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When the luxury liner SS Morro Castle erupted in flames off the New Jersey coast in 1934, it left behind 137 dead, a captain's corpse that vanished before it could be examined, and a heroic radio operator whose criminal past suggested he may have started the fire himself. | #WDRadio June 14, 2026==========HOUR ONE: Jeannie Saffin already had a tough life, being born with a birth defect that stunted her mental growth, leaving her with the mind of a child, never getting married and having kids, never dating… but that all pales in comparison to how she died: bursting into flames for no apparent reason. Was Jeannie Saffin the victim of spontaneous human combustion? (The Spontaneous Combustion of Jeannie Saffin) *** Sometimes it's easy to get a girl to go out with you – just be polite and ask. Some men resort to cheesy pickup lines thinking it will help their chances. But one man chose to call upon a woman in a very unusual way… by purchasing a gravestone. (Pitching Woo With a Tombstone) *** If a man demands his girlfriend give up the baby they conceived, otherwise he would no longer be with the woman – what is that newborn's mother to do? Sadly, Emily Dunn made the wrong decision – with tragic results. (The Durbin Baby Murder) *** The transplanting of an organ is almost a routine procedure now in the 21st century – even doing a transplant of an arm or a leg isn't uncommon. But when you talk about transplanting a living head onto a dead body – that's when things get tricky. But Robert White thought it could be done – and even tried doing it. (The Man Who Wanted To Do a Head Transplant) *** Imagine getting onto a plane and once in the air finding out that the pilot wasn't qualified to fly that kind of plane – and that he was only there because the original pilot wasn't available due to being dead. That's what happened in 1934 on the boat, the SS Morro Castle. And it was the beginning of tragedy after tragedy. (Mystery, Mismanagement, and Mayhem on the SS Morro Castle)==========HOUR TWO: In June of 2009 a man calling himself Peter Bergmann checked in to a hotel in Sligo Town. Five days later his body was found on Rosses Point Beach. But Peter Bergmann was not Peter Bergmann – so who was he? (The Peter Bergmann Mystery) *** Sharing stories from people who are frightened by a bump in the night or a strange shadow on the wall in their bedroom is one thing, but when you get professional ghost hunters telling of the scariest experiences they've had, you know it has to be some freaky stuff. (Scariest Experiences of Ghost Hunters) ==========SUDDEN DEATH OVERTIME: More of the scariest experiences of ghost hunters! *** I'll tell you about that time when a dam failed – and because of it, people were legally allowed to marry the dead. And still do to this day. (That Time A Failed Dam Led to Marrying Corpses) *** Personal experiences of those who have stayed at the Wolf Creek Inn, plus some hard evidence, seems to indicate that spirits who haunt the place are not only benign in nature, but even protect the guests and owners from other malevolent spirits which roam there as well. (Haunts at Wolf Creek Inn)==========SOURCES AND REFERENCES FROM TONIGHT'S SHOW:“Mystery, Mismanagement, and Mayhem on the SS Morro Castle” by Brent Swancer for Mysterious Universe:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/56jb9c7j“The Man Who Wanted To Do a Head Transplant” by Gary Krist for the Washington Post: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/39d2k9pw“The Durbin Baby Murder” posted at Murders In History: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/c96z9kst“Pitching Woo With a Tombstone” from the New York Journal, posted at The Victorian Book of the Dead website:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/utw6vh45“The Spontaneous Combustion of Jeannie Saffin” by Brent Swancer for Mysterious Universe:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/e6as67fn“That Time A Failed Dam Led to Marrying Corpses” by Kaushik Patowary for Amusing Planet: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/zyrxx43k“Scariest Experiences of Ghost Hunters” by Amanda Ashley for Graveyard Shift:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/y7tx3a2t“Haunts at Wolf Creek Inn” posted at HauntedHouses.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yadzm4ae“The Peter Bergmann Mystery” by Rosita Boland for Irish Times: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/9b44kfs==========(Over time links seen above may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for material I use whenever possible. If I have overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it immediately. Some links may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)=========="I have come into the world as a light, so that no one who believes in me should stay in darkness." — John 12:46==========WeirdDarkness®, WeirdDarkness© 2026==========To become a Weird Darkness Radio Show affiliate, contact Radio America at mailto:affiliates@radioamerica.com, or call 800-807-4703 (press 2 or dial ext 250).==========https://weirddarkness.com/WDR20260614This episode of Weird Darkness moves from a burning luxury liner off the New Jersey coast to a fire-scarred kitchen in London, a body on an Irish beach, a drowned infant in Illinois, a collapsed French dam that legalized marrying the dead, and a haunted stagecoach inn in Oregon — with a head-transplant surgeon and a tombstone-shopping widower along the way.It opens with the SS Morro Castle, the 508-foot American ocean liner that ferried wealthy passengers between New York and Havana during Prohibition until September 8, 1934, when its captain, Robert Wilmott, dropped dead the night before departure and a fire of unknown origin erupted in a B Deck storage locker on the voyage home. Replacement captain William Warms steered into gale-force winds and waited 38 minutes to send a distress call, paint-gummed lifeboats refused to lower, untrained passengers broke their necks jumping in faulty life jackets, and at least 137 of the 549 aboard died before the charred hulk ran aground at Asbury Park, New Jersey, where souvenir stands sprang up around the wreck. Suspicion later fell on chief radio operator George White Rogers, the disaster's celebrated hero, whose hidden history of arson convictions, an aquarium-heater bomb built to maim a police lieutenant asking too many questions, and a double murder ended with his sudden death in Trenton State Prison — and the disappearance of his prison records.From there the episode lightens briefly with a pair of newspaper accounts of courtship by gravestone: an 1896 story from the Cincinnati Enquirer about a widower who finally bought a $50 monument for his wife of five years past — not out of grief, but to impress a wealthy widow who had called him too cheap to mark the grave — and a 1924 item from the Kansas City Star about a Kansas woman who married a widower precisely because he kept his first wife's grave so well.Next comes Dr. Robert J. White, the Cleveland neurosurgeon who watched the first successful human kidney transplant in Boston in 1954 and spent the rest of his life pursuing something far stranger: transplanting a living human head onto a donor body. In March 1970 he performed the operation on monkeys, moving one animal's head onto another's decapitated body in an 18-hour surgery; the hybrid lived nine days. White, a devout Catholic who sparred publicly with journalist Oriana Fallaci and animal rights activist Ingrid Newkirk, came close to attempting the procedure on a quadriplegic human volunteer through Russia's medical system before he died in 2010, leaving behind questions about consciousness, identity, and death that medicine has yet to answer.The hour then turns to Jeannie Saffin, a 61-year-old London woman with the mental capacity of a child who, on September 15, 1982, burst into flames while sitting calmly at her father's kitchen table in Edmonton with her hands in her lap. Her father Jack and brother-in-law Don Carroll doused the fire, but Jeannie — burned to the subcutaneous fat on her face, hands, and abdomen — never screamed, slipped into a coma, and died eight days later. The chair she sat in was unmarked, the nearest flame was a shielded pilot light five feet away, and a police constable concluded it was spontaneous human combustion, a verdict the coroner rejected. Skeptic Joe Nickell's pipe-ember theory accounts for some details, but not how a human body ignited so completely in under two minutes while burning nothing around it.Then the mystery of Peter Bergmann: the tall, gray-haired man with an Austrian accent who arrived in Sligo, Ireland by bus on June 12, 2009, checked into the Sligo City Hotel under a false name and a fabricated Vienna address, and over three days left the hotel thirteen times carrying a full purple plastic bag — returning empty-handed each time, never once caught by CCTV disposing of anything. He bought ten international stamps, cut the labels from his clothes, folded them neatly on a rock at Rosses Point Beach, and was found dead at the water's edge the next morning near Dead Man's Point. The autopsy revealed terminal prostate cancer he could not have been unaware of, yet he died of cardiac arrest, not dr
Head transplant trigger warning! Kat covers a neurosurgeon who performed morbid full-body transplants because he was obsessed with the location of the human soul. Then Hayley covers the worst nuclear disaster in history and the unusual ecosystem that evolved in the now uninhabited exclusion zone. Still got a thirst for knowledge and parasaocial camaraderie? You're in luck! We release bonus shows every week on our Patreon. https://www.patreon.com/nightclassy Night Classy | Linktree Produced by Parasaur Studios © 2024
Robert J. White fue un renombrado especialista. Pero sus experimentos en animales, y sus objetivos de operación en personas vivas, marcan a su figura. Distribuido por Genuina Media
The superpower rivalry of the Cold War had many different fronts, space, the rice paddy fields of south-east Asia and even the operating theatre. The desire to push the envelope of human ingenuity led Dr Robert J. White to conduct a series of successful head transplants on monkies during the 1970s with the eventual aim of performing the procedure on a human patient. Dr Brandy Schillace, the author of Mr Humble and Dr Butcher, is today's guest on the podcast and she tells the almost unbelievable story of how close we came to seeing human head transplants take place. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
The superpower rivalry of the Cold War had many different fronts, space, the rice paddy fields of south-east Asia and even the operating theatre. The desire to push the envelope of human ingenuity led Dr Robert J. White to conduct a series of successful head transplants on monkies during the 1970s with the eventual aim of performing the procedure on a human patient. Dr Brandy Schillace, the author of Mr Humble and Dr Butcher, is today's guest on the podcast and she tells the almost unbelievable story of how close we came to seeing human head transplants take place. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
When one mentions the topic of “head transplantation” (or a related topic – the “brain transplant”), for most people, it remains a topic purely in the context and sphere of science fiction. Yet most people are unaware of the following history: In 1908, Nobel Prize winner Alexis Carrel, a French surgeon who had developed surgical methods to connect blood vessels in the context of organ transplantation, collaborated with the American Charles Claude Guthrie perform the first head grafts between dogs. In 1954, Vladimir Demikhov, a Soviet surgeon who conducted important work to improve coronary bypass surgery, performed experiments in which he grafted a dog's head and upper body, onto another dog; the effort was focused on how to provide blood supply to the donor head and upper body. In 1965 American neurosurgeon Robert J. White did a series of experiments in which he attempted to graft the vascular system of isolated dog brains onto existing dogs monitoring brain activity with EEG and also monitored metabolism, and showed that he could maintain high levels of brain activity and metabolism by avoiding any break in the blood supply. In 1970 he did four experiments in which he cut the head off of a monkey and connected the blood vessels of another monkey head to it. From 1970-1994, Paul A. Pietsch was a Professor in the School of Optometry and an Adjunct Professor of Anatomy at Indiana University, and conducted and published on a long series of "brain shuffling" / transplantation experiments in regenerative organisms between salamanders and frogs. Related "brain switching" experiments have routinely taken place in the world of embryology to this current day, between species such as chickens and ducks, and quails and finches. Dr. Ren Xiaoping, is an orthopedic surgeon from China, and is most well known for being part of the team that achieved the first hand transplant in China. Dr. Ren attended the Harbin Medical University in Harbin, China, and received his M.D. in 1984. From 1996 to 2000, he continued his education, performing research relating to anatomy and hand surgery. During this period, specifically on January 25, 1999, the first hand transplant was performed on Matthew Scott, and Ren was an influential figure in this achievement. He is currently a partner with Italian neurosurgeon Dr. Sergio Canavero in a project (HEAVEN - Head Anastomosis Venture) to plan and attempt the first human head transplant, known as a Cephalosomatic Anastomosis, an operation that has never been done before.
Episode 28: Part 1 of 1970. Amy tells Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald’s tale of the murders of his family while The Jackson 5 are topping the charts, Debbie Reynolds is quitting shows, Raymond Burr is sitting down, Robert J. White is switching monkey heads, and Doc Ellis is pitching on LSD. All of this and much more! Amy and Joe discuss Timelines in American Pop Culture and True Crime Year by Year. This week: Season 3, Episode 1: 1970, part 1. Credits Include: Popculture.us, Wikipedia, IMDB, Bizarropedia & Youtube. Information may not be accurate, as it is produced by idiots. Music by MATT TRUMAN EGO TRIP, the greatest American Band. Click Here to buy their albums! Donate to American Timelines on Patreon! We’ll make more podcasts and make them better!
完整文稿看周日微信第三条，你懂的~ This is NEWS Plus Special English. I'm Liu Yan in Beijing. Here is the news.Chinese and American scientists have jointly developed a new antibody targeting the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome virus, which has killed 16 people and landed 150 others in hospital in South Korea.Fudan University, which worked with U.S. National Institutes of Health to develop the antibody, said tests on animals have seen very effective results.Researchers at Fudan University said the "m336" antibody could neutralize the MERS virus more effectively than other antibodies. The treatment has proved more effective when coupled with a specific type of polypeptide. Theoretically, the polypeptide can be used as a nasal spray, as a preventive measure for high-risk groups such as medical staff.Respiratory experts have called for an immediate clinical trial of the drug. Four phases are required before new medicine goes to the market, namely laboratory tests, animal testing, trials on humans, and approval from the Food and Drug Administration.A Korean official has said over 100,000 foreign tourists canceled their trip to the country this month due to the deadly MERS disease. Last year, more than 1 million travelers visited South Korea on a monthly basis. The country's foreign currency earnings decline by 2.3 billion US dollars, when the number of tourists goes down by 50 percent.This is NEWS Plus Special English.A surgeon in Harbin, northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, has triggered public debate after announcing plans to perform head transplant on primates following successful operations on mice.Ren Xiaoping, a doctor with the second affiliated hospital of Harbin Medical University, successfully transplanted the head of a mouse to another's body in 2013. His team has since performed almost 1,000 such operations, though very few survived long after surgery.Ren has been working on perfecting the operation and announced plans to test the procedure on monkeys in the future.Ren studied and worked in the United States before returning to China three years ago. He said head transplant may help people with spinal cord injuries, and it presents the ultimate challenge for neurosurgeons. Major technical difficulties include reconnecting the donor head with the recipient's spinal cords, keep the brain alive during transfer, and prevent transplant rejection. The ambitious plan, more found in science fictions, is beyond many people's imagination and has drawn hot debate on the media and the internet.The world's first attempted head transplant on a monkey dates back to 1970, when American neurosurgeon Robert J. White transplanted the head of a monkey to the body of another. The animal died of immune-rejection several days after the transplant.You're listening to NEWS Plus Special English. I'm Liu Yan in Beijing. China will continue to promote green and low carbon development in urban areas to achieve efficient and high quality growth.The country's top economic planner, the National Development and Reform Commission, made the announcement to mark the National Low-carbon Day which fell on June 15th this year.The commission says China will push forward energy-saving and environment-friendly urban development to provide citizens with a sustainable living environment.Acknowledging the previous economic growth came at the expense of environmental destruction, the commission said China has been making concrete contributions to address climate change and prioritizing green, low-carbon economic development. In a joint statement issued during the visit by U.S. President Barack Obama to Beijing last November, China pledged to achieve peak carbon dioxide emissions around 2030, and increase the share of non-fossil fuels in primary energy consumption to around 20 percent by 2030.The National Low-carbon Day began in 2013, and is aimed at promoting awareness about climate change among the general public. It falls on the third day of the National Energy Efficiency Promotion Week in June every year.This is NEWS Plus Special English.China is promoting the use of wind-generated electricity for winter heating in northern China as part of its effort to alleviate air pollution.The National Energy Administration has asked provinces in north and northeast China, as well as Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia to come up with plans and include wind power in their heating system before next winter.The goal is to allow wind-powered heating to replace coal and make it accessible to places with no natural gas pipelines. The move also aims to combat the issue of wind power waste, a headache for China, due to imbalanced distribution of wind resources and imperfect grid system. Wind-rich provinces are mainly in the less developed northwestern regions where electricity supply exceeds demand.An average of 8 percent of wind electricity was abandoned last year. The rate climbed to 18 percent in the first three months of this year.This is NEWS Plus Special English.Beijing and its neighboring cities enjoyed better air quality last month, as the main pollutants, ozone and PM2.5, both decreased year on year.According to the Ministry of Environmental Protection, PM2.5 in 13 cities monitored in the most polluted areas in Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei Province decreased by almost 10 percent compared with the same period last year. The ozone index in this area was down 1 percent.Beijing reported sound air quality in 58 percent of the days last month and only one day of heavy pollution. In addition, the Yangtze River Delta region and the Pearl River Delta region saw improved air quality last month. The two regions refer to the economically-developed eastern and southern areas encompassing Shanghai and Guangzhou respectively.China began to include the index of PM2.5 and ozone in a new air quality standard in 2013.
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