CURSE OF THE BLACK AGGIE: Baltimore's Most Famous Ghost and America's Most Notorious Statue
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There are many ghostly legends involving haunted, glowing and moving gravestones in America. While these tombstones can certainly be strange and even a little spooky, there are few that can be as eerie as the baleful stare of a piece of graveyard statuary. Many of these monuments are nothing more than the peaceful, angelic forms of heavenly messengers. But look into their cold, stone eyes for just a moment.

Is there something hidden there, lurking just below the surface? Or is that shadowed gaze just the work of the weather as it beats down on the figure year after year? Graveyard statuary runs the entire gamut between beautiful and frightening. During the early part of the century, craftsmen were given free rein to express themselves in cemetery art and create sculptures that included seductive angels, surrogate mourners, and even the deceased themselves.

Many of these sculptures have gained a reputation for being something other than just the ordinary artwork of a cemetery. But few of them have gained the kind of fearsome reputation enjoyed by the legendary Black Aggie. 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 story of Morrow Road is one of Michigan's oldest and most enduring legends. There are so many versions of the legend, but all of them contain two disturbing elements: a missing child and a ghostly mother desperately looking for him.

But the tragedy doesn't end there, as there have been some harrowing experiences for those who've gone searching for the spectral mother. Asylum 49, formerly the Tula Hospital in Utah, is a place where the lines between the living and the dead blur in terrifying ways.

Half-abandoned medical facility turned haunted attraction, half-functioning retirement home, this schizophrenic building is home to spectral nurses, mischievous child spirits, and a sinister man in black. And not just for the Halloween season, but all year round. The old hospital's haunted reputation has even drawn ghost hunters and mediums who claim it hides a portal to another dimension.

A family moves into a new home, only to find they aren't alone. Items began disappearing, then reappearing later. The lights would turn on and off on their own. Typical poltergeist activity. But when they started to do renovations to the home, the paranormal activity escalated, and after some investigation, they found their ghost had a very sad story to tell.

But first... If you came of age in Baltimore during the 50s and 60s, you probably heard the talk about Druid Ridge Cemetery's most famous grave marker. Just about everyone knew about Black Aggie, the statue of a draped, melancholy and mysterious woman seated at the Agnes family plot in the south-facing side of the cemetery in Pikesville.

Word was that her stony eyes turned red at night. Sit on her lap at midnight and you would meet your own end within two weeks. Teens, often fueled by beer and bravado, traveled to Druid Ridge at night to test the rumor. It was terrifying, exhilarating, and the stuff of Baltimore urban legends for years. By 1967, she had disappeared. We'll look at the legend of Black Aggie.

Now, bolt your doors, lock your windows, turn off your lights, and come with me into the Weird Darkness. I first heard about Aggie when I was about 11 years old. I ran across a few paragraphs about her in a book about ghosts, and the author recounted every legend that had been told about her in the Baltimore area.

I never imagined that I would see her for myself after I heard that she had vanished without a trace from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. Many years later, though, I decided to try and find out what had become of Aggie, and I began to learn that her story, while not as evil as I have been led to believe, was perhaps even stranger than the eerie one that was originally told.

Most people believe the story of Black Aggie, as she would come to be called, began with the death of General Felix Agnes, the publisher of the Baltimore American in 1925. However, the real story began many years before with the death of a woman named Marion Adams and a sculpture that was created for her resting place by Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Saint-Gaudens was a premier American sculptor of the Beaux Arts period of the late 1800s,

Before his death in 1907, he created some of the country's most honored works, including the figure of Diana that once topped Madison Square Garden, the $20 Double Eagle gold piece, and monuments to American heroes and statesmen like Lincoln and Sherman. One of his lesser-known pieces was for a memorial to Marian Adams, the wife of Henry Adams.

Marion, who was called "Clover" by her friends, had fallen into a dark depression after the death of her father in 1885. In December of that year, she committed suicide by drinking potassium. Henry Adams plunged into a deep depression after the death of his wife. In search of comfort, he traveled to Japan in June 1886 with his friend, artist John Lafarge.

When he returned from his trip, he decided to replace the simple headstone that he had ordered for his beloved clover in Washington's Rock Creek Cemetery with a more elaborate memorial. He turned to St. Gaudens and asked him to create something with an Eastern feel to it, perhaps combining the images of the Buddha with the work of Michelangelo.

The endeavor took over four years, frustrating Adams, but creating what some called one of the most powerful and expressive pieces in the history of American art, before or since. It was placed in the cemetery in 1891, and Adams was delighted with both the design and the setting. St. Gaudens called it "the mystery of the hereafter" and "the peace that passeth understanding."

But it became known as the Adams Memorial, and later by the more popular name of "Grief." The stories for this nickname vary. Some say that the statue was dubbed this by St. Gaudens himself, and others say Mark Twain, who viewed the memorial in 1906, coined the name. The placement of the memorial started a new round of speculation and rumor about the death of Marian Adams and her husband's strange reaction to it.

He had discovered her body collapsed in front of the fireplace in their Lafayette Square home in Washington, D.C. He never discussed the circumstances of her suicide, and when Adams wrote his autobiography, Marion was never mentioned. As time passed, he spent less and less time in their former home, and neighbors began to claim that it was haunted.

At dusk, they reported the sounds of the woman weeping inside the dark mansion, and even after it was sold, later residents claimed to experience a persistent cold spot in front of the fireplace. They could never explain this, especially when the fireplace was piled high with burning logs. Another story claimed that the apparition of Marion could sometimes be seen sitting in a wooden rocking chair in her old bedroom.

It was said that she often appeared in front of several witnesses at one time, and a terrible feeling of loneliness would overwhelm each of them. In moments, the ghost would simply fade away. Stories have persisted about the house even today. Strangely, Marion's grave monument was something of an enigma itself. Henry Adams refused to ever speak publicly about his wife's death and would never officially name the monument.

He also refused to acknowledge its popular nickname. Thanks to Adams' silence and the fame of his esteemed political family , many became curious about the monument. Adams furthered this curiosity by refusing to have an inscription placed on it and by placing it behind a barrier of trees and shrubs.

The challenge of finding it only fueled public interest, first by word of mouth and later in guidebooks and magazine articles. The grave became a popular site for the curious, especially as the statue was so unnerving to look at. It was so fascinating that it became the subject of an audacious piracy by a sculptor named Edward L. A. Posh,

It would be from the original Adams design that the sculptor created his own unauthorized copy of "Grief" in the early 1900s. The statue would later come to be known as the infamous "Black Aggie." Within a few months of the statue being placed on Marian Adams' grave, Henry Adams reported that someone had apparently made a partial casting of the piece.

He wrote to Edward Robinson in 1907, complaining that "even now the head of the figure bears evident traces of some surreptitious casting, which the workmen do not even take the pains to wash off." Strangely, the copy would go on to become more famous than the original. General Felix Agnes purchased the posh copy of the sculpture in 1905, perhaps after having admired the original work at the Adams grave.

Why he decided to use the copy to grace his family tomb instead of commissioning an original work of some sort is unknown, but perhaps something about the posh statue compelled him to own it. We will never know for sure. Felix Agnes was born in France in 1839. At the age of only 13, he traveled around the world and at 20 fought in the army of Napoleon III against Austria, later serving with General Garibaldi's forces in Italy.

In 1860, he came to New York and went to work as a silver chaser and sculptor at Tiffany's. When the Civil War broke out, he enlisted as a private in the Union Army and began a war record so incredible that he was promoted to the rank of Brigadier General by the age of 26. He saw action in dozens of battles, including Big Bethel, Richmond, the Siege of Port Hudson, and the Battle of Gaines Mills.

He was wounded more than 12 times by both bullet and saber. His friend, writer H.L. Mencken, later quipped that Agnes had so much lead in him that he rattled when he walked. After a severe shoulder injury at Gaines Mills, then-Lieutenant Agnes was brought to Baltimore for treatment. There he met Charles Carroll Fulton, the publisher of the Baltimore American newspaper, and his daughter Annie, who nursed Agnes back to health.

Bolton had met the young officer at the Pratt Street Pier when the medical streamer docked and had taken him to his home for care and rest. When the war was over, Agnes returned to Baltimore and asked Annie to marry him. She quickly accepted. After that, Agnes continued his remarkable career, working briefly in the Internal Revenue Office, then as consul to Londonderry, Ireland for the United States Senate.

He later retired from this position to take over for his father-in-law at the newspaper. He remained the publisher of the newspaper until his death. In 1905, Agnes began construction of a family monument in Druid Ridge Cemetery. It was during this time that he purchased "Black Aggie," the copy of "Grief," and then had a monument and pedestal created that would closely match the setting of the Adams Memorial in Washington.

The first burial at the site was that of the General's mother, whose body had been brought over from France. A year later, Augusta Homer St. Gaudens, the widow of the artist Augustus St. Gaudens, sent a letter to Henry Adams to inform him of the poor reproduction that had been done of Grief and which was now resting in Druid Ridge. There was nothing they could do legally about the theft of the design, so Mrs. St. Gaudens traveled to Baltimore to see the site for herself.

she discovered a nearly identical statue, seated on a similar stone but with the name "Agnes" inscribed on the base. She also noted that the stone was a nondescript gray color and not the pink granite of the original. The Baltimore site also did not have the bench and the rest of the stonework as the original Washington gravesite had.

After seeing the site, Mrs. St. Gaudens declared that General Agnes must be a good deal of a barbarian to copy a work of art in such a way. Agnes quickly responded and claimed to be the innocent victim of unscrupulous art dealers. The artist's widow then requested that he give up the sculpture and file suit against the art dealers. Strangely, Agnes did file suit and won a claim of $4,500, but he refused to give up the copy of the statue.

The General's wife, Annie, died in 1922, and Agnes himself died three years later at the age of 86. He was also laid to rest at the feet of the monument, and shortly thereafter, her legend was born. While the Agnes Monument seemed innocent enough in the daylight, those who encountered the statue after darkness fell gave her the nickname "Black Aggie,"

To these people, she was a symbol of terror, and her legend grew to include an occasional feature story in the local newspaper. And of course, she was whispered about in the private conversations of those who believed in a dark side. Where else could you find a statue whose eyes glowed red at the stroke of midnight?

The legend grew more fantastic, and it was said that the spirits of the dead rose from their graves to gather around her on certain nights, and that living persons who returned her gaze were struck blind. Pregnant women who passed through her shadow, where strangely grass never grew, would suffer miscarriages. A local college fraternity decided to include Black Aggie in their initiation ranks.

Not really believing the stories, the candidates for membership were ordered to spend the night in the cold embrace of Black Aggie. The stories claimed that the local fraternity initiates had to sit on Aggie's lap, and one tale purports that she once came to life and crushed a hapless freshman in her powerful grasp. Other fraternity boys were equally unlucky.

One night, at the stroke of midnight, a cemetery watchman heard a scream in the darkness. When he reached the Agnes grave, he found a young man lying dead at the foot of the statue. The story goes that he died of fright, but no records exist to say whether or not this story is true or merely another part of Aggie's eerie legend. One morning in 1962, a watchman discovered that one of the statue's arms - the one with a hand tucked under her chin - had been cut off during the night.

The missing arm was later found in the trunk of a sheet metal worker's car, along with a saw. He told the judge that Black Aggie had cut off her own arm in a fit of grief and had given it to him. Apparently, the judge didn't believe him, and the man went to jail. However, a number of people did believe the man's strange story, and almost every night, huge groups of people gathered in Druid Ridge Cemetery.

The public attention gained by the news story brought the curiosity seekers to the grave, and the strange tales kept them coming back. Were the stories told about Aggie merely urban legends and eerie tales about a spooky piece of graveyard art? Some thought so, while others weren't so sure.

One man that I was able to interview, who we will call Frank, grew up in the New Jersey area and became intrigued with the stories of Black Aggie, especially after a strange event that took place in the early 1950s. Was it just a coincidence or something more? One night, Frank and two of his friends came down to Baltimore from Atlantic City for a visit. They wanted to see some young women that they'd met while the girls were in New Jersey on vacation.

The group decided to go sightseeing, and one of the stops they made that night was to see the legendary statue of Black Aggie. The young women took them to the cemetery and told them a story or two about the monument. Frank and his friends walked over for a closer look, curious to see, as the girls told them, if anyone had placed coins in Aggie's lap for good luck, as was the local tradition.

They didn't find any coins, but Frank's friend, Freddie, thought it would be funny to snuff out his cigarette on Aggie instead. "We told him not to," Frank later recalled, "but Freddie just laughed. He didn't believe any of that stuff." About ten years later, Freddie was found in a dump in South Carolina. He'd been shot in the back of the head, mafia-style. They never found out who did it. Frank paused for a moment and appeared thoughtful.

It's been many, many years now, but I will never forget the feeling that I had standing in front of Aggie that night. As if she knew the future and could see what lay ahead for us." Other lurid tales brought many listeners and the Agnes gravesite began to be trampled by teenagers and curiosity seekers. Although Pikesville, where Druid Ridge is located, was fairly remote at the time, the site was visited and vandalized by hundreds or perhaps thousands of people over several decades.

In addition to the statue's arm being damaged, hundreds of names and messages were scrawled on the statue, the granite base, and the wall behind it. Today, these have been sandblasted away, although some evidence of the vandalism sadly remains. Cemetery groundskeepers did everything they could to discourage visitors, including planting thorny shrubs around the monument. But they failed to keep people away,

There is no indication as to why the cemetery was not better patrolled at night, but perhaps they just couldn't afford it. For every trespasser arrested, dozens of others managed to reach the site. A fence surrounds the grave of the Agnes family today, but back then the cemetery was wide open, especially at night. Eventually, the number of nighttime visitors and the destruction they caused became too much for the cemetery to handle.

By the 1960s, it had gotten so bad that the descendants of Felix Agnes elected to donate black Aggie to the Maryland Institute of Art Museum. However, this move never took place, and the statue remained at her resting place for one more year, until 1967. On March 18, the Agnes family donated Aggie to the Smithsonian Institution for display.

For many years, this donation would prove to be quite an enigma for researchers who attempted to track down the whereabouts of Black Aggie. According to the Smithsonian, they didn't have her. Despite some people recalling that Aggie was displayed in the National Gallery for a brief period, officials at the Smithsonian claimed they had never displayed her at all.

Conspiracy theorists smelled a rat and believed that perhaps she was simply placed in storage rather than put on display because of her cursed past. "Maybe, just maybe," wrote a columnist for the Baltimore Sun, "they're not taking any chances." The real answer would not be as strange. Somewhere along the line, the staff at the Smithsonian gave Aggie away, which explains why she does not appear in their records.

They had no interest in displaying her and instead gave her to the National Museum of American Art, where she was put into storage and never displayed. For years, she would remain in a dusty storeroom, shrouded in cobwebs. Until a few years ago, when Black Aggie would rise from the dead. In 1996, a young Baltimore-area writer named Shara Ter-Jung did a story on Black Aggie for a small newspaper.

After having been long fascinated with the legends, she became determined to track down the statue's present location. Finally, shortly after Halloween, she got a call from a contact at the General Service Administration who was able to discover where the elusive Aggie had ended up. The statue can still be seen today at the Federal Courts Building in Washington, in the rear courtyard of the Dolly Madison House. Black Aggie may be gone from Druid Ridge Cemetery,

but she is certainly not forgotten. "We still have people coming to Druid Ridge, asking for Black Aggie all the time," said one of the cemetery spokesmen in an interview. "I don't think there's a week that goes by when we don't get a call about it." The Agnes grave site is well cared for today, and shows little sign of the desecration of the past. Grass grows now in the place where for many years it could not.

The only lingering evidence of Black Aggie is a chipped area on the granite pedestal and a faint shadow where she once rested. At least, that's the only lingering presence that can be seen. Some say there's more. Who knows? Whether the Agnes gravesite was ever haunted or not, Black Aggie has left an indelible mark on not only Druid Ridge Cemetery, but the annals of the supernatural in America as well.

Up next... Asylum 49, formerly the Tula Hospital in Utah, is a place where the lines between the living and the dead blur in terrifying ways. Half-abandoned medical facility turned haunted attraction, half-functioning retirement home, this schizophrenic building is home to spectral nurses, mischievous child spirits, and a sinister man in black. And not just for Halloween, but all year round.

The old hospital's haunted reputation has even drawn ghost hunters and mediums who claim it hides a portal to another dimension. That story when Weird Darkness returns.

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If a building could ever be described as being schizophrenic, then that building would be the old Tooele Hospital. Located in the city of Tooele, less than an hour's drive from Salt Lake City, one half of the building is an abandoned medical care facility that has been turned into a fright-based haunted house attraction. The other half is a fully functional retirement home for senior citizens.

The fact that these two wildly different worlds are able to coexist in relative harmony is surprising, to say the least. The only thing that separates them is a single doorway between the new wing and the old one.

Originally built in 1873 by a man named Samuel Lee, the building was a family residence for 40 years before passing into the hands of the county in 1913 when it was pressed into service as a care home for senior citizens and those with special needs. Its nickname during that era speaks volumes, as locals referred to it as the County Poorhouse.

Mr. Lee and his young son Thomas are said to be just two of the many ghosts who haunt the corridors and bedrooms of this historic old structure. At approximately seven years of age, Thomas is said to be a playful and mischievous though harmless young spirit who takes great delight in playing games with the flesh-and-blood staff and residents of the nursing facility, not to mention those who visit its haunted house alter ego in the hopes of getting a good scare.

After closing its doors as a hospital for the last time, the old building has had occasional brushes with fame by serving as a TV and movie set, including the acclaimed TV miniseries adaptation of Stephen King's The Stand, where it stood in for the very real Boulder Community Hospital during filming.

Entrepreneur Kim and Cammie Anderson created the medically-themed Halloween-style haunted house known as Asylum 49 in 2006, complete with its own ambulances, which are sometimes crewed by demonic-looking paramedics and doctors. It also doesn't hurt in the least bit that the building sits directly adjacent to the local cemetery.

Starting out with an extremely skeptical attitude, the Andersons quickly became convinced that their new investment was a haunted house in more than name only. A number of psychic mediums have visited throughout the years and have made some remarkable claims about the place.

Perhaps the most intriguing one is that the old Tula Hospital contains a portal to another dimension, over which a ghostly nurse named Maria is said to stand guard, warning away the spirits of newly deceased residents from taking the wrong path into the afterlife. A far more disturbing aspect of the haunting is the reported presence of a frightening man in black,

This shadow figure, said to be malicious, is seen wandering the hallways after dark and is a source of great trepidation for those who have encountered him. This shadow man is most commonly seen at 3 o'clock in the morning. Nurses have witnessed this apparition walk across the hallway and pass directly through a closed door, which turned out to be a locked room from the inside.

Getting no answer from the patient inside the room, the frightened night duty nurse summoned a maintenance team to remove the door from its hinges. Both the nurse and the maintenance van were shocked to find that the occupant of the room, who had been visited by the black shadow figure, had died earlier that night. The ghost of a young girl has also been seen. At first, she seemed localized to one specific conference room in the condemned hospital wing,

But when the Asylum 49 haunted house opened its doors for business, customers often claimed that the scariest part of the attraction was the young girl who followed them around from room to room. Staff didn't always have the heart to tell them that there was no young girl working at Asylum 49.

Perhaps the most frightening aspect of the haunting of this former hospital is the belief commonly held by the nursing staff that the appearance of this ghostly young child presages the death within the building. In 2011, Zach Bagans and his Ghost Adventures crew spent the night locked down in Asylum 49, where they experienced what appears to be some fascinating potentially paranormal activity.

When Baggins and his crew interviewed the current nursing home staff on camera, these trained medical professionals were not shy about recounting their own ghostly encounters within the building. For example, the sound of what the staff presumed to be an escaped patient was heard walking back and forth across the roof at 4:30 one morning, which was completely empty.

A team of local paranormal investigators named the Utah Ghost Organization, who were conducting an EVP session in the building, received a Class A EVP Class A EVPs are the best and clearest possible type of electronic voice phenomenon, believed to be the voice of a deceased person, which clearly stated the name of an X-ray technician who used to work at the hospital.

This finding was eerily mirrored by the Ghost Adventures crew during their own night at the Tula Hospital when they also received a Class A EVP, which quite clearly said the name "Zack Baggins." The Ghost Adventures boys also captured what they believed to be a hostile, verbally abusive male voice growling at them in one of the Asylum 49 rooms and then later speaking directly into Baggins' ear.

Similarly, crewed EVPs were recorded on the team's digital voice recorders. A high-pitched female scream was also picked up by the Ghost Adventures team, in addition to a forlorn, almost childlike moan which was captured on an old-style reel-to-reel analog tape recorder. Using heat-sensitive thermal imaging cameras, Baggins and his team also captured an intriguing heat anomaly, which came into view and then disappeared almost instantaneously.

Also recorded on camera was a ball that was being used as a control object, which subsequently rolled down the corridor toward their locked-off video camera. Baggins believed that this could have been a manifestation of the two childlike shadow figures that he had seen standing right next to him, playfully moving the ball around for fun. During their lockdown, the Ghost Adventures crew also witnessed doors slamming inside empty rooms,

Footsteps were heard in deserted hallways, and investigator Aaron Goodwin claimed that he was grabbed on the hip by an unseen hand. Baggins theorized that the old hospital is now basically a ghost manufacturing factory, especially considering the fact that elderly inhabitants are still passing away there on a regular basis.

Whether you buy into Zach Bagans' theories or not, there is no doubt that something strange and mysterious is afoot inside Asylum 49. The following is a first-hand account from author Richard Estip. Kim and Cami Anderson were more than willing to let me and a couple of fellow investigators from my team, the Boulder County Paranormal Research Society, spend a night there and take a look at the place first-hand.

On a bright and sunny Saturday morning in May, we loaded up our trucks and took Interstate 25 north out of Colorado. Our little two-vehicle convoy headed west through Wyoming and into Utah, putting more than 500 miles of empty prairie behind us in the rearview mirror. When we hit Salt Lake City, ominous gray thunderclouds were hanging low in the sky.

No sooner had I thought that it might rain than the heavens opened and fat drops of rain started to splatter across my windshield as I drove the final leg of the journey into Tula. So many scary movies and stories begin with "It was a dark and stormy night," but it's rarely true of my real-life paranormal investigations. Tula was very much the exception.

Pulling into the parking lot at Asylum 49, it felt like the perfect night for something paranormal to manifest itself. Because the daylight was starting to melt away into the gloom of twilight, we wasted no time pulling out our cameras and circling the entire building, snapping photographs of the exterior.

Working our way to the rear of the structure, we came upon some abandoned medical office buildings and then a very neatly kept cemetery. The same one that I had seen Zach Bagans interview Kim Anderson in during the Ghost Adventures TV episode. A disembodied hand clawing its way up out of the ground gave me the shock of my life until I realized that it was nothing more than a latex prop, the sort that can be bought at a Halloween store. We left it for the next unwary traveler to enjoy.

Kim Cami and their staff were warm, friendly, and very welcoming. Kim was hard at work on construction of the building. Asylum 49 is a constant work in progress, as the Andersons strive to make it better and better with every passing season, but took a break to fill us in on some of the background to the case. Cami escorted us on a tour throughout the building, pointing out the areas of interest and the specific haunted hotspots.

Starting with the north wing, we turned a corner that led into the maternity area. Only to come face to face with a life-sized human centipede. Three dummies, positioned nose to tail in the most disturbing way. I'm not gonna lie, I jumped halfway out of my skin when I saw it. "We go where other haunted houses don't dare," Cammy laughed.

She wasn't kidding. During the course of our tour, we encountered a crashed UFO, complete with a snarling alien crew and eggs that oozed slime; a disturbing array of surgical oddities, such as dismembered bodies sewn together in a sinister tableau that looked as though they had been pieced together by a deranged anatomist; and evil experiments conducted by a surgical team from hell upon an unwilling, bed-bound victim.

All of this was barely scratching the surface. I don't want to give away all of Asylum 49's spooky secrets, but suffice it to say that it's not a place for the faint of heart. We heard about the impressions given by a number of mediums and people claiming psychic abilities to have visited Asylum 49.

The resident spirits, they said, included at least one doctor and nurse, a pair of little girls named Tabitha and Sarah, and one adult spirit who is both deaf and unable to speak. Cami has personally seen the apparitions of Tabitha, the doctor and the nurse.

I should mention that during this interview with Kim and Cammie, we were standing in the same location that doubled as the baby ward of Boulder Community Hospital in the TV miniseries adaptation of Stephen King's "The Stand." Something that my inner geek found to be extremely cool.

"This hospital was sort of known as the hospital of death," Cammy said bluntly. "Nobody would come here if they could help it, for a combination of reasons. This is a small town, and the hospital was built mainly because there are a lot of military bases around here." The Andersons have been running a haunted house in the city of Tula for a decade now.

"All the spirits here know what we do," explained Cami as she led us deeper into the building. "They like to peek in and sometimes be a part of the show. Sarah especially likes to scare the customers. I see her every year. She looks like the girl from the movie The Grudge, very pale with dark brown hair." Kim broke in to describe some of the evidence that he and Cami have gathered during their time running Asylum 49.

He believes that the reason for them being able to gather such a wealth of fascinating results is that the Andersons have built and nurtured a relationship with the paranormal residents of the building, particularly because they both spend so many of their waking hours inside there doing renovation work.

While conducting his own amateur ghost hunt with some friends and family, a Serbian friend of Kim's captured an extraordinary photograph in the main hallway late one night containing what appeared to be the form of a man at the end of an empty corridor. "I can see you!" the ghost hunter exclaimed. "What is your name?" The voice box that he was carrying immediately piped up with "My name is Robert."

Robert happened to be the name of a shadow figure that was well-known by the Asylum 49 staff to haunt that very same hallway. But Robert isn't alone, and the figure captured by the Serbian's digital camera isn't him. When zooming in to blow up the facial features, they appear to be somewhat unnatural in appearance, as though the man's wearing a mask of some kind.

In fact, the features looked decidedly clown-like, an opinion that Kim went on to voice several times after the picture was taken. Accompanying a medium through the building one day, Kim was not thrilled to hear that there was a spirit lurking in the hallway that was less than happy with her. "The spirit says that you make fun of him," the medium continued. "He says that you call him a… a clown or something."

"The clown guy!" Kim suddenly realized. "His face looks like that because of how he died," explained the medium. "He died in a fire." Shadow forms and figures are nothing new at Asylum 49. They crop up regularly on both the in-house security video system and the cameras brought by visitors. One particularly chilling piece of video footage was taken in an area of the building that has been informally dubbed the "scary hallway" by Asylum 49 staff.

A shadowy figure can clearly be seen lurking at the back of a guided tour group as it makes its way along the corridor, a ghostly hanger-on captured for posterity by a video camera. Passing through what had once been the patient rooms, I made the observation that the beds looked old enough to have been the original hospital beds, which Cami confirmed.

The Andersons both feel that because there are still residents at the hospital, the spirits who have remained there, they would like to retain as many of the fixtures and fittings as possible. For instance, one of the rooms is haunted by the ghost of an older lady who likes to stimulate EMF meter readings when a deck of cards is brought out. In the central hallway, from which many of the rooms branch off, paranormal investigators have captured video footage of a shadowy figure walking into one of the rooms

We stopped at the door to the room, which is said to be haunted by a patient named Wes, who suffered from the cruel and debilitating conditions known as Alzheimer's and schizophrenia. A visiting medium stated that this particular ghost was still earthbound due to the fact that he died in a state of confusion. Although if true, that would beg the question of why the millions of people who die in a state of confusion do not remain behind as ghosts.

I told Cami that my fellow paranormal investigators and I do not believe in provocation as a means of stimulating an interaction with ghosts due to its disrespectful nature. However, we do favor encouragement, inviting them to touch us somewhere, for example. She cautioned us that Wes and some of the other residents of Asylum 49 have been known to respond by scratching and pinching overly provocative investigators.

I pondered this warning thoughtfully as I stood outside Wes's room, looking at the pencil sketch of him drawn by one of the visiting psychics. A placid-looking older man, the bald head, and a level gaze stared back at me from that drawing that was placed outside his door. The former doctor's lounge was known for having an inhospitable atmosphere, reinforced by the fact that on one occasion when Cammie was vacuuming, a voice had barked at her to "get out."

Moving into the X-ray room, we heard of the resident spirit there, a former technician who had worked at the hospital during its heyday and despite not having died on the premises, seemed to have returned to the place he loved working at after his death. The tech had given his full name to investigators in the form of an EVP, which I heard for myself and found to be extremely compelling.

A check of records corroborated this man's name. "This is an intelligent facet of the haunt that loves to interact with living visitors of Asylum 49, and it is far from the only one. This is the Guardians area," Cammy said, referring to the part of the hospital that was close to the entrance doors. "We pushed our way through what seemed like hundreds of trash bags suspended from the ceiling, making a dark and claustrophobic maze.

This room had been the MRI chamber when the hospital was still open. He's big, he's grumpy, and he'll mess with you a lot, especially your equipment. For example, when Jay from Ghost Mine was here, his K2 meter was in the red all the time. There are no electrical sources back here to explain it. We believe that the Guardian could be behind the physical attacks on investigators that have taken place in this area.

Entering the mirror maze, we were surrounded by reflections of reflections of reflections of ourselves on every surface, and warned about the resident male ghost that liked to grab female visitors on inappropriate parts of their body. Cami showed us a photo taken by a female visitor to the maze, which, though nothing unusual had been seen at the time, showed what looked like faces and figures staring back from the depths of one of the mirrors.

It would be easy to dismiss them as pareidolia, the brain's tendency to see human faces and forms in natural patterns of light as they play across surfaces, but the level of detail was a little too sharp for my liking. Unsurprisingly, although paranormal activity takes place at Asylum 49 all year round, it is at its very height during late October, when the commercial haunted house is in full swing.

Hordes of visitors, eager to experience the thrills and chills cooked up by the Andersons and their dedicated staff, bring along with them a tsunami of emotional energy - something upon which the spirits seem able to draw. In the 2014 Halloween season, more than 38,000 visitors came through the doors of Asylum 49, and that is a lot of energy.

Kim had rolled a number of hospital beds out into the hallway shortly before opening the doors to the public, placed mannequins on each one, and covered the fake bodies up with white sheets. This created a rather creepy hallway of cadavers. Satisfied with his work, Kim was just about to head over to the main entrance to get the evening rolling when he stopped suddenly.

There, standing in the doorway of patient room number two, was the apparition of a little girl. He could see her as plain as day. The girl was completely solid, wearing a full-length lace dress. Long brown hair fell down over her shoulders. The girl had both hands over her eyes and she was crying. Kim could not only see her, he could hear her sobbing. "It's not fair! It's not fair!" the girl repeated over and over again.

Sarah was putting in an appearance. This little girl usually manifested in either the nursery or, like tonight, patient room number two. She liked to hide in a nook between the rocking chair and heater in the nursery and had been seen there by quite a few staff and visitors to the old hospital over the years.

Engaging her in conversation, despite the outlandishness of the situation, Kim was told that Sarah was unhappy because she wanted to join in with the colorfully clothed, blood-splattered actors who were about to scare the patrons halfway out of their wits. Thinking quickly, Kim asked the ghostly little child to hide underneath the beds out in the hallway and snatch at the feet of the passersby.

Notting her agreement, Sarah then faded to black and disappeared before Kim's astonished eyes. "Still to this day, I get huge bumps every time I talk about her," he told me with a visible shudder. From that point on, Asylum 49 staff would catch glimpses of a black mist moving from bed to bed to bed in that very same corridor.

Our own night there turned out to be rather interesting. Although nothing of note was captured during an EVP session that we conducted in Wesley's room, we did get strong K2 EMF meter hits in there when I offered to share my turkey sandwich with him, and also when a colleague asked him about his sports team preferences. We tried another EVP session over in the nursery where Sarah likes to hang out.

Once again, although no paranormal voices were recorded, our REM-POD-EMF meter would go crazy, lighting up over and over again, as if in the presence of an unseen energy source of some kind. There were no artificial power sources that could have explained it, and the entire group had switched our phones off at the beginning of the investigation. The reason for the REM pod's anomalous behavior has still not been satisfactorily explained.

Back in the days when Asylum 49 was a functioning hospital, the boardroom was the place in which decisions both large and small were made concerning the hospital's future. Now, row upon row of white-cloaked, hooded figures sat in church pews, staring back at my team and me as we clustered around the board table, which was covered with K2 meters, REM pods, and a host of other accoutrements of the paranormal investigator's trade.

Remembering a warning given by our tour guide Misty earlier on that same evening, these figures sometimes move all by themselves, I kept a watchful eye on this silent gallery of observers, while Kim told us about the two resident boardroom spirits, a pair of ghostly children by the names of Christian and Jessica.

Christian is believed to be two years old, and Jessica is thought to be seven, if what the psychic mediums have stated is accurate. Both children are extremely playful, liking nothing more than to play pranks on visitors and staff alike. My team and I listened intently to an EVP captured in that same boardroom, in which a young girl's voice says, "I'm here now."

The voice rasps in much the same way that any child does when it is play-acting a monster. Another EVP, also very easy to hear, can quite clearly be heard to say "Mom?" and "Yeah." Not all EVPs captured at Asylum 49 are quite as benign.

Kim and Cammy regularly inform visitors that before leaving, whether they have any spiritual beliefs or not, to speak with intent to any spirits within earshot and tell them in no uncertain terms they are not permitted to accompany them in their car or to follow them home. Despite that, one chilling EVP was captured in which an adult female voice quite plainly states, "I'm going with you."

Another says bluntly, "You're dead." Sobering words indeed. On leaving the old hospital under a cloudy early morning sky, I made a point to follow Kim and Cammy's advice, stating quite firmly and forcefully that nobody was welcome to accompany me on the long drive back to Colorado. It remains to be seen whether they actually listened.

Coming up, the story of Morrow Road is one of Michigan's oldest and most enduring legends. There are many versions of the legend, but all of them contain two disturbing elements: a missing child and a ghostly mother desperately looking for him. But the tragedy doesn't end there, as there have been some harrowing experiences for those who've gone searching for the spectral mother.

But first ... A family moves into a new home only to find they aren't alone. Items begin disappearing, then reappearing later. The lights would turn on and off on their own. Typical poltergeist activity. But when they started to do renovations to the home, the paranormal activity escalated and after some investigation, they found their ghost had a very sad story to tell. That story is up next.

The house in which Shirley Ann chose to raise her young family was in West Allis, Wisconsin. Located in a highly coveted area, it was warm and spacious, allowing the youngsters plenty of room to run around and enjoy being kids. The family was happy there and didn't notice anything out of the ordinary, until objects began disappearing and reappearing, even though no one in the house would admit to taking them.

It became somewhat of a challenge to find the shoes and hair barrettes that would be placed in a closet or on a dresser and not be seen again for weeks. When the items finally resurfaced, it would be in the exact spot from which they had vanished. To add to the mystery, all of the lights in the house also began acting up. The overhead in the kitchen would turn itself on and off while the family was eating dinner.

The bedroom lights had a tendency to suddenly turn on in the middle of the night, waking whoever was sleeping. The constant flickering of lights was a nuisance. But it didn't hurt anyone, and the family eventually got used to it, even though they knew it wasn't normal. When the time came to do some home renovations, Shirley Ann started in the kitchen. She was especially thrilled to be getting rid of the old sink.

In preparation for the big event, she picked out a new, modern-looking basin that would complement her countertops. On the day the sink was delivered, it arrived cracked and unusable. In spite of the fact that the pricey fixture had been packaged in protective material, a replacement was ordered on the double, which, when unboxed, was also found to be damaged beyond repair. This occurred on six different occasions.

the sink would leave the store intact, only to arrive at the home in pieces. The delivery personnel could not explain the condition of the basins for which they were taking great pains to handle with kid gloves. A frustrated Shirley-Anne finally gave up on the sink she wanted and ordered another one that wasn't as nice but would serve the purpose just the same. When that sink arrived, much to everyone's relief, it showed no signs of damage.

When the old basin was removed, the contractors were surprised to discover the original manufacturer's manual still taped to the bottom. Unbeknownst to her, Shirley Ann had selected a newer version of the exact same model she was having replaced. This time, the installation went off without a hitch. Shirley Ann had never had the slightest interest in antiques. She had never collected them and didn't find them particularly appealing.

That is, until she moved into the house in West Allis. For reasons she couldn't explain, she began surrounding herself and her family with antiques. She found herself inexplicably drawn to antique malls and estate sales where she was always on the lookout for some item from a bygone era to add to her growing collection. Previously owned objects had become her obsession.

Around this same time, one item in the house that began giving the family headaches was an alarm clock that went off without being set. The family would deliberately make a point of checking the clock before bedtime to make sure there was no chance of it blaring in the middle of the night. Even so, it would jolt them from sleep in the early hours of the morning despite their efforts. As a last resort, Shirley Ann unplugged the clock so they could get some rest.

It made no difference. The alarm went off anyway. Thoroughly fed up with the device, she finally threw it out. Enough was enough. Stubborn alarm clocks. Flickering lights and vanishing objects were annoying occurrences to be sure, but not necessarily frightening. The family had a feeling that they weren't alone in their home, but whatever had taken up residence there seemed harmless. So they didn't pay it much mind.

that is, until it began to frantically search for something it had no luck in finding. Family members were awakened on numerous occasions by the sound of someone running through the house. The pounding of feet would be followed by the slamming of the washer and dryer doors as they were opened and closed over and over again. Drawers would be pulled out and violently shut as if someone was looking for something. This would go on for hours,

During one of these nocturnal disturbances, Shirley Ann saw a dark figure moving through the house. She only glimpsed it for a few moments but could tell that the spectral visitor was a young woman. Shirley Ann was also aware that although she could see the ghostly form clearly, it didn't seem able to see her. As she watched, the figure ran past her in a panic. It was obvious that she had lost something very dear to her.

After that night, the family decided to do some research in an attempt to get to the bottom of just who it was that was haunting their house. By accessing public records, Shirley Ann found the names of the home's prior owners. There had been several, but one stood out from the rest. A young couple had lived in the house years before Shirley Ann and her family moved in.

She managed to track down some of the woman's relatives in hopes that they could shed some light on why she might be earthbound and tied to their home. The woman's family agreed to help in any way that they could. Her survivors explained that she and her husband had lived in the house for only a few months before the woman learned she was expecting. She'd been overjoyed with the prospect of motherhood and reveled in her pregnancy.

When the baby came into their lives, the couple was elated. Their world was perfect. Until the infant passed away at sleep following a brief illness. The grief-stricken woman died not long after, presumably from a broken heart. After hearing Shirley Ann's story, they theorized that perhaps she was still in the home, searching in vain for her lost baby.

Her family told Shirley Ann that they would be willing to come to the house and talk to their long-dead relative if she thought that it would help, an offer she readily accepted. Nearing the end of her rope, she was willing to try anything. Some of the young woman's family members who showed up on the day of the visit were familiar with the house, while others were seeing it for the first time. As they made their way from room to room, they spoke to her as if she were walking alongside them.

They told her that it was time to move on. Someone else lived there now. They also explained to her that she would never find the baby in the house. Her child had crossed over long ago. If she would only step into the light, she would find what she was looking for on the other side. Hoping that their message had gotten through, they wished her well before leaving the place she had once called home.

Shirley Ann thanked them for their trouble and waited to see what would happen next. As simple as this solution may have been, it seemed to do the trick. The family had no more nightly visits from the lost woman after that day. The lights stopped flickering on and off. The phantom footsteps ceased. The house was finally theirs for the first time. In the end, if nothing else,

The experiences of Shirley Ann and her family illustrate that the love of a mother for her children knows no boundaries in this life or the next. This legend dates back to the late 1800s and it is said to be Michigan's oldest legend. Morrow Road is just outside of Algonac City, southeast of Michigan,

Depending on who you ask, or how much and what you want to know, the story is told differently by everyone. But one thing is for sure: there is something paranormal around these parts. There are a few versions of the story. While the true story cannot be known for sure, what we know is that a woman is known to haunt Morrow Road, and from a distance a faint crying child can be heard.

One version tells that the woman with the initials "IC" lived along Morrow Road. One very stormy night she was alone with her child. Around midnight, not hearing her child for quite some time, she decided to check on him. But when she reached the boy's bedroom, his bed was empty. Frantically, she searched the two-story house and not finding the child anywhere, she dashed out of the house into the storm wearing only her nightgown.

She searches everywhere and eventually gets lost and freezes to death. The people of the nearby town found her body the next day, but no one ever found the body of the child. Some people say the two-story home of the woman, having no nearby neighbors, was burglarized. They say that she caught the burglars and they were left with no choice but to brutally murder the woman and her child.

Another version of the story has it that one stormy night the woman was walking with her baby in her arms along Morrow Road, which at that time was still unpaved and all dirt. She was going to try to abandon the boy because she had him out of wedlock. She left the child under the bridge and walked away. But after some time she felt guilty and decided she could not abandon her child, so she went back to the bridge in search of the child.

As she came to the place where she had left him, he was nowhere to be found. A sub-version of this story says that she froze to death searching for her son. Another sub-version says that when she came up to the spot and found it empty, she could still hear the child crying. Not being able to find him, she killed herself out of guilt. People say her punishment for abandoning the child was to roam Morrill Road for all eternity, still in search of her baby.

One rare story tells that the woman, having gone back to the bridge to get her child, found him face down in the creek. In her sorrow, she decided to hang herself. All of the versions agree that the road is haunted by a woman who is searching for her baby, and the said baby can be heard crying in the distance. The stories differ as to why she lost her baby, from mysteriously disappearing, being killed and being abandoned,

The fact remains that the woman who was haunting Morrow Road is looking for a baby and is determined to stay there until she does. There are many accounts of people seeing floating orbs or hearing a baby crying in the distance. Some even say they saw a woman on the side of the road. Here are some of the stories about the woman on Morrow Road.

One legend says that the woman is haunting the length of Morrow Road and some lucky or, should I say, unlucky people see her walking by the road in her nightgown. One account tells of a man traveling along Morrow Road in the dead of night.

On the side of the road, he sees a woman with her hands to her face as if crying. So he stops his car to ask if the lady is alright. When the woman takes her hands from her face and looks up, she has no eyes and there is blood everywhere. She then points at the man and shouts, "Where is my son?" And before he can even react, the woman comes running towards him and starts banging at his window. Panicked, he drove off, only to have the woman chase him.

It is said that the man ended up in a mental institution. Another legend says that when you get to Morrow Road, honk your horn three times and the woman will appear. This story made some teenagers go out to Morrow Road on a dare. They had heard of the legend and wanted to see if it was true.

When they got there, they honked their horn three times and then, without any warning, a woman in a battered nightgown appeared out of the woods. They all screamed and the driver drove off in a hurry. Finally, far from Morrow Road, they stopped at a crowded place. When they got out of the car, they noticed that one of the doors had fingerprints all over, as if someone had been trying to get in. In a different version of this story, the teens brought a Ouija board with them.

When they started playing, the board went crazy and began spelling out that one of the teens would die in exactly six years. Then they heard a bone-chilling scream coming from the woods. Scared, they all piled into the car and drove off. Deciding that it was best that they not talk about the incident ever again, they eventually forgot about it. But exactly six years to the day, one of the teenagers died in a car crash.

One version of the legend says that if you light a fire on the side of the road, you will see the face of the woman in the flames. Having heard this, some drunken college student decided to try it out. But when nothing happened, they got angry and decided to light the whole bridge on fire. The flames grew high and shot up above their heads. In the flames, they saw the face of the woman screaming at them, "Where is my son?"

The college boys suffered severe burns from the flames and were disfigured for life. In 2007, a fundraising project was launched to help fund the movie adaptation of the legend. In this project, a trail one-quarter mile long was hiked by the customers where they are taunted and cackled at by volunteers. The hike also had stations depicting real legendary places.

In its first year, it was only a quarter mile long, and it was situated quite close to the real Morrow Road. It only had 30 volunteers in its first year. The second and third year resulted in more volunteers and customers. The length also doubled. But the whole trail had to be relocated to a bigger area to accommodate the stations and the people. It was relocated to the Morrow Road Forest.

During these years, stations of real-life theories about the legend have been built for the customers to relive the legend. In its last years, the trail has expanded to more than a mile. From 30 volunteers, it had 130-plus volunteers in its last year. A finale for the trails was added, and it was a terrifying 200-foot pitch-black maze where customers ran around scared and panicked.

New paths have also been added to the whole trail, which resulted in an hour of hiking all throughout. The trails only lasted for five years. In 2012, the founder decided to close the trails for good, claiming that it took a lot of energy to make an event like that work. He even joked in the introduction of his closing post that he would have to close the trail since a lot of customers had ended up dead, and a number of them haven't yet been found.

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! All stories used in Weird Darkness are purported to be true unless stated otherwise, and you can find links to the stories, the authors, and sources I used in the episode description as well as on the website. The Legend of Black Aggie is by Troy Taylor from the book Haunting of America.

"Asylum 49: A Haunted, Haunted Attraction" is by Richard Estup from the book "The World's Most Haunted Hospitals". "A Lost Soul Searching the Afterlife" is by Cindy Parmeter from the book "True Stories of the Paranormal: The Complete Collection". And "The Grieving Ghost of Morrow Road" or "Where Is My Son" was written by Layla Hawkes from the book "True Paranormal". Weird Darkness is a registered trademark. Copyright Weird Darkness. And now that we're coming out of the dark,

I'll leave you with a little light." Philippians 2:14-15: "Do everything without complaining or arguing, so that you may become blameless and pure, children of God without fault in a crooked and depraved generation, in which you shine like stars in the universe." And a final thought: pleasing everyone likely means you've not said anything really new or significant. I'm Darren Marlar, thanks for joining me!

in the weird darkness. They've been here for thousands of years, making their presence known in the shadows. They might be seen by a lonely motorist on a deserted road late at night, or by a frightened and confused husband in the bedroom he's sharing with his wife. Perhaps the most disconcerting part of this phenomenon boils down to this question.

Has the government been aware of their presence all along and is covertly working with them towards some secret end? In the audiobook, Runs of Disclosure, what once was fringe is now reality. While listening, you'll meet regular people just like you who have encountered something beyond their ability to explain.

You'll also hear from people of great faith and deep religious belief who continue to have these strange and deeply unsettling encounters. Author L.A. Marzulli explores these ongoing incidents to discover the answers to these questions: Who are they? What do they want? And why are they here? Can you handle the truth? Listen to this audiobook if you dare!

Rungs of Disclosure, Following the Trail of Extraterrestrials and the End Times, by L.A. Marzulli. Narrated by Darren Marlar. Hear a free sample on the audiobooks page at WeirdDarkness.com.