Genius Party

Here's one that might be music to your ears, MMers. A sixteen year old minor from Falmouth (who we won't name for his protection) recently hosted his sixteenth birthday party when things got a little strange. The boy was acting as DJ for his party while his friends - other kids from his school - danced and cheered him on. 

It was at a birthday party just like this.

"I had the whole set up, my laptop, my Pioneer 4-channel controller, I even had my dad's old turntable, you know, a record player," the kid told us. "I had been mixing for a little while. Everyone was really into it, you know? I'm a really good DJ. I thought I would mix some of my dad's old records in. Like, the old school scratching thing."

After playing through various pop hits of the 80s, the boy pulled out a record he didn't immediately recognize. "It was black, right? I mean, they're all black. But the label in the center was black too. There wasn't anything written on it except, 'Adolphus Winn,' my great-grandfather."

Adolphus Winn was born in 1895 in Portland. By 1916 he had become an accomplished composer and musician. He released several compositions which had gained him some acclaim, but in 1916 he largely disappeared from public life. He continued to compose and record music by himself. By the 1930s he had fully embraced the new technology - vinyl recording.

Adolphus Winn's record looked something like this

What his sixteen-year old great-grandson had discovered was one of Winn's private recordings from his "quiet years." 

"I thought it would be pretty cool to put it on, maybe I could freestyle over it," the boy told us. "So I started spinning it, but it was all this weird piano music. So I thought, I'd reverse it."

When the sixteen-year old DJ played the record backwards that's when everything changed.

"They all stopped dancing," he says. "They just stood there. Then they... they just went crazy."

There were twenty teenagers at the party. Upon hearing Adolphus Winn's music played in reverse they froze for a moment before running around. They all grabbed for things to write with and started scribbling furiously. When they couldn't find pens and pencils, they grabbed whatever they could find. One boy used the frosting from the three tier birthday cake. A girl used a knife to scratch into the wood floor. Several kids tore into their own flesh and used their blood to write on the walls, floors, and tables.

"It was crazy," the teenager told us. "It was like they were possessed or something. They just kept writing. They couldn't stop until I stopped playing that song."

All in all, the episode lasted one minute and thirty-nine seconds before the plug was pulled on the speakers and the adults rushed to quiet the manic teenagers. As the music ended, they began to calm from their frenzied writing, but a new panic had set in. They could not recall what had been happening or what they were doing.

Like this if everyone was writing down genius level thoughts.

When asked about what his friends were writing, the aspiring DJ had this to say:

"I don't know. I couldn't see it all. [One kid] wrote a bunch of math problems, like crazy advanced equations and whatnot. One of the others drew like plans for some kind of machine. It didn't make any sense to me, but it looked advanced, like really complex. I think one of the girls was writing a play. She... she was using her own blood. She'd covered one of the white table cloths."

Four minutes after the music ended, the birthday boy says, men in black suits and cars arrived. They ushered everyone out of the room and began taking pictures. They wouldn't say what had happened or what the writings meant. In the end, of the twenty party-goers who had been affected, eighteen were sent to local hospitals. All are expected to make full recoveries. By the time the boy and his family were allowed back into their home, the entire place had been cleaned.

"It was like nothing had ever happened," he says. "There was even a new cake waiting for me. They  took my great-grandfather's record, though."

What exactly happened when Winn's composition was played backwards? Did it somehow inspire over a dozen youths to spontaneously create. Were they channeling some strange energy?

For now, no one is saying anything. The boy's parents did not want to be interviewed for this piece, nor did any of the victims or their families. For now, this will have to remain just another unsolved mystery.

Stay safe out there, Maine!

Lady in the Closet

There is no sweeter story than a young couple buying a new home to fix it up and make it a wonderful place to raise a family. Until they find out that the house has an unwelcome presence within it! This is what happened to Jessica and David Smith when they bought what they thought would be their forever home, up in Caribou. 

Jess and David were high school sweethearts, both are very religious, and before dealing with the being in their house they didn’t believe in the supernatural at all! It started simply enough with their dog Barney, a great pyrenees being uneasy with the closet in their spare bedroom. First he would just stare at the door, then eventually he would begin growling, and it got to the point he would bark at it almost constantly. 

“It was super weird,” Jess said. “Barney was always such a sweet dog, before we moved he never barked at all. Now he wouldn’t stop barking, until the day he came limping up to David with a bloody paw. We don’t know how it happened but he avoided the closet from then on and would not make a peep when he was near it.”  

But the weirdness doesn’t stop there. Eventually Jess would walk by the spare bedroom and she would hear scratching noises from within the closet. “I went in there, flung the door open and all over the inside there were little crosses scratched into the drywall. I called David and asked if he was pranking me, but he was just as shocked as I was. I avoided the spare room from then on, but sometimes I would wake up at night and David wouldn’t be in bed, so I began to get suspicious. I bought a little baby monitor camera and set it up across from the closet, to see what was going on. On certain nights David would go into the room and stand in front of the closet door, then the door would slowly open on its own and I would catch just a brief glimpse of a young girl with long dark hair. David would go into the closet and stay there almost until dawn.”

Eventually Jess tells us that David started acting even more strangely, his normal talkative self gave way to a quiet and serious person that Jess hardly recognized. She decided that it was the Lady in the Closet affecting David in some way. She contacted the pastor at her church who put her in touch with a priest who specialized in exorcisms. Jess didn’t want to talk about the exorcism too much but she said as the Lady in the Closet was forced out in the open she saw a figure with long dark hair in a white dress with long claws on her fingers. David recovered after the exorcism and the couple quickly put the house on the market, and moved away before the house even sold. 

Whatever this phenomenon was, a ghost, a demon, a crazy woman, the fact remains that this couple went through hell, but came out alive, and that is all that matters. If you are up in Caribou and notice a house for sale, maybe give that one a pass. Stay safe out there, Maine!

The Auditor

We naturally get nervous around those people who have control over our careers, managers, CEOs, supervisors. Rachel works for a large insurance company in Portland, it's a branch of a major national brand. Every year they have an auditor from the parent company come in to make sure they are following best practices and to see if they can tighten up any processes. Well this auditor is the same one every year and Rachel tells us that the amount of nervousness and stress he causes every year is unnatural. 

Portland Maine

By all accounts this man is extremely nice, “I’m not sure why he makes us all so nervous,” Rachel said. “He brings in coffee and a big box of munchkins every morning for the week or so he is here. He never raises his voice, and is respectful of our personal spaces. He cracks jokes and yet we all feel this existential dread when he is around.” You might be able to chalk this up to nervousness about losing one’s job, but Rachel’s branch is never recommended for restructuring or layoffs, in fact they are often upheld as a national exemplar. “He never suggests changes and often even takes extensive notes on how we do things so they can replicate it elsewhere. But still no one feels comfortable around him.”

He can't be that bad if he brings donuts right?

Rachel told us of a time that a younger employee, a new hire, was alone in the break room with this auditor. “Stevie couldn’t even look him in the eye, he had a cup of coffee but he couldn’t even drink from it his hand was shaking so bad. The whole time the auditor just stood there smiling at him and drinking his coffee in small sips. After he is gone we all just feel so drained, management who get just as nervous as we do, relaxes the dress code and lowers quotas, so we can relax a bit. I’ve worked for other insurance companies and there is stress when one of the higher ups comes around, but never to this degree, it's crazy and weird.”

We reached out to others at this company that Rachel has asked us not to name here. Other employees at this branch and others all over the country opened up to us about this auditor. Everyone confirmed that he seems like a nice guy never getting angry or confrontational, always telling silly jokes and bringing in treats. He should be well liked but everyone is glad when he leaves and reports feelings of terror and anxiety in his presence. No one can explain why. 

Is he using some kind of psychic field to make people afraid?

Is this auditor human? Does he have some kind of psychic power or field around him that causes others to cower in fear? Could he be an emotional vampire? It is hard to tell, if you have experiences with this individual or another like him please reach out to us. 

Stay safe out there, Maine!

Fear the Fryzlwulf!

Watch your backs, MMers. Our most recent investigation brought us to North Monmouth, right off Route 202, along the shores of Wilson Pond. North Monmouth is a technically an unincorporated village, part of Monmouth proper. There are lot of summer homes around the pond, there's Tammy's One Stop, a gas station-slash-general store (and pizza and sub shop, don't forget), and Ray's Autos, though that looks like it's more of a museum to rust than a working mechanic. There's not much else, except for one heck of a whopper of a tale, going back all the way to 1963.

Wilson Pond, North Monmouth

Unlike a lot of the stories we investigate here at Malevolent Maine, this one seems fairly well documented. It started with a man, Juri Fryzlwulf (pronounced "Frizzle-wolf"), a Polish immigrant who moved to North Monmouth in the early 1960s. Fryzlwulf was a loner by nature, keeping to himself despite the large Polish community in the Monmouth area. 

On a few occasions, Fryzlwulf was seen running through his fields naked. This was usually in the late evening or early hours just before dawn. One witness described him as, "Naked as the day he was born. Well, that's not exactly right. He was wearing some sort of belt. It looked like fur. But he didn't have any pants on. You could see... well, you know. The belt didn't make much sense."

Many people assumed that Fryzlewulf was some sort of naturalist and as long as he wasn't bothering other people, they left him to his own devices. He might be a little eccentric, but he was mostly harmless. All of that changed in the summer of 1963, however. 

Edwin Simonet

Edwin Simonet was out for his early morning walk. He liked to be up before the birds, he said. He would walk the two and a half mile loop around his house, which brought him along Wilson Pond for about a mile. "In the mornings, it was just as beautiful as could be," he said. Simonet was a math teacher at Monmouth Academy, lived alone, and was well known and respected in town. He was forty years old in 1963, and when we sat down to talk to him, he was just as spry and sharp at 98 as the man he was half a lifetime ago. Here's Edwin:

"I remember that day just as clear as this morning. It was June 28th, a Friday. School had gotten out the week before. I have to tell you, even for teachers, summer vacation is like a rebirth of new life. The air is suddenly sweeter, the sky bluer. It's like while you were sleeping someone came and touched up the world. There's a weightlessness about late June and July. A sense that there is no evil in the world and there never could be. That morning was like that, like the world was free and alive and good. How wrong I was."

Simonet was doing his usual loop when he came to a particularly wooded area near the pond. He heard something then that didn't sound right. "It was a voice, a man's voice, but it was high and reedy. It was talking really fast, like he was trying to convince someone of something." That's when he saw something through the trees, a brief flash of skin.

Simonet couldn't take us out to the area. He lives at the Heron Pointe Senior Living Center in Monmouth, and while his mental faculties are still intact, he doesn't move around very well these days. Still, he was able to draw us a map of where it was, and true to it, we were able to find the spot easily enough. It's on the other side of the Plossay Road, across from Wilson Pond. It's pretty heavily wooded during the summer, a good place to hide.

The wooded area off Plossay Road,
where Simonet found Fryzwulf

As Simonet explained it, he saw that there was someone in the woods. He thought maybe someone needed some help and he went in. What he came upon shocked him. Seventeen year old Linda Williams had just finished Simonet's Algebra class that spring, so he knew her well. "She was standing there in her delicates.  Her clothes were in a little pile near by. She was standing there in her undergarments, her hands trying to keep herself modest."

Simonet said that Linda looked scared. Standing across from her was a man. He was naked save for a fur belt he had tied across his hips. 

"It was Fryzlewulf," Simonet told us. "No doubt about that." He tried to plead his innocence, but it was obvious to Simonet what was going on. He chased after Fryzlewulf but the man ran off, afraid to leave Linda alone, Simonet doubled back. 

The police searched for Fyzlewulf and found him barricaded behind the doors to his home. They arrested him and brought him to the jail. Linda Williams was not raped and claimed Fryzlewulf did not physically touch her at all, but her account of what happened was disjointed and made little sense. Here's a piece of he report:

"I... I went down there to swim. I was changing in the woods...it was a new bathing suit. a Two piece. My mom didn't know. That's when I saw him. That... man. Except he wasn't a man. He was... bigger...bulkier. His body didn't move like a man. So much hair. He... He kept saying, 'Please, please. Shhh. It's okay. Please.' And I saw... I saw.. I saw..."

There was very little they could charge Fryzlewulf with. The best they could do was indecent exposure. However, Linda Williams' father, Earl wanted to take matter into his own hands. He rounded up a posse of men and they went to Fryzlewulf's house. They jumped him and dragged him out of his home. Then they set his house on fire. Fryzlewulf went mad as his house went up in flames. One of the men, Brent Kirkwood recalled how Fryzlewulf almost threw them off and ran back into the house. "He kept screaming about his belt. How he needed his belt. How it was the only thing that could control it." Why the local fire department never responded to the house fire is unknown, though many suspect that Fire Marshall Carl Townes was part of the mob that came from the suspected child molestor.

After the house had burned down, the mob dragged Fryzlewulf to the woods where he had been arrested a few days earlier. There, they strung a rope up over a tree limb, looped the other end around Frylewulf's neck, and lynched him.

Things didn't go quite as planned though. Here's a report from Colin Hardy, another one of the men in the mob:

Artist's rendition of what Colin Hardy saw

"Earl was all fired up. We all were. Earl was a good guy. We all had kids. We could only imagine what that creep would have done to our kids if he caught them. Anyways, Earl was screaming and cursing him - Fryzlewulf, I mean - and the guy was just dangling there at the end of the rope. I had never seen a man die before, but Earl was a little older. He had been to Korea. But there he was twitching and jerking at the end of the rope, and the sun was going down. And I swear this is the God's honest truth, just as the sun went down all the way, Fryzlewulf's body started to twist and turn. Not like it had been. Like he was changing."

In the end seven of the fifteen men came forward and admitted their part of in the attack. To a man, every single one of them told the same story. All of these are on record at the Monmouth Police station. Fryzlewulf's body began to change. It lengthened in place. Bones cracked and regrew at different angles, skin split open and thick, coarse hair, fur, grew. HIs face shattered and turned more lupine. The creature at the end of the rope was half man, half wolf.

When the transformation was complete, the wolf-thing, snapped the rope around its neck. It snarled at the men and took a swipe at Earl Williams. slicing him across the belly. He would later be treated at the local hospital where he received twenty-three stitches. The medical records are private of course, but there are plenty examples of photographs showing the four slashes across his stomach. Then the creature that had been Fryzlewulf ran off.

Juri Fryzlwulf was never seen again. With no one to press charges, the men of the mob were not charged with anything. Again, the Police Chief happened to be a friend of Earl Williams. However, as previously stated the seven men who came forward with their stories of what happened, did so after several days. Many of the men said they could not live keeping secret what they saw.

The story of the Fryzlwulf does not end there, however. Over the next six decades the stories of a werewolf in the woods around Wilson Pond are regular occurrences. There have been multiple stories of mutilated deer found in the woods. Dogs and cats have gone missing; they're often found weeks later torn and shredded apart. In the late 80s there was three separate cases of people being attacked by a "tall, wolf-like creature." Game cameras, placed by hunters, have picked up several unexplainable images. The Fryzlwulf is described as standing over seven feet tall, with dark or black fur. It has the head of a wolf and human-like body. It runs on both two legs and four, and each appendage ends with a series of sharp claws.

Actual game cam footage from 2015

If Fryzlwulf is some sort of lycanthrope, he would be almost one hundred years old at this point. Still, the stories of Fryzlwulf roaming the woods have persisted. The beast is considered dangerous and should not be approached. As any long-timer in North Monmouth will tell you, when the moon is full, stay inside, lock your doors, and pray for no midnight visitors.

Stay safe out there, Maine.

Sit down with the Midnight Magician

 Okay, MMers, we've got a lot going on this week, so let's dive right in.

It took us awhile but we were finally able to track down the Midnight Magician, Malachai Blackstone, or more accurately, he tracked us down. Before we get to that, however, we have to tell you how hard it was to learn anything abut this guy.

Marty's Magic Shoppe

Our research brought us into contact with one Martin Ellison, owner of Marty's Magic Shoppe in Dover, New Hampshire. Marty was an accomplished magician in his younger days, performing under the name the Magnificent Marty. After he retired from the traveling scene in 1987, he opened Marty's Magic Shoppe to service all the regional magicians. Marty's is a one stop shop for costumes and magic tricks, as well as training, books on the craft, and just a general place for magicians both up and coming and well-established, to come and share secrets. It was Marty that gave us our first real clue about contacting Malachai Black.

Marty Ellison

"He's an odd one, that guy," Marty told us, his voice still thick with a New York accent. "Yeah, I know him. Knew his parents too, God rest their souls. They said it was one last effect - a magic trick if you will - that did them in. The Blackstones were the best in their day - Prospero and Evanora. Kinda goofy names if you ask me, but what I can say, I called myself Magnificent Marty."

Marty didn't know much about Blackstone's current whereabouts, but he did tell us that from time to time Blackstone has had use of Marty's shop. He explained to us the old means of contacting a magician:

"They say in the old days if you need a witch or a warlock, you left a coin outside your house, on a fence post or windowsill, with the face side scratched with an x. After a day or two, the coin would disappear and soon after you'd be contacted by the wizard. Complete rubbish if you ask me, but Blackstone seems to use that trick. I don't know how he does it, but it's worked for me the few times I've needed him."

It seemed ridiculous (and we're guys who hunt for Bigfoot and write about ghosts for a living!) but we were desperate, so we tried. He carved an x into a quarter and left it outside our office. Sure enough, the next day, the coin was gone. Inside, on our desk, we found a black slip of paper with an address, a date,  and a time written on it in the same silver ink we had seen on the black envelopes.

We went to the location, which we're keeping secret for now, at the assigned time (11:45 at night). We knocked on the door and after a moment a mysterious figure opened it. For the first time, we were face to face with Malachai Blackstone.

Not quite Malachai Blackstone, but pretty close

He was taller than expected. Thin, but strong. He wore a black dress shirt and black pants, but honestly, he would have looked just as comfortable in a black hooded robe. There was an aura about him that was hard to explain. Icy was the best way to describe it. Or like that feeling in the air right before it snows. Except this wasn't going to be a shake of the snow globe kind of storm, this was going to be a blizzard that dumps over a foot of snow and knocks out power to half the state. There was an air of mystery about him, but a dangerous type.

He gestured for us to take a seat in a high-backed velvet chair. Two had been set up in the middle of the room, which was large and completely dark except for the small circle that illuminated the chairs. Where that light came from, we never knew; there were no visible light sources anywhere. He wouldn't allow us to record his voice, but we can tell you it was deep and yet soft at the same time. His voice was like a cobra waiting to strike.

We asked him about the Black Tarot and he scoffed. He claimed no knowledge of them despite his initials appearing on the cards, though he did admit that "the tarrocchi are often a useful tool for the true adept." We asked him about the people who received the cards. Again he maintained he knew nothing of them. This wasn't getting us anywhere, so we asked him to tell us something about himself.

"I was a practitioner of the arts before I ever knew it. My parents, as you know, were some of the finest artists the world has ever known, but from a young age, I knew I was different. I could hear it. You don't understand, but it whispered to me. This world is too confined. There are tremendous and treacherous things beyond. If we could pierce the veil, lift the shroud that covers this world, we could see it all. I'm doing that. With my rituals, I am showing the world beyond. Az'azouzis."

When asked what he meant by that word,  he explained it meant, "the end is not the end." It was a phrase he had learned from his masters. 

"I'm changing this world," Malachai Blackstone told us. "I am opening the forgotten doorways. I'm bring it through. You don't understand, but you will. I will remake this world into the infinite and we will see plain what stares at us from beyond."

Readers, we have to warn you, what we're about to describe is 100% impossible. This blog is pretty comfortable with the unexplainable, the mysterious, and whatnot. What happened next does not fall into this category. It is something else entirely. After he spoke, Malachai Blackstone turned to water. His body rippled like a current on a river, and then he simply collapsed, as if a water balloon had suddenly been popped. One minute he was whole and solid and sitting across from us, the next his entire form turned to water and washed away. There was nothing left except a now wet chair where he had once sat.

We're still processing everything we saw and heard, but we do have one small addendum. We finally heard back from a linguistics professor who claimed to have some knowledge of the strange word that had been carved into the stone monolith in Crannog's Field and that Malachai Blackstone had said to us. When we told Professor Carter Derwent what Blackstone said Az'azouzis meant, he had this to say:

"He's lying. Or he's wrong. It's an ancient word, predates the Babylonians, but it most certainly does not mean, 'the end is not the end.' It roughly translates to, 'dark watcher from beyond the stars,' but it probably means something more like Satan or the Devil. It is the name given to the great adversary of mankind."

Az'azouzis, dark watcher from beyond the stars

Stay safe out there, Maine.