Dark Histories

Garbo & The Ghost Spies of WWII

When the Allied forces hit the beaches of Normandy on D-Day, in June of 1944, everyone was well aware of the importance of success. Gaining a foothold on the beaches was the first step in the liberation of France, placing a force on the ground that would go on to steamroll to Berlin, ending the war outright. The plan was vast. multi-faceted and was as audacious as it was complicated, hinging on the cooperation of every level of the joint military system. Included in this system was a man named Garbo, a man who, squirrelled away in a London office, not only had the job of convincing the Nazis that the invasion force didn’t exist but of also conjuring an entirely fictional force one million strong from thin air and presenting them as living and breathing, flesh and blood. Of course, one man could not hope to do such a thing alone, fortunately, Garbo had 27 spies under his command to help him. That was the story as far as the Nazis were concerned at least. In truth, Garbo's agents were only as real as the stories that he, himself created for them. Out of sight, in his small office, Garbo weaved a cast of characters into a plausible tapestry of espionage that, even years after the war had ended and the truth was out, many of the people involved struggled to believe.
 
SOURCES
 
Talty, Stephen (2012) Agent Garbo: The Brilliant, eccentric secret agent who tricked Hitler and saved D-Day. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston, USA.
 
West, Nigel & Pujol, Jean (1985) Operation GARBO: The Personal Story of the Most Successful Double Agent of World War II. Random House, London, UK.
 
Liverpool Daily News (1942) Deaths. Liverpool Daily News, 24 Nov. 1942, p.4. Liverpool, UK.
 
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The Dark Histories Butterfly was drawn by Courtney, who you can find on Instagram @bewildereye
Music was recorded by me © Ben Cutmore 2017
Other Outro music was Paul Whiteman & his orchestra with Mildred Bailey - All of me (1931). It's out of copyright now, but if you're interested, that was that.
 

The Medieval Ghosts of Byland Abbey

Some time around the turn of the fifteenth century, a Cistercian monk of Byland Abbey took it upon himself to pen a series of ghost stories on the empty pages of a folio containing some of the library's more prestigious works. A medieval monk scribbling down ghost stories was, in truth, not entirely unusual. In the case of the Byland monk, however, the stories seemed to be less concerned with religious matters and more with grisly details of the spirits themselves. Undead rising from the graves, shapeshifting from human to animal and back again, hunting down the living to gouge their eyes from their skulls. The monk was, in his way, reporting on the folklore of the day, leaving behind one of the middle ages' more unique documents on belief in the afterlife. Republished in its original Latin by medievalist and author M.R. James in 1922, the stories had, perhaps, more in common with his own writings than they did that of the church and opened a window on the prevalence of Pagan beliefs and folklore tradition that maintained throughout medieval Europe.
 
SOURCES
 
Scmitt, Jean-Claude (1998) Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society. The University of Chicago Press, London, UK.
 
Bartlett, Robert (2008) The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages. Cambridge Universtoy Press, Cambridge, UK.
 
Joynes, Andrew (2001) Medieval Ghost Stories. The Boydell Press, Woodbridge, UK.
 
Grant, A.J. (1924) Twelve Medieval Ghost Stories. Yorkshire Archeological Journal, Vol. XXVII. Yorkshire, UK.
 
Fleischhack, Maria & Schenkel, Elmar (2016) Ghosts - or the (Nearly) Invisible: Spectral Phenomena in Literature and the Media. Peter Lang, NY, USA.
 
Harrison, Stuart (2022) History of Byland Abbey. [online] English Heritage. Available at:
 
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For almost anything, head over to the podcasts hub at darkhistories.com
Support the show by using our link when you sign up to Audible: http://audibletrial.com/darkhistories or visit our Patreon for bonus episodes and Early Access: https://www.patreon.com/darkhistories
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Connect with us on Facebook: http://facebook.com/darkhistoriespodcast
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or via voicemail on: (415) 286-5072
or join our Discord community: https://discord.gg/cmGcBFf
The Dark Histories Butterfly was drawn by Courtney, who you can find on Instagram @bewildereye
Music was recorded by me © Ben Cutmore 2017
Other Outro music was Paul Whiteman & his orchestra with Mildred Bailey - All of me (1931). It's out of copyright now, but if you're interested, that was that.
 

Iron Mike Malloy: The Man Who Would Not Die

Depression-era New York was a tough time for a guy just looking to get by. The pressure of feeding a family, the lack of available work, the poor conditions suffered from much of the work that was available and at the end of the day, you couldn’t even relax with a drink or drown your sorrows in the bottom of a bottle. At least, not legally. Whilst laws attempted to stop people from drinking alcohol, the culture of the speakeasy ripped through the underground. It was a place where one could relax and unwind, listen to some live music, play some cards, or set up an insurance fraud with a few of the friendly locals. It was the latter that took place in a small dive in The Bronx over several months in 1933 that would highlight how desperate the times could really be. It would also prove to be one of the most catastrophic displays of disorganised crime that the 19th-century newspapers would ever write about in what was dubbed as New York’s “most fantastic” murder. SOURCES
 
Read, Simon (2005) On The House: The Bizarre Killing of Michael Malloy. Berkly Publishing Group, NY, USA.
 
Funderburg, Anne (2014) Bootleggers and Beer Barons of the Prohibition Era. McFarland Incorporated Publishers, NC, USA.
 
Brooklyn Times Union (1933) Gang Murderers “Rub Out” 4 Men, Wound Another. Brooklyn Times Union, 20 March, 1933. P.3. NY, USA.
 
Brooklyn Times Union (1933) Two Gun Girl Seized In Bronx Holdup. Brooklyn Times Union, 17 April, 1933. P.1. NY, USA.
 
Daily News (1933) 5 Indicted As Murderers In Insurance Ring Probe. Daily News, 17 May, 1933. NY, USA.
 
Daily News (1933) When Justice Triumphed. Daily News, 29 October, 1933, P.42. Daily News, NY, USA.
 
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For almost anything, head over to the podcasts hub at darkhistories.com
Support the show by using our link when you sign up to Audible: http://audibletrial.com/darkhistories or visit our Patreon for bonus episodes and Early Access: https://www.patreon.com/darkhistories
The Dark Histories books are available to buy here: http://author.to/darkhistories
Dark Histories merch is available here: https://bit.ly/3GChjk9
Connect with us on Facebook: http://facebook.com/darkhistoriespodcast
Or find us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/darkhistories
& Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dark_histories/
Or you can contact us directly via email at contact@darkhistories.com
or via voicemail on: (415) 286-5072
or join our Discord community: https://discord.gg/cmGcBFf
The Dark Histories Butterfly was drawn by Courtney, who you can find on Instagram @bewildereye
Music was recorded by me © Ben Cutmore 2017
Other Outro music was Paul Whiteman & his orchestra with Mildred Bailey - All of me (1931). It's out of copyright now, but if you're interested, that was that.
 

Jürgenson, Raudive & A Brief History of EVP

An evolution of centuries-long efforts to contact and communicate with the dead, the practice of recording voices from the great beyond was attempted almost as soon as radio and tape recording technology became widely available in consumer devices. From garbled electrical chirps emanating out of swathes of white noise, to perfectly clear, eloquent speech, the results across the years have been as varied as they have been numerous. Up there with the capturing of “orbs” on camera in regards to its plausibility, EVP Research has somehow survived sceptical analysis and become a surprisingly persistent area of parapsychology. Though there were several pioneers in the space, there was one man who was supposedly so invested in the subject by the time of his death that he decided to come back and continue the job from the afterlife, through the medium of the telephone.
SOURCES
Jürgenson, Friedrich (1967) Voice Transmissions with the Deceased. Firework, Sweden.
Raudive, Konstantin. (1971) Breakthrough: An Amazing Experiment in Electronic Communication with the Dead. Smythe, UK.
Roach, Mary. (2005). Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife. W.W. Norton & Co. UK.
Banks, Joe (2001) Rorschach Audio: Ghost Voices and Perceptual Creativity. Leonardo Music Journal, Vol. 11, pp 77-83. MIT Press, USA.
Estep, Sarah (1988) Voices of Eternity. Fawcett Gold Medal, NY, USA.
Estep, Sarah (2005) Roads to Eternity. Glade Press, MN, USA.
Moreman, Christopher M. (2013) The Spiritualist Movement: Speaking with the Dead in America and Around the World. ABC-CLIO, CA, USA.
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For extended show notes, including maps, links and scripts, head over to darkhistories.com
Support the show by using our link when you sign up to Audible: http://audibletrial.com/darkhistories or visit our Patreon for bonus episodes and Early Access: https://www.patreon.com/darkhistories
The Dark Histories books are available to buy here: http://author.to/darkhistories
Dark Histories merch is available here: https://bit.ly/3GChjk9
Connect with us on Facebook: http://facebook.com/darkhistoriespodcast
Or find us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/darkhistories
& Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dark_histories/
Or you can contact us directly via email at contact@darkhistories.com
or via voicemail on: (415) 286-5072
or join our Discord community: https://discord.gg/cmGcBFf
The Dark Histories Butterfly was drawn by Courtney, who you can find on Instagram @bewildereye
Music was recorded by me © Ben Cutmore 2017
Other Outro music was Paul Whiteman & his orchestra with Mildred Bailey - All of me (1931). It's out of copyright now, but if you're interested, that was that.

The Floreana Affair: Murder in Paradise

Given a certain degree of infamy thanks to Charles Darwin, the Galapagos Islands are far less famous for their role in playing host to a tiny, isolated German ex-pat community in the 1930s, living quietly, surrounded by the unending blue of the Pacific Ocean. The motley crew of settlers included a doctor with philosophical aspirations, a pregnant housewife and an eccentric Baroness bent on creating a hotel for millionaires, complete with her doting entourage of love interests. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the ideologically disparate factions often failed to see eye to eye whilst they precariously shared the island's few natural springs, a situation that rose more than a few suspicions to those that watched on from the outside, after a series of unexplained deaths and disappearances tore the quiet island life apart from the inside, leaving the survivors to shrink off into quiet obscurity.
SOURCES
Treherne, John (1983) The Galapagos Affair. Random House, NY, USA.
Beebe, William (1924) Galapagos: World’s End. G. P. Putnam's Sons, NY, USA.
Strauch, Dore (1936) Satan Came to Eden: A Survivor's Account of the "Galapagos Affair". Harper & Bros, London, UK.
The San Fransisco Examiner (1930) Two Modern Robinson Crusoes. Sun 06 April, 1930. P103. CA, USA.
The Montreal Star (1932) Hunt For Priates Hoard. 29 December, 1932. Quebec, Canada. 
The Miami News (1934) Ritter, Galapagos Nudist, Dies Without Telling Orgy secrets. 06 December 1934, P.21. FL, USA.
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For extended show notes, including maps, links and scripts, head over to darkhistories.com
Support the show by using our link when you sign up to Audible: http://audibletrial.com/darkhistories or visit our Patreon for bonus episodes and Early Access: https://www.patreon.com/darkhistories
The Dark Histories books are available to buy here: http://author.to/darkhistories
Dark Histories merch is available here: https://bit.ly/3GChjk9
Connect with us on Facebook: http://facebook.com/darkhistoriespodcast
Or find us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/darkhistories
& Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dark_histories/
Or you can contact us directly via email at contact@darkhistories.com
or via voicemail on: (415) 286-5072
or join our Discord community: https://discord.gg/cmGcBFf
The Dark Histories Butterfly was drawn by Courtney, who you can find on Instagram @bewildereye
Music was recorded by me © Ben Cutmore 2017
Other Outro music was Paul Whiteman & his orchestra with Mildred Bailey - All of me (1931). It's out of copyright now, but if you're interested, that was that.

The Unsolved Murder of Sir Harry Oakes

In the 1940s the Bahamas was something of a tropical paradise for the world’s rich. Used as a tax haven and an island getaway far removed from the battlefields of war, it was an idyllic retreat for those that could afford it. Its society had a somewhat darker underbelly, however, with ties to money launderers, smugglers, spies and mobsters. At least, that was how it started to appear in stories after one of the richest men in the world wound up dead in his Bahamian home in the summer of 1943. The fact that all of this happened under the nose of the island's governor, the one time King of England, Edward, the Duke of Windsor, who was at the time a suspected Nazi sympathiser, made it all the more intriguing, becoming the only story to ever knock the news of the war from the front pages of the Daily Telegraph.
SOURCES
Craton, Michael (1962) A History Of The Bahamas. Collins, UK.
Owen, James (2008) A Serpent In Eden. Hachette Digital, UK.
Daily News (1943) Didn’t Murder Oakes. Daily News, 11 July, 1943, P1. New York, USA.
The Province, (1944) Acquittal Of De Marigny Leaves Oakes Murder Unsolved Mystery. The Province, 12 November 1944. P1. Vancouver, Canada.
Le Grand, Cathleen (2010) Another Look at a Bahamian Mystery: The Murder of Sir Harry Oakes: A Critical Literature Review. International Journal of Bahamian Studies, Vol.16, The College of The Bahamas, The Bahamas.
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For extended show notes, including maps, links and scripts, head over to darkhistories.com
Support the show by using our link when you sign up to Audible: http://audibletrial.com/darkhistories or visit our Patreon for bonus episodes and Early Access: https://www.patreon.com/darkhistories
The Dark Histories books are available to buy here: http://author.to/darkhistories
Dark Histories merch is available here: https://bit.ly/3GChjk9
Connect with us on Facebook: http://facebook.com/darkhistoriespodcast
Or find us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/darkhistories
& Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dark_histories/
Or you can contact us directly via email at contact@darkhistories.com
or via voicemail on: (415) 286-5072
or join our Discord community: https://discord.gg/cmGcBFf
The Dark Histories Butterfly was drawn by Courtney, who you can find on Instagram @bewildereye
Music was recorded by me © Ben Cutmore 2017
Other Outro music was Paul Whiteman & his orchestra with Mildred Bailey - All of me (1931). It's out of copyright now, but if you're interested, that was that.

Tom Slick & The Search for the Yeti

High up in the peaks of the Himalayas, a footprint in the snow baffles a mountaineer as he attempts to climb Everest for the first time. Pulling out his camera, he prepares to snap a shot, eyeing the horizon nervously before placing his icepick down alongside the print for scale and bringing the viewfinder up to his eye. In India, a tea planter reads about the photograph in a local newspaper and turns over the idea of going to hunt the creature that made the tracks, completely unaware that he was about to start what would eventually become a lifelong mission. On the other side of the world, a Texas oil baron reads about tales of adventure high up in the mountains of Nepal, a mystical land of incense and meditation, and dreams of uncovering the mysteries of the wilds. The trio was, it's safe to say, a fairly unlikely crew, but their fates would become intimately linked by a search that would carry them halfway around the world, hole up in damp caves for days on end and pull off one of the most unusual heists in all of history. It was a search for a myth, a symbol and a monster. It was a search for the Yeti.
 
SOURCES
 
Coleman, Loren (2002) Tom Slick: True Life Encounters in Cryptozoology. Craven Street Books, Fresno, CA, USA.
 
Taylor, Daniel C. (2018) Yeti: The Ecology of a Mystery. Oxford University Press, UK.
 
Waddell, Laurance A. (1899) Among The Himalayas. Archibald Constable & Co. UK.
 
Liechty, Mark (2017) Far Out: Countercultural Seekers and the Tourist Encounter in Nepal. The University of Chicago Press, IL, USA.
 
McGarr, Paul M. (2013) The Cold War in South Asia: Britain, The United States & The Indian Subcontinent, 1945-1965. Cambridge University Press, UK.
 
Princep, James (1832) The Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Volume 1. Baptist Mission Press, Calcutta, India.
 
Redfern, Nick (2016) The Bigfoot Book: The Encyclopaedia of Sasquatch, Yeti, and Cryptid Primates. Visible Ink Press, MI, USA.
 
Dundee Courier (1951) Everest Has A Monster: Britons Find Footprints. Dundee Courier, Tuesday 04 December 1951, Page 3. Dundee, UK.
 
Star Tribune (1921) Snowman! Star Tribune, Saturday 17 December 1921, p.20. Minneapolis, MN, USA.
 
The Sphere (1954) The Abominable Snowman. Saturday 02 January 1954, p14. London, UK.
 
The Press and Sun Bulletin (1961) Yeti Belongs in Legend Says Hillary, Disposing of Track, Scalp Evidence. The Press and Sun Bulletin, 10th January 1961, p.49. New York, USA
 
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For extended show notes, including maps, links and scripts, head over to darkhistories.com
Support the show by using our link when you sign up to Audible: http://audibletrial.com/darkhistories or visit our Patreon for bonus episodes and Early Access: https://www.patreon.com/darkhistories
The Dark Histories books are available to buy here: http://author.to/darkhistories
Dark Histories merch is available here: https://bit.ly/3GChjk9
Connect with us on Facebook: http://facebook.com/darkhistoriespodcast
Or find us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/darkhistories
& Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dark_histories/
Or you can contact us directly via email at contact@darkhistories.com
or via voicemail on: (415) 286-5072
or join our Discord community: https://discord.gg/cmGcBFf
The Dark Histories Butterfly was drawn by Courtney, who you can find on Instagram @bewildereye
Music was recorded by me © Ben Cutmore 2017
Other Outro music was Paul Whiteman & his orchestra with Mildred Bailey - All of me (1931). It's out of copyright now, but if you're interested, that was that.

Christmas Campfire 2021 (Part 2)

Happy New Year! Here is part of the Christmas (New year? Holiday?) Campfire episode! This year's campfire was a brilliant collection of stories, thank you so much to everyone who sent in stories and got involved. Onwards and upwards, here's to 2022! x

Christmas Campfire 2021 (Part 1)

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Happy Holidays everyone! Here is the first part of this years Christmas Campfire episode and I have to say a massive thank you to everyone who sent stories in! This year the Campfire episode had overwhelming interest from everyone and there were so many great stories from everyone, it was such an enjoyable experience reading them and collating them for the episode, so thank you so much! I hope you all enjoy some creepy for the holiday season and have a great holiday, best wishes to you and all your family! Thank you so much for another great season of Dark Histories!

The Gloucester Sea Serpent of 1817

From the ancient pages of the Old Norse Edda to the interwar pages of American adventure magazines, the depths of our oceans have, in imagination, been host to unspeakable monsters for many hundreds of years. In modern times, the phrase “Here Be Dragons” has been absorbed into popular culture as titles for books, films, TV shows, bands and video games, all this despite the fact that it only ever appeared on the unknown seas of a single 16th Century Globe. Far more common were the giant sea monsters that adorned maps for hundreds of years, existing only as illustrations and in the minds of those that viewed them. In the summer of 1817, just off the coast of Massachusetts, however, these illustrations became flesh and blood for several weeks when witnesses of a Giant Sea Serpent numbered into the hundreds, in what the 19th Century Harvard Professor Jacob Bigelow called “the most interesting problem in the science of natural history.”
 
SOURCES
 
France, Robert L. (2021) Ethnozoology of Egede’s “Most Dreadful Monster,” The Foundational Sea Serpent. Society of Ethnobiology, Boston, MA, USA.
 
Egede, Hans (1818) A Description of Greenland. T & J Allman, London, UK.
 
Paxton, C. G. M. & Knatterud, E. (2005) Cetaceans, sex and sea serpents: an analysis of the Egede accounts of a “most dreadful monster” seen off the coast of Greenland in 1734. Archives of Natural History, London, UK.
 
Nickell, Joe (2019) Gloucester Sea-Serpent Mystery: Solved after Two Centuries. Skeptical Enquirer, Vol. 43, No. 5. https://skepticalinquirer.org/2019/09/gloucester-sea-serpent-mystery-solved-after-two-centuries/
 
Magnus, Olaus (1658) A compendious history of the Goths, Swedes, & Vandals, and other northern nations. J. Streater, London, UK.
 
Pontoppidan, Erik (1755) The Natural history of Norway. A. Linde, London, UK.
 
Linnæan Society of New England (1817) Report of a committee of the Linnæan society of New England, relative to a large marine animal, supposed to be a serpent, seen near Cape Ann, Massachusetts, in August 1817. Cummings & Hilliard, Boston, USA
 
Brown, Chandos Michael (1990) A Natural History of the Gloucester Sea Serpent: Knowledge, Power, and the Culture of Science in Antebellum America. American Quarterly
Vol. 42, No. 3 (Sep., 1990), pp. 402-436. The Johns Hopkins University Press, USA
 
The Long Island Star (1817) A Frightful Fish! The Long Island Star, 20 August, 1817, p.3. NY, USA.
 
Dublin Evening Mail (1842) The Missouri Leviathan. Monday 07 November, 1842, p.3. Dublin, ROI.
 
The Illustrated London News (1848) The Great Sea Serpent. The Illustrated London News, 28 October, 1848, p.8. London, UK.
 
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For extended show notes, including maps, links and scripts, head over to darkhistories.com
Support the show by using our link when you sign up to Audible: http://audibletrial.com/darkhistories or visit our Patreon for bonus episodes and Early Access: https://www.patreon.com/darkhistories
The Dark Histories books are available to buy here: http://author.to/darkhistories
Dark Histories merch is available here: https://bit.ly/3GChjk9
Connect with us on Facebook: http://facebook.com/darkhistoriespodcast
Or find us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/darkhistories
& Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dark_histories/
Or you can contact us directly via email at contact@darkhistories.com
or via voicemail on: (415) 286-5072
or join our Discord community: https://discord.gg/cmGcBFf
The Dark Histories Butterfly was drawn by Courtney, who you can find on Instagram @bewildereye
Music was recorded by me © Ben Cutmore 2017
Other Outro music was Paul Whiteman & his orchestra with Mildred Bailey - All of me (1931). It's out of copyright now, but if you're interested, that was that.