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The Dustlight Archives Book Club: Sinister Forces: The Nine: Chapters 3-4 (Preview) · The Dustlight Archives

• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: All right, hi guys.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome back to the latest episode of the Sinister Forces Book Club.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: We are on chapters three and four of book one, the nine.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: And oh man, we have a lot, we have a lot to cover.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: So let's just go ahead and get started.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: First up, we have chapter three, Red Dragon, the Ashland Tragedy.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm just gonna go ahead and start out with the first real story he tells because there is so much packed in here that I want to get into, and it is actually an incredibly interesting story in a lot of ways.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: So, okay, we're gonna read from uh page 99 and 100.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: In 1991, there was an exorcism of a nightclub in Wilder, Kentucky, a small town near Covington across the Ohio River from Cincinnati.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: Due to a lawsuit by one of the customers, Claude Lawson claimed that the owner of Music World, Bob Mackey, was running a haunted establishment and that he had been attacked by evil spirits during the time he worked and lived there as a caretaker.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: Music World is built on the site of an old slaughterhouse, complete with a well underneath the building that received the drained blood of the slaughtered animals, dating back to the 19th century, and indeed it was a site for satanic activity and a cult murder in 1896 when the headless body of five-month pregnant Pearl Bryan was found.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: Two men, Alonzo Walling and Scott Jackson, were arrested for murder after confessing to the crime.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: Self-proclaimed devil worshippers and occultists, they refused to tell investigating authorities the location of Pearl Bryan's missing head, saying it would bring the wrath of Satan upon them.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: They feared Satan more than death because they were offered life in prison instead of execution if they gave up the head.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: They were hanged not far from the slaughterhouse, and Wallen cursed his captors from the gallows in a scene out of Nathaniel Hawthorne.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: Another young woman, a cabaret dancer known as Johanna, committed suicide at the club in the 1930s, but not before poisoning her father, a gangster who had murdered Johanna's boyfriend.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: Johanna was also five months pregnant at the time.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: Club has been the site of numerous murders, shootings, and other crimes.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: It is one of the strangest clubs in America, for it boasts, if that is the right word, 29 sworn affidavits by customers, employees, and even local policemen who have been attacked there by forces from what Cod and Mather called the invisible world.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: Once destined to be torn down in 1993 due to some strange accidents that the owner felt were paranormal warnings, it has remained in operation.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: If, as suggested in the last chapter, some sites in America are sacred, then perhaps Music World is evidence that others may be just the opposite: unholy and profane.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so I'm not gonna lie, after reading that, I had a little bit of a panic attack as far as putting together this episode because I promised you guys two chapters, and we are four or five paragraphs in, and so many claims have been thrown at the wall that I mean this took me a couple of hours to research, uh, but it is a very interesting story, and thankfully the entire uh two chapters did not end up being this dense, so we will probably spend a little bit of time on this.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um there's several claims made here.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: The first one being that in 1896 there was a pregnant woman named Pearl Bryan who was found dead, decapitated in a satanic ritual, and that the two people who killed her cut off her head in the satanic ritual, and because of their allegiance to Satan in this deal they made with him, they were so unwilling to reveal where her head was that they chose to die rather than to get a stay of execution for delivering it.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: Literally none.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, this was something that was retconned almost a hundred years later, when this place kind of got a reputation for being haunted, and people were trying to attach stories to it.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean the the we'll get more into it, but the places that gave music world, what would become music world, a reputation for being haunted are like Jerry Springer and like the Travel Channel and Ghost Hunters, so not exactly the most reliable sources.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: Either way, what appears to have happened here is there were two dental students who uh went to the Ohio College of Dental Surgery, and they under the table accepted money to do an abortion for Pearl Bryan.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: Either they did it or they paid somebody else to do it.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: That part is not clear, and I think that what's important to establish is that this location has always been haunted, but not by ghosts, by organized crime.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: Like the Ohio College of Dentistry was notorious for doing things like selling corpses and doing under-the-table abortions.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: There was definitely an organized crime element there.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: Uh later on, it would be kind of a hub for biker gangs and the Kentucky mafia.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: So I really think, and I I mean, I think we'll see this a lot as we move on with a lot of Levenda's claims that he is definitely trying to attribute something metaphysical to something that is I don't know, has real direct material implications that are probably worth looking into.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: Uh another one of his claims, as far as the Pearl Bryan story, is that it happened at the location that would eventually become Music World.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: This also is not true.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: The murder or accidental murder, as far as we can tell, happened about two and a half miles from Music World.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: And the only reason that this gets attached to that location in any way is because, like I said, almost a hundred years later, when they're retcotting this thing, uh, a ghost hunter claims that Alonzo Walling and Scott Jackson threw Pearl Bryan's head down the well that existed at this location because this location was originally a slaughterhouse.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: Really, I'm inclined to believe that the most likely explanation for what happened to her head is Detective Kale Cribb of the Cincinnati Police Department, who uh was the lead investigator who actually untangled a lot of the logistics behind this.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: His belief was that the head was burned in the school's furnace, which would make a lot of sense.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, if you're trying to get rid of a head, it's not a bad place to do it if you have access and you are familiar with it, which they were.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: Also worth noting that I give this guy a little bit of credit because it's actually pretty impressive how him and his team discovered Pearl Bryan's identity.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: And so in 1896, if you cut somebody's head off, there's a very good chance that, especially when you are several counties away, that this body is never going to be identified.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: Which also, for the record, makes way more sense than them doing it in a satanic ritual, with absolutely no extra context given that would lead one to believe that they were into any sort of devil worship.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: But the way they found out it was Pearl Bryan was she had a pair of shoes on, and they traced the shoes back to the manufacturer, they found the batch that the manufacturer had made that included these shoes, and then they found the store where this batch was sold, and nine people had bought the this pair of shoes from this batch, and they tracked each of them down, except for obviously Pearl Bryan, who they could not track down because she was unfortunately dead.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: Now, lastly, the one other claim that is made here is that they cursed their captors from the gallows, or specifically Walling did, in a scene Levenda says is straight out of Nathaniel Hawthorne.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: And I just want to read what he actually said, what contemporary sources recorded him saying, because I don't know, like use your own judgment on this.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: But what he said is I am innocent of this crime, and my blood is on the hands of those who execute me.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: Doesn't sound like much of a hex to me.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: Sounds like the sort of thing a guy would say right before he's executed.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: Like, uh Lavenda's just full of shit here.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: And he has to know he's full of shit, or he's using really bad sources.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: Like, like I said, the previously mentioned travel channel in ghost hunting books and Jerry Springer and whatnot.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the second claim is that there was a cabaret dancer who was the daughter of a mobster who committed suicide at the club in the 1930s because she had gotten pregnant and her father, her mobster father, had murdered her boyfriend.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: Johanna, then at that point, five months pregnant, poisons her mobster father, then poisons herself and her unborn baby.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: Now, there is absolutely no solid evidence that this happened, period.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, in 1914, a housewife in the area poisoned herself, and her name was Johanna.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: That's the closest thing we can find in any sort of records.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, where this story comes from is from a man named Carl Lawson, who is a caretaker at Music World in the 80s and 90s, and is responsible for a lot of this place's reputation.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: We can get into him more in a little bit, but let's just say the diary he found that contained this story, which is which is where the story comes from, uh, has never been seen by anybody but him and the co-author of ghost hunting books that he was working with.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: Levenda mentions this place is the location of several other shootings and violent crimes, which is true.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, once again, this is a hub for a lot of organized crime.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: The Kentucky mob was very active in this area in the uh 1930s.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, and just and this is a very small note, but also the Johanna thing, too.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: If we're talking about the mob here, the idea that a mobster's daughter in the 1930s would have been a cabaret dancer also just rings as very false.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: Like, like in the cultural milieu of the mob, like in the 1930s, especially.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I mean, I think even today, uh, you're not as a mobster going to allow your daughter to do that, particularly in the establishment you own, uh, which you obviously have a lot of control over.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: Like, this man, I do not believe, hired his own daughter to be a cabaret dancer.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: It would have been horrible for his reputation.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: So eventually in the 1960s, RFK and his Justice Department do come in and they do break up some of the Kentucky mob's holdings.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: They arrest some people and they shake some things up, so the mob has to kind of move a little bit more underground.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: They can't be quite as open and audacious because I mean, at a certain point, this location was, I mean, I, you know, very openly a brothel and a casino, more or less.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: But when this happens, they sell this location to a biker gang, and the biker gang makes it into a new bar called the Hard Rock Cafe, not the Hard Rock Cafe, the corporate chain.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: This would have been prior to that, but it does share the same name.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: And several, you know, shootings and violent crimes do happen in that time because it's a fucking biker bar in Kentucky, and it's owned by a biker gang that's trafficking in drugs.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: This isn't exactly rocket science.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: But either way, by the 1980s, this place does have a reputation in the area for being haunted, and a lot of that comes from Carl Lawson, the caretaker of Music World, because when the Hard Rock Cafe sells off, it then becomes this bar called Music World, which is this country music bar that uh I genuinely think the owner never wanted to turn into the kind of freak show it ended up becoming.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like his hand was kind of forced.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: I think this guy was just really into country music and wanted to own a bar.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: But nonetheless, he has this caretaker, Carl Lawson, who's spreading all these stories about the place being haunted and seeing ghosts and other apparitions and you know having all of these experiences in this place.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: And this guy would later go on to be exercised in the on an episode of the Jerry Springer show, if you kind of want an idea of exactly what we're talking about as far as reliability.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but this place does have this reputation.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: And then this really bizarre story happens where a man named Michael Costigan files a lawsuit claiming that an apparition in a cowboy hat attacked him in the men's room and claimed that because of the place's reputation, that the owner had a legal liability to make the place safe.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: And this just created a wild cascade of events where the owner trying to protect himself in a lawsuit decides with his legal team to basically try to establish that this place is so haunted that reasonably nobody could expect a person to protect guests from abaritions there.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so he goes around the town and he does get those, which Lavenda mentions, the the 29 signed affidavits about different supernatural experiences that happened there.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and at this point, this is when your ghost hunters and your, you know, uh ethically fraught authors and local TV all kind of move in and really kind of cement this place in the uh cultural imagination as being like incredibly haunted.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: And at this point, the owner kind of backed into a corner, steers into it, and he starts selling ghost tours and stuff like that.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: He puts up a very silly plaque on the wall about how like you basically you come in at your own risk and all of this sort of stuff.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so I guess what I'm saying is that this is all super interesting.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: I think I think it is a very interesting story, but it is an interesting story about how places through a series of strange events and unreliable narrators may get a reputation for being haunted, particularly in an area that has always been associated with organized crime.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't want to beat this dead horse because I feel like this is something we're going to continually, continually, continually go through as and run into as we do this book.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_00: But the logical leaps taken to make this a metaphysical story, primarily, as opposed to a story about crime networks, I think is Levenda's worst impulse.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's also one of the reasons that he is associated with, you know, a lot of a lot of spooky figures and stuff, because it it kind of defangs a lot of the threat to institutions that releasing this information could ostensibly represent.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: I think reality is incredibly weird, and I try to keep an open mind, but in this case, after doing quite a bit of research on it, yeah, not uh not not convinced.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_00: So try to move through a little bit of the rest of this a bit faster because we just spent 20 minutes on the first five paragraphs uh of the third chapter, because Peter Levenda is a bastard man who loves to machine gun fire claim after claim after claim and make me do a lot of work.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_00: So after that, he tells a brief story about the 1996 vampire murders.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_00: They are mostly true, but he makes it sound like it all took place in Kentucky when the murders themselves actually happened in Florida.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't know.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_00: He's really into this idea of trying to make can this area in Kentucky itself seem like a uniquely haunted area, and the the logical leaps he takes, once again, just no good.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: Next, he tells another fairly interesting story.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: I will read briefly here.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_00: About 50 miles south of Ashland in another Appalachian town, Innes, Kentucky, then President Lyndon Johnson announced the war on poverty in 1964.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: He did so outside a small shack in the hollow to the backbeat of television crews and print reporters.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: Twenty-eight years later in 1992, that shack would still stand and its once famous inhabitant, Tommy Fletcher, still lived there.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_00: Only this time the television crews would return to report that he and his current wife had been indicted for murder, for having children, and then killing them off one by one for the insurance money.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_00: The body of their daughter, little three-year-old Ella Rose Fletcher, had been exhumed in an autopsy showed she died of an overdose of an antidepressant and had also been sexually molested.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_00: Her four-year-old brother Tommy Fletcher Jr.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_00: was hospitalized only a month after his sister's death, showing these same symptoms of drug poisoning.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_00: There had been a$5,000 life insurance policy on each child.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_00: The war on poverty was another war we lost.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely true, my man.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_00: We definitely lost the war on poverty.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think there was ever even a serious attempt to combat it.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_00: For a photo op.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_00: And down the line, this man would marry a like mentally challenged teenager, and they would have two kids together, and those two kids would die more or less under the circumstances that Peter Levenda claims.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, I would say once again, not that things can't have multiple explanations.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I do think that tying yourself down to a single explanation is it's just not how the world works.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_00: And oftentimes there are several different angles you can look at things from.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_00: But this is once again, I would say more than a story about a haunted area.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_00: It is a story about poverty and the sort of human misery that poverty creates.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_00: Then at this point, he starts to jump into Charles Manson, which is someone that we will spend a lot of time on in this chapter.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the first thing he kind of posits is that we don't really know much or anything about Charles Manson's father, uh Colonel Scott.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_00: And this is a strange claim because we do, and uh the the name Colonel is a first name in this case, like it's his legal first name, and I feel like there are so many strange connections between Manson and the US security state that I really don't think you need to make up or infer or imply that this is a military title, which I feel like he sort of does.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_00: This was just his first name, and uh he was a 24-year-old transient laborer who impregnated Manson's 16-year-old mom, skipped town, was sued for paternity, and ran away to avoid child support, got married two times, had more kids, and died of liver cirrhosis at 44.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_00: He is buried in Kettlesburg Cemetery.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_00: We do have an idea of who this guy was.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_00: He then mentions that Manson spent a brief amount of time in Boys Town, and once again, if we're kind of trying to look at what information gets revealed and why it gets revealed, it is interesting to me that he chooses to focus on a 1938 film about Boys Town that represents it as this place that helps children and you know can really help you get your life together when that was never what it was.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_00: That is true, but you would think a man who like will obsessively kind of point out that something happened in the exact same place where an Indian burial mound from 400 years ago existed or whatever, would maybe mention the fact that this is the same boys town from the Franklin scandal.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um seems like it would be relevant.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_00: Not that I'm even drawing a direct line between Charles Manson and the Franklin scandal.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_00: I do think it's interesting he stayed in that boys town, but it was for a very brief period of time, and it was decades before we are at least aware of the you know organized uh assault in sex trafficking, elite sex trafficking that took place through that institution in Omaha, Nebraska.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_00: It is true Manson's mom was arrested for a gas station stick up at 21.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but once again, Levenda kind of buries the lead on how weird it is.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_00: I would say he's pulling from Vincent Bugliosi's Helter Skelder, who really wants to paint him and his mom as kind of like white crash losers, or you know, frame it in that sort of a way.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_00: And what I find most interesting is that she got five years in Moundsville, uh, which is an extremely violent prison with a very high bid for a first-time female offender to get at that time.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_00: And it was really for a crime that wasn't even that bad.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_00: Like she basically tricked a gas station attendant into coming outside into a car and hit him over the head with a catch-up bottle and stole some money from him.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, five years, especially for a female offender, is a very long time to get in a maximum security prison.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_00: But he gets out.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_00: Alright, guys, this is where we must part ways now on the main feed.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_00: If you would like to hear the rest of this episode, please come over to my Patreon, and for just five dollars a month, you know, you'll be getting two of these every month.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_00: Uh there's about an hour left, or maybe even a little bit more than that.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_00: So uh a lot more content there.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_00: Like I've said before, if you really genuinely can't afford it, hit me up and we'll work something out.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_00: Cause like I'm not trying to keep this content from anybody who would want it.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_00: I want people to hear this.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_00: I want to build a community.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but if you can't afford it, like it would mean a lot to me.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_00: It allows me to do more of this work, so yeah, head on over there if you're interested.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, and I will see you next week with my next investigative episode on Nexium.