It was the spring of nineteen thirty one when Asia Iker began corresponding with Cornelius O.

Pearson, a widower from Clarksburg, West Virginia, through a Lonely heartsad.

He would write things like women are the sweetest, purest, and most precious part of the human race.

They saying the melody of human life.

However, it would be romantic lines like this that would doom Iker, a lonely Illinois widow, and her three young children.

Through his letters, Pearson came across as romantic and kind.

He explained that he had used a Lonely Hearts ad because his job as a civil engineer kept him on the road and made it difficult to meet women.

After months of back and forth, Pearson and Iker met at the latter's Park Ridge home on June twenty third, nineteen thirty one.

From the moment he arrived, it was clear that the photos he had sent to her were outdated and didn't match the haggard, pale man that arrived on her doorstep.

Nevertheless, after Pearson stayed at the house for five days, Iker agreed to leave her children, Greta nine, Harry twelve, and Annabelle fourteen with a nurse and travel with him to the East.

Five days later, the nurse received a letter from Iker saying that she'd be staying in the East indefinitely and to release the children to Pearson.

He arrived shortly after and put the kids into his car without packing any of their clothing or belongings, and drove off with them.

The sudden disappearance of the Ikers did not go unnoticed in the small town of Parkridge.

Local police began an investigation and discovered there was no Cornelius Pearson around Clarksburg.

They did, however, learn that a man known as Harry F.

Powers had rented a po box under that name.

Powers was a vacuum cleaner salesman who survived off of the money of his wealthy wife.

When investigators searched Power's property, they discovered a windowless concrete garage in the back.

Inside the structure, they found numerous dank concrete cells and a pile of bloody clothing.

Police Chief C.

A.

Duckworth described the scene as something the likes of which this country hasn't seen in a long long time.

Digging up the nearby land, the police found the bodies of the Aiker family, as well as another woman, Dorothy Lemke, another widow who Powers had tricked and murdered.

A lynch Bob was formed to deal with Powers, but the police were able to get a hold of him before he was killed.

When Powers admitted his crimes, he described the murders with stomach churning banality, saying, I walked through Annabelle's chamber and killed the younger kids, killed the brother and sister.

I hit the little boy on the head with a hammer before putting the rope around his throat.

They never made any noise or put up any fight.

I killed the older girl.

I didn't have any trouble.

They took it quietly.

When questioned by the police as to who the other clothing found in his house belonged to, he said, you've got me on five.

What good would fifty more do?

Powers was hung soon after.

I'm Darren Marler and this is Weird Darkness.

Welcome weirdos.

This is Weird Darkness.

Here you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and unexplained coming up in this episode.

Out of Weird Darkness.

Five hundred years ago, Europe saw its first rhinoceros in more than a thousand years, well sort of.

In reality, it was an accidental fake.

A physics paper proposes, neither you nor the world around you are real.

If that's true, then does that mean that you're not actually listening to this podcast?

When it comes to mythical monsters, the dragon seems to have never lost its celebrity.

Dragons have always been popular, not just on multimillion dollar cable channels and blockbuster movies, but in games, posters, artwork, and tales young and old, generation over generation, in just about every culture.

An extramarital affair in eighteen twelve resulted in a pregnancy and a murder, and evidence of the term sins the father also comes into play.

Scrying is the act of gazing into a reflective or translucent object to open your intuition.

This supposedly allows the scrier to gain information they may not have access to normally inside their conscious mind.

Often the object used for this is the often scene but often misunderstood crystal ball.

But first, from the Beast to the Red Ripper to the candy Man, child murderers might be the most terrifying people to ever walk the earth.

We'll look at a few serial killers who thought nothing of murdering the most innocent of humanity.

Now bolt your doors, lock your windows, turn off your lights, and come with me into the weird darkness.

While the people like Harry f.

Powers who take human lives for their own pleasures are always terrifying, child murderers almost always elicit an even greater level of disgust and revulsion.

They defy all the biological and societal impulses that tell us that children are to be protected.

These child murderers thus seem to be unnatural and almost inhuman.

Harry of Powers was arrested for the murders of two women and three children in Illinois in nineteen thirty one.

Evidence from the scene of the crime suggests that he killed many more in his concrete bunker.

He was hung soon after his crimes were discovered.

Between nineteen seventy eight and nineteen ninety Andrea Shikatillo, known as the Red Ripper, raped, killed and mutilated at least fifty two women children in Russia, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.

He was executed for his crimes by gunshot in Russia in nineteen ninety four.

During the late nineteen twenties and early nineteen thirties, serial killer and cannibal Albert Fish terrorized the east coast to the US by raping, murdering, and eating at least three children.

He suspected of killing significantly more people, with at least five other victims being linked to him.

He was executed by electric chair in nineteen thirty six.

Pedro Lopez, the Monster of the Andes, raped and murdered at least one hundred and ten girls in Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador, though he has claimed that his total number of victims is closer to three hundred.

He was arrested in Ecuador in nineteen eighty three, but released from a psychiatric hospital in nineteen ninety eight for good behavior.

His current whereabouts are unknown.

From nineteen sixty three to nineteen sixty five, Manchester couple Ian Brady and Myra Hinley killed five children between the ages of ten and seventeen.

Hinley lured in the victims and Brady killed them with a variety of blunt objects and strangulation.

The two were arrested in nineteen sixty five and both eventually died in prison.

Martha Ann Johnson of Georgia killed three of her children between nineteen seventy seven and nineteen eighty two.

After confrontations with her husband, the mother would roll her two hundred and fifty pound body on top of her young children to kill them.

After strangling her eleven year old daughter to death, Johnson was finally caught.

She's currently serving life in prison.

Luis Garavito, known as Labistia or the Beast, raped, tortured, and killed at least one hundred forty seven young boys in his native country of Columbia.

Most of them were street urchins who he had lured in with gifts.

He was arrested in nineteen ninety nine and is currently in prison.

While working at his family owned candy factory in the early nineteen seventies, Dean Coral, also known as the Candyman, would rape and kill at least twenty eight boys with the assistance of two teenage partners.

Kurl's murders came to light when he was killed by one of his accomplices, who confessed to police.

Mayuki Ishikawa was a midwife in Tokyo in the late nineteen forties when she allowed at least one hundred three of the babies in her care to die because she believed that their parents were too poor to raise them.

She received only four years in prison for her crimes.

Norman F.

Sal Simmons, aka the Station Strangler, was a fifth grade teacher in South Africa where he raped and killed twenty two young boys from nineteen eighty six to nineteen ninety four.

After luring the children away from the local train station, he would sodomize and strangle them to death.

He was eventually arrested in nineteen ninety five and is currently serving time in the South African Prison From nineteen eighty nine to nineteen ninety two, and Ecio Ferrara de Susa was a doctor in the remote town of Altamira, Brazil, where he ran a Satanic cult that raped and murdered nineteen local children.

He was convicted for three of those murders in two thousand and three and was sentenced to seventy seven years in prison.

Between nineteen seventy two and nineteen eighty five, Mary Beth Tinning killed her own nine infants through various methods disguised as natural causes.

Though people began to suspect foul play, it wasn't until the ninth child when people took action and found that the death was clearly caused by smothering.

She was soon after arrested and is currently serving life in prison.

Between nineteen eighty six to nineteen eighty nine, Robert Black of Scotland raped and murdered four girls between the ages of five and eleven.

He used his delivery van to abduct girls across the UK.

He was eventually caught after a nationwide man hunt and died in prison.

In nineteen ninety nine, javette Ikbaal sent a letter to the local police in Lahore, Pakistan, explaining that he had killed one hundred boys, mostly street urchins he had picked up.

After locking the boys in a room, he used a chain to strangle them and then disposed of their bodies with acid.

He was sentenced to hang, but instead killed himself in his cell before his scheduled execution.

After being released from a sixteen year sentence for killing his girlfriend, Anthony Kirkland went on to rape and murder four people, two women and two girls from two thousand and six to two thousand and nine.

He would burn the bodies of his victims to conceal that he had raped them.

He's currently serving a life sentence in Ohio up next.

Five hundred years ago, Europe saw its first rhinoceros in more than a thousand years.

Well, sort of turns out Doer's rhinoceros wasn't really a rhinoceros.

A new physics paper proposes a theory that neither you nor the world around you is real.

So what does that mean?

If it's true?

And dragons have been around for generations in just about every culture, We'll look at dragons and their dragon kings, these stories and more when Weird Darkness returns.

Five hundred years ago, Europe saw its first rhinoceros in more than a thousand years.

The animal was fairly common during Roman times, seen in circuses and gladiatorial events, but after the fall of the Roman Empire, the rhinoceros faded away from people's memory, becoming something of a mythical beast alongside dragons and unicorns, until one living example arrived from the far East.

The rhinoceros was a gift from Alfonso de Albuquerque, the governor of Portuguese India, to King Manuel the First of Portugal.

Albuquerque himself received the rhino as a diplomatic gift from Sultan Musafarshah, the second of Cambe, the modern Indian state of Gujarat.

At that time, presentatives of the Portuguese monarchy and Indian sultan's commonly exchanged gifts to keep the strenuous relationship between a foreign colonial power and the indigenous rulers well oiled.

In this case, Albuquerque wanted to build a fort on the island of dew and as the Sultan for permission.

The Sultan refused, but Toui's tension gifted him the rhinoceros from his own menagerie.

Albuquerque decided that a rhinoceros would be a great gift for the Portuguese king, and thus, in January fifteen fifteen, the rhinoceros, named Genda, which literally means rhino in Hindi, embarked on a four month journey across the Indian Ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope and up north through the Atlantic to arrive in Lisbon on May twentieth, fifteen fifteen.

The rhino caused a sensation and attracted crowds of curious onlookers.

Many scholars came to examine and admire the east.

Letters describing the fantastic creature were dispatched to correspondence throughout Europe.

A description of the rhinoceros soon reached Nuremberg, along with a rough sketch of the animal.

Lfrich Duer, a German painter and printmaker living in Nuremberg, was captivated by the strangeness of the animal, so he began to prepare a pen sketch, relying on the written description and the sketch made by an unknown artist.

Duer never saw the animal himself, but the woodcut he prepared became so famous that for two centuries it was the only rhinoceros Europeans ever saw.

But Duer's representation of the rhinoceros was not anatomically correct.

He put armor like plates on the animal's body, complete with rivets along the seams.

He placed a small twisted horn on its back, and gave the animal steely legs.

Despite its anatomical inaccuracies, Doer's fanciful creation became so popular that three hundred years later, European illustrators continued to publish Dourer's woodcut, even after they had seen the real animal.

Some scholars believe that Doer was not being artistic when he prepared the sketch, but was true to the descriptions he read.

The armour like plates that Doer rendered so sharply may represent the heavy folds of thick skin of an Indian rhinoceros.

The ribbed midsection, knobby's skin, and soft hairy ears are remarkably accurate.

The scaly texture over the body of the animal may be Doer's attempt to reflect the rough and almost hairless hide of the rhinoceros, which has wortlike bumps covering its upper legs and shoulders.

The degree of detail was surprising given that Doer had not actually seen the animal.

Doer's woodcut was eventually reprinted some four to five thousand times, an impressive number considering the era when this happened.

It was probably one of the first mass produced images and the very first one that went viral.

Images have always been a powerful medium, especially in the early fifteenth century when few people could read a picture, as the saying goes could speak a thousand words, and they facilitated the rapid and widespread dissemination of information.

As William Evans, the curator of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, noted, images such as Doers rivaled or even superseded written texts.

The influence of Dura's rhinoceros declined only in the eighteenth century, when more live rhinoceroses were brought to Europe, enabling Europeans to finally see what the animal actually looked like.

What happened to the original King Manuel's rhinoceros.

It died, of course, but not of old age.

After spending seven months in the king's menagerie at the Ribera Palace in Lisbon.

King Manuel decided to gift the animal to the Medici Pope Leo the Tenth, so that he would continue to receive favors from the pope.

In December fifteen fifteen, the rhinoceros was loaded onto a ship, but on the way to Rome, the ship met a storm and sank in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Liguria.

Bound in shackles, the rhinoceros drowned while others swam to safety.

The carcass of the rhinoceros was recovered and its hide was returned to Lisbon.

Some say it was sent to Rome.

The fate of the hide is not known, although some hope that a giant stuffed rhinoceros is still stowed somewhere waiting to be discovered.

How real are you?

What if everything you are, everything you know, all the people in your life, as well as all the events were not physically there, but just a very elaborate simulation.

You might want to take your etc.

In Migraine now because this is about to get kind of brainy.

Philosopher Nick Bostrom famously considered this in his seminal paper Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?

Where he proposed that all of our existence may be just a product of a very sophisticated computer simulation ran by advanced beings whose real nature we may never be able to know.

Well, Now a new theory has come along that takes it a step further.

What if there are no advanced beings either, and everything in reality is a self simulation that generates itself from pure thought.

The physical universe is a strange loop, says this new paper, titled the Self Simulation Hypothesis Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics from the team at the Quantum Gravity Research, a Los Angeles based theoretical physics institute founded by the scientist and entrepreneur Klee Irwin.

They take Bostrom's simulation hypothesis, which maintains that all of reality is an extremely detailed computer program, and ask, rather than relying on advanced life forms to create the amazing technology necessary to compose everything within our world, isn't it more efficient to propose that the universe itself is a mental self simulation.

They tie this idea to quantum mechanics, seeing the universe as one of many possible quantum gravity models.

One important aspect that differentiates this view relates to the fact that Bostrom's original hypothesis is materialistic, seeing the universe as inherently physical.

To Bostrom, we could simply be part of an ancestor simulation engineered by posthumans.

Even the process of evolution itself could just be a mechanism by which the future beings are testing countless processes, purposefully moving humans through levels of biological and technological growth.

In this way, they also generate the supposed information or history of our world.

Ultimately, we wouldn't know the difference.

But where does the physical reality that would generate the simulations comes from?

One of the researchers.

Their hypothesis takes a non materialistic approach, saying that everything is information expressed as thought.

As such, the universe self actualizes itself into existence, relying on underlying algorithms and a rule they call the principle of efficient language.

Under this proposal, the entire simulation of everything in existence is just one grand thought.

Now would the simulation itself originated?

It was always there, say the researchers explaining the concept of timeless emergentism.

According to this idea, time isn't there at all.

Instead, the all encompassing thoughts that is, our reality offers a nested semblance of a hierarchical order, full of subthoughts that reach all the way down the rabbit hole toward the base mathematics and fundamental particles.

This is also where the rule of efficient language comes in, suggesting that humans themselves are such emergent sub thoughts, and they experience and find meaning in the world through other sub thoughts called code steps or actions in the most economical fashion.

In correspondence with big think, physicist David Chester elaborated, while many scientists presume materialism to be true, we believe that quantum mechanics may provide hints that our reality is a mental construct.

Recent advances in quantum gravity such as seeing space time I'm emergent via a hologram also is a hint that space time is not fundamental.

This is also compatible with ancient Hermetic and Indian philosophy.

In a sense, the mental construct of reality creates space time to efficiently understand itself by creating a network of subconscious entities that can interact and explore the totality of possibilities.

The scientists link their hypothesis to pan psychism, which sees everything as thought or consciousness.

The authors think that their pan psychic self simulation model can even explain the origin of an overarching pan consciousness at the foundational level of the simulations, which self actualizes itself in a strange loop via self simulation.

This pan consciousness also has free will, and its various nested levels essentially have the ability to select what code to actualize while making syntax choices.

The goal of this consciousness to general meaning or information.

If all of this is hard to grasp, the authors offer another interesting idea that may link your everyday experience to these philosophical considerations.

Think of your dreams as your own personal self simulations, postulates the team.

While they are rather primitive by super intelligent Future AI standards.

Dreams tend to provide better resolution than current computer modeling and are a great example of the evolution of the human mind.

As the scientists write, what is most remarkable is the ultra high fidelity resolution of these mind based simulations and the accuracy of the physics therein.

They point especially to lucid dreams, where the dreamer is aware of being in a dream, as instances of very accurate simulations created by your mind that may be impossible to distinguish from any other reality.

To that end, now that you're sitting there listening to this podcast, how do you really know you're not in a dream?

The experience seems very high in resolution, but so do some dreams.

It's not too much of a reach to imagine that an extremely powerful computer that we may be able to make in a not so distant future could duplicate this level of detail.

The team also proposes that in the coming years, we will be able to create designer consciousnesses for ourselves, as advancements in gene editing could allow us to make our own mind simulations much more powerful.

We may also see minds emerging that do not require matter at all.

While some of these ideas are certainly controversial in the mainstream science circles.

KLi and his team respond that we must critically think about consciousness and certain aspects of philosophy that are uncomfortable subjects to some scientists.

If you would like to read the full paper on this, I have placed a link to the article in the online journal Entropy in the show notes.

My only question to all of this is simple, If what I'm experiencing is not real and I'm not real, does that mean I don't have to pay my credit card bill?

We encounter dragons in almost every ancient culture of the world.

Dragons played an important role in the belief of our ancestors, and these creatures were depicted in a variety of ways.

Dragons can be placed in two groups, East and West dragons, and they were regarded as either good or very fearsome and evil creatures.

In ancient China, the dragon was a highly significant creature that became a symbol of the emperor, and his throne was sometimes called the dragon throne.

Ancient Chinese believed dragons were in control of the weather and water.

These creatures were said to be able to manipulate oceans, bloods, tornadoes, and storms.

There are nine distinctive Chinese dragons, and some of them are serpent like creatures with large bodies and long heads.

The dragon in China is believed to be a benign creature that is said to bring wisdom, power and luck.

They are famous for their goodness.

They ward off evil, protect the innocent, and bring safety to all.

Tradition and celebration of the New Year in China can be traced to a dragon named nin or Year Nan or nine was a legendary wild beast that attacked people at the end of the Old Year.

Villagers would use loud noises and bright lights to scare the creature away, a practice that slowly morphed into the Chinese New Year festivities.

Today, the dragon has its own year on the Chinese calendar.

On the British Isles and in Scandinavia, dragons were often depicted as wingless creatures.

In this part of the world, the dragon was depicted as a more malevolent creature that was difficult to kill.

The West dragon was wingless and lived in dark places or wells where he was guarding horde treasures.

Approaching the dragon was almost impossible because of its poisonous fire breath dragons in British and Scandinavian mythology often appear in stories when a prince tries to save a young maiden from being abducted by the fearsome animal.

If he can slay the dragon, he can become the new king and win the girl as his bride.

In ancient Chinese mythology, we encounter five enormous dragon kings who were rain makers and rulers of the waters.

Four of them were stationed at the cardinal points and ruled the seas.

Their chief at his abode in the middle.

The five dragon kings were named lung Wang.

The dragon kings of China lived in crystal palaces under the sea.

It was believed these underwater dwellings were part of the mysterious underworld that could only be reached through underground mountain caves and special secret entrances.

When the water dragons rose to the surface, they caused typhoons, and when they flew through the air, caused heavy raining and hurricanes.

The dragon kings are among the deified forces of nature of the Taoist religion.

A dragon's head was one of the most famous symbols of the Vikings.

The Viking dragon was in many ways a representation of the Midguard serpent, a mythical sea creature who fought with the Norse god Thor.

The reason why Vikings built ships with huge dragon heads was because they wanted to appear as frightening as possible from the long distance.

Vikings called their long ships dracar or dragon ships, and the dragon was a powerful and fearsome symbol of war.

Many have seen the Welsh flag whicheatures a red dragon, and that the Prince of Wales uses rampant dragons on his banner.

The old British word drake means leader and the word penn meant head.

The two words combined to form penn Dragon or Pendrag, a noble surname in early Britain.

As early as the fifth century.

The dragon symbol continued to be used by the last native Welsh princess of Wales Llewellyn Apgufied and Owang Glendwer during their struggles against English occupation in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

The Pendragon name in Welsh literature includes Uther Pendragon, father of the legendary King Arthur.

In ancient times.

There are also many superstitions about the dragon, and surprisingly some of them persist even today.

It was, for example, believed that the blood of the dragon held special properties that could give a person the power to see into the future.

On the other hand, it was also said that if a knight dipped the tip of his sword into the dragon's blood and stabbed you with it, the wound would never heal.

Dragon teeth were thought to bring good luck to the person who possessed one.

The dragon has survived as a powerful symbol in many parts of the world even into the twenty first century, when we'd Darkness returns.

An extramarital affair in eighteen twelve resulted in an unexpected pregnancy and an unexpected murder.

But that's just the beginning of the story of a most horrible murder in hank Loschesher.

And why is the crystal ball so mysterious?

Why is it the object used by fortune tellers and mediums so often?

I'll share some little known facts about the crystal ball up next.

On April eighteenth, seventeen ninety seven, George Morey from the village of Hanklow near Nantwich Sheesher, married Edith Komer from the neighboring village of Wybenbury.

The couple went on to have six known children, the first Elizabeth, born in seventeen ninety eight, followed by William James, Mary who only lived for a year, Edith, and finally George Junior in eighteen ten.

Clearly, despite George Senior being a successful farmer, their marriage was not as happy as it ought to have been, and as the saying goes, while the cat's away well, it was whilst George was away selling his wares that e began an affair with a younger man, their former farm hand, John Lomas, in late eighteen eleven.

It was in the spring of eighteen twelve that things came to a head when Edith found herself pregnant with John's child.

Things had to change, and with that John and Edith hatched a plan to murder Edith's husband George.

Between two and three o'clock in the morning of Sunday, April twelfth, the family servant, Hannah Evans, who slept with the children in the room adjoining the parlor, heard a noise which sounded like several blows being delivered in her master's room.

She quickly got up and could hear groans coming from the bedroom.

She opened her chamber window to get through it, and as she was putting her head out the window, she heard the door open, and turning her head, saw her mistress come in with a lit candle and caught hold of her, saying she must not go out, as there was a murderer in the house and if she went through the window she was likely to be killed.

After a few minutes all went quiet Edith sent Hannah to fetch John Lomas, their servant.

Hannah then told him to wake the neighbors, which after some persuading, he agreed to do.

Having gathered some neighbors and George's brother, they went upstairs to George's bedroom, where they found him lying dead on the floor, his throat having been cut through the windpipe, a left temple bone fractured.

A large blood stained axe covered in blood was found underneath his body.

Claims of a break in were made, but on checking there were no signs of any sort of break in.

When daylight appeared, one of the neighbors noticed that Lomas had blood on his nose and on one of his wrists, creating suspicion of guilt.

The room in which he slept, was also found to have traces of blood on the floor and the stairs leading up to his bed.

Also, his bed showed traces of blood, and he was wearing a clean shirt on finding the the one he had worn the previous day.

Other items of clothing were found which had blood on them too.

This was hardly a well thought out crime, as he had left evidence of his crime everywhere.

Once the search was complete, Lomas was taken away by the constables to await his fate.

Whilst on the journey, not only did Lomas confess to the crime, but also implicated his mistress, Edith as his co conspirator, saying that it was she who had administered alcohol to her husband to get him drunk, and that she had urged Lomas to kill her husband so that once he was out of the way, she would inherit the farm and the money they had, and she would be free to be with Lomas.

When Edith was questioned, the constable went to arrest her.

She produced a razor and attempted to cut her own throat, but as a doctor was already present in a house examining George's body, he was summoned and quickly sewed up the wound.

After the trial, at which both poleaded not guilty, after just a few few hours deliberation and with a packed courtroom the like of which had never been seen before, the death sentence was passed for the pair.

Lomas immediately said, I John Lomas deserved my fate.

He was taken from the county to the city jail in Chester, and at midday ascended the drop and met his maker.

According to the criminal Registers, John Lomas was executed on August thirty first, eighteen twelve, and that prior to his execution it was agreed that both he and Edith should receive the sacrament together, at which time the pair made a full confession of their guilt.

But what about his accomplice Edith?

She pleaded the belly.

In other words, she was pregnant, a fact that was substantiated by a jury of matrons, who confirmed that she was between four and five months pregnant and therefore permitted to live until the birth of her child.

Once born, she would then suffer the same fate as Lomas quote.

On the twenty third of April eighteen thirteen, Edith was taken to the scaffold.

She walked from the castle to Glover's Stone, having hold of mister Hudson's arm with the utmost firmness, amidst an unusual pressure from the immense crowd assembled.

She then got into the cart and immediately laid herself down on one side, concealing her face with her handkerchief, which she has invariably done when in public, from her first appearance before the judges to her final dissolution.

And we venture to affirm that no person obtained a view of her face out of the castle since her commitment.

She remained in prayer with the Reverend w Fish till one o'clock, when she ascended the scaffold with a firm and undaunted step, with her face covered with a handkerchief, and she immediately turned her back to the populace.

When ready, Edith dropped the handkerchief as a sign that she was ready to die.

Quote.

By the time Edith died, her son Tai Thomas was now aged four months, having been born on December twenty first, eighteen twelve.

But what became of this love child?

He was raised by Edith's brother, Thomas Coomer, But this child had his own story to tell.

He was baptized in eighteen fourteen, his baptism showing clearly that his parents were dead.

Life was not to be plain sailing for this young man, who frequently found himself in trouble for thieving, and according to the Chester Chronicle, April twelfth, eighteen thirty three, yet again young Thomas found himself in trouble with the law.

Quote at the present session, a youth named Thomas Moray, only twenty years of age, appeared before the court for the third time, charged on this occasion with stealing a quantity of wearing apparel and some fowls from his uncle, Thomas Cumus of Bassfort, who had humanly taken him into his house in the hope of snatching him from a career of crime, which must end in bringing him to the gallows.

This ill starred boy is the son of Edith Moray, who was convicted at the August Sizes of eighteen twelve of the murder of a husband, and whose execution took place in April eighteen thirteen, was stayed on account of a pregnancy until after the birth of this boy.

The court despaired of ever being able to reform young Thomas, so opted for having him transported to Tasmania for a period of seven years.

Following his sentence, he was removed to the prison hulk Cumberland, moored at Chatham, Kent, where he remained until being transported the following year on board the Moffat.

On arrival in Tasmania, he was appointed to public works and received a ticket of freedom in eighteen forty six.

As to what became of him after that is lost to history.

Knowledge is power, particularly in the information age we're living in, and while people worldwide have access to more accumulated knowledge than at any time in human history, there was still a desire for secret knowledge.

This is hidden information not available to the mainstream or even to our own senses.

For this sort of knowledge, untold millions seek out alternative methods of acquiring information, from meditation and prayer to divination, fortune telling, and seances.

One of the oldest methods still being utilized to gain access to this hidden knowledge is crystal ball gazing, the practice of staring into a crystal ball or orb in a trance like state to see visions of the past, the future, or even into the minds of others.

In modern times, celebrities, politicians, and even royalty have been known to conceal mystic seers for insight.

Can crystal balls tell the future?

That's up to you to decide.

The earliest recorded uses of crystals and esoteric practices date to the ancient Sumerians.

He wrote magic formulas including crystals, dating back five thousand years.

Around the same time, the ancient Chinese were using crystals in medicinal practices and crystal tipped needles in acupuncture.

The ancient Egyptians buried their dead with crystals of all kinds to provide spiritual support in the afterlife.

Ancient Greeks thought rubbing crust heemtite crystals over their bodies made them invincible.

In India, all manner of crystals were used in medicinal and spiritual practices and to increase libido.

The Japanese believed smaller rock crystals were the congealed breath of the white dragon, and larger ones were the saliva of the violent dragon and contained magical property.

The practice of scrying, a form of divination said to derive from analyzing reflections in water, metal, or precious stones, has likely been practiced since prehistoric times, but the use of crystal balls can be traced to the ancient Druids who lived in the British Isles and parts of France during the Iron Age.

As noted by Roman author, naturalists, philosopher, and military leader Pliny the Elder, the Druids used polished balls of beryl, which is colorless and as clear as glass in its purest form, but can be many different colors depending upon the impurities in it.

Even though the Druids were all but wiped out by six hundred a d.

The practice of scrying or crystal gazing exploded in Europe during the early Middle Ages, when countless wizards, sorcerers, oracles, seers, and gypsies began using crystal balls to see the future and tell fortunes for all classes of people, rich and poor, regardless of religious affiliation.

Like the Druids, these crystal balls were often made of highly polished spheres of beryl, though rock crystals started to become more widely used because it was believed to be more effective at connecting with the psychic energies that supposedly allowed scrying to work.

It was common at this time for the ball to be carried in a sling.

With Christianity spreading throughout Europe.

During the Middle Ages, many converts and even devout Christians continued to use crystal balls and scrying to gain hidden knowledge in the form of visions, which they considered to be divine messages from heaven.

In his fifth century book The City of God, Saint Augustine attacked scrying, labeling it and all magical practices as entangled in the deceptive rites of demons who masquerade under the names of angels.

Despite this proclamation, many prominent women and men of the era were often buried with crystal balls.

Perhaps the most powerful man to ever claim wisdom from a crystal ball is John d an English mathematician, astrologer, and occultist born in fifteen twenty seven.

D not only chose the coronation date of Queen Elizabeth and consulted her in all manner of courtly affairs, using a crystal ball for guidance, but he also published an influential book that promoted his vision of England as a maritime world power with rightful claims on New World territories, and even coined the term British Empire.

In the twentieth century, the image most commonly associated with crystal balls is of the scarf wearing gypsy fortune teller.

The people who were called Gypsies are more accurately called Roma or Romani.

They moved out of northern India in the second half of the first millennium AD and eventually spread throughout Europe.

Because of the fear and super of the Europeans they encountered, they tended to move from region to region and caravans and engage in businesses that were easy to set up and break down, like fortune telling booths.

The term gipsy was actually derogatory, coined by those intolerant of their customs and traditions.

They were mercilessly persecuted, not only in the Asian regions they were from, but also by Europeans and later Americans.

Most famously, Romas were killed as part of Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany because they were racially undesirable.

A Cerus named Luis Linloff was arrested in Chicago in nineteen thirteen for the death of five including her husband, brother in law, and son.

In her defense, Linloff said that she had foretold their deaths in her crystal ball, which she called her Ball of Fate.

She further claimed she foresaw her acquittal in the Ball of Fate, but she must have read it wrong because she ended up being convicted of killing her son and was sentenced to twenty five years in prison.

The popularity of gypsy fortune tellers in the early twentieth century prompted many magicians to begin incorporating crystal gazing into their performances.

The most famous magician of this ilk was Claude Alexander Conlin, who went by the stage name Alexander the Man who Knows.

At the height of his career, Conlin was the most famous mentalist in the world and one of the highest paid magicians at the time.

Not only was he a masterful entertainer, but Conlin was an expert at promotion, and his striking posters helped influence the idea of fortune tellers as wearing elaborate turbans.

Despite the fact that Americans were flocking to stage performers like Alexander the Man who Knows for crystal gazing experiences and to travel gypsy fortune tellers for a glimpse into the unknown.

During the early twentieth century, many Puritans medical lawmakers outlawed the fortune telling industry in their communities.

In fact, there is still a law on the books in New York that considers it a Class B misdemeanor for anyone to accept a fee for compensation for claimed or pretended use of occult powers, including fortune telling.

In twenty fourteen, a crystal ball helped start a fire after sunlight refracting through it caused a pair of curtains to catch fire and in gulf a bedroom.

The fire investigator for the London Fire Brigade warned the populace against placing these scrying devices on windowsills.

In a slightly quippy statement, the investigator said, you can't predict the future with crystal balls, but you can prevent this type of fire.

One of the most famous modern day crystal gazers was Jeane Dixon.

Given a crystal ball by an old gipsy as a little girl, Dixon began making predictions and proved to be frightenedly accurate.

After she predicted the deaths of John F.

Kennedy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Marilyn Monroe, she became a sensation and was even profiled in Life magazine.

In nineteen sixty five.

She began advising many high profile clients, and was even invited to the White House as an advisor to Nancy Reagan, who used Dixon's insights to plan President Ronald Reagan's schedule.

Dixon said that for her, a crystal ball is like a television set.

Though crystal gazers believe the visions they received while staring into crystal balls come from different sources gods, angels, spirits, demons, and ancestors, scientists who have studied the topic believe the user's trances are less a connection to another entity or reality than a form of self hypnosis.

The psychologist Malais Culpin wrote in nineteen twenty that the visions are memories or fancies from the unconscious, while coologists Leonard Zusta and Warren H.

Jones wrote in nineteen eighty nine that visions are likely forgotten memory images.

Though crystal gazers claim they can foretell death and other tragedies with their crystal balls, rarely are the objects themselves used to affect a death.

But that's exactly what happened in Oklahoma City in twenty twelve.

For no apparent reason, Clara Ann Blocker, a homeless woman, beat four foot five inch Eric Scott Saxton to death with a crystal ball in his home, where she'd been staying temporarily.

Blocker pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of the little Man with a Big Heart.

A crystal ball inscribed in Hebrew with the Ten Commandments was buried inside Mount Princeton in Colorado on August twenty third, twenty eleven.

It took twenty years for Richard Grossman, who conceived the project, to find the perfect location to bury the ball and to gather the permits that would allow him to do so.

The ball will remain hidden in the ground for what his geologists estimate will be twenty million years, by which time natural forces will allow the erosion that will release the Torah Ball.

Grosman hasn't said exactly why he wanted to bury the crystal ball.

In the twenty first century, crystal balls are more pervasive than they've ever been in their seven thousand plus years of use.

They're a trope that can be found in movies like The Wizard of Oz and Labyrinth, and TV shows like Mighty Morphine, Power Rangers, and Merlin.

In novels like The Riftwar Cycle and The Dark Tower in comic books, anime, music, video games, pinball machines.

The list goes on and on.

Often the crystal ball isn't a literal device of seeing the future.

It's more of a symbol of self reflection, guidance, and power.

Well, if you made it this far, welcome to the Weirdo Family.

Please share a link to this episode in your social media to help spread the word about the podcast, And if you could, please recommend Weird Darkness to your friends, family, and co workers who love the paranormal, horror stories or true crime, maybe they'll become a Weirdo Family member too.

All stories in Weird Darkness aren't purported to be true unless stated otherwise, and you can find source links or links to the authors in the show notes.

Killers of Children is by Gabe Poeleetti.

For All That's Interesting, Doer's Rhinoceros is by Koshik Vatari for amusing Planet.

What If I Only Think I'm Real is by Paul Ratner for Big Think.

Dragons and dragon Kings is by A.

Sutherland for Ancient Pages.

A Horrible Murder in hank Low is by Sarah Murden for Georgian Era and Little Known Secrets at The Crystal Ball is by Brent Sprecker for Ranker.

We're Darkness theme by Alibi Music.

We're Darkness is a registered trademark.

And now that we're coming out of the dark, I'll leave you with a little light Psalm forty two, verse eleven.

Why my soul are you downcast?

Why so disturbed?

Within me?

Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise Him, my Savior and my God.

And a final thought, if you do not enjoy what you are doing, you will never be good at it.

Luke Parker, I'm Darren Marler.

Thanks for joining me in the weird Darkness.