THE NORTHWOOD MURDERER: Serial Killer Franklin Evans and the Ghosts of Bussey's Woods
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Welcome, Weirdos! I'm Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness. Here you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, the strange and bizarre, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and unexplained.

If you're new here, welcome to the show. While you're listening, be sure to check out WeirdDarkness.com for merchandise, to visit sponsors you hear about during the show, sign up for my newsletter, enter contests, connect with me on social media, hear other podcasts that I host, listen to free audiobooks I've narrated. Plus, you can visit the Hope in the Darkness page if you're struggling with depression, dark thoughts, or addiction. You can find all of that and more at WeirdDarkness.com.

Now, bolt your doors, lock your windows, turn off your lights, and come with me into the Weird Darkness! The origin of this ancient giant book is unknown. It has been compared to the seven wonders of the world in the Middle Ages. For over 700 years, this ancient manuscript has fascinated scholars.

The existence of the book is connected with a certain legend that should have worried the church, but the truth is that this ancient manuscript was never condemned by the Inquisition. That the church would allow a Bible that depicts the devil sounds like a contradiction, but in this case it is true. According to one legend, it was written by a monk who wrote it with the help of the devil.

The Codex Gigas, which means "giant book," is also known as "the Devil's Bible." It is the largest medieval manuscript in the world. The true origin of Codex Gigas is unknown, but a note in the manuscript reveals it was created back in the year 1295 in the Benedictine monastery of Položice in Bohemia, today known as the modern Czech Republic.

Shortly after that, the manuscript ended up in another monastery in Brevnov, near Prague. Later, in 1594, Rudolf II, the Holy Roman Emperor, King of Bohemia and King of Hungary, Croatia, and Slavonia, took it to his castle, where it was kept until it was stolen by the Swedish army during the Thirty Years' War. It became a part of the collection of Queen Christina of Sweden.

Today, Codex Gigas is kept in the National Library of Sweden in Stockholm. The Codex Gigas has remained in Sweden ever since it was taken from the Czech Republic. On two separate occasions, it was exhibited abroad, in New York and in Berlin. On September 24, 2007, after 359 years, the Swedes gave permission to put the manuscript on display in Prague.

Conditions for exhibiting the Codex were strict, and the state had to guarantee the Bible for the amount of 15.1 million US dollars. In January 2008, the Devil's Bible returned safely back to the National Library in Stockholm. It is indeed a giant book, and naturally it was compared to the seven wonders of the world in the Middle Ages.

It weighs nearly 75 kilograms, and it requires two librarians to lift it. The Codex Gigas has 312 parchment folios, hence 624 pages, and the pages are 890 millimeters tall by 490 millimeters wide. The Codex includes an entire version of the Bible, and it is written in Latin. There are also some short texts in the manuscript.

The first is a work on penitence, a manual for priests with a list of sins and appropriate ways of atonement. Parts of this work make it clear it was written by a churchman who committed sins. The codex contains also a magic formula on how to overcome evil, misfortune, and disease. Inside it also has a calendar containing a list of saints and local Bohemian persons.

The calendar was also used to keep track of feast days of the church. All the indications are that it was a life work of one person. Historians estimate that the scribe in question must have conceivably spent as many as 20 years on such a monumental work. The reason Codex Gigas is referred to as "the Devil's Bible" is because inside this large book there is an image of the devil.

The portrait of the devil is the most famous image in the Codex Gigas. It is not uncommon to find images of the devil in ancient medieval manuscripts and other works, but this one is slightly different. For one thing, the devil is illustrated alone, and it occupies a whole page. He is depicted in an empty landscape, standing between two large towers, and he is raising his hands up in the air. He has only four fingers and toes.

This illustration was intended to portray the devil as the Prince of Darkness. According to a legend, a monk who once lived in the monastery of Položice, Czech Republic, was sentenced to be walled up alive for his sins. In order to escape punishment, he promised in one single night to write the largest book in the world that would make the monastery famous.

He soon realized that the task was beyond his powers, and he invoked the aid of the devil, who demanded the monk's soul as payment. When the book was completed, the monk drew an image of the devil to thank him for his support. The legend says that the monk avoided the punishment, but he lost his peace of mind and his life turned into hell.

It is a strange world we are living in. One would assume that the legend behind the creation of the world's largest book was disturbing for the Pope and the Church, but this was not the case. Despite its unconvincing source, this medieval manuscript was never condemned by the Inquisition. On the contrary, it was studied by a number of scholars.

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

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

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

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

Hi, I'm Richard Karn, and you may have seen me on TV talking about the world's number one expandable garden hose. Well, the brand new Pocket Hose Copperhead with Pocket Pivot is here, and it's a total game changer. Old-fashioned hoses get kinks and creases at the spigot, but the Copperhead's Pocket Pivot swivels 360 degrees for full water flow and freedom to water with ease all around your home. When you're all done, this rust-proof anti-burst hose shrinks back down to pocket size for effortless handling and tidy storage.

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By texting 64000, you agree to receive recurring automated marketing messages from Pocket Hose. Message and data rates may apply. No purchase required. Terms apply. Available at pockethose.com slash terms. How can a four-year-old girl disappear without a trace? Robert Keyes moved his family to Princeton, Massachusetts in 1751, purchasing 200 acres of land on the southeastern slope of the Wachusett Mountain. Four years later, on April 14th, his daughter Lucy, four, followed her sisters to Wachusett Lake for some sand.

This adventure in the woods would be her last. Lucy never returned home. The townspeople created search parties, drained the lake, but came up empty-handed. Lucy's mother, Martha, scoured the woods, calling for her. Night after night, she searched the woods. Her grief overwhelmed her sanity. She died in 1786, never knowing what happened to her daughter. There are many theories as to what happened to Lucy Keys.

There was a letter found after Martha and Robert Keyes had died. This letter was from the Keyes' neighbor, Tilly Littlejohn, written on his deathbed. He had a quarrel with the Keyes over property lines and resented the family's happiness. When he spotted Lucy Keyes wandering in the woods all alone, he struck her head with a rock several times, then concealed her body in a hollow log and went home. He joined the search party,

As the townspeople thoroughly combed the woods, he feared the discovery of her body. Little John retrieved her body and buried it under a fallen tree, placing stones and dead leaves over it, then built a fire over it to conceal his crime even further. The body was never found, even after the discovery of the letter. Whether any of this is true, I don't know. Little John presented the theory of Lucy being taken by Indians,

claimed he had seen some in the area to shift any suspicions off of himself. Indians took children all the time. White men traveling in Canada came across an Indian tribe who had a white girl with them. The only bit of English she knew was "Chasit's Hill." Pachasit is classified as a mountain but looks more like a hill. It was never confirmed whether the girl was Lucy or not. Something else to consider.

Lucy was four years old at the time of her disappearance. A number of things could have happened to a girl that young in the woods alone. She could have been attacked by wild animals. Only problem with this theory is that there was no trace of her found. If she was killed by animals, there would be tracks, blood, pieces of her clothing, or something left behind for someone to find. It is believed Lucy and her mother Martha haunt on or around Wachasett Mountain.

A Lifetime movie was made about the little girl called "The Legend of Lucy Keys." On June 18, 1865, the bodies of two children, Isabella and John Joyce, were discovered in a forest area known as Busey's Woods near Roxbury, Massachusetts, outside of Boston. Raped and savaged with dozens of knife wounds, poor Isabella had been slaughtered among the trees.

John was found a short distance away, beaten and stabbed nearly a dozen times himself. The murders would have gone unsolved if the same killer did not strike again seven years later.

The serial killer, or repeat killer as such a monster was known then, was a man named Franklin Evans, and in the eyes of his contemporaries, he was the most monstrous and inhuman criminal of modern times. Or indeed of any time. His crimes have been largely forgotten over the years, which is strange in itself given that they were brutal, bloody, and targeted children

But his victims have not because, according to local lore, Isabella and John Joyce did not rest in peace. On Monday, June 12, 1865, 15-year-old Isabella Joyce and her 12-year-old brother John, children of a recently widowed seamstress who lived in Lynn, Massachusetts, went to visit their grandmother in Roxbury, a neighborhood of Boston.

At around 11 a.m., they asked for permission to go and explore a nearby wooded area called May's Woods, which was popular locally as a picnic spot and recreation ground. After some initial reluctance, their grandmother agreed to let them go. She packed them a lunch, gave them 10 cents each for their trolley fare, and told them to return no later than 2 p.m. She never saw them alive again.

When the children did not return, their grandmother became frantic. For the next five days, search parties scoured the forest outside town. It wasn't until Sunday, June 18, however, that two men, John Sautel and J.F. Jameson, while hiking in nearby Busey's Woods, not Mays Woods, where the children said they planned to go, stumbled across the remains of the two missing children.

From the scene, it seemed clear that Isabella and her brother had been playing contentedly in the woods, creating little hillocks of moss and fashioning wreaths out of oak leaves and twigs when they were unexpectedly attacked. The assailant, which the newspapers called a fiend in human shape, attacked the girl first, cutting her savagely with a knife, tearing off her undergarments, and raping her.

The coroner found 27 stab wounds in her torso and another 16 in her neck. The ground around her body was saturated with blood. She had apparently put up a desperate fight, grabbing the long blade of the knife and trying to wrest it from the attacker's hands. The index finger of her right hand was completely severed, and the rest of her fingers were mangled, bloody, and hanging loosely by bits of skin.

Her clothing was soaked in her blood, and clumps of grass and dirt had been roughly shoved in her mouth to try and stifle her cries. Apparently, poor John had stood paralyzed for a few moments in terror, watching the attack on his sister. When he finally turned to run, it was too late. He was found lying face down in the dirt, possibly having tripped over a tree root when he was attempting to escape.

The killer had pounced on the boy's back and stabbed him a half-dozen times. The wounds were so deep that in several instances the blade had gone all the way through the young boy's body and pierced the earth beneath him. There were two houses within a few hundred yards of the murder scene, but the occupants were so used to hearing shouts, laughter and yells from the nearby picnic area that, as the newspaper noted, they would not have paid any attention if they heard screams on this occasion.

The horrific savagery of the Joyce murders provoked a tremendous response throughout the state. From church pulpits, ministers pointed to the murderers as a sign that the country was descending into a deplorable state of vice, immorality and crime.

Rewards totaling more than $4,500 were offered by local residents, while an enormous manhunt was started for the inhuman wretch that was responsible for the outrage. Newspapers issued confident predictions that the perpetrator would be speedily arrested and subjected to summary vengeance.

But even though a number of likely suspects were interrogated in the wake of the murders, no serious suspects were found. Months, then years passed with no arrests in the case. It seemed that the murder of the Joyce children, which newspapers called one of the most horrible and revolting crimes which has ever occurred in New England, would remain forever unsolved. Time moved on, and for the most part, the murders were sadly forgotten.

But in the early summer of 1872, seven years after Isabella and John Joyce had been brutally slain, a new string of events was set into motion when Franklin Evans came to board with his elderly sister, Mrs. Deborah Day, at her farmhouse in Northwood, New Hampshire. Evans, a gaunt and grizzled 64-year-old ne'er-do-well, had led a shiftless existence for most of his adult life.

A contemporary writer later said of him, "He belonged to that numerous class of deadbeats that are always broke." Wandering the New England countryside, he survived by sponging off his adult children, borrowing small amounts of money from relatives and acquaintances, and blatantly seeking handouts from strangers.

What little honest money he did make came from supplying a Manchester physician, Dr. F. W. Hansen, with healing roots and herbs that he scrounged up in the forest. His vagabond life had given the old man a deep knowledge of the land, and his reputation for obtaining medicinal products of the woods and fields was unsurpassed. Even in this line of work, though, Evans could not keep from betraying his lazy and dishonest nature.

Claiming that he himself was a botanical physician, he peddled worthless cures to rural families. He also passed himself off as an itinerant preacher. Taking advantage of the religious fervor of the era, he joined the Second Advent Society, declared that he was a minister of the gospel, and managed to raise a little money from his brethren to support himself while on his sacred mission.

The Religious Society naturally took offense, however, when he was arrested for consorting with prostitutes. And this incident wasn't his only brush with the law. At various times, he was charged with petty theft, attempting to pass crudely forged $10 bills and, most seriously, scheming to defraud the Travelers Insurance Company of Boston of $1,500.

If these crimes were the worst of his transgressions, Evans would have been nothing more than a small-time scoundrel, a snake oil salesman, and a con artist. But as the country would eventually learn, much to its horror, he was something far worse, a creature so depraved that to the people of his time his crimes seemed the work of a supernatural evil.

"too horrible," as one newspaper stated, "for anything in human form to have perpetrated." There were four people living at his sister's farm when Evans showed up there that summer: Mrs. Day and her husband Sylvester, their widowed daughter Susan Lovering, and Susan's daughter Georgiana. This poor young woman, Evans' grandniece, immediately became the object of the depraved old man's lust.

Within days of his arrival, he began trying to seduce the girl. When she repulsed his advances, he concocted a diabolical scheme. It was, as one account stated, "a deeply laid plan designed for no other purpose than to lure his victim into his lecherous grasp." Near the day farmhouse was a deep forest, the largest tract of woodland in the country, covering an area of more than 2,000 acres.

Late on Monday, October 21, 1872, after being away from the farm for most of the day, Evans returned to his sister's home, explaining that he'd been off in the forest setting snares for partridges. The following morning, he invited his niece to accompany him into the woods to see if he had caught anything. For reasons unknown, she agreed.

The traps turned out to be empty, but he showed Georgiana how they worked. Little hoops concealed inside the hedges, designed to snag birds by the throat as they scrambled through the foliage. Georgiana was intrigued by the snares, never suspecting that their purpose was actually to trap her. Early Friday morning, October 25th, Evans asked the young woman for a favor.

He had agreed to take care of some chores for a neighbor, a farmer named Daniel Hill, and would be gone all day. He asked Georgiana if she would mind going into the woods and check the partridge traps for him. Surely he must have caught something by now. She was reluctant at first, but allowed herself to be persuaded. Evans left soon afterward, presumably for Hill's farm several miles away.

A short time later, Georgiana stuck a comb into her thick brown hair to hold it in place, threw on a shawl, and disappeared into the forest. When Georgiana failed to return by lunchtime, her grandfather went to look for her. Unable to find any sign of her, he came back home and told her mother, who immediately became alarmed.

The two of them hurried back into the woods. As they frantically made their way along the forest paths, shouting the girl's name, they spotted her shawl on a tree branch. A short distance away, they discovered her comb, broken in half, with strands of her hair still tangled in its teeth. The earth all around had been trampled with footprints, one made by a man's boots, the other by a girl's shoes, evidence, Sylvester Day would later testify, of a squabble

Terrified now, Day and his daughter pushed deeper into the trees, but found no other signs of the missing girl. The two of them ran home, alerting the neighbors as they went. Throughout the weekend, all day on Saturday and Sunday, hundreds of people scoured the woods but found nothing. By then, however, suspicion had fallen on Franklin Evans. The authorities checked with Daniel Hill and found that Evans' story didn't hold up.

He had not asked him to help with chores that day. In fact, he hadn't seen him for more than a week. Another witness, a young man named James Pender, testified that he had seen Evans cross into the forest at around 8:30 a.m. on Friday morning, just a half hour before Georgiana had disappeared into those same woods.

County Sheriff Henry Drew grilled Evans, but the old man could offer no convincing account of his whereabouts on the day that his grandniece went missing. He was promptly taken into custody. Inside Evans' pockets, Drew later stated he found a wallet, money, obscene books, a bottle of liquor, and a common bone-handled knife with two blades, bloodstained, and keen as a razor.

Even after he was arrested, Evans denied knowing anything about what had happened to Georgiana. But when Drew assured him that no harm would come to him if he confessed, Evans changed his story. Georgiana, he insisted, was alive and well. He had arranged to have her carried away by a man from Kingston, a farmer named Webster, who wanted her for his bride and was willing to pay for her.

Although Sheriff Drew was skeptical, he immediately started for Kingston, where he quickly confirmed the story was a base falsehood. Back at the jailhouse, he continued to badger Evans, plying him with liquor and even telling him that he would help him escape to Canada if he told him the truth. Finally, on October 31, six days after the girl's disappearance, the old man gave in. Evans told the sheriff he would accompany him to the place where the body had been left.

Through the dark forest, they silently made their way along, over rocks and logs and along narrow trails. Then, in a clearing at one of the deepest points of the woods, Evans took the sheriff and an assembled group of deputies to a spot underneath the roots of an upturned tree. He pointed a shaking finger at a pile of dried leaves and quietly murmured, ''There she is.''

The sheriff gently brushed away the leaves, and by the dim light of his lantern he saw the pale face and mangled remains of Georgiana Lovering. Two townsmen who were at the scene, Evan J. Parsley and Alonzo Tuttle, had brought the local physician, Dr. Caleb Hansen, with them. Gaping in shock at the body of the naked, savaged girl, Parsley couldn't help but speak. He demanded of Evans, "How did you come to do such a bloody deed?"

The old man shrugged as he replied, "I suppose the evil one got the upper hand of me." Dr. Hansen bent down to examine the dead girl. A glance at her face with its bulging eyes, swollen and protruding tongue and dark bruises at her throat told him that she had been strangled. Her body had been hideously mutilated. Evans later confessed that he had raped her corpse and then had torn open her belly with his bone-handled knife to get to her uterus.

He had also excised her vulva, which he carried away with him and hid under a rock. When a stunned Sheriff Drew asked him why he had committed such butchery, the old man calmly replied that he did it to gain some knowledge of the human system that might be of use to me as a doctor. As he was dragging the man back to jail, Drew had one more question for him. What did you set those snares for, Frank? Evans answered with a self-satisfied smirk,

I set them to catch the girl, and I catched her." Franklin Evans' trial opened on February 3rd, 1873, but it was a perfunctory affair. The outcome was a foregone conclusion to everyone involved, including the defendant. Only one dramatic moment occurred during its three-day duration.

Early on the morning of Tuesday, February 5, while his guard was off fetching him a glass of water, Evans took one of his suspenders, tied it around his neck, attached the other end to a clothes hook on the wall of his cell, and tried to hang himself. Just then, the newspapers reported, the guard returned, seized Evans, and disengaged him from the hook. Most observers believed that the man's half-hearted suicide attempt was nothing more than a ploy to set up an insanity defense.

If that was the case, the effort failed. He was convicted of murder in the first degree and sentenced to hang on February 17, 1874. For his "unnamable and incredible crimes he will be swung like a dog," celebrated one local newspaper, which went on to recommend that those wishing to attend the hanging should make early application in order to secure "reserved" seats, which will be scarce.

Accompanied by the High Sheriff of Rockingham County, J.W. Odlin, Evans was transported by train to the state prison at Concord. A crowd of more than 800 people gathered at the station to get a glimpse of him. One newspaper stated that they were excited to a remarkable pitch of feeling. This frenzied fascination was not entirely based on Evans' notoriety as the killer of Georgiana Lovering,

By then, he had confessed to other crimes as well – atrocities that marked him as one of the most appalling killers of the era. Evans began his murderous career nearly 15 years earlier when he was visiting Derry, New Hampshire. Passing by the home of a family named Mills, he peeped in a window and spotted a little girl, approximately five years of age, playing on the floor. There were no adults nearby.

Possessed by the urge to procure a body for surgical purposes, he snuck into the house, snatched the child, then took her off into the woods and strangled her. When he stripped off her clothing, though, he discovered that one hip and part of her spine were deformed. Filled with revulsion, he abandoned his plans to examine her, the name he gave to post-mortem rape and sexual mutilation, and buried the corpse under a rotten tree stump.

Three years later, while in Augusta, Maine, he snatched a 14-year-old girl named Anna Sibley on her way to school. Carrying her deep into the woods, he raped her, cut her throat, and then hid her corpse under a pile of leaves. In May 1872, just weeks before arriving at his sister's home in Northwood, Evans raped and murdered a woman whose body was found in the woods near Fitchburg, Massachusetts.

His most sensational confession, though, was that he had killed little John and Isabella Joyce in Lynn, Massachusetts. While some of the law officers involved in the case were skeptical of this claim, and though Evans himself retraced it shortly before his death, the similarities between the Lovering murder and the murders in Busey's Woods convinced most lawmen that the crimes had indeed been perpetrated by the same person.

Headlines around the country spread the news that the eight-year-old Joyce murder mystery had finally been solved. Franklin Evans spent the last night of his life quietly falling asleep around midnight with the Reverend Church of Providence, Rhode Island at his side. Around 5.30 a.m., he ate a hearty breakfast and drank a cup of tea.

When Church asked him if he had any last-minute statements to make, he replied, "I have confessed everything. If the people don't believe it, I can't help it." A large, excited crowd gathered outside the prison walls as the hour of execution drew near. At 10:50 a.m., they were admitted into the building where the gallows had been set up in the corridor between the guardroom and the cells.

Within minutes, every available space was packed with spectators, some of them standing on the stairways leading up to the cells, others crowding around the scaffold. At 11 a.m., Evans, dressed in a black suit, was led through the crowd by the prison warden. He climbed the scaffold on his own and muttered something under his breath as his arms and legs were tied.

He appeared quite calm and possessed, although the people who were standing closest to the gallows later reported that his knees were trembling. The noose was adjusted around his neck, and a black hood was pulled over his head. After reading the death warrant, Sheriff Odland placed his foot on the spring that controlled the drop and, at exactly 11:06 a.m. on Tuesday, February 17, 1874, the elderly serial killer was launched into eternity.

He dangled in the air, slowly strangling for nearly 20 minutes before his heart stopped beating and the attending physician declared him dead. Ironically, since he claimed that his murders were committed so that he could gain anatomical knowledge to aid him as a doctor, his corpse was donated to the Dartmouth Medical College so that it could be dissected by the students there. This was not quite the end of the story, at least in regards to the murders of the Joyce children.

A few years after Franklin Evans went to the gallows for the murder of Georgiana Lovering, a ghost story came to be connected to the murders of the children in Busey's Woods. The murders had a tremendous effect on the local community. As one local resident wrote in 1878, "Of the many dark deeds of blood which have disgraced this age, few have been fraught with more harrowing details than the one enacted right here."

Isabella and John Joyce vanished on June 12, 1865, but were not found until the following Sunday, when their bodies were accidentally discovered by hikers in Busey's Woods. The woods were part of an old 400-acre farm located on both sides of Busey Street that was given by Benjamin Busey to Harvard College for the Horticultural Institute.

In time, 120 acres of the farm and woods would become the Arnold Arboretum with the Busey Institute on one side. The Joyce children had sought the high ground of the woods for their picnic. Isabella had been raped and stabbed repeatedly, and her brother was found a quarter mile away by Busey Brook in a condition that sickened the war-hardened Civil War veterans who saw the body.

It was surmised that just before noon, he had left his sister, fallen, and finally been attacked by his sister's murderer. The children were brought back to Lynn for burial. The funerals became the scene of public sorrow, especially since they occurred just two months after the assassination of President Lincoln. Rewards were offered by the authorities, and seven suspects were interrogated and released. Visitors to the girls' murder site raised a memorial

In the process, any further clues were obliterated, although what could have been discovered during those days of primitive forensics remains unknown. For the protection of the public, a police beat was established in the Busey Woods. Then, 13 years later, the story took another bizarre turn.

"The details of our area's terrible atrocity and barbarity fueled a feeling of unprecedented horror," wrote an author of a book about the murders published in Boston in 1878. The book asked how a crime so terrible could ever have happened. In a section as civilized, a community so guarded, a population so abundant in the marginal outline of a great city.

The book's author was Henry Johnson Brent, founder and editor of the New York City magazine Knickerbocker, which was widely enjoyed from 1833 through the Civil War. In June 1865, he happened to be staying with friends who lived within a few hundred yards of the murders. He wrote his book, Was It a Ghost?, to focus attention again on the twin murders that had gone unsolved for more than a decade.

Brent himself had immediately become a suspect in the case when a boy told police that he had often seen a man of Brent's description in the Busey's woods with a knife and gun. Fortunately for Brent, he was an artist, whose palette knife and target-shooting practice was known in the neighborhood. He was also acquainted with members of the police force. The police quickly dismissed him as a suspect. By the end of June 1865, the search for the killer had grown cold.

A week or so later, in a bizarre personal twist, Brent saw the ghost of a man on the far side of his host's property between Busey and Motley Woods. Brent truly felt that the event was something beyond his ability to reconcile by the usual rules of explanation and that it deserved publication. He had gone down to meet his host returning from Boston via Forest Hills, only to learn later that he had returned home via Center Street at 10 p.m.

Brent revisited the site where he spotted the apparition at 9 p.m. within half an hour of the event, but nothing more was seen nor found. Initially, Brent connected the apparition with his host, whom he feared might have met with some kind of misfortune, but during this second visit, which included a walk to the rock where Isabella Joyce had been murdered, Brent suddenly connected it with the murders. He took his story to a perplexed police chief, who urged him to publish it.

The chief asked whether Brent recognized the ghost. Could it have been the children's recently deceased father? Was the spirit perhaps a witness to the murders? H.J. Brent detailed his encounter with the spirit in Chapter 10 of his book. An abridged version of it follows:

Upon a still and clear night, I went out of the cottage and, taking two dogs with me, strolled down through the stable yard and past the garden, until I came to the brow of the hill that formed the apex of my friend's grasslands. The brow of the hill was flat all about me, and at the base ran off into a meadow, the opposite side of which was overlooked by the Busey Woods."

From where I stood, several pines rose out of the even surface of the forest, marking, as with an uplifted hand spread out, the place where the girl's murder had been done. On my left was Motley's Woods, drawing up with its intense shadows close to the dividing wall. From the wall to where I stood, all was clear and distinct, save where the shadows fell over the ground.

The wall in the wood on my left ran down to that corner of Busey Creek, which was only a short distance, about 50 feet, from the spot where the boy had fallen. Some 250 yards away and close to the corner just mentioned was a clump of trees, and then straight before me, without an intervening object, the dark wood gloomed over the rock of the girl's death. My purpose was simply to take the cooling air from the winnowing trees."

It was the habit of my host, who did business in Boston, of leaving the train at Forest Hill Station at nine o'clock as a general thing and keeping to South Street until he got to the bottom of the hill near to where the brook crosses the road. He would then enter the lowlands at the outskirts of Busey Woods and thence follow the path and up the hillside covered by Motley's Woods, keeping close to the wall until he reached the point of the wall near which I was standing, pass over it, and be home.

"'Knowing that my host was irregular as to his hours of return home at night, "'I was not surprised when I saw a figure lean over the wall for an instant within about twenty feet of me, "'pause a moment, and then cross over to the side on which I was. "'Seeing that he stopped, I spoke aloud these words. "'Hello? Dan, is that you?'

Though I could discover the figure and recognize its movements, there was too great a shade thrown over the wall to enable me to distinguish a face so familiar to me. To my appeal, there was no reply, and then in an instant the impression came upon me that, if it really was my friend, he was testing my nerves. Up to this moment, I never had a thought apart from him.

While I stood perfectly motionless, waiting for some recognition of my appeal, the figure advanced slowly in a direct line from the wall, leaving the shadow and stopped before me and not twenty feet away from me. I saw at once that it was somebody I had never seen before. When in the light, without even a weed to obstruct my vision, as soon as he stopped I called, "Speak, or I will fire!" It was at this period that I observed especially the behavior of the dogs,

Up to this time, they had been quiet, lying on the grass, but now they both got up, and I felt on each side of me the pressure of their bodies. They were evidently frightened, and I saw that they were looking with every symptom of terror at the figure that stood so near us without emotion. The figure never once turned its head directly toward me, but seemed to fix its look eastward, over where the pine trees broke the clear horizon on the murder hill.

This inert pose was preserved but for a moment, for as quick as the flash of gunpowder it wheeled as upon a pivot and making one movement as of a man commencing to step out toward the wall was gone. To my vision, it never crossed the space between where it had stood and the outline of the shade thrown by the trees upon the ground. One step after turning was all I saw, and then it vanished. What I saw I relate exactly as it happened.

Can I describe this figure, you will ask? It looked like painted air. There was no elaborate appearance. Indeed, I could not make out the fashion of the garment. I was more occupied in the effort to recognize a human being in the figure that was before me. He looked dark gray from head to foot. Body he had, legs, arms, and a head, but the face I could not distinctly see as he turned it from me.

Brent published his book long after interest had died in the case, and it is believed that many local residents never accepted Franklin Evans' claim that he had killed the Joyce children, despite the similarities to his other crimes. Brent hoped that his book would stir up a renewed investigation and would goad the murderer, if still alive, into remorse and confession. The ghost story is the centerpiece of his book, and rightly so given the title,

Many local residents must have had theories about the murders. Brent, believing the murderer was still alive, did not state his complete details. The change of the picnic from May's Woods, where the children told their grandmother they were going, to the more secluded Busey's Woods prompted a suspicion that the children were accompanied by someone they knew. The coins their grandmother had given the children to ride the streetcar were found lying near the girl's body.

someone else had apparently paid their fare. Brent's book alternates between a detailed description of the double murder and an argument for the existence of ghosts. He even noted the results of seances that had recently occurred in which letters were read that were alleged to be written by the murdered girl and her father. A communication purportedly from the boy also was circulated.

Though unacquainted with spiritualism, Brent felt that he had to include these reports with his ghostly account. Brent maintained a terrible feeling of guilt over the fact that he had been in Busey's Woods painting and target shooting on the day that the murders took place and yet had seen nothing. Unfortunately, his unorthodox look at the murders, weaving together the crime and the ghost stories, drew scorn from many contemporary reviewers.

One of them wrote, "We are disposed to consider this a very unsubstantial pretext for making a book. What good it accomplishes, what end it serves, it is impossible to discover. It does not help the identification of the murderer. It throws no light on the supernatural speculations so prevalent these days. The curious public will probably hang with fresh interests on the horrible details of the crime.

But no one, as far as we can see, will be benefited by its perusal.

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Monsters, myths, mysteries, mirth, and more every Monday with Mind of Marler. I like alliteration, can you tell? You can find a list of where you can subscribe to the podcast at WeirdDarkness.com under the menu tab for podcasts.

Hi, I'm Richard Karn, and you may have seen me on TV talking about the world's number one expandable garden hose. Well, the brand new Pocket Hose Copperhead with Pocket Pivot is here, and it's a total game changer. Old-fashioned hoses get kinks and creases at the spigot, but the Copperhead's Pocket Pivot swivels 360 degrees for full water flow and freedom to water with ease all around your home. When you're all done, this rust-proof anti-burst hose shrinks back down to pocket size for effortless handling and tidy storage.

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By texting 64,000, you agree to receive recurring automated marketing messages from Pocket Host. Message and data rates may apply. No purchase required. Terms apply. Available at pockethost.com slash terms. Now there's a new way to share weird darkness with the weirdos in your life. It's a skill on your Amazon Echo device.

Just say, play Weird Darkness, and you'll immediately start hearing the newest episode. With your Amazon Echo or smart device, you can let me keep you company all day and all night. And it's easy to tell your friends how to tune in, too. Just tell your Amazon device, play Weird Darkness, to start listening. Hold the kaleidoscope to your eye. Peer inside. One twist changes everything. A woman awakens in a grotesque, human-sized arcade game.

A mysterious cigar box purchased at a farmer's market releases an ancient jinn who demands a replacement prisoner. An elderly woman possesses the terrifying power to inflict pain through handmade dolls. An exclusive restaurant's sinister secret menu includes murder-for-hire and harvested organs.

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My husband and I had an experience, and creepily enough, it was in Massachusetts. I don't even remember which road it was on, but I can tell you it was on a highway. It wasn't a well-lit major highway, though. It was two lanes in each direction with basically no street lamps, except for one every quarter mile or so. My husband and I had to drive from New Jersey to Rhode Island to do a dog rescue.

We'd picked up the dog and were on our way back home when we saw him. There we were, cruising home down this creepy, dark highway. It was doing that misty, half-rain, half-fog thing that makes it even creepier than it is. There was snow on the ground, which is the only thing that made visibility not as bad as it could have been. My husband started to slow down and I asked him what was wrong.

and he pointed with his chin at a man in what looked like blue jeans and a white shirt. No jacket. It was 35 degrees out. He said, "I'm slowing down because I'm leery that this guy might slip and stumble out into the lane or, you never know, he's out here dressed like it's 80 degrees out. He might decide to leap in front of us." When we looked again, the guy was gone. There were no trees he could have gone into.

There were just fields along that stretch of road, and with the snow it was easy to see the fields. There was a tree line, but it was at least 300 yards back. There's no way he made it to that tree line in six seconds or less. He was nowhere. It was three plus hours back home to Jersey from there, and we were creeped out every inch of the way. I was petrified I was going to turn around and see him in the back of our van with the dog crate or something.

I was never so glad to get home and get out of that car. I posted on Facebook looking for people who had experienced the old hag. Here are a few of the replies: "I've experienced sleep paralysis three times in my life. One very recently. It came immediately after I experienced dream looping where I have this groundhog day effect and I can't wake up.

In my dream, I dream that I'm dreaming and then wake up to find that I haven't woke at all and this starts looping into a weird cycle. Once I wake, truly awake, I'll have a physical paralysis and I can't move yet everything is like being drunk. This last time was bad. I actually threw up afterwards. I've been inquiring on dreamwalking feeling that somehow there's a connection.

"I wonder if the paralysis is due to not fully coming back somehow." – Sheila Halverson Once, only once thankfully. Mine was textbook, so not noteworthy, but it was awful nonetheless. I woke up unable to move and felt like there was a very evil presence in the room. That was terrifying. After about ten seconds it passed.

Thankfully, I had read exactly what it was, so I came to and knew it was just normal sleep paralysis that I happened to awaken in. Willow Waters. I experienced that one time. Someone was calling my name, a woman and a man shaking me on the shoulder. I woke up from it and got sleep paralysis. Thought I was being attacked. That was the only time. Claudia Lusion. This happened when I was about five or six years old.

My sister and I were in our shared bedroom one night, and I was playing with a plastic toy phone. I said hello into the receiver and clearly heard an older man's voice say hello back to me. The voice wasn't creepy or weird at all. It sounded like the normal way anyone would say hello. I was still terrified, of course, and ran to tell my parents. I even asked my dad if he'd just said hello, but he hadn't.

As I got older, I kept trying to tell myself that it was just the normal active imagination of a child, even though my imagination had always been just about playing pretend with dolls or toys or friends or whatever, but fully aware I was just playing, as opposed to seeing or hearing things that weren't there. But I can still hear that voice in my mind. It didn't sound like anyone I knew,

and I never heard a voice on that telephone again. One of the most famous characters in Czech fairy tales is a water sprite called Vodnik or Hastruman. You can see him anywhere close to water, and he embodies the spirit of water. He is usually depicted as a green man riding on a catfish. He has green hair, bulging eyes, and water is dripping from his coattails.

He is usually described as an evil spirit that likes to harm people and who catches inexperienced swimmers in order to gain their soul. He is very resourceful when it comes to catching souls, and will use ribbons and small mirrors to lure girls into the water, for example. He can also change himself into all kinds of animals, such as a horse.

But if somebody tries to ride him while he is a horse grazing by the shore of a pond, he jumps into the water with the person on his back and drowns them. He stores his gathered souls in a jar at the bottom of the pond. Then there are the Rusalki, female ghosts, mermaids, or water demons that haunt lonely lakes or rivers.

Rusalki are believed to be the souls of unbaptized children, suicides or unwed mothers who die in childbirth, living in a state of purgatory. This is my friend's story. There's a Japanese crab restaurant and she works there as a part-timer. After she'd worked there for a while, she heard many strange stories about the restaurant. The stories are about two ghosts that are there.

One day, one of the employees she knew saw a man entering the kitchen. He'd never seen the man before, so he assumed he was a customer. He wondered, what is he doing in the kitchen? So he told the owner about it. Oh, he's not a customer, the owner said. He's a ghost. We see him all the time. The owner didn't look scared at all. He's often here walking around, he said. The other story is about a woman wearing a kimono.

Some employees talked about seeing her in the restaurant. My friend saw her too. One night, when she had finished her job, she, the owner, and another employee came out of the restaurant. It was 2 a.m. Of course, they had turned off all the lights in the restaurant. However, she saw a red light shining through the window. She thought, did I forget to turn off a light? But she was wrong. She looked in the window and saw a woman wearing a kimono standing near the red light.

My friend was very surprised and told the other two, "Really?" the owner said, and they all looked in the window. However, this time there was no light and no woman. A gas station attendant in northeast Louisiana had a terrifying encounter on November 2012. The gas station was creepy enough to begin with at 3 am, but then the power went out

Led by the light of his cell phone, the attendant was able to get the generators going, but the backup lighting was dim and only lit up in certain areas, like the cash area and the parking lot, while the rest of the isolated establishment was cloaked in black. Out in that darkness, he noticed movement. Three children on bikes were heading his way. They stood at the door and stared at the attendant.

He felt creeped out, but they were just kids and it was way too late for them to be out. He opened the door and asked if they were okay. The young girl asked to use the phone, but as he handed his cell over to her, he realized her eyes were all black. No, I need the real one. She pointed at the landline inside. The thought of letting her inside sent chills up his spine.

He shouted at all of them to leave as he slammed and locked the door. The children stood there a bit longer, silently staring at him through the glass with their solid black eyes. Then they got back on their bikes and disappeared back into the darkness. The next morning, the attendant was eager to go through the surveillance footage. Unfortunately, the power outage cut the cameras off and they didn't boot back up with the generator.

he had nothing to prove the events of the night before took place. Bilocation is the term often used to describe someone being in two places at the same time. Funnily enough, it's not as rare as you might think. In fact, bilocation is often something attributed to saints and other holy people who can earn their sainthood by being ghosts of the living.

Parawiki describes bilocation as, "...bilocation, or sometimes multi-location, is a term used to describe the ability or instances in which an individual or object is said to be or appears to be located in two distinct places at the same instant in time."

Biolocation is a physical rather than spiritual phenomenon, and a person experiencing it is supposedly able to interact with their surroundings as normal, including being able to experience sensations and to manipulate physical objects exactly as if they had arrived through natural means. This makes it distinct from astral projection.

In most instances, bilocation is said to be involuntary and not to have been directed by the individual concerned in terms of time or space. Here are a few saints of the Church who have been credited with this miraculous ability. Trust me, the list is very long and I have picked just a few illustrative examples. Saint Alphonsus Mary de la Guerre

She was seen in two places at once, in the pulpit preaching a sermon and at the same time taking confession. On the morning of September 21, 1774, a companion of St. Alphonsus Mary de Liguori watched him sit in an armchair where he appeared to be lost in thought. In fact, he stayed like that for several hours, almost 24 hours.

He was asked what had been wrong. He told his companion that he had been assisting Pope Clement XIV, who had just died. It took a little time for the news of the Pope's death in Rome to arrive, but he had, in fact, died at the very time St. Alphonsus Mary de Liguori had been seated in a trance. St. Paul of the Cross

After seeing St. Paul of the Cross aboard a ship and staying on the quay until the ship was very distant, Dr. Girardini was surprised to see St. Paul of the Cross emerging from a room at a friend's house. He approached him and asked how it were possible that he was in the house since he had just returned from putting him on a ship, and St. Paul is reputed to have replied, "'Be still. I came here for an act of charity,' before promptly disappearing."

Saint Martin de Porres. He spent his entire religious life at a monastery in Lima, Peru, but was seen at different times in many other locations, including Mexico, China, Japan, Africa, the Philippines, and France. One Peruvian man, for example, on meeting Saint Martin, listened in astonishment to his descriptions of China, as well as various people in China also known to him as he had just returned from China.

Another witness testified under oath that he had observed the saint ministering to captives on the Barbary coast. Saint Francis of Paola was said to have bilocated on several locations, and it is recorded that once, while serving at the altar in the chapel, he was also seen by some of his monks working simultaneously at his chores in the kitchen.

In his biography, another example is provided as follows: "People who wanted to see him approached the chapel and found him so deep in prayer that they decided not to disturb him. When they returned to the street, they were surprised to see him talking to some people. They hurried back into the chapel and saw him still lost in prayer." Padre Pio

Perhaps the best documented example is that a Padre Pio and numerous instances of bilocation have been cited including the testimony of Father Alberto who met Padre Pio in 1917. I saw Padre Pio standing in front of the window looking at the mountain. He was speaking to himself. I approached him in order to kiss his hand, but he did not notice my presence and I noticed that his hand was rigid.

At that time, I heard that he was clearly giving absolution and pardon to someone. After a while, Padre Pio shook like awaking from a nap. He looked at me and said, "You're here. I did not realize it." After some days, a telegram from Turin was delivered. Someone was thanking the Superior of the Covenant for having sent Padre Pio to Turin to assist a dying person.

I realized that the man was dying in the same moment Padre Pio was blessing him in San Giovanni Rotondo. Obviously, the superior of the covenant had not sent Padre Pio to Turin, but he had bilocated there. Here's another remarkable recounting of Padre Pio's abilities. In 1946, an American family went from Philadelphia to St. Giovanni Rotondo in order to thank Padre Pio,

In fact, their son, a bombardier plane pilot during World War II, had been saved by Padre Pio in the sky over the Pacific Ocean. The son explained, "The airplane was flying near the airport on the island where it was going to land after it had loaded its bombs. However, the airplane was struck by a Japanese attack plane. The aircraft exploded before the rest of the crew had the chance to parachute. Only I succeeded in getting out of the airplane.

I don't know how I did it. I tried to open the parachute, but I didn't succeed. I would have smashed to the ground if I had not received a friar's help who had appeared in mid-air. He had a white beard. He took me in his arms and put me sweetly at the entrance of the base. You can imagine the astonishment inspired by my story. Nobody could believe it, but given my presence there, they had no choice."

I recognized the friar who saved my life some days later while on home leave. I saw the monk in one of my mother's pictures. She told me she had asked Padre Pio to look after me. Heading to his car on the third floor of a parking garage when one of the guys from the conference he'd just attended, Doug, asked him to drive around the block a few times.

He said there were some freaky-looking kids hanging around his car and was hoping to kill some time while waiting for them to wander off. John let Doug in and they started cruising. When they neared his car, John saw the group Doug was talking about and agreed. They were creepy. Three kids, two boys and a girl, all gothed out. The girl looked about 15, the boys around 14 and 10.

They were intense. But John described it as if he began itching behind his eyes and really needed to look at them. He stopped driving. The kids maneuvered around his car, and the youngest one said, "It's scary out there all alone, and we just wanted a ride home." Apparently, Doug had interacted with the younger one earlier and had agreed to drive him home, but the two older ones creeped him out and he changed his mind.

John felt as if his heart was going to erupt from his throat as adrenaline raced through him. Doug said he was getting out of the car. As soon as he reached for the handle, it was like the children got older somehow, and he saw their eyes were solid black. No pupil, no iris, nothing. Just black. John threw the car into reverse and squealed the car backwards about 60 feet.

The kids began to pursue them. John took the car around the lot's corners, going around 30 miles per hour. He felt that they would die if he let those kids get in the car. He sped down three floors only to find the oldest boy was already at the bottom of the garage when they came out. They sped past him out of the garage and when John glanced in his rearview, the boy was gone.

and so was that menacing feeling that had been building inside him since making contact with those kids. They waited a few minutes before going back, and Doug was able to get in his car and head home. The black-eyed children were nowhere in sight. Upon leaving the garage for the second time that night, the menacing feeling returned. John was behind Doug's car watching helplessly as it misjudged the time it would take to get through the intersection on a yellow light.

Doug was struck by a truck and died instantly. John saw the three black-eyed children still lurking about two blocks away. I walk my dog four times a day, whatever the weather or time of year. It gives both of us exercise, but also gives me time to think, away from the burden of the home and its distractions. Our rambles around the small English country village in which we live rarely follow the same route.

There is much to see in Kent, and the little village of Charring has some real ancient gems if one is prepared to search for them. The village can claim to be over a thousand years old, having seen settlements from the Iron Age through the Saxons and Romans into the medieval period and right up to the present day.

The high street is beautiful, meandering up the hill past the historic marketplace, palace and church to the heights which is surmounted by a windmill. It runs past houses and buildings which have stood for centuries. Water has never been in short supply here. It collects through the chalk and slowly permeates the ground until centuries later it appears again in the wells, which most houses either still have or once had.

Building supplies have always been available. Wood is plentiful, and sand, gravel, and chalk abound close by. The sand and shingle of a long-past seabed fill the valley beneath the rich, fertile topsoil, and it's still quarried in the village, the unfilled sandpits now being quite verdant sanctuaries apart from the low moan of wind which rustles through the trees and undergrowth.

Until the First World War, chalk was quarried from the low escarpment which follows the ancient pilgrim's way. Today, the quarry is a silent retreat for rabbits and other wildlife, overgrown with brambles and bushes. The perfect place for the hide-and-seek games played by the village children, or to search for stone roses, fossil sea urchins in the chalk.

In the deep of a cold Kentish winter, the quarry is usually thick with snow, deep, crisp, and even. That is, until the tobogganing starts, when from sheds and garages, sleds and sledges old and new are dragged up the steep, sloping white meadow and raced to the bottom with squeals of joy from their riders. A few years ago, we had an unusually heavy fall of snow,

Overnight, it built up to form soft banks against the hedgerows and made the lanes around the village impassable to any traffic. We were effectively snowed in and cut off from nearby towns, but of course this did not stop my morning walk. I had awoken early to that strange silence which heralds the sight of snow. As the curtains are pulled back to reveal the day,

The sad orange ball of the sun had peeked over the trees in the east very briefly, before being swallowed up by gray and forbidding clouds as they swept the sky. In my kitchen, the comforting aroma of brewing coffee and the warmth of the stove invited me to linger over breakfast before buttoning into a sheepskin coat and slipping on stout boots for our chilly walk.

Millie was eager to be out and wagged her tail excitedly as she watched me tie the laces and then reach out for her harness and leash. Once outside, we crunched through the snow as we made our way across the road. The village street was deserted and silent. Not a soul was stirring at this early hour. Mist formed with every breath, and the trail of our passage across the snow followed us up the hill.

It was as if we were alone in the world, the only evidence of others being the gray smoke that issued from odd chimney and wafted gently into the sky. Our walk took us up across the top of the ridge where we could see the village and fields below, a white patchwork of roofs and gardens with strange humps here and there, bushes and cars covered with snow and waiting for the day to warm enough to reveal them again as the snow melted.

The quarry lay below us, with an unspoiled blanket of snow across the meadow, the blue shadows of the trees fading gently into cold white as the sun struggled to overcome the cloud. We made our way down the slope, and, stopping at the stile which bridged the fence, I lifted Millie gently across and followed her into the meadow.

I now observed that another lone soul had woken early. As snowy footprints made their way from the stile across the field, a single line of prints wavered across the white expanse and over the ridge in the direction of the village, the way in which we were going. We followed on, Millie stopping now and again to mark her way as dogs are inclined to do.

She's always loved the snow, a medium which she sees only occasionally but obviously enjoys much as a child would. She loves to play in the snow as much as she loves the sand on a summer beach. As we passed over the ridge, her behavior changed. She no longer wanted to frolic in the snow and hung behind my heels, keeping close to me with her tail down and giving the odd, quiet whimper. The footprints stretched ahead of us,

and now took the diagonal direction across the middle of the meadow, away from the path to the bottom stile which led on to the village lane. Curious now, I followed the trail, ready to greet my fellow walker, whoever it was, and to enjoy discussing the weather as we chatted on our way back to our warm homes. It was not to be. Millie and I followed the prints to the exact middle of the field, at which point they stopped in mid-stride,

The snow around was crisp, deep, and unspoiled. Only our footprints could be seen alongside the now mysterious trail. It was as if whoever had left the prints had been lifted to heaven suddenly as he or she had strode across the snow. Millie began to howl, something I had never witnessed before. A sad, wild wailing from deep inside her. A sound of despair mixed with fear.

I shivered myself in spite of the warmth of the sheepskin coat and the thick sweater below. I suddenly did not want to be on this spot a second more than I had to, as the realization of a strange disappearance ran through me. Millie was tugging to get away, the leash tight and whistling oddly as the cold brutal wind caused it to vibrate and sink.

The feeling of being closely watched came over me as the dog pulled hard back in the direction in which we had come, and in spite of the willowy sun above, the meadow became cold, dark, and unwelcoming. We made our way back as we had come, the dog now in my arms, shivering and snuggling close to my face for comfort. As we climbed the stile to get out of the field,

I looked back across the quarry to the meadow, with its trails of our own footprints and those of an unknown person still forming a dark line across the snowy surface. As I looked, I thought I witnessed a very faint glow at the end of the trail. It glimmered briefly and formed into a gentle mist as fresh snow began to fall.

For the first time, I noticed that no other footprints than those of me and my dog approached the stile from outside of the field. The line of the other person's prints started inside the meadow at the stile.

My wonder became worry as the falling snow thickened more on our way back to the house and its warmth and comfort. The outdoor chill had deepened and the snow fell in thick flurries, making the day dark and silent around us as we walked. That day I pondered the footprints and experimented in my garden, trying to walk backwards in my own prints in case a practical joker was at large.

It was impossible to walk in this way, as even if one foot went accurately into the print, one's weight was differently distributed and messed up the print. Short of the very unlikely scenario that the walker had been lifted into a balloon or helicopter midfield or lifted by a crane, there was absolutely no explanation for the disappearance. By next morning, all the evidence had gone.

first covered by the previous night's new version snow, then later crisscrossed by the trails of children's toboggans as they enjoyed the winter weather. Time passed, and my experience was largely forgotten, although I continued to walk Millie across the fields and quarry every day, and indeed still do in most places around Charring.

But for the last year, I have avoided the quarry with its silence, its old railway trucks once used as shacks for the workers, and its enduring mystery. The reason for this is simple to understand. Last winter was again severe, with cold easterly winds bringing a deep covering of snow, once again making travel about the area either difficult or impossible. At about this time, a young man was missed from the village.

he had headed out early on the morning of the snowfall to meet friends at the quarry, the intention being to film a toboggan run for YouTube. His friends arrived later at the stile to find the toboggan propped against the wire fence, the GoPro camera fixed to its deck and still recording as it faced the sky. His footprints stretched away over the ridge and, as of those before, stopped abruptly in the middle of the sloping meadow.

The young man has never been seen since that day. Of course, the video was checked. It shows a young man wearing a beanie hat looking intently at the camera as he probably makes adjustments to its position. Then the view changes to the sky. A leg and booted foot are then seen in brief as he apparently climbs over the stile. The rest of the video is of the sky, as the toboggan leans against the fence where it was found.

It filmed a lonely passenger jet leaving a contrail high in the sky as it passed towards the east on a long journey to somewhere. The movement of the clouds, and a little later, recorded two of the friends as they discovered the abandoned sledge and turned off the camera. Gone. Never to be seen again.

Today, observing the meadow from the stile, I note that the cows avoid the middle, which stays lush with long grass while all else is nibbled low. At the height of summer, the grass is sparse and yellow across the field, but green and gold at the point at which the footprints stopped. On a satellite view, the patch is easily seen from far above, which is how I prefer to view it. Far away is not far enough for me.

What happened in the meadow, we will likely never know. I have a theory about this mystery, as I'm sure others in the village will have too. It is a silly and strange theory, and I do not wish to be seen as a fool, so I keep it to myself. I no longer walk the quarry in winter, and in fact, I no longer walk in the quarry at all, whatever the time of year, but something tells me that the quarry will remain in my mind forever.

I wait until the next time, as I'm sure it will happen again. And is this a true account? Visit the quarry yourself, or Google it, and make your own decision. Working the night shift for a data center in Ohio, a man had a creepy exchange and posted his tale anonymously as "noetic." It was around 5:00 AM on July 31, 2010.

Noetic was taking a smoke break outside when he noticed two teenage boys standing motionlessly and staring at him from across the street. Immediately feeling unnerved, he snubbed out his smoke and went back inside. No more than ten minutes later, the intercom buzzed. Noetic checked the monitors, and there they were. The two boys had made their way over to his building and were now staring into the surveillance camera like they could see him through it.

Through the speaker he asked what they wanted. They said nothing, but motioned for him to come outside. He hit the speaker button again and told them to go away. They didn't leave, but continued to stare into the camera as if they were watching Noetic as he worked. Noetic was fed up after about ten minutes of this creep fest, so he went to the door to chase them off.

Right before opening the door, he saw them through the one-way glass and was horrified to see their eyes were completely black. He knew he had to open up the door and tell them to get out, and he decided he'd call the police if he had to. As if the boy read his mind, the moment the door opened, he said, ''That will not be necessary, sir. We simply need to use your phone. Can you let us in?'' Noetic was not about to fall for that nonsense.

He pulled out his cell and threatened to call the police if they didn't leave. He made sure the door was locked and he went back to the monitor. Only one boy was still there staring at the camera. Then he realized the second boy positioned himself out back and was staring into camera three. Nowetik called the police. Both boys moved into a blind spot with no camera coverage. Nowetik waited for them to reappear, but they never did. They simply vanished.

The police arrived at 6 a.m., and both boys were gone. I went to the U.S. recently for my mother's funeral. She was a great lady, and she will be missed by many. But she lived a good, long, joyful life and died at the age of 92, so we can be happy she lived a good life. Two days after the funeral, I was sleeping on the couch in the living room of the family home. My sisters and in-laws and nephews were all sleeping in the bedrooms upstairs.

For some reason, I was wide awake and couldn't sleep. The shutters on the windows were all wide open, as my mother had liked to keep them, and I closed them, as I didn't like the idea of anyone being able to look in and see me sleeping. Just then, the family cat walked into the room. He had one window, which was his window, as it looked out on the bird feeder, and he liked to sit and watch the birds and lick his lips while they ate the seeds my mother put into the feeder.

But he liked to sit on a chair and stare out that window and watch the world at all hours of the day and night, as cats like to do. He saw the shutter was closed and looked at me, but I was feeling too tired and lazy to get up, so I just said, "Tough luck, cat. You'll have to wait until morning," and laid back down on the couch. Suddenly there was a loud scratching on the window, as if someone or something was rattling the window frame behind the closed shutter.

I stared at the window, trying to figure out what was making the sound. The window is set about four feet above the ground outside, so there was no chance that some animal would be scratching at the window screen. It got louder and louder until I got up and opened the shutter and looked outside. There was nothing there. The second I had opened the shutter, the scratching noise stopped.

The cat jumped up onto the chair and took his usual position for looking outside the window. He purred contentedly as if someone were stroking him and sat there happily for several minutes afterwards. My mom always loved that cat, and I couldn't help but think it was her calling to me to open the shutters and let the cat have his window to look out of. Thanks for listening! If you like what you heard, be sure to subscribe so you don't miss future episodes.

All stories used in Weird Darkness are purported to be true unless stated otherwise, and you can find links to the authors, stories, and sources I used in the episode description as well as on the website at WeirdDarkness.com. If you like the show, please share it with someone you know who loves the paranormal or strange stories, true crime, monsters, or unsolved mysteries like you do! You can email me and follow me on social media through the Weird Darkness website.

WeirdDarkness.com is also where you can find information on sponsors you heard during the show, listen to free audiobooks I've narrated, get the email newsletter, find other podcasts that I host. You can visit the store for creepy and cool Weird Darkness merchandise. Plus, it's where you can find the Hope in the Darkness page if you or someone you know is struggling with depression,

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