Masquerade Podcast: Unexplained Mysteries With Author Steph Young

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!

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 wa

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

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

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 t

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, l

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 lon

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

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-sh

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

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 canc

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

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….”

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 co

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 re

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

“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.

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?

“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…

“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