Good day fellow investors. Now I've made a lot of videos and almost under each video I get what do you think about this stock, what do you think about this stock and I have put all those stocks on a list and I finally made a video where I analyze the first 15 stocks on the list. So subscribers here I'll shortly analyze what I think about the stocks you have asked about here on the channel. Now before we start I'm a very very picky stock picker. That means that I'm happy if I buy one, two, three stocks during the whole year so I'm really really careful what I buy. I have made therefore a categorization so I see a bad stock destroying value. Okay stock, market perform 4 to 6% in the long term, good stock from 8 to 13% in the long term, great stock and that's what I'm looking at and you can see why it is so difficult to find. So I want potential 50% in the year multi-bagger in a few years with low risk, with a margin of safety. So don't get mad if I say okay this is a good stock, this is a okay stock and there will be a few great stocks. I can guarantee you that but that's just me. So use me as a way to check what you're doing. My risk-reward preferences are really extreme. This is because I spent 15 hours a day looking at stocks doing research analyzing. So somebody is happy with 10% a year, 13-15% a year and that's very good and there are actually yes you will see stocks that will offer that so don't get mad if I say it's not a great stock. So let's start immediately. The first company I have on my list was Tractor Supply, current valuation 16.3, growth 8% per year, however it has a low book value so that's a deterrent for me. Growing depth levels, it performed very well in the recession so it has a margin of safety. Now they are expanded into oil markets which can be very costly in the future over expansion and their same-store sales are a little bit down. To conclude it's a choppy outlook for a relatively high PE. So I would say it's between okay and a good stock. You can expect 6% or 7%, 8% in the long-term from Tractor Supply. It's a good company to be invested in but think realistically and the stock price is extremely low now so a good company. Fresh Belmont are produced. It's in the positive part of its cycle. It has high competition. 30% of the company was bought back which means they invested a lot by buying shares which is good when you do it when the price was below book value as it was a year or two ago. I wrote an seeking alpha article where my target was 65 over the next five years with the price earnings ratio 17. The price was then 30. Now the price is 50 something so it was much better. It was a much better investment when it was 30. I would say it's an okay company at these levels. You can expect it to go to 65 from a fundamental perspective. From a market perspective is if there is euphoria it can go to crazy levels. The price earnings ratio here is low due to one-off event. It will be much higher and you can see the forward price earnings ratio is 15.5 so that's not such a cheap company. I expect my returns to come from earnings. Now if you take the price earnings ratio 15.5 for a brewing company it's very low but nevertheless it's all about sentiment. 15.5 means a return about 6-7%. There is some margin of safety in the book value so to conclude between okay and good in the long term. All right this is a small cap, micro cap, Tinkwarn resources, expect further dilution. They're looking at the mine that was abandoned in the past. Now they want to start mining again which means they need a higher Tink price. That means that there is no margin of safety if Tink prices go lower. I'm a margin of safety value investors. I like to invest in companies that have mining costs into the first quartile, not higher. This is really a bet on higher Tink prices. Yes Tink will go into a supply gap. There is a potential of higher prices but I don't know whether that will happen this year, next year or in the next three to five years. Therefore I need a margin of safety. They need still a lot of permissions. What to do is to follow drill results, estimate the preliminary economic assessment before it's made, if you can do that and then you can make an investment there so you have to really know what's going on and follow the company. There is potential but that potential needs to be followed and analyzed. On the personal side I prefer less risk. Northern dynasty minerals. Oh this is a complicated one. Pebble mine in Australia, full of regulatory issues can end up either way. Extremely expensive to build and again not in the first quarter of costs so really betting on higher metal prices. Anglo-American walked away from the project so huge risk and I prefer less risk.  If not then it's just betting, not for me. Paseco mines had a depth problem which is refinanced to 2022. They have new prosperity projects, Florence project again with regulatory risk and the projects are all low-grade so high expenses. They want to use a new system on the Florence project that will lower costs but is very detrimental for the environment. Nevertheless it's cash flow positive but they need higher copper prices so again no margin of safety for me. However high potential if copper prices jump. A lot of permitting needed but net present value is high compared to market capitalization therefore it's interesting to follow but I don't like the low grades. Prefer high grades. Nevertheless I will follow the company. Now Ortla Assa Norway it's a company that sells food, Norway, Baltics, very interesting, very stable as people will buy food whatever happens. However the current valuation is a bit high which implies a return of 5%, price to book is a little bit high, price to cash flow is again 5% and they are spending 60% of it for the dividend yield. This is a good company, high price earnings ratio for slower growth, market performance is expected and the risk is not coming from the company itself but from the environment. Higher interest rates might hit the stock badly. So target annual average growth is 6 to 9% for a price earnings ratio of 20. I would say this is a good company. Now Deutsche Rofstoff, oil and gas and rare earths. Such companies are really really bad. You have if you're exposed to those companies you can really make a killing if they find something, if they have additional value to it. Therefore there are but there are also risks if they don't find something. So it has to be compared to other drillers in the US shale industry. What are their costs? The money they make they will probably reinvest in future projects or short-term projects so it's difficult to know what's going on. It's probably good investment as these oil prices as I have checked they are not present values so the discount is there however I don't know what will be the catalyst that will push it much higher from the market. So it can be a value trap but again if you know the company it can be a good company. Pets at home this is an interesting one. Stable company, small company, low debt, good stock. What has to be analyzed is the British pound effect as they buy in probably from around the world and sell now in England so their margins will probably get squeezed and price earnings ratio higher correct me if I am wrong. However the premium here is also for the smallness small cap interesting dividend yield so if someone wants to dig into it and check what will happen with the pound then he might have a very interesting investment to park your money and enjoy significant growth and a good dividend yield. Silver corp take a look for this company for a silver play. It's mining in China which is very interesting and usually investors don't like when something is going on in China especially when the company is traded in Canada and so was much cheaper two years ago but there might still be value and it's very interesting play for silver so this company goes on to my future research list if I ever want to get exposed to silver. Tyson Foods it's a cyclical company depending on food prices and feed prices have started to go up thus we will see lower market price earnings ratio to be at the peak of the cycle is a bit high so we we can expect higher price earnings ratio when the cycle reverts. SORL Chinese corp parts company a little bit too late the huge surge already happened higher debt falling book value no dividend and negative cash flows despite the growth and high earnings. The management has been doing something which they buy and do a lot of intercompany transactions so it has to be checked out and then again eight million on the balance sheet can be used for growth but check check check check check before you invest. Elio Gold issued warrants and stocks at current price warrants and stocks dilutes current owners by 40 percent. I don't like dilution but it could be interesting however the Anapala project is not the risk yet there are still permitting drilling and so on so it's let's say fairly priced for the risk at this stage again it's interesting to make an analysis analysis and what see what comes out all these miners you really need to dig into all the data and then put it in the model and see what comes out of it there that is the only way to analyze miners and that takes a few days for me to do in a stock. Caledonia mining again looks good look into it and we have the final one a mortgage read and l y annually capital management mortgage mortgage mortgage mortgage mortgage in a credit economy this could blow up in your face so I know the price of this ratio is low dividend yield is extremely high but that's because there is a high risk so I will begin to some miners probably to create a model and then get a real present value in comparison to what can happen and the risk so you can expect somewhere in the future a video a detailed analysis of those miners because I like to keep that database with exactly okay this is the value what happened and then I can jump in if I have the capital available for the rest I see a lot of good companies that will bring good returns five 10 15 percent in the next few years which is very good I'm an investor that really spends a lot of time on researching and I expect much higher returns so don't get mad on me I also have made an analysis of just the first 15 stock the list goes on so you can expect some time in the future another video on the next stocks if you have a company that you think that might search 50 100 percent that has a margin of safety that has good fundamentals so everything to make it a great stock please share it with us in the comments below and I'm happy to make an analysis and even perhaps a video on the stock thank you for watching I'll see you in the next video


Hey, this is Brett and this 2022 Jeep Compass Limited 4x4 is stock number 14477Z. I am here at Summit Automotive in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. You're new and used Jeep and Jeep Compass headquarters. This 2022 Jeep Compass Limited has the 2.4 liter multi-air engine. It puts out 180 horsepower and it's paired with the nine-speed automatic transmission. This Jeep has been fully safety and inspected by our service shop per the state of Wisconsin inspection process. It has a fresh oil and filter change. All the fluids have been checked and topped off and this Jeep is 100% ready to go. I'm gonna go all the way around in this video. Inside, start it up, take a look under the hood and show you all the options and give you the most accurate representation that I can of the vehicle. Bright white clear coat is the color. I shoot all my videos in 4k. If you like the video subscribe to the YouTube channel. Click the bell notifications, get updates in the videos I do each and every day as well as having access to one of the largest catalogs of vehicle and SUV walk-arounds on YouTube and stay current on our ever-changing Inventory of SUVs here at Summit Auto. So you do not miss out on gems like this one. This one comes with the painted and polished aluminum 18-inch wheels and it has continental Pro contact tires. These are 225 55 R 18s. I would say that they have probably about 70-75% of the tread left on them. Front fender is in excellent condition. No dents or dings on there. You get the LED headlamps and the factory fog lights. We'll turn those lights on at the end of the video so you can see just how bright they are. Front bumper is very, very clean. You get these seven slotted chrome trimmed grille and the chrome Jeep lettering. The hood is in fantastic condition. I didn't see any major dents or dings on there. Looks really good. And the passenger side front fender. Absolutely perfect. Passenger side front wheel. No major scuffs or scrapes on there. And as you go down this side of this 2022 Jeep Compass, take note of how clean the body is, how reflective and mirror-like that paint is. Take these HD videos. So if you're far away or even if you're close by and you just cannot make the trip down, you can still see the vehicle, hear the vehicle, and have confidence in what you're looking at. So when you get here, there's absolutely no surprises and you can make a smart and informed buying decision from wherever you're at. If this video helps you make that buying decision, let your salesmen know that you saw the video, that it was helpful, and that Brett sent you back wheels in excellent shape. Didn't see any dents or dings down that side. And the back tires have just as much tread as the front tires and the underbody looks really good. This is a one-owner clean title history, clean car facts out of Michigan. You get the capitalist fuel fill on there, which is a really nice feature coming around to the back of the vehicle. Just as clean as the rest, rear bumper is in great shape, does have the backup parking sensors, and you have the chrome tipped exhaust. The tailgate or the rear gate is in really nice condition. It is a manual raised gate. This one does come with the factory floor mats. It also has a another set in it too. You get the tire inflator kit and nice storage area back there. Those seats do fold down for extra storage. You have a 12 volt power point back here, and the shocks are doing a great job of holding that rear gate up. A couple of little Easter eggs. You get the Jeep logo there, and I'm pretty sure that that is the Loch Ness Monster on your rear class. There we go. Not really sure. I think it's the Loch Ness Monster. There's also another Jeep logo right there. Shuts nice and solidly coming around to the driver's side just as clean as that passenger's side. No major dents or dings on the rear quarter or door. And for full disclosure, this back wheel is in excellent shape. One other thing to point out, it does have the four-wheel disc brakes on here. Driver's side door is in great shape. It does have heated power mirrors with blind spot monitoring and built-in directional signals entering-go system just to have to have your key fob in your pocket. It'll automatically unlock those doors. Back seats are in fantastic condition. You get the leather interior, the latch child safety system. These seats do fold down for extra storage, and you can see they go down pretty nice and flat. And they go up like so. Back here is another 12-volt power point, a USB plug-in, and then weather tech floor mats, or a weather tech floor mat. Child safety locks on the back doors, and the inside and bottoms of the doors are all in really nice condition.  No rips or tears on these seats there in fantastic condition. You get the dark copper stitching, or brown stitching almost, the embossed Jeep logo on the backrest, power driver seat with lumbar, and weather tech floor mats up here as well. Auto headlamps, tilt telescopic steering wheel, power windows locks, and mirrors. You get the classy piano black gloss trim on there. Hop inside, check out the miles, the radio, and everything that this one has to offer on the interior. You can see this one has 10,007 miles on it. Actually when this one came in it had exactly 10,000 miles, so that's pretty cool. And then you have all your different screen settings here. So you go all the way to one, you get the digital spinometer, which is what I always like showing. And that instrument cluster is very nice and clean. This one comes with the leather-wrapped steering wheel, cruise controls on the right, adaptive cruise controls on there as well, Bluetooth and information center controls, audio controls in the back of the steering wheel. So these adaptive cruise controls will keep you a certain distance from the vehicle in front of you when you have the cruise on. If they slow down it will slow your speed down to match that, so you do not run into them. And up here is the Uconnect 10-inch radio. Believe it's a Uconnect 5 system. You get AM, FM, and Serious XM radio capabilities as well as Bluetooth and USB hookups.  You also have all your different apps, including your heated seats, heated steering wheel controls, and your backup camera. That actually scrolls. So that's pretty neat. And you can see the backup camera. They've made those nice and crystal clear. And you can zoom in. If you had a hitch on here, you can zoom in on that. So a lot of great stuff you can do with the radio. Here are your start-stop capabilities, stability control, lane departure warning, hazard lights, and your parking sensors. You can turn those off and on. Down here you have more tactile volume, tune and climate controls, including the dual climate controls. Note you get that nice gloss black trim around the center console shifter and knobs there. Electronic parking brake, your four-wheel drive system, snow, sand, mud, and auto settings. And it does have a four-wheel drive lock setting, which I really like. And then you get your keyless entry with your remote start there. Key fobs in really nice shape. And the passenger side format and seat are in excellent condition as well. No rips or tears. This vehicle's never been smoked in. And the headliner's absolutely perfect. You do get map lights up here and SOS alert up there. Let's start it up and take a look under the hood and check out those lights in the front. Starts right up. No check engine lights or anything like that. I would personally like to thank you for checking out the video today. And hopefully from this HD video, you've been able to verify the quality condition options and of course, cleanliness of this vehicle all the way around inside out. You can see those LED headlights are very bright and the fog lights aren't working nicely. Under the hood, we have the 2.4 liter multi-air engine. Engine bay is very clean. Runs very smooth. Once again, this Jeep has been fully safety and inspected by our service shop. Has a fresh oil and filter change. All the fluids have been checked and tapped off. Per the state of Wisconsin inspection process and this Jeep is 100% ready to go. There is the emission sticker. And I would highly recommend this Jeep for make quality and condition standpoint. I would ship this one anywhere, California, Texas, New York, Florida, back to Michigan. Whoever's going to get this Jeep is going to be very happy with it. And to see more pictures of this Jeep or one of our other 550 new and used cars, trucks, SUVs, minivans, Wranglers, half-tons, two-quarter tons, one-tons, Cherokees, compasses, renegades, you name it, we got it. Go to the website right there, summitauto.com. Full pictures and descriptions of every single vehicle. All at summitauto.com. If you want to check out more HD videos, you can go to youtube.com.com. Click the bell notifications, get updates on the videos I do each and every day, as well as having access to one of the largest catalogs of vehicle walk-arounds on YouTube. And do not miss out on any of our inventory as it comes through our pictures studio here and stay current on our ever-changing inventory. In fact, any second, you will see a link to subscribe to my YouTube channel on the upper left. A link to all the Jeep Compass videos I've ever done in the upper right. A link to this vehicle on our website on the lower left. And a link to one of our latest YouTube videos on the lower right. Click those, check us out. We're super excited. I'll be with this Ultra Clean 2022 Jeep Compass Limited four-wheel drive in bright white clear coat. Thank you so much for checking out the video. Remember to like, subscribe, and share on the YouTube channel. I really appreciate it. Thanks and have a great day.


Now let's do a question that combines some of the chemical quality concepts you just learned. So you have an 80% sulfuric acid H2SO4 concentrated solution, 80% by weight, and the rest is assumed to be manly water. Its density has been measured experimentally to be 1.73 kg per liter. Calculate the molar concentration and the molality of that solution. Ok, so let's summarize the problem. We have density equal to 1.73 kg per liter. We have the information that solution is an 80% sulfuric acid by weight. Since the question tells us to assume that the rest is water, we have the remaining 20% being water by weight, and we need the molar mass for the sulfuric acid, which we can calculate from the periodic table, which is 98.073 g per mol. Ok, so first, the molar concentration which is equal to the number of moles of sulfuric acid developed by the total volume of the solution. Now we are not given the idea of those, we are only given the density and the mass fraction, and the molar mass which comes from the identity of the compound. However, since we are only asked to calculate the molar concentration which is the same regardless of the volume, and from density we can calculate any mass or any number of moles of sulfuric acid that we want in whatever amount of volume. And since the molar concentration is the number of moles per liter, we can just set a volume to be 1 liter for convenience. So V equal to 1 liter. So now we can find the total mass of the solution when the volume is 1 liter using density. So M equal to rho density multiplied by the volume equal to 1.73 kg. So what does this mean? It means that the total mass which is the sum of the mass of the sulfuric acid and the solvent which is water is equal to 1.73 kg. So can we decompose that so that we can use the mass of the sulfuric acid to calculate the concentration? Yes we can. From the question we know that the solution is a sulfuric acid 80% by way solution. That means 80% of this total mass was 1.73 kg of sulfuric acid and 20% of that is water, presumably. So that means the mass of sulfuric acid in 1 liter of the solution is 1.73 kg multiplied 80% equal to 1.38 kg. And the mass of water in 1 liter of the solution is 1.73 kg multiplied 20% equal to 0.35 kg. So the number of moles of sulfuric acid in 1 liter of the solution is equal to the mass which we calculated above, divided by the molar mass of sulfuric acid, so that we give us 14.1 moles. And since this is the number of moles in one liter of the solution, it is therefore also the molar concentration of the solution. So C equal to N divided by V equal to 14.1 moles per liter. Before we finish, there is one more thing to do. We need to calculate the molality of the solution. So molality is the number of moles of sulfuric acid, divided by the corresponding mass of the solvent, water. And from above, in one liter of the solution we have 14.1 moles of sulfuric acid. And that solution weighs 1.73 kg, where 1.38 kg of that is sulfuric acid, 0.35 kg of that is water, which we obtained from the mass fraction. So now we can calculate the molality of the solution. And it is B equal to the number of moles of sulfuric acid, divided by the mass of water, equal to approximately 40 moles per kilogram, or 40 mol.


You know, oh Sorry, now I move that seems okay. Everybody hear me. It's all right. Okay, cool Let's see if I get this working again Here we go. Okay, cool Say my name's Eric I A little bit nervous about this talk So I feel like it was funny to mention that the first line of my speaker notes are hi My name is Eric, which is which is pretty good, but that's my cat but I work at the office for creative research, which is a I think you call us the probably a data viz studio and in Brooklyn It's I feel like that's not totally the best description of what it is that we do we're pretty pretty small group I think this this is this is my friend and and the guy who's Started the studio talking about it and saying We make visualizations online tools community platforms and public interventions that increase data literacy Facilitate understanding and promote equality our work is meant to provoke surprise and delight while deriving While driving critical thought and facilitating understanding I thought that was a pretty good description doesn't tell you exactly what it is that we do But more or less that that first part of that sentence is is the case where we're sort of all over the place We'll we build websites for science education purposes. We do data sculptures that we've put in Times Square We're working on a community a map room project right now But the project that I'm here to talk to you all about Is this thing called fuel kit? And feel kid is very much an in progress project. So I'm kind of here to I can't see that very well But that's the that's the logo It's very much an in progress project. So I'm here to sort of talk about where it came from where it's headed What are some of the ideas behind it? But the gist is is that it's an open data and open science effort That's aimed at field researchers field researchers and conservationists So that is it's it's it's targeted towards scientists, but mostly scientists that do work In the field And I'll elaborate a little more on what I what I mean by that So the the project more or less began here This is the this is the Okavango River Delta is as seen from space The Delta is is entirely inland. It's part of a drainage basin in northwest Botswana Where the river basically just comes to an end and drains out Right after passing through Angola and Namibia to the to the northwest there And although it's been designated as an Esco World Heritage Site. It's it's considered largely unprotected And for the most part generally understudied as well and there's all kinds of reasons for that but Including the geography there but But those two things are really sort of related in my mind the the difference between being unprotected and understudied Um And and really why that's a problem for conservation is that there's not there's not as much of a sort of baseline understanding of even the current conditions for wildlife in this area Um to sort of suss out whether or not any sort of efforts You know political publicity or otherwise are actually even working um So partnering with uh Local populations in the area um with funding from the National Geographic Society The Okavango Wilderness Projects has been able to send expeditions to the river with the explicit goal To sort of accomplish those things that I was talking about to sort of build the baseline understanding of the ecosystem in the area and raise awareness of of the of What's going on in this sort of amazing ecosystem in the in the middle of Africa Um, so the work started back in 2011 and Um We've been going is sort of our our part as part of the studio for every pretty much annually ever since Um, for the most part, I think you could describe this as is sort of a conventional science and documentation effort Um There's sort of an effort to record wildlife settings and things like that But you know for our part of it, uh, we wanted to bring something new to Um the way we're doing data collection in the field And that is both how we collect it and what we do and what we do with it Um, so this is this is one of our collaborators, Jacob, who works with a nonprofit called Conservify Um, Servify is a group that is looking to lower the barriers to entry for technology based conservation And and that's him working with One of the sensors that they design in the field Um, and part of what's been done with the Okavango project is to use these sort of low cost open hardware Solutions to capture a wide array of information about the area on an ongoing basis Um, and this includes all kinds of things like this is you can't see this very well again because of the light but they've Um, been working on building sort of open source hardware solutions to a lot of sort of expensive sensors like this is a water flow Sensor that that they're they're still working on and prototyping But that's one example of the kind of data that we might be able to collect in the field Um, this is a this is a weather station Many of which we can we can set up in the area to sort of Monitor what's going on even after even after we've left And with this data on on our side what we've been trying to build You know sorry With all of that data and along with things like location of team members Vehicles animal sighting social media posts We've been trying to build Sort of web representation of these expeditions that the more or less Let's folks follow the follow the the team and the effort in real time And I think one of the big things about this to me is that there's no There's not necessarily one single focus to the data collection or presentation here. There's The idea is breath so if this looks like there's a lot of things going on that's that's intentional there are a lot of things going on Social some other slides from this like this is this is one day of Of a sort of journal entry of the expedition and we've been able to aggregate You know photos from the field Individual sightings that I'll talk more about in a second But this is The idea is that this is one representation of a whole lot of data that's coming out of this project I'm even going to try to do my best to show a video of how this site actually works But this is one of those things that probably won't work Come on play Is it going to happen There we go Okay, so this is this is the representation as it stands. You can sort of see where where this area is situated in africa And this is this is the the main site that we built when you When you load up into the okavango as a as a project And you know sort of following on what I was saying that hardware philosophy was of using these low cost solutions to collect a broad variety of data You know the same way this this web presence is sort of a low cost software solution to showing a lot of data Um You know for the most part this is built on Other open technologies. We're not spending like a great deal of money to sort of produce this Um and this we'll get moving in a second I sort of took a bad video of this on my computer. I apologize, but This is sort of the idea that you can you can actually follow the team in real time like as they move as they move through the The delta area you can you can actually sort of explore all of these observations that they're making um different wildlife observations to Different sensor readings like on the weather stations you can get to the that journal section I showed earlier up there um I'm gonna move on from this if I can get out of this video sorry and One of the big ideas of this is that this is really just a front end sitting in front of this massive repository of information that we built coming out of Years and years of going going back here Um, this is just you know a snapshot of one query against the api But you know you can see that there's there's over there's almost uh Almost four million like individual recordings in here Um, and they're all kinds. They're all kinds of things like this is a very like heterogeneous dataset where we've got Like right now. This is I think these are all bad of the day Which is a sound recording of bats in the area. Um sound recording was actually a big part of this project um along with daily daily bats apparently um, but this is sort of where I I came into this projects with with all this work existing and What the question we started to ask about it is What can we what can we move on to? from all of this work that is still something that is still something that has the kind of core mission of this project, but Is something that sort of like builds on the things that we've learned and is repeatable. Um, so Um Cool, so the key things to me about into the okavango is this idea of it being a low cost platform But that I don't necessarily always mean cost, but um, this was um Cost in this context can also mean things like training team members. It can mean things like upkeep. It can mean Things like uh hiring developers to write software for For custom sensors things like that and and the platform that we were getting towards providing sort of eliminated some of the some of the pain and getting going with with with these tools and also the In addition to just the financial cost of actually using them um so This this is sort of a a set of dichotomies that they had got at me about about fieldwork where there's There's there's sort of this tendency because these Because these expeditions into areas where it might be hard to get to it might be Uh dangerous to be there. It might be You know any number of reasons The the expense associated with these expeditions can also mean that they tend to become more narrow Where you might be going there to study one particular aspect of an ecosystem because it's so hard to get there Or it's so hard to get a set of equipment there that Um, the the focus starts to narrow and the sort of general usefulness of the data you're producing narrows as well Um, so part of what I think is good about okavango is it's moving It's moving some of that where you've still got this sort of expensive to lead expedition, but Building a broader base for the kind of information that you can collect once you're out there and doing that mostly also by Introducing low cost tools in the way in the way I was talking about So so what I mean about the the way that the way that these Conservation efforts can end up being very expensive Um Can clear to me on this other project we were working on Which is we were building a set of data visualizations for the great elephant census, which was Um An effort that sort of wrapped up recently to basically go and count every single African savanna elephant in africa Um And if you're wondering how they do that, it's it's kind of the way that that might seem obvious How they would do that they actually got an airplane and actually many many airplanes and flew These sort of narrow transects up and down Covering as much area as they were allowed to or that was reasonable to you given the train I'm sort of using models based on the based on how the elephants move They can actually take those raw counts of elephants from these airplanes and produce Sort of total counts for for how many elephants they think they're they think they're our president in a given area But one of the things that kind of strikes me about this is this is like a This is like a single single purpose and very expensive way to Do this kind of work and that if you're in an airplane, you know conceivably you're seeing all kinds of things about the train You're seeing other animals. You're seeing Carcasses from poaching you're seeing Human densification and you're seeing fires. You're seeing, you know any number of things and there's there's some question about like when you mount this sort of Expedition to do this kind of work What are the tools that you're disposal? It's actually broad in the base of what you're doing while you're out there And this is to sort of like, you know, what is the what is the orthogonal data that you could be collecting and making useful in the larger group So we started on a field kit to try and solve some of these questions. We came back to the hardware again So conservafi working with conservafi They're producing they're working on producing another set of low cost sensors This is the board for the sort of base unit that we're working with right now And what this is is it's basically a piece that sort of solves the communications aspects of sensors in the field So when you're getting live data from Places where you might have not have an internet connection You need things like the ability to Store data continuously the ability to send data over a satellite uplink potentially the ability to Send data over wi-fi when it's available Um And all of that can be kind of kind of expensive one of the one of the most expensive components of systems like this can be the Satellite radio the satellite modem So the idea behind this piece of hardware is that it can act as a sort of a hub between multiple sensors to collect and communicate data So some of some of the question after that is where does this data go? So this gets to the software So we wanted to try to learn some lessons from what we did with into the archivango Which is more or less that we were Had produced this very ad hoc system over a course of years that led us to these large sort of monolithic data structures that it was difficult to Difficult to share a reason about So this was this was all stored in sort of a document database and essentially had arbitrarily Deep and arbitrarily structured Objects that were really trying to capture as much data as possible at the time but What starts to happen is that we ended up with layers upon layers of these code driven Ingest routines and this is a lot of people writing python basically To sort of take this data from a field sensor and or from a form that someone filled out on their computer later on To say oh if they Want to upload a photo of a bird they know what bird it is maybe we want to take that That bird sighting and add the taxonomy information for birds And then produce a document and it's geogas on here because actually the the root of all the documents were geogas on features And that everything we're recording had a location attached but the problem with that and if you're here for the earlier talk is that this is a It's a very side-effective process And the structure in the end of those documents is really only the sort of Imprint of these sort of hard to understand Um Nested ingest routines. So there's a couple things we want to do here. We want to kind of break this apart Move a lot of that sort of input processing into a field where the user can do something with it And also get data that we can reason about in a way that we can potentially share So if we're doing one expedition In the Okavango there might be related expeditions, particularly around Bird populations and we want to be able to share data in some sort of meaningful way And it may not be that way is is you know in the form of like publishing a paper or something like that But some sort of meaningful representation of the shared effort of going here and documenting this wildlife Um, so what we came up with is more or less breaking it out into two different pieces It's sort of strictly defined metadata structure to give us Information that we knew we were always going to have about the individual observations Um, and also bringing some sort of sense of of Typedness uh to the to the other component of the data Um, and I'll just run through this pretty quick. Um, but this is just sort of the The sort of new ingest pattern that that that we came up with It's pretty straightforward. The idea is that we a data can be Set of data can be coming from any number of Any number of sources this can be things like rock block, which is a satellite provider atulia which handles sms And we want to be able to pull the the payload data out of out of those formats We want to be able to parse a set of standard formats and also a Um A set of binary packs in the case of that that device that showed earlier And we want to be able to map those onto some set of knowable objects After the fact So just to run through what this might look like just real simply it's just basically pull something like a csv out of out of a larger objects Parse that csv And then produce some sort of user defined mapping to get an object and this is not this is not too crazy Um, but what this lets us do is use like a set of use a set of standard Um technologies that are out there to get to data that might be meaningful between projects So this is just json and json pointers. Um, you know, you can imagine storing this pretty easily having this be fairly easily editable um And in our case, we're just sort of building a lot of these in advance for the for the uh, sensor kits that we're starting with So, uh, where are we now, uh, we're We've been using a system kind of like this to to get uh, to get Um, a sort of demo of of similar functionality to what we had with the insidio commigo project running On a generic platform like this. So this was something that you're able to go and sign up for and build an expedition connect a sensor And get some output that that is sort of similar to the way we were handling it within to the okavango projects And this is in some ways like slightly less ambitious right now than what was going on and into the okavango, but The the importance of it, I guess is that um, this is not something that's bespoke. It's not something that was tailored just for this project. This is a Potential platform that we want, you know, people that we're not interacting directly with to be able to use um And i'm getting close out of time, but it's good because i'm wrapping up Um, but there are so many more problems for us to solve. Um One is that you know, it's easy to say that it's we can define these Mappings between objects and json, but there's a lot of user interface complexity behind that And there's sort of some debate about where we want to draw the line between sort of out of the box usability and how customizable it is Um, there's issues around the sort of taxonomy of those Typed objects that we're trying to produce. How do you how do you sort of decide on what a what a bird signing should look like in a Way that you can collaborate between projects a huge question The other one is just these are huge amounts of data that we're talking about the okavango project produced about four million data points So if we imagine that you know, we've got even tens of people using this system plowing the same sort of data in How do we deal with that? Those those are all good open questions that we're working on. We think we have some solutions to this I would say Stay tuned um fieldkit.org has a has a Mailing list sign up. Um, that's our website. That's conservify So there's going to be a more coming more coming out of this, but this is going to be an open source project We're working right now To get the sort of licensed stuff sorted out so that we can have it up on github But you can find that under our website And we'll email about it once that happens um But I think we want this to be A larger community effort and that we're sort of trying to leave the development on this But I think like I said originally it's one of exactly a software shop so we're sort of depending on the idea that People are going to have other resources to bring to bear on on this kind of work and are interested in it so Um on that I guess I will wrap up Thanks


The following is an on-core presentation from April 29, 2020. Stories and content in Weird Darkness can be disturbing for some listeners and is intended for mature audiences only. Parental discretion is strongly advised. Beyond the edge of our physical world is a metaphysical realm in which evil, demonic spirits wallow and run wild. This may not be scientifically proven, but we all accept it in one way or the other. It's like an itch at the back of our heads that just won't let up. That same itch tells us that these spirits will occasionally cross the threshold of the metaphysical realm and find their way into our world for the sole purpose of taking over our minds and controlling us.  We continue to hear stories, watch films, and read books about these paranormal occurrences. Despite this, we dismiss it as overdramatized, Hollywood-induced nonsense. But we just can't forget that persistent itch. The belief that evil spirits can possess humans has been terrifying people throughout history. That's probably why the history of exorcism is littered with horror stories highlighting the practice. Exorcism came to everyone's attention with the release of the 1973 film The Exorcist, which was based on the book, The Exorcist, by William Peter Blatty. The author drew from the real-life exorcism of Roland Doe, but exorcism has been a part of virtually every religion throughout recorded history. Ancient Babylonian priests performed exorcisms via a voodoo-like rite, ancient Persians were saved from demonic possession via holy water, and the Bible recounts many times when Jesus Christ himself cast out demons from people who were possessed. One of the most evil cases of demonic possession is of a 16-year-old girl in South Africa in 1906. Her name was Clara. I'm Darren Marlar, and this is Weird Darkness. Welcome, weirdos. This is Weird Darkness. Here you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved, and unexplained. Coming up in this episode of Weird Darkness… In 1986, there was a surge in the number of people entering the Himalayan Mountains and never leaving. Those who did escape reported hearing a loud ringing alarm, so loud they had to cover their ears and run, and even then suffered severe or complete hearing loss. They may not have known it at the time, but they had just come into contact with SCP-6789, so known as Siren Head. The coldest of cold cases for law enforcement in Idaho is the disappearance of Lillian Richie, and it's also the most baffling as Lillian disappeared from within her own home. Many people consider Harry Price to be the first recognized ghost hunter in modern history, and he made a name for himself rather quickly. But then, if you are the first person to investigate the burly rectory, the most haunted building in England, you deserve to have your name remembered. Grocery shopping is such a mundane activity that all families take part in it at some point, so it wasn't a big deal when 11-year-old Makayla and her mom went grocery shopping, picking up dinner for their Sunday night. Who did they know?  A family in Chicago was terrified when voices began emanating from the wall of their little girl's bedroom, and the story has an odd twist in that somehow unbeknownst to me, I, your weird darkness narrator, Darren Marlar, end up right smack dab in the middle of it. In 1906, Clara Germana Sell, an orphaned 16-year-old girl living in South Africa, had her life changed forever. According to members of the clergy at St. Michael's Mission in Natal, the girl known as Germana sold her soul to the devil, and he immediately possessed her body and began causing havoc. We begin there. Now, bolt your doors. Lock your windows.  And come with me into the weird darkness. True stories of exorcisms are incredibly harrowing. Not only do they usually involve young people going through something awful, but those who've been possessed and make it to the other side are never the same once they're free of the demon. Before we look at Clara's terrifying ordeal, let's look at just a few other real demonic possessions. Anna Ecklund was born in the state of Wisconsin in 1882. Records do not show what happened to her mother, but it's safe to assume that she died or otherwise disappeared when Anna was very young, leaving her father Jacob as the primary caregiver. Anna seemed to be, by all accounts, a normal girl. She was religious, a devout Christian. This all changed on her 14th birthday. Suddenly, Anna began to have severe issues with going to church and receiving communion. She would have harmful and compulsive thoughts such as wanting to smash Christian artifacts and harm priests. She was also reported to have experienced signs of depression as well as hypersexual feelings. Over the next few years, Anna visited a number of doctors, but they made nothing of her behavior, insisting she was fine. At last, the local church got involved and sent Father Theophilus Reisinger, an authority figure on exorcisms, to Anna's aid. In 1912, the first exorcism of 30-year-old Anna Ecklund was performed, and Father Reisinger managed to cast away the evil spirits that had taken hold of her body, albeit temporarily. Two decades later, Anna's demons returned. At the age of 46, Anna turned to Father Reisinger once more to help rid her of this desperate evil presence. The second exorcism was a well-documented and terrifying affair. During the procedure, Anna remained repulsed by holy water and would refuse to eat blessed food, although unaware that it was blessed. She would curl up in a corner and emit in human noises like a cat's hissing and climb walls until she was forcibly restrained to a bed. Being restrained seemed to be the catalyst for the evil spirits to come out in full force. Her unconscious body began to forcefully rise to the ceiling, and the only thing stopping it were the restraints. Despite her vegetative state, loud voices, wails and groans would escape her body.  Anna also displayed other recognizable signs of demonic possession, such as the ability to understand and utter foreign languages she had no way of learning or displaying extraordinary strength. The second exorcism of Anna Eklund was performed over the course of 23 days in three different sessions. The story of Anna Eklund was recorded in a pamphlet titled Begone Satan. George Lukens was a British tailor who lived in a small town called Yatun on the outskirts of Bristol back in the 18th century. He was described as a man of great character and spirit, which is ironic because at the age of 44 he was possessed by evil demonic spirits. As a young man, George would suffer from fits of an alarming nature, always claiming he was fine afterwards. All of that changed one night. After going through another of his fits, he would snarl aggressively and bark like a dog, as well as argue with himself loudly. He was not the same charismatic figure that the Yatun locals had grown accustomed to. He would react violently to any religious recitals. Lukens would also sing hymns backwards and began yelling in languages he couldn't have possibly known. His condition only worsened with time and it was soon clear that Lukens was in desperate need of medical attention. The doctors kept a close eye on George but after a series of mishaps and freak accidents declared him incurable. George himself was convinced he was possessed by demons, more specifically seven demons. Locals were highly concerned about Lukens' condition for he was a well-liked figure. A vicar named Joseph Easterbrook, the reverend of one of the local churches, heard stories and rumors of Lukens' mishaps and was determined to help him exercise the demons. He gathered an entourage of religious clergymen and arranged the exorcism. Easterbrook's account of the exorcism makes for a vivid reading. The exorcism began with Lukens singing in an uncharacteristically high voice, one that was most definitely not his own. His voice began altering between low, gruff, masculine voices and high-pitched, feminine ones which were incidentally spewing malicious, blasphemous rants and physically threatening the religious men present. Lukens would bark, scream, groan, sing and babble utter nonsense throughout the exorcism, even blurting a satanic hymn at one point. Easterbrook also mentioned that Lukens would go berserk, requiring at least two men to physically restrain him. Eventually, Easterbrook and his men were successful. Lukens woke up, praised Jesus and said that the evil spirits were gone. George Lukens would go on to live a relatively quiet, humble life until his death in 1805. The exorcism of Roland Doe remains one of history's most notorious stories of demonic possession. It is also the true story behind the novel and Hollywood blockbuster, The Exorcist. It retells the demon-riddled life of a 14-year-old boy and the paranormal events surrounding it. Roland Doe, a pseudonym given to the boy by the church to protect his identity, was born in the mid-1930s in Maryland and was an only child. He was close with his aunt as a child who introduced him to Ouija boards when he expressed interest in them. In fact, many people speculate that, following his aunt's death, Roland attempted to contact her through the Ouija board, an incident that opened the door for demons to possess his soul. Soon after, Roland's house became plagued by weird noises and even weirder supernatural events, sounds of dripping water that could not be placed with a first indication that something was wrong. This was team, however, compared to what followed. Scratching noises, loud and unexplained footsteps heard all around the house. And worst of all, religious hangings and artifacts would fly off and smash against the walls. Words would appear to be carved into his flesh and Roland would make inhuman noises and levitate in the air. Stories quickly got circulated around of the strange events in the Doe household and this concerned the local church. Debates on the possibility of Roland being possessed quickly followed and it was determined that he would require an exorcism. Two Catholic priests were brought in for what would be a lengthy and arduous affair. His exorcism was performed over an entire month in several sessions. He would reportedly react in an aggressive and unruly manner toward the priests performing the exorcism. It often spoke Latin in what was described as a demonic voice. Finally, Roland Doe was free of his demons thanks to the painstaking efforts of the two priests, one of whom even remarked that Roland Doe later grew up to be a fine young man. This brings us to the terrifying case of Clara Germana Cell, which has a factor different from those I have mentioned previously. In the cases of Anna Eklund, George Lukens and even Roland Doe of the exorcist fame, they were all unwilling participants in a battle of good versus evil, innocent of wrongdoing and just being the perfect victim for a blood-lusting demonic entity. But Clara, she made a literal pact with the devil and lived to tell about it. On September 10, 1906, Clara Germana Cell underwent a strenuous two-day exorcism that almost ended her and the priests who were trying to save her. According to reports, the exorcism took place in front of 170 people, with the priests starting in the morning and stopping only for brief lunch breaks before they returned to the hard work of expelling a demon from the girl's body. At one point, as Germana allegedly struggled within the clutches of Satan, she managed to snatch a Bible away from one of the men and tried to choke him. Clara Germana Cell didn't have a great life before she was possessed. As an orphan in South Africa, Germana was mostly raised by the church. Baptized as a child, the only life she knew was in St. Michael's Mission in Natal. There, she allegedly made a deal with the devil himself in exchange for her soul, though it's unclear what she thought she was getting out of the bargain. Stories about Germana's possession have taken on near-mythical proportions in retellings. One of the most horrifying things she allegedly did was slither around on the floor like a snake. One witness claimed that during the exorcism, Germana's body lost all its rigidity and became rubbery like a serpent. It's not out of the ordinary for possessed people to writhe and squirm across the ground, but some versions of the story say Germana fully turned into a snake. Many stories about Germana's possession say she was averse to all forms of religious iconography during the ordeal, but in a history of exorcism and Catholic Christianity by Francis Young, the author claimed this might not be entirely true. Young stated that Germana not only went to confession while she was possessed, but she also received Holy Communion. Either this happened early in her possession, or she was dealing with incredibly strong forces that thought they could withstand the power of the Catholic Church. Nones at Germana's school weren't sure if she was possessed or merely acting out. That began to change when she started discussing the embarrassing personal stories of people she couldn't have known. After she allegedly brought up the private life of someone in the church, people began to realize something was happening with the young woman. After her psychic abilities appeared, so did her penchant for levitation. One account said Germana floated five feet above her bed. Father Eraspus Horner, one of the priests who later performed her exorcism, recalled, Germana floated often three, four, and up to five feet in the air, sometimes vertically and at other times horizontal. Witnesses claimed that after Germana's possession she was able to converse in and understand multiple languages. According to one of the nuns, the 16-year-old could suddenly speak French, German, and Polish. Becoming a polyglot is a typical trait of demonic possession, so it's not surprising this was one of the first ways the girl's demonic hangar on manifested. Germana's abrupt use of multiple languages is likely what tipped off members of the parish. Once possessed, Germana wasn't just allergic to religious iconography. She was physically revolted by the sight or feel of anything the church had blessed. Multiple people who worked on her case claimed that when Germana went into a crazed possession trance, the only thing they could do to snap her out of it was to spritz her with holy water. But the holy water was only a temporary solution. Throughout her two-day exorcism, Germana assaulted nuns and acted out wildly every time a Bible or cross went near her. One of the creepiest parts of the Clara Germana's cell story is her savage treatment of a nun during the exorcism. One of the sisters assisting the priests got more than she bargained for when Germana grabbed her arm and bit down. The imprints left on the nun weren't just of Germana's teeth, but also something that looked like the outline of a snake's tongue. The nuns at the school realized something was wrong when Germana began acting like an animal and making strange, guttural noises. She spoke to people who weren't there and even smashed her bed to pieces. After witnessing the girl ripping at her clothes and making strange noises, one nun said no animal had ever made such sounds. Neither the lions of East Africa, nor the angry bulls.  The book, Demonic Possession, Extraordinary True Life Experiences by C. Torrington, alleged Germana felt like she was cheated out of something by the demon who possessed her. Supposedly, after she confessed to Father Horner about her deal with the devil, she got into a verbal argument with the spirit inside of her. She allegedly said, You have betrayed me. You have promised me days of glory, but now you treat me cruelly. According to the devil and philosophy, the nature of his game, Germana recovered from her exorcism and was incredibly embarrassed about the behavior she exhibited while possessed. Rather than hide away in her room and hope everyone would forget the insanity of her two-day exorcism, she asked for forgiveness and dedicated her life to humble pursuits. It took a while for the clergy of Germana's school to accept that she was possessed, but if they had listened to her in the first place, they might have saved themselves some trouble. According to their accounts, the girl went to confession and told a priest she wanted to make a pact with the devil. She may not have been clear with her reasoning, but it was something she wanted. She later went back to confession and told Father Erasmus Horner that the deal was done. There are countless examples of people being possessed by evil demonic spirits. The internet is overflowing with stories of demons wreaking havoc on people's lives and evil spirits wandering maliciously, disrupting the lives of poor innocent souls. Whether you believe there is any real merit to these accounts or not, the truth of the matter is that they dig into one of the deepest horrors known to man, fear of the unknown. As long as stories of these possessions continue to pop up, the fear of demons will remain. And that little itch we were talking about? Yeah, that's never going to go away. Up next, the coldest of cold cases for law enforcement in Idaho is the disappearance of Lillian Richie, and it's also the most baffling as Lillian disappeared from within her own home. Also, in 1986, there was a surge in the number of people entering the Himalayan Mountains and never leaving. Those who did escape reported hearing a loud ringing alarm.  They may not have known it at the time, but they had just come into contact with SCP-6789, also known as Siren Head. Plus, a family in Chicago was terrified when voices began emanating from the wall of their little girl's bedroom. Not only that, but this same story has a direct connection to yours truly, your head weirdo, Darren Marlar. These stories and others are still to come on Weird Darkness. October is the anniversary of Weird Darkness, and we celebrate by raising funds through our Overcoming the Darkness campaign to help people who suffer from depression. Jamie gave to the Overcoming the Darkness campaign a few years ago, and when she did, she left a message saying, I live in the smallest of small towns, and Weird Darkness makes me smile, sometimes uncontrollably. I suffered from depression for the first time after my father passed away in 2013. It was awful. I didn't understand at first what I was feeling. It's debilitating. Also, my child suffers from extreme depression, and I didn't know how to help. It makes you feel useless. Well, of course, he loves your podcast too, since I shared it with him. Thanks for all you do. To other listeners, come on people, more donations. We should be able to surpass the goal. Donate, donate, donate. In 1986, there was a surge in the number of people entering the Himalayan Mountains and never leaving. Those who did escape reported hearing a loud ringing alarm.  They may not have known it at the time, but they had just come into contact with SCP-6789, also known as Siren Head. The SCP Foundation evacuated the area. That night, they sent in a team to learn more about what was creating the alarm sound. Having reached a distance of 10 meters, approximately 32 feet from the entity, the alarm rang out. In seconds, half of the team was dead, and the rest made a run for it. Their radios destroyed by the nameless entity. Those who did make it back to the base were deaf.  Having seen the creature, the Foundation had no choice but to bomb the area, hitting it and allowing a team to restrain him. The creature was 40 feet tall, humanoid in nature, with an emaciated almost skeleton-like body. His flesh was like that of a mummy, dried in the color of rust. He smelled like burnt skin. His arms were long, as long as his legs, and he had exceptionally large and bony hands. His neck looked like a long thin pole of flesh, and his head was nothing more than two sirens. You can see what appears to be several black wires snaking down and around his neck and into his upper shoulders. Looking at the sirens, you could see toothy, lipless, human-like jaws and a long snake-like tongue. The creature was given the name Sirenhead and labeled SCP-6789. He was placed into a containment room with a size measuring 68 feet, or 20.8 meters in diameter, and the area is equipped with an anti-sound device. Observations have shown that Sirenhead can play various types of noises, usually air-raid sirens, garbled music, emergency broadcasts and even conversations. It is also worth noting that his teeth are only visible on certain radio frequencies. While some may rest easy knowing that Sirenhead has been captured and contained, it is worth noting that there have been sightings of another in Tanyard Creek in Arkansas. On July 16, 1995, a man named Chad and his friends were hiking in the woods. Something through the trees was mimicking their voices, and his friends were snatched by something gigantic. Chad escaped with few injuries, but his friends were gone. Throughout North America, caves are being uncovered with ancient cave paintings resembling Sirenhead. These paintings showed him combating people at the time. What may be of further interest are the sightings of creatures that very closely resemble Sirenhead. One had a head resembling a streetlight, while another was able to transform into various structures in order to blend in with his surroundings. One other sighting showed Sirenhead with more than the known two sirens on his head. The witness counted five. In this particular area where he was spotted, the majority of the population was found dead, having suffered burst eardrums and soft tissues. While most of the bodies were found in their homes or on the streets, several were never found, leading some to speculate that he was not just killing for sport, but perhaps for food. Sirenhead was created by Trevor Henderson, a Canadian illustrator, artist and writer. He is most commonly known for his horror-related works and has released several books and graphic novels. Some of his most well-known creations are Cartoon Cat, Long Horse, The Country Road Creature, The Bridgeworms, The Man with the Upside Down Face, The Smile Room and of course, the Sirenhead. You can see some of his other creations on his website and his Instagram, both of which I have posted links to in the show notes. In other words, yes, despite what you've heard, Sirenhead is not real. All these calls for social distancing and stay-at-home orders are driving some to boredom, but that might not be the case for those who happen to live in homes where the walls speak. The strange tale of one such abode appeared back in February 2020, when reports circulated of a Lockport, Illinois family who are likely still experiencing strange noises, voices and music emanating from the walls of their home, particularly those found in their nine-year-old daughter's bedroom. There are voices in the wall and I don't know what it is, Breonna Smith told ABC7 of the strange occurrences. Her father Richard said the noises which have been present for the past six or so years keep them up at night. At one point, the situation became so annoying that the Smiths eventually contacted the police, who filed multiple reports. Perhaps hauntingly, one officer said that he too could hear the sounds in the walls. Voices and music, he wrote, talking about Christ. That would keep a person up at night. Fortunately for the Smith family, the origin of their ghostly wall voices has never been much of a mystery. As the officer also shared in his report, along with disembodied voices and music, he also heard a commercial, one for the local Christian radio channel AM1160. Even knowing what station it is, that only gets you so far. Richard took the wall apart in an attempt to find out what might be picking up the radio signal, which he believes is likely sent out by one of the six radio towers not far from his home. But he couldn't locate anything that would explain it. An engineer sent by AM1160 also investigated the house's walls but found nothing in particular. I don't know what is acting as a speaker, he told Richard. Under certain conditions, metal can pick up radio waves and even vibrate to act as a speaker. Ceiling fans and oscillating fans have been known to do so, and back in 1999, new scientists tackled the phenomena with a number of anecdotes, involving everything from boat masts to water heaters to fence wire. If two items of metal are joined and there is some corrosion between them, the junction will act as a diode and rectify or demodulate the AM radio signal. This causes an audio frequency current to flow in the metal. You can hear some of the recordings Richard Smith took of their would-be-wall radio, which he shared with ABC7's I-Team in a video I will link to in the show notes. You can hear the commentator or the pastor's voice in the wall, he says of one of his examples, he is praying over someone for healing. Here is a portion of that news stories audio from ABC7 in Chicago. There are voices in the wall. The mysterious sounds nine-year-old Brianna Smith is hearing are real. It's been waking me up at night. They're coming from the bedroom walls of her suburban Lockport home in the middle of the night. We hear it audibly and it's kind of, you know, keeps us up at night. Do you have a speaker in your wall? No, no speakers. You can hear the commentators or the pastor's voice in the wall. Right. He's on his shoulder and he's sorted and he's underneath. A.M. 1160 sent out an engineer to investigate the transmission. And he said, I gotta be honest with you, I don't know what's acting as a speaker. There's nothing that I can explain of why you're actually hearing it. Smith even tore up his daughter's bedroom wall. But this isn't helping. It isn't. To inspect the electrical grounding. So we took a piece out to expose the electrical wiring and the conduit to see if we could come up with a solution. He says the Federal Communications Commission was unable to help. Sometimes when we think we've arrived at a solution, the next season comes around and it's back. It was actually pretty hard to understand the broadcast section of that audio clip. So I went in and tried to do a little audio magic to clean it up and this is what that sounded like. A side note before I finish with this story. They're right that this is not an uncommon occurrence. At this very moment, I live under an FM radio tower in Loves Park, Illinois, WQFL FM, where I used to do the morning show. And when we first moved into our house, we could hear the station bleeding into just about every FM frequency that wasn't already being used by another station. That hasn't changed, so thank goodness for Pandora and iHeart Radio. When I worked at KCNW, AM 1380 in Kansas City, Missouri back in the 90s, we received very angry messages from people living near the station. They were complaining and loudly, I might add, about how our signal was seeping into their phone lines. Now, here's the crazy thing, are you ready? I, Darren Marlar, your Weird Darkness host, currently work for the radio station talked about in this story, AM 1160 in Chicago. I was there during the time all of this was happening too. That means this family was listening to my voice through the walls of that girl's bedroom. How freaky is that? Unfortunately, I didn't know any of this was happening until yesterday when working on this episode because I work from home, so I wasn't in on the commotion with engineering and management trying to deal with the issue. So, three stations having the same issue and me working at all three. Perhaps I'm the problem. Another irony, all of these stations I just mentioned are Christian radio stations, but then maybe that's a good thing. You have to wonder if having your house itself recite scripture and constantly speak about Jesus might just ward off any potential demonic infestations. Among the creepiest disappearances are ones where the victim apparently vanished from his or her own home. Equally chilling are the cases where there are virtually no clues indicating what happened to this person. The following mystery managed to combine both these elements, making the fate of one otherwise completely normal person very abnormal indeed. 51-year-old Lillian Ritchie was a resident of Napa, Idaho. She had lived alone since the death of her husband but she had a good job at Bullock's jewelry, friends, family and an active social life so she was far from being lonely or isolated. She was a well-liked woman who had no known enemies or any notable personal problems. On the night of February 8, 1964, Ritchie visited a nightclub with an old friend, a California man who was in the area for a cattleman's convention.  One of Ritchie's neighbors saw the car drive away, immediately followed by lights being turned on in Ritchie's kitchen. All was quiet and seemingly ordinary. Around 11 am the California man drove Ritchie's car back to her home. He was followed by a friend in another car who would drive him back to Boise. They put her car in the garage and as the night before Ritchie had invited them to breakfast knocked on her door. They were puzzled when she failed to respond. The front door was unlocked so they opened it and called to her. Silence. The pair entered and when they failed to find any sign of Ritchie they left a note for her. Breakfasted in a restaurant and went to visit other friends in Nampa. No one realized something was very wrong until the following day when Ritchie failed to show up for work. Calls to her home went unanswered. By late afternoon her co-workers were concerned enough to contact police. The hunt was on for Lillian Ritchie. Everything in and around Nampa was searched. All her friends, relatives and acquaintances were questioned by police. Searches of her home found nothing unusual. All her belongings were in their accustomed places. After checking her clothes closet, friends believed that the only item missing was the black evening dress she had worn to the nightclub. The wrap she had worn that night was found hanging in the closet. But there was no sign of the evening purse she had had with her. Plain tickets she had purchased to visit a son in Moscow, Idaho later that month were untouched. The house was dusted for fingerprints but the only ones found belonged to the missing woman. Naturally the focus of the inquiry was on Mrs. Ritchie's California friend, the last person known to have seen her before she disappeared. He and his friend were interrogated for hours. Their personal lives were heavily scrutinized. They submitted to lie detector tests. In short, the two men were investigated six ways from Sunday and their stories checked out completely. The police found absolutely nothing to suggest that either of them were anything other than frustratingly innocent. So if these two men were not responsible for Ritchie vanishing, who was? The police found nothing to indicate she committed suicide or that she had been kidnapped or murdered or left voluntarily. It was as clue-free a mystery as you could ever imagine. Police spent years chasing down whatever rumors or tips came their way. They even spoke to a man who claimed he'd invented a machine that could find missing people with absolutely no results. Private detectives hired by Ritchie's two sons were equally ineffective. It was as if this woman had spontaneously evaporated into thin air. Although Ritchie was declared legally dead in 1967, the search for her has never really ended. For years, there were rumors that Ritchie's body could be found beneath the Nampa School District office building, which was under construction at the time of her disappearance. In 2018, police took that gossip seriously enough to excavate the office floor and bring in cadaver dogs and ground-penetrating radar. But to no one's real surprise, nothing anomalous was found. The vanishing of Lily and Ritchie is not only Idaho's oldest cold case, but arguably its most baffling. When Weird Darkness returns, we'll peer into the life of the man recognized as the first ghost hunter in modern history, Harry Price.  These stories and more are up next. He has been spotted all over the world. But photographic evidence is lacking, as is any scientific proof. But he still exists and is still seen. And now, you can search for Bigfoot every month in the Find Bigfoot calendar by Timothy Wayne Williams. Each month, you'll be captivated by an original Timothy Wayne Williams painting. Beautiful, captivating. But within each painting hides a monster. Bigfoot is hiding, somewhere in each painting. Search for Bigfoot and invite others to do so as well with the new Find Bigfoot calendar available now at WeirdDarkness.com There is as much that's a mystery about Harry Price, perhaps England's most famous or infamous ghost hunter, as there is a quantifiable fact. Some of this confusion is due to Price's own dissembling. For instance, though Price claimed that he was born in Shropshire in 1881, he was actually born in London of that year. Whatever the truth of his origins, Price let behind a legacy that'll be familiar, even to many who've never heard his name. Fans of films of the paranormal or readers of Mike Bagnola's Hellboy have likely encountered fictionalized accounts of several of Price's cases. An amateur magician and psychic researcher, Price dedicated most of his life to studying paranormal phenomena and debunking spiritualists. The latter practice made him none too popular with many of the believers of that movement, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. After Price debunked spirit photographer William Hope, Doyle led a mass resignation of 84 members of the Society for Psychical Research and continued to hound Price for years. Unlike many magicians, however, Price was actually open to the possibilities of the paranormal and believed that some spirit mediums were genuinely legitimate. This, among other things, put him at odds with some other members of the Society for Psychical Research, or SPR, which he joined in 1920. Price was also a member of the Magic Circle, an organization of stage magicians, the Ghost Club, arguably the oldest paranormal research organization in the world, and the founder of the National Laboratory of Psychical Research, which he founded as a rival to the SPR. Most of Price's most famous cases include his investigation of the medium Helen Duncan and a black magic experiment atop Mount Brocken in Germany in which an attempt was made to transform a goat into a young man. Price claimed that he participated in the experiment, known as the Blokesburg Trist, only to prove the fallacy of transcendental magic. Price also investigated Jeff, the talking mongoose in the 1930s. Jeff supposedly inhabited the farmhouse of the Irving family on the Isle of Man, though Price's investigations alleged that the hair and paw prints of the mongoose were actually from a dog, and that the talking was produced by hollow walls in a house which makes the whole house one great speaking tube with walls like sounding boards. In 1927, Price claimed that he had come into possession of a box left behind by self-styled religious prophetess Joanna Southcott, which she had left behind after her death in 1814. Along with the box, Southcott had left instructions that it should be opened at a time of national crisis and only in the presence of every bishop of the Church of England. Price opened the box in the presence of only the reluctant bishop of Grantham and found that it contained only a few odds and ends, including a lottery ticket and a horse pistol. Followers of Southcott, known as Southcottians, maintain that the box Price opened was a fraud. As recently as the 1970s, a Southcottian group called the Panacea Society claimed to be in possession of the actual box and placed advertising campaigns that pushed to have the box opened under the conditions set forth by Joanna Southcott. Price's most famous case was his study of Borley Rectory, which he called the Most Haunted House in England. Price rented and resided in the rectory from May of 1937 until May of 1938, along with a rotating group of 48 official observers recruited through newspaper ads tasked with reporting any unusual phenomena. His study, which included a seance held by Helen Glanville, concluded that the rectory was indeed inhabited by several spirits, including the ghost of a French nun who had been murdered on the property. Another spirit was said to claim that he would set fire to the rectory and that the fire would reveal the bones of a murdered individual. In 1939, the rectory's new owner knocked over an oil lamp while unpacking boxes, resulting in a fire that gutted the building. The insurance company would later conclude that the fire was deliberately set. During the blaze, a woman who lived nearby said she saw the figure of a ghostly nun in an upstairs window and charged Harry Price one guinea for her story. A dig in the cellars of the ruined house conducted by Price in 1943 turned up two bones, which he believed belonged to a young woman. The bones were eventually given proper burial, though not in the parish of Borley, where local opinion held that they were the bones of a pig. After Price's death in 1948, the SPR conducted their own study investigating Price's claims about Borley rectory. In what came to be the Borley report, the SPR concluded that Price had faked many of the phenomena or that they were due to natural causes. Meanwhile, psychic researcher John L. Randall claimed that dirty tricks had been played on Price by members of the SPR during his residence at Borley. Whatever the truth of Price's life and cases, perhaps the greatest legacy he left to the world of paranormal research was his extensive collection of writings on magic and psychic phenomena, which make up the Harry Price archives at the University of London, as well as the Harry Price Library of Magical Literature housed at the Senate House Library. Grocery shopping is such a mundane activity that all families take part in it at some point, so it wasn't a big deal when 11-year-old Michaela and her mom went grocery shopping, picking up dinner for their Sunday night dinner. Little did they know, they had caught the eye of a convicted felon out on parole. That night, Michaela, her sister Hailey and their mom Jennifer were all murdered in one of the most horrendous cases Connecticut had ever seen. Michaela Pettit was the youngest daughter of Dr. William Bill Pettit, Jr., 50, and Jennifer Hawke Pettit, 48. Her older sister, Hailey, was 17 and had just graduated from Miss Porter's School, a prestigious private school with many notable alumni such as Gloria Vanderbilt and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. She was set to attend Dartmouth University in the fall, where she planned on following in her father's footsteps by studying medicine. She was an active fundraiser for multiple sclerosis research and captained a walk MS team called Hailey's Hope. Dr. William Pettit was an endocrinologist and the medical director of the Jocelyn Diabetes Center at Connecticut's Central Hospital. His wife Jennifer was a nurse and co-director of the Health Center at Shesher Academy. Jennifer had recently been diagnosed with MS. Michaela attended Shays College's school and planned on taking over her sister's charity and renaming it Michaela's miracle. She loved food and aspired to one day become a chef. On the morning of July 22, 2007, the family attended church. It was a relaxing day and Michaela wanted to cook Sunday dinner. She and her mom went to the local grocery store to pick up what she needed for the meal. They traveled aisle to aisle, never once suspecting someone was watching them. That night, after dinner, Mr. Pettit lay down on the sofa in the sunroom where he fell asleep while the girls all watched TV after which they went to bed. Joshua Komasarjewski had seen Michaela and her mother in the grocery store that night and had followed them home. That night, Komasarjewski and his friend Stephen Hayes, whom he had met while staying at a halfway house, made a plan to burglarize the Pettit family. According to Komasarjewski, the family had a very nice house and very nice car and thought it would be nice to be there someday. At approximately 3 am on July 23, Komasarjewski and Hayes broke into the Pettit family home through an unlocked door in the basement. Leaning against the stairs was a baseball bat which Komasarjewski picked up as he ascended the steps. They found Mr. Pettit asleep in the sunroom. Komasarjewski struck Mr. Pettit in the head with the bat four or five times before dragging him down to the basement and bound his wrists and ankles with rope and zip ties. They moved upstairs where they found Mrs. Pettit and the two girls each in their respective rooms. They were each bound by their wrists and ankles to their bed posts and pulled pillowcases down over their heads. The men searched the house, ransacking as they went looking for cash. They were disappointed with what little they found, until they came upon a check register indicating they had $40,000 in the bank. Stephen Hayes found two gas cans and took them to a nearby gas station where he was spotted on surveillance video filling them with $10 worth of gas. He returned to the house and forced Jennifer to accompany him to the bank. She was told she needed to withdraw $15,000 for the men. Jennifer was smart though and managed to inform the bank teller that men were holding her family hostage, threatening to kill them all. The bank manager called 911 while Jennifer was still busy with the teller and was still on the line with them after she left the bank. She informed them that Jennifer had indicated that the men were being nice and that she believed they only wanted money. The police responded, setting up a vehicle perimeter around the Pettit home without revealing their presence. Little did they know the horrors that were going on inside. Joshua entered little Micaela's bedroom where she had been tied to the bed posts. He proceeded to sexually assault her, taking photos of his acts with his cell phone. At some point her clothing was removed and washed as they were later examined and had bleach on them. The assault was confirmed when medical examiners found Joshua's sperm in her body. During his interrogation he claimed that he believed the girl was 14 or 16. Stephen went on to strangle Jennifer. Unfortunately her death did not stop him from raping her, claiming Joshua provoked him into doing so. The sound of the thumping and moaning was so great that Mr. Pettit could hear it in the basement. He yelled and received the response don't worry it's all going to be over in a couple of minutes. Mr. Pettit managed to free himself of his restraints. He escaped, hopping up the basement stairs and to the outside of the house. I thought it's now or never because in my mind at that moment I thought they were going to shoot all of us he said. He crawled to a neighbor's yard for help. His injuries were so bad the neighbors didn't even recognize him at first. Joshua discovered Mr. Pettit had escaped and rushed to tell Stephen. He finished up with Jennifer then together they took the gas cans, dousing her body and the rest of the house with gasoline. They left McKayla and Haley tied to their beds and covered them in gasoline as well. They set the place on fire and fled the scene in the Pettit family car. The police that had been nearby watching the house immediately pursued and the men crashed the car into a police car. By the time firefighters arrived on the scene the entire house had gone up in flames. They were not able to save the girls. Jennifer died from strangulation, McKayla and Haley died from smoke inhalation. Haley had managed to escape her restraints but was found collapsed near the top of the stairs. Her feet had sustained third and fourth degree burns. McKayla was found still tied to her bed with her lower body hanging off. The entire invasion lasted seven hours. The men confessed and were both sentenced to death. However, since then the state of Connecticut has abolished the death penalty and both men's sentences were turned into life sentences. The details of the case were so unsettling that jurors were offered counseling to deal with any psychological or emotional trauma they may have experienced. There is much controversy over the police action or inaction during the invasion. They had orders to set up the perimeter and monitor the situation but not to engage. They didn't know the extent of the horrors going on inside. The original ghost hunter Harry Price was written by Orrin Gray for the lineup and The Cheshire Murders is from the Scare Chamber. Weird Darkness Theme by Alibi Music Weird Darkness is a registered trademark, copyright Weird Darkness 2020. If you'd like a transcript of this episode, you can find a link in the show notes. And now that we're coming out of the dark, I'll leave you with a little light. Proverbs 11 verse 25 A generous man will prosper. He who refreshes others will himself be refreshed. And a final thought, don't be afraid to start over. It's a brand new opportunity to rebuild what you truly want. I'm Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness. You can hear the snarls right behind you, the faster you run, the closer the creatures seem to get. How can the undead run this fast? You think to yourself.  You need to find somewhere to stop and think about how to survive the next few minutes of your life. Then you see it and run towards the water station. The zombie fun run will have to wait until you quench your thirst. But bottled water is expensive and you don't even want to know what might be in tap water or much less fresh water. Fortunately, the horde of horror fanatics at this water station planned in advance and brought Patriot pure outdoor filtration water cooler system. 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