Show notes
A school bus driver in Circleville, Ohio was told in block letters to end an affair or her husband would die, and he did. Decades later a New Jersey couple paid $1.3 million for 657 Boulevard and never spent a night there, because a stranger signing himself The Watcher kept writing to ask about the "young blood" in the house.
EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/circleville
READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2ycj6492
FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Two stories of people living ordinary lives being terrorized by threatening, creepy letters in the mail. We’ll begin in 1976 in Circleville, Ohio. Then I’ll share a more modern story where a New Jersey family moves into a home and is terrorized for years by mail through 2017.
CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00.00.000 = The Foreboding
00:01:50.978 = Show Open
00:03:06.569 = The Circleville Letters
00:14:25.756 = The Westfield Watcher ***
00:43:42.991 = 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:
“The Circleville Letters” by Les Hewitt for Historic Mysteries: https://tinyurl.com/y8hhhjnr
“The Watcher of Westfield” by Les Hewitt for Historic Mysteries: https://tinyurl.com/yadngrqd
(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)
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Originally aired: June 2021
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This episode of Weird Darkness follows two unsolved campaigns of terror by mail: the Circleville Letters that tormented a small Ohio town beginning in 1976, and The Watcher, an anonymous writer who drove a family out of a $1.3 million house in Westfield, New Jersey.It opens in Circleville, Ohio, where school bus driver Mary Gillespie started receiving block-lettered letters postmarked from Columbus accusing her of an affair with the school superintendent and warning that her house was being watched. Her husband Ron Gillespie got one ordering him to end the affair or die, and on August 19, 1977, after a phone call whose contents Mary never learned, Ron grabbed his pistol, drove off, and struck a tree at a nearby intersection. Police found the gun had been fired once, the postmortem showed his blood alcohol at 1.5 times the legal limit despite friends describing him as a teetotaler, and the crash was ruled an accident. The letters resumed and spread to elected officials, and in 1983 Mary pulled over her bus to tear down a sign threatening her daughter and found a box rigged with a booby-trapped pistol that failed to fire. Police traced the gun to her brother-in-law Paul Freshour, who was convicted of attempted murder on the strength of a disputed handwriting test despite an alibi. The letters kept coming from Columbus for the entire decade Freshour sat in prison, one of them mailed to Freshour himself, and six months after his release, when Unsolved Mysteries aired the case, the network received its own note signed The Circleville Writer.From there the episode moves to Westfield, New Jersey, where Derek and Maria Broaddus paid $1.3 million for 657 Boulevard in June 2014 and found a letter in the mailbox before they'd moved in, addressed to the new owner and signed The Watcher. The writer claimed his grandfather had watched the house in the 1920s and his father in the 1960s, named the Honda minivan out front, knew the ages and nicknames of the couple's three children, and asked whether the house would be filled with "young blood." Later letters described which bedrooms faced the street and asked whether the children would be afraid to play alone in the basement. Westfield police questioned the Langford family next door, a private investigator and a former FBI agent named Robert Lenehan built profiles, and a DNA test on one envelope came back female but matched no suspect. The Broadduses never spent a night in the house, sued the previous owners John and Andrea Woods over a similar letter received days before closing, and were denied permission to subdivide the lot in 2017. Two weeks after renters moved in, a fourth letter arrived promising car accidents, fires, and dead pets, and the case remains unsolved with the house still in the family's hands.
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