The Horned Man of Dawstone Road: Heswall Crashes
Across four decades on Heswall's Dawstone Road, drivers and a motorcyclist reported a seven-foot horned figure that seized their vehicles and threw them into the sandstone wall.
EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/DawstoneDemon [https://weirddarkness.com/DawstoneDemon]
READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2en5ubww [https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2en5ubww]
FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Dawstone Road is where some say the veil between our reality and the unknown is thin. A motorist's brush with death in 1961 sparked a chain of inexplicable events. From encounters with horned entities to unexplained accidents, the road holds secrets that seem to defy rational explanation. (The Demon of Dawstone Road) *** There is a dark history and supernatural secrets at the Manila Film Center. Built as a symbol of power and prestige during the Marcos regime, its construction was rushed, resulting in a catastrophic collapse that claimed numerous lives. But the horror didn't end there. Stories of hauntings, spectral hands reaching out, and cries for help still echo through its halls. (Horrors At Manila Film Center) *** When 19-year-old Kenneka Jenkins vanished during a hotel party, it sparked a viral whirlwind of speculation and suspicion. Despite authorities ruling her death an accident, questions lingered – as they should, seeing as her body was found in the hotel freezer. (Frozen Corpse at Crown Plaza) *** For over a century, these ghostly orbs have captivated and spooked travelers in Queensland, Australia. Are they supernatural spirits or mere mirages? (The Ghostly Orbs of Min Min) *** AND MORE!
CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = Show Open
00:02:07.004 = Demon of Dawstone Road
00:11:30.917 = Horrors at Manila Film Center ***
00:31:46.055 = Frozen Corpse at Crown Plaza ***
00:40:24.583 = Ghostly Orbs of Min Min
00:50:15.674 = Blowing Smoke Up Your Enema ***
00:56:56.461 = Show Close
*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad break
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Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.com/wdapps [https://weirddarkness.com/wdapps]
*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*
SOURCES and RESOURCES:
“Blowing Smoke Up Your Enema” by Bipin Dimri for Historic Mysteries: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yckujv2n [https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yckujv2n]
“The Demon of Dawstone Road” by Tom Slemen for Anomalien.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/muvz6wbv [https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/muvz6wbv]
“Horrors At Manila Film Center” by Lucia for TheGhostInMyMachine.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/9es3ka3j [https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/9es3ka3j]
“Frozen Corpse at Crown Plaza” by Amanda Sedlak-Hevener for Graveyard Shift: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8drf6j [https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8drf6j]
“The Ghostly Orbs of Min Min” by Kimberly Lin for Historic Mysteries: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/ea9zway9 [https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/ea9zway9]
(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: April 15, 2024
This episode of Weird Darkness travels from a haunted stretch of English road and a tower built on dead workers to a teenager found frozen in a hotel kitchen, a century of phantom lights in the Australian Outback, and an 18th-century medical practice involving tobacco and a part of the body it had no business near.It opens on Dawstone Road in Heswall, where a Neston motorist crashed through a six-foot sandstone wall in the winter of 1961 and later told a surgeon at Clatterbridge Hospital that a horrible devil had pushed his car sideways, despite no alcohol in his blood. That March, a 23-year-old Wallasey man named Rory was thrown from his motorbike at the Baskervyle Road junction by a seven-foot horned figure that seized his handlebars, and he woke to a face with pointed ears and luminous eyes muttering about the pit. The road's reputation reaches back to November 1934, when a posse hunted a demonic creature that a wealthy mansion owner blamed on his escaped bulldog, an explanation a local policeman rejected by asking how a broad bulldog squeezed through iron gate bars. The pattern continued through a stalled Hillman Imp shoved backwards in 1969 and a nurse's 1978 sighting of a horned man in black standing beside a ten-foot hole that glowed red and echoed with screaming.From there the episode moves to the Manila Film Center, the cinema palace Imelda Marcos rushed to completion for the first Manila International Film Festival in January 1982, where part of the structure collapsed on November 17, 1981 and buried workers in wet cement during a 24-hour construction schedule. Eyewitness Nena Benigno described seeing men carried out frozen in cement that had not fully hardened, while official counts from the Marcos regime claimed only a handful of deaths against outside estimates ranging as high as 169. Architect Froilan Hong put the toll at seven and denied the burial stories, yet legends persisted that the dead were entombed in the walls, and a medium reportedly brought in by Imelda Marcos to exorcise the building announced during a trance that the spirits now numbered 169 after the road death of project supervisor Betty Benitez.Next comes the death of 19-year-old Kenneka Jenkins, found face-down in a walk-in freezer at the Crowne Plaza Chicago O'Hare in Rosemont on the morning of September 11, 2017, nearly a full day after security footage caught her stumbling through the hotel and entering an unused kitchen. The Cook County Medical Examiner ruled the death an accident from hypothermia, with a blood-alcohol level of 0.112 and epilepsy medication cited as contributing factors, but her mother Teresa Martin questioned how a teenager could open the freezer's heavy steel doors and filed a $50 million lawsuit against the hotel. Viral speculation drew comparisons to the 2013 death of Elisa Lam at the Cecil Hotel, fueled by footage in which background music was mistaken for a cry of help and an anonymous tip claiming a gang had killed her for $200.The episode then crosses to the Outback near Boulia in Queensland, where Min Min lights have trailed travelers since Europeans first documented them in 1838, hovering about three feet off the ground, changing color, and following people on foot, on horseback, and in cars. A stockman riding past the burned ruins of the Min Min Hotel reported a glow the size of a watermelon that chased him to the edge of town, and Arrernte elder Mavis Malbunka tied the lights to a Dreamtime story of a mother searching for a child fallen from the Milky Way. University of Queensland physiologist Jack Pettigrew traced the phenomenon to a Fata Morgana, an optical illusion in which warm air over cold bends light from sources hundreds of kilometers beyond the horizon, a finding he published in 2003 after recreating the effect with car headlights ten kilometers away.The episode closes on the tobacco enema, the 18th-century practice of blowing smoke into a patient's rectum to revive the drowned, with resuscitation kits hung near English waterways for emergency use. Nicholas Culpeper adapted the method from Native American medicine and Richard Mead carried it forward, and an early 1746 account credits a husband with reviving his apparently drowned wife by inserting a pipe stem and puffing smoke through it. Nicotine absorbed this way could raise a patient's heart rate, which gave the treatment a plausible mechanism, and the 1774 Institution for Affording Immediate Relief to Persons Apparently Dead from Drowning built its work around it before being renamed the Royal Humane Society, which still operates in England today.
