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Picture the scene: It's a beautiful day outside, you're walking your dog and soaking in the sunshine, it's relatively peaceful and quiet, and you're enjoying your time out with your dog. What could possibly ruin this moment. Well what if your dog started acting strange, pulling you towards a spot in the dirt. He keeps pawing at it and won't leave it alone. Eventually he unearths a bone. No big deal you find animal bones all the time on your walks. But this bone seems different, it's too long, too big to be an animal bone. You get kind of creeped out. But has that feeling completely ruined the moment, maybe not yet but it's about to get worse. On a whim you decide to take a picture of the bone and send it to your sister who is a nurse. Your good time is officially ruined when your sister confirms your suspicions, the bone is, in fact, not animal, it's human. A human femur to be exact. This is the exact scenario that led to the discovery of one of the, if not the, largest crime scenes in American history and a series of crimes that would as of yet, go unsolved.

Christine Ross was the unfortunate soul that came across the body in the scenario described at the outset of the episode. She was walking her dog Ruka in an area that had recently been cleared out for a new neighborhood to be built. After the bone was found she called the police and that's when things get crazy! So let's get further into this story!

The West Mesa is an elevated landmass lying west of the Rio Grande stretching from south of Albuquerque northward to Bernalillo in the state of New Mexico. A large portion of West Mesa is part of Petroglyph National Monument and is bisected by Interstate 40 and Historic Route 66. There are numerous subdivisions with new homes being built on the lower portion of the West Mesa as the City of Albuquerque continues to expand further to the west. Further west on the mesa are the mobile home communities of Pajarito, located to the south of I-40, and Lost Horizon, located about 1/2 mile north of I-40. The bodies of 11 women and one unborn child would be uncovered in West Mesa. It would take a year to identify all of the victims. Police would follow many leads but to no avail. We're going to look at the victims then discuss the most likely suspects and evidence did them being there killer and even discuss how this may be connected to a small sex trafficking ring that could be part of a larger global ring!

The story may start earlier than you think. In the early 2000s, in an area called The War Zone, a tumor began to spread about a killer in albuquerque. There were stories of a killer roaming the streets and murdering sex workers. The war zone is an area now known as the international district. It is one of the most diverse areas of the city. It is also one of the poorest areas in the city and has a high crime rate. A 1991 article from the Albuquerque Journal described East Central as "a loose-jointed carnival of sex, drugs and booze" with drug dealers and prostitutes operating openly. In 1997, the city put up barricades in the neighborhood to make it harder for criminals to get in and out. Eventually, thanks in part to efforts by neighborhood residents, the crime rate decreased and the barricades were removed. In 2009, residents who resented the War Zone name persuaded city leaders to officially re-brand the area as the International District, highlighting its diverse community rather than crime. The first International Festival was held later that year. Despite these changes, crime has continued to be an issue in the neighborhood.

It was here in 2004 that Cinnamon Elks, a sex worker that often worked in the war zone, came to hear a crazy story. She had told her friends there was a dirty cop murdering and decapitating sex workers and burying their bodies on the West Mesa. Soon after she related this story she disappeared.

Years before the bodies are found, police detective Ida Lopez found that a number of sex workers were going missing. She began to compile a list, which included Cinnamon Elks, and began to try to bring notice of the issue to light. Lopez had a list of 16 women that had gone missing. When the body's were found Lopez feared the bodies were the same women on her list. She was partially correct, 10 of the 11 women identified we in fact on her list.

For homicide investigators, the case posed challenges from the start, said Dirk Gibson, a communications and journalism professor at the University of New Mexico who has authored numerous books on serial killings. Years had passed from the time the women and girls disappeared, probably limiting available evidence.

“You can’t have a colder cold case,” Gibson said. “In this case, there was almost nothing but bones.”

Let's take a look at the victims. All but one of the women were sex workers from New Mexico. Many were known to live hard lives. Several were mothers. None of them deserved what happened to them.

Jamie Barela, 15, was last seen with her 23-year-old cousin Evelyn Salazar heading to a park at San Mateo and Gibson SE in April 2004. Neither woman was ever seen again until their bones turned up in the mass grave site on the West Mesa in 2009. Jamie was the final skeleton to be identified, almost a year after the first bone was found. But Jamie’s mom believed investigators would find her daughter’s body long before she was named. Unlike the other West Mesa victims, Barela had no known prostitution or drug arrests.

Evelyn Salazar was reported missing on April 3, 2004, by her family. She was 23 when she disappeared. She was the 10th victim to be identified, and her 15-year-old cousin Jamie Barela was the final one to be identified.

The two were last seen together at a family gathering and then went to a park at San Mateo and Gibson. Salazar liked camping and outdoor activities, was a good cook and taught her daughter how to roller skate, according to her obituary.

Michelle Valdez:

The last time Dan Valdez saw his daughter Michelle, he asked her to not stay away too long. Michelle Valdez had a daughter who she cared for deeply, and had a big heart, Dan Valdez said.

“Michelle was quite a gal, she would give you the shirt off of your back if you needed it,” he said. “She was good-hearted, kind, and didn’t deserve what she got.” He said he couldn’t remember exactly when she got involved with drugs. But she started disappearing for days, sometimes a week at a time. Later it turned to months. When she did show up, he would give her small sums of money — even though he knew she would use it on drugs — in the hopes that she would come back again.

Eventually, she stopped altogether. Dan Valdez reported her missing in February 2005, when she was 22. Her bones were the second set to be identified in late-February 2009 after investigators started digging for bodies. They also discovered the remains of Michelle Valdez’s 4-month-old unborn baby. Michelle had dreamed of one day being a singer, her mother said, or maybe a lawyer like her aunt. “Drug addiction certainly wasn’t the lifestyle she wanted,” Jackson said. “She wanted help, but she didn’t have money or insurance, so it was very hard for her to get it.”

Veronica Romero was 27 when she was reported missing by her family on Valentine’s Day 2004.

Her family laid her to rest in July 2009 after her body was one of the 11 unearthed. “We’re putting her to rest finally, but considering what’s been done, and now we’re finding out more of what’s happened to her, and it’s sad,” family member Desiree Gonzales told KOB-TV at the time. “She was hurt real bad.”

Julie Nieto grew up in Albuquerque’s South Valley and Los Lunas, and loved chile peppers and jump rope. She later went to Job Corps, which teaches under-priveleged young people different professions. Her mom, Eleanor Griego, said Nieto started doing drugs when she was around 19. She tried to get her treatment to no avail. Griego says she last saw Nieto, then 23, in August 2004 at Griego’s dad’s house. She left behind a young son, who Griego said she had doted over. Two years after Nieto went missing, her sister Valerie Nieto was found dead in a motel on Central Avenue after overdosing. “She couldn’t handle it. She was depressed all the time, crying all the time,” Griego said. “That was the only sister she ever had.”

Doreen Marquez loved jewelry and fashionable clothes and had a huge personality, according to her friends and family. She went to West Mesa High School where she was a cheerleader, and later had two daughters who she was devoted to, throwing them extravagant birthday parties. But as the girls got older, Marquez’s boyfriend was jailed and she turned to drugs. She spent less and less time with her daughters, leaving them with her sister or other family members.

“I had kicked her out of my house. That was the last time I saw her,” Julie “Bubbles” Gonzales, Marquez’s sister, said in an interview last year. “I just told her, ‘You know, it’s better if you just go. Whenever you feel like you’re not going to use, or you just want somewheres to come and eat, shower, or whatever, my door is open.’ And she never came back.” Garcia said the last time she saw Marquez, she told her she could help her deal with her addiction. But Marquez refused. Unlike many of the other women whose bones were found on the West Mesa, Marquez didn’t have any prostitution arrests. But police believe she engaged in it nonetheless.

When Diana Wilhelm didn’t hear from her daughter on her birthday in August 2004, she knew something was wrong. But it would take nearly five years for police to confirm what Wilhelm already believed — her daughter Cinnamon Elks was dead. Elks, who was 32 when she went missing, was the third of the West Mesa victims to be identified after the first bone was found in early 2009. She, like many of the others, had a string of prostitution and solicitation arrests — 19 total, with 14 convictions. She was friends with at least three of the other victims — Gina Michelle Valdez, Victoria Chavez and Julie Nieto.

Syllannia Edwards stands apart from the other West Mesa victims. She had no known friends or family, and was a runaway from foster care in Lawton, Okla. Edwards, who was 15, was the only African American victim. She never knew her father, and last saw her mother when she was 5. Police believe she may have been a “circuit girl,” meaning she was traveling along the I-40 corridor as a prostitute. Early in the investigation, a tipster told investigators Edwards was seen in Denver in the spring and summer of 2004. The tipster said she had been at a motel on East Colfax Street in Denver. “They were high-prostitution areas,” then-APD spokeswoman Nadine Hamby said in 2009. Police believe she may have been travelling in a group. “We’ve received information that Syllannia was associated with three other females and that she may have gone by the aliases Chocolate or Mimi,” Hamby said.

Early on, investigators hoped Edwards’ background, because it’s different from the other victims, would provide the details needed to crack the case.

Virginia Cloven grew up in a small trailer heated by a wood-burning stove in Los Chavez. She was funny, loved doing her makeup and was a favorite at school. Tragedy struck the family when she was in high school. Her brother was shot and killed in a homicide that would later be ruled self-defense.

Virginia Cloven ran away from home a week later, when she was 17. Another brother ran away too. “They said they couldn’t stand it anymore,” Robert Cloven said. At first Virginia Cloven lived with her grandfather in Albuquerque, then moved in with a boyfriend. He got hit by a car and went into a coma, and soon Virginia Cloven had lost her home and was living on the streets of Albuquerque’s International District. One year, she called her dad asking what he wanted for his birthday. He asked her to clear up her citations and then they were supposed to meet in Albuquerque. They last heard from her in June 2004. She called to say she had a new boyfriend who had just gotten out of prison and that she was probably going to marry him. “We said we’d like to meet him, but we never heard from her again,” Robert Cloven said in 2009. “After that, everything just went dead.” Robert Cloven reported his daughter missing four months later, in October 2004. She was 23 at the time.

Victoria Chavez, 26, was the first woman whose bones were identified after they were found on the mesa — before the public learned the women were likely murdered by a serial killer. “To have them come and knock on my door, I was devastated,” stepfather Ambrose Saiz said at a memorial event in 2009. “I never thought it would end like this. I just had that hope.” Chavez’s mother reported her missing in March 2005 after she hadn’t seen her in more than a year. The mother also said in the missing persons report that Chavez was on probation and was a “known drug user and prostitute.” She had five prostitution convictions, according to court records.

Sheriff’s deputies investigating the disappearance of Monica Candelaria in 2003 heard from her friends that she had been killed and buried on the mesa. It turns out, those friends were right. When the 21-year-old never showed up, detectives turned it over to the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office cold case unit. The case stayed cold until she was identified as one of the women found on the mesa in 2009. She was last seen near Atrisco and Central in Southwest Albuquerque. Deputies said she lived a “high-risk lifestyle” and may have had gang ties. She had been convicted of prostitution once, according to court records. But her obituary highlights a happier side. “Monica enjoyed laughing, joking, taking care of babies, and spending time with her family,” the obituary reads. “She will be remembered as a loving daughter, mother, granddaughter, niece, cousin and friend who will be truly missed.”

11 women who all list their lives too soon. Most likely in a terrible manor. The police have not revealed the causes of death of the women. It was difficult to figure out how the women died and they are keeping that nugget to themselves to use as a gage of the beauty of claims and tips.

After several years of nothing some suspects started popping up. Some actually fit the profile very well. Even still no official suspects have been named. Here's a look at some of the suspects that police have checked out.

Lou Fred Reynolds, who police said was a pimp, died of natural causes on Jan. 2, 2009. Police found pictures of several West Mesa victims at his home but no physical evidence linking him to the murder. Reynolds, of Albuquerque, was arrested in 2001 and in 1998 on suspicion of promoting prostitution. Reynold was supposedly very focused on some of the West Mesa victims back when they were still missing. Lori Gallegos and Amy Reid both have connections to the mystery. Reid's sister and many friends started to disappear around the same time. Gallegos's close friend Doreen Marquez vanished in 2003. Gallegos said her search led her to Reynolds who supposedly ran an escort service. "When I met Fred Reynolds I wasn't looking for a suspect of a murder case at that point I was looking for my friend that was missing," said Gallegos. In October 2008, he showed her pictures of Doreen. He also had photos of missing women he claimed he was looking for. "He told me he was a former heroin addict himself and this was the reason he wanted to help the women that worked for him, he wanted them to have a good life," said Gallegos. Reynolds passed away a couple months later from health complications. What came as a surprise to Gallegos was Fred Reynolds was one of the names initially mentioned as a person of interest in the case. Reid who also knew Reynolds and considered him a friend. She said there is no way he was involved. "He wasn't violent and he wasn't abusive and he wasn't in anyway a killer," said Reid. Reid said Reynolds was someone who truly cared about the missing women and wanted to help find them.

Another really suspect was Ron Erwin. Erwin has a connection to I've of our previous episodes. He is a photographer from Joplin Missouri. Erwin fell under a cloud of suspicion in the serial murders case investigators from New Mexico showed up at his properties in Joplin armed with search warrants. In the first interview he has granted about the matter, Erwin told the Joplin Globe he does not know how he became a suspect in the case, only that the experience has resembled a nightmare. “There’s an old ‘Twilight Zone’ episode,” Erwin said, “where a man wakes up to the world he’s always known and suddenly nobody recognizes him and he’s running around trying to say, ‘Don’t you remember me? I’ve known you for 40 years,’ and all this.

“Well, that’s what my life’s been in that time,” he said during the interview at the office of Joplin attorney Phil Glades.

“I don’t know how it all got to that stage before it suddenly exploded that morning,” he said. “I don’t know.”

Erwin spent the better part of a year trying to prove his innocence behind the scenes. He hired lawyers in Joplin and New Mexico to advise him, even though he has never been charged with the murders, and he declined all interview requests.Erwin went to Alexandria, Va., in December to have the polygraph exam administered by former FBI polygrapher Barry Colvert. Glades said Colvert determined that Erwin was not being deceptive in his answers regarding the West Mesa murders. The results of that exam were provided to Albuquerque investigators a few months later when they asked, as a last request, if he’d be willing to take a polygraph. While no real reason was given to the public about why Erwin was a suspect, it is said that he was seen often at the fair in Albuquerque where the women were known to frequent and men were known to pick up prostitutes. Erwin and his attorneys provided the Globe with a copy of the final page of an Albuquerque police report dated June 26 of this year that concludes: “Ron Erwin is not a viable suspect in the killing of the 11 victims located at the 188th Street S.W. site.”

The paragraph specifies dates in 2004 when victims Veronica Romero, Evelyn Salazar and Jamie Barela are known to have disappeared. The report states that detectives were able to verify that Erwin was in Joplin on both the day that Romero vanished and the day Salazar and Barela turned up missing.

“I believe there weren’t too many specific dates in this case, but those were two of them,” Erwin said. “And I was able to account for all my days in 2004.”

“Why he was a suspect — that’s all in sealed warrants, that’s still part of our pending investigation,” said Sgt. Tricia Hoffman, spokeswoman for the Albuquerque Police Department, in a phone interview. “But, at this point, we’ve been able to eliminate him as a viable suspect.”

So at least they know who didn't do it.

Scott Lee Kimball is a convicted serial killer from Boulder County, Colorado. He is serving a 70-year sentence after pleading guilty in 2009 to the murders of 5 people. All four victims died between January 2003 and August 2004, while Kimball was on "supervised release" after a prior check fraud conviction, serving as an FBI informant. In December 2010, Kimball told a cousin that he had been proposed as a suspect in the West Mesa murders in New Mexico, which were committed during the same 2003-2005 time period. He denied involvement. Even though he's denied involvement, he has boasted about committing other murders although authorities have yet to uncover direct evidence to back up his claims.

Another suspect, and one of the most viable ones was Lorenzo Montoya, we say was as he was killed while in the act of committing another murder. When Lorenzo Montoya was killed in 2006, the bodies of the West Mesa victims had not yet been found. Police Chief Ray Schultz said at the time that police had been looking into him in connection to prostitutes who had vanished from the city.

He has since been named as a possible suspect in the West Mesa deaths.

That’s likely because, like another possible suspect Joseph Blea, who we'll get to in a bit, Montoya cruised the East Central corridor and was known to be violent.

His first prostitution-related arrest was in 1998 when he picked up an undercover detective posing as a prostitute. He offered her $40.

She took him to a motel room near Washington and Central, where officers arrested him.

That apparently didn’t deter him.

In 1999, vice detectives watched him pick up a prostitute near Central and San Mateo and followed him to a dark dead-end road near the airport.

Police believe they caught him in the act as he was trying to rape and strangle her.

Montoya had apparently never planned to pay her — he only had $2 in his wallet.

He was arrested, but the case was later dismissed.

About four years later, he was still at it. Detectives watched him pick up a prostitute on Central Ave. and arrested him. The woman told officers he paid her $15.

By that time, Montoya already had a history of violence.

According to a domestic violence form his girlfriend filled out after an alleged assault, Montoya repeatedly beat her.

The woman said he had also done “gross things to me,” but didn’t detail what they were in the document.

She wrote that Montoya threatened “to kill me and bury me in lime.”

That threat may shed light on Montoya’s last crime.

In December 2006, he invited an escort to his trailer and killed her, according to a search warrant affidavit.

“She was bound by the ankles, knees and wrists, with duct tape and cord,” a detective wrote in the warrant.

When the woman’s boyfriend came to check on her, he shot and killed Montoya. The woman’s body was found outside Montoya’s trailer partially wrapped in a blanket. Her legs and wrists were wrapped in duct tape, and a thick layer circled her neck. An unrolled condom, pillowcase, and the woman’s belongings were in a trash bag in the trunk of the car Montoya had rented. Inside Montoya’s trailer, investigators found duct tape next to his bed. They also found hardcore pornography and some homemade sex tapes. One of those recordings shows Montoya having sex with a woman and the tape goes black. In a following scene on the same tape, the camera is focused on Montoya’s bedroom wall.

The camera doesn’t capture what’s happening, but the audio captures what sounds like tape being pulled from a roll. At least one trash bag is opened and there’s minutes of rustling noises. Police have sent that audio to the FBI and other crime labs for enhancement, but haven’t been able to determine what Montoya was doing. Two years after Montoya’s death, the decomposed remains of the West Mesa victims were found.

Montoya was immediately a potential suspect. But police have never detailed conclusive evidence tying him to the crime. Police spokesman Tanner Tixier said detectives tested Montoya’s living room carpet for DNA of all the victims found on the mesa and it came back negative. They also found nothing suspicious in his financial records around the time that the women went missing. Although Montoya’s family has declined to speak with the press, some of their comments were captured in interviews recorded by police the day he was killed. His mother expressed disbelief that Montoya could have done what police accused him of. And his girlfriend told them through sobs that she was supposed to be at Montoya’s trailer the night Hill was killed, but she had canceled because she wasn’t feeling well.

“He was very aggressive when he was younger, but he changed a lot,” she said. “He was good to me.”

Police announced in October 2016 they were looking for two escorts shown in one of the sex tapes.

“We need those two women identified,” Tixier said. “We’re trying to figure out if they are still alive.”

Next up is the aforementioned Joseph Blea. Joseph Blea caught the attention of investigators almost immediately after the first remains of the West Mesa victims were unearthed.

April Gillen, Blea’s first wife, contacted police seven days after the discovery of a bone on the mesa and said she thought police should look into him.

They already knew a lot about him.

Blea is currently serving a 90-year prison sentence after he was convicted of four sexual assaults unrelated to the West Mesa case. He’s faced other sex-related charges as well, including accusations that he raped a 14-year-old girl he knew with a screwdriver. That case was later dropped, according to online court records.

And his DNA was found on a prostitute left dead on a curb in 1985. He’s never been charged in connection with that crime.

Police knew him even before many of those allegations surfaced — they had run across him more than 130 times between 1990 and 2009, and many of those encounters were along the East Central corridor known for prostitution and drugs, according to a search warrant affidavit unsealed late last year.

It’s an area many of the victims reportedly frequented.

In one report six years before the West Mesa victims went missing, a woman who had been walking on Central Avenue said Blea called her over to his car and exposed himself.

Police found rope and electrical tape on his passenger seat.

In the weeks after the victims’ remains were found, detectives with APD’s Repeat Offender Project tailed Blea for four days as he appeared to stalk prostitutes on the stroll.

“On two separate occasions Mr. Blea drove Central Ave from the west part of Albuquerque to the east part of Albuquerque,” the detective wrote in the warrant. “He slowed and circled the block in areas where prostitutes were working. He did not approach any prostitutes but appeared to be closely watching them.”

When detectives interviewed a prostitute who knew him, she said he took her to his house and tried to tie her up. She said she didn’t let him.

About eight months after the West Mesa murder investigation began, detectives searched Blea’s home and collected women’s jewelry and women’s underwear.

His wife, Cheryl Blea, told police he enjoyed wearing women’s underwear when having sex. She said she had on occasion found jewelry that didn’t belong to her or her daughter in their home. And she said her daughter had found women’s underwear hidden in their shed.

In a 2015 interview with the albuquerque Journal, Robert Cloven, the father of victim Virginia Cloven, said some families had noticed the women’s jewelry was missing.

Detective Mark Manary, who is the only investigator on the West Mesa case full-time, won’t say if the jewelry or underwear found at Blea’s house matched any of the victims’ DNA.

“Due to this being an ongoing criminal investigation this question cannot be answered at this time,” he said in an email in January 2016.

Blea also reportedly discussed the West Mesa case with others.

When detectives interviewed a former cellmate, he said Blea told him he knew the victims. He said he had paid them for sex acts.

“Mr. Blea spoke poorly about other identified victims, calling them trashy,” officers said cellmate Monroe Elderts told them.

Blea told Elderts he hit one of the victims when she tried to take his money.

Most of the evidence detectives present in the search warrant is circumstantial, but there’s one piece of physical evidence they believe may tie him to the crime.

Officers digging up the bones found a plant tag for a Spearmint Juniper next to Virginia Cloven’s remains.

Detectives traced that tree tag to a nursery in California that sends plants to Albuquerque, and Blea’s business records indicate he bought plants from nurseries that sold the California plants.

It’s unclear if detectives were ever able to directly tie that tree tag to Blea.

Blea began his lengthy prison sentence for the sexual assault cases in 2015. He is appealing his conviction in those.

His former attorney, John McCall, said Blea says he had nothing to do with the West Mesa murders.

“We dealt with issues relating to all of this,” McCall said in January 2016. “But it doesn’t seem like they really had any conclusive evidence regarding Joseph Blea. He’s denying involvement in West Mesa consistently.”

Authorities believe that the women may have been involved in a large interstate sex trafficking operation. According to the El Paso Times, the presence of Syllannia Edwards among the victims has led authorities to believe that sex trafficking gangs could have been involved. Edwards was from Oklahoma, but was known to have been in Texas and Colorado before ending up in Albuquerque. It is unknown, however, if she traveled on her own or was trafficked there. Several arrests and convictions in El Paso, Texas, indicated that Albuquerque is part of a broader sex trafficking route that includes the states of Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas, as well as the Mexican city of Juarez. According to New Mexico State University, the FBI has investigated long-haul truck drivers as suspects in murders of sex workers along major highways, and authorities have reason to believe that Edwards was one such victim. The El Paso Crime Stoppers office received an anonymous tip in 2010 that a suspect whose last name was Cota had killed a girl nicknamed "Mimi" and "Chocolate," both of which were names Edwards was known to go by. Despite the tip, however, the West Mesa Murder case remains unsolved.

So what about this Cota feels anyways. The following is taken from a new Mexico state university article.

A truck driver who used to belong to El Salvador’s military special forces allegedly could be linked to serial crimes of girls and women in El Paso, Texas, and Albuquerque, New Mexico, according to a Crime Stoppers tip included in court documents related to the appeal of Texas death row inmate David Leonard Wood.

The tip, which is part of the Crime Stoppers report, refers to Wood’s case and to the West Mesa murders of Albuquerque.

The report states that the victim or victims of the alleged suspect, whose last name in the Crime Stoppers report is Cota, were nicknamed “Mimi” and “Chocolate.” New Mexico authorities had identified one of the 11 victims that were found in shallow graves in Albuquerque’s West Mesa in 2009 as Syllannia Edwards, whom police stated may have used the nicknames “Mimi” and “Chocolate.”

The West Mesa case remains unsolved.

Edwards, who was 15 years old, was reported missing in 2003 in Lawton, Oklahoma. Police there said they considered her an endangered runaway. Police said she was also seen in Aurora, Colorado in May of 2004, and may have been associated with prostitutes in that city. It is not known when and how Edwards traveled to Albuquerque.

“Edwards was killed sometime between 2004 and 2005 and then buried in a mesa located adjacent to 118th Street SW in Albuquerque,” police authorities stated. “(The Cota) suspect would lure the females with narcotics,” the tipster told Crime Stoppers.

An anonymous caller provided the tip on Feb. 22, 2010 to Crime Stoppers of El Paso, Inc. According to court records, El Paso Detective Arturo “Tury” Ruiz, who was assigned to follow up on the tip, went as far as to prepare a grand jury document so that he could request more details about the tipster’s information. An official with the Albuquerque Police Department confirmed today (Sept. 13, 2016) that the El Paso Police Department had shared the 2010 Crime Stoppers report with authorities investigating the West Mesa murders.

No further comment was available due to the ongoing nature of the investigation.

According to the Crime Stoppers report, “The caller (tipster) advised they have information regarding the crimes for which a man named David Leonard Wood will be executed soon. The caller advised (that) the suspect [Cota]… is responsible for these crimes.”

“The caller advised two of the victims’ nicknames were Mimi and Chocolate,” the Crime Stoppers report stated. “The caller advised the suspect never admitted to killing the women, but did admit to having picked up the women and paid them in exchange for sex.” “The caller has reason to believe the suspect … is responsible for the West Mesa, NM murders as well … (and) may also be responsible for several murders in Milwaukee, WI,” the Crime Stoppers report stated.

The tipster claimed that the suspect had been a member of El Salvador’s military special forces. The tipster further alleged that the suspect is “very violent” and “exhibits a very strong hate towards women.”

The tipster told Crime Stoppers that Cota allegedly once boasted that “You will see me all over the news one day.” The suspect, the tipster alleged, used to be involved in drug-trafficking, and had a relative that was arrested on drug charges in California. The tipster alleged that the suspect ‘s nickname was “El Tigere,” was between 55 and 56 years old (in 2010), had a thin build, reddish hair, and drove a light burgundy-colored van.

The suspect reportedly worked as an interstate 18-wheel truck driver, and had lived in Albuquerque and West Oakland, California.

Wood was convicted in the deaths of six girls and young women who disappeared in 1987 in El Paso. Their bodies were found in shallow graves near what is now the Painted Dunes Golf Course in Northeast El Paso.

The victims were Ivy Susanna Williams, Desiree Wheatley, Karen Baker, Angelica Frausto, Rosa Maria Casio and Dawn Marie Smith.

Three others who went missing in 1987, two from Northeast El Paso, and one who lived in nearby Chaparral, New Mexico, were Melissa Alaniz, Cheryl Vasquez and Marjorie Knox; they were never seen alive again. El Paso police said they had suspected Wood in their disappearances.

Wood has steadfastly denied killing the six victims and denied any connection with the disappearances of Knox, Alaniz and Vasquez. After his conviction by a jury trial, Wood was sentenced to death, and was scheduled to be executed in 2009. The Texas Criminal Court of Appeals granted him a stay the day before he was to be executed so he could prepare his appeal.

There is thought that the same person responsible for the west mesa killings was also responsible for the cringes that Wood was convicted of.

So there you have it… the unresolved story of the West Mesa killings. Who did it? Why did they do it, where are the rest of the missing girls? We may never know.

Sources for today were an amazing special article series from the Albuquerque Journal, the New Mexico state university article on the Cota suspect, the El Paso times and their article on the subject. Those were the main sources although we did find some smaller bits scattered around various random websites.

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7pm

Rumour was loose in the air,hunting for some neck to land on.I was milking the cow, the barn door open to the sunset.I didn’t feel the aimed word hit,and go in like a soft bullet.I didn’t feel the smashed flesh,closing over it like water over a thrown stone. I was hanged for living alone for having blue eyes and a sunburned skin, tattered skirts, few buttons,a weedy farm in my own name, and a surefire cure for warts; Oh yes, and breasts, and a sweet pear hidden in my body. Whenever there’s talk of demons these come in handy.

8pm

The rope was an improvisation. With time they’d have thought of axes. Up I go like a windfall in reverse, a blackened apple stuck back onto the tree. Trussed hands, rag in my mouth, a flag raised to salute the moon, old bone‐faced goddess, old original, who once took blood in return for food.The men of the town stalk homeward, excited by their show of hate, their own evil turned inside out like a glove, and me wearing it.

9pm

The bonnets come to stare, the dark skirts also, the upturned faces in between, mouths closed so tight they’re lipless. I can see down into their eyeholes and nostrils. I can see their fear. You were my friend, you too. I cured your baby, Mrs., and flushed yours out of you, Non‐wife, to save your life. Help me down? You don’t dare. I might rub off on you, like soot or gossip. Birds of a feather burn together,

though as a rule ravens are singular. In a gathering like this one the safe place is the background, pretending you can’t dance, the safe stance pointing a finger. I understand. You can’t spare anything, a hand, a piece of bread, a shawl against the cold, a good word. Lord knows there isn’t much to go around. You need it all.

10pm

Well God, now that I’m up here with maybe some time to kill away from the daily fingerwork, legwork, work at the hen level, we can continue our quarrel, the one about free will. Is it my choice that I’m dangling like a turkey’s wattles from this more than indifferent tree? If Nature is Your alphabet, what letter is this rope? Does my twisting body spell out Grace? I hurt, therefore I am. Faith, Charity, and Hope are three dead angels falling like meteors or burning owls across the profound blank sky of Your face.

12 midnight

My throat is taut against the rope choking off words and air; I’m reduced to knotted muscle. Blood bulges in my skull, my clenched teeth hold it in; I bite down on despair Death sits on my shoulder like a crow waiting for my squeezed beet of a heart to burst so he can eat my eyes or like a judge muttering about sluts and punishment and licking his lips or like a dark angel insidious in his glossy feathers whispering to me to be easy on myself. To breathe out finally. Trust me, he says, caressing me. Why suffer? A temptation, to sink down into these definitions. To become a martyr in reverse, or food, or trash. To give up my own words for myself, my own refusals. To give up knowing. To give up pain. To let go.

2am

Out of my mouth is coming, at some distance from me, a thin gnawing sound which you could confuse with prayer except that praying is not constrained. Or is it, Lord? Maybe it’s more like being strangled than I once thought. Maybe it’s a gasp for air, prayer. Did those men at Pentecost want flames to shoot out of their heads? Did they ask to be tossed on the ground, gabbling like holy poultry, eyeballs bulging? As mine are, as mine are. There is only one prayer; it is not the knees in the clean nightgown

on the hooked rug I want this, I want that. Oh far beyond. Call it Please. Call it Mercy. Call it Not yet, not yet, as Heaven threatens to explode inwards in fire and shredded flesh, and the angels caw.

3am

Wind seethes in the leaves around me the tree exude night birds night birds yell inside my ears like stabbed hearts my heart stutters in my fluttering cloth body I dangle with strength going out of me the wind seethes in my body tattering the words I clench my fists hold No talisman or silver disc my lungs flail as if drowning I call on you as witness I did no crime I was born I have borne I bear I will be born this is a crime I will not acknowledge leaves and wind hold onto me I will not give in

6am

Sun comes up, huge and blaring, no longer a simile for God. Wrong address. I’ve been out there. Time is relative, let me tell you I have lived a millennium. I would like to say my hair turned white overnight, but it didn’t. Instead it was my heart: bleached out like meat in water. Also, I’m about three inches taller. This is what happens when you drift in space listening to the gospel of the red‐hot stars. Pinpoints of infinity riddle my brain, a revelation of deafness. At the end of my rope I testify to silence. Don’t say I’m not grateful. Most will have only one death. I will have two.

8am

When they came to harvest my corpse (open your mouth, close your eyes) cut my body from the rope, surprise, surprise: I was still alive. Tough luck, folks, I know the law: you can’t execute me twice for the same thing. How nice. I fell to the clover, breathed it in, and bared my teeth at them in a filthy grin. You can imagine how that went over. Now I only need to look out at them through my sky‐blue eyes. They see their own ill will staring them in the forehead and turn tail Before, I was not a witch. But now I am one.

Later My body of skin waxes and wanes around my true body, a tender nimbus. I skitter over the paths and fields mumbling to myself like crazy, mouth full of juicy adjectives and purple berries. The townsfolk dive headfirst into the bushes to get out of my way.

My first death orbits my head, an ambiguous nimbus, medallion of my ordeal. No one crosses that circle. Having been hanged for something I never said, I can now say anything I can say. Holiness gleams on my dirty fingers, I eat flowers and dung, two forms of the same thing, I eat mice and give thanks, blasphemies gleam and burst in my wake like lovely bubbles. I speak in tongues, my audience is owls. My audience is God, because who the hell else could understand me? Who else has been dead twice? The words boil out of me, coil after coil of sinuous possibility. The cosmos unravels from my mouth, all fullness, all vacancy.

Creepy… That was a poem written by Margaret Atwood about today's subject, Half hanged mary webster. We figured it would be a good way to set the tone of the episode. Kind of lengthy but awesome nonetheless. So who exactly is Mary webster? Why do they call her half hanged? Well let's find out shall we!!

Mary’ Webster was born Mary Reeve, daughter of Thomas Reeve and Hannah Rowe Reeve, in England around 1624. The family migrated to Springfield in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and Mary married William Webster in 1670. He was 53 and she was about 46. They lived in the Puritan town of Hadley, Mass., 20 miles north of Springfield along the Connecticut River.

William and Mary Webster had little money, lived in a small house and sometimes needed help from the town to survive. No records exist of Webster having had any children.

Poverty and neglect did not improve Mary’s fiery temper, and she spoke harshly when offended, wrote Sylvester Judd in his 1905 History of Hadley.

“Despised and sometimes ill-treated, she was soured with the world, and rendered spiteful towards some of her neighbors; they began to call her a witch, and to abuse her,” Judd wrote.

Mary Webster supposedly put a spell on cattle and horses so they couldn’t go past her house. The drivers found her and beat her so the animals could pass.

She once walked into a house and a hen fell down a chimney into a pot of boiling water. She had a scald mark on her body, probably from the hot water, but her neighbors called it the witches’ mark.

All of this was happening here years before the infamous Salem witch trials. Essentially this was one of the big precursors to the witch trials as Cotton Mather, who was a New England Puritan minister, prolific author, and pamphleteer. One of the most important intellectual figures in English-speaking colonial America, Mather is remembered today chiefly for his Magnalia Christi Americana (1702) and other works of history, for his scientific contributions to plant hybridization and to the promotion of inoculation as a means of preventing smallpox and other infectious diseases, and for his involvement in the events surrounding the Salem witch trials of 1692–3. He would write about an incident with Mary Webster and Philip Smith. Smith was a judge, deacon, and a representative of the town of Hadley. These writings by Matters plus a few others would serve as the catalyst that pushed people to the insanity that was the witch trials. We’ll talk a little about the consequences of these writings a little later but let's look at the incident that Cotton Mather would write about first.

Given the stories from earlier about her supposedly causing animals to not be able to pass by her house, and the witches mark, plus her overall “go fuck yourself” attitude, it's not a wonder given the times that thing's would get kinda crazy.

Eventually, the various stories and Mary’s apparently unpleasant behavior reached a critical mass: Mary was examined on suspicion of witchcraft by the county court magistrates at Northampton on March 27, 1683. The following is from the record:

"Mary, wife of William Webster of Hadley, being under strong suspicion of having familiarity with the devil, or using witchcraft, [had] many testimonies brought in against her, or that did seem to centre upon her, relating to such a thing;"

The courts at Northampton, as they had done in the previous case of Mary Parsons, decided that they were not equipped to handle such a case, so it should be sent to the Court of Assistants in Boston. She was sent to Boston in April of 1683, where she waited in jail until her court date on May 22nd 1683; Gov. Bradstreet, Deputy Gov. Danforth and nine Assistants were present. The record of the court reads:

"The grand-jury being impannelled, they, on perusal of the evidences, returned that they did indict Mary Webster, for that she, not having the fear of God before her eyes, and being instigated by the devil, hath entered into covenant and had familiarity with him in the shape of a warraneage, [fisher or wild black cat of the woods] and had his imps sucking her, and teats or marks found on her, as in and by several testimonies may appear, contrary to the peace of our sovereign lord, the king, his crown and dignity, the laws of God and of this jurisdiction -- The court on their serious consideration of the testimonies, did leave her to further trial."

After the indictment, Mary was returned to jail again to await her trial on June 1st, 1683. The record of this court appearance reads:

"Mary Webster was now called and brought to the bar, and was indicted To which indictment she pleaded not guilty, making no exception against any of the jury, leaving herself to be tried by God and the country. The indictment and evidence in the case were read and committed to the jury, and the jury brought in their verdict that they found her -- not guilty."

Thus Mary was decreed innocent, although her neighbors were perhaps less than overjoyed to have her return to Hadley. Perhaps in an early example of Western Massachusetts’ discontent with decisions made by Boston, the residents of Hadley clearly disagreed with the Boston court’s verdict.

On January 10th, 1685, Lieut. Philip Smith died under supposedly mysterious circumstances. Smith was a prominent member of the Hadley community, and had probably had encounters with Webster. Apparently Mary was suspected of having caused the death, and some residents attempted to hang her for it. At this point, the explanations of what happened vary depending on the source. Philip Smith's accusations, afflictions, and death were described within a few years in a publication by Cotton Mather “Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcrafts”. Mather names Smith but not Mary Webster. Mather describes how some friends of Smith "did three or four times in one night go and give Disturbance to the Woman." A little bit about Cotton Mather real quick.

Born on Feb. 12th 1663 into a family of renown New England Puritan ministers, including Rev. John Cotton and Rev. Richard Mather, Cotton Mather seemed destined to achieve fame. His own father, Rev. Increase Mather, also held a position of prominence as a well-admired political leader, minister of the South Church in Boston, as well as the presidency of Harvard College. Excelling in his entrance exams in Latin and Greek, young Cotton began his schooling at Harvard at only 12 years of age. After receiving his M.A. at age 18, he felt called to a life of service in the clergy. A terrible stutter, however, forced him to delay entering the ministry and the demands of preaching, and instead he entertained the notion of becoming a doctor. Encouragement from a friend eventually pulled him over this speech impediment and back to his calling, although medicine remained a key interest throughout his life. Mather preached his first sermon in August of 1680, and went on to be ordained by 1685 at age 22. Besides his involvement with the witch trials in Salem during the 1690s, Cotton Mather is remembered as one of the most influential Puritan ministers of his day. Never achieving his father's success as a political leader or president of Harvard, Cotton made his mark through his efforts as a master of the pen. By the end of his life, he had published over 400 of his works, ranging from the subject of witchcraft to smallpox inoculation. His publication, Curiosa Americana(1712-24), demonstrated his abilities as an accomplished scientist, and earned him election to the prestigious Royal Society of London, England. Although his efforts of encouragement in smallpox inoculation were met with much resistance and nearly killed his own son, he is recognized as having been a progressive medical advocate for his day.

n regard to the Salem witch trials, however, it was Mather's interest in the craft and actions of Satan that won him an audience with the most powerful figures involved in the trial proceedings, several of the judges and the local ministers in Salem. Before the outbreak of accusations in Salem Village, Mather had already published his account, Remarkable Providences (1684), describing in detail he possession of the children of the Goodwin family of Boston. Mather actually took the eldest of the children, 13-year-old Martha, into his home to make a more intense study of the phenomenon. Later scholars have suggested that this book in fact outlined the symptoms of clinical hysteria. It was this same hysteria that provided the behavioral model for the circle of "afflicted" girls during the trials in Salem. Mather, however, used his experience with Goodwins to further his notion that New England was in fact a battleground with Satan. Similar themes appear in his sermons and in the Preface to one of his children's books, in which he warns young readers: "They which lie, must go to their father, the devil, into everlasting burning; they which never pray, God will pour out his wrath upon them; and when they bed and pray in hell fire, God will not forgive them, but there [they] must lie forever. Are you willing to go to hell and burn with the devil and his angels?". Thus, the subject of eternal damnation weighed constantly upon Mather's mind, and it resonates in his own diary accounts. Scholars suggest that Mather's dramatic descriptions the devil's activity upon the young Goodwin children may have led to the first cry of witchcraft among the young girls in Salem Village

Although Mather was not directly involved in the proceedings of the Salem witch trials, he wrote a letter to one of the magistrates in the trials, John Richards of Boston, urging caution in the use of spectral evidence. Mather was also the author of the "Return of the Several Ministers," a report sent to the judges of the Salem court. This carefully-worded document advised caution in the use of spectral evidence, saying that the devil could indeed assume the shape of an innocent person, and decrying the use of spectral evidence in the trials, their "noise, company, and openness", and the utilization of witch tests such as the recitation of the Lord's Prayer. However, the final paragraph of the document appears to undercut this cautionary statement in recommending "the detection of witchcrafts". Thus, in Bernard Rosenthal and Perry Miller's opinions, the courts interpreted the letter as Mather's seal of approval for the trials to go on.

Ok so back to the Mather at hand….

That's The kind of man we're dealing with when it comes to his feelings and beliefs.

Mather claims that it was only during this night of vigilante violence perpetrated against Mary Webster that Smith was able to sleep peacefully. "Upon the whole, it appeared unquestionable that witchcraft had brought a period unto the life of so good a man," Mather concludes. Cotton Mather's book was published in 1689 only a few years before the infamous witchcraft trials of 1692 and it followed a similar book recently published by his father, Harvard president Increase Mather in 1684. As early as 1681, Increase Mather had met with "ministers in this colony" and begun soliciting far and wide for instances and anecdotes of witchcraft. It is not known to what extent Increase Mather's solicitations (and the implied doctrinal views in support of the real power of witchcraft) may have directly influenced the circumstances in Hadley in 1683-4. According to Thomas Hutchinson, prior to Increase Mather's book, it had been decades since anyone had been executed for witchcraft in New England, despite the occasional slur or spurious accusation. While many would go on to say they regretted their actions during the witch trials, Mather would stubbornly stick to his guns and repeatedly call for more trials and executions. As late as 1702 Mather would use the incidents of the Mary Webster Philip smith incident to try and rile up the people about witchcraft.

Mather claims that Mary Webster had it out for Smith because:

"He was, by his office concerned about relieving the indigences of a wretched woman in the town; who being dissatisfied at some of his just cares about her, expressed herself unto him in such a manner, that he declared himself thenceforward apprehensive of receiving mischief at her hands."

Smith’s illness is described at length, and perhaps most important are Smith’s own suspicions about what has caused it. From Mather’s telling, it is easy to imagine how distraught and suspicious Smith’s family and friends would have been:

“About the beginning of January, 1684-5, he began to be very valetudinarian. He shewed such weakness from and weariness of the world, that he knew not (he said) whether he might pray for his continuance here: and such assurance he had of the Divine love unto him, that in raptures he would cry out, Lord, stay thy hand; it is enough, it is more than thy frail servant can bear. But in the midst of these things he still uttered a hard suspicion that the ill woman who had threatened him, had made impressions with inchantments upon him. While he remained yet of a sound mind, he solemnly charged his brother to look well after him. Be sure, (said he) to have a care of me; for you shall see strange things. There shall be a wonder in Hadley! I shall not be dead when it is thought I am! He pressed this charge over and over.”

From the description, it is obvious that Smith is suffering in the extreme, and the very visible struggle he endured with his illness no doubt appeared to the Puritan audience as a fight with the devil. Whatever the cause, he suffered fits and delirium, sure to frighten not only him but also his nurses and watchers:

“Being become delirious, he had a speech incessant and voluble beyond all imagination, and this in divers tones and sundry voices, and (as was thought) in various languages.”

He cried out not only of sore pain, but also of sharp pins, pricking of him: sometimes in his tow, sometimes in his arm, as if there had been hundreds of them. But the people upon search never found any more than one.

Mather explains that some of the witnesses to Smith’s outcries tried to test the theory that Webster was involved in an interesting way:

"Some of the young men in the town being out of their wits at the strange calamities thus upon one of their most beloved neighbors, went three or four times to give disturbance unto the woman thus complained of: and all the while they were disturbing of her, he was at ease, and slept as a weary man: yea, these were the only times that they perceived him to take any sleep in all his illness."

There were continuous strange occurrences in the man’s sick room: (We’ll go through these and break them down)

Gally pots of medicines provided for the sick man, were unaccountably emptied
audible scratchings were made about the bed, when his hands and feet lay wholly still, and were held by others.
They beheld fire sometimes on the bed; and when the beholders began to discourse of it, it vanished away.
Divers people actually felt something often stir in the bed, at a considerable distance from the man: it seemed as big as a cat, but they could never grasp it.

All of these strange incidents, combined with the strange occurrences after his death:

The jury that viewed his corpse, found a swelling on one breast, his back full of bruises, and several holes that seemed made with awls.
After the opinion of all had pronounced him dead, his countenance continued as lively as if he had been alive; his eyes closed as in a slumber, and his nether jaw not falling down.
Although he died on Saturday morning, on Sunday afternoon, “those who took him out of the bed, found him still warm, tho' the season was as cold as had almost been known in any age”
On Monday morning they found the face extremely tumified and discolored. It was black and blue, and fresh blood seemed running down his cheek upon the hairs.
Divers' noises were also heard in the room where the corpse lay; as the clattering of chairs and stools, whereof no account could be given.

These symptoms would have been pretty fucked up and disturbing to anyone, especially the Puritans with their limited understanding of disease and death. In this culture, the only reason one got sick – especially in such a visible and painful way – was because of a punishment from God, or the involvement of the Devil. If bad things were happening to good people, then witchcraft was afoot. Mather ends his discussion of the case with the sentence: “Upon the whole, it appeared unquestionable that witchcraft had brought a period unto the life of so good a man.”

So getting back to what the men had to "disturb" Mary and supposedly get Philip smith to finally rest, we find out how she was really treated, being accused of being a witch and the rumors of her involvement in Smith's death.

The practice of beating or restraining a suspected witch to prevent her from further mischief was a popular practice. Similar activities are referred to in the Salem witch trials. In referring to the “disturbing” of Mary Webster, Thomas Hutchinson, in his History of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, describes the incident like this:

"While [Philip Smith] lay ill, a number of brisk lads tried an experiment upon the old woman. Having dragged her out of the house, they hung her up until she was near dead, let her down, rolled her sometime in the snow, and at last buried her in it, and there left her; but it happened that she survived, and the melancholy man died."

There are various stories and takes off this incident. The most popular of which seems to be that she was hung and left overnight and when the men came back the next day she was still alive. They cut her down and she was let go. The stories say that she lived for anywhere between 11 and 14 more years. But from what it seems 11 is the most accurate as her death is reported to be 1696. This date is pretty interesting because after all she had gone through she then would live throughout the incidents of the Salem Witch Trials. Although the trial took place about 130 miles away, we figure she would still be a little wary of the goings on and, rightfully so, stay the mother fuck OUT of Salem. There is no record of her thoughts or feelings on the witch trials but we would imagine she was very on edge. Especially considering that her experience helped directly contribute to the hysteria that lead to the trials. Years later Margaret Atwood would write the poem we read in the opening of the episode and also if her name sounds familiar outside of that poem, it's probably because you are a fan of The Handmaid's Tale. You see Atwood is actually one of Mary's ancestors and dedicated her novel to Mary Webster and would say "But she is slightly a symbol of hope because they didn't actually manage to kill her. She made it through."

Scariest movies about witches

Monday Apr 26, 2021

The Real Men In Black

Monday Apr 26, 2021

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Tonight on the Midnight Train we are exploring the world of the men in black. That's right we're going to be talking about the best Johnny Cash cover band to ever live!!! Oh wait… Wrong notes… We're actually talking about the real men in black tonight… Not the movies… The good stuff.

So first off.. Let's get into what the men (and women) in black may be, then a few fun encounter stories!

So many people have theories on who or what the men in black are. These theories range from the mundane to the insane! Government agents, to paranormal, to extraterrestrial and everything in between. Government agents seem to be the most prevalent answer to who the men in black are mostly because of the circumstances behind their appearances.

If you don’t know already, the Men in Black, also known as the MIB, are men from a secret government organization aimed at keeping the existence of aliens away from the public eye. They are typically bald, going as far as even not having eyelashes. All are required to wear a plain black suit and black fedora as to keep from arousing suspicion and to intimidate individuals. They speak in a very monotoned nature and never reveal their true identity. Some have reported them calling each other by identification numbers rather than name. The Men in Black idea was accepted by many in the conspiracy-prone UFO community, partly because it seemed to legitimize the truth of eyewitness reports. No matter how outlandish their story, if an eyewitness credibly claimed that he or she had been threatened, the story seemed more plausible. After all, if the story was bogus, why would the government take an interest in the eyewitnesses, much less try to silence them? They typically come in groups of three barging into homes and brandishing a badge of some sort. It seems their only purpose is to rattle and disturb the target individual. The men seem to already know about the experience and even know details that the individual may not know. After initially questioning the individual on the experience, there is generally some sort of threat made to try and encourage the individual to keep quiet. Often they say that it is for the good of the individual, the country or even the world. Occasionally some have even claimed it was for the good of the universe. Most people believed that the MIB were just what they claimed to be, a secret branch of the air force. But it seems to some that as the strangeness of the sightings increased, people who experienced the MIB and other researchers started to think that this was much more than a simple branch of the government. Some started to notice that the MIB seemed to be distinctly...unhuman. Skin has been reported to look like plastic or rubber, and as stated earlier they seem to have no hair including eyelashes and eyebrows. They walk and move around in a clumsy manner and seem to struggle with basic human interaction. They seem to misuse common english words and display strange and disturbing body language. So with all this being said, where did all of these stories begin, well let's find out. The very first recorded brush with the MIB came in 1947 from one Harold Dahl.

Dahl was fishing with his son and dog one day. He saw six strange looking and unidentified craft in the sky. As they stared into the sky, Dahl claims one of the craft dumped what he described as molten lava onto the boat. The substance landed directly on the dog killing it. Dahl and his son both suffered severe burns and had to be hospitalized. After Dahl recuperated he had the presence of mind to collect some of the material that was left on his boat after the incident. After this Dahl was greeted at his door one day bya man dressed all in black. He demanded Dahl forget everything that he witnessed. After several more visits Dahl was compelled to listen to what the man said and left it alone.

THis is kinda crazy!

The next and one of the most infamous accounts we are going to talk about is that of Albert Bender. This one gets pretty crazy, so buckle up passengers. Bender's experience is one of the earliest and most well documented accounts of the MIB. He was an office clerk and served a brief stint in the military during world war 2. After he returned he moved into his fathers attic. Bender would eventually be the founder of the first major civilian UFO investigation group, the International Flying Saucer Bureau or the IFSB. He brought the group to the forefront of the ufo investigation community with the publishing of a periodical The Space Review in 1952. Soon like minded individuals began contacting Bender from all over the world with their own UFO stories. As the IFSB became more and more popular, its popularity would ultimately be the thing that found it completely shut down!

Bender would find himself on the receiving end of some very strange phenomena. It began with a strange phone call. Bender picked up the phone and as soon as he put it to his ear he felt strange, and a chill went up and down his spine. He repeatedly asked hello but no one responded but he knew someone was there. He felt dizzy and hung up and went and laid down. He sort of forgot about the call until a little later in the week when he decided to take in a movie. It was just past midnight when the movie ended and he began to walk home. He couldn't see anything but he could feel someone, or something, following him. He sped up to make it home and quietly made his way to his room. When he opened the door to the attic he was hit with an extremely foul odor, and that's not all. He was also presented with a floating orb in the middle of the room. H switched on the light and quickly the orb was gone. Bender was not sure what had just happened, was it just in his head, was it a strange paranormal phenomena? Well, he soon realized it couldn't have all been in his head. As he looked around the room he could see that there were wrecked items all over his attic room. His files were all over the floor, laid out as if someone had been looking through them all looking for some sort of information. While this incident was shocking an unsettling Bender kept pushing forward with his work with the IFSB. A few weeks later he yet again had a strange incident at the movie theater. He was sitting in seat and had the feeling that someone was staring at him, but upon looking around the theater he couldn't see anyone particularly looking in his direction. Then as he continued to look around he was shocked to turn back around and see a man, dressed all in black, suddenly occupying the empty seat next to him. It was as if the man just popped into existence. His appearance was just as strange as his arrival. He had a long black trench coat, black fedora, and most strangely his eyes seemed to glow unnaturally in the darkness. As with the phone call and the last theater experience, Bender began to feel sick. He closed his eyes as the room began to spin. When he opened his eyes again the strange man was gone. He tried to rationalize the experience any way he could and get back to watching the movie. Soon though he got the same feeling of being watched. He began to look around and soon to his dismay he found that the same strange man was sitting directly behind them. He was staring at Bender with anger in his eyes. After this he got up and headed home from the theater as he was thoroughly unsettled. For the next few months strange things would continue to happen. Then came the day the MIB contacted him.

Bender decided to develop a “Contact day” with his followers and fellow members of the IFSB and the ufo community. He felt that contact could be made telepathically with the occupants of the UFOs if the whole of the group would set aside a specific time to all stop and continually repeat a memorized mantra directed towards the UFOs. he put out a bulletin in the space review asking all to join him on a specific day and time to do this. You can find the mantra online and oddly enough it was also the basis of a pop song that was ultimately made a hit song by the Carpenters. At any rate on the designated contact day at 6pmhe laid down in his quiet attic and started repeating the mantra. The third time he repeated the words he felt the temperature in the room drop and he developed a terrible headache. The headache was followed by a terrible sulfur smell. He says shortly after this he passed out. Next thing he knew there were flashing blue lights and his headache was worse. All of a sudden the headache was gone and he found himself floating above his own body. He was having an out of body experience! He began to hear a distinct voice. The voice stated:

“we have been watching you, and your activities. Please be advised to discontinue delving into the mysteries of the universe. We will make an appearance if you disobey.”

Where did this voice come from? This did not seem to be the response from an e.t. he was looking for. Bender mentally asked why whoever the voice was coming from was not friendly to him as he meant them no harm. The voice responded:

“We have a special assignment and we must not be disturbed by your people!”

Wow

The entity left Bender with the following remark:

“ We are among you and know your every move. Be advised we are here on your earth.”

After this he opened his eyes and was back in his body. In that moment he could have sworn he saw a figure dressed all in blck in the corner of the room. As he gathered himself he saw nothing though. Was it just a crazy dream, maybe but there was something about this incident he couldn't shake no matter what he did. Over the next few days he became physically ill and could not sleep. It was as if something was sucking his lifesource out of him. He wrote everything down and locked it in his safe until he could figure out what to do.He eventually decided to publish the incident in The Space Review. He went to get the letter he had written detailing his incident from the safe but it was gone! There was that same strange sulfur smell emanating from the safe ! He couldn't figure out what was going on, but he would soon get his answer! A week or so later he had the same sort of incident he had before. He saw the blue flashing lights and ended up floating above his body again. This time though he was more aware and could look around the room. As he did he saw three figures dressed all in black wearing fedoras emerged from the darkness. One of them spoke to him and said the following:

“You have dedicated yourself to the solution of the strange problem of unidentified objects in your atmosphere. Your interest is deep and sincere, and you have devoted many hours to it. We also know that such interest and determination may lead to something that could bring you harm. We also know that you are a very good contact for us on your planet earth. You are an average person and we know that anything we tell you will not be believed by anyone you might tell. You are not a person of great renown on your planet , therefore we have nothing to fear at present. We have a purposefor being here and we will be here for some time yet. We must not be disturbed in our ultimate goal. As you see us here we are not in our natural form. We have found it necessary to take on the form of your people while we are here. This is mainly used as a means of returning here without being detected by anyone. We have made numerous contacts on earth with craft and at present we have craft hidden on your planet. We have gone to great extremes at times to frighten off your earths people and it has resulted in their deaths. We Have also found it necessary to carry off earth people to use their bodies to disguise our own! We wish to keep in touch with you and tell you many things as one day you will write about this and we are certain no one will believe you, but you will be much wiser than anyone else on your panet. You will know what is out there in space and you will know what the future holds for your mankind. You will see all three of us again, but we will not tell you our names as they mean nothing to you. Refer to us as numbers 1,2,and 3. We will answer according to number. We will leave you with a small piece of metal similar to your coins. It is to be kept in a secure place of your own. We wish to have you come with us at a time to be announced soon. “

Bender then woke up and found himself clutching a strange piece of cold metal. This made it hard for Bender to believe that this was just a sort of dream.

After this incident Bender seemingly went from a man hellbent of proving the existence of UFOs to a man who wanted nothing to do with them! His colleagues noticed this change and everyone thought it was strange to say the least. All Bender would tell everyone was that he was visited by three men of authority who convinced him it would be best to shut down the IFSB. Without giving any other explanation or reason, Bender tendered his resignation as head of the IFSB. Author Grey Barker wrote a book about Benders experiences and the last days of the IFSB titled “They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers”. It was Barker who was the first to put forth the theory that there was a secret organization actively trying to silence those who had experienced anything having to do with UFOs. As Barker continued to dig into what had happened to Bender, he became convinced that the government knew much more than was ever let on. He even became convinced that the government may have cut some kind of deal with ETs. He placed the blame so to speak for these theories on the shoulders of Dwight D Eisenhower! This timeline is interesting to conspiracy theorists because at this time, eisenhower was in the middle of his first term as president and if you keep up with your alien conspiracy theories like we do, you'd know that it is claimed that Eisenhower signed an official treaty with an extraterrestrial civilization at this exact time! Barker was one of the first to bring this theory out to the mainstream.

While this may all seem crazy just maybe it's not as crazy as you might think! After Barker started talking about his theories and Eisenhower, he would soon get his own visit from the MIB!! According to Barker a man dressed all in black showed up at his door with one of Barkers brand new business cards demanding to know what the card was all about. The card identified Barker as chief investigator for the now defunct IFSB. After Barker gave the man his explanation, the man told him that this card was found on a man that was admitted to a local hospital. The man had no identification on him, only the business card. The man claimed he was following the business card as a lead to find out who the man was. Barker told the man he did not know the john doe. The man in black seemed to accept this answer and left his office. It dawned on Barked that it would be virtually impossible for an unknown man to have his business card as they had only been printed a couple days earlier and he had not given but a few out. This made it hard for Barker to swallow the excuse the man gave to be there.

At this time even though the US branch of the IFSB was shut down, the Australian and British branches had chosen to forge ahead. The director of the Australian branch, Edgar Gerald, would be the next to experience the MIB. Soon after Bender resigned, Gerald began to see a black Cadillac routinely parked outside of his office. Soon he would see the car more often with a strange pair of men dressed all in black sitting inside. It seemed everytime he looked out of his window, these men were staring back at him. He began to receive strange phone calls shortly after the car started showing up. He knew that the two were connected. He then started experiencing harassment in the form of..well...poltergeist activity! He would hear strange unexplained knocking sounds in and around his home. Household items began to disappear and reappear in strange places. This strangeness continued for the next few weeks until it entered into the realm of physical violence. Gerald was pushed down the stairs by an unseen force. This occurred in public at a popular department store.

After this incident Gerald became a believer in the fact there was a campaign to silence those that sought to expose information about UFOs and resigned his post at he Australian branch of theIFSB. Bender and Gerald had frequent conversation and it is thought that Bender let Gerald in on more of his secrets than anyone else. This led many to speculate that the MIB went after the next man up in the chain of knowledge. While Barker had changed his mind on the validity of Benders claims of the more paranormal aspects of his story, he still believed the MIB to be just a strange branch of the US government. But many would speculate that Geralds experience thousands of miles away would lend credit to the theory that the agency was more than just something from this planet.

So are the MIB simply humans working for the government? Aliens masquerading as humans? Humans masquerading as aliens? To those who have experienced these men and women, that is one of the most frustrating questions.

Cynthia Appleton was a british housewife with no previous interest in the paranormal. Her tale began on November 16 1957. She walked into her living room and felt an immense feeling of oppression. Cynthia watched as an intense illumination filled her home. She then experienced the phenomena of missing time. She looked at her clock and noticed it was an hour later than she remembered yet she had no memory of what had transpired in that hour. Had she been daydreaming for an hour? She didn't know how else to explain it but two days later she experienced another incident. As she went upstairs to check on her sleeping child, she stopped to admire the strange color the sky had become. At that time she felt the same feeling she felt two days earlier. She then heard a strange high pitched humming sound that seemed to come from everywhere all at once. The sound intensified and it felt like it was vibrating through her body. She said the vibration became so intense she felt as if her body would be torn apart. Then, just as quickly as it started, then phenomena ended. She then noticed a haze swirling around the room until it started to pixelate. All of a sudden a holographic projection snapped in to focus of a strange man. The man was described as nordic looking and wearing a spacesuit which would resemble those of the Apollo missions even though the Apollo missions were years away. Cynthia was terrified but the being repeatedly told her to not be afraid in her own head. And after a minute she found she was calm and not afraid. The being informed Cynthia that it came from a planet called Gharnasvarn. The man then drew a holographic screen out of thin air to show her pictures of his planet and people. Shortly after this incident the man would return with two others, notas a holographic projection, but in a black Cadillac. The three showed up and when Cynthia answered the door she saw them dressed in all black attire. The nordic looking visitor was now there in person and dressed in full MIB garb right down to the fedora! From February to August of 1958 there were frequent visits that took on a more decidedly MIB feel to them. During the course of one visit, one of the men told her he'd been hurt and showed Cynthia his finger which appeared to be badly burned. He asked Cynthia for only a glass of warm water. She brought him the water and he proceeded to dip his finger into the bowl then squeeze some sort of gel on his skin and it was instantly healed. The trio then left the house. Cynthia then noticed that the man had left a piece of skin in the bowl of water. She gathered the piece of skin and the artifact was sent for testing. The skin was deemed not to be human but it closely resembled that of a pig. Later , when it was found that human and pig DNA were very similar, some would speculate that the skin was actually grown in a lab. The skin tissue contained proteins similar to those used to grow skin in petri dishes. This led to speculation that the MIB are not natural born human beings but clones grown in a lab!! That's a crazy ass tale to say the least!

If you are into aliens and spacemen you undoubtedly know the story of the Solway Firth spaceman. But what a lot of people don't know ist that the Solway Firth incident also spawned a MIB meeting!

On May 24, 1964 Jim Templeton, a firefighter from Carlisle, Cumberland, took three pictures of his daughter on a trip to Burgh Marsh. There was nobody else in the area except two old women sitting in a parked car at the far end of the marsh. When he went to get the pictures the clerk who gave him his photos back made a remark about how the pictures were great but that it was a shame that one of the best ones was ruined by the man in the background wearing a spacesuit . He pulled out the pictures and was shocked to see that what the clerk had said was indeed true. He saw the picture of his daughter with what truly looked like a man in a space suit right behind her looking right at the camera. Jim was confused and alarmed so he went to the police station to see if they could clear this up. The police were baffled as well. The photo was sent to a lab where it was determined that the photo did not contain any double exposure or any kind of a superimposed photo. The man in the image was indeed there in real life when the picture was taken. Theories began to pour in. Many claimed that the individual was not detectable by the human eye because it was popping in out of dimensional space so fast that it was only detectable by the split second timing of Jims camera shutter. After the story gained traction and speculation ran wild, the MIB made a visit. Later that summer they received a phone call from a man saying he had some questions about the photo and was interested in investigating the incident. Jim was interested in getting to the bottom of the incident and agreed to talk to the man. A couple days later a black car pulled up to Jim's house and two men dressed all in black came to the door. They were polite at first but as the conversation went on the men seemed to become irritated and were demanding that jim get into their car and take them to the spot where the incident happened. He agreed and got into the car with the men. When they got to the spot the MIB started grilling Jim about every detail of the day. They even asked about seemingly menial details such as exact weather conditions and even what wildlife was present at the time of the photo. They seemed to be specifically interested in the behavior of any cows and sheep at the scene. The men then essentially accused Jim of lying when they started to continuously ask him who the man in the photo really was. The men repeatedly demanded to know where the man he collaborated with on the photo was. When Jim answered that he had no idea who or what the man was, the men eventually looked at one another and just shrugged and the men turned and walked back to the car. Jim watched as the men got into the, dumbfounded at what had just transpired, and realized the men were about to leave him. He shouted after the men and jogged towards the car but the two men just took off at a high rate of speed leaving Jim there by himself. Jim then had to walk several miles back home by himself.

On august 3rd 1965 Rex Hefflin was running the road as a California highway inspector. He was concerned that a tree had fallen in front of a railway crossing sign. Hefflin was afraid people would not slow down and use caution so he radioed to dispatch to have them send a tree removal crew. When he tried to send his message he realized the airwaves were dead. He had thought this was a temporary issue so he tried again. Just then he noticed something out of the corner of his eye. When he turned to look he saw an unidentified object moving across the sky in his direction. It was very close to him yet it made no sound. He estimated that this floating skyscraper, as he called it, was about 150 ft. in length. He quickly snapped three photos of the craft before it left his field of vision. Many say these photos were the best detailed close up photos of a UFO ever taken. The pictures showed detailed closeups of complex machinery on the bottom of the craft as well as a searchlight shining down onto the road. All of these things would have been pretty hard to hoax back in 65.

Hefflin himself was actually not that impressed with the photos as he thought that what he had seen was just some as yet unknown military or government craft. His friends however did not share this view and convinced Hefflin to take the photos to the papers. Once the photos were out for all to see Hefflins life began to change. Soon he was being bombarded by UFO researchers asking what he'd seen. Then he had to deal with officials from local military bases asking to examine the pictures. After seeing the pictures the military officials handed them back to Hefflin, but this would not be the last “government official” Hefflin would encounter. Soon after the military brass examined the photos, Hefflin was approached by a man claiming to be from the North American Air Defense Command or NORAD. The man was dressed typically of the MIB and flashed some sort of official lookin badge. The man claimed he needed to borrow the pictures for study. Since the other military officials had returned them, he didn't hesitate to loan them to the man. After several weeks of no contact or word on when he would get his pictures back, he contacted NORAD. When he called though, he was guaranteed no representative of theirs had visited Hefflin. They told him that in fact they were not responsible for the evaluation of UFOs and therefore would have no need to collect pictures of UFOS. Hefflin then realized the man who took his photos was an imposter. But who was he and where was he from? Since this incident , through the freedom of information act, there have been several memos uncovered that showed that the US government was just as confused and interested in the MIB tale and were actively seeking to unmask the imposter. So much so that an official memo from the Air Force was titled Impersonation Of Air Force Officers. This memo showed that the Air Force did not know who this person was and that they were concerned that he passed himself off as a NORAD official. The memo mentions Heflins encounter and another subsequent incident involving a man dressed in fatigues intimidating civilians and even police officers that had witnessed a UFO. The imposter informed them that they did not see what they thought they saw and that they should not speak of the incident. They did not know the identity of these imposters. The memo implored any Air Force personnel that witness this type of activity or hear others talk about it, to send all reports to the Office of Special Investigation, or the OSI.

That same year the University of Colorado began the conden report led by Edward Conden. It sought to investigate the best information from the Air Force's own investigations of UFOs, project Bluebook. Hefflin’s UFO sighting and subsequent meeting with the MIB would be one of many subjects in the conden report. In fact one investigator who was charged with interviewing Hefflin, says that his incident was one of the top in the report. Oddly enough the MIB seemed to take notice of the new attention as well. In the middle of the Conden investigation the MIB paid Hefflin a second visit. This time they pulled up in a pitch black vehicle, then two men in Air Force uniforms got out. The two men immediately began hounding him about recent UFO sightings in the are and also oddly brought up people missing in UFO incidents at the Bermuda Triangle. The two men entered his home and Hefflin could feel a strange charge in the air and his radio started crackling and popping. Hefflin says that while the two men did not directly threaten him, he recalls that their whole demeanor was threatening. And while they continually discussed UFO incidents that were not directly related to him, he says they became increasingly agitated and angry. As they went on, Hefflin could not get a word in. He insisted on knowing the full name and ranks of the men in his house. He was actually surprised when the two men divulged to him that info. When he contacted the Air Force they could find nobody matching the names and ranks the two men had given.

Next up we are gonna discuss John Keel. Keel was the first person to use the term Men In Black. Keels association with the men in black began on december 15th 1966. A group of West Virginia teens were hanging out in an area called the TNT area. Parked in the spot they were hanging out being typical teenagers when they spotted something in the rearview mirror. They saw an entity standing 7 ft tall. It had moth-like wings wrapped around its body and eyes that glowed red through the darkness. The driver slammed on the gas and took off, driving to the police station to report what they had seen. The deputy who took the report, while weary of entering such details into an official police report, knew these kids well and knew they were not the sort to make up stories for no reason. He could also tell that these kids were frightened out of their minds. The deputy offered to go back to the sight with the kids but their search turned up nothing. The next morning similar reports were popping up all over the area. The locals had also already come up with a name for the beast, you guessed it..they dubbed it..The Mothman! Keel became famous for reporting these incidents with the mothman. It was also while investigating and reporting on the Mothman that Keel came face to face with the MIB. Oddly enough before he would hear of the Men in black, Keel would get reports of a Woman n Black. The woman would show up at witnesses houses holding a clipboard and would introduce herself as an associate of keels and badger the witnesses about ufos and other paranormal happenings. Just like the MIB she seemed to have an uncanny knowledge of the witnesses' lives and would make them uneasy by revealing details of their health and lifestyle.

Several people wrote to Keel asking him to please stop sending his secretary around to question them. Keel informed them that he certainly had no secretary or anyone else working for him and that he was extremely confused by the situation. The experiences with this WIB were accompanied by the typical sightings of the black Cadillacs of the MIB which were seen roaming the streets at all hours of the day. Men dressed all in black would park the cars and get out and canvas the area. They claimed to be census takers, various types of federal employees, and social workers. One popular tactic of these MIB was to pound on someone's door only to ask for a glass of water, not to discuss the Mothman at all. As the sightings of the mothman became more frequent so did the MIB sightings and incidents. The MIB seemed to become increasingly hostile in their approach. One highschool student was even the target of a kidnapping by these MIB. She got away but later that evening a note slipped under her door that read “be careful girl, i can get you yet”. As the principal investigator of the mothman incidents, Keel became a target for the MIB as well. After leaving West Virginia, the MIB followed him back to New York. Keel often mentioned MIB types following him around Manhattan. He once received a phone call asking him to meet and discuss his work. When he went to Long island the MIB told him to end his inquest into the mothman or something bad would happen to him. Keel would eventually come into contact with an MIB who claimed his name was Apole. He tld Keel that he was trapped in time and forced to jump about from the past to the future. This another layer of the MIB enigma. Keel would later claim that he believed the MIB were a whole other level of entity from somewhere just beyond our perception. These beings he termed Ultra terrestrials. While searching to uncover the mystery of what was happening in West Virginia, keels seems to have deepened it more.

So we wanted to give you sort of the history...the beginnings of the MIB phenomena before we got too far gone. The previous timeline is essentially the beginnings of the MIB lore until they officially got their name. Since Keel coined the term and had his own crazy story with the MIB sightings and visits have continued to modern day. Next we have a couple more crazy tales of more recent MIB encounters!

Paul Miller was returning home after a hunting trip when they saw a “luminous” disc in the sky. The disc landed in an empty field, and two humanoids emerged from the craft. Miller fired his gun at them, and believed to have injured one, when he fled down a rural road in his car.

However, in that moment, he realized he had lost time. It was almost three hours later than when he first encountered the craft. He shrugged it off, and went back to his Air Force job the next day.

However, upon entering work, he was immediately confronted by three men in black suits. They told him that they “had his file.” Despite having told nobody about the event, the men said that they “knew all about it” and mentioned that the encounter would be best forgotten. Paul says:

They seemed to know everything about me; where I worked, my name, everything else,” Miller said. They also asked questions about his experiences as if they already knew the answers.

Miller, terrified, did not come forward about his experience until years later.

Danny Gordon was a radio personality who became interested in a flurry of Wythe County UFO sightings. Multiple people across the county claimed to have seen bizarre objects in the sky, and Gordon decided to investigate.

Gordon became obsessed with getting photos of the objects, including one time where an entire school bus of students saw the UFOs flying over a shopping mall as Gordon took photos. Eventually, Gordon snapped a few photos at extremely close range that allegedly verified they were not of this world.

However, strange things began happening to Gordon. He received a phone call from a man who claimed to be “ex-military” and warned him that his research could “cost him everything” and urged him to stop for “his family’s sake.”

Gordon was also “interviewed” by two men in black suits who claimed to work for a magazine publication. Not long after the interview, Gordon realized all his photos were missing. He contacted the magazine for information, and they claimed to have never heard of him, much less commissioned an article about him.

Not long after, Gordon suffered a heart attack, and his doctor warned him that all the research and stress was jeopardizing his health. Gordon gave up the story, and was never bothered again.

Dr. Herbert Hopkins was working as a consultant on a UFO case in Maine. One evening he received a phone call from someone purporting to be an activist in the UFO community, asking him if he could visit Hopkins to discuss the case. Only minutes later, the man arrived.

The man was wearing a black suit and black tie, and had very unusual facial appearances, with no hair or eyebrows, and an extremely pale figure. Hopkins’ dog began barking erratically the minute the man entered the home. After the bizarre visitor was finished questioning him about the UFO case, the visit got even stranger. Here’s how it went according to the website The Night Sky:

"The Man in Black] informed Hopkins that there were two coins in Hopkins’ pocket (which was correct) and asked him to remove one. Hopkins complied and held the coin, a shiny new penny, in the palm of his hand. The MIB told Hopkins to watch the coin closely. After a few moments the coin took on a “silvery” appearance and then appeared to be going out of focus. It then began to fade and, eventually, disappeared altogether. The MIB informed Hopkins that the coin would never be seen ‘on this plane’ again. He then inquired as to whether Hopkins was familiar with alleged UFO abductee Barney Hill. Hopkins replied that he had heard of Hill, but was under the impression that he had died in the not too distant past. The MIB informed Hopkins that was correct. “Barney didn’t have a heart,” said the MIB, “just like you no longer have a coin.” (It should be noted that Barney Hill actually died of a cerebral hemorrhage.) The MIB then gently suggested that Hopkins destroy any material he had related to the UFO case."

Hopkins, extremely shaken by the encounter, followed the advice of the man and burned all the files he had related to the case. While he had repeated phone troubles after (the phone company said his line had been tampered with, maybe to tap it?) he never saw the man again.

And here's a final fun one from none other than Dan Akroyd!!!

In 2002, Aykroyd was working on a documentary for the SciFi channel with a number of recognized names in the world of ufology, including Linda Moulton Howe, Steven Greer, and John Mack. They had filmed eight episodes of a series that was close to airing.

One day after filming, Aykroyd stepped outside for a cigarette and answered a phone call from Britney Spears who wanted to talk about an upcoming SNL episode. While he was on the phone he said he turned and looked out onto 42nd street in New York and noticed a black SUV with a tall man dressed in black giving him a dirty look. Aykroyd turned away, but then did a double-take within a matter of a second and the car had vanished.

Two hours later, Aykroyd and the cast were told the show had been cancelled completely and would never air. To this day they were never given a reason why.

So what the fuck are the men in black? Humans, aliens, interdimensional beings, clones made in a lab,... Who knows. Are they even real? Who knows, but there are thought people out there who are sure they do exist because they've come face to ugly face with them. Even freaking Dan Aykroyd for crying out loud. Some folklorists, however, claim that the whole idea of “Men in Black” is itself a form of mass panic or of “psychological drama” due to suggestibility and a willingness to believe. Others, however, insist the Men in Black are part of a real government agency designed to prevent the public from learning “the truth about UFOs.” They also insist that their experiences are real and that anyone who thinks they’re crazy is merely a tool of government propaganda and manipulation. So what do you all think? Are they real?

Top ten alien movies as ranked by imdb rating:

Monday Apr 19, 2021

Haunted Breweries (Surprise Episode For The Conductor)

Monday Apr 19, 2021

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SURPRISE!!!! This week is a surprise episode for our great conductor Jon. This week we are exploring the wonderful world of hauntings. These hauntings take place at some of Jon's favorite places… No it's not My Little Pony Conventions, it's Jon's second favorite thing, breweries. That's right, we're talking about haunted Breweries this week. After discovering that we may be psychos after last week, we figured it was a good week for something fun! So without further ado… Let's get wasted! I mean let's check out some haunted breweries.

Our first stop is in good ol Savannah Georgia. We are taking a look at Moon River Brewing Company. The moon river brewing company is located in the 21 West Bay St. building. 21 West Bay Street is a historic building located a block south of the Savannah River in the Savannah Historic District, the building dates from 1821.

Housed in one of the oldest, most historic and genuinely haunted buildings in Savannah, we invite you to experience the history and our excellent food and hand-crafted beers first hand.

It all started with Elazer Early, a native of Charleston, South Carolina, who constructed our building as the City Hotel in 1821. Not only was it the first hotel in Savannah, but it was also home to the first branch of the United States Post Office in Savannah. It also served as a branch of the Bank of the United States. (It must have been convenient having a hotel, post office, bank, and bar all under one roof!)

During the hotel’s tenure, many notable people stayed at the Hotel. The guests included War of 1812 hero Winfield Scott, the Marquis de Lafayette, the first three Commodores of the United Statues Navy, and naturalist James Audubon. Audubon stayed six months at the hotel while attempting to sell books of his wildlife sketches.

In 1851, Peter Wiltberger bought the City Hotel. He renovated it and put a live lion and lioness on display to draw attention to his business. The City Hotel’s final guest checked out in 1864, just before the arrival of General Tecumseh Sherman during the War of Northern Aggression and the subsequent closing of the hotel. The building also served as a hospital during Savannah’s numerous yellow fever outbreaks. Hundreds of people, mostly children, reportedly died on the upper floors of the building during these outbreaks, when the building functioned as a makeshift hospital. It is not surprising that child spirits are often seen in the Moon River Brewing Company.

At the turn of the century, the building was used as a lumber and coal warehouse. As the use of coal slowly died off, the building was used for general storage. In the 1960’s, the space was renovated as an office supply store, complete with a large printing press.

The building sat empty until 1995 when it was renovated into its current configuration as a brew pub. The Moon River Brewing Company debuted in this space on April 10, 1999 and welcomes all who pass by. So there you can see there's quite a history with this building. Now a bit about the brewery.

Moon River Brewing Company opened to the public in 1999 on the site of the former Oglethorpe Brewing Co. In 2010, the brewery won a Gold Medal for its Rosemary India Pale Ale in the "Herb and Spice or Chocolate Beer" category at the Great American Beer Festival in Denver, Colorado. In 2003, the brewery was voted #28 on the "Top 50 American Brewpubs" in the United States by BeerAdvocate.com. In 2014, the brewery won a Gold Medal for its "Bomb," an Irish-style stout at the World Beer Cup. In 2017, Moon River Brewing Company took home a Gold Medal at the Great American Beer Festival for their Wild Wacky Wit in the "Belgian-style Witbeir" category. Along with the medal, they were also awarded "Best Mid-size Brewpub & Mid-size Brewpub Brewer of the Year."

So now that we know the history of the building and a little about the brewery, let's talk about the good stuff… Hauntings!!

There are many people who will tell you that ghosts only are left behind when a person dies a tragic or violent death. If that is true then The Moon River Brewing Company may very well be a deeply haunted place. Enough violence has taken place inside the building to easily leave several restless spirits behind.

The hundreds of children who died of yellow fever are the most numerous deaths that took place. Though it was mostly children who perished, many adults also died on the top floors of the brewery. Dying young and sick is always a tragedy and might just be enough to leave behind a few ghosts.

The building was used as a hospital quite a few times as yellow fever kept hitting Savannah. This meant that an impromptu hospital had to be constructed in order to treat and house all of the children falling sick. The amount of people who died of yellow fever during separate outbreaks is alarming and tragic.

More vindictive acts of violence include a shooting of a known town vagrant. In 1832 a doctor by the name of Dr.Phillip Minus shot a drunk man named James Stark inside the then hotel. James Stark was a known drunk and troublemaker who seemed to have a reputation for insulting people and being hated by the people of Savannah.

After Dr. Minus shot Stark he insisted that he had seen Stark going for his gun first. Dr. Minus was quickly acquitted of the crime as Stark was not liked in the town and Savannah needed a doctor. An unpunished murder could be enough to leave a man who was known to be angry in life behind to cause more trouble in death.

One of the biggest acts of violence that occurred in the walls of the brewery took place in 1860. The Civil War had not yet started but there was already a clear hatred for Yankees in Georgia. A Yankee by the name of James Sinclair came into town and decided to stay at the City Hotel.

The residents of Savannah were furious at the thought of having a Yankee in their midst. The people of Savannah tried to pressure Sinclair into leaving the town of his own accord but he refused. The anger and hate of a Yankee in town were enough to cause a mob to form in the streets of Savannah.

The lynch mob marched through the city and into the hotel. They dragged Sinclair into the streets outside of the building where they stripped and beat him. Sinclair lived through the incident but was beaten near enough to the point of death that the violent experience might have caused him to come back and haunt where his tragedy took place. Starting at the bottom of things means beginning with the ghosts that haunt the basement of The Moon River Brewing Company. Arguably the most famous ghost of the brewing company is named “Toby” and is often seen wandering in the basement. This is one of the ghosts that the staff saw often enough they decided he deserved a name.

The basement is widely regarded as the most active floor in the brewery. It might not have the feeling of the top floor or the violent history of the other floors, but it certainly has the most ghost encounters. “Toby” is known to brush up against the people playing in the billiards room or get frustrated and push them.

There are a few people who will tell you that slaves were kept in the basement which would certainly be a reason for a haunting, but there is no evidence this is true. People who have been in the basement of the brewery have reported many different signs of a haunting. These signs include sudden coldness, bottles falling or being thrown, and the feeling of being touched by someone who is not there. All of these reports from patrons and staff have been enough to put the basement of the brewery onto many ghost tours.

The second floor of the brewery is also known for having many strange occurrences. This is the floor where James Stark was Shot by Dr. Minus. There are differing reports of where exactly the shooting took place but they all seem to agree it was somewhere on the main floor.

Many people believe that Stark is the reason many people report liquor bottles being thrown. There are also those who believe he is the reason for some of the more violent reports of grabbing, hitting, and pushing that people experience while inside the brewery. The main floor is also where the dining room is placed. There have been a few patrons who have said they felt someone touch them while they were eating but no one was around them. Several women have also complained of feeling cold in the bathroom or being locked into a stall. This floor might not be the most haunted room in the building, likely because it is so busy with people, but it has its fair share of activity.

The top two floors are known to have more violent encounters than those happen in the basement or even the main floor. A full-body apparition is known as “the woman in white” and has been seen on the third floor several times by many different people. She is one of the most well-known ghosts of the brewery and is sometimes referred to as “Mrs.Johnson”.

The third floor is also one of the floors where many children died of yellow fever. This means it is no surprise that many workers and patrons have reported hearing children talking and playing on this floor. When even the people who run the brewery are talking about hearing children running in the halls, you know there is something going on.

In the 1990s there was construction being done on the third floor. During this time the wife of the foreman was pushed down the stairs on the third floor and fell all the way down the staircase. She was shoved hard enough that it was clear she had not simply fallen.

The foreman immediately stopped construction on the building and left. Several other people have reported feeling people pulling on them or pushing them when they walk on the stairs of the brewing company. This particularly takes place on the third floor which many people argue has the most aggressive spirits in the building.

The final floor of the brewery has been said to have a dark energy that the other floors do not possess. This could be because the majority of yellow fever victims and patients were housed on this floor while the building was being used as a hospital. The victims of the terrible virus might still be trapped feeling the hopelessness they felt in the moments before they died. Interestingly, there are not many reports of actual activity on this floor. There are so many reports on the other floors that almost everyone who has been to the brewery has a different paranormal experience. Yet the top floor where hundreds died is only known for its terrible energy. The same stories of children playing and talking are told about the fourth floor. This is likely because so many children have died on the top floor over the years. Many people agree that if anyone is haunting the brewery it is the ghosts of the children who died young and sick on the top floors of the building.

There is speculation that none of the spirits want to linger where so many died. Or maybe the lack of ghosts on the final floor makes patrons feel an emptiness after experiencing so much activity. Either way, the top floor of The Moon River Brewing Company does not seem to be anyone’s favorite floor whether they are dead or alive.

Well that's the craziness of moon river brewing company in Savannah. So stop in and have a drink and see a ghost!

Next up we are heading to Missouri and checking out a winery! The Belvoir winery to be specific. The winery is located at the Odd Fellows Home District in Liberty Missouri. The Odd Fellows Home District site has a ton of history and it's also visually a great site to see. The Odd Fellows' Home complex is architecturally significant as a collection of Jacobethan Revival educational and institutional buildings. The three remaining historic buildings, the Administration Building, the Old Folks Building and the Old Hospital, were all designed by different architects over a period of twenty-three years, yet all are cohesive in their design and embody the distinctive characteristics of the style. After the first structure used as the home was burned in February, 1900 in an attempt to unthaw frozen pipes, the Grand Lodge of Missouri I.O.O.F. advertised for designs of a "completely fireproof" building to house offices, classrooms, dormitories for the orphans, and rooms for the elderly. The architects selected were Albert Knell and William B. Ittner of St. Louis. The Administration Building designed by Ittner set the precedent for the rest of the Odd Fellow complex buildings. Although designed by other, later, architects, the other buildings reference this unique style. There were three other buildings designed in this style on the site. One, the School Building, was torn down in the early 1950s to make way for the newer hospital. The School Building was built in 1904, and designed by J. H. Felt & Co. of Kansas City, who also designed some later additions at the Odd Fellows. The Old Folks Building, at first called the Old Folks Pavilion, was designed by E. C. Eckle and built during 1907-1908 in order to accommodate the growing number of applications for admittance. The Old Hospital was built in 1923, and designed by Samuel M. Hitt of Kansas City. Viewed together, the three remaining buildings not only document the evolution of this style over a quarter of a century, but the typical building technology and materials for institutional structures as well.

The Odd Fellows Home is significant as an early 20th century example of a statewide home providing care and education for the orphans and elderly members of a fraternal organization. The Independent Order of Odd Fellows (I.O.O.F.) is one of the largest fraternal and benevolent orders in the United States. The chief purpose of the Order of Odd Fellows is to give aid, assistance, and comfort to its members and their families. Because the Grand Lodge made it impossible for the Home to reject an applicant due to a physical disability, many residents required hospital care beyond that provided by the staff nurse and doctor. Hospital facilities were moved to the Old Folks Building, but by 1910 it was apparent that a separate hospital building would be needed. It wasn't until 1923 that the hospital (now known as the Old Hospital) was constructed on the northern end of the property. For a period, the hospital was the only medical facility in Liberty; it even had its own laboratory. As the chief purpose of the Odd Fellows' society was to give aid, assistance and comfort to members and families, the Grand Lodge of Missouri helped in times of death as well as in sickness and misfortune. A cemetery plot, headstone, and burial services were all part of the large system of benefits that were available to the Odd Fellows. Usually, the elderly residents of the Home who had no other arrangements were buried there. Current IOOF members also had the option to be buried at the Liberty complex. The cemetery is currently located on the northern end of the property. The cemetery contains the remains of nearly 600 people. Just outside the cemetery gate sits a memorial dedicated by the Liberty IOOF lodge to honor members who were killed in World War II.

Man it's cool to hear the history of places that you go without even thinking about it! That being said, let's get into what this history had contributed to… Hauntings!

It is believed that many of the nearly 600 people who are buried in the cemetery on the site may still be lingering around, haunting the winery buildings. Ghost sightings have included orphan children, a mischievous man, and a singing old lady.

The stories of hauntings abound. People have heard odd voices and noises, including children giggling and running up and down the stairs. Doors have opened and closed by themselves. The owner tells an account of seeing a little boy in a red shirt, blue knickers and brown boots, who appeared near the fireplace. Although the boy was visible, the owner could still see the details of the fireplace through him. Children have been heard singing “Ring Around the Rosy” in the halls. The owner’s daughter heard a little girl talk to her. The piano has played on its own. Perhaps the most haunted building on the property is an old brick hospital that was constructed in 1923. Located on the northern end of the property, it is now known as Old Hospital.The winery and its buildings are also popular with people in the supernatural business. Professional paranormal investigators such as the Ghost Hunters and CREEPZ have found remarkable amounts of evidence. People have had some odd experiences during some of these investigations. On one occasion while investigating the hospital, a woman had to sit down after feeling unsteady. She stood after a few minutes, but then her head hit a wall, her eyes were rolling back in her head, and she was sweating. When she finally recovered, she had no memory of what had happened. During the same exploration, investigators heard a deep growl coming from the room known as “the mischievous man’s room.” When they heard it again, one woman offered to check it out. As she walked toward the room, she felt an oppressive feeling, like doom or dread. Eventually, she retreated without continuing. The growling ended up being enough for the rest of the group as well. At this point, they were all ready to leave the building. In the administration building, once used as an orphanage, meters went crazy when investigators sang “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

In an outbuilding once used for food storage, dowsing rods turned up some interesting activity. Supposedly, the orphans used to hide in this storage space in order to avoid their chores. When investigators asked questions such as “Where are your friends?” the rods pointed to locations throughout the room. A conversation through the dowsing rods continued, and when it was time to say goodbye, one woman experienced the feeling of being hugged.

Voices, laughing and singing seem to be the most common evidence. However, some people have seen apparitions and shadow people throughout the grounds. One man saw someone peeking around a corner.

The feeling of being watched is also common. In addition, much like the woman experiencing the hug, others have reported physical contact such as being grabbed by the shoulders.

Belvoir Winery does acknowledge and capitalize on the hauntings and old buildings. Besides the public paranormal investigations in October, they also provide guided tours. Other events at the winery include a “Halloween Massacreade” on October 31 and Murder Mystery Dinners in November, December and January. For all you wine drinkers out there… This one sounds fun!

So we've done beer…. We've done wine… What else can we do...oh I know… Moonshine! Next up on the list we head to Tennessee. Brushy mountain distillery to be more exact!

The thing that makes this distillery interesting is that it used to be one of the, if not there, most violent and infamous penitentiaries in the state of Tennessee.

Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary wasn’t just a jail. For decades it was a coal mine for the state of Tennessee that originated in the wake of a bloody labor battle.

The end of the Civil War led to a boom in railroad construction and the rapid expansion of the coal mining industry throughout Tennessee. Because many of the state’s coal veins were located in remote areas, most mining companies providing housing by collecting rent from miners’ wages.

When those companies opened onsite stores selling food, clothes and other necessities at inflated prices, already poor workers piled up debt. By the time their debt and rent were paid, they had little to show for a meager wage job with dangerous working conditions. The Coal Creek miners were clever, holding strikes in winter when coal demand was high; this tactic worked until a new convict lease program gave companies a cheaper, more compliant workforce.

The prison lease system was adopted throughout the South mainly because state governments couldn’t afford to build and maintain prisons or feed, shelter and clothe inmates and a convict lease program cut costs and brought in money. Beyond that, officials could exploit the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery but allowed “involuntary servitude” for criminal punishment.

When federal troops left the South in 1877 after Reconstruction, state officials who were hostile to former slaves handed down long prison terms and life sentences; even for petty crimes. Soon, blacks made up the majority of prisoners in the South.

Tennessee began leasing prisoners in 1866 and by 1891, the Tennessee Coal Mine in Anderson County adopted the practice. This fateful decision led to the Coal Creek War, where citizen-miners attacked and burned the state prison, stockades and mines, then loaded prisoners and guards alike onto a train headed out of town. Mining companies sent them back and state officials called in troops for protection. When months of small-arms skirmishes led to dead men on both sides, officials realized the cost of maintaining a standing militia undercut any financial gains and as convict-lease contracts expired, legislation passed to construct the state’s first maximum security prison – Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary.

By 1896, inmates were building an onsite railroad spur, as well as the original wooden prison structure with their own hands. Between the ongoing violence, deadly mining accidents and chronic illness, life inside Brushy was precarious to say the least. Diseases were rampant, including tuberculosis, typhoid fever, pneumonia, and syphilis – which alone affected 3/4 of the black prisoners. Beyond generally poor medical care and treatment, inmates were routinely beaten for “underproducing” in the mines, despite their dire health conditions, and many died as a result. There was never a death row at Brushy, but there was plenty of death, I promise you. While America was roaring through the ‘20s, convicts at Brushy spent their days in the dark of the mines, urged to dig faster with lashes from thick leather straps.

Their nights weren’t any better, with men stacked into the original wooden buildings that were falling apart and just waiting to catch fire. In 1931, Brushy held nearly a thousand inmates, far more than it was ever meant to.

In 1931, Brushy housed 976 men, roughly 300 more than its capacity. Overcrowding was so prevalent and persistent it drew comparisons to conditions inside the infamous Siberian prisons of the Soviet Union. The state’s answer was simple. Plans were drawn for a new structure to be made of reinforced concrete and they made convicts break sandstone out of the nearby quarry to build the new prison. Constructed in the shape of a Greek cross, it stood four stories high, boasted battlements atop and by 1934 was surrounded by an 18-foot stone wall. For a moment, things got better. The new prison was safer, more sanitary, and built in the shape of a cross, offering inmates a narrow path to redemption. Mining remained the sole mission of the prison until the 1960’s and in 1969 Brushy was reclassified as primarily maximum-security when 100 beds were added to house lesser offenders “outside the walls.” Many of the new minimum-security inmates were entrusted with jobs serving the outside community such as participating in the Petros Voluntary Fire Department, which operated 24/7 between 1971 and 1994.

By the middle of the century, Brushy’s reputation as the last stop for the worst criminals had become legend. If you wore out your welcome at another prison or committed some unspeakable crimes, you ended up at Brushy, and let me tell you, that was never a good thing.

In ‘57, after finally shutting down The Hole, they built D-block to keep the nastiest inmates isolated from the rest. It just happens that D-block was built on the site of the old “death house,” where the bodies of dead inmates were kept until they were given back to their families or buried at the pauper’s cemetery up on the hill there.

In ‘69, Brushy was reclassified as a maximum security prison. The end of the line.

But convicts continued to work and die in the mines for decades. It was Lake Russell, a reform-minded warden and former football coach at nearby Carson-Newman College, who finally stopped the mining at Brushy Mountain. Of course, the mines were also losing money. So was it a good warden, or a good businessman that put an end to it? That’s Brushy for you.

This was the most infamous era of Brushy’s history, a time when the assassin James Earl Ray was transported here, tried to escape, failed, got stabbed. In ‘72 the guards went on strike, demanding security improvements, and Brushy was shut down for four years. So they improved some things and reopened Brushy in ‘76, but friends, let me tell you, it was still Brushy. Tensions between black inmates and white inmates threatened to overwhelm a system that just didn’t seem capable of containing the evil of this place.

In ‘82, the powder keg ignited. Seven white inmates held guards hostage at knifepoint. They took the guards’ guns, found four of their black rivals in their locked cells and opened fire. They killed two. The other two managed to survive by hiding in the corner behind their mattresses.

People said things couldn’t get any worse, and maybe, finally, they were right. Make no mistake Brushy has a darkness about it. You’ll recognize that as soon as you step inside and breathe this air. But you need to know that it wasn’t all darkness.

Back in ‘82, where the old segregated bath house once stood, they built the Brushy Chapel. They say more than a thousand inmates were baptized. Sure, some of it was that jailhouse religion, act right and get out early, but some of it was real.

In ‘89, they built the High Security Annex, a modern building with solid doors, electronic locks and fire prevention systems, the kind of place you’d expect. D-block became a minimum security section, so maybe that was a kind of redemption, too.

Brushy didn’t suddenly became a nice place to spend time in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Far from it. But there was hope here, too. Good people doing good work, and bad people trying to be good. Brushy ate Tennessee’s sins for 113 years. It bore witness to terrible sadness and awful violence. It provided hard lessons and good jobs. More than anything, it created a legend and a legacy that will echo across this country and its history. The prison opened in 1896 and only closed its doors in 2009.

Plans to repurpose the historic prison began in 2012, and Brushy Mountain Distillery only opened in 2018. Using local grains, local natural spring water, and (of course) local distillers, Brushy Mountain has already released 10 creative flavors of moonshine such as apple pie, blackberry, honey, fruit punch, frosted orange, peach cobbler, cinnarum, and butterscotch. Man what crazy tale! And now they distill moonshine here! No wonder the place is haunted! Speaking of Hauntings… Let's get to it!

It's been said you can hear the screams of the hopeless, the clanging against bars and railing for justice, over and over. It makes sense that a place filled with such heartache would carry a connection to the other world. Also Brushy Mountain is very open about its ghosts. No joke. They even include them in their warning of possible hazardous conditions you might encounter while tiring the facility.

Many people report a grave feeling of dread or despair in the area that was the hole or solitary. Down there are reports of shadowy figures and banging and strange noises. People have described getting heavy feelings in their chests and several have said they felt like they were having a heart attack. Another hot spot seems to be the cafeteria. We found this story online:

"Not much struck me emotionally about the place until I reached the serving line in the cafeteria. My wife and I both had a feeling of dread come over us. Having cold chills and generally wanting to get out of the area as soon as possible made us wonder why. As we continued the tour we put that moment behind us until we sat for a documentary style video played in the museum. The video described the brutal murder of an inmate in the cafeteria lunch line! A fellow prisoner had taken a knife from the kitchen and hacked the man to pieces. The video graphically described that blood splattered into the potatoes, the man's arm was barely hanging on by a piece of skin, and his spine fell apart when the guards tried to move him. Now they say at times you can see a man waving his arm from behind a pillar in the cafeteria. People have also experienced a folding chair slide across the room!"

Another visitor said this:

"Not a believer myself, but I went on the night tour. I saw a swirl of smoke go past me in the visitation room off of the cafeteria. I have several photos with unexplained oddities. I plan on going back."

There's many stories just like these floating around and honestly it sounds like a really cool place to get wasted and wander around! You can do tastings and ghost tours.. My kind of night.

Next up we are getting back to beer… And also pizza! What a combo! Throw in ghosts and we are in for a heck of a party. We are heading to Portland Oregon to check out Old Town Pizza and Brewing. It was in 1880 that two successful lumber barons built the Merchant Hotel on this block, catering to Portland’s best patrons. Old Town Pizza sits in the original hotel lobby. In fact the window where you place your pizza order is the original hotel’s reception desk and is flanked by the lobby’s original decorative cast iron beam posts. Underneath the floor boards are the Shanghai Tunnels connecting Portland via underground pathways, then used to nab unsuspecting sailors and transport them to ships docked on the river. The Shanghai Tunnels, is a group of passages in Portland, mainly underneath the Old Town Chinatown neighborhood and connecting to the main business section. The tunnels connected the basements of many hotels and taverns to the waterfront of the Willamette River. They were originally built to move goods from the ships docked on the Willamette to the basement storage areas, allowing businesses to avoid streetcar and train traffic on the streets when delivering their goods. There is documentation in the newspapers of the 19th century of tunnels and secret passages underground. Organized crime was the center of many of these stories. The more crazy stories go that the tunnels were also use to Shanghai sailors. Shanghaiing or crimping is the practice of kidnapping people to serve as sailors by coercive techniques such as trickery, intimidation, or violence. Those engaged in this form of kidnapping were known as crimps. The most straightforward method for a crimp to shanghai a sailor was to render him unconscious, forge his signature on the ship's articles, and pick up his "blood money". This approach was widely used, but there were more profitable methods. Whether the stories of shanghaiing on these tunnels are actually true or not it's a matter of debate among historians, but if true we're sure there are plenty of stories of occidental that went to far leading to dinner bad juju in the tunnels. Old Town Pizza sits in what used to be called the Old North End, a section of the city with a rather questionable reputation. Despite the upstanding clientele of the Merchant Hotel, even it was known for offering one of the oldest professions in the world: prostitution. As legend goes, one of the young “working women” was Nina, sold into this life by a thriving white slavery market. In an effort to clean up the neighborhood, traveling missionaries convinced Nina to share information in exchange for freeing her from a fate she did not choose. Nina cooperated but soon afterward was found dead in the hotel, now Old Town Pizza. Thrown down the elevator shaft, Nina is reported to have never left the building. That elevator shaft is now the location of a cozy both in the restaurant… Fun! Nina is often seen wandering around in a black dress. Years ago a skeptical (of ghosts) general manager saw a woman in a black dress head to the basement. He followed the woman down the stairs to let her know they weren’t open and instead found the room empty. Old Town’s beer and wine distributor has reported seeing Nina as well.

Other strange occurrences include a woman who reached out to Old Town Pizza after reading about Nina on their website claiming that Nina haunted her room when she was a little girl staying at the hotel.

While Adam Milne, the owner, has yet to come across Nina personally, he does recall a picture frame moving while he was doing paperwork in the lobby (and has video evidence to prove it). Another possible Nina sighting came when a customer shared a photo that captures a ghostly howling face…. We'll post the picture. As for other haunts, owner Adam Milne said an employee once saw a woman in a white dress go downstairs during closing time. When he went down to tell her they were closed, no one was there. it seems that while Nina is the most commonly seen apparition or encounter, others report feeling someone's presence around then in the dining room along with people reporting being touched but no one being around them. Sounds like a pretty spooky place!

We're gonna do a few quick hitters next.

We've done beer, wine, and moonshine… What's left? Well how about one for Moody...a haunted meadery. That's right and we don't even have to leave Portland!

Many local Portlander’s are familiar with the long closed Ye Olde Towne Crier,a building built in 1927 with a long history of it’s roots. It is most famous for being the Ye Olde Towne Crier, but a variety of other bars and businesses have resided within it’s walls. More recently and after nearly a decade of being vacant, Wyrd Leatherworks and Meadery have taken up the mantle of bringing the basement area back to life with their own medieval twist. The new business location for Wyrd includes a fully functional mead hall style tap room, their meadery where they make their honey based beverage, and their storefront of handmade leather goods with artists on consignment. The hauntings and ghost sightings date back to the staff at Ye Olde Towne Crier. The Ye Olde opened in ‘53. The building was built in 1927 as a market. The family who originally owned it converted it over many years and added a 3rd level for their residence. That’s the secret spot. The ghost first appeared in the lounge in 1966, per the old staff. During the remodeling process over the last few months, Wyrd Leatherworks and Meadery has noticed minor paranormal activity while working on their new space. Objects have shown up in random spots, ceiling fans have begun to spin on their own while the co-owners ate their food on breaks, loud noises as if someone walked into a metal sink hard, etc. Often it is just the three co-owners there working on the space and can confirm their experiences so far, which led to them researching into whether or not the place has a history of being haunted. Wyrd Leatherworks and Meadery does not wish to upset any spirits who share their residence and is currently working on a plan to collaborate peacefully with their new shared space roommates. Moody will definitely be going to this place!

Touted as the most haunted brewery in Illinois, Wolfden Brewing Company resides in a building built in 1851. While weird incidents happen on a weekly basis—batteries draining quickly, magnets flying off the wall, shadowy figures, coughing and footsteps—the most notable occurrences happened while Wolfden Brewing was under construction.

Co-owner Katie found a soldier’s marble on the property and after taking the marble off the property, she experienced a series of frightening events. At a home improvement store, paint cans fell from 25 feet above and landed right behind her. She also randomly cut herself while shopping for fire extinguishers. While driving on the highway, a construction barrel flew out on the road in front of her car. Lastly, she tripped over a wire and cut her Achilles tendon on the construction site. All incidents ended once she returned the marble.

While not much about the building’s history has been recorded, Wolfden Owner and Head Brewer Krystov and Katie were able to decipher from existing documents that a woman died on the property after falling into a well. Another spirit, Jack, is believed to have been a soldier from the Civil War (or perhaps during the Blackhawk War).

“We did our first investigation before we opened to the public (last July) and were able to capture Jack telling us his name is Jack,” says Krystov. “We also asked the spirits to move something and shortly after, two 50lb grain bags were pushed off the stack of grain bags and onto the floor. “

According to Krystov, multiple mediums and ghost investigation crews have come through and confirmed that spirits haunt the building and that the upstairs room is a portal.

“Although many of the incidents are creepy, we feel that the spirits here are not evil,” says Krystov. “they aren’t particularly nice, but probably because they don’t want us here. None of the staff is scared, they have just gotten used to it.”

Awesome… That's close enough to Ohio for us to go check out!

A Victorian house built in 1864 houses both the Yak & Yeti, one of Denver’s best Nepalese restaurants, and Spice Trade Brewing. With delicious aromas and spices that fill the air and unique craft beer, it’s no wonder that ghostly visitors don’t want to leave. The restaurant and brewery are said to be haunted by former owner Cora who died falling down the stairs in the 1940s. Jeff Tyler, head brewer at Spice Trade, notes that repairmen have complained about strange things happening in the basement and according to a Fox 31 news report, Yak and Yeti employees witnessed so many strange occurrences that the Rocky Mountain Paranormal Research Society was brought in to investigate. While they were not able to clarify that the strange occurrences were indeed spirits, cameras did catch a mysteriously moving chair.

Why are ghosts always moving chairs?..... Anyway

Another spot we've found is the wynkoop brewery. Located in Denver Colorado, there are many studies from patrons of paranormal experiences. Who better to hear about this possible haunting from than the brewery itself. The following is taken from their own website:

"Our downtown Denver brewery resides in a 125-year-old brick warehouse building that’s seen a lot of changes over the last century. In the past year or so, we made a few changes of our own when we updated our 30-year-old tap system, replacing all of our taps, lines and pumps so we could get fresh beer from the basement up to our bars. And just recently we installed brand new, state-of-the-art brewing equipment, making our brewers’ lives (and backs) easier with our newly implemented grain elevator.

While updating our systems, we spent a lot of time in our basement. Down there, you really get a sense of the history of this place. You’ll find some interesting remnants from the past, such as the bricked-over tunnels that lead all the way to Union Station and the Brown Palace. Because our building used to be a mercantile, these tunnels served to move the merchandise coming in off the trains. (Interesting trivia: The Beatles once had to use these tunnels to get across downtown to avoid the frenzy of fans up above.)

But like many turn-of-the-century buildings, we have our fair share of ghosts. Not the horror movie kind, more of the sort-of-annoying-but-harmless kind. Since our restrooms are located in the basement, we’ve had a few guests tell us they’ve experienced “encounters” while using the facilities, especially men who claim that they could feel something brush the backs of their legs while they were using the urinals.

While most ghostly encounters seem to happen in the basement, sometimes the spirits make their way up the stairs. There’ve been a few late nights where I’ve turned off all the lights upstairs, walked down the basement to check on the bathrooms, walked back up the stairs and all of the lights were back on. (I was the only one there.) And some customers have claimed to see a lady in a red dress walking across the room in our upstairs pool hall.

So a few years ago, we decided to do our own “paranormal investigation”. A few of our staff members stayed overnight in our basement using a “spirit box” that supposedly contacts spirits through the use of radio frequency. While down there, they asked the ghosts if they knew where they were. They claim they kept hearing “Koop” coming through the static. They asked who the lady in the red dress was. They heard “Isabelle”. Coincidence? You can watch this video online and decide for yourself.

One of the more unsettling things from that night is the video capture of a shadow darting along the wall. Everyone is seated, no one is moving. Who made that shadow? You can watch the video and see if you can figure it out."

We'll post links to both videos so you can check em out for yourself. If you watch the videos leave em a comment and let them know we sent you!

Well there you have it, the surprise episode just for Jon! Alcohol and ghosts, what a combo! If you guys are ever near these places definitely check them out and tell them we sent you!

To ten horror movies of 1976… Jons year of spawning!

Monday Apr 12, 2021

The DSM 5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders)

Monday Apr 12, 2021

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Tonight we are doing something a little different. We are not going anywhere creepy. We aren't talking about UFOs, cryptids, or ghosts. You may have noticed our love of unsolved murders and true crime as well. Well, tonight we are looking at one of the most revolutionary tools used in diagnosing those criminals. We are talking about the DSM. This is going to be a little nerdy, but definitely interesting.

What is the DSM 5?

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM–5) is the product of more than 10 years of effort by hundreds of international experts in all aspects of mental health. Their dedication and hard work have yielded an authoritative volume that defines and classifies mental disorders in order to improve diagnoses, treatment, and research.

DSM 1

The DSM 1 was released by the American psychiatric association in 1952. It contained 60 recognized disorders and was very different from the current DSM. The objective of DSM I was to create a single nomenclature for psychopathology. Three separate diagnostic systems were in use, none of which matched systems used by hospitals for reporting purposes:

Standard Nomenclature of Disease, (1942 revision)

War Department Technical Bulletin (Medical 203), 1943 (US Navy)

Veteran's Administration (modified version of Medical 203)

rooted in Adolf Meyer's psychobiology: all disorders considered to be reactions to stress (e.g., depressive reaction)

psychoanalytic (i.e., Fruedian) which was constructed by sending questionnaires to 10% of APA members, 46% of whom responded.

Final approval obtained from vote of full APA membership

There were three broad classes of psychopathology:

organic brain syndromes (e.g., Korsakoff's syndrome, epilepsy)

functional disorders (e.g., depression, schizophrenia)

mental deficiency (mental retardation [now called intellectual disability])

one childhood disorder, adjustment reaction of childhood/adolescence.

The structure and conceptual framework were the same as in Medical 203, and many passages of text were identical. The APA listed homosexuality in the DSM as a sociopathic personality disturbance. In 1956, the psychologist Evelyn Hooker performed a study comparing the happiness and well-adjusted nature of self-identified homosexual men with heterosexual men and found no difference. Her study stunned the medical community and made her a heroine to many gay men and lesbians, Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytic Study of Male Homosexuals, a large-scale 1962 study of homosexuality by Irving Bieber and other authors, was used to justify inclusion of the disorder as a supposed pathological hidden fear of the opposite sex caused by traumatic parent–child relationships. This view was influential in the medical profession. Unfortunately homosexuality remained in the DSM until May 1974. DSM was criticized for its reliability and validity. The major limitation of the DSM was that the concept had not been scientifically tested. Also, all of the disorders listed were considered to be reactions to events occurring in an individual’s environment. Another problem was that there really was no distinction between abnormal and normal behavior. Despite this, it gained acceptance.

DSM 2

This second edition was released in 1969 by the APA. This edition featured a jump to 182 disorders. There were few changes in either process or philosophy (still psychoanalytic)

For the first time, international treaty dictated that the DSM and International Classification of Diseases (version 8; World Health Organization, 1966) be compatible.

Another primary objective was to improve communication among psychiatrists. Major psychiatric classes were expanded from 3 to 11 and several child and adolescent disorders added. They were: group delinquent reaction, hyperkinetic reaction, overanxious reaction, runaway reaction, unsocialized aggressive reaction, withdrawing reaction. The term "reaction" was dropped, but the term "neurosis" was retained. Both the DSM-I and the DSM-II reflected the predominant psychodynamic psychiatry,[24] although both manuals also included biological perspectives and concepts from Kraepelin's system of classification. Symptoms were not specified in detail for specific disorders. Many were seen as reflections of broad underlying conflicts or maladaptive reactions to life problems that were rooted in a distinction between neurosis and psychosis (roughly, anxiety/depression broadly in touch with reality, as opposed to hallucinations or delusions disconnected from reality). The idea that personality disorders did not involve emotional distress was discarded. There was still a disconnect between many doctors on whether the DSM was a reliable diagnostic tool. Robert Spitzer and Joseph L. Fleiss found that different practitioners using the DSM-II rarely agreed when diagnosing patients with similar problems. In reviewing previous studies of eighteen major diagnostic categories, Spitzer and Fleiss concluded that "there are no diagnostic categories for which reliability is uniformly high. Reliability appears to be only satisfactory for three categories: mental deficiency, organic brain syndrome (but not its subtypes), and alcoholism. The level of reliability is no better than fair for psychosis and schizophrenia and is poor for the remaining categories".

DSM 2: 7TH PRINTING

Homosexuality was removed as a mental disorder following protests by gay rights activists at the 1974 annual convention of the APA in San Francisco

This landmark event illustrates several important points about conceptualization and diagnosis of mental illness:

diagnostic systems such as the DSM, which are constructed by social institutions, reflect social values

Psychiatry and related disciplines reinforce prevailing social values, which can lead to stigmatization, with considerable potential for negative effects on mental health.

As a social institution, the APA is not indifferent to socio political influence.

DSM 3

The DSM 3 was released in 1980 and showed a radical shift in philosophy from earlier versions. It contained 265 disorders. Available (albeit limited) research weighted heavily for the first time. It was designed to be descriptive and atheoretical in order to appeal to professionals across theoretical orientations (e.g., social workers, psychologists) instead of just psychiatrists. Psychoanalytic paradigm was supplanted by the 'biological psychiatry' perspective. A major objective was to make psychiatry more scientific, bringing it into mainstream medicine. There was a pretty big problem though. There were low inter-rater agreements in psychiatric diagnosis, the major dependent variable in psychiatry. The US-UK Cross National Diagnostic Project revealed much higher rates of schizophrenia diagnoses in NY and much higher rates of mood disorder diagnoses in London, despite nearly identical symptoms among psychiatric admissions. A meta analysis by Spitzer and Fleiss (1974) revealed the following kappa (κ) statistics for major psychiatric disorders:

depression: .41

mania: .33

anxiety: .45

schizophrenia: .57

alcoholism: .71

In general κs greater than .6 are unacceptable, so basically what this is saying is that these numbers are too high and there's too much disagreement in diagnosis. Low agreement was attributed to two sources, criterion variance and information variance.

criterion variance is when diagnosticians are using different criteria when rendering diagnoses. Information variance is when diagnosticians are obtaining different information when interviewing patients. Both of these things led to major breakthroughs in diagnosis techniques but we're getting nerdy and scientific enough, and frankly we don't have the time… Just know they were important! The DSM-III also introduced multi-axial classification:

Axis I: clinical disorders, and conditions that need clinical attention (e.g., schizophrenia, major depression, bipolar disorder, panic disorder)

Axis II: personality disorders and mental retardation (e.g., antisocial personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, autism spectrum disorder)

Axis III: general medical conditions (e.g., hypothyroidism, Huntington's disease)

Axis IV: psychosocial and environmental problems (e.g., homelessness, child abuse)

Axis V: global assessment of functioning scale (0-100)

DSM 3-R

The revision of the DSM 3 was released in 1987. It added a few more disorders bringing the number to 292. The explicit goal was to revise diagnostic criteria that were inconsistent, unclear, or were contradicted by subsequent research.

It eliminated most exclusion criteria, thereby doing away with implementing diagnostic hierarchies, which simplify diagnosis.

pre- DSM-III-R:

organic brain syndrome (i.e., illness attributable to CNS disease, brain trauma, etc.); if absent, then

schizophrenia; if absent, then

mood disorders; if absent, then

personality disorders

Eliminating diagnostic hierarchies resulted in a major increase in prevalence of disorders, and on rates of comorbidity.

DSM 4

The DSM 4 was released in 1994. The DSM 4 contained 365 disorders. A new version was needed to be compatible with the ICD 10. It is more data driven than any previous version. Some of the things done to collect now data were as follows: 13 work groups, populated with experts in each domain (e.g., anxiety disorders, eating disorders, mood disorders, multi-axial issues, etc.)

review papers commissioned

12 multisite field trials to collect new data with 5-10 sites per field trial with 70 total sites involving 6000 participants

workgroups were to use data from the field trials to "compare alternative options and to study the possible impact of suggested changes"

McArthur foundation funding for re-analysis of existing datasets

publication of a multivolume DSM Sourcebook

Side note: looking into different sources, the number of disorders and diagnosis in each edition vary from source to source. For example three different sources list the the amount of disorders for the DSM 4 at 297, 365, and 410 respectively. If you've been listening and say this point are like: these idiots can't even get the number right… Well we're doing our best goddammit, and as we like to say, Blame the internet!.

Ok back to it

DSM 4 TR

A text revision of DSM-IV, titled DSM-IV-TR, was published in 2000. The diagnostic categories were unchanged as were the diagnostic criteria for all but 9 diagnoses. The majority of the text was unchanged; however, the text of two disorders, pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified and Asperger's disorder, had significant and/or multiple changes made. The definition of pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified was changed back to what it was in DSM-III-R and the text for Asperger's disorder was practically entirely rewritten. Most other changes were to the associated features sections of diagnoses that contained additional information such as lab findings, demographic information, prevalence, course. Also, some diagnostic codes were changed to maintain consistency with ICD-9-CM .

Ok so that covers the first four editions and their revisions. And yes, for those of you who knows your DSMs, there is much more to editions 3 and 4 that we didn't go into. We are aware of this. But for the sake of time and sanity we did it the way we felt best… So back off.

That brings us to the present edition, the one that had piqued Jons interest so much, the DSM 5.

Turns it the joke may be on Jon as big changes were anticipated but few were implemented. A similar revision process to that used for DSM IV was used including:

11 expensive field trails at medical/academic sites to assess "...reliability, feasibility, and clinical utility of select revisions"

19 expert work/study groups

re-analyses of large datasets

Here are done of the major highlights:

autism spectrum disorder (ASD) subsumes what were autistic disorder, Asperger's disorder, childhood disintegrative disorder, and PDD NOS

ADHD placed in the neurodevelopmental disorders category (with intellectual developmental disorder, ASD, specific LDs, motor disorders, etc.)

a schizophrenia spectrum is now recognized

disruptive mood dysregulation disorder added to depressive disorders

several new obsessive compulsive disorders added (e.g., hoarding, skin-picking, substance-induced)

gender dysphoria added

gambling disorder added to the the substance-related and addictive disorders chapter

ALMOST NO CHANGES TO THE PERSONALITY DISORDERS!

Multi-axial classification that characterized the DSM-III, DSM-III-R, DSM-IV, and DSM-IV-TR was abandoned.

The DSM spawned the five factor model, or FFM. The FFM came about as an idea that it could be used to describe and understand the official personality disorder (PD) constructs from the American Psychiatric Association's diagnostic manuals. The FFM while spawned from the DSM is not exactly the same thing they are often confused and many think they are the same thing. The five factor model (FFM) is based on five personality factors, often referred to by the acronym OCEAN for Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism. They are measured on continua, whereby an individual may be highly extraverted, low in extraversion (introverted) or somewhere between these two extremes.

It enables the analysis of human personality based on observations carried out from clinical practices. Psychologist Lewis Goldberg referred to these as the ‘Big Five’ factors of personality, and developed the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP) - an inventory of descriptive statements relating to each trait. Within each factor, a set of individual traits relate to more specific aspects of personality.

FIVE FACTORS AT A GLANCE:

Openness to Experience

The openness to experience dimension of personality is characterised by a willingness to try new activities. Openness to experience is often associated with intelligence when measuring personality factors.

Individuals who score highly on verbal/crystallized intelligence measures have been found to also report being more open to experience.

CONSCIENTIOUSNESS:

People who are conscientious are more aware of their actions and the consequences of their behavior than people who are unconscientious. They feel a sense of responsibility towards others and are generally careful to carry out the duties assigned to them.Conscientious individuals like to keep a tidy environment and are well-organized. They are keen to maintain good timekeeping. People with high conscientious levels also exhibit more goal-oriented behavior. Low levels of conscientiousness are reflected in less motivated behavior. Unconscientious individuals are less concerned by tidiness and punctuality. Unconscientious people tend to engage in more impulsive behavior. They will act on a last-minute whim rather than considering the consequences of their choices. Research suggests that both environmental factors and heritability may influence conscientiousness.

EXTRAVERSION:

Extraversion is characterised by outgoing, socially confident behavior. Extraverts are sociable, talkative and often forward in social situations. They enjoy being the center of a group and will often seek the attention of others.This personality trait is measured on an introversion-extraversion continuum. Individuals who fit in the middle of the two traits are described as ambiverts. Introverts are people with low levels of extraversion, display contrasting behavior. They are quieter and often feel shy around other people. They may feel intimidated being in large groups such as parties, and will often try to avoid demanding social gatherings.

AGREEABLENESS:

Individuals who score highly on agreeableness measures are friendly and co-operative. Often considered more likeable by their peers and colleagues, agreeable people are trusting of others and are more altruistic, willing to help others during times of need. Their ability to work with others means that they often work well as members of a team. Individuals who are disagreeable score lower on this dimension of personality. They are less concerned with pleasing other people and making friends. Disagreeable individuals are more suspicious of other people’s intentions and are less charitable. As with some of the other ‘Big Five’ personality factors, our agreeableness levels are fluid throughout our lives, tending to increase as we grow older.

Neuroticism

This personality dimension is measured on a continuum ranging from emotional stability to emotional instability, or neuroticism. People with high neuroticism scores are often persistent worriers. They are more fearful and often feel anxious, over-thinking their problems and exaggerating their significance. Rather than seeing the positive in a situation, they may dwell on its negative aspects.People with low neuroticism scores are less preoccupied by these negative concerns. They are able to remain more calm in response to stressful situations, and view problems in proportion to their importance. As a result, they tend to worry about such problems to a lesser extent. A person’s neuroticism can have repercussions in terms of their relationship with others. A study found that people in relationships were less happy than other couples if their partner scored highly on the personality trait.

These 5 major traits contain facets, and within these facets are the 18 items that experts link with psychopathy.

We started with the DSM 5 which led us to the FFM, which brings us to psychos. There were so many damn case studies and legal papers from law students, this shit was hard to research past the basic explanations. As for both being used in legal settings that is an even more gigantic pile of stinky shit to wade through. There were at least 6 pages worth of google his about the misuses of both in diagnosing criminals for court cases. A good amount of the misuses were dealing with trying to use the dsm 5 and the FFM as proof for an insanity plea. Not necessarily a misuse, but it seems that even when these are used to help determine personality and/or mental illness, even these are rarely convincing enough to actually grant an insanity ruling. The FFM can help determine a person's personality and possibly if they are a psychopath, but even being a psychopath won't automatically guarantee any kind of insanity defence. The DSM 5 can help identify any mental disorders, but mental disorders alone don't call for an automatic insanity defence. Even put together, personality profile and any underlying mental disorders, they are not necessarily a recipe insanity. Successful insanity defenses are rare. While rates vary from state to state, on average 0.85 percent actually raises the insanity defense nationwide. Interestingly, states with higher rates of insanity defenses tend to have lower success rates for insanity defenses; the percentage of all defendants found NGRI is fairly constant, at around 0.26 percent.

Another reason that it is hard to use the dsm5 in insanity defences is the factor of the many differing opinions on how the dsm5 is applied. We saw earlier in the episode that there was a large amount of different diagnosis on patients that had the same symptoms.

After all this we then looked into the DSM as it pertains to profiling as Jon had mentioned. It turns out profilers don't really use the dsm 5 to help them. Which maybe they should, seeing as how profilers are right only around 66%, they could probably use all the help they can get. Some, however, believe by using the dsm 5 you can find the common mental illness of serial killers and use that to help determine a profile. Speaking of mental illness, let's look at the top three mental illnesses most commonly found in serial killers. First up schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is a severe mental disorder that affects how a person thinks, feels and behaves. Symptoms range from hallucinations and delusions to emotional flatness and catatonia. It is one of the most common mental disorders diagnosed among criminals, especially serial killers. David Berkowitz, Richard Chase, James holmes, and Ed Vein all had schizophrenia. Next up, Borderline Personality Disorder.

Characterized by impulsive behaviors, intense mood swings, feelings of low self-worth and problems in interpersonal relationships, borderline personality disorder seems more common among female criminals. Jeffrey Dahmer, Kristin H Gilbert, and Aileen Wuornos were all found to have borderline personality. Antisocial Personality Disorder is the third major illness. Known in the past as “psychopathy,” this mental disorder is characterized by a total lack of remorse and disregard of the feelings of others. People with APD may lie, act out violently, or break the law. While it’s reported that APD only affects 0.6% of the population, it may affect up to 47% of male inmates and 21% of female inmates. It’s also been diagnosed among three of the most ruthless serial killers. So we know that we just said that it was formerly known as psychopathy but turn out they may be two distinct things. There's actually pushback from both sides that there are traits of each that are distinct from the other. Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, and John Wayne Gacy were all diagnosed with antisocial Personality Disorder. These determinations of the diagnoses were carried out using the dsm5 guidelines for determining illnesses. So while it may not be used in profiling so to speak, you can use it to gather information to help see the traits of other people like the one they are looking for.

The DSM has been a valuable tool for mental health development and treatment. Every mental health professional uses the DSM in his or her own way. Some practitioners rigidly stick to the manual, developing treatment plans for each client based solely on the book's diagnoses. Others use the DSM as a guideline—a tool to help them conceptualize cases while focusing on each client's unique set of circumstances.

Despite its flaws, the DSM is uniquely helpful for several reasons.

Standardization

Beyond billing and coding, standardization provides a number of important benefits to the clinician and the client. Standardization of diagnoses helps ensure that clients receive appropriate, helpful treatment regardless of location, social class, or ability to pay. It provides a concrete assessment of issues and helps therapists develop specific goals of therapy, as well as assess the effectiveness of treatment.4

Research Guidance

In addition, the DSM helps guide research in the mental health field. The diagnostic checklists help ensure that different groups of researchers are studying the same disorder—although this may be more theoretical than practical, as so many disorders have such widely varying symptoms.

Therapeutic Guidance

For the mental health professional, the DSM eliminates a lot of guesswork. Proper diagnosis and treatment of mental illness remains an art, but the DSM diagnostic criteria serve as a sort of map.

In the age of brief therapy, a clinician may see a specific client only a handful of times, which may not be long enough to delve fully into the client's background and issues. Using the diagnostic criteria contained in the DSM, the therapist can develop a quick frame of reference, which is then refined during individual sessions.

No tool is perfect, and the DSM is no exception. Being aware of its drawbacks is important for both patients and therapists.

Oversimplification

The latest round of criticism echoes a long running debate on the nature of mental health. Many critics of the DSM see it as an oversimplification of the vast continuum of human behavior.6 Some worry that by reducing complex problems to labels and numbers, the scientific community risks losing track of the unique human element.

Misdiagnoses and Over-Diagnoses

Possible risks include misdiagnosis or even over-diagnosis, in which vast groups of people are labeled as having a disorder simply because their behavior does not always line up with the current ideal.7 Childhood attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a common example. Shifts in terminology and diagnostic criteria in DSM-IV coincided with a massive upturn in the number of children on Ritalin or other medications.

Labeling and Stigmatization

Other risks involve the possibility of stigmatization. Although mental health disorders are not viewed in the negative light that they once were, specific disorders can be perceived as labels. Some therapists take great care to avoid attaching labels to their clients. But for a variety of reasons, a specific diagnosis may be required.

While doing the research, many many many boring ass theses were read trying to give Jon what he wanted as far as the link between the DSMs and serial killers and such. The thing is, there isn't much and what's out there is basically just the same stuff over and over. The biggest link you'll find between the dsm and serial killers is the use of the dsm in diagnosing psychopathy and sociopathy in a majority of the cases. One cool thing we found was that at one point, psychologists were asked to look into the personality and mental well being of Ted Bundy. Perhaps the most obvious reason for this interest in Bundy is the fact that he was able to function and even flourish in his career and personal life, while carrying out and evading arrest for a longstanding series of brutal rapes and murders. Seventy-three psychologists from APA Division 42 recently took the opportunity to participate in a study concerned with the personality structure of Ted Bundy. The psychologists were provided a brief one and a half page vignette compiled from historical sources and reference materials. The psychologists were then asked to describe Bundy in terms of the American Psychiatric Association s personality disorder nomenclature. This means using the DSM for their evaluations of his mental disorders.The most commonly diagnosed personality disorder was antisocial, which was endorsed by almost 96% of the sample. In fact, nearly 80% of the respondents described Bundy as a prototypic case of antisocial personality disorder. Considering the history of brutal rapes and violent murders perpetrated by Bundy, this diagnosis is not particularly surprising. However, it is also worth noting that nearly 95% of the sample also saw Bundy as meeting sufficient criteria to be given the diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder. Over 50% of the psychologists also viewed Bundy as being above the diagnostic threshold for the borderline and schizoid diagnoses. This variety of personality disorder diagnoses offered by the members of Division 42 certainly supports the complex nature of Bundy s personality. As a comparison the psychologists were also asked to describe Bundy using the FFM system. Of course, the most notable aspect of Bundy s FFM profile was the consistently low ratings on all six facets of antagonism, indicating that the clinicians saw him as manipulative, deceitful, mistrustful, arrogant and callous. However, consistent with the reports of Bundy s success in political endeavors, the clinicians also rated him highly in the domain of extraversion, describing him as assertive, active, and thrill-seeking although also extremely low in the extraversion facet of warmth. Bundy was described as being particularly low on all the facets of neuroticism, with the exception of angry hostility. This indicates that he was seen as relatively free from experiencing negative emotions such as anxiety, depression, and selfconsciousness, but also as having great difficulty controlling his anger. Perhaps the most noteworthy finding from the FFM ratings was his generally high ratings on the domain of conscientiousness. In contrast with the impulsive, undercontrolled behavior that one would typically expect from an antisocial criminal, Bundy was described as being , orderly, achievement oriented and deliberate. Perhaps it was his characteristic style of careful planning and deliberate execution that enabled Bundy to avoid capture and arrest for so many years. The reasons for this evaluation was to determine which system was more useful for clinicians when looking for a diagnosis, working with patients, and being able to relay the information to the average person not familiar with all of the psychology jargon. They also used this as a study for what they may have needed to change from the DSM 4 to the dsm 5. The cool part was that they were able to dig into the mind of a killer and show the use of both the dsm and ffm models.

So look at know that this was more of a nerd out episode. Hopefully you find it interesting. Getting into the mind of criminals to determine what drives them is important for future dishonoring and treatment research. The DSM and ffm are critical tools used to help do this. The DSM is pretty much the exclusive tool used by psychologists to diagnose mental disorders and come up with treatment plans.

Another question that is being explored using the dsm is whether serial killers, repeat violent offenders, serial rapists and the like, can be rehabilitated. There are many studies in the world using the DSM 5 and other tools trying to determine if there are visible treatment options to use for this purpose. The big question here is, who would want to take the risk on rehabbing a serial killer, then putting their name on a piece of paper saying that person is ok to rejoin society, and theeeeen have that person revert back to their old habit of you know…. Killing people. There are plenty of people out there doing research on this topic. It was hard to find any solid answers as of now, but hopefully there will be more information soon.

We would also like to take a moment to say a couple things about this research. Most of the research was hampered but the fact that most of the good papers written on the subjects we discussed you actually have to pay to read. There many good papers with much good info that we could not access due to that fact. We wanted a DSM episode as we are both very interested in the minds of killers and criminals and the dsm and the FFM are the major tools in diagnosing the personalities and mental disorders of these killers and criminals. We know this wasn't our usual type of episode but sometimes we like to get nerdy and this one of those times. Hopefully you guys entity getting nerdy with us.

Monday Apr 05, 2021

The Boston Strangler

Monday Apr 05, 2021

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So most of us deranged lunatics already know the story of the boston strangler which is what we are discussing tonight. Some of you may be asking yourselves, “ but guys, I thought you only did unsolved cases” well we do and this one is no different. Even though you know the story, you may not know all the craziness surrounding the case. Most people straight up believe the killer was Albert Desalvo, and he seems like the logical choice, especially since he's been linked directly by DNA evidence to one of the crime scenes, which we’ll talk more about later. There's also much evidence that does not necessarily add up to Desalvo being responsible for all the murders. One thing a good portion of people don't realize is that desalvo was NEVER convicted of the Boston Strangler murders. We will start off with Disalvo's story and how he became known as the perpetrator behind these heinous murders, and then we’ll get into the crazy stuff.

Born on September 3, 1931, in Chelsea, Massachusetts, Albert DeSalvo was in and out of trouble with the police from an early age, but nothing as gruesome as the "Boston Strangler" case. DeSalvo admitted to murdering 13 women in Boston between 1962 and 1964, most of whom were elderly and alone. He was killed in prison in 1973, after being sentenced to life.

DeSalvo, a well-built 29-year-old, had a history of breaking and entering. He had spent time in prison for a bizarre series of peeping tom escapades where he would knock on ladies' doors, pretend he was a model scout and proceed to measure up the flattered woman if he was lucky enough to get in. It seemed like a harmless, albeit disturbing pastime and DeSalvo spent 18 months in prison for such sexually oriented mischievousness.

DeSalvo had a tough upbringing. He was brought up with four siblings and his father was a wife-beating alcoholic. As a boy, Desalvo became a delinquent and spent time in and out of prison for petty crime and violence.

Years after he had been discharged from the army for disobeying orders, he settled down and married Irmgard Beck, a girl from Germany. They lived modestly and, despite Irmgard giving birth to a handicapped child, the family managed to sustain itself. Irmgard was aware that DeSalvo was highly sexed and tried to avoid intercourse for fear of having another handicapped baby. However, a healthy boy was born and DeSalvo appeared to become a conscientious family man, liked and appreciated by colleagues and his boss. He was also known to be an outrageous braggart, which perhaps led the police to later disbelieve his claims to be the Strangler.

Between June 1962 and January 1964, a series of grisly murders took place in Boston. All the victims were women who had been strangled. The Boston slayings were blamed on one lone sociopath, and mystery still surrounds the case.

The "Boston Strangler" has been held accountable for around 11 of 13 murders of female victims. No one was actually tried for the Boston murders. But DeSalvo was—by the public at least—believed to be the man responsible. DeSalvo actually confessed to each of the 13 official Strangler murders. However, some doubt was shed on DeSalvo's claims by people who personally knew and worked with him.

What makes these particular murders stand out in the annals of serial killing is the fact that many of the victims were mature or elderly. The combination of old age, loneliness and vulnerability, adds to the brutality and tragedy of the events.

Anna Slesers, a seamstress and devout churchgoer was the first victim to be murdered on the evening of June 14, 1962. She lived on her own in a modest brick house apartment at 77 Gainsborough St. in Boston. Her son Juris was meant to come by to pick her up for a memorial service. When he discovered her body in the bathroom with a cord around her neck tied in a bow, Juris assumed she had committed suicide.

Homicide detectives James Mellon and John Driscoll found Slesers in an obscene state; nude and stripped of dignity. She had been sexually assaulted. The apartment looked as though it had been ransacked, with Slesers' purse and contents strewn on the floor. Despite what appeared to be a robbery, a gold watch and pieces of jewelry were left behind. The police settled on the hypothesis that it was a botched burglary.

Just under three weeks later on June 28, 1962, 85-year-old Mary Mullen was also found murdered in her home. Two days later, the body of 68-year-old Nina Nichols was also discovered in the Brighton area of Boston. Again, it appeared to be a burglary despite valuable silver that appeared untouched. The ransacking didn't seem to make sense to detectives.

Nichols was also found in a state of undress, her legs wide open and her stocking tops tied in a bow.

Then, on the same day, a second body was discovered a few miles north of Boston, in the suburb of Lynn. Helen Blake was a 65-year-old divorcee and her murder was more gruesome. She had suffered lacerations to her vagina and anus. Again, the bow trademark was evident; this time made from tying her bra around her neck. Like the previous crimes, the scene appeared to be a burglary.

After this brutal slaying, it was clear that Boston had a serial killer in its midst. Police Commissioner Edmund McNamara canceled all police leave due to the severity of the situation, and a warning went out via the media to Boston's female population. Women were advised to lock their doors and be cautious of strangers.

Police profiling had already decided that in all probability they were looking for a psychopath, whose hatred of older women may actually be linked to his own relationship with his mother.

It wasn't long before McNamara's fears were realized. A fourth brutal slaying took place at 7 Grove Garden in Boston's West End on August 19. The victim was 75-year-old widow Ida Irga. She had been strangled and she was on her back on the floor wearing a brown nightdress, which was ripped and exposed her body. Her legs were apart and resting on two chairs and a cushion had been placed under her buttocks. Again there was no sign of forced entry.

Less than 24 hours later, the body of Jane Sullivan was found not far from the previous victim at 435 Columbia Rd in Dorchester. The 65-year-old nurse had been murdered a week before and was found dead in the bathroom. She had been strangled by her own nylons.

Terror spread throughout Boston as the city feared another attack, but it was three months before the Strangler struck again. This time the victim was young.

Twenty-one-year-old Sophie Clark was an African American student who was very mindful of her safety, and rarely dated. Her body was found on December 5, 1962, a few blocks away from the first victim, Sleser. Clark was found nude and had been sexually assaulted. She had been strangled by her own stockings and semen was discovered for the first time. Somehow, despite Sophie's precautions, she had still let in the murderer.

Although Clark did not fit the same profile as the other victims, the police were sure it was the work of the same killer. Furthermore, this time they had a lead regarding the killer's possible identification. A female neighbor informed the police that a man had knocked on her door, insisting that he had been sent to paint her apartment. He finally left after she told him that her husband was sleeping in the next room.

Three weeks later, another young woman's life ended tragically. Twenty-three-year-old Patricia Bissette was pregnant when she was found dead in her apartment near the area where Slesers and Clark had lived. Bissette was discovered by her boss when she didn't turn up for work. Her body lay in her bed covered by sheets, and she had been sexually assaulted and strangled with her own stockings.

While the city appeared to have been spared another attack for several months, the police desperately tried to find any connection between the women and people they may have known. Every sex offender on the Boston Police files was interviewed and checked, yet still nothing turned up.

Before long, a series of murders started again. This time the body of 68-year-old Mary Brown was found strangled and raped 25 miles north of the city in March 1963.

Two months later, the ninth victim, Beverly Samans, was found. The 23-year-old graduate had missed choir practice on the day of her murder, May 8, 1963.

(1956–2002)

Samans was found with her hands tied behind her back with one of her scarves. A nylon stocking and two handkerchiefs were tied around her neck. Bizarrely, a piece of cloth over her mouth hid a second cloth which had been stuffed in her mouth. Four stab wounds to her neck had most likely killed her rather than strangulation.

There were a further 22 stab wounds to Samans's body, 18 in the shape of a bulls-eye on her right breast. She had been raped, but there was no evidence of semen. It was thought that because of her strong throat muscles due to singing, the killer had to take to stabbing her instead of strangulation.

The police, who were now desperate, even sought the help of a clairvoyant. He described the killer as a mental patient who had absconded from Boston State Hospital on the days the killings took place. However, this was soon discounted when another murder was committed. On September 8, 1963, in Salem, Evelyn Corbin, youthful-looking 58-year-old divorcee became the latest victim.

Corbin was found nude and on her bed face up. Her underwear had been stuffed in her mouth and again there were traces of semen, both on lipstick stains and in her mouth. Corbin's apartment had been ransacked in a similar fashion.

On November 25, Joann Graff, a 23-year-old industrial designer was raped and killed in her apartment in the Lawrence section of the city. Several descriptions of her attacker matched those of the man who had asked to paint Clark's neighbor's flat. The description detailed a man wearing dark green slacks, dark shirt and jacket.

On January 4, 1964, one of the most gruesome murders was discovered when two women came across the body of their roommate. Mary Sullivan was found dead sitting on her bed, her back against the headboard. She had been strangled with a dark stocking. She had been sexually assaulted with a broom handle. This obscenity was rendered even more disturbing by the fact that a Happy New Year card lay wedged between her feet. The same hallmarks of the killer were evident; a ransacked apartment, few valuables taken and the victims strangled with their own underwear or scarves, which were tied into bows.

The city was panic stricken and the situation prompted the drafting in of a top investigator to head the hunt for the Strangler. Massachusetts Attorney General Edward Brooke, the highest-ranking law enforcement officer in the state, began work on January 17, 1964, to bring the serial killer to book. There was pressure on Brooke, the only African American attorney general in the country, to succeed where others had failed.

Brooke headed up a task force that included assigning permanent staff to the Boston Strangler case. He brought in Assistant Attorney General John Bottomly, who had a reputation for being unconventional.

Bottomly's force had to sift through thousands of pages of material from different police forces. Police profiling was relatively new in the early 1960s, but they came up with what they thought was the most likely description of the killer. He was believed to be around thirty, neat and orderly, worked with his hands and was most likely a loner who may be divorced or separated.

In fact, the killer ended up being found by chance, not by the work of the police force.

After a spell in prison for breaking and entering, DeSalvo went on to commit more serious crimes. He had broken into a woman's apartment, tied her up on the bed and held a knife to her throat before molesting her and running away. The victim gave the police a good description, one that matched his likeness sketch from his previous crimes. Shortly afterward, DeSalvo was arrested.

It was after he had been picked out of an identity parade that DeSalvo admitted to robbing hundreds of apartments and carrying out a couple of rapes. He then confessed to being the Boston Strangler.

Despite the police not believing him at the time, DeSalvo was sent to Bridgewater State Hospital to be assessed by psychiatrists. He was assigned an attorney by the name of F. Lee Bailey. When DeSalvo's wife was told by Bailey that her husband had confessed to being the Strangler she couldn't believe it and suggested he was doing it purely for payment from the newspapers.

During his spell in Bridgewater, DeSalvo struck up a friendship with another inmate, an intelligent but highly dangerous killer called George Nassar. The two apparently had worked out a deal to split reward money that would go to anyone who supplied information to the identity of the Strangler. DeSalvo had accepted that he would be in prison for the rest of his life and wanted his family to be financially secure.

Bailey interviewed DeSalvo to discover if he really was the notorious killer. The attorney was shocked to hear DeSalvo describe the murders in incredible detail, right down to the furniture in the apartments of his victims.

DeSalvo had it all worked out. He believed he could convince the psychiatric board that he was insane and then remain in prison for the rest of his life. Bailey could then write up his story and make much needed money to support his family. In his book The Defense Never Rests, Bailey explains how it was that DeSalvo managed to avoid detection. DeSalvo was Dr. Jekyll; the police were looking for Mr. Hyde.

After a second visit and listening to DeSalvo describe in grisly detail the murder of 75-year-old Ida Irga, Bailey was convinced his client was the Boston Strangler. When he asked DeSalvo why he chose a victim of such an age, the man coolly replied that "attractiveness had nothing to do with it."

After many hours of questioning and going into minute detail of what the victims wore or how their apartments looked, both Bailey and the police were convinced that they had the killer. One disturbing revelation was when DeSalvo described an aborted attack on a Danish girl. As he was strangling her he caught sight of himself in the mirror. Horrified by the ghastly vision of what he was doing he released her and begged her not to tell the police before fleeing.

DeSalvo was incarcerated in what is now known as the MCI-Cedar Junction prison in Massachusetts. In November 1973, he got word to his doctor that he needed to see him urgently; DeSalvo had something important to say about the Boston Strangler murders. The night before they were to meet, however, DeSalvo was stabbed to death in prison.

Because of the level of security in the prison, it is assumed that the killing had been planned with a degree of co-operation between employees and prisoners. Whatever the case, and though there were no more murders by the Strangler after DeSalvo had been arrested, the Strangler case was never closed.

So there you have the basic tale of the strangler. We didn't get to crazy into details because quite frankly you either already know the story or you can find literally hundreds of other podcasts on just Desalvo and The Strangler murders, so really there's no reason to rehash all that. We want to look into the other circumstances surrounding the case.

GEORGE NASSAR/F. LEE BAILEY

George Nassar was the man that Delsalvo originally confessed to being Strangler to. Nassar would contact his lawyer F. Lee Bailey to tell him he should come and talk with Desalvo. If that name sounds familiar it's probably because Bailey was involved in some pretty notable cases throughout his career. There's another local connection in this episode for us. Bailey, who used to be a Rocky River Ohio resident, was the man who famously got Sam Shepherd acquitted of murdering his wife. If you are not familiar with that case, you may soon as it is another unsolved case from our own backyard that I have a feeling we may cover at some point. He also represented Patty Hearst and yes...O.J. Simpson. Bailey’s cross examination of detective Mark Fuhrman is considered by some to be the key to Simpson's acquittal. The man was pretty good at what he did even if he is a jackass. The confessions came when DeSalvo was arrested and sent to Bridgewater State Mental Hospital. Dr. Ames Robey was the medical director:

“Well, the first thing that was so obvious about Albert was his incredible need to be somebody important. He would brag about almost anything. He gave the feeling, although he didn’t say so at that time, that he sort of wanted to be as well known as, quote, “the Boston Strangler.”

Three months later, George Nassar, another inmate at Bridgewater, had an odd conversation about the Boston Strangler with his lawyer, F. Lee Bailey. Bailey recalled his talk with Nassar:

“He asked me whether or not it would be possible for someone who had done the stranglings to write a book. And my off-hand answer was sure, but he might go to the electric chair as a consequence. Later on, I was asked to go down and see this fellow, Albert DeSalvo, by my client.”

Bailey expected to come face to face with a monster. Instead, he met a married man with two children who seemed concerned about his family:

“I was a little incredulous because everybody develops a profile. You’re looking for a monster, somebody that, you know, the jowls are dripping and it just didn’t seem to fit.

He wanted to be able to tell his story. He said, ‘I would like to find out why I am like this. Maybe people can give me tests or something.’”

According to Bailey, DeSalvo confessed he was the Boston Strangler.

“I had no way of knowing whether or not he was telling the truth, fantasizing because he was crazy, or had read a lot of things in the newspapers and wanted to be famous.”

Two days later, Bailey returned to Bridgewater with a tape recorder and a list of questions. With DeSalvo’s permission, Bailey had struck a deal with the Boston police. They would provide Bailey with details only The Strangler would know, as a way of testing DeSalvo. In return, Bailey was guaranteed that the tapes would never be heard in court.

Deputy Superintendent John Donovan, retired Chief of Homicide in the Boston Police Department, said he was intrigued by what he heard:

“His descriptions of the crime scenes were just so accurate that that impressed me very much.”

But when Dr. Ames Robey heard the tape, he was not so impressed. He believed there was another explanation for DeSalvo’s knowledge of the crime scenes:

“Albert indicated to us that he had gone to the various sites that the newspapers had named after the police tape was off the doors in the apartments, just to sort of be there and see what it was like.”

Dr. Robey says that DeSalvo had a photographic memory. He may have visited the victims’ apartments, or perhaps he was just repeating what someone else had described to him. Then Robey began to believe that DeSalvo’s friend, George Nassar, was somehow involved:

“I first began to wonder about something going on when no other inmates would come near them. And they would immediately stop talking if the guards or staff came anywhere near where they could hear. But they would have extensive conversations about what, of course, we didn’t know.”

A career criminal, George Nassar had been imprisoned for killing a gas station attendant shortly after the Strangler killed his last victim. Nassar agreed to discuss his role in the case and his relationship with Albert DeSalvo for the first time:

“With Albert DeSalvo, I was simply an associate. I’ve done the same thing with many, many prisoners. People come to me and ask for advice. I give it to them if they say, if it’s worthy of me assisting them, I assist them, for my reasons because I feel it’s a worthy thing to do.”

The Massachusetts Attorney General ordered that news of DeSalvo’s confession be kept under wraps. Within the police department, there was a split over whether DeSalvo was, in fact, the killer. Then someone leaked the story of the confession to the local papers.

In response to the story, two women came forward. One was a survivor of a possible Strangler attack. The other was a neighbor of one of the victims. They were brought to Bridgewater to see if they recognized any of the inmates.

Surprisingly, the one familiar face did not belong to Albert DeSalvo, but to George Nassar. Is it possible that he was actually the Boston Strangler? Dr. Ames Robey thought it was possible:

“George Nassar would fit the profile of the Boston Strangler. We found nothing that would rule him out, not even one iota.”

George Nassar denied the accusation:

“I do not kill women. I’ve never conceived of it. I wouldn’t conceive of it. I have great respect and regard for women, beginning with my mother who brought me up that way.”

Lee Bailey wasn’t convinced his client fit the profile of the Strangler:

“George Nassar was eliminated as the Strangler. I don’t think he had the profile to strangle. George Nassar used a gun.”

Albert DeSalvo was the state’s prime suspect, even though there was no physical evidence that linked him to any of the killings. F. Lee Bailey suggested that DeSalvo undergo hypnosis. He recalled the session:

“We had him hypnotized and age regressed right through one of the homicides. And the things that developed in the presence of a very bright medical hypnotist were of great interest.”

The session revealed that DeSalvo had had problems with every significant woman in his life. According to F. Lee Bailey:

“We found an involvement of his wife who he’d married in Germany, his daughter who had a physical disability that troubled him greatly, his mother whom he had a love-hate relationship. And it was just the beginning.”

Dr. Robey observed the session and came to a completely different conclusion:

“The answers were almost implied in the question, which, at least from my training, is something you don’t do. I was not at all convinced that anything had been uncovered. And was a little surprised later when Mr. Bailey announced what had occurred under hypnosis was ‘definitive evidence.’ Albert, even with the crimes he was charged with, he was considered gentle, polite. His sexual proclivities, his general attitude, he was not angry and hostile.”

In the summer of 1965, the Massachusetts Attorney General’s office conducted its own interrogations. The transcripts of those interviews were never released, but author Susan Kelly obtained a copy while researching her book called “Deadly Charade.” Susan came to believe that Albert DeSalvo was playing along:

“When you read the transcript and you come to a point where Albert gives an incorrect answer to a question, he is guided to give the correct answer. And Albert, who was a smart guy, caught on very quickly. This man was not the Boston Strangler, he didn’t kill anyone.”

Lee Bailey strongly disagreed:

“They had the right guy, beyond question. No one has ever come up with anything meaningful to contradict that. The question is, how could we try him as the Strangler and close the file in the public’s mind?”

Lee Bailey struck a deal with the State. Albert DeSalvo went on trial, but not as the Boston Stranger. Instead, he was tried for sexual assault and other crimes in connection with the “green man” case. In return, the State agreed not to press for the death penalty.

According to Bailey, it was the right thing to do:

“That’s all we wanted. Nobody ever wanted Albert on the street, including Albert, and to ask not to be executed so that he could be studied seemed to me a reasonable objective.”

After less than four hours of deliberation, the jury reached its verdict: guilty on eight criminal counts. DeSalvo had wanted to be sent to a mental hospital, but his insanity defense failed. He was sentenced to life in prison. Susan Kelly had suspicious as to why:

“It was a much more severe sentence than he would have received normally on the sex charges of which he’d been convicted. But he was being sent to the prison as the Boston Strangler. It was that simple.”

Dr. Ames Robey concurred:

“I think the most difficult part of all of this was the feeling that whether they had it solved or not, they had quieted the public’s concern. So, theoretically everyone was happy.”

In prison, DeSalvo was re-united with his old friend, George Nassar. Once again, questions were raised regarding Nassar’s possible involvement with the stranglings. Nassar admitted nothing:

“Because Al was not tried, this case had become mythical, it became part of, like, a public fantasy of what really happened. It became a continuing mystery, when it should’ve been resolved. And I was part of the mystery.”

Outside of prison, DeSalvo had become a legend. But inside, he feared his fame had made him a marked man. After more than six years behind bars, he asked to be transferred to a cell in the prison infirmary. Here, he would be isolated from the other inmates.

On the evening of November 25th, 1973, DeSalvo telephoned his former psychiatrist, Dr. Ames Robey.

“He wanted to talk to me, to tell me the, quote, real story. He didn’t say what the real story was and I could only hope that this is what I would hear, but I never heard it.

DeSalvo told Dr. Robey that he also intended to tell a reporter the same story. But before he talked to anyone, he was found in his cell murdered, stabbed repeatedly in the chest.

Some believed that DeSalvo was involved in a drug deal gone bad. Others, including George Nassar, say DeSalvo was killed in a dispute over cuts of meat he was allegedly selling on the prison black market. To Dr. Robey, it was clear what had happened:

“Somebody didn’t want that interview happening. And I think they’ve said before, ‘dead men tell no tales.’”

Three inmates were eventually charged with Albert DeSalvo’s murder, but no one was ever convicted.

While Nassar and Bailey are convinced that Desalvo was the strangler there are many people that think Nassar had something to do with the murders and used Desalvo and Bailey to get Desalvo convicted. Dr. Robey said “I think Albert became the Boston Strangler because he wanted so much to be the Boston Strangler. It was the most important thing in his life. For somebody that felt all his life that he was a nobody, all of a sudden he could become world-renowned.” Author Susan Kelly, who has written a couple books about the Strangler case, said of Desalvo being the killer “After eight years of research on this case, one thing I’m certain of is that Albert DeSalvo was not the Boston Strangler. There are a number of very good suspects. None of them happen to be Albert DeSalvo.”

Shortly after his murder, authorities came across a collection of poems that DeSalvo had written while in prison. One of them provided an intriguing footnote to the legend of the Boston Strangler. It read:

Here’s the story of the strangler yet untold

The man who claims he murdered 13 women, young and old

Today he sits in a prison cell

Deep inside only a secret he can tell

People everywhere are still in doubt

Is the strangler in prison, or roaming about?

Nassar was in prison twice. He was convicted, along with two buddies, in the killing of a store clerk during a robbery spree. He was paroled for this offense in 1961. The Boston Strangler slayings would begin the following year. The next murder , for which he is still serving his life sentence, would be the one that brought him i contact with Desalvo. He was convicted of killing a gas station clerk after an eyewitness identified him as the shooter. He has maintained his innocence and has requested several retrials, all of his appeals have been denied. While two of the murders took place after Nassar was caught for this crime that hasn't stopped people from speculating that he was somehow involved in the other slayings, possibly with Desalvo. Some followers of the case have also straight up declared Nassar to be the real Strangler, claiming that he fed details of the murders to DeSalvo. DeSalvo, they speculated, knew that he would spend the rest of his life in jail for the "Green Man" attacks, and "confessed" so that Nassar could collect reward money that they would split—thus providing support to DeSalvo's wife and two children. Another motive was his tremendous need for notoriety. DeSalvo hoped that the case would make him world-famous.

Besides Desalvo and Nassar, there were suspects in several of the other murders, leading many to suspect that not all of the murders were committed by one person. The fact that the victims were so wide ranging in age and type, and that aside from strangling there were many inconsistencies in MO from case to case led many to believe there wasn't one perpetrator but several. For instance, On June 14, 1962, the Strangler claimed his first victim, 56-year-old Anna Slesers. Earlier that day, a painting crew was working at her apartment. Sixteen days later, the same painting crew arrived at the apartment building of Helen Blake. She became victim number two. Two of the paint crew's alibis could not be corroborated by their boss or coworkers. For many people that's enough proof Desalvo was not the killer of these two.

Victim number 6 was Sophie clark. Police investigating this murder came upon a suspect, a man she used to date. The man was seen entering Sophie's apartment building and fleeing the buildin a short time later covered in sweat. According to authorities the man was given polygraph tests on two separate occasions and failed them both.

There was also a strong suspect for victim number 7, Paricia Bissett. The suspect in this case was her boss. Detective found that she was having an affair with her happily married boss at the time of her murder. It was also discovered during the autopsy that she was...wait for it...pregnant. Sounds like a big stinky pile of motive.

Despite these guys all be strong suspect in the respective case, authorities just basically said fuck it after Desalvo confessed, and even though he got many details of the murders constantly, they pretty much just stopped looking into theses leads. On person associated with the case had this to say

“There’s a possibility that some of the older women died at the hands of the same person. Each of the young women who died was murdered by a different individual who had his own motives.” “If you hated a woman back in the early 1960’s, you could kill her, loosely wrap a stocking around her neck, and hope that the police would think it was the Boston Strangler. All the grizzly details were printed in the papers at the time. If you wanted to commit a murder, here was your diagram.”

To go along with the multiple killer theory,Former FBI profiler Robert Ressler said, "You're putting together so many different patterns [regarding the Boston Strangler murders] that it's inconceivable behaviorally that all these could fit one individual."

John E. Douglas, the former FBI special agent who was one of the first criminal profilers, doubted that DeSalvo was the Boston Strangler. In his book The Cases That Haunt Us, he identified DeSalvo as a "power-assurance" motivated rapist. He said that such a rapist is unlikely to kill in the manner of crimes attributed to the Boston Strangler; a power-assurance motivated rapist would, however, be prone to taking credit for the crimes.

The family of one of the later victims, Mry Sullivan believed that Desalvo was not Mary's killer and even formed an unlikely partnership with Disalvo's team to try and prove he was innocent and to find Mary's real killer. On January 4, 1964, Mary Sullivan was found by her roommate, strangled to death and sexually assaulted. In a final morbid gesture, placed at her feet was a Happy New Year card. The police collected semen left on Mary’s body by the killer. But in 1964, there was no way to match it to a suspect. Albert DeSalvo later admitted he’d killed Mary. However, two families have formed a surprising alliance to challenge his confession: the family of Mary Sullivan and the family of Albert DeSalvo, including his brother Richard:

I never believed my brother was the Boston Strangler from day one. I just want the name cleared. That’s all. Albert was not perfect. Albert did some bad things. Albert was not a murderer.”

Mary Sullivan’s sister, Diane, also believes that DeSalvo was not the killer:

I’m gonna do everything I can to find her murderer, to find the murderer of Mary.”

According to Casey Sherman, Mary Sullivan’s nephew, he contacted the Boston police and asked about possible DNA evidence in The Strangler case:

“I made several inquiries to the Boston police department and they told me flat out that they did not have any physical evidence left in the Boston Strangler case to test for DNA evidence.”

So Mary Sullivan’s family turned to the only evidence available to them: Mary’s remains.

Casey said the family felt exhumation was the only way they could settle the case:

“We had to do the exhumation of my aunt’s body. It was a horrible experience. We didn’t want to do it, but it was our last and only recourse, we thought, and it was the only chance to find her killer.”

The Sullivans got help from a team of forensic experts, including world-renowned Professor of Law and Forensic Science, James Starrs:

“We were obviously looking for any seminal fluid, and we do know that seminal fluid will fluoresce under UV light. So we looked, and seminal fluid fluoresced, and it was also in the right location for seminal fluid. It’s on pubic hair.”

Forensic molecular biologist Dr. David Foran was another member of the team:

“So we examined that, hoping to get any DNA from it. We had to be extra careful because, obviously, her hair is going to have her DNA in it, so one of the tricky parts becomes isolating DNA only from this material that’s stuck in the pubic hair, and not from the hair itself.”

Dr. Foran successfully isolated a DNA sequence and compared it to Albert DeSalvo’s genes using DNA taken from his brother, Richard. The results were virtually indisputable; the semen was not Albert DeSalvo’s. It confirmed to Casey Sherman that his family made the right decision in exhuming his aunt’s body:

“When he said that there was DNA, they believed, from Mary’s killer on her body, and that DNA didn’t match Albert DeSalvo, it was just complete vindication as far as I was concerned.”

The results led James Starrs to lay down a challenge:

“For those who say that Albert DeSalvo did do it, the shoe is on their foot now. It’s for them to come forward and show the evidence to prove that Albert DeSalvo did do it.”

But if Albert DeSalvo did not kill Mary Sullivan, then who did?

The detectives who first investigated the killing found a strange piece of evidence in her bathroom. According to Diane Dodd, Mary’s sister, it implicated Mary’s abusive ex-boyfriend:

“They found an ascot cut up in the toilet. When my sister dated this person, that’s all she bought him for presents, because he loved ascots. So I could see him definitely cutting that ascot up in the bathroom, and I could absolutely see him killing Mary.”

Another suspect emerged based on an eyewitness account. A neighbor saw a man in Mary’s apartment at the approximate time of the murder. Mary’s roommate had a boyfriend who matched the description given by the neighbor. He may have had access to Mary’s apartment, and her keys, explaining why there were no signs of forced entry.

Casey Sherman felt this scenario made sense:

“Her apartment key had gone missing the day before she was killed. Now this key hadn’t fallen off the keychain. It was taken off.”

The suspect was brought in for a polygraph test. According to police, his responses were deemed “untruthful.” Once DeSalvo had confessed however, investigations into this suspect and Mary’s ex-boyfriend, were closed.

According to author Susan Kelly, the police also had strong suspects in several of the other murders:

“If Albert wasn’t the Boston Strangler, who was the Boston Strangler? From what my research indicates, there wasn’t one, there were many.”

So what conclusions can we draw? Well hold onto your tits cus here's a tidbit we’ve left for the end. In 2013, authorities claimed to have a familial match to Desalvo of the substance taken off the body of Mary Sullivan. After this they exhumed the body of desalvo to get a sample for comparison. The sample from Desalvo matched the one from Mary. The conclusion made was that this is proof that Desalvo was the strangler. But in reality it only proves he killed Mary Sullivan or at the very least raped her. Were the murders all done by Desalvo, some seem to think this proves it. Despite the mountains of evidence to the contrary it seems the authorities demm this worthy of calling it a win and claiming Desalvo was the sole Boston Strangler. Many people are calling this case officially closed. But despite this it is hard to find a real consensus on this one. Read 50 articles on the case, get 50 different opinions and answers. So Did Desalvo murder MAry and try to make it look like the strangler? Was he the only killer of all these women? Did George Nassar have anything to do with it, or F. Lee Bailey? Did the authorities let multiple murderers go due to a “bogus Confession” we may never know as Nassar maintains his innocence, Desalvo was brutally murdered in prison, and there's a lot of strange discrepancies from case to case. Many of the murders deviated from a single M.O. suggesting multiple killers, or a schizophrenic one. Oh did we mention George Nassar was a schizophrenic? SO what do you all think? Let us know.

One last fun tidbit for you guys. In 1971, the Texas legislature unanimously passed a resolution honoring DeSalvo for his work in "population control"—after the vote, Waco Representative Tom Moore, Jr. admitted that he had submitted the legislation as an April Fool's Day joke against his colleagues—his declared intent was to prove that they pass legislation with no due diligence given to researching the issues beforehand. Having made his point, he withdrew the resolution… So that's pretty awesome.

Horro movies based in Mass:

Monday Mar 29, 2021

Creepy New Jersey

Monday Mar 29, 2021

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Today, my friends, we have another installment in our creepy places series. We are taking a trip to the east coast. We've covered probably the most known creepy story about this state already in a past episode, and now we're back for more creepiness! We know there are more than a few listeners from this particular state, so if we fuck up, we know we’ll hear about it. At the same time we would love to hear more stories about anything we cover from the people who are around it and may have visited these spots or encountered any of the crazy stuff we discuss. So without further ado...the train is pulling out of the station and heading east to none other than New Jersey. Keep your hands inside of the train and watch out for raccoons!

So a little less than a year ago, at the beginning of this whole covid plague, we did a quarantine mashup. We discussed Springheeled Jack, The Wendigo, and the one and only Leeds devil, aka The Jersey Devil! If you are looking for our take on the Jersey Devil Go back and listen to that episode, we will not be discussing him(it?) today. But we are going to head to a bunch of different creepy spots. First Up we head to Totowa (toe tuh wuh) NJ.

Totowa is a borough in Passaic County, New Jersey, United States. Totowa in its current iteration has been around since 1898, but the land that is Totowa has been occupied since the 1600’s. Its been around for a long time. Having been around for so long there are destined to be tons of creepy tales, like our first one!

First up is the legendary “Ghost Of Annie”. For more generations than anyone can seem to remember, Totowa’s Riverview Drive has been more commonly known to locals as “Annie’s Road.” And for just as long, it has played host to innumerable carloads of late night thrill seekers. What these adventurous night riders are looking for is the spectral figure of Annie herself, an other-worldly apparition that has long been associated with this snaking riverside byway. Running along the Totowa side of the Passaic River, Riverview Drive, or “Reefer Road” as it has been dubbed by many a partying teen, seems to be just brimming with the stuff from which local legends are made. At night it is a dark and treacherous drive that leaves little room for error between the steep hillside on one side, and the muddy slough of the Passaic on the other. It is a remote and wooded road, right in the heart of a densely populated area.

There are mythical places to be discovered here as well, or so many have alleged. The isolated community located on Norwood Terrace, an oxbow street found on one of Riverview’s many curves, has long had the reputation of being New Jersey’s much fabled “Midgetville.” We are not going to discuss midgetville here as it is one of the more famous Jersey legends.

But what really beckons people to Annie’s Road year after year, decade after decade, is the quest to see Annie herself. The lure of experiencing the supernatural first hand, has been the catalyst for countless late night adventures over the generations, and several notorious misadventures as well. In most cases, these ghost hunters and seekers of Midgetville are nothing more than carloads of bored suburban youth, looking for some harmless late night thrills. Annie’s Road has however, on more than one occasion led its nightriders down a pathway to danger, and even death. Riverview Drive is no stranger to severe auto accidents, and Annie is not the only soul who has been lost there. What better way to get to the heart of the legend than to hear it from the locals! This is the story of her death as recounted by a local who was young when it happened:

“As I have been a resident of Totowa all my life, I can tell you the actual story of this poor girl’s fate. Annie was walking home from her prom at school in Little Falls. The shortest and perhaps the easiest route to take was Riverview Drive. She was passing the Laurel Grove Cemetery when a large truck plowed her over and dragged her about 50 feet or so. Her blood can still be seen on the side of the road she had been dragged. If she is to be seen she is a short ways down the road from the blood. This is very close to the place where her tomb once is. My brother has been to the plot in the Laurel Grove Cemetery that was created for her. Though I was little, I do remember hearing that for no apparent reason at all, the tomb caved inward and looked somewhat like a cave”. —Court

Well Thanks Court for the info!!!

Another story we came across was that back in the 1960s, a couple was driving down the road in Totowa when they got into a huge fight which led the man to open the car door and throw out his partner. Ah, the 60’s! Alone, scared, and injured, the woman began wandering on the street only to be hit by a truck and die on the spot. Even worse, her dress got tangled in the car and she was dragged along the road, taking off her face. Sounds like a cannibal corpse song. While the stories may vary, they both have the same stories attached. The main one is that there is a trail of old blood on the road from where she was dragged and a splatter of blood on a guardrail as well. Here’s a story about the blood splatter from another local:

“ I have heard many stories about this road, and have been there numerous time. I was told roughly the same story that she was killed on her wedding night, and was killed on the road and dragged along it. The first time I went there my friends told me that there was a bloodstain on the road, and a splatter on the guardrail. It WAS there, whatever it was, and it scared the shit out of me. I have taken other friends there throughout the years, and have told them the same story. “Annie’s Lane,” as I have often heard it called, is a great place to bring people for a scary experience. —Marcus Freeman”

Sounds crazy right! So the cool part about researching all of these legends is finding different people recounting their stories and seeing all of the crazy variations on the legends. One story has her ghost appearing at midnight while another swears it's at 2am. There's the prom story, the couple story, then there was another that is positive that her cousin's uncle's brother's friend's grandpa was at the scene and that she was decapitated during a car accident. Then you have the tales of the blood on the asphalt and blood on the guardrail. There's a variation on that story that says that her deranged father would come back every year on the anniversary of her death and paint the guardrail red to keep the memory of his daughter alive and meet with her ghost. Regardless of what version you want to believe, it seems that overall the stretch of road is pretty creepy. There is a cemetery nearby where she is buried and supposedly is a hotspot for paranormal happenings as well. There are reports of video cameras being drained of their batteries, strange lights being caught on camera but not being seen by the naked eye, and some have reported seeing Annie's Ghost at the cemetery as well. Some people also have attributed the “hail mary murders” in NJ as having something to do with this story. We found this tale on another website. It goes as such : It was 1992, and six high school boys spent their days fixated by Annie’s tale. Believing she was run over by a car and that she now haunted the road, they spent their nights at Norwood Terrace, near the house she supposedly lived in, then they would drive up and down River View Dr, before ending up at the mausoleum where they thought she was buried.

Eventually though 5 of the boys felt that they no longer wanted to hang around with the 6th boy, and decided to make him leave. They made several botched attempts to burn his car, but they all failed. Eventually realizing that they couldn’t make him go away, they decided he needed to be eliminated. (and all this because they were bored with his company mind you)

They tried to stuff an aerosol can into his gas tank in the hopes of causing an explosion. It didn’t fit. They tried to convince him to be handcuffed to the steering wheel, after which they would stick a flaming rag into the gas tank. He refused. After so many botched attempts to scare him and even eliminate him, some of the boys wondered if he wasn’t protected by Annie herself…

They finally settled on a simpler method, and tragically it worked. One day they all drove out to the HS and parked in back. They all began to recite the Catholic “Hail Mary”, and then one of the boys in back took out an electrical cord and strangled the victim from behind, garrote style. Putting his feet on the headrest, the victim didn’t have a chance, and the other boys continued to recite the Hail Mary, until after nearly 10 minutes, he was dead.

They tried to cover up the crime by outing the body in the trunk and causing an explosion, but it didn’t work. They ditched the car, and predictably, were caught, arrested, and convicted.

Although this makes for a great story, after going through more than a few articles about the Hail Mary Murders, not one of them had any mention of the Annie legend in them. Doesnt mean its not true but we didn't come up with any proof!

Sounds fun...we’re there! Anyone out there experienced Annie’s ghost, or have you been there to check it out? Let us know!

There is, or once was, a legendary place off a dirt road called Disbrow Hill in Monroe Township (Middlesex County) known as Crematory Hill in local lore. As the stories go, back in the 1970s it was one of those scary places where at night anything could happen. The legend of this place was that it was a structure where bodies were cremated, with the remains either shipped out or buried in the graveyard adjacent to the building. It is said that it was abandoned long ago due to the presence of ghosts and spirits. We thought this would make a really cool story but it was hard to find a ton about this legend! There was a story that was on Weird NJ website that we found that has the most info and it came from a local so we are going to relay that story because it is pretty cool!

“Back when I was in East Brunswick High School, ’69-’72, it was a great place to go with friends or your date and get a good scare, especially on Friday and Saturday nights. It was considered a real rite of passage.

There was usually clothing and unrecognizable stuff hanging off the trees at the start of the road leading to Crematory Hill and sometimes further on down. On several trips, we saw a large wooden sign painted in red propped up on the side of the road with the warning: WELCOME TO HELL. That was the signal it was going to be a hell of a ride! Screaming sounds were often heard from the woods, but we drove on, excited and expecting anything!

On the way, there was one house close to the dirt road, always with the lights on, where it was rumored that you would see the family living there hitting each other with hammers in the windows. We never saw that, but even with the lights on, it really didn’t look like anyone lived there and it had a weird presence, stuck out there in the middle of nowhere.

After passing that landmark, we would look for the opening in the woods off the dirt road that would lead to the Crematory. It was on the right side. This is where the courage factor came into play. It was dark, real dark, and the woods were thick. Weird sounds startled you. You didn’t know what was out there. All we had were a flashlight and our nerve.

We walked the dirt path, adrenaline pumping, always aware that something was out there, and in the beams of the flashlights, the structure loomed. Covered with graffiti, it was imposing in the darkness, yet waiting for us to enter and explore. The large, empty building was built up on a dirt hill. It was made out of bricks, stone, and cement. There were openings for windows and doors; there was rubble in the basement. To get to the basement, you had to jump through a hole in the floor. There were some pipes through the floor, which were supposed to be part of the crematory equipment. The structure was probably built in the 19th century.

After exploring the Crematory, more courage was mustered to walk the grounds and find the cemetery. There was a low wall, which you followed to find the graveyard, taking you deeper into the woods, further away from your car, the only means to escape if anything happened. This took a lot more of your courage.

After locating the burial ground, the walk back seemed longer and scarier. When you got closer to the road and the car came into view in the flashlight beam, you breathed a sigh of relief, quickening your steps until the key was in the door and you were back in the car.

One time we got out of the car at the Crematory, started walking, and heard some rustling in the trees. All of a sudden from the dark came a combination of howling voices and figures, trying to attack us. We were close enough to the car and I had the key in hand fast enough for us to pile in and for me to spin my wheels in gear to get out of there like a bat out of hell. Luckily we escaped uninjured. One of my friends looked back and saw dark outlines of figures, but there were no cars around for them to follow us in. How and why they were there is a mystery.

I was told that the Crematory was used by Rutgers fraternities and Douglass sororities as part of the pledging/initiation processes since the 1940s. Crematory Hill provided lots of unpredictable excitement for us teenagers. The ride itself was scary enough, but you were always drawn to walk in the woods, to face the unknown.” –Lewis Sofman

There were other stories of people hearing howls and screams when they would travel through the woods to get to the site. There are stories of people being shot at while they were there. People claimed to have been chased but god knows what. It's odd cus there seems to be tons of local stories but there isn't much outside of that. Which is great for legends and myths though not so much for research. It does appear that the building was definitely there, there are old pictures of the building that you can see, we’ll definitely post them. Unfortunately for everyone the building has been demolished and condos now reside on the spot where the building used to be. We were unable to find any concrete evidence that the building was actually crematory either. If any of you folks from jersey can shed more light on this one we’d love to hear it, meanwhile we’ll keep digging!

Now we are gonna switch it up and talk cryptids. There are more cryptids than just the Jersey devil roaming and swimming around. First up we have the The Sandyhook Sea Serpent.

The North Shrewsbury (Navesink) River is one of the most scenic estuaries on the Eastern Coast of America. Known for luxury yachts, stately homes, and iceboating, it is hardly the place you would expect to find the legend of a sea serpent. But, in the late nineteenth century it was the location of one of many well-documented and unexplained sightings of mysterious sea creatures that plagued the waters of the North Atlantic.

The creature in question was seen by several people, all who were familiar with local sea life. While returning from a daylong outing, Marcus P. Sherman, Lloyd Eglinton, Stephen Allen and William Tinton, all of Red Bank, encountered the monster. The Red Bank Register reported the witnesses to be sober and respectable local merchants.

At around 10:00 P.M. the yacht Tillie S., owned by Sherman, was making its way back to Red Bank after a picnic at Highlands Beach. The men had enjoyed a pleasant Sunday evening escaping the warm early summer weather. The moon was shining bright, providing for high visibility as the yacht cut through the water. A stiff summer breeze was blowing and they rounded the Highlands and headed toward Red Bank. At the tiller of the Tillie S., Marcus Sherman steered through the familiar waters. At the bow was Lloyd Eglinton, who kept watch for debris in the water ahead.

Suddenly Eglinton yelled that there was something in the water dead ahead. Sherman steered “hard to port” to avoid the collision. As they looked to see what the obstacle was, they were shocked. There ahead of them was the Sandy Hook Sea Serpent that had been sighted many times over the preceding two years. So credible were the sightings of the Serpent two years earlier, that Scientific American had run an article issuing an opinion that the monster was in fact a Giant Squid. The article, complete with drawings, appeared in the December 27, 1887, edition of the prestigious scientific periodical.

The earlier sighting at Sandy Hook had been made by several credible witnesses. Most notably the members of the Sandy Hook Life Saving Service. The crew members had sighted a large monster in the cold waters just off Sandy Hook in November 1879. The sighting was so credible that scientists were dispatched to take statements. It is from these descriptive statements that it was determined the Sandy Hook Sea Monster was, in fact, a giant squid. For the next several years there were reports of all types of sea serpent sightings up and down the east Atlantic Coast.

What the Red Bank men saw was surely no giant squid. It was described as about 50-foot long and serpentine in shape. It swam with snakelike undulations slowly and steadily through the water. As it passed halfway past the bow, its head rose from the water giving forth a mighty roar. The head was described as small and somewhat resembling a bulldog’s in shape. It had two short rounded horns on its head just above its eyes. The eyes we said to be the size of silver dollars. Bristles adorned the upper lip of the monster, much like those that would be found on a cat. The beast’s nostrils were quite large and flattened. The serpent-like body tapered to a sword-like pointed tail. The frightened men stared in disbelief as it slowly and leisurely swam toward the shore of Hartshorne’s Cove. As the monster disappeared into the night, the men made their way back to Red Bank with a monster of a story to tell.

The men of the Tillie S. were not the only ones to see the creature. Other boaters on the water saw the serpent and gave near identical descriptions. In all over a dozen boaters had seen the strange creature on his nocturnal swim. Over the next months and years there would be other sightings of the monster in the Navesink. In time it came to be known as the Shrewsbury Sea Serpent. No scientific explanation was ever given for the sightings, as had been done for the so-called Sandy Hook Sea Serpent, however the description is not totally without merit. Other than the size, the description is very similar to that of the Oarfish. In any case the mystery remains as to the true identity and fate of the Sea Serpent.

Next up we have the blobs….yes the blobs. On August 6 a large mysterious blob appeared in a Little Egg Harbor tributary in 2003. The Jersey State Police’s marine unit was called in and the Department of Environmental Protection poked and probed the blob and determined that it was not hazardous, though they could not say for sure just what it was. The gooey mass was eventually towed out into the Great Bay using a 50-foot rope and then released.

The following year in May of 2004 another gooey, putrid mass surfaced in another waterway in the lagoon community of Beach Haven West, miles away from the original Blob encounter. This smaller “Son of Blob” was only about 10 feet in diameter, but terrorized the beach community nevertheless.

“It’s miserable, ugly and disgusting,” said resident Nancy Olivia in the Press of Atlantic City. Olivia called Ocean County officials to say “I went to work today, and I have a Blob in my backyard!”

The NJ Department of Environmental Protection, the NJ State Police and Ocean County Health Department were called in to inspect the mass, and samples were taken. The inspectors believed that it was not the same blob that appeared in Little Egg Harbor the prior year, but still didn’t have a clue as to what it consisted of. It smelled like rotten eggs and measured about 8ft.x10ft. Most scientists think it was just a mass of algae or plant waste. We like to think its something creepier.

The blob might just be the most disgusting and frightening thing ever encountered at the Jersey Shore, with the possible exception of some cast members from the TV show of the same name. The blob may still be at large, lurking in the depths––so BEWARE!

On top of those there are the numerous bigfoot sightings! These are my people. They are out there and we know they are! In some areas of Jersey they use the nickname Big Red Eye as many reports state he has glowing red eyes! Sussex and Burlington counties seem to be hotspots as they are the top counties for sightings. Here are a few sightings, just cus we love bigfoot sightings.

In 1975, five people reported in a local Sussex County newspaper that a large creature, about nine-feet-tall, was spotted near the Bear Swamp, south of Lake Owassa in the farthest reaches of Sussex County. The creature walked upright, and was covered with shaggy gray hair. Locals who hunt and fish in the surrounding forest said that it’s possible that something like that could exist because of the remoteness of the area.

In May of 1977, a Sussex County farmer in the town of Wantage reported that a large brown, hairy, Bigfoot-like creature with no neck and glowing red eyes had broken down a one-inch thick oak door and killed his rabbits. Some of the bunnies’ heads were torn off, while other hares were crushed and twisted. The man said there was an unusual absence of blood at the scene. Four men waited with loaded guns the following night for the creature to return. It reappeared at dusk, was shot at, and reportedly hit at least three or four times before running away growling. Although there was an account of the wounded beast re-emerging a few days later, no carcass was ever found.

Bob Warth, a member of S.I.T.U. (The Society for the Investigation of The Unexplained based in Little Silver, NJ), claims these Bigfoot-like entities may be UFO related.

“We know what robots are,” says Warth. “Is there a possibility that these bigfoots with super-human strength are an extraterrestrial biological robot up in North Jersey? These farmers encountered a bigfoot stealing animals from their barn, they shot at it, hit it right in the body cavity, but there was no blood. It then ran away. When you witness something like that, the first thing you do is relate it to yourself—physically and mentally. If you shoot it, you’re going to shoot where you know the heart is, or whatever, to be to bring it down. First of all, you don’t know what kind of armor it has, and secondly the brain (or control system) may be in his feet for that very purpose…if it is a biological robot.”

According to the report on The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization website, this witness and his brother-in-law were hunting in an area that they had frequented for several years and heard a sound that neither of them could explain. The sighting,which took place in 2006, was recounted as follows:

The deer stood there for about a minute or two mostly looking to the north and east, then turned directly south and walked away. Shortly after this moment I heard a screaming sound coming from the east. The sound had a human quality to it and sounded more angry than distressed. I immediately thought my brother-in-law was hollering for some reason as he was in that direction but chose not to contact him via radio. There were several short 10 second screams lasting a little over a minute and then stopped. I sat there completely perplexed having never heard a sound like that before. After this I noticed the conspicuous absence of any sound or movement in the forest. Prior to this the woods had been filled with the sound of twittering birds and chattering squirrels. After this, the forest was dead quiet. This was the most eerie part of the whole event.

After this incident, the witness found a sound file from another website dedicated to Bigfoot encounters. He and his brother-in-law agreed that it was similar to what they had heard.

And then there are the stories of “the big hairy man”. No it's not Moody either, he's only been to Jersey a couple of times and we're pretty sure the timelines don't match up to any sightings, well maybe 1 or 2. A Bigfoot-like entity has been seen in the regions of Somerset County, including the Great Swamp area and the Somerset Hills. The locals call it “The Big Hairy Man,” and he has even been spotted as far away as Hillside. According to eyewitness reports The Big Hairy Man stands about eight-feet tall and is covered with hair the color of a deer’s. He walks upright with a human gait, according to a bone specialist and a physical therapist who encountered the Big Hairy Man while taking a shortcut through the Great Swamp on Lord Stirling Road in a hurry to reach the airport.

They claimed the Big Hairy Man walked in front of their car and hopped the fence alongside the road. They could not see his face because he (or it) was looking down. These sightings, according to the Folklore Project in Bernardsville, have occurred for many years.

We’ll finish up with a story about Big Red Eye:

Not that I’m a big believer of urban legend and folklore, but I must tell you this story because after reading about The Big Red Eye in a recent issue, I got the chills!

My wife and I live in Westwood now, but we’re formerly from Mahwah. One night, early last summer, we were walking our dog in our condo development (Paddington Square in Mahwah) and heard this guttural sound that scared us so much that we called the police. I’ve heard just about every animal noise imaginable and I’ve got to tell you this was the strangest thing I’ve ever heard. It wasn’t a dog, or bear, but it was big and angry, and had red eyes. I estimate it was roughly 30 yards from us. We were standing by a street light on the sidewalk.

I told my wife to pick up the dog and go into the street and walk home slowly. I was shaking in my boots as I slowly backed up, keeping my eyes on the brush. We made it home and called the police, not once, but twice, to find out what the hell that thing was. They investigated but found nothing. To this day my wife and I wonder what it was. –Mike V.

So now with some cryptids out of the way, we have another creepy haunted road. Texas has shitloads of haunted bridges...Jersey has haunted roads, there's always something. This may be the greatest road name ever though. It is called Shades Of Death Road. Yes that's the real name. It’s a two-lane rural road of about 7 miles (11.2 km) in length weaving from farm country just off I-80 along a portion of Jenny Jump State Forest, riding the edge of the unofficially-but-aptly-named Ghost Lake. The road is the subject of folklore and numerous local legends.

One tale relating to murder says that the original inhabitants of the area surrounding Shades of Death were an unruly band of squatters. Often, men from this vile gang would get into fights over women, and the squabbles would result in the death of one of the participants. As the reputation of these murderous bandits grew, the area they inhabited was named “Shades of Death.” When the civilized world encroached on and disbanded the bandits, the last remnant of their control over the meadows was restricted to one road that retained the name they made famous.

Another murder theory says that the road was originally known as “The Shades,” because of the low hanging trees which formed a canopy over the length of the street. Legend says that over time, many murders occurred there, and many stayed unsolved, causing local residents to add the sinister “of Death” twist to the formerly pleasant “Shades” name.

One of those legends is that many years ago, a car of teenagers was driving down a country road in Hackettstown, NJ after the prom. The road was slippery that night and it curved sharply to the left and right, winding into the dark. The driver lost control and the car crashed into a ditch killing one of the passengers. To this day, on dark and slippery nights, you can still see the girl who died wandering that murderous curve wearing her prom dress.

There are the stories of the random pillars of steam rising from the lake that people attribute to the souls of dead Indians that settlers tossed into the lake. The phenomena is also called The Great Meadows Fog. People claim to see the dead walking in the mist. The road was also the site of many deaths that were once attributed to a curse in the area. The deaths are also sometimes blamed on a plague caused by the waters in the lake, said to have been a malaria outbreak.

Lenape Lane is an unpaved one-lane dead-end street about three-quarter mile (1.1 km) in length running eastward off Shades just north of I-80. It ends at a farmhouse for which it is little more than a driveway, but halfway down there is space to park or turn around next to a wooden structure described as looking like an abandoned stable.

Weird New Jersey writes that visitors to this stable site at night have reported extremely local fog surrounding it and seeing apparitions in it, or sometimes even in clear weather, and also claimed the air is sometimes unusually chilly, and feeling general unease in the area for no immediately apparent reason. An additional legend claims that sometimes nocturnal visitors to Lenape see an orb of white light appear near the end of the road which chases vehicles back out to Shades Of Death, and if it turns red in the process, those who see it will die. This may be due to an old tree near the end of Lenape that was never cut down when the road was built. As a result, the road forks right before the tree, and a big red reflector has been nailed to the tree to warn drivers. Another legend says that if one circles around the tree and drives down the road again at midnight, a red light will shine and the driver will never survive.

There are some legends concerning a Native American spirit guide who supposedly takes the shape of a deer and appears at various points along the road at night. If drivers see him and do not slow down sufficiently enough to avoid a collision, they will soon get into a serious accident with a deer.

Another legend tells of a bridge where, if drivers stop past midnight with their high beams on and honk their horns three times, they will see the ghosts of two young children who were run over while playing in the road. This legend actually refers to a bridge over the Flatbrook on Old Mine Road, not far from Shades of Death. The bridge is no longer accessible by car as a newer, larger bridge has been built next to it. The original bridge can still be reached on foot.

And then there are the polaroids. The site Weird NJ, which is all about weird stuff in New Jersey, and quite on the nose, has a page about Shades of Death Road. Now, if you go to their page for Shades of Death Road and check out the tags at the bottom of the page, you’ll see one that says “Polaroids” but the story article itself never mentions Polaroids. From what we could find, back in the 1990s, when Weird NJ was a magazine, they shared a story from two readers who claimed to have found hundreds of odd photos while checking out Shades of Death Road. Some of the Polaroids showed a TV on different channels, and others showed various women bound and apparently in distress. Weird NJ turned the photos over to the local police but after that the story kind of weirdly ends with the police supposedly losing the Polaroids.

Were the Polaroids taken by a serial killer similar to that of the BTK Killer in Kansas? Or were they a hoax? The lack of any solid information on them, and the idea that the police lost hundreds of Polaroids makes most think hoax. Still, if you Google for Shades of Death Road Polaroids, some of the images will come up

Ok, how about some good old haunted buildings? Everyone loves haunted buildings, except pussies, they don't like haunted buildings. At any rate, first up is the so-called Spy House.

One of the most haunted houses in America is the Spy House, built in 1648, added on to and moved to its present day site. As a tavern during the Revolutionary war, it was frequented by British troops. The tavern owner would tell the Colonial troops about British plans of attack. For many years it was open to the public as a historical museum, but just a couple of years ago it was closed to the public.

Quite simply, it is one of the most haunted houses in the country with not one but up to five different spirits haunting it. A female spirit dressed in white has been seen walking from room to room looking for her crying baby. A full bearded old sea captain is also known to roam the grounds and halls, and a small ghost of a boy has been seen peering out of windows. Even the infamous pirate Captain Morgan was known to hide treasure in the house's basement and conduct sordid business and tortures in the old house. He's been seen in a ghostly form threatening children and others who visited the museum. This ghostly activity has been going on for years.

The Spy House once touted 22 active ghosts. Longtime volunteer curator Gertrude Needlinger would show videos of the seances! In October, 1993, Neidlinger was locked out of the museum after a dispute with the Spy House Museum Corp. The board claimed she continued to lead ghost tours through the house, with visitors carrying lit candles and posing a fire hazard. In 1992, while it was still an antique-cluttered, spirit-infested treasure of the Jersey bayshore, 13 nights of ghost tours drew about 1,800 people. Gertrude, an elderly woman who, by most accounts, was a colorful character with a vivid imagination, would spin yarns of the house’s past, weaving in threads of ghosts and espionage as she walked visitors around the museum. Though most historians today bristle at the tales she told, they will admit that Neidlinger’s narratives gained quite a bit of attention for the house in the public’s eye. ghost stories that began to circulate about the Spy House soon became the primary focus of the homestead’s appeal, much to the chagrin of the local historians.

Here's a couple tales of ghostly happenings:

Spy House Ghost Boy

One morning my friend Dave’s parents went to visit the old Spy House Museum in Port Monmouth. They were there at the appointed opening time but the curator wasn’t there. After about a half hour of waiting they said “the hell with it,” and left. As they were getting back into their car, my friend’s father looked up and pointed out a kid about 10 or12-years-old, looking at them from the upstairs window. His dad said that the kid had on one of those puffy shirts that they used to wear in the old days.

As they watched, he slowly backed away from the window. Just then the curator drove up and apologized for being late. They told her that they had seen a young boy in the upstairs window. She said no one is supposed to be in there. She opened the house up and together they searched the place, but found no one. –Ray

ROCKING CHAIR GHOST

On the way back from a very fun day at the water park in Keansburg, my dad decided to show my sister and myself the Spy House. When we got there we looked into the windows. It was extremely dark inside, and everything was locked. When we made it to the left side of the house my dad noticed something moving inside the house. I just shrugged it off as nothing, but then when I was looking in the same upstairs window I noticed that the rocking chair moved!

I was scanning all the windows to see if I could see anything else unusual, and I clearly saw a man sitting in a rocking chair reading. It couldn’t have been a ranger because he was wearing old clothes and was sitting in the dark, reading, in a locked up house. We snapped a picture and ran, and as we pulled away, a ranger pulled up and unlocked the doors, so we assume it must have been a ghost. –Ali

Creepy!

Ringwood Manor

According to the caretakers, Ringwood Manor is one of the most haunted places on the east coast. It has layer upon layer of legend, myth and folklore. The Native Americans would even call it the Haunted Woods. In fact, before the home was built, prehistoric artifacts were found on the grounds of Ringwood confirming Native American occupation of the site dating back to the Archaic and Woodlands periods of prehistory. These Munsee-speaking Lenape peoples lived in a hunting and farming paradise at the head of the “Topomopack” or Ringwood River Valley and traded with other natives in the Pompton area. The Lenapi recognized special earth forces at work here, and as long as their memory is, this has been sacred ground with supernatural occurrences attributed to the area. Perhaps it is the earth’s immense magnetism at Ringwood that affects all type of matter. It is said that the Highlands region was a gathering place for all of the diverse prehistoric Native Americans of the Northeast.

While the “forces” remain a mystery, it was known that there were lots of iron in the hills and valleys of Ringwood. As such, in 1742, the Ogden family established the Ringwood Company and built the first blast furnace to begin mining and selling the iron. By 1771, the last ironmaster of the American Iron Company, Robert Erskine, was sent from England. He would manage the company during the Revolutionary War. The iron mined at the site helped to supply the Continental Army with components of the chain system used to defend the Hudson River, camp ovens, and domestic tools and hardware.

After the war, Martin J. Ryerson purchased the historic ironworks in 1807 and began building the first section of the present Manor circa 1810. The home was a small, 10-room, Federal style building. In 1853, the Ryerson’s house and property were purchased by Peter Cooper. Cooper purchased the 19,000 acre site, which included the Long Pond ironworks area, for $100,000. Cooper’s iron business, Trenton Ironworks, was managed by his son Edward and his son’s business partner, Abram S. Hewitt. Additions to the Manor were constructed in 1864, 1875, 1900, and 1910. Eventually, the iron industry moved further west in America and Ringwood’s iron mines finally closed. In 1938, the Hewitt family donated Ringwood Manor and its contents to the State of New Jersey. Preserved as a historic house museum and State Park, Ringwood Manor and its grounds are excellent examples of Victorian wealth and lifestyle.

The Ringwood Manor Hauntings

In total there are four different places that are said to be haunted. If you wander the halls of the Manor House at night, guests commonly meet the ghost of a servant known as Jackson White who haunts a small bedroom on the second floor. Legend states that in the early 1900’s Jackson worked as a servant for the family, but was caught stealing food from the pantry in the middle of the night. One of the white workers beat the man to death in this room. Many visitors have heard noises coming from the empty room – footsteps, sounds of heavy objects dropping, soft crying. And they keep finding the bedroom door ajar and the bed rumpled.

Behind the Manor pond is the grave where Owner/ General Robert Erskine is buried. The locals are afraid to come near the graves because at dusk General Erskine can be seen sitting on his grave gazing across the pond. The pond itself was created for a young woman known as Sally who can also be seen around the graves. She meets guests with music as well as flowery fragrances.

The French Soldiers

Also near Erskine it is said there is an unmarked grave filled with the remains of French soldiers who fought during the Revolutionary War. During the day, all you can see is a depression in the grass near the General’s grave. But it is believed that, at night, when the lights are out and the moon hangs brightly over the manor, the dead return to walk around the pond, and gaze over the shore in search of their loved ones. Sometimes, you can hear soft, sad voices speaking in French.

The last haunting is the grounds itself which were said to hold an ancient Indian burial ground. When the house was build over these remains, along came a curse and haunting which was resulting in various strange occurrences to visitors who say that a dark energy can be felt. Others claim that spirits come home with them.

Sounds fun!

"A purported meeting place for the KKK, notorious suicide site and rumored gateway to the depths of hell".

This was the first description of The Devil's Tree that we found, kind of had to put it in. While it's not exactly a building, Thrillest named The devil's tree one of the most haunted places in America and the most haunted in New Jersey! the Devil's Tree is infamous among locals and has evolved into a chilling tourist attraction," according to Thrillist. "Legend has it, anyone who harms the tree will suffer swift and violent retribution — so naturally, it has become a tradition for ballsy teens across the Garden State to pee on its trunk.

The infamous tree stands alone in an open field off Mountain Road in Bernards Township right on the border of the Martinsville section of Bridgewater and continues to draw in thrill seekers from all over the Garden State and beyond.

Legend has it that the tree has been cursed since as far back as the 1920s when a group of KKK members were rumored to hold cross burnings and hangings off the limbs of the tree.

Basking Ridge historian, or also known as mrlocalhistory.org, Brooks Betz confirmed there was in fact an active KKK clan located just down the road on the Bridgewater side near Route 202/206 and Brown Road, where the Hindu temple now stands. However, the clan activities have not been proven.

"One of the different rumors is that one of the guys, a grand wizard of the clan, who owned the property in Bridgewater would hold a series of KKK activity and cross burnings. And instead of doing it on the Bridgewater property they did it on the tree. There were tales of lynching and cross burning. But nothing was substantiated," Betz said.

Another rumor revolves around a farmer — who lived in the white farmhouse that had stood adjacent to the tree — who murdered his entire family at the home and then hung himself on the tree.

Betz said there is no record of the murders ever being reported.

"The property then laid dormant until the 1960s when a couple of local kids invented a story about a rogue white pickup truck that would come up over the hill and kill you," Betz said.

Betz said he spoke with one of those boys later on who told him that they made up the story and drove the "haunted" pickup in an attempt to keep people off the property so they could hang out and drink by the tree.

The tree has since been called "a portal to hell" because of all the rumors.

"Supposedly anyone who tries to cut down the unholy oak comes to an untimely end, as it is now cursed. It is said that the souls of those killed at the spot give the tree an unnatural warmth, and even in the dead of winter no snow will fall around it," Betz wrote in a piece about the tree years ago.

The tree gained much more attention after Weird NJ published a story on the tree in 2012.

To this day, thrill seekers come out to the tree and try to press their luck and see if they end up cursed.

Some try to touch the tree, while others pee on it or try to cut it or burn it down. You can still see the ax and burn marks permanently branded onto the tree. Many took pieces of the bark as a souvenir or proof they were at the tree.

With much commotion surrounding the tree the township designated the area a park where the field and tree are now sanctioned and protected. The tree has a protective chain link fencing around the trunk and the park remains closed with Bernards Township Police patrolling the area for trespassers.

Betz noted that there is "some element of truth" when you look at the rumors "but when you dig deeper" it doesn't all check out.

"Was there a clan there? Yeah. A white truck? Yeah. There were no hangings proven," Betz said. "You decide for yourself. Is it real? Is there any truth to it? Or is just some tree. You decide."

How about another road?

INDIAN CURSE ROAD

Route 55 has a long history of curious occurrences.

Home state HauntingsIn March of 1983, the Department Of Transportation started construction on a field just off Route 47 in Deptford, between Mantua and Franklin Township, to build a new 7.2 mile stretch of Route 55. Two months later mysterious deaths began to befall the workers involved with the project.

“All they had to do was detour around the field maybe three or four miles and nothing would have happened,” said Carl Pierce in a newspaper article at the time. Pierce, or Sachem Wayandaga, the chief and medicine man of the Delaware Indians, said the land was an ancient Indian burial ground, and therefore sacred.

“I told them what would happen if they didn’t stop the desecration, Pierce was quoted as saying. “The damage is done. The problem is I feel sorry for some of the people who will be traveling that road in the future.”

The first unfortunate incident was that of a 34-year-old worker who was run over by an asphalt roller truck. Another worker fell to his death when he was working on an overpass, swept up by unexpected high winds that had apparently come out of nowhere.

Soon after those incidents, an inspector fell dead on the job from a brain aneurysm. Other workers, or members of their families, suffered strange maladies. One worker’s feet turned black, while other workers’ family members developed cancer. Then a van carrying five Department Of Transportation employees caught fire and blew up. The parents of killed asphalt worker died during the first week of construction, and a brother and father of another worker died that same week.

A D.O.T. employee, who asked not to be identified because he fears the curse, said that Karl Kruger, the site engineer for the project, would often speak about the curse, and the coincidence of the events. The employee informed Weird N.J. that Mr. Kruger had died of cancer shortly thereafter. Yet another victim of the curse?

DEVILS TOWER

The Devil's Tower was built in 1910 by a millionaire sugar importer named Manuel Rionda. Before it received the name Devil's Tower, it was formerly known as Rio Vista. According to reporting from Forbes, the tower was built and dedicated to Rionda’s wife, Harriet Rionda, who was buried on nearby land but later moved to Brookside Cemetery, Englewood. Rumor has it that Mr. Rionda built the tower for his wife so she could look out at the New York City skyline. Others believe he built it as a mausoleum or for religious purposes. But, even with Mrs. Rionda’s death and later Mr. Rionda’s death in the mid 1900’s, many believe Harriet Rionda’s spirit still lives on at the tower.

The tower was connected to Rionda’s home by an underground tunnel. According to the local legend story, his wife was looking out of the tower when she saw Manuel with another woman. While she may have suspected infidelity for years, according to reporting from New Jersey Magazine, distraught from the site, she jumped off the tower, killing herself. Since her rumored suicide, there have been many reports of hauntings, including people who have said they have been pushed by something unseen. Others have reported strange noises and because of this, Manuel locked up the tower, filled in the tunnel connecting the home to the tower and even removed the elevator leading to the top of the tower proclaiming, “Nobody will ever go up here again,” according to reporting from Try To Scare Me.

Since that time, people have started calling it Devil's Tower. Witnesses report still hearing noises and smelling perfume, while at other times you can hear a scream as the wife jumps from the tower or a workman falls from it. Her ghostly spirit has also been seen as a shadowy figure in the windows.

Some have said that if you drive or walk backward around the tower a certain number of times, the devil or Manuel's wife appears.

Devil’s Tower and the spirit surrounding it clearly seems to be here for good, keeping a dark cloud around the rich community of Alpine. Even after Mr. Rionda’s death there were plans to demolish the tower by the Town but activities were halted and eventually aborted after several workers fell to their death.

BURLINGTON COUNTY PRISON

The Burlington County Prison is a historic museum property, located next to the Burlington County Jail in Mount Holly Township, Burlington County, New Jersey, United States. Operating from 1811 to 1965, it was the oldest prison in the nation at the time of its closure. The imposing structure was designed by Robert Mills, considered to be the first native-born American trained as an architect. Mills may be most famous for his government buildings and monuments, including the Treasury Building (featured on the back of the 10-dollar bill) and the Washington Monument, but he also designed several courthouses, churches, and prisons. The Burlington County Prison, built with 18-inch-thick walls made of stone and brick, was designed to hold 40 inmates. When it opened, the penitentiary didn’t have electricity or running water; it was the first prison in the U.S. constructed to be fireproof, and each cell was heated by a wood-burning fireplace. The first floor, for perpetrators of less severe crimes, had larger windows than the second, which held more serious offenders. A maximum-security cell (known as “the dungeon”) located on the top floor is flanked by niches for additional guards and has a steel ring on the floor to which a prisoner could be chained. In 1876, five men punched a hole through the ceiling of their prison cell, located on the top floor of Burlington County Prison. Four of the men slipped through the hole onto the roof, climbed down a woodpile, and over the prison yard wall to freedom. The fifth man, upset that he was too large to fit through the small opening, didn’t wait long before he snitched on his cellmates. The warden responded immediately to the alarm, but only two of the four escapees were ever caught and returned to the prison. The early laws of NJ required that prisoners convicted of capital crimes had to be executed by the county in which they were convicted. Except for two of the earliest executions in the 1830s (one of which was a woman, the other a young man named Joel Clough), public hangings took place in the prison yard, on gallows erected for each event. The first two mentioned were carried out on public lands at a crossroads a few miles from the prison, and from contemporary accounts, drew quite a crowd. According to records, Joel’s body was later buried in the prison yard in a corner where a large tree now grows. It is believed his ghost is the principle haunt.

Besides the executions, other violent deaths took place at the prison. During the 1920s some inmates managed to escape, making their way through the lowest level. They encountered a trustee near the kitchen and murdered him. A few decades later practically the same scenario occurred, with a second guard being killed in the same corridor.

The last execution to take place at Burlington County Prison was a double bill in March of 1906. Two men, Rufus Johnson and George Small, were executed just two months after their crime. They had murdered an English-born governess at a refuge for homeless children in Moorestown.

Joel Clough had been arrested and convicted of the stabbing death of a woman in Bordentown—apparently she had jilted him. Though he managed to escape, the 29 year old Clough was quickly recaptured and confined to the Death Cell on the upper floor of the prison. A brochure given out at the museum describes the maximum security cell this way:

The “dungeon”, or maximum-security cell, was in the center of the top floor. That location was carefully chosen to prevent escape by digging, to minimize communication with criminals in the cell blocks, and to ensure constant surveillance by guards making rounds. This was the only cell without a fireplace. It is flanked by niches for guards or visitors and has one very high, very small window and an iron ring in the center of the floor to which the prisoner could be chained. As one might expect, tradition states that this cell is haunted.

Policy of the time was to chain the condemned to a ring on the floor, naked. Accordingly, Joel’s spirit has been heard moaning and languishing there, and electro-magnetic indicators (used in ghost hunting) routinely register a “hit.” The Death Cell, complete with its metal ring, and all the “accommodations” at the prison, welcome inspection, and in many cases prisoner graffiti has been preserved on the walls.

The Prison now is a Historic Landmark and a nice museum, a fascinating place to learn about prison life. It still holds a few entities who don’t want to leave. This became evident when in 1999 renovation work began on the run-down building, in order to create this museum for the public.

MANIFESTATIONS

The Prison now is a Historic Landmark and a nice museum. It still holds a few entities who choose to stay here. There is much psychic research done to support this haunting of the old prison. Thanks the North and South Jersey Paranormal Research groups. In a joint effort, they investigated this prison with video, photos, EVP equipment and came up with some interesting results.

During the renovation work, workmen experienced some paranormal activities.

They were treated to loud noises, voices and screams from their new friends – The entities who stayed behind.

The workers would find their tools missing and later found on another floor or other location much later in the day.

Because the workers were uneasy being the last ones in the building, they started to leave early, prompting the officials to call in the South Jersey Ghost Research team to confirm or deny the claims of the now scared workers, in order to ease their minds. Dave Juliano of theShadowlands.net was in on these early investigations and saw first hand evidence. This was the first of several investigations.

An apparition was seen in the shower area, and a foot print in the dust was found there as well.

The Maximum Security Cell – Haunted by entity or entities who spent their last nights here before being hanged. David Juliano observed with his team that a stretcher next to the maximum security cell moved by itself, and that the movement sensors were set off by a force in the cell itself.

Susan Bove (SJPR) meditates in the “Death Row” cell while two orbs move past.

The gallows which are on display are haunted by the condemned. Possible candidates may include convicted murderers Rufus Johnson and George Small, as well as others who were executed here.

Got to love old prisons and asylums! And speaking of asylums… We don't have one...I know I know, but all of the reportedly haunted asylums that sounded awesome to us have been demolished, and honestly… What's the point then?

Here's some quick guys for you guys since there's so many things we could cover:

Probably one of the more popular urban legends, the Atco Ghost is said to appear when drivers honk three times on Burnt Mill Road in the Pine Barrens. Legend has it that the ghost boy haunts the site where he was struck by a drunk driver.

The Hindenburg disaster occurred on May 6, 1937, in Manchester Township. The German passenger airship LZ 129 Hindenburg caught fire and was destroyed during its attempt to dock with its mooring mast at Naval Air Station Lakehurst. On board were 97 people; there were 36 fatalities. Though the disaster took place 77 years ago, some say that reverberations of the tragic event, of a paranormal nature, can still be felt around the Lakehurst Naval Base to this day––especially in Hangar No. 1.

Ok so there you have some of the creepy things we could find in Jersey. Honestly there's a fucking ton more, but… we saved the craziest,creepiest, and possibly the most tragic story we could find for last. Mad science, murder, and a lasting presence in new Jersey, make this the craziest story you may have ever heard. It goes like this:

Rumors had started circulating around the creepy plain building in Hudson county in New Jersey. It sat by itself and seemingly none ever went in or came out. No one knew who owned it or what it purpose was. That is until a mysterious fire gutted the building one night in 1974. After the fire was put out investigators quickly depot in and started to gather what was left and sweep it away without letting anyone see what was there. However, they were not as through as they thought and left behind some interesting evidence that was find by curious townsfolk checking out the site after the fire. As much as could be piecedd together goes like this. Apparently the government owned the building. After WW2 the government brought over Nazi scientists with operation paperclip. Well it looks like this building in Jersey played host to several of the worst. The files showed the scientist were working on some sort of biological weapon and also animal experimentation to train small animals to be weapons. They experimented with mice, rats, possums, raccoons, squirrels, moles, groundhogs, and other small animals trying to find ways to train them to deliver explosives and other biological weapons. When the fire started there were many animals that escaped. Most of them were near death due to mistreatment. But a local family stumbled across possibly the most disturbing pair of animals to have been tested on and experimented with. These two animals, a male and female raccoon, showed many disturbing characteristics that trains should not have. They acted almost human like and communicated with a series of sounds that seemed like their own sort of language. They had very little fur left except on their heads. The couple put it done food for them and the raccoons are the food and then took off. Nobody else saw these two raccoons but there's compelling and creepy evidence that they existed. Wandering the streets of Jersey today you may find yourself in some unsavory places. Within these unsavory places is where you can find the evidence of these raccoons existence. While you may run into many normal raccoons, you may also run into raccoons that are essentially… Human. They walk, talk and wear leather jackets. They are tough and will not hesitate to cut you as many of them carry switchblades. They generally have bad attitudes but have been known on occasion to help you out if you are being threatened by someone from the family Pepitone. These raccoons are said to be the direct descendants of the two raccoons that escaped from that burning building so many years ago. So when you're in Jersey the takes warn to beware the raccoons!

Well there you have it, our first installment of creepy Jersey! There will be another at someone as we've found so many cool creep places and things in Jersey. Because if its age and location there's a ton of really cool historical places there and events that took place there. We recommend checking out the history of the state. While it may have a reputation as being the garbage dump of the United States, there's actually alot to love, especially if you like creepy and haunted…. And raccoons!

Monday Mar 22, 2021

Changelings

Monday Mar 22, 2021

Today on the train we are discussing changelings. Who are they...or maybe what are they? Where do they come from? What is their agenda? Well hopefully today we can clear up some of these questions for you...do you even care?

Changeling, in European folklore, are a deformed or imbecilic offspring of fairies or elves substituted by them secretly for a human infant. According to legend, the abducted human children are given to the devil or used to strengthen fairy stock. How do you make the faerie gene pool stronger? You steal human kids! Duh! The return of the original child may be effected by making the changeling laugh or by torturing it; this latter belief was responsible for numerous cases of actual child abuse. The existence of changelings is believed to stem from the idea that infants are susceptible to demonic possession. In the Medieval Chronicles, by Ralph of Coggeshall, and in other sources, the fairies are said expressly to prey upon unbaptized children.

Most stories about changelings describe them as looking like ugly, little old men. Obviously, this can make distinguishing them from your average baby difficult. I’m sure you love your own kid, but let’s be honest. Most babies are horrifyingly strange looking when they are born. Now imagine if they fail to gain weight because of poverty or a condition the parents aren’t aware of. Other descriptions include babies with abnormally sized body parts or facial features. Basically, any defect could be a sign that a fairy took your baby.

Though in other cases, a changeling baby does resemble a human child, but only slightly off. Maybe their eyes contain the wisdom of millennia. Or they seem quieter than they were when firstborn. But if they are alive and getting into mischief, it is still better than the alternative. Sometimes the changeling is said to be a pile of sticks magically made to appear as the mirror-image of the stolen child. The mirage sickens before quickly dying. The parents unknowingly bury the sticks, never knowing their true child was missing. n Irish legend, a fairy child may appear sickly and won't grow in size like a normal child, and may have notable physical characteristics such as a beard or long teeth. They may also display intelligence far beyond their apparent years, as well as possess uncanny insight. A common way that a changeling could identify itself is through displaying unusual behaviour when it thinks it's alone, such as jumping about, dancing or playing an instrument — though this last example is found only within Irish and Scottish legend. So far it kinda looks like we might be changelings… beards and music instruments...also I have uncanny eyesight and Moody likes to dance when he thinks no one is around.

"A human child might be taken due to many factors: to act as a servant, the love of a human child, or malice. Most often it was thought that fairies exchanged the children. In rare cases, the very elderly of the fairy people would be exchanged in the place of a human baby, so that the old fairy could live in comfort, being coddled by its human parents. Simple charms such as an inverted coat or open iron scissors left where the child sleeps, were thought to ward them off; other measures included a constant watch over the child."

L. Ashliman points out in his essay 'Changelings' that changeling tales illustrate an aspect of family survival in pre-industrial Europe. A peasant family's subsistence frequently depended upon the productive labour of each member, and it was difficult to provide for a person who was a permanent drain on the family's scarce resources. "The fact that the changelings' ravenous appetite is so frequently mentioned indicates that the parents of these unfortunate children saw in their continuing existence a threat to the sustenance of the entire family. Changeling tales support other historical evidence in suggesting that infanticide was frequently the solution selected."

Fairies would also take adult humans, especially the newly married and new mothers; young adults were taken to marry fairies instead while new mothers were often taken to nurse fairy babies. Often when an adult was taken instead of a child an object such as a log was left in place of the stolen human, enchanted to look like the person.[5] This object in place of the human would seem to sicken and die, to be buried by the human family, while the living human was among the fairies. Bridget Cleary is one of the most well known cases of an adult thought to be a changeling by her family; her husband killed her attempting to force the fairies to return his 'real' wife.

The interesting thing about changelings is that there are tales of changelings in many different cultures and their folklores. Let's check out some of these different versions of changelings throughout folklore.

First up we have Mên-an-Tol. Mên-an-Tol is a small formation of standing stones in Cornwall UK. In Cornish the name means “the stone of the hole”, why call it that you ask...well the main stone is basically a stone donut. Only one other example of a holed stone exists in the county: the Tolvan Stone near Gweek.

The other three stones are more regular granite pillars commonly used in stone circles, with one dressed flat side. There is speculation that these were simply four of the stones of an ancient circle, further large stones having been discovered lying just below the ground nearby. The local moniker the 'Crick Stone' alludes to its alleged ability to aid those with back pain and children suffering from rickets and tuberculosis.

This cute little stone formation is thought to be from the late neolithic to early bronze age. Now you may be asking yourselves what this thing has to do with changelings, well, we are gonna tell ya. So according to local legend, a woman had a child that was supposedly replaced with a changeling by pixies. The woman did not know what to do. Under the suggestion of some locals, she took the child to the stone and passed him through 9 times. 9 seems to be the magic number here, as for the curing of rickets and tuberculosis, children were passed through the hole naked nine times. After the woman passed the changeling through the stone it allegedly cured the child of the changeling issues. Ok so its not much but fuck it, its a relatable changeling story.

GERMAN FOLKLORE

According to Karl Haupt in the book The Legend Book of Lausitz, A child must always have someone nearby until it is six weeks old. Otherwise, an old woman from the woods or the mountains could come and exchange a physically and mentally retarded, malformed changeling for the infant. At the very least, one must place a hymnbook near the child's head before leaving the room. However, if--through negligence--the misfortune does occur, you should take prompt notice of it. Then you need only make a switch from the branches of a weeping birch tree and beat the changeling severely with it. The old woman will respond to his cries by bringing back the exchanged child and taking the beastly child away. You must allow her to depart unhindered, neither scolding nor cursing her, otherwise you will be left with the changeling hanging on your neck.

Wow. This is one of the descriptions that have actually led to cases of child abuse as stated at the beginning of the episode. There are many tales of changelings in german folklore. The belief in changelings was strong and widespread. These beliefs continued to exert influence well into the nineteenth century, and in some areas even later. As late as 1924 it was reported that in sections of rural Germany many people were still taking traditional precautions against the demonic exchange of infants. The Germans had some precautions to help aid in the combating of changelings being swapped out for human children. Here are some according to Jacob Grimm from the book Deutsche Mythologie:

Placing a key next to an infant will prevent him from being exchanged.

Women may never be left alone during the first six weeks following childbirth, for the devil then has more power over them.

During the first six weeks following childbirth, mothers may not go to sleep until someone has come to watch the child. If mothers are overcome by sleep, changelings are often laid in the cradle. To prevent this one should lay a pair of men's pants over the cradle.

Whenever the mother leaves the infant's room she should lay an article of the father's clothing on the child, so that it cannot be exchanged

In the town of Altmark they believe in what are sometimes called dickkopfe or thick heads. In the area itself they are usually referred to as “the underground People”. The underground people are dwarves. They have names like sleepy, grumpy, and dopey. According to J. D. H. Temme in his book Folk Legends from Altmark, to prevent the underground spirits from exchanging a newborn child, it must be continuously watched until it is baptized. For this reason the baptism takes place as soon as possible. Dwarfs are often called "the underground people." They live beneath the earth and would like nothing more than to have beautiful, well-formed human children. They will steal newborns, leaving their own malformed children, called changelings, in their place. Therefore there is always a great rush to have the child baptized, and until this happens the mother and child will not be left alone for even an instant. Furthermore, until then there must always be a burning light near them, even in broad daylight, because the underground people are afraid of light.

A child must carefully and continuously be protected against exchange by the underground people until it is baptized. Therefore the so-called "word of God," a leaf from the Bible from a hymnbook, is either wrapped up with the child in its blanket or laid in its cradle.

Here's a few stories of changelings in different parts of Germany:

The Changeling of Spornitz

(Source: Karl Bartsch, Sagen, Märchen und Gebräuche aus Meklenburg)

A young peasant woman in Spornitz had her child stolen by an underground person or a Mönk, and a changeling put in its place in the cradle. The mother saw it happen, but she could neither move nor call out. The maniken told her that her son would someday become the king of the underground people. From time to time they had to exchange one of their king's children for a human child so that earthly beauty would not entirely die out among them. She was told to take good care of the little dwarf prince, and her house would be blessed with good fortune. With that the Mönk laid the changeling on her breast and disappeared with her child. She took care of the child, and the prosperity of her household increased visibly. However, the changeling remained small and ugly, and died in his twentieth year.

Mecklenburg Changelings

Source: Karl Bartsch, Sagen, Märchen und Gebräuche aus Meklenburg (Vienna, Wilhelm Braumüller, 1879), vol. 1, p. 62.

Bartsch's source for this legend is Pastor Dolberg from Hinrichshagen.

In Rövershagen the underground people once exchanged a woman's unbaptized child for one of their own. Following the advice of a wise man, she laid the underground people's child on the chopping block as though she were going to kill it with an ax. The dwarf's child immediately disappeared, and her own child was returned.

The Changeling of Plau

Source: Karl Bartsch, Sagen, Märchen und Gebräuche aus Meklenburg (Vienna, Wilhelm Braumüller, 1879), vol. 1, p. 42.

A married couple in Plau had a child that after two years was still only as long as a shoe. It had an enormously large head and could not learn to talk. They shared their concern with an old man, who said: "For sure the underground people have exchanged your child. If you want to be certain about this, then take an empty eggshell and in the presence of the child pour fresh beer into it, then add yeast to make it ferment. If the child then starts to talk, then my suspicion is right." They followed this advice. The beer had scarcely begun to ferment when the child called out from its cradle:

Now I am as old

As Bohemian gold,

But this is the first I've ever heard tell,

Of beer being brewed in an eggshell.

The dwarf's actual words, in the original Low German:

Ik bün so olt

as Böhmer Gold,

doch dat seih ik taum irsten Mal,

dat man Bier brugt in Eierschal.

The parents determined that the very next night they would throw the child into the Elbe River. They arose after midnight and went to the cradle, where they discovered a strong and healthy child. The underground people had taken back their own child.

Up next...the changeling in Irish folklore…

In Ireland, the Faerie folk are always treated with respect, but many accusations are hurled at them as well, from making crops wither to milk turning sour. One of the most common accusations is that they steal humans and spirit them away to live in the Faerie realm, whilst leaving an unwanted faerie in their place, which becomes known as...you fucking know it...a changeling.

Humans at risk of being taken are said to include handsome young men as they are taken to become lovers of the female Faeries. One theory why this happens is that the Faeries see humans as a stronger and healthier race and try to enhance their own bloodline by breeding with humans. Midwives and new mothers are also favoured by the Faeries because they can be made servants of the Faerie queens and easily tend to the Faerie children. It is said that Faerie women find childbirth very difficult and if the pregnancy even lasts until birth then the Faerie babies that survive are often deformed and stunted.

Very occasionally, some people leave the mortal world to live in the Faerie realm by choice. They don’t usually stay in the Faerie realm for life and will return to their home after several years. Of course, none of them returns the same person after so long in the Faerie realm and often people will recognise that these people have ‘changed’ in some way. Traditionally, the person who returns will possess a ‘gift’ of some type and may be a master of herbal or magical knowledge.

Humans most at risk of the Faeries are babies and young children. It is suggested that babies are taken as it is easier to integrate them into the Faerie community and there is less chance of them remembering their real parents. When they are taken, a Faerie child, disguised to look like the human child, is left in their place hence the name, ‘Changeling’. Although most Changelings don’t get to return to the Faerie realm, there have been tales of this happening and the Human child finally returned to its rightful family.

The Faeries envy human babies as they tend to be happy, healthy, and sturdy beings. On occasion, they have been known to take a child because they simply believe it is not loved enough by its human parents or even take the child out of malice or spite, especially if someone from that family has disrespected someone from the Faerie Realm. One can never be too sure what a Faerie’s motive is.

So how do the Irish recognize a changeling? Well let's find out! It is said that you can tell a Changeling baby by the fact that it is ill-tempered and looks wizened in appearance. Most will have very dark eyes and if you look into them you can see wisdom well beyond their age. A Changeling will also grow and develop a lot quicker than a human baby and within a few weeks the Changeling will have a full set of teeth and their legs and arms will be quite bony and thin.

A changeling doesn’t always appear as a baby and occasionally the Faeries will leave a piece of enchanted wood called a ‘stock’ in the cradle instead. This stock will appear to grow sick and die right in front of the ‘parents’ eyes.

The changelings’ new family will never have any good luck while the changeling resides in the family home as the changeling will drain the family of any good fortune that will come their way. A warning though to all those people who become parents to a changeling, it must be loved and cared for like it is your own if you ever want to have a chance of seeing your own child again.

The unspoken threat is that if the changeling is harmed or abandoned in any way, the Faeries will treat your child just as badly or possibly even worse, a risk any parents would not be willing to take.

However, don’t despair! There are certain methods one can use in the event of returning a Changeling from where it came from and ensuring the safe return of the child that has been taken. Below you will find some of the most traditional methods used.

Trooping Faeries leave their barrow, (their home) several times a year. A direct swap is possible at this time although to be successful, specific spells and rituals need to be performed.

A Faerie changeling is often weak and feeble so they must be nurtured and loved so that he/she becomes healthy and happy. When this occurs the Faerie parents usually decide that they want their natural child back and will switch them, themselves. This is probably the best and safest way to return a changeling to its proper parents as I really wouldn’t recommend the next method myself.

In some areas in Ireland, Faeries are seen as demons. So because of this, the stolen person is not seen as kidnapped but possessed and it is believed that Faeries can be exorcised just like demons. The victim is beaten or tortured in the hope that life within the ‘host’ will become so unpleasant the Faerie be cast out.

In Ireland, it is widely believed that the Faeries are terrified of fire and some alleged Changelings have been badly burned or even killed by the efforts of others in order to make the Faerie leave.

If attempts at returning the changeling fail the unlucky ‘parents’ can expect the Changeling to grow up to be a snivelling, dim-witted person who will no longer be a changeling but will be known as an ‘oaf’.

So if the Changeling becomes an oaf, what becomes of the human child living in the Faerie realm? Some are reported to pine and grieve so much for their loved ones in the mortal world that they wither and die. While others can adapt quite well and live happily within the Faerie realm enjoying a long life filled with cheerfulness, Irish music and Irish dancing.

You want stories? Here's a couple for ya.

This is the story of Bridget Cleary. On March 15, 1895, Bridget Cleary, the 28-year-old wife of a copper, went missing from her cottage near Clonmel in County Tipperary. Days later her body was found in a shallow grave, burned to death by her husband and family members who suspected her of being possessed by a fairy.

Cleary, believed to be 'the last witch burned in Ireland,' was the victim of dangerous superstitious beliefs. Her story has become part of Irish folklore, and her tragic tale has been immortalized in the children’s rhyme “Are you a witch or are you a fairy, Or are you the wife of Michael Cleary?”

Books have been written about her and filmmakers are currently trying to raise funds to make a movie loosely based on her story.

Cleary and her husband Michael were a well-off but childless couple. Bridget was a dressmaker who made additional independent income from keeping hens.

According to accounts, she caught a cold that possibly developed into pneumonia, or she may have had tuberculosis.

As her condition worsened, her husband and her uncle, Jack Dunne, began to circulate the story that Bridget had been taken by fairies and the woman in the bed was a changeling. According to Irishidentity.com, herbal cures were forced down her throat and she was held over the fire while being asked repeatedly if she was a changeling. Several family members assisted and neighbors were present the evening before her death as more tests were conducted on her.

On March 15, 1895, her husband set fire to her nightgown and threw lamp-oil on her.

“She’s not my wife,” he said. “You’ll soon see her go up the chimney.”

Jack Dunne forced one of Bridget's brothers to carry her to a shallow grave.

Some time afterward, it was reported to the local priest that Bridget had been burned to death by her husband and other family members. The priest went to the police who found her charred body and arrested nine people, including Bridget’s family members, neighbors, and friends, in connection with the murder.

Michael Cleary served 15 years for the crime, after which he emigrated to Canada.

According to the New York Times, the case was used as a weapon against Irish Home Rule, asking how could a people who still believed in fairies and spirits be trusted to govern themselves in the modern world?

A REAL CHANGELING

In a little village on the Cavan/Leitrim border, there lived a man who had disappeared and was said to have been taken by faeries. Miraculously he returned 10 years later out of the blue. While this story is said to be retold all the time even up to this, we could not find the details of this story anywhere, no names, no dates, no nothing. That being said … get your shit together people out there.

POLISH/SLAVIC

How do you get a one armed polish guy out of a tree? How many pollocks does it take to screw in a light bulb? Screen door on a submarine...you've heard them all, but have you heard about the changeling in Polish folklore? Doubt it, but that is why we are here. To inform you on the coolest shit around...like the Dziwozona. Also known as the Mamuna or Boginka, they were thought to be the spirits of a girl who died in childhood or women who killed their child (oddly connected), but they could also be women who died during pregnancy or women who had a child out of wedlock. Basically, the demon was often meant to represent things that were considered bad for women and represented an unnatural life or death. Depictions vary, but the most common description is that she’s an old hag with breasts so large she washes her clothes with them. Damn thats hot...anyway… Dziwożona was thought to appear during foul weather among the trees and swamps. Unlike many demons who would attack directly (though depictions of the boginka did include attacks), Dziwożona waited and observed mothers with their children. During this time she could make the children ill and would often come up with elaborate schemes to draw the mother away. She would then strike when the mother was gone, replacing the child with a changeling – the hag’s own child. Changelings were creatures that appear throughout Slavic myth. Demons would use them to replace the children they stole, but the changelings did not grow like normal humans. They had massive abdomens and small, disfigured heads. Which is different from the German myths if you remember from earlier as theirs had the big heads. They rarely slept, screaming into the night, and sometimes they even grew claws and jagged teeth. Almost all changelings died in childhood, but if they survived, they were little more than spiteful, mumbling loners.

It’s likely that changelings and the connection with Dziwożona were simply the early Slavs’ ways of understanding disabilities among children. Beyond it being a warning for mothers not to abandon their children, it was easier to explain away that a demon stole the child than to accept disabilities are a part of human life. It’s brutal but unfortunately was common among early cultures.

There were ways to protect your child against the Dziwożona, though. Parents would tie a red ribbon around the baby’s hand (a tradition still continued today in some Slavic countries) and also give the child a red cap to wear, protecting their face from the moon.

SCANDINAVIAN

The folk belief regarding the interchanging of children by the subterraneans is prevalent and old – in Norse times, the changeling was called vixlingr and skiptingr – and was most likely founded on the physical fact that a seemingly healthy and normal child could change drastically over a short period of time, and develop abnormal features. The portrayals often include the child having a big head, yellow and sallow complexion, "old man's face", bulging eyes, long hands and short feet and pointy teeth. Being "hungry as a watchdog," crying day and night, the changeling was described as a obstinate and imbecile being, and a slow learner, whether it came to walking, reading or talking.

Contemporary medicine would most likely recognize symptoms of jaundice, rickets, atrophy (muscle wasting) and other defects caused by heredity and malnutrition. But for people without this medical knowledge, the "healing" simply consisted in getting rid of the changeling as soon as possible, in order to get the “rightful'' child in return. The treatment performed to attain such, was nothing less than horrible; among the many tricks in the book were to pretend to throw the child in the oven, pinch his nose with red-hot irons, and whipping him naked on a pile of garbage three Thursday evenings in a row. The idea was of course to frighten and abuse the poor creature to such a degree that the child’s “real” mother would feel sorry for him and reverse the switch.

The legends recounting stories about elderly changelings prove however that this procedure was far from effective. At worst, they could be hundreds of years old, it was said. But it was never too late to get them out of the house. You could just lure them to talk and reluctantly divulge their age, they were exposed and made ready to die. The more outrageous the attempts were, the greater was the chance to fool them.

A legend from Southern Norway, tells the story of an elderly changeling; the household put forward for him a huge pot of just a tiny bit of porridge in it, yet as many spoons as they could muster.

Then he said: "I'm older than the mountains, and as gray as a scythe, but never have I seen so great a barrel and so little food and so many spoons before!" Then they knew that he was a changeling.

On a farm in Eastern Norway they pretended to brew ale in an eggshell. But when the old man awoke and saw this, he burst out laughing:

"No, now I have been around for so long that I've seen the old forest burn down and grow up again seven times, but never have I seen anyone brew beer in an eggshell."

Then, someone asked. "Are you finished?"

"Yes, "replied the old man. At the blink of an eye he was gone, and there was only a crumbling bone remaining. "

Norwegian poet Haldis Moren Vesaas (1907-1995) wrote a poem about the changeling that might be easier to relate to than the old legends. This poem however, speaks of loving your child no matter how tired you are. For the changeling and the sweet, gentle child is the same, but sometimes it feels as if your little angel has been replaced with a nasty, vicious troll that nobody likes. Wanna hear it? Well you’re gonna anyways cus its out fucking show!

Rockabye rockabye big, ugly child,

troll is your surname, no doubt.

The hugest boiler is in use as we speak,

no less, to silence your trout

The cradle you lie in will soon be too small,

this hardship sure takes its toll

You are heavy, so heavy, and the night is so long,

for she who must cradle a troll

All that see you, give me advice,

that I should torment you, kick and toss.

Then they will come for you, and I can get back

the long lost child I’ve lost

Rockabye changeling, big and foul

Please, keep the fear at bay

I will not hit you, trust me on that,

and no one shall take you away

The other, the cutie, can stay where she is

While you, who is hated so deep,

needs me to love and care for you

And look! Now you’ve fallen asleep

The tales vary from country to country and region to region in Scandinavian folklore. Scandinavian parents would often place an iron tool such as a pair of scissors or a knife on top of the cradle of an unbaptised infant to prevent its being abducted by the trolls. It was believed that if a human child were still taken, in spite of such measures, the parents could force the return of the child by treating the changeling cruelly, using methods such as whipping or even inserting it in a heated oven. In at least one case, a woman was taken to court for having killed her child in an oven. In Sweden, it is believed that a fire must be kept lit in the room housing a child before it is christened, and ,furthermore, that the water used to bathe the child should not be thrown out, since both of these precautions will prevent the child from being taken by trolls.

In one Swedish tale, the human mother is advised to brutalize the changeling (bortbyting) so that the trolls will return her son, but she refuses, unable to mistreat an innocent child despite knowing its nature. When her husband demands she abandon the changeling, she refuses, and he leaves her – whereupon he meets their son in the forest, wandering free. The son explains that since his mother had never been cruel to the changeling, the troll mother had never been cruel to him, and when she sacrificed what was dearest to her, her husband, they had realized they had no power over her and released him.

SPAIN

The next legend comes from Spain, more specifically Asturias. Asturias is an autonomous community in northwest Spain. Their mythology contains tales of the Xana. The Xana is a beautiful fairy said to dwell wherever pure bodies of water flow, combing her long curly hair with a comb made of sun or moonbeams, using the water as a mirror. This bad fairy may also live in a cave, safeguarding her immense collection of ill-gained treasure. The Xana reminds us of sea nymphs and nixies, who also spend time near water using their beauty to lure humans.

One of the key defining characteristics of the Xana is their thievery. Many tales describe the Xana acquiring a plethora of earthly treasures, and many myths talk of young adventurers who unsuccessfully attempt to gain the treasure of the Xana.

Tales of Xanas also often involve the kidnapping of a human child, replacing it with their own offspring (called Xaninos). The Xana will make this swap by entering a human home through a keyhole. They cannot care for the children themselves. They find themselves ill-equipped to feed their children, due to their lack of lactation. So instead of dooming their own child to the fate of starvation, they take a human child from their cradle and replace it with their own fairy child. This behavior is reminiscent of changelings in other cultures. Eventually, the human mother will realize that their child has been replaced.

WALES

“Tylwyth Teg,” (Welsh fairies) or “Fair folk” were thought to have sought-after human babies and would steal them whenever they could, swapping them with a poor weak substitute of fairy descent. The new fairy baby displayed crabbiness and ugliness which would be visible.

The distraught families, upon suspecting their child to have been “swapped” would seek the most horrific solutions to the problem, often employing a “fairy doctor” to diagnose the child as a fairy using various torturous methods which would lead to the death of the poor child. Some practices involved burning the child with hot coals, holding them over a fire or boiling water, leaving them exposed to the elements, or drowning them in the belief that the fairies would rush to save their own and give back the “real” child. Such was superstition and so intense was the fear of the fair folk, this practice was sadly common and widespread.

Unchristened children were thought to be most at risk as were girls and twins. In all households, there were routine precautions aimed to prevent child theft. A prevalent one involved putting fire tongs over a cradle, because of the fairies’ well-known antipathy to iron.

In the parish of Trefeglwys, near Llanidloes, Montgomery, a little shepherd’s cottage dubbed the Place of Strife, on account of the trouble recorded there. A couple that once resided there had twins, when they were a few months old the wife went to the house of neighbors, leaving both babies alone. When she returned, she saw the “blue petticoats of the old elves'' fleeing from her home. Hurrying indoors, she found her house as she had left it and was relieved. However, as the weeks rolled by, she noticed her twins' growth seems stunted. Her husband accused them of not being his, and it caused a huge rift between them. A local wise man gave this advice.

He told her that when she was preparing dinner for the harvesters, in sight of the twins she was to empty the shell of an egg and fill it with pottage. Then carry it out to the workers as if meant to feed them all. But he told her to listen to what the twins say to each other about this strange behavior. If they discuss it in ways that children should not understand, then she should take them both to the river Llyn Ebyr and throw them both in. She did as she was told and heard the twins say; ACORNS BEFORE OAK I KNEW; AN EGG BEFORE A HEN; NEVER ONE HEN’S EGG-SHELL STEW ENOUGH FOR HARVESTMEN! On hearing this, the mother took the two children and threw them into the Llyn, and sure enough, saw goblins in their blue trousers come to save their dwarfs. The mother had her own children back again, and all was well once more.

In Wirt Sykes book British Goblins, Welsh Folklore, he writes that a Dazzy Walter, the wife of Abel Walter, of Ebwy Fawr, one night in her husband’s absence awoke in her bed and found her baby had gone. Terrified, she searched around her bed for it and grabbed it with her hand above the bed, which was as far as the fairies had managed to carry it. And a woman called Jennet Francis, of that same valley of Ebwy Fawr, said that one night in bed she felt her infant son being taken from her arms; after that, she screamed and hung on, and, as she phrased it, ‘God and me were too hard for them.’ This son later grew up and became a famous preacher of the gospel.

The Llanover estate when run by Lady Llanover in the 19th century was rife with rumours of the fairies amongst the gardeners who worked there. Several accounts were recorded, and it was said that Twlyth Teg would change children in the area. One family who would regularly leave out offerings of bread and milk for the Fae had a son who decided it was funny to replace the bowl of milk with urine. On finding it, the angry fairies threw the contents around the room and placed a curse as punishment that there would always be a fool – an idiot who would never prosper in his family. Sure enough one of his own children in later years turned out to be one and this continued in every generation since.

A woman by the name of Nani Fach was also said to be the offspring of the fairies as she was presumably “different.” House staff of Lady Llanover would throw crumbs of bread on the floor before going to bed at night as offerings to the fairies such was their fear of them.

Well… Wales seems to have a bit of a changeling problem...and a lot of funny names of places.

So those are some of the myths of changelings from various cultures. While there are some differences most seem to have the same basic principles. You see many of the same stories repeated through the various myths. They may have different wording or phrasing due to the region or culture but they are the same. There were a couple recorded stories of deaths due to people thinking that someone was a changeling. We discussed the story of Bridget Cleary earlier but there was another tragic incident that involved a child. Michael Laehy was only four when he died.

Anne Roche, an old woman of very advanced age, was indicted for the murder of Michael Leahy, a young child, by drowning him in the Flesk. This case, which at first assumed a very serious aspect, from the meaning imputed to the words spoken by the prisoner, that the sin of the child’s death was on the grand-mother, and not on the prisoner, turned out to be a homicide, committed under the delusion of the grossest superstition. The child, though four years old, could neither stand, walk, or speak – it was thought to be fairy struck – and the grandmother ordered the prisoner and one of the witnesses, Mary Clifford, to bathe the child every morning in the pool of the river Flesk, where the boundaries of three farms meet; they had so bathed it for three mornings running, and on the last morning the prisoner kept the child longer under the water than usual, when her companion (the witness, Mary Clifford) said to the prisoner, ‘how can you hope ever to see God after this?’ to which the prisoner replied, that ‘the sin was on the grand-mother, and not on her.’ Upon cross-examination, the witness said it was not done with intent to kill the child, but to cure it – to put the Fairy out of it. On her being charged by the policeman who apprehended here with drowning the child, she said it did not matter if it had died four years ago. Baron Pennefather said, thought it was a case of suspicion, and required to be thoroughly examined into, yet the jury would not be safe in convicting the prisoner of murder, however strong their suspicions might be. Verdict: not guilty. Author Robert Curran says that the verdict is suggestive of the depth of belief in changelings in the community. There were several similar cases in rural Ireland in the 19th century.

The reality behind many changeling legends was often the birth of deformed or developmentally disabled children. Among the diseases or disabilities with symptoms that match the description of changelings in various legends are spina bifida, cystic fibrosis, PKU, progeria, Down syndrome, homocystinuria, Williams syndrome, Hurler syndrome, Hunter syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, Prader-Willi Syndrome, and cerebral palsy. The greater incidence of birth defects in boys correlates to the belief that male infants were more likely to be taken. Psychologist Stuart Vyse writes that modern parents have higher expectations of childbirth and when "children don't meet these expectations, parents sometimes find a different demon to blame." A condition known as regressive autism, where children appear to develop normally in their early years and then start to show symptoms of autism, can also be compared to marks of a changeling child.

As noted, it has been hypothesized that the changeling legend may have developed, or at least been used, to explain the peculiarities of children who did not develop normally, probably including all sorts of developmental delays and abnormalities. In particular, it has been suggested that autistic children would be likely to be labeled as changelings or elf-children due to their strange, sometimes inexplicable behavior. For example, this association might explain why fairies are often described as having an obsessive impulse to count things like handfuls of spilled seeds. This has found a place in autistic culture. Some autistic adults have come to identify with changelings (or other replacements, such as aliens) for this reason, as well as their own feelings of being in a world where they do not belong and of practically not being the same species as the other people around them. (Compare the pseudoscientific New Age concept of indigo children.)

So like a lot of things the changeling myth may be chalked up to nothing more than people just not understanding and knowing about deformities, birth defects, and mental illness. Interesting nonetheless!

Top movies involving changelings...there's one that doesn't make sense...but here we go

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Monday Mar 15, 2021

The Doodler

Monday Mar 15, 2021

Today we take this illustrious train to the land of Rice A Roni, the Golden Gate Bridge and those son of bitch basketball Warriors...San Francisco, California. Considered the cultural, commercial, and financial center of Northern California. San Francisco is the 16th most populous city in the United States, and the fourth most populous in California, with 881,549 residents as of 2019.

Between January 1974 and September 1975, the LGBTQ community of the Castro District and surrounding city of San Francisco were terrorized by yet, another serial murderer. Still trembling in fear from the previous horrors of the Zodiac killer, tentatively responsible for over 30 deaths and the Zebra murders, which were a string of racially motivated murders committed by a small group of black Muslims that took the lives of at least 15 people. Needless to say, citizens of the area were locking their doors and looking over their shoulders, knowing that evil could be behind every corner or hiding in every shadow.

The gay community already faced plenty of unfortunate danger without the added prospect of being targeted by a fucking serial killer. Even in the comparatively welcoming environment of the city’s Castro neighborhood, being outed in the mid-1970s meant risking stigmatization, injury, and even death, owing to antigay sentiments prevalent across the United States. (Harvey Milk’s election to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors was four years away. If you’re unaware, Harvey Milk was an American politician and the first openly gay elected official in the history of California who was assassinated on November 27th, 1978 along with Mayor George Mascone by a piece of shit former San Francisco board of supervisors member who I won’t mention his name because fuck that guy! He did commit suicide in 1985 after serving only 5 years in prison. Dickhead.)

Fear of such repercussions led three men who survived encounters with the Doodler to refuse to cooperate with police. One, reportedly, was a European diplomat (according to the Chronicle, he was stabbed six times before fleeing). Published reports about survivors also mention a “nationally known” entertainer and an individual who quickly skipped town and declined further contact with law enforcement. Four decades later, the identities of these men still remain unknown.

While the Doodler is thought to have been active between January 1974 and June 1975, there has been some confusion over his total number of victims. In 1976, reporter Maitland Zane made blunt reference to the number of unsolved homicides of gay men at the time—17 had occurred in 1975 alone—in an article for the San Francisco Chronicle titled “The Gay Killers.” Owing to this tragically large number, some reports have suggested that the Doodler’s true body count may be as high as 14.

In the five cases officially tied to the Doodler, the victims died from numerous stab wounds. Each body was found in a park or by the beach. Following the discovery of the Doodler’s fifth victim, Harald Gullberg, in June 1975, the killings seemed to stop.

During the mid-1970s, the overall homicide rate in San Francisco was more than double what it is today. In 1974, there were 129 homicides in the city. The following year, there were 132. Needless to say, the SFPD’s homicide detectives were busy, and the Doodler wasn’t even the only serial killer on their radar. At the time of Cavanaugh’s death, the city was enduring the infamous Zebra murders, and arrests were still three months from being carried out.

A murderer that would draw a sketch or doodle of men in order to entice them to lower their guard, was seemingly hunting homosexual men from the area. This prolific killer ended the lives of 5 confirmed men with up to 14 potential deaths under their belt, in total. All of the victims were found within 4 miles of one another and all within 18 months.

So who was the Doodler, aka The Black Doodler? No one knows for sure and may never. This is what makes this story one of the most horrific.

THE VICTIMS

January 27th, 1974

On the morning of January 27, 1974, at approximately 1:25 a.m., police dispatch received a phone call reporting the discovery of a corpse at San Francisco’s Ocean Beach.

“I believe there might be a dead person,” the caller said in a calm, male-sounding voice before declining to give their name and hanging up.

When officers arrived on the scene 30 minutes later, they found the body of 50-year-old Gerald Cavanaugh. He’d been stabbed 16 times.

Over the course of the next year and a half, five victims—all white gay men—would be linked to the serial killer dubbed the Doodler. Despite its childish quality, the Doodler’s nickname is a haunting reference to the killer’s reported fondness for sketching cartoons of the men he’d meet at bars in San Francisco’s Castro district, then lure somewhere more remote with the promise of sex.

June 25th 1974

A woman walking by Spreckles Lake happened upon the body of 27 year old female impersonator and local area comedian, Joseph “Jae” Stevens. Stevens worked at Finnochios, a club and bar that was started as a speakeasy in 1929 and was located on Stockton Street. Authorities believe that Stevens had possibly driven his killer to the lake area and one report claims that the murder had taken the car to flee crime scene, only to crash the vehicle into the side of a house, forcing the them to abscond from the accident by foot. Stevens was stabbed 5 times and was presumably dragged roughly ten feet into the brush.

July 7th, 1974

Walking her dog “Moondance” around the foot of Lincoln Bay at Ocean Beach, Tauba Weiss noticed what seemed to be the lifeless body of a man, 31 year old Claus A. Christmann, a German citizen who had worked for the tire company Michelin. Christmann was married with children, though they did not accompany him to America. When his body was found, he was wearing a tan leather jacket, heeled ankle boots, a white Italian shirt and orange bikini briefs, with his pants unzipped and pockets emptied, other than a single tube of makeup. He was left wearing three rings on his hands, including a gold wedding band. Christmann was stabbed at least 15 times with three of the wounds slashing his throat. The coroner report states that it was “ In a manner which seemed as though the assailant had attempted to decapitate the deceased.” Inspector David Toschi, a 20 year veteran of the department, described to the Sentinel, that the murder was “one of the most vicious stabbings he has ever seen. (Toschi also investigated the Zodiac murders, which are also still unsolved.)

May 12th, 1975

Nearly a year after the murder of Claus Christmann, the body of 32 year old registered nurse and former Navy medical corpsman in the Vietnam War, Frederick Elmer Capin, was found. His corpse was discovered by a hiker, walking by a sand dune, not far from a highway that runs parallel to Ocean Beach. Capin was a tall, thin man approximately 6 foot tall and at 148 pounds. The coroner's report states that he had been stabbed in the aorta and heart and that he had blood smeared on his shoes, hands and torso. It was also noted that there were marks in the sand leading to the body that “indicating that he had been dragged approximately 20 feet.” Notably, Capin had received a commendation medal for saving four men under fire while serving in Vietnam.

June 4th, 1975

While hiking by the Lincoln Park Golf course, the body of 66 year old Swedish immigrant, Harald Gullberg was found ten yards from a nearby trail. Gullberg was a sailor who had travelled to numerous harbors, including Boston, Puerto Vita, Cuba, Shanghai, Melbourne, San Luis Obispo, Yokohama and Liverpool, according to immigration records. When the body was found, Gullberg’s pants were unzipped and he was not wearing undergarments. Some speculate they were taken by the killer. He had been slashed across the throat and due to bug activity, the coroner indicated that the body had been deceased for approximately 2 weeks. This was the oldest and assumably, the Doodler’s last victim.

In the time around the murders, three men had come forward claiming that they too had been assaulted by the supposed Doodler. Reports claim that one of these men was a “well known entertainer”, with speculations of news outlets pointing to actor Richard Chamberlain, singer and pianist Johnnie Ray and actor Rock Hudson although police have confirmed that it was, in fact, NOT Rock Hudson and that the entertainer is indeed still alive. Of the three, Chamberlain would be the only surviving person. Due to the victims understandably wanting to keep their sexuality private, none of the men would come forward, publicly, nor assist the police in their investigation. LGBTQ rights activist and politician Harvey Milk had defended their refusals by saying “I understand their position. I respect the pressure society has put on them.”

THE SUSPECTS

5 months after Harald Gullberg’s body was found, the San Francisco Police Department released a sketch composite of an african/american male between the ages of 19 and 22 standing between 5’10” and 6 foot tall, with a slim build, wearing a Navy style watch cap.

The profile of the man was of a quiet man, possibly an art student, from an upper middle class background.

In Jan 1976, a man had been arrested at a Tenderloin District bar after a patron had called the police claiming that a man was inside that matched the composite and he was offering to draw sketches of other patrons. New reports claimed that when the police arrived and arrested him, that he was carrying a butcher knife and a sketch pad. Police questioned him, however they did not have evidence and without the assistance of the witnesses they could not prosecute him. He was booked for carrying a concealed weapon and, after he attacked homicide inspectors during an interrogation, charged with aggravated assault.

Police came under fire because the community didn’t think that they were helping.

As Gay sex was illegal until Jan of 1976 which lead to complete mistrust of the police department

In the last few years the case has had a resurgence. Police are looking at it with fresh eyes and have been able to locate the European diplomate, however they cannot find the entertainer

DNA has been submitted – no word in results yet

In Feb 2019 police offered a $100,000 reward in info that leads to the identification and prosecution of the killer

They have also released an age progression composite sketch of what the man would likely look like today.

They are also looking for a man who called into dispatch about one of the bodies found. Here is the audio from that phone call.

(*audio?*)

Police think that the killer may have been seeing a psychiatrist in the East Bay area with the name Priest and are currently seeking information about that doctor as well.

Anyone with information can call the San Francisco police at 1-415-575-4444.

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Horror: Horror movies set in asylums/ mental hospitals - IMDb

Monday Mar 08, 2021

Danvers Lunatic Asylum

Monday Mar 08, 2021

The Danvers State Hospital, also known as the State Lunatic Hospital at Danvers, The Danvers Lunatic Asylum, and The Danvers State Insane Asylum, was a psychiatric hospital located on what was once known as Hawthorne Hill, in Danvers, Massachusetts. This is ironically where the Salem Witch Trials judge, John Hathorne, once lived. Which, sounds like a future train ride or bonus… maybe. It’s been done a lot. And HOLY SHIT was that a fucked up situation. If you think people are judgmental now, OH BOY!

Once occupied on a hilltop site of over 500 acres with a commanding view of Boston 18 miles to the south. Known as Hawthorne Hill, Porter Hill, and Dodge's Hill, the Commonwealth purchased the site in 1874 from Francis Dodge, who owned the 200 acre Dodge Farm and was a local farmer and Civil War veteran, for a whopping $39,542, right around $907,322.41 in today's money. It was laviously covered with established oak, pine, and apple groves. Speaking of apples, my family owns the distinct privilege of finding and documenting the first “Golden Delicious'' apple tree. The original tree was found on the Mullins' family farm (My grandmother was a Mullins) in Clay County, West Virginia, in the U.S. of Fuckin’ A, and was locally known as Mullin's Yellow Seedling and Annit apple. Maybe you don’t give a shit and maybe you do. Either way, that’s now a part of YOUR useless knowledge. Suggit! Just kidding… kind of.

The State Lunatic Hospital at Danvers was erected, (erected… hehe) under the supervision of prominent Boston architect Nathaniel J Bradlee, in an extremely rural, out-of-the-way location.The immediate crisis which precipitated the building of a mental hospital north of Boston was the imminence in the early 1870's of the closing of the facility at South Boston. In 1873, Worcester, Taunton and Northampton and the 1866 Tewksbury Asylum for chronic patients were already housing 1300 patients in buildings designed for 1000; So, a LITTLE tiny bit crowded. And another 1200 patients were scattered about in various other hospitals.

At a cost of $1.5 million at the time, right around $39,237,300 the hospital originally consisted of two main center buildings, housing the administration, with four radiating wings on each side of the Administration Block. Said to be the inspiration for our own episode topic H.P. Lovecraft’s Arkham Sanatorium, Danvers had a gothic design that has captured the imagination of horror aficionados, the world over. The kitchen, laundry, chapel, and dormitories for the attendants were in a connecting building in the rear. Middleton Pond supplied the hospital its water. On each side of the main building were the wings, for male and female patients respectively. The outermost wards were reserved for the most hostile patients.

It included space for patients, attendants, and administration, reflecting a centralized approach to care. Later buildings were added such as the Male and Female Nurses Homes representing the segregation of patients and staff; the male & female tubercular buildings and the Bonner Medical Building represent specialization of medical treatment; the cottages, repair shops and farm buildings represent an increased self-sufficiency for the hospital, an emphasis on occupational therapy and increased dispersal of the hospital population. A circumferential (my 10 point scrabble word) and interior road network serviced the entire complex.

The hospital opened on May 1st, 1878 and the hospital's first patients arrived on May 13th. Dr. Calvin S. May was appointed Superintendent through 1880. Previous to Danvers, Dr. May was an Assistant Physician at the Connecticut Hospital for the Insane from 1874-1877, and for 1877 was Acting Superintendent. While Danvers was originally established to provide residential treatment and care to the mentally ill, its functions expanded to include a training program for nurses in 1889 and a pathological research laboratory in 1895. By the 1920's the hospital was operating school clinics to help determine mental deficiency in children. During the 1960's as a result of increased emphasis on alternative methods of treatment and deinstitutionalization and community based mental health care, the inpatient population started to decrease. Danvers State Hospital closed on June 24, 1992 due to budget cuts within the mental health system by the former Governor, William Weld.

Danvers State Hospital, originally known as the State Lunatic Hospital at Danvers, was significant in both architectural and social history. Designed in 1874 by noted Boston architect, N.J. Bradlee, it is an implementation of the nationally recognized Kirkbride plan. When built it represented the latest contemporary advances in technology and engineering as well as architecture. Later additions reflect changes in mental health care philosophy and contribute to an understanding of the overall functioning of the hospital. Historically, Danvers State Hospital was significant for its leading role in treatment of the insane including an advanced occupational therapy program, early training facilities for staff, and a long-term concern with community health issues. Thus, Danvers State Hospital possesses integrity of location, design, setting, materials and workmanship. Concern for the disadvantaged, including the poor, the sick, and the mentally disturbed, was recognized as a responsibility of the public sector in Massachusetts since its early 17th century settlement period. Until the mid-19th century, the charge for their care rested primarily with the towns in which they resided through locally established poor farms: As the towns' duties in 'this regard- became unwieldy and largely' unfulfilled, due to in part to the pressures of immigration and rapidly increasing numbers of unsettled poor, the state stepped in first establishing the Board of Commissioners of Alien Passengers (1851) and in 1863 the Board of State Charities. Though still administratively combined, different facilities and types of care were gradually provided to victims of varying types of misfortune. For example, by 1863, three state hospitals specifically to care for the insane had been built: at Worcester (1877), at Taunton (1854), and at Northampton (1856).

Bradlee's design for Danvers State Hospital was based on his unbuilt 1867 plan and 1868 plan for an insane asylum at Winthrop. Many locations were picked including Nahant, Chelsea, Dorchester and Roxbury but the state purchased land in Winthrop. After numerous appeals to relocate Winthrop to another location, Danvers was finally chosen. A logical choice of the Danvers commissioners in December 1873, he prepared for this project by researching hospitals at Worcester, MA Poughkeepsie, NY, Concord, NH, Philadelphia, Trenton, and one under construction at Morristown, NJ. On this basis, he asked for $900,000 almost half again what the commissioners had allotted in April and picked draftsman James F. Ellis to be superintending architect during its construction. The Danvers site, was chosen for its beauty, privacy, view, and farming potential. Eighteen miles north of Boston, 2 miles west of Danvers, 7 miles from the coal port at Salem, accessibility to visitors and a supply of heating fuel were also deciding factors. The "Swan's Crossing" station (later renamed Asylum Station) on the Lawrence Branch of the Eastern Railroad sat on the northern border of the tract. Under the supervision of Lynn engineer Charles Hammond, an overall site plan was drawn up, locating the main building on the crown of Hathorne Hill and providing also for a support network of roads and room for a farming operation.

Bitter controversy over the building of Danvers State Hospital centered around its configuration, ornamentation and cost. Construction began May l, 1874, eventually cost a whopping $1,464, 940. 57. Many agreed that "Danvers rank(ed) among the foremost in its facilities for convenience in practical operation, its provisions for securing that purity of atmosphere which is necessary to the perfection of hygienic conditions and in its general adaptation to the purpose for which it was intended." They explained "the plan, the style, the architect, and the thoroughness and permanence of the work already performed."

In 1877 an inquiry was held into cost overruns during which the issue of the hospital's style, dubbed "Domestic Gothic" by Bradlee, inevitably surfaced. The Commissioners defended their plans which when exhibited at the International Exhibition in Philadelphia, received the only award made to this country for plans for an insane hospital. Others lined up behind Senator Sanborn who, calling it the "Hospital Palace at Danvers", argued that "even many a royal palace is neither so large nor so pretentious architecturally as the hospital at Danvers." (Sanborn, E.F.; The Hospital Palace at Danvers ; 1877). Pliny Earle, then Superintendent at the State Lunatic Asylum in Northampton "decried the trend to excessive ornamentation in hospital architecture, preferring comfortable interiors to 'gorgeous exteriors', suggesting that domes, towers, and turrets are very appropriately situated 'at universities like Harvard and Yale but are scarcely appropriate' when they stand as monuments over the misfortune and the miseries of men. "(Lucy Sanborn, The towers and turrets were in fact necessary to the building's ventilating system, not merely stylistic features.)

The investigating committee concluded that several errors in judgment had been made. While the hospital commissioners were “superseded” early as a reprimand, a $150,000 appropriation was awarded to allow the completion of construction. The first patient was admitted May 13, 1878. Provision of pure water, an important component in 19th century mental health therapy, was also the subject of argument during the construction and early years of the hospital. The nearby Ipswich River was explored early as a source. Ultimately, the town of Danvers, which had in 1874 established its own water supply from Middleton Pond at Wills' Hill, indicated its willingness to service the hospital's needs as well. In 1876, an agreement was struck whereby the town would build its own intermediate reservoir on the grounds to supply a gravity feed system via a series of ten 5000 gallon tanks in the attic.

The towns' inability to cope with a rapidly rising and undigested anti-social population was not the only impetus behind state involvement in mental health. Another important component was the move away from "demonology" toward moral treatment of the insane, a cause which was loudly and publicly championed by such social reformers as Boston's Dorothea Lynde Dix. Her energetic career (1841-1887) had significant local as well as national and international impact.

Ok, so what the fuck is “demonolgy”? Demonology, as some of you dark sumbitches may know, is the study of demons or beliefs about demons. They may be nonhuman, separable souls, or discarnate spirits which have never inhabited a body. Once smarty pants doctors and psychologists realized that people were mentally ill and stopped pointing their fingers at them for being “possessed by the goddamn devil!”, science slowly moved in and people started to receive the help they needed.

At mid-century, the humanistic approach toward care of the insane was generally accepted, about time, dummies...yet controversy still surrounded the form or building arrangement such institutions should assume. Some, heavily represented on the State Board of Charities, favored the dispersion of the dependent as opposed to their congregation. The other faction in the controversy, which found many supporters in the Association of Medical' Superintendents, favored a large, highly centralized complex. Chief proponent of the centralized plan was Thomas S. Kirkbride, M.D., L.L.D. (1809-1883), a founder of the American Psychiatric Association, physician to the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane, and friend of Dorothea Lynde Dix. Sorry about your name, Dorothea.

Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride, who is a legitimate badass and who served the Pennsylvania Hospital as the superintendent from 1841-1883 created a humane and compassionate environment for his patients, and believed that beautiful settings restored patients to a more natural "balance of the senses". Dr. Kirkbride's progressive therapies and innovative writings on hospital design along with management became known as the (DUN DUN DUN) Kirkbride Plan, which influenced, in one form or another, almost every American state hospital by the turn of the century including Danvers.

Kirkbride the badass devised a specific institutional model, thereafter known as the (DUN DUN DUN) Kirkbride Plan, which was built upon in all thirty states then in existence and in several European cities. H.H. Richardson, the prominent American architect. for example, built a variation of the Kirkbride Plan hospital in Buffalo, NY in the early 1870s in cooperation with Frederick Law Olmsted. The Kirkbride Plan provided that mental hospitals should:

be built “in the country” though accessible at all seasons
be set on grounds of at least 100 acres
house a maximum of 250 patients
be built of stone or brick with slate or metal roof and otherwise made as fireproof as possible
be composed of 8 wards, separated according to sex, and built according to other specifications as to size, location, and material of accommodations
be organized with wings flanking a central administration building
house the most "excited" patients in the end or outermost wings
provide an abundance of "pure fresh air"

Kirkbride's hospitals were intended as monuments to the belief that most insane are curable and thus that the function of the hospital is primarily curative and not custodial. That curative process was to be greatly enhanced by pleasant surroundings, fresh air, and pure water. Fully developed Massachusetts' examples of the Kirkbride Plan exist at Danvers and at Worcester

By the turn of the 20th century, Danvers State Hospital had outgrown its site and facilities. Therefore, in 1902 an additional 100 acres straddling the towns of Danvers and Middleton, was purchased and a major building campaign was undertaken. Twentieth century additions to the hospital reflect not only growth of the patient population, but also an increased emphasis on occupational therapy and current theories of decentralized care. Large barns (demolished) were built as were new buildings for the men who helped out the farming venture. Grove Hall and Farm Hall and for women chronic patients (Middleton Colony 1903). In fact, after the very first year of its operation, once the layout was decided, roads, fences, piggery, corn barn, wagon shed, manure cellar, and apple orchard were in place. After only the second, 50 cords of wood and 10,386 lbs. of fresh pork were realized. The farm continued to grow and prosper and soon became a famous model. The Danvers onion, locally derived by the Gregory Seed Co., was among the many vegetables grown. Elaborate pleasure gardens were established adjacent to the Kirkbride complex to supplement recreational therapy programs. In fact, the Danvers State Hospital was so remarkable that it attracted 12,000 yearly visitors as early as 1880. In addition to visiting patients, they brought contributions of books, magazines, and flowers and conducted religious services. Thus, was established a pattern of community involvement for which the hospital would later become noted.

As originally established, the Danvers hospital was to be run by a resident Superintendent appointed by an unpaid lay Board of Trustees, chosen by the Governor. Central authority lay with the Board of State Charities (after 1879-The State Board of Health, Lunacy and Charity). In 1898 the leadership role of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts radically advanced with the information of the State Board of Insanity, the first in the United States. Landmark legislation:

took the poor out of the almshouses and put them under state control.
introduced occupational therapy and social services.
emphasized mental hygiene, and called for professional training of nurses and attendants.

Danvers State Hospital became a leader in the implementation of these progressive and humanitarian tenets, becoming one of "the most advanced institutions of the kind in the country providing all practical means possible for intelligent treatments of insanity as a disease." (Frank E. Moynaham (Publisher), Danvers, Massachusetts (Danvers: Danvers Mirror, 1899) Danvers State made extensive early use of occupational therapy. In addition to working the farm and greenhouses, patients repaired facilities (like the reservoir-1912), dug tunnels (like the one to the Nurses' Home-1913), and built small buildings (like the 1917 slaughter house built from patient-made concrete blocks). They also made shoes and participated in other crafts and Montessori kindergarten exercises. Patient crafts were sold to the public and exhibited (along with displays about the hospital's latest therapeutic techniques) at exhibitions; like the Boston Mechanics Hall Textile Show (1916) and the one at Stoneham (1919). Mental and physical hygiene at Danvers State was guided by the most advanced contemporary thinking (despite epidemics such as the great outbreak of bacillary dysentery of 1908 in which 36 died). Primary ingredients in the program were recreational therapy (gardens, etc.) fresh air supplied by an advanced ventilating system, and especially hydrotherapy. It was believed that the use of water baths to ameliorate the clogged condition of the brain would allow for the discontinuance of irritating restraints and depressing drugs and advanced pathology department supported the hygiene effort.

Danvers State Hospital established the second nursing school in Massachusetts (1889) and the second nurses' home in the state (Gray Gables-1898). It had already pioneered by being the first Massachusetts mental hospital to hire a woman doctor (1879). By the end of the 1920s, two large nurses' homes had been built on the property, one for female nurses and the other for male.

The hospital was a leader in the area of community involvement from the start. As early as 1907, the Superintendent was advocating a preventive mental health program. In 1909 the "Danvers Series" was inaugurated to share the results of research at the hospital. By 1912 there was an active community mental health program. "From such beginnings grew the Massachusetts Plan in which the state hospital is regarded as the center of mental hygiene and psychiatric activity throughout the district." About the same time the Massachusetts Plan was being popularized, 1938, the current Department of Mental Health was set up. It succeeded the Commission on Mental Diseases, which had replaced the State Board of Insanity in 1916.

By the 1920s the hospital was operating school clinics to help determine mental deficiency in children. Reports were made that various inhumane shock therapies, lobotomies, drugs, and straitjackets were being used to keep the crowded hospital under control. This sparked controversy.

Shock therapy and straight jackets became the norm. The thinking was that jolts of electricity could either alter a patient’s brain or make the patient afraid of shock therapy and scare them into submission. When they misbehaved, they were put in straight jackets and forgotten.

When shock therapy failed, the lobotomies started. In 1939, the medical community was looking for a permanent fix to the crisis facing mental health facilities. The population of the hospital swelled to 2,360. A total of 278 people died at the hospital that year.

Medical science saw lobotomies as a cure for anyone’s insanity, and as a way to stop the deaths.

Neurology experts often called Danvers State Hospital the “birthplace of the prefrontal lobotomy.”

Brought to the US and perfected by Dr. Walter Freeman, most while at Danvers. The moniker came from its widespread use, but also from the deplorable procedures refinement at the hospital.

What is a lobotomy, you may ask yourself, well… self, I’ll tell you.

LOBOTOMY (from the Greek lobos, meaning lobes of the brain, and tomos, meaning cut) is a psychosurgical procedure in which the connections the prefrontal cortex, the section of the frontal cortex that lies at the very front of the brain, in front of the premotor cortex, and underlying structures are severed, or the frontal cortical tissue is destroyed, the theory being that this leads to the uncoupling of the brain's emotional centres and the seat of intellect (in the subcortical structures and the frontal cortex, respectively).

The lobotomy was first performed on humans in the 1890s. About half a century later, it was being touted by some as a miracle cure for mental illness, and its use became widespread; during its heyday in the 1940s and '50s, the lobotomy was performed on some 40,000 patients in the United States, and on around 10,000 in Western Europe. The procedure became popular because there was no alternative, and because it was seen to alleviate several social crises: overcrowding in psychiatric institutions, and the increasing cost of caring for mentally ill patients. Um, because they were making ZOMBIES!!

Although psychosurgery has been performed since the dawn of civilization, the origins of the modern lobotomy are found in animal experiments carried out towards the end of the nineteenth century. The German physiologist Friedrich Goltz (1834-1902) performed SURGICAL removal of the neocortex in dogs, and observed the changes in behaviour that occurred as a result:

I have mentioned that dogs with a large lesion in the anterior part of the brain generally show a change in character in the sense that they become excited and quite apt to become irate. Dogs with large lesions of the occipital lobe on the other hand become sweet and harmless, even when they were quite nasty before.

Poor dogs...These findings inspired the physician Gottlieb Burkhardt (1836- ?), the director of a small asylum in Prefargier, Switzerland, to use these removals of the cortex to try and cure his mentally ill patients. In 1890, Burkhardt removed parts of the frontal cortex from 6 of his schizophrenic patients. One of these patients later committed suicide, and another died within one week of his surgery. Thus, although Burkhardt believed that his method had been somewhat successful, he faced strong opposition, and stopped experimenting with brain surgery. Quitter.

It was not until the 1930s that lobotomy was again performed on humans. The modern procedure was pioneered at that time by the Portugese neuropsychiatrist Antonio Egas Moniz, a professor at the University of Lisbon Medical School. While attending a frontal lobe symposium in London, Moniz learned of the work of Carlyle Jacobsen and John Fulton, both of whom were experimental neurologists at Yale University.

Jacobsen and Fulton reported that frontal and prefrontal cortical damage in chimpanzees led to a massive reduction in aggression, while complete removal of the frontal cortex led to the inability to induce experimental neuroses in the chimps. Here, they describe the post-operational behaviour of a chimp named "Becky", who had previously got extremely distressed after making mistakes during the task she had learnt:

The chimpanzee...went to the experimental cage. The usual procedure of baiting the cup and lowering the opaque screen was followed...If the animal made a mistake, it showed no evidence of emotional disturbance but quietly awaited the loading of the cups for the next trial. It was as if the animal had joined the "happiness cult of the Elder Micheaux," and had placed its burdens on the Lord!

On hearing the presentation by Jacobsen and Fulton, Moniz asked if the surgical procedure would be beneficial for people with otherwise untreatable psychoses. Although the Yale researchers were shocked by the question, Moniz, together with his colleague Almeida Lima, operated on his first patient some three months later.

On November, 12th, 1935, Moniz and Lima performed for the first time what they called a prefrontal leucotomy ("white matter cutting"). The operation was carried out on a female manic depressive patient, and lasted about 30 minutes. The patient was first anaesthetized, and her skull was perforated on both sides (that is, holes were drilled through the bone). Then, absolute alcohol was injected through the holes in the skull, into the white matter beneath the prefrontal area. Jebus christmas!

In this way, two of the bundles of nerve fibres connecting the frontal cortex and the thalamus were severed. (The thalamus is either of two masses of gray matter lying between the cerebral hemispheres of the brain on either side of the third ventricle, relaying sensory information and acting as a center for pain perception.) Moniz reported that the patient seemed less anxious and paranoid afterwards, and pronounced the operation a success. Subsequently, he and Lima used a knife, which, when inserted through the holes in the skull and moved back and forth within the brain substance would sever the thalamo-cortical connections. What the fuck!!!! They later developed a special wire knife called a leucotome, (that sounds better, doesn’t it?) which had an open steel loop at its end; when closed, the loop severed the nerve tracts within it. You know who else used an object like that? Yep! Egyptians who turned people into mummies.

These procedures were "blind" - the exact path of the leucotome could not be determined, so the operations produced mixed results. Ya think?! In some cases, there were improvements in behaviour; in others, there was no noticeable difference; and in yet others, the symptoms being treated became markedly worse! In all, Moniz and Lima operated on approximately 50 patients. FIFTY! The best results were obtained in patients with mood disorders, while the treatment was least effective in schizophrenics.

In 1936, Moniz published his findings in medical journals, and travelled to London, where he presented his work to others in the medical community. In 1949, he was shot four times by one of his patients (on a positive note, it wasn’t one who had been lobotomized… SHOCKER!); one of the bullets entered his spine and remained lodged there until his death some years later. In the same year as the shooting, Moniz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine, for his innovations in neurosurgery AND SCRAMBLING PEOPLES BRAIN EGGS!

So, what in the shit does this have to do with Danvers Lunatic asylum? Well...

The American clinical neurologist Walter Freeman (1895-1972) had been following the work of Moniz closely, and had also attended the symposium on the frontal lobe. It was Freeman who introduced the lobotomy to the United States, and who would later become the biggest advocate of the technique. With neurosurgeon James Watts, Freeman refined the technique developed by Moniz. They changed the name of the technique to "lobotomy", to emphasize that it was white and grey matter that was being destroyed.

The Freeman-Watts Standard Procedure was used for the first time in September 1936. Also known as "the precision method", this involved inserting a blunt spatula through holes in both sides of the skull; the instrument was moved up and down to sever the thalamo-cortical fibers (above). However, Freeman was unhappy with the new procedure. He considered it to be both time-consuming and messy, and so developed a quicker method, the so-called "ice-pick"lobotomy, Did you get that? ICE… PICK…! which he performed for the first time on January 17th, 1945.

With the patient rendered unconscious by electroshock, an instrument was inserted above the eyeball, mmmhmmm... through the orbit using a hammer. (Calm down, Thor) Once inside the brain, the instrument was moved back and forth; this was then repeated on the other side. (The ice-pick lobotomy, named as such because the instrument used resembled the tool with which ice is broken, is therefore also known as the transorbital lobotomy.

Freeman's new technique could be performed in about 10 minutes. Because it did not require anaesthesia, it could be performed outside of the clinical setting, and lobotomized patients did not need hospital internment afterwards. Thus, Freeman often performed lobotomies in his Washington D.C. office, much to the horror of Watts, who would later dissociate himself from his former colleague and the procedure, because fuck that guy!

Freeman happily performed ice-pick lobotomies on anyone who was referred to him. During his career, he would perform almost 3,500 operations. Like the leucotomies performed by Moniz and Lima, those performed by Freeman were blind, and also gave mixed results. Some of his patients could return to work, while others were left in something like a vegetative state.

Most famously, Freeman lobotomized President John F. Kennedy's sister Rosemary, who’s lobotomy was scheduled BY HER FATHER and without her mother knowing, because she was mentally impaired!! She was incapacitated by the operation, which was performed on her when she was only 23 years of age. Rosemary spent the next six decades hidden from the public in a Wisconsin Catholic institution, where she was cared for by nuns. She died there in 2005 at age 86. Her father never visited her again, and her siblings rarely spoke of her. WHAT THE FUCK, KENNEDYS!?!

Also, on December 16th, 1960, Freeman notoriously performed an ice-pick lobotomy on a 12-year-old boy named Howard Dully, at the behest of Dully's wicked fucking stepmother, who had grown tired of his defiant behaviour. Howard went on to say

“My stepmother hated me. I never understood why, but it was clear she'd do anything to get rid of me...If you saw me you'd never know I'd had a lobotomy.

The only thing you'd notice is that I'm very tall and weigh about 350 pounds. But I've always felt different - wondered if something's missing from my soul. I have no memory of the operation, and never had the courage to ask my family about it.

So [recently] I set out on a journey to learn everything I could about my lobotomy...It took me years to get my life together. Through it all I've been haunted by questions: 'Did I do something to deserve this?, Can I ever be normal?', and, most of all, 'Why did my dad let this happen?'”

Dully's mother had died when he was 5 years old, and his father subsequently remarried a woman named Lou. Freeman's notes later revealed that Lou Dully feared her stepson, and described him as "defiant and savage-looking". According to the notes:

He doesn't react to either love or punishment. He objects to going to bed but then sleeps well. He does a good deal of daydreaming and when asked about it says 'I don't know.' He turns the room's lights on when there is broad daylight outside.

Freeman recorded the events leading up to Dully's lobotomy:

[Nov. 30, 1960] Mrs. Dully came in for a talk about Howard. Things have gotten much worse and she can barely endure it. I explained to Mrs. Dully that the family should consider the possibility of changing Howard's personality by means of transorbital lobotomy. Mrs. Dully said it was up to her husband, that I would have to talk with him and make it stick.

[Dec. 3, 1960] Mr. and Mrs. Dully have apparently decided to have Howard operated on. I suggested [they] not tell Howard anything about it.

Following the operation, the notebook reads:

I told Howard what I'd done to him...and he took it without a quiver. He sits quietly, grinning most of the time and offering nothing.

About 40 years after his lobotomy, he discussed the operation with his father for the first time. He discovered that it was his stepmother who had found Dr. Freeman, after being told by other doctors that there was nothing wrong, and that his father had been manipulated by this evil cunt and Freeman into allowing the operation to be performed. Sorry about the C word, but...what would you call her? The poor kid probably had HDD or something far less problematic than the need for a FUCKING LOBOTOMY!

It was largely because of Freeman that the lobotomy became so popular during the 1940s and '50s. He travelled across the U. S., teaching his technique to groups of psychiatrists who were not qualified to perform surgery. Freeman was very much a showman; he often deliberately tried to shock observers by performing two-handed lobotomies, or by performing the operation in a production line manner. (He once lobotomized 25 women in a single day.) Journalists were often present on his "tours'' of hospitals, so that his appearance would end up on the front page of the local newspaper; he was also featured in highly popular publications such as Time and Life. Often, these news stories exaggerated the success of lobotomy in alleviating the symptoms of mental illness.

Consequently, the use of lobotomies became widespread. As well as being used to treat the criminally insane, lobotomies were also used to "cure" political dissidents. It was alleged that the procedure was used routinely on prisoners against their will, and the use of lobotomies was strongly criticised on the grounds that it infringed the civil liberties of the patients.

An excellent account of the effects of lobotomy, and of the ethical implications of the use of the procedure, can be found in Ken Kesey's book One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. (This was made into a film in 1975, by Milos Forman, who received the Academy Award for Best Director. Jack Nicholson won the award for Best Actor in a Lead Role.)

The use of lobotomies began to decline in the mid- to late-1950s, for several reasons. Firstly, although there had always been critics of the technique, opposition to its use became very fierce. Secondly, and most importantly, phenothiazine-based neuroleptic (anti-psychotic) drugs, such as chlorpromazine, became widely available. These had much the same effect as psychosurgery gone wrong; thus, the surgical method was quickly superseded by the chemical lobotomy.

Visitors to Danvers State Hospital in the early 1940s reported lobotomy patients wandering aimlessly through the halls of the hospital. The patients didn’t complain, because many of them just stared blankly at walls. Patients walked around in a drugged, hellish daze. No one would let them leave and held them against their will.

During the 1960s as a result of increased emphasis on alternative methods of treatment, deinstitutionalization, and community-based mental health care, the inpatient population started to decrease.

Massive budget cuts in the 1960s played a major role in the progressive closing of Danvers State hospital. The hospital began closing wards and facilities as early as 1969. By 1985, the majority of the original hospital wards were closed or abandoned. The Administration Block, in the original Kirkbride, building closed in 1989. Patients were moved to the Bonner Medical Building across the campus.

The great shift in mental health treatment came with the invention of psychopharmaceuticals, the early “hypnotics.” Though drugs like chloral hydrate, morphine, and opium had been in use for much of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the advent of modern antipsychotics such as chlorpromazine (Thorazine) “revolutionized” the care of the “mentally ill.”

With the help of this new breed of drug, hospitals were able to admit and manage a greater number of patients. The population at Danvers peaked at nearly 3,000 in the late 1960’s and into the early 1970’s. Patients were regularly treated using not only psychotropic medications but also electroshock therapy, hydrotherapy, and psychosurgery (also known as the prefrontal lobotomy). Asylum populations began to shift dramatically and hospitals moved away from the centralized model, choosing instead to unitize, working with the various regions to provide as much community support as possible.

Eventually reports began to surface of abuse and neglect within the hospital’s walls. Suspicious deaths, patient escapes, and violent assaults were all recorded. By the late 1980’s the hospital’s main operations were moved from the Kirkbride to the more modern Bonner Building across the way. By the time the remaining hospital buildings were closed down for good in 1992, the buildings had begun to decay and by and large the public was happy that the state hospital was no more. The doors to Bradlee’s architectural masterpiece were locked and the Castle on the Hill was abandoned. The remaining and lasting impression of Danvers State Hospital was that it was a snake pit where the mentally ill went to languish and often die.

The entire campus was closed on June 24, 1992 and all patients were either transferred to the community or to other facilities

In December 2005, the property was sold to AvalonBay Communities, a residential apartment developer. A lawsuit was filed by a local preservation fund to stave off the demolition of the hospital, including the Kirkbride building, which was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. This did not stop the process, however, and demolition of most of the buildings began in January 2006, with the intent to build 497 apartments on the 77-acre (310,000 m2) site.

By June 2006, all of the Danvers State Hospital buildings that were marked for demolition had been torn down, including all of the unused buildings and old homes on the lower grounds and all of the buildings on the hill. Demolition was done by Testa Corp. of Wakefield, Massachusetts. The historic Kirkbride was also demolished, with only the outermost brick shell of the administration area (along with the G and D wards on each side) being propped up during demolition and construction while an entirely new structure was built behind and inside of it, leaving the historic Danvers Reservoir and the original brick shell. Much of the wood from the demolition project was salvaged and recycled into flooring and other millwork.

A replica of the original tower/steeple on the Kirkbride was built to duplicate what was removed around 1970, due to structural issues. (The first picture illustrates the original tower in 1893, the second and third pictures illustrate the new replica in 2006 and 2007, and the fourth picture illustrates the one from 1970.) Avalon Bay predicted that they would have properties available for rent or sale by Fall 2007.

On April 7, 2007, four of the apartment complex buildings and four of Avalon Bay's construction trailers burned down in a large fire visible from Boston, nearly 17 mi (27 km) away. Damage was confined mostly to the buildings under construction on the eastern end, but the remaining Kirkbride spires caught fire due to the high heat.

The tunnel leading up from the power plant still exists, but is blocked at the top of the hill. Only the exterior of the Kirkbride complex was preserved in the demolition, and the cemeteries, several blocked tunnels, and the brick shell of the administration and the D and G wings are all that remain from the original site. Richard Trask of the Danvers Archival Center wrote, concerning the state's failure to preserve the Kirkbride complex, noting:

“The failure to protect and adaptively reuse this grand exterior is a monumental blot in the annals of Massachusetts preservation. What might have been a dignified transformation of a magnificent structure which was originally built to serve the best intentions, but at times lost its way through human frailty, now is a mere ghost-image of itself.”

On June 27, 2014, Avalon Bay Communities, Inc,. sold the property for $108.5 M to the DSF Group. The DSF Group released plans for the property to undergo further renovations.

The only remnants of the horrific practices that went on in Danvers State Hospital are the gravestones in two nearby cemeteries, which contain 770 bodies. Some headstones only have numbers as opposed to names. Even in death, administrators at Danvers State Hospital did not dignify their patients. There is a monument listing the patients’ names, but nothing on the grave markers.

Many ghost hunters snuck into the property before it’s demolition. Very few of them captured any sort of evidence. In most cases, they caught phantom footsteps and a few shadows.

There’s only been one eyewitness report to surface over the years. Jeralyn Levasseur stated she saw a ghost when she lived there as a child. The ghost pulled the sheets off her bed and it manifested as an older, scowling woman. Levasseur said she never felt threatened by the ghost. She also confirmed it only appeared one time.

While the number of documented paranormal experiences may be low, there’s a great deal of potential ghostly activity at the hospital. From 1920-1945, the hospital and its staff committed horrible acts, including those horrendous lobotomies, systemic neglect and restraining children for days at time. Supposedly, this negative energy left a massive psychic imprint in the dark and decaying halls of Danvers.

You may not see a ghost, but you can feel the patients’ pain from years ago. Some paranormal experts believe this may help create a personalized haunting. This means you may not see a patient’s ghost, but the building could manifest your inner fears, doubts and agony.

Ok, listen… The following is A horrible account from a Danvers employee… this is pretty fuckin’ rough so if you don’t want to listen to it, I completely understand. It’s about the unfortunate death of a child. Skip ahead about 30 seconds if you need to.

“Back when they started dual diagnosis, they transferred this 15-year-old boy from Hogan to DSH. This boy had a habit of crawling into heat ducts. The heat ducts don't go anywhere at Hogan, it's a newer building and you can't get hurt. Anyway, they sent him up and he was up there for about 3 weeks and he disappeared. We searched everywhere for him. We looked all over and we couldn't find him. The staff over at J ward started to notice a horrible smell getting worse and worse every day. Anyway, to make a long story short, he got inside the duct work in J Annex. The duct work in DSH goes right down to heating coils. He slid down, couldn't get up, got trapped and died. His feet landed right on the coils and literally burnt off up to his shins. I was there and had to go over there and help cut him out of the wall. There must have been 25 people in that room that day. The Medical Examiner, clinicians you name it. I cut the wall and Butch (The Tinsmith) was there to cut the tin duct work. When we cut through it all and opened it up the kid was right there and looked almost frozen. The pathologist reached in to take him out and his hands sunk into his chest like Jello. The smell was disgusting. It was a nasty stench and we all got sick. His death brought on a major, major state investigation. His parents were mad as hell and rightfully so. We had big wigs from Boston and the State Police lab up there for weeks. It was just a horrible experience. I've seen a lot in my 24 years and that was by far the worst.”

Top Horror movies set in asylums/ mental hospitals

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