Tales of Mystery with Bestselling Author Steph Young

It all seemed to begin when local man David Farrant wrote a letter to the Hampstead and Highgate Express on February the 6th 1970, in which he explained that he had been passing the cemetery on Christmas Eve 1969 when he had glimpsed a fleeting figure. He said, “I had an awareness of some kind of presence. I decided to wait a minute to try to find some material thing, such as a tree moving in the wind that could have accounted for it. Staring into the blackness there was a distinct impression of something moving. What appeared one minute to be a solid black shape would suddenly alter its form. Suddenly something caught my eye and clearly visible was a tall dark shape. I wanted to assume it was someone wandering through the cemetery, despite that the figure appeared to be over seven feet tall, but this was soon dispelled when I saw two red eyes meeting mine. Those eyes were not human…’ Tales of Mystery Unexplained Podcast – The Highgate Vampire

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What was The No Monster Club?

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The Mystery of the Silpho Saucer & the fish and chip shop!

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In 1972, the retired Vicar of Chidick, in the west county of Dorset, England, apparently came to Loch Ness to ‘exorcise’ the Loch Ness Monster. Reverend Donald Omand, a doctor of philosophy, and a man rather bizarrely said to have been held in particular high ‘esteem by circus people throughout Europe,’  for his ‘Ability to spiritually de-louse potentially dangerous places such as big tops, and wild animals,’ according to paranormal researcher Ted Holiday, arrived at Loch Ness to rid the Lake of the infamous giant water-monster, and the BBC came along to record it on film for posterity. On the shores of the Lake, the Vicar, dressed in his ecclesiastical robes, entered a small rowing boat alone and rowed out to the middle of the cold water of Loch Ness. Once he reached a spot in the middle of the Lake, the vicar promptly stood up in the rowing boat and began his exorcism: “Let devil worship and all nefarious magic cease!” he said in a loud voice. The BBC reporter commentates; “It’s a strange mission indeed that’s brought the Reverend Omand on a 700-mile journey from his west-country home to the shores of Loch Ness. Dr. Omand, just retired as a Vicar of Chiddick, has an appointment with the monster. It’s a coming together the 71-year old Doctor of Philosophy doesn’t expect Nessie to particularly enjoy; because Dr. Omand is here to get the monster to change its ways. Many men would shrink from such an assignment – after all, monsters might be expected to give short shrift to elderly vicars who come along interfering in their business. However, Dr. Omand, his canonicals fanned by the breeze, seems to have no qualms as he heads for the centre of the Loch. It’s there he will perform the ceremony which he confidently expects will mark the end of a million years of monstrous behaviour. The vicar says, “I adjure thee, thou ancient serpent….” Says the BBC reporter; “The Vicar’s theory is that the Loch Ness Monster is not a pre-historic beast that somehow slipped through the evolutionary net and lived on in the vast depths of the Loch. He maintains that Nessie is an apparition: a spirit, and an evil one at that; so much so that it’s having a bad effect on the locals, driving them to drink, foul tempers and black magic. It’s a ceremony the Vicar has performed on many occasions in other haunted spots and now Dr Omand is exorcising Loch Ness of the evil spirit of the Monster.” The Vicar continues; “Depart to the place appointed them, there to remain forever.” The Vicar is standing precariously in the small rowing boat. “Grant that by the power entrusted to the unworthy servant, this Highland Loch and all land adjoining it may be delivered from all evil spirits, all vain imaginations, projections and phantasms, and all the deceits of the evil one. Be gone thou hideous demon, unto thine appointed place and return no more to plague the servants of almighty God.” With the exorcism now complete, the vicar sits back down in the rowing boat and rows back to shore where the BBC awaited his safe return. When the reporter asks him what does he think the monster is? He replies, “I think it is something that thousands or even millions of years ago was in this place. I think it was possibly what we knew in those days as a Dragon. The Dragon, which really of course is the Devil – it means that. You may not know that in Sweden there is a lake that was just as famous as Loch Ness, for its monster. I’ve been there and I’ve also seen it in a Fjord in the North of Norway. And, in both these places, I have found that it has an injurious effect upon people – people who see it, people who live near it, people particularly who go searching for it. I’ve known one very bad case of turning to drugs, numerous cases of alcoholism, and I have known marriages broken in the most unexpected ways – marriages that had stood the test of time, broke after this. It seems a terrific coincidence that these things should have happened in people who were closely associated w...

In November 1930, in the Swan and Pyramid Public House in North London, a conversation was taking place between two men. If anyone else in the pub had caught any part of the conversation taking place between the two men standing at the bar, they would have noticed nothing strange or unusual. They might have noticed that one was drinking beer and the other lemonade, and one of the men was more smartly dressed than the other, but there was nothing else of note that would have drawn their attention. It would later transpire that the two gentlemen had met outside the public house, and one had invited the other one inside. It was November the 5th, although one of them would later say it was the 2nd or 3rd. Later, one of the men would say that the other man with him was “Approximately forty years of age, between 5 ft 6 and 5 ft 8 inches tall, had a slight brogue, and had a boxing or sports tattoo on his right forearm.” He would say that the man had been wearing police boots, which the other man explained had been given to him by the London police. He was also carrying a sports diary. What one of the men did not know, was that this meeting would set in play a most diabolical plan, and one riddled with strange coincidences too…. Tales of Mystery Unexplained Also in the Book Tales of Mystery Unexplained

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A haunting last photo is all that his parents are left with. The photo is a close-up shot of his face, set against a bleak, dark landscape. He is alone, we think. He is lost, we believe, and he is very afraid. How he vanished has never been solved. He was a boy scout aged 12, and he vanished into thin air. He was with his scout group on a hike. There one minute, gone the next. It was July the 19th 1991, and 12-year-old Jared Negrete was on his first overnight camping trip in the San Gorgorio wilderness in the South-Eastern part of the San Bernardino National Forest of California. It is an area the LA Times calls, ‘A breath-taking bramble of rocky crags, sandy switchbacks, and dozens of trails, many of which meander to nowhere….’ After Jared disappeared, a 19-day search for him found only his camera with that last haunting photo, and some discarded candy wrappers. How could he vanish in the middle of the wilderness? There was no road to leave by, no transport out of there; no route out, apart from a very long hike. “The hardest part is at night, knowing he’s out there by himself in the wilderness,” said Linda Negrete, his mother, who called out to her son over a public address system for days after he vanished, from a helicopter circling the search area. ‘Searchers find camera belonging to Jared,’ wrote Associated Press. ‘Camera found as they followed footprints they believed were made by the missing boy. The film in the 5 foot 2, 150 lb boy’s camera was developed, but proved to be of no use to searchers.’ All it had was an eerie close-up of his face. The photo looked as though it had been taken after night had fallen…. also in the book Tales of Mystery Unexplained

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English essayist in the 1800’s, Maurice Henry Hewlett, wrote Lore of Posperine, which features an account of the strangest of doll-like ‘creatures’ and the sinister results of it’s appearance. “The facts were as follows. A Mr Stephen Mortimer Beckwith, 28, clerk in the Wiltshire & Dorset Bank at Salisbury was living in Wishford. He was married with one child. At approximately 10 pm on the 30th November, 1887, he was going home after spending the evening at a friend’s house. It was a mild night, with rain and a wind was blowing. There was a quarter moon and it was not completely dark. Accompanied by his dog, he was riding a bicycle. He stated that he had no difficulty seeing the road nor the stones on it nor the sheep in the hillside. He recalled quite clearly seeing an owl flying. A mile or so along and his terrier dog ran through the hedge and ran barking up the hill. The man imagined he was after a hare and called him, but the dog took no notice and ran to a gorse bush then stopped, paw uplifted and watching it intensely. The man watched him for some minutes, dismounting from his bicycle. He could see nothing up there himself but the dog was in a state of excitement. It was whimpering and trembling, and his master decided to take a look at what was causing this behaviour in his dog. The dog would not take his eyes off whatever was up there. Now standing just behind the dog, the man looked but could see nothing there. He had no stick and imagining it could be a drunk man in there in need of help or a rabbit caught in a trap, he urged his dog inward, but the dog wouldn’t move and eventually it began to howl. It shook his owner, who because of the isolated location and a ‘mysterious shroud of darkness,’ wanted nothing more than to leave the spot, but he now couldn’t get his dog to leave. Finally, he braved it and put his two hands inside the bush to try to feel for what was in there. It was during this fumbling that he suddenly saw a bright pair of eyes staring back at him, and a pale face. He found his voice and asked who they were, what was wrong, why they were in there, but no answer came back. He tried to reassure them that he meant no harm to them. There was no movement at all of the features of the face. It was a very small face, “about as big as a large wax doll’s. It was longish and oval and very pale. I could see its neck and it was no thicker than my wrist. I would have said it was a girl had it not been for the size of her and her face. It was, in fact, neither fish, flesh, nor fowl. Strap my dog had known that from the beginning, and now I was of Strap’s opinion myself.” In his mind he called her ‘a foreigner;’ for he had no other word for it. To him she was something he could not define. Her face was that of an older girl, a late teenager at least but her size was under three foot. She couldn’t seem to understand what he said to her and said nothing back to him. Her clothing was odd too. It seemed almost like it was made of cobwebs. It was all of this that made him suspect her of being ‘something outside experience,’ but this was just the beginning. Suddenly he heard footsteps and a torch coming up the hill toward him and it was the local policeman. The man told the policeman immediately that there seemed to be some kind of foul play at hand, because he had found this tiny girl and didn’t know what else to say. The policeman followed the direction the man’s head went in, as the man indicated the girl he now had in his arms, having pulled her out of the gorse, but the policeman couldn’t appear to see anything in his arms. In fact, he made a joke and walked back down the hill. Now the man really did know something was wrong. However, he didn’t feel he could just leave her there in the rain and darkness and so he took her back home with him. When he got home his wife was waiting anxiously at the front door looking out into the dark, worried that he was so late. When he began to explain what had happened,

Was Richard Lancelyn Green killed by a rival, an assassin, or by his own hands? Lancelyn Green was probably the foremost collector of the personal papers and materials of the great detective writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Lancelyn Green also probably had the largest collection of memorabilia of Sherlock Holmes ever gathered too, and his death would ironically turn out to be most fitting for a plot in one of the Sherlock Holmes novels; though the solution to his death remains cryptically unsolved. On the 24th of May 2004, Ricard Lancelyn Green was discovered dead in his home in Kensington London. A shoelace had been wound around his neck and then tightened with the handle of a wooden spoon. He had been garrotted. There was no sign of forced entry into his apartment. It almost appeared to be a locked-room mystery. Just prior to his death, Lancelyn Green had said “someone” was after him, yet his death looked more like a suicide. He was found lying on his bed, surrounded by stuffed toys and a bottle of Gin… Said The London Times, ‘a mystery as tantalizing as any to unfold at 221B Baker Street.’ Was Richard Lancelyn Green killed by a rival, an assassin, or by his own hands? Also featured in one of my books Tales of Mystery Unexplained

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‘In did come the strangest figure! A wandering fellow with a gipsy coat of red & yellow. And he himself was tall & thin. Lips where smiles went out & in. There was no guessing his kith & kin! Quoth one: “It’s as if my great-grandsire, Starting up at the Trump of Doom’s tone, had walked this way from his painted tomb!” Who was this Walking Cadaver who stole away all the children?

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Was there really an Underground Monster at Montauk? Listen to one woman’s story of what happened to her undergound at Montauk… Tales of the Unexplained with music by http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/NiGiD/50238 Ft: AT Martijn de Boer (NiGiD) Tales of the Unexplained

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Stories of Strange Intruders, with music by http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/NiGiD/50238 Ft: AT Martijn de Boer (NiGiD)

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Sent by special cable from France on May the 27th 1922, The New York Times reported on a very curious case. ‘A baffling mystery is exciting the inhabitants of the small Brittany village of Goas Al Ludu in the Brest district. Early in April, a little girl, Pauline Picard, disappeared from her parent’s farm, all searches proving fruitless…. ‘ As the story progresses, soon we will have a missing girl, a girl returned who is a doppelganger, a headless girl, and a bodiless man; all of whom remain unidentified!

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When Henry McCabe disappeared, he left what can only be described as the most bone-chilling voicemail. He is screaming, pleading, and growling in raw, animalistic agony. Along with these sounds is a noise in the background that sounds indefinably mechanical. As we listen to it, we do not know what is happening to him. Even more chilling is the moment another voice can be heard, telling Henry in a cold, emotionless, detached voice, “Stop it.” Fifty-five days later, Henry’s body was found in an isolated creek. His body had no wounds, no trauma, no injuries. How could this be possible after Henry’s harrowing, visceral voicemail? What was it that took Henry to the gaping, echoing abyss of unremitting terror? And who, or what took him on that terrible one-way journey? “This is what they did to my son. Henry paid for you to learn the lesson,” said his mother; but what does she mean? Why would he walk six miles to a spot only accessible through thick inhospitable vegetation, in pitch darkness, toward a creek that was so isolated few even knew it was there? For that is where he was found. The crime scene photos show this location. There is no footpath to lead him to where he was found. It is a bleak landscape of tall dense trees and thick brambles. Had Henry tried to cut-through this area, to get home? And yet it was no-where near where he had been dropped off, and no-where near home, and it led only to the cold depths of the water. It was not an easy route to get through, and it was not a route to anywhere other than desolation. The Strange Unexplained Death of Henry McCabe

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Beachy head is the most notorious spot for suicide in Britain. The famous white cliffs of chalk were formed in the Late Cretaceous era between 66 and 100 million years ago when the entire area was submerged under the sea. On Easter Sunday in 1981, a local photographer set his camera on a tripod close to the cliff-edge at Beachy head. He was hoping to take some stunning photographs of the South coast of England, when a 19-year-old boy approached him, pointed at the camera and said: “I hope you’ve got that loaded”. The boy then walked away, turned on his heel, and ran at the edge, yelling madly as he jumped to his death.’ “This beautiful place openly invites us to die,” wrote novelist Louis de Bernieres in an essay on Beachy Head. “All about are the wisps and traces of broken hearts, cancelled dreams, abandoned expectations.”  ‘High among the chalk crags, where the wind always howls, dwells the most malevolent spirit in Britain,’ writes John Maklin. ‘It is an evil influence that, it is claimed, has hurled more than 100 victims over the edge to their deaths on the cruel wave-lashed rocks below. Many people have positively stated – some under oath – that they have felt the evil influence on the cliffs. They claim that they had to combat violently a power that attempted to force them over the edge to their doom.’ The unexplained lure of Beachy Head with special thanks to Ed Parnell for audio production

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Readers of my earlier books may recall the strange story of Netta Fornario, and it was one of the first stories of unexplained mystery that I came across, and it has beguiled me ever since. Did the spirit of a dead woman come back to kill Netta? Or, was she killed by the Immortal race of the Fairies? It’s a gothic, Victorian tale of magic and mystery, murder and madness, and the yearning for immortality.  It is ripe for a chapter in a Penny Dreadful; but this is a true story. It is a tale that grips as it horrifies; fascinates yet simultaneously strikes at the fear inside of us all, that if we were to delve into the supernatural, it may show us where its allegiances lie, and destroy us entirely. The location of this tale is the tiny ancient island of Iona, an Island in the Outer Hebredies off the Coast of Scotland. It is 1929, and a young woman has gone missing. When she is found, she is naked and dead and lying on a cross cut into the earth on top of a ‘faerie mound.’ There is a knife in her hand and a look of terror etched across her face. She has no wounds. She is barefoot but the soles of her feet are clean. Her story encompasses the most cryptic unsolved disappearance and death of an eccentric student of the esoteric arts, whose adventures into ‘the Nether World,’ would appear to be her undoing. Iona is a mystical place, rich in the lore of dragons, angels, and vengeful faeries. Its victim is perhaps a naive adept of the occult, who believed she could step into ‘Summerland,’ the astral plane of Heaven, and return unscathed. One of her best friends, Dion Fortune said, “I do not object to reasonable risks, but it appeared to me that ‘Mac’ as we called her, was going into very deep waters … and there was certain to be trouble sooner or later.” Netta Fornario and her unexplained death….

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In the elevator, Elisa Lam wore a red hoodie and a white shirt. In the elevator of the Cecil Hotel, we can see she is wearing this outfit. Very strangely, this is identical to the outfit a character called ‘Cecilia,’ wore in the horror movie ‘Dark Water’, where a woman ends up dead in a water tower on the roof of a building. There is also a very creepy elevator scene in the movie, with a young woman dressed identical to Elisa Lam in the elevator. What happened to Elisa Lam is almost identical to this horror movie; yet the movie was made before Elisa’s death. Elisa died in 2013. The movie was released in 2005. It is a remake of a Japanese horror movie made in 2002, and the story originates from a book by Koji Suzuki who also wrote ‘The Rings.’ The American version of ‘Dark Water’ stars Jennifer Connelly as ‘Dahlia,’ who has a young daughter called ‘Cecilia.’ They move into a run-down apartment. Not long after they move in, water begins to drip from their bedroom ceiling. The elevator in the building is prone to malfunctioning, like Elisa’s elevator. Cecilia sneaks up to the roof one day and finds a back-pack sitting next to the water tower. In time, Cecilia and Dahlia cannot help but notice the dark water which starts to run out of their taps and toilet. Dahlia goes up to the roof and to her horror, she finds a girl’s dead body floating in the water tower; just like the real-life case of Elisa Lam at the Cecil hotel. How can it be that a movie released before Elisa vanished, seems to mimic so precisely the last known hours of Elisa’s life; even down to the exact outfit she is wearing in an old elevator that malfunctions just like the elevator in the movie? Naming one character ‘Cecilia,’ and the other ‘Dahlia,’ we also cannot but help think of the infamous ‘Black Dahlia’ case in LA, and indeed there seems to be many similarities between Elisa Lam and the ‘Black Dahlia’ victim, Elizabeth Short. Many believe that the Cecil Hotel where Elisa vanished was the last place Elizabeth Short was seen. Elizabeth Short was a young aspiring actress who was found mutilated in January 1947. Her face was carved into a ‘Glasgow Smile’, her body drained of blood, and cut in half, then washed in gasoline. When a local resident happened across her body, at first, they thought it was a store mannequin. Her body was left on display, deliberately to be found and seen. The notorious case of ‘The Black Dahlia,’ as Elizabeth Short came to be known, is an as yet still-unsolved murder-mystery that has beguiled so many. Elisa was ‘washed clean’ by the water, and some believe she too had been drained of blood, because there was so little blood left in her body that it was not even possible to carry out many of the necessary forensic tests. There are other striking and unsettling similarities between Elisa Lam and Elizabeth Short, whose severed body was found on Leimont Park. Both Elizabeth and Elisa were petite, brunette, and pretty, both were called names that derive from Elizabeth, both were in their twenties, and both sadly suffered from depression. Both were known to travel alone and both had travelled from San Diego to downtown LA just prior to their deaths. Both Elisa and the Black Dahlia vanished after last being seen in a downtown hotel, and many say this was the Cecil Hotel. Both were not reported missing for a number of days before their bodies were found, and both died horrifying, inexplicable deaths that would become notorious. Both appear to have been drained of blood. Both cases ‘went viral.’ Newspapers around the world and armchair detectives have been fascinated with the mystery of who killed ‘The Black Dahlia’ for decades, and now Elisa too. Notably as already said, the movie ‘Dark Water’ has a central character called ‘Dahlia,’ and ‘Dahlia’s young daughter is called ‘Cecilia’; so similar to the word ‘Cecil,’ Elisa’s Hotel. It would almost seem as though this movie ties the Black Dahlia and Elisa Lam together in a way that is impossib...

What was in the mystery box? And did this have anything to do with the synchronicity of the two Zip codes….? The new revelations about Elisa Lam. For anyone has read some of my earlier books, they may recall that in “Something in the Woods” in 2014, I discuss the strange case of Elisa Lam which was very current at the time. I have spent a considerable amount of time over the last few months re-visiting the case of Elisa Lam. The fate of Elisa Lam is a tale of tragedy, synchronicity, and perhaps of how the hunter became the prey in a game that was quite possibly crafted, as Gnostics would say, aeons ago and put into play by shadowy figures of dark power, across centuries. Elisa Lam’s unexplained death is a deeply mysterious story, full of unanswered questions which yearn for revelation of the method, and yet the path to truth lies shrouded in obscurity, layered in riddles, and revolving in astonishing synchronicities. The baffling unsolved death of Elisa Lam seemed to grip much of the world in February 2013, largely due to the bizarre video capturing her in an elevator just before she vanished. She was gone for 19 days. The video capturing some of her last known movements were taken from what was strangely said to have been the only security camera in the Cecil Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. LAPD released the footage of her inside the elevator, in an appeal for information about her whereabouts, after her parents reported they had not heard from her and this was highly unusual. An official missing person’s case was opened, and the world became transfixed by Elisa inside the elevator. Her behaviour was very odd, playful perhaps in moments, but the overall tone was incredibly eerie and sinister. It was as though she was in a desperate fight for life; her enemy however, was both unknown and unseen. It would not be until guests staying at the hotel began to report to staff, 2 weeks later, that the water in their rooms tasted most odd, that she would be found; naked, dead, and floating in one of the water towers on the roof of the hotel. In June 2013, authorities determined that Elisa Lam’s death was ‘accidental,’ and caused by her own hand. Many crucial questions however, have been left unanswered; One of which is, why would she climb over 15 feet up the side of a water-tower, on a roof at night, without her glasses, alone, and climb in? Another question, is what is happening to her in the very disturbing footage inside the elevator, on the night she disappeared? Captured in immemorial now, it is chilling and unnerving to watch her. There is something very wrong here. She is seen entering the hotel elevator, pressing lots of buttons quickly, and then peeking out of the open elevator door into the corridor, several times, while she waits for the elevator to close. Its almost as though she is fearful that someone is after her, and perhaps they were. Peering along the hotel corridor, she waits as the door fails to close. Becoming increasingly agitated and distressed, we watch her begin to make increasingly odd gestures with her hands, then step out of the elevator and she seems to hide in the corridor, but then quickly she returns, appearing terrified yet not fleeing the scene. Is her imagination playing tricks with her? Or is her killer there?  – Out of sight of the camera but lurking within inches of her? Strange shadows and movement can be seen inside the elevator; even face-type forms appear on the walls of the elevator. It looks like a scene from a horror movie. The video quality is not good however, and perhaps this accounts for the shadows and blurs and unnerving atmosphere, although in hindsight, we are watching it in the full knowledge that soon Elisa would die. Some people think, that on studying the video, they catch sight of a foot in the corridor. Adding to the mystery is that for some reason, when the police released the footage of Elisa in the elevator, it had been chopped and cut,

It’s a tale of strange twin stone heads discovered buried in a garden, a half-man half-beast appearing in bedrooms, and archaeologists appearing to become distressed or possessed: this is the strange mystery of ‘The Hexham Heads.’ One February afternoon in 1972, 11-year-old Colin Robson was playing in his garden at the family home of 3 Rede Avenue, Hexham. He was having a go at weeding when he looked down at a lump in the ground that appeared to be a large stone approximately the size of a tennis ball. As he looked closer, he saw that there appeared to be a conical protrusion on one side of the object. Clearing away the grass and earth around it, he reached down to pick it up, and he saw that it appeared to have human features on it, like a face. The young boy was filled with excitement at his unusual find and he shouted for his brother Leslie to come and see what he had discovered. Leslie was astonished at his brother’s discovery and not to be outdone, he frantically started to dig the ground. It was not long before Leslie too had found a second strange head. One of the heads appeared to be a ‘boy’ and the other the girl. They were a pale, greenish stone colour. The boy had short hair carved into his head. Both of their faces were carved too. Neither of the stone faces were pretty – but the girl’s was the worst. She would go on to be given the name ‘the Hag’ or ‘the Witch,’ for she had a large hook nose and what was described as ‘wild bulging eyes.’ It seemed that the protrusions that stuck out at an angle, were their necks. The discovery of the two strange heads was to see the start of a chain of inexplicable events that involved local folks, academics, scientists, historians and fortean investigators. Mrs Dodds, who lived next door to the boys, suddenly woke one night startled to find a half-sheep half-man creature standing in her bedroom. When it saw that she was awake and staring at it, she said it then turned and “padded” downstairs and went out of the front door! Scientist Dr Don Robbins, a chemist who became involved in the investigation into the mysterious heads, on hearing of this strange night-time visitor, drew a tentative parallel between the half-man half sheep seen in Mrs Dodds bedroom and a creature from Norse mythology called ‘The Wulver;’ a powerful and dangerous creature, he said. Dr Anne Ross said that after much investigation, these heads were of Romano-Celtic origin and part of the Pagan ‘Head-cult’ tradition. The Celts had settled in North East England and they were known to revere the human head as a gruesome charm. The practise of the Celts was such that they would set the severed heads of their vanquished enemies over the doors of their houses and barns. This practise had been particularly rife in West Yorkshire and Northumberland, where Hexham was. However, local lorry driver Des Craigie said he had made the heads for his daughter to play with! They were not ancient he said! The story has many twists and turns, and the ending could be right out of a Fairy Tale….

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What happened to Jeffrey on the isle of Ibiza? How could he have got to the place in which he was found? The unsolved and unexplained disappearance of Jeffrey… Tales of Mystery Unexplained

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In the 1980’s, in the Yorkshire Dales National Park of northern England, a retired policeman had a very unsettling experience. On December 1st 1987, retired policeman Phillip Spencer set out on a walk across a windswept Ilkley Moors in the early hours of the morning, taking with him a camera in the hope of photographing the ‘strange lights’ that had recently been reported in the area. As well as it being dark, the moor was swirling with mist and Mr Spencer doubted that he would get any pictures at all, despite having loaded his camera with ultra-light-sensitive film. Suddenly, to his immense surprise, he spotted a human-like creature ahead of him in the gloom. He clicked the camera and duly photographed one of the most talked-about photographs in the history of unexplained phenomena. Although very blurred, the photograph appears to show a ‘humanoid’ figure over 1 metre high, that bears an uncanny resemblance to the ‘Greys’ of UFO legend. Spencer claimed that he ran after the creature, which entered a ‘dome-shaped’ craft that rose rapidly into the sky before he could get a shot of the craft. Spencer remained adamant that what he had seen was an alien, and donated the photo to UFO watchers. Analysis carried out at the Kodak laboratories in Hemel Hempstead suggested that the picture had not been interfered with in any way, but a later computer analysis of the photograph by US Navy expert Dr Bruce Maccabee was inconclusive. When the retired policeman took the photograph on the Moors, of the strange ‘human’ looking creature and saw the craft, he believed the incident lasted merely a couple of minutes, yet when he reached his father-in-law’s house in the village, his intended destination, he noticed that the village clock was an hour fast, or so he thought. It wasn’t – and he appeared to be have ‘lost’ some time. It was this which led him to suspect something else had happened to him after seeing the strange figure on the gloomy Moors. He suspected it was possible he had been abducted. In fact, he would later claim that he had indeed been abducted by an alien craft. When he walked across the moor that early morning, he had with him a compass to help him find his way, and through the gloomy fog he saw the strange-looking being ahead of him on the slopes of the moor. Intrigued, and too surprised to feel any fear, he found himself running toward it, trying to get closer and make out what it was, and it was then that he realized there was a flying craft of some sort, with a dome on top of it, rising up from the moor. It disappeared from sight within seconds however, and the unidentified creature was gone too. He hung around for some time, hoping that both would return so that he could figure out what it was he had just witnessed but neither returned and so he made his way to the village. His compass however was now of no use to him – it was pointing south now instead of north and when he got to the village, his watch said a different time to the village clock. He had lost an hour of time. The photograph that Spencer took was first analysed by a wildlife expert. He concluded that whatever was in the photograph was not any known animal. There was no way to ascertain what the creature in the photo was however. It was dark and quite blurry given the conditions of that morning but analysis of the image in the photo concluded that the strange figure hadn’t been superimposed or added in later, and indeed the photo had not been tampered with at all. It was after this odd encounter, that the policeman began to experience strange dreams at night. It was this that led him to undergo hypnotic regression, organised through the researcher Peter Hough, to try to get to the bottom of what had happened to him on the moor. A Dr Jim Singleton conducted the session and surprisingly it seemed that from Spencer’s recall, his encounter with the creature came after his abduction, and indeed, in his words, the creature was “waving goodbye to him” when he ...

Boleskine House on the banks of Loch Ness in the highlands of Scotland, is best known for its association with occultist Aleister Crowley. Aleister Crowley was known as a master of the Dark Arts and he studied ‘The Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage.’ He specifically found the Manor House of Boleskine to be the perfect place to conduct this dangerous ritual. Located on the shores of the home of the Loch Ness Monster, Crowley purchased this ancient hunting lodge called Boleskine. It was an isolated, brooding and deeply malevolent house, and in this house, worrying supernatural phenomenon would occur, to the great detriment and even deaths of those close to it, as we will now discover. Crowley studied the Book ‘The Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage.’ It is a very old European Kabbalistic Grimoire, an ancient book of magic that claims to describe a method to make contact with ‘Your Holy Guardian Angel.’ The ancient summoning ceremony requires long and intense participation, in seclusion. It was a very dangerous ritual – for it would invoke Angels and Spirits “good or bad.” Crowley ‘raised the demons’ in the lodge at Boleskine and discovered them to be uncontrollable. A workman employed to renovate the buildings attacked Crowley and had to be locked in the cellar. Crowley absent-mindedly’ (although we could perhaps contest this) scribbled some incantation on the Butcher’s bill and the poor man promptly chopped through his own femoral artery and died. People began to take the old hill paths rather than risk offending the inhabitant of Boleskine. More death & disaster would follow… The Unexplained Deaths at Boleskine Tales of Mystery Unexplained Podcast with author Steph Young

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Alex Sanders, The King of the Witches was also called The Halloween King. He was England’s highest witch, but he would come to regret his involvement in the dark occult. “I made a dreadful mistake in using black magic in an attempt to bring myself money and sexual success. It worked. Walking through Manchester, I was accosted by a middle-aged couple who told me that I was the exact double of their only son who had died some years previously. They took me into their home, fed and clothed me, and treated me as one of the family. They were extremely wealthy, and when I asked them for a house of my own with an allowance to run it, they were quite happy to grant my wishes.  I held parties, bought expensive clothes, was sexually promiscuous: But it was only after a time that I realised I had a fearful debt to pay.” It would seem that Sanders believed the subsequent suicide of one of his mistresses around this time, along with his sister Joan being accidentally shot and then subsequently diagnosed with terminal cancer, was his price to pay.  He had studied the Book ‘The Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage.’ It is a very old European Kabbalistic Grimoire, an ancient book of magic that claims to describe a method to make contact with ‘Your Holy Guardian Angel.’ The ancient summoning ceremony which requires long and intense participation, in seclusion. It was a very dangerous ritual – for it would invoke Angels and Spirits “good or bad…..” Tales of Mystery Unexplained Podcast with author Steph Young

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The Headlines said, ‘60-year-old found dead on beach was involved in the occult and lived with former King of the Witches Alex Sanders.’ It was the year 2000. Local Newspaper, the Brighton & Hove Argus asked, ‘Was beach death black magic? Victim said to be obsessed with outer space,’ and continued, ‘A man who had been involved in witchcraft for 25 years was found washed up dead on a beach at Rustington, West Sussex, an inquest heard yesterday.’ The Guardian reported; ‘His body was discovered washed up beside a symbol marked out in the sand. A sword was found nearby. He had lived with the former king of black witches, Alex Saunders.’ His death is an Unexplained mystery. The inquest at Worthing, West Sussex, heard how Derek Taylor, 60, of Bexhill-on-Sea, had been involved in witchcraft since 1975.  Mr Taylor’s former wife Anna, said at the inquest that by the time their marriage ended, Taylor had become obsessed with witchcraft, and she had split up with him several times, she said, because of his obsession with the King of the Witches, Alex Sanders. “He wanted to come back to me but he was very ill. He said he would have to return the children to the stars. I never believed him, he used to be an actor and was very dramatic.” However, the Newspaper adds, rather disturbingly, ‘She said “He thought he was the Corn King and would be sacrificed at the end of the year.”’ UNEXPLAINED MYSTERY OF DEREK TAYLOR. WAS HE SACRIFICED? Unexplained Tales of Mystery Podcast

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On October 8th 2009 the Jamison family’s white pick-up truck is found abandoned in a remote part of Oklahoma. Inside is $30,000 and a dog. The human occupants of the truck are missing and there are no tracks leading away from the vehicle to indicate where they went. This would see the beginning of one of the most baffling unsolved unexplained murder mysteries. It would become a cryptic and strange tale. The unexplained disappearance of the Jamison family of Oklahoma is a mystery which seemingly involves zombie-like trances, secret lists, special bullets, fighting demons, a bundle of money, and the vanishing of a family in the remote landscape of the Latimer Mountains. Said the Sheriff Israel Beauchamp; “Normally you can go through an investigation and one by one, eliminate certain scenarios. We haven’t been able to do that in this case. With this family, everything seems possible….”

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In 2008 an astonishing incident was captured live on CCTV and by a BBC film crew who happened to be filming a documentary about the British motorway police. Two women are observed on the live screens at the M6 Motorway traffic control room in a rural part of Northern England near Stoke on Trent. They are walking along the central reservation of the motorway. The control room dispatches highway patrol officers to the scene immediately to stop the women. It’s completely illegal and a highly dangerous and illogical place to be walking. As the patrol car approaches them, back at the control room the live feed shows both women climbing over the short barriers of the central reservation and running straight into the path of the fast flowing traffic on the motorway. One of them is hit by a car in the fast lane. Inexplicably, despite having just been hit head on by the car, she immediately gets straight back up and continues on to the other side of the road. She is seen to be oblivious to any pain. Immediately the control room call the motorway police to go to the scene. The BBC film crew go in the car with the two police officers, filming their arrival within moments and expecting to find the woman who was hit by the speeding car very seriously injured and needing urgent medical treatment. As they pull up and get out of the police car, the women suddenly seem to notice the police and become highly agitated. As the police approach them and start to question them on the roadside, the BBC cameras capture the astonishing moment one of the women side-steps the police and runs straight into the oncoming traffic, again, followed quickly after by her sister, who does exactly the same thing. They are Swedish twins Sabina and Ursula Eriksson. One of them is hit by a car and sent flying over its roof; the other is hit head-on by a lorry. This highly disturbing scene is captured by the cameras. The police immediately call for an ambulance, stating to the emergency services over the walkie-talkie that it’s probably going to be two fatalities; they were both hit at full impact by the speeding vehicles. The woman hit by the car, at a speed of at least 60mph, is lying unconscious in the middle of the traffic lane. The woman hit by the lorry has broken bones visibly sticking out of her legs. As the police minister to her, she’s heard saying, “I know you are not real….” Unexplained folie a deux or Rise of the SuperSoldiers?Sabina and Ursula Eriksson – Tales of Mystery, Unexplained Podcast

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Unexplained -The curious case of Christopher Case; In April 1991, Christopher Case was Director of Programming for Muzak, the Company responsible for introducing elevator music and department store jingles. Growing up, he’d always had a passion for music. He grew up in Richmond, Virginia, and was known by all his friends and family for his love of music as well as for being a fitness fanatic. He’d been a DJ back then and had often preferred listening to music, rather than socializing and going out at night. The worst anyone could say about him was that he was sometimes a bit of a loner.  A good friend from his DJ days in Richmond, Sammy Saddo said, “One of the reason’s I get emotional about it is because he was my friend and I loved him, and I didn’t like the way he died. He would travel around the world with his job, so he didn’t date much but women liked him. He was the kind of guy you could rely on – everybody’s friend.”Fast forward to the night he died; on the night Christopher Case died, he had almost resigned himself to his fate. He had accepted that his death would most likely come. He felt that he simply would not be able to stop it, and although he put up a fight, his fears were confirmed. He did not make it through the night. He was found clothed in a kneeling position…… Unexplained – The Curious Case of Christopher Case.

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“I was told they were not Human.” The Strange Unexplained Story of Kyle Odom.

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“I can’t understand what’s going on round here,” said Mrs Jones. “It is all very tragic and impossible to explain.” “I never knew the others, but a voice in my head kept telling me to do it – because everything would be ok.” In this episode, we visit a place “Wrapped in Secrets” and an Unexplained cluster of Hangings.

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How did hunter Aaron Hedges climb a mountain in deep snow, with no boots ? How did Ottorrina Bonaventura wind up dead in a spot “unreachable via trails”? How did hiker Stacy A. Arras vanish in the middle of a National Park, never to be seen again? Are people disappearing in the wilderness, never to be found again….or found, dead?

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“I’m a freak. I have hands and I have feet, and if you saw me, you’d faint, you’d be petrified, mummified, turned into stone.” These were the words of ‘Gef’, the strangest being, that bewildered a farming family and most of the United Kingdom when his story was reported across many city newspapers. “It is impossible to deny that there is serious evidence …  for Gef’s reality,” said Mr. R.S. Lambert of the BBC, in the 1930’s. We could be forgiven for believing that Gef was a man, or a boy, but in fact ‘Gef’ was something that appeared not quite of this world…

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“Chaos is perfect order!” Kramer had announced prior to his disappearance, “I was able to decipher the code – it was heavily encrypted. People are going to want what I’m working on. We have to get off the planet…” that in the days before he disappeared, he had been supposedly working on perfecting a top-secret 30-year-old formula that he and his father believed would disprove Einstein and change the course of history. The formula was based on a theory that linked faster-than-light communications. ‘It was a kind of gravitational vibration wilder than anything seen on Star Trek. It was, he believed, worth billions, and then, one day, he disappeared, leaving behind a web of suspicion, intrigue and conspiracy theories more elaborate than anything since the grassy knoll.’ The Washington post asked; ‘Is Kramer trapped by his own technological wizardry, imprisoned somewhere in cyberspace?’ Many people believe that when Kramer vanished he entered another realm.’ On February 12th, 1995, he’d driven to LA Airport where he was due to pick up a business colleague and his wife. However, after approximately 45 minutes, he got back into his car and left the airport without waiting for his colleague to arrive. He stopped after a while and made a series of strange telephone calls. He called a former band member and good friend, Ron Bushy, and said to him, “I’ll see you on the other side.” Then he called the police and said, “This is Philip Taylor Kramer. I’m going to kill myself. And I want everyone to know O.J Simpson is innocent. THEY did it.” Then he disappeared.

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The Mystery Vanishing of Peter Gibbs, one dark night on the tiny Isle of Mull is an unexplained mystery that no-one has been able to solve…. it’s a baffling tale . It’s a mystery that has puzzled, perplexed and baffled both experts and amateur sleuths combined, ever since it happened. A man’s body is found up on a hill, four months after he disappeared on the Isle of Mull. He was last seen getting into his private plane. His body was found with only a tiny scratch, but his body hadn’t been where it was found when all the search parties had looked for him, multiple times. Then his body was found in the exact spot where searchers had looked, many, many times. When his body was found, it had only a tiny scratch; What happened to Peter Gibbs? And how did his body get to where he was found?

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The Smiley Face Killers: Part 2 Who is abducting, torturing & murdering college-aged men in the US and UK? The cryptic graffiti left at a scene. For the past 20 years, hundreds of college-aged men have disappeared, silently, soundlessly, vanishing without trace, only to be found some time later, dead in the water, but with no water in their lungs. They did not drown. Many are still missing… Who are The Smiley Face Killers? These men are abducted, held for a period of time, murdered, then disposed of in bodies of water. The original investigators found graffiti near the scenes, frequently with the Smiley Face symbol… In almost every case, the authorities have ruled the deaths ‘accidental’… but something far darker is at work here….and it isn’t stopping. A long history and a growing number of chilling unsolved disappearances and murders of young men in cities, who vanish for several days, or several weeks, and are later found in water. The Smiley Face Killers: Who is Abducting, Torturing and Murdering College-Aged Men in the US, Canada and the UK? The Secrets of the Smiley Face Serial Killers…. The Smiley Face Killers: Who is abducting, torturing & murdering college-aged men in the US and UK? An investigation, from bestselling author Steph Young

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The Smiley Face Killers  The Smiley Face Killers: Who is abducting, torturing and murdering college-aged men in the US and UK?  Who are  ‘The Smiley Face Killers’? The Smiley Face Killers, an investigation, from bestselling author Steph Young  https://www.amazon.com/default/e/B00KE8B6B0 For the past 20 years, hundreds of college-aged men have disappeared, silently, soundlessly, vanishing without trace, only to be found some time later, dead in the water, but with no water in their lungs. They did not drown. Many are still missing… Who are The Smiley Face Killers? Who is abducting, torturing & murdering college-aged men in the US, UK and Canada? These men are abducted, held for a period of time, murdered, then disposed of in bodies of water. The original investigators found graffiti near the scenes, frequently with the Smiley Face symbol… In almost every case, the authorities have ruled the deaths ‘accidental’… but something far darker is at work here….and it isn’t stopping. A long history and a growing number of chilling unsolved disappearances and murders of young men in cities, who vanish for several days, or several weeks, and are later found in water. The Smiley Face Killers: Who is Abducting, Torturing and Murdering College-Aged Men in the US, Canada and the UK? The Secrets of the Smiley Face Serial Killers…. https://www.amazon.com/default/e/B00KE8B6B0 Part 2 and 3 https://www.patreon.com/posts/smiley-face-19768576 Creepy Unexplained Disappearances: Investigating The Smiley Face Killers. based on my 2014 book. The Smiley Face Killers documentary Who’s abducting, torturing, and murdering college-aged men in the US, UK, and Canada….? These men are abducted, held for a period of time, murdered, then disposed of in bodies of water. The original investigators found graffiti near the scenes, frequently with the Smiley Face symbol……  Scores of young men have vanished without a trace, only to be found dead weeks or months later, in remote rivers or creeks, shallow ponds or canals, in areas that search parties have searched multiple times before; then later their bodies are discovered there, as though they have been placed there deliberately to be found.   “They go directly into the shallow water. And then they are all gone….. no ghost, no memories.….as if they never lived in the first place. And then they stay there; awake and afraid.”   “The evil is rampant and deep and widespread. He was tortured, taken to the river and killed. Then his body was ‘positioned.’’    “Loaded in cargo van. Paid in dollars green.”    “We take what we need and leave. Understand this: This is necessary. Life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on death feeds on life.”     “To murder a man was an act of the greatest devoutness.’ ….An investigation into ‘The Smiley Face Killers.’ The Beginning…

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I came across this little-known story, which bears remarkable similarities to the Dyatlov Pass incident – yet it happened in 1978 in a National Park in America! Described by the Washington Post in 1978 as “The American Dyatlov Pass,” it concerns the curious, bizarre, tragic and ultimately still unsolved case of the death of four young men in the woods…who fled something…. in absolute terror for their lives..and paid the ultimate price… It’s the most curious and inexplicable case…

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Ep 1: The Strange & Unexplained disappearance of Lars Mittank I’m Best-selling amazon author Steph Young and I’d like to welcome you to my new podcast, where things are never quite what they seem, where the Unexplained brings baffling true cases of mysterious  disappearances, cryptic clues in missing person’s cases, and where the world of lore, legend, and the supernatural, meets fact. Exclusive Member only Episodes will also be available through Patreon Thank you! Steph Young is an independent researcher and amazon bestselling author, addicted to researching all Supernatural, Paranormal, Esoteric and Enigmatic Mysteries. Each book she writes seems to lead her to further questions and searches for answers, as the unexplained Mysteries inevitably deepen & develop into ever more complex riddles in the spectrum of the Unknown. She particularly likes to write about baffling unexplained disappearances, strange missing persons cases, and stories of creepy encounters in the Woods. Her research delves into the relationship between the supernatural, metaphysics and the unknown, the places where legend and lore meet fact, and always, the strangest and most fascinating of true stories. Join me for some of the creepiest unexplained mysteries, for true stories that make us question our own sanity and the reality of the world around us, and where darkness has a way of taking hold. The stories are true, and yet very often, we would wish that they were not… Keep coming back and enjoy the Masquerade Podcast. you’ll also find me on facebook

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