I work on the Siddham Epigraphic Database, which is at the moment basically a repository of Sanskrit inscriptions from India, but the plan is that it will in the future include non-Sanskrit inscriptions and some also from outside India, so broadly from the geographical region covered by our project, which is south-southeast and central Asia, possibly in the distant future who knows it might expand to other areas. Essentially most of the work I do is just digitizing pre-published inscriptions, so there's very little brand new research involved and for that reason perhaps my sort of data management might seem to be very simple. What do I do? I take a printed edition of an inscription, I encode it in an appropriate way, it becomes a digital edition which is then disseminated on the one hand through a dedicated website Siddham.uk, which is conceived as a dynamic thing, which is also a tool, a research tool, and it's also disseminated on Zenodo, which I mainly see as an archive, as a static archive for my work. So the backbone is the text. A text when converted into a digital edition looks like this, it uses the Epidoc format which has been mentioned yesterday and which I'm not going into, it's a subset of TEI XML specifically geared for working with inscriptions. Now of course things are not as simple as they look at first, so in case we wish it were that simple, no it is not. An inscription is of course not just a text, even though I'm basically a philologist, I must admit that an inscription is a lot more than a text and therefore it comes with a lot of baggage, a lot of metadata that we need to treat, that we need to work with. So the way this talk is going to be set up is first I'm going to try and be very brief but I have to explain what sort of data I work with and how they fit together. I've done previous talks on that and there are some people here who've heard a previous talk of mine in Vienna about that and I really try to summarise that bit very quickly and concentrate this time on how those data are managed right now, so within the project and within my own workflow what things look like. But I have to go into a little bit of an explanation of the data anyway first. So we've got metadata, they include data about the object bearing the inscription, such as how big it is, where it was found, what museum it is kept in. There are also physical data about the inscription, such as what size the inscribed area is, what its characters look like. We've got some internal metadata about the inscription, such as what date it was composed at, if it has a date, or if it can be estimated. And in addition we've also got bibliographic data where the inscription was first reported, who has edited it and where it was published, and major articles and books discussing the inscription or its text or some kind of implication of it. We're also working with images, although this has not been a high priority, we haven't been actively trying to amass high quality images, but I've been trying to at least keep track of the images I have worked with while re-editing texts, while re-editing the inscription texts. I had to look at facsimiles and photographs and I've been trying to archive those. And in addition to these, there are some, to my mind, very easily conceivable, very easily realizable editions that we can make to these. There have been some steps made toward adding translations, pre-published translations, but new translations could just as easily be created if somebody's willing to do the work and re-translate the inscriptions. I'll do some of them myself and anybody is welcome to do others. Commentaries can also be added to the inscriptions. There's a lot of gray data, there's a lot of half-baked commentary that I've been writing as notes for myself while re-editing the inscriptions. They are not ready for the public, but they are preserved and I'm hoping to be able to convert them to a sort of semi-readable, more than half-baked commentary at a later time, or we could add geolocation information. So how do the metadata and the text fit together? First of all, there is a way to include the metadata in the XML itself, and perhaps that should be sufficient. Epidoc has been designed with that in mind. A part of the file called the TEI header can include metadata, but the main problem I see with that is that it's not really object-oriented. It's very much text-oriented and in particular, there are cases, not many admittedly, but they're definitely there, where for example you've got an object which has several different inscriptions from different periods of history, or you might have an object that consists of multiple parts, either because it has been fragmented, broken into several parts, all or some of which are still extant, or because it was conceived as a composite object to begin with, for example, a set of copper plates, copper plate land grants. And to be able to represent these sort of complex relationships, several inscriptions on one object, one inscription on several objects, it's probably easier, at least from our side of view, to not just use Epidoc as the primer medium, but instead to conceive of our data in a way that there are several databases, basically an object database, an inscription database, and the bibliographic database, or bibliographic database table, plus bits of edition, edition snippets, XML snippets, that just contain the text edition, and the website, the Sydom website can work from a combination of these, when you visit sydom.uk, or when you visit sydom.uk a couple of weeks or months from now, when it works better than it does right now, it's coming, I'm told. So at that time, what you see in your browser is what the website engine has put together from a bit of an XML plus the databases, and eventually we hope it will also be able to export Epidoc so that the exported Epidoc contains all the metadata for that particular inscription, but that will be generated on the fly, I'll come back to that in, I don't know, 10 minutes or so. So anyway, very quickly, we might have an object database. So here is one inscribed object, the big pillar on the right, and there are metadata recorded for, can you, you don't actually need to be able to read the small print, but is it legible? Okay, I'm glad to hear. So that sort of data are recorded about an object. Similarly, we have an inscription here, that's what's written on the pillar you've just seen. And we've got metadata recorded for it. So that's inscription metadata. And then we go on to the bibliography, which is meant to be recorded as a database record, but in a way that is compliant with a structured TI bibliography. So that again is something we don't have yet. But what I hope we will be able to achieve is that the website will be able to actually export a full bibliography, perhaps even a partial bibliography in TI format. You know, TI bibliography lets you use analytic and monographic levels with different bits of information recorded for each. And so what we have right now is we have references to the bibliography in various parts of the database. There is one, for example, to what I classify as a book, although it's in a bit of a shady area. And there's a corresponding entry in the bibliography table at the monographic level. There's another bibliographic reference over here, which is to a journal article. There's a bibliography table entry for that. And even within that bibliographic entry, there's a reference to the journal, which will again be something on the monographic level from a TI bibliography perspective. And there's a separate entry for that. Similarly, there are analytic entries for book chapters and monographic entries for books, which I'm not showing here. And of course, there are the images, which on the one hand need archiving and perhaps some retouching enhancement. And on the other hand, I need to record basic metadata about the images. So for example, for the pillar and inscription that you have seen, I've got a couple of images, basic metadata have been recorded for it. And we can show all of those images on sedum.uk. So, yes, basically to show you in an image what I have set so far, we've got an object database, we've got an inscription database, each involves each each incorporates metadata about the object side and the inscription side. The inscription database sort of draws in the XML snippet, which contains the addition. And potentially it could draw in also a similar XML snippet with the translation and with the commentary. Objects can consist of multiple parts. So there may be component objects, but there's always a sort of hypothetical or virtual superordinate object and it's only the superordinate object that is linked to an inscription. So if an object consists of parts, then it's always the master object, the parent object that is linked to an inscription. I don't want to go into any more detail than that, except to quickly mention that in this way, more complex relationships can also be represented in a fairly simple way, which does not, of course, map to all the intricacies of reality, but I believe this level of complexity is sort of a good midline for our purposes. So to go back to my previous outline of data management, that was the simple view. And well, that is what actually happens. It's a bit tangled and I hope it can be simplified a little. But let's look at a few parts of this diagram. So first of all, to get to zooming on the sources, I'll even try to magnify them, which I think I can do here. Yes, I can. That's, that's a simple bit. People have talked about similar things before. Basically, I've got the printed edition to start out with, but to some extent, the printed edition is supplemented by field work research, which I might do, or someone from the project might do, or at a later time, someone from outside the project may do and contribute. Images and metadata are all sourced from the printed publications, but may also be supplemented or augmented through fieldwork. And both, or three of the images, the edition and the metadata go their own separate ways. What ways are those? So to close in on the main thing we are doing or I am doing transformation and what we produce vis-à-vis digital data. Yeah, okay, nice. Almost nice. Over here. Basically, not much to do with images at this stage, a bit of post-processing and recording the image metadata, as I have shown before. For the edition, that's quite a lot of work. What we don't need to go into the details, I need to add all the markup for the Epidoc XML to produce this Epidoc edition snippet, which contains just the, what you call the edition division in the Epidoc file, but not the TEI header. Metadata need to be recorded in a structured way. We now have the table to do that, so it's pretty straightforward to record the metadata. Now, once they've got the snippet and we've got the structured metadata, that's sort of fuel for the Sydom site to work with, but it's not really what we want to archive on Zenodo. When we're archiving things on Zenodo, we want to put up things that are more compatible and more transparent. The best way to go about that is to produce those full Epidoc edition files that I mentioned at the beginning, which actually contain all the metadata for the inscription in the TEI header. This, of course, results in some level of redundancy. If there's an object, let's say the Junaga rock, which has an inscription by Ashoka and another inscription by a Vassal or a Furitorial Skanda Gupta, then the metadata for that rock will be included in the Epidoc editions for both of those inscriptions, where so far, since we're working on the Gupta period, we don't have the Ashoka inscription digitized, but we do have the Skanda Gupta inscription digitized. In future, somebody will hopefully add the Ashoka inscription, and at that time, when somebody gets the Epidoc files, there will be two Epidoc files containing data about the rock. We'll have to live with that. Anyway, we need to incorporate those metadata in the XML file. Now, at the moment, Get and Reeze does that sitting at the back here. He's been kind enough to write a script which can extract the metadata from my tables and put them into the XML files, merging them with the XML snippets. Yeah, I think that's about Carbazid. I haven't talked in detail about how we publish and archive the images and the bibliography, because that's sort of still in the works, basically. So, how does this metadata integration thing work? On the left-hand side, you can see the basic structure of an Epidoc edition. It has a TEM header, where our written stuff goes here, and then it has a body part, and the body part contains different kinds of divisions, and so the edition division can contain the pre-made XML snippet for the text edition. The translation division can very easily ingest a translation XML snippet if somebody creates one. We've got a number of translations typed up by subcontractors, but we are not yet in XML, but since we're not going to be adding a lot of markup to these, and a very basic markup, like paragraph structure, these can be created in a matter of hours for all the translations we have once we have the means to incorporate that in the Epidoc edition. And similarly, we can do that for a commentary and for a property bibliographic reference list to a master bibliographic partner. So, what I showed you before as Epidoc is actually the edition snippet that goes in the edition division, and similarly metadata from the table go in the Epidoc header. So, for example, in the Epidoc header, there's a place for a title, and the title of an inscription from the metadata table goes in there. Or the Epidoc header has a place for an inscription identifier, an ID number, and our internal ID number goes in there. I should probably talk a little more about the ID numbers, which are sort of key to keeping track of all the work we do. But the essence is that it's just an arbitrary number. It could be any sort of number, come up with IN for inscription numbers and OB for object numbers and five digits in addition to that. And that's a stable identifier for all the inscriptions and all the objects in our database. And every file that is in addition to the metadata tables, such as XML files with the inscription additions, and in future, possibly XML files with translations or XML files with commentaries, will be identified using that number. That's the essence. At the very beginning, I thought for some time, just as Mark talked about his dilemma yesterday about how to put the Pew inscriptions in sequence, would there be any point in like, okay, let's start all the Gupta Dynasty inscriptions by IM005? There isn't really a point, because on the one hand, sometimes the qualifications are not quite clear. How do you know if an inscription is Gupta Dynasty? Okay, let's suppose it's by a Gupta vassal, but maybe he was also a Vakartaka vassal, or who knows? Or maybe just don't know who's vassal he was. And on the other hand, you can't account for new discoveries. So okay, you can always leave a number of empty slots. But there's just no point. It's just a number. It doesn't need to be meaningful. The inscription identifying number doesn't need to tell you anything about the inscription, or the object number doesn't need to tell you anything about the object. The metadata do that. And the ID is just an ID. Okay. And an object can also go in there. It doesn't matter. So how is the work shared? Well, most of it I do myself. As I mentioned, get in, thankfully, does the metadata integration. What complicates the picture a little bit is that we now have subcontractors who take up some of the partial tasks, such as encoding published editions in XML, recording metadata in our structured tables, or typing up translations. And we've also got some contributions from project members and in future, hopefully from people outside, who will either like post corrections to metadata, or submit photographs, or rubbings, or whatever images to us. All these data are mainly stored on Google Drive. And for all kinds of data, there is one master version for which only I have edit privileges, and everybody else can only view them. And everyone else has view access to the whole of the dataset. But basically, when, for example, a subcontractor uploads like an XML, they have transcribed, or a metadata partial table that they have filled out, then that comes up to the Google Drive. It comes down to my computer. And it's I who merged that new input while verifying it. I merge it with the master set. So the master set never gets changed, never gets overruled. It only gets gradually expanded. I mean, never gets changed or overruled by multiple people at the same time. I think this Google Drive thing is good for our purposes at the moment. It's safe enough just in my own household. It syncs daily to three separate hard drives, plus the copy in the cloud. And I do hope, though I'm not certain that some of the other project members, including some of the PIs, actually sync it down to their own local hard drive sometimes, and don't just keep it in the cloud. But even if it's just in the cloud, plus on my hard drives, that's probably safe enough. And every now and then, the unfinished or work in progress files are also archived on Zenodo. Now, a little more about what I hope will simplify this workflow in the not so distant future. Work is going on on this. As I said, the Sydom.uk website is a bit rudimentary at the moment, and there are bits of it that are broken, but it's being being improved. And one of the main things we're hoping to have in the near future is working CMS, a content management system. And the content management system will basically simplify our workflow in two ways. One of those ways will be, thank you, one of those ways will be that we can get rid of the Excel file and the Word doc and whatever that I have on my Google Drive. And the master version will be simply the version that is on Sydom.uk. Either I or a subcontractor, anyone who wants to add something or correct something, can directly correct metadata or inscription bits into the Sydom site through the website interface. And the same content management system will, I hope, take care of what get-in manually or semi-automatically does now and create those exportable full Epidock files that contain metadata in the headers, which can then be either downloaded by end users or can be at regular intervals archived into Zenodo. That's all I was going to speak about. Thank you. Questions? Please. Maybe I missed this, but you mentioned Junar. So for example, for Junar, we have Harry Fault's book, which contains a great deal of detail about the physical site, contains GPS coordinates and not an edition of the inscription, but a lot of material about the surface and so on. It seems like when you have that kind of information, it would be, what I heard you say is we could maybe in the future, whatever, but that information is already available and known to be reliable. Yeah, yeah. Okay. For most inscriptions and most objects, there's a lot of known and reliable information out there. There are two things we can do. One is to duplicate at least part of that inscription in the website, part of that information on the website. And the other is, of course, to just include bibliographic reference. So obviously, I mean, there are entire books dedicated to some of the objects or some of the sites, and we're not going to transcribe all the texts of those books. I mean, even if there were no copyright restrictions on that, manpower restrictions would prevent us from doing that. So what we want to do is basically to become on the one hand an index with a bibliography. That's where you go for more information. And on the other hand, the website is also a tool for working with the inscription. You can click and display the inscription as a diplomatic edition. You can click and display it as an amended editorial version and hopefully you will be able to search in the inscription texts or across multiple inscription texts with various restriction criteria. So that's what we want to do. Obviously, we're not going to be able to ingest every single bit of information and put it out there on the web. Does that answer your question? Yeah, no. I mean, it's not a kind of question where there is an answer to it. It's a really ongoing question. How much, in any kind of process, I guess, how much you want to send your users to something else for everything, right? And how much you want to, as you said, ingest, sort of. And I wonder, I mean, obviously, ideally, all the inscriptions get re-edited, obviously. But there's a lot of material, for example, for the older publications, which is basically public domain, which could be actually, you could actually upload the publications into the system itself. You could. Indian Antiquary, for example, I believe. You could upload the publication itself. But I'm not sure it's worth the while. I mean, what we're trying to create here is something that's machine readable. Now, okay, somebody has scanned Indian Antiquary. It's out there on DLI, or DLI is no longer extant, but it's there on archive.org, most of it. And people can hopefully find it for themselves. But let's say a portal outside Siddham will not be able to read the scanned Indian Antiquary that I've uploaded to Siddham. So, yes, it would be nice. It would simplify some other people's work a little, if we at least, for example, linked to Indian Antiquary on archive.org. But that's not the main thing we're interested in. It's something that, I mean, if this whole thing takes off and it becomes really a sort of crowdsourceable venture, like the Chinese text, for example, then I hope that users and outside contributors in future will add links of that sort. Okay, this Indian Antiquary is actually, that's the archive.org link where you can download it from. It's not priority right now. Yeah, that would be nice. Are there any aspects to this design of this, or what you're doing here, which would, because you looked at the archive that you're kind of using here is relatively small and graphically compared to later periods and other regions in India. And there you're faced with other issues with, for example, where large numbers of inscriptions are unpublished or only available in this step, which is at the ASI and so do you think this could be expandable into those? I certainly hope so. I can't really predict the future. The way I feel about this is we're at the start of something really big. It's like the little rocks that begin to slide from mountain top to become an avalanche. And some of those little rocks will not be part of the avalanche. And some of those little rocks will just stop on the way down. But I'm hoping to be one of those bigger rocks that will actually generate the avalanche. I mean, all of this kind of work will be a lot easier 10 years from now. Several times now in these, during this conference, have been reminded of Douglas Adams, whose, I forget the name of that hero, but he, in his youth, he spent, I don't know, three days trying to make the computer play three blind mice. And when asked was that, wasn't that very futile? He said, well, no, because it taught me a lot about working with computers. So, I mean, right now what we're trying to do is pave the way to make this kind of work simpler. And as it gathers momentum, I think maybe five years from now, either for me or for someone else, adding 10 inscriptions, for example, to a similar database, will take as much time as it takes for me now to add one inscription. And in 10 years time, maybe somebody will be able to add 10,000 inscriptions in as much time as it takes for me to add one now. But first, we have to do the groundwork. And that's what we're doing now.


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You can find all of that and more at WeirdDarkness.com.  Regular citizens may not expect these concealed offenses to occur in the same places that families take their children during summer holidays. But authorities have identified dump sites of bodies all across the United States. The unknown victims may never be found and these sites contain unsolved mysteries. While the New Jersey Pine Barrens are often linked with occult rituals and KKK meetings, the New York Central Pine Barrens is known as a spot for perps to bury evidence. The Central Pine Barrens are supposed to be protected grounds, a breath of fresh air in heavily populated Long Island, New York. But in recent years, investigators have uncovered a number of bodies there. Between 2000 and 2003, four victims were found in the forest, two of which were dismembered and had their heads removed. As many as 11 bodies have been found in the forest overall. The deaths are thought to be the work of the Butcher of Manorville. In 2007, these unsolved cases were featured in an America's Most Wanted episode. Although the temperature at Lake Tahoe may reach around 65 to 70 degrees in the late summer, making it an ideal place for a family vacation, the depth of the lake, which reaches an average of 1,000 feet, remains a cool 39 degrees. Investigators surmise this makes it a prime place to dispose of bodies. The lake is only a couple of degrees shy of the temperature that morgues use to avert decomposition. A body that is not decomposed cannot float to the surface, and it is believed that Lake Tahoe became a dumping ground for mafia members in the 1950s. To this day, rumors abound about the number of bodies at the bottom of Lake Tahoe, since most victims never resurface. The Everglades is more than just an expansive National Park and Wildlife Sanctuary. This Florida Haven is also a notorious dump site, as there are an abundance of alligators here. In 2016, two alligators were found eating a body which authorities presumed had been abandoned at the location. This was not the first time a body popped up in the swampy area. Before the showtime drama Dexter informed viewers about hiding a body in South Florida, serial killer and sugar plantation owner Edgar Watson terrorized the area in the early 1900s. Watson built a cabin on the river in 1880. He allegedly ended the lives of several laborers every year when the harvest ended to avoid paying them. Leakin Park is one of the largest parks in Baltimore, Maryland. While some people may enjoy the hiking trails or the gorgeous architecture of the Orianda Mansion, others use the park to commit and conceal an array of nefarious offenses. In upwards of 70 bodies have been found in Leakin Park since 1946. Residents are reportedly now terrified to wander the grounds alone. Though Baltimore has a notorious gang problem, so notorious that it inspired the hit TV show The Wire, not everybody recovered from Leakin Park is related to the mob. Known victims include a slain mother as well as scorned lovers. In an effort to clean up the park and deter wrongdoing, the city started closing the most dangerous and secluded areas in 2011. Officials also created bike trails, hoping foot traffic would help diminish unsavory activity. The number of bodies found in Leakin Park has since declined, but the reputation remains. The Texas killing fields are so notorious that they actually inspired a film of the same name. The fields are located on a 25-mile patch of land near I-45 between Houston and Galveston, Texas. Unknown predators have abandoned dozens of bodies in this area. The fields is desolate and navigable only by a winding path of dirt roads. Since 1971, when 13-year-old Collette Wilson was found dead five months after disappearing on her way home from school, 30 bodies have been recovered. Four of those bodies were found just a mile off of I-45. While most of the cases remain unsolved, there has been at least one conviction related to a discovery in the Texas killing fields. In 2012, a suspect, Kevin Edison Smith, was apprehended on unrelated charges. A DNA test revealed that he was a match for samples taken from the dress and underwear of Crystal Jean Baker, a 13-year-old girl whose body was found in 1986 in the fields. Smith was given life without parole, but not much is known about the other 29 bodies that were discovered within the fields. The Mojave Desert is somewhat of a horror movie trope. As evidenced in The Hangover and Casino, bodies left here may disappear forever. The Mojave Desert is expansive and desolate, stretching through four western states. In the desert area between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, the temperature reaches upwards of 135 degrees Fahrenheit, a conducive temperature for decomposition. Unlike the Texas killing fields, there have been a few convictions related to the illicit Mojave burials where investigators have recovered over 100 bodies. Among the arrests include William Bradford and William Floyd Zemastel. In 1987, L.A. County convicted Bradford, a photographer for the deaths of 21-year-old Sherri Miller and 15-year-old Tracy Campbell. In 1978, the bodies of teen siblings Jacqueline and Malcolm Bradshaw were found in the desert. 26 years later, San Bernardino County convicted Zemastel of the Canoga Park teen's deaths. Gilgo Beach is a scenic stretch of land in Long Island, New York. It is also home to a notorious serial offender who dumped between 10 and 17 bodies off Ocean Parkway, a few hops from the sandy shore. Cops have been unable to find the perp, who has been claiming lives now for over 20 years. As of 2015, investigators have uncovered 17 victims here, with deaths spanning back to the early 90s. Three of these victims were Craigslist call girls who went missing between 2007 and 2010. All three were strangled, thrown into a burlap sack and dumped near Gilgo. Authorities have speculated a connection between the Long Island serial killer, the Craigslist Ripper, and the Gilgo Beach Killer. Pelham Bay Park is one of the largest parks in New York City. Despite its dense population, this spot has been the site of numerous abandoned bodies since the late 1980s. According to the New York Times, at least 65 bodies were found in Pelham Bay Park between 1986 and 1995. Investigators connect the spot to a wealth of offenders, including gangs, drug dealers, and the mob. Those familiar with popular TV series, such as Law and Order SVU, know that bodies turn up in the East River. Bodies left during the winter can take months for investigators to recover. The East River's frigid temperatures ensure that remains don't surface until April, when the temperature hikes and decomposed bodies are able to float. In 2010, the NYPD's Harbor Unit uncovered 26 bodies during April, May, and June alone. Law enforcement has linked some of these to the mob, and in 2016, a body washed up on Brooklyn's shore with actual cement shoes as a result of New York gang-related disputes. The Pocono Mountains is known as a peaceful vacation retreat, but the area has been home to suspicious deaths as well. The winding mountain highways lead to areas so secluded that some of the bodies deposited there may never be located.  It was the first of eight bags found containing severed body parts. The following year, a tree cutting crew found more human remains in Mount Pocono. In 2011, a headless torso wrapped in a plastic bag was uncovered, marking the third dismembered body discovered in a decade. Washington State's Green River is a gorgeous escape from city life. It can also be the resting place for over 50 victims. Gary Ridgeway, better known as the Green River Killer, was captured in 2001. Over the course of approximately two decades, he ended the lives of at least 49 women. Five were found in the Green River. In 2015, two bodies were uncovered in this idealic Washington State expanse. In May, a female victim was found in a suitcase. Shortly after in July, another victim was found in a duffel bag. Authorities did not connect the two deaths. Elmer McCurdy was an everyday outlaw who didn't become infamous until long after his passing. In 1911, McCurdy lost his life to police after robbing a train of $46 and two jugs of whiskey. At the mortuary home, no one claimed McCurdy, and the undertaker decided to preserve his body with arsenic and charge visitors to see it. This display went on for a few years until one day a man arrived at the mortuary claiming to be McCurdy's brother. The mortician took the stranger at his word and allowed the man to take McCurdy. It turned out the man was not McCurdy's kin, he was just a carnival worker. The man put McCurdy's corpse on display as the Oklahoma Outlaw in his traveling show. Years would go by and as McCurdy was sold to other carnivals, the story of who he was became lost. Eventually, people assumed he was just a prop and treated him as such. McCurdy's corpse eventually made its way to The Pike, an amusement park in Long Beach, California. In 1976, 65 years after his passing, a production crew for the $6 million Man TV show was filming an episode at The Pike. One of the film crew moved McCurdy's corpse out of the way, thinking it was just a mannequin. The arm broke off and the film crew was stunned to see bone and tissue where the arm once was. The police were called and officers were able to identify the man as Elmer McCurdy. They sent him back home to Oklahoma and on April 22, 1977, a service was held for McCurdy as he was buried in Guthrie, Oklahoma. The Phantom Mayor is Disneyland Paris' version of the popular haunted mansion attraction. The fictional narrative told inside the ride tells the story of a previous inhabitant who was visited by a Phantom and subsequently passed. She is said to now haunt the house. It's a scary tale for kids visiting Disney's European outpost, but the haunted house got even creepier in April, 2016. An actual body was discovered in the Phantom Manor by employees. The corpse belonged to a fellow employee who had worked at Disneyland Paris for 14 years. The 45-year-old was fixing a faulty piece of lighting behind the scenes when he was electrocuted. In June of 2015, some ghost hunters paid a visit to the Kuhn Memorial State Hospital in Vicksburg, Massachusetts. The abandoned hospital was reportedly haunted, so the ghost hunters wanted to check it out for ghost sightings. What the ghost hunters discovered was much more chilling than a specter. They found the corpse of a woman outside of the hospital, with a bloody trail leading to the hospital entrance. The body belonged to 69-year-old Sharon Wilson, a woman who had been reported missing. Two suspects were later arrested for the crime when they were discovered driving Wilson's car. In May 2017, neighbors in Laredo, Texas became concerned about Gabriel Martinez after not seeing the septigenarian out and about for quite a while. Martinez lived with his mother, who no one had seen in years. The lights remained on at all times and the grass was getting high around his property. Concerned citizens called the police for a welfare check and the police made an unsettling discovery. Martinez's body was found inside the home, in a homemade wooden coffin. What's more, there were remains of another body in the coffin that police believed to be Martinez's mother. In October 2017, a 61-year-old man disappeared after receiving abdominal surgery at a hospital in Stellenbosch, South Africa. A nurse said that they left the room to get some bed linens and when the nurse returned, the man was missing. Almost two weeks later, the man's body was discovered in the ceiling of the hospital. It's unclear why or how the man got up into the ceiling. The hospital was under construction at the time of his disappearance, which a hospital spokesperson said complicated the search for the patient. In December of 2016, fishermen in Cape Cod, Massachusetts discovered something shocking in their nets. Among all the fish in their hall was a human body. The fishermen took the body to Provincetown and contacted the local police. Police were able to identify the body as Robert Carnival of Rhode Island, as it turns out Carnival suffered from lymphoma and chose to be buried at sea. While most prefer cremation for burials at sea, Carnival opted to be interred in one piece. It's unknown what the family decided to do with his body after he was found by the fishermen. In 2017, surveillance cameras recorded 29-year-old Catherine Caroway entering Walmart in San Springs, Oklahoma on Friday, June 23, but she was never seen exiting the establishment. It wasn't until the following Monday when store employees discovered Caroway's body at a locked bathroom stall with an out-of-order sign on the door. An employee remembered going into the bathroom on Friday evening and noticing the door locked. Instead of investigating, they figured something was wrong with the stall and placed the out-of-order sign on the door. Autopsy results found that Caroway's passing was accidental, ruling out any foul play. Medical examiners determined she passed from defluratane toxicity caused by huffing air duster which investigators found in her car. 30 minutes after family reported her missing, the body of 70-year-old Carolyn New was discovered by a pastor at the church she attended in Somerset, Kentucky. New went to the church on Thursdays to clean, and in August 2017, someone took New's life while she was in the church. Surveillance showed a man, Dwight Bell, taking New's car, which was eventually found abandoned in a parking lot in Indiana. Police issued a warrant for Bell's arrest, and the suspect was captured a month later in Knoxville, Tennessee. During a news conference after apprehending Bell, police disclosed that Bell confessed to ending New's life, although his motive is still unclear. In August 2017, two men were walking on a New York street in the Bronx looking for bottles to recycle. The men came across a shopping cart and decided to look in it for recyclables. Instead of bottles, they discovered a decomposing corpse hidden inside a cardboard box. The man went to the police about their findings, and examiners were able to identify the victim as Nevala Hassan. The 27-year-old Hassan was concealed in a cardboard box and placed inside of the shopping cart. Police were able to obtain surveillance footage which showed a man, Darrell Orr, wheeling the cart into the street. Orr was apprehended, and he confessed to meeting Hassan and doing drugs together in his apartment, where he later discovered Hassan dead. He put Hassan's body in the box and then pushed it three blocks away from his apartment in the cart. Orr was charged with concealing a human corpse and drug possession. Up next, more of the weirdest places bodies have been found. We'll look at some very bizarre incidents. Plus, in Florida there was a short stretch of freeway so full of incidents of danger, death, and the paranormal that many consider it cursed and most definitely haunted. Locals have deemed it the dead zone. These stories and more when Weird Darkness returns. Dark Intrigue's Book 1 is filled with horror fiction for fans of short story anthologies, horror collections, ghost fiction, suspense, possession, and more. Dark Intrigue's Book 1 by J. C. Moore, available on Kindle or as an audiobook narrated by Darren Marlar. Find Dark Intrigue's Book 1 on the audiobooks page at WeirdDarkness.com. That's WeirdDarkness.com slash audiobooks. What are the weirdest places bodies have been found? A woman's body was discovered in an elevator in China after she apparently starved until she was no longer alive. Workers found the body which had been trapped in the elevator for more than a month when they returned to work at the building after the Chinese New Year. They were supposed to have checked the elevators before taking them out of service before the holiday, but authorities said the workers neglected to perform a visual inspection. When they finally did discover the poor woman, they noticed her hands were mangled from repeated attempts to escape. 22-year-old Lauren Moss was first reported missing in November 2015, but she wasn't found until the following February. For months, Moss's body sat in her parked car in a Walmart parking lot in Salinas, California. Police suspected that she ended her own life, and surveillance cameras noted that the car had been in the lot since December. Moss was finally discovered when employees finally looked inside the tinted windows of the car. In July 2014, 20-year-old Tito Morales was discovered between the 18th and 19th floors of the building he was living in in the Bronx. Police don't know for sure how he got there, but pronounced him as someone who had perished after they were able to pull him out. It's unknown whether or not foul play was involved. Possibly the grossest yet most famous instance of finding a corpse in a weird place, Canadian tourist and University of British Columbia student Alisa Lam was found floating in one of four water cisterns situated on top of the Cecil Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. This was not a situation of her falling in one night and being found the next day. Lam was left decomposing in the tank, which provided water for bathing and drinking to the residents of the hotel for as many as 19 days. Patrons of the budget hotel had reported that water pressure was almost non-existent and the water coming from the taps had an off-taste to it, but it was over two weeks before anyone from the maintenance staff of the building investigated the cause of the issues. When Rebecca Wells, an auditor for the Department of Internal Services, was found passed at her cubicle in an office building, it wasn't because her coworkers noticed her and immediately called the paramedics. She had been no longer living for over 24 hours when she was found hunched over at her desk. She normally worked in East Los Angeles but was conducting an audit in the Downey area. Her body went unnoticed for a whole day. She was working on the second floor of the office building in a row of cubicles where no other workers were stationed. She was found by a security guard Saturday, February 12, 2011 and was last seen alive in the previous day at 5 p.m. after a staff meeting. According to the neighborhood parking enforcement officials, the issue wouldn't even have been flagged in the system for another full week after the seventh ticket was placed on a man's car at the man not been discovered as perished, not sleeping. John Waldo was reported missing nearly two weeks before the first parking ticket was issued, and the toxicology reports that will determine Waldo's cause of death will take a month and a half to process. Embedded in this item is a fan's American Idol audition. It's one of the greats. It includes her full personality, her street attitude, and her inability to sing more than two correct consecutive notes of music. Her name was Paula Goodspeed. At the age of 30, she was found to be dead in a car outside former American Idol judge Paula Abdul's house in Sherman Oaks, around the 3,800 block of Beverly Ridge Drive. Police investigated her death with the possibility that Godspeed ended her own life. She had auditioned for one of American Idol's earlier seasons, but she didn't make it past the first round of recruitment. She sang Proud Mary and wore a pink frock that caused fellow Idol judge Simon Cowell to comment that Godspeed looked like Abdul. Anonymous police officers of the Los Angeles Police Department threat management unit commented that they were familiar with Godspeed because of her involvement in a number of stalking incidents. This one just happened to be a little more final. Officials declined to further comment. Ingrid Rivera's corpse was discovered in a utility closet after one of rapper Lil Kim's birthday parties at Spotlight Live, a popular karaoke club. She was 24. Spotlight Live shut its doors for weeks after the incident in order to clean up the utility closet and figure out what had happened. Rivera was reported missing by her mother on Tuesday, and Lil Kim didn't even hear about the body until Wednesday. According to club patrons, the woman was thrown out of the club by the reportedly very heavy-handed security after being found drunk in the men's bathroom. She wasn't seen after that incident until someone discovered her in a closet. An employee of the club was later charged with her slaying. According to multiple reports, it took three calls to Detroit authorities in over two days before they recovered the body of a man frozen in ice in the elevator shaft of a vacant warehouse. A Detroit News reporter working from an anonymous tip found the body and it was eventually removed from the ground with a saw. Investigators estimate the body was frozen in the ground for months, no word on how the man came to be trapped in the elevator shaft in the first place. It is a mystery. The cause of death is also under investigation, with no leads in sight so far. While filming an episode of CSI New York in Los Angeles, a set that was supposed to be downtown New York was filming in downtown Los Angeles. Just to not let anyone down, the criminals of LA decided to leave a mummified corpse right where the cast and crew happened to be filming. Huge coincidence, yes. Did they roll with it and use it in the show for authenticity sake? No. The body was the mummified remains of a man found on the fifth floor of the same building where CSI New York was being filmed. According to the manager, the tenant was discovered by a building engineer who checked on the tenant because he had not paid rent for the month. Body dumps aren't always human. A baby shark, like a real three- to four-foot-long baby shark, was found in a public restroom by two women taking a walk who had to use the bathroom. Needless to say, they did not use the toilet since the baby shark was actually positioned so that it looked like it was busting out of the toilet and into the world. Betty Williams, 28, was found as a corpse in a suitcase in East Harlem, New York City, near a place called Rao's Restaurant. The security video identified a man seen carrying the suitcase, nonchalantly dropping it off. This is not the first case of a suitcase operation at Rao's either. Nearly a year earlier, another victim was found in an area nearby the popular eating establishment, also in a suitcase. Police investigators suspect mafia influence. Jody White, the innocent bystander who found the suitcase, commented, I was just walking by and came across it. Autopsy results show that Williams was strangled. She was found with all her clothes on. This next incident isn't exactly public, but when you go to your parents' house to look for some free food and find baby corpses, it doesn't really seem like home anymore. A German housewife who should never be allowed to reproduce again slayed three of her infant children, packaged their bodies in freezer safe wrapping and likely forgot about them after stuffing them into a fridge. That is, until her other adult children discovered the gruesome frozen treats when they were rifling through the freezer for some frozen pizza. After the grown up kids found the babies, they confronted their parents and the mother turned herself in. She was too psychologically disturbed to endure any police questioning. It is estimated the babies were born during the 1980s and spent their 30 years in the freezer among pounds of expired food. Never hook up near the edge of a roof. You know, when you are really getting into it and you start neglecting certain things that you wouldn't otherwise, like your volume, the pounding of the headboard against the wall or that cup or dresser that is about to fall? Well, never underestimate the ability of people to do that, even when their lives are in danger. Two people were found at the base of the building after driving to the top floor of an adjacent parking garage and climbing onto the roof unclothed. Their car was in the garage, their clothes on the actually really steep roof. Wildfire rangers harpooned a crocodile and found a lot in its stomach, such as a human head, a torso and a few appendages. The man's legs were found further upstream. People say the man was attacked the previous night by a crocodile as he slept on the riverbanks. Aquin Lewis, 10 years old, was found unresponsive, hanging from a hook in the boy's bathroom at Oakton Elementary School and was later pronounced as no longer living at the Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago. The school janitor, Elliot Latau, attempted to perform CPR after the boy was initially discovered. Police Commander Tom Goonther commented that Aquin's death was an isolated incident and that police did not consider the rest of the children at the school in danger of any foul play. Joshua Maddox was reported missing by his mother in 2008. Seven years later, a demolition crew found the remains of the Colorado boy's body stuck in the chimney of a cabin that belonged to his parents. Officials identified Maddox from his dental records but couldn't immediately determine what ended his life. They didn't find any signs of physical injury or gunshot wounds, which means Joshua might have simply gotten stuck in the chimney while trying to shimmy down into the house. Some places seem to pull tales of the weird towards them, with the strange and the paranormal gravitating towards them for reasons we cannot yet begin to fathom. In the U.S. state of Florida, there lies one such place, a short stretch of highway that has become known as Ground Zero for all manner of anomalous phenomena, strangeness, and even death. They haunted a cursed place that they call the Dead Zone. There was a time when Florida was nothing more than untamed wilderness ruled by the proud native peoples of the area. Yet by the 1860s and 70s, the region was steadily built up and settled by Europeans en masse. The natives of the area would go on to be displaced, sent to reservations or killed in fighting such as the Seminole Wars, and the pristine area witnessed a surge of settlers looking to make a life out of this new uncharted land, along with numerous railroads and roads that penetrated and crisscrossed the wilds. People poured into the region at the time, and cities and towns began to pop up all over the place, transforming the landscape in the process. One of the first of these settlers was a businessman named Henry Sanford, who in 1877 bought up land just north of present-day Orlando along the St. John's River for the purpose of creating a Catholic farming community called St. Joseph's. It was more of a get-rich-quick scheme than anything religious as far as Hawkins was concerned, and he sat back waiting for suckers to come rolling in. Things would not go according to plan, and instead of the vast profits Sanford had imagined making on the land, he only ended up selling a few plots, and not long after the settlement experienced a devastating fire and an epidemic of yellow fever that swept out from the mosquito-choked swamps. The disease was catastrophic for St. Joseph's, with quite a few who died simply buried out in the woods or on their property, and by 1887 the settlement was all but a ghost town. Sanford would go on to found the bustling nearby town of Sanford, Florida, and the area would later make a comeback at the turn of the century, while the site of St. Joseph's would become absorbed by a township called Lake Monroe, but this dark history remained there to haunt it, perhaps literally. In 1905 a settler named Albert Hawkins bought up some land on which a family of Dutch immigrants had once lived before becoming victims of the yellow fever epidemic that helped to wipe out the original St. Joseph's colony. He figured out the grim secret buried on his rural land quite by accident, stumbling upon the weed-infested unnamed graves as he explored the area one day, but he was respectful and decided not to have the bodies moved, rather maintaining the plot and their decrepit unmarked wooden crosses like a miniature cemetery, complete with a fence around it and telling people to stay away from it. However, it would soon appear as though these mysterious graves held some sort of dark power that infused them. Neighbors sometimes complained to Hawkins that they could see mysterious lights roaming about at night in the vicinity of the graves and that all manner of ghostly phenomena such as moving objects and strange noises had been plaguing their homes. On top of this were some ominous claims that the graves were actually cursed, seeking grim revenge on those who would try and defile them. In one instance, a neighbor allegedly got tired of the graves being there and tore down the fence surrounding them. Yet later, that same day, this man's house would supposedly be struck by lightning and razed to the ground. In another incident from the 1950s, a grandson of Hawkins himself was fooling around at the gravesite and kicked over one of the wooden crosses marking one of the graves. The very next day, he would be killed in an auto accident involving a hit and run with the perpetrator never caught. Even Hawkins himself purportedly had his own house catch fire after he tried replacing the time-worn rotten old wooden grave markers with new ones, prompting him to take it as a warning to leave them as they were. All of this strange phenomena and death earned the area of that little cemetery the name of The Field of Death and locals became too terrified to go anywhere near it. Despite this, Florida's popularity at the time and the surging population and droves of tourists coming through meant that more and more highways were being built in order to meet the demands of the rampant development going on. One of these was the proposed Interstate 4 or I-4 which was meant to connect Tampa and Dayton Beach and which would cut right through the property on which those haunted graves rested. Hawkins had died in 1939, but he was survived by his widow and there was not much that she could do at the time because she had sold the land and it had become imminent domain. However, she did inform the state of the secluded little cemetery and suggested that they move the graves before construction begins. The officials supposedly promised that they would have the bodies moved and interred at a proper cemetery, but this apparently never happened and when construction commenced in 1960 the highway just ended up going right over the graves and their forgotten remains. This would seem to have been a bad idea because almost immediately there was tragedy that befell the project in the form of the catastrophic Hurricane Donna which tore across Florida at that exact time and even eerily changed directions to follow the path of the proposed I-4. Also odd was that meteorologists had predicted that Donna was going to just pass by relatively harmlessly off the coast yet it suddenly made a sharp turn right towards the state for no apparent reason and even more eerily still passed right over the construction site. Whether this was all merely coincidence or not it was one of the worst hurricanes the state has ever seen and stalled construction on the highway for months. When the highway was eventually finished it began to accrue a sinister reputation almost immediately when a truck went wildly out of control and crashed right in the vicinity of the graves claiming several lives on the very day I-4 opened to traffic in 1963. This would be merely the beginning of an ongoing phenomenon that has played the stretch of highway where the graves are said to be which is right at the banks of the St. John's River at the Interstate Bridge overpass and is earned the ominous name the Dead Zone. By far the most notorious of the many strange and quite frightening phenomena linked to this patch of road is the inordinately high concentration of traffic accidents that occur here. Depending on the source there have been anywhere from 1500 to over 2000 traffic accidents in this one spot along a mere quarter mile stretch since the opening of the highway with the Florida State Highway Department saying that there were 44 accidents over the course of 1995 and 1996 alone in this one place and from 1999 to 2006 there were 440 accidents many of them fatal. The rate of accidents at the Dead Zone of I-4 is so intense that many locals still absolutely refuse to drive over that area instead going through great lengths to take roundabout routes around it. Officially this is explained away as the unfortunate result of so much traffic through the area but even considering this the rate is quite high and there are even reports of people claiming that it often seems as if something has actually taken control of their vehicle. Is there something more supernatural going on here and if there is does it have anything to do with those graves? It's hard to say. In addition to the uncommonly high rate of traffic accidents along the road are the frequent tornadoes that tear through often seeming to follow the path of the I-4 as if attracted by it as well as yet another strange hurricane Hurricane Charlie which eerily passed right over the cursed site in 2004 as if aiming for it. Researcher and author of the book Strange Florida, Charlie Carlson, has said of this particular hurricane, Charlie followed almost the same route as Donna, they referred to Charlie as the I-4 hurricane. Strangely enough there was construction going on around the graves, the land where the graves are was being disturbed again, it was almost like a repeat of Donna. Besides harrowing car crashes and deadly tornadoes and hurricanes, the I-4 dead zone has gathered about itself all manner of other resorted paranormal phenomena and high strangeness. One very frequently reported oddity is that radios, cell phones and CBs go dead and refuse to work over the area or that they will pick up ghostly disembodied voices or anomalous static on the devices. Commonly reported are the sounds of children's laughter or a voices that desperately ask who's there or why yet never responding if one is to try and talk with the entities. Some people have even reported hearing not voices but rather an ominous growling or snarling echoing out from their radios as they drive through. Considering that the immediate area has no radio or cell phone antennas nor any microwave emitters, it's hard to tell what could be causing these disturbances. Is there a rational explanation or something far odder at work here? Who knows? There are numerous other strange phenomena reported from the I-4 dead zone as well, including ghost lights, shadow people, roving cold spots, sudden thick fogs from nowhere, phantom hitchhikers and ghostly vehicles. Add all of this to the death and tragedy that also seemed to cling to it like flies to a corpse and I-4 has gone on to be considered one of the strangest, most haunted places in the state. Is this just urban legend mixed with spooky history and superstition? Is it all overactive imaginations? Or could it be that this length of highway holds to it the specters of the dead, damned to remain tethered here and compelled to lash out at those who have desecrated their graves? When Weird Darkness returns, a man is found dead, obviously murdered, but even after a positive identification, some believed the body was not of the man authorities thought it was, and an even larger mystery was whose monogrammed handkerchief was stuffed in the corpse's mouth. That story is up next. Nothing goes better with chocolate than vanilla, and nothing goes better with the darkness than vampires. So we have combined all of them into a new blend of weird dark roast coffee called Very Vamdilla.  So good, you'll want to sink your fangs into the fresh roasted bag itself. Weird Dark Roast Very Vampilla, the only thing at stake, sorry, not sorry, bad pun, is your dissatisfaction with your old coffee. Sip it while the sun is down if you're one of the undead, or when the sun is up if you just feel dead and need a bit of a boost. Get your Weird Dark Roast Very Vampilla at WeirdDarkness.com slash coffee. That's WeirdDarkness.com slash coffee. Samuel Morton, who was employed to keep watch over six coasting schooners laid up for the winter just below Tottenville, Staten Island, New York, found the body of a man lying in the mud, half floating next to one of the vessels on March 11, 1891. A man's arms were crossed behind his back, tied together at the wrists and above the elbows with heavy packing twine. Morton secured the body and went to tell the police. An autopsy revealed that the man had not drowned but had died of strangulation. The body had probably not been killed where it was found but had been carried by the tide from somewhere else, but it had not been in the water for more than four or five days. He had been about six feet tall, weighing 200 pounds, powerfully built, but his hands were soft and he was fashionably dressed. If robbery was the motive, the thief left behind a gold and platinum watch chain and other pieces of jewelry. There had been no attempt to hide his identity. In his coat pocket was a passport issued by the Royal Police Department of Saxony to Carl Emanuel Ruttinger, Jr. There was also a receipt for a registered letter from England to Ruttinger at an address in Stuttgart, Germany. Both documents were dated December 20, 1890. There was no question that Herr Ruttinger had been murdered. In addition to strangling the victim, the killer had stuffed a linen handkerchief in his mouth and rammed it down his throat with a stick. Stitched into the handkerchief was the monogram WW. As the investigation into Ruttinger's murder progressed, the mystery surrounding the case grew even more dense and each new discovery prompted more questions than had answered. In his pocket were numbered receipts for two tickets from Tottenville to Perth Amboy, New Jersey, which had been sold on February 2 for two people. The tickets had been used, presumably soon after their purchase, but if the body had only been in the water four or five days, where had he been in the month between? A big German stranger would have stood out in both Tottenville and Perth Amboy, but no one in either community remembered seeing him. The other question raised by the tickets was who used the second ticket? That question was answered when a boarding housekeeper named Gustav Neu went to the German Council's office with information on Karl Ruttinger. Ruttinger had come to his house on January 10th and shared a room with a young Englishman named Wright, whom he introduced as his wife's brother. Neu was questioned by New York City Police and he told them that Ruttinger was a lace salesman and expert from Dresden who had come to America to find employment. He was an educated man who spoke German, English and French fluently. Wright, whose first name Neu did not know, was a diamond-center. On January 26, both men traveled to Boston and returned three days later. On February 1, Wright packed his bags, paid his bill and left again for Boston where he said he had found employment. The next morning, Ruttinger left the house early, leaving his things in his room as if he expected to return that night. Mr. Neu never saw him after that. On the passenger list of the steamer, City of Chicago, which arrived in New York on January 10 from Liverpool, were the names Charles Ruttinger and William Wright. Of course, it was lost on no one that the initials on the handkerchief stuck in Ruttinger's throat were WW. Wright, who could not be located, was now the prime suspect in Ruttinger's murder. But William Wright, aged 28, was described as five feet four inches tall, weighing about 120 pounds. There was no way he could have overpowered a man of Ruttinger's size and build. Did he have an accomplice? In any case, there was now a pressing need to locate William Wright and his description was sent to Boston and every other city within the reach of the telegraph wire. On March 15, a man whose name was withheld from the press visited New York Police headquarters with additional information on Ruttinger and Wright. He had known the Ruttinger family in Germany and he confirmed that Carl Ruttinger was a lace manufacturer, well-educated and well-traveled. On a trip to London, Ruttinger became acquainted with the Wright family and subsequently married the daughter, Maj Wright. The family was well to do and Ruttinger's new bride had a healthy income of her own. Her brother William, who the informant described as an idle cigarette-smoking, bicycle-riding young man, accompanied the newlyweds when they moved to Germany. Since then, the Ruttingers had two children and they were all living with Carl's mother in Stuttgart. Maj Ruttinger had not been heard from since Carl's death. With the police unable to locate William Wright, speculation grew that he was dead as well. Mr. New, their landlord during January, did not believe that Wright was the killer. He was a mental as well as a physical weakling, New said. He couldn't have planned anything so intricate as the murder and couldn't have executed it if he had a plan. He also said they'd been inseparable when he knew them and felt if Wright were alive he would have written long ago to inquire about his friend. The theory that Wright was dead was given a boost when people began to notice that Wright's description matched that of an anonymous man who committed suicide in the Astor House on February 2. The man who checked into the Astor House under the name Fred Evans was short, slightly built and spoke with a strong English accent. He carefully destroyed everything that could lead to his identification, stripped to his underwear and cut his own throat. Among Ruttinger's effects were some photographs of himself and Wright. When shown the photograph of Wright, members of the hotel staff were convinced that he and Evans were the same person. Likewise, Gustav Knew was positive that Wright resembled a photograph of Evans. The shoes of the dead man were German and the back of the uppers had W.W. scratched into the leather. The collar worn by Evans was marked Pluto 15 Threes and collars left at Knew's house were also marked Pluto 15 Threes. Inspector Burns of the New York City Police considered this conclusive proof that Evans was Wright. It was now speculated that Wright had killed himself out of remorse for killing his brother-in-law, or that it had been a suicide pact and after assisting Ruttinger's suicide he had taken his own life. But the identification of the dead man was not absolutely positive. Evans was described as being five foot six inches tall, while Wright was five inches four inches tall. Gertrude Norman, a New York actress, was absolutely convinced that Evans was actually George Edgar, whom she had known well for two years. On March 22nd, she announced that she would believe to her dying day that it really was Edgar. Around the same time, Gustav Knew received a letter from a man in Rochester, New Hampshire, saying that a man with an English accent who fit Wright's description took a room at his boarding house on February 25th. He spoke of setting up a business in Boston with goods coming from Germany and seemed to take an unnatural interest in news of the Ruttinger murder. Witnesses in Boston said a nervous man who fit Wright's description left town on a cattle steamer. Inspector Burns may have believed one of these clues, or he may have had new information that he was not sharing, but five days after saying conclusively that Wright was the Aster House Suicide, he was now saying he believed that Wright was still alive. Others went so far as to say that Ruttinger was also still alive. It was discovered that Carr Ruttinger's life was insured for more than $20,000, with a $10,000 policy purchased just one month before the trip to America. It may have been an elaborate plot to defraud the insurance company, with Ruttinger and Wright already hiding out in Europe awaiting payment. The body discovered in Tottenville was not Ruttinger's. Some believed it was the body of a man named Schneider, first mate of the German oil ship Momsen, who was missing when the ship left Perth Amboy for Copenhagen. On March 31st, 1891, an inquest was convened in Tottenville to hear a testimony from everyone with direct evidence in the murder case. Among the witnesses was Dr. Caleb Lyon, the doctor who performed the autopsy, who said that in his opinion Ruttinger had committed suicide with the aid of another person who bound his arms after death. The jury returned to the verdict that the body was that of Carl Emanuel Ruttinger and that he was suffocated at the hands of a person or persons unknown to the jury. Though the investigation continued, no evidence was ever uncovered to revise that verdict. In February 1892, the Equitable Life Assurance Society paid $22,000 in German marks to Mrs. Therese Ruttinger, mother of Carl Ruttinger. Statements made by the insurance company implied that they were not convinced that it was not suicide or other fraud, but decided it was cheaper to pay the claim than to continue investigating.  You can email me anytime with your questions or comments at darren at WeirdDarkness.com. WeirdDarkness.com is also where you can find all of my social media, listen to free audiobooks I've narrated, visit the store for Weird Darkness t-shirts, hoodies, mugs, phone cases and more merchandise. Sign up for monthly contests, find other podcasts that I host and find the hope in the Darkness page if you or someone you know is struggling with depression or dark thoughts. Also on the website, if you have a true paranormal or creepy tale to tell, you can click on Tell Your Story. You can find all of that and more at WeirdDarkness.com. All stories in Weird Darkness are purported to be true unless stated otherwise and you can find source links or links to the authors in the show notes. Strange Dumping Grounds is by Jessica M. Thomas, Mariel Loveland and Rachel Stewart for Ranker. The Runtinger Mystery is by Robert Wilhelm for Murder by Gaslight and Hauntings on Highway I4 is by Brent Swancer for Mysterious Universe. Weird Darkness is a production and trademark of Marlar House Productions. And now that we're coming out of the dark, I'll leave you with a little light. John 6, verse 35, Jesus declared, I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry and he who believes in me will never be thirsty. In a final thought, you do nothing to remove your limits if you do nothing to help others remove theirs. To do this is to live and let live and keep an open mind. David A. Stewart. I'm Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness.


I would try to be a bit soft and simple. So the overall idea is how to find the models in the processing to help environmental monitoring. And in this case, our application is according to ways and targeting in India. I'm going to use the answer. So what's the goal for this one to understand. To deflect the technology or the tools that save AI and computer vision and immense processing, signal processing together, so that we can monitor the growth of semi-polyweds. I'll come to that point, which is what it has, which is one of the most notorious way in the world. It looks very nice finding flowers, but practically it creates a quite health problem across the world, especially in the tropical region. So the idea, how do you use satellite imagery in order to monitor them remotely. So this is just to give you some context to why this is such a big problem and why we are interested to solve this problem by providing some process. So in this particular world, what we are trying to develop the tool say we should help to understand the policymakers or somebody responsible can help them what action plan they could take. So what this tool has and is, as I said, it's a major problem across the tropical region, and it impacts fisheries, drinking water sources, rice cultivation, navigation, recreational water bodies and lots of things. And it also leads to becoming breading ground for many diseases, especially the musculoskeletal, and that goes to diseases like chicken gonia and endangering human health. So I guess these are the some of the photographs captured all of the world with the problem starting from India, Africa, USA, Sicily, Florida area, and some parts of Europe as well, particularly in Portugal. So the way we are trying to tackle this problem, it's a multimodal problem, we're trying to take it, we're using satellite imagery, particularly Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 because they're free. But that comes with the problem, I'll tell you about that later. We had some drone missions, particularly who wanted to have high resolution data that we can map back in order to develop the models, develop the algorithms. And those are optical and multistakeholder. And whereas in the satellite, we took care of synthetic aperture radar or SAR, and optical and stakeholder. And finally, in the ground, we also wanted to promote optical and multisensors because we wanted to capture the water quality data. There is a direct relationship between the water quality and the growth and the growth cycle. And finally, we put them all together and to process it with data fusion. And some of the mess in the models, the ultimate aim is to create a higher regression map, interactive map, which people can use to see what is the growth in the certain targeted area. Just to give you a bit more context, this is one of the favorites that's in Southern part of India, that's in Kerala. And we had some drone missions over there. These are the some of the pictures we took. So we had a local drone company to fly over. And those are multispectral sensors on the drone payload. And these are some of the images. And it has to give a little more why this is a problem. Just to give you some idea, this is one of the drone missions we had. Kerala is a beautiful place. It has got lots of backwater. And this is very nice. These backwater channels, we used to have for fishing purposes or the transport purposes that can be over the years, 100 years of years. But what happened with invasion of the water has in those channels are typically choked. And only very large channels have been cleared and nobody has got that much of capacity to clear them out. So it is quite important to have them monitored and see what is happening and get back some of the ways to ensure the full security, particularly for the fishing purposes and the origin purposes. And this video I just wanted to show you because that shows the scale that shows the scale of the problem and why do we need digital tools to address those problems to monitor them. This is another UN organization based in India. They do quite a lot of agricultural research. Okay, part of this project, what we did, we tried to run some controlled experiment because it's not always possible to have everything from the field and we can analyze. So we just wanted to understand the growth cycle of the water has in sure what we did put the libelia migraeusensors in there and trying to see what is the growth cycle by placing water has in on this on this pond. And we have a very popular way of passing nutrients towards it. And that gives us some of the nice interesting result, which we can then compare it because we also do continuous picture, as we were doing the data. Right now, moving on to some of the results we have obtained from this project. So one of them is using the Sentinel one synthetic aperture relative of the solid data. But exactly we did. This is one of the legs, quite large legs, and we do some measurement from Sentinel one in November 2019. January and that thing, there was that way. And in that area, we have seen clear presence of water has in which was there. That was the actual picture with the mobile camera. Now, what we did measure is the backscattering of the synthetic aperture radar. And if you do the statistical analysis, you would be able to fully understand what is the distribution of those signals over the target area. When you compare them, you can actually create a chance detection map, which is clearly showing this is a process and you have a way of passing. And if you get in what happened, this is a benefit statistical modeling we put together. This is a mixture of washing dogs where you can actually create a box. You can see if the clean water is there, you can have a single nice one, so you can pick. But whereas for the presence of water has, you can already see a single double or multiple takes a mixture of question.  This is another site in Hyderabad. In this case, I'm going to show you how high regulation drone flights actually help us to understand the growth. We have actually picked up a few sites as well where we actually took the water quality data that we can see site 1345 and some of the pictures using citizen sense we created one app so that we can take images as well. So that further verification that has been quite useful. Now, in this case you can see we have taken this is from Sentinel to radar. And we have taken optical plus infrared as well. We have taken the data from various different dates and color representing if they're going to be something or not. Typically the talk who has for water has to be in stores. Bank of the lake. Welcome to where not. And what we have actually to get out with the citizen sense data to map these things. So what the interesting question I think all of us we face is the data leveling. So it's quite great, we can have all the data from the satellites for the historical data. But that data learning is painful. If you like to use any nice environments. So what we do, either you stick together, create polygons with fairing that we actually spend hours. There's another way to do which we think is quite useful what we did. We take random samples from the target area, and that was there we have grown using machine learning model something called random forest, and which we have verified with the data that actually is giving quite nice results and that can partially solve the data learning problem. Once we have that, then we try to segmentation using different techniques. Multiple techniques we tried, and also we combined modification of some of these techniques, and find the previous segmentation man. We are the second team and you can see the green area is the water has impact, whereas the blue is water and other visitations are like this kind of stuff. So having seen that those kind of algorithms that is working fine, but we had a solution, but that's not the end of the story, but you really like to see what are the challenges in these kind of approaches in the model. And that challenge is not only for aquatic vegetation monitoring, it's clear for everybody, every problem we try to solve using this monitoring model systems. And it's the ability of the data. We have seen European space agencies setting a data is free, but they are low resolution. One pixel represents 20 square meter, 20 meter by 20 meter, not large enough because if you're trying to see small water bodies or anything smaller than that will miss it. You can't probably get very high resolution data, either you have to pay to planet or picture or maybe Airbus Locked Martin. But the other way, what do you think we could actually use what we are trying to achieve for this one and future work by using the drone data which is very high resolution code five centimeter resolution, and creating the model, which is called super resolution, having the low resolution satellite data and the high resolution drone data, create the model, so that the low resolution drone data from 20 meter by 20 meter is free code that surely bring that to the resolution of one meter is going to be substantially useful for multiple different detections. So that's that's the kind of the goal from the competition side, I mean, my background is complex and so I look from that side. But that's not the only problem, because that comes with the registration problem. When you're flying drone, you're passing the satellites, they're not exactly same time. They're not exactly in the same location either. So how do you shop that problem. That's also a challenge. Finally, something we're working on for transfer learning, because the optical data, often problematic because rain cloud, any environmental issues, or sometimes satellite passes in the night, so what do you do. And we can probably use in that case, Sentinel one data, which is, which can penetrate through cloud, which is fine in the night, but the site data is very much noisy. So use the site data to fill the gaps within the optical or multiple strata multiple strata data is one of the key questions it is a challenge with us, but it is something doable, which we're going to work on. The problem is small object detection and the simplification from the remote data, or the satellite data is a problem. So that is something we're trying to work on. And finally, this is the Asia because not all the high ground with data, we want to transfer in our large server that takes a lot of communication problems. And then finally, can I do processing at the is, and can I do all this intelligent AI putting back that in the device that can actually process it and send the data that is minimal and that is required to send. So these are the some of the challenges we're trying to work on. And hopefully this is a generation you're pressing for working in this domain. And with that, I'm going to stop and have to take any question. Let's find out. Any questions for the floors. Yeah, I want to bring you out. Why are you in our factory. Sorry, could you please take it. I want to ask why people's factories is not the same to go on like, I know India has defense in which I'm trying to do this kind of work using one ceiling. So I believe in the factory, you know the variations in the defense in the internal. Yeah, that's that's absolutely correct. So we take care of the weather data, the rain and the temperature as well. So we started looking at data from African countries, so that it has got the right variation. And what we are more keen on understanding this, these tools and algorithms is transferable for various geographical locations. But yes, that is quite important to include the seasonal information within that. Thank you. And the second question for Steve, have you considered the jets and now it's not actually for your age processing. Yes. Indeed say I work on multiple different is processing device. One is Jackson Nano. Yes, but also we have created something a heterogeneous system, which has got this and nano, we have one carrier board where we put very small I don't know how many of you are familiar with that so there are three or four types of computer architecture so the process architectures. One is the CPU most computer use and say Raspberry Pi uses GPU will run lots of large machine learning models. They get some nano from Nvidia, they have got that. And the another is called field programmer to get ready. Basically you can design your processor, and that is very much energy efficient. You can do stream processing, but all of these different types of computer architecture are good for certain purposes. So what we're trying to see large algorithms like CNN, how do you partition them into different types of architecture to get based off all to give you a very fast response time, but the energy consumption is minimal. Okay, there's another question for Anna Smith. Deepak, might the new data hub offer an opportunity to address challenges around your data availability. What else might be needed so this is about the information architecture for observation images. I mean, in terms of the infrastructure, or in terms of the how the data should be curated. I'm guessing both. Yeah. The infrastructure and they're asking lots of advancements has happened from European space agencies and the data has been quite incredible, but still what we felt is understanding that data processing that to such an understanding everybody can understand what the domain expert that gap is still exist. That is what we're trying to do here. So after processing what we're trying to have interactive say Google Maps type thing, where you can just put your location. And that would try to show this is a another semi transparent layer of what it has in different growth states. So, taking from raw data into a usable visualization is quite important. In terms of the other data what we have curated. And one of the things we are trying to do haven't done that properly yet is the metadata information, because all the grown flags we have collected the proper metadata information is so important, even if you want to do any processing with it. So those are the things often missing.