When the Pritchard family moved into 30 East Drive, they thought a broken pipe was flooding the kitchen. But the hooded thing they came to call the Black Monk would flood their home with water, drag their daughter up the stairs, and become one of the most violent hauntings England has ever recorded.
EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/blackmonk
READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p88xknw
FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: A family moves into a home and almost immediately begins to experience escalating supernatural activity – which then introduces a sinister, dark menacing entity. (The Black Monk) *** Urban legends are typically dark, strange stories which for the most part are only that – legend. Harmless tales meant to frighten the listener with no more repercussions than some goose bumps and perhaps a restless night of trying to sleep. But some legends are based on truth – and those are the ones that truly make our skin crawl and our faces turn white. (Urban Legends Which Are Actually True) *** Why would a U.S. state vote to have an official state demon? It really happened – and stories about the Jersey Devil continue to this day. We’ll look at the history and horrors of this bizarre cryptid and see if it’s more than urban legend. (Legend of the Jersey Devil) *** Delano, California is a small, uninteresting town that many may think twice before visiting. East of this town is an equally dreary road known as Browning Road. If you’re a paranormal enthusiast, you know that this is one road you shouldn’t dare travel alone. (Hitchhiking Ghost of Delano) *** A woman shares her horrifying true story of an evil entity she encountered on Browning Road in Delano, California. (Evil Walks Browning Road) *** In the summer of 2014 a series of UFOs were being reported by Navy pilots – the most elite of our airborne military. Not only were the sightings becoming more frequent – they would last up to 12-hours at a time. (Navy Pilots Report UFOs)
CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding
00:00:55.732 = Show Open
00:03:16.616 = The Black Monk
00:19:05.635 = Navy Pilot Reports UFOs ***
00:24:26.222 = Urban Legends Which Are Actually True
00:31:27.802 = Legend of the Jersey Devil ***
00:40:09.038 = Hitchhiking Ghost in Delano / Evil Walks Browning Road
00:45:37.698 = Show Close
*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad break
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*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*
SOURCES and RESOURCES:
The Black Monk” by Brent Swancer”: http://bit.ly/2Fg0QUV
“Navy Pilots Report UFOs” by Helene Cooper: http://bit.ly/2ImqbhP
“Urban Legends Which Are Actually True” by DeAnna Janes: http://bit.ly/2WIlbId
“The Legend of the Jersey Devil” by Carolyn Cox: http://bit.ly/2Im39rq
“Hitchhiking Ghost in Delano” posted at Backpackerverse.com: http://bit.ly/2IkU6XM
“Evil Walks Browning Road” by Amy S.: http://bit.ly/2N7inoL
(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)
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Originally aired: January, 2022
This episode of Weird Darkness moves from a violent English poltergeist to Navy encounters with unexplained aircraft, a run of urban legends with real-world roots, the New Jersey cryptid born of a colonial grudge, and a haunted California roadway. It opens at 30 East Drive in Pontefract, West Yorkshire, England, where in 1966 Jean and Joe Pritchard and their children Phillip and Diane began living alongside an entity the family first nicknamed "Fred" and later called the Black Monk. Cold gusts, pooling water, rattling crockery, slashed portraits, and inverted crosses scrawled in red and black ink escalated over years, with Diane singled out for choking, scratches, and being dragged up the stairs in front of witnesses. Investigator Tom Cuniff tied the site to a former gallows and to a Cluniac monk hanged for raping and killing a girl, and decades later Nick Groff and Katrina Weidman of Paranormal Lockdown spent 100 hours locked inside, recording a Latin EVP, a rolling ball, a knife left on the stairs, and Katrina being scratched.From there the episode turns to the skies off the East Coast, where from the summer of 2014 into March 2015 Navy pilots including Lieutenant Ryan Graves of the VFA-11 "Red Rippers" reported objects with no visible engines that reached 30,000 feet and hypersonic speeds and stayed aloft for up to twelve hours. A Super Hornet nearly collided with one in late 2014, footage captured an object skimming the ocean off the USS Theodore Roosevelt, and the sightings reached the Pentagon's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, whose former head Luis Elizondo called them a striking series of incidents while Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysicist Leon Golub pointed toward mundane explanations.Next comes a set of urban legends that turned out to have true counterparts, from the 1997 organ-theft chain email set against a 2008 ABC News account of Indian men drugged and cut open near Delhi, to the body-in-the-bed frame tale debunked by folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand yet echoed by killer Richard Kuklinski, to Halloween hanging-stunt deaths of teenagers Brian Jewell, William Anthony Odom, and Caleb Rebh, to intruders like 1941 Denver attic-dweller Theodore Coneys, to explorer John Hanning Speke and British traveler Rochelle Harris and the creatures found inside human ears.The show then digs into the Jersey Devil, the winged Pine Barrens beast the 1939 WPA guide dubbed New Jersey's official state demon, and traces its origin to almanac maker Daniel Leeds, his son Titan's feud with Benjamin Franklin, and the family crest's wyverns, alongside a claimed sighting by Joseph Bonaparte and the January 1909 panic that closed schools and mills across the Delaware Valley.The episode closes on Browning Road in Delano, California, where locals say a young woman struck and killed decades ago haunts the lonely stretch marked by a roadside memorial, appearing in backseats and on the yellow divider lines, followed by the first-person account of a driver named Amy who saw pale gray eyes in her rearview mirror before the figure screamed, vanished, and reappeared standing in the middle of the road.
