Show Notes
It's that time of year where the sun is out for more than 10 minutes a day over here in England, so that must mean it's summer holiday! I'll be off for just a short two weeks, but until then, I thought I'd introduce a podcast to you. It's a great, Dark History podcast, which I shall leave to their own words:
Macabrium Lore & Legends
Subscribe here: https://podfollow.com/1695858163
“The 13th Child: The Jersey Devil”
In the New Jersey Pine Barrens, where the trees grow dense and the roads give way to tangled wilderness, something stirs. The locals say you can hear it on the coldest nights—a high-pitched shriek, something not quite human, not quite beast.
The stories go back centuries. Some say it was a curse, an omen of misfortune that slithered into this world on a storm-wracked night. Others claim it was the child of a mother who, in her desperation or her rage, called upon the Devil himself. The details shift with time, but the warning remains the same: stay out of the pines after dark.
Because if you listen closely, past the rustling leaves and the distant howl of the wind, you might just hear the beat of leathery wings.And by then, it’s already too late. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
More from Dark Histories
In the early 1970’s a small group of Canadians making up the Toronto Society for Psychical Research set out to prove the existence of ghosts and poltergeists. Such an investigation was sure to need a highly controlled experiment if it were to hold any integrity at all, and the Toronto group felt they had created just that, when they sat for several years, communicating with their very own poltergeist. There was one small twist, however, and that’s that the poltergeist never actually existed and was nothing more than the product of their own imaginations.SOURCES
On a cold, grey January afternoon in 1914, a railway carriage travelling through north London shuttled along its route, carrying a grim secret. Beneath a third-class carriage seat lay the body of five-year-old Willie Starchfield, strangled and carefully concealed from view. Earlier that day, Willie had been sent out on an errand and never came home. The police launched a struggling investigation, hampered by a voracious press and conflicting witnesses, that eventually concluded with the arrest of Willie’s own father. Yet when the case finally reached court, the truth remained frustratingly out of reach.
In the years following the American Revolution, when the country was still uncertain of itself and the frontier was still a place of violence, two brothers carved out a story of fear across the wilderness. When their story was first published in 1824, many people thought it was so terrible it simply had to be fiction, and whilst the facts may have been a little blurred, it sadly had much more truth to it than people wanted to accept. Behind the legend lay a grim and disturbing story of violence and murder and even a twinge of mystery, that is still as troubling today as it ever was.SOURCES
In the winter of 1864, two ships met their fate on one of the most remote and unforgiving stretches of the Southern Ocean. The Grafton and the Invercauld were wrecked thousands of miles from civilization, leaving their survivors stranded on the desolate Auckland Islands. What followed was a remarkable test of endurance, struggling against the cold, hunger and isolation that would see feats of remarkable ingenuity and the lowest of humanity leading to two very different survival stories, separated by only a few miles of wilderness and a very, very tall cliff.