Transcript
Danielle (0:00)
Foreign.
Cassie (0:19)
Hello everyone. Welcome back to National Park After Dark. You're listening to a Trail Tales episode. And I'm Cassie.
Danielle (0:26)
And I'm Danielle and we got some stories for you. Oh sure. As normal. Sure do. Yeah. So my first story. Small town legend with a scary story behind it. Hi, my name is Roger from just south of Denver and a long time fan of the pod. I grew up in a then small town in Connecticut, a place called Wallingford. Oh, it's coming back. I'm like Roger, you're already being chosen because I too lived outside of Denver and my dad lived in Wallingford.
Cassie (0:56)
Oh wow. Sync cities.
Danielle (0:59)
Yep. Our small town legend had to do with a real event, but the legend was definitely built to scare people even more. The version of the legend everyone knows is that of Shoebox Lane, also known as Tyler Mill Road. The story was that an old man lived in the creepy house off of this very desolate road and would murder people and leave parts of them around in shoe boxes for kids and wayward teens to find along this very, very scary road. Of course, the big thing was to drive down that road with not a single street light to be seen late at night and scare the hell out of yourself. There really was a spooky old house with abandoned cars and other machinery around it and it was out there all by itself. Of course, the old guy who lived there was actually a very nice old guy and his family had owned the home and land around it for so many years, nobody was really sure how long it had been there. But the story doesn't end there. The real story, almost 140 years old, includes a little used wooden path, an inquisitive dog, an old style wooden shoebox, which was more like a shipping crate, and an odor that had to be investigated. Turns out the dog's owner, Edward Terrell, approached the box that his dog was obsessed with and he was nearly overcome by a stench coming from within it. Because Edward had found a dead body only weeks before. Not sure the story about that, as it just seemed to be noted in passing. He knew that smell. And before opening the box he went to get some help. When the group of men Edward had gotten to come with him returned, they pried open the box thinking they would find a dead animal. Instead they found, wrapped in tar paper and packaged in straw, the nude torso of a man with no head, arms or legs included. The medical examiner later determined that body had been dead for between five to 10 days, was a man in his 20s and who had likely weighed about 150 pounds. One final thing, there was arsenic in the dead man's stomach. There had been several theories of who that man was from a veteran who had recently collected a large pension to criminals killed by accomplices to various other missing men. But no person was ever identified as the victim, although arms and legs wrapped in the same tar paper were later found by a local farmer. There have been many theories and stories linked to the body in the shoebox, but the case was never closed. Although 40 years after the body was found in the now ancient police chief claimed he knew who the murderer was and the murdered were, he refused to ever tell anyone the names of those involved, saying he was keeping it to himself to protect the murderer's family. So the dark woods of Wallingford still holds its secrets. And supposedly a ghost of the poor man whose body was stuffed into that shoebox and whose arms and legs were found months later. The story is that the body is still wandering the woods, looking in discarded shoe boxes, crates, boxes, suitcases, and even the trunks of vehicles that might stop along that road late at night looking for his still missing head. That's it. And. And this. Roger did attach. And I'll post them. He did attach news articles and stuff about this murder case.