 ads heard during the podcast that are not in my voice are placed by third-party agencies outside of my control and should not imply an endorsement by Weird Darkness or myself. 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, the strange and bizarre, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and unexplained. Coming up in this episode. The Anatomy Act of 1832 allowed doctors, anatomy lecturers and medical students greater access to cadavers and allowed for the legal donation of bodies to medical science, but the act would never have come to be had it not been for a series of murders committed in order to sell corpses. After being confronted with his crimes, Wesley Alan Dodd claimed that death was the only way to make sure he never committed those crimes again. Pauline Picard's family thought that their missing daughter had come back home, but then a body was discovered. You might not believe in fairies, but you might if one kept calling your name. On April 22, 1920, seven members of the Wolf family were buried. Their murders were the start of a bizarre and bloody series of events that still reverberate in the Turtle Lake North Dakota area today. October is a spooky month already thanks to our celebration of Halloween, but even outside of October 31st, the month has had some horrifying events take place and we'll look at just a few of them. An eight-year-old hears whispers in the dark, but then it becomes even more terrifying. You may be average in every way, average in height, income, attractiveness, but something must be special about you if you are continually being abducted by aliens. We'll begin with that story. Plus, I have many other stories in this episode. If you're new here, welcome to the show. While you're listening, be sure to check out WeirdDarkness.com for merchandise, my newsletter, to enter contests, to connect with me on social media. 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. It sure has a funny way of telling us there is still a lot we don't know about the world around us. The Old Man of the Lake is a mysterious tree trunk that has defied the laws of physics for 120 years. Floating in Crater Lake, the deepest lake in the United States, one can say the 30-foot-long tree trunk is not very eye-catching at first sight, but it has sparked the imagination of many people nevertheless. It was discovered in 1896 by Joseph Diller, a geologist and explorer who extensively studied Crater Lake at the time. Diller was fascinated by the Old Man of the Lake and described it as a spectacle curious enough to excite the imagination. The first written account of the Old Man appeared in 1902, the year Crater Lake was named a national park. The Old Man's curious behavior resulted in several scientific studies. The tree trunk can travel miles in a single day. One day it can be close to the shore and the next day it is in the middle of the lake. In the 1930s, the government commissioned a study of his movements. In their log of the log, Rangers observed the Old Man move more than 60 miles in less than three months. This was not a very good idea though. In the 1980s, Mark Buktencia, an aquatic ecologist for the National Park in Southern Oregon, was part of a submarine exploration of Crater Lake. To avoid running into the Old Man out in the water, they tied him up on the shore. Bad idea. It wasn't long after he was tied up that a storm blew in. Buktencia recalled, and the surface of the lake got too rough for us to deploy and recover the submarine. When it started to snow in August, superstition got the best of the scientists. Our senior scientists went out quietly one evening and released the Old Man from his bondage, he said. And wouldn't you know it, the weather cleared up right afterwards. What is truly intriguing about the Old Man of the lake is that the tree trunk has been floating upright ever since, standing about 1.2 meters or 4 feet tall above the surface. You would think that the 4 foot above the water would act as a little sail, but sometimes they'll move all the way across the lake against the wind, Buktencia said. Though the Old Man in the lake has been floating in Southern Oregon's Crater Lake National Park for at least the past 120 years, carbon dating suggests that it is at least 450 years old. Crater Lake has been the subject of Native American legends and several spooky stories. A Native American legend tells that an epic battle occurred one night in Southern Oregon 7,700 years ago. Standing atop Mount Mazama, spurned by the daughter of a local chief, Lao, god of the underworld, spit magma and shot superheated steam miles into the sky. Skell, god of the world above, fought back by pitching pyroclastic fireballs from California's Mount Shasta, blowing the massive summit of Mount Mazama to bits. By dawn, Lao was driven back underground. Skell honored the victory by filling the massive caldera with water, creating Oregon's Crater Lake. Since then, streamed stories have hovered above the area like a chilly northwest fog. People have spotted ghostly campfires on uninhabited Wizard Island, and visitors to Crater Lake Lodge still tell stories of eerie occurrences in the night. Crater Lake is some 592 meters or 1,943 feet deep, making it the deepest in the United States and the ninth deepest lake in the world. What makes Crater Lake different is the fact how relatively empty it is. According to the U.S. National Park Service, fish are not native to the lake, and the species that exist there now were introduced between 1888 and 1941. Six species were originally introduced, but only two have survived, Rainbow Trout and Cocony Salmon. Crater Lake's clean, cold water is responsible for preserving the tree trunk in such good condition. But why does it defy the laws of physics? Scientists think the higher density of the submerged part is keeping it balanced. Basic physics states that a floating object of uniform density will always have its center of mass as being higher than its center of buoyancy. That means a long log will float with its axis in a horizontal orientation and a short log will float vertically. The old man is 9 meters long, 30 feet, with a diameter of about 61 centimeters or 2 feet. This suggests it should be floating horizontally, but it doesn't. Instead, it floats vertically. Why this is the case remains unknown. There are some theories. One possibility is that when the tree slid into the lake more than a century ago, rocks had become tangled up in its roots. But there are no rocks there now, so it seems the theory does not explain the old man's behavior. All across the world, there are a number of natural formations that defy physics. Another example is an intriguing structure that can be found in India. Known as Krishna's Butterball or the mysterious Stone of Sky God, this 250 ton rock stands on less than a 4 foot base. How is it possible? Maybe Albert Einstein was right when he said the most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. One night when I was 12 years old, I had left my bedroom window open all night as our house didn't have any kind of air conditioning and it was very warm. At around 2 in the morning, I heard a very loud husky voice speak to me. I looked out of the window but saw absolutely nobody out there. I remember thinking that I was just dreaming. The next day I woke up very late in the afternoon and in the hospital. My parents said they found me unconscious outside on the lawn at 4 in the morning after hearing a loud bang. The bang they had heard was me jumping off the shed. The funny thing is that there is no way to get on the roof of the shed without a ladder and we did not have one. I told them what I had heard but they didn't believe me and said that I was making up a story to cover the fact that I had tried to kill myself. I was allowed home about a week later and was put on medication. That night I woke up unable to breathe. My little brother who was 6 at the time came to my room because he had heard noises. He walked in and screamed intruder. My parents then rushed in but whatever my brother had seen was gone. My parents were again angry thinking that I was staging something. Two nights later I heard that low inaudible voice again. It was like in a movie when a bomb explodes next to a person and they are partly deaf. My parents got up and came to my room with my brother all covering their ears. They all heard it too. They walked in and were trying to talk to each other but no one could hear anything but that stupid inaudible voice. They sat down on my bed and my door slammed shut. The voice stopped and everything was eerily quiet. My dad opened the door and almost everything in the house had moved. We moved out of the house a few days later. I haven't had anything happen since. I used to live in a bed-sit that a friend had lived in a couple of years earlier. She had moved to another city. She was really into her music, dancing and playing guitar. One night I brought a guy I had just met back to the bed-sit. In the morning he told me he had woken up and seen a woman dancing through the room. He said she had long blonde hair but with one side of her head shaved. He told me that she had gone next door. This described my friend perfectly and since her best friend used to live next door it also fit that she would be heading next door. I rang her to make sure that she was okay. She was fine but just a little freaked to hear that her ghost haunted my bed-sit. Many years ago when I still lived with my parents in Ohio I worked a 20 minute or so bus ride away in a neighboring town. Coming home one evening on a really miserable, cold and raining winter night the bus gradually emptied as the passengers got off at each stop. Although my stop certainly wasn't at the end of the line, by the time I pressed the bell and got up and stood by the driver I noticed the bus was completely empty. Nobody hiding or lying down in the seats I had passed them all as I came down the bus. I stood swaying holding on to the pole and looking back down the empty bus chatting to the driver. I was the last one to get off. The bus came to a stop outside our house and I climbed off but for some reason I again looked back before leaving and the bus was still empty. As the doors closed and the bus slowly moved past me there sitting two seats behind where I had been sitting was a little old man complete with hat on his head. I watched the bus pull away and I still don't know how he got there. He looked as real as anyone else. My mother and I were home alone one day and in different rooms of the house. She was in her bedroom in the attic and I was on the second floor in my room. All of a sudden my cell phone started to ring and it said, Mom. I picked it up and said, Hey, what's up? Do you need something? I waited for a response but there was nothing but dead air. A few seconds went by and then I heard a very eerie whisper but I couldn't make out what she was saying. So I said, What? Mom, are you okay? Again there was no response until a few seconds later. I heard a woman whisper, The attic in a really creepy voice. Then there was static and the phone hang up. It gave me chills. I then went upstairs to check on Mom. When I got to the top of the steps I looked to my right and saw that my mother was on her bed sweating like crazy and gasping for air. She couldn't breathe. She has asthma and she was having an asthma attack at that very moment. I looked through her drawers to find her pump and when I found it I gave it to her. After a few minutes she was able to breathe normally again and I asked her if she had just called me before I came upstairs. She said no and gave me a weird look and said how could I have called you if I couldn't breathe? Besides my cell phone battery is dead so it's been off for a few hours. Once again I got the chills. Who could that have been on the phone telling me to go to the attic and how could they have known my mother was having an asthma attack at that moment? That same day when I told her about the phone call she was pretty scared and told me to help her move her furniture and other things to the empty bedroom on the second floor. A time for pumpkin patches, autumn celebrations and of course Halloween. But it's not all fun and games this time of year. From a horrific fire to a tidal wave of beer here are seven October events that created ghosts. On October 2, 1942 the RMS Queen Mary accidentally rammed and sank her escort ship the HMS of Curicoa as she carried over 10,000 troops to Europe. More than 200 men died in the collision and now Queen Mary staff and visitors reportedly hear strange sounds coming from the ship's bow. The eerie noises include rushing water, tearing metal and anguished screams. On October 7, 1849 renowned author Edgar Allen Poe died four days after he was discovered deliriously wandering the streets of Baltimore. No one knows how Poe got into that condition or what caused his unexpected death. Though Poe might be gone, some people believe the author still lurks around his former home at 203 North Amity Street. Several people have reportedly felt taps on the shoulder but saw no one when they turned around. One guest was spooked when a window sash appeared to fly across the room and land at his feet. On October 8, 1871 the deadliest wildfire in recorded history swept through Pestigo, Wisconsin. Strong winds stoked what was initially a controlled burn, creating a firestorm with superheated flames reaching 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Many people fled to a nearby river but died of hypothermia in the frigid waters. Those left behind burned alive. All in all, between 1,500 and 2,000 perished in the flames. Legend has it they haunt the area today. Locals tell stories of shadowy figures that drift across streets and roam across the lands that once made up Pestigo. Other tales speak of glowing red lights in the cemetery where many charred victims were buried. At times, a thick, blue fog also blankets the area. Paranormal investigation teams have collected several EVPs near the old cemetery. In one, an anguished voice seems to scream, it burns. After a two-day trial, French Queen Marie Antoinette was convicted of high treason and guillotined on October 16, 1793. Legend has it the infamous Antoinette now haunts the palace of Versailles. In 1901, two sisters visiting Versailles claimed to have wandered away from their tour group and traveled back in time. One woman reportedly saw Antoinette sketching in a garden and a woman's time-travelling tale soon became known as the Mobilejordain Incident. However, Marie didn't just appear to the sisters. Several other visitors have claimed to see the Queen's Ghost in the palace gardens. Strangely, the erstwhile monarch has also been spotted at a home in Maine. On October 17, 1814, enormous vats ruptured at London's Moe & Company Brewery and sent nearly 1.5 million litres of beer gushing into the city streets and nearby homes. The wave of beer killed at least eight people, and rumor has it one of them still lurks around the area today. In January 2012, a photo surfaced on the internet. The couple took the photo at Dominion Theatre, which now stands on the site of the old brewery. The two speculate that the pale woman behind them is the ghost of Eleanor Cooper, a young barmaid who drowned in the beer flood. On October 20, 1977, a plane carrying rock band Leonard Skinnerd crashed in a remote forest near Gilsburg, Mississippi. The accident killed three band members, including lead singer Ronnie Van Zant. But is Ronnie really gone? Legend has it, Van Zant haunts Free Bird Live, a bar and live music venue owned by his widow. According to an article in the Florida Times Union, a staff member left a full bottle of Jack Daniels whiskey on the counter one night, but returned the next morning to find it empty. Jack Daniels was one of the musicians' favorite drinks. Kristen and other employees believe Ronnie drank the liquor to show them he was still around. King Henry VIII's third wife, Jane Seymour, gave birth to a much-longed-for son on October 12, 1537. Sadly, she died just 12 days later on October 24, 1537. Now the former queen reportedly haunts Hampton Court Palace, searching for the infant she left behind. Jane's former apartments aren't open to the public today. However, some visitors and staff say they've seen the queen's ghost ascending a set of stairs on the anniversary of Edward's birth. During these annual appearances, Jane reportedly wears white and clutches a candle as she climbs the stairs. The ghostly queen doesn't interact with the living or seem aware of their presence in any way. She simply walks up the stairs and disappears. Coming up, a woman finds that her pregnancy tends to attract the paranormal. A boy visits a friend's house for the summer and is confronted by the hat man. You might not believe in fairies, but you might if one kept calling your name. And after being confronted with his crimes, Wesley Allen Dodd claimed that execution was the only way to make sure he never committed those crimes again. Plus, you may be average in every way. Average in height, income, attractiveness, but something must be special about you if you are continually being abducted by aliens. That story and more when Weird Darkness returns. In the film, a man takes $20 from his employer to go on a date, planning to replace the money the next day. But he falls increasingly into more disastrous circumstances and further in need of more money, and it spirals out of control. Join us Friday, February 9th for Quicksand. It's free to watch online and you can chat along with the rest of us weirdos as we watch the movie together. The show begins at 8 p.m. Eastern, 7 p.m. Central, 6 p.m. Mountain, and 5 p.m. Pacific. You can watch a trailer for the film and watch horror hosts and schlocky B-movies anytime, day or night, on the Weirdo Watch Party page at WeirdDarkness.com. 1950s Quicksand, starring Mickey Rooney and Peter Laurie. Friday, February 9th on the Weirdo Watch Party page. This story takes place a few years ago. I was 8 years old and I was scared of the dark. I always told my parents that I could hear voices in the dark. I would scream until they left the light on all night. The voices were not necessarily evil, but they did scare me. Even with the light on in the middle of the night, I would wake up and hear whispers as I would call them when telling my mom. She figured they were just my overactive imagination. One morning around Christmas, I awoke and felt the need to use the bathroom. I walked out from the door and distinctly heard a voice say, Look! I saw a red light almost like a spotlight flashing at the bottom of the stairs. There was no explainable source for the light. Being a little kid, I began walking down the stairs to see what it was. That's when I heard him. A very strong voice which was totally different from the first. Not at all like my dad's. It said, Stop right now! Go back up those stairs. After reaching the top of the stairs, I heard a very loud bang that sent me running back to my mother's bed where I jumped straight under the covers and stayed there the whole night. When we awoke the next morning, the lights my mother had put on the railing down the stairs were pulled straight down to the bottom of the stairs, some broken and laying in a single pile. My mother could not explain it. There was nothing missing, nobody had broken in. There did not seem to be any reason this had happened. I still think about this occurrence quite often, but I do not hear the voices anymore. Was I being protected from beyond the grave? I would like to think so. This past summer, my husband and I were tending a baby shower for our new baby to be. We were staying at my parents' house. There are three entities that reside in my parents' house. This incident took place with an older male spirit who is rarely seen but often felt. The feeling you get from him is one of fear. Even as a child, I remember being afraid of this spirit. We were sleeping in the spare room that is in my parents' basement, and I could feel him staring at us from the corner of the room while we were sleeping. I had to lay facing towards the wall because I could not turn my back on him. We got little sleep while we were there. I would just lay in bed and stare into the corner. I was so scared. I thought that after that first night he would leave us alone and go back to his place in the other room, but he did not. We were there for a total of three nights, and he was in the corner each night, just watching us. I am not sure if it was just me in my pregnancy or what about this visit was different from others, but he definitely made himself known. Has anyone else had more experiences while being pregnant? In 1998, I was 14 and was spending the summer with a friend and her family in Idaho. At first, everything was perfect and I was very happy sleeping alone in my own room on the third floor. Five nights into my stay, though, I started to wake up every night. Standing in front of me at the foot of my bed stood a man looking down at me. I couldn't really see anything. All I saw was a bright white outline and it looked like he had a hat on his head. He would just stand there and stare at me. I would just turn around and stare at the wall and hope he would disappear. I never turned around to see if he had gone away. Eventually, I told the father of my friend, who was a pastor about it, and he prayed for me and told me I should open my Bible at night, so I did. The first morning I woke up to find my Bible was closed, which was very weird. Then the second night I took four heavy things and put them on the corners of my Bible. But the next morning, the Bible was closed and had been knocked to the ground. The next night I did it again with bigger and heavier things. But the next morning I woke up and the Bible was torn on the outside. I just left it where it was and moved out of the room. It never happened again. This chilling story happened when I was around 15 years old. My grandmother would spend a lot of time in my room trying to keep it tidy. She was a clean freak. One day I came home and found her staring into my closet. She wasn't moving at all. It was like she was suspended in the middle of cleaning the closet. I asked her if she was okay, but she totally ignored me. My 85-year-old grandmother just continued to stare into the closet. Suddenly she turned her head slowly toward me and gave me the coldest of stares. She had the evilest eyes I had ever seen. A chill ran up and down my spine. Those were not my grandma's eyes, I thought. Then she looked away from me and walked into my closet, closing the door behind her. But when I went to my closet, she wasn't there. She had literally disappeared into thin air, completely gone. I froze for a few seconds. Then I yelled for her and heard her say, I'm down here in the kitchen. Dinner's almost ready. I ran to the kitchen to find her standing there cooking away. Then I asked her if she was here the whole time. Of course I was, dear. Dinner's not going to make itself, she laughed. I mean, she had no idea what had gone on upstairs. What did I find in my bedroom that day? I still have no idea. It was the fall of 1978. I was driving in the northern part of Virginia and I was in a very remote area where the hills rolled gently and there were no homes, barns, fences, riding trails, or another motorist. I was really enjoying the scenery when I drove around a curve and there on the left side of the road, about half a mile ahead, was a horse with a rider. As I drove closer to the horse and rider, I noticed what the man was wearing, a full Confederate uniform with sleeve markings indicating a high rank officer. His uniform consisted of the gray and color pants, jacket, and full belt dressing with sword, a sidearm, black hat, riding gloves, and riding boots. As I drove past slowly, I waved and he tilted his hat. I will never forget the expression on his face. It was one of confusion and interest. Being a Civil War historian, I was actually very surprised and enjoyed the experience. This person and his horse seemed as real as I would to you. I could not understand why someone would be dressed in this fashion in the middle of nowhere. He happened to be dirty enough for me to notice from several feet away. His beard looked wild and his hair was longer than the hat would cover. That is when I decided it must be a ghost. This is the only thing that made sense to me. Once I found a place to make a turn, I drove back and there was no trace of the person. In November 2011, I took my brother Greg to the ER. I was directed to the waiting room while they took an initial look at him. It was very early in the morning, around two or so, and unsurprisingly no one else was in the waiting room, so I had a seat to wait on until I could go back. I had been sitting for a while when a young woman came in and sat down near me. We smiled at each other and I started talking. After a while, a nurse came by, looked over at us, and stopped. Looking at me, the nurse asked if there was something wrong. I answered, No, we are just talking. The nurse looked at me as if I was crazy. Then she said, There's no one in here but you and me. I looked over at the young woman who was still sitting there smiling sadly to see her just slowly vanish. When Leah recounted her alien abduction story in 1993, Leah lived in Prince George's County, Maryland, worked at a bank, and was engaged to be married. She was thin with blue eyes. She was, in her words, average looking and average in every way. Knowing that most people react with scorn and ridicule at the mention of UFOs and extraterrestrial life, she asked that her last name not appear with her story. I used to think I belonged in a mental institution to be honest with you, she says. But I don't think any more than I am crazy. I go to school, I work full time, I pay my bills like anybody else. I think other people think I'm crazy. The subject of abductions by other worldly beings is so far out, so utterly fantastic, that most people even today cannot begin to fathom it. Many will not take it seriously. It is unbelievable, unthinkable. Imagine how Leah felt in 1993. What's really happening? No one knows for sure, but one thing is clear. Something has shattered Leah's and others calm, secure existence on planet earth. Whether the rest of us accept or reject their stories is irrelevant. We cannot assuage their fear. It is palpable. The torment is real. Leah's torment began when she was in the fourth grade. She remembers clearly. She was outside her apartment in Prince George's County, playing with her sisters and other children. It was dusk. They heard a hum or a buzz like a swarm of bees. They saw a disk-like object, wingless, silver-gray, a row of lights along the edge creeped at treetop level over the apartment complex. It hovered above a parking lot between buildings and then drifted away. Leah and her sister ran inside to tell their parents. The girls even drew pictures. My father wanted to call somebody, Leah says, but my mother said, no, we had made it up. But all of us saw it. We talked about it for days at school. Shortly after that, Leah says the recurring nightmare began. She dreamed it on and off for a decade from when she was 10 until about 20. Dreams are only part of her story. When she was 12 or 13, she and her sister, who is two years younger, were staying at their grandparents house in St. Mary's County. They were in separate beds in the same room when a ball of lightning, as Leah describes it, passed through a window and curtain into the room. About the size of a tennis ball, it glided between the beds, bounced off a door, and vanished. A couple seconds later, another lightning ball did the same thing. And then another. Leah says there might have been 20 in all. For a long time afterward, Leah feared she was losing her mind. But then, five years ago, she and a friend were at a mall outside a bookstore. Leah spotted a display of books, the covers of which featured a drawing of a grotesque creature with big, black, almond-shaped eyes. The book was Communion, a true story. The writer, Whitley Stryber's account of his abductions by aliens. Leah pointed at the drawing and screamed, Oh my God! Oh my God! That's them! That's them! They were the creatures in her nightmare. That's when it registered, Leah says. That's when I said, Wait a minute, something's going on here. It was the first she had heard of abductions by space creatures. She read the book, and then a couple of others on the subject. She became convinced that the terrifying events, the nightmares, the night of the lights, perhaps other unexplained events as well, had been abductions. As we are aware, Leah was not alone. Over the past few decades, hundreds of credible abductees have come forward and detailed their ordeals. The phenomena occurs in various forms and intervals, as Leah was about to find out. Strange things continued to happen to her. While visiting friends in the West Virginia mountains, she was floated out of the house, taken aboard a spaceship and handed a baby. It was a boy with a leathery skin, a thin neck, and an oversized head with patches of red hair. It had huge eyes, she says, but they weren't cold black like those of the adult aliens. They were blue. I don't know why, and I know this sounds strange, Leah says in a voice trembling with emotion, but as soon as I held him in my arms, I knew he was mine. I felt like I was his mother. She rocked him and talked quietly to him, she says, as several aliens watched. Leah hesitates and says almost apologetically, I know this doesn't make any sense. Even though she had trouble sleeping and often felt as if she was being watched, she says she has kind of gotten used to the idea of being abducted. I don't like it, but there's nothing I can do about it as far as I can see, she says. If they were going to hurt me, I think they would have done it a long time ago. She knows what the skeptics say, but she says they don't give people enough credit for knowing the difference between what's actually happened to them and what they might have imagined. Leah says she was never abused as a child. She says she has no reason to make up a story so crazy and bizarre. Why does she think the aliens chose her? I have no idea, she says. I don't know who they are, where they come from, what they're doing, nothing. I just want people to understand that this is real, this is happening, it's out there and you're going to have to accept it sooner or later. And Leah's ordeal continues. I can preface this a little, by saying my home province of Newfoundland has lots of stories about fairies. This took place when I was about 15 or 16 years old. My friends and I wanted to build a place in the woods where we could go smoke cigarettes and drink beer without having to worry about getting caught. It wasn't going to be anything fancy, just somewhere to sit and maybe not get wet. The work was going well. We'd used materials that weren't needed, found and stolen, but my friends ran out of nails. I still had a pocket full. My friends told me that they were going to leave to look for more, leaving me behind alone and trying to get a little more work done. I was by myself for maybe a half hour and I started to feel like I was being watched. I stopped working and looked around. I didn't see anything and all I could hear was the rolling of the waves against the shore. I went back to work and I heard someone, something, call my name. I yelled out for my friends to see if they were on their way back. I got no answer. I sat down to get a drink and I heard someone call my name again. By now, I was starting to feel pretty anxious. I tentatively called out to my friends again and again and I got no answer. Then I heard my name again as if someone was beckoning me to follow. I had heard plenty of stories of Ben getting lost in the woods because they heard a voice calling their name. Being sufficiently creeped out, I decided that I was going to leave to find my friends. Just as I threw my backpack on my shoulder, my friends showed up. I cursed them out for trying to scare me, but they swore they had no idea what I was talking about. And then, all of a sudden, there was a deafening blood-curdling scream. I looked at my friends and saw that they had heard it too. We grabbed our backpacks and ran out of the woods, leaving the tools and materials we gathered behind. We never went back to that spot. And I still shiver at the thought of the scream we heard. One afternoon in 1989, Wesley Allen Dodd walked into the bathroom of a movie theater in Camus, Washington. There, he spotted a five-year-old boy. A few moments later, Dodd grabbed him and started moving towards the door. As Dodd walked out of the theater with the boy in his arms, the child started crying. The theater employees immediately became suspicious when the boy started fighting to get out of Dodd's grasp. When the boy began screaming for help, they knew that they were witnessing an abduction and ran after Dodd. Realizing that he was not going to get away with the abduction, Dodd released the boy just outside the theater and ran to his car. Meanwhile, the employees told the child's mother and her boyfriend, William Graves, that her son had almost been abducted. Graves immediately asked for a description of Dodd's car and took off on foot after him. Luckily, he found the car had broken down just a few blocks from the theater. Pretending to offer help, Graves approached Dodd and put him in a head luck. Graves then physically hauled Dodd back to the theater where other witnesses bound Dodd's arms with a belt as they waited for the police to arrive. Once in police custody, Dodd started to talk. The incident in the movie theater wasn't the first abduction. There had been many others, and not all the victims had been as lucky as the boy in the movie theater. After three days of questioning, Dodd confessed to having murdered three children. Armed with a search warrant, police searched Dodd's room in the town of Vancouver, Washington. Inside, they found photographs of one of the murdered children, Lee Isley and the boy's underwear. Nearby was a homemade torture rack and a diary containing a meticulous record of the murder. With this evidence, the detectives could close the book on at least three murders, but the question remained, who was Wesley Allen Dodd? Wesley Allen Dodd grew up in Washington in a somewhat troubled home. Dodd was a shy child, but he also seemed to have a dark sexual compulsion to expose himself to other children, something he began doing at just 13 years old. But exposing himself wasn't enough, and Dodd began molesting his younger cousins and neighborhood kids. At 15, Dodd was arrested for one of those molestations. Due to his youth, though, the police declined to pursue charges and recommended he get counseling instead. Dodd continued molesting children for the next several years. In 1981, he joined the Navy. He was discharged after his superiors discovered he was molesting children on the base. This time, he served only 19 days in jail and was ordered to undergo counseling again. The counseling had no effect on Dodd's compulsion to harm children, and he fell into a routine of molesting children, being caught and being released with a slap on the wrist. But his sexual desires continued to grow darker over the years. Dodd wrote in his diary about a desire to not just molest children, but to murder them. Darker still, he began writing about the possibility of performing medical experiments on his victims to turn them into zombies he could victimize or will. In September 1989, Dodd lured Cole and William near 11 and 10 respectively to a wooded area. There, he forced them to undress and tied the boys to a tree. He then began molesting them. When he finished, he stabbed the boys repeatedly and fled the area. Both boys died of their wounds soon after. A month later, Dodd lured four-year-old Lee Isley to his apartment. He kept Isley overnight molesting him while taking photographs. He wanted to wait to kill Isley so that the body would be fresh enough to perform experiments on. In the morning, Dodd strangled Isley and hung his body in the closet before leaving for work. When he returned, he took the body down and disposed of it in trash bags, keeping the boys' underwear. The body was soon discovered, sparking a manhunt for the killer. Dodd, meanwhile, stayed in his apartment, making plans for future murders and constructing a rack on which to torture his next victim. This was the planned fate of the boy at the movie theater two weeks later. Fortunately, he was apprehended before he could claim another life. In court, Wesley Allen Dodd refused to speak in his own defense, claiming it was pointless. He requested, instead, that he be executed by hanging the same way his last victim died. He stated that he hoped that it would bring peace to his victims' families. Dodd seems to have understood that the system had failed to stop him too many times before. He was confident that if he were to be released, he would kill again. It is hard to say how sincere Dodd's remorse was, but he clearly wanted to be executed. Dodd actively resisted any attempt to appeal his execution. I must be executed before I have an opportunity to escape or kill someone else, he said. If I do escape, I promise you I will kill and rape again and I will enjoy every minute of it. In the end, Dodd got his wish. He was executed by hanging in 1993, the first judicial hanging in the US since 1965. The technique was now so unfamiliar that the executioners had to use an army manual from the 1880s as a guide. Dodd's last words were a statement that he had found God, and other child molesters could change by doing the same. Wesley Allen Dodd stated a desire to help stop people like him from offending. And in a way, he did. Shortly after Dodd's crimes came to light, Washington passed some of the toughest laws in the nation against sex offenders. One can only hope that in some way, the tragic fate of Dodd's victims helped save the lives of other children. When Weird Darkness returns, the Anatomy Act of 1832 allowed doctors, anatomy lecturers and medical students greater access to cadavers and allowed for the legal donation of bodies to medical science. But the act would never have come to be had it not been for a series of murders committed in order to sell the corpses. And on April 22, 1920, seven members of the Wolf family were buried. Their murders were the start of a bizarre and bloody series of events that still reverberate in the Turtle Lake, North Dakota area today. But first, Pauline Picard's family thought their missing daughter had come back home. But then, a body was discovered. That story is up next. The song White Christmas used to be one of my favorite holiday tunes, until the year of the ice storm. One December, Robin and I heard a loud crash outside. Not only did the ice cause a large tree to fall onto our house, but it ripped out the power lines. We were suddenly in sub-freezing temperatures with Jack Frost nipping at our noses thanks to zero heat or electricity. Talk about baby, it's cold outside. If this happened today, I'd be hooking up my Patriot power generator 2000X. This solar-powered monster can power your lights, TV, medical equipment like my CPAP machine, even keep your refrigerator running, and possibly root all snows, although I can't vouch for that last one. Plus, it's expandable and comes with a free solar panel, so you can begin using it immediately. And because it's solar and portable, you can use it indoors, without having to worry about deadly carbon monoxide fumes, and you don't have to spend money on gasoline to power it, because solar power is free. That's something even Ebenezer Scrooge could smile at. WarPatriots.com has a ton of great gift ideas, and they're always offering special deals, and we've set up a special page for weirdos just for that purpose. Visit WarPatriots.com slash weird. That's the number for Patriots.com slash weird. Just like the holidays, though, these deals never last long, so you'll want to check this daily to see what the latest special deals are. That's WarPatriots.com slash weird. The terror of a parent whose child has vanished is hard to imagine. Is it possible that parents in that situation could convince themselves of anything to avoid the horror of the truth? That may be the only explanation for the strange disappearance of Pauline Picard. Pauline was only two years old when she disappeared from her family's farmhouse near the rocky end of Brittany in France in 1922. Volunteers scoured the countryside to no avail. Then two weeks later, when hope was nearly lost, word came from the town of Cherbourg 250 miles away that a little girl had been found wandering alone. The Picards raced to Cherbourg. They recognized their daughter immediately and embraced her. But oddly, the little girl did not seem to recognize her parents. What's more, she did not respond when spoken to in Breton, the regional dialect spoken by the Picards at home. And there was no explanation of how a toddler had managed to travel 250 miles. But neighbors back in Brittany accepted the girl as Pauline, as did the police officer who accompanied her from Cherbourg. Her strange behavior was put down to trauma. Questions were pushed aside and life returned to normal. But then there was a gruesome discovery. The badly decomposed body of a little girl was found not far from the Picard farm. The area had been thoroughly searched, so it appeared someone had put it there recently. The body was naked and the head was severed. The girl's clothes were folded neatly near the body. They were the clothes Pauline had been wearing when she disappeared. Newspapers from around the world wrote about the dark twist, including the New York Times. Adding to the mystery, local reports claimed the skull discovered with the body was not that of a little girl at all, but a grown man. The Picards accepted the grisly discovery as proof that their biological daughter was dead. A month later, the little girl who had lived with them was sent to an orphanage. The Picards never learned what happened to their daughter, the police never found her killer, and the fate of the mysterious little girl found wandering in Cherbourg is lost to history. In contrast to the increase in numbers of executions in the wake of the bloody code, the Judgment of Death Act 1823 saw the number of crimes punishable by death in Britain drop dramatically. Good news in theory, but since medical and anatomical schools were only legally allowed to dissect the bodies or cadavers of those who had been condemned to death, this led to an extreme shortage of dead bodies available. However, the financial compensation offered by medical schools meant that some unscrupulous types soon found a way around this shortage of bodies, leading to a rash of grave robbing by those known as resurrectionists. Instances of grave robbing became so commonplace that relatives were known to watch over the recently dug graves of their dearly departed and watchtowers were installed in cemeteries across the land. The fresher the body, the more money it was worth. Thus, it didn't take long before grave robbing graduated to anatomy of murder, murder committed with the sole intention of providing the remains for medical research and attracting a monetary reward. The most infamous were the Burke and Hare Murders in Edinburgh, which occurred between 1827 and 1828. William Burke and William Hare both originated from the province of Ulster in the north of Ireland and moved to Scotland to work on the Union Canal. Burke having abandoned a wife and two children back in Ireland. The pair met and became close friends when Burke moved with his mistress Helen McDougal to lodgings in Tanners Close in the west port area of Edinburgh. Hare lived on the same street and was running a boarding house there with Margaret Laird, a widower with whom he lived as man and wife and who was also known as Margaret Hare, even though they were not legally married. The pair's first foray into the world of medical science happened in December 1827, when one of Hare's tenants, an elderly army pensioner by the name of Old Donald, died of natural causes whilst still owing £4 in rent. To cover the man's outstanding debt, the pair weighed his coffin down with tanning bark prior to his funeral and took his body to the medical school at Edinburgh University where they were swiftly pointed in the direction of Professor Robert Knox, a popular anatomy lecturer. Knox paid the duo £7 and £10 shillings for Donald's body. Encouraged by the ease with which they had made this money, the pair struck again in early 1828 when another tenant named Joseph became ill. Too impatient to see if Joseph would actually die from his afflictions, Burke and Hare took it upon themselves to help him along, plying him with whiskey and then suffocating him by covering his mouth and nose while he was forcibly restrained. This became their favourite method of execution as it left the body unmarked and undamaged for the students who were later to dissect the cadavers. In the aftermath of their killing spree, the practice became known as Birking. In the absence of any further ill tenants, the pair decided to entice victims to the lodging house, preying on Edinburgh's poorest communities who were less likely to be missed or recognized. In total, Burke and Hare are said to have murdered at least 16 people for between £7-10 apiece, although the real total is likely to be a lot higher. A local prostitute, Janet Brown, was lucky to escape with her life when she and a friend, Mary Patterson, were invited to stay by Burke. Having excused herself earlier in the evening, Janet returned to find her friend missing and was told Mary and Burke had stepped out. Having waited for her friend to return, Janet eventually decided to leave, having no idea that Mary was actually lying dead in the next room, ready to be taken to Knox and that she herself was the next likely victim. Burke and Hare soon became greedy and no one was safe. An elderly grandmother was killed with an overdose of painkillers and Hare murdered her blind young grandson by breaking the boy's back across his knee. Even a relative of Helens and MacDougall was unhesitatingly dispatched. However, with greed came carelessness. A number of Knox's students were said to have recognized Mary and two other prostitutes murdered by the pair, Elizabeth Halden and her daughter who made the unfortunate mistake of calling at the lodging house to inquire after her missing mother. The gossip was exacerbated when the pair brought in a handicapped children's entertainer by the name of James Wilson, who was well known in the city as Daft Jamie. Knox was said to strongly deny the identity of the body, but swiftly removed his head and deformed foot during the dissection. Following an argument between Burke and Hare, which was caused by Burke's suspicion that Hare and Margaret were cutting himself and Helen out of deals with Knox, Burke and Helen began to take in their own lodgers. On Halloween 1828, Burke and Hare's last victim, Marjorie Campbell Dosharty, was invited to stay with Burke and Helen on the pretense that she was a distant relation of Burke's mother. Burke's other lodgers, a couple called James and Anne Gray, were invited to stay temporarily at Hare's boarding house that evening so the murder could take place. On their return to Burke's lodging the following day, the Grays were told that Marjorie had been asked to leave because she had been flirtatious with Burke. The couple became suspicious when they were not allowed to enter the spare room where they had left their belongings and when left alone they discovered Marjorie's dead body hidden under the bed. The couple challenged Helen over their discovery and she offered them a bribe of $10 a week if they would keep the discovery to themselves. The Grays refused and reported the murder to the police. However, in the meantime, word must have reached Burke and Hare as by the time the police arrived at the premises Marjorie's body had been removed and taken to Knox. Burke and Helen and later Hare and Margaret were all arrested and gave conflicting accounts of what had taken place with Burke and Hare each blaming each other. The police investigation soon led them to Knox and James Gray identified the body found in his lecture hall as Marjorie. Having read about the murder in a local newspaper, Janet Brown later identified clothes found at Hare's lodging house as belonging to her missing friend, Mary Patterson. However, the police had little hard evidence to prove the crimes had been committed and eventually the Lord advocate Sir William Ray offered Hare immunity in return for testifying against Burke and Helen, which he was more than happy to do. The trial began on Christmas Eve, 1828 and early the following day Burke and Helen were both charged with Marjorie Dosharty's murder. Burke was also charged with the murder of Mary Patterson and James Wilson. While Helen's complicity in Marjorie's murder was deemed not proven under Scottish law and she was set free, Burke was sentenced to death by hanging. William Burke was hanged at Lawn Market in front of a boisterous cheering crowd of over 25,000 on January 28, 1829 and fittingly perhaps, after being put on public display, his body was donated to medical science. A number of anatomy students took ghoulish souvenirs of his skin, even using it to bind books and card holders. Burke's skeleton is still on display at Surgeon's Hall in Edinburgh next to his death mask and the life mask of Hare's face. Despite his obvious involvement in the murders, his accomplice, Hare, was released in February 1829 and escaped across the border in New England. No one knows definitively what happened to Hare, but it has been rumored that he was thrown into a lime quarry by an angry mob and lived out his days as a blind beggar on the streets of London. Both Helen and Margaret also fled Edinburgh with Helen said to have emigrated to Australia and Margaret to Ireland. And despite mass public outrage, Knox was also cleared of his involvement in the murders, as Burke claimed he had no idea where the bodies had come from. His reputation and ruins, Knox moved to London to try and salvage a career in medicine. The Burke and Hare murders, followed swiftly afterwards by the 1831 murders, committed by the London Burkeers and Bethnal Green, led to the Anatomy Act 1832, which allowed doctors, anatomy lecturers and medical students greater access to cadavers and allowed for the legal donation of bodies to medical science, effectively calling an end to the illegal body snatcher trade. On April 22, 1920, seven members of the Wolf family were buried. Their murders were the start of a bizarre and bloody series of events that still reverberate in the Turtle Lake, North Dakota area today. That story when Weird Darkness returns. Nothing goes better with chocolate than vanilla, and nothing goes better with the darkness than vampires, so we have combined all of them into a new blend of weird dark roast coffee called Very Vampilla. This bloody good blend combines a medium dark roast coffee with hints of chocolate, vanilla and just a tad bit of dried cherry too. So good, you'll want to sink your fangs into the fresh roasted bag itself. Weird dark roast Very Vampilla, the only thing at stake, sorry, not sorry, bad pun, is your diss satisfaction with your old coffee. Sip it while the sun is down if you're one of the undead, or when the sun is up if you just feel dead and need a bit of a boost. Get your Weird Dark Roast Very Vampilla at WeirdDarkness.com slash coffee. That's WeirdDarkness.com slash coffee. On April 22, 1920, seven members of the Wolf family, along with their stable boy, were buried in a windswept cemetery in Turtle Lake, North Dakota. The entire family, except for its youngest member, an eight-month-old daughter named Emma, had been slaughtered by an unknown assassin. The unlucky stable boy, Jacob Hofer, had been at the wrong place at the wrong time. The murders were the start of a bizarre and bloody series of events that still reverberate in the region today. Three weeks after the murders, a neighbor named Henry Layer confessed to the crime, but questions remain as to whether or not he actually killed the Wolfs. Layer's confession to the police was both bizarre and terrifying. He said that he had gone to the Wolf farm to speak to Jacob Wolf about one of his dogs that was attacked by Layer's cows. Wolf became very hostile, ordered him off the property and loaded his shotgun. There was a scuffle and the shotgun went off killing Jacob's wife, Beetta, and the stable boy, Jacob, who had been standing nearby. Jacob began to run and Layer, finding the shotgun in his hands and two people dead, shot Jacob in the back and killed him. At the sound of the shots, daughters Maria, nine, and Edna, seven, ran into the barn. Layer followed them there and killed them. He then returned to the house and found the remaining Wolf children, Bertha, twelve, Lydia, five, and Martha, three, hiding in terror. He shot and killed the older girls and then bludgeoned Martha to death with a hatchet. He hid the bodies of the children that he killed in the house by dragging them down to the cellar. The others were stashed away in the barn and sloppily covered with straw and dirt. Then, seemingly without a care in the world, Layer returned to work on his farm. The bodies were discovered two days later. A neighbor noticed that the Wolf's laundry was still hanging on the line to dry and went over to check on the family. He discovered the gruesome scene and found poor baby Emma still alive in her crib, but weak from cold and hunger. The crime would become North Dakota's most horrific mass murder. More than 2,500 people attended the funeral for the family and their stable boy, even though Turtle Lake's population at the time was only 395, minus the eight lost souls. Henry Layer's strange behavior began at the funeral. He opened all eight of the caskets and looked at the faces and confessed to the murders. He claimed the only reason he didn't kill Emma was because he didn't know that she was there. He was sentenced to spend his life in prison and he died behind bars in 1925. But was Layer's confession the truth? Did he really kill the Wolf family as he claimed? Once in prison, Layer's story changed. He now said that he was innocent and that his bizarre behavior was merely caused by the terrible grief that he felt over his neighbor's deaths. The police had coerced his confession, he said, beaten him into signing a statement. He often wept, claiming to be innocent and would cry, Oh my children, my children. Many believed his claims of innocence and questions are still asked about the Wolf murders today, leading a number of historians to believe that the murders were never solved. The Wolf family was buried in the Turtle Lake cemetery. There was one large tombstone on their plot that reads in German, the Murdered Family. Every member of that tragic family is buried beneath that ground except for one. The orphaned Emma was raised by her aunt and uncle and went on to live a long life, dying at the age of 84 in 2003. She never forgot how lucky she had been on that cold day in April 1920 when she was permanently separated from a family that she was never able to know. Thanks for listening! If you like the show, please share it with someone you know who loves the paranormal or strange stories, true crime, monsters or unsolved mysteries like you do. And please, leave a rating and review of the show in the podcast app you listen from. You can email me anytime with your questions or comments at Darren at WeirdDarkness.com. Darren is D-A-R-R-E-N. WeirdDarkness.com is also where you can find all of my social media, listen to audiobooks that I've narrated, shop the Weird Darkness store, sign up for monthly contests, find other podcasts that I host, and find the Hope in the Darkness page if you or someone you know is struggling with depression or dark thoughts. Also on the website, if you have a true paranormal or creepy tale to tell, you can click on Tell Your Story. You can find all of that and more at WeirdDarkness.com. All stories in Weird Darkness are purported to be true unless stated otherwise, and you can find source links to most of the stories in this episode in the show notes. Weird Darkness is a production and trademark of Marlar House Productions, copyright Weird Darkness 2022. And now that we're coming out of the dark, I'll leave you with a little light. Luke 6, verse 35. But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great and you will be children of the most high because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. And a final thought, it's great to be happy, but it's even better to bring happiness to others. I'm Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness.