Episode 45: The Wolf Adviser

The Malevolent Maine squad digs deep into the possible identity of the legend known only as, “The Exile.” Could this person be a Viking prisoner, exiled from his home for some terrible crime? And could he be related to the so-called King Beyond the Desert? Plus, an update on Katie Clark, the woman who followed the Gray Fool, and our investigation into the Portly Man phenomenon. Also, new information on the disappearance of Mark!

Content Warning:  black magic, torture, beheading, exile, mind control, disappearances, references to killing

Host: Chris Estes
Writer: Chris Estes
Senior Investigator: Lucas Knight
Senior Investigator: Tom Wilson
Special Appearance: Professor Preston Yates
Special Appearance: Mark Mercier
Sound Design: Chris Estes
Producer: Megan Meadows

Transcript

 Malevolent Maine

Episode 45: Adviser Wolf

Malevolent Maine is a horror podcast, and may contain material not suitable for all audiences. Listener discretion is advised.

INTRO: 

A woman making a strange request of hunters. An occult presence in an abandoned wax museum. And a shack out in the woods reportedly home to a demented clown. Welcome back, listeners. It’s your host, Chris. These are the stories we’ve got coming your way in the next few weeks.

Before we dive into the newest episode, I’d like to thank everyone who supports us. We appreciate all the likes and comments you guys leave us. If you’re so inclined to support us a little more, consider heading over to patreon.com/malevolentmaine where for a small monthly fee you can join our Malevolent Mob. We’re releasing two, that’s right, two - side stories: Cardinal Sins - which is about Lucas’s investigation into the mysterious cult known as the Hermetic Brotherhood of the Cardinal Court, and Witch’s Mark, which fills in some of the gaps of what’s up with Mark. We really appreciate all your support.

The tent is dark and smoky. From a deep shadow you hear the hushed whispered words of a man you can barely see. His eyes glow a wolfish gold in the reflections of the fire light and his words cause your skin to bristle with goose bumps. Who have you aligned yourself with? What dark knowledge does this shadow man possess? And is it worth the cost to know his secrets?

This is Malevolent Maine.

TITLE SEQUENCE

Gather close MMers, this episode attempts to shine a light on the King Beyond the Desert and give some definitive answers on who we believe this figure actually is.

It’s funny how something so small, like a penny, can have such large ramifications on the world. For us it was the story of the Maine Penny, the viking coin discovered in Maine during the 1950s, that we covered in Episode 41 that set us off on a path of discovery. This odd silver coin literally was just what we needed to break our investigation wide open.

The coin depicts the face of Olaf Tryggvason, King of Norway from 995 to 1000 AD on one side. On the other is a black triangle with runes spelling out “The Exile” surrounding it. This coin was worn as a pendant at some point, presumably around the neck of the person so-named. 

We theorized that Leif Erikson, the Viking explorer and founder of Greenland, may have left this person, the Exile, on an island off the coast of Maine. There are Native American stories of a strange Exile who lived on the outskirts of their civilizations, which may be the same person who carried the coin.

But is there any evidence to support this? Leif Erikson was born and lived most of his life in Iceland and Greenland. Why would he have a Norwegian prisoner? It seems unlikely, so we did what we always do when we’re faced with a problem: we hit the books.

Lucas began looking into the reign of Olaf Tryggvason, who himself was raised in a sort of self-imposed exile, hiding from the men who killed his father.

LUCAS: Olaf Tryggvason [Trig-va-son]  was the first Christian king of Norway, and there are many stories of his attempt to convert the people of Scandnavia to Christianity. It was while researching Olaf the First’s life that I uncovered an interesting piece of information in Snorre [Snory] Sturlason’s Heimskringla [Heim-skring-la]: or, The Lives of the Norse Kings. Shortly before the year 1000, Leif Erikson sailed to Norway to meet with King Olaf. There, the king baptized Erikson, and sent him back to Greenland with a priest to further spread Christianity. 

Leif Erikson was in Norway during the reign of King Olaf the First and he left with someone at the king’s behest. By 1001, Erikson had formed a settlement in Vinland, the name he gave for the North Eastern Atlantic Coast, including Newfoundland, Canada and Maine. This immediately jumped out at us. If Erikson did deliver The Exile to his supposed final prison on an island in Maine, the timeline makes it at least possible that this Exile could have come from Norway, and carried the marked Olaf coin.

Who was this Exile? Exile wasn’t that uncommon in Viking tradition. Leif Erikson’s grandfather had been exiled from Norway, and his father, Erik the Red, was exiled from Iceland for killing another prominent member of the community. Many of these exiles were still important, honored members of Viking culture.

Our Exile, the man with the black coin, the Wanôbôthlôt of the Penobscot people, the One Who is Separated, has no known name. There are no records of this man sailing with Leif Erikson or being banished from the court of Olaf the First. Whatever crime this man had done was so offensive that his name was stricken from all records and any mention of him was erased.

What possible crime was so heinous to King Olaf that he would send the man as far from society as possible? The more we looked into Olaf Tryggvason the more we kept reading about his conversion to Christianity.

Many listeners will be aware of the Norse mythology that the Vikings believed in. Thor, Loki, and Odin are all household names due to the Marvel movies and the comics they are based on. While many of the Vikings still worshiped these traditional gods, by the time Olaf the First claimed the Norwegian throne, Christianity had begun to spread into the region. After the death of his first wife and an encounter with a fortune teller, Olaf converted and took steps to spread the Christian message to all of his people. 

That meant that many who kept to the old gods were branded heretics and punished severely. Among the most hounded were those that practiced the old Norse magic of seiðr [sayth-er]. Here’s Megan to explain.

MEGAN: Okay, so in Norse mythology or whatever, magic came from Odin. They called this magic galdr. But there was another kind of magic: seiðr [sayther]. This magic was associated with Freya, the goddess of love, fertility, battle, and death. This magic included prophecy and fortune telling, but also trickery, enchantment, and curses: or black magic. This magic was said to control the mind of its victims and make them do the whims of the caster. The seiðkonur [sayth-cone-er]or the women who practiced this magic, were feared, but could also be approached in times of need for an enchantment or vision of the future. This magic was rarely spoken of, and only then in hushed tones.

This sort of magic and its practitioners sounds similar to the wyrd sisters of Shakespeare’s Macbeth or the way early American Puritans treated witches. They were women to be feared for their power, but also shown great respect and reverence.

Men who practiced seiðr, however, were a very different being.

Seiðmenn were considered “perverted” or affronts to nature. The Aryan ideals of honors and directness, of facing something head on and straight to the point, flew in the face of the secretive, subversive seiðr which influenced the minds of people and attacked them indirectly through curses and foul enchantments. While the seiðkonur were tolerated, if not venerated, the seiðmenn were considered abominations.

There are several historical reports of King Olaf Tryggvason, in his attempt to wipe away the old practices and religions would take seiðmenn prisoners and tie them to post along the shore so that as the low tide rose the magicians would slowly drown.

When we layed all of our pieces out on the table we began to see the shape of something emerging. A Norwegian king who hated black magic and would often punish practitioners in cruel ways. A famed Viking explorer returning to the country his family was banished from at the behest of the king. An unnamed figure who travels back with the explorer. The discovery of Vinland and a Viking presence in Maine. And a mysterious, exiled figure who prowled the outskirts of Native American culture.

Is it possible that the unnamed man who sailed back with Leif Erikson wasn’t a priest meant to spread Christianity, but a prisoner, a criminal who had done something so terrible that Olaf the First would not allow the man to remain in Norway, but was too afraid to kill him? Could the man that sailed with Erikson, in fact, be the Exile whose coin was discovered in Maine?

And could this man be our so-called King Beyond the Desert?

We all began reading translations of ancient historical Viking texts, looking for something…anything that would lend any credence to our theories. It was Tom who finally found something.

TOM: While we started with Snorre [Snory] Sturlason’s Heimskringla [Heim-skring-la] we soon began looking to older, more obscure texts. The Heimskringla was written sometime around 1230, but we wanted to find works more contemporary to Olaf the First in hopes of finding some information that history would have wiped away. What we found was a relatively unknown history written by Hagbarth Haddirsson, who chronicled King Olaf’s ascendancy in 995. According to known history, Olaf usurped his throne from the corrupt Jarl Haakon. As Olaf’s men began to liberate Norway, Haakon and his slave Kark hid in a pigsty, in a deep hole they had dug. When Olaf couldn't find them he proclaimed loudly that he would offer a massive reward to anyone who brought him Haakon’s head. Kark saw his opportunity and killed his master, presenting his severed head to Olaf. Instead of his reward, however, the new king beheaded the traitor. Hagnbarth Haddirsson’s account tells a very different account of the man named Kark and his fate.

Based on Haddirsson’s writing however, the man in the hole with Haakon Siggurdsson, was not, in fact, the real Tormod Kark. That Kark was a slave is well known to history, but this account claims  the man who crawled out of the pit carrying the head of his master was no slave, but instead an adviser to the Jarl named Einar [eye-nahr] Ragnulf. He was said to have a great knowledge of the world, able to control animals, see the future, and speak with the dead. Einar Ragnulf was, in fact, a seiðmenn.

Haddirsson’s account claims that when Einar Ragnulf presented King Olaf with Haakon’s head, he came not seeking the reward, but offering a vision of the future. Ragnulf told Olaf that his reign would be a prosperous one and that he would be remembered as a just and powerful king. Ragnulf told Olaf secrets that only the conquering king knew, though Haddirsson doesn’t say what those are. The king was impressed with the seer and instead of decapitating him, brought him to his court.

Here’s where Haddirsson’s account gets interesting. Olaf Tryggvason had recently converted to Christianity and as we’ve noted, could not abide seiðmenn, yet according to the Viking historian, the king kept Ragnulf around. His visions of the future, and perhaps his ability to cloud the minds of Olaf’s enemies, made him valuable to the new king as he tried to unite his domain. By the time Leif Eriksson arrived five years later, the king had grown tired of his adviser, and according to Haddirsson, had him smuggled out of Norway, disguised as a priest when Eriksson left a short time later, bound for his discovery of Vinland, or America. 

So, just who was Einar Ragnulf, and what did he do to anger the king? Hagbarth Haddirsson doesn’t say in his record of King Olaf the First, and as we know, histories and accounts were soon changed to erase the name of the King’s magic-using adviser from history.

Now, at Malevolent Maine, we don’t have a lot of experience with ancient Viking histories. Living in Maine, it’s not one of the areas we frequently encounter. Luckily for us we have several contacts who were able to help us out.

One of those is a professor at Armitage College. Preston Yates is a professor of European History with a focus in Scandinavian Studies. He teaches several courses, including one called History of the Vikings. He was on spring break - actually visiting Sweden and Norway at the time - but we were able to exchange emails and calls with him in between his visits to Scandinavian historical sites. What follows is his response when we asked him point blank who Einar Ragnulf was.

Professor Yates: Hmmm. That’s a good one. Einar [eye-nahr] means something like, “one warrior” or “one who struggles alone.” While Ragnulf means “adviser wolf”. The Vikings at the time you’re talking about typically used the name of their father as a surname - i.e. Leif Eriksson, or Leif Erik’s son. This has the ring of someone who either named himself, or had a non-traditional name given to him because his lineage was unknown. As far as any historical value to the name, there isn’t much out there. I did come across one fable, something like a Viking fairy tale. I’ve attached the Cade Glenn translation from his 1967 collection of old Scandinavian stories. If there’s another version, I’m unaware of it, but I’ll forward it on if I find one.

For those who are unaware - and we definitely fell into this category until our conversation with Professor Yates, Cade Glenn was one of the top five historians of Scandinavian culture in the 50s and 60s. His translations of ancient Viking and Scandinavian texts are still being used in classrooms to this day. Sadly, Professor Glenn passed away in 1993.

The file Yates sent us was a photocopied scan of several pages. It had that trademark off center, slightly crooked vibe that seems to be the standard for college literature. There’s no date attached to the story, but it appears to be from a time before Olaf Tryggvason’s reign. It’s short, so we’re going to read it to you in full:

 In the remote village of Vetrheim, nestled between the ancient forests and the towering mountains, there lived a mysterious witch named Sylvi. She was rumored to be touched by the spirits of the night, and whispers of her dealings with the darkness itself echoed through the icy winds.

Sylvi's heart harbored secrets as profound as the starlit night. Legend spoke of a night when the Northern Lights danced with an unusual brilliance, and the shadows seemed to coalesce into a tangible form. It was on this ethereal night that Sylvi, guided by the mystical forces surrounding her, summoned the very essence of darkness to give life to a child.

A  child was born from the union of Sylvi and the shadows, his arrival accompanied by an eerie silence that settled over the village. His eyes, as dark as the abyss from which he emerged, gleamed with an otherworldly wisdom even in infancy. His mother named him Einar. The villagers, sensing an ominous aura surrounding the child, regarded him with a mixture of fear and awe.

As Einar grew, so did the whispers of his unearthly origins. His mother recognized the extraordinary potential within him. She guided him in the ancient arts, teaching him to commune with spirits and animals of the forest and to harness the power of the shadows that coursed through his veins.

Einar, fueled by the mystery of his birth and a hunger for knowledge, embraced the forbidden arts with an intensity that surpassed even his mother's expectations. As he grew, he delved deep into the forbidden arts, seeking knowledge from the shadows that whispered secrets to those who dared to listen. The villagers, once wary, now gazed upon him with a sense of fear.

Einar's thirst for power led him to a forgotten cave, hidden within the heart of the mist-shrouded mountains. There, he discovered an ancient wolf bound in chains. The wolf whispered dark spells and forbidden rituals to Einar and promised him unimaginable power. First he would serve Jarls and Kings, but one day he would become king by his own hand and rule from a black throne. He would be cast out into the world, forever apart until the day he claimed his second throne. As his ambition grew, so too would his power, and in the end the whole world would bow to him.

Thus Einar, shadow born, son of a witch, advised by the Wolf, emerged from the cave, master of the shadows that dwelled within. His eyes gleamed with an ominous light, and his long, black cloak trailed behind him like the shadow of a raven soaring across the moonlit sky.

So he began his journey for the throne he was promised, and the one that would come after, the one that would encircle the world.

The legend itself never names the seiðmenn Einar Ragnulf directly, but we can see why Professor Yates thought it might apply. If Ragnulf means wolf advisor, it would make sense that the sorcerer in the story might take that as his surname. Especially if he is, as the myth states, the son of the shadows itself. If he has no father to form his last name in the Viking tradition, perhaps he took the name of the creature that mentored him in the cave.

It’s easy to compare the fable and the historical records. We know that the man posing as Tormod Kark, the man we now assume was Einar Ragnulf, served Jarl Haakon. Jarl was a term that meant chief or leader, not exactly a king, maybe more like a duke or some other lord. Then Ragnulf was employed in the court of King Olaf the First. It’s easy to picture this man as a sort of Jaffar from Aladdin type figure, advising the leaders of men from the shadows, while slowly advancing himself for the throne he so desired.

It’s important to note that at this time it’s all conjecture. While Cade Glenn was a respected historian and his translations have stood the test of time, not much is known of Hagbarth Haddirsson, the Viking poet who recorded the so-called “true story” of King Olaf’s rise to power. While this may be an accurate description of what transpired that day at the pig sty, it’s also just as likely that Haddirsson had heard the earlier legend of the sorcerer Einar, and decided to make his story more fanciful. 

Still, if we assume both stories are true, at least to some degree, it does match up with what we know of the Exile. The prophecy the wolf gave Einar in the cave said he would be cast out into the world, apart from everything. That sounds an awful lot like exile, which aligns with the man bearing the black coin who was abandoned on an island in Penobscot Bay. According to the Penobscot peoples’ story, Wanôbôthlôt, the One Who is Separated, told the fisherman he was going, and I quote, “Beyond. Against my will, to where the sun has dried the land to dust. To the throne I was promised. Though it will not be my last.”

Now obviously, the beyond part seems to connect with the King Beyond the Desert, especially when talking about the land dried by the sun, but more importantly to this episode, it seemingly infers two thrones. The one that lies beyond that Wanôbôthlôt is going to, and a second one. This is similar to what the wolf promised Einar Ragnulf in the cave: two thrones, two crowns, two kingdoms. 

None of this is definitive, but it may be just enough information for us to proceed. If Einar Ragnulf was in fact a seiðmenn, and he did serve Olaf Tryggvason, the rest of the story might be a logical extension of what else we know about Exile.

If Ragnulf did something to anger his king, perhaps his lust for power led him to betray his king, or perhaps he told Tryggvason something so disturbing that the king was forced to exile his seer. Whatever occurred it is not unlikely that exile beyond the sea to the most remote place in the Viking world, would be out of the question. Olaf Tryggvason was a man known for shoving a live snake down a man’s throat, for placing a brazier of hot coals on a man’s abdomen, and the aforementioned posts sunk far out in the low tide that would slowly submerge a man chained to it as the tide came in.

Assuming Einar Ragnulf did something so egregious that it warranted punishment by the king, exile would certainly be on the table. 

It’s possible that King Olaf feared his seiðmenn. If he really was the Einar Ragnulf of the story, this was a man who could control the minds of people, speak with the dead, and command the very shadows to do his bidding. Olaf may have feared that his former seer would haunt him in death and instead sent him across the ocean.

There’s a lot of different information from a variety of sources, and it may be useful to put it all together in some sort of order or a timeline so that it makes sense. So here goes. This is our theory on who the King Beyond the Desert is, at least at this time.

Einar Ragnulf was a powerful, and potentially evil seiðmenn. At some point he angered King Olaf the First who had a visiting Lief Erikkson take the sorcerer into exile. Eriksson transported Ragnulf, in disguise as a priest, to an island in Penobscot Bay, not far from modern day Rockland. Ragnulf was marked with the symbol of an exile - an Olaf coin with a black triangle (we’re not sure what exactly that signified…yet), which he wore on a chain or rope around his neck. 

Somehow Ragnulf escaped from his island prison to the mainland, where he became known as Wanôbôthlôt to the indigenous people. He looked differently than then, spoke differently, and was regarded as mysterious and dangerous. Remember, the Penobscot people said he looked like, “cold white frost.” This could be a reference to his Nordic complexion, or perhaps his icy demeanor.

At some point during his time in Maine, probably well after 1001 AD, Ragnulf met the fisherman and proclaimed he was going beyond. After that, we’re unsure how he got to the Ebony Cenotaph in the Bone Tree Desert. In fact, we’re not even sure what that is. Katie Clark’s disappearance and subsequent return (which we covered in Episode 41) seems to imply the desert is an actual place, but it seems highly unlikely it’s anywhere on this earth.

How Einar Ragnulf enticed the Gray Fool, the being Katie referred to as the Discord Weaver, how he influences dreams, and how he became known as the King Beyond the Desert are also unknown at this time. 

And speaking of Katie Clark, we have something of an update. You will recall that Katie was the focus of our initial investigation into the Gray Fool, back in Episode 5. Katie disappeared from her apartment, seemingly joining the Gray Fool and his master, the King Beyond the Desert. She suddenly returned this past fall. Tom sat down with her for Episode 41, where she seemed to indicate that her trip had been more spiritual than physical, and that we were implying supernatural meaning to something more mundane.

Like many facets of this investigation we’re still looking into just where Katie went, but recently we received an email from Katie’s mother, Gloria. 

TOM: The email had the tagline “Sent from Gloria’s iPhone,” at the end of it. This surprised us a little, because in our previous encounters with Gloria Clark, there wasn’t much to indicate she was… how can I say this politely… She didn’t seem too interested in technology. The entire time she sat in our lobby while I interviewed Katie, she chatted up Lucas and Chris. There’s just something about her that didn’t scream tech-savvy.

We’ve only ever spoken with Gloria on the phone a few times and that was a landline when we were trying to reach Katie. So we were shocked Gloria even had a cellphone. And as you’ll hear, the email itself was… unusual. We’ve asked Megan to read it:

MEGAN: I don’t have a lot of time, but I wanted to reach out to you. Katie has been acting…differently lately. She was never really into music before. She listened to it, but she never really got into bands or groups. Now though, since she’s come back, she listens all the time. Not just one style either. She listens to classical music, dance music, country, even whatever the teenagers are listening to these days. And sometimes… she listens to them all at once. Sometimes even backwards. She stays in her room and just listens all day. All that noise! She asked us to get her one of those electronic keyboards and Roger and I got her one that can do all different instrument sounds. She plays that sometimes, but… but it doesn’t sound like any song I’ve ever heard before. I don’t think it’s music. I think it’s just…noise. I’m afraid something is wrong with her. She was doing so well, but now… she’s acting so strange. 

We emailed Gloria back, but received no reply. We tried calling the house phone, but no one answered. There’s something so… desperate in the tone of that email. It reads like a mother at her wit’s end, someone who has tried to be patient and understand, but is being driven past her comfort level. It’s distressing that we haven’t been able to connect with Gloria Clark recently, but as of yet not a cause for concern. The Clarks asked for privacy after our last interview, and this may have just been a weak moment, when a mother could no longer tolerate her daughter’s actions. It doesn’t have to be disturbing. 

LUCAS: And yet… there is something slightly off, about Katie’s new obsession with music. We’ve seen the dangers that music can cause when we investigated the so-called Genius Party back in Episode 29. There, a certain song played backwards induced a manic state of frenzied creativity in a group of teenagers. We have since learned that music was composed by a man named Adolphus Winn who I believe was a member of the secret group, the Hermetic Brotherhood of the Cardinal Court. For the most part, backwards messages in songs, or backmasking as it’s called in the recording industry, isn’t nearly as nefarious as many people believed in the 1970s and 80s. Then the belief was rock stars were hiding Satanic messages in their music. This is fairly unfounded, except where bands intentionally did it to mess with their audiences in the wake of this paranoia. 

At the time of this episode, we’re unsure if Katie’s new interest in music is alarming or not. Certainly listening to music backwards isn’t necessarily problematic. Listening to many different genres of music is equally not disturbing. Listening to many songs at once, layered on top of each other, we assume from different devices is… odd, to say the least. This isn’t a common practice, and aside from a few possible internet trolls, we couldn’t find many examples of it on the internet. That’s not to say it isn’t a sensory processing mechanism or perhaps something related to Katie’s time away. It’s something we’d like to monitor, but without direct contact from the family, it’s proving difficult to understand. We’ll bring you any updates if we uncover any.

Next, a few weeks ago we ran an episode about the so-called Portly Man who picks up women, drives them around Southern Maine, and tells the dark histories of various landmarks and artifacts. We asked at the end of that episode if anyone had any encounters with the Portly Man. We were shocked with your response. We heard from seventeen other women who claimed to have gone for a ride with the Portly Man. The story was always the same - his truck pulled up beside them, a strange, overwhelming compulsion to go with the man, and a history lesson. In all cases the work of art - a painting, an ornamental forest, a statue, even a student film at the local community college were all attached to personal tragedy in the lives of the creators.

What we weren’t expecting is to have seven men also have run-ins with the Portly Man. We had earlier believed that the Portly Man was targeting women exclusively. To hear that men had also been driven around was a surprise to us, and it made us re-evaluate our theory. 

It doesn’t seem like the Portly Man is searching for a specific type of woman, but a specific person in general. We’re still unsure what or who he is searching for, but this new knowledge changes what we believe his motives are. So far we don’t believe he has found the person he is looking for, at least, as far as we know. It’s entirely possible that he has taken a victim or perhaps multiple victims and… done whatever he plans to do to them. Perhaps he is locking them up somewhere, perhaps he is taking their lives. Or perhaps - and this just occurred to us - perhaps he’s releasing them back into their everyday lives, completely unaware that they have been marked or chosen for whatever vile purpose he has planned. We’re going to try and arrange meetings with some of the Portly Man’s victims to do deeper interviews. We believe his powers may be hypnotic in nature so we’re looking into some hypnotherapy to see if we can uncover any buried memories. Again, if you’ve had any encounters with the Portly Man, or you’d like to be part of our study, please contact us through our website. 

Lastly, at the start of the season we played you a phone call from Mark. As you well know, we literally lost Mark on Halloween night of last year when he disrupted the Ritual of Blood being performed by the Five Covens. We weren’t sure what had happened to him, or even if he was alive, but the phone call we played for you seemed to prove he was indeed alive. We haven’t talked about it on the show, but we’ve been hard at work trying to figure out his message and where he is.

The call came on January 1st, just a few hours into the new year. He knew no one would be in the office when he made the call. It was untraceable, but we are fairly confident it was from a cell phone, probably one of those pay-by-the-minute type devices. If this were a TV drama we’d be tempted to call it a burner phone. And as near as we can tell it is, in fact, Mark.

MEGAN: We’ve compared the voice to our recordings of him and it appears to be identical. More importantly it passed our own ear test. We know it’s Mark.

LUCAS: It seems impossible, but it’s him. We don’t know where he is, but he’s alive.

TOM: He’s alive. He’s okay. He… we’re going to find him. We’re going to find you, buddy. And we’re going to bring you home.

Now, one of our top priorities is finding Mark. He’s one of us. He’s family. And if he’s out there somewhere, alone, then like Tom said, we need to find him and bring him home. And we may have gotten our next clue.

Mark called us again. We’re going to play the call for you, but we want you to know there’s something disturbing about what he says. 

TOM: You’ve reached the Malevolent Maine offices. Please leave a message after the beep.

[beep]

MARK [distraught]: Oh God. Oh Godddd. I think… Gabe didn’t show up for work today. There’s… there was blood everywhere. I think… I think…. Oh God! What’s wrong with me? How do I get it out? I think… I think…I killed him. Help me. [breaking down] help me. Please help me. Help-

The call came at 2:17 in the morning on March 29. We traced the call to a pay phone in Morrow, Arkansas outside the post office. Morrow is tiny, only a little over two hundred and fifty people. In a lot of ways it looks like a small Maine town. We checked with authorities, but no one matching Mark’s description was seen in town. Nor was there any deaths reported in the area. The local sheriff said he didn’t even know anyone in town named Gabe.

We’re going to investigate further, but it appears Mark is in serious trouble. We don’t know what’s going on, but for the first time since the night at the Witch Tree, we have a real lead. We know Mark at least traveled through Morrow. Where was he going? Where did he come from? If we can start tracing his route, we may be one step closer to finding him. We don’t know what’s happened to him or what kind of trouble he’s in, but we owe it to him to find him and get him the help he needs.

If you’re listening, Mark, please call us again. Let us help you. We want you to come home. Please, stay safe out there, Mark.

And stay safe out there, Maine. 

Malevolent Maine is Lucas Knight, Tom Wilson, and myself, Chris Estes.

If you’d like to read more about our investigations check out our website at malevolentmaine.com

While there, don’t forget to check our merch store. And, if you’re so inclined, support us on Patreon at patreon.com/malevolentmaine

Thank you for listening to Malevolent Maine.

And as always, stay safe out there, Maine.