West Hobart Haunted House West Hobart is an inner-city suburb located in Tasmania, Australia. Over the years, dozens of allegations of supposed hauntings, ghost apparitions, and other paranormal activity have been made by tourists and residents of West Hobart. And it's honestly not too hard to see why, as West Hobart is a pretty old town with a generally creepy vibe. As is usually the case, most of these stories have either turned out to be fake, or the people making the allegations didn't have enough evidence to support their claims, which makes it almost entirely likely that they're hoaxes.
But as it turns out, at least one of these stories actually has some amount of truth to it. Back in the late 80s and mid-90s, rumors started spreading of a house in West Hobart that was apparently so haunted it drove its residents insane. At first, the rumors created a huge buzz all over town, with the locals doing everything possible to stay far away from the alleged haunted house. It wasn't until months later that the authorities got involved and finally got a clear picture of the situation. While it was true that the house's residents appeared to be going insane, it didn't have anything to do with paranormal activity, but with the fact that a detour vine had been growing through the trees directly above the home and dropping leaves into the family's rainwater tank.
For a long time, the family had been inadvertently consuming microdoses of the plant every single day, which made them slowly but surely start to lose their sanity as they sank further and further into delirium. In case you've never heard of it, Datura is a species of plant within the Nightshade family, also known as Jimsonweed, The Devil's Weed, or Devil's Trumpet, and you'll see why in a second. Even though the plant itself looks pretty harmless, it's known for having extremely powerful hallucinogenic properties, which is why it was used for centuries by Native American tribes in coming-of-age rituals and other important ceremonies.
The Aztecs also used the Tura as a painkiller in certain rituals, namely in ritual sacrifices, and it's also commonly used as an ingredient in the ritual of zombification in the Haitian voodoo religion, where it's referred to as the devil's cucumber. As you can probably tell by now, Datura isn't your typical Recreative Hallucinogen, and there's a reason why it's really only ever used in hardcore spiritual rituals and ceremonies, and sometimes by naive people who have no idea what they're getting themselves into. In low to medium doses, Datura causes extremely distressing, delirious experiences, and in higher doses it can lead to paralysis and even death. Nowadays, Datura is recognized by most tribes as a highly toxic and dangerous plant, and have understandably stopped using it.
Before we move on, I wanted to take a minute to talk about War Thunder, the sponsor of this video. As of recently, I've had a growing interest in history, specifically World War 1 and 2, so when War Thunder reached out, it was perfect. War Thunder is an immersive, large-scale, realistic multiplayer action game where you take control of ground vehicles, aircraft, and naval vessels at locations all around the world.
It's completely free to play, available on PC, PlayStation, and Xbox. One thing I really like about the game is its realism. Forget unrealistic features like health bars. In War Thunder, every hit on an enemy has a real effect.
Like, if you're accurate enough to hit a plane's fuel tank, it will ignite. And you can visualize all the damage you've done with the X-Ray mode. War Thunder includes all advanced military technology like guided missiles or even a nuclear strike that can flatten entire maps, making for a true modern war experience.
Plus, all vehicles in the game can be upgraded and improved with additional modules. Even visual changes like skins can be used to make your combat machine unique. The Seek and Destroy update is out now, which added new missiles with active radar homing, making aerial battles on modern aircraft even more engaging. And they added two new maps, Mysterious Valley and Bering Sea.
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As the story went, Cropsey was a serial kidnapper and killer who lost his son and resorted to stealing other people's children to deal with his grief. According to the legend, Cropsey also had a hook for a hand, scars, burns, and open wounds covering his entire face and body, and a generally horrifying appearance. Considering the mass areas of uninhabited woodlands, it's not all that unexpected that a tale like the legend of Cropsey would make it into the mainstream culture at some point. Unfortunately, this wasn't just a tall tale made up by Staten Island parents to keep their kids from venturing too far into the woods and getting lost.
Although the legend has some obviously made up elements such as the hooked hand and the horrifying scars and burns, at some point in the early 70s, In the early 70s, children in Staten Island really did start disappearing. That's when the line between legend and reality started to blur, and the story of the real Cropsey immediately replaced the urban legend. This is the real story.
Andre Rand was a man from Manhattan who was born in 1944 and moved to Staten Island in the late 60s. After working for two years at the infamously brutal Willowbrook State School for Children with Disabilities, Rand was arrested in 1969 and served over a year in prison for the attempted attack of a nine-year-old girl. As soon as he was released 16 months later, reports started cropping up of more little girls disappearing all over Staten Island, including five-year-old Alice Pereira, who was playing in her building's lobby when she suddenly disappeared without a trace. Over the next decade, Rand was the prime suspect in the disappearances and deaths of several other young girls in the area. But it wasn't until 1983 when he picked up 11 kids from a local YMCA and brought them fast food before taking them to the airport that he was finally arrested and sentenced to 10 months in prison again.
Throughout the 70s and 80s, dozens of young kids disappeared in Staten Island, and although Rand was often the last person to be seen with them, there was ultimately never enough evidence to put him away for a long time. For many years, he would often be seen hanging around young kids, going on walks with them, and even taking them to lunch and dinner with him at local restaurants. After years of letting him walk the streets as a free man, police would finally have a breakthrough in the case in 1987 when they found undeniable evidence that Rand had been behind the disappearance and murder of Jennifer Schweiger, a 12-year-old girl with Down syndrome.
In 1988, he was sentenced to 25 years to life, and while he was behind bars, more and more evidence was found that tied him to several other disappearances in Staten Island. in the 70s and 80s. Unfortunately, he was only charged with one additional major crime in 2004, which was the kidnapping of Holly Ann Hughes, thanks to which he will spend the next 13 years behind bars until 2037. If he lives that long, he'll be 93 by the time he gets out. The Maine Hermit The Kennebec Valley is one of the most beautiful regions in Maine, with over 5,000 square miles of forests, rolling hills, and natural paradise surrounding the Kennebec River.
Many cabin owners of the North Pond area in the Kennebec Valley have described the area as the most peaceful place on earth. But it hasn't always been that way. All throughout the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s, there were reports of over 1,000 break-ins in the North Pond cabins. For decades, nobody knew who was responsible for the thefts, especially since they were always carried out when there was no one home.
As the cabin owners soon noticed, the break-ins seemed to follow a pattern, always peaking in the days before Memorial Day and after Labor Day. As for the stolen items themselves, they ranged from food, to cooking utensils, to books, to propane tanks, to toiletries of all kinds. In the absence of a concrete suspect, the locals eventually named the thief the North Pond Hermit, even though by this point, there was nothing to suggest the break-ins were being carried out by a single person.
Although it wasn't uncommon for groups of homeowners to venture out into the woods to try to find the North Pond Hermit, they never found a trace, which only added to the legend's mystery. One afternoon in 2002, 100 people attended a North Pond homeowners meeting, and when someone asked how many of them had suffered break-ins, almost all of them raised their hands. As you can probably guess, the North Pond Hermit quickly turned into somewhat of a boogeyman, with the legend frequently being shared over campfires in the area.
For years, nobody thought that the person or people behind the break-ins would ever be found. But in April 2013, a man named Christopher Thomas Knight was arrested in the middle of the woods in the North Pond area by an officer who had made it his sole mission to bring the thief to justice. As soon as he was brought to the police station, the cops asked him why he wasn't answering any of their questions.
At first, it seemed as though he was having trouble speaking, but eventually he responded that he was ashamed of himself. As it was later revealed, Christopher had been living out in the middle of the woods by himself in an unheated nylon tent, surviving only on the things he stole from nearby North Pond cabins. Shockingly, he had survived winter temperatures of 20 degrees below zero for years and hadn't been to a doctor or taken any medicine for three decades. What's most incredible about the hermit's story is that for the entire time he lived in the woods, he didn't have a single conversation with another human being, except for one time when he ran into a hiker and only said hi.
Understandably, Chris had lost interest in keeping track of time, so when he was asked how long he had been in the woods by himself, he replied, a since the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown, which took place in 1986. As investigators later found out, he was 20 years old when he decided to become a her-just a couple of years after high school, although he never gave the authorities a real reason why he decided to disappear. In all his years of isolation, he went to extreme lengths to preserve his privacy. He never lit fires, only moved at night, and hadn't had any kind of communication with the rest of society for more than half of his life. He'd never driven a car, sent an email, or even known what the internet was until his arrest.
Interestingly, as the cops dug deeper and deeper into his story, they realized that his only real possessions were his glasses, which he had been wearing for 30 years and could even be seen in his Lawrence High School yearbook picture from 1984. Everything else down to his underwear and jacket had been stolen. After the investigation, Knight was sentenced to seven months in prison, after which he once again disappeared. According to the cops, he's now living a quiet, peaceful life in rural Maine.
Purple Aki Throughout the late 1980s and 90s, rumors of a massive bodybuilder called Purple Aki began to surface in the northwest of England. According to the allegations, Purple Aki would supposedly walk the streets of Liverpool hunting down young, muscular men and rugby players, and oddly ask them if he would let them feel their muscles. If they complied, he would allegedly squeeze their muscles for much longer than was considered socially acceptable, and would then ask them to perform squats so he could feel their quad muscles. Some teenagers reported that Purple Aki even went as far as to ask them to pose for him, and often offered exercise and nutrition advice for those who gave him the time.
Because the rumors were so incredibly ridiculous, nobody really took them too seriously at first, and eventually the story of Purple Aki turned into an urban legend, with crazy details being gradually added to the tale. Including one where Purple Aki would allegedly swallow teenagers whole if they let him feel their muscles. But as time went on, it became clear that Purple Aki wasn't just a made-up character created by bored teenagers looking to get some laugh from their friends, but a real person named the Kenwal Aerobic. Aki was often seen traveling across England by train carrying a plastic bag and asking young men if he could feel their muscles. Naturally, this made a lot of people uncomfortable, and it wasn't uncommon for Aki's face to be featured in local newspapers after several encounters with the law.
Most of the accusations against him were related to his creepy behavior around teenage boys, but around 1986, the story of Purple Aki took a really dark turn. Early that year, 16-year-old Gary Keller was walking home from school when he ran into Purple Aki, who immediately asked to feel his muscles. Freaked out by the weird request, Gary said no and ran away.
Later that same year, Aki followed Gary to a local outdoor swimming pool, and when the teenager noticed, he ran to New Brighton train station and jumped onto the railroad tracks to get away from Aki. Sadly, the story ended in tragedy, as Gary was accidentally electrocuted by one of the rails. Considering the whole thing happened because Gary was being chased, Purple Aki was convicted of involuntary manslaughter, charged with harassing 14 different teenage boys, and sentenced to two and a half years in prison.
In 1988, Aki filed an appeal and complained that the only reason he had been convicted was because he was black. Ultimately, the judges agreed there wasn't enough evidence to prove Aki had been directly responsible for Gary's death, and believe it or not, he was freed and awarded £35,000 in compensation. Between 1988 and 2006, Aki went in and out of jail for failing to resist his compulsion to touch, feel, and measure other people's muscles. and in 2003 he was arrested for an additional 15 charges of harassment and witness intimidation, for which he was sentenced to 6 years in prison. Just like any other predator, he was also forbidden from waiting outside schools in the area.
A few months later, he was jailed for 15 months for getting up to his same antics. Upon his release, he was once again arrested a few weeks later in 2010, and then again in 2015. After his latest release, he reportedly moved to Leeds, where rumors started cropping off that he had passed away during the pandemic. However, those rumors were put to rest when videos started surfacing in 2023 of Aki walking the streets of Leeds asking random dudes to, you guessed it, feel their muscles. As of today, Purple Aki is alive and well, and will probably continue in his same behavior with or without permission for many years to come. Leiloyen.
According to a Swiss urban legend, people have allegedly been running into a mysterious human-like figure in the Fribourg Forest in the western part of the country near the town of Mals since the early 2000s. Based on the dozens of allegations that surfaced over the years, the figure has been described as being around 6 feet tall and always wearing a vintage-looking gas mask covering his entire face, a boiler suit, and a cloak. Most people who supposedly ran into the figure reported he or she was completely harmless, but this didn't make the encounters any less terrifying, and it wasn't uncommon for people to report the figure to the police when their children reported feeling scared.
As expected, it didn't take local residents long to start adding their own crazy twist to the story, with some claiming that the creature was the ghost of a mentally unstable soldier, while other popular theories assured it was an alien. For a while, the story was classified as an urban legend, and the mysterious humanoid was given the name Leidloyne. also known as the Ghost or the Hermit of Mauls.
Throughout the early 2000s, Le Loyen was mostly the subject of local oral legend because there was no real evidence to support its existence. But in 2013, the story gained international attention when the Swiss-slash-French newspaper Le Matin published the first ever photograph of Le Loyen which was sent in by a hiker. After the photograph was published, there was no turning back as people from all over the country started to make trips to the woods outside malls for a chance to catch a glimpse of Le Loyen. The last known sighting of Le Loyen took place in June 2013 when a local woman named Marianne Desclues saw the figure clutching a bunch of flowers as she was walking outside. Later that year, Le Loyen's clothes were found in the middle of the woods along with a wooden note titled, The Death Certificate and Will of the Ghost de Mose.
In the letter, Le Loyen accused the media of having murdered a harmless being by revealing its existence and turning him into a circus freak. The letter also mentioned that due to the unwanted attention, Leigh-Loyan had to abandon its daily walks, which were referred to as happiness therapy in the letter. After the cryptic note was published in the newspaper, many people concluded that Leigh-Loyan had taken its own life, although this has never been confirmed.
As of 2024, nobody has ever seen Leigh-Loyan's true face, and many people have theorized that the figure was possibly a woman with a facial disfiguration who didn't want people to see her, which is supposedly why she wore the gas mask. But this line of reasoning will probably remain unconfirmed forever. The Bunny Man In the early 70s, dozens of locals started reporting that a man dressed up as a bunny had started haunting the residential neighborhoods around D.C., Maryland, and Northern Virginia. Although dressing up as a bunny in itself seems pretty harmless, what made the encounters a little scarier was that the guy would allegedly threaten children on the street with an axe and frequently vandalize people's property for no apparent reason.
Even though sightings of the so-called bunny man were pretty rare, they seemed to follow a pattern, as the man usually appeared in secluded locations where there weren't a lot of witnesses. The story itself has a lot of elements of a typical urban legend and is kind of hard to believe, but through my research, I found that it's all loosely based on a true story. In 1970, a couple was parked in a driveway close to a bridge on Colchester Road in Fairfax County, when suddenly a random guy appeared out of nowhere, yelled at them for allegedly trespassing, and threw a hatchet at their car.
Terrified, the couple left the area immediately before they had a chance to get a good look at the guy. As they reported the incident to the police, they mentioned the guy had been dressed in light-colored clothing and may or may not have been wearing something white on his head. Although the couple never mentioned anything about a bunny in their statement, as soon as the story hit the news, people started claiming that the hatchet thrower had been wearing bunny ears.
Pretty soon, rumors of a man in a bunny suit threatening kids in the woods with a hatchet started surfacing all over the DMV area. And as the years went by, the stories got wilder and harder to believe. Over time, the legend of the Bunnyman has become pretty mainstream, with the bridge on Colchester Road even being renamed as Bunnyman Bridge. As of the uploading of this video, the legend has now been standardized and goes something like this. In 1904, there was allegedly an asylum close to the bridge on Colchester Road.
As soon as it was built, a bunch of Fairfax County residents started complaining about the idea of having an asylum full of mental patients so close to their homes, so the authorities supposedly put all the patients in a bus and transferred them to a nearby prison. But on the way to the prison, the bus crashed and all the patients escaped. As the story goes, a few hours later the cops had successfully located and brought back all the patients, except for one guy by the name of Douglas Griffin. This is where the legend gets a little weird.
Allegedly, the fugitive patient hid in the woods from the authorities for weeks. As the days went by and the cops did everything to find him, rabbit corpses started to appear in the middle of the woods, which led everyone to believe Douglas was eating bunnies to stay alive. Then, one Halloween night, a group of kids were hanging out near the bridge on Colchester Road, when they suddenly saw a blue orb flashing in midair.
A second later, they were all strung up like bunnies, hanging from the bridge. As the legend goes, if you go to Bunnyman Bridge on Halloween night at midnight, the same thing will happen to you. Obviously, none of this is true, but it just goes to show how much of an impact the story of the Bunnyman has had on mainstream Virginia, D.C., and Maryland culture. Nowadays, there's even Bunnyman t-shirts, a Bunnyman horror movie franchise, Bunnyman beer, and everything in between.
Needless to say, the area surrounding the railroad over... Pass near Fairfax Station is now a major attraction for both tourists and locals alike, and will probably remain that way for many years.