Unexplained : True Tales of Unexplained Mysteries with Bestselling Author Steph Young

Strange Disappearances – Supernatural Abductions – Taken by the Spirits

In the elevator, Elisa Lam wore a red hoodie and a white shirt. In the elevator of the Cecil Hotel, we can see she is wearing this outfit. Very strangely, this is identical to the outfit a character called ‘Cecilia,’ wore in the horror movie ‘Dark Water’, where a woman ends up dead in a water tower on the roof of a building. There is also a very creepy elevator scene in the movie, with a young woman dressed identical to Elisa Lam in the elevator. What happened to Elisa Lam is almost identical to this horror movie; yet the movie was made before Elisa’s death. Elisa died in 2013. The movie was released in 2005. It is a remake of a Japanese horror movie made in 2002, and the story originates from a book by Koji Suzuki who also wrote ‘The Rings.’ The American version of ‘Dark Water’ stars Jennifer Connelly as ‘Dahlia,’ who has a young daughter called ‘Cecilia.’ They move into a run-down apartment. Not long after they move in, water begins to drip from their bedroom ceiling. The elevator in the building is prone to malfunctioning, like Elisa’s elevator. Cecilia sneaks up to the roof one day and finds a back-pack sitting next to the water tower. In time, Cecilia and Dahlia cannot help but notice the dark water which starts to run out of their taps and toilet. Dahlia goes up to the roof and to her horror, she finds a girl’s dead body floating in the water tower; just like the real-life case of Elisa Lam at the Cecil hotel. How can it be that a movie released before Elisa vanished, seems to mimic so precisely the last known hours of Elisa’s life; even down to the exact outfit she is wearing in an old elevator that malfunctions just like the elevator in the movie? Naming one character ‘Cecilia,’ and the other ‘Dahlia,’ we also cannot but help think of the infamous ‘Black Dahlia’ case in LA, and indeed there seems to be many similarities between Elisa Lam and the ‘Black Dahlia’ victim, Elizabeth Short. Many believe that the Cecil Hotel where Elisa vanished was the last place Elizabeth Short was seen. Elizabeth Short was a young aspiring actress who was found mutilated in January 1947. Her face was carved into a ‘Glasgow Smile’, her body drained of blood, and cut in half, then washed in gasoline. When a local resident happened across her body, at first, they thought it was a store mannequin. Her body was left on display, deliberately to be found and seen. The notorious case of ‘The Black Dahlia,’ as Elizabeth Short came to be known, is an as yet still-unsolved murder-mystery that has beguiled so many. Elisa was ‘washed clean’ by the water, and some believe she too had been drained of blood, because there was so little blood left in her body that it was not even possible to carry out many of the necessary forensic tests. There are other striking and unsettling similarities between Elisa Lam and Elizabeth Short, whose severed body was found on Leimont Park. Both Elizabeth and Elisa were petite, brunette, and pretty, both were called names that derive from Elizabeth, both were in their twenties, and both sadly suffered from depression. Both were known to travel alone and both had travelled from San Diego to downtown LA just prior to their deaths. Both Elisa and the Black Dahlia vanished after last being seen in a downtown hotel, and many say this was the Cecil Hotel. Both were not reported missing for a number of days before their bodies were found, and both died horrifying, inexplicable deaths that would become notorious. Both appear to have been drained of blood. Both cases ‘went viral.’ Newspapers around the world and armchair detectives have been fascinated with the mystery of who killed ‘The Black Dahlia’ for decades, and now Elisa too. Notably as already said, the movie ‘Dark Water’ has a central character called ‘Dahlia,’ and ‘Dahlia’s young daughter is called ‘Cecilia’; so similar to the word ‘Cecil,’ Elisa’s Hotel. It would almost seem as though this movie ties the Black Dahlia and Elisa Lam together in a way that is impossible ...

Alex Sanders, The King of the Witches was also called The Halloween King. He was England’s highest witch, but he would come to regret his involvement in the dark occult. “I made a dreadful mistake in using black magic in an attempt to bring myself money and sexual success. It worked. Walking through Manchester, I was accosted by a middle-aged couple who told me that I was the exact double of their only son who had died some years previously. They took me into their home, fed and clothed me, and treated me as one of the family. They were extremely wealthy, and when I asked them for a house of my own with an allowance to run it, they were quite happy to grant my wishes. I held parties, bought expensive clothes, was sexually promiscuous: But it was only after a time that I realised I had a fearful debt to pay.” It would seem that Sanders believed the subsequent suicide of one of his mistresses around this time, along with his sister Joan being accidentally shot and then subsequently diagnosed with terminal cancer, was his price to pay.  He had studied the Book ‘The Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage.’ It is a very old European Kabbalistic Grimoire, an ancient book of magic that claims to describe a method to make contact with ‘Your Holy Guardian Angel.’ The ancient summoning ceremony which requires long and intense participation, in seclusion. It was a very dangerous ritual – for it would invoke Angels and Spirits “good or bad.....” Tales of Mystery Unexplained Podcast with author Steph Young

H Healer and clairvoyant John Cain stood in the local civic hall with his hands on a patient, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth and a bottle of whiskey nearby. As you can imagine, he was not typical of many involved in the spiritualist movement, whose attitude at times can tend towards holier than thou. Cain was born in 1931 in the village of Eastham, Merseyside, near Liverpool. During his national service in the Army he was a physical training instructor, and he was also a boxer and black belt in Judo. In 1956 he started his own business as a blacksmith and he became incredibly successful, employing thirty people and driving a Rolls Royce; but he would soon give it all up to devote himself to giving spiritual healing for free to anyone in need. One day, he’d been sitting in the pub with his wife, as he did most evenings, when he noticed he could see something out of the corner of his eye that looked like shimmering mist. Instinctively, he believed this had to be some kind of ‘energy,’ and he felt suddenly inclined to place his hands on a nearby person in the pub who he felt was in need of healing. As he did so, the person’s pain, that they’d been feeling for a long while, suddenly disappeared. Cain is interviewed on an old radio show called ‘Beyond Belief’ for Radio Merseyside, and presenter Kieran Devay says, “Cain smokes up to 50 cigarette a day, swears like a trooper, and is more than partial to Scotch Whisky. He works twelve hours a day, seven days a week. His wife Audrey acts as his secretary, dealing with the hundreds of letters he receives each week asking for his help.” Cain says, “Going back to when I was about five years old my mother suffered with migraines. I just used to rub her temples and the pain would disappear. At the age of 14 I joined a boxing club. Later on, I practiced Judo for 25 years.” When members of his sports clubs would suffer sprains or other injuries, Cain found he could take away the pain by massaging and manipulating the injured areas of the body. “I found I could take the pain away – but didn’t realise it was the gift of healing.” Cain says he was brought up in the Church of England but as a young man, his interest turned to Spiritualism and what spiritualists call a development circle, where people attempt to make communication with the dead. However, Cain didn’t last long in the circle at his local spiritualist church, for understandable reasons; “We sat in the silence for an hour, and then you say what happened in that hour. Well, the lady sitting opposite me said, “You’ll never believe whose been with me tonight John.” I said, “Well, go on, try me.” She said, “Well, I’ve had Long John Silver with me, and we’ve been walking for hours along the beach.” So, I said to her, “Did he tell you where the treasure’s buried?” She said, “No,” so I said, “Well, let’s go back into the silence, find out where he buried the treasure, and we’ll all go and have a bloody good holiday in the Bahamas.” Then the lady sitting next to her said, “Isn’t that funny Nancy, I’ve had his parrot sitting on my shoulder all night.” Well, I thought to myself, this is the time you bail out John!” After such nonsense, Cain decided he would leave the circle that night, but when he went back the following week to tell them this, one of the ladies in the group became upset and asked him how she would get her healing if he left the group. Cain didn’t understand what she meant and so she explained that since he’d been attending the circle, her back pain had vanished. Then another lady in the group chipped in, telling Cain that she was in a lot of pain that evening and would he be kind enough to put his hands on her. Cain did as she asked, and her pain vanished. This was before Cain had become a healer, and he couldn’t understand how this could be happening. At the same time, his daughter was suffering with a huge number of warts on one of her legs. “Not just a couple of warts, they were like fish scales,” said his wife.

George Chapman, who died in 2006, was brought up in the working-class docklands area of Merseyside, Liverpool. He worked variously as a docker, a firefighter, and he was a professional boxer. Maurice Barbanell, former Fleet Street newspaper editor once remarked about Chapman; ‘When Spiritualism’s history comes to be written, the Lang/Chapman partnership, which has brought health to thousands of sufferers after their cases were called “hopeless”, will contribute some of its most illumined pages’, and this will shortly be explained. During World War II Chapman became an Air Force Commander and then he joined Marines, where he taught unarmed combat. He met his wife Margaret in 1945 and they had a daughter Vivian, but sadly she died just 4 weeks after her birth. This tragedy caused Chapman to consider, was there an afterlife? In search of answers, he turned to the Clergy, but they warned him not to dabble ‘in the supernatural.’ After the War, Chapman joined the Fire Brigade where he met a fellow fireman called Leslie Miles. On the long nightshifts between emergency calls, Miles would experiment with an upturned tumbler and the letters of the alphabet, in an attempt to receive messages from the spirit world, and it wasn’t long before the rest of the fire crew, their curiosity fully aroused, joined in with him. Soon, they were all sitting around the table at night at the fire station, putting their fingers on the glass and watching it move from letter to letter to spell out words and phrases. Meanwhile at home, Chapman began to do the same thing with his wife, and before long he was stunned to receive a message purportedly from his dead mother, who had died when he was just 5 years old. Of course, he needed to check that he wasn’t simply deluding himself, and so he asked his relatives to see if what his dead mother had told him could be verified. To his surprise, his relatives confirmed it all to be completely correct. This helped Chapman to believe that there really could be life-after-death and he began to spend a couple of hours at home every day trying to receive more messages from spirits. To his surprise, many of the messages they gave him told him that he was a healer. As well as being a fireman, Chapman was a professional boxer. How on earth could he be a healer then, he wondered to himself? He had to find out more and so soon he put together a development circle with likeminded people, where further spirit messages repeated to him that he was a healer. Spirits were coming through Chapman – even though he had no idea at the time because he had gone into trance and was completely oblivious to it. The spirits were healers too, they said, and they were going to work with him. According to Chapman’s later biography, ‘One of the spirits was introduced to us as Dr. Lang.’ Dr. Lang told them that Chapman would be working with him to heal sick patients. Of course, Chapman didn’t take this as fact; after all, it sounded completely incredulous, and firstly, he wanted to know if a Dr. Lang had even ever really existed. He wanted absolute proof. ‘Too many alleged spirit guides do not stand up to critical exam,’ he wrote, and the spirit communicating with them, ‘should be able to give dates, names, and details of his earthly experiences.’ Dr. Lang duly went on to give names, dates, places, for the purpose of verification, and Chapman began to check them out. ‘There were colleagues of Lang still in practice. There were also patients who had consulted him while he was a surgeon on earth...they confirmed that it was the same Dr. Lang they had known.’ Pretty soon, Chapman began to do what the spirits were urging him to do – to become a healer and treat people, and he set up a clinic at his home in Aylesbury. One of his patients was a Dr. Kildare Singer, who had been taught ophthalmology by Dr. Lang at the Middlesex Hospital and was suffering with cancer. When Dr. Singer came to hear that people were visiting Chapman to receive spiritual he...