Speaker 1: On a stormy night on the small island of Guernsey,
Speaker 1: a young paranormal expert joins a skeptical history teacher to
Speaker 1: record the first in a series of podcasts based on
Speaker 1: the island's incredible folklore and paranormal history. As the expert
Speaker 1: regales his horrifying stories, the teacher learns that we all
Speaker 1: have our own truth, our own story ghosts that haunt us.
Speaker 1: Starring Olivier nominated actor and former Blue Peter legend Peter Duncan,
Speaker 1: When Darkness Falls is a spine chilling ghost story that
Speaker 1: delivers a twisted, terrifying and thrilling tale that the Guardian
Speaker 1: said will leave you cowering in your seat. Catch the
Speaker 1: brand new UK tour of When Darkness Falls from September
Speaker 1: fifteenth in a town near you. Select nights will also
Speaker 1: feature myself delivering a live episode of Unexplained. For more
Speaker 1: details or to book tickets, visit When Darkness Falls dot
Speaker 1: co dot uk. If you dare you're listening to Unexplained
Speaker 1: Season six, episode twenty two to Mourn Names, Part three
Speaker 1: of three, with the discovery of the small slip of
Speaker 1: paper bearing the enigmatic words tamam should by pathologist Professor
Speaker 1: John clelland Detective Lionel Lean's team down at the Adelaide
Speaker 1: Detective's Office finally have a serious clue to get their
Speaker 1: teeth into. Sadly, nobody, however, has the faintest idea what
Speaker 1: it means. Weeks go by as they try in vain
Speaker 1: to uncover the meaning of the words, until one afternoon
Speaker 1: Frank Kennedy, a journalist at the Adelaide Advertiser, gets wind
Speaker 1: of the strange discovery and has an instant jolt of recognition.
Speaker 1: He races to the phone and calls Detective Len Brown
Speaker 1: to let him know where he's seen the phrase before.
Speaker 1: In a volume of poetry, The Rubayat of Omar Khayam,
Speaker 1: the Rubayat is a series of quatrains attributed to Omar Khayam,
Speaker 1: a mathematician and astronomer who lived in Persia in the
Speaker 1: eleventh and twelfth century CE, which were loosely compiled and
Speaker 1: translated by the poet Edward Fitzgerald. First published in eighteen
Speaker 1: fifty nine, the book initially failed to sell until a
Speaker 1: fashion for Orientalism in the English speaking world saw its
Speaker 1: popularity increase markedly. The Rubayat became even more popular during
Speaker 1: the First and Second World War, offering solace to many
Speaker 1: with its themes of accepting fate and embracing the virtues
Speaker 1: of living life by the day. Detective Brown grabs the
Speaker 1: slipper paper and heads straight out to a nearby bookstore.
Speaker 1: He runs his fingers across the spines in the poetry
Speaker 1: section until finally he comes across a Collins Press first
Speaker 1: edition at the Rubaiyat. He pulls it from the shelf
Speaker 1: and rifles through the pages, turning over the last one
Speaker 1: to discover right there, staring back at him in bold type,
Speaker 1: the words tamam should Holding the page up to the light,
Speaker 1: he pulls out the torn piece of paper from his
Speaker 1: pocket and holds it over the words on the page.
Speaker 1: It's a perfect match. Later, after consulting with the librarian,
Speaker 1: Detective Brown and the rest of the team learned that
Speaker 1: the phrase its Persian its English translation meaning to end
Speaker 1: or finish. They go into overdrive, contacting all bookshops and
Speaker 1: libraries in the hope of finding the original item from
Speaker 1: which the slip had been torn, but the search comes
Speaker 1: to yet another dead end back at the Morgue. Despite
Speaker 1: the continuing of the embalming process, the dead man's body
Speaker 1: is beginning to disintegrate, and in the absence of a
Speaker 1: positive identification, the police are left with little option but
Speaker 1: to finally lay him to rest. Local taxidermist Paul Lawson
Speaker 1: is brought in to make a cast of the upper
Speaker 1: torso and head should anyone turn up later wanting to
Speaker 1: id the body before it is dressed and prepared for burial.
Speaker 1: On the morning of June fourteenth, nineteen forty nine, the
Speaker 1: nameless man is transported by Hearst from the funeral parlor
Speaker 1: of F. T. Elliot and Sons in Hindmarsh and delivered
Speaker 1: to the West Terrace Cemetery. It is hard to escape
Speaker 1: the stark somberness of the occasion, laying to rest a
Speaker 1: body for which there is no identity. This unnamed man,
Speaker 1: with no apparent friends or family to claim him as
Speaker 1: their own, those who'd spent over six months trying to
Speaker 1: decipher his riddle are united in a peculiar sadness as
Speaker 1: his body is lowered into the ground. The case touched
Speaker 1: the public's hearts to such an extent that a local
Speaker 1: bookmaker covered the cost to grant the man a proper funeral,
Speaker 1: and a few days later, a small headstone is placed
Speaker 1: at the top of his grave, a gift from a
Speaker 1: local stonemason. It reads, here lies the unknown man who
Speaker 1: was found at Somerton Beach first of December nineteen forty eight.
Speaker 1: An inquest is held into the man's death shortly after,
Speaker 1: concluding that he'd most likely died from unnatural causes, which
Speaker 1: appears to draw a final line of sorts under the investigation.
Speaker 1: The man's bust is placed on display at the South
Speaker 1: Australian Museum for anyone caring to examine it. And although
Speaker 1: the detectives continue their hopeful search for the vital Rubayat,
Speaker 1: it's hard for them not to suspect that they'd come
Speaker 1: to the end of the road. That is, until something
Speaker 1: extraordinary comes to light. Late one Friday evening in July.
Speaker 1: Ronald France This is reading the newspaper at his home
Speaker 1: on Jetty Road in Glenelg when he comes across a
Speaker 1: story about a local police search for a book with
Speaker 1: a partially torn off back page. Remembering a road trip
Speaker 1: he and his wife had taken with her brother and
Speaker 1: his wife the previous year, Roland gets up and heads
Speaker 1: out to his hillman Minx parked up on the street
Speaker 1: just by his house. He opens the door and reaches
Speaker 1: over to the glove compartment, pulling out the book from
Speaker 1: inside that his brother in law had placed there when
Speaker 1: they'd return from their trip, The Rubayat of Omar k
Speaker 1: i Am, it says on the front Rowland flicks immediately
Speaker 1: to the back page and is astonished to find a
Speaker 1: large chunk of it is missing, ripped out from the middle.
Speaker 1: What's more, there appears to be something written inside the
Speaker 1: back that looks suspiciously like a phone number. As it
Speaker 1: will transpire, Roland's brother in law had found it under
Speaker 1: the seat and had placed it in the glove box,
Speaker 1: thinking erroneously that it was Roland's. The next morning, Roland
Speaker 1: arrives at the Adelaide detective's office and is introduced to
Speaker 1: a beaming detective lion Or Lean. Roland hands the book
Speaker 1: to Lean, who wastes no time in comparing the strip
Speaker 1: to the back page, finding it an exact match. After
Speaker 1: confirming Roland's story and subsequently clearing him of any involvement
Speaker 1: in the man's death, the team immediately get to work
Speaker 1: analyzing the book, placing the inside of the back cover
Speaker 1: under ultra violet light. They're amazed to find not one,
Speaker 1: but two phone numbers in dent onto the card. Underneath
Speaker 1: those numbers, they find something very peculiar, indeed, five rows
Speaker 1: of letters written out in an unrecognizable sequence W R
Speaker 1: G O A B A B D M L I
Speaker 1: A O I W T b I M P A
Speaker 1: n E T P M l I A B O
Speaker 1: A I a QC and I T T M T
Speaker 1: S A M S T q a B. The second
Speaker 1: line seems to have been crossed out, and there is
Speaker 1: an X written over the O in the fourth. It
Speaker 1: looks like a foreign language, suggests one of the officers. No,
Speaker 1: it doesn't, says another. It looks like a code. The numbers,
Speaker 1: at least are more easily deciphered. One is discovered to
Speaker 1: belong to a bank, but the second is found to
Speaker 1: be residential and tracked to a property in Moseley Street
Speaker 1: in Glenelk, which incredibly runs directly off Jetty Road, right
Speaker 1: next to where Rowland Francis kept its car. A short
Speaker 1: time later, Detective Errol Caney, who'd been tasked with tracing
Speaker 1: the phone number, makes its way up the porch steps
Speaker 1: of the requisite home, in Moseley Street. It's a pleasant
Speaker 1: tree lined street, just one back from the beach front
Speaker 1: and barely fifteen minutes walk from where the unknown Man's
Speaker 1: body had been found the previous year. On that bright
Speaker 1: December morning of nineteen forty eight, Caney can barely contain
Speaker 1: as nervous excitement as he knocks on the door, Hearing
Speaker 1: movement from insight, He catches sight of someone approaching, and
Speaker 1: moments later is greeted at the door by a young,
Speaker 1: confident woman with wavy, brown shoulder length hair. She shields
Speaker 1: her eyes from the light to get a better fix
Speaker 1: on Caney as he introduces himself, before he suggests politely
Speaker 1: that perhaps they better go inside to talk. The woman,
Speaker 1: who introduces herself as Jessica Thompson, is completely dumbfounded as
Speaker 1: to why her number might have been written in the
Speaker 1: back of the dead man's rubayat, but is happy to
Speaker 1: answer Caney's questions. She goes on to explain that she's
Speaker 1: lived in Glenelg for the past few years, working as
Speaker 1: a nurse in the city. She had moved here after
Speaker 1: completing her training in Sydney and lived alone with her husband, Prestige,
Speaker 1: who was presently out of town along with their three
Speaker 1: year old son Robin. After a lull in the conversation,
Speaker 1: Kaney asks again if she can't think of anything that
Speaker 1: might be of significance to the case, and then finally
Speaker 1: something occurs to her. There was a soldier a few
Speaker 1: years back, she says, whom she'd met a couple of
Speaker 1: times during the war while out with friends back when
Speaker 1: she was a trainee in Sydney. She'd given him a
Speaker 1: copy of the Rubayat shortly before he'd been due to
Speaker 1: ship out again. The man had later tried to contact
Speaker 1: her after the war had finished, but she'd written back
Speaker 1: to him letting him know that she was married and
Speaker 1: that it would be best if they no longer spoke.
Speaker 1: The man's name, she says, was Alfred Boxall, and she
Speaker 1: also gives an address whether police might find him. Kainey
Speaker 1: reads out the strange sequence of letters found at the
Speaker 1: back of the book and asks if Jessica has any
Speaker 1: idea what it might mean, but she is as stumped
Speaker 1: as anyone. Kiney thanks Jessica for her time and suggests
Speaker 1: they arrange a date for her to come down to
Speaker 1: the station to make a formal statement. And take a
Speaker 1: look at the cast of the man as he turns
Speaker 1: to go. Kiney asks if Jessica ever went by any
Speaker 1: other names. She replied, yes, people often used to call
Speaker 1: me Jestin. Back at Anger Street, Detective Lean asks all
Speaker 1: personnel to find out what they can about Alfred Boxall.
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Speaker 1: Linked to the Rubaiyat and Jessica's rejection of him, Lean
Speaker 1: is beginning to think they might finally have their man,
Speaker 1: and that perhaps it had all been a case of
Speaker 1: suicide after all. On the afternoon of July twenty sixth,
Speaker 1: nineteen forty nine, seven months since the body of the
Speaker 1: unknown man was found, detectives Lean and Caney accompanied Jessica
Speaker 1: Thompson to the South Australia Museum to view the bust.
Speaker 1: The men watch with bated breath as Jessica approaches it.
Speaker 1: For a moment, Lean is certain he discerns a glimmer
Speaker 1: of recognition on her face, before she quickly averts her
Speaker 1: eyes to the floor, where they stay for the remainder
Speaker 1: of their conversation. She seems momentarily unsteady on her feet too,
Speaker 1: almost as if she might faint, but when Lean asks
Speaker 1: if she's okay, she insists she is. He asks her
Speaker 1: to confirm whether she has seen the man before there
Speaker 1: is the briefest of pauses before she answers, I have not,
Speaker 1: she says. Three days later, after tracking Alfred Boxall's last
Speaker 1: known address to a property in the beachside suburb of
Speaker 1: Maruber in Sydney, the man is found alive and well,
Speaker 1: working maintenance at a bus depot in near by Randwick.
Speaker 1: When Boxall is later interviewed at his home by the
Speaker 1: Sydney's CIB, he confirms Jessica's story about the night at
Speaker 1: the Clifton Gardens Hotel when she'd given him a copy
Speaker 1: of the Rubayat, and even shows them the original book
Speaker 1: to prove it, pointing out the inscription in the front,
Speaker 1: signed by Jesstin, before carefully returning it back to his bookshelf.
Speaker 1: He apologizes for their wasted journey. There is no luck
Speaker 1: with the possible code either, not even when it's offered
Speaker 1: to the country's finest naval intelligence officers to crack. With
Speaker 1: nothing left to lose, Detective Lean releases it to the
Speaker 1: press in a move that, over the next seventy years
Speaker 1: will see a vast army of amateur sleuths try their
Speaker 1: luck at trying to break it. To this day, nobody
Speaker 1: has been able to offer a satisfactory answer as to
Speaker 1: what it means. Many things will come to light further
Speaker 1: down the line that had the detectives known may have
Speaker 1: proved significant, one piece of information being that Alfred Boxall's
Speaker 1: wartime Engineer's unit had and merely been a glorified home guard,
Speaker 1: but were also involved in intelligence gathering. One other being
Speaker 1: that Jessica Thompson, as she is alleged to have told
Speaker 1: her daughter shortly before dying in two thousand and seven,
Speaker 1: had indeed known the unidentified man, and so too had
Speaker 1: others who she allegedly described as being of an authority
Speaker 1: above the beliefs. Time has done little to damp an
Speaker 1: interest in the unknown man found dead on Somerton Beach
Speaker 1: in December nineteen forty eight, with speculation as to what
Speaker 1: he was doing that evening in a quiet Adelaide suburb
Speaker 1: as rife today as it ever was. Was he the
Speaker 1: mysterious Ray Clark, a secret agent and cohort of Jessica
Speaker 1: Thompson's perhaps who could no longer be trusted, or worse,
Speaker 1: having served his purpose, was no longer of use, or
Speaker 1: was he merely a passing acquaintance of Thompson, destroyed by
Speaker 1: an unrequited love, or was he simply one of many
Speaker 1: people who'd been forced to leave their wars, guard, homes,
Speaker 1: and families behind on the other side of the world,
Speaker 1: finding any job they could in the hope of building
Speaker 1: a better future for their loved ones, A man whose
Speaker 1: heart had unexpectedly given out as he took a moment
Speaker 1: to enjoy the sunset and to think upon the day
Speaker 1: when they might all be finally reunited. Although it's the
Speaker 1: failure to conclusively identify the summiton Man as he came
Speaker 1: to be known that has given his existence more visibility
Speaker 1: than most, it has certainly not been on his terms.
Speaker 1: Whether or not he cared himself for posterity. His fate
Speaker 1: is one that will surely haunt many of us, the
Speaker 1: sadness of a life destined to be forgotten, an affirmation
Speaker 1: of a degree of meaningless to profound to comprehend, even
Speaker 1: if in reality it is a fate that may well
Speaker 1: befall us all. The notion of individuality may seem peculiar
Speaker 1: to an omnipotent godhead observing our insignificant speck of rock
Speaker 1: from outside our universe, seeing the rapidity with which we
Speaker 1: come and go, watching as the busy minute shapes scurry
Speaker 1: about the globe while hundreds of years tick by, seeming
Speaker 1: to them like nanoseconds, watching on as points of mass
Speaker 1: emerge and structures rise and fall, noticing with amusement, perhaps
Speaker 1: how with such predictable regularity, lights begin to flicker and
Speaker 1: turn on as the great shadow of night curls around
Speaker 1: the planet. From this perspective, divided we were considered significant
Speaker 1: enough to even warrant observation, we would appear to them,
Speaker 1: how many of us might regard a colony of ants,
Speaker 1: for example, or a slide of bacteria, singular components of
Speaker 1: an irrelevant species that jostles, evolves, lives, and dies, each
Speaker 1: of us completely interchangeable and indistinguishable from each other, appearing
Speaker 1: merely to be fulfilling the objectives of some sort of
Speaker 1: hive mind. How shocking it might be to them, then,
Speaker 1: to move in closer and discover a very different world, indeed,
Speaker 1: a world of fierce uniqueness and breadth of individuality, full
Speaker 1: of all the many ways we might distinguish ourselves from
Speaker 1: each other. It is this world that begins with our names.
Speaker 1: In the Arthur Miller play, the Crucible of fictionalized account
Speaker 1: of the Salem Which trials and an allegory of the
Speaker 1: communist paranoia that gripped the US in the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 1: Lead character John Proctor finds himself forced to confess to
Speaker 1: witchcraft to avoid execution. However, such a confession comes at
Speaker 1: a cost. Not only will it condemn other prisoners to
Speaker 1: their deaths, but with his name written in ink and
Speaker 1: pin to the local church door, he and his family
Speaker 1: will forever be marked by his confessed sins. In the
Speaker 1: play's climactic scene, Procter changes its mind and rips up
Speaker 1: the confession. In answer to why he'd done so, he
Speaker 1: cries out, because it is my name, because I cannot
Speaker 1: have another in my life. I have given you my soul,
Speaker 1: leave me my name. What then, is in a name? Certainly,
Speaker 1: as Shakespeare would have us believe in Romeo and Juliet,
Speaker 1: it is not hand nor foot, nor arm, nor face,
Speaker 1: nor any other part belonging to us. We rarely choose
Speaker 1: them for ourselves. Sometimes we don't even like them. And
Speaker 1: yet for most of us, for better or worse, it
Speaker 1: is our name that will remain on the administrative records certificates, censuses, gravestones,
Speaker 1: and social media accounts long after we have gone. For
Speaker 1: all that we attempt to project ourselves into collective spaces,
Speaker 1: be it through written, audio, or visual means, it is
Speaker 1: the simple magic of our names that serve as the
Speaker 1: primary trigger from which we are conjured up and held
Speaker 1: in the minds of others. How in our absence we
Speaker 1: might remain something solid and real. A name, then has power.
Speaker 1: It is where we begin and end. It is quite odd, then,
Speaker 1: to think how few of us take the root of
Speaker 1: the eponymous ladybird in Greta Gerwig's brilliant twenty seventeen film
Speaker 1: and choose our own name for ourselves. For many, a
Speaker 1: name you don't like might be an annoyance, but it
Speaker 1: can at least be a source of pride, a connection
Speaker 1: with one's family or tribe. We will often take for
Speaker 1: granted that we have a name at all, But what
Speaker 1: a luxury it is when you consider the millions of
Speaker 1: German Jews with names of so called non Jewish origin,
Speaker 1: forced by law on first of January nineteen thirty nine
Speaker 1: to adopt the name Israel or Sarah to make it
Speaker 1: clear to authorities who was Jewish or not, or the
Speaker 1: hundreds of thousands of women, men, and children abducted from
Speaker 1: their homes in Africa, enslaved, an amised, and stripped of
Speaker 1: their identities, often only granted a name in their newly
Speaker 1: forced places of residence to make it easier for administrative
Speaker 1: purposes or as a mark of a master's ownership. Given
Speaker 1: the horrific experience of victims of the Holocaust or slavery,
Speaker 1: a given name can then be a complicated and wholly
Speaker 1: unwelcome signifier that you exist, and one that can bury
Speaker 1: the truth of who you truly are underneath. When Muhammad
Speaker 1: Ali became the heavyweight boxing champion of the world in
Speaker 1: February nineteen sixty four, he did so under a different name,
Speaker 1: Cassius Clay. When he decided to change it, many people
Speaker 1: in the Western worlds predominantly white media refused to recognize it,
Speaker 1: but Ali would not be refused. He told them, Cassius
Speaker 1: Clay is a slave name. I didn't choose it, and
Speaker 1: I don't want it. I am Muhammad Ali, a free name.
Speaker 1: It means beloved of God, and I insist people use
Speaker 1: it when people speak to me. Perhaps this concept of
Speaker 1: individuality is just an additional layer of sophistication in what
Speaker 1: is nothing but part of a genetically driven strategy to
Speaker 1: heighten the illusion of self that keeps us fighting to live.
Speaker 1: We might also argue that to do away with such
Speaker 1: ideas of individual self is where true liberty lies. That
Speaker 1: only when we learn to shed our egos and stop
Speaker 1: laboring under the delusion of separateness and our desire to
Speaker 1: be noticed, we might finally be free. Until that day comes,
Speaker 1: it is hard to argue with Gerwig's lady Bert Hard
Speaker 1: to fail to understand the torment of Margaret Atwood's handmaiden offered,
Speaker 1: or indeed to fail to understand the shedding of names
Speaker 1: such as Alice Fay Williams for the luminescence of a
Speaker 1: fiene schaccur. Instead. David Lytton, whose body was found on
Speaker 1: Saddleworth More in twenty fifteen, and with whomse name this
Speaker 1: story began, had in fact been born David Loutenburg. At
Speaker 1: some point later in his life he decided to change
Speaker 1: his name to Lytton, which, as long as the records
Speaker 1: exist to show it, will perhaps stand as a more
Speaker 1: truthful mark of whom he considered himself to be. Consider
Speaker 1: too our propensity for social media to so often operate
Speaker 1: not as a tool with which to explore each other,
Speaker 1: but a means with which to validate ourselves, not only
Speaker 1: a way of saying who we are, but, in the
Speaker 1: way of old school graffiti, a way of saying we
Speaker 1: were here, that we did exist. If all this life,
Speaker 1: the universe, and everything is meaningless, perhaps at the very
Speaker 1: least we can say that we were here, material and
Speaker 1: extant in our own right. What's in a name might
Speaker 1: just be the beginning of the truth that your entire
Speaker 1: existence is founded on. If you enjoy Unexplained and would
Speaker 1: like to help support us, you can now do so
Speaker 1: via Patreon To receive access to add three episodes, Just
Speaker 1: go to patron dot com forward slash Unexplained pod to
Speaker 1: sign up. Unexplained. The book and audiobook, featuring ten stories
Speaker 1: that have never before been covered on the show, is
Speaker 1: now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase Amazon, Barnes
Speaker 1: and Noble, and Waterstones, among other bookstores. All elements of Unexplained,
Speaker 1: including the show's music, are produced by me Richard McClain smith.
Speaker 1: Please subscribe and rate the show wherever you listen to podcasts,
Speaker 1: and feel free to get in touch with any thoughts
Speaker 1: or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show.
Speaker 1: Perhaps you have an explanation of your own you'd like
Speaker 1: to share. You can reach us online at Unexplained podcast
Speaker 1: dot com or Twitter at Unexplained Pod and Facebook at
Speaker 1: Facebook dot com. Forward slash Unexplained Podcast