THE VANISHING TRAVELER’S OF OLIVER’S FERRY: Deaths at the Crossing, Skeletons on the Floor
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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

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Do you like my horror-able humor episodes called Mind of Marler? If so, and you'd like more, it now has its very own podcast. Comedic creeps, sarcastic scares, frivolous frights, macabre madness. Every week I dive into strange history, twisted true crime, and paranormal weirdness. All the stuff you'd expect from me on Weird Darkness, but delivered with dark comedy, satire, and just the right amount of absurdity.

There is a legend told at Rideau Ferry of murder most foul, of travelers disappearing, of human bones found. In the early 1800s, a Mr. Oliver set up a ferry business at today's Rideau Ferry.

His ferry, a rough-hewn raft, linked roads leading from the Rockville and Perth. Mr. Oliver had one unusual quirk: he would refuse to take travelers across to the far side after dark, preferring to put them up in his house overnight and send them on their way at first light in the morning. His neighbors seldom saw the travelers in the morning. When asked about them, Mr. Oliver would simply say they went on their way at first light, you must have been asleep.

One strange thing kept happening, though. Many of the travelers who had stayed overnight at Oliver's house did not arrive at their destination. Victims, perhaps, the neighbors thought, of murderous highway robbers. Years later, long after Mr. Oliver had passed away, a bridge was to be constructed to replace the ferry service. When the outbuildings on the Oliver property were dismantled to make way for the bridge, human bones were found under the floors and in the walls.

the travelers had never left. 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...

Does reconstruction of a home or a building anger the souls who once lived there? Some people are now claiming they can live without food, at all, indefinitely. We'll learn about a poltergeist that haunted a shed. A 1940s supermodel was apparently brainwashed with drugs and used as a CIA covert operative. We'll meet Elizabeth Barnes, the Witch of Plum Hollow.

But first... Some travelers arriving late at night to board Oliver's ferry the next day stayed at Oliver's house, but they were never seen making the ferry crossing the next morning. Is it possible that the rumors are true, that they never left the house alive? We begin with that story...

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The truth behind the legend is perhaps even more interesting than the legend itself. In 1816, John Oliver, a Scottish pioneer, set up a ferry business on the south shore of First Narrows of Rideau Lake, the location of today's community of Rideau Ferry.

This was a narrow section of the lake, and the ferry linked a rough trail that led from Coyle's Bridge, near the head of Irish Lake, connecting with the road to Brockville, to the newly formed community of Perth. The trail in the area of Oliver's Ferry was described as "an avenue cut through extensive forest, where the traveller had to pass over rocks and wade through swamps and surmount all the inequalities of the ground in its natural condition."

When Reverend William Bell passed this way en route to Perth in 1817, he noted, "At the Ferry House Mr. and Mrs. Oliver showed me every attention and sent their son William with me to the house of Andrew Donaldson, Esquire, a next-door neighbor of the Olivers, where I remained the night." John Oliver appears to have had a somewhat unstable personality, which culminated in his death by suicide, shooting himself, in about 1821.

Rev. Bell noted that Oliver had forsaken all professions of religion and succumbed to his lunacy. His neighbor, Donaldson, didn't fare much better. Originally a devout Presbyterian, he seems to have degraded over time. Bell noted that Donaldson had a most outrageous temper and a malicious disposition. Donaldson died in 1826. Personality issues were passed on to John Oliver's son, William, who took up the reins of the ferry business.

William was almost universally disliked. He had many disagreements with his neighbors, which often turned violent. He made attempts on the wife of William MacLean from across the river. On July 19, 1842, his violent nature caught up with him when cattle from a neighbor, the Toomeys, trespassed onto Oliver's property. Oliver confronted the two Toomey brothers in a rage and struck one of them.

The Perth Courier, in its July 26, 1842 edition, reported that the Toomeys retreated to their home and that Oliver followed them there. One of the Toomeys grabbed a loaded gun and told Oliver to get back. As Oliver tried to wrestle the gun from Toomey, the gun discharged, shooting Oliver through the heart. He was killed instantly.

Rev. William Bell of Perth noted, "...the tragical death of William Oliver at the Rideau Ferry on the 19th, creating at this time a universal thrill of horror. It was dreadful to think of a man so profanely wicked as he was being sent into eternity in a moment." Word spread fast. On July 20, Peter Sweeney, the lockmaster at Jones Falls, wrote in his diary, "...heard that Mr. Oliver was shot by a neighbor at Oliver's Ferry."

The Toomeys were jailed and later convicted of manslaughter. William's death, however, wasn't the end of the story. As related at the beginning of this episode, stories grew over time that some travelers, arriving late at night, stayed at Oliver's house, but they were never seen making the ferry crossing the next morning. These stories developed into the legend that William killed these poor souls, took their possessions, dismembered their bodies, and hid those remains.

The legend says that when his buildings were torn down to make way for the new bridge across the Narrows in 1874, human bones were apparently found in the walls and under the floors. Reporter Rob Tripp of the Kingston Whig-Standard looked into the truth behind the legend in 2007. The papers of the era never actually reported bones being discovered when the buildings were torn down to make way for the bridge,

However, the Perth Courier in 1873, the year when bids were being assembled for the construction of the bridge, did run a story reporting the discovery of a human skeleton under the platform of a house near the wharf that was undergoing repairs. Dr. Dyslongs of Perth was asked to examine the bones, which he reported to have lain in the ground for as much as 25 to 30 years, hence the kernel of a legend.

A human skeleton? The right time period? A profanely wicked man? The legend of lost travelers and Oliver's Ferry grew over time. In the Kingston Whig-Standard article, Tripp points out a problem with the legend. The discovery of a human skeleton actually took place in Petawawa, hundreds of miles away. Dr. Dislongs of Perth just happened to be visiting at the time and was asked to examine the bones, hence the report in the Perth Courier.

No human bones have, as yet, been found in or under the buildings at Oliver's Ferry. Up next, a 178-year-old mystery comes to the surface in a Philadelphia suburb. Welcome back to We Are The Weirder. 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.

With each turn through these 20 tales, Reddit NoSleep favorite AP Royal reshapes reality, creating dazzling patterns of horror that entrance as they terrify.

The Kaleidoscope, 20 Terrifying Tales of Horror and the Supernatural by A.P. Royal, narrated by Darren Marlar. Hear a free sample on the audiobooks page at WeirdDarkness.com. Weird Darkness, I'm Darren Marlar.

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

"This is a mass grave," Bill Watson said as he led the way through the thick Pennsylvania woods in a suburb about 30 miles from Philadelphia. Duffy's Cut, as it's now called, is a short walk from a suburban cul-de-sac in Malvern, an affluent town of the fabled Main Line. Twin brothers Bill and Frank Watson believe 57 Irish immigrants met violent deaths there after a cholera epidemic struck in 1832.

They suspect foul play. "This is a murder mystery from 178 years ago and it's finally coming to the light of day," Frank Watson said. The brothers first heard about Duffy's cut from their grandfather, a railroad worker who told the ghost story to his family every Thanksgiving.

According to local legend, memorialized in a file kept by the Pennsylvania Railroad, a man walking home from a tavern reported seeing blue and green ghosts dancing in the midst of a warm September night in 1909. "I saw with my own eyes the ghosts of the Irishman who died with the cholera a month ago, a-dancin' around the big trench where they were buried. It's true, mister, it was awful," the documents quote the unnamed man as saying.

Why, they looked as if they were a kind of green and blue fire, and they were a-hoppin' and a-bobbin' on their graves. I had heard the Irishmen were haunting the place because they were buried without the benefit of clergy." When Frank inherited the file of his grandfather's old railroad papers, the brothers began to believe the ghost stories were real. They suspected that the files contained clues to the location of a mass grave. "One of the pieces of correspondence in this file told us X marked the spot," said Frank.

He added that the document suggested that the men were buried where they were making the fill, which is the original railroad bridge. In 2002, the brothers began digging and searching. They found forks and remnants of a shanty and, in 2005, what Bill Watson calls the Holy Grail, a pipe with an Irish flag on it. They knew they were close. But Bill said they needed hard science to get them to the next step.

The science came from Tim Bestel, a geophysicist who learned about the project from a colleague at the University of Pennsylvania who had heard the Watson brothers speak. The friend knew Bestel could provide the missing link in the brothers' excavation efforts. Bestel's work included earth scans, which can help detect what's underground without digging or drilling. By shooting electrical current through the slope, Bestel said he learned that there were oddball areas, or places where the current wouldn't pass through.

"We saw areas in the slope that were very electrically resistant," Bestel recalled. This was an initial indicator something might lie beneath the surface. After further digging, Bestel and the Watsons detected air bubbles above the coffins. Bestel helped pinpoint key areas to dig, and on March 20, 2009, Bill Watson said the team made a startling discovery.

"One of my students came running over at about two in the afternoon with something that was a clearly discernible human bone," Bechtel said. "It was just the beginning of the many puzzle pieces to surface at Duffy's Cut." The pieces led them to suspect that something other than cholera was responsible for the deaths. "A teeny-weeny little fragment like that is so chock-full of information," said Janet Monk, holding up a jawbone and teeth found at the Duffy's Cut site.

She believes the teeth, because of their irregularities, could someday be linked through DNA to living descendants of the men unearthed at the dig site. Mong, an anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania, joined the forensics team when Beshtel looked her up in the campus directory and asked for help separating the human bones from any animal bones. Since then, she has collected bones from seven skeletons unearthed at Duffy's Cut, including four skulls.

The trays and containers of bones occupy a long, wide table in the back of a lecture room at the University of Pennsylvania Museum in Philadelphia. Pouring over the bones with her green spectacles sitting low on her nose, Mong said she's focused her attention on the skulls, adding that they've provided crucial clues to what might have killed the Irishman at Duffy's Cut. "This skull has a little divot on what would have been the side bone of the skull," she said, holding it up.

"That little divot is something that didn't happen when they excavated it out of the ground." With just one divot on one skull, she was reluctant to jump to conclusions. But as more skulls surfaced, a pattern started to form. Holding the second skull, Meng said with confidence, "This person was clunked on the head at around the time of death. Recently a new piece of evidence came up from the ground to Duffy's cut: a skull with a perforation that could be a bullet hole."

"In fact, we can see some nice cracked edges that do look very much like a bullet hole," Meng observed. Meng and the team will soon test the skull for the presence of lead. The source could be a bullet or an axe. Either way, she said, if they had cholera, it didn't kill them. I'd say something else killed them, but they might have had cholera too. Why is the mystery so important to the team?

"It could have been us," Bill Watson said. "These guys came over here with nothing, looking for the American Dream like countless people have done. They thought they were going to make it and within six weeks of arrival they're literally buried in the fill here." Although they've unearthed seven individuals' remains so far, the Duffy's Cut team labors on to find the 50 more they believe are still under the surface.

The brothers said their goal is to preserve the memory of the Irish workers and to put the story in textbooks to be remembered for years to come. "It's a story that transcends nations, transcends history in a sense. It's the story you hear of workers that were exploited anywhere in the world," Frank Watson said. "How do we treat our employees? How do we treat people who immigrate for a new life? Every human being deserves to be remembered."

Just as dust lies on the floor of a long-abandoned house, the energy of those who once lived in that house could be absorbed into the building's walls. This energy can be awakened by disturbances, such as new owners who begin remodeling and changing what the spirits still think of as their home. The paranormal field is filled with stories of hauntings that come about suddenly when home or business owners begin to demolish, construct, or change the layout of a structure.

Recently, a wrecking crew began tearing down the old French warstead company building in Woonsocket, Rhode Island. The construction crew, made up of big, tough, rugged fellas, got so spooked on the site they refused to continue the demolition. Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management hydrologist Sophia Cazor said the men were legitimately frightened and the work stopped.

According to members of the wrecking crew and onlookers, one of the cranes being used to demolish the building would go haywire every time it got close to tearing away part of the building. Kim Bakari, daughter of John Bakari, the crane operator, took a photo which she said shows what looks like apparitions in a window of the building. Another incident involved a large beam that fell and seemed to aim itself directly at the crane's cab, missing John Bakari by mere inches.

Kim McCary called on Andrew Lake, a paranormal investigator, who agreed to come to the site. He brought along two mediums to assist in his investigation. The trio entered the building and had a "conversation" with the spirits, explaining that the deceased needed to move on because the building couldn't be saved. After their visit, the activity stopped, and demolition continued without incident.

Doug Hogate Jr., CEO and founder of Jersey Unique Minds Paranormal Society, said in his opinion, spirits may get upset that their home is being changed. "Imagine being at your house and someone comes in and starts tearing walls down and remodeling," Hogate said. "They could be thinking, 'This is my house. What are you doing to my house?'" One investigation Hogate remembers that could have been caused by construction was at Johnson Hall in Salem.

They said a lot of activity stirred up while they were remodeling the first floor, he said. Jumps investigated the building three times and recorded the most activity on the first floor just as construction was being completed. "That is a prime example," Hogate said.

There are other explanations of why remodeling could conjure up strange activity in a home, such as replacing plaster walls with more modern drywall, which is a much weaker sound barrier, and even exposing molds that could contain toxins which could affect a person's perception. But is it also possible that a spirit who has resided undetected in a certain building for hundreds of years could become more active in order to express his or her disapproval of the changes?

The next time you replace a window or build a partition, keep an eye out for someone who might want you to leave the room exactly as it is. The way life has grown on our planet requires that all living things feed off each other and must kill others in order to survive. That's the way of the world if you want to live for any more than a few days. But some people are now claiming they can live without food at all, indefinitely.

I'll have that story for you up next. Welcome back to Weird Darkness, I'm Darren Marlar. The way life has grown on our planet, it requires that all living things feed off each other and must kill others in order to survive. Even as a vegetarian, you're killing a plant. One could say that as a result of this arrangement, life in a sense is a tragic phenomenon. The idea of a life form that has transcended the need to kill would strike a new note in our idea of life on Earth.

Apparently, some Catholic saints lived for prolonged periods with little or no food or drink, and in some cases without that sure sign of nature elimination. In Ediacs, people who live without eating, like Lucie Latteau or Molly Fancher, are often bedridden and afflicted with numerous abnormalities. But the most famous in Ediac of the 20th century was quite different.

Therese Newman, a Bavarian Catholic who lived through the Nazi era, was a visionary who displayed the stigmata. Because of a muscle spasm in her throat in 1922, she stopped eating solid food. By 1926, all she could manage was to drink a few drops of water. On August 6, 1926, she had a vision of Christ's transfiguration. Hunger and thirst permanently left her.

By 1927, she quit all forms of nourishment, except a daily eighth of a communion wafer. She stopped eliminating and continued in this state for the remaining 35 years of her life, according to the official account. Exceptionally, she was not bedridden but healthy, energetic, and robust. She lived very much a public life, made herself accessible to visitors, and was fond of nature and sightseeing excursions.

Friends, family and religious confessors never saw her eat despite spending hours working with her in the fields or going on outings with her that lasted for days. Her brother said that despite the heat, she never drank or showed signs of fatigue. Witnesses swore to all of this under oath, and there are no reasons I'm acquainted with that suggest they conspired to mislead the public or were driven by unconscious forces to prevaricate. Naturally, one wonders whether Therese ate or drank on the sly.

To make sure this was not the case, and in response to widespread requests to test her, she consented to being observed in July 1927 by a medical commission and four Mallersdorf nurses whose veracity was placed under oath. She was intimately probed and carefully observed for 15 continuous days and nights. At all times, she was under observation by at least two nurses.

Powerful arc lamps beamed 5,000 watts in her eyes to test the authenticity of her ecstasies. She showed no reactions. She lost about 8 pounds after her stigmata bled, but by the end of the experiment, her weight was somehow restored. Only by assuming a wildly improbable conspiracy can you doubt the conclusion. For 15 days, she drank and ate nothing but tiny shards of the Eucharist wafer,

So well known was her Inadiac lifestyle that during the war the Third Reich gave her no food rations. There are other spectacular cases of impossibly long fasts in other cultural traditions. The aim here is to give one example of a so-called miracle that is part of a pattern. The pattern of these miraculous phenomena is the real story and what it suggests for our dietary future.

At this juncture of life on planet Earth, being menaced by climate catastrophe and global wars, any grounds for hope in the creative advance of our species should be of some interest. Generally speaking, poltergeists are the bratty kids of the paranormal world. They create a lot of noise, cause some damage, and make obnoxious spectacles of themselves, but they are, on the whole, seemingly helpless to do any real harm. Their antics are tiresome rather than evil.

On occasion, however, poults exhibit threatening, even fiendish behavior. Reading these accounts, one understands why our ancestors attributed such sinister visitations as the work of the devil. One of the more well-known cases of such malevolent hauntings took place in Bromley, England, in the early 1970s. It is also, fortunately for paranormal researchers, among the more well-documented poltergeist accounts.

Of all the places where you'd expect hellish forces to erupt, an allotment shed probably rests at the bottom of the list. The Kentish Garden Guild of Bromley, England consisted of three pensioners, Alfred Taylor, Tony Elms, and Clifford Jewess, who managed two sheds in the city's Grove Park allotments, which they used to sell gardening supplies to other allotment holders. It was a modest little enterprise, run by the retirees mainly as a way of keeping active.

It was on April 26, 1973, that these sheds began inspiring something considerably weirder than flowers or vegetables. The three men were in one of the sheds when some strange powder suddenly hit the ceiling. Before the trio had time to digest this occurrence, a small jug on a shelf abruptly flew across the room. Jewess picked up the jug and placed it in a covered box, but instantly the jug was, somehow, out of the box, back on the floor.

Flying jugs are quite bad enough. Ones that teleport themselves through solid matter are really too much. That was just the beginning of any number of unexplainable and increasingly disruptive incidents. Fertilizer would shoot out from its bin, spraying anyone in the vicinity. A seven-pound weight sailed through the air, circling Taylor's head menacingly. Any and all items in the shed would be seen, as Taylor put it, going around the hut like skittles,

Bottles would mysteriously become unscrewed and their contents dumped on the floor. Large amounts of fertilizer would vanish from their storage containers. Once, when Elms was about to drink coffee, he noticed, fortunately just in the nick of time, that its contents had been replaced with fertilizer. Half-ton bags of fertilizer would move on their own accord. At times, the sheds themselves would shake as though an earthquake had hit. Coins would fly throughout the rooms.

One of their customers, George Bentley, summarized the situation quite nicely: "There were some right queer goings on. The men were not only baffled by these events but increasingly frightened. They sensed that whatever was causing these phenomena was not just mischievous but hostile. Unsurprisingly, they lost customers. Who wants to shop for a rake only to be hit in the head with a bag of fertilizer? And the trio began to fear their personal safety was threatened."

Elms decided to try fighting a cult with a cult. One night, after consulting with a group of white magicians, he performed an exorcism in one of the sheds. Those waiting outside heard chaos. The walls thudded loudly, and the heavy iron door repeatedly swung open. When Elms finally staggered out, he was bruised and bloody from a cut on the head. Next morning, when the men returned to the shed, they saw what the entity thought of their spiritual efforts.

As one of the men said, it looked as if it had been hit by a bomb. Items which had been on the shelves were now circling in the air. Creepiest of all, the sign of the cross was painted or scratched everywhere inside the shed: on walls, on chairs, on bins, everywhere. The thing, whatever it could be called, was laughing at them. The poltergeist began pursuing the men even when they were nowhere near the sheds. Taylor was, in the presence of witnesses, tormented by the entity in his own home.

On another occasion, when he was in an office building, he felt invisible hands give him a strong shove. It seemed that there was no getting away from the harassment. In September 1973, Taylor contacted the Society for Psychical Research. Perhaps professional assistance could finally rid them of this costly and dangerous pest.

Two society members, Pauline Ronells and Manfred Kassir, made several visits to the sheds, and immediately saw that it was no hoax. The poltergeist treated its guests to its whole bag of diabolical tricks. Items flew about the room, or were suspended in mid-air, or simply, inexplicably, disappeared. Security bolts on the windows vanished before their eyes. The buildings shook from the force of violent blows on the walls.

They witnessed the entity ripping Elm's shirt and sticking a saw down his back. Later, a flower bulb was forced into Elm's mouth. For whatever reason, Elm's seems to be a particular focus for the spirit's wrath. During one visit, money belonging to Elm's vanished. Ronells asked the entity to return his cash. Two coins suddenly appeared from nowhere, hitting her on the head. The presence of the psychic detectives seemed to inspire the entity to new heights of high strangeness.

The number 1659 suddenly appeared on a wood panel. This was followed by more automatic writing. A question mark, various random letters, the name of one of Alfred Taylor's friends. Perhaps the eeriest features of the entire haunting came next. On a shelf, the impression of a child's face began to appear. Then a piece of brass with MN stamped on it suddenly dropped on the floor. Nobody present had ever seen such an object before,

And what did the letters MN mean? That was for the poltergeist to know, and none of them to find out. Two chemicals stored in the shed, white sulfite and brown maxicrop, were used by the entity to outline a skull on the counter. It appeared almost instantly, too fast for human hands to have created it. Then the sinister face gradually vanished.

The whole unnerving business kept going for nearly two years, an unusually long time for poltergeist visitations, until it suddenly stopped, as unaccountably as it had begun. It was noted that the activity ceased when work on a nearby block of garages had finished, but it's anyone's guess if there was any possible connection. Everyone who visited the allotment sheds during those two hectic years agreed that something very strange went on.

something that was not capable of being created by any human trickery. But what did create it? And why? We'll almost certainly never know while we're on this side of the grave. When Weird Darkness returns, Candy Jones was such a looker she became a supermodel. But there was the other side of her life, as a CIA spook. And we'll look at the story of Elizabeth Barnes, who was better known in her community as the Witch of Plum Hollow.

Welcome back to Weird Darkness, I'm Darren Marlar! If you'd like to display your dark weirdness wherever you go, you can find Weird Darkness t-shirts, trucker caps and dad hats, school supplies, kids clothes, coffee mugs and more in the Weird Darkness store, with dozens of designs to choose from and a variety of colors to match your style.

In the movie "Salt," Angelina Jolie plays a double agent who is mind-controlled by scary remnants of the USSR Secret Service. And in real life, the 1940s bombshell Candy Jones was apparently brainwashed with drugs and used as a CIA covert operative.

Kandi Jones was a successful model, author, and modeling agency owner who had married Long John Nebel, a popular late-night talk show host on New York radio station WOR. Kandi told Nebel that years earlier, the FBI had asked her to use her office as a mail drop, and that she had agreed to deliver mail for the FBI when traveling on business. Kandi was prone to insomnia and suffered from abrupt changes in her normally congenial disposition.

Nebel, an amateur hypnotist, offered to hypnotize her. During their first session, Jones easily fell into a hypnotic trance and began speaking in another voice who identified herself as Arlene Grant. This second personality revealed that Jones had once delivered a package for the FBI to a man in San Francisco while she was on business there. The man was Dr. Gilbert Jensen, a doctor she knew from her USO days.

Candy had dinner with Jensen on November 16, 1960. Jensen said that he now worked for the CIA and had an office in Oakland, across Bay Bridge. He said that if Candy wanted to, she could get "far deeper" into the covert intelligence business, adding that it could prove lucrative for her. With three sons at private schools, Candy was short of cash and accepted. The first thing Jensen did was to hypnotize Candy.

Under hypnosis, Jensen told Candy that she was to be a messenger for a secret CIA unit and she would sometimes be required to travel abroad, that she would be given a passport under the assumed name of Arlene Grant. Using mind-altering drugs, Jensen reinforced the Arlene personality so that she could take Candy over almost completely when triggered by a telephone call that played a recording of particular sounds.

This done, he was able to send Candy, with Arlene's voice and manner, on various experimental missions at home and abroad. Candy would change into Arlene in appearance, too, wearing a wig and using a different makeup style. Jensen aimed to create a perfect messenger, one who could not reveal, even under torture, anything about the message she carried, where she came from, or who had sent her.

Jones was then supposedly sent to a CIA training camp where she was trained to kill and learned how to hide code numbers under her fingernail polish. After each mission was completed, Candy would remember nothing. Jensen's piece de resistance was to demonstrate that his conditioning was so deep that Arlene would kill herself on command.

As a means of demonstrating the psychiatrist's control over her, Candy was once supposedly even tortured in front of 24 doctors in an auditorium at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Candy Jones' story sounds like the wild fabrications of a deranged mind. However, there is some evidence that this bizarre tale is true.

Candy told Joe Vergara, her book editor at Harper & Row, that she sometimes worked for a government agency as a courier and might disappear occasionally for weeks at a time. She also wrote a letter to her attorney, William Williams, instructing him that if she were to die or vanish under unusual circumstances, he was not to reveal the details of the event to anyone, especially the press.

Also, when writer Donald Bain was talking to Candy about publishing a book on the story of her life, she showed him a passport issued in the name of Arlene Grant, bearing a photo of Candy in a dark wig. Freedom of Information requests have also revealed that the CIA does have a substantial file on Jones, but they refuse to release it. Rural Ontario, Canada has always had its mystics.

In Ontario's Leeds County, it was Elizabeth Barnes, better known as Mother Barnes, the Witch of Plum Hollow. Her date of birth is unclear. Some sources say 1794, others say 1800. She was from Cork in Ireland, where she fell in love with a young sergeant named Harrison. Her father, a colonel in the British Army, disapproved of the relationship, so the couple eloped and moved to what was then Upper Canada.

When Harrison died a few years later, Elizabeth married David Barnes, a shoemaker who had moved up from Connecticut. The couple ended up having nine children, six sons and three daughters. In 1843, the family relocated to Sheldon's Corners in Kittley Township, north of Brockville, not far from Lake Eloyda and the village of Plum Hollow in the amusingly named Bastard Township.

Barnes eventually left his wife, and Elizabeth needed money to support her large family, so she turned to fortune-telling, reading tea leaves and charging her customers 25 cents each. A large sum in 19th-century Ontario, her talents earned her the title "The Witch of Plum Hollow," even though she did not live in Plum Hollow itself.

She was the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter and was also alleged to be part Spanish Gypsy, which was credited as the source for her sixth sense. Mother Barnes was a diminutive woman, barely five feet tall. She did tell a few tall tales, though, when it came to fortunes. People traveled from all over Canada and Upper New York to consult with her. Her more local cases involved finding lost livestock and solving crimes.

A man named Morgan Doxeter disappeared in Charleston Lake. Mother Barnes directed the searchers to the place where his murdered body was found. Her most famous customer was a lawyer from Kingston and aspiring politician named John A. MacDonald. The Witch of Plum Hollow told him that he would become the leader of a new country and that its capital would be what was known as Bytown, in those days a gritty lumber town. In 1867, the Dominion of Canada was formed.

Bytown is now Ottawa and the capital city, and Sir John A. Macdonald was the first Prime Minister of the new country. Mother Barnes had earned her a quarter. Elizabeth Barnes died in 1886 and was buried in an unmarked grave in the Sheldon's Corners Cemetery. In 1892, local writer Thaddeus William Henry Levitt published his short novel The Witch of Plum Hollow, featuring Mother Barnes and her sixth sense.

Today, her little cabin still stands behind a rail fence along Mother Barnes Road, just west of County Road 29. It's on private property, and it's posted with "No Trespassing" signs. Visitors cannot go inside, but they can park beside the road and have a look at this piece of the past along the back roads of Leeds County. A frightening incident took place at Hinawana National High School in the Weybehol on the morning of Thursday, October 12, 2023.

Up to 14 students were allegedly possessed by an evil spirit right in the middle of their classes, according to Staff Sergeant Donald Curran, chief investigator at the Loewe Police Station. Sergeant Curran described the terrifying scene: "Many of the students suddenly became aggressive and started screaming at the top of their lungs. They also displayed abnormal strength as teachers tried to restrain them."

"In my assessment," he said, "it is likely they were possessed. They are not usually so aggressive, but they were shouting loudly." After being brought to a local priest for exorcism rites and examined at the rural health unit, the students finally calmed down from their hysterical state. Curran revealed that earlier on Monday, one of the students claimed to have seen a shadowy black figure. This prompted the school to hold a mass the next day, on Tuesday.

This was the first time such an incident has occurred at Hinawana National High School. To allow the traumatized students time to recover, the school administration made the decision to temporarily suspend classes. 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. Visit WeirdDarkness.com and you can also 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. Grandfather's Ghost Story Leads to Mass Grave is by Megan Rafferty for CNN. Does Remodeling Your Home Disturb the Spirits Who Died There? was written by Kelly Roenkes for NJ.com. Life Without Food is by Michael Grosso for Consciousness Abound.

The poltergeist in the allotment shed is from Strange Company. The supermodel who was brainwashed into becoming a spy is by Annalie Newitz for Gizmodo. The Witch of Plum Hollow was written by James Morgan for North Country Public Radio.

"The Frights of Oliver's Fairy" was written by Ken Watson for Rodeo Info. And "Schoolhouse Demons" was from Paranormality Magazine. 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 3:5-6, "Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your paths straight." And a final thought.

Trust yourself. You've survived a lot. And you'll survive whatever is coming. Robert Too. I'm Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me in the 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... An eerie tombstone stands watch over one of Portland, Oregon's oldest cemeteries. And the story behind that tombstone is a strange one.

Don't take a gift from little Gracie's grave, or her lifelike statue might cry tears of blood. When it came to her daughter's Elsa doll, one mom was eager and ready to let it go. But the doll wouldn't allow it. An ancient stone cross is said by locals to be cursed, and the curse infects anyone who dares to disrespect it.

But first… Two authors reported a very strange encounter with a mysterious entity they believed was not of this world. What did they see, and why were they under the impression this being was not of the world? 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 catacombs of St. Calixtus in Rome, Italy, hold the remains of 16 popes, several martyrs, and around a half a million Christians. Nine of those popes were buried in the famous Crypt of the Popes.

The underground burial chambers, named after Calixtus, who at the time of their construction was the Deacon of Rome, under Pope Zephyrenus, have long been a popular tourist attraction. Calixtus was later elected pope and eventually martyred for his Christian beliefs. The catacombs of St. Calixtus are now naturally closed due to the coronavirus outbreak, but those who visited this rather gloomy place say they experienced something strange there.

Among these people are two authors who report a very strange encounter with a mysterious entity they believed was not of this world. What did they see? And why were they under the impression this being was not of this world? Did they accidentally catch a glimpse of someone from another reality? There's one particular aspect of this case that makes the experience very unusual to say the least.

Lionel and Patricia Vanthorff have investigated the world's unsolved mysteries for more than 30 years and are the authors of 15 best-selling books. In their fascinating book, Mysteries and Secrets of Time, I'll have a link to that in the show notes, they recall a highly unusual sighting of a being who was present inside the catacombs of St. Calixtus. Lionel was visiting the catacombs together with Patricia, and they were both behind the rest of the party.

They were so far from the rest of the other tourists that they could still see them, but both authors are convinced no one, absolutely no one, was behind them. According to their own testimony, Lionel and Patricia were not walking side by side. Lionel was about 30 meters behind Patricia, and she was far behind the party in the catacomb. Lionel remembers how he suddenly became aware of someone's presence right behind him.

In their book, the authors write, "The tall stranger behind him in the eerie darkness of the Calixtus Catacombs was not of this earth, but he was nothing hostile or negative. If he gave off any psychic atmosphere at all, it seemed to be curiosity." He seemed to be asking politely enough who Lionel was and what he was doing there. Lionel also got the impression that the entity was probably an ordained deacon or priest. He was wearing a tall, pointed hat, like a traditional wizard from legends and folklore.

and a long cape, which, together with the hat, gave the outline of a tall, upright cone. The cloak and hat were black, but they shone, gleaming and glistening as though something bright and sparkling was woven into them. When Lionel turned to look more closely at the entity, he could see nothing. It was one of those apparitions that is restricted to peripheral vision.

Because, as a priest, Lionel is frequently called upon to conduct funerals, and regards comforting and helping the bereaved as one of the most important parts of his priestly work, he wondered whether the entity that had looked over his shoulder, down there in the solemn silence of the Calixtus Catacombs, had also been a priest, one who had laid to rest the mortal remains of those that lay there.

The experience made a big impression on Lionel, who tried to make sense of who he had encountered in the Calixtus catacombs. In time, Lionel became convinced the mysterious stranger must have been an early Christian funeral priest. This puzzling encounter raises many intriguing questions. Those who believe in the existence of ghosts will most likely say Lionel witnessed a spirit or phantom of some sort.

As mentioned on several occasions, the number of scientists who promote the multiverse theory is steadily increasing. If our reality is surrounded by multiple worlds invisible to our naked eye, it can occasionally happen that these worlds collide with our own, and we can catch brief glimpses from other realities. Lionel and Patricia wonder if the encounter in the catacombs could have been a time slip.

In their book, the authors ask, "Did a priest from the third or fourth century encounter a fellow priest from the twenty-first century? Did a man who had done his best to help the bereaved seventeen centuries ago glide through a mysterious portal in time to encounter a kindred spirit doing that same work today?" Assuming this was a time slip, it cannot be denied it was a very different experience than most time slip cases reported worldwide.

What's unusual about this particular case is that Lionel saw the mysterious being once again, but this time not in the catacombs. When Lionel and Patricia returned to their hotel, the sightings continued for the next 36 hours. Lionel saw brief glimpses of the same entity that simply wasn't there in physical form.

Lionel, who thought this must have been a priest, says the man seemed to be surrounded by animals, most likely sheepdogs or tamed docile wolves. As time passed, Lionel's peripheral visions faded until they were completely gone and he could no longer see the unknown stranger anymore. Lionel and Patricia think the experience was most likely a time slip and not an encounter with a ghost.

As a theologian, Lionel had a great deal of sympathy for Callixtus, and he has wondered whether the entity he encountered could have been the deacon himself. In their book, Lionel asks, "Could that strange figure looking over Lionel's shoulder in the catacomb have been Callixtus himself, from the days when he was the deacon responsible for it?"

Did Calixus sense that this British priest, visiting these ancient Roman burial places from a century 1,700 years ahead of his own, was a tolerant kindred spirit? Potentially a theological comrade-in-arms who would stand beside him in his dispute with bitter opponents who held cruder, narrower, less merciful views? These are valid questions, and the reasoning is logical.

But let's not forget that most who report time slips have no relation with the places or people they witnessed. Up next: An eerie tombstone stands watch over one of Portland, Oregon's oldest cemeteries. And the story behind that tombstone is a strange one. Don't take a gift from little Gracie's grave, or her lifelike statue might cry tears of blood.

And when it came to her daughter Elsa's doll, one mom was eager and ready to let it go. But the doll supernaturally refused to be let go. These stories and more when Weird Darkness returns. I'm Darren Marlar, welcome back to Weird Darkness.

If you or someone you know struggles with depression or dark thoughts, I'd like to recommend the Hope in the Darkness page at WeirdDarkness.com. There I have gathered numerous free resources to help you fight depression, including the Crisis Text Line, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, Save.org, iFRED and more. These resources are absolutely free and they are there when you need them on the Hope in the Darkness page at WeirdDarkness.com.

Visitors to Portland's Lone Fir Cemetery may wonder at its name. The Lone Fir is now one of many in this lush and green space, home to nearly 25,000 souls at rest. In 1854, Oregon pioneer James B. Stevens sold a large part of his land in Portland to Colburn Barrel under the condition that Barrel maintain the gravesite of his father who was buried there.

Just a few months later, there was no question of what the land would be used for after Barrel Ship Gazelle exploded, killing 24 of the 60 people on board. Body parts were blown into all directions, both into the sea and on land. Identification wasn't easy, and early Portland settlers opened up their homes to store the bodies until they could be buried.

Though Barrel had intended the land he had just purchased from Stevens to be his own personal plot, he ended up interring several victims of the explosion there, including his friend Crawford M. Dobbins, calling the cemetery "Mount Crawford" after him. Years later, in 1866, Barrel tried to sell the land to the city, but they were not interested. Thanks to a group of Portland families, the property was incorporated and 20 more acres of land were added.

Mount Crawford was then rechristened "Lone Fir." The name was suggested by Beryl's wife, Ariella, in honor of the, at the time, lone fir tree on the property. In 1887, Stephen's wife Elizabeth died, and he had a special gravestone carved for her resting place. The sculpture depicts James and Elizabeth, standing together holding hands, in a manner that can only be described as visually arresting. The tombstone also has a rather creepy quote imprinted on it:

"...here we lie by consent after 57 years, two months, and two days, sojourning through life awaiting nature's immutable laws to return us back to the elements of the universe of which we were first composed." For two years, James visited his wife at what would also be his final resting place so that he could imagine holding his wife's hand again. He died in 1889 and was buried beside her.

Elsewhere in the cemetery, you'll encounter nearly 10,000 of the residents of Lone Fir, buried without names, including 132 patients of an insane asylum run by a man named Dr. Hawthorne in the 1800s. Dr. Hawthorne was also buried here. One section of the cemetery, known as Block 14, was used to house the unidentified remains of Chinese railroad workers, who were later exhumed and moved in 1948.

Some, however, were undoubtedly left behind. Cemetery records claim about 1,100 immigrants were buried here, and only 265 bodies were moved. The eerie occupants of the Lone Fir Cemetery are not limited to the unnamed. Wander down the aisles and you may see the grave of Emma Merlitton. Emma, 33 years old at the time of her death, was a famous beauty and infamous sex worker in Portland. She was murdered brutally, hacked apart with a hatchet,

In an attempt to find her killer, one of her eyes was removed by photographers, who at the time believed that the last image a person saw would be preserved in their eyes. Unsurprisingly, this revolutionary thought did not result in her murderer being apprehended. One of Dr. Hawthorne's patients, one whose name was preserved, is another fascinating case. Charity Lamb was well known for having killed her husband with an axe, supposedly because she was jealous of her own daughter.

It seems now that Charity was likely acting in self-defense against an abusive husband. But as the first woman convicted of murder in what was then the Oregon Territory, her notoriety outlived her. Today, James and Elizabeth Stevens, the two pioneers of Portland and founders of Lone Fur, greet visitors as they trek through the 30-acre burial ground that lies just across the river from downtown Portland.

Tourists and curious locals have described the gravestone of the Guardians of Lone Fir as "unsettling, creepy, weird, spooky, but also awesome, incredible, amazing, sweet, romantic and beautiful."

Though the cemeteries open daily to the public from 7 a.m. to sunset, Halloween is Lone Fur's busiest time of year when the cemetery hosts the popular Tour of Untimely Departures, featuring the graveyard's most famous residents, including James and Elizabeth Stevens. Nearly a thousand people queue up outside for a chance to meet them and to see their undying love carved into stone for themselves each year.

Savannah's Bonaventure Cemetery is known for its lush scenery and striking monuments to the dead. Yet there is one particular headstone that stops visitors in their tracks. Surrounded by a long iron fence, sitting pensively with her right hand resting on a tree stump, is the statue of a little girl. Her name is Gracie Watson, also known as Little Gracie. She was the only child of Wales W.J. and Margaret Frances Watson,

Wales took over management of the luxurious Pulaski Hotel in the 1880s, though the Watsons found themselves largely ignored by the city's upper class. Margaret longed to integrate herself into the community and began giving away food and drinks at their hotel. Soon the family's social status improved. Numerous parties were held at the Pulaski, to which Gracie was often invited. The little girl charmed guests with her lovable personality, taking on the role of an adorable hostess.

When she grew tired of mingling with the adults, Gracie would often slip away to play beneath the back stairwell. Her disappearing act became a running joke with the partygoers who would ask aloud, "Where's Gracie?" as a way of acknowledging the lateness of the hour. Then, just two days before Easter in 1889, Gracie Watson died of pneumonia. She was six years old.

Wales and Margaret were inconsolable. A grief-stricken Margaret claimed that she could still hear little Gracie laughing and playing under the back staircase. Soon thereafter, Wales moved his wife into the newly opened De Soto Hotel to escape their painful memories. But over the years, different staff members insisted that Gracie's voice could still be heard near the stairs. Other staff members refused to go into the basement due to the ominous sound of low moaning and clanking metal.

Wiels Watson, in a final tribute to his daughter, hired sculptor John Walls to carve a life-sized monument of Gracie, using a photograph as a reference. The finished work became the marker of her grave in Bonaventure Cemetery. It's said to be eerily accurate, all the way down to the shape of her mouth. And as the years passed, tales of Gracie's life — and her haunting gravestone — grew. Visitors to Gracie's grave often leave toys and objects for her to enjoy

Some say Gracie's statue cries tears of blood if these gifts are removed. Numerous witnesses have claimed to see what they perceived to be a real girl in a white dress skipping through the cemetery grass before vanishing into thin air. Others have seen little Gracie playing in Johnson Square, a public space near the Pulaski Hotel's former location.

At least one person has seen a young girl staring from the window of the building at the corner of Bryan and Bull Street, where the Pulaski stood, until it was demolished in 1957. In the spring of 2002, a Savannah tour guide led a group past the Pulaski's former site and began to tell Gracie's story. Suddenly, she noticed an unfamiliar, four-story structure reflected in the window of the building she faced. The guide spun around but saw no such building.

she continued to see the same reflection in other buildings until she finished Gracie's story. Later, after seeing a historic photo of the Pulaski Hotel, the tour guide went pale and confirmed it was the reflection she had seen. Gracie Watson's grave is one of the most heavily trafficked in Bonaventure Cemetery. The iron fence was specifically added to prevent damage to the sculpture. Yet, if the aforementioned sightings are to be believed,

Gracie Watson herself is also watching over her resting place. So, if you're ever in Savannah, Georgia, and decide to visit the beautiful 160-acre grounds of Bonaventure Cemetery, keep your eyes and ears open for a little girl in Victorian clothing. She may just be coming out to play. Coming up on Weird Darkness… An ancient stone cross is said by locals to be cursed, and the curse infects anyone who dares to disrespect it.

But first up, when it came to her daughter's Elsa doll from the movie Frozen, one mom was eager and ready to let it go. But the doll wouldn't allow it. Welcome back to Weird Darkness, I'm Darren Marlar

A story about a frozen doll seemingly haunting a family is creeping out people on the Internet. The now-viral post made by a woman named Emily Madonia about her daughter's Elsa doll is definitely pretty freaky.

The gist was this: Madonia and her family in Texas tried to toss out the doll in question. Emphasis on tried, because little haunted Elsa homegirl came back, y'all. Not once, but twice. Her original motivation for tossing the Elsa doll was pure practicality.

"We decided to get rid of it because we wanted to get rid of old toys before Christmas, so we would have room for new ones. I didn't even think about the Elsa doll. My daughter said she didn't care about it anymore, so it was easy to throw away. It was so old and germy and she had already colored on it with her markers. It seemed useless to donate it, so it went in the garbage outside," Madonia told the Scary Mummy website. But as we now know, Elsa didn't stay gone.

Two weeks later, we were looking for something and found the doll inside a wooden bench in the living room. A bench that was covered in books and things, and we never usually opened — and wouldn't have opened if we hadn't been looking for something we had lost. At this point, the family had what I feel to be a perfectly reasonable response to molded plastic traversing the supernatural realm to play hide-and-seek in your house.

Madonia explained, "My husband found it and yelled and I came running in. He put on rubber gloves and double-bagged the doll and took it out to the curb inside the garbage can with all the other garbage on top of it. The truck took it away." And while Madonia's husband clearly made a good call with the rubber gloves, it mattered not. Two weeks later, my daughter found the doll, no bags, hidden in our backyard.

Scary Mommy asked Madonia the obvious question: Is there any way her kids or her husband or really any other animate person that isn't a demonic doll could be pranking her? Despite what people may believe to the contrary, though, Madonia makes a few very good points. For starters, the entire situation has been a huge stress for her. If this was a loved one, they would surely have given up the gag by now.

Her kids don't really comprehend the fact that it could be something sinister. They're just excited to see if Elsa comes back, like Santa or the Tooth Fairy. Her husband is right there with her and suffering legitimate lost nights of sleep over this. Also, the alternative to the doll being haunted isn't exactly any more comforting.

"Rationally, I wanted to believe it was a person doing this, but how terrifying is that? Especially since it would have been very difficult to find it in the garbage that had been taken. And someone secretly coming into my house and backyard is a terrible thought too," she said. Madonia says that since their Elsa story went viral, they've received a lot of feedback. ***We all know how the internet loves opinions.

One thing people keep harping on is the fact that she mentioned the doll, although it was marked as a bilingual toy, only spoke English for the first two years, regardless of what setting it was on. Then it started randomly speaking Spanish as well. But right before we got rid of it, it would only speak Spanish. And it stopped singing, she explained. It was only talking, whether we pushed the button or not.

This didn't immediately throw up any red flags for Madonia because hashtag mom life. If you have children, you've experienced the random and sometimes strange ways toys malfunction. However, and it's a spine-tingling one, there was a very recent moment the doll gave Madonia chills. The creepiest thing I ever saw the doll actually do is when I boxed it up to send to a friend in Minnesota. It laughed for about 30 seconds straight.

"Usually it would have been a little giggle after saying something, but it has never laughed like that before. And that chilled me to the bone. My husband and I both looked at it in horror before we taped the box shut, drove it to the post office and mailed it off," she shared. As for where they mailed it and how the saga of the possessed Elsa doll will continue to unfold, a man by the name of Chris Hogan is the new owner of Creepy Elsa.

"I don't think he believes it could be haunted, so he took it for fun. I'm a skeptic too, but I just can't explain what happened here," said Madonia. "I'll feel better if a couple weeks go by and it doesn't reappear at my house. It is, after all, 1,500 miles away right now." She also covered her bases by shipping the Elsa doll with no return address she and Hogan are online running buddies to a P.O. box. Hogan couldn't send it back to her house if he wanted to.

If the doll does come back, we feel confident in suggesting that the family should move. Hire a paranormal investigator. Or both. An ancient cross which puts a curse on anyone who dares to meddle with it. No, it's not the plot of an M.R. James story, but rather a news item in the Saskatoon Star Phoenix, March 28, 1969. The following is the entire article word for word.

"Ancient Saxon Curse if Stone Cross Moved." -Couplestone, England Residents in this Devon village fear the consequences of an ancient Saxon curse when municipal workmen move the massive stone cross which has stood here for 1,000 years. Legend has it that anyone tampering with the 20-ton granite monument will suffer a life of misfortune and eternal damnation.

Thirty years ago, the council decided the cross was a traffic hazard and planned moving it. But workmen refused to do the job. Last year, the scheme was revived, and this time objections came from local citizens, led by 75-year-old Madge Pope, who petitioned officials to heed the warnings. No action was taken for six months. But now workmen have begun the long task of digging up the stone from its 10th-century foundations and re-erecting it on a new site.

"We're not worried about the curse," said a spokesman for the County Highway Department. And a workman commented, "If there is a curse, it will only fall on the boss. He gave the order to move it. My mate and I are just doing as we are told." Meanwhile, Ms. Pope is apprehensive. "They are all very foolish to interfere with it," she says. "The curse does work. Nobody in the village would dream of touching it. We all know what happened to others who tried to interfere with it." End of article. ***Well, I thought, this is getting good.

I eagerly searched the archives for the sequel, wondering what was the final body count from this act of desecration. And then I came upon this story from the Victoria, British Columbia Times Colonist from September 6th on the same year, just over five months later. "Saxon curses lose potency with centuries. Copplestone, England.

Saxon curses may have lost their potency after 1,000 years. At any rate, no dire consequences appear to have followed the shifting of an ancient stone cross in this Devon village in the interest of highway safety. The cross, a Saxon monument which has stood at the village crossroads since the 10th century, was supposed to bring a lifetime of misfortune and eternal damnation to anyone tampering with it. In modern times, it has proved a traffic hazard, impeding the view of motorists approaching the crossroads.

But when the council first proposed moving it 30 years ago, workmen refused on account of the curse and the scheme was dropped. Earlier this year, when the idea was revived, some villagers headed by 75-year-old Madge Pope pleaded with the council to heed the ancient warnings. The council compromised, agreeing to move the cross only a few yards from its original site and to keep it on the crossroads. The job was done about two months ago, apparently without supernatural retribution. Bummer.

Curses just aren't what they used to be in the good old days.

If you like Weird Darkness and would like to get even more, you can check out the free audiobooks I have narrated at WeirdDarkness.com. I have free audiobooks by Algernon Blackwood, Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen King, H.P. Lovecraft, Charles Dickens, Robert Heinlein, Robert Louis Stevenson and more. You can listen to all of the free audiobooks I have narrated on the Audiobooks page at WeirdDarkness.com. That's WeirdDarkness.com/Audiobooks.

Up next, Christopher Slaughterford was seemingly a completely ordinary young Englishman, but he's earned an unenviable place in the legal books. We'll find out why when Weird Darkness returns. Welcome back to Weird Darkness, I'm Darren Marlar. Will NASA help Scotland search for the Loch Ness Monster? Is it possible that time doesn't really exist? Can you find true love and marriage with a ghost? How can a pothole revive the dead?

These are just some of the questions that I have in my regular oddities column, Mind of Marlar. It's full of the strange and macabre as you'd expect from me and Weird Darkness, but with an added twist of humor, satire, and absurdity. It's a bit of comedy and creepiness combined. You can read the articles at WeirdDarkness.com slash Mind of Marlar. Marlar is M-A-R-L-A-R. WeirdDarkness.com slash Mind of Marlar.

This is the tale of how one seemingly completely ordinary young Englishman earned an unenviable place in the legal books and, more importantly to our modern generation, his own Wikipedia entry. Christopher Slaughterford was born in Westbury, Surrey, sometime in 1684. His father was a miller. He spent his early life apprenticing at a farm in Goldaming, after which he served other farmers in that neighborhood.

Slaughterford was hardworking, honest, clean-living, and eager to succeed. He had a good reputation and seemed as inoffensive and respectable a character as could be found. Before too long, he had saved enough money to buy a malt house in Shelford, which earned him a healthy living. The future was certainly looking bright. Slaughterford had an aunt keeping house for him, but he naturally now began looking for a wife to take her place.

Equally predictably, the single ladies of the area saw this steady and successful young man as an excellent catch. When his attentions turned to a pretty servant girl named Jane Young, she welcomed his courtship. The pair were often seen together, socializing with friends or taking strolls in the countryside. Early in October 1708, Jane went to her employer, Elizabeth Chapman, with some exciting news: she and Christopher were getting married!

Mrs. Chapman was happy for her young servant. She wished Young well and admired her trousseau. When Jane left the Chapman home, it must have been with a light heart indeed. Instead, this simple tale of rural romance turned to dark tragedy. On the evening of October 5th, Jane and Christopher were seen together, and then the girl vanished. No one knew what became of her,

until about a month later, when her body was found in a pond near Slaughterford's home. A surgeon's examination found several wounds to her head, which led to the common assumption that the unfortunate young woman had been murdered. The local community instantly settled on one suspect, and one suspect only, the dead girl's sweetheart.

It's unclear why so many people were immediately convinced that the hitherto exemplary Slaughterford would commit such a brutal act against the girl he planned to marry. But convinced they were. In the words of the Newgate calendar, "A clamour was raised against him and every person believed that he had murdered her. But why would he do such a thing? Nobody could say."

The common assumption was that Christopher had tired of his lady love and could think of no other way to be rid of her than by turning to murder. There was absolutely no evidence of any such thing, but that didn't stop this theory from quickly being accepted as fact. It was an alarming example of how easily public perceptions can be swayed. For his part, Christopher vehemently denied having anything to do with Jane's death.

He insisted that he had no idea how she met such a grim fate, and he was determined to prove it. On his own initiative, Slaughterford presented himself to the local authorities for examination. After a justice of the peace heard all the available evidence, he had no problem dismissing the case. As far as the law was concerned, Christopher was left with his good name unsullied. Unfortunately for Slaughterford, his neighbors felt differently.

Lack of evidence be damned, the community continued to insist that he was a murderer. They just had to find a way to prove it. And so they did. Dark stories began to be told of Christopher's behavior after Jane's disappearance. One woman claimed that when she asked him what had become of his whore, he replied, "'I have put her off. Do you know of any girl that has money your way? I've got the way of putting them off now.'"

Another woman said that before Jane's body was discovered, she asked Slaughterford what he would do if Jane Young should lay such a child to you as mine here. She alleged that he sighed, saying that was now impossible, and burst into tears. Then a neighbor of Christopher's said he had seen a man and a woman walking together on the night Jane vanished. He did not see the couple well enough to identify them, but the man was wearing clothing similar to that worn by Slaughterford.

Shortly after he passed by the couple, he claimed to have heard a woman scream. This lurid gossip seems like remarkably weak reasons to hang a man. But the community had whipped themselves up into a legal lynch mob. They knew, even if they couldn't exactly say how they knew, that Slaughterford was a murderer, and they were determined to send him to the gallows.

So intense was the uproar that the authorities decided it was necessary to have a formal trial at the next assizes. In the meantime, Slaughterford was held in custody at Marshallsea Prison, probably at least in part to prevent his neighbors from taking the law into their own hands. At his trial, Slaughterford's aunt and the apprentice who lived with them swore under oath that he had been at home for the entire night that Jane disappeared.

the previously described "witnesses" brought forward their dubious testimony. The judge and jury, realizing there was not a scintilla of hard evidence against the defendant, quickly returned an acquittal. This verdict did nothing to quell the fury of his accusers. One way or another, they were going to make Slaughterford pay for his crime. Local residents convinced Jane's family to bring a private prosecution against him,

This brought particular hazards for the accused. If he was found guilty, he was unable to lodge an appeal to the monarch since the case was brought by an individual, not the Crown. If Christopher lost this case, there was no hope for him. Neighbors took up a collection which financed the lawsuit as the Young family was far too poor to do so on their own. In the summer of 1709, the riddle of Jane's death was again brought before the law.

For Christopher Slaughterford, this was a case of the third time being anything but a charm. Although no additional evidence pointing to his guilt had been found, the jury, all consisting of local men, knew that they were there not to try the case but to deliver a conviction. Accordingly, they declared Slaughterford guilty and sentenced him to die.

It was the first time in modern English history that someone was to be executed for murder based solely on circumstantial evidence. Slaughterford was hanged in Guilford High Street on July 9. He maintained to the very end that he was completely innocent. Shortly before his execution, he wrote a statement, "...being brought here to die, according to the sentence passed upon me at the Queen's Bench Bar for a crime of which I am wholly innocent,"

I thought myself obliged to let the world know that they may not reflect on my friends and relations, whom I have left behind me much troubled for my fatal end; that I know nothing of the death of Jane Young, nor how she came by her death, directly or indirectly, though some have been pleased to cast reflections on my aunt. However, I freely forgive all my enemies, and pray to God to give them a due sense of their errors,

and in his due time to bring the truth to light. In the meantime, I beg everyone to forbear reflecting on my dear mother or any of my relations for my unjust and unhappy fall, since what I have here sat down is truth, and nothing but the truth, as I expect salvation at the hands of Almighty God. But I am heartily sorry that I should be the cause of persuading her to leave her dame, which is all that troubles me, as witness by hand this ninth day of July."

As a final gesture of contempt for the proceedings, as soon as the executioner put the rope around his neck, rather than wait to be pushed off the gallows, Slaughterford took the fatal leap himself. There was a local legend that his ghost was subsequently seen in the area with a noose around his neck and crying, "Vengeance! Vengeance!" The mystery of Jane Young's death may have been legally closed, but it was by no means resolved.

There are a number of obvious questions in this case. If Slaughterford was indeed guilty, what motivated this hitherto law-abiding young man to kill his fiancée, if he was innocent? What made so many people so convinced of his guilt that they would literally hound him to death? Why did no one at least address the possibility that someone else might have murdered her? And was this even a murder at all?

Presuming that Jane died the night she disappeared, her body, when discovered, must have been far too decomposed for any sort of proper post-mortem. It's conceivable that while walking home, she accidentally fell into the pond and drowned, with the suspicious marks on her head and neck being caused after her death from rocks and other materials in the pond.

Whether this was an instance of justice finally being done, or, as most legal analysts believe, an example of judicial murder, this was a remarkably perplexing case. 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. And in tonight's Sudden Death Overtime content in the podcast, I have two additional stories – the Hoskin family murders and how someone got the job of an executioner in medieval times. That's only in the Sudden Death Overtime content in tonight's podcast.

Visit WeirdDarkness.com, 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've already posted at WeirdDarkness.com. An author's encounter with a not-of-this-world entity was written by Ellen Lloyd for Ancient Pages. The Guardians of Lonefur Cemetery is by Jessica Ferry for the line-up.

The Ghost of Gracie Watson is by Gary Sweeney, also at the lineup. Haunted Elsa Doll is by Julie Sprankles for Scary Mommy. Curse of the Saxon Stone Cross is from Strange Company. And The Trials of Christopher Slaughterford is from Strange Company as well. 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.

Psalm 32:10, "Many are the woes of the wicked, but the Lord's unfailing love surrounds the man who trusts in Him." And a final thought: Be happy. Just because things are not good doesn't mean you can't see the good side of things. I'm Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness.

For Alan Taylor, January 15, 1919 was just another day on his farm near Prescott, Iowa. That is, until his 15-year-old neighbor, Irene Hoskins, came stumbling down the lane with a gash in the side of her head.

Young Irene told Alan that her father, John Hoskins, had murdered her stepmother Hulda and her two step-siblings, Roy and Gladys. Alan raced to the telephone and called for help. Chester Wood, another close neighbor, arrived soon thereafter. Together, they rode to the Hoskins farm. The men had known John for some time and wouldn't have thought him capable of something like this. John Hoskins was a widower with two children, Merlin and Irene.

In 1915, he'd married Hulda Campbell, a widow from nearby Nevinville, Iowa, with two children, Roy, 12, and Gladys, 18. John and Hulda had appeared happy together, and the family was well-liked in the area. When Wood and Taylor arrived at the Hoskins farm, they could see Hulda's bloody body on the back porch. John stood nearby, grasping a straight razor. He told them not to come any closer or he would attack. Frightened, the two men fled.

By the time law enforcement arrived, John had slit his own throat, as well as one of his wrists. He lay in a pool of blood just inside the back door of the house. One of the responders, a doctor, inspected the wounded man, declaring him "beyond saving." But then John began to twitch. They lifted him up and carried him inside the house to treat his wounds. A horrific sight awaited the responders once they entered the back door into the kitchen.

on the floor were the bodies of Roy and Gladys. Blood covered the room in a grisly red mosaic. Merlin was nowhere to be found. The doctor kneeled down to more closely examine John. It became clear his wounds were superficial. The damage to his wrist was minor, and his throat had been cut too high to cause any fatal injury. The sheriff ordered Hoskins to be treated and then transported to the county jail in Corning, Iowa.

with John Hoskins in custody, the investigation commenced. At the coroner's inquest, several of those who had been present that day were called to testify. A grim timeline emerged, based largely on the testimony of Irene and Merlin, who, it turned out, had witnessed some of the bloodshed before fleeing to his uncle's house. Irene said that she and Gladys had slept in until nearly 6:30 that morning, which was much later than John had wanted.

The family planned to go see John's parents that morning. The delay apparently put John in a foul mood. He soon began arguing with Hulda. According to the children, this was far from an isolated event. Indeed, earlier that same year, an enraged John had grabbed Roy by the throat and began strangling him. When Hulda and Irene tried to break it up, John attacked them too. The quarrel subsided without further injury. Then, nevertheless, it told of violence to come.

As John argued with his wife, the children sat down at the kitchen table and began eating breakfast. Soon, John joined them, while Hulda went outside to the separating house to get some lard. In the middle of the meal, John stood up and walked to the back door. He reached outside and grabbed a piece of wooden buggy axle that he used for mixing hog feed. Without a word, John then walked over and clubbed Gladys in the head. She crumpled to the ground.

John swung again, this time striking Roy. Irene and Merlin both ran, afraid for their lives. John ran after Irene, catching her easily in the front yard. She begged her father to stop, but John swung the axle. Blood seeped from the gash left in her head as John turned away from his bleeding child. He next spotted Merlin running across the room and called out to him. The boy froze in place. John ordered Merlin to take his horse and ride to his uncle's farm,

He wanted Merlin to tell his uncle what had happened that morning. Petrified, Merlin obeyed. He ran to the barn, saddled up his horse, and prepared to head off to his uncle's house. John then returned to the kitchen where he finished off Gladys and Roy with additional blows to the head. It was at this point that Hulda returned to the main house. Upon entering, she discovered her children dead on the floor. John then struck her in the face with the axle. Hulda stumbled out the back door and into the yard.

John followed her, smashing her in the head, then leaving her for dead. Meanwhile, Irene had come to her senses. The first thing she saw was her stepmother in a heap in the backyard. She staggered over to the injured woman. Hulda was badly hurt but still alive. She told Irene to run away and find help. Irene complied and went straight to Alan Taylor's farm. With the last of her strength, Hulda crawled onto the porch and died.

By the end of the inquest, the entire region knew what John Hoskins had done. He showed absolutely no remorse about his crime, even relating details of that day to his jailers. Local authorities brought Hoskins to trial almost immediately, and by March 1, 1919, he had pled guilty to murder. He was sent to Iowa State Penitentiary in Fort Madison, Iowa, to serve out a life sentence. Irene and Merlin were sent to live with their grandparents in Nevinsville.

In 1959, 40 years after the murder took place, the 78-year-old John Hoskins was granted parole after his original sentence was commuted. Surprisingly, he went to stay with Irene, who was now living in California. Life outside prison didn't suit John, however. He asked to be returned to Iowa. The state obliged, and a parole officer escorted Hoskins back to Fort Madison. He died there in 1963.

John's headstone is plain and makes no mention of the heinous crimes he committed on a cold January day in 1919. Few occupations from history are as maligned as that of medieval-era executioner. Popularly painted as gleeful dispensers of death and torture, the truth seems to be that many executioners throughout this period usually treated the occupation with a certain reverence and exhibited an extreme dedication to duty.

Beyond trying to minimize the suffering of those slated to be executed, this was, among other reasons we'll get into, because it would often mean the life of the executioner if they ever botched an execution or otherwise aren't extremely professional in carrying out their job. So, moving beyond any Hollywood depictions, what was it actually like to be an executioner in the ballpark of medieval times? And how did someone get the job in the first place?

A thing to note before we continue is that the duties expected of and performed by executioners, as well as what life was like for specific executioners, has varied wildly across time and regions.

For example, those condemned to death in the Ottoman Empire during the 18th century could potentially get off scot-free by challenging the executioner to a foot race. In this case, in addition to doling out lethal justice with their bare hands, executioners also worked as both bodyguards and gardeners. That caveat out of the way. How did one become an executioner in the first place? It turns out that many European medieval executioners were former criminals themselves.

You see, for reasons we'll get into shortly, the role of executioner was so unpopular that finding someone to do the job often required either forcing someone into the profession or offering the gig to someone who was slated to be executed themselves. Scandinavian countries were known to make extensive use of this novel hiring practice with a little twist thrown in: they'd maim executioners by cutting off one or both of their ears so that they could be easily identified by the public.

It also wasn't uncommon for people made executioners in this way to be branded somewhere on their head, once again for the purpose of their new profession being, in this case literally, written all over their face. For example, as noted in Hugo Matthiessen's Baudelaug Galgafutl, in the year 1470 a poor thief stood at the foot of the gallows in the Swedish town Arboga and was awaiting to be hanged.

The public attending the spectacle had pity on the sinner, and when he, to save his neck, offered to become executioner in the town, it was agreed. He was pardoned, and the red hot iron was used to brand his body with both thief and executioner mark.

In Germany, on the other hand, as author Joel Harrington notes in a discussion of his book "The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent 16th Century," while standing executioners on salary were the norm throughout Germany during the 1600s, for many centuries prior to this it was commonplace to thrust role of executioner upon a victim's oldest male relative. I'll place a link to that book in the show notes.

This all brings us around to why so many avoided the profession like the plague. To begin with, the general consensus among most was that, in taking such a job, one was then sure to be damned in the afterlife. This was despite the fact that in some regions, such as France, executioners were by official church decree absolved of all sins committed while performing their duties.

This still didn't stop the general public from considering executioners unclean, leading to the more practical problem with the job, nearly being completely ostracized from society. Coming back to those condemned to die instead of becoming an executioner, people seem to have been perfectly fine with this as the criminal's life would still be forfeit, just in a more metaphorical sense. For example,

Throughout medieval Europe, executioners were often forced to live in houses outside of the city or town that they plied their trade in. In cases where this wasn't possible, they tended to live near things like public latrines, leperatoriums, or brothels.

Executioners were similarly often denied citizenship to the towns and cities they served, and thus had few rights in the town, and were largely barred from holding office or even entering churches, pubs, bathhouses, etc. Basically, most public establishments were off-limits to the executioner. Thus, despite executioners being deemed critical for a society to remain civilized, they were paradoxically generally forced to live apart from that civilized society.

In fact, some places across Europe went as far to institute laws specifically targeting executioners and what they could and could not do in their day-to-day lives. For example, the Bavarian town of Memmingen enacted an ordinance in 1528 that forbade members of the general public dining with an executioner.

Such laws and general attitudes effectively limited the people an executioner could interact with in their day-to-day lives – just their own family and those from the criminal underworld who simply didn't care that the executioner was unclean. On top of this, an executioner's children and spouse were likewise similarly shunned by anyone but the underbelly of society.

This, combined with the fact that the children of executioners could usually only find mates with children of other executioners, understandably led to the role of executioner becoming a macabre family trade that resulted in executioner dynasties that spanned centuries.

Beyond being ostracized and damning your progeny to a similar life, as well as an afterlife full of hellfire, while there were potentially ways for an executioner to make a killing within the profession, it turns out for most there simply weren't enough executions themselves to make ends meet.

Alternate work was limited to jobs nobody else wanted. This included all manner of things from disposal of corpses , emptying cesspools, collecting taxes from the diseased and prostitutes, etc. Oddly, at least from a modern perspective, another common profession for a well-trained executioner was that of a doctor and surgeon. You see, beyond executing people, another thing executioners were often called to do was torture people for various reasons.

These two things, combined with the close-knit community of executioners sharing their knowledge amongst themselves, resulted in lifelong executioners generally having exceptional knowledge of human anatomy, and thus they were commonly called on to treat various medical maladies.

In fact, one rather famous 17th-century German executioner, Franz Schmitt, noted in his journal that over the course of his near-five-decade career, he had over 15,000 people he treated as a doctor, while executing only 394, and disfiguring or otherwise torturing or flogging roughly the same number, meaning most of the time he functioned as a doctor, despite society at the time considering him an executioner.

Schmidt was one of those thrust into the profession as his father was strong-armed into becoming an executioner, condemning Schmidt to the same life once he came of age. Though Schmidt's story has something of a happy ending. Like many executioners, Schmidt was given a wide berth by the public in his day-to-day life, but the incredible professionalism with which he conducted his grisly duties earned him the begrudging respect of both the general public and those in power.

In his later years, Schmidt was able to parlay this into a meeting with Nuremberg authorities and then he was able to appeal to Emperor Ferdinand II himself with the goal of restoring his family honor.

Swayed by not just Schmidt's words but also letters from city council members and other notable people extolling Schmidt's character and dedication to his duty, the then 70-year-old executioner was granted both Nuremberg citizenship and had his family name cleared, allowing his progeny to escape the bloody spectre of his work.

Of course, being ultra-professional with the profession was something of a necessity for Schmidt, as at the time in Germany there was a law stipulating that any executioner tasked with doling out death by the sword, a form of execution largely reserved for especially important individuals who took more than three swings to behead a victim, would be condemned to die themselves.

even where such laws didn't exist. The job of an executioner was extremely dangerous, as executioners were also at risk of being killed by either vengeful relatives or the crowd witnessing an execution.

In regards to the latter, if an executioner was especially cruel in their meting out of punishment, simply incompetent to the point that they caused undue suffering, or just otherwise acted in an unprofessional manner in performing their duties, it wasn't unheard of for a crowd to retaliate by killing the executioner on the spot, generally with no consequence to anyone in the mob. This constant danger of the job was something Schmidt himself talked about several times in his journal,

though he only notes one instance where the crowd turned into a mob. This occurred during a flogging he was performing, with the person being beaten ultimately stoned to death by the crowd. As you might imagine from this, in cases like Schmidt, who was trained from childhood to take over the job from his father, a rather lengthy apprenticeship was called for, including a robust education from one's parent, followed by assisting in executions and torture from a young age.

Schmidt also notes that he practiced executions extensively on various animals before being allowed to actually execute a human himself. The end goal of all of this was to make sure he wouldn't screw up, as raucous mobs didn't really care if it was someone's first day on the job or not. Now, although being an executioner came with some massive downsides, it wasn't all bad.

Enterprising executioners could actually earn a fairly decent living doling out torture and capital punishment on command, if they were smart about it. For example, especially skilled executioners who didn't mind traveling could take advantage of the scarcity of people willing to do their job by applying their trade across whichever country they happened to live in, rather than just staying local.

Executioners also frequently earned extra money in the form of bribes from the condemned or their families, invariably given in the hopes that the executioner would ensure death was as swift and painless as possible, or otherwise allow the condemned extra comforts leading up to the execution. This might include, for example, slipping them extra alcohol or the like to make the execution a little easier to handle.

On top of this, throughout much of medieval Europe, a perk of being an executioner is that it was customary for whatever property was worn at the time of death to be granted to the executioner. Additionally, executioners in Germany were frequently tasked with things like arbitrating disputes between prostitutes and driving lepers out of town, among other such jobs, all of which they could charge a premium for because nobody else was willing to do the job.

Executioners were also sometimes not just given the job of disposing of human carcasses, but also in some regions the explicit right to all stray animal carcasses found in a town. Depending on the animal, this could mean the rights to valuable hides, teeth, etc. An even greater benefit for certain executioners, this time in France, was the idea of "droit de

In a nutshell, because executioners were so ostracized and couldn't in some regions, for example, just go down to the market and shop freely, under droit de havage executioners were more or less allowed to tax those who sold various food and drink items. This came in the form of being able to demand goods for free. Finally, there's the money an executioner would be paid for performing an execution, flogging or the like.

Although it's hard to say exactly how much an executioner could earn per hanging or beheading in today's currency due to the inherent difficulty of gauging the value of historic currencies, it's evident that it was a good amount, at least relative to the generally low social standing of executioners. For example, according to information gleaned from an old statue dated to a small German town in 1276, an executioner could earn the equivalent of five shillings per execution.

This is an amount roughly equal to the amount of money a skilled tradesman could earn in about 25 days at a time. Likewise, an executioner operating in England some two centuries later in the 1400s could reportedly earn a fee of 10 shillings per execution, or roughly 16 times the amount of a skilled tradesman could earn in a single day.

Granted, as you might have deduced from the aforementioned case of Franz Schmidt only executing about 400 people and flogging a similar number in his near-five decades on the job, nobody was getting rich doing this by itself. It at least wasn't bad pay per hour of work. Finally, we'd be remiss in any discussion of medieval executioners to not point out that the idea of executioners wearing masks to hide who they were does not appear to have actually been much of a thing.

Beyond, as mentioned, in many regions being literally branded as executioners, even large cities for much of history weren't actually that large, so people knew who the executioner in a given region was, if not directly, by being marked thus. Thus wearing a mask would have been pointless.

"Such laws and just general attitudes effectively limited the people an executioner could interact with in their day-to-day lives, to their town, in their day-to-day lives, to their own family, and those from — — limited the people an executioner could interact with. Such laws and just general attitudes to their own family and those from the criminal underworld who simply didn't care what the execution