The Body in the Tree: A Terrifying Mystery

I'm so thankful for that Netflix auto shut off or whatever, like it's just are you still watching? Really? I find it very shaming because it's like, yes, how dare you? Of course I'm still watching? And you know how like they say that, you know, dads when they're watching TV and you try to turn it off because they're asleep, They're like, I was watching that. No, sorry, you were definitely asleep during that episode of burn. Notice. Welcome to Scary Mystery Surprise, where we talk about scary things that surprised us around the Internet. I'm Edwin and I'm Michelle Edwin. You're a fourteen year old boy. Yay. We are in England nineteen forty three. So the war is on and rations are low bored. You and your three friends decide to go for a bit of poaching or bird nesting, as this specific type of coaching was what you were going to go do. Stealing eggs? Yeah wow, And you're gonna go to the Hagley estate owned by Lord Cobham. Yes this is trespassing. Yes this is illegal, but also it's something to do. You and your friends are strolling through the ancient English woods, laughing at old Cobham what a silly old lord he is. It's a lovely day, the birds are chirping, and you spot an old witch elm tree, a spooky name for a European elm species. It has a long, single trunk that looks like it might be hollow, and a tall, narrow crown. Also, I just want to clarify it's spelled wyh. They grow in Northern Britain in the Northern British Isles and could be found in Sweden and Norway. Thinking this would be a particularly good place to find birds nests, you climb up to investigate. As you climb, you glance down in the hole of the trunk. Since it's hollow, you catch a glimpse of something that's white, like an eggshell. You reach in the tree. This is bigger and harder than an egg. You pull it out. It's a human skull. And this is a quote from the real boy that found it. By the way, there was a small patch of rotting flesh on the floorhead with lank hair attached to it, and the two front teeth were crooked. The reality of the situation sinks in. You and your friends are on the Hagley estate illegally trespassing. Ah, you guys are freaked out, so you carefully place the skull back where you found it, in the hollow of the tree of the witch Bell, and you shimme down the tree. All four of you sprint home, bowing, never to mention a word to your parents. What are the odds of that? Like? Right? Like, I don't know, Like it just some random kids on a big ass property that just randomly fine and a skull a skull, It's pretty weird. But obviously because your edwin, your conscious slowly gets the better of you and you tell your parents and the police are finally called. Oh no. When the police checked the trunk of the tree, they find an almost complete skeleton with a shoe, a fake gold wedding ring, some fragments of clothing. The skull was valuable evidence in that it still had tufts of hair and a clear dental pattern, despite some teeth that were missing. After further investigation, the remains of the hand were found some distance from the tree. What ok. Yeah. The body was sent for forensic investigation and it was established that it was a female around thirty five years old who'd been dead for at least eighteen months, so her death probably would have occurred in October nineteen forty one. Also, they found taffida in her mouth, suggesting that she had been suffocated. Why are you fake wedding ring? Like, how do you know it's fake? First of all, probably because it's not real gold, That's what they said on multiple What if you didn't want to wear your real gold ring because you were out and about doing something, or you needed to look married because you knowed you were going to die, who knows. From the measurement of the trunk of the tree, it was pretty clear that her body had been stuffed in their while it was still warm, because if rigor mortis had set in and she wouldn't have been able to fit, So someone had stuffed her in their while she was still warm. So she was stuffed in a tree. Yeah, she was stuffed in a tree. This woman was stuffed in a tree. Even with the distinctive dental impression she had those two crooked front teeth and being able to tell what she was wearing when she disappeared because her clothes were pretty well intact. They checked all the reports of missing people in the region, couldn't find any that matched her, and the case eventually went cold and basically cold for a year. I mean, the war was on. Lots of people were of missing during the war too, which is you know, there was like England, it was being bombed. It was just a lot going on. So this case just slipped through the cracks. That's when it happened about a year later, sprawled on the wall in the middle of town written in chalk, who put Bella down? The witch up. Since the nineteen seventies, similar graffiti has sporadically appeared around the Hagley Obelisk near where the woman's body was discovered. It was her name, Bella. Rumors swirled in town that it had been scrawled by like the murderer or an ex lover, or even like the boys aka you who had discovered her. Or was it the ghost of the woman Bella herself keeping the murder from being forgotten. So many questions, so many questions. Oh yeah, oh hey, this is great because over the last eighty years people have come back to this case periodically and just they come up with new theories all the time, and so it's like, yeah, like there's always some new speculation on what happened to her and who she was because they've never found out. If nobody knows who she is, that's that's what gets me. So she's probably not from there, not from the area. She's probably taken there and just dumped, or maybe someone that was kept captive. And I don't know about the name Bella. I think I might have named a few things that I don't know who they are. I do that all the time. Sometimes it's people I'm just like, I just make up their name and then hope they correct me. I know it's a weird habit and really bad and disrespectful, but I've done it and intentionally. He just calls me Suzanne for some reason, you know, correct him on it. Yeah, I think that might have been a made up thing. Bella might be just but it sounds cool. Or the goos wrote it herself. I like that. So one of the first theories is that it had to do with MI I five Nazi spies. There's an MI five to classified file about Joseph Jacobs, the last man put to death at the Tower of London. A German spy parachuted into Cambridgeshire in nineteen forty one but broke his ankle when landing, which is unfortunate's that's spy one oh one. I think you strengthen your ankles. And obviously he was soon arrested. So anyway, this guy in his pocket was found a photo of his lover, a German cabaret singer an actress named Clara Bowery. Jacob said that she was being trained as a spy and that when he made contact, she might have been sent over to England after him. However, there is no evidence that Clara Bowery parachuted into England at all, and several witnesses described that Clara Bowery was actually six feet tall, while Bella in the witch Elm was about five feet tall. Also, it was determined that Clara Bowerley had died in Berlin in nineteen forty two. In nineteen fifty three, another theory surfaced that the victim was actually a Dutch woman named Clara Bella Dronkers another Clara Yeah weird right, and she had been killed by a German spiring consisting of a British officer, a Dutchman and a music hall artist for knowing too much quote unquote, although there's no available records or evidence to support this whatsoever. Just one of those theories where it's like, oh, another theory. One possible victim was reported to the police in nineteen forty four by a Birmingham sex worker. In the report, she stated that another sex worker called Bella who'd worked on Hagley Road, had disappeared about three years previous. The name Bella or Louibella suggested that the graffiti writer was probably aware of the identity of the victim, so possibly this missing woman. Then we started to get real weird. In nineteen fifty three, this woman named Una Mosap basically was interviewed and she said her ex husband Jack Mussop, had confessed to family members that he and a Dutchman called Van Ralt had put the woman in the tree. Mossap and Van Ralt met for a drink at the Littleton Arms of pug and Hagley. Later that night, Musap and the woman who became Bella became drunk and passed out while they were driving. Why were they driving with her in the car? Where were they going? What was going on? And then the men decided when she passed out, to put her in the hollow of the tree in the woods in hopes that in the morning she would wake up and be frightened seeing the error of her ways. That's trying to teach her a lesson. Yeah, for passing out drug which sounds so made up. Listeners. Don't put anyone in a tree if they pass out, do that, Listeners, scary mystery surprise cares about you and I And I'm also just telling you don't put anyone in a tree. That's all. It's not cool. Jack moss Up was confined to the Stanford Medical Hospital because he kept having reoccurring dreams of a woman staring out at him from a tree. God so cepy I know. And then he died in the hospital before the body was even found in the witch Elm. Yeah, so who knows if it was him. But the likelihood of this being the correct explanation is questioned because like, why did Una moss Up decide to come forward with this information like ten years after Jack's death? You know, people just thought that was weird, trying to get some attention. I don't never understand. I don't even understand confessions honestly, Like when people say, yeah, I did it, is it your conscience? Yeah, I don't know. And then we get to your favorite aliens just no good old witchcraft. So in nineteen forty five, this woman named Margaret Murray, she was an anthropologist and an archaeologist at the University of London, proposed the more radical theory witchcraft because she believed that the severing of one hand was consistent with a ritual called the hand of glory after the victim had been killed by the Romani people during an occult ritual. And so I had to look up what the hand of glory was because I was like, what the fuck is that? Which is funny because they make candles like this now. So the hand of glory is a dried, pickled hand of a hanged man, often specified as the left. It's supposed to be the Latin for sinister leftists, and then uh, the person that's hanged for the murderer, it's the hand that did the deed. That's what it's like looked as. So you take the hand that did the murdering the dominant hand. I'm assuming whatever the left or whatever these are, this is a spell. You're doing whatever you feel like. So anyway, you're basically you use the hand to make a candle, and this candle if you presented to someone would render them motionless, so they wouldn't be able to move. The hand of glory could also unlock any door it came across. So that's what the hand of glory is supposed to do. Isn't that really weird? Isn't that weird? So that's the hand of glory. You'd have to take it from a hanged man and use his evil and like sometimes you would use like their hair or whatever, and you'd the wick of the candle would be the hangman's hair. Have you ever burned hair? No? But also i'm assuming just burning anything made of like human any smile. Also, it's unclear if they used the hand to make a mold to make a candle, or if they somehow shape the hand to burn like a candle. I'm not clear on that. You guys are gonna have to google it. The name is, it doesn't fit it. Hand of glory doesn't fit it. Sounds like it would be a better spell than what it is. Honestly, it's like, oh, this will bring you all this prosperous whatever. Also, the police kind of suspect that it was animals that scattered the bones, because she'd been there for like eighteen months. But this idea of witchcraft really excited the local press and led investigators to consider another seemingly ritualistic, gruesome murder. There was another killing kind of in the area of this guy named Charles Walton in this village called Lower Quentin. And this murder's kind of famous because it was like bizarrely gruesome at the time because he had had his throat cut and like also he was pinned to the ground through the neck with a pitchfork. The weird thing is is people were like, oh, he was killed ritualistically because he's a witch. Also Bella short for Bella Donna a really important planted witchcraft. So you know, there's like there's a lot of witchcraft ties here. It could go a lot of ways. I like it. Like it. A case review by the West Mercia Police was closed in twenty fourteen. I think it was just ruled unsolved, And in twenty eighteen, a television program called Nazi Murder Mysteries, you know, our favorite show, Nazi Murder Mysteries, basically had a forensic facial reconstruction created of her skull from the photographs of the call. And it was commissioned by Andrew Spark or Sparky for his book and hopes that like some person would have a photo in their attic and like recognize a family member. But this didn't happen, so this ended in a dead end. And the weird thing is is that her body has disappeared and so has her case file. Granted, it is like an eighty year old case. I sign a museum, I'm pretty sure. In May two thousand and three, the BBC launch would appeal to museums to track down the victim's remains to try and carry out DNA analysis, and they still haven't found them. Some collector. Man, those guys are creepy. I'm telling you, Yeah, someone's got it somewhere. I would want something like that, honestly, Well, let's get the Witch on boat. It would be so cool to have something just a really haunted thing, or like something that's just very out there. Anyway, the case has become one of Britain's greatest unsolved mysteries and at this point it's probably never gonna be solved because it's like anybody who's actually involved in it is dead. The only hope they really have is DNA. So who put Bella in the Witch Elm graffiti still occasionally appears in Birmingham, you know, and it's probably written by pranksters or kids, but it could be Bella never letting us forget. I like that. I like that second option. I think Bella never letting us forget is solid. All right, we're starting a new segment. We're going to read your reviews and comments, and we love for you to call in Edwin. How are we going to do that? On the website, There's going to be a little button that says send an audio Scary Mystery Surprise dot com and you can do it on Instagram too. Yeah, you can send us an audio like damn us, nothing creepy please. Michelle's usually the first one, the first line of defense here, and I would prefer to not deal with creepy things, please, Amanda K fifteen. My family loves Scary Mystery Surprise. Edwin and Michelle are absolutely hilarious together and we look forward to listening each week. My eleven year old daughter actually discovered Edwin on her own, and we have listened to every episode of his other podcast, Thanks Wow, Oh that's nice. When we listen to SMS, we instantly found a favorite. Thank you Edwin and Michelle for working so hard on all your podcasts and keeping us entertained. We truly feel like you are our besties. Hope you read this and we did. We read it owl loud. Send in your comments, you guys, reviews dms uh, we're gonna start reading them here. Yeah, and we're gonna you know, and if you leave a message on our website, we're on our Instagram, we'll play it on the air and then we'll answer your questions Scarymisterysurprise dot com or on our Instagram at Scary Mystery Surprise. I think on that note, you guys should join the club at Scarymistery Club dot com. Cool. What are we gonna talk about next week? Edwin, I don't know. I think it'll be a surprise. Scary Mystery Surprise is hosted by Michelle Newman and Edwin Komarubias. This podcast GAS was edited and sound designed by Sarah Borhez Wendel, a VW Sound