Unexplained Disappearances

Hi there, I'm KTown and on this edition of Mysterious Radio. I used to spend a lot of time on the island of White, which is an island in the south of England, and it's got a reputation for being the most haunted place in the world. So growing up, spending a lot of time there, I was thinking about this the other day because I always kind of say it was when I first started writing, but actually I think it was because when I was a child we used to go there all the time for weeks at a time and it has that kind of atmosphere because it's so old and they used to hang people from gibbets they're called on hills and they had smugglers and pirates and so I think actually that's how it all began, but obviously years later I started writing and I used to buy these magazines that had really scary stories in and reader stories about ghosts and supernatural and one day I just thought I would really like to write an article so I said to them I've written loads of articles, can I write one for you which is a bit of a fib and that's so that's kind of how I started writing and then I was getting so much research that I just started putting it into books. I've also seen your name spelled Steven, why did you decide to go to Steph later on? Well it was a bit of a mistake but I actually started writing books on the afterlife and near death experiences so when I first started writing them I was using a pen name for the magazine articles and then I used one for these afterlife books and then I wanted to write about time travellers and I've been to college you know but I'm not that bright when it comes to science and I thought oh I'm going to have to be a man to be taken seriously so I just used this name Steven and it was only when I got asked to go on coast to coast a couple of years ago that I realised I was going to have to explain it's actually Steph not Steven because all of the books had gone out as Steven and I actually didn't expect anybody to read the books and I certainly didn't expect to be asked on radio shows so and now it's kind of too late to change them you know so that's what's happened. It's okay perfectly fine thank you for explaining that. Now do you have any new books coming out? I just brought one out called Terror in the Woods and I've written a series and they're mostly based in the woods so that one's just come out and there's about eight of those and it's about scary things that happen in the woods so somebody might see a strange looking creature but in the same area you might find that somebody else has had a really weird experience with something to do with possibly aliens or UFOs. Another area might have somebody going into the woods and they suddenly find themselves in a totally different place to where they went in so you have time slips and all sorts of weird things that happen in the woods so it all kind of converges and kind of how you said about answering I do kind of find myself doing really in-depth investigations into some cases and others might be stories that readers have sent in so sometimes there's really long chapters because I've done lots of research on it and it's taken me down really strange paths and other ones are more kind of the short and scary ones so it's kind of a mixture but it's amazing the sorts of things you come across and you know is it government conspiracies or is it something natural or I mean for me that's what keeps me going because it's also fascinating and it can take you months to go through it all and still not get to the end. I can imagine and how do you actually go about doing your research I mean are you like when you're investigating the time slips for example are people reaching out to you like on your website or how do you actually find these people that have these unusual experiences? They do now when I first started of course nobody I hadn't been on any shows so nobody knew how to get hold of me so when I first started it was really very much looking on the internet and you could find an article about somebody having a time slip then I would look at who'd written it and what their background was. I kind of get a gauge for how credible it might be and then if it happened in a certain area you could go through archives of newspaper reports and you could start researching and building up a picture yourself so trying to find as many different sources to corroborate this story. Obviously not if it's just a single first-hand account but had something happened there and you can really look into all the texts that exist and then I also like to try and find a reasonable explanation for it to not debunk it but to say well maybe there's a mundane reason why this happened and then I kind of leave it up to the readers to decide. So when I first started yeah it was very much sort of doing it all through sources and developing it that way and then as I've gone on shows I tend to have people writing to me with their experiences and of course you can't necessarily corroborate those because it could be one person on their own and it happened to them so you kind of have to take that for what they're telling you and I think some of the details that people come up with so for example there's a man who says that he lives in a rural area and he is visited by fairies well most people would just think that was ridiculous but the amount of detail he's given and one example is that these little fairies came into his house and he said one day they were running along the back of the sofa and they were dancing on a doorstop so in my mind I could see a picture of them dancing vertically almost like a couple man man and woman dancing you know he said they were spinning round and round and so I would have thought if I was making that up I would say that they were upright but he described it to me before I questioned him that they were they were at a 45 degree angle which of course divides gravity you know so you think well that's really strange if somebody was making that up how would they come up with that detail so another case was a man in the San San Juan islands I just off I believe it's between Vancouver and the United States and so he'd written into me because he was having really strange experiences and he came out of his home and he went walking and he was on the phone at the time and he said I inadvertently stepped inside a fairy ring a ring of mushrooms but he calls it a fairy ring and he said after I'd came out of it I went back home but I had to go straight to bed because something had happened to me and he fell asleep for hours he said which is not like him because he has his own business and he woke up he felt very very odd well he found that he went down to the harbour and there was a ship called the sea defender I think it's called and he couldn't find the ship and he couldn't find the building that it you know it was housed by and then he found this other new development of business units and he'd gone there it was he saw it as it was driving by and he wanted to find a new place for his business so he stopped there and he said well I saw these soldiers in paramilitary gear and with machine guns when I got out of my car and I went over to them and I said is this a new building here and they said yes and as he was but they said to him but but we don't want you here you need to go so he got back in his car and as he was driving away he looked in his mirror he said that the soldiers had morphed into black black garbage bags well you know that sounds crazy doesn't it but funny enough I I checked out his background because I found that he'd done some videos with a shaman on YouTube years and years ago before he contacted me so he sent me all this stuff about underground underground building work taking place as well near the harbour and he'd also had this really strange sighting of a huge bird so it wasn't a bird of prey it was absolutely huge and it had almost been trying to attack him it had red eyes it was huge so it was almost like he had this convergence of really odd experiences happening all the time so there's no logical explanation for those kind of things you know and you can say well that's just somebody's perspective and they're just making it up but on the other hand he didn't want his name put out there he wanted certain details left out so you know you hear the oddest things that's incredible and in fact he said um it's part of his correspondence because we um toad and foat for ages you know to get the full story and he said I had a friend on the island who was visiting and he was an investigative journalist and he and his daughter found the same buildings found the same soldiers and yet when he went back to the harbour about three days later the boat was there the building that housed the boat was there it was all back to normal again right well I totally agree with you about trying to discern whether or not people are telling the truth because usually when they're trying to get attention they want their name attached to things like this right so the fact that he told you he didn't want his name attached to any of this what is he really going to get out of it yeah he wanted his also the type of work that he did he wanted change so that because it's a small island you could whack at who it was you know and certain bits had to be left out um which were even more astonishing really um that's the thing as well though because uh I'll give you an example I haven't worked on it that recently but the Elisa Lamb case of course you know it was it was so strange that so many people took notice of it and um although at one point I was wondering if it was even actually something that happened but I I've spoken to a person who was hired by the family to look into it so this person I spoke to was working for the person hired and went and did some investigating and has told me some things um which I can't use because of course sometimes there are things that have to be kept confidential particularly if it's a ongoing investigation into something terrible that happened so there's a lot of things that I find out as well that I I can't obviously to protect people I can't reveal as well which adds a lot more to the story and another thing I've written two books on it and I'm still working kind of behind the seasons on it is the phenomenon really that's called the smiley face killers and I don't know if people will have heard of that but that started about 20 years ago where college boys were disappearing after going out for a night out and somehow being separated from their friends sometimes it was because the bouncers had thrown them out but quite often when you looked into the stories that they were thrown out on spurious reasons so they they said they were drunk but they weren't that drunk or they hadn't been arguing and then they would be separated from their friends and disappear and then their bodies would be found in water uh sometimes up to 40 days later and there's uh well there was supposed to be about 40 cases of this um initially it was it was a brought to the public forefront by two detectives detective Ganon and Duarte his partner and then a professor in uh Wisconsin Milwaukee he uh and the Ganon the private the detective wrote a book about it had some of the cases reinvestigated forensically so there's this idea that there's a group and it is probably a group going around and it's still happening now I mean the number of young men who disappear in exactly the same way um and they always seem to be going uh they always seem to be found in the opposite direction to where they would be going um so so there's a lot going on with that and and actually somebody sent me something on Facebook which I looked into at the weekend um and I can't reveal it because um really it should go to the police um and it's something that was found on the dark web you know the um if you use the the tour network which I won't do because I don't want to look there and and I wish to god that I hadn't seen what I saw but and is it real or is it not real I don't know um but there are so so there's quite often things that you find out um that really substantiate what could be going on um but you can't always add it into to what you write about you know there may be a point where you can but so I suppose to that the point I'm trying to make is that sometimes these stories are a lot deeper than you could even realize now when someone shows you something like that or tells you something like that that obviously needs to go to the police do you tell them listen I can't you know I can't investigate this I can't do anything with it you need to take this to the proper authorities no I mean I haven't because it's it's sent from them but they found that they didn't actually find it themselves so it was out in the public domain but you you wouldn't have found it unless they found it by accident okay so let me ask you something what was they wanting you to do with it well because they know that I'm still looking into the cases and because I've written the books on it um and I guess they wanted to show me so that I could use it in some way to prove that this really is happening um because I know that the original investigators and I have another contact who's formerly was in law enforcement have taken it to the FBI and they they don't see the connection or they don't have enough evidence they don't have enough evidence of it being anything but an accidental drowning um so they gave it to me because I'm looking into it still um but they got it not by going on the dark web themselves they found it on the internet okay so somebody else had found it but they they didn't know what it was it was part of a long video so they this person was watching this other video made by a youtuber and this person didn't know what it was but the person who contacted me did know what it was yeah I mean I have a couple of contacts I can send it to I guess the problem is that if it's from the dark web how on earth do you how on earth do you um find find who made it right right that's what I've been looking into this weekend because I think people have been caught in the past haven't they from from doing things on the dark web so I know it's possible um I also know somebody who's developed software to enable them to go on the dark web and track things so um it's it's possible let's get into some of these cases that you have in your book and can we start off by talking about the mystery of Alan Jill he was going uh well he left his home a couple of years ago in Cornwall which is in the southwest of England it's sort of a holiday area really beautiful although it has a reputation for um witches and witchcraft in the past but so he lived on his own and he was just going out he was captured on CCTV as he he left he went to a bus station he caught a bus going out of the town that he lived in taking him to another town which then he walked to a beach I think from there or rather sorry he was found on a beach yeah so he'd been seen on CCTV after he left the bus station walking um two or three people saw him and were in the CCTV but they never came forward so when his body was was found on the beach um he he had um a sock in his mouth and he had earphones from his ipod or iphone inside his mouth as well and there was a jacket that he was wearing but it wasn't the jacket that he'd left home in so it didn't seem to be his jacket and his jacket was found next to him and it had a picture of a 18 month old roughly um child well when the police managed to work out who he was they discovered that this was actually a picture of him as a child but nobody could work out how he ended up dead on the beach the police said that there was some water in his lungs so they could say that he probably did drown but there was no logical reason why he'd been there and there was some suggestion that the beach that he'd gone to or the area itself could have been a spot where gay people might go um but there's nothing to prove that he was gay in any way or anything like that happened he was an online gamer so the police also wondered could he have been talking to somebody on the computer that could have led him to meet up with them um he'd bought some weights walking weights that you can strap around your ankles and they disappeared um the only other thing I thought of as well was that he worked once worked for a um Nobel prize winner in chemistry and there was no evidence that that had anything to do with it but having looked into other sorts of cases um which we'll probably get on to um I kind of wondered whether he knew something to do with science or research that you know he'd had to be shut up and but there's there's no real reason and I guess the mystery mainly would be why that was found in his mouth um the what what reason somebody would have for doing that didn't seem like it was um a normal way for him to commit suicide so it's a really mysterious case that there's no sort of logical reason for it that is very strange I've never heard of anything like that happening now are most of your cases based on um events that happen in your area no I mean they're worldwide um no I don't tend to do them as much actually for my area oh you don't okay that's interesting no no I mean they they're UK based uh quite a lot but also Canada and America um or worldwide really yeah um I mean I'm I'm looking into some uh strange missing persons cases in Yorkshire in the north of England but I only came across those um through contact with another author actually a couple of days ago so uh yeah they're all over how much media attention do they usually get over there yeah that one did get a bit of attention mainly in the local area um they I guess they kind of stay in the news for a day or so but not massively there was one if I can remember it correctly um a man's body was found on Yorkshire Moor um Yorkshire Moor is famous for the the killings of the children by Ian Brady and Moira Hindley and they buried some of the children there so it's it's a shame really because it's a beautiful area and it's it's very rugged and and it's a place where everybody goes to walk well this particular case was very much covered in the news really because it was such a mystery a man had gone there he'd he'd gone there on a rainy day and there's a pub just below the hill on the moor and he'd walked into the pub and he said to the man who owned the pub could you tell me how to get to this particular part of the hill and the man had told him but he said I did warn him that it was late in the afternoon it was sort of winter time and it would be dark by the time he got to that spot so it would be dangerous for him to walk back in the dark he said it was also really strange because he wasn't dressed for hiking he had a raincoat on and just ordinary clothes but the man asked him twice for the direction so in the end he he he left the pub and he went off up the hill well his body was found on the hill dead and when he was found a hiker saw him and walked past the body a few few meters away and when he saw him he said it was so odd because his body was just laid out completely flat almost like he'd sat down laid back and gone to sleep well the really weird thing about that case was that it turned out that he'd been poisoned but he didn't have any idea on him so nobody knew who he was at first well the media and the BBC did really good work on this and nobody knew his name so first they traced through CCTV and given that I mean England is so covered by CCTV they traced his movements from Ealing in west London up to Manchester in the middle of England and they didn't know how he got from the train station to the pub in the hill but they they know that he got to Manchester and they could see him walking around the railway station he went into a betting shop he went into a newsagents but he didn't buy anything and he didn't bet and then he kind of almost slipped out one of the back entrances where the taxi rank was at the station and then they lost sight of him well they actually traced him through I believe it was he'd had some medical work done and the surgery done to put pins in his leg could only have been done in a certain part of Pakistan so they traced him back through that and they discovered that he'd once lived in Pakistan although he was English and the poison that had been bought could also only be bought from Pakistan so somehow and for some reason he'd left Pakistan he'd come to England he'd travelled up from London he'd gone to this specific spot on the hill in the moors and poisoned himself and died but the really weird thing is that when you poison yourself or a person it's um it's a very painful and I read some medical reports on poisoning and if you die that way you're going to be vomiting and your body will go into really terrible convulsions so it's really unlikely that you would be found laying flat as if you'd fallen asleep but he did die of poisoning um so they worked out his name and so he came from Pakistan they came up with one theory and that was that in the 40s there'd been an airplane crash on the moor and people had died in it but they discovered that all of the people had either died there were a couple of survivors and close relatives of victims but they were all tracked down and none of them had anything to do with this man because so at first they thought maybe he'd gone there because his family had died there but they couldn't find a connection so although they found his name there's still no answer as to why he came from Pakistan went to the north of England and went to a moor this specific spot and killed himself there was also nobody seen you know because you could think well maybe somebody killed him but they'd have to have come from Pakistan they'd have to have bought the poison from Pakistan come with him and killed him that way um any idea what kind of poison it was I think it was I think it was strictening something like that okay strictening weird absolutely weird um these cases are they typically closed cases or are they still open investigations if we talk about the cases of the many many college age boys that have drowned um the thing with those is that they're very quickly closed um so those kind of ones are almost always called um suicide or accident words in fact as I say there's a lot more evidence that shows it's not but they do get closed very quickly why do they do that why why close it very quickly the biggest reason is that okay so you're a college you're a college you drink a lot you get drunk you go out walking you think you're invincible and you fall in a river so that's why because that's that's the automatic assumption of what happens when you're near water um but these cases specifically happen not in the summer they happen in the winter when it you're least likely to jump in so you might jump in because you're you're drunk and you're you know you just feel like doing it but uh these are and where they where they supposedly jump in is in the opposite direction to their their dorms or where they live um but they're closed because yeah you know you're young you're drinking having a good time and you take a risk um and of course if you're if you're found in the water some of the evidence is gone especially if you haven't been found for a long time so it's it's it's it's almost like and there probably are sort of a lot of people that end up in the water not to do with these cases at all but because it washes the evidence away and it's the easiest way to to to cover up things um but in the last case we spoke about of course that one was I think the police you know really wanted to get to the bottom of that and they certainly did by the amount of man hours that they put into that case I guess because it was so strange um and one of the other cases in this book was the I don't know if you read it was about the woman who was maybe stalking herself maybe not stalking herself and that went on for seven years and you know that was well the police kind of gave up on that one because they couldn't work out what was happening and they just thought well maybe it's her doing it um so that was about you know going on for about seven years and then they just kind of ended it whereas they maybe could have looked more into it but so I don't know it really depends on um because I write a lot about the woods and people ending up dying in the woods as well and I suppose for those cases of course the most obvious cause is going to be hypothermia and yet the really chilling thing I found the other day was from a woman who'd written a book in the 40s and she was a bit of a psychic so she had been speaking to a professor friend of hers and the professor said that he used to go hiking a lot in the Scottish Highlands in the Cairnghorns and he had heard from one of his hiking friends about two hikers that had been found dead and the most common assumption would be well they died of hypothermia but she had gone to exactly the same spot that these two hikers had been found in but she had no knowledge about this because it had been years ago when she went to the spot and then years later the two hikers were found dead when she was there with her husband they were just hiking along completely normal when all of a sudden she absolutely felt terrified and she yelled at her husband to start running well her husband automatically ran because he needed to keep up with her he had no idea what was going on but there was nothing in sight that could have made her frightened but I suppose it just spooked him and he ran with her well after they'd been running for ages he said what's going on and she said I can't describe to you but there's this entity and it is terrifying and it was going to kill us well that sounds like nonsense doesn't it until she spoke to this professor many years later and these two hikers were found dead there was not not a mark on them and the pathologist actually ruled that they were frightened to death so they looked like they'd died of fright and had heart attacks well one could have a heart attack but you can't simultaneously both have a heart attack for no reason you know and and you can't both just have a heart attack but he said that they'd been scared to death and in another case there's an area called the Bennington Triangle which is in the Glastonbury Mountains and this was in the 50s people had been disappearing and one woman well a little boy had gone just disappeared and not been found and a woman had been hiking and she had she had got her she'd accidentally slipped into a little bit of the river and so she was with her cousin and she said well you carry on the hike I'll go back I'll walk back to the tent I'll change and I'll catch you up well he carried on walking and eventually he finished his hike and he walked back to the campground but there was no sign of her so she had completely disappeared and they brought in searchers and tracker dogs and couldn't find any sign of her at all well I found a newspaper article that had been written at the time that her body was found and a witness who found who was one of the ones who came across her body had strangely said that although she'd been missing oh it must have been something like two months her body didn't appear to be decomposed and the expression on her face appeared to make it look like she had died a fright so it was a a terror a mask of terror but no injuries to her to say how she died. Steph I want to ask you about the Isle of White I find very interesting you said it was the most haunted place in England tell me did anything strange happen to you growing up? Well no I mean actually we lived in we didn't live there my grandmother lived there so we spent all of the school holidays there so in the summer we'd be there for six weeks you know no my uncle used to scare us all the time by jumping out in the dark but we it was a house that so you would go from the kitchen and you could walk a circuit so it was almost like a circle and go through the conservatory through the garden and back to the kitchen so you could do a full lap and there was part of the house used to be an old an old slaughterhouse so all of us have never had any experience there and we have many cousins and aunts and uncles and nieces and but every single one of us dreaded going downstairs in the dark at night and going past this particular corridor where the slaughterhouse had been so nothing ever happened we never saw anything and and I'm the only one really that's interested in these kind of things my family aren't you know but all of us have this dread of this terrible dread at night but no nothing ever happened in the house and nothing ever happened when any of us were anywhere on the island why is it so haunted um there's a theory it's got so many lay lines underneath the ground lay lines are lines of energy natural lines of energy well it's very difficult to really sort of believe in them because you can't see them dowsers can say that they can sense them but an ordinary person like me I couldn't tell you where they are so it's almost a pseudo science um interestingly David Ike lives on the Isle of Wight um and he when I was doing some research into missing people I'd come across the case of a teenage boy who had disappeared in Southampton Southampton is opposite the Isle of Wight and the the water that separates this is seven miles across so he had disappeared in Southampton off the Isle of Wight but in the course of the research I discovered a man called Ellis Taylor who's a numerologist and very well versed in lay lines and occultism and his theory ties in with David Ike's theory which is that lay lines can manipulate or sorry can be manipulated these lines of energy so the idea is that occultists or these sort of elite um ritual worshipers that they're supposed to be whether they exist or not is a another matter but the idea is that they get together and they hold rituals and they blacken these energy lines which can cause terrible things to happen in these places um whether you can buy into that or not it's another matter but in the course of the research this young boy had disappeared he'd been night fishing he's a 14 year old boy he'd been night fishing and he was with his friends they packed in early they went to the local shop I think they probably bought some alcohol and around midnight he went back to collect his fishing gear on his own the boys went off to their respective houses he went to get his gear and an hour or so later his mom was worried because he hadn't come home and so she went out herself to find him she knew exactly where he was he was in a sheltered waterway by the harbour well he wasn't found and they brought in sonor to look for him but there was no scent detected and he wasn't found at all but a couple of months later his body was found well sorry no his foot was found in a enclosed inlet about 40 miles away down the coast and the thing about the lay lines and the energy grid and the occultists doing these rituals well when I was looking into the case about this missing boy that's how I found out about all of this and that they run through the Isle of Wight and so his his foot was found but not the rest of his body so the possibility is that he was put onto a boat and abducted that way and that also ties in with some of the ritual things that supposedly have been going on even to the extent of their being accusations of this sort of thing happening with the next prime minister for the UK and again these are things that cannot be proven by the ordinary person and whether they are true or not entirely another matter but getting back to the Isle of Wight and so the theory is that these lay lines cause poltergeist type activity and ghost activity and hauntings well I was also looking into a case that happened in a different part of England where a man in his 40s had left his home in a village called Todd Morden and he had been found in a really weird condition well in the course of looking into that case I discovered that somebody had done a survey in that area on lay lines so they had taken a group of psychics and they'd asked them to go to all these different spots without telling them about these lay lines and without telling them about any of the reports of hauntings or demonic activity so all of the psychics went to these different areas and they were able to describe the sort of encounters that had been reported there and also there's quite a sort of UFO hotspot in this Todd Morden area and the psychics were all correct but what they discovered through this survey apparently is that on the lay lines that hadn't been touched or altered or tampered with positive things can happen almost like you can go to some ancient stones and you might feel far better by being there almost like there's an energy there and you can experience healings of maybe chronic fatigue and things like that well this survey apparently discovered that on the lay lines that had been the rumor was in Todd Morden that a group of witches had been blackening these lay lines through their rituals and this was where the poltergeist or the demonic activities were happening um but actually this man had disappeared and he was found in a coal mine on the top of a coal pile and the owner of the mine had been there in the morning so the man wasn't lying there then but then when he came back later that day this body was lying on top of a coal pile and his clothes were done up the wrong way and his shirt was wrong and he had no shoes on and he had a strange mark on his shoulder and on top of the mark was this coloured ointment well he is another case where the pathologist officially ruled that the man had died of fright because he said I mean obviously his heart stopped which is why he died but he said that the man had died of fright he also said that through their tests they could not identify what this ointment was on on his shoulder or covering up the mark um and there's more to that story as well because the policeman who'd gone there and found the body when it had been reported who'd been the first on the scene uh noted that there were no footprints so he had no shoes on the shoes were gone his feet weren't dirty and there were no footprints leading up the coal pile showing that you know yeah so how did he get there well well no one knows but the policeman um Alan Godfrey he the the man the victim was um Mr. Rodampsky but the policeman was called Alan Godfrey and he well he just thought well this is really odd but a few nights later he was out on patrol and he'd been tasked with trying to find a group of missing sheep that had disappeared from their field so he was out looking for them and um they weren't in the field and then he saw this really these really bright lights coming towards him on the road and he thought at first it was a double decker bus but then he realised it wasn't and he they were coming whilst at him so he thought well this is a bit strange and he tried to use his radio to radio back and just say there's some strange lights i'm going to get out and investigate but i'm just telling you what's going on well his radio wouldn't work his engine wouldn't work and later on he found himself driving and he realised that he'd lost about half an hour of time and when he looked at his boots the soles of his boots seemed to be as though he'd been dragged along by his feet because they were all hanging off well he was so disturbed by all of this that he asked to have hypnotherapy to try and find out what could have happened to him and a few months later he had this done and in the hypnotherapy he said that he was in a dark room and there was a man there who looked like a biblical figure he had a long beard he was wearing a long robe and there was a huge black dog and then there were these two tiny little creatures who were the size of children but they looked like robots so i don't know but funnily enough unbeknown to him when it happened that evening he'd other police in other areas had also reported seeing strange lights in the sky so whether this was connected to mr. adamski being on the coal pile or not i don't know but that area is supposed to have these really really really harnessed lay lines on them well as i say it's it's really hard to sort of prove that and whether they exist and whether they have anything to do with it i was going to say that with him being found on that coal pile and nothing on his feet sounds like maybe he might have been you know one could assume he was taken and dropped on that pile you know do you find that some of these disappearances or many of them are connected with possible abduction type scenarios yeah there's a i was i was looking at someone's in the wilderness area and of course you can go back through all the old newspaper archives and see what was reported at the time and there was a case i believe it i believe it was devils gate reservoir which is pasadena and there's a lot of hiking area around there and two children had disappeared whilst they were out on their bicycles and it kind of there was no reason or no explanation as to what could have happened to them but after many years a man who was being held in prison actually on death row had written a confession letter for his wife and he said mac edwards was his name and he said that he had been a construction worker and he had been one of the people who was building the highway that was running through that area and he said that he'd abducted both of them and buried them under the asphalt as the road was being constructed so a lot of times um some tourists as well went missing in yosemite and they were eventually found in the back of well two of them two of them were found in the back of somebody's car well the person who took them carstena he had a very strange story himself because his own brother was abducted as an eight-year-old boy so carstena grew up without his brother after his brother was abducted by a child predator except the brother was returned to the family after a number of years so the the child predator let him go alive returned him to the family and then carstena took to hanging around these national parks and he spotted these two female tourists and he abducted them out of there the room of the lodge they were staying in and sort of butchered them and the police um well the park rangers found him actually they were suspicious because um he was walking around naked smoking a joint um um but he also killed a woman who was working for the park service as well i remember this i remember this case in a lot in a lot of these cases in the wilderness yeah it's definitely definitely possible that somebody is out there they could be living wild they could um i think israel keys as well may have been prowling some of these wilderness areas steve can you share with us the very strange and unusual circumstances surrounding the gentleman that worked for the bbc and what happened to him it's kind of called the umbrella case um well a man worked for the bbc um this was in 1978 and he worked for the world service which is part of the radio radio shows and it goes out across the world and it covers all different countries and he had left his london home to go and work at the radio station to do a broadcast on an ordinary ordinary day and he set off he walked across one of the bridges and then he waited at the bus stop just by waterloo bridge to take him to the bbc well as he was waiting for the bus he felt something on his leg a bit almost like a beasting well he turned around and he caught sight of a man who was um clutched down and picking up an umbrella they didn't really think anything of it but he he just watched the man the man walked across the road in a bit of a rush and he jumped in a taxi and the taxi drove off so this man carried on went to work well when he got to the bbc he just went into the bathroom because his leg was really hurting and he looked down at it and it did look uh almost like he'd been bitten by something but it was very very inflamed well he carried on he did his broadcast and then he went home but that night in bed he woke up extremely hot almost like a fever and he said to his wife um please call 911 or 1099 for uk and she did so and he said to her as they were waiting for the ambulance he said i think this might have something to do with what happened to me earlier so he explained and he said i was at the bus stop and you know um well it turns out this man his name was george markov and he was a bulgarian dissident and he was an outspoken critic of the communist regime there but now he worked for the bbc well he did actually end up dying he died um not long after being admitted to hospital and the police did an investigation they asked all the taxi drivers if they could find who this man might be because that there was really the only lead they had to go on because it turned out that they removed a pellet from his leg so the umbrella had been used to stab him with a pellet in the leg to poison him um and he died because of it so the police kept trying to look into this for years and years and um it got to about 2005 and the bulgarian intelligence files were leaked secretly and because the police had gone there so many times to bulgaria and they tried to get hold of these files that would help them understand what might have happened but they weren't allowed access to any of the files then when it came to 2005 these leaked files spoke about a man who was known as the umbrella assassin and they called him agent piccadilly and he was a legislature of work for the communist um the uh people that want to keep the dissidents quiet um so and there was a report on this assassin and it said this is a man that feels no fear well that was probably the end of it but i i wondered if it had ever happened after that and i found a case in 2011 that happened in hanover germany and the newspapers there had reported that a man a 40 year old had died after being stabbed in the back by an unknown man who'd been carrying an umbrella but this time mercury was injected into him and it did poison him fatally but it took him uh i think it was about 40 days to die but it was the same method of killing um so i don't know if it was the same man all those years later or whether that was they were still employing that method um but i was surprised that they were using that method because i thought that would have been something they did years ago but yeah now how did you find um this particular case well i remember this case from years ago because because of the british newspapers um and it would often be revisited because it was such a mystery because they could never track down who the assassin was so i think it's quite well known in the uk but maybe not elsewhere yeah because i had not heard of this at all you do have a couple of stories in your book based on cases in australia and one is titled uh closed placed on bodies which you said was one of the greatest unsolved mysteries for that country can you take us through that story and what happened to dr gilbert boggle yeah it was really strange it is um it's not really been solved well it happened in 1963 in sydney and on new year's day two boys who were out looking for golf balls beside the river they discovered a man's body and at first they thought because it was new year's day they thought he'd probably had too much to drink and was sleeping it off but he is he looked like he'd been partially undressed and his trousers had been placed back on top of him covering him up and a length of carpet had also been placed on him and then his jacket on top of him well when they realised that he wasn't sleeping they ran off to get the police and when the police came what the boys hadn't seen was that there was also a female body and so the male was called dr gilbert boggle and the female was mrs margaret charnelor well she had had a flattened out cardboard beer crate placed on her body which is really strange um they didn't have any injuries at all though but there was evidence that they had maybe been vomiting well initially the police thought that they both had had too much to drink and it had killed them um and that maybe they'd been engaging in some sexual behaviour so that wasn't a very sort of good explanation that they had drunk too much um but the post mortem showed that there was hardly any trace at all of alcohol in their body and there were no recreational drugs either so no marijuana or anything there was no violence to their bodies um they hadn't been attacked by an animal and they hadn't been bitten by a snake or any kind of insect either um but it did look like they'd possibly been poisoned because they they've been vomiting well the toxicology reports took some time but they showed no sign of any known poison and also no carbon monoxide um so the case kind of went cold um the doctor himself was actually quite a genius and he was a physicist and he worked for the australian commonwealth scientific and industrial research organisation um which did sort of groundbreaking research at the time well he was married with children but they had quite an unusual sort of life because um the suggestion was that they had an open marriage his wife at the time was at home with a newborn baby and he'd been at a party and he'd been there where mrs. Chandler had been at the party as well and her husband had been there but they too had an open marriage so it seemed that they had just left the party together and her her husband had said that he'd given permission for them to go off together so that was what just happened to make them go to the river it seems well the police looked into all of the people at the party and all of the possible suspects and they found a lady who worked with him who was a female doctor and she was described as quite neurotic and obsessive and at first they wondered whether she might have killed them because she was jealous because she'd once been her his boy his girlfriend um but they couldn't find anything really to prove that um and then they thought well is there any possibility and journalists at the time really sort of took this angle on and wondered whether because he worked for the an institution that was important for national defence they wondered whether um it had been an industrial espionage type of murder whether he'd been killed because of his job um the doctor also worked um in things like the development of lsd um to be used on people so he was studying the effects of lsd which i know in america they they did secretly administer to people to see what happened to them so the cia and he was also working on um the death ray which was an electromagnetic weapon so a particle beam that could be used to kill people um that supposedly originated from nicole tesla in the 20s and in fact is rumoured to have then been used and developed by the uk um by marconi and there's a numerous amount of really strange deaths that happened by people that worked in the marconi laboratories as well but going back to this case so had he been killed um because they needed to cover something up uh was was it something to do with espionage was he revealing secrets was he killed by his government by the fbi cia or what was going on um but um a couple of years ago a chinese doctor of forensic science came out and said well there was a strikingly similar case in hong kong in which a couple had died in very similar circumstances but their death had been caused by an illegal aphrodisiac and it was called um you're him you're him buying well the thing was um i don't think that had been developed at the time that this doctor had died and they did wonder well maybe he had taken the lsd as an aphrodisiac and that he'd had too much but it wasn't in his system when they did the autopsy although maybe they hadn't had up to date testing as we do now but so the only other theory that was developed was by somebody who did a documentary on them and he was called peter butt and he offered the theory well their bodies were found by the river and the river had a factory there and local residents had been saying that there were fumes coming off the river and maybe it was becoming toxic and it was hydrogen sulfide um so he was saying i think that fatal levels of hydrogen sulfide came off the river through being being dumped from the factory and that this had killed them well their autopsy had shown discoloration of their blood but not to the amount that it would have been fatal and also i thought well surely if they had died of it then anybody walking their dog would have died of it by the river if they'd walked by the river you know and also somebody had placed their clothes back on top of them so somebody had to have been there at the time um the only other thing that came up was actually the female doctor who had been labelled as neurotic and obsessive she came forward just before she died and she said that she had found a book written by the widow of another leading nuclear scientist called Dr Dalton and he had a friend he had been he'd been a friend of Dr Boggle and that this widow said that she firmly believed that her husband had been poisoned at the hands of intelligence agents so she said it's highly likely that so had Dr Boggle been poisoned by intelligence agents because actually at the time he had discovered some security breaches supposedly at the energy nuclear energy commission so the idea was that he'd been revealing secrets about nuclear breaches and that she believed he'd been killed with a nerve gas to stop him from talking and so the woman was just collateral damage really um I would not be surprised at all if it were connected to his job honestly yeah it's probably the most likely but don't know yeah probably incredible story um you also have another one in your book and it's called the secrets of scion I want to know what made you put that one in there oh well a lot of these cases I'd like to write a book on each one of them but I don't have time to spend two years looking into and I suppose anything that's got secret societies really fascinates me and I've always wondered myself the priory of scion is supposed to be a hoax and maybe it most likely is so when the Da Vinci code came out and Dan Brown had written about this priory of scion it seemed to be suggested that this was this was all true and it genuinely existed but the um man uh the French man Pierre Plantard in the 50s was supposed to have been exposed for actually creating this priory of scion as an absolute hoax but a very intricately created one so the idea is that the priory of scion they are in France and it goes back to the time when Mary Magdalene was supposed to have been married to Jesus and they had a child and then she left and took the child to Europe and settled in France so of course there's supposed to be a bloodline of Jesus in France so the the priory is is all around that it's supposed to be a secret society guarding this this you know secret um well I came across this story about the queen of England's cousin Lord Litchfield he was a very famous photographer and he was most known really for capturing people like the Rolling Stones and that's what everybody knew him for and he photographed Princess Margaret a lot as well he was called Patrick Anson and he was the fifth Earl of Litchfield and he had a very privileged life but whilst on a on a shoot one day at the age of 66 he had a stroke and he died well it turns out that this documentary maker Burgess along with his fellow researcher Robert Howes they'd actually been talking to the Earl of Litchfield just before he died and they'd spent three years looking into this priory of scion and they felt that they were getting closer and closer and a contact of theirs had said the Earl will speak to you he has some information about this well they were due to meet him literally a day after he died and he was going to be revealing some information but the thing was of course does it really exist well the strange thing about it was after he died of a cerebral hemorrhage several people that they'd already been in contact with came forward who allegedly had contacts with the priory and said well several other people did handover research or secrets of ours and they all died of a stroke and that is actually one of the side effects of a potential poison that we would use to kill people so nobody overtly said it and indeed is it all a big hoax anyway but their research was saying well these people came forward and actually he wasn't the first one to be killed because of it and they noted that on his estate the Earl had particular works of art that were supposed to be quite heavily encrypted with information let's say that the priory are quite keen on so things to do with Gnosticism and alchemy and consciousness that that sort of stuff so they were saying well you know clearly the Lord was heavily entrenched in all this mysticism and this secret society but well you know you could say the people making the documentary although it was they'd worked for the BBC they'd also made documentaries about area 51 and you know critics would say well they just believed in everything you know they were just making anything to do with conspiracy so probably it was a load of rubbish but again it's one of those things that you're never going to be able to actually prove unless you have first hand contacts with and you're given that information but the documentary maker did say well you know this could all just be the make believe but we did find out that our phones had been bugged all the time we were staying in the hotel doing our research so again I don't know oh my it's one of those things you really want to look really deeply into a couple of times actually something really strange happened I was on a radio show and because I'm in London I had to be on at my time was four in the morning and do you know what it was a boiling hot day but I couldn't have the window open but I can hear traffic and things going past my window for the entire program a helicopter was outside my window now I don't buy into conspiracies and that just sounds ridiculous and also I didn't look out my window because I didn't want to lose concentration you know because I was focusing on doing the radio show and I could have looked out the window and you know but I know I know that there's and but it just sounds so ridiculous I wasn't talking about anything that would require having you know it just sounds ridiculous and I know it wasn't in my imagination but it also couldn't have had anything to do with me but you know quite often I listen to you know radio shows like yours and maybe something on YouTube and you hear the researchers saying oh my god the Skype connection's gone this happens every time I talk about this subject you know and when I was doing this radio show I thought oh calm down I know there's a helicopter outside your window but it's nothing to do with you it's a lot of strange things happen you know I'm serious I've heard some some crazy things happen to some of these researchers so trying to discourage them but you're not talking about anything that would require a helicopter I don't think so no no no all right um outstanding staff um I want to give you an opportunity now to tell my listeners where they can find more information about you and your books oh they're on Amazon um you can look up Steph or Stephen and that's Steph with a pH Steph Young so they're on Amazon um I have a website which is StephYoungOrther.com and they're probably the best places I really love chatting with you and I hope to have you back and I thank you very much for joining me on Mysterious Radio thank you it's an honor for me to be asked and thank you so much it's been a pleasure to find out more about our guests and all others please visit our website at mysteriousradio.com