On a stormy night on the small island of Guernsey, a young paranormal expert joins a skeptical history teacher to record the first in a series of podcasts based on the island's incredible folklore and paranormal history. As the expert regales his horrifying stories, the teacher learns that we all have our own truth, our own story ghosts that haunt us.
Starring Olivier nominated actor and former Blue Peter legend Peter Duncan, When Darkness Falls is a spine chilling ghost story that delivers a twisted, terrifying and thrilling tale that The Guardian said will leave you cowering in your seat. Catch the brand new UK tour of When Darkness Falls from September fifteenth in a town near you. Select nights will also feature myself delivering a live episode of Unexplained. For more details or to book tickets, visit When Darkness Falls dot
co dot uk if you dare. It is just after two pm on the eleventh of December twenty fifteen when a stranger walks into the Clarence Pub in the village of Greenfield at the edge of Saddleworth Moore, in Britain's Peak District. On brighter days, the nearby Moors can seem a place of stark majesty, colored by vibrant tufts of pink and purple heather and swathes of thawny grass, a place where, from any number of its rocky ledges, you feel you need only hold out your hand to reach
through to the heavens. But on days like these, in the dreak and dreariness, the Moors seem charged with a far more ominous beauty. Green and grays of their gritstone crags are turned black, and all color seems washed from the land. The shadow lands at the edge of an apocalyptic John Martin painting, perhaps shortly before the ground is ripped asunder and the fiery boughs of the earth are
revealed from below. The man is middle aged, around six feet tall and wearing a cedar brown mac He has white and graying hair at the sides and only a small tuft of it on top. After approaching the bar, he asks for nothing but directions to the top of the mountain, and is pointed towards Chew Reservoir by the pub landlord. It's the highest place he can think of but one. He warns the man that he will not
be able to return from after dark. Undeterred, the stranger thanks the landlord, and as a light drizzle begins to fall, sets off into the gloom. The following morning, on a path between the dove Stone and Chew reservoirs, a cyclist spots a body lying parallel to the road that was oddly unresponsive to the unforgiving rain lashing down and the bitter coldness of the air. It's the Stranger from the Clarence.
When police and Mountain Rescue arrive, they find no form of ID, and only some cash train tickets and a container emptied of its thyroxine sodium tablets with which to determine his identity. In the months that follow, media outlets across the globe pick up the news of the body's discovery. It's hard not to be intrigued by the mystery of why the man who was eventually discovered to have committed suicide chose to enter his life in such a way.
But more than anything, we're gripped by the mystery of the man's identity. We seem compelled regardless of whether anonymity had been his desire to want to name him, Although it's fairly likely that names were used verbally for many years before the first to be recorded by Homo sapiens appear sometime around three thousand, five hundred to three thousand BC in Samaria, Mesopotamia. They were scrawled on to what
were essentially ancient receipts made from clay. The Cushim tablet, thought to describe the transaction of twenty nine thousand and eighty six measures of barley, also seems to bear the name of the person who'd regulated the transaction. Turn in a corner from the combination of two symbols that are believed to translate phonetically as Ku and shim, the name Kushim may well be the first ever name to be
recorded in the history of humanity. As writing and language evolve, so too does our capacity to comprehend ideas and, by extension, the world around us. In this sense, the Cushim tablet represents a key moment in the evolution of communities. As Yuval Noah Harari notes in Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind, it's a reflection of how increasingly complex societies needed more
sophisticated ways of keeping track of their engagements. Perhaps the recording of the first name marked another transition of sorts, moving away from communal ideas into a world whereby we all began to think personally about who we were and our place in that world, and how, as individuals we could shape it. Before the written name, we could leave handprints or unique symbols painted on rocks, such as those found in the cast caves of Sulawesi in Indonesia, but
their ownership has long since been lost to time. Without recorded evidence to attest to who we were individually, whole swathes of society could be forgotten, ignored, and left out of the conversation. But now exemplified by Kushim's bureaucratic cornerstone, here was the chance for anyone to be able to exist in print. You would know we existed, because it
says so right there. It equipped us with a tool with which, even in the most forgotten and marginalized of corners, like a New York et artist of the nineteen seventies, you could scream your refusal to be ignored in Fire and Thunder, emblazoned on the side of a subway carriage
as it rolled out at the Bronx. In January twenty seventeen, after an exhaustive search lasting over a year, the body found on Saddleworth Moore was finally identified as being that of David Lytton, who'd been living in Lahore, Pakistan for the previous ten years, before returning to the UK when
he decided to take his own life. David's story, as described in William Atkins's twenty sixteen article for The Guardian, The Mystery of Saddleworth Moore, who was Neil Dovestone, or at least what little we know of it has parallels with another that began seventy five years earlier on the other side of the world. Like all such story, it two begins with the discovery of a body. You're listening
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Check out my link nord vpn dot com forward slash unexplained to get your subscription started today. He was lying on a ledge of rocks down by the water's edge when they found him. Judging by the state of the corpse and the newspaper dated twentieth of May nineteen forty five tucked neatly under his head, he'd been dead just over two weeks. The calm cobalt waters of Sydney's Tailor's Bay a little duller than usual that afternoon under the
overcast skies lapped gently against the rocks below. As the officers in spe did the scene. To the left of the body, they found a small glass and a half emptied bottle of lemonade, next to an open sachet, now void of its contents. On his chest, still nestled in the grip of his right hand, a small hardcover book no more than five inches in length. Pages flapped back
and forth in the light breeze. As one of the officers bent down to pick it up, he blew the sand from the cover and held it out to read the Rubayat of Omar Khayam printed in gold across the front. A quick glance inside revealed a faint cross marked in pencil, next to the lines, ah, make the most of what we yet may spend before we two into the dust, descend dust into dust, and under dust to lie, sans song,
sans singer, and sans end. The man was later identified as thirty year old Joseph him Saun Marshal, who lived in Sydney for the past six years after arriving from Singapore in nineteen thirty nine. Although Joseph would sometimes prefer to be called George and the name Marshal had in fact been changed from Maschau, an all too common attempt, perhaps to disguise the family's true Jewish and Bagdaddy heritage
for fear of how others might receive them. The inquest into Joseph's death revealed the empty sachet found next to his body to have contained barbituric acid, and death by suicide was confirmed. It was also revealed that the night before Joseph was thought to have died, he met with Gwyneth Dorothy Graham, a young Sydney based hair dresser. Graham, who had become close friends with Joseph over the last four years or so, attended the inquest as a principal
witness in the case. Less than two weeks later, Dorothy Graham's body was discovered bent over and partially submerged in the bath tub of her Roslin Road flat in King's Cross, Sydney. Her wrists seemingly cut by the razor blade found at the bottom of the bath, yet her autopsy later revealed that her death had in fact been caused by drowning.
Just across from Taylor's Bay, barely three kilometers from where Joseph Marshall's body was discovered, lies Chowder Bay, a popular scenic spot for twilight walks by the sea or swift dips in the sheltered waters of its Grand seapool. One especially popular location, owing largely to the Army barracks located nearby,
was the Clifton Gardens Hotel. Built in a striking Federation style, it was perched just a few yards inland from the bay, peeking out from a surrounding cover of woodlands, the perfect place to spend an evening with friends in the soft glow of the winter sun. The perfect place, too, perhaps to surreptitiously watch the movement of warships as they pulled out of Sydney Harbor, past Watson's Bay and beyond into
the treacherous waters of the South Pacific. There was something special about evenings at the Clifton during wartime, often materializing out of the moment, an embodiment of the spirit of the age for those only too familiar with how precious
such moments might ultimately prove to be. One night in early August nineteen forty five, around the time of the inquest into Joseph Marshall's death, a group of friends from the barracks chanced their luck at the hotel's back door, despite it being passed the usual six o'clock closing time. Moments later, ensconced in the bar and raising toasts to
the hotel staff for letting them in. One of the group, thirty nine year old Army Lieutenant Alfred Boxall, is introduced to a young training nurse of the Royal north Shore Hospital. The pair strike up an instant rapport, so much so that, at only their second meeting, with Boxall due to ship out the next day, the nurse is moved to offer him a parting gift, a copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam. Inside the front cover is Britain. Indeed indeed repentance oft before I swore? But was I sober when
I swore? And then came spring and rose in hand my threadbare penitents A pieces tour. The number of the verse seventy is marked just below, and the inscription is signed Jest. In the following day, Boxall leaves for the Northern Territories to join up with the rest of the Fourth Water Transport Company. The pair will never see each other again. Look at the way that man slumped, says Helen,
as they make their way across the sand. On warm evenings like this, with the sound of waves lapping softly at the shore and the light turning pink and gold under the darkening sky, Helen and her husband John Lyons could often be found taking a stroll along Summrton Beach.
Today is Tuesday, thirtieth November nineteen forty eight, the last day of spring, and as Helen and John amble north towards the quiet Adelaide suburb of Glen Elk, it has just gone seven when Helen first spots the smartly dressed man lying on the sand just below the Summerton Children's Home. John looks to where his wife is pointing at the figure lying down with his legs crossed over and stretched
out towards the ocean. He certainly seemed strangely propped, as if he hadn't quite the strength to pull himself fully up against the wall. Helen is greatly relieved to see the man raise his arm as they pass. Someone's had a bit too much to drink by the looks of it. Maybe we should report him to the police, jokes John. Helen smiles, then turns her head for one more look at the prostrate man, her smile becoming a little less sure as she turns back to John, threading her arm
through his and pulls him a little closer. As they continue along their way, a young couple pull up outside the children's home on a motorbike. Olive and her boyfriend Gordon have come for the sunset too, and pick a prime spot on a bench just next to the small set of steps leading down to the beach. There'd only been there five minutes when Olive notices a pair of legs in striped brown trousers sticking out from the base of the sea wall. She taps Gordon and points leave
it out. You should mind your own business. What if he's dead, you mean sleeping more like. The pair laugh it off, but for the next thirty minutes it certainly seems odd that the man hasn't moved once, especially with so many mosquitoes buzzing about, But each time Olive tries to get a better look, Gordon pulls her back, telling her it's rude to pry. As twilight descends and all around them the street lights are coming on, Olive notices a man in a blue suit walking past, before stopping
just above where the man is lying. She watches him as he looks down at the obscured figure on the sand for what seems like a good few minutes, before turning away and disappearing down one of the streets off the seafront. Not long after, Gordon and Olive are back on their bike and riding off into the warm, hazy night.
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morning swim. After emerging from the water, he notices two men with horses looking at something close to the sea wall. As John draws closer, the object of their interest slowly begins to reveal itself. Although he can't be sure, it looks for all the world to be the same man from the night before, still lying strangely slumped, with his head hanging limp to the right. The two other men, local jockeys, Neil Day and Horry Patching, had just been passing,
they said when they found him like that. As John draws closer in the starkness of the early morning light, he sees him clearly now for the first time, his broad shoulders and coarse, reddish hair receding from the front and graying slightly at the sides. He's dressed in a white shirt with a red and blue tie, under a brown wool knitted pullover, with a gray and brown double breasted jacket and brown leather shoes. John sees two immediately
and without question that the man is dead. Police Constable John Moss of nearby Brighton Police Station arrives to find John Neil and Horry, along with the steadily growing crowd of onlookers waiting by the corpse. Moss inspects the body, finding it cold, stiff, and damp from the morning dew, then opens the eyelids to briefly examine the gray irises
and dilated pupils. He makes the routine and ultimately unsuccessful check for a pulse and discovers a half smoked cigarette between the man's right cheek jacket lapel, but no sign of blistering, suggesting it had perhaps fallen from the mouth after it had already gone out. The constable judges the man to have been somewhere in his forties or fifties.
He notes the loose hanging arms by his side and the lack of obvious signs of violence or damage to the body, nor does the surrounding sand appear to have been much disturbed. He notes, also with some surprise, how clean the man shoes appear for someone who might have been walking along the seafront. Searching the pockets for id, he finds instead an unused second class rail ticket from Adelaide to Henley beach, a seven p tramway bus ticket, a thin aluminum comb, some chewing gum, a packet of
Army Club cigarettes and a box of matches. A short time later, with the pale morning sun lifting ever brighter and higher into the sky, a warm breathe sweeps loose grains across the beach as John Lyons watches the body being placed into the ambulance and finally driven away. Doctor John Bennett is on hand to meet the vehicle as it palls into the forecourt of the Royal Adelaide Hospital.
Going on the extent of cyanosis and degree of rigor mortis, Bennett judges the man to have died no more than eight hours, previously putting the time of death loosely at some point around two o'clock that morning. Doctor Bennett formerly declares the man deceased, suspecting a possible coronal seizure as the cause, although his unable to ascertain exactly how he died at this point. From here, the body is driven directly to the city Morgue at West Terraced Cemetery in
the southwest corner of Adelaide's Central park Lands. Piece Moss helps to wheel the body inside, where moments later coroner John Dwyer removes the clothes and ties a blank cardboard label around the big toe. Dwyer places a sheet over the body and wheels it up to the refrigeration unit, opens the door and eases it on to one of
the racks. Moss bags up the items found with the body, along with each piece of clothing, noting with some curiosity how most of the labels appear to have been snipped out, leaving only frage remains. With Moss's work complete, the task to identify the man is transferred to the Adelaide Metropolitan Police where Detective Sergeant lion Or Lean is instructed to oversee the investigation committed as they are to putting a
named unknown bodies. Even with little suspicion of any foul play, such cases can often prove to be lengthy distractions from more pressing work, so there is some relief when later that evening, Lean's department receives a call from Sergeant Fennick of Glenelg Police Station with a strong lead on the man's id. Fenix suspects the body to be that of fifty five year old Edward Cecil Johnson, who'd recently gone missing from his home in Paynham, a northeastern suburb of Adelaide.
Fennick asked them to look out for a fractured elbow and partially missing little finger. The following morning, the second of December, Constable Sutherland of the Metropolitan Police joins John Dwyer to oversee the unknown man's autopsy and watches patiently as the sheet is pulled back, only to reveal five digits clearly intact on each hand. Edward Johnson is not their man. As Dwyer meticulously carries out the two hour autopsy, something even more unexpected is about to come to light.
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His fingers and toe nails are recently clipped and clean, and his face is clean shaven, none of which talies with the police's first suspicion that the man was a drunk or vagrant of some description, although there are a significant number of teeth missing from both the up and lower jaw eighteen in total. Dwyer puts him at roughly forty five years old and measures him at five ft
eleven in height. He has a significant physicality, with the broad and muscular body of a man possessed of considerable strength. Dwyer pauses for a moment at his eyes. Looking a little closer, he notes an odd unevenness in his pupils, as if they'd been unnaturally reacting to something just prior to his death. Moving round the back, Dwyer finds a deep lividity behind the ears and neck where the blood has settled, consistent with the position the body had been
in after the man died. He also finds a small amount of sand in the hair, but nothing in the nostrils or mouth, suggesting, along with the cleanliness of his shoes, that he'd not been on the beach before he died. Like doctor Bennett, Dwyer too assumes a condition of the heart to be the most likely cause of death, and Dulie finds a congestion of blood in all the major organs,
a telltale sign of heart failure. So it's with some surprise that when he examines the heart itself he finds it not only in a healthy condition, but tough and firm, like the heart of a younger man. He's even more surprised when he opens the stomach to find blood inside, which points to a very different cause of death. Indeed, Dwyer can't yet be sure, but going on the evidence so far, he's left with the suspicion that although it may well have been heart failure that killed the man,
his death had not occurred naturally. He had been poisoned, either by his own hand or by some one else's. With no obvious signs of anything lethal having been ingested, Dwier wanders for a moment if a hypodermic needle had been used. He checks in between the toes and the knuckles for a puncture wound, but finds nothing save for a light scar on the left arm and a few
abrasions across the hand. Later that afternoon, Constable Sutherland delivers tissue samples to the state Government Department of Chemistry in the north of the city, along with samples of blood and urine. Each is received by doctor Robert Cohen, the deputy government chemical analyst, and will be tested for cyanides, alkaloids, barbiturates, and carbolic acids. It will be a few days before
the results can be known. The following morning, Detective Lean, in his white panama and dark sea succor suit, grabs the copy of the Adelaide Advertiser from a new stand. Lean's attention is momentarily caught by a front page article announcing the arrest of two spies captured in the British zone of Vienna, before he flicks past to page two and finds what he's looking for. Dead man still unidentified
reads the title. Satisfied that that will do the trick, he returns the paper to the new stand and heads off to work. A hot day as steadily brewing as Lean makes his way to the City Detective's office on Anger Street. The South Australian task Force consisted of fifteen or so personnel spread out across four small rooms, and
base was at a premium. It wasn't uncommon to see any one of Constables Sutherland and Storch or Detective Caney squeezed onto the window sills or perched on the end of tables as they compiled their reports and checked their paperwork that morning. As they gather around, Lean takes the team through Dwyer's report, advising them to start considering the case as a suicide or a possible homicide, and to
step up their search for the man's identity. Later, after receiving photos of the body and fingerprints from the morgue. The team put together case packs to be mailed with copies of the prints and photographs to all major police headquarters in the nation. In late nineteen forties Australia, by identifying a dead body could be a particularly arduous task. The end of war had triggered a tidal wave of mass migration, as many people unwilling or unable to return
home looked to re establish their lives elsewhere. For Australia, the sheer scale of the hostilities, not to mention the attacks on Darwin and Sydney Harbor, had left many in government, perhaps recognizing the manner in which the nation had itself been established, terrified that such a young and underpopulated country
was dangerously susceptible to invasion. Between nineteen forty seven and nineteen fifty two alone, what was called a populate or Parish policy resulted in a hundred and eighty thousand people arriving to take up homes and jobs. The policy was heavily racially controlled, with Minister for Immigration Arthur Corwell terrified that what he called the Yellow Races might one day take over. Corwell had hoped also to Most of the
new arrivals would come from the British Isles. However, with British shipping crippled by war, the government was forced to open its doors to Eastern and Southern Europeans, who often arrived on makeshift papers with no friends or family to receive them, and were sent to work on the most
manual and transitory jobs. Thanks to the newly revised article in the Advertiser, more than twenty police have contacted the City Detective's office by the end of the day, mostly with info from distraught relatives worried for the safety of their lost sons, brothers and fathers. But one call stands out amongst them all. It came from a man named Brian Joseph Dietmarch. You've been listening to Unexplained Season six, episode twenty two to more Names, Part one of three
to find out what happens next. Part two will be released next week Friday, September sixteenth. If you enjoy Unexplained and would like to help support us, you can now do so via Patreon To receive access to add free episodes. Just go to patron dot com forward Slash Unexplained pod to sign up. Unexplained. The book and audiobook, featuring ten stories that have never before been covered on the show, is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase through Amazon,
Barnes and Noble, and Waterstones, among other bookstores. All elements of Unexplained, including the show's music, are produced by me Richard McClane smith. Please subscribe and rate the show wherever you listen to podcasts, 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 Twitter at Unexplained Pod and Facebook at Facebook dot com, forward slash Unexplained Podcast