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76. The Thing on the Hill: The Flatwoods Monster
28:43||Season 1, Ep. 76At approximately 7:15 in the evening on Friday the 12th of September 1952, three young boys were playing in the schoolyard of Flatwoods Elementary School, in the small Appalachian town of Flatwoods, West Virginia. It was almost fully dark. One of them looked up. A bright, pulsating object was streaking across the sky. It appeared to descend and crash on a nearby hillside, on the property of a local farmer. The boys ran home to tell their mother, 27-year-old Kathleen May. Kathleen called on her 17-year-old cousin, a National Guardsman named Eugene Lemon. Two other local boys joined the group. The family dog, Rickie, came along. Seven of them altogether. Six boys, one mother, one dog. What they said they found in a clearing at the top of the hill has become one of the most persistently unsettling paranormal encounters in American history. They said they saw a creature. They said it was ten feet tall. They said its head was shaped like an ace of spades, glowing red and orange in the dark. They said it emitted a foul, sulphurous mist that burned their throats and eyes. They said it did not walk. It glided toward them. By the time they got back to the May family home, six of the seven witnesses were vomiting. Their eyes were red. Their throats were swollen. The dog was cowering. The local sheriff came. The local newspaper editor came, with a shotgun. Multiple neighbours reported strange lights that night. Nothing physical was ever found at the site. But for the rest of their lives, all seven witnesses would stand by exactly what they had seen. And nearly 74 years later, no one has ever definitively explained what it was.
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75. An Adventure: The Versailles Time Slip
27:38||Season 1, Ep. 75On the afternoon of Saturday the 10th of August 1901, two English women stepped off a train at Versailles, near Paris, on holiday together. One was 55-year-old Charlotte Anne Moberly, the first Principal of St Hugh's College, Oxford. The other was 38-year-old Eleanor Jourdain, her incoming Vice Principal. They toured the palace. They found it uninspiring. They opened their guidebook and decided to walk to the smaller chateau at the end of the grounds, the Petit Trianon, which had once been the private retreat of Marie Antoinette. They took a wrong turn at an unmarked lane. And over the following 30 minutes, in the gardens of Versailles, they would claim to have seen palace bodyguards in green-grey coats and three-cornered hats, an old plough beside a farmhouse that had long since been demolished, and a woman sitting on a terrace sketching, in an old-fashioned summer dress and a shady white hat. Moberly would come to believe that the woman was Marie Antoinette herself. Neither of them knew, at the time, that the date they had chosen was the 109th anniversary of the fall of the French monarchy. Sixty years of research followed. A book was published in 1911. It became one of the most famous ghost stories in the English language. And to this day, no one has ever been able to prove or disprove what the two women said they had seen.
74. The Lost Cosmonauts
31:18||Season 1, Ep. 74On a winter night in 1961, in a stone bunker on a hilltop outside Turin, two young Italian brothers sat in front of a wall of homemade radio equipment and heard something they would spend the rest of their lives trying to explain. The slow, wet sound of a man breathing his last breaths from somewhere above the Earth. Over the following years, Achille and Giovanni Battista Judica-Cordiglia would record eight more transmissions just like it. Morse code SOS signals from spacecraft in trouble. A capsule drifting into deep space. A female voice, calm at first and then terrified, counting down numbers in Russian as her capsule appeared to burn up around her. They were the dying breaths of Soviet cosmonauts on missions that, officially, never happened. Or they were one of the most extraordinary fabrications of the Cold War. Sixty years on, no one has been able to decide which.
73. The Boy Who Was His Own Grandfather - Sam Taylor
28:33||Season 1, Ep. 73A young father in Vermont was changing his eighteen-month-old son's nappy when the little boy looked up at him and said something that no toddler should be able to say. Daddy, when I was your age, I used to change your nappies. His father searched his face for a smile. There was none. The little boy looked back at him with the calm certainty of a child stating a fact. And the strange thing was, his paternal grandfather had died eighteen months before the boy was born. The exact length of time it would take for a soul to return. In the months and years that followed, the little boy named Sam began saying things he could not possibly have known. About kitchen appliances. About cars. About a great aunt who had been murdered sixty years before. This is the story of one of the most studied cases of childhood past-life memory in modern science. Investigated, documented, and to this day, never explained.
72. The Ghosts of Muncaster Castle
27:03||Season 1, Ep. 72High on a hillside above the River Esk in Cumbria stands one of the oldest occupied houses in England. Muncaster Castle has been home to the Pennington family for over 800 years. A king once sheltered here after losing his throne. A cruel jester named Tom Fool once stalked its grounds. A young carpenter was beheaded in its stables. A housemaid was murdered on the road outside its main gate. And in a quiet room at the end of a first floor corridor, where dark tapestries hang from the walls and iron fire dogs shaped like devils' heads guard the fireplace, an academic named James Cartland heard something in 1988 that he would never be able to explain. The sound of a child crying. The soft voice of a woman singing. And the slow realisation that the room he was sleeping in had once been a nursery, where a little girl had died over a century before.
71. From the Vault - New Years Mystery
32:07||Season 1, Ep. 71Hello legends, Jack here, host of Mysteries at Bedtime. I'm currently travelling to the US because my other show, One Minute Remaining, was lucky enough to be nominated for an award. I’ll be back very soon, but while I’m away, I’m diving into the vault to bring you some fascinating and mysterious stories from Crime at Bedtime.These are stories focused on people who have vanished under mysterious circumstances, and today we look at the case of Ben Smart and Olivia Hope from New Zealand. On New Year’s Eve 1997, they were seen partying and celebrating with friends. By the following morning, they were gone...This is their story.New Year’s Eve, 1997. Hundreds of partygoers pack into Furneaux Lodge in New Zealand’s remote Marlborough Sounds. By morning, two young friends – Ben Smart and Olivia Hope – have vanished after stepping from a water taxi onto a stranger’s yacht. They are never seen again. In this Crime at Bedtime episode, we walk carefully through one of New Zealand’s most controversial murder cases: the disappearance of Ben and Olivia and the conviction of Scott Watson. We follow the movements of that final night, the mystery man on the yacht, the massive search, the forensic hair evidence, and the witness identifications that helped secure a guilty verdict – along with the doubts and challenges that have followed ever since. Told in a calm, measured way for listening at night, this episode lays out the key facts so you can decide what you make of the Scott Watson case.
70. From the Vault - Into the Darkness
23:33||Season 1, Ep. 70Hello legends, Jack here, host of Mysteries at Bedtime. I'm currently travelling to the US because my other show, One Minute Remaining, was lucky enough to be nominated for an award. I’ll be back very soon, but while I’m away, I’m diving into the vault to bring you some fascinating and mysterious stories from Crime at Bedtime.These are stories focused on people who have vanished under mysterious circumstances, and today we look at the case of Asha Degree — a young girl who disappeared on a rainy night in 2000, last seen clutching her backpack and walking off into the darkness.She has never been seen again...On a rainy February night in 2000, nine-year-old Asha Degree vanished from her Shelby, North Carolina, home. Clutching her backpack, she walked into the cold darkness, never to return. Twenty-three years later, her case remains a haunting mystery with more questions than answers. Why did she leave? Where was she going? And what clues did the few items left behind reveal?Join me as we unravel the known facts and chilling details surrounding Asha’s disappearance, exploring the theories, hopes, and the enduring search for answers in one of America's most perplexing missing child cases.