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Mysteries at Bedtime
The Thing on the Hill: The Mothman of Point Pleasant
Shortly after midnight on the morning of Tuesday the 15th of November 1966, in the small Ohio River town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, in the county of Mason, two young married couples in a black 1957 Chevrolet drove out along State Route 62 to see what there was to see at the abandoned munitions plant seven miles north of town. The plant had been decommissioned since the end of the Second World War. It was known, to everyone in Mason County, as the TNT Area. It consisted of several hundred acres of overgrown vegetation, crumbling concrete storage bunkers, and an abandoned power plant building. The four young people in the car were Roger Scarberry and his wife Linda, and Steve Mallette and his wife Mary. Roger was driving. It was a Monday night rolling over into a Tuesday morning. They had been out. On the drive back into town, they had decided to take the long way home, past the TNT Area. As they approached the abandoned power plant building at approximately five minutes past midnight, their headlights fell on what appeared to be two red points of light standing beside the road. Roger slowed the car. The four of them looked out through the windscreen. The two red points of light, they realised as they got closer, were not lights. They were eyes. The eyes belonged to a figure that was standing perfectly still at the side of the road, watching them. The figure was, in Roger Scarberry's later description to police, shaped like a man, but bigger. Approximately six or seven feet tall. It was covered in a dark grey substance that might have been feathers, or might have been skin, or might have been something else entirely. Behind its back, folded, were what appeared to be a pair of very large wings. For a moment, the four young people in the car sat and looked at it. Then the figure moved. The story of the 13 months that followed, in which more than 100 people across Mason County reported sightings of the same creature. Of the extraordinary investigation conducted by American paranormal researcher John Keel. Of the disturbing dreams that spread through Point Pleasant in the autumn of 1967. And of the terrible event that occurred, in the darkness of the early evening of Friday the 15th of December 1967, exactly 13 months and one day after the first sighting, that killed 46 people and, in a strange coincidence that has never been explained, ended the Mothman sightings entirely.
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91. The Shag Harbour Incident - Canadas Roswell incident
26:33||Season 1, Ep. 91The Shag Harbour incident is one of the best-documented UFO mysteries in the world. On the night of 4 October 1967, at least eleven people, police among them, watched a large lit object descend from the sky and settle onto the water off the fishing village of Shag Harbour, in Nova Scotia, Canada. Fishing boats raced out, the Royal Canadian Navy sent divers down for three days, and no wreckage, no missing aircraft and no explanation were ever found. Logged in Canada's own government records as a UFO, the object has never been identified to this day. On Mysteries at Bedtime, settle in, get comfortable, and let us tell you the story of the Shag Harbour incident.
90. The Disappearance of Suzy Lamplugh: The Mystery of Mr Kipper
28:17||Season 1, Ep. 90The disappearance of Suzy Lamplugh remains one of Britain's most enduring mysteries. On 28 July 1986, the twenty-five-year-old estate agent left her Fulham office to show a house to a client she had written in her diary only as "Mr Kipper", and she was never seen again. Her car was found abandoned that night, her body has never been found, and although police would later name the convicted killer John Cannan as their prime suspect, he was never charged over her disappearance and always denied any involvement. Nearly forty years on, the questions still stand: who was Mr Kipper, and what happened to Suzy? This is the story of a young woman who vanished in broad daylight, and the mystery that has never let go. On Mysteries at Bedtime, settle in, get comfortable, and let us tell you the story of the disappearance of Suzy Lamplugh.
89. The Disappearance of Harold Holt: The Prime Minister the Sea Swallowed
27:16||Season 1, Ep. 89On the seventeenth of December 1967, Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt walked into the surf at Cheviot Beach near Portsea, Victoria, and was never seen again. Despite one of the largest search operations in the nation's history, no body and no trace were ever found. Was it an accidental drowning, as a coroner would eventually rule, or something stranger: a suicide, a shark, or the extraordinary claim that Holt was a secret agent who faked his own death and slipped away aboard a waiting submarine? This is the enduring mystery of the most powerful man in the country, who went for a swim one summer Sunday and simply vanished. Settle in, get comfortable, and let us tell you the story of the disappearance of Harold Holt.
88. Titu Singh: The Boy Who Named His Own Killer
27:31||Season 1, Ep. 88Titu Singh was barely more than a toddler when he began insisting he was not who his family thought he was. He was not a little boy, he said, but a grown man named Suresh Verma, a shopkeeper from the city of Agra, with a wife, two children, and a radio shop, who had been shot dead in his own car. His family dismissed it as a child’s fantasy, until they travelled to Agra and found the shop, the widow, and the murdered man, all exactly as the boy had described. Then there were the two birthmarks on Titu’s head, which matched the entry and exit wounds recorded in the dead man’s autopsy. Investigated by serious researchers and filmed by the BBC, it remains one of the most carefully documented and most debated cases of its kind in the world. In this episode of Mysteries at Bedtime, we tell the full story, and weigh it honestly: how could a small boy know the intimate details of a murder he could not possibly have witnessed? Settle in, get comfortable, and let us tell you the story of the boy who named his own killer.
87. The Hexham Heads: The Cursed Stones and the Werewolf
25:02||Season 1, Ep. 87The Hexham Heads are one of the strangest and most enduring mysteries in British folklore. In 1971, two young brothers dug up two small carved stone heads in the garden of their home in Hexham, Northumberland, and, according to those who were there, unleashed something. Objects moved on their own. A neighbour reported a werewolf walking down the stairs in the dead of night. And when a respected Celtic scholar took the heads home to study them, she woke to find a half-wolf, half-human figure in her bedroom, an account she stood by, on national television, for the rest of her life. Then a local man claimed he had made the heads himself, out of concrete, as toys. And in the end, the heads themselves simply vanished, and have never been seen again. In this episode of Mysteries at Bedtime, we tell the full story: the haunting, the werewolf, the scholar, the sceptic, and the objects that disappeared off the face of the earth. Settle in, get comfortable, and let us tell you the story of the heads that vanished.
86. The Disappearance of Brandon Lawson: The 911 Call in the Dark
26:58||Season 1, Ep. 86The disappearance of Brandon Lawson is one of the most haunting missing-persons cases of the modern age, and it is captured, in part, on a chilling 911 call. In August 2013, the 26-year-old father ran out of petrol on a dark rural road in Texas. He phoned his brother for help, then called 911, breathless and terrified, saying men were chasing him and that he'd run out into a field. He begged the operator to hurry. Then the line went dead. When his brother reached the abandoned truck minutes later, Brandon was gone. He was so afraid of whatever was out there that he called the police despite having a warrant out for his arrest. In this episode of Mysteries at Bedtime, we tell the full story: the frantic phone calls, the search that found nothing, the remains discovered nine years later in already-searched ground, and the question no one can answer, what was he running from? Settle in, get comfortable, and let us tell you the story of the voice in the field.
85. The Ilkley Moor Alien: The 1987 UFO Photograph Mystery
28:59||Season 1, Ep. 85The Ilkley Moor alien case is one of Britain's most famous UFO photographs. In December 1987, a retired police officer photographed a small green figure on a Yorkshire moor, then found his compass reversed and an hour of time missing. Experts examined the photo and could not prove it a fake. We lay out the evidence, the sceptics' case, and why, nearly 40 years on, no one can explain it. Settle in, get comfortable, and let us tell you the story of the figure by the quarry.
84. The Man Who Walked Off Camera: The Disappearance of Steven Koecher
23:48||Season 1, Ep. 84The disappearance of Steven Koecher in December 2009 is one of the most quietly baffling vanishings of the modern age, and more than sixteen years later, not a single trace of him has ever been found. Steven Koecher was a devout and much-loved 30-year-old journalist from Utah who, in the days before he disappeared, made a series of long and secret road trips that he explained to no one. On a sunny Sunday two days before Christmas, he drove 135 miles to a retirement community in Henderson, Nevada, a place where he knew no one and had no reason on earth to be. A residential security camera caught him parking his car, getting out, and walking purposefully down a quiet suburban sidewalk with something tucked under his arm. He turned a corner, out of the camera's view, and was never seen again. His car sat for days, full of Christmas presents he never came back for, and in the days after he vanished, his phone pinged from a tower miles away. In this episode of Mysteries at Bedtime, we tell the full story of the disappearance of Steven Koecher: the secret drives, the last footage of a man walking off camera, the untouched Christmas gifts, the phone that moved without him, and a mystery so complete that every theory anyone has offered runs straight into a wall. Settle in, get comfortable, and let us tell you the story of the man who walked off camera.
83. Ninety Flashes in the Dark: The Disappearance of Kris Kremers and Lisanne Froon
26:22||Season 1, Ep. 83The disappearance of Kris Kremers and Lisanne Froon in April 2014 is one of the most haunting and hotly debated mysteries of the modern age, and more than a decade later, no one agrees on what really happened. The two young Dutch women, best friends near the end of the trip of a lifetime, set out on a popular jungle trail near Boquete, Panama, on a bright afternoon. They photographed themselves smiling at the foot of the trail at 11 in the morning. They never came back. Six hours later, one of their phones dialled the emergency number. It did not connect, and for the next ten days the phones kept trying, again and again, and never once reached a soul. Then, one week in, in the dead of night, their camera took ninety photographs in near-total darkness: rocks, jungle, running water, and images no one has ever been able to fully explain. Ten weeks later, a backpack was found by a remote river, dry and neatly packed, far from where the two women should ever have been. In this episode of Mysteries at Bedtime, we tell the full story of Kris Kremers and Lisanne Froon: the ten days of calls into the void, the ninety flashes in the dark, the strange condition of the backpack and the remains, and the two competing explanations that still divide everyone who studies the case. Settle in, get comfortable, and let us tell you the story of the ninety flashes in the dark.