Dickens, Seances, and Why Ghosts Still Wear Victorian Clothes

Nobody in the Victorian era who claimed to see a ghost described lace and corsets – that look came from the magazine trade that discovered ghost stories were cheap to print and easy to cut to length.

EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/VictorianGhosts

READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4p69wekw

FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Victorian-era ghosts… they seem to haunt not only our imaginations, but also our Halloween wardrobes. Why were people in the mid-to-late 1800s so obsessed with the supernatural? And why are we so fascinated by Victorian ghost stories still today? (What’s The Deal With Victorian Ghosts?) *** The story of Queen Esther is chilling – full of an Iroquois warrior woman’s quest for vengeance, brutal warfare, haunting legends, ghostly wails, and a curse that many believe still has power even today. (The Curse of Queen Esther) *** No one can remember exactly when the ghost story began, but records show it dates back to at least 1926. The tale centers around the Administration Offices of Rockford School District 205 on South Madison Street, formerly Rockford High School. Built in 1885, the school gained a spooky reputation due to eerie events reported in its underground tunnels. After a tragic accident in the school’s swimming pool claimed the life of a student named Gosta Anderson, strange sightings and sounds fueled the legend of his restless spirit, haunting the very site where he died. (Gosta’s Ghost) *** Plumas County, California, holds a chilling mystery that dates back to 1978. On a winter night with a half-moon, five friends left a basketball game at California State University, Chico, and drove away, never to be seen again. Their car was found abandoned on a remote mountain road, leading to a series of eerie discoveries, unanswered questions, and clues that still baffle investigators today. (The 5 Boys Who Never Came Back)

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00.00.000 = Short fiction story “Lost Hearts” by M.R. James
00:24:29.734 = Show Open
00:27:12.649 = What’s The Deal With Victorian Ghosts?
00:36:13.257 = The Curse of Queen Esther ***
00:46:07.677 = The Five Boys Who Never Came Back
01:06:21.586 = Gosta’s Ghost
01:12:56.658 = Show Close
*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad break

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*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*

SOURCES and RESOURCES:
Free Audiobook: “A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens, narrated by Darren Marlar:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/AChristmasCarol
Narration: “The Signalman” by Charles Dickens, narrated by Darren Marlar: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/TheSignalman
“What’s The Deal With Victorian Ghosts?” source = Dan Nosowitz at Atlas Obscura: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p94894t
“Lost Hearts” by M.R. James (public domain)
“The Curse of Queen Esther” source = Creative History Stories: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/3bn9kwe8
“Gosta’s Ghost” written by Kat

THE FOREBODING===== We begin this episode in a slightly different way… although it is a non-fiction episode with all of the stories being true, I am going to start with a fictional story by M.R. James entitled “Lost Hearts”. You’ll understand why as we get through the episode… === It was, as far as I can ascertain, in September of the year 1811 that a post-chaise drew up before the door of Aswarby Hall, in the heart of Lincolnshire. The little boy who was the only passenger in the chaise, and who jumped out as soon as it had stopped, looked about him with the keenest curiosity during the short interval that elapsed between the ringing of the bell and the opening of the hall door. He saw a tall, square, red-brick house, built in the reign of Anne; a stone-pillared porch had been added in the purer classical style of 1790; the windows of the house were many, tall and narrow, with small panes and thick white woodwork. A pediment, pierced with a round window, crowned the front. There were wings to right and left, connected by curious glazed galleries, supported by colonnades, with the central block. These wings plainly contained the stables and offices of the house. Each was surmounted by an ornamental cupola with a gilded vane. An evening light shone on the building, making the window-panes glow like so many fires. Away from the Hall in front stretched a flat park studded with oaks and fringed with firs, which stood out against the sky. The clock in the church-tower, buried in trees on the edge of the park, only its golden weather-cock catching the light, was striking six, and the sound came gently beating down the wind. It was altogether a pleasant impression, though tinged with the sort of melancholy appropriate to an evening in early autumn, that was conveyed to the mind of the boy who was standing in the porch waiting for the door to open to him. The post-chaise had brought him from Warwickshire, where, some six months before, he had been left an orphan. Now, owing to the generous offer of his elderly cousin, Mr Abney, he had come to live at Aswarby. The offer was unexpected, because all who knew anything of Mr Abney looked upon him as a somewhat austere recluse, into whose steady-going household the advent of a small boy would import a new and, it seemed, incongruous element. The truth is that very little was known of Mr Abney’s pursuits or temper. The Professor of Greek at Cambridge had been heard to say that no one knew more of the religious beliefs of the later pagans than did the owner of Aswarby. Certainly his library contained all the then available books bearing on the Mysteries, the Orphic poems, the worship of Mithras, and the Neo–Platonists. In the marble-paved hall stood a fine group of Mithras slaying a bull, which had been imported from the Levant at great expense by the owner. He had contributed a description of it to the Gentleman’s Magazine , and he had written a remarkable series of articles in the Critical Museum on the superstitions of the Romans of the Lower Empire. He was looked upon, in fine, as a man wrapped up in his books, and it was a matter of great surprise among his neighbours that he should ever have heard of his orphan cousin, Stephen Elliott, much more that he should have volunteered to make him an inmate of Aswarby Hall. Whatever may have been expected by his neighbours, it is certain that Mr Abney — the tall, the thin, the austere — seemed inclined to give his young cousin a kindly reception. The moment the front-door was opened he darted out of his study, rubbing his hands with delight. ‘How are you, my boy?— how are you? How old are you?’ said he —‘that is, you are not too much tired, I hope, by your journey to eat your supper?’ ‘No, thank you, sir,’ said Master Elliott; ‘I am pretty well.’ ‘That’s a good lad,’ said Mr Abney. ‘And how old are you, my boy?’ It seemed a little odd that he should have asked the question twice in the first two minutes of their acquaintance. ‘I’m twelve years old next birthday, sir,’ said Stephen. ‘And when is your birthday, my dear boy? Eleventh of September, eh? That’s well — that’s very well. Nearly a year hence, isn’t it? I like — ha, ha!— I like to get these things down in my book. Sure it’s twelve? Certain?’ ‘Yes, quite sure, sir.’ ‘Well, well! Take him to Mrs Bunch’s room, Parkes, and let him have his tea — supper — whatever it is.’ ‘Yes, sir,’ answered the staid Mr Parkes; and conducted Stephen to the lower regions. Mrs Bunch was the most comfortable and human person whom Stephen had as yet met at Aswarby. She made him completely at home; they were great friends in a quarter of an hour: and great friends they remained. Mrs Bunch had been born in the neighbourhood some fifty-five years before the date of Stephen’s arrival, and her residence at the Hall was of twenty years’ standing. Consequently, if anyone knew the ins and outs of the house and the district, Mrs Bunch knew them; and she was by no means disinclined to communicate her information. Certainly there were plenty of things about the Hall and the Hall gardens which Stephen, who was of an adventurous and inquiring turn, was anxious to have explained to him. ‘Who built the temple at the end of the laurel walk? Who was the old man whose picture hung on the staircase, sitting at a table, with a skull under his hand?’ These and many similar points were cleared up by the resources of Mrs Bunch’s powerful intellect. There were others, however, of which the explanations furnished were less satisfactory. One November evening Stephen was sitting by the fire in the housekeeper’s room reflecting on his surroundings. ‘Is Mr Abney a good man, and will he go to heaven?’ he suddenly asked, with the peculiar confidence which children possess in the ability of their elders to settle these questions, the decision of which is believed to be reserved for other tribunals. ‘Good?— bless the child!’ said Mrs Bunch. ‘Master’s as kind a soul as ever I see! Didn’t I never tell you of the little boy as he took in out of the street, as you may say, this seven years back? and the little girl, two years after I first come here?’ ‘No. Do tell me all about them, Mrs Bunch — now, this minute!’ ‘Well,’ said Mrs Bunch, ‘the little girl I don’t seem to recollect so much about. I know master brought her back with him from his walk one day, and give orders to Mrs Ellis, as was housekeeper then, as she should be took every care with. And the pore child hadn’t no one belonging to her — she telled me so her own self — and here she lived with us a matter of three weeks it might be; and then, whether she were somethink of a gipsy in her blood or what not, but one morning she out of her bed afore any of us had opened a eye, and neither track nor yet trace of her have I set eyes on since. Master was wonderful put about, and had all the ponds dragged; but it’s my belief she was had away by them gipsies, for there was singing round the house for as much as an hour the night she went, and Parkes, he declare as he heard them a-calling in the woods all that afternoon. Dear, dear! a hodd child she was, so silent in her ways and all, but I was wonderful taken up with her, so domesticated she was — surprising.’ ‘And what about the little boy?’ said Stephen. ‘Ah, that pore boy!’ sighed Mrs Bunch. ‘He were a foreigner — Jevanny he called hisself — and he come a-tweaking his ‘urdy-gurdy round and about the drive one winter day, and master ‘ad him in that minute, and ast all about where he came from, and how old he was, and how he made his way, and where was his relatives, and all as kind as heart could wish. But it went the same way with him. They’re a hunruly lot, them foreign nations, I do suppose, and he was off one fine morning just the same as the girl. Why he went and what he done was our question for as much as a year after; for he never took his ‘urdy-gurdy, and there it lays on the shelf.’ The remainder of the evening was spent by Stephen in miscellaneous cross-examination of Mrs Bunch and in efforts to extract a tune from the hurdy-gurdy. That night he had a curious dream. At the end of the passage at the top of the house, in which his bedroom was situated, there was an old disused bathroom. It was kept locked, but the upper half of the door was glazed, and, since the muslin curtains which used to hang there had long been gone, you could look in and see the lead-lined bath affixed to the wall on the right hand, with its head towards the window. On the night of which I am speaking, Stephen Elliott found himself, as he thought, looking through the glazed door. The moon was shining through the window, and he was gazing at a figure which lay in the bath. His description of what he saw reminds me of what I once beheld myself in the famous vaults of St Michan’s Church in Dublin, which possesses the horrid property of preserving corpses from decay for centuries. A figure inexpressibly thin and pathetic, of a dusty leaden colour, enveloped in a shroud-like garment, the thin lips crooked into a faint and dreadful smile, the hands pressed tightly over the region of the heart. As he looked upon it, a distant, almost inaudible moan seemed to issue from its lips, and the arms began to stir. The terror of the sight forced Stephen backwards and he awoke to the fact that he was indeed standing on the cold boarded floor of the passage in the full light of the moon. With a courage which I do not think can be common among boys of his age, he went to the door of the bathroom to ascertain if the figure of his dreams were really there. It was not, and he went back to bed. Mrs Bunch was much impressed next morning by his story, and went so far as to replace the muslin curtain over the glazed door of the bathroom. Mr Abney, moreover, to whom he confided his experiences at breakfast, was greatly interested and made notes of the matter in what he called ‘his book’. The spring equinox was approaching, as Mr Abney frequently reminded his cousin, adding that this had been always considered by the ancients to be a critical time for the young: that Stephen would do well to take care of himself, and to shut his bedroom window at night; and that Censorinus had some valuable remarks on the subject. Two incidents that occurred about this time made an impression upon Stephen’s mind. The first was after an unusually uneasy and oppressed night that he had passed — though he could not recall any particular dream that he had had. The following evening Mrs Bunch was occupying herself in mending his nightgown. ‘Gracious me, Master Stephen!’ she broke forth rather irritably, ‘how do you manage to tear your nightdress all to flinders this way? Look here, sir, what trouble you do give to poor servants that have to darn and mend after you!’ There was indeed a most destructive and apparently wanton series of slits or scorings in the garment, which would undoubtedly require a skilful needle to make good. They were confined to the left side of the chest — long, parallel slits about six inches in length, some of them not quite piercing the texture of the linen. Stephen could only express his entire ignorance of their origin: he was sure they were not there the night before. ‘But,’ he said, ‘Mrs Bunch, they are just the same as the scratches on the outside of my bedroom door: and I’m sure I never had anything to do with making them .’ Mrs Bunch gazed at him open-mouthed, then snatched up a candle, departed hastily from the room, and was heard making her way upstairs. In a few minutes she came down. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘Master Stephen, it’s a funny thing to me how them marks and scratches can ‘a’ come there — too high up for any cat or dog to ‘ave made ’em, much less a rat: for all the world like a Chinaman’s finger-nails, as my uncle in the tea-trade used to tell us of when we was girls together. I wouldn’t say nothing to master, not if I was you, Master Stephen, my dear; and just turn the key of the door when you go to your bed.’ ‘I always do, Mrs Bunch, as soon as I’ve said my prayers.’ ‘Ah, that’s a good child: always say your prayers, and then no one can’t hurt you.’ Herewith Mrs Bunch addressed herself to mending the injured nightgown, with intervals of meditation, until bed-time. This was on a Friday night in March, 1812. On the following evening the usual duet of Stephen and Mrs Bunch was augmented by the sudden arrival of Mr Parkes, the butler, who as a rule kept himself rather to himself in his own pantry. He did not see that Stephen was there: he was, moreover, flustered and less slow of speech than was his wont. ‘Master may get up his own wine, if he likes, of an evening,’ was his first remark. ‘Either I do it in the daytime or not at all, Mrs Bunch. I don’t know what it may be: very like it’s the rats, or the wind got into the cellars; but I’m not so young as I was, and I can’t go through with it as I have done.’ ‘Well, Mr Parkes, you know it is a surprising place for the rats, is the Hall.’ ‘I’m not denying that, Mrs Bunch; and, to be sure, many a time I’ve heard the tale from the men in the shipyards about the rat that could speak. I never laid no confidence in that before; but tonight, if I’d demeaned myself to lay my ear to the door of the further bin, I could pretty much have heard what they was saying.’ ‘Oh, there, Mr Parkes, I’ve no patience with your fancies! Rats talking in the wine-cellar indeed!’ ‘Well, Mrs Bunch, I’ve no wish to argue with you: all I say is, if you choose to go to the far bin, and lay your ear to the door, you may prove my words this minute.’ ‘What nonsense you do talk, Mr Parkes — not fit for children to listen to! Why, you’ll be frightening Master Stephen there out of his wits.’ ‘What! Master Stephen?’ said Parkes, awaking to the consciousness of the boy’s presence. ‘Master Stephen knows well enough when I’m a-playing a joke with you, Mrs Bunch.’ In fact, Master Stephen knew much too well to suppose that Mr Parkes had in the first instance intended a joke. He was interested, not altogether pleasantly, in the situation; but all his questions were unsuccessful in inducing the butler to give any more detailed account of his experiences in the wine-cellar. * * * * * We have now arrived at March 24, 1812. It was a day of curious experiences for Stephen: a windy, noisy day, which filled the house and the gardens with a restless impression. As Stephen stood by the fence of the grounds, and looked out into the park, he felt as if an endless procession of unseen people were sweeping past him on the wind, borne on resistlessly and aimlessly, vainly striving to stop themselves, to catch at something that might arrest their flight and bring them once again into contact with the living world of which they had formed a part. After luncheon that day Mr Abney said: ‘Stephen, my boy, do you think you could manage to come to me tonight as late as eleven o’clock in my study? I shall be busy until that time, and I wish to show you something connected with your future life which it is most important that you should know. You are not to mention this matter to Mrs Bunch nor to anyone else in the house; and you had better go to your room at the usual time.’ Here was a new excitement added to life: Stephen eagerly grasped at the opportunity of sitting up till eleven o’clock. He looked in at the library door on his way upstairs that evening, and saw a brazier, which he had often noticed in the corner of the room, moved out before the fire; an old silver-gilt cup stood on the table, filled with red wine, and some written sheets of paper lay near it. Mr Abney was sprinkling some incense on the brazier from a round silver box as Stephen passed, but did not seem to notice his step. The wind had fallen, and there was a still night and a full moon. At about ten o’clock Stephen was standing at the open window of his bedroom, looking out over the country. Still as the night was, the mysterious population of the distant moon-lit woods was not yet lulled to rest. From time to time strange cries as of lost and despairing wanderers sounded from across the mere. They might be the notes of owls or water-birds, yet they did not quite resemble either sound. Were not they coming nearer? Now they sounded from the nearer side of the water, and in a few moments they seemed to be floating about among the shrubberies. Then they ceased; but just as Stephen was thinking of shutting the window and resuming his reading of Robinson Crusoe , he caught sight of two figures standing on the gravelled terrace that ran along the garden side of the Hall — the figures of a boy and girl, as it seemed; they stood side by side, looking up at the windows. Something in the form of the girl recalled irresistibly his dream of the figure in the bath. The boy inspired him with more acute fear. Whilst the girl stood still, half smiling, with her hands clasped over her heart, the boy, a thin shape, with black hair and ragged clothing, raised his arms in the air with an appearance of menace and of unappeasable hunger and longing. The moon shone upon his almost transparent hands, and Stephen saw that the nails were fearfully long and that the light shone through them. As he stood with his arms thus raised, he disclosed a terrifying spectacle. On the left side of his chest there opened a black and gaping rent; and there fell upon Stephen’s brain, rather than upon his ear, the impression of one of those hungry and desolate cries that he had heard resounding over the woods of Aswarby all that evening. In another moment this dreadful pair had moved swiftly and noiselessly over the dry gravel, and he saw them no more. Inexpressibly frightened as he was, he determined to take his candle and go down to Mr Abney’s study, for the hour appointed for their meeting was near at hand. The study or library opened out of the front-hall on one side, and Stephen, urged on by his terrors, did not take long in getting there. To effect an entrance was not so easy. It was not locked, he felt sure, for the key was on the outside of the door as usual. His repeated knocks produced no answer. Mr Abney was engaged: he was speaking. What! why did he try to cry out? and why was the cry choked in his throat? Had he, too, seen the mysterious children? But now everything was quiet, and the door yielded to Stephen’s terrified and frantic pushing. * * * * * On the table in Mr Abney’s study certain papers were found which explained the situation to Stephen Elliott when he was of an age to understand them. The most important sentences were as follows: ‘It was a belief very strongly and generally held by the ancients — of whose wisdom in these matters I have had such experience as induces me to place confidence in their assertions — that by enacting certain processes, which to us moderns have something of a barbaric complexion, a very remarkable enlightenment of the spiritual faculties in man may be attained: that, for example, by absorbing the personalities of a certain number of his fellow-creatures, an individual may gain a complete ascendancy over those orders of spiritual beings which control the elemental forces of our universe. ‘It is recorded of Simon Magus that he was able to fly in the air, to become invisible, or to assume any form he pleased, by the agency of the soul of a boy whom, to use the libellous phrase employed by the author of the Clementine Recognitions , he had “murdered”. I find it set down, moreover, with considerable detail in the writings of Hermes Trismegistus, that similar happy results may be produced by the absorption of the hearts of not less than three human beings below the age of twenty-one years. To the testing of the truth of this receipt I have devoted the greater part of the last twenty years, selecting as the corpora vilia of my experiment such persons as could conveniently be removed without occasioning a sensible gap in society. The first step I effected by the removal of one Phoebe Stanley, a girl of gipsy extraction, on March 24, 1792. The second, by the removal of a wandering Italian lad, named Giovanni Paoli, on the night of March 23, 1805. The final “victim”— to employ a word repugnant in the highest degree to my feelings — must be my cousin, Stephen Elliott. His day must be this March 24, 1812. ‘The best means of effecting the required absorption is to remove the heart from the living subject, to reduce it to ashes, and to mingle them with about a pint of some red wine, preferably port. The remains of the first two subjects, at least, it will be well to conceal: a disused bathroom or wine-cellar will be found convenient for such a purpose. Some annoyance may be experienced from the psychic portion of the subjects, which popular language dignifies with the name of ghosts. But the man of philosophic temperament — to whom alone the experiment is appropriate — will be little prone to attach importance to the feeble efforts of these beings to wreak their vengeance on him. I contemplate with the liveliest satisfaction the enlarged and emancipated existence which the experiment, if successful, will confer on me; not only placing me beyond the reach of human justice (so-called), but eliminating to a great extent the prospect of death itself.’ * * * * * Mr Abney was found in his chair, his head thrown back, his face stamped with an expression of rage, fright, and mortal pain. In his left side was a terrible lacerated wound, exposing the heart. There was no blood on his hands, and a long knife that lay on the table was perfectly clean. A savage wild-cat might have inflicted the injuries. The window of the study was open, and it was the opinion of the coroner that Mr Abney had met his death by the agency of some wild creature. But Stephen Elliott’s study of the papers I have quoted led him to a very different conclusion.

SHOW OPEN===== Welcome, Weirdos – (I’m Darren Marlar and) this is Weird Darkness. Here you’ll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, the strange and bizarre, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and unexplained.

Coming up in this episode…

The story of Queen Esther is chilling – full of an Iroquois warrior woman’s quest for vengeance, brutal warfare, haunting legends, ghostly wails, and a curse that many believe still has power even today. (The Curse of Queen Esther)

No one can remember exactly when the ghost story began, but records show it dates back to at least 1926. The tale centers around the Administration Offices of Rockford School District 205 on South Madison Street, formerly Rockford High School. Built in 1885, the school gained a spooky reputation due to eerie events reported in its underground tunnels. After a tragic accident in the school’s swimming pool claimed the life of a student named Gosta Anderson, strange sightings and sounds fueled the legend of his restless spirit, haunting the very site where he died. (Gosta’s Ghost)

Plumas County, California, holds a chilling mystery that dates back to 1978. On a winter night with a half-moon, five friends left a basketball game at California State University, Chico, and drove away, never to be seen again. Their car was found abandoned on a remote mountain road, leading to a series of eerie discoveries, unanswered questions, and clues that still baffle investigators today. (The 5 Boys Who Never Came Back)

Victorian-era ghosts… they seem to haunt not only our imaginations, but also our Halloween wardrobes. Why were people in the mid-to-late 1800s so obsessed with the supernatural? And why are we so fascinated by Victorian ghost stories still today? (What’s The Deal With Victorian Ghosts?)

Now.. bolt your doors, lock your windows, turn off your lights, and come with me into the Weird Darkness!

BREAK=====

STORY: WHAT’S THE DEAL WITH VICTORIAN GHOSTS?===== When you search for ghost costumes online, you’ll find three major categories. The first is a simple white, flowing gown-type costume—think classic white bedsheet. The second is pop-culture ghosts, whether it’s the murderer from the Scream movies (which wasn’t even a ghost, but whatever), Slimer from Ghostbusters, or a bold-striped Beetlejuice suit. But the third, the Victorian Ghost, is more peculiar. It’s ornate and complex but isn’t tied to any particular horror franchise or iconic ghost. So, why does formal Victorian wear, like corsets and lace, feel so ghostly to us? The idea of a person’s spirit interacting with the living world is ancient. For example, in the Hebrew Bible, there’s a medium who claims to speak to the ghost of Samuel. However, we never actually see the ghost of Samuel saying “boo” at people. In Homer’s Odyssey, characters visit the underworld and see ghosts, but that doesn’t totally count as haunting. For a ghost to truly haunt, it must at least partly inhabit the land of the living. These underworld-dwelling ghosts are usually called “shades” rather than “ghosts.” Ghosts have featured in stories for centuries, but it wasn’t until the Victorian and Edwardian eras that the ghost story as we know it became a hit. Kira Cochrane at The Guardian offers a great overview of the era’s intense love for ghost stories, linking their popularity to technological advances. One major factor was the rise of the periodical press. Cochrane writes, “Ghost stories had traditionally been an oral form, but publishers suddenly needed a mass of content, and ghost stories fitted the bill—short, cheap, generic, repetitive, able to be cut quite easily to length.” “There were several very excellent and popular Victorian magazines, including one run by Charles Dickens,” notes Jack Sullivan, a professor of English at Rider University and the editor of The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural. While Dickens wasn’t a genre writer like his contemporaries Sheridan Le Fanu and M.R. James, his story A Christmas Carol, published just before Christmas in 1843, is perhaps the best-known Victorian-era ghost story today. Sullivan points out that A Christmas Carol was published near the beginning of the Victorian/Edwardian golden era of ghost stories. (Note: I’ve narrated the entire novel “A Christmas Carol” and you can listen to it free on the audiobooks page at WeirdDarkness.com. I’ll also place a link to it in the episode notes.) Another reason for the boom in ghost stories during this time is a bit contradictory. The Victorian era is famous for huge leaps in technological development. This is the era that pioneered trains for quick movement of goods, created the telegraph for instantaneous long-distance communication, and developed gas power for efficient lighting. London’s first sewage system was also built in the mid-1800s. The Victorian era was, quite frankly, terrifying: all of a sudden, magic seemed to become ordinary and tangible. Because so many things that seemed impossible were made very real in just a few decades, Victorians, despite being scientifically minded, had a deep love of magic and paranormal spectacles. Mediums and seances were fantastically popular, as were hypnotism shows. This isn’t an isolated phenomenon. The past decade has also seen incredible technological advancements, with high-speed internet, mobile communication devices, and Silicon Valley disrupting every aspect of our lives. In the future, people might look back on our era similarly to how we view the Victorians: as people struggling to keep up with rapid technological change. And just as with the Victorians, there’s been an explosion in the love of the supernatural. Sullivan explains that most ghost stories in Victorian periodicals were not accompanied by many illustrations. Surprisingly, there wasn’t a consensus on how ghosts looked or dressed. “It’s usually something that’s very ambiguous and shrouded,” he says. The Victorians liked ghost stories that were hyper-realistic rather than scenes of fantasy. These weren’t world-creation stories; they were designed to scare the reader. And what could be scarier than a realistic depiction of the world in which something totally unexplainable suddenly happens? Another simple reason for the Victorian era’s love of ghost stories is the weather. “Of course, bad weather is always good for ghosts and ghost stories,” says Sullivan. Over time, the concept of the Victorian-dressed ghost—usually women in corsets and lace, with many-layered puffy dresses, sometimes wedding-dress-like, or a male ghost in a formal coat with tails—solidified in popular culture. This is partly because the stories from the Victorian era were so good that they’ve been remade or referenced ever since. There’s been a steady undercurrent of these stories, regardless of current horror trends. For example, in the 1970s, the BBC remade Lost Hearts in 1973, the story by M.R. James from 1904 that I opened up this episode with, and The Signalman in 1976, based on a Dickens ghost story from 1866. (Note: “The Signalman” from Charles Dickens is another story I’ve narrated for the podcast – I’ll link to it in the episode notes.) The Victorian ghost story is one of those genres that became solidified very quickly, within just a few decades. Most later takes on the genre have to acknowledge it in some way. The same thing happened with film noir: it was so popular and codified during its heyday in the 1940s and early 1950s that any film noir now is often consciously and playfully dependent on tropes from that era. Think of Brick, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, or even Drive, which is more of a hardboiled film. Similarly, much of the ghost stories that followed the Victorian era referenced their storytelling forefathers by incorporating specific tropes. Clothing is an easy one: think of Nearly Headless Nick from the Harry Potter series or the many references to the Victorian era in Lev Grossman’s The Magicians series. Here’s one from the first book in that series: “Brakebills [the book’s magical school] was largely dependent on Victorian-era technology. It wasn’t an affectation, or not entirely; electronics, Quentin was told, behaved unpredictably in the presence of sorcery.” So, it’s not that ghosts always wear Victorian garb; it’s that Victorian-era ghost stories have a significant influence on any supernatural storytelling in the English-language canon that followed. Literature and film build on what came before, and that influence often shows itself in little nods—like a ghostly corset. Victorian ghost costumes might seem peculiar at first, but they have deep roots in the rich tradition of 19th-century ghost stories. The Victorians’ fascination with the supernatural, fueled by rapid technological advancements and a love for spooky tales, has left a lasting mark on how we imagine ghosts today. Whether through literature, film, or even Halloween costumes, the eerie elegance of Victorian ghosts continues to haunt our imaginations, reminding us of a time when the line between the possible and the impossible was thrillingly blurred.

BREAK===== Coming up… Plumas County, California, holds a chilling mystery that dates back to 1978. On a winter night with a half-moon, five friends left a basketball game at California State University, Chico, and drove away, never to be seen again. Their car was found abandoned on a remote mountain road, leading to a series of eerie discoveries, unanswered questions, and clues that still baffle investigators today. But first… The story of Queen Esther is chilling – full of an Iroquois warrior woman’s quest for vengeance, brutal warfare, haunting legends, ghostly wails, and a curse that many believe still has power even today. That story is up next on Weird Darkness.

STORY: THE CURSE OF QUEEN ESTHER===== A maul is a war hammer. In European history, it’s often thought of as a medieval weapon. However, well into the 18th century, many indigenous peoples of North America used stone war hammers, or mauls, to protect their homeland from white settlers and to terrorize their enemies. In the quiet suburban town of Wyoming, Pennsylvania, in Luzerne County, which sits along the banks of the Susquehanna River about five miles north of Wilkes-Barre, there is a large boulder known as “Queen Esther’s Rock,” often simply called “The Bloody Rock” by locals. In the 1960s, a monument with a plaque was erected on this site by local historians to commemorate the supposed massacre of fourteen Continental soldiers during the American Revolution. This massacre was said to have taken place on or near that site by a vengeful maul-wielding Iroquois woman seeking retribution for what she perceived as the unjust murder of her son. The monument reads simply: THE BLOODY ROCK - “On the night of July 3, 1778 after the Battle of Wyoming, fourteen or more captive American soldiers were murdered here by a maul wielded by a vengeful Indian woman, traditionally but not certainly identified as Queen Esther.” The Iroquois woman may have gained vengeance for her son’s death by smashing in heads with her stone war hammer. However, according to most accounts, the Continental Army of the United States eventually caught up with Queen Esther and her band of indigenous followers. She apparently ended her days swinging from a noose on a tree branch somewhere deep in the Pennsylvania woodland. To this day, it is said that her ghost, with its mournful wailing, haunts Pennsylvania up and down the Susquehanna River, as her restless spirit continues to seek vengeance for those who murdered her son and followers. But who was Queen Esther of the Iroquois People, according to history? And what happened between the American settlers in Pennsylvania and the Native Americans of the nearby environs to cause this tale of murder, revenge, and bloodshed that has led to one of America’s most enduring hauntings? In order to find answers to these questions, we must first travel back to the town of Wyoming, Pennsylvania, and look more deeply into the folklore surrounding this historical story. When it comes to Queen Esther and her ghost, all that can be said for certain is that nothing is really known “for certain.” Surprisingly, for such a small, seemingly innocuous place, the monument to Queen Esther’s Bloody Rock is not the only historic marker that stands in Wyoming, Pennsylvania. Only a short distance away from Queen Esther’s marker stands another plaque outside the Revolutionary War-era site of the old frontier Fort Wyoming, which was fought over by American Patriots and Tory forces loyal to the British Crown during the 1770s. This marker commemorates, more generally, the battle that took place in Wyoming, Pennsylvania, on July 3, 1778, almost two years to the day after our nation declared independence from Great Britain. It reads: BATTLE OF WYOMING - “Nearby on July 3, 1778, 300 Patriots under Colonel Zebulon Butler were defeated by 1000 British Tories and their Indian Allies under Major John Butler. Captives were murdered. Survivors fled to Forty Fort.” Two army officers, both named Butler, on opposing sides—one Patriot and one Tory—faced off with one another in a battle on July 3, 1778. Indigenous people, most likely Iroquois, sided with the British. The Tories and their Native American allies won, and the American prisoners who surrendered were murdered in cold blood. Often during the course of the American Revolution, from the mid-1770s right up until hostilities ceased in 1784, control of the area along the banks of the Susquehanna River and the place then known as Fort Wyoming on the Pennsylvania frontier would change hands many times in fighting between Tories and Patriots. Bloody atrocities were committed in abundance on both sides, and unfortunately, Native American peoples were unjustly dragged into all of the European bloodshed. All of this most certainly happened, as did the pivotal battle on July 3, 1778, outside Wyoming, Pennsylvania, between loyalist Tories and American Patriots. But did an Iroquois warrior woman nicknamed Queen Esther have anything to do with any of it at all? Maybe not. Many retellings of the story behind Queen Esther and her ghost have little to do with the American Revolution, other than the fact that most agree that something involving murder and revenge by an Iroquois woman occurred in the year 1778. The most common version of the origins behind what Pennsylvanians call “Queen Esther’s Curse” takes place way to the north of Fort Wyoming, outside the town of Sayre, Pennsylvania, which straddles the state’s northern border with New York. The woodlands of northern PA and New York State were in the heart of Iroquois land during America’s War for Independence. This version of events claims that Queen Esther’s son, supposedly a mere lad in his early teenage years at the time, was killed by a notorious town drunk from Sayre, Pennsylvania, after an argument perhaps over some sort of bartering that went woefully wrong. What did happen outside of Sayre, Pennsylvania, is that on the night of September 27, 1778, a raid was launched by a war party of Iroquois, supposedly under the command of the tomahawk-wielding Queen Esther, in revenge for her son’s murder. Two people, a farmer named Arthur van Rossum and his wife Jane, were murdered and scalped by the Iroquois as revenge for the death of Queen Esther’s son. In retaliation for this, in October of 1778, a force of 200 Continental Army soldiers under the command of Colonel Thomas Hartley launched an attack on the Iroquois in search of Queen Esther. Though the details of this expedition are murky, Colonel Thomas Hartley was indeed a real Patriot military officer who was in command of the American militia from York, Pennsylvania, during the American Revolution. After the war, he would go on to serve in the Pennsylvania State Legislature and was a well-known lawyer and respected politician in the early days of the American Republic. He did lead the Pennsylvania militia on an expedition up the Susquehanna River in the autumn of 1778 against marauding hostile Native American forces and Tory Loyalists. However, whether he caught up with Queen Esther and her band of vengeful Iroquois is anyone’s guess. Legend says that Hartley’s column of 200 soldiers did indeed catch Queen Esther and her band of Iroquois warriors and that he had her watch as his soldiers massacred every man, woman, and child from her village before disposing of all their lifeless corpses in the river. After massacring all the Iroquois, Colonel Hartley then, so the story goes, had the infamous Queen Esther hanged from a nearby tree before his column of Continental soldiers moved on down the Susquehanna. Contemporary reports claim that the screams of the murdered Iroquois could be heard all the way in the town of Athens, Pennsylvania, nearly ten miles from the site of the oak tree where Queen Esther was supposedly lynched. No matter what really happened, it is probably true that Colonel Thomas Hartley and his column of soldiers murdered scores of Iroquois men, women, and children in cold blood in retaliation for what they saw as a crime against their fellow Patriots from Pennsylvania. According to a journal kept by an American soldier who was present at Queen Esther’s lynching, the young queen of the Iroquois said as the noose was placed around her neck, “May a curse be placed on the heads of any white men who dare set foot on this land.” Thus was born the so-called “Curse of Queen Esther.” Within a decade of the supposed massacre and lynching, locals in the area reported hearing the sound of screams and mournful wailing coming from the woods around the oak tree where legend has it Queen Esther was lynched near Wyoming, as well as from the site of the Bloody Rock on the banks of the Susquehanna River. To this day, local residents report hearing the blood-curdling screams of the massacred indigenous Iroquois villagers at night. Also, hunters out in the woods routinely report seeing the floating apparition of a Native American woman carrying a stone maul, still seeking revenge on those who murdered her and her son. Dozens of hunters have reported that when they give chase or even fire off a shot at Queen Esther’s ghost, she simply vanishes into thin air. Is any of this true? Who knows. But what is true is that the tales that gave rise to the story of Queen Esther’s Curse and her ghost are some of the most enduring and longest-lasting stories of the paranormal in American history. It is possible that Queen Esther’s ghost still haunts the woodlands of Pennsylvania, but it is almost certain that the crimes Americans committed against one another during our War for Independence continue to haunt our collective conscience as a nation to this very day… ghostly specters not withstanding.

STORY: THE 5 BOYS WHO NEVER CAME BACK===== Plumas County, California. There was a half moon that night, a winter moon in a cloudless sky. Up in the mountains above the Feather River, the snow-drifts sometimes rose to 15 feet. "You need a coat," Ted Weiher's grandmother had said, watching him go. "Oh, Grandma, I won't need a coat," Weiher had said. "Not tonight." Two hours before midnight on Feb. 24, 1978, when the basketball game ended at the California State University at Chico, five young men from the flatlands 50 miles to the south climbed into a turquoise and white 1969 Mercury Montego and drove out of the parking lot. They were fans of the visiting team, which had won. They stopped three blocks away at Behr's Market, mildly annoying the clerk (who was trying to close up), and bought one Hostess cherry pie, one Langendorf lemon pie, one Snickers bar, one Marathon bar, two Pepsis and a quart and a half of milk. Then they walked out of the store, got back in their car, drove south out of Chico and disappeared. Ted Weiher's mom woke up afraid, at 5 the next morning. She cannot say what woke her up, except that maybe the Lord decided it was time to end her one last night of solid sleep. Ted's bed was empty. The house was still and it was not quite light and this is how the horror began, as it often does: no crash, no wailling, just a dim morning chill in a small house on what ought to be an ordinary day. Imogene Weiher got on the phone and called Bill sterling's mother as fast as she could. Juanita Sterling had been up since 2 a.m. "Bill didn't come home either," she said. Mrs. Sterling had already called Jack Madruga's mother. Jack also had not come home. Mrs. Weiher called Jackie Huett's mother and Mrs. Weiher's daughter-in-law walked down the street to talk to Gary Mathias' stepfather. All five friends had vanished. At 8 that evening, Mrs. Madruga called the police. The boys had never done such a thing before. They were men, really, not boys - Huett was the youngest, at 24, and Weiher was 32 - but their families called them boys, our boys. They lived at home. Three of the five had been diagnosed with mental disabilities or as they impolitely worded it then - retarded); Madruga, although undiagnosed, according to his mother, was generally thought of as slow, and Mathias was under drug treatment for schizophrenia, a psychotic depression that first appeared five years before and that his doctor says had not resurfaced for the past two years. They were supposed to play a basketball game of their own on Feb. 25, part of a tournament, with a free week in Los Angeles if they won. Their clothes had been laid out the evening of the 24th, before they left for Chico - each had a beige T-shirt, the words "Gateway Gators" emblazoned across the chest, from the Yuba City vocational rehabilitation center for the handicapped where they all played basketball. Weiher had asked his mother to wash his new white high-topped sneakers for the tournament (he had scuffed them while trying them out); Mathias had just about driven his mother crazy with the game. "We got a big game Saturday," Mathias kept saying. "Don't you let me oversleep." Saturday came and went and no word came. The police began to take interest. On Tuesday, Feb. 28, they found Madruga's Mercury, and from that day on nothing they found, nothing anybody told them, seemed to make any sense. The car was 70 miles from Chico, on a deserted and rut-ravaged mountain road. It had stopped at the snow line, and although its tires had apparently spun, the car was not really stuck; five men easily could have pushed it free. The gas tank was a quarter full. Four maps, including one of California, lay neatly folded in the glove compartment. The keys were gone, but when police hot-wired the car the engine started immediately. Both seats were littered with the wrappers of the food bought at Behr's. Everything had been eaten except the Marathon bar, which was half gone. And the car's underside was undamaged. This heavy American car, with a low-hanging muffler and presumably with five full-grown men inside, had wound up a stretch of tortuously bumpy mountain road - apparently in total darkness - without a gouge or dent or thick mudstain to show for it. The driver had either used astonishing care and precision, the investigators figured, or else he knew the road well enough to anticipate every rut. The families say only Madruga drove that car, ever. And the families say Madruga, who disliked camping and hated the cold, did not know that road. None of the boys knew the road, as far as anybody could tell. Once about eight years earlier, Bill Sterling had gone fishing with his father at a cabin not far away, but he had not enjoyed himself and had stayed home the few times the Sterlings went back. Three years back Weiher had hunted deer with friends in the Feather River country, but it was quite a way west of the area where the car was found, and his family says he was not keen on the forest either. With the exception of Mathias, who occasionally stayed out all night with friends, each of the lost men led mostly stay-at-home lives of such scheduled predictability that no one could fathom what - or who - might have taken them up that lonely road in mountains. A storm whistled in the day the car was found, dropping nine inches of snow on the upper mountain. The search teams nearly lost men themselves two days later, as their Snow-cats struggled through the drifts. Nobody found anything, not so much as a shoe, until after the spring thaw, when on June 4 a small group of Sunday motorcyclists wandered into a deserted forest service trailer camp at the end of the road and inhaled a nauseating smell. It was Ted Weiher, stretched out on a bed inside the main 60-foot trailer, frozen to death. Eight sheets had been pulled over his body and tucked around his head. His leather shoes were off, and missing. A table by the bed held his nickel ring with "Ted" engraved on it, his gold necklace, his wallet (with cash inside.) and a gold Waltham watch, its crystal missing, which the families say had not belonged to any of the five men. Weiher had been a tall, heavy-set follow back in February - 5 feet 11, 200 pounds. By the time his body was found he had lost from 80 to 100 pounds.His feet were badly frostbitten. The growth of beard on his face showed that he had lived apparently, in starving agony inside that trailer, for anywhere from eight to 13 weeks. He was 19.4 miles from the car, Weiher, wearing a striped velour shirt and lightweight green pants, had walked or run, or been somehow taken in the moonlight through almost 20 miles of 4-to-6-foot snowdrifts to reach the locked trailer where he died. The trailer had been broken into through a window. No fire had been built although matches were lying around and there were paperback novels and wood furniture that would have burned easily. More than a dozen C-ration cans from an outside storage shed had been opened and emptied - one had been opened with an Army P38 can opener, which only Madruga and Mathias who had served in the Army, probably knew how to use - but no one had opened a locker in the same shed containing enough dehydrated Mexican dinners and fruit cocktails and assorted other meals to keep all five alive for a year. No one had touched the propane tank in another shed outside, either. "All they had to do was turn that gas on," says Yuba County Lt. Lance Ayers, "and they'd have had gas to the trailer, and heat." All though the spring, the search for the boys had practically consumed Ayers. He had gone to Marysville High School with Weiher and his brothers, although he had not known them well, and there was something about this silent disappearance of five strong men that haunted him like nothing he had ever investigated. Leads were drifting in from all parts of the country. The boys had been seen in Ontario; the boys had been seen in Tampa; the boys had been seen entering a movie theater in Sacramento accompanied by an older man. Ayers could punch holes in all of them. Skeptical but desperate, the consulted psychics: One told him the boys had been kidnapped to Arizona and Nevada; another said the boys had been murdered in Oroville, in a two-story red house, brick or stained wood, with a gravel driveway and the number 4723 or 4753. For two solid days Ayers drove every street in Oroville, looking for that house. It did not exist. Before long he could rattle off their names and vital statistics almost automatically. Theodore Earl Weiher, brown eyes, curly brown hair, handsome beer-bellied, friendly in a trusting child's way (he waved at strangers and brooded for hours if they did not waveback); got a good chuckle out of phoning Bill Sterling and reading from newspaper items or oddball names from the telephone book; employed for a while as a janitor and snack bar clerk but quit at the urging of his family, who thought Weiher's slowness was causing problems. Jackie Charles Huett, 24, 5 feet 9, 160 pounds, slight droop to the head, slow to respond, a loving shadow to Weiher, who looked after Huett in a protective sort of way and would dial the phone for him when Hyett had to make a call. Jack Antone Madruga, 5 feet 11, 190 pounds, high school graduate and Army veteran, brown eyes, brown hair, heavy-set, laid off in November from his job as a busboy for Sunsweet growers. William Lee Sterling, 5 feet 10, 170 pounds, dark brown hair, blue eyes, Madruga's special friend, deeply religious, would spend hours at the library reading literature to help bring Jesus to patients in mental hospitals. Gary Dale Mathias, 5 feet 10, 170 pounds, brown hair, hazal eyes, 25, assistant in his stepfather's gardening business. Army veteran with psychiatric discharge after drug problems that developed in Germany five years ago. By late spring Ayers was dreaming about the boys at night. Once he woke in the darkness, arms outstretched: He had almost embraced all five. "You do a lot of handshaking." Ayers says. "And a lot of drinking." Then there was the man who saw lights on the road. Joseph Shones, 55, told police he drove his Volkswagen bug up that same road sometime after 5:30 the evening the boys disappeared. He said he was checking the snow line, because he wanted to bring his wife and daughter up that weekend. His car got stuck in the snow just above the snow line - about 50 yards beyond the place where the Mercury would be found - and as Shones was trying to free his car, he said, he had a heart attack. (Doctors later confirmed to investigators that Shones had indeed suffered a mild heart attack.) Shones lay in the car with engine on and the car heater going, he said. Sometime in the night, he heard what he described as whistling noises a little way down the road, and he got out of his car. What he saw looked like a group of men and a woman with a baby, he said, walking in the glare of a vehicle's headlights. He thought he heard them talking. Shones said he yelled for help, but the headlights went out, and the talking stopped. Shones got back into his car and lay down again, he said. Sometime later, maybe a couple of hours, he saw lights outside his car window - flashlight beams, he said. Again he called for help.The lights went out and whoever was out there went away. Shones said he lay in the car until it ran out of gas, and then while it was still dark he walked back eight miles to the lodge called Mountain House, where he had stopped for a drink before heading up the road. Just below his Volkswagen, in the place where he had heard the voices, he passed the Mercury Montego sitting empty in the middle of the road. The day after Weiher's body was discovered, searchers found the remains of Madruga and Sterling. They lay on opposite sides of the road to the trailer, 11.4 miles from the car. Madruga had been partially eaten by animals and dragged about 10 feet to a stream: he lay face up, his right hand curled around his watch. Sterling was in a wooded area, scattered over about 50 feet. There was nothing left of him but bones. Two days later, just off the same road but much closer to the trailer, Jackie Huett's father found his son's backbone. Ayers had tried to talk him out of joing the search, fearing something like that might happen, but Huett, whose first name is Jack, had insisted on going. There were a few other bones around, along with Jackie's Levis and ripple-soled "Get Theres" shoes. An assistant sheriff from Plumas County found a skull the next day, about 100 yards downhill from the rest of the bones. The family dentist identified the teeth as those of Jackie Huett. Huett's remains had lain northeast of the trailer, like Sterling's and Madruga's. Northwest of the trailer, about a quarter mile away, searchers found three wool forest service blankets and a two-cell flashlight lying by the side of the road. The flashlight was slightly rusted and had been turned off. It was impossible to tell just how long it had been there. They found no sign of Gary Mathias. His tennis shoes were inside the forest service trailer, which suggested to investigators that he might have taken them off to put on Weiher's leather shoes - particularly since Weiher had bigger feet, and Mathias' feet might have swollen with frosbite. But that was pure conjecture, which was all they had. State mental institutions received a description of Mathias - slender, dark-haired, double vision without his glasses. He was not carrying his billfold when he left the house for the Chico basketball game, so he had no identification on him, and if he is still alive he has been without the drugs he needs for the last four months. Mathias took his medicine weekly, as he had for at least three years - stellazine and cogentin, both used in the treatment of schizophrenia. His family says the illness appeared five years ago, while he was in the Army in Germany. Police records show he had become violent on occasion - he was charged with assault twice - and there was a difficult period, after his return from Germany, when Mathias would fail to take his drugs and lapse into a disoriented psychosis that usually landed him in a Veterans Administration hospital. "Went haywire," is how Bob, his stepfather, puts it. For the last two years, though, Mathias had been working steadily in his stepfather's business and was taking his medication so faithfully that a local doctor who knows Mathias well calls him "one of our sterling success cases." He collected Army psychiatric disability pay, was enormously attached to his family, loved the basketball games he shared with the other four men and listened to the Rolling Stones and Oilvia Newton-John on the record player in the living room. Klopf says his stepson took his medicine the week he disappeared. But he and the doctor say Mathias had not "gone haywire" in two years. "What I looked for all the time I was up there were his glasses," says Klopf. "I didn't think the bear would eat that." He is sitting at his dining room table. His voice is gruff. He is tired of reporters and tired of the pain and tired of not understanding what happened to the boy. Ida Klopf, across the table from him, says she had not turned on her television in weeks because she does not want to find out that way. She says she is going back up there on the weekend, back up to see if she can find something the searchers missed. "There's no place to look, Ida," says Klopf. "I'll find someplace," Mrs. Klopf says, turning her face away. "Bizarre," says John Thompson, the special agent from the California Department of Justice who has joined Ayers on the investigation. "And no explanations. And a thousand leads. Every day you've got a thousand leads." They learned that a forest service Snowcat ran up the road to the trailer on Feb. 23, leaving a packed path in the snow that the boys might have followed. They took on a water witcher from the town up north called Paradise, who said the he had fixed it so his divining rod would pick up traces of human minerals and then led the searchers to a deserted cabin near the abandoned car. They found a gray cigarette lighter, the disposable plastic kind, about three-quarters of a mile northwest of the trailer. The families said none of the boys carried lighter. They found that gold watch beside Weiher's body. They discovered that Gary Mathias knew people in Forbestown, which is about halfway between Chico and Yuba cities, on a road with a turnoff so easy to miss that anybody driving it late at night might have ended up heading north, toward the mountains, and lost. But none of it helped. The cabin-found by the water witcher was empty, the cigarette lighter might have been dropped by a hiker, the watch might have belonged to a forest ranger in the trailer mouths earlier, and Mathias' friends in Forbestown said they had not seen him for a year. And suppose they followed the Snowcats' tracks. Suppose that was how Weiher made it through 20 miles of deep snow. Why? Why abandon a perfectly operable car to strike out into the forest at midnight? Why press on through 20 miles of snowdrifts and darkness to break into a lock, unheated trailer and die? Why drive all the way up there in the first place? And how? If someone chased them, why was the car undamaged? What were the whistling noises and the voices Shones heard on the road? It doesn't add up. "There was some force that made em go up there." Jack Madruga's mother Mabel says firmly. "They wouldn't have fled off in the wood like a bunch of quail. We know good and well that somebody made them do it. We can't visualize someone getting the upper hand on those five men, but we know it must have been." "They seen something at that game, at the parking lot," says Ted Weiher's sister-in-law. "They might have seen it and didn't even realize they seen it." "I can't understand why Gary would have been that scared," says Klops. Even a fire, he says, "All those paperbacks and they didn't even build a lousy fire. I can't understand why they didn't do that unless they were afraid." But he cannot imagine what they were afraid of. Neither can the investigators. They can't prove there was foul play and they can't explain it if there wasn't. They don't even know if Gary Mathias is dead. They think he is. They think his body probably lay on the snow until the spring thaw came and eased him down, deep inside some thick green patch of mountain manzanita.

BREAK===== When Weird Darkness returns… A tragic accident in a school’s swimming pool claims the life of a student, leading to strange sightings and sounds haunting the school ever since.

STORY: GOSTA’S GHOST===== No one can remember how far back the following ghost story goes. Research shows that the story goes back at least until 1926. The ghost story was about the Administration Offices of Rockford School District 205 located on South Madison Street. It was originally the Rockford High School (also known as the Rockford Central High School). It was definitely not where one would imagine ghosts would linger. It was built and opened in 1885 as the first school built by the newly founded Rockford School District #205. It served as the Rockford High School from 1885 until 1940 when it was developed into the administrative offices. The number of students grew beyond its capacity in 1935 so it was once again decided to build two new high schools. There would once again be an East High School and a West High School. East still continues as a high school while West is now a middle school. The Rockford Central High consisted of two buildings which were connected by a tunnel. There were lockers located in these tunnels and a maintenance office (according to witness stories). And a shop area where “the male students would use the machines to make certain projects.” The students would use the tunnels to pass between the buildings and attend shop class. Through the years the tunnels got a reputation for being dark and rat infested. It soon earned the nickname “Rat Alley.” The maintenance men started to talk about the strange happenings along this tunnel and in the lower area. Lights would flicker and then go off completely, plunging the whole area into darkness. There were also unexplainable sounds. There would be the sounds of doors slamming when no doors were being opened or shut. There was also moaning and the sounds of someone choking. And perhaps the scariest of all, shadows would be seen here. One story claimed that a maintenance worker was in the tunnel late. Everyone else had left the school, or so the man thought. But he heard sounds coming from the end of the tunnel. He shone his light into the darkness and saw a shadow form of a man. He called out to ask who was there but got no answer. He thought that the shadow might be something playing tricks with his eyes so he walked closer. He could see the shadow quite clearly then and realized there was nothing in that location that would make the human-like shadow on the wall. He was walking closer when suddenly the shadow suddenly moved and darted around the corner into the darkness. This time the man didn’t follow it. It really startled him and he decided to go back towards the lighted area. As he turned his back to that part of the tunnel, he heard a young man’s voice call out something to him from the darkness. He couldn’t make out the words. “ I just felt the need to get out of there.” The legend part of the story stated that someone had drowned in the pool area in the past and people felt that either the boy didn’t know he was dead or he was angry that no one helped him. There are many times when the specifics to a legend can’t stand up under the research. This story was different. Gosta and his twin brother Folke Anderson, immigrated to America from Sweden in 1924. It seemed like an omen to the two boys that they arrived on July 4. They traveled to Rockford from New York. The two boys were sent to live with their uncle, Carl Anderson and their aunt Anna. Gosta was enrolled at the Rockford High School in February transferring from Brown School. On March 3, 1925 during his gym class, Gosta would be killed in a tragic accident. Though there were at least 10 other boys in the pool, no one saw Gosta jump into the pool and strike his head. No one saw as his body sank to the bottom of the pool. It would be 43 minutes before a student that was on the swim team, T. Horral noticed Gosta’s body on the bottom of the pool. Horral shouted to his Coach Tom Poole and then dove in and brought Gosta’s body to the surface. Police were immediately called and they worked on the boy for almost two hours as the boys from the gym class helplessly watched. At first, they didn’t know the identity of the boy who they tried to revive. They found his identification in the locker room and his twin brother, Folke was the first to identify the Gosta’s body. Two coaches Beyer and Poole joined Officers Addington and Conklin as they worked on the boy. But their efforts were in vain. Gosta was pronounced dead by Coroner Fred C. Olson. The police and School Administrators questioned the boys that had come into the pool area during the time that Gosta’s body must have been in the pool. Some of the boys remembered seeing Gosta on the diving board and watched as he went off the diving board backward. There were no signs that Gosta was in any trouble after his dive. The students and coaches all stated that they didn’t see any thrashing or signs that anyone was in trouble. In the end, there were no clear answers to Gosta’s death. This case caused a huge controversary about whether there was any negligence by the coaches or the other students. Mayor J. Henry Hallstrom called for an inquest and swore that if there was any sign of negligence that coach would be fired. The autopsy showed that Gosta had a bruise on his forehead and no water in his lungs. At the end of the inquest, there was no proof that the coaches showed any negligence in Gosta’s death. Gosta’s body was released to his aunt and uncle. They took him to the Scandinavian Cemetery for burial and that should have been the end of the story. But shortly after Gosta’s death the stories begin to circulate that students and maintenance workers were seeing and hearing things in the tunnels below the Rockford High School. Some theories about paranormal activity include the belief that if a person dies suddenly and unexpectedly, that they might not realize that they are dead. There is also the belief that maybe if some part of Gosta was aware of what was happening, that he might have thought someone would help him. And then as no one came to help, Gosta might have grown confused and then angry that no one came to save him. The Rockford High School was torn down and a parking lot now exists where the building once stood. Only more investigation will tell if Gosta still continues to haunt the area where he died.


SHOW CLOSE===== Thanks for listening (and be sure to stick around for the bloopers at the end)! If you like the show, please share it with someone you know who loves the paranormal or strange stories, true crime, monsters, or unsolved mysteries like you do!

All stories on Weird Darkness are purported to be true unless stated otherwise, and you can find links to the stories, authors, and sources I used in the episode notes.

WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright, Weird Darkness.

Now that we’re coming out of the dark, I’ll leave you with a little light… Proverbs 16:17, “The highway of the upright avoids evil; he who guards his way guards his life.”

And a final thought... “Your existence is not accidental. Your skills are not incidental. God shaped your destiny, so don't settle for someone else's story.” -- Max Lucado

I’m Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness.