west, according to the official explanation given by Dysvatsky. However, this does not account for the sighting of the people in the boat approaching a hovering body. P. Stonehill, the Russian UFO researcher says, and at the same time for all who proposed another interpretation of the phenomenon. Stonehill explains that the lifespan of lightning is short. Also, its diameter is no more than 3 feet, certainly not 130 feet. Moreover, ball lightning appears under stormy weather conditions and the weather was beautiful on August 15, 1663. It was a sunny and warm day, the sky was perfectly clear. Here we are dealing with a large flying object which approached suddenly and from nowhere. The behavior of the reported flying object was definitely unlike that of a meteor. The object was seen by many witnesses in at least two locations three times at different time intervals. Fragments from meteorites are ejected simultaneously as a rule. The duration of the sighting is unclear but we can hardly expect more details from the witness's report which is today almost four centuries old. Is it possible that the hour and a half refer to the whole sighting or its part only? As for meteorites, it is generally known that they penetrate space with a velocity of 30-40 km per second, which corresponds to the speed of our globe in its journey around the sun. The meteorite's fate depends upon its mass, the larger it is, the greater the velocity. At the Earth's surface, small meteorites weighing 10 to 100 grams develop a speed of several tens of meters per second. The larger ones weighing a couple hundred kilograms show a velocity of about 500 meters per second. If it was a meteorite that showed up over the lake 350 years ago, it must have been a large one weighing from 30,000 to 250,000 tons. The speed of such a monster must have been enormous. Not one, not a single witness would survive its approach, but in fact, all witnesses did. If the object despite its large size traveled with a speed of less than 5 km per second, it was not than a falling meteor. The fishermen who also observed the object from their location in the boat said that they were unable to come closer to the object because of the great heat coming from it, and not because of its large speed. Apparently, they could approach the object and even pursue it because its velocity was more probably similar to that of the fisherman's boat itself. In other words, the velocity of both the boat and the unidentified flying object was very low. Whatever its speed, the meteorite must finally fall somewhere and the meteorite plunging to the ground could hardly pass unnoticed. Still, nothing like this was documented because no fall was reported. The UFO that came from nowhere made three visitations in the area and disappeared into the unknown. Three months later, on November 30, a similar incident took place over the same location. Was it the same unidentified flying object back on yet another mission? No one knows. To this day, no known scientific theory has explained the phenomenon. Up next, a man believes he hears the sound of a car crash, but it shouldn't be possible from where he lives. And, while serving a life sentence for the murder of 14-year-old Mary Ellen Deener, Lester Eubanks was granted a trip to an Ohio mall. Then, he vanished without a trace. But first, in St. James Episcopal Cemetery in Marietta, Georgia, there is a grave that people say began to weep tears of blood when they got too close. That story is up next, when Weird Darkness returns. He has been spotted all over the world, but photographic evidence is lacking, as is in a scientific proof. But he still exists, and is still seen. And now, you can search for Bigfoot every month in the Find Bigfoot calendar by Timothy Wayne Williams. Each month, you'll be captivated by an original Timothy Wayne Williams painting, beautiful, and captivating. But within each painting hides a monster. Bigfoot is hiding somewhere in each painting. Search for Bigfoot, and invite others to do so as well, with the new Find Bigfoot calendar, available now at WeirdDarkness.com While the most famous grave at St. James Episcopal Cemetery in Marietta, Georgia belongs to slain beauty queen Jean Benet Ramsey, the eeriest plot belongs to a woman named Mary Minot. It's marked by a large marble statue of a woman cradling two infants in her arms. Thanks to her unique memorial, Mary has become a celebrity at St. James Episcopal. Those brave enough to venture through the graveyard at night claim to hear the sound of a woman weeping near Mary's memorial. Those that have gotten close enough say the statue weeps tears of blood. Others have heard the sound of a young child calling out Mommy. Spooky or still, it's said that the two babies in Mary's arms switch positions. Local legend states that if you approach Mary's statue on Halloween night and circle her memorial three times, asking, Mary, Mary, how did your children die, her ghost will appear. A local group of ghost hunters had not one but two camera batteries completely lose power as they approached the statue on a research trip in 2005. Furthermore, all claimed to hear footsteps behind them, though they appeared to be the only ones in the cemetery. Ghosts of Marietta, a Marietta ghost tour group, offers a trolley tour that includes a trip through St. James Episcopal Cemetery. The tour, known as the Scarietta ghost tour, provides guests with an expanded version of the Minert Grave legend. According to Representative Betsy Throop, Mary's marble statue is said to weep tears so real that they roll down the statue's face and dampen the bodice. Said tears are seemingly shed for the infant twins cradled in Mary's arms. The legend states that if you run around the statue 13 times and say, oh, Mary, oh, Mary, what happened to your babies, then she will begin to cry. Betsy is quick to discourage visitors from an after-hours visit to St. James, though. For starters, trespassers may be arrested. More importantly, as Betsy warns, it's never a good idea to taunt the spirits. Otherworldly retributions aside, the spell of the Mary-Minert grave endures, as does the allure of its alleged Halloween hex. Many have wondered how Mary came to rest at St. James, and if perhaps the presence of the infants in the statue indicate that she died in childbirth. Some believe she died with her babies in a fire. The truth is Mary, her real name was Marian, Mary-Minert died of a lung ailment, most likely tuberculosis in 1898. According to findagrave.com, her obituary appeared in the Marietta Journal on May 26, 1898, saying, She was one of the most patient, lovable women in Marietta. She had a heart that sympathized with suffering humanity, and one who did more charitable work in visiting the poor and sick, ministering unto their need that did Mrs. Minert. She was truly a disciple of Christ and went about doing good. The explanation for her arresting memorial is also revealed in her obituary, which says she was in her 34th year of age at the time of her death. She leaves behind her husband and six children of that number, two twin girls, four weeks old. It is clear that Mary was a beloved mother and member of her community, so much so that her headstone was erected to include her twin girls, who entered the world just as Mary left it. As for the stories about Mary's ghost, you will have to visit her famous grave on Halloween night to find out the truth for yourself. People occasionally experience something science cannot explain. This case is a perfect example of how little we still understand about the nature of reality. This time our unexplained mystery deals with a baffling incident that happened to a man who for some unknown reason suddenly heard a bizarre sound of the crash. He wasn't supposed to have heard it, but he did. It was an ordinary Sunday. Nothing unusual had happened. He was just getting ready for bed when he heard something crashing. It was a sound he was not meant to hear. It happened in a place far away that he was not supposed to find. His remarkable experience defies explanation. What happened on Sunday, June 10, 1962, is something Howard Wheeler will never forget. Howard Wheeler was a broadcaster who lived in Charlotte, North Carolina. He'd enjoyed a pleasant Sunday and was just going to bed. Being a religious man, he kneeled beside his bed and prayed. He was a daily habit. Suddenly he stopped praying and said to his wife, Pat, I heard an automobile wreck. I'll be right back. He ran out of the house to his car. For some seconds he didn't know what to do. In which direction should he drive? Where was the wreck? If there was one. His house was surrounded by many streets and the accident could have happened anywhere. Then without hesitation, Mr. Wheeler drove quickly down Park Road. As soon as he came to Woodlawn, he turned right and drove down the hill to the shrimp boat. But to his disappointment he found nothing there. In an interview later he explained he got a feeling that he should turn around and hurry back to Manford Drive, which he also did. He went about 200 yards on Manford, around a curve, and there was a car smashed against the pole. The engine driven back into the car. He saw no one, but a voice said, Help me, Humpy, help me. Mr. Wheeler hurried to the wreck where he found a man badly hurt and bleeding. At first he did not recognize him, but then he saw the man in the wreck was Joe Thunderbrook, an old friend who always called Mr. Wheeler by his nickname, Humpy. It was not easy, but somehow Mr. Wheeler managed to get his friend out of the car wreck and drive to the hospital where surgery was performed. Mr. Wheeler saved his friend's life, but many people wondered how he had learned about the accident. According to Mr. Wheeler, the sound he heard was similar to the distant rumble of railroad cars bumping together in some freight yard. Police and newspapers were puzzled. How could Mr. Wheeler have heard the sound of the crash half a mile from his home? How could he locate the place of the accident? When the police arrived 45 minutes later, Mr. Wheeler was still the only person who had passed by and found the wreck. How can we explain this case? Is intuition tapped into the extraordinary wisdom some people already have within them? Mr. Wheeler was a religious man, a listener who believed in the existence of God or other divine powers, or maybe guardian angels may find it interesting to know Mr. Wheeler was praying at the time when he heard the ominous sound. In 1973, convicted child murderer Lester Eubanks escaped from prison. Incarcerated for life without parole in 1966, Eubanks had been a model inmate for about seven years. So, Ohio State Penitentiary granted him a furlough to go Christmas shopping at a local mall that December. But a busy holiday season mall provided Eubanks with a perfect escape scenario. He was asked to meet back at a specific time and place near the mall when he was finished. Instead, he vanished and hasn't been seen in nearly half a century. Lester Eubanks was imprisoned in the first place for trying to rape a 14-year-old girl before shooting her to death and then bludgeoning her into a pulp with a brick. His disappearance has plagued both authorities and the victim's families for decades. How a convicted killer so easily escaped prison and where he might be today has since become fodder for unsolved mysteries. The Netflix series' second season aims to probe every detail of the case, which has only gained more steam the longer Lester Eubanks has been on the run. By the time Lester Eubanks murdered Mary Ellen Deener, a 14-year-old Mansfield, Ohio girl, he had already committed a series of sexual offenses. But the attack on Deener on November 14, 1965 is the one that landed him in prison. On that day, Mary Ellen Deener and her younger sister, 12-year-old Brenda Sue, were doing laundry. Out of change, Deener walked to another laundromat for Nichols and Dimes. Tragically, she found Eubanks instead. She put up a courageous fight and thwarted his forcible sexual assault but only anchored Eubanks into bloodlust in the process. He shot her twice, then beat her with a brick. When she was found, Deener's family was naturally consumed with unbearable pain. The girl had only tried to help her family out with chores and ended up dead in the streets, with change still in her hand. As if her murder couldn't be any sadder, Deener had dreamt of becoming a nun. Eubanks confessed to the murder the following day after local authorities placed him under arrest. After being charged with first-degree murder while perpetrating rape, he tried to plead insanity to no avail. On May 25, 1966, a jury found him guilty and sentenced him to death. Inarguably the first time Eubanks would escape justice, his sentence was commuted to life in prison without parole when a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 1972 found the death penalty unconstitutional. From the next year, he escaped. For the seven years Lester Eubanks was in jail, he acted like a model prisoner. The inmate was even profiled while still on death row in 1972 by the Columbus dispatch in an article on incarcerated artists. The publication deemed him the best of the death row painters and photographed him next to his Angela Davis triptych. The three images show Davis in glasses, her iconic afro and a resolute stare. Perhaps it was the distinct change in personalities Eubanks related to so much. I have admiration and respect for her, he told reporters. Eubanks was so well mannered and docile that he became an honor inmate at the facility, which earned him certain privileges. The program was born from hopes that time outside the prison walls would help reform felons like him and was heavily curtailed after three convicts including Eubanks escaped. After being escorted to the Great Southern Shopping Center on December 7, 1973, the man who murdered Mary Ellen Deener vanished. He never showed up to the designated pickup spot and remains elusive to this day. Her Deener's family, that day in December, nearly paralleled the night of 1965. To use as powerful a word as I can think of, we were traumatized, said sister Myrtle Carter, who was 18 at the time of the murder. We thought it was over and then, lo and behold, he goes Christmas shopping, first of all, that's a shock and then escapes. My mom, she was just beside herself. I don't want you to think this has consumed my life because it didn't, said Myrtle Carter. I'm a Christian and I trust God and I allow him to do what he's going to do in my life. It doesn't consume me, but it bothers me that he's still missing, that he's still free and took her innocent life. That bothers me. While the Ohio Department of Corrections immediately listed Eubanks as a fugitive, it would take decades for federal authorities to do the same. It was clear to Deputy U.S. Marshal David Seiler, who began working the case in 2016, that Eubanks had planned his escape from justice all along. He had to start this process two or three years prior, said Seiler, manipulating those guards, manipulating the system, being that good guy that he portrayed himself to be. It just got him outside the gates and that's all he was working towards. Then in the early 1990s, the investigation began to pick up when a young officer directed the public eye to the case. Law enforcement officer John Arcuti was at high school when Deaner was killed. As head of the Detective Bureau of the Mansfield Police Department, he started digging into Eubanks' disappearance in the early 1990s. He was shocked to find the National Crime Information Center hadn't listed him as wanted. That meant Eubanks couldn't have been caught speeding or engaged in any other minor infraction and the officer who took his prints or ran his license wouldn't have known he was a wanted fugitive. It had been 20 years and it was like nobody was working the case that we were aware of, said Arcuti. He was just out there on his own and nobody seemed concerned about it. Investigators suspect that Lester Eubanks may be using the alias Victor Young. With no help on the cold case from fellow authorities, Arcuti contacted America's most wanted. All we need is that one tipster, that one person that can bring in the last piece of the puzzle, even if they knew him a year ago, two years ago, said Seiler. That's what we're looking for, someone who's like, I know that guy. The 1994 TV episode certainly helped as hundreds of calls came in with promising leads pointing to Northern California. Arcuti notified the LAPD of his search for Lester Eubanks and found a cooperative detective in Tim Connor. The duo teamed up to check out a mattress factory in Gardena, California where an anonymous source said Eubanks worked. I don't think he ever took employment that ever did any background check. He was a guy who didn't lay his head in any one place for very long. Though the media stunt helped raise awareness, and U.S. Marshals officially listed Eubanks on their 15 most wanted list, it was obvious that Lester Eubanks had heard of these developments too. The promising Gardena lead ended with news that their suspect had quit his job and vanished. I think we were probably fairly close to Lester at some point, but the tips and the technology just didn't make it where we could get close enough, said Connor. He's very cunning. He's not a dumb guy. He's been avoiding the authorities for 40-plus years. Seiler believes that Eubanks is most likely being unwittingly protected by people who don't even know who he is. He's certain Lester Eubanks is likely fathered children by this point, and is potentially a grandfather as well. For Seiler, tragedy and pain mark the Lester Eubanks case from all angles. The sad thing is, those who he has won over are victims too, said Seiler. They have no idea. So when we come knocking on the door and apprehend that person, their families become victims. And that's sad. Investigators say Lester Eubanks was an avid martial arts enthusiast who loved music and art. He's easily recognizable as he has a huge scar on his right arm. The disappearance of Lester Eubanks most recently garnered renewed attention with the second season of Netflix series Unsolved Mysteries. While not an unsolved murder case, the culprit's disappearance remains baffling. The show aims to understand how anything like it could have happened. For Connor, two things are clear. I've often thought of him over the years. I think he's probably still alive. I think there's people who know who he is and what he did. They're just not giving him up. Fortunately, neither are authorities. As the 50th anniversary of Lester Eubanks' escape approaches, investigators are more determined than ever. Furthermore, it appears DNA evidence collected from his biological son could yield enormous leaps previously unavailable in catching him. The U.S. Marshals are not deterred by the passage of time when it comes to cases like this one, said U.S. Marshal Peter Elliott of the Northern District of Ohio. We are fueled by one thing, and that is justice for 14-year-old Mary Ellen Deener of Mansfield, Ohio, the innocent victim in this case. Thanks for listening. If you like the podcast and you haven't already subscribed, be sure to do so now so you don't miss future episodes. And also, please tell somebody else about the podcast. 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 the podcast with someone new, it helps spread the word about the show, and a growing audience makes it possible for me to keep creating episodes as often as I do. Plus, telling others about Weird Darkness also helps get the word out about resources that are available for those who suffer from depression. So please, share the podcast with someone today. Do you have a dark tale to tell of your own? Fact or fiction, click on Tell Your Story on the website, 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. The True Stories Behind Terrifying Urban Legends was written by Marco Mogheritov for All That's Interesting and Jake Rawson for Mental Floss. What Makes an Urban Legend was written by David Robson for BBC.com. The Robuzero Lake UFO of 1663 is by Ace Sutherland for Message to Eagle. The Halloween legend of Mary Minert's grave is from Jessica Ferry for the lineup. The unexplained sound of a crash is by Ellen Lloyd for Ancient Pages. And the escape of Lester Eubanks is from Marco Mogheritov for All That's Interesting. 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 Peter 2, Verse 9 But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's special possession that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. And a final thought, kids learn faster than adults because they don't spend their time thinking up reasons why they can't do it. I'm Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness. Are you a member of the Darkness Syndicate? The Darkness Syndicate is a private membership where you receive commercial-free episodes of the Weird Darkness podcast and radio show. Behind the scenes, video updates about future projects and events I'm working on. You can share your own opinions on ideas to help me decide upon Weird Darkness contests and events. 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