 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. 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 doing the podcast. And while listening, be sure to check out the Weird Darkness website so you can find me on social media and drop me an email. Coming up in this episode... In 1929, the Soviet Union decided seven days a week just was too many to keep track of. And it's easier to count by five anyway. So in the USSR, they suddenly began to live life with only five days per week. No more weekends. How do you think the citizens took that news? While not nearly as well known as its larger Bermudan brother, the Bridgewater Triangle in southeastern Massachusetts in the United States is home to strange tales itself, with the paranormal, unexplained and even home to its very own cryptid. Other Margaret Helen James wrote, There is an uncomfortable sort of ghostly terror in beast form that haunts the villages on the borders of the two countries which is commonly called the hateful thing. I allude to the churchyard or hell beast. Something was terrifying people in the marshlands of a small county in England and tales of it can still bring nightmares to those who live there today. But first, it's what every non-muggle dreams of. To be able to turn any metal into gold and to create a magic potion to give one eternal life. So is the life of wizarding at Hogwarts in the Harry Potter books. But was there a real Philosopher's Stone? Was there a real Nicholas Flamel who created it? We begin there. Now, bolt your doors. Lock your windows. Turn off your lights. And come with me into the weird darkness. Before we begin, I need to say that I am a Muggle. So much so that I not only have no magical abilities, but have only seen one of the Harry Potter films and have read zero of the books, so I may get some of the names wrong. If I do, just chalk it up to my being an ignorant Muggle. I don't mind. In Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Nicholas Flamel is the only known maker of the Philosopher's Stone. An object capable of turning metal into gold and granting immortality with its elixir of life. At 665 years old, Nicholas and his 658-year-old wife, Perinell, certainly make use of the elixir, but having lived more than six centuries in the wizarding world, they favor a quiet life. The real Nicholas Flamel, because he was a real person, was probably born in 1330 in Penteau, near Paris, which would indeed make him around 665 at the time of the writing of Philosopher's Stone as well as the movie if he had really had access to the elixir of life, and some people think he might have. But how did a little-known bookseller from 14th century France become so synonymous with alchemy that he fetched up in the wizarding world? We are told that the Flamel of the wizarding world met his wife, Perinell, at Bobotons. While we don't know where they met, the real Flamel's wife was called Perinell. She had been widowed twice before and brought the fortune of her two previous husbands to her marriage with Nicholas. After their marriage, Flamel continued to work as a bookseller. The couple were relatively wealthy. They owned several properties and donated money to the French Catholic Church. Their wealth and philanthropy had become part of the legend that surrounds Flamel's posthumous reputation as an alchemist. Records show that Flamel died in 1418. He was buried in Paris beneath a tombstone he designed himself, and his will, dated 1416, apparently left the majority of his library to a nephew, Harry A., of whom little else is known. This is where the historical facts about Flamel start to merge with the stories. Because some people don't believe he died at all, there are reports of Nicholas and Perinell having faked their deaths and escaped to India, and their immortality is all down to his supposed alchemical genius. Flamel's interest in alchemy apparently began with a book. It is said that a stranger approached him one day with a rare manuscript. Flamel recognized it because not long before he had dreamed about an angel. The angel had appeared holding a book telling him, one day, you will see in it that which no other man will be able to see. The book was written by a man called Abraham the Jew. It was in Greek and other languages Flamel couldn't understand, including Hebrew. It was also full of awe-inspiring symbols which Flamel realized were instructions on alchemy. Flamel supposedly spent 21 years trying to decipher it all. When Paris couldn't provide answers, he set off to Spain to find a Jewish scholar and came across Maestro Canchez, a learned Jewish man living in Lyon. Canchez recognized Abraham the Jew as one of the earliest masters of the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah and translated the few pages Flamel had with him before agreeing to travel back to France and translate the rest. Unfortunately he fell ill on the journey and died before they reached Paris. Luckily for Flamel, Canchez had taught him enough. Over the next three years he went on to translate the entire book, learning the secrets of Hermeticism, an esoteric tradition based on the divine writings of Hermes Trismegistus. Those who believe Flamel used the book of Abraham the Jew to create a philosopher's stone point to the fact that Flamel then became rich. Apparently his incredible wealth and generosity brought him to the attention of Charles VI who ordered an investigation into Flamel but found nothing of interest. Others say there is no indication that Flamel had any involvement in alchemy at all and the stories about the mysterious book are just that. Stories. Some believe that the character of Flamel was invented by 17th century publishers in a bid to sell lots of supposedly ancient alchemical books. Flamel's reputation was fueled by a number of books attributed to him long after his death. One was The Book of Hieroglyphic Figures which was published in Paris in 1612. By the mid 17th century Flamel had become legendary with reported sightings and well-known historical figures like Isaac Newton referring to his alchemical prowess. Interest resurfaced in the 19th century. Flamel's mentioned in Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame the composer Eric Sati was said to be fascinated by him and the Freemason Albert Pike mentions him in his book Morals and Dogma a philosophical rationale of Freemasonry. Whether or not they believed he was still alive is another thing, but these learned figures all identified Flamel as an alchemist. More recently, as well as Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Flamel has been mentioned in fictional works including Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum in 1988 and Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code in 2003. So while the real Flamel may not have been a genuine alchemist, even without the elixir of life, his legendary reputation has certainly made him immortal, a terrible, shape-shifting horror, a ghost that rattles the chains that drown him, a spectral coach and horses, a phantom donkey, Galdeston in Norfolk, England boasts ghosts aplenty. In one of the most remote areas of the county in the midst of marshland where waterway is crisscrossed the land, the hateful thing lurks in darkness. In the book Bogeytales of East Anglia, written by Margaret Helen James in 1891, a first cousin of horror writer M.R. James and sister of Minnie James, the first female librarian of a national library, we learn of the hateful thing. I've linked to her book on Amazon in the essential web links section of the show notes. Margaret Helen James wrote, There is an uncomfortable sort of ghostly terror in beast form that haunts the villages on the borders of the two counties, which is commonly called the hateful thing. I allude to the churchyard or hell beast. This charming creature generally takes the somewhat indefinite form of a swoundling, i.e. a swooning shadow, whatever that might be. Whatever it is met in any locality it is a sign that some great and unusually horrible wickedness is about to be committed or has just taken place there. The writer, when crossing a field at night, once came across a countryman who had just seen his apparition but a slight search for the goblin was wholly unsuccessful. Margaret also tells the story of a respectable old charwoman who went walking in Gillingham and Galdiston with her daughter and the young man she was courting one night. Between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. in Galdiston, they saw something strange by the market path. It was that time I saw the hateful thing the woman told her. Her daughter had alerted her to the presence of a dog in front of them, which she said then grew before her very eyes into a creature as big as a horse, walking slowly and mindful that her daughter had been born under the chime hours so she could see things, the woman looked for the creature but could see nothing. She could, however, hear a thumping noise. When her daughter came to cling to her in abject fear, suddenly she was able to see the object of her terror. The moment she touched me I saw the hateful thing. The beast was black and didn't keep the same size and it wasn't any regular shape. She walked slow for I was afraid of it getting behind us. The creature kept ahead of the trio until it disappeared at Galdiston Churchyard itself a magnet for the strange. In another of Margaret's tales she talks of a path from the village which skirted a pond which often flooded in bad weather, forcing walkers to take a different route along Hodman's path. In order to put an end to the diversions, the decision was taken to deepen the pond and during the excavation it said that a skeleton was found in the mud, a millstone chained around its neck. The workmen began to recollect old stories told to them by their grannies of a wicked felon who for his sins was condemned to be buried at the Four Relit or Four Crossways but from respect to his family was after all deposited in the pond where he had lain undisturbed ever since. The rector of Galdiston agreed that the skeleton should be freed from its millstone, a punishment mentioned in the New Testament and reburied close to the wall on the north side of the churchyard just across the field. It was a turned out a rash decision. Margaret continues this wicked felon relieved of his spiritual clog rose at once from his dry and uncomfortable churchyard quarters and nightly with a horrid clanking of ghostly chains rambles the unconsecrated space of Gleb between the churchyard and Lovers Lane. It is said that the ghost can be heard at night clanking the chains it once wore. The website Hidden East Anglia which can be found at hiddenea.com believes the location of the pond to have been just south of Norwick Road and adds that Lovers Lane is now Snakes Lane and runs southward from the church to meet with Sandy Lane, the haunt of the hateful thing. Additionally, it adds that both of these lanes were once said to be haunted by a coach and horses driven by a headless coachman whose passengers were the restless souls of the infamous Biggid family on their way to the stronghold at Bungay Castle. And if you need more reason to take a supernatural trip to the Norfolk Suffolk border in England, there is also a ghostly donkey that rattles chains in the village on dark nights, an embarrassment of supernatural riches as it were. Coming up, while not nearly as well known as its larger Bermudan brother, the Bridgewater Triangle in southeastern Massachusetts in the United States is home to strange tales itself, with the paranormal, unexplained and even home to its very own cryptid. That story is up next on Weird Darkness. Hey Weirdos, our December Weirdo Watch Party is Saturday, December 23rd, hosted by horror host Hall of Famers, Drac and Countess Corita. Dracula and his bride are bringing us the 1946 noir thriller Shock, starring Vincent Price. In the film, a psychologically distraught woman is committed to a private sanitarium. Only to find out that the man who committed her was the man she witnessed commit a murder. The Weirdo Watch Party is always free to watch online with everybody, so grab your popcorn candy and soda and jump into the fun, and even get involved in the live chat as we watch the movie, this Christmas Eve Eve. It's shock, starring Vincent Price, presented by Count Drac and Countess Corita, Saturday, December 23rd, starting at 10pm Eastern, 9pm Central, 8pm Mountain, 7pm Pacific. See a few clips from the film and invite your friends to watch along with you on the Weirdo Watch Party page at WeirdDarkness.com and we'll see you on Saturday, December 23rd for the Weirdo Watch Party. The ghost stories, personal accounts and folklore that make up the legend of the Bridgewater Triangle are too vast to ever fit in a single book, though many devoted investigators of the Triangle have tried meticulously to record them. They encompass what can only be described as a smorgasbord of the paranormal, cryptozoological and just plain weird. In fact, one of the most baffling parts of the Triangle legends has to be the range of strange sightings said to be part of this enigmatic approximately 200 square mile area of the Bay State. Anything that you want to be in the Triangle is in the Triangle. It's a Pandora's Box, said folklorist and author of several books on the Bridgewater Triangle, Chris Balzando. So you're into zombies? There are stories about zombies. If you're into Bigfoot, he's there. If you're into Pukwuchys, that's kind of Pukwuchy Central. If you're into ghosts, you've got it. UFOs, Black Helicopter, it's there. And one need not believe in the supernatural to enjoy the mystery and history of it Aaron Cadio, co-creator of a 2013 documentary on the Bridgewater Triangle, said that while he is a born skeptic, he loved collecting creepy stories about the Triangle just because of the fun of it. I walked into the project probably like 99% skeptic and walked out of the project still like a 96%, he said. But there were a few things in the film that even me as a skeptic kind of had to take a step back and scratch my head. The modern cultural origin of the Bridgewater Triangle legend is widely thought to lie within cryptozoologist Lauren Coleman's 1983 book, Mysterious America, the ultimate guide to the nation's weirdest wonders, strangest spots and creepiest creatures, which I have placed the Amazon link to in the essential web links of the show notes. In it, he coined the term Bridgewater Triangle, inspired of course by the Bermuda Triangle, established its rough boundaries and identified some of the Triangle's most notable places and legends, calling it a window area of unexplained occurrences. Coleman establishes Reaboth in the southwest, Abington in the north and Freetown in the southeast as the three points of the Triangle, meaning hundreds of thousands of people in Tonton, Brockton, Rainham, Berkeley, Dyton, Easton, Norton, Mansfield and the Bridgewaters live inside it. But modern investigators into the Triangle insist there is by no means a clear boundary for the haunted and strange area, often pointing to Fall River, parts of Rhode Island, nearby towns and even Cape Cod as being under the Triangle's unique influence. No one ever said there is a line on the road and if you are on one side of it you are fine and outside the Triangle and on the other side you are in it, said author and paranormal investigator Jeff Bellinger. It bleeds out. Coleman wrote about the infamous Huckamuck Swamp, located between Easton and West Bridgewater as being known for its sightings of spook lights, unexplainable balls of light floating around, as well as large hairy creatures often thought to be Bigfoot himself. He has also penned some of the most famous Bridgewater Triangle stories. How two WHDH radio reporters from Boston saw a home plate shaped UFO with red lights and a front headlight in West Bridgewater in 1979. In 1971, Norton police sergeant Thomas Downey spotted a gigantic winged creature while driving home through Easton one night and reported it to Easton police, much to his ridicule. But the stories go far beyond what Coleman captured in his book. The mysterious Dytton Rock with its strange writings is often included. Attawan Rock and Rehoboth, Lake Nipponnicket in Bridgewater and Profile Rock in Freetown are hotspots for sightings of phantom campfires and bursts of Native Americans. Also notable for paranormal sightings are Solitude Stone, the Rainham Taunton Dog Track, several cemeteries in Rehoboth, King Philip's Cave in Norton and the Hornbine School and Shad Factory in Rehoboth. One of the eeriest legends has to be the red-headed hitchhiker of Route 44. It's said that a man with a big ginger beard, a plaid flannel shirt and jeans is often seen on the side of the road near the Rehoboth Seacock town line. He said to get into cars only to disappear. And then there's the Freetown State Forest, which has perhaps the darkest reputation of them all. There's Asinet Ledge, the site of many suicides and where people who have never considered suicide are said to get the sudden urge to jump. But much of this is apparently due to its ties to horrifying true crime stories. Retired Freetown Detective Sergeant Allen Alves said he witnessed evidence of regular satanic cult activity in the forest for 15 to 20 years, beginning in the late 1970s and continuing in the early 1990s. He said he and other officers would regularly find animals that appeared to be sacrificed ritualistically, with no blood in the animal but none on scene either. They'd often find satanic graffiti of upside-down crosses and pentagrams. Alves said police believed the infamous Fall River cult murderers Carl Drew and Robin Murphy conducted rituals in the forest, even having a hut in the middle. Alves also said police found an underground bunker with creepy dolls believed to belong to a satanic couple who were prosecuted for molesting children they had adopted. Alves was the first officer on scene at the discovery of 15-year-old Mary Lou Aruda of Rainham's body after she was kidnapped in 1978 and found dead in the forest two months later tied to a tree. That stayed with me because at the time my daughter was a few years younger, Alves said. It really stood with me and it stays with me today. Since Coleman's introduction of the Bridgewater Triangle to the world, a select group of paranormal investigators and enthusiasts have stepped up to record and investigate as many strange occurrences as possible and in doing so continue the story of the Triangle. Most of their own websites devoted to their findings in the Triangle but none have any definitive answers as to what's going on there. It's trying to solve a mystery that doesn't want to be solved, Balzano said. You're never going to find the answer but you're going to find a lot of clues. So what is going on in the Bridgewater Triangle? There is of course what perhaps most skeptics believe. Is it because the region has been defined as strange that people are automatically attributing things that could be easily explained as paranormal? Because there is a heightened sense of awareness living here? Kado asked, in other words, you hear something crashing in the woods and it could be a deer but everyone's minds go to Bigfoot because they are living in the Bridgewater Triangle? But others who have dedicated their time to investigating the Triangle are convinced there is something more going on. Bellinger believes it goes back to King Philip's war, a war between the English settlers and the Native Americans in the mid-1670s, the bloodiest war per capita in U.S. history. It took place largely in the Bridgewater Triangle region and ended with the Wampanoag chief Metacom, also known as King Philip, being hung, beheaded, drawn and quartered and his head displayed on a pike for 200 years at Plymouth Colony. You've probably heard the trope of the unfinished business. The unfinished business really has nothing to do with the dead. It has everything to do with the living, Bellinger said. We don't like people getting away with murder, even if it happened a long time ago, so there is this nagging feeling that happened in this area. But many other Triangle investigators believe King Philip's war is merely a symptom of the negative energy there and that its mysteriousness is much older, having something to do with the land and possibly even being conscious. There are these areas all over the globe that are nicknamed window areas, said Andrew Lake of Greenville Paranormal Research. These are locations that seem to be like a tear in the veil to other realities. It's a thing. It's not a location. It's not a random place on a map, Balzano said. It's a living, breathing thing that has a hunger and has a dark side to it. But whatever you believe, the Bridgewater Triangle is just a step out the door for anyone living in Southeastern Massachusetts and when you see something strange, you might just wonder if it was something more than it seemed. These dedicated paranormal investigators, folklorists, writers and legend trippers have devoted their time as hobbyists to recording and investigating reports of UFOs, Bigfoot, ghosts and other paranormal phenomenon in the area in an attempt to help themselves and others understand these strange occurrences. Sometimes they will go legend tripping, simply going out to places where hauntings and sightings have been reported with little equipment, hoping to see something. While other times they will conduct full-blown investigations using apps and equipment to try and pick up signals from the unexplained. Many also record the experiences of others, turning them into books, TV shows or blog posts. And some, like Tim Weisberg, digital managing editor of WBSM radio and host of Spooky South Coast, even do live investigations on radio, devoting an entire episode of his show to investigating the Bridgewater Triangle once a year. But despite what you might assume about so-called believers, the relationship with the paranormal is complicated. Many of these investigators' interest in the paranormal stems from their own unexplained experiences. Andrew Lake, 56, of Greenville Paranormal Research, said he was 11 when he encountered a ghost at a family friend's old house in Skitchwood. One night while he was staying over he woke up in the middle of the night while everyone else was asleep to hear the sound of someone in the kitchen directly below him. "'No lights on, but going about, moving chairs, opening cabinets, moving crockery and silverware,' he said. But yet there were no footsteps accompanying it. And it happened two nights in a row and exactly the same time, 2.35 a.m., with no lights on and nobody coming back upstairs.' Weisberg always had an interest in ghosts, but said he also experienced them himself. He said often as a child he would see an image of an old hag in the wall and would often get the feeling there was someone else in his room. He also believes his aunt and uncle's house in Halifax was haunted, having heavy steel doors to the basement swing open and closed on their own, and faucets turn on and off with no one there. Paranormal investigator Kristin Evans, 50, said that as an adult she moved into a haunted house in Hanson where she would hear people moving around when she was the only one home. And folklorist Chris Balzano, who has written several books on the Bridgewater Triangle, lived in the famous Haunted Charles Gate Hotel building in Back Bay while he attended Emerson College, which owned the building at the time. He said his particular experiences are some of the most quoted. "'How many coincidences does it take? Before you go, something unusual is going on here,' he said. But other investigators simply followed an interest." Paranormal investigator Chris Pittman, 41, started investigating UFOs in high school when he joined some UFO study groups, which eventually led him to start investigating other types of phenomena in the Triangle, believing that they were connected. "'I think there's a lot of hubris in the assumption that we know everything about the world around us, especially when people in every community are consistently reporting experiences that seem to fall outside of our understanding,' he said. "'There's something compelling about claims of the paranormal, even if we don't believe them. The fact that the witnesses insist their fantastic-sounding accounts to be factual is itself worthy of attention.'" Jeff Bellinger, 46, writer and researcher for the Travel Channel's Ghost Adventures and co-creator of PBS's New England Legends, got into the paranormal as a newspaper reporter seeking out future stories about hauntings. He said he was quickly hooked and moved into working for TV as well as writing books and podcasting about his research. Investigating the paranormal means asking the biggest questions humans have ever asked. What happens after we die? Are we alone in the universe? Do we know every creature who walks the earth with us? He said. But no matter how they got into the paranormal, all of these investigators ended up seeking out like-minded people, often finding one another's books and websites. Many of these investigators have gone out to investigate the Bridgewater Triangle together and have tag-teamed following up on reports. It may surprise you, but most of these investigators don't care whether or not people believe in the Bridgewater Triangle. They are more interested in helping people understand their strange experiences and exploring the unknown for themselves. If someone doesn't want to listen to any account of paranormal phenomena that lacks ironclad proof, I can't blame them for that, Pittman said. These mysteries blur the line between reality, imagination and maybe more than that. It takes time and effort to sort the fact from fiction. Not everyone is going to be interested enough to try. In fact, many say it takes a personal experience to believe in the paranormal and the Bridgewater Triangle. An experience like the one Bill Russo had approximately 30 years ago to the day when he was walking his dog on Cynthia Street in Rainham after working a midnight shift at Rainham Ironworks and he came across something strange. Samantha, a German shepherd Rottweiler mix, started shaking like a washing machine. At first, Russo couldn't see or hear what was bothering her, but then it reached his ear. Care, care, I want you. That's what it said sounded like. It was a dark night, but that streetlamp made a big circle on the pavement. A circle of white light and into that circle came this creature, he said. Three feet tall, maybe four feet tall. Kind of like a stuffed animal, think teddy bear. A hundred pounds or so with a pot belly, eyes a little bit too big for his head. I always say think of a cat and then was motioning to me beckoning me with its arm or paw or whatever. At first, Russo said he thought it was a kid in a Halloween costume, but he tried to talk to it and it just kept repeating its nonsense . He said he wasn't scared, being so much larger than it, but Samantha was, so he decided to leave and go home. When he got back, he thought long and hard about the incident and eventually came to the conclusion that the creature was trying to speak to him in English. He believes it was trying to say, come here, we watch you. I'm not a paranormal guy, I don't look up in the sky, I don't watch UFO shows. I had no connection to them, nor do I now to the paranormal, he said. I was just the guy out walking with my dog who saw something that stretches credibility. Russo said he's still not sure what happened to him. But many paranormal investigators believe Russo may have encountered a puckwudgy, the legendary creature said to lure humans into the woods to their deaths. But many investigators are also not quick to use labels, using the idea of legendary creatures like Bigfoot and Thunderbirds as a reference point to talk about what was experienced. When we talk about things like another dimension or aliens, we're just kind of explaining a mystery with another mystery, Pittman said. So the reality is nobody really knows and I don't know if anybody ever will really know. And most investigators say they do question their belief in the paranormal. Belinger and Lake said they question it all the time. Pittman says he's not even sure if the word paranormal is even appropriate for what he investigates. But one thing they all agree on is that regardless of what the Bridgewater Triangle is or how it got there, there is something strange going on in and around it. While some, like Belinger and Pittman, have never experienced anything strange, many others have. Weisberg said he's been thrown against a wall and down the stairs by spirits multiple times in the Lizzie Borden House in Fall River after daring them to do so. Lake said he has seen Phantom Fires at Anahuan Rock as has Belzano, who has also experienced lots of other strange happenings in the Triangle, including losing two hours of time for apparently no reason. And as long as people keep experiencing strange phenomena in Southeastern Massachusetts, these people will be there to see if it's an everyday occurrence or something that needs further investigation. Coming up on Weird Darkness, imagine being told that starting next month there will no longer be any more weekends and that you will be working every day of the week non-stop because there is now only five days to a week. Ludacris, tell that to citizens of the Soviet Union in 1929. That story is up next. Well, hello there, it's Santa and my big night is getting closer by the day. You know, I love milk and cookies when I visit your home each year. Well, the milk can get warm while waiting for me to arrive and a warm toddy is not the best thing to drink if you plan on staying alert and flying around the world. So this year I'm asking that you instead leave me a plate of cookies and a nice hot thermos or mug of weird dark roast coffee. It actually tastes like Christmas. It has a hint of cocoa and caramel and I've been drinking a lot of it recently to wake me up early in the morning to work on toys and take care of the reindeer. So this year, leave Santa a mug or thermos of weird dark roast coffee. Tell your parents they can find it right now at WeirdDarkness.com slash coffee. That's WeirdDarkness.com slash coffee. On September 29, 1929, the USSR had its last Sunday for 11 years. In an effort to boost productivity and eliminate religion, Joseph Stalin instituted a new Soviet calendar known as the Soviet Eternal Calendar. Under the Soviet Union's continuous working week calendar, the USSR eliminated weekends. Instead, workers operated on a five-day week. Each day, 80% of the workforce showed up to work, while 20% stayed home. Workers received a color code corresponding to their day off. Husbands and wives often worked opposite schedules, meaning families lost their shared day of rest. The move was incredibly unpopular, with one letter and Pravda complaining, What is there for us to do at home if our wives are in the factory, our children at school and nobody can visit us? The five-day week wasn't the first change to the Russian calendar, but it had the greatest impact. The new Soviet Union calendar tore families apart and wiped out religious communities. Yet one group ignored Stalin and continued to follow a Soviet Union calendar with weekends, while still taking off the new state-sponsored revolutionary holidays. Maximizing productivity was a top agenda item in the USSR. In 1929, Yuri Lahren came up with a revolutionary plan. Instead of closing the factories on Sundays, why not switch to a continuous work week? With machines running every day, the Soviets could surely meet the production goals of Stalin's five-year plan. Joseph Stalin loved the idea. By August of 1929, the Council of People's Commissars ordered a five-day work week, completely eliminating Saturdays and Sundays. The new calendar went into effect just weeks later. Known as the Nepkharivka, or uninterrupted work week, the new calendar changed life radically in the Soviet Union. Under the new Soviet eternal calendar, the USSR divided the year into five-day weeks, with six weeks in each month. The government added five holidays throughout the year to equal the 365 days. Every Soviet worker clocked in for a four-day shift each week, with one rotating day off. But the plan never considered how the staggered rest days would change life for Soviet workers. To help workers adjust to the new system, the USSR introduced a color-coded system. Each day came with a color, yellow, peach, red, purple, or green. All the green workers took that day off, while the red workers took off red days. The Soviet eternal calendar also carried new symbols for days of the week, since the Soviets no longer recognized old names like Monday or Tuesday. Instead, a red star and a military cap symbolized different days of the week. When the Soviet eternal calendar went into effect, husbands and wives were often given opposite schedules. While one spouse might have the first day off, the other might take the fifth day off. Under the system, spouses barely shared any days off in a year. After several months operating on the Soviet eternal calendar, the government finally considered granting simultaneous breaks for spouses. Families could petition the government for the same day off. But there was no guarantee of approval. Soviets complained about the five-day calendar from the beginning. Pravda, the official newspaper of the Soviet Communist Party, published a letter from an anonymous worker who criticized the system. In the letter the worker complained, what are we to do at home if the wife is in the factory, the children in school, and no one can come to see us? What is left but to go to the public tea room? What kind of life is that when holidays come in shifts and not for all workers together? That's no holiday if you have to celebrate by yourself. With husbands, wives, and children on opposite schedules, Soviet families were torn apart. One worker complained, how are we to work now if mother is free on one day, father on another, brother on a third, and I myself on a fourth. But some considered the cost to families a benefit of the calendar. Just before the new calendar went into effect, Ivan Ivanovich Schitts wrote in his diary that the continuous working week would make it impossible for people to meet as a family or join religious or political groups. He believed that eliminating these associations would bond people more closely with the state. The USSR tried to give the new calendar day's revolutionary names. One would be called trade union, another was hammer, and a third day was named sickle. They even considered names like Lenin and Soviet. But the revolutionary names never caught on. Instead, Soviets simply began to refer to the days by their number or color. The colors associated with the five-day calendar became shorthand for the days of the week. Some even marked colors in their address books as a shorthand code for which day of the week a friend had off work. Not surprisingly, Soviets soon socialized by color. A worker who only had the green day off couldn't easily maintain a friendship with someone who had the purple day off. In an entire year, two workers on different schedules would only share five days off in common. The five-day week didn't last long in the Soviet Union. After protests from workers, the government finally decided to introduce yet another new calendar. The 1931 calendar added back Saturdays, shifting to a six-day week. Under the new system, all workers took a rest day together on Saturdays, which always fell on the 6th, 12th, 18th, 24th, and 30th of the month. The six-day work week lasted for nearly another decade in the USSR. Stalin believed the new five-day calendar would boost productivity. When considering the Soviet eternal calendar, the USSR mainly emphasized factories that fell silent on the weekend, but one major sector of the Soviet economy practically ignored the new calendars. Farmers. In rural areas, farmers already worked every day of the week. There were no purple days off on farms, nor were there staggered shifts. Historian Malta Rolf reports that in 1931 almost all officials were complaining about the still-existing ties of rural people to traditional habits. However, farmers did adopt part of the Soviet eternal calendar that took off the new state holidays in addition to taking off traditional religious holidays. The Soviet efforts to manipulate the calendar and the working day didn't start in 1929. In 1928, the USSR announced a reduction of the working hours. Instead of an eight-hour day, workers would spend just seven hours at work. The shorter working day was part of Stalin's five-year plan, and in 1929 the USSR announced that all industries must incorporate shorter working hours and extra time off throughout the year. In exchange, industries had to increase production by using a three-shift system. With factories running night and day, production increased, though at the cost of workers forced to take the night shift. The continuous working week wasn't just about productivity. It was also about breaking the religious associations to the calendar. Sociologist Eviatar Zareval argues that the main purpose of abolishing the seven-day week in the Soviet Union was to destroy religion there. Without Saturday or Sunday, Jews and Christians had to completely rearrange their worship times, and with only 20% of the workforce off work on any day of the week, it was difficult to maintain religious congregations. Stalin's change to the Soviet calendar wasn't the first time the USSR tankered with calendars. Lenin also agreed to change the Soviet calendar way back in 1917. However, Lenin's change brought the USSR in line with the rest of the world. Prior to 1917, Russia used the Julian calendar, which was 12 days behind the more common Gregorian calendar that we use today. Lenin ordered the Soviets to skip 12 days in February 1918 and start the month with February 14 to catch up with the Gregorian calendar. The shift, though less major than eliminating the weekends, did alter history. Under the new calendar, the Soviet October Revolution actually took place in November. Stalin finally admitted defeat in 1940. On June 26, 1940, he reinstated the seven-day week. Sundays were once again holidays. However, in order to meet its strict productivity goals, the USSR passed harsh penalties for tardy or absent workers. Those who missed one day of work or came to work more than 20 minutes late were guilty of misconduct and faced mandatory time in prison. The return of the weekends may have come at too high a cost for some Soviet workers. Thanks for listening. Feel free to drop me a note anytime with your questions or comments. You can email me at daron. You can also find all of my social media on the contact page of the website. If you want to help the podcast, be sure to subscribe if you haven't already done so, and leave a review of the show in the podcast app you listen from. But more important than anything, please share the podcast, tell somebody about it, somebody who loves paranormal stories, true crime, monsters, or mysteries like you do. 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 real Nicholas Flamel and the Philosopher's Stone is from Wizarding World. The eerie inhabitants of the mysterious Bridgewater Triangle was written by Susanna Sudburrow for South Coast Today and Wicked Local. The hateful thing of Geldiston is from Stacia Briggs and Seal for Connor for Eastern Daily Press. And What Is Life in a Five-Day Week was written by Genevieve Carlton for Weird History. And now that we're coming out of the dark, I'll leave you with a little light. Proverbs 20, verse 3. It is to a man's honor to avoid strife, but every fool is quick to quarrel. And a final thought, faith is not the belief that God will do what you want, it is the belief that God will do what is right. Max Locato. I'm Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness. And their immortality is all down to this supposed alchem- and their immortality is all down to his supposed alchem- alchemical. His legendary reputation has certainly made him immortal. His legendary reputation has certainly made him immortal. Whatever it is met in any locality, it is a sign that some great and unusual horth- it is a sign that some great and unusually horrible wickedness is about to be committed or has just taken that it is a sign that some great and unusually horrible wickedness is about to be committed or has just taken place there. Through your stories you not only help humanity sidetrack from their day-to-day accent. Keep up the good work you're doing. Keep up the good work you're doing. Keep up the good work you're doing. Something for people that's a huge missing link in social structure today. You're there when they need you and you always offer… Dagnabbit. He has been spotted all over the world, but photographic evidence is lacking, as is any 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 Hey Weirdos, be sure to click the like button and subscribe to this channel, and click the notification bell so you don't miss future videos. I post videos seven days a week, and while you're at it, spread the darkness by sharing this video with someone you know who loves all things strange and macabre. If you want to listen to the podcast, you can find it at WeirdDarkness.com.