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In the first hour, Weird Darkness Radio digs into the archive for Halloween stories, with the Denver haunting behind the film The Changeling, the Halloween-night disappearance of Penn State student Cindy Song, Europe's werewolf trials, the history of the Ouija board, and how to support a friend after a paranormal experience. Weird Darkness Radio stays with Halloween itself in the second hour, covering how trick-or-treating nearly died during World War II, where the holiday's customs come from, the legend of Stingy Jack behind the jack-o'-lantern, and how the wise woman became the witch. ==== HOUR ONE:It opens in Denver, where composer Russell Hunter said that in 1968 he rented the Henry Treat Rogers Mansion near Cheesman Park, found a hidden room full of a sickly boy's belongings, and followed séances to a grave beneath a house on South Dahlia Street. His account became George C. Scott's 1980 ghost film The Changeling, down to the red rubber ball, though no record places Hunter in the mansion, and Cheesman Park itself was laid out over an old cemetery where workers still turn up skeletons.From there, the hour turns to Cindy Song, a Penn State student from Seoul, South Korea, who left a Halloween party at Players Nightclub in State College dressed as a bunny and was dropped off at her apartment around 4 a.m. on November 1st, 2001. Only her keys and purse were missing. In 2003, investigators dug burned human remains out of the yard of Hugo Selenski's home near Wilkes-Barre, and Selenski was later convicted of two other murders and sentenced to life, but police have never connected him to Cindy, and her disappearance is still unsolved.Next come the werewolf trials of early modern Europe, beginning in Poligny, France, in 1521, when Pierre Burgot and Michel Verdun confessed under torture to rubbing on a devil's ointment that turned them into wolves. The roll call runs through Gilles Garnier, Jacques Roulet, the Werewolf of Caude, and Peter Stumpp, executed in 1589, on to a teenager named Hans, sentenced to death in Estonia in 1651, and Thiess of Kaltenbrun, an old man who said he was one of the hounds of God and got off with a flogging.After that, the hour traces the Ouija board from the Fox sisters' rapping messages and the planchette to the Kennard Novelty Company of Baltimore, named on the first talking-board patent in 1890, and to William Fuld, who took the business over and died in 1927 when a rib he broke falling from his factory roof pierced his heart. Parker Brothers bought the board in 1966, and the segment weighs the scientists' answer, unconscious movement of the users' fingers, against the belief that spirits push the planchette themselves.The hour closes with Rebecca Montiel's advice, from an article for Paranormality magazine, on supporting a friend who reports a shadowy visitor that comes into the bedroom every night and leaves the sleeper unable to move or scream: listen without interrupting, keep skepticism out of it unless asked, and help rule out a medical cause first. ===== HOUR TWO:It opens with War Ration Book No. 1, the so-called Sugar Book handed out starting May 4th, 1942, after sugar became the first consumer good rationed in wartime America, which all but ended the young custom of trick-or-treating. Once rationing lifted in June 1947, candy-company advertising, children's magazines like Jack and Jill, Charles Schulz's Halloween Peanuts strips, and the 1966 special It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown brought it back for good, with UNICEF's cardboard collection boxes riding along.From there, after the 2016 creepy-clown sightings and the red balloons found tied to sewer grates in Lititz, Pennsylvania, the year the remake of Stephen King's It reached theaters, the hour goes back about 2,000 years to Samhain, the Celtic festival marking summer's end. Folklorist Jack Santino ties Samhain to the dead crossing over, York University historian Nicholas Rogers finds no hard evidence of that, and the customs that followed run from mumming and souling to tipped outhouses, bobbing for apples, and the midnight mirror ritual that grew into Bloody Mary.Next is the jack-o'-lantern, carved in Ireland from turnips and potatoes and tied to the legend of Stingy Jack, the drunkard who trapped the devil once in a coin and once up an apple tree, then found himself barred from both heaven and hell and left to wander with a single ember inside a hollowed turnip. Irish immigrants brought the custom to America in the mid-1800s, where pumpkins, a word that traveled from the Greek pepon through French and English, were cheaper and easier to find.The hour closes with the witch, from the healers and wise women of the ancient Middle East, as biblical scholar Carole R. Fontaine describes them, to Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger's Malleus Maleficarum, the witch hunts of France and Germany, and an estimated 60,000 executions across Europe. In Salem, the panic started in 1692 in the home of minister Samuel Parris, whose household slave Tituba was among the first three women accused, and 19 people were hanged. Margaret Murray's 1921 book The Witch-Cult in Western Europe has long since been discredited, but it helped give rise to modern Wicca.
