Welcome to Unexplained Extra with me Richard McClane smith. For the weeks in between episodes, we look at the stories that, for one reason or other, didn't make it into the show. In last week's episode, Whispers in the Trees, we looked at the unsettling mystery of the skeleton found inside the hollowed out trunk of an old witch elm tree. The gruesome discovery was made one evening in April of nineteen forty three by four young boys looking for rabbits and
birds eggs. The boys had been searching through a small stretch of forest just west of Birmingham known as Hagley Wood when they came across the bizarre tree and its grizzly secret. For over seventy years, numerous attempts have been made at piecing together the mystery, but to this day, the identity of both the victim and the perpetrator remains unknown. There is one theory, however, relating to the case that
stands out amongst all others. In nineteen forty five, the historian and anthropologist doctor Margaret Murray surmised that whatever crime had been enacted may have been ritualistic in nature. Suggesting a possible link to witchcraft and the occult. Murray's supposed authority on the subject was crystallized in her nineteen twenty one book The Witch Cult in Western Europe. The book drew a great deal of criticism, but in equal measure it was also to become exceedingly influential to a number
of like minded individuals, individuals such as Gerald Gardner. Today, Gardner is perhaps best known for having been a leading figure of pagan witchcraft, also known as wicker. What is perhaps less known is the extraordinary story of what Gardner, along with sixteen other witches, claims to have attempted on behalf of the British war effort in August of nineteen forty.
It was an unsettling time, to say the least, after the Nazi invasion of Poland in September nineteen thirty nine, Belgium and the Netherlands was to follow in May nineteen forty. After a gallant but disastrous attempt to halt the invading forces, the British Army were forced to evacuate from the continent at Dunkirk. Barely ten days later, the Nazi army had
captured France. It seemed only a matter of time before Hitler would send his forces across the Channel to claim the British Isles, and so it was when Gerald Gardner, operating as part of a group known as the New Forest Covern, hatched a cunning plan to halt the anti Scipated invasion. Born in eighteen eighty four in Blundell Sands in the northwest of England, into a wealthy line of timber merchants, Gardner was to spend his formative years traveling
the world with his nurse maid, Josephine McCombe. Such exposure to many different peoples and cultures filled Gardner with a deep sense of searching and a desire to get to the root of life. It was a path that would lead him to increasingly esoteric and occult interests, culminating ultimately
in his devotion to pagan witchcraft. In nineteen thirty eight, shortly after returning to the UK with his wife Dorothea, Gardner had become fascinated with a group known as the Rosicrucian Order krotona fellowship who were operating in his newly adopted town of Highcliffe on the Dorset coast. But something didn't fit. Within a year, Gardner became skeptical of some of the Orders followers who were taken to believing that
their founder, George Alexander Sullivan, was immortal. After expressing his dissatisfaction to other members of the group, Gardner was invited to join a small gathering at a large house known as the Mill House in Highcliffe. After arriving, Gardner was invited to strip naked before being taken through a series of initiation rituals, by the end of which Gardener had become a fully fledged member of the New Forest Covern. Twelve months later, the fate of the British nation hung
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get started. That's tela DC dot com slash Unexplained Podcast. It was shortly after night descended on Lamas Day, the first of August nineteen forty, when seventeen people made their way deep into the new forest. They gathered a few miles north of High Cliff at the foot of an
ancient gallows tree known as the Naked Man. Once the group had assembled, they made their way to a part of the woodland known as Ferny Nap, in a forest clearing of ancient primordial beauty, surrounded by birch, oak and fern. The group marked out a large circle of about nine feet in diameter. It was a witch's circle. A shutter lantern was placed to the east of the circle, facing out towards Berlin, providing a beacon for which the group
could focus their powers. One by one, the group lined themselves around the circle and began to strip free from their clothes in preparation for the ritual. Some covered themselves in goose fat to better endure the chill summer air. On the order of one the group began to dance in a spiral pattern about the circle, slowly at first, but then as their awareness grew, the movement became faster and more fluid. Then they began to chant louder and louder.
As the bodies spun around the circle. More and more they moved as their voices built in unison to an ecstatic crescendo. Finally, with the cone of power established in all their minds, a collective picture was drawn of a circular base of energy moving up like clay on a potter's wheel, squeezing to an apex of power, rising high into the night sky before being flung through the air.
The energy bursting forth from the cone thundered over the tree tops and across the fields, across the freezing gray waters of the North Sea and the lowlands of Europe, and headed straight for the mines of the German High Command. You cannot cross the sea. They said you cannot cross the sea. You will not cross the sea. The rest is, of course history. All elements have Unexplained are produced by me,
Richard McClain Smith. Please subscribe and rate the show on iTunes, and feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have an explanation of your own you'd like to share. You can reach us online at Unexplained podcast dot com or on Twitter at Unexplained Pod. Hello, it's Jamie from My dad wrote a Porno. Now, Christmas just wouldn't be Christmas without my dad writing some really terrible
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