Ghost Stories 2026

Okay, here we go.

Stand by.

Three, two, one.

The thinking atheist. It's not a person. It's a symbol. An idea.

The population of atheists in this country is.

Going through the roof. Rejecting faith. Pursuing knowledge. challenging the sacred.

If i tell the truth it's because i tell the truth not because i put my hand on a book and made a wish.

And working together for a more rational world.

Take the risk of thinking for yourself much more happiness truth beauty and wisdom will come to you that way assume nothing question everything and start thinking this is the thinking atheist podcast hosted by Seth Andrews.

Ghost Stories 2026.

South Africa has more than its share of haunting stories, not the least of which is the true and very tragic history of Kempton Park Hospital. Constructed in the late 1970s and opening in 1978, the facility provided general medical and surgical services to the residents of Kempton Park and the East Rand. The hospital had 300 beds. Many of the patients were young children. Yet, because of underuse and due to the difficulties in retaining doctors, nurses, and support staff, Campton Park Hospital would close its doors only 18 years after it opened. Strangely, when the building became vacant... It was the people who were emptied, but not the medical equipment, the surgical tools, the wheelchairs in the halls, the gurneys,

even the tiny medical cribs which once held the youngest of children fighting for their lives. What would cause anyone to leave behind assets worth millions? Had this place merely been abandoned in exhaustion and sadness, or... were the occupants eager to leave everything at Kempton Park Hospital behind as quickly as they could. Whatever happened then, only the rats and wreckage remain today. The building stands as a ghostly monument to unrealized potential and broken promises. The floors are caked with dust, fixtures hang from wires... Debris fills the hallways.

Many windows have been reduced to tiny shards of broken glass. A place which once gave life now feels like a tomb, even more so, knowing that the mortuary lies at the basement level. A hospital empty except for the curious who visit illegally. People travel from all over the world to walk the corridors with eyes open and recorders rolling, and the footage they brought back has fueled the strongly held belief that not everyone evacuated on that final day in 1996.

I mentioned that it was not legal to enter the building. The entire property has been fenced off, and security guards man the perimeter. But there are people who call themselves paranormal tour guides, and they've made themselves available to the public. If you hire these guides to show you the hospital, they will pay the guards to unlock the gates and look the other way. Whether you call it an admission fee or a bribe, it's not difficult for tourists to access Kempton Park Hospital's vacant corridors today. One such tourist, a man named Sean DeCoche, documented something very strange in 2013.

His voice recorder was rolling as he asked a question inside an empty hallway. In his native language, he said, Are you a patient? He did not hear a response in the moment, but when Sean reviewed the footage, he discovered what sounded like a direct reply to his question. I'm going to play you the audio here. Pay attention to the second voice, which seems to reply to the question, Are you a patient? with Yes, but I'm still here.

Now listen to it again.

This is the same audio slowed down slightly, with the voice seeming even more clear this time. Kempton Park continues to mourn the loss of a hospital which the community still desperately needs. But the perceiving of recorded voices is a phenomenon that extends far beyond any single building, and it has persisted since the invention of the recorder. When someone asks a question while standing in a place of dark history or mystery, are their brains connecting random dots or is something or someone genuinely trying to communicate? This is audio recorded by Brendan Cook and Barbara McBeath. It was featured on a radio show in 2005 as they believed they had documented the voices of a child and then an adult in an empty room inside a closed

institution called the Exchange Building. It is suggested that the sounds near the end of the clip represent the last splashing moments of the child's life, as the boy's body had been found submerged in a bathtub years before.

I can't breathe.

I can't breathe. I can't breathe. Hello?

Hello?

A group of Syracuse investigators visited a hotel in upstate New York. They were given access to the building under the agreement that they would not release the name of the hotel. The owners did not want that kind of publicity. They wanted visitors to feel welcome and not wary. And this group of investigators brought back a 2025 recording which they claimed revealed a voice and then footsteps and then some increasingly disturbing sounds from the empty floor above.

How do these stories and sounds make you feel?

Do you believe.

That the living are encountering the dead, or are we just sensory creatures who assign our own ghosts to the tragic histories and headlines of our real world? One thing is certain, from Kempton Park to old hotels to the dense woods down the way, when you and I hear a dissonant and disturbing sound detached from anything we can explain, our quickened breath And our goosebumps tell us that something, somewhere, was, is, or might become horribly wrong. Welcome to our annual tradition.

Ghost Stories is something that we do every October. We suspend disbelief and we take a ride. down very haunted lanes, learning a little history and lore along the way, and occasionally asking ourselves, what if the dead can truly drift among the living?

It's the site of one of the country's most infamous crimes, the crime of murder. Murders which inspired a famous rhyme. Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother 40 whacks. And when she saw what she had done, she gave her father 41 whacks. Many have heard the name Lizzie Borden, but aren't familiar with the story of that fateful day.

August 4th, 1892, in Fall River, Massachusetts. Contrary to the rhyme, there weren't 81 strikes of an axe, but the true story is disturbing enough without embellishment. Old photos of the crime remain as haunting as any ghost story, perhaps even more so because the forms aren't spirits, tragically real. Lizzie was the third child born to Andrew and Sarah Borden.

Her father had grown from a man of modest means to become successful and wealthy in land, banking, and other enterprises. At the time of his murder, his estate would be valued at $ 300, 000, which in today's money would surpass $ 10 million. Lizzie's biological mother, Sarah, tragically died when Lizzie was only three.

When her father remarried to a woman named Abby three years later, Lizzie called the woman Mrs. Borden, not Mom. In the years after, she would say that Abby had married Andrew for his money. Over the years, tensions within the family grew. Lizzie kept pigeons in the barn, but when local children broke in to steal them, Father Andrew's solution was to decapitate Lizzie's beloved birds with a hatchet.

She was devastated. The house itself didn't look like that of a rich man. The interior was a hotbox in the August summer, and Andrew made his family eat from a communal pot of stew that often sat in the open for days. The stench of old meat, the rampant food poisoning which sickened everyone— And the stifling heat brought the Borden home to a place of nightmarish misery that might explain a leap toward violence. On August 4th, 1892, Abby Borden was struck roughly 19 times in the back of the head and neck with an axe. Andrew was struck 10 times while sleeping on the sofa. His face left unrecognizable.

Whoever the killer.

This was obviously a crime of rage. Inside the home, investigators discovered a hatchet head near a handle that had been cut away with a saw. The small axe's blade had been rolled in dust to suggest it had been there for months or years, but this was obviously a staged scene. Police didn't find blood on Lizzie's hands or clothing.

But inside the Borden house after the murders, Lizzie's close friend Alice Russell reported that she saw Lizzie tearing scraps from her dress and throwing them in a furnace. Lizzie explained to Alice that paint had ruined the dress. But Alice was unconvinced, and that friendship immediately ended. In the basement of the house, police found a bucket filled with water and blood. Lizzie argued that it was menstrual blood and that she was on her period. With that embarrassing explanation, the prudish male police officers blushed their way out of the basement and pursued the matter no further. It was reported by a pharmacist that, the day before, Lizzie Borden attempted to purchase prussic acid, cyanide, for the killing of bugs.

The pharmacist refused the purchase because she did not have the proper note from a physician. it's speculated that Lizzie went to Plan B after the poison scheme didn't pan out. The victims' bodies were buried without their heads as the skulls became literal courtroom exhibits. At the sight of the crushed skulls in court, Lizzie Borden fainted. There were other suspects in the crime. The maid, Lizzie's sister, Andrew's uncle who was angry over a business dispute, or was someone hired to do the job? Whatever happened, we know that the kill wasn't spontaneous. It was planned. The murderer lurked in that house with a terrifying patience. Abby was ambushed and killed in the upstairs bedroom around 9.30 a.m. Andrew

wouldn't meet his murder for another hour and a half. How did this lurking killer avoid Lizzie and the maid in a stifling, suffocating, stinking house for 90 minutes? Everything I've just told you is documented and true. The murders were real. The investigation was real. The media frenzy was real. But since that terrible day in 1892, many have said that the Borden home is haunted by Andrew Borden, his wife Abby, and even Lizzie herself, who was acquitted in a crime never solved. Visitors to the home report the sounds of footsteps, opening and closing doors, unexplained temperature changes, shadowy figures, mists moving through the rooms, disembodied female voices, and even a vision of a gentleman in a hat

looking out the window. Oh yes, you can stay inside the Lizzie Borden murder house, advertised as America's most haunted house in Fall River, Massachusetts. Part museum, part novelty, The house frequently hosts tours, including a guided tour of Oak Grove Cemetery. You can enjoy a Victorian tea party at the Borden Table, where Lizzie and Sister Emma once enjoyed their afternoon tea. You can bring your cameras and recording devices into the rooms for both guided and unguided experiences.

And of course, there is a gift shop.

How macabre.

A gift shop inside a house where two people were murdered by an axe to the head? Would you wear a Lizzie locket? Would you place a tiny replica of the Borden house inside your own home? Would you drink from a coffee mug shaped like Lizzie Borden's face? Perhaps the true haunters of the Borden house aren't ghosts. but living, breathing people drawn to an amusement over violence and death.

The head of the hatchet may have been bloodless, but in August of 1892, the home flowed with blood, mixing with the rancid air and rampant oppression that had marked that place for so long. And all these years later, we the living are witnesses, participants, accomplices? The numbers may have been changed, but that famous poem still holds its dark power. It paints the picture in eerie rhyme, and it transports us back in time. Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother 40 whacks. And when she saw what she had done, she gave her father.

Many thanks out to narrator and voice actor Elena Wyss, who has collaborated with me on several Ghost Stories episodes over the years. I've always just liked the sound of her voice and the style of her storytelling. So big thanks out to Elena. No, I don't use AI voices for the broadcast. I'm all about the human storyteller and the human story. And we will continue with Ghost Stories next week. You are listening to our October tradition, a fun Halloween distraction, the spooky stories of the season. It is Ghost Stories 2026. By the time I realized why we were really on Everest, I had maybe 10 minutes left to live. The blood freezing inside my jacket told me that much. I sat against a wall of blue ice,

one glove missing, fingers blackening from frostbite. Somewhere below me, hidden behind clouds and snow, the rest of the team was dead. Or worse. The funny thing is, I wasn't scared anymore. I was angry. Because I'd finally solved it. And because everyone else already knew. The project had been announced as a humanitarian mission. For decades, Mount Everest had been littered with bodies. More than 300 climbers had died there.

Some were landmarks now, frozen into the mountain itself. People gave them nicknames, names that made it easier to forget they had once been people. Then, suddenly, governments, sponsors, and wealthy donors poured millions into a recovery initiative, the largest body removal operation in history. The media loved it. Families loved it. Everyone loved it, except the Sherpas. None of them would look us in the eye when the project was explained. A few outright refused to participate. One old Sherpa named Dorje laughed when he heard the plan. He actually laughed, and then he said something in Nepali. Our translator went pale. What did he say, I asked. The translator hesitated, then quietly replied. He said the mountain doesn't

keep the dead by accident. Nobody laughed after that. I wasn't a climber. I was a logistics specialist. The kind of guy who managed equipment inventories and transportation schedules. The kind of guy who belonged behind a desk. But the project needed personnel willing to spend months at high altitude.

The pay was absurd. Enough to wipe out my debts. Enough to ignore the bad feelings. And so I signed. Everyone signed. The first few recoveries went smoothly. Frozen corpses were extracted from ice, tagged, documented, prepared for transport. It felt respectful, necessary even. We told ourselves we were doing something good. Then people started disappearing. Nothing dramatic, no screams, no avalanches. Someone would simply leave camp and never come back, A tent would be empty in the morning. Tracks would lead into a blizzard and then stop, as if the person had vanished mid-step. The official explanation was altitude sickness, confusion, poor judgment, but nobody believed it. Especially after the radio

transmissions began, the first one came from Team 4, a routine check-in. At first, everything sounded normal. Then, there was screaming. Not frightened screaming. Ecstatic screaming. Like someone had just witnessed a miracle. The transmission ended with one sentence, over and over, repeated dozens of times. They're moving. We never found Team 4.

The sponsors refused to stop. The government officials refused to stop. The project leaders refused to stop. Whenever concerns were raised, new funding appeared, new personnel arrived, the operation continued. It was almost desperate, as if someone somewhere was terrified that we might quit. Three weeks later, we reached an untouched sector near the mountain face, a graveyard of ice. Bodies everywhere, dozens of them, some centuries old, some much more recent.

Frozen expressions trapped forever behind a glaze of ice and snow. Our team prepared extraction equipment, and then Dorje stopped walking, He stared at the field of corpses, and he whispered,' Too many.' Nobody understood. One of the supervisors ordered us forward, but Dorje refused. The supervisor threatened to fire him. Dorje looked at him for a long moment and then said,' You think they're dead?' The wind stopped completely. No sound, no movement. Everest became silent. The kind of silence that feels wrong. The kind that makes your instincts start screaming.

And then the mountain moved. Not shook, not trembled.

It moved.

It moved. Imagine standing beside an elephant your entire life and then realizing one day it was not an elephant, but it was a flea. And the creature it stood upon had been sleeping beneath you all along. That was the feeling. The horizon shifted, clouds parted, and something emerged, not from on top of the mountain, but inside it.

The summit wasn't a summit. It was a shoulder, a shoulder covered in ice, covered in centuries, covered in human remains. The thing was so large that my brain rejected it. Distances became meaningless. Scale became meaningless. Its shape stretched beyond sight. Something ancient enough to wear mountain ranges like skids. and all across its frozen surface, bodies. Thousands, maybe millions, embedded within it, like insects trapped in amber. Offerings. People broke instantly.

One woman tore off her oxygen mask and walked directly toward a cliff, smiling. Another started laughing until blood poured from her eyes. Several simply knelt, as if praying. Dorje screamed at us to run, then something looked back. I don't know if it had eyes. I only know that it noticed us, and noticing felt worse than death. The slaughter that followed barely exists in my memory, but it does exist. Snowmobiles crashing, gunshots, people attacking one another, a helicopter falling from the sky, the mountain turning red. I ran.

Everyone ran. Somewhere during the chaos, a metal support rod punched through my side. I kept moving anyway. Fear can do that. Hours later, I found shelter in an ice cave, alone, bleeding, dying, and finally able to think. And that's when the pieces came together. The funding, the secrecy, the missing climbers, the Sherpa's fear, the desperate insistence on continuing. None of this had ever been a recovery mission. The bodies weren't abandoned.

They weren't forgotten. They weren't victims. They were payments. For centuries, people vanished on Everest, and humanity accepted it. The mountain took a few lives each year, a tragic but acceptable cost. Then, modern technology arrived. Recovery operations improved. Safety improved. The number of deaths started falling. The offering was shrinking. The balance was changing. Someone noticed, someone important, important enough to understand what slept beneath the mountain, and important enough to know the consequences of starving it. So they adapted. If natural sacrifices decreased, artificial ones would be needed. And that's why they hired us. That's why they paid so much. That's why concerns were ignored. That's why nobody stopped the project.

We weren't there to remove bodies. We were there to replace them. Hundreds of fresh offerings delivered directly to the altar. A sacrifice disguised as a rescue mission. I started laughing. The sound echoed through the ice. Dad would have laughed too, whenever I got cornered by bullies as a kid, he'd always say, if you can't beat them, join them. I used to think it was terrible advice, but now I understood.

Someone long ago had discovered the thing beneath Everest, and instead of fighting it, They joined it. They fed it. They worked with it. Built traditions around it. Built lies around it. Built an entire system around keeping it asleep. A shadow passed over the cave entrance. The temperature dropped instantly.

I looked outside. The clouds had cleared. Far above me, impossibly distant, something was moving beneath the mountain's skin, slowly, as if waking, as if hungry, as if wondering where its next meal would come from. My blood pooled across the ice, warm for only a few seconds before freezing solid. I knew then that nobody would find me. And even if they did, they wouldn't bring me home. Because they couldn't.

The dead had to stay. The offering had to remain. Otherwise, something much larger might decide to stand up. And if it ever stood up, there wouldn't be a mountain left. Only the thing beneath it. Waiting. Hungry. And finally, awake. That is a popular story found online titled, The Dead Must Stay. Of course, many of our most powerful fictions revolve around real life events. There are right now more than 300 bodies still resting on Everest. In fact, there is a section that is called Rainbow Valley. It's about 26,000 feet above sea level in the death zone. It's a place where so many dead people lie in their multicolored jackets that it resembles a kind of macabre rainbow. There is a fallen climber on the mountain that is known

simply as Green Boots. His body is passed by almost everyone who climbs Mount Everest. The identity of this climber was debated on the order of decades until finally a DNA test was done. The dead man was identified as an Indian climber, ironically named Dorje, like the character in the story that I just read to you. In 2006, many years later, there was another climber named David Sharp, and he would pass away in close proximity to Green Boots.

He was trying to summit Everest on his own. No partner, no climbing buddy, and very little experience. He froze to death on the mountain, his body stuck in a huddled position, mere feet from green boots. Tragically, more than 40 other climbers had passed by David Sharp as he was freezing to death, and not one of them stopped to help him.

That death sparked a major debate about the responsibilities that other climbers have to help someone at high altitude.

Is it an.

Unnecessary risk for those who have to think about their own lives first? There was Frances Arcentiev, a woman who was not an experienced climber, but she was to set out to summit Everest in 1998. Reportedly, the night before her climb, her 11-year-old child said that he had had a nightmare, that she had died on the mountain. She said, don't worry about it. I'm going to be just fine.

She did make it to the top of Everest, but she froze to death on the way down. And she lay on the mountain in her black and purple clothing. Mountain climbers and the media have given her a nickname, Francis Arcentia, as known as Sleeping Beauty. And of course, there is the oldest body ever known to fall on Mount Everest, the body of George Mallory. Mallory had attempted to be the first person to climb Mount Everest in 1924.

He disappeared before anyone knew if he had reached his goal. His body was found 75 years later. It's still not known whether George Mallory made it to the summit of Everest before he perished. Of course, if we hold to the lore of our original story, the question has to be asked if he perished or if he was payment.

A man who set off on this grand quest without realizing the offering he was about to become.

Mommy.

Two-sentence horror stories. There was a picture in my phone of me, sleeping.

Sleeping.

I live alone. My sister says that mommy killed her. I don't have a sister. I can't move, breathe, speak, or hear in the darkness of this place. If I had known it would be like this, I would have been cremated instead. I work the night shift alone. There's a man smiling at me on the security camera. I woke up when there was knocking on my bedroom window.

Then I realized the sound was coming from the mirror. My husband asked why I was breathing so heavily.

I told him it.

Wasn't me. He was cryogenically frozen upon his death. He had no way of telling them that he was still fully conscious. I wondered why my dog always stared at me nervously. Then I realized that the dog was looking directly behind me. They delivered the mannequins packaged in bubble wrap. In the middle of the night, I heard the sounds of popping. My mother cast two shadows on the floor.

The room had only a single light bulb. A little girl was smiling at me from outside my window. I live on the 14th floor. My daughter won't stop crying in the middle of the night. I visit her grave and ask her to stop, but she just won't listen.

Of the many charmingly named villages in England, there is one particular town, Chilton Cantelo in Somerset. It has a strange story, one made of human bone, and it takes us back to the mid-17th century. Somerset saw a great deal of fighting in its town during the English Civil War. The parliamentarian forces of Oliver Cromwell clashed against the royalist army which supported the monarchy. One soldier, Theophilus Broome, fought for the monarchy, but as the bloody battles raged, and as Theophilus saw firsthand the depravity and savagery of the king's army, and all-consuming anger filled him, and he cast off his royalist army uniform and joined the opposition. He would fight on the side of his once-sworn enemy, the

parliamentarians led by Oliver Cromwell. But in the end, the monarchy would prevail. King Charles II regained the crown in 1660, and this restored monarchy granted amnesty to nearly all of Cromwell's supporters, all but 50. While some of those condemned people were imprisoned or exiled, many of the unfortunate few were executed in terrible ways. They were hanged, drawn, and quartered, beheaded, Regrettably, the king couldn't publicly execute Oliver Cromwell because Cromwell had died of disease two years earlier. Yet this would not do. Cromwell, the parliamentarian general, would have to be beheaded even if he was already dead. And he wasn't the only one dug out of the ground for this particular purpose. There

were two other men, enemies of the monarchy, who deserved the same fate. As Theophilus watched the bodies of these three traitors exhumed, subjected to public humiliation, and then beheaded in front of a cheering crowd, those heads taken away, placed on pikes, and put on display at Westminster Hall for many years. And seeing as he had switched sides, he had betrayed the king to fight for the king's sworn enemy. It is no surprise that Theophilus worried about his own head even after his death. And it was this fear that drove a bizarre agreement between Theophilus and his sister. He asked, however I die, I would like my remains protected. Would you bury my body at the nearby church in Chilton Cantelo? And would you remove the

head from that body so I might not meet the same fate as Oliver Cromwell? With all earnestness, he begged her, Decapitate and protect me when my time comes. I do not wish to be beheaded and desecrated under the cheers and sneers of the king. And his sister agreed. Theophilus Broome did eventually pass away on the 18th of August, 1670.

And yes, his sister buried his body in the ground near St. James Church. Before he was interred, she separated his skull from the body for safekeeping inside her house. Such a macabre sight for the visitors to her home. Those bones above the spine, sitting and even smiling with those wide teeth. This skinless head of Theophilus' broom gazed upon the occupants of that home, and it would remain in the house for long decades after the sister died.

Not because the new occupants enjoyed the skull as decoration, but because Theopolis' head apparently refused to be sent away. Those who attempted to bury the skull would barely reach their doorway before hearing blood-curdling screams. The house would ache and groan with the echoes of unrest. The days would see furniture tipping and slamming. The nights would hear the sounds of shrieks that only grief and terror can bring.

Each time, those who buried the skull outside would eventually rush and retrieve it, placing it back on its inside perch. And in that moment, all would become quiet again. In the 20th century, the farm came under the ownership of the Curtin family, which not only kept the skull in its rightful place, but put a visitor's book with dates going back a hundred years. Anyone and everyone who felt a presence or who saw something unexplained would chronicle that encounter in the book, The tale itself was first committed to paper in 1791 by John Collinson in his book, History and Antiquities of Somerset. And the tomb of Theophilus can be found in St. James Church today. The phenomenon of the screaming skull is more common than you might think.

Skeptics doubt the authenticity of the eyewitness report's But the legends appear to relate to traditions of earlier cultures, those that held special reverence for the human body above the neck. The Celts in particular worship the head, and archaeological finds support this, from skull shrines to an abundance of discovered carved stone heads. Celtic myths are filled with stories of craniums detached at the neck. Another account which gave birth to legend, the Screaming Skull of Betterscombe Manor in Dorset, where a black servant begged that his remains be returned to the West Endies, his place of birth, but his master refused the trip, and when the servant's remains were instead put in a local grave... In the days, weeks,

and months following, so many reports of screams coming from the graveyard and the surrounding lands terrified the family so much that they eventually dug up his bones and brought them inside the house. After that, all went quiet, but those skeletal pieces would disappear piece by piece except for the skull. And even today, that skull resists any attempt to bury it. The screaming skull in Derbyshire has been named Dickie, of all things. It is believed to belong to a man named Ned Dixon, who was murdered by his cousin in the 19th century. Reports say that his skull, when moved, becomes a screaming skull. There's the Screaming Skull of Wardley Hall, which belonged to Father Ambrose Barlow, a priest,

a man hung and quartered for his faith in 1641 and put on display in Lancaster Castle. More than a hundred years later, a servant would thrust the skull into the moat of a castle, triggering an angry, screaming storm so severe that the manor lord had the moat drained, the skull found, and then replaced to its rightful perch.

What determines which resting place actually gives rest? Some seem happy underground. Others are happier on a banister shelf. Still others gaze down upon the worshippers of a church. How often do you and I unknowingly walk upon the skulls of those who came long before us? And do their mouths ever groan, howl, scream, and shriek from vocal cords long ago consumed by the worms? Many screaming skulls have come before. With so much violence carried out above the throat, I suspect we may hear the cries of many more.

In our final segment of the broadcast, I have a morality tale, a lesson about how bullies might become bloody. The living should never taunt the living, lest they be taunted in death. That's coming up. And then I'm going to cap the show with kind of a fun one, narrated perfectly by British voice actor Peter Wicks. It's a story about a phantom with wings. Stand by. You are listening to our annual October tradition. It is Ghost Stories 2026.

Ghost Stories 2026 Carmen Winstead was 17 years old. Awkward and shy, not many friends. A cloak of sadness all around her. She had recently relocated from another city, and try as she might to fit in, her fellow students found her much too different. Constantly and cruelly, they never let her forget it. Most of the taunting came from a clique of five girls that bullied her relentlessly. The teasing gang called her the most terrible of names, laughing and pointing as they banded and bonded beyond her. When the lunch bell rang on one chaotic Tuesday, Carmen realized she had forgotten her school books on a classroom desk.

And when she came back to get them, she discovered hateful words scribbled in Sharpie on every single page. A few days later, her lunch sack had been filled with something rancid and gummy, a combination of glue and mud and who knows what else. Her locker was constantly vandalized. every day seemed to present a fresh new insult. But finally, even the shy, diminutive Carmen decided that she had had enough, and she told the gang that at the end of the school day, she planned to tell their homeroom teacher everything that had been happening. By strange coincidence, just before the final bell rang, the fire alarm was triggered. It was then that this gang of five seized its prime opportunity to stop Carmen in her tracks for a humiliation

that would keep her in line. They would make her an example in front of the entire student body. The shrieking alarm sent classmates out into the schoolyard. At the end of the yard near the fence was a sewer drain. It had a round metal cover which the girls had removed moments before. It wasn't long until the taunting gang pushed Carmen toward it, mocking her, frightening her, ignoring her pleadings to stop, please stop. Once Carmen had been sufficiently shamed, her tormentors pushed her down into that hole, sneering and reveling at the thought of a terrified freak screaming and scrambling in the dark. Having kicked their target down the well, All five peered down from above. Their faces then went blank,

as each realized that their scheme had gone horribly wrong. Carmen Winstead lay at the bottom of that well, inert, unmoving, her face smashed and bloody, her lungs unbreathing, her body obviously lifeless. Pranksters had become killers. Each of the five made eye contact with the others, yet those without conscience think only of saving themselves. And within minutes, the conspirators agreed to tell their teachers it was all just a terrible accident. Carmen had merely wandered to that corner of the yard and somehow just fallen down the well. This same story was repeated when the police arrived. Carmen was walking around over there and suddenly disappeared. When we ran to help, it was too late. It's all just terrible.

So very terrible. The examination of Carmen's body revealed a broken neck. The spine cracked on a concrete shelf at the bottom of the sewer. Emergency workers whispered that they would never forget Carmen's contorted expressions. A look of terror and rage forever mapped onto her broken face. It was shortly after this accident that the sightings began. All five girls reported variations on the same scenario. One was in the shower and felt a finger touching her shoulder, but no one was there. Another was alone in the bathroom brushing her teeth, when an invisible palm landed on her back.

In their respective homes at all hours of the day and night, each of these girls heard laughter within walls, whispers in unoccupied spaces, and footsteps passing through empty rooms. One of the conspirators said she had been sitting on the toilet when fingers seemed to touch her from within the bowl. frantic texts and calls began, until the girls met face to face in the yard of the school, their lips quivering, their eyes teary, their hands trembling. One by one they gave their account of that morning's events.

Each of their stories were identical. They had gotten out of bed and started the school day with a hot shower. When each emerged from behind the shower curtain, they recoiled and screamed. For each of these girls, in each of their homes, written by a finger in the steam on the bathroom mirror was a message, an accusation, a warning from the well. The words on the mirrors read, I was pushed. From that day, none of these girls enjoyed a restful day or night. Then, One by one, each of the five disappeared. Their bodies discovered inside the schoolyard sewer, with the cover reopened. Necks were broken, faces were smashed and contorted, fates had been sealed. All five of these girls had caused Carmen's death, and all five had covered

it up. Today, those killers are covered by soil and a headstone. In each of the cases, the authorities could find no clues, and those cases ultimately went cold. We are all familiar with that strange and uncomfortable feeling when we are inside a locked bathroom. We know that we are alone, and yet we sense that we are somehow being watched. We scan the corners, we listen for the rattling of pipes, We even check behind the shower curtain.

In our most intimate moments, we are fully aware of just how vulnerable we are to something spilling from the walls or crawling up from the drain. Many believe that the different young girl who was dashed to her death in a schoolyard drain still drifts through those corridors today, staring from behind mirrors and standing in the steam. For all who have ever laughed and taunted and wounded the innocent, Carmen Winstead puts her fingers on their shoulder, forever determined to keep pushing back.

The End.

What you are about to hear is one of the strangest ghost stories ever written about. It is the legend of the Highgate Ghost, a phantom that was foul in the most literal of ways. The tale begins at Highgate Pond in England, and it revolves around none other than the philosopher and scientist Sir Francis Bacon. The year was 1626, Sir Francis Bacon had gotten into an argument with a friend, a man named Witherbone. As both men possessed food which needed to be stored, and as both were very much science-minded, they had a spirited disagreement over the best method for preserving meat. Francis Bacon believed that cold temperatures were best.

Freezing air would provide an effective natural preservative. Witherbone, a physician, believed the cold temperature method to be absolutely ridiculous. Hot or cold, the meat would spoil as it always had.

The contest became so heated that Francis Bacon pledged to prove his point with a practical experiment. In short order, he procured a chicken, put an axe to its neck, plucked the carcass, cleaned it and stuffed it with snow. and the icy bird would prove him right to Witherbone and the world. Yet, shortly after this experiment began, Francis Bacon contracted pneumonia. It is speculated that his exposure to the cold brought on this malady, one that quickly took his life. The account by biographer William Rawley described Bacon's last moments in these words. He died on the ninth day of April in the year 1626, in the early morning of the day then celebrated for our Saviour's resurrection in the sixty-sixth year of his age, at the Earl

of Arundel's house in Highgate, near London, to which place he casually repaired about a week before. God so ordaining that he should die there of a gentle fever, accidentally accompanied with a great cold, whereby the deflection of room fell so plentifully upon his breast that he died by suffocation. Now, many have said plainly that Sir Francis Bacon's death was not of coincidence. People of that time, and through the centuries, claimed that Bacon had been punished. Then the killing grounds haunted by a spirit not of any human being. As the story says, for 400 years, the region has been stalked by the phantom of the chicken he killed for its meat. Oh, it certainly rings like a humorous thing.

But since 1626, people at Highgate Pond have reported seeing a plucked and headless chicken running in circles, and even pecking at the ground with a beak it no longer possesses. Sightings were prevalent throughout the Second World War, with some soldiers stationed nearby rushing to try and catch this acephalous creature.

Had they somehow caught it? It's unclear what would have happened next, but given that was a literal spirit animal, it's doubtful they would have prepared it for any meal that was not their last. The last reported sighting dates back only a few decades, to the year 1970. A young couple was enjoying an evening of romance in the field when they first heard, and then saw, the undead thing.

When they recounted their wild story, few believed them, but those who know the strange history of that place... Those who learned the true story of Sir Francis Bacon's snowy sacrifice four centuries ago, they are not so quick to laugh under their breath. For many decades, the pond and the park have been silent. But if you ever visit that modest English pasture, beware.

Beware the haunted garden. headless chicken of Highgate Pond. A petrifying, pecking, paltry geist which will forever go home to roost.

A very special thank you to the voice actors and narrators who lent their talents to the broadcast. Barry Savaris, she was the voice for Two Sentence Horror Stories. Elena Wiss, who told us the terrible tale of Lizzie Borden. And Peter Wicks, who finished off our broadcast with that amusing tale about the haunted and headless chicken. Halloween's supposed to be fun. I certainly hope yours is. I'm going to go out and buy some Halloween candy and tweak the decorations and prepare for all of the trick-or-treaters on October 31st.

Happy Halloween, and I'll see you next time.

Thank you.

Kapitelklicken springt direkt hin

Shownotes

Transkriptvom Podcast bereitgestellt · Zeitmarken springen hin