Masquerade Podcast: Unexplained Mysteries With Author Steph Young

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. “The evil is rampant and deep and widespread. He was tortured, taken to the river and killed. Then his body was ‘positioned.’’ “I couldn’t get through to him. He couldn’t talk. He couldn’t tell me where he was. 8 minutes into the call there was suddenly this ghastly screaming. I started crying.” How does a young man end up dead in water that is only a couple of feet deep? Why can’t he get out of that water, even though he is not drunk? Why can’t he be found in that water, often for weeks when it is searched multiple times? Why would he go to the most remote body of water, in the opposite direction to the one in which he was heading? Why did his cell phone suddenly go dead after he said some

It was late in the night when David Smith became separated from his friend, Heath Bullard. They had been running frantically in blind panic in the dark and when they reached a creek, Heath couldn’t go any further – he couldn’t swim, and maybe David didn’t notice, but David plunged headlong into the water, and their separation for a descent into surreal horror began.   It was August the 8th 1994, and it would be some days before Heath and David would be reunited, but the space in between would see them changed beyond all recognition from their former selves… 

music: Romance for Piano and Cello by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD)

In November 2009, in the middle of the night in a rural province in China, Mrs. Gu Denghui is having a disturbing dream. In her dream she sees a tall, thin man wearing a suit. He is walking through the old village where she and her family used to live and where they still owned an abandoned house. He is carrying a bag of some kind and she watches as he approaches their old house. She cannot see his face as he wears a hat like a trilby. It hides his face, but as he approaches the back door to their house he stops, and she catches a glimpse of his mouth. It forms a wide smile. There is something very sinister about this man. He is carrying a package of some kind….

To an old and ornate cemetery now, and ‘Is the secret to time travel lurking in an old London Cemetery?’ asked Helen Smith in the Daily News of October the 29th 1998. You see, there is a story that deep within the Brompton Cemetery in London is a time machine for teleportation or time travel. It sounds an extraordinary claim and there is much intriguing mystery to this story. This portal to another world is said to be within the Egyptian mausoleum of a spinster named Miss H. Courtoy and her daughters… Tales of Mystery Unexplained

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…’ The Tale of the Highgate Vampire…

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

What was The No Monster Club?

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

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 tha

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 g

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

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 wat

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

‘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?

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

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