Teenage Girl's 1912 Confession to 35 Axe Murders Anchors Podcast Tour of Haunted America

WEST CROWLEY, LA. — The latest episode of the Weird Darkness podcast, hosted by Darren Marlar, opens in West Crowley, Louisiana, in January 1911, where according to the show notes the Byers family was found axed to death in their beds. Similar family killings, the episode says, followed along the railroad to Lafayette, Lake Charles and San Antonio, Texas.

Clementine Barnabet, a Black teenager from Lafayette, testified that her father, Raymond, killed the Andrus family, the notes state. The murders continued while he sat in jail. After a verse signed 'Human Five' appeared on a wall in Lake Charles, newspapers recast the case as a racially charged tale of Voodoo and a so-called Church of Sacrifice. Clementine confessed to 35 murders in 1912 and was sentenced to life in the Louisiana State Penitentiary.

The remaining stories range widely. A driver on Interstate 10 reports a young woman who vanished whenever he looked at her. Anonymous letters in Circleville, Ohio, exposed local secrets from 1976, and a booby-trapped sign in 1983 sent the bus driver's brother-in-law, Paul Freshour, to prison, though the letters reportedly kept coming. California's Hecker Pass offers a fanged woman in a white dress, and Venice's Poveglia Island offers plague ashes and a tortured-patient legend.

The episode also supplies its own skepticism. No Texas newspaper ever reported the school-bus crash said to haunt the San Antonio railroad tracks, the notes say, and the crossing slopes downhill, so gravity may do the pushing. Author Troy Taylor, they add, found no record that the principals of Pittsburgh's 'most haunted house' on Ridge Avenue ever existed. The real house survived a 1927 gas explosion with broken windows and was later torn down for a highway interchange.