NASTY GNOMES, EVIL IMPS, AND TERRIFYING TOMMYKNOCKERS #WeirdDarknessRadio WEEK OF June 29, 2025
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Get more than you expect with the $5 meal deal part of new McValue. Five gets you a McDouble or a McChicken and a small fry and a small drink and a four-piece McNuggets. Woo! New McValue at McDonald's. Prices of participation may vary. McDouble meal, $6. In some markets, we're limited time only. Since time unremembered, there have been tales from all over the world of various magical little people.

Gnomes, imps, fairies, trolls, goblins, whatever you want to call them, they are there, etched into the pages of lore and fairy tales. Yet, what if these creatures are not merely the denizens of myth and legend, and what if they are somehow real? Even more spookily, what if some of them are not so benevolent? There are many reports of encounters with such sinister little people, and I'll share some of the more frightening.

I'm Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness. Welcome, Weirdos! I'm Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness Radio, where every week you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, the strange and bizarre, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and unexplained, coming up this hour.

Did she drown? Did she commit suicide? Despite her death in 1889, we still don't know how Maggie Hurrigan died. In 1958, Gavin Gibbons wrote a children's science fiction novel by Spaceship to the Moon, which featured a UFO landing on Mole Seek in the Berwyn Mountains of North Wales.

16 years later, in a surreal case of life imitating art, those very same mountains would again be the focus for a story involving a downed UFO. But this time, some said the story was for real. But first, what if creatures like gnomes and imps aren't just real but also evil? We begin there.

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Probably one of the more notorious cases of some sort of imp or demonic gnome attack allegedly occurred in the town of Porterville, California, where a woman known only as Tammy moved with her three children to a rural farmhouse just off the Toole River in 2004.

Things got odd almost immediately, as Tammy claimed that she would often feel the heavy sense of being watched, at times almost feeling the gravity of eyes upon her, but there was never anyone around during these episodes. It did not take long for her to realize that this phenomenon happened most often and most intensely when she was near the barn, which sat in a secluded corner of a rather large 100-acre property.

Indeed, in the coming days the barn took on quite a sinister air, seeming to emanate a cold chill and spooking the many animals the family owned, including dogs, a cat, chickens, turkeys, and even a duck. Although they tended to wander all over the property, none of these animals would go anywhere near the barn, as if repelled by some unseen force lodged within.

Indeed. She observed that none of the neighbors' animals, strays, or wildlife would go near the spooky old barn either. Whenever any animals passed the barn, they'd give it a wide berth, and on many occasions would act strangely in its presence, staring at it as if something were staring back. The dogs would sometimes go nuts around the barn, barking and yipping excitedly even though no one was there.

Sometimes there could be heard strange noises coming from within the barn which sounded like grunts, growls, and squeals. To add a layer to the thickening air of foreboding, Tammy claimed that she began to notice several of her animals had begun to even go missing, gone without a trace, and it was immediately suspected that the menacing barn had something to do with it.

Tammy chalked it all up to nerves and perhaps rats or wildlife nesting in the barn and explained the missing animals away as having just run off or being killed by coyotes. But one frightening encounter would convince her that it was something much more than that. One evening, Tammy returned from town with her son and parked the car, but as she exited the vehicle and went to get some groceries out of the trunk, she claims that she saw fleeting movement in the periphery of her vision.

When she looked up, there was nothing there. And she went back to unloading the groceries, but almost immediately there was another movement, this time punctuated by an insidious laugh. She would later say, "...this time I heard a very freaky, very evil-sounding chuckle. I looked in the direction of the sound and there, standing about fifty yards from my son and I, was what I can only describe as a gnome."

Standing there around 50 yards away was what she described as a humanoid creature, about three feet tall, which sported a beard and was wearing baggy black pants, a gold-colored shirt, and a red pointy cap. For a moment it just stood there, staring at her and her son with deep-set, dead black eyes, as if studying them. But then things took a turn for the sinister.

Tammy would say, "That thing grinned at us, and the creepy grin spread from ear to ear, and its teeth were a gross brown and pointed or jagged. It had a bulbous nose and large, deep-set eyes, though I really couldn't tell the color of them. I never got a closer look at it, and don't know if it was wearing shoes or not, because at that moment I dropped my groceries, grabbed my son and ran for the house."

As soon as Tammy and her son had entered the house and slammed the door behind them, she began frantically telling her daughters what had happened between deep gasps. Somewhere outside, the strange little man was still cackling, and there was a movement by the window.

The terrified family looked out to see what it was and as they approached the window they could see the top of the red, pointed cap loom into view. Which was especially odd considering this particular window was located around eight feet above the ground. Tammy closed the blinds, moved her children well away from the window and waited there breathlessly until the thing finally went away.

This would be the only direct sighting of the evil gnome. But Tammy would occasionally hear that same ominous chuckling issuing forth from the shunned barn. She would later say, "After that night, whenever the dogs barked or howled, we were pretty sure we knew what they were barking at. We were also pretty sure of where our missing poultry had gone. From time to time, we'd hear a weird, creepy chuckle and other noises coming from that old barn."

This is not even the end of the story. Tammy and her family would eventually move away, and a new family would move into the house in 2010. This new family, too, immediately noticed that there was something weird going on with that decrepit old barn. One evening in the early morning hours, the couple woke to the sound of a raspy, gurgling singing, which chilled them to the bone.

When they looked out the window, they could see standing by a small pond on the property a creature standing around three feet in height and wearing maroon pants and a baggy yellow shirt with a brown vest and a dark waistcoat. The thing was described as having a bushy gray beard and wearing a tall, pointed reddish hat. The eyes of the being were said to be small and black, and its teeth were discolored, jagged and sharp, to the point of looking almost broken.

The creature seemed to know it was being watched and apparently stared right back at them before snatching one of the expensive koi fish that they had stocked the pond with and jamming it into his mouth with glee. The husband allegedly shouted at it to go away, and it actually apparently gave him the finger before running off while laughing. When the area was examined later, a set of footprints were found that were about the size of a child's

Whatever this thing was apparently really liked that pond, because it would purportedly be seen there numerous times, always in the early morning hours at around 3 a.m., and often eating the fish within. It also, rather amusingly, seemed to like playing with the garden gnome decorations that had been set up there.

Fed up with this strange intruder, the husband then apparently took away the lawn ornaments and fish, which caused the gnome to one night throw a tantrum, stomping about and shouting out in some garbled, bizarre language. The thing would skirt around the house, banging on the walls and testing the locked doors at night before the family had had enough and moved away.

The interesting thing about this case is that at the time this family had no idea that the previous family had experienced similar, bizarre incidents. What was this creature and where did it come from? Was it an actual gnome from fairy tale legends or was it something more demonic in nature? More stories of nasty gnomes, evil imps, and terrifying Tommyknockers when Weird Darkness returns.

This episode is sponsored by my friends at BetterHelp. And I do mean friends, because not only have I used BetterHelp in the past myself, but I've sent friends and family their way too. Yes, I have friends. We all deal with the occasional stressful situation. Welcome to life. But once in a while, the stress and anxiety can either hit us like a ton of bricks unexpectedly, or creep in without our noticing until we're suddenly overwhelmed.

At work, you're dealing with bosses, co-workers, employees, paperwork, that guy who keeps replacing a real coffee with decaf without telling anybody, and somehow trying to balance that with life at home. Bills, crying babies, critical in-laws, that faucet that refuses to stop dripping all night long like some kind of torture method. It's no wonder 61% of the global workforce nowadays is experiencing higher than normal stress levels.

We have that much more we're trying to handle without any more downtime or relief. I needed help when stepping into being self-employed full-time as a voice actor and podcaster. It was a bit much to take at first, and it triggered my depression horribly. Better help was there for me.

I've learned to walk away from the studio when things get overwhelming or tense. I don't feel guilty now about taking an afternoon nap or an extra long lunch just to settle my brain. If it gets really bad, BetterHelp is there to get you over the bump.

What I like most is the convenience. You can join a session with your therapist at the click of a button without ever leaving your house, your office, your car, the hot tub in your neighbor's backyard when they're not home, wherever you happen to be. Hey, you do you. You gotta love mobile therapy. And if you don't feel your first choice of therapist is working for you, you can switch to another one. No extra charge. Switch anytime. The important thing is that you find who you feel comfortable with and connect with.

As the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise, so you can find just the right person for your particular situation and personality. As a Weird Darkness listener, you get 10% off your first month at BetterHelp.com slash weird. That's BetterHelp.com slash weird.

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Get more than you expect with the $5 meal deal, part of new McValue. Five gets you a McDouble or a McChicken and a small fry and a small drink and a four-piece McNuggets. Woo! New McValue at McDonald's. Prices and participation may vary. McDouble meal, $6. In some markets, we're limited time only. Another fairly well-known case is that of the experiences of Chris Fleming, who is the host of TV's Dead Famous and Psychic Kids, and who's allegedly been plagued by some sort of demonic imps since his childhood.

It apparently all started in the 1970s when Fleming was just a young child.

At the time, he was living at Hoffman Estates, Illinois, and he claims that his house was rather intensely haunted, not only by ghosts, but also what he calls little demons, which he described as being around three feet tall and rather reptilian in appearance, sort of like gremlins, and which he says would peer out of the walls, walk out of, into, or fly out of closets and dark corners of the house.

He is said of the profound fear they instilled in him thus: "I became so terrified as a child that I slept with the lights on, slept with my back to the wall each night, and had by me a glow-in-the-dark plastic toy sword my mom got me to help me feel safe at night. I even ended up placing the last rites cross with candles and holy water beside my bed each night." The manifestation of these diminutive creatures slowed down in later years and stopped altogether.

That is, until decades later, when they purportedly began to appear to him again as an adult. In an interview with Dave Schrader on Darkness Radio, he related one particularly harrowing encounter from 2009, where one of the things appeared, and he decided to actually try and catch it. According to Fleming, he chased it into a closet, but once there, it simply vanished into thin air.

He also described how he came to classify the little monsters as imps, recalling a spirit box session in which he called out to ask what kind of spirits were haunting his home, and they replied, just imps. Fleming has gone on to give lectures on his experiences, and he theorizes that there are actually lower-level demons that he believes have the grim work of breaking a family's will so that more powerful demons can enter and cause mayhem.

He's even theorized that other similar creatures and "little people" across the world are also these devils in different guises, merely taking different forms and having different names across cultures, with djinn, fairies, and gnomes all basically devils that have been terrorizing humans over the millennia.

On a last note, Fleming has warned people not to try and investigate or communicate with such creatures as they are apparently very dangerous and have the ability to spread like a virus. A similar account of one of these mysterious and malicious imps was reported on the site Your Ghost Stories and allegedly happened back in 1975 when the witness was just a child.

He claims that at the time of the incident, his family had just returned from a road trip to Fresno, California, and were on their way to the home in Salt Lake City, Utah. They had decided to try and take a shortcut, but ended up getting lost out in the desolate desert wastelands of Nevada. As they drove about the back roads out there in the middle of nowhere, they apparently came to a tiny little town squatting out there in this moonscape of a place where they stopped for the night.

That night, the witness says he went to sleep on his stomach as usual, with his arm hanging down off the bed. In the middle of the night, his sleep was broken by the sensation of someone yanking and pulling at his arm. In his groggy sleepiness, he at first thought it was his family's dog, even though they had not brought the dog on the trip with them. Nevertheless, the witness was tired and drifted back to sleep before being woken yet again by a harder, almost painful tug on his arm.

This time, he emerged from his daze and was wide awake, looking about the darkened room to see nothing. At that moment, the witness claimed his arm was yanked so hard that he was pulled clear off the bed. In a panic, he looked up to see that his aggressor was some sort of vaguely humanoid-shaped green glowing mist.

He explains what happened next thus: "Well, my mom jumped out of bed and ran up behind this thing and screamed, 'No!' Then she smacked it with her hand, which made contact with the thing, and you could hear a loud smacking sound. Once this thing was hit, it let go of my arm and let out a high-pitched scream like I have never heard before. It started whirling around like a funnel, then disappeared into the drain that was located in the center of the room. My dad had slept through most of this and hadn't woken up until he heard the thing scream.

I ended up sleeping between my parents the rest of this night with no further incidents. Years later, I was telling this story to someone who had a great deal of experience with the paranormal and supernatural. What he told me was this: "The thing I had encountered was an imp. An imp is a low-level demon that feeds upon the souls of young children. They also have the ability to take shape or form and usually appear as children to other children."

He also told me that folklore and mythology has some root in fact and that many of the old fables are still true today as they were hundreds of years ago. He also told me that I was "very lucky." Many a missing child have ended up in the hands of these demons and have never been found.

It's interesting that many such reports do indeed seem to revolve around children, with one wondering if maybe the Porterville account also had something to do with the creature being drawn to the three young children in the family, and one other such account supposedly happened in the United Kingdom, when the witness was just an eight-year-old kid. She claims that she'd gone to bed one night but was kept from sleep by a series of taps on her window.

Curious, she made her way towards the noise and peered out into the night to see a bizarre entity lurking just beyond the glass, which she would describe thus: "This 'thing' was sat on my windowsill on the outside, humanoid, about the same size as a four-year-old child, but its body was almost skeletal. It was so thin. It made the thing's head look slightly too big for its body. It had no hair whatsoever but large black-red eyes and a mouth full of lots of sharp little teeth, almost like a cat's.

Ahead under the covers, very scared and didn't get any sleep that night at all. The next day, she says that she told her mother, but she wouldn't believe the outlandish story. However, the witness was convinced of what she had seen, and three scratch marks on the glass assured her that it had all been very real. Bizarrely, at school she drew a picture of the creature that she'd seen in art class and was shocked to find out that another child had independently drawn a picture of the exact same entity.

When she asked the girl what it was, she told of her own experience, and it was a perfect match, including the same description of the thing and the three scratch marks on the window. Most unsettling of all was what happened many years later, which she explains thus: "I was 22 years old at the time living in a bedsit on the third floor of this building. I had a boyfriend called Martin who would come to stay at mine or I would stay at his from time to time.

One day we woke up at mine, switched on the TV, made us coffee when out of the blue Martin asked me, "Do you have an imp following you?" I replied with something such as, "Been reading too many fairy stories, have we?" Martin then explained what he had seen outside my window. He was woken up by three taps on the window and had seen this thing. The descriptions matched up to what I had seen all those years ago.

When I took a closer look at the window, there were three scratches on the outside of the window. Of course, not all reports of trickster imps and gnomes revolve around children, and there is a long tradition of tales involving a type of trickster demon gnome called the Tommyknockers, which have long been said to terrorize minors.

These gnomish creatures, typically described as only around two or three feet tall, are said to lurk within mine shafts and are so named because legend has it they will knock on the walls of a mine in a specific pattern before triggering a cave-in.

They were also said to cause all manner of mischief, such as stealing food or tools, pushing or pinching from the dark, or calling people's names to draw them deeper down into the darkness. But it was the knocking that the miners most feared, and they would often leave out food in a Tommyknocker-infested cave in order to appease them. Where exactly do Tommyknockers come from, if they exist?

We'll take a look at their origins up next on Weird Darkness.

But once in a while, the stress and anxiety can either hit us like a ton of bricks unexpectedly, or creep in without our noticing until we're suddenly overwhelmed.

At work, you're dealing with bosses, co-workers, employees, paperwork, that guy who keeps replacing a real coffee with decaf without telling anybody, and somehow trying to balance that with life at home. Bills, crying babies, critical in-laws, that faucet that refuses to stop dripping all night long like some kind of torture method. It's no wonder 61% of the global workforce nowadays is experiencing higher than normal stress levels.

We have that much more we're trying to handle without any more downtime or relief. I needed help when stepping into being self-employed full-time as a voice actor and podcaster. It was a bit much to take at first, and it triggered my depression horribly. Better help was there for me. I've learned to walk away from the studio when things get overwhelming or tense. I don't feel guilty now about taking an afternoon nap or an extra long lunch just to settle my brain.

If it gets really bad, better help is there to get you over the bump.

What I like most is the convenience. You can join a session with your therapist at the click of a button without ever leaving your house, your office, your car, the hot tub in your neighbor's backyard when they're not home, wherever you happen to be. Hey, you do you. You gotta love mobile therapy. And if you don't feel your first choice of therapist is working for you, you can switch to another one. No extra charge. Switch anytime. The important thing is that you find who you feel comfortable with and connect with.

As the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise, so you can find just the right person for your particular situation and personality. As a Weird Darkness listener, you get 10% off your first month at BetterHelp.com slash weird. That's BetterHelp.com slash weird.

Lowe's knows July 4th savings are worth celebrating. Get up to 40% off select major appliances and get an additional 10% off two or more select major appliances. Hurry. These July 4th deals won't last long. Lowe's. We help. You save. Valid to 7-9. Selection varies by location. While supplies last. See Lowe's.com for more details. Visit your nearby Lowe's on Cottle Road in San Jose.

Get more than you expect with the $5 meal deal, part of new McValue. Five gets you a McDouble or a McChicken and a small fry and a small drink and a four-piece McNuggets. Woo! New McValue at McDonald's. Prices and participation may vary. McDouble meal, $6. In some markets, we're limited time only.

Welcome back to Weird Darkness, I'm Darren Marlar! You can stay up to date on everything Weird Darkness – you can read my regular oddities column, Mind of Marlar, you can get notified of upcoming Weirdo Watch Parties that I'm holding online and other events I'm a part of, get the info on contests I'm holding, and more – all through the Weird Darkness email newsletter. You can sign up for free at WeirdDarkness.com/Newsletter. That's WeirdDarkness.com/Newsletter.

We've been talking about gnomes and imps and tommy knockers, but where on earth do these things come from? The origins of these beings ranges from being the ghosts of dead miners to inhuman demonic spirits. But whatever they are, it was believed that to hear those knocks meant certain doom, and that the deeper one was to go into the earth, the better their chances of encountering the fiends.

While this sounds like it all must certainly be mere myth and legend, there are many real reports of encountering the Tommyknockers, and they have long been blamed for mysteriously missing miners. These reports and tales are not only from the days of superstitious miners trying to explain the myriad dangers of their profession either, and there are more modern reports of the dreaded Tommyknockers as well.

One allegedly occurred in 2016 when a 38-year-old paranormal investigator named Xavier Hunter and his friend Katie ventured out into a mine located 25 miles outside Las Vegas, Nevada, which was said by locals to be haunted by Tommyknockers. Almost immediately after penetrating into the mine, Hunter claims that he and his partner were assailed by a smell of rotting meat, and as they continued down into the bowels of the earth, they began to hear grunts and growls,

They'd also make the rather odd and unsettling discovery of women's clothing discarded deep in the mine. It was all disturbing enough to cause them to hesitate going any further. But they would go from hesitation to full-on panic. When Hunter allegedly saw a dark shape lurking in the shadows near Katie, this was enough to spook them into a full retreat. And Hunter claims that the entity exuded a profound aura of evil that actually made him physically ill.

The whole bizarre excursion was captured on camera, and while reviewing the footage, they found that at one point the entity could actually be seen as what appears to be a miniature hooded figure standing just a few feet tall. Hunter would explain, "The figure appeared to be hooded. It was completely black. We didn't immediately see it. We saw it after we began to review the video. The odd thing is that around the same time the figure appeared I began to feel sick and nauseous. I threw up and felt extremely dizzy."

We did not record that moment because Katie was trying to help me figure out what was happening. I was shocked, especially after feeling sick right after capturing the figure on tape. I have no idea what it could be. I suppose that a possible explanation could be that it was our own shadow, but why would I feel sick right after it happened? The presence we both felt in there felt malevolent.

Another expedition to a supposedly Tommyknocker haunted cave was carried out by the crew of the travel channel TV show Ghost Hunters, led by host Zach Bagans. Their destination was Phoenix Goldmine, located in Idaho Springs, Colorado.

Opened in 1871, the mine supposedly has a long history of paranormal phenomena that's often blamed on the Tommyknockers. And there's also a legend of a black magician in the area, as well as an unsolved double murder at the mine, making it seem as good a place for a haunting as any. The team would certainly not be disappointed, as their investigation produced numerous instances of strange phenomena.

Right off the bat, one of the crew claims she saw something move in the dark and heard someone calling her name from one of the tunnels, which was confirmed by two other witnesses who also heard it. Indeed, throughout the excursion, there were heard various anomalous noises such as footsteps, knocks, and banging sounds, and voices are also captured on EVP saying "get out" or mumbling other things incomprehensively.

These are not even the spookiest of the phenomena they encounter, and throughout the episode, there are almost non-stop instances of weirdness. At one point, Zach is using a kinetic cam and claims that he can see a tiny figure of some sort standing in the mine, which appears shortly after hearing a series of mysterious knocks, and after which there is a sudden temperature drop that the entire crew can feel.

On another occasion, their thermal imaging equipment picks up a bright, unidentified heat signature that Zach speculates is possibly a miner's headlamp, and around this time, they pick up strange interference on their equipment. This same interference is heard on another occasion, and this time two of the tripod legs on one of the cameras are found to be inexplicably bent out of shape shortly after.

There were also anomalous lights seen over a spirit box. And on another occasion during the investigation, one of the crew members is startled by what he says is something pulling on his pants, among other weirdness. It's all very spooky and entertaining, but does little to provide any evidence for Tommyknockers or ghosts in the mine, although Zach comes away convinced they are there.

Although it's unclear just what exactly the Tommyknockers are supposed to be, with their impish ways, typically small stature, and propensity for sowing fear in their victims, they certainly seem to be at least a subspecies of the various malevolent imps, gnomes, and other supernatural little people that seem to pop up to terrorize people from time to time. Indeed, we are really left to wonder what any of these malicious entities are really supposed to be.

Are they figments of the imagination and mere denizens of folklore and fairy tales? Are they ghosts, demons, something from some other dimension or ghoulish goblin universe, or something else altogether? Where do they come from? And why do they go about instilling fear, harassing, and attacking people? We don't know. And perhaps it's even something we're not meant to know.

these beings part of the machinations of a secret, inscrutable universe that we may be unable to comprehend. Coming up, did she drown? Did she commit suicide? Despite her death in 1889, we still don't know how Maggie Horrigan died. This episode is sponsored by my friends at BetterHelp. And I do mean friends, because not only have I used BetterHelp in the past myself, but I've sent friends and family their way too.

yes i have friends we all deal with the occasional stressful situation welcome to life but once in a while the stress and anxiety can either hit us like a ton of bricks unexpectedly or creep in without our noticing until we're suddenly overwhelmed

At work, you're dealing with bosses, co-workers, employees, paperwork, that guy who keeps replacing a real coffee with decaf without telling anybody, and somehow trying to balance that with life at home. Bills, crying babies, critical in-laws, that faucet that refuses to stop dripping all night long like some kind of torture method. It's no wonder 61% of the global workforce nowadays is experiencing higher than normal stress levels.

We have that much more we're trying to handle without any more downtime or relief. I needed help when stepping into being self-employed full-time as a voice actor and podcaster. It was a bit much to take at first, and it triggered my depression horribly. Better help was there for me.

I've learned to walk away from the studio when things get overwhelming or tense. I don't feel guilty now about taking an afternoon nap or an extra long lunch just to settle my brain. If it gets really bad, better help is there to get you over the bump.

What I like most is the convenience. You can join a session with your therapist at the click of a button without ever leaving your house, your office, your car, the hot tub in your neighbor's backyard when they're not home, wherever you happen to be. Hey, you do you. You gotta love mobile therapy. And if you don't feel your first choice of therapist is working for you, you can switch to another one. No extra charge. Switch anytime. The important thing is that you find who you feel comfortable with and connect with.

As the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise, so you can find just the right person for your particular situation and personality. As a Weird Darkness listener, you get 10% off your first month at BetterHelp.com slash weird. That's BetterHelp.com slash weird.

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Two children playing near their house in Greenwich, New York, the morning of Saturday, October 20, 1889, found a woman's hat and jacket lying on a log and reported them to a group of men who were working on a road nearby. Reuben Stewart, superintendent of streets who was also president of the village, thought the circumstances were suspicious and went down to take a look for himself. It was a secluded spot, about halfway between two villages with a small pool of water near the road.

Stewart found the owner of the hat and jacket floating face down in the pool. The woman was soon identified as Maggie Horrigan. A hasty autopsy conducted by Dr. S. Walter Scott and several other physicians determined that she had drowned, and a coroner's jury concluded that it had been suicide. No one who knew Maggie Horrigan believed that she had taken her own life. She was a healthy, attractive 19-year-old woman who worked as a servant for the family of Herbert Reynolds.

Her employers described her as competent, industrious, tidy, cheerful, and an agreeable person to have in the house. Her habits and manners were exemplary. She was naturally timid and not known to have a boyfriend. Maggie's friends said she was happy and lively when they were last together. She was a devout Catholic, and her pastor, Father Fields, spoke of her in glowing terms and did not think it possible that she had committed suicide.

District Attorney Hull, fearing that the autopsy had not been thorough enough, ordered a second autopsy. This time, a different team of doctors found a wound on the side of her head that was made before death and was sufficient to produce death, or at least unconsciousness. Dr. Montgomery Jones testified that he believed she was alive but unconscious when she entered the water, and the final direct cause of death was drowning.

Two other doctors agreed that the wound was inflicted before death and she was either dead or unconscious when she entered the water. This time, the coroner's jury said they were unable to determine the means or causes of Maggie Hurrigan's death. Maggie left the Reynolds house around 7:00 the night of October 19. She was to meet three of her friends, Ella and Bertha Obenauer and Julia Nolan, in front of the post office. They were planning to spend the evening with Mrs. Sprague, the wife of the postmaster.

Mrs. Sprague was an excellent musician. The girls had spent Wednesday evenings listening to her and were anxious to do it again. When Maggie didn't show up at the post office, Julia and the Obanar sisters called at the Reynolds looking for her. But no one knew where Maggie went. Maggie's body was found about a mile away from where she lived, but in the opposite direction from the post office.

Rumors were circulating surrounding the death. Two strange men were seen on a bridge near the pool where the body was found. A farmer said he heard men's voices and the sound of a struggle nearby, but it was too dark to see. A man's gold watch and chain were found in a stream near the pool, but there were no solid clues. The county offered a reward of $1,500 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Maggie Horrigan's killer, and District Attorney Hull hired the Pinkerton Detective Agency to investigate.

After the second autopsy, an article in the New York Sun implied that Dr. Scott may have come to a false conclusion in the first autopsy because of a conflict of interest in the case. Dr. Scott's name came up numerous times in the investigation that followed. In January 1890, it was reported that Dr. Scott made a statement, admitting to knowing more about the death than he first revealed.

He said that on the night of Maggie's death, he was called by a man said to be Howard Bailey to attend an injured girl. He found her in a field with three men who said that she had fallen and struck her head. She appeared to be dead, and Dr. Scott told the men they were in a bad scrape and refused to advise them what to do.

Either the report of Dr. Scott's admission was untrue or it was not taken at face value, because soon after, the police brought in a man named Edward Scully for questioning after he told a different story. While drunk, Scully told someone that he'd been sleeping in a barn near the bridge and two men came in carrying Maggie's body. They said they'd been riding in a carriage when the driver thought he recognized Maggie walking down the road. He tried to snap his whip and give her a start,

but the carriage lurched and he hit her head with the butt of the whip. They sent for a doctor, but she was dead by the time he arrived. The man offered the doctor $500 to keep quiet. The police knew Scully by reputation and had a reason to believe he knew about the murder. Though a young man, he had already served time for horse stealing and burglary. In custody, Scully denied any knowledge of the case. He said he may have spoken of the murder but never told the story that the police had heard.

Scully was able to prove that he was not in Greenwich on the night of October 19. About a month later, Scully and his father told the police that a man named Lawton Wilbur had come to their house and talked about the murder. The police arrested Lawton Wilbur on suspicion of murder, but he was not held. With little progress being made on the case, the governor of New York offered another $1,000 reward for the capture of her killer.

The following July, an inmate at Dannemora Prison named Merritt Shuler claimed to have information on the murder. District Attorney Hull went to Dannemora to interview Shuler, who was serving five years for forgery. He had been living near Greenwich at the time of the murder and had seen Dr. Scott pick up Maggie Horrigan in his carriage and drive away with her. Shuler said that he'd provide the whole story if he were granted a full pardon from the governor.

Hall said that he was favorably impressed with the story and would swear Shuler in at the next session of the grand jury. However, it does not appear that he took Shuler up on his offer. Allegations of his connection to the death of Maggie Horrigan had hurt Dr. Scott's practice to such an extent that in May 1892, he sued the New York Sun for $20,000 in damages for a libelous article in October 1889 regarding his autopsy.

In the court case, Dr. Scott presented evidence from the coroner and other doctors that Maggie had, in fact, died of drowning as his autopsy concluded. District Attorney Hull, arguing in favor of the son, said that if he had not ordered a second autopsy, it would not be known that Maggie Hurrigan was foully murdered. The jury awarded Dr. Scott $10,000 in damages. The son appealed the verdict and in December 1893, a settlement was reached awarding Dr. Scott $6,000.

the true circumstances of Maggie Hurrigan's death remain a mystery. If tales of crashed UFOs are your thing, then you'll probably have heard of the alleged UFO crash on the Berwyn Mountains, North Wales, on the night of January 23, 1974. There are rumors of roads cordoned off by military units, of strange bodies secretly taken to portendown Wiltshire, England, and of a huge cover-up to hide the truth.

As Wikipedia notes of Porton Down, "Porton Down is a science park situated just northeast of the village of Porton near Salisbury in Wiltshire, England. It is home to two British government facilities, a site of the Ministry of Defence's Defence Science and Technology Laboratory , known for over 100 years as one of the UK's most secretive and controversial military research facilities."

Andy Roberts states in his book on the case UFO Down, which I have a link to in the show notes, in 1958, Gavin Gibbons wrote a children's science fiction novel by Spaceship to the Moon, which featured a UFO landing on Moyle Sick in the Berwyn Mountains of North Wales. Sixteen years later, in a surreal case of life imitating art, those very same mountains would again be the focus of a story involving a downed UFO. But this time, some said the story was for real.

I have a link to that children's book in the show notes as well. Andy is of the opinion that nothing of an extraterrestrial nature came down on the mountain. Rather, he concludes that the affair was a case of mistaken identity. Not a doomed UFO and its doomed crew anywhere in sight. Instead, Andy believes that it was all the result of a localized earth tremor and the presence of a meteor both roughly at the same time.

Back in the late 1980s and through the early to mid-1990s, I was quite open to the possibility that there was more to the case than something of a very down-to-earth nature. But as time went by and as more data came along, I began to lean towards Andy's theory. I still do. But that doesn't take away the fact that intriguing tales concerning the incident still continue to appear and circulate.

As for that saga of alien bodies allegedly found at the equally alleged crash site and transferred to Porton Down, it surfaced in 1996. The source was, unfortunately and perhaps inevitably, anonymous. The story was given to the late UFO researcher and police sergeant Tony Dodd. At the time, Dodd was working with Graham Birdsall's UFO magazine. As for that source, Dodd gave him the alias of James Prescott.

According to Prescott, he was directly involved in the incident. The role of Prescott and his team was to drive a number of alien bodies in crates from the mountains and to the aforementioned Porton Down. As is the case with so many tales of crashed UFOs, the Porton Down story stalled, and the source retreated back into the shadows from where he came. Ufology was left with an interesting but totally unverifiable story.

Although I think Andy got it right with his meteorite/earth tremor theory, I'm still open-minded when it comes to the possibility that something strange may have happened. I don't, however, think that aliens were the cause of all the fuss. A military event? Maybe. Over the years, I've received 14 accounts from various people, mostly retired UK military, who'd heard of the Porton Down Link years before the James Prescott revelations reared their collective head in 1996.

Today I'll share with you one of those accounts, with more to follow soon. Regardless of what you might think of the following, the good news is that all of my sources are speaking on the record. No James Prescott-type hidden identities here.

"I spent 30 years in the Royal Air Force as an aircraft engineer," explains Bob Bolton, when I met him way back in 2000, and who granted me permission to share his story. And yes, that is his real name. "I had various postings, including at Akrotiri in Cyprus, RAF Huntington, and at RAF Valley in North Wales from 1971 to 1974. My wife's family came from Corwen."

At the time the thing on the Berwins happened, they lived up on the side of the mountain and her mom still lives there to this day. From where their house is, if you walk up the path that goes behind the houses up and onto the top of the mountains, you're talking perhaps a mile and a quarter away from where it all occurred, so it's not very far away at all. Her mom still remembers what happened on the night of 23rd January 1974.

She said to me when I spoke to her about it just recently, "I saw aircraft and heard aircraft shot down during the blitz and it was like an aircraft coming down but the sound was louder, bigger, heavier than anything you could imagine to do with an aircraft."

They didn't know what it was. They heard the noise first of all and ran out into the road. They weren't the only ones. All of their neighbors ran out as well. It got louder and louder and louder and they couldn't see anything in the sky but then they felt the impact where the houses shook and she had things fall off the mantelpiece in the house. It was my wife's dad who told me the story about bodies being found on the mountain.

His name was Harold Smith. He had a full-time job with Vauxhall at Ellesmere Port. He was a local councillor and was also a part-time sub-fire officer at Corwin. One day we got talking and got on to the subject of UFOs, and he said to me, "Oh well, you obviously don't know about the incident up on the Berwyn Mountains." I first heard the story from him around 1976. At that time he only told me that bodies had been brought down from the mountain and didn't say anything more.

nothing about who brought them down or where they were taken. But from 1979 to 1982 I was posted to Germany and he came out to stay with us for a month and it was here that he told us a lot more. I remember that the information he told us had apparently come from another person in the North Wales Fire Service whose son was in the Army, but it's not surprising that he would have been told. He was a well-respected man and knew people throughout the North Wales Fire Service, including at Bala and Wrexham,

He told me that while the police weren't involved, the army was. Heavily. I can't give you an exact date when they visited and told us this, but it was definitely between 1979 and 1982. He said they were definitely lorries from Porton down at the scene, but there was a lozenge-shaped object on the mountainside, and that bodies were taken off the mountain and driven to Porton.

and to this day my wife's mother can confirm that she was told the story about Porton Down and Bodies II either in the late 1970s or the early 1980s. I do remember him saying that when he had first told me this story in 1976, he didn't know that it was the Army who had taken the bodies off the mountain, and he didn't know at the time that they had been taken to Porton Down, so he must have learned that between 1976 and when he came to see us in Germany.

the legend of the Berwyn Mountains crashed UFO lives on. Thanks for listening! If you like the show, please tell somebody about it who loves the paranormal or strange stories, true crime, monsters, or unsolved mysteries like you do! And tell them where they can listen to the show so they can tune in next weekend

If you missed any part of tonight's show, or if you'd like to hear it again, you can subscribe to the podcast in your favorite podcast app by searching for Weird Darkness. By doing that, you'll get a copy of tonight's show, plus you'll get daily podcast episodes that come out seven days per week. Visit WeirdDarkness.com and you can follow me on social media. Drop me an email, send me your own true paranormal story, listen to other podcasts that I host, and more!

All stories used tonight are purported to be true unless stated otherwise, and you can find links to the stories or the authors in the show notes, which I have already posted at WeirdDarkness.com. 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. Lamentations 3, verses 31 and 32.

for no one is cast off by the Lord forever. Though he brings grief, he will show compassion. So great is his unfailing love. And a final thought: if you don't know what you're living for, you haven't yet lived. Rabbi Noah Weinberg, I'm Darren Marlar, thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness.

This episode is sponsored by my friends at BetterHelp. And I do mean friends, because not only have I used BetterHelp in the past myself, but I've sent friends and family their way too. Yes, I have friends. We all deal with the occasional stressful situation. Welcome to life.

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Greer Island, a small patch of land close to where the West Fork of the Trinity River flows into Lake Worth, is heavily shaded by tall oaks, cedar elms, and cottonwoods.

One of the quietest spots in Fort Worth, the island is home to egrets and owls, perhaps an alligator or two, and maybe just maybe the Lake Worth Monster.

Welcome, Weirdos! I'm Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness Radio, where every week you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, the strange and bizarre, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and unexplained, coming up this hour!

In 2017, Washington State Senator Karen Kaiser was quoted as saying, "The incidents continue, they continue, and we've had to consider that there is potential cosmic life over the island. It's a very special place with a cosmic presence." What exactly happened on Maury Island in 1947?

Whether you are a true believer or one of those skeptics, stories of spirits haunting the living from the confines of a Ouija board can chill you to the bone and make you think twice before communicating with entities from another dimension. But first, the Lake Worth Monster. We begin with that story.

If you're new here, welcome to the show. And if you're already a member of this weirdo family, please take a moment and invite someone else to listen in with you. Recommending Weird Darkness to others helps make it possible for me to keep doing the show. And while you're listening, be sure to visit WeirdDarkness.com where you can follow me on social media, listen to free audiobooks that I've narrated, and more. That's WeirdDarkness.com.

Now, bolt your doors, lock your windows, turn off your lights, and come with me into the Weird Darkness! The Lake Worth Monster, also known as the Goatman, hasn't been seen regularly at the Fort Worth Nature Center since a very memorable summer 40 years ago when all of Texas seemed to buzz with the news that a hairy, scaly, 7-foot man-goat beast was terrorizing the good citizens of Tarrant County.

"Every so often it'll come up in conversation," said Suzanne Tuttle, manager of the Nature Center. "Somebody will say, 'I remember when that happened.' Perhaps the monster moved on to less populated environs. And maybe it's dead by now, his bones to be discovered decades later by a lucky anthropologist."

Or, as more people actually suspect, the monster was really several creatures, all hoaxes carried out by enterprising and opportunistic mischief-makers from Brewer, Castleberry, or Northside High School. No one is exactly sure. Mystery still cloaks the legend of the Lake Worth Monster and his tire-chucking, hair-raising appearance in July 1969. On the afternoon of July 10th that year, the Star-Telegram's front page carried a headline above the fold:

"Fishy Man-Goat Terrifies Couples Parked at Lake Worth." Reporter Jim Mars broke the story to the world. Six terrified residents told police early today they were attacked by a thing they described as being half man, half goat and covered with fur and scales. Four units of Fort Worth police and the residents searched in vain for the thing, which was reported seen at Lake Worth near Greer Island.

Sean Reichardt told police that the creature leapt from a tree and landed on his car, and he showed them an 18-inch scar down the side of his car as proof. The police officer told Mars that, "We did make a serious investigation because those people were really scared." The police also revealed that they had received reports in the past but had laughed them off. The next night, the monster in front of a couple of dozen witnesses was said to have uttered a pitiful cry and hurled a tire from a bluff at them.

The police weren't laughing anymore. Hundreds of amateur trackers descended on the area with all manner of Remingtons, Brownings and Colts. "I'm not worried about the monster so much as all those people wandering around out there with guns," a police sergeant was quoted as saying in Marr's second day story.

One of the curious who went to Lake Worth that summer was Sally Ann Clark, an aspiring writer and private investigator who dropped everything to interview people for what would become her quick-draw and slightly tongue-in-cheek book, The Lake Worth Monster of Greer Island, self-published in September of 1969. I have a link to the book in the show notes if you're interested.

During the weeks of summer, people saw the creature running through the Johnson grass, found tracks too big for a man, and reported dead sheep and blood. Soldiers and sailors in Vietnam wrote their parents in Fort Worth and asked for more news, and reporters from far and wide wrote stories about it. The authorities continued to blame either a bobcat or teenage pranksters.

Then, about the time school resumed, perhaps not coincidentally, the Lake Worth Monster Fuhrer largely disappeared. Clark is 80 years old now and still lives in Benbrook, but regrettably she can't talk much about that summer. "A series of strokes greatly damaged her memory and her health," said her husband, Richard Lederer. "Clark has always regretted the way she wrote her book," he said, "because after she published it she saw the monster on three occasions."

If I'd seen it before I wrote the book, the book would have been quite a lot different, she told the Star-Telegram in 1989. It would have been semi-fiction. It would have been like a history. She has the most famous, perhaps the only photograph ever taken. It was given to her by Alan Plaster, who snapped it in October 1969 at 1.15 a.m. near Greer Island. I have a link to the photo in the show notes if you'd like to see it.

Both her descriptions and the photo show a large white something, though it doesn't seem to favor a goat at all. Plaster, interviewed in 2006, said he doesn't buy the monster story now. Looking back, I realized that when we drove by, it stood up, he was quoted as saying in the Star-Telegram. Whatever it was, it wanted to be seen. That was a prank. That was somebody out there waiting for people to drive by. I don't think an animal would have acted that way.

For his part, though, Plaster isn't talking anymore. He declined an interview request. In 2005, a reporter at the Star-Telegram received a handwritten letter with no name and no forwarding address: "One weekend, myself and two friends from Northside High School decided to go out to Lake Worth and scare people on the roads, where there were always stories of monsters and creatures who would attack parkers," the letter began. The writer claimed to have used tinfoil to make a homemade mask to scare a truckload of girls.

When the friends were finished, they went to a Dairy Queen on the north side. "I had a Coke float. The Goatman had a parfait," the letter said. The Goatman turns 55 this summer and resides a peaceful life in the hills outside of Joshua. Except that whoever wrote the letter, a man who lives somewhere near Beaumont, based on the postal cancellation, isn't the only person to make such a claim.

Mars, the reporter, told the newspaper in 1989 that police questioned several Castleberry students who were found with a faceless gorilla outfit and a mask. Fort Worth, Texas magazine outed a man this month identified only as Vincenz, who admitted being involved in the infamous tire-throwing incident of July 11. He said the tire went airborne only because it hit a bump after they rolled it, but he had no interest in naming more names or publicly taking credit or blame.

The owner of a kennel near Lake Worth has also said that he lost a macaque monkey that summer and that perhaps the primate was responsible. All of it could be true. Or none of it. Who knows? Clark's husband maintains that the monster was definitely not pranksters. "She offered a $5,000 reward for any person who could pass a polygraph that they were the monster," Lederer said. "She never got a call."

Tuttle said the Nature Center staff is skeptical of the existence of a monster. "But you never know," she said. "He may hear about it and just turn up." Up next on Weird Darkness: In 2017, Washington State Senator Karen Kaiser was quoted as saying, "The incidents continue. They continue, and we have to consider that there is potential cosmic life over the island. It's a very special place with a cosmic presence."

She was referring to something that happened on the island in 1947. We'll find out, or at least try to find out, what she's talking about. This episode is sponsored by my friends at BetterHelp. And I do mean friends, because not only have I used BetterHelp in the past myself, but I've sent friends and family their way too. Yes, I have friends. We all deal with the occasional stressful situation. Welcome to life.

But once in a while, the stress and anxiety can either hit us like a ton of bricks unexpectedly, or creep in without our noticing until we're suddenly overwhelmed.

At work, you're dealing with bosses, co-workers, employees, paperwork, that guy who keeps replacing a real coffee with decaf without telling anybody, and somehow trying to balance that with life at home. Bills, crying babies, critical in-laws, that faucet that refuses to stop dripping all night long like some kind of torture method. It's no wonder 61% of the global workforce nowadays is experiencing higher-than-normal stress levels –

We have that much more we're trying to handle without any more downtime or relief. I needed help when stepping into being self-employed full-time as a voice actor and podcaster. It was a bit much to take at first, and it triggered my depression horribly. Better help was there for me. I've learned to walk away from the studio when things get overwhelming or tense. I don't feel guilty now about taking an afternoon nap or an extra long lunch just to settle my brain.

If it gets really bad, better help is there to get you over the bump.

What I like most is the convenience. You can join a session with your therapist at the click of a button without ever leaving your house, your office, your car, the hot tub in your neighbor's backyard when they're not home, wherever you happen to be. Hey, you do you. You gotta love mobile therapy. And if you don't feel your first choice of therapist is working for you, you can switch to another one. No extra charge. Switch anytime. The important thing is that you find who you feel comfortable with and connect with.

As the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise, so you can find just the right person for your particular situation and personality. As a Weird Darkness listener, you get 10% off your first month at BetterHelp.com slash weird. That's BetterHelp.com slash weird.

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On the 21st of June, 1947, during the same month of the infamous Roswell incident, two unofficial harbor patrolmen, Harold Dahl and his son, were salvaging wood from the Puget Sound in Washington state when they noticed something strange in the sky. High above them were five saucer-shaped aircraft made from reflective material, circling around a sixth unidentified flying object of the same description.

All six objects were described as being donut-shaped and about 100 feet in diameter. Dahl also claimed that he saw round portholes on the objects and what he thought was an observation window. Slowly, the sixth object descended over the men's boat and stopped an estimated 500 feet above the water. Fearing that the saucer was about to crash into them, Dahl and his son moved their boat onto the shore of nearby Maury Island.

Once safely on shore, Dahl took several photographs of the six unidentified flying objects. As he did this, one of the aircraft, which had been circling above, had begun to descend. It hovered over the sixth object, which the men had moved to avoid for several minutes until, all of a sudden, a loud thud was heard and thousands of pieces of lightweight white and dark material sprayed out from the craft. Dahl estimated that around 20 tons of the dark material was dropping by the ship.

The material was hot, with Dahl and his son seeing steam rising from the waters of the Sound where they fell. Most of the debris landed in the water. However, a piece burned Dahl's son's arm, and another hit and killed their dog. Dahl rushed his son to the hospital for treatment and told his supervisor, Fred Christman, about what had happened. Christman did not believe Dahl, and since the negatives of the photographs Dahl had taken had been damaged during the incident, there was no visual proof to convince him.

Regardless, Crispin went to the shores of Murray Island to collect samples of the material Dahl described. The material was found to be metallic, some white and lightweight and the rest looking like lava rock. Whilst collecting samples, Crispin claimed that he too witnessed a UFO. Dahl claimed that the morning after seeing the UFOs, a man dressed in a black suit appeared at his doorstep.

The stranger suggested they go eat breakfast together, so Dahl drove his own car, following the other man's new black Buick to a restaurant. While they ate, the stranger asked no questions. Instead, he gave a detailed account of what had happened to Dahl the previous day. It was then that the man in black told Dahl not to disclose anything of what he had seen, or bad things what happened to him and his family.

Far from heeding the strange man's warning, Dahl spoke out about the incident and told UFO investigators all that had happened, even sending them samples of the material he and Chrisman had collected. Yet, just as the man in black had warned, this placed his family in danger. Dahl claimed that after he spoke out, his son disappeared. He was supposedly found one week later in Montana, waiting tables, with no recollection of how he got there.

With interest high in the case, the UFO investigators invited two Air Force officials to question Dahl and Christman in order to understand what they had seen. After questioning, two different versions of the story emerged. In one, the Air Force officials noted there might be something of interest in the material Dahl and Christman had collected. In another, the officials immediately lost interest, dismissing the materials as aluminum.

However, both versions end in the two officers perishing in a plane crash on their way back to their stations, taking whatever secrets they possessed to the grave. Again, here the events differ depending on whose testimony you believe. The official report states that the plane went down due to an engine failure, whilst people at the time in the area reported hearing anti-aircraft guns. Many were left wondering if the Air Force officials had been silenced to conceal their findings after meeting with Dahl.

Since the publicity around the incident roused suspicions of sabotage, the FBI became involved. Another USAF investigator was dispatched, this time to examine Maury Island. His report concluded that the strange material Dahl and his son encountered was not so strange at all but merely "slag" - stony byproduct from a metal smelter. The FBI concurred with this conclusion and threatened to prosecute Dahl and Christman for fraud if they did not drop their story and admit it to be a hoax.

According to the FBI's report, the pair had the hope of building up their story through publicity to a point where they could make a profitable deal with a fantasy magazine. Faced with the possibility of legal action being taken against them, Dahl did as the FBI asked, but was careful in his wording, stating that, quote, if questioned by authorities, he was going to say it was a hoax because he did not want any further trouble over the matter, unquote.

After that, Christman came out multiple times, affirming that the story was real and that he did indeed see a UFO. However, as he got older, his opinion changed, believing that the incident did not involve extraterrestrials but instead illegal dumping by the military.

Understandably, the Maury Island incident has stirred up much controversy over the years. Many believe the FBI's conclusion of it being a hoax, with others certain that it was a cover-up of extraterrestrial activity, pointing to the ominous appearance of the man in black the day after the original incident and the bizarre disappearance of Dahl's son.

On Tuesday, 18 April 2017, the Washington State Senate paused to recognize the Maury Island incident's 70th anniversary year by passing Resolution No. 8648. During a speech by Senator Sharon Nelson, who lives on Maury Island, it was revealed that, far from being over in 1947, the Maury Island UFO phenomena continued, with another senator having allegedly sighted a UFO over the island when he was 14 years old.

On that same date, Tuesday, April 18, 2017, Senator Karen Kaiser was quoted as saying, "...the incidents continue. They continue, and we have to consider that there is potential cosmic life over Maury Island. The island is famous, and for those of you who have not visited it, I would invite you. It's a very special place with a cosmic presence."

In a recent story shared by a Missouri man named Jerry, a captivating encounter with a mysterious creature has stirred intrigue and wonder among locals. The incident, which allegedly occurred in 1974 or 1975, has remained etched in Jerry's memory, prompting him to share his extraordinary tale on the Sasquatch Theory YouTube channel a few months ago.

Jerry, an Air Force veteran residing in the picturesque Missouri Ozarks precisely north of Willow Springs, recounted an incident that unfolded in a mere 30 seconds but left an indelible mark on his young mind. At the tender age of 11 or 12, Jerry found himself lying in bed, only to catch sight of an unusual spectacle outside his open window: a towering silhouette that sent shivers down his spine.

Estimating the creature's height to be nearly 10 feet, he was gripped with fear, unable to move. Reacting swiftly, Jerry summoned his father who rushed to his aid with a shotgun in hand. However, by the time they reached the window, the enigmatic visitor had vanished into the Missouri night. Despite the passing decades, the memory of this encounter has haunted Jerry, leading him to share his story and unburden his long-held secret.

Jerry firmly believes that the creature meant no harm, deeming it merely curious. He speculated that a source of light inside the room might have attracted the mysterious being's attention. Moreover, he revealed that his region had seen numerous peculiar reports of similar encounters over the years, fueling further curiosity about the existence of elusive creatures.

Was this truly a rendezvous with the mythical Bigfoot, the legendary Sasquatch, or perhaps even the famed Momo? Jerry and his family staunchly maintain that something paranormal transpired that fateful night. While skeptics may question the veracity of such stories, Jerry's account has struck a chord with those who hold an unwavering belief in the unexplained and the extraordinary.

Regardless of the creature's true identity, Jerry's revelation has provided him with a sense of relief and empowerment, the ability to share his otherworldly experience with a wider audience. As the allure of Missouri's dense forests and mysterious landscapes persists, so too does the fascination with the possibility that mythical beings might be hidden among the shadows, waiting to be discovered or forever remain an enigma.

This episode is sponsored by my friends at BetterHelp. And I do mean friends, because not only have I used BetterHelp in the past myself, but I've sent friends and family their way too. Yes, I have friends. We all deal with the occasional stressful situation. Welcome to life. But once in a while, the stress and anxiety can either hit us like a ton of bricks unexpectedly, or creep in without our noticing until we're suddenly overwhelmed.

At work, you're dealing with bosses, co-workers, employees, paperwork, that guy who keeps replacing a real coffee with decaf without telling anybody, and somehow trying to balance that with life at home. Bills, crying babies, critical in-laws, that faucet that refuses to stop dripping all night long like some kind of torture method. It's no wonder 61% of the global workforce nowadays is experiencing higher than normal stress levels.

We have that much more we're trying to handle without any more downtime or relief. I needed help when stepping into being self-employed full-time as a voice actor and podcaster. It was a bit much to take at first, and it triggered my depression horribly. Better help was there for me. I've learned to walk away from the studio when things get overwhelming or tense. I don't feel guilty now about taking an afternoon nap or an extra long lunch just to settle my brain.

If it gets really bad, better help is there to get you over the bump.

What I like most is the convenience. You can join a session with your therapist at the click of a button without ever leaving your house, your office, your car, the hot tub in your neighbor's backyard when they're not home, wherever you happen to be. Hey, you do you. You gotta love mobile therapy. And if you don't feel your first choice of therapist is working for you, you can switch to another one. No extra charge. Switch anytime. The important thing is that you find who you feel comfortable with and connect with.

As the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise, so you can find just the right person for your particular situation and personality. As a Weird Darkness listener, you get 10% off your first month at BetterHelp.com slash weird. That's BetterHelp.com slash weird.

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The intricate hand-drawn letters and numbers beckon you to trace the planchette along their curves and to call on whatever lies beyond the wall of death. If you've ever been to a Halloween party, you probably have a few creepy Ouija board stories, but I doubt that they're scarier than the stories of ghostly visitors that we've collected from Reddit.

Scary Ouija board stories are particularly terrifying because they deal with an unknown presence that the victims invite into their homes, the one place where we're supposed to be able to relax and escape the corporeal haunting that is real life. Ouija board stories all have a few things in common. Groups of friends who underestimate the power of the spirit realm,

entities that lie about who they really are, and mysterious occurrences that even the most ardent of skeptics have trouble explaining. Whether you're a true believer or one of the skeptics, one of these stories of spirits haunting the living from the confines of a Ouija board will chill you to the bone and make you think twice before communicating with entities from another dimension. From Redditor IamABallsackAMA

This Redditor went out of their way to get haunted by something that came through their Ouija board. After trying and failing to contact a spirit the first time, they cut the lights, lit some candles, and turned on an old radio to play nothing but white noise while they tried to contact the dead. That's a pair of bad idea jeans if ever there were one. When a spirit finally responded, the Redditor and her friends learned that its name was Zozo, and from there things go about as poorly as they could.

We began to try and move the planchette in circles like you do when you're expecting an answer, and all of a sudden it stopped on the "hello" spot of the board and wouldn't move. We actually slid the whole board off the table trying to get it to move. It was being pushed down hard. The planchette continually alternated between "hello" and "no,"

The radio emitted screeching sounds. A bunch of objects fell off the top of the refrigerator. The candles blew out, and a cat that lives at the house began walking with a limp the next day. Weird activity continued in her home for the next two weeks. From Redditor Kimmy Gibbler Say What, After reading this collection of spooky Ouija stories that happened to this Redditor, you're probably going to buy a ticket for the No Thank You train, just like we just did.

The writer's most terrifying story comes from an evening where a spirit named Deb proves that it exists by explaining that it knows where she and her friends smoke, possibly insinuating that it's watching them as they get their fix. Not freaked enough by this information to stay inside, the Redditor and her friend Haley pressed Deb to prove she's real. "I said, 'How will we know you're real?' And she said, 'Trees.'

I'm like, "Forget it." And Haley says we have to do it. So we're smoking outside. I'm looking into the forest, sweating buckets in fear, thinking I'm going to see a demon face in the branches or something. Eventually we relax, but then Haley mid-sentence, her face drops and goes white and she says like, "Crap! Get inside now!" I toss my cigarette and jump in the window. We close the blinds and we're breathing super heavy. I'm like, "What happened?"

She says that behind me in the distance there was a giant like 100 foot tall tree. There was no wind. I remember this because I was watching my cigarette smoke go directly up and I was blowing perfect O's without them disappearing. She says the tree was still, then suddenly the whole tree, including the trunk, moved back and forth, then went back to perfectly still. I was like, heck no, and after a while of freaking out, sat back at the board.

When we put our fingers on it, it said, Did You See? from Redditor Huxley Pearl. Redditor Huxley Pearl relates a Ouija board story that seems to be more about a family of intuitive people who live in a haunted house than anything else. But it's worth noting that their spooky troubles didn't begin until they horsed around with a Ouija board.

Afterwards, their ghostly issues included phantoms pulling on a baby's limbs, a black-clad ghost, slave family, and the Red Door. What's more, the sister in this family may have summoned up something very troubling. Anyway, her sister said that she was playing with the board one day, and when she asked who she was speaking to, she got a weird name. It struck her as odd, but she didn't really worry about it.

Weeks later, she watched a special on the History Channel or something. They were discussing demonology. She recognized one of the names as being the strange one she had encountered through the Ouija board. From a former Redditor: "While stationed in Germany, a group of soldiers decided to light some candles and contact the dead. The first spirit they spoke with was a young woman who had died while she and her boyfriend were driving home from a Grateful Dead concert. And now she was looking for him."

After she went away, they actually spoke to the boyfriend, who asked if they could tell his girlfriend that he was sorry. They then spoke to the ghost of an older woman who said that the reason the spirit of the young woman couldn't find her boyfriend is that he's in hell. From another former Redditor, while messing around with a Ouija board as a young man, one unlucky fellow was visited by a demon who told him that his firstborn child would die. Understandably, the next morning, the guy tried to get rid of the board first by throwing it away.

then by burning it, and finally burying it with a Bible on top for good measure. Years later, his wife miscarried their first child. From Redditor Helvin3: "While mucking around with a Ouija board with some friends from high school, the gang encountered a spirit named Niall who said that he'd been murdered by his father.

The boys tried to move on from this conversation, but the spirit continued to insist that he wanted answers, even going so far as to spell out, "Satisfy my requests." After that, the boys abandoned everything — the board, the house, the street. Truly the only way to bust a ghost. From Redditor LifeInHexColors:

After building a spirit board with his sister, this Redditor says that the duo contacted a spirit named Roger who died of food poisoning and knew that the brother and sister's older sibling wanted to talk to them. Shortly afterwards, the older sister, who was upstairs vacuuming, called for the kids to help her with the household chores. The spirit boarding duo got so freaked out they threw their board away, only for it to return the next day. From Redditor ZombieTheVen,

Imagine a Ouija board that was so pent up with spooky energy that it didn't even have to be used to start screwing around with your life. That's exactly what happened to one woman who took the board in question from a friend who said that every time she tried to use it, the same spirit continued to show up. After taking the board to its new home, things began to move around in the middle of the night. Footsteps were heard, and the cats were not happy. But really, when are cats happy? From Redditor WooWooWee,

While using a Ouija board to contact the spirit of a young girl's grandmother, a group of young folks were contacted by the spirit of something that wore wooden clogs and who had the touch of something not quite human. After being called, the spirit entered the room and touched everyone in the circle, causing them to hyperventilate. Suddenly, the girl sitting closest to the door starts hyperventilating and tears fill her eyes.

We're all basically frozen in fear at this point. It's really hard to get a feeling for how fast time went but not long after it started, it stops and starts with person on her left side doing the same. I don't think I really understood at that time that I was next in line. It ended with the person next to me and I suddenly felt something touch my shoulders. It wasn't completely like the physical touch of a human but it definitely was something that put weight on my shoulders.

I of course freeze and start hyperventilating at the shock of something unknown touching me. When this had gone halfway through the circle, it jumps straight at the granddaughter who starts with the same hyperventilating and breaks down crying. From Redditor FrostFromFire While playing with a Ouija board late at night, one Redditor asked for a simple sign so that they could know they were actually communing with the dead and not just absentmindedly moving the planchette around.

That's when their local flood alarm sounded three times, even though there was no rain that night. From Redditor Twisted Missy, one Redditor tells a Ouija story about their grandmother, who decided to kill some time with her lady friends and husband one spooky eve. After reaching a spirit and asking the basics, they cut to the chase and asked how the ghost died. The ghost said it would tell them, but not until the boy left the room. After the grandpa left, the spirit began to relay the story of its death.

But when the grandpa returned to fetch his wallet, the spirit cut its chilling tale short. From Redditor Robliki While playing with a Ouija board with his cousin Donnie in a camper outside of his house, one Redditor kept receiving the same message again and again. The letters H and A followed by, "You are trapped." When the two cousins decided to leave the camper, they discovered that the door handle had broken off.

they were trapped. Eventually, they got out of their prison, but that was the last time either of them messed with a Ouija board. From Redditor EatMyCupcake, On New Year's Eve, 1991, while drinking like only teenagers can, a group of siblings and their respective partners contacted a spirit named Eugene. According to the Redditor, we asked, "'Why are you contacting us, Eugene?' We received the answer, "'Afraid,' but seemed a bit more serious. We asked, "'Why are you afraid, Eugene?'

It replied "music, music" over and over. Nonsense. Then we got a series of numbers. Puzzling. My brother had the bright idea to turn on the radio to the station indicated by the numbers. To our surprise, there really was a station there. The song "Don't Leave Me Stranded" by Heart was playing. The board immediately started saying "Heart, Heart, Heart." I thought my brother was just playing off what he was hearing and was screwing with me.

Then, it started saying, "Don't go! Don't leave me! Don't go! Church! Church! Afraid! Don't go!" over and over and over. We assured it we weren't going to go, but it dwindled into nonsense after a while. It was getting really late and we decided to go to bed. The next afternoon, while everyone was eating breakfast, the family's father received a phone call letting him know that his uncle Eugene had had a heart attack the previous night and died multiple times on the table.

only to be revived very early that morning. He'd been terrified of dying because he hadn't attended church in decades. From Redditor Garden198, It's a well-known fact that the Queen Mary, an antique cruise ship permanently docked in Long Beach, California, is one of the most haunted sites on the planet. So it makes perfect sense that someone would get a very scary Ouija experience on board the ship, even if they made their board out of two pieces of paper and some Band-Aids.

When a collection of amateur ghost hunters decided to experiment on the ship, they spoke with a spirit who said that its name was "Zach" and who may have tried to physically assault the team after they went to bed that night. Each member of the crew suffered night terrors, with one of them running through the "Our Holy Father" prayer in a state of lucid dreaming. From Redditor woowoohoo: Redditor woowoohoo tells a couple of stories about their strange Ouija board that predicted major events in the lives of those who used it.

But the most interesting thing they mention is how the board consistently had 35 cents in its box. One of their friends ended up taking the change, for luck, and kept it on them at all times. Months later, the change was able to help them make a phone call that got them out of a sticky situation. When the same Redditor decided to use her Ouija board in the wilderness one afternoon, she and her family spoke to a spirit who may have been reaching out for help.

After meeting something calling itself Patrick, the family had a good time joking around with the ghost until it told them that he'd been brutally assaulted and murdered near where they were hanging out. After the family shut the conversation down, they returned home and checked up on the story, which had been reported in the local news. From Redditor OrphanTeer, If you've seen any horror movie with a Ouija board, you know the last thing you want to do is burn a spirit board.

We don't know the exact science behind it, but something about setting one of these things on fire pisses all of the ghosts off, and then you have to figure out how to get them out of your house. This guy decided to get spooky with his friends one day and printed out a Ouija board from the internet. Ah, the internet. And after they failed to get anything going with the ghost, he burned the board in the fireplace. But then everything got creepy. A set of downstairs doors opened randomly, and he heard continual banging from downstairs.

The creepiest part of the entire story is that one piece of the board survived. The word, yes. From Redditor DonnieNarco89. After having some success speaking with spirits via Ouija board in college, one Redditor claims to have accidentally attached himself to two ghosts who followed him home after graduating school. The spookier of the beings was an old man who wore a hat and smoked a pipe while sitting next to the Redditor as he slept and shouted at him to wake up.

The haunting became so bad that he and his mother had to cleanse their house. From a former Redditor: "If you're using a Ouija board and the spirit gets tired of you and wishes you a good day, don't get offended and definitely don't keep pestering the entity because things won't go well." While playing with a Ouija board in their teens, one Redditor and their friends continually pestered a spirit after it told them goodbye multiple times.

Finally, the spirit, or whatever, got so tired of these meddling kids that it called them on the phone, spoke to one of their dads, and said, don't F with me. Yikes. From Redditor BlueJake42, take some advice from this Redditor who accidentally invited a demon named Cause into his dreams and leave well enough alone when you're using a Ouija board.

The writer says that while he doesn't necessarily believe in spirits, the conversations he had with his entity in front of his friends on an abandoned basketball court have made him believe that something is out there. To quote the Redditor, "He said that he was blonde, blue-eyed and burned, all of which I thought was a weird description, and when I asked what he meant by 'burned,' he said, 'F-I-R-E' . I asked, 'Did you die in a fire?'

There was some hesitation. I thought I hit the wrong nerve or something with the spirit. It was a long pause, then, yes. I asked what year and it said 1816. Okay, so at this point, I just started talking to cause like an old chum or something. I began to ask about his family life and things like that. While I didn't believe it, I still had fun. I asked him if he could visit me because I thought he was an alright guy.

Cause said, D-R-E-A-M-S. Dreams. I said, sure, visit me in my dreams. That'd be alright. From Redditor DorianGrey98, When two brothers who live together decided to dig up their mother's antique Ouija board and play around with the spirit world, they may have gotten more than they bargained for.

After goofing around with the spirit, they put the board away without dismissing the spirit, thus inviting it to creep them out constantly even when they were going to the bathroom. They destroyed the planchette, burned the board and buried it. But then the board reappeared on their doorstep. From Redditor N8sobis1216:

While using a Ouija board with some friends to communicate with a spirit from beyond the grave, a group of friends chatted with a young woman named Bridget, who claimed to have died in a car accident. When the friends grilled her about the facts of her death — make and model of car, year of death, etc. — the spirit freely gave up her answers until the game ended. The Redditor who wrote the story says they looked up Bridget's info online and discovered that it was true, and ever since they have felt like something is following them.

From Redditor Slackerish: "Maybe this Redditor's first mistake was getting crossfaded before invoking a demon through a Ouija board. Or maybe it was not shutting down the conversation when they discovered they were talking to a demon. Either way, they kept chatting with this alleged demon until it said that it wanted to hurt everyone using the board, which is never a good sign. When the players went home they discovered all of their furniture moved around and all of the cabinets open."

Whether this was simply a prank or the work of a demon is yet to be seen.

But once in a while, the stress and anxiety can either hit us like a ton of bricks unexpectedly or creep in without our noticing until we're suddenly overwhelmed.

At work, you're dealing with bosses, co-workers, employees, paperwork, that guy who keeps replacing a real coffee with decaf without telling anybody, and somehow trying to balance that with life at home. Bills, crying babies, critical in-laws, that faucet that refuses to stop dripping all night long like some kind of torture method. It's no wonder 61% of the global workforce nowadays is experiencing higher than normal stress levels.

We have that much more we're trying to handle without any more downtime or relief. I needed help when stepping into being self-employed full-time as a voice actor and podcaster. It was a bit much to take at first, and it triggered my depression horribly. Better help was there for me.

I've learned to walk away from the studio when things get overwhelming or tense. I don't feel guilty now about taking an afternoon nap or an extra long lunch just to settle my brain. If it gets really bad, better help is there to get you over the bump.

What I like most is the convenience. You can join a session with your therapist at the click of a button without ever leaving your house, your office, your car, the hot tub in your neighbor's backyard when they're not home, wherever you happen to be. Hey, you do you. You gotta love mobile therapy. And if you don't feel your first choice of therapist is working for you, you can switch to another one. No extra charge. Switch anytime. The important thing is that you find who you feel comfortable with and connect with.

As the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise, so you can find just the right person for your particular situation and personality. As a Weird Darkness listener, you get 10% off your first month at BetterHelp.com slash weird. That's BetterHelp.com slash weird.

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This happened a few months back, but I'm new to Reddit so I'm just now finding a place to post about it. It was really weird and I still think about it sometimes. A few months ago my boyfriend and I were coming home from a trip to visit my family. We live in a small second-floor apartment that overlooks our parking lot. We were unpacking the car, bringing stuff upstairs little by little, and my family had sent us with a lot of food so one load we brought up all had to be unloaded into the fridge.

As I was unloading the food, my boyfriend was standing at the counter and we were having a full conversation. I don't remember exactly what we were talking about, but it was something you wouldn't just walk away from. Anyways, he's standing there and as I'm talking, I turn around to put something in the fridge, but when I looked back, he was gone. I was confused because again, we were in the middle of a conversation, but I was like, "Is he hiding from me? Is he playing a joke?"

I started laughing and looking for him around the apartment. After a few minutes, I was like, "What the heck is going on?" because he was nowhere to be found. Sometimes he steps onto the patio to smoke, so I opened that door and, while he wasn't on our patio, I saw him downstairs unloading the car. I was really confused about how he got downstairs so fast and why he left in the middle of our conversation.

He came back up a few minutes later and had to knock because apparently the front door was locked and he didn't have his keys. How did the front door get locked with him outside without keys and me not knowing that somehow he left? The front door is in the kitchen I was in. I would have heard the door open and close, but I heard or saw nothing if he had left. I was also just literally putting something down in the fridge, so I had my back to him for like a split second.

How could he possibly get to the door so fast and I didn't see anything? None of it makes sense to me, and when I asked him about it, he had no idea what I was talking about and had no memory of our conversation while I was unloading food. So strange.

Thanks for listening! If you like the show, please tell somebody about it who loves the paranormal or strange stories, true crime, monsters, or unsolved mysteries like you do, and tell them where they can listen to the show so they can tune in next weekend! If you missed any part of tonight's show, or if you'd like to hear it again, you can subscribe to the podcast in your favorite podcast app by searching for Weird Darkness

By doing that, you'll get a copy of tonight's show, plus daily podcast episodes that come out seven days per week. Along with Weird Darkness each day, I also post marathons of creepy and scary old-time radio shows. Every Saturday we do a scary story just for the kids. And if you like horror fiction, I do those stories every Thursday.

Visit WeirdDarkness.com and you can follow me on social media, drop me an email, send me your own true paranormal story, listen to other podcasts that I host, watch B-movies presented by horror hosts for free, and more! All stories used tonight are purported to be true unless stated otherwise, and you can find links to the stories or the authors in the show notes which I have already posted at WeirdDarkness.com. 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. Proverbs 12:11: "He who works his land will have abundant food, but he who chases fantasies lacks judgment." And a final thought: Knowledge comes from looking around. Wisdom comes from looking up. Adrian Rogers. I'm Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness.

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