Show notes
The most evil among us are sometimes sentenced to death — but by cutting their lives short, are we unknowingly creating malevolent entities that haunt us forever?
EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/DeathRowGhosts
READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/mr3vu756
FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: The most evil of lawbreakers in our society – the murderers and rapists – are usually confined to life in prison. The most evil of the evil are sometimes sentenced to death. But is it possible that by cutting short the lives of the horrific individuals on Death Row, we are unknowingly creating new malevolent entities that continue to torment us from the grave? (The Ghosts of Death Row) *** From beatings to murders to a handful of escape attempts made by Alcatraz's prisoners, the terrifying history of Alcatraz prison contains plenty of ghosts. (The Hauntings of Alcatraz) *** What if UFOs aren’t from another planet – or even another dimension? What if they are actually machines built right here on Earth, piloted by human time travelers? (Time Machine Flying Saucers) *** Weirdo family member Amber Harris shares a true story called “Darkness Was My Neighbor”. (Darkness Was My Neighbor)
CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding
00:00:51.953 = Show Open
00:02:45.176 = Ghosts of Death Row
00:23:40.720 = Hauntings of Alcatraz ***
00:40:46.307 = Time Machine Flying Saucers ***
00:47:37.172 = Darkness Was My Neighbor
00:53:53.392 = 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 Ghosts of Death Row” by Brent Swancer: http://bit.ly/2KzEFw9
“The Hauntings of Alcatraz” by Erin McCann: http://bit.ly/2QSsuM6
“Time Machine Flying Saucers” posted at UFO Digest (link no longer available)
“Darkness Was My Neighbor” by Amber Harris – submitted directly to Weird Darkness
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Originally aired: January, 2022
Weird Darkness journeys into haunted prisons, botched executions, secret time-travel technology, and a neighbor's death that seemed to linger after the funeral, spanning true crime, the paranormal, and a firsthand ghost story from a listener.It opens with the ghosts of Death Row, where condemned killers appear to keep terrorizing long after execution. German immigrant Frederick Hollman, one of America's earliest serial killers, was hanged at the Ford County Jail in Paxton, Illinois, on May 14, 1897, after promising to return and rap on the windows of the witnesses and jurors who convicted him — and the jail is now a paranormal hotspot where his face has been photographed glaring into his old cell. Lavinia Fisher and her husband John ran the Six Mile House near Charleston, South Carolina, in the early 1820s, allegedly poisoning and dropping wealthy travelers through a trapdoor before their hanging for highway robbery, and her aggressive spirit is still blamed for choking sensations and foul stenches at the Old Charleston Jail. Raymond Snowden, dubbed Idaho's Jack the Ripper for the 1956 stabbing of Cora Dean, endured a botched twenty-minute hanging at the Old Idaho Penitentiary in Boise in 1957 and reportedly haunts the gallows site alongside inmate Douglas Van Vlack, who leaped to his death from the cell block rafters. Ted Bundy, executed in Florida's electric chair on January 24, 1989, has supposedly been seen grinning atop the chair and telling guards he beat them all, while Willie Lloyd Turner — executed by lethal injection in 1995 after fifteen years and five aborted trips to the chamber — appeared so lifelike after death that inmates mistook him for the living. The segment closes across the Atlantic with executioner John Ellis, who hanged more than a hundred people at Manchester's Strangeways Jail before killing himself in 1932 and is said to still patrol B Wing to keep the prison's other ghosts, including poisoner Mrs. Merrifield, in line.From there the episode moves to Alcatraz, the federal penitentiary that operated on its fog-bound San Francisco Bay island from 1934 to 1963 and earned a reputation as one of America's most haunted sites. The solitary cells of D-Block known as "the hole" are tied to the 1940s strangulation death of a screaming inmate in cell 14D, possibly the work of former occupant Rufus McCain, and visitors report icy fingers and unnatural cold there. The 1946 Battle of Alcatraz left two guards and three escapees dead in a utility corridor where clanging noises still echo, psychic Sylvia Browne sensed murdered hitman Abie "Butcher" Maldowitz in the laundry room, and the catacomb "dungeon" beneath A-Block preserves the screams of prisoners once chained naked to its walls. Al Capone spent part of his 1934 sentence strumming a banjo to hold off insanity, and that banjo music is still reportedly heard in the halls, while "Birdman" Robert Stroud haunts the hospital wing where he was confined among his canary research. The island carried dark associations long before the prison, from Ohlone tribal beliefs that it gathered evil spirits to the Civil War soldiers who died chained in its guardhouse basement, and even the 1969 to 1971 Native American occupation ended in fire and loss before the ghosts reportedly stayed behind.Next the episode turns to a fringe theory that reframes flying saucers as human technology rather than alien craft, arguing that a secretive commercial group used patent-law secrecy to build working time machines in twentieth-century laboratories. The account claims these machines can move an ion through time in both directions, that short-range "trans-burst" devices let a person leap across nearby distances, and that the UFOs people photograph are previews of future mankind rather than extraterrestrial visitors. It ties the idea to Einstein's 1901 work as a patent clerk and to E=mc², and recasts Area 51 as cover not for alien bodies but for a commercial experiment involving four trained monkeys linked to a 1961 interstellar flight.The episode closes with a listener account from Amber Harris, who lived at the end of a cul-de-sac in Williamsburg, Virginia, in a house set down in a ditch so the second floor sat level with the street. After her next-door neighbor died suddenly in his home and his widow moved away, the house sat unsold for months, and one night past midnight the hallway light outside Amber's bedroom switched on without the telltale sound of anyone climbing the loud staircase, casting the shadow of a male figure beneath her door before it went dark. Weeks later her sister woke her by text to watch the dead neighbor's dog standing beneath the orange street light, barking at the empty house before turning its head directly toward the two of them at the window and then vanishing, an image that stayed with the family until a job moved them to Indiana, with the neighbor's house still unsold when they drove past it the following May.
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