This mystery made an ENTIRE TOWN believe in ghosts

Today, I'm going to tell you two stories that really have shock endings. I mean, the plot twists in both these stories are absolutely worth waiting for. But before we get into those stories, if you're a fan of the Strange, Dark, and Mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right place because that's all we do. So if that's of interest to you, please remove the batteries from the Like Button's TV remote, and then once they're out, go ahead and use super glue and glue the back back on.

Also, please subscribe to our channel and turn on all notifications so you don't miss any of our weekly uploads. Okay, let's get into today's stories. On the night of May 3, 1897, a 43-year-old widow named Mary Titus lay in her bed inside of her house in the small town of Plymouth, Pennsylvania. And Mary, as she laid there, she just could not fall asleep because she kept hearing this

strange tapping sound coming from somewhere in her house. Eventually, Mary just stopped trying to fall asleep altogether, and she just sat up and just listened really intently to figure out, you know, where the sound is coming from. But she just couldn't do it. It was sort of erratic, and it seemed like it was coming from all over the house and at one point it felt like it was right below her and then it was over here.

I mean it really was hard to pinpoint where it was even coming from, let alone what was actually causing it. And then on top of that, the volume of this tapping was also changing. Sometimes it would get really loud and then it would be super faint and she could barely hear it, but it was still there, somewhere in her house. But then sort of inexplicably, the tapping sound just abruptly stopped.

Mary is sitting up in bed, you know, it's 2, 3 in the morning, and it's just silence in her house. And at that point, Mary told herself, okay, well clearly it was some animal or maybe it's a branch tapping on the outside of her house or something. You know, she's rationalizing the sound. It's gone now, so it can't be harmful, and I should just stop thinking about it and actually go to sleep now.

But shortly after laying her head back down on the pillow when she was almost asleep, she started hearing the sound again. And again, she just could not tell where it was coming from. Now, Mary, she was a widow, but she did have somebody else who lived with her in the house. It was her daughter, her 18-year-old daughter whose name was Cora. Cora's father and Mary's husband had passed away tragically 11 years earlier in this terrible mining explosion. And really, even though it had been 11 years, Mary and Cora were still very much living in the shadow and the grief of, you know, his death. This is something that they really had

never been able to move past. And so as Mary is laying here in bed and she's hearing this tapping sound starting again, you know, part of her thinks maybe it's Cora, you know, maybe she's doing something. But really, what was going through her head when this tapping sound began again was how utterly alone she felt and how badly she missed her husband. Like, she really just wished he was here because then she would have told him, hey go investigate. I'm gonna stay here, you go make sure the house is safe. But obviously he was gone. He'd been gone for over a decade. And so eventually, even though Mary really didn't want to get up and go look for

this tapping sound, because truthfully she was just scared at this point, but she's thinking about her daughter Cora who's downstairs and you know, heaven forbid, there's some problem in the house. Maybe an animal has literally gotten into the house and it could be hazardous. She doesn't know. So she needs to go and be the brave one and go find out where the sound is coming from and make sure her daughter's okay. And on top of that, her daughter Cora had recently had this really bad case of strep

throat and while she was recovering, you know, she really was not back to 100%. And so Mary told herself, this is an opportunity as much as anything to go down and just check on her daughter and make sure she's okay. And so finally, Mary musters the courage and she takes her sheets off

and she gets up out of her bed. And at the same time, the tapping is sort of rocketing all around the house. It's all over the place. And right as Mary steps onto the ground, she's out of her bed, the tapping stops.

Mary starts walking towards the door, and there's nothing. She gets to the door, she opens it up, she listens, she's looking out, but there's nothing, and the house is completely silent. And there was something kind of eerie about it. It's like the sound was responding to Mary's actions, and suddenly all of Mary's courage evaporated, and she thought,

you know what? The sound has stopped. Everything's okay. I'm sure Cora's okay. I'm getting back in bed and I'm going to sleep. And that's what she did. She rushed back to her bed. She did not go check on Cora. She just got under the sheets, pulled him up to her chin and just hoped the sound wouldn't come back. And it didn't. And eventually, Mary fell asleep. The following morning, when Mary woke up, she immediately kind of took stock and realized, okay, you know, I'm okay. You know, everything seems fine in the house. She listened and didn't hear any knocking sounds and she quickly got up.

She got dressed. She went downstairs into the kitchen. And Cora was actually already down there doing some needlepoint and she seemed perfectly fine, albeit still recovering from her strep throat. But she was okay. She was in the kitchen in good spirits. And so Mary just kind of, you know, breathed a sigh of relief here.

Even though again, she really has no idea what that tapping was. She has no idea if it was sinister or not. This could be totally benign. But there was just something uneasy about it, and so it was just really nice to come down here and have life be totally normal. And so pretty quickly, Mary just fell into her everyday routine. She began prepping some food for her and Cora to eat, and then she and her daughter just started chatting.

At no point did Mary bring up the tapping sound, in part because she didn't really even know what they meant, she was kind of spooked by it, didn't want to scare her daughter, so it never came up. But they're chatting, having their completely normal morning, when suddenly there's very clear and fairly loud tapping that starts not in the kitchen, but below the kitchen, in the cellar. And as soon as the tapping starts, Mary immediately stops, because she recognized it as the same

sound she was hearing the night before that spooked her so badly. And she looked over at Cora without saying anything, just seeing if maybe Cora heard the noises too. And Cora as well is looking at her mom like, did you hear that? And Mary's like, you heard that too?

You heard that tapping? And Cora's like, yeah, I think it's coming from the cellar. And Mary, she's like, I could have sworn I heard that tapping last night. It was actually keeping me up. And Cora, she said, well, you know, it sounds like it's in the cellar. Maybe we have mice down there and they're rummaging around or something. That's probably what it is. And so Mary, who at this point is desperate to find a logical, non-scary explanation for what's going on

here, just immediately goes down the stairs into the cellar and begins looking for mice. That would prove, that's all this is. It's mice making these sounds. But when she's down there, she's looking around and there's no mice, there's no sign of mice. And as she's down there, she starts hearing the tapping again. But now it's not coming from the cellar

where they thought the sounds were originating. It's coming from somewhere above her. And as soon as Mary hears this tapping sound, she hears Cora reacting to it upstairs in the kitchen, like she was kind of startled by it. And so Mary runs back upstairs to the kitchen, she looks at Cora, and Cora is visibly distressed because she's like, I heard it.

It was in here, it was in the kitchen or somewhere nearby. I didn't see anything, but I heard it. As soon as you went down there, I heard it." And so at this point, Mary is undeniably scared. She doesn't know what this is, but it's gotten to the point where she cannot deny there is something strange happening in her house. Her daughter has now fully corroborated that. And so Mary said, you know what?

I'm going next door. They had a friend she went next door, knocked on this guy's door, and when he came, she explained that there's something happening, there's knocking sounds happening in my house, it's scaring me and Cora, we can't figure out what it is,

can you please come take a look? And he was like, absolutely, I'll be over in a second. house and she and Cora are standing in the kitchen and periodically they're hearing these tapping sounds and then the neighbor he comes over. He comes inside and right away, you know, when he comes in he starts to hear the tapping too. And Mary's like, what is that? And Cora, she's totally spooked. And the guy's like, I think it's your pipes. I think that's all this is. It sounds very much like your pipes are banging against the wood inside your house or something. So let me just check your plumbing.

That's probably what this is. And so Mary and Cora, they're like, great. Like he seems pretty confident that that's all this is. And so Mary and Cora, they kind of hover around the neighbor as he begins to check the kitchen and the bathroom plumbing.

But as he's checking all the pipes and the fittings and kind of looking for the origin of these strange tapping sounds, he realizes as he's checking all these different areas that as he's checking them, the tapping sound is persisting and it's not coming from the pipes. Sometimes it sort of seems like the tapping is coming from near the pipes, but other times as he's working right here, the tapping sound is coming from somewhere else on the other side of the house.

And eventually, Mary and Cora started to sense that the neighbor, who had come in very confident that this was no big deal, was starting to show signs that he too felt a little uncomfortable, like something was off here. And then, sort of out of nowhere, when the tapping got really loud, and it was now apparent not only to this guy, but also to Mary and Cora, that the tapping could not be coming from the plumbing because it's nowhere near here.

It's behind us. And the man, he turned around and he looked at Mary and Cora. His face is ashen. He really looked pretty upset. And he said, you know, the last time I heard this sound was in the mine. It was when your husband was killed in that explosion. You know, he died, but other men got trapped in the mine behind all this rubble from the explosion,

and they couldn't get out. And they were tapping on the rocks over and over again until they all died. That's what this sounds like. After that, the man just got up and hastily left and just told them, I'm sorry, I can't help you. And he was out the door and back over to his house. And so Mary and Cora, they're left wondering, like, what do we even do? Who do we talk to?

What's happening here? But for Mary specifically, even though she couldn't believe that this guy had just told her that, what a horrible thing to tell her. grieving the loss of her husband. How could you possibly say that to me?" But she's thinking about what he told her, that it sounds like the tapping of these doomed men, including her husband, tapping on the mine walls before they perished.

And she started to wonder, what if these are ghosts? What if it's my husband and these men who died in the mines 11 years ago trying to get my attention? What if they're trying to communicate with me? Over the next four days, the tapping sound inside of their house continued.

And the story about what was happening here spread all across town. In fact, all sorts of neighbors and actually news outlets were coming to Mary and Cora's house to hear the tapping sounds for themselves.

And when they'd come in the house, Mary would walk them around the house. And sure enough, the reporters, the neighbors, they'd all hear the tapping sounds. And nobody could explain it. It was like this unbelievable phenomenon. And Mary and Cora, by this point, I mean, they were convinced that these sounds were very likely, you know, Mary's dead husband and the other men who perished in the mine. Finally, on May 9th, so six days after this haunting began,

by this point the story is out in newspapers, people are talking about it all over the place, and in some ways that legitimized Mary and Korah's plight. But they also really didn't know what to do about this. This had become sort of a spectacle, but nobody had any solutions for them. So Mary and Korah are sitting at the table weighing out their options. Like, what do we even do? Even if this is, you know, our dead husband, our dead father trying to communicate with us, we can't live with this.

This is kind of terrifying. And if it just goes on and on, do we eventually move? And so they're having that kind of discussion. And as they're sitting at the kitchen table, suddenly the tapping starts again. Except now, the tapping sound is so close. It's practically on top of Mary and Cora.

So much so that their conversation immediately stopped when this tapping started. And they both kind of looked at each other like, it's right on top of us. What's going on? And then as this tapping continued, they realized it was basically right below them, almost like in the cellar, right underneath them. And so Mary sort of reflexively leaned back in her chair, just kind of trying to get out

of the bubble of this really intimate, close tapping sound that they were in. And as she's sitting back, she saw something, something she had never noticed before. And immediately she understood what was going on. It would turn out the tapping sounds that were plaguing Mary and Cora were not being caused by Mary's dead husband or the other men that died in the mines 11 years ago. However, the actual origin of these tapping sounds was in some ways equally as bizarre. So Cora had recently had a bad case of strep throat and she

was doing better but she still was feeling kind of under the weather and that was in part because the bacteria that causes strep throat was still in her system. And that same bacteria is also responsible for causing a totally different condition known as Sydenham's chorea, which Cora also had. In fact, she had it likely at the same time that she had strep throat. And Sydenham's chorea has a very different set of symptoms to strep throat. This condition, which is

also known as the dancing plague, causes your body to have these involuntary movements that the person who has this condition is often totally unaware of. These people can flail around suddenly and not even know they're doing it. And so what was happening is Cora was making the tapping sound, but had no idea she was making the tapping sound because it was being caused by synonyms chorea. Now it seems like, well, how didn't Mary catch on that her own daughter is tapping her feet

or flicking her hand and causing this tapping sound? Well, the reality was when the tapping first started, a lot of times Mary was not in the same room as her daughter, and her daughter did not know she was making the tapping sounds.

So her daughter is genuinely scared of the tapping sounds because she doesn't know she's making them, and Mary doesn't know it's her daughter making them. And so combined, they're like, oh my gosh, what's happening in our house? And then before long, they had kind of gone down this path of, it's my dead husband, it's my dead father, he's the one making these sounds. And then it's like they had tunnel vision, as did all the other neighbors, as did the reporters. Everybody wanted this in some ways to be a haunting. And so nobody's checking to see if maybe Cora

is tapping her feet or hands and creating these tapping sounds. Because again, Cora was fully convinced she was not making those sounds. But then finally, when she and her mom were sitting at the table

discussing what they were gonna do six days after the haunting began, and they hear this really intense, close-tapping sound. When Mary kind of leaned back to kind of take stock of the room and figure out what was going on,

she noticed under the table Cora's foot stomping on the ground. Cora didn't know it was Sydenham's career. One afternoon in November of 2021, a middle-aged woman named Nicole Petit was on break at her job in the city of Decatur, Alabama. And while she was sitting in the break room, she pulled out her phone and she

called her 21 year old daughter, Hannah. The phone rang a couple of times, then eventually Hannah picked up and right away Nicole could tell her daughter Hannah was still very much not feeling well. She could hear it clearly in her voice. So Nicole's daughter was a stay-at-home mom to two very young kids, which, you know, was totally exhausting in its own right. And in fact, on this phone call, Nicole could hear in the background the sound of the kids yelling and running around and crashing into things. So,

clearly, it was just chaos over there. But Nicole knew Hannah could not just be tired from tending to her kids. Because over the last couple of months, what Nicole had noticed was every time she spoke to her daughter, whether her daughter's kids were going crazy or not, Hannah just completely sounded under the weather. And in fact, Hannah often was complaining, again, over the past few months of not only feeling a deep exhaustion, but also of feeling really dizzy and nauseous. Now, over the past few months, Nicole had been telling her daughter, you have to go see a

doctor. This is not normal. This is not just parenting fatigue. Something is off. You need to go get looked at. But Hannah, who was known to be very, very tough and, you know, generally didn't really

go to the doctor much, she said to her mom, like, I'm fine. I'm just exhausted from the kids. It's no big deal." And so she kind of pushed that idea aside. And so this time, as Nicole's talking to her daughter, and she can clearly hear that her daughter is not better, she's still feeling awful,

she knew trying to push her daughter to go see the doctor wasn't going to work. So instead, she said, Okay, Hannah, when's Brian going to be home? Brian was Hannah's husband. And Hannah just sighed and she said, no, he's not home yet. I don't know when he's going to be here. So for the most part, Brian was, you know, a very active parent and husband, but he also was a very successful chiropractor. And in fact, he'd had so much success at his

private practice that recently he'd even been able to fully renovate his building. And so with this new building and all this extra space and all this new staff, he was working even more than usual, which financially was great for the family, but it meant he basically was absent all the time. And so it had become kind of commonplace that Brian was nowhere to be seen. It was kind of Hannah alone with the kids and this mystery illness she was suffering from.

Now, Nicole obviously understood the nuance here. She knew that Brian's practice was very important, not just to him, but to Hannah and their family. And so instead of being upset with Brian, Nicole had tried very hard to make herself available to her daughter, to take care of her kids, to help her out whenever she could.

But there was a limit to how much Nicole could help because Nicole also worked full time. And so she couldn't just be around all the time to help with her daughter. Like today, you know, she was working. She wished she wasn't so she could go be with her daughter,

but that was just the way it was. For the next couple of minutes, Nicole and Hannah just chatted like mother and daughter. And then at some point towards the end of the call, like Nicole always did, she told her daughter, like, hey, I really think you ought to go to the doctor. You know, if you tell me what day you're going to go and you make an appointment, I'll go over and take care of your kids.

I'll even take you to the appointment. Whatever you need. Don't let logistics be the reason you don't see a doctor. Like whatever you need, you let me know and I will help you if I can. I'll flex see a doctor. I don't know, but I think I'm going to be fine.

You know, I'm going to rest. I'm going to take vitamins. I'm going to eat well. I'm going to do all the things and I'm sure this will pass. Nicole sighed when she heard this because basically she hears her daughter saying, I'm not going to the doctor still. But, Nicole didn't argue. She just told her daughter that she loved her and she would see her soon, and then the two hung up.

Over the next few weeks, Hannah continued to feel completely awful, nauseous, dizzy. I mean, all of her symptoms persisted and in some ways even got worse. But no matter how much pressure was put on her, namely by her mom to go see a doctor, Hannah didn't. She really had convinced herself that this was just, you know, parenting fatigue and that she would just get through it and she would be fine, which again was sort of very

much her personality. She was this tough, hard-charging woman. She was going to just grit this one out. But then finally, in January of 2022, so now it's been months and months of Hannah having these symptoms and her mom basically begging her to go see a doctor. And by this point, Hannah can't argue with the fact

that she is basically falling apart. She's lost so much weight, she actually can't even walk around her house anymore. She literally sits on a swivel chair, like a desk chair, and just pushes herself around the house. I mean, she is absolutely sick

and it's something that she can't even deny anymore. And so finally in January of 2022, Hannah says, okay, mom, I'll go to the hospital. Nicole in some ways was incredibly relieved that finally her daughter is doing the thing she should have done a long time ago. And then also Nicole was just so annoyed with her daughter. Like why didn't you go sooner? This is so silly.

But regardless, Nicole's like, great. She tells her daughter, I'm going to come over, pick you up, I'm going to take you to the hospital, I'll be there with you. And so she goes over to Hannah's house, and when she gets there, Hannah, in her chair, wheels over to the door, and Hannah looks awful. She looks like she weighs less than 100 pounds, she's so pale, her hair looks like it's falling out. I mean, she looks absolutely sick. She looks like there's something seriously wrong with her. But Nicole, she just takes her daughter

and assists her down the stairs, puts her in the car. She also gets her kids and brings them along as well. And they drive to the hospital. And when they get there, eventually Hannah is brought into an exam room along with Nicole and the kids.

And a nurse comes in and they begin checking Hannah's vital signs and asking her some questions, and they also weighed Hannah. And eventually, you know, after that was done, the nurse told Hannah that, hey, you only weigh 84 pounds. This is way below what's considered healthy. This is like an emergency. And based on the other things you're telling me about over the last few months having these

symptoms, I'm worried you might actually have stomach cancer. Now, even though Nicole had anticipated that something seriously was wrong with her daughter, it still hit her like a freight train to hear that her 21-year-old daughter had stomach cancer. I mean, she'd never even heard of somebody that young having stomach cancer. And when Nicole looked over at her daughter, Hannah, too, was horrified. I mean, for her, she still believed this was all just gonna pass.

You know, whatever this is, it'll go away. But obviously, stomach cancer is not something that just goes away. A couple minutes later, a doctor came in the room and explained to Hannah and Nicole that the next step here was to test Hannah to see if she actually had stomach cancer. Now the doctor said it was entirely possible this could be something else, but again, based on all the symptoms you've described

and the sudden extreme weight loss, unfortunately, this really does appear to be stomach cancer. But we're gonna check, and in a couple of days, we should have an answer. And so, Nicole and Hannah, despite obviously being shocked and scared,

they both said, you know, whatever we need to do, that's what we're going to do. A few days later, Nicole was at home when her phone rang and it was her daughter calling. Now to this point, Hannah had gone in and begun doing some of the tests to see if she had stomach cancer and they were waiting for some of the results to come back. And so when Nicole saw this call coming in, she's thinking, oh my goodness, this could be it. I could be getting the call where Hannah has been told one way or the other about this being stomach cancer. And

so with quite a bit of anxiety, Nicole answered the phone and when she heard her daughter, her daughter was not telling her about test results. Her daughter, you know, she was speaking in such a low tone that she could barely hear her, but she basically croaked out to her mother that she felt so sick, she had to be taken to the hospital right now. And so Nicole, she dropped everything, sped over to her daughter's house, and when she found Hannah inside, it was like Hannah could barely move. She was so fatigued, she was so sick, so pale, so skinny and malnourished.

It was like her daughter was dying. And so she scooped her daughter up and she rushed her to the hospital. Later that day, Hannah was in a hospital room and was stabilized. When she had come in, she actually was showing signs of what's called acute respiratory failure, which basically meant her lungs were shutting down. And in fact, one of her doctors had told Nicole that had Nicole not gone over there and rushed her daughter to the hospital on that day, very likely she would have died.

She would not have survived another 24 hours at home. So this was as close as you can come to, you know, your daughter dying. But they had been able to stabilize Hannah and she was now resting in bed and they were now trying to figure out what to do. And one of the doctors pulled Nicole aside and said, look, like we know she's being tested for stomach cancer and we don't know if she has that or not yet,

but acute respiratory failure is not connected to stomach cancer. And on top of that, it's incredibly rare for someone as young as Hannah. So we really don't know what's going on here. All we can do is keep her here, keep her stable, monitor her, and run some additional tests." And so Nicole, you know, she said, okay, let's do it. And so for a few days,

that's what the medical staff did. They just continued to monitor and keep Hannah stable while testing her to figure out how somebody her age and in her condition could be contracting respiratory failure. But after a few days of this, out of nowhere, Hannah has this severe sudden seizure. But after her seizure passed, the medical staff began investigating Hannah's brain

because a seizure is a brain-related event. And as they're looking into Hannah's brain, they discover that she has also contracted viral meningitis, which is inflammation of the membrane surrounding the brain. And generally speaking, viral meningitis is not life-threatening,

but in rare cases, it can be. And considering the fact that Hannah had other very serious medical issues going on, and the fact that her particular viral meningitis case was very severe, doctors were worried that she could be someone who could die from this meningitis, or potentially

have very serious brain damage if they didn't do something drastic to combat the swelling in her brain. And so a decision was made to put Hannah into a medically induced coma so that she would lay perfectly still, and they could just wait for the swelling in her brain to go down. But what that meant functionally

was that Hannah would be in this coma indefinitely until the swelling goes down in her brain, or who knows what. I mean, basically the doctors didn't know what was going on with her. However, just a couple of days after Hannah had been placed

in this medically induced coma, some of her imaging tests came back from all the testing they had run on Hannah to try to figure out what was going on here. And in particular, there were these imaging tests that came back from her abdomen. They had scanned her abdomen. And what they discovered inside of her abdomen was truly shocking. Hannah's entire digestive tract was covered in white spots and the doctors all knew that those spots were not cancer.

They were something worse. And after running a few more tests to confirm their theory, you know, once they had that information that, yep, what we suspect is going on here, they called the police. So remember Hannah's husband, Brian,

he's the very successful chiropractor. Well, his practice had been so successful that he had had the funds to fully renovate his office and build this bigger, better chiropracting practice. And that was great, not just for him, but also for Hannah, her whole family.

They were making money hand over fist. Everything was great, except there was an issue. One of the upgrades that Brian wanted to do within this renovated space was to include an x-ray room. And when people build x-ray rooms, they actually line the walls of the room with these big sheets of lead to keep the radiation from penetrating the walls.

But lead is incredibly toxic and harmful to humans, especially if you ingest it or you touch it. It's not something you really wanna interact with at all. It needs to be kept at a safe distance. But after the renovations were done and the X-ray room was built,

there were several sheets of lead that didn't make it into the walls. They were sort of extra sheets of lead that just didn't get used and they were out in the open. And when police discovered that and they began investigating,

they found somebody had been shaving off pieces of those extra lead sheets, little bits of lead. They were shaving them off and planting them inside of Hannah's vitamins that she took religiously every day, believing those were the things that were going to make her healthy again. But in reality, sort of ironically, they were doing the opposite.

She was literally poisoning herself every time she took one of those vitamins. And who was the person who was shaving off all that lead and literally trying to kill

Hannah?

Her own husband, Ryan. All those white spots inside of Hannah's digestive tract were literally just pools of lead that had accumulated inside of her, because her husband had been trying to poison her to death for months. Miraculously, though, Hannah would survive. After nearly two months in a medically-induced coma, Hannah was healthy enough to be woken

up and got to go back home with her kids. As for Brian, he was arrested, found guilty of attempted murder, and sentenced to life in prison. in prison. His motive was the $1.3 million in life insurance policies that he had taken out on Hannah.