“WHEN HELL CAME TO BATH MICHIGAN” and More True, Dark and Disturbing Stories! #WeirdDarkness

Listen to ““WHEN HELL CAME TO BATH MICHIGAN” and More True, Dark and Disturbing Stories! #WeirdDarkness” on Spreaker.

IN THIS EPISODE: After spending ten years in prison, Sam Sheppard was acquitted of his wife’s murder. But for some, questions remain. (The Shocking Twists Of The Sam Sheppard Case) *** “If this stone is real, it’s the most significant artifact in American history of early European settlement,” said geologist Ed Schrader. “If it’s not, it’s one of the most magnificent forgeries of all time.” Could the 430 year mystery of what happened to the colony of Roanoke finally be solved? (430 Year Mystery of Lost Colony of Roanoke Finally Solved) *** I’ll tell you about the horrors and hauntings of the Bath School Massacre in 1872. (Hell Came to Bath, Michigan)

SOURCES AND REFERENCES FROM THE EPISODE…
“Hell Came to Bath Michigan” by Troy Taylor and Rene Kruse from the book “A Pale Horse Was Death”: https://amzn.to/2udv3OZ
“The Mystery Of Lost Roanoke Finally Solved?” by Kara Goldfarb for All That’s Interesting: http://bit.ly/33i3WRN
“Sam Shepphard: The Wrong Man” by Orrin Grey for The Line Up: http://bit.ly/33qv2X7 (with an excerpt from the book, “The Wrong Man” by James Neff also used in this story: https://amzn.to/2NHNgfu)
Weird Darkness theme by Alibi Music Library.
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“I have come into the world as a light, so that no one who believes in me should stay in darkness.” — John 12:46

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Originally aired: July 11, 2018

PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT:
DISCLAIMER: Ads heard during the podcast that are not in my voice are placed by third party agencies outside of my control and should not imply an endorsement by Weird Darkness or myself. *** Stories and content in Weird Darkness can be disturbing for some listeners and intended for mature audiences only. Parental discretion is strongly advised.

INTRODUCTION=====
There are two things in life that are certain: death and taxes. In the case of the horror that befell a Michigan town one spring morning in 1927, it was a deranged man’s fury over taxes that resulted in the deaths of 45 people.
On May 18, 1927, hell came to the village of Bath, Michigan.
The community was forever changed when a bomb went off in the basement of the local consolidated school, followed by a car bomb blast. The explosions killed 38 school children, two teachers, four other adults and the bomber himself. The deaths still constitute the deadliest act of mass murder in a school in American history.
The perpetrator was a farmer named Andrew P. Kehoe who was upset over a property tax that had been levied to build the consolidated school. He ran for and was elected to the board of education, where he tried unsuccessfully to get the school portion of his property taxes reduced. Soon the higher taxes, coupled with his wife’s medical expenses, caused him to lose his farm. It was too much for Kehoe to take and he started plotting revenge.
With the recent concern over school violence in our country, we yearn for “the old days,” when small-town life was peaceful and schoolchildren were safe from harm. The story of the Bath School Massacre serves as a bitter reminder that the good old days were not always good.
I’m Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness.

SHOW OPEN=====
Welcome, Weirdos – (I’m Darren Marlar and) this is Weird Darkness. Here you’ll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, the strange and bizarre, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and unexplained.

Coming up in this episode…

After spending ten years in prison, Sam Sheppard was acquitted of his wife’s murder. But for some, questions remain. (The Shocking Twists Of The Sam Sheppard Case)

“If this stone is real, it’s the most significant artifact in American history of early European settlement,” said geologist Ed Schrader. “If it’s not, it’s one of the most magnificent forgeries of all time.” Could the over 400 year mystery of what happened to the colony of Roanoke finally be solved? (Mystery of Lost Roanoke Finally Solved?)

But first… it’s the horrors and hauntings of the Bath School Massacre in 1872. (Hell Came to Bath, Michigan)

If you’re new here, welcome to the show! While you’re listening, be sure to check out WeirdDarkness.com for merchandise, to visit sponsors you hear about during the show, sign up for my newsletter, enter contests, connect with me on social media, listen to my other podcasts like “Retro Radio: Old Time Radio In The Dark”, “Church of the Undead” and a classic 1950’s sci-fi style podcast called “Auditory Anthology,” listen to FREE audiobooks I’ve narrated, plus, you can visit the Hope in the Darkness page if you’re struggling with depression, dark thoughts, or addiction. You can find all of that and more at WeirdDarkness.com.

Now.. bolt your doors, lock your windows, turn off your lights, and come with me into the Weird Darkness!

STORY: HELL CAME TO BATH MICHIGAN=====
Andrew Kehoe was born in Tecumseh, Michigan, on February 1, 1872. One of 13 children, he had a troubled life. His mother passed away when he was very young and while his father later remarried, Kehoe and his stepmother never got along. One day, when Kehoe was 14, his stepmother attempted to light an oil stove in the kitchen. The stove exploded and set her on fire. Kehoe simply stood and watched her burn. After a few minutes, he doused her with a bucket of water, which put out the fire. Gravely injured, she later died. It would later be speculated that Kehoe had something to do with the malfunction of the stove.
He attended Tecumseh High School and went on to Michigan State College in East Lansing, where he met his future wife, Nellie Price. He later moved out West for a few years and spent some time in St. Louis, where he suffered a severe head injury as the result of a fall in 1911. He was attending electrical school at the time of the accident. Kehoe was in a coma for two months. Whether this injury contributed to Kehoe’s madness will never be known, but it certainly seems possible. His behavior became more and more erratic after the fall, even though he physically recovered.
When Kehoe returned to Michigan, he married Nellie. She came from a rather wealthy family, which owned several pieces of property in Clinton Township. Eventually, Andrew and Nellie bought 185 acres from an uncle’s estate. The property was located just outside of the unincorporated village of Bath. Kehoe quickly gained a reputation for his intelligence, cleanliness and rather odd behavior. He was quick to help people, but equally quick to be critical when he didn’t get his own way. He was intelligent able to easily articulate his views, but had little patience for ideas that did not agree with his own. He was habitually neat and often changed his shirt twice a day. He liked to tinker with machinery, especially with electrical gadgets. He seemed happiest when repairing or adjusting the machinery on his farm. New ways of carrying out familiar chores intrigued him and he was constantly looking for ways to improve the farm. But there were troubling reports from some of his neighbors that Kehoe was cruel to his farm animals and once beat a horse to death.
Kehoe also gained a reputation for being tight with a dollar, a trait that helped him get elected to the school board in 1926. On the board, Kehoe constantly campaigned for lower taxes because he claimed the current taxes were causing him financial hardship. His creditors tried to work out a payment plan with him, but were unsuccessful. Soon, he stopped paying his mortgage and homeowner’s insurance premiums. To complicate matters, Nellie Kehoe was chronically ill with tuberculosis. She required frequent hospital stays, which wiped out what little savings they had left. Kehoe was sure that they would lose the farm and plunge even deeper into debt. In his mind, high property taxes were the source of all his financial woes. He saw nothing good come from the taxes and believed that many of the town’s expenditures were wasteful and pointless.
But above all, without any valid reason, he blamed the five-year-old Bath Consolidated School for his troubles.
Throughout the country during this era, most of the one-room schools, where different grades shared the same classroom and teacher, were starting to close down. There was beginning to be a widespread belief that children would receive a better education if all the students from a region could instead be educated at a single facility, with the students divided by age into grades. After years of debate and planning, the local district built a new school called the Bath Consolidated School. A school tax was levied to pay for the project and as a result, property owners like Andrew Kehoe had to pay.
Kehoe argued against the new school and complained constantly about the increase in taxes, stating that they were illegal and unfair. He considered at least one of his fellow school board members to be his bitter enemy – board president Emory E. Huyck. Kehoe claimed that Huyck was influencing the other members of the board to vote for higher taxes. Kehoe became obsessed with school board politics, Emory Huyck and the injustice of property taxes, which he believed were ruining his life.
No one knows for sure when Kehoe conceived the idea for the bombing, but based on the activity at the school and the purchase of explosives, his plan had probably been underway for at least a year. He probably started working things out in the winter of 1926, when the board asked him to perform maintenance inside the school building. Regarded as a talented handyman, he was known to be especially good at installing electrical wiring. As a board member appointed to conduct repairs, he had free access to the building and his presence was never questioned.
At some point that summer, Kehoe began purchasing large quantities of pyrotol, an incendiary explosive that was first used during World War I. Farmers often used it for excavation, so Kehoe’s purchases of small amounts of the surplus explosive at different stores on different dates did not raise any suspicions. Neighbors reported hearing explosions on Kehoe’s farm, which he explained by saying he was removing tree stumps. No one thought this was odd and no one questioned it when he drove to Lansing in November 1926 and bought two boxes of dynamite at a sporting goods store.
Throughout the spring of 1927, Kehoe began to transport the pyrotol into Bath School. He did so in small increments and no one noticed anything out of the ordinary. He calculated exactly what he needed each day and brought just that amount. He had volunteered to fix the wiring in the school’s basement but instead of repairing things, he wired the explosives throughout the basement, connecting various charges of explosives beneath the floors and in the basement rafters. He slithered into the sub-floors and crawlspaces beneath the school, hiding large amounts of pyrotol behind pipes and beams. Over time, he managed to run thousands of feet of wire throughout the building – all under the feet of unsuspecting children and teachers.
The horrific project was completed in early May. Kehoe set the charges and waited. During this time, he also wired his home in the same manner. In every structure on the farm, he rigged a series of firebombs – crude devices made from containers filled with gasoline and wired with automobile spark plugs attached to a car battery.
On May 17, he drove his car over to the front of his barn and loaded the back seat with metal debris. He threw in nails, old tools, pieces of farm machinery and anything else capable of creating shrapnel in an explosion. When the back seat was filled with bits and pieces of metal, Kehoe packed dozens of wrapped sticks of dynamite under the front seat and placed a loaded rifle on the passenger’s seat next to him.
After he completed this grim task, he set out on another, bloodier one. Records at Lansing’s St. Lawrence Hospital revealed that Nellie Kehoe had been discharged on May 16. On the afternoon of the following day, Kehoe killed his wife by hitting her over the head with a blunt object. The exact nature of the object was never determined, because the ever-thorough Kehoe burned his house, barn and outbuildings to the ground. After killing his wife, Kehoe dumped her body into a wheelbarrow and pushed it over to the back of the chicken coop. Piled around her on the cart were silverware, jewelry and a metal cash box containing the ashes of burned bank notes. After abandoning his wife’s body, Kehoe completed wiring the farm to explode. He had placed one of his homemade firebombs in every building and if all went according to plan, his property would simultaneously explode and burn to the ground before help could arrive. The house, barn, outbuildings and even the farm animals that had been tied in their enclosures would be destroyed. There would be nothing left for the bank to foreclose on.
On the morning of May 18, the children began arriving at the consolidated school at about 8:00 a.m. To the students, it was a day like any other. They laughed and talked, pushed and shoved in the hallways and hurried to their classrooms. They had no way of knowing that – just inches beneath their feet – more than 1,000 pounds of explosives waited for an electrical current that would start a chain reaction that would change their lives forever.

BREAK=====
Kehoe was only getting started… and what comes next is even more gruesome than what came before. We’ll continue our story of how “Hell Came to Bath Michigan” when Weird Darkness returns.

STORY CONTINUES=====
At approximately 8:45 a.m., two miles from the school, Kehoe detonated the firebombs on the farm. The place exploded into flames, sending smoke, fire and debris into the air. Burning streamers of flame fell from the sky, raining down on the farm across the road. The neighbors, hearing the explosion, ran to Kehoe’s farm to offer assistance but as they hurried down the driveway, Kehoe was already behind the wheel of his car. He calmly looked at them through the open window and said, “Boys, you are my friends. You better get out of here. You better go down to the school.” Kehoe roared away, leaving his confused neighbors and a farm completely engulfed in flames, behind him.
As Kehoe drove away, another tremendous explosion, much larger than the first, was heard in the distance. The sound, it was later said, was heard for 10 miles in every direction. The Bath Consolidated School had been blown up. O.H. Buck, who had run to the Kehoe farm after the first series of blasts, heard the massive explosion of the school. He later told reporters, “I began to feel as if the world was coming to an end.”
And for many, it was.
Before the dust from the explosion had settled, townspeople were already digging through the rubble of the school. The sound of children screaming and moaning could be heard coming from the ruins. Fully half the building, the northwest wing, was gone. The walls were destroyed and the roof lay on the ground. Bodies of children could be seen protruding from the bricks and stone, little arms and legs only partially visible. Faces covered with blood and dust peered through the broken windows and from between splintered beams of wood. Frantic mothers ran screaming to the scene, for almost every family in town had at least one child enrolled at the school. The sobbing of trapped children could be heard as some of the mothers fought with rescuers to pull their children from the wreckage. Men worked feverishly in the mountain of rubble, tossing aside bricks and pushing twisted metal as they searched for survivors.
Monty Ellsworth, a neighbor of the Kehoe, recounted, “There was a pile of children of about five or six under the roof and some of them had arms sticking out, some had legs, and some just their heads sticking out. They were unrecognizable because they were covered with dust, plaster, and blood. There were not enough of us to move the roof.” Ellsworth volunteered to drive back to his farm and retrieve the heavy rope that was needed to pull the structure off the children’s bodies. On his way back to the farm, Ellsworth reported seeing a cheery-looking Kehoe driving into town toward the school. Ellsworth said, “He grinned and waved his hand; when he grinned, I could see both rows of his teeth.”
Less than 30 minutes after the explosion, Kehoe arrived on the scene. No one knew that his car had been loaded with dynamite and metal debris. He got out of his car and saw his nemesis, board president Emory Huyck. Kehoe waved and called him over to the car. As he approached, Kehoe picked up the rifle from the seat next to him, aimed it at the dynamite and fired. Another terrible explosion rocked the town. A huge ball of flame shot upwards and shrapnel was sent flying in every direction, ripping apart trees, splintering houses, shattering windows and cutting down everything in its path. Emory Huyck and town postmaster Glen Smith were instantly killed. Kehoe was almost totally obliterated. An eight-year-old student named Cleo Clayton, still dazed from the first blast, was walking along the street when the second explosion occurred. He was struck in the stomach by a large piece of metal from the blast. He died a few hours later.
The people working at the rubble of the school were panicked and confused. No one understood what had happened, most imagining that they were under some sort of military attack. Rumors swept through the crowd about more explosions to come. In the distance, Kehoe’s farm was still burning, sending a column of black smoke high into the air. Smaller explosions could still be heard from the farm as Kehoe’s leftover pyrotol continued to explode. Across the street from the school, trees, houses and parked cars were on fire from the original blast. Pieces of bodies were strewn on the grass and in the bushes and many people had fainted or had become hysterical. Over 100 people had been injured and more injuries were being found every minute. At that point, no one had any idea just how many had been killed.
Minutes after Kehoe’s car exploded, the Lansing fire and police departments arrived on the scene. They were followed by the Michigan State Police and representatives of the state department of public safety, but nothing could have prepared these hardened veterans for what they saw: wrecked and burning cars, downed trees, a collapsed school building that was filled with screaming children, fires everywhere. It was like a battle scene from some distant war – or a taste of hell.
Local physician Dr. J.A. Crum and his wife, a nurse, had both served in World War I, and had returned to Bath to open a pharmacy. After the explosion the Crums turned their drugstore into a triage center. Private citizens were enlisted to use their automobiles as additional ambulances to take survivors and family members to area hospitals.
A short distance away from Kehoe’s destroyed car, Mrs. Frank Smith stood in front of her home watching in horror as the events took place before her eyes. In the corner of her garden, amidst the flowers and shrubs, she saw a crumpled mass of bloody clothing. As she looked closer, she saw that it was part of a human body, mangled almost beyond recognition. Protruding from a rear pocket of the clothing, she saw some papers and carefully removed them. When she looked over the papers, she saw that part of it was a bankbook from the Lilley State Bank of Tecumseh. Andrew Kehoe’s name was on it. Mrs. Smith ran over to a police officer who was directing rescue efforts at the school, and he brought over some of Kehoe’s neighbors to view the body. A positive identification was made. They finally understood Kehoe’s odd words to them as he drove away from his burning farm. He had urged them to go to the school. They could have never imagined what he had planned there.
Hundreds of people climbed through the wreckage to and rescue the children pinned underneath. The injured and dying were transported to Sparrow Hospital and St. Lawrence Hospital in Lansing. Michigan Governor Fred Green arrived during the afternoon of the disaster and assisted in the relief work, carting bricks away from the scene. The Lawrence Baking Company of Lansing sent a truck filled with pies and sandwiches, which were served to rescuers in the township’s community hall.
As policeman, firefighters and volunteers searched through the rubble, desperately looking for survivors, a chilling discovery was made in the ruined basement: a huge cache of unexploded dynamite. State Police officers who emerged from the basement of the school with a bushel basket filled with dynamite informed everyone that there was even more still inside, still attached to a battery and a clock. The rescue efforts suddenly came to a halt as the area around the school was cleared. Working frantically in the broken beams and shattered concrete, fearing they could be blown up at any moment, police officers carefully dismantled what remained of Kehoe’s mad plan. They carried out 504 pounds of dynamite, along with wires and detonating devices. The pyrotol had been divided up into eight different bombs which were hidden in various spots on the south end of the school. Experts later theorized that the first blast had caused some sort of short circuit, which made the additional bombs malfunction. If the rest of the dynamite had gone off, the school would have been completely demolished and the death toll would have surely been in the hundreds.
Slowly, the bodies of the dead were carried out of the ruins of the Bath Consolidated School. They were placed in neat rows on the scorched grass and hastily covered up. A short distance from this grim scene, Mrs. Eugene Hart sat in the street, with her two little dead girls, one in each arm, and her son lying dead in her lap. One of the police officers at the scene later told newspapers, “There were sights that I hope no one will ever have to look at again.”
The bodies of the children were taken one by one to the township hall, which served as a temporary morgue. Dazed parents were brought in to identify the remains of children, some of whom were horribly burned and disfigured by the blast.
The following day, police and fire officials gathered at the Kehoe farm to investigate the fires. On May 19, the body of Nellie Kehoe was found. Her body was so disfigured that she first went unnoticed by everyone who walked past her. She had been burned almost beyond recognition. Her left arm and her right leg were both missing. Only the axle and wheels remained of the cart on which her corpse had been placed. All of the Kehoe farm building had been destroyed and all of the animals that had been trapped in the barns were dead. The amount of unused equipment and materials on the property reportedly could have easily paid off the mortgage – but Kehoe had been too obsessed with the “unfair” taxes for him to realize it.
As officials searched the property for clues to the devastation, they found a hand-lettered wooden sign that Kehoe had wired to a fence that bore the short message that he likely imagined would explain his actions: “Criminals are made, not born.”
All over the world, newspaper headlines announced the shocking tragedy in Bath. The press struggled to find reasons for Kehoe’s rampage, but of course, there were none. The Bath community was devastated and the loss could not be measured in simply the number of children that had been killed. There was no one in the community that had not been touched by the tragedy. Everyone had lost a relative, a friend, a classmate or a teacher. In addition to the human toll, Bath faced financial catastrophe. A new school would have to be built. The future now looked bleak.
The American Red Cross, which set up operations at the Crum pharmacy, did what it could to provide aid and comfort for the victims. The Lansing Red Cross headquarters stayed open until 11:30 on the night of the disaster to answer telephone calls, update the list of the dead and injured and provide information. The Red Cross also managed donations that were sent to pay for both the medical expenses of the injured and the burial costs of the dead.
Over the next few days, there was an endless wave of funerals in Bath, with 18 of them being held on Saturday, May 22. The last funeral was held on Sunday, May 23, the same day that Charles Lindbergh completed the first solo transatlantic flight to Paris. This event shared newspaper space with news of the tragedy in Michigan. Over 100, 000 automobiles passed through Bath that weekend, a staggering amount of traffic for the small village. Some Bath citizens regarded this armada as an unwarranted intrusion into their time of grief, but most accepted it as a show of sympathy and support from surrounding communities. Unfortunately, as with any other tragedy, heartless curiosity-seekers also made their way to town, as did the headline-seekers like the Ku Klux Klan, who proclaimed that the actions of Kehoe, a Roman Catholic, were the result of his adherence to the stance of the Catholic Church against what they considered “Protestant or godless schools.”
A coroner’s inquest was held the following week. The coroner had arrived at Bath on the day of the disaster and had sworn in six community leaders to serve as the investigative jury. The Clinton County prosecutor conducted the examination and dozens of Bath citizens and law enforcement personnel testified before the jury. Although there was never a doubt that Andrew Kehoe had carried out the bombing, the jury was asked to determine if the school board or any of its employees were guilty of criminal negligence.
The testimony lasted for more than a week and in the end, the jury exonerated the school board and its employees. In the verdict, the jury concluded that Kehoe “conducted himself sanely and so concealed his operations that there was no cause to suspect any of his actions; and we further find that the school board, and Frank Smith, janitor of the school building, were not negligent in and about their duties, and were not guilty of any negligence in not discovering Kehoe’s plan.”
It was determined that Kehoe had murdered Emory Huyck on the morning of May 18. They also found that the school was destroyed as part of a plan that was carried out by Kehoe alone, without the aid of conspirators, and that he had willfully caused the death of 44 people, including his wife, Nellie. On August 22, some three months after the bombing, fourth-grader Beatrice Gibbs died following hip surgery. It was the final death attributed to the Bath School Massacre.
The jury returned a judgment of suicide as the cause of Andrew Kehoe’s death. His body was eventually claimed by his sister. Without any ceremony, he was buried in an unmarked grave in an initially unnamed cemetery. Later, it was revealed that Kehoe was buried in the pauper’s section of Mount Rest Cemetery in St. Johns, Michigan. Nellie Kehoe was buried in Mount Hope Cemetery in Lansing by her family. Her tombstone bears her maiden name of Price.
The people of Bath were left with no other choice but to move on. Governor Fred Green created the Bath Relief Fund with the money supplied by donors, the state and local governments. Scores of people from all over the country donated to the fund, which eventually allowed for the demolition of the damaged portion of the school and the construction of a new wing with the donated funds.
School resumed on September 5, 1927, and for the first school year, classes were held in the community hall, the township hall and two retail buildings. Most of the students returned. An architect from Lansing, Warren Holmes, donated plans for a new school and the school board approved contracts for a new building on September 14. On September 15, Michigan’s Republican U.S. Senator James J. Couzens presented a personal check for $75,000 to the Bath construction fund and the school’s new wing was named in his honor.
In 1928, artist Carlton W. Angell presented the board with a statue called “Girl with a Cat”. The statute currently rests in the Bath School Museum, which is located in the school district’s middle school, adjacent to the bombing site. Angell’s inscription on the piece stated that it was dedicated to the courage and determination of the people of Bath. The sculpture was funded by donated pennies from students all over Michigan. According to legend, the pennies were melted down and used to cast the statue.
In 1975, the new school was also torn down and a small park was created, dedicated to the victims of the tragedy. At the center of the park is the cupola of the original building, the only part that has been preserved. At the entrance to the park is a bronze plaque that contains the names of all the children who were killed on that terrible day.
The parents of those children survived the massacre, but their lives were never the same again. Some of them moved away from Bath in the years that followed, but it’s unlikely they ever really escaped their horrible memories. For those who stayed behind, the bloody history of that day was always present and to many people, the community remains a place where death came calling on what should have been a beautiful spring day. Instead, it became the day when the twisted obsessions of a dangerous man claimed the lives of dozens of innocent people and forever stained the landscape of rural Michigan.
With a horrific event such as the Bath School Massacre, it’s no surprise that ghostly tales and legends have sprung up around the scene of the disaster. According to stories, people claim to have had many experiences at the park where the two schools once stood. Voices are heard, as well as cries for help, and recordings have been obtained that allegedly contain the eerie voices of the lost, still seeking help after decades have passed. Unexplained cold spots are also felt — as well as the strange touch of unseen hands, as if they are reaching out from beyond the grave.
And, according to first-hand accounts, the massacre site is not the only place in Bath that is haunted. A funeral home on Main Street, where many of the bodies of the victims were prepared for burial, was turned into an apartment house many years after the massacre. A tenant who moved into the place in 2000 began to experience odd happenings in the house, starting almost from the night she moved in. As she climbed into bed that night, she felt the unsettling stare of someone watching her — and things were never the same after that.
She began hearing footsteps going up and down stairs that had been removed years before and voices coming from the basement. Toilets flushed by themselves, water faucets turned on and off and she claimed to hear the sobbing and crying of children. When she heard the sound of breaking glass one night, she called the police. Officers came to search the house but when she unlocked the basement door, both men refused to go down and look around. When the landlord came to her the following day and blamed her for damage that had been done in the basement, she showed him the police report and he was as puzzled by the disturbance as she had been.
A short time later, she began seeing the ghosts.
The first victim she saw said that his name was George Hall and that he had been eight years old when he died at the school. According to the witness, George’s ghost had no legs. The spirit, she claimed, was a prankster and loved the tenant’s cat, along with other animals. There was also a little girl, who was missing a hand and wanted the tenant to look for it. The spirit told her that she had been wearing a ring that was special to her when she died at the school and the ring was still on one of her missing fingers.
During the time she lived in the house, the tenant stated that the ghostly occupants were always nearby and seemed to need something from her — something that she seemed to be unable to give. They wanted help, she said, but she didn’t know how to help them. For reasons that she couldn’t understand, the children were unable to rest.
And one has to wonder if they still linger there, unable to find peace after their terrible deaths, still searching for solace and understanding of the bitter crime that took them from this earth.

BREAK=====
Up next, after spending ten years in prison, Sam Sheppard was acquitted of his wife’s murder. But for some, questions remain. We’ll look at the bizarre twists and turns of the case of Sam Shepphard… did they have the wrong man?
But first, it has been over 400 years since the colony of Roanoke was lost with no clue as to why all of the colonists disappeared. But is it possible the mystery has finally been solved? That story is up next on Weird Darkness!

STORY: THE MYSTERY OF LOST ROANOKE FINALLY SOLVED?=====
“If this stone is real, it’s the most significant artifact in American history of early European settlement,” said Ed Schrader, a geologist and president of Brenau University in Georgia. “If it’s not, it’s one of the most magnificent forgeries of all time.”
A recently discovered 21-pound engraved stone that, based on the results of upcoming testing, could perhaps solve the mystery behind the “Lost Colony” of Roanoke that has puzzled historians for centuries.
This mystery involves the creepy disappearance of more than 100 English settlers from the colony sometime between 1587 and 1590 — and the stone may finally help explain what happened.
The story of the “Lost Colony” begins on July 4, 1584, when English explorers landed on Roanoke Island in present-day North Carolina. The explorers were unsuccessful in establishing a settlement, so a larger group led by a man named John White was sent there in 1587.
Among the 117 colonists were White’s daughter, Eleanor White Dare, and her stonemason husband, Ananias Dare. Eleanor and Ananias soon had a daughter, named Virginia, the first English child born in the New World.
Low on supplies, the group soon found themselves in a desperate situation. John White then traveled back to England for reinforcements later in 1587, but the outbreak of the Anglo-Spanish War delayed his return.
When he finally managed to get back to Roanoke more than three years later, in 1590, the settlement was entirely deserted with no remains in site. The only clue as to what had happened was a fence post with the word “Croatoan,” the name of a neighboring Native American tribe, carved into it.
And that was the last we’d heard from the colonists of Roanoke — until 1937, when a tourist from California walked into the history department at Atlanta’s Emory University with the massive stone that Ed Schrader and others now think might be the most important artifact of the early American period.
On one side of the stone, which the tourist said he’d simply found in a swamp while traveling through North Carolina, the writing appeared to constitute a grave marker reading, “Ananias Dare & Virginia Went Hence Unto Heaven 1591 Anye Englishman Shew John White Govr Via.”
The engraving on the other side of the stone, however, was much longer. As a team of Emory scholars deciphered the message, they were shocked to discover the story that it told, one describing two years of suffering due to sickness and war with local Native Americans that led to the death of virtually all of the colony’s settlers, including the writer’s husband and child.
This story referred to John White as “Father” and, sure enough, was signed “EWD,” the initials of Eleanor White Dare. It looked as though Eleanor had left behind the story of the Roanoke Colony and more or less settled the mystery of the settlers’ mass disappearance once and for all.
Indeed, the Emory team initially declared that the stone was authentic. However, within the next few years, a Georgia stonecutter found more than three dozen stones also claiming to have been written by Dare and which were also soon deemed authentic.
Then, in 1941, the Saturday Evening Post ran a devastating 11,000-word exposé debunking the legitimacy of all the stones as a hoax and revealing the Georgia stonecutter to be a fraud thanks to various evidence.
Just like that, one of the most astounding discoveries was transformed into a pile of rocks and sent to sit in a basement at Georgia’s Brenau University.
But then, in 2016, Ed Schrader decided to take the original stone found in 1937 to the University of North Carolina for analysis.
He sliced off one end of the stone to discover that, in contrast to the darker exterior, the interior was a bright white. Thus, any inscriptions made in this stone would be that same bright white.
However, the inscription on the stone was much darker in color. Such darkening takes a very long time to occur, suggesting that the inscription was made in the approximate era of the Roanoke Colony (it would have been very difficult in the 1930s to use chemicals to mask the color).
But now, Schrader wants to fund an “exhaustive, geochemical investigation” that should go beyond the analysis described above and perhaps prove once and for all whether the stone is legitimate.
And before that, this fall, researchers plan to more thoroughly analyze the language inscribed on the stone in order to verify its authenticity.
“I would surely like to know,” Schrader said, “whether Eleanor White Dare had her hands on this stone about 500 years ago and left us a message.”

STORY: SAM SHEPPHARD – THE WRONG MAN=====
With decades passed since Sam Sheppard’s death, we may never know what truly happened in the sleepy town of Bay Village, Ohio in the early morning hours of July 4, 1954. What we do know is that, at some point in the night, Sheppard’s wife Marilyn, who was four months pregnant at the time of her death, was brutally bludgeoned to death in the Lake Erie home that she shared with her neurosurgeon husband and their young son.
Marilyn Sheppard’s slaying and the subsequent trial of Sam Sheppard would become one of the most controversial murder cases in American history.
The Sheppards had been visited by neighbors earlier in the night of July 3, and Sam Sheppard had fallen asleep on a daybed in the living room while watching Strange Holiday. Their guests left shortly after midnight, and no one knows for sure what transpired between then and 5:40 the next morning of July 4, when a frantic Sam Sheppard called his friend Spencer Houk, the mayor of the small Cleveland suburb, saying, “I think they have killed Marilyn.”
*****The following is an excerpt from the book, “The Wrong Man: The Final Verdict On The Dr. Sam Sheppard Murder Case” by James Neff…
At 5:40 A.M. on July 4, 1954, the mayor of Bay Village was awakened by a telephone call. It was his neighbor Sam Sheppard, shouting, “My God, Spen, get over here quick! I think they’ve killed Marilyn!”
“What!”
“Oh, my God, get over here quick!”
Spencer Houk jumped up and got dressed, waking his wife, Esther. She hated to get up early, but she knew something terrible had happened. She pulled on a dress and shoes. They lived only two houses away from Sam and Marilyn, but Spen, a butcher, had a bad knee, so they got in their car and drove to the Sheppards’ house. They didn’t stop to call the police or grab a weapon.
Sam and Spencer had become fairly good friends in the past year, even though they appeared at first glance to have little in common. Sam was a decade younger, just shy of thirty, and physically vigorous—he was always water-skiing and playing pickup basketball with the neighborhood boys. With his bad knee, exacerbated by long days on his feet cutting and selling meat to his Bay Village customers, Spen had to sit on the sidelines—except when they went fishing. Spen could outfish him any day; Sam didn’t have the patience to fish for Lake Erie perch or walleye when he could be flying across the lake on skis at thirty miles an hour. Together they had bought a thirteen-foot aluminum boat and clamped on two powerful outboard engines. Sam liked to race sports cars in amateur road rallies; now he had another grown-up toy to satisfy his need for speed.
The Houks found the Sheppards’ kitchen door unlocked. It faced Lake Road, a two-lane highway along the lake. Just inside the hallway and to the right was the den. Sam was leaning back on a red leather swivel chair, holding his neck.
“Sam, Sam, what happened?” the mayor wanted to know.
Sam was bare-chested, his pants soaked, and moaning softly, his surgeon’s fingers laced like a sling at the base of his skull.
“Pull yourself together, Sam!” Spen ordered. “What happened?”
He mumbled that he was asleep on the couch in the living room, heard Marilyn cry “Sam!” and ran up the stairs to help, and then “somebody clobbered me.”
Esther had gone right upstairs. In the northwest bedroom were twin beds. The far bed was empty, its quilt and covers neatly turned down, as if waiting for someone to quietly slide underneath. A spray of blood flecked the covers and the pillow.
A few feet away, on the bed closer to the door, Marilyn’s body lay faceup. Her legs hung over the foot of the bed, bent at the knees, her feet dangling a few inches above the rug. It was an odd position. Her legs were under a wooden bar that ran from post to post across the foot of the bed. It looked as if someone had pulled her legs under the bar, pinning her like a giant specimen. Her body was outlined by blood, a huge crimson aura. Her face was turned slightly toward the door, as if she had been expecting someone to walk in, and coated with stringy, clotting blood. She was unrecognizable. About two dozen deep, ugly crescent-shaped gashes marked her face, forehead, and scalp.
Her three-button pajama top was pushed up to her neck, baring her breasts. A blanket draped her middle. Underneath, her flimsy pajama bottoms had been removed from one leg and were bunched below the knee of her other leg, exposing her pubis.
Esther Houk steeled herself and checked Marilyn for a pulse. Nothing. She ran back downstairs and yelled to her husband, “Call the police, call the ambulance, call everybody!”
Esther poured a glass of whiskey in a kitchen glass and carried it to Sam. “You need this.”
“No, no,” he said. “I can’t think, I’ve got to think.” Then he asked about Chip—was he okay?
Esther went upstairs to check. The boy’s bedroom door was open. He was sleeping, curled on his right side. From the distance, sirens wailed, grew louder and louder, then abruptly shut down.
At 5:57 A.M. Bay Village policeman Fred Drenkhan took a radio call that help was needed at 28924 Lake Road, the home of Dr. Sam Sheppard, a friend. Within a few minutes, he was inside the house. On the hallway floor he saw a black leather medical valise opened wide, standing on end, its vials and prescription pads spilled out on the wood floor.
Drenkhan found Sam in his den. On the shelves behind him were two shotguns, two small air rifles, Sam’s beloved record player, and a row of medical textbooks. Two trophies lay on the floor, broken: one of Sam’s treasured high school track trophies and Marilyn’s bowling trophy.
Drenkhan wanted to know what had happened, and Sam gave him more details. He woke up, heard his wife shout his name, then ran upstairs. On the way up, he saw a large form wearing a white top in their summer bedroom. When he reached the top of the stairs or just inside the bedroom, he was struck from behind and knocked out. After he came to, he heard a noise downstairs, ran down, saw something in the dark—a large, dark figure, probably a man—outlined against the living room windows facing the lake. He chased him out of the house, thundered down the long flight of wooden steps, caught the figure on the sand, grappled with him, and was knocked out once again. When he woke up, he was facedown at the water’s edge, his lower half in the water, his head toward the bluff. Dawn was breaking.
Fred Drenkhan, twenty-six, with only three years of police experience, didn’t know what to think. It was a puzzling story, but if Sam had been knocked out twice, he would be disoriented and perhaps give an odd account. Mostly Drenkhan enforced traffic laws in a suburb that was essentially a long, narrow strip of beachfront and nice homes, bisected by a two-lane highway, Lake Road, that connected Cleveland and Toledo. His part-time partner this weekend had never even received training, just pulled on a blue uniform a year earlier and became one of the city’s cops. Drenkhan had investigated break-ins, but never a homicide.
As the first policeman on the scene of what would rapidly metamorphose into a world-famous murder case, Drenkhan would soon find his life turned upside down. (That was an excerpt from James Neff’s book, “The Wrong Man” – you can find a link to the book in the show notes. **********
Sheppard was never able to describe the “bushy-haired” figure very clearly, nor even tell if it was a man or a woman; in at least one case describing the person simply as a “biped”. Sheppard attributed his hazy memory to having been twice knocked out. Of course, authorities found his story fishy.
As did the media. Ohio news outlets seized upon the case, with numerous papers casting a harsh and accusatory light upon Sam Sheppard. One front-page article from a July 30 edition of The Cleveland Press shouted, “Why Isn’t Sam Sheppard in Jail?”.
Sheppard was eventually arrested for the the murder of his wife. The trial began on October 18, 1954, and was among the most reported-upon in American history—rivaling the Lindbergh kidnapping trial. Throughout, the media continued its tactics, fanning the flames of Sheppard’s presumed guilt. On December 21, 1954, Sheppard was found guilty of the second-degree murder of his wife. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. A string of family deaths followed in the wake of the trial. On January 7, 1955, Sheppard’s mother committed suicide. Then, eleven days later, Sheppard’s father died of a bleeding gastric ulcer and stomach cancer. In February of 1963, Sheppard’s father-in-law would also commit suicide.
While Sheppard remained in prison, his legal team fought the 1954 ruling. The appeals process advanced to the Supreme Court. On June 6, 1966, it struck down the murder conviction by an 8-to-1 vote. Ultimately, the Supreme Court ruled that the media had created a “carnival atmosphere” of “inherently prejudicial publicity” around the trial, and that the judge had failed to “control disruptive influences in the courtroom.” Sam Sheppard, who had been found guilty of his wife’s murder in his first trial in 1954, was finally free in 1966.
Following his release, Sheppard appeared as a guest on The Tonight Show, co-wrote a book about his trial and his time in prison, and embarked upon a wrestling career under the name “Killer” Sam Sheppard. During his brief stint as a wrestler, he used his knowledge as a doctor to develop a submission hold called the “mandible claw” which would later be popularized by Mick Foley while wrestling under the name Mankind. Sheppard died in 1970 of what was initially thought to be liver failure but was later found to be Wernicke’s encephalopathy.
The debate about whether or not Sam Sheppard killed his wife didn’t die with him, however. Three decades after his death, Sam Sheppard’s son Sam Reese Sheppard helped to bring a civil suit alleging wrongful imprisonment of his father. DNA evidence that had come to light only a few years earlier played a major role in the trial, during which time the plaintiff’s attorney argued that Richard Eberling, a local handyman who had worked as a window washer at the Sheppard house, was responsible for the murder. According to the argument, the DNA–which included blood stains from a third person who was neither Sam Sheppard nor his wife–showed that Sam Sheppard was innocent and indicated that Eberling had killed Marilyn Sheppard in 1954.
At the time, Eberling was serving a life sentence for the murder of Ethel May Durkin in 1984. Over the years, several other women had also died under mysterious circumstances in proximity to Eberling, and in 1959, while Eberling was under suspicion for several robberies which had occurred in the area around Bay Village, police found rings that had belonged to Marilyn Sheppard in his possession.
However, Eberling maintained his innocence in the Sheppard case, claiming that he had stolen the rings several years after the murder, from a box in the house of Sam Sheppard’s brother. At the time of the retrial in 1966, Eberling was dismissed as a suspect because he passed a polygraph test, though later experts have called that test’s findings into question.
To this day, there are individuals who believe that Sam Sheppard killed his wife, while many others believe just as vehemently that he was wrongfully imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit. While the media circus surrounding the Sheppard trial has since been eclipsed by high-profile murder cases such as the O.J. Simpson trial in 1995, there is still no shortage of mystery surrounding Marilyn Sheppard’s end on that fateful July night.

SHOW CLOSE=====
Thanks for listening! If you like the show, please share it with someone you know who loves the paranormal or strange stories, true crime, monsters, or unsolved mysteries like you do! You can email me anytime with your questions or comments at darren@weirddarkness.com. WeirdDarkness.com is also where you can find information on any of the sponsors you heard about during the show, find all of my social media, listen to FREE audiobooks I’ve narrated, sign up for the email newsletter, find other podcasts that I host including “Retro Radio: Old Time Radio In The Dark”, “Church of the Undead” and a classic 1950’s sci-fi style podcast called “Auditory Anthology”. Also on the site you can visit the store for Weird Darkness tee-shirts, mugs, and other merchandise… plus, it’s where you can find the Hope in the Darkness page if you or someone you know is struggling with depression, addiction, or thoughts of harming yourself or others. And if you have a true paranormal or creepy tale to tell of your own, you can click on TELL YOUR STORY. You can find all of that and more at WeirdDarkness.com.

All stories on Weird Darkness are purported to be true unless stated otherwise, and you can find links to the stories or the authors in the show notes.

“Hell Came to Bath Michigan” by Troy Taylor and Rene Kruse from the book “A Pale Horse Was Death”

“The Mystery Of Lost Roanoke Finally Solved?” by Kara Goldfarb for All That’s Interesting

“Sam Shepphard: The Wrong Man” by Orrin Grey for The Line Up (with an excerpt from the book, “The Wrong Man” by James Neff also used in this story)

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Now that we’re coming out of the dark, I’ll leave you with a little light… Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.'” — Matthew 4:4

And a final thought… “Don’t focus on regrets; find your inspiration in what you can do now.” – Catherine Pulsifer

I’m Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness.

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