Show notes
In 1917, a dead Mark Twain "wrote" a novel through a Ouija board — and the lawsuit that followed forced everyone to ask who really owns a book authored from the afterlife.
EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/ghostwriting
READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/366f2sny
FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Did Mark Twain write a new novel after he was dead? If so, how? *** Though David Parker Ray's girlfriend Cindy Hendy helped him commit numerous rapes and murders in the 1990s, she was released in 2019 and walks free today. *** Louis Le Prince vanished under mysterious circumstances, but did he willingly decide to hide from the outside world, or was he murdered? *** A man has a dream so disturbing that he’s deeply affected by it well after he dreamt it. And the reason it stuck with him could be that it wasn’t a dream after all – but a premonition of something horrible to come. *** Shortly after finishing her junior year of high school, Alissa Turner disappeared, never to be seen alive again. Her murder would’ve gone unsolved if not for the social media platform, TikTok. *** Humans have been fascinated with Mars ever since we learned it was a planet. But why are we so obsessed with it? Is it simply our next step towards deep-space travel, or are we drawn to it for a more basic reason… because our ancestors originated from there? *** There are many UFO sightings on record, but ones that are accompanied by missing time are particularly interesting. Perhaps not least as they might suggest something more akin to alien abduction than just a mere sighting. We’ll look at one particular incident that took place in Nebraska in 1966.
CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = Show Open
00:02:26.278 = Do Copyright Laws Apply To Spirit Writing?
00:13:54.317 = The Murder Solved Through TikTok ***
00:19:27.188 = The Nebraska Time Affair
00:35:44.438 = The Strange Dreams of Mr. Moir ***
00:40:33.850 = Did Our Ancestors Live On Mars?
00:52:06.275 = The Toy Box Killer’s Girlfriend ***
01:01:04.695 = The Strange Disappearance of Louis Le Prince
01:06:58.396 = 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 Nebraska Missing Time Affair” by Marcus Lowth for UFO Insight: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yckjf4xe
“The Toy Box Killer’s Girlfriend” by Marco Margaritoff for All That’s Interesting: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8k8j79
“The Strange Disappearance of Louis Le Prince” by Jan Bartek for Ancient Pages: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p9f5zdd
“The Strange Dreams of Mr. Moir” posted at Anomalien: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/33za3tej
“The Murder Solved Through TikTok” by Olivia McCormack for Bust.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/42s9je2z
“Did Our Ancestors Live On Mars?” posted at Earth-Chronicles.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4j8pcrwe
“Do Copyright Laws Apply to Spirit Writing?” posted at Esoterx.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/nzsen4v5
(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.)
WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.
Originally aired: December, 2022
This episode of Weird Darkness moves through posthumous authorship, serial murder, a vanished film pioneer, a TikTok-cracked cold case, alien abduction, Martian origins, and a premonition dug out of the ground.It opens in 1990s New Mexico, where Cindy Hendy helped David Parker Ray abduct, rape, and torture as many as sixty women inside the trailer he called his "Toy Box," a space fitted with ceiling mirrors that forced victims to watch their own suffering. Hendy tracked down targets and stood by while Ray tormented them with electric shocks and medical instruments, until Cynthia Vigil escaped on March 22, 1999, running naked into traffic in Elephant Butte with a dog collar around her neck after stabbing Hendy in the neck with an icepick. Sentenced in 2000 to thirty-six years, Hendy was released on July 15, 2019, because her plea deal predated a law requiring violent offenders to serve eighty-five percent of their terms, and she walks free today.From there the episode crosses to France and the case of Louis Le Prince, born in Metz in 1841 and credited as the forgotten father of motion pictures for building a sixteen-lens camera in 1888. He boarded a train from Dijon to Paris on September 16, 1890, waved off by his brother, and was gone when the train arrived, luggage and all. Thomas Edison spent years asserting sole ownership of cinematography, and Le Prince's son Adolphe, who testified against him, was found shot dead on Fire Island in 1902; a diary entry attributed to Edison and dated September 20, 1890, reportedly records that a man named Eric called from Dijon to say "Prince is no more."Next comes the disappearance of Alissa Turney, a Phoenix teenager last seen on May 17, 2001, after finishing her junior year and arguing with her stepfather, Michael Turney, who claimed she ran away to California. A 2008 search of his home turned up twenty-six homemade explosive devices and a ninety-eight-page manifesto, and he served time on federal bomb charges before his release in 2017. Alissa's younger sister, Sarah Turney, built a TikTok following past one million people around the hashtag campaign for her sister, and in August 2020 Michael Turney was charged with the murder.The episode then turns to a lonely road outside Columbus, Nebraska, on September 5, 1966, where a seventeen-year-old riding his motorcycle to meet his girlfriend's parents saw a completely circular object hovering roughly a hundred feet overhead, ringed with green, red, and yellow lights and emitting a low hum he felt resonate through his body. His engine raged and his wheels spun, but the bike held frozen in place; a five-minute trip took over thirty minutes, and he could never account for the missing time. The same night, radar at Finland Air Force Station in Minnesota tracked an oval craft with the same colored underside, prompting two F-89 jets to scramble from Duluth before it vanished.The Mars segment follows, examining why NASA, SpaceX, and Elon Musk remain fixed on a cold desert planet, and the fringe claim that human life may have originated there billions of years ago before Mars lost its magnetic field and its atmosphere was stripped away by solar wind. The piece leans on the detail that astronauts in space drift toward a 24.9-hour circadian rhythm matching the Martian day, and cites Haim Eshed, former head of Israel's space program, who claimed a secret underground base on Mars where American astronauts and aliens work together, alongside NASA scientist Jim Green's proposal to shield the planet with an artificial magnetic field placed at the Sun-Mars L1 point.Mark Twain surfaces next, seven years after Samuel Clemens died in 1910, when a novel called "The Coming of Jap Herron" appeared in 1917, purportedly dictated by his spirit through a Ouija board to Emily Grant Hutchings and Lola V. Hays. Hutchings, a Hannibal-born writer who had corresponded with Twain in life, had earlier channeled a supposed seventeenth-century spirit named Patience Worth, and psychical researcher James Hyslop tested the Twain claim by asking the ghost to relay the line "Hyslop is a cabbage head," a message that never arrived. Because Harper and Brothers held exclusive rights to Twain's work, his daughter Clara Clemens moved to block publication, and the resulting suit against publisher Mitchell Kennerley ended with every copy pulled from shelves.The episode closes in June 1870 near Boyndie, Scotland, where farm bailiff William Moir dreamed of a bloodied corpse lying on sloping ground near the shore, and weeks later helped carry a drowned asylum inmate over that exact spot, watching blood appear on the dead man's face when the body slipped from its board. The vision returned relentlessly through 1871 until, in January 1872, Moir took a spade to a place called Stakeness and unearthed a human skull and skeleton estimated to be at least fifty years old, in ground where villagers recalled a man named Elder had vanished decades earlier, reportedly murdered in the very room where Moir later slept. The discovery did not free him; he sank into a religious depression and died in October 1873.
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