Season 08 Episode 21: East of Edon (Pt.2 of 3)

Part 2 of Season 08 Episode 21: East of Edon 

From the moment he is born, Carl Edon's mother senses there is something a little different about him.

The story he will come to tell, is beyond anything she or anybody else could possibly have imagined...

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
You're listening to Unexplained, Season eight, episode twenty one, East
of Eden, Part two. From the moment he arrives Carl
Eden's mother, Val senses there is something a little different

(00:30):
about him. There are the physical differences, first and foremost.
Both Karl's brother and sister have dark hair and brown eyes.
Karl's eyes are blue and his hair strawberry blonde. Their
skin was also a little darker and hand easily, whereas

(00:51):
KRL's is fair and pale. But there's something else too,
the sense that Carl never quite seems able to relax.
One night, shortly after Karl's second birthday, Val wakes to
the sound of screaming coming from the other end of
the house. Racing to Karl's room, she finds the young

(01:13):
boy sitting up crying in his bed as he struggles
to explain himself with his limited words to the confused
and concerned Val. He seems to be saying something about
falling from the sky and that his leg is missing.
When she finally manages to calm him down, he attempts

(01:33):
to explain his dream in more detail. He was flying
through the sky, he says, in some sort of plane.
It was on fire, and he couldn't get out. Then
it fell to the ground, leaving Karl feeling that not
only had he died, but that he was also missing

(01:54):
his leg. VAL's heart breaks at the sight of her son,
sobbing uncle controllably with terror in his eyes. She hugs
him tightly and rubs his leg to show him he
hasn't lost it at all. It was just a dream,
she says, a horrible dream. Despite her reassurances, Val and Jim,

(02:18):
Karl's father, can't help but be disturbed by the strangeness
of their son's nightmare, wondering how it is that a
toddler can recount such vivid and chilling details. But Karl's
peculiar visions are soon forgotten and disappear into the background
noise of the busy family home. That is until Val

(02:41):
comes across Karl one morning a few months later. Playing
on his own with a toy aeroplane, Karl notices his
mother and looks up to greet her. I died before,
he says, my plane crashed straight through a window. Val
stares in confusion at the boy, Unsure what to say.

(03:05):
She tells him to forget about the dream. But it
wasn't a dream, he says, turning back to play with
his toy plane. It really happened. As the months go by,
Val and Jim are surprised to find that not only
does Carl refuse to forget the strange vision, he seemingly

(03:26):
begins to remember more. One of our engines ran out,
he would say, and after we crashed, I opened a
hatch to try and escape, but one of my legs
was gone and I bled to death. Jim and Val

(03:49):
have no intention of indulging their young son's peculiar fantasy,
but then he tells them something else. According to the
young Carl, he is convinced that he has been alive before.
He was a German pilot during the war, he says,
who crashed while on a bombing mission over England. One evening,

(04:12):
Foul notices Karl's birthmark, the one just below the groin
on his right leg. Remembering what he said about losing
his leg in the dream, she asks him again which
one it was? My right one? He replies. Throughout his
early childhood, Foul often found Karl beavering away on joining

(04:35):
the dots or scriveling across the patterns of a coloring book,
and soon he was drawing his own shapes and patterns.
One morning, Foul notices he's been working on one particular
picture for some time. She asks if she can take
a look. Karl leans back with a smile. As Val

(04:56):
pulls the picture closer. She is amazed by how it looks,
not like the usual infantile pictures you might expect from
a five year old, but she can't quite make out
what the images are exactly. They're my Air Force badges,
says Karl. Looking at it again, Val sees it. There's

(05:19):
a badge with a bird, which he identifies as an eagle,
its wings drawn laterally on the side. Before Karl can
explain the next symbol, Val realizes with a jolt what
it is. It's a swastika. Perhaps even more extraordinary is
the picture that Jim finds in Carl's bedroom just after

(05:42):
his sixth birthday. It too looks odd from a distance,
and it's only when Jim turns the picture round that
he realizes what it is. The cockpit of a plane,
complete with all the gauges and instruments, even the levers.
Jim asks Karl if he drew the picture, to which

(06:04):
he replies yes, before pointing out the red foot pedal
he detailed at the bottom. He says it was used
to drop the bombs. As the boy continues to explain
in a strangely casual tone, the picture is of a
Mesherschmidt bomber one O one, just like the one he

(06:25):
flew in the war. Despite Karl's increasingly detailed apparent recollections
of a past life, Jim is unconvinced. Clearly Karl is
just playing some kind of game. After all, he knew
the mesher Schmidt was a fighter plane, not a bomber.

(06:46):
So together with Val, he decides to put Karl to
the test. What uniform did you wear? They ask, to
which Karl replies without hesitation, gray trousers tucked into leather
boots and a black jacket. A few days later, Jim
travels to the local library with Karl's picture tucked under

(07:09):
his arm. After being directed to the history section, he
proceeds to pull out whatever books he can find on
the German air forces of the Second World War. Moments later,
Jim is sitting with the books laid out in front
of him in complete shock. It is all there, everything

(07:30):
from the picture of the cockpit, the badges, the description
of the uniform. Everything is exactly as Karl had described,
even the plane there had been a Meshishchmidt bomber. After all,
it carried the number one one zero. But perhaps he'd
just misheard Karl when he said one oh one. A

(08:04):
few days after Jim's trip to the library, the family
are watching a war film when a character playing a
German sergeant appears on the screen. The uniforms all wrong,
says Carl, out of the blue. He's got the badge
on the wrong side. Jim returns to the library the
following day, and sure enough, his son was right. As

(08:29):
Carl gets older, he seems only to become more convinced
of his other life. Of course, there are elements of
his personality that are distinct and his own. He also
enjoys many of the same things that any of the
other local kids his age are into, like spacehoppers, Middlesbrough
Football Club, and cartoons. But then there are the other

(08:52):
quirks that catch Fowl a little off guard. Sometimes they
are small things, like how particular Carl is about the
clothes he wears for a child his age, how the
collars always have to be pressed. Other times it's something
else entirely like. When Carl is around seven years old

(09:14):
and his friend Michael is over for dinner, Karl launches
into his story about how he died once before during
the Second World War. Val grows increasingly uncomfortable as Karl
describes how he bled to death and how he had
this strange feeling that he would die again before the

(09:35):
age of twenty five. He ends his story with a
description of what it was like to see Adolph Hitler
in person. Then he gets down from the table and
starts goose stepping around the kitchen. Michael bursts into laughter
until Val quietly reminds them to finish up their food.

(09:59):
With Karl remain and convinced of his supposedly extraordinary past life,
it begins to impact on his time at school. One
parent's evening, a teacher asks Valerie and Jim if everything
is all right at home? Why? Asks val The teacher
explains that Karl is becoming increasingly distracted in class. He

(10:23):
has strange eyes, she says, curiously. When I try to
talk to him about anything, it's as if he's staring
straight through me. There is also Karl's peculiar habit of
arriving at answers without fully understanding where the response has
come from. When asked to explain his reasoning, he would

(10:44):
say that there was no need to bother if he'd
already given the correct answer. Val and Jim can only
smile and nod along politely as they take it all in.
Over the next few years, Carl continues to detail a
vivid picture of a life lived somewhere else, in a
time and place unrecognizable from the concrete streets and industry

(11:09):
of nineteen seventies Middlesbrough. Karl comes to the understanding that
his name used to be Robert. He speaks of a
quaint village tucked away amid forested hills, and explains how
his father, Fritz, used to always make him laugh, and
how he taught him about all the flowers and trees

(11:32):
of the local woodlands. This Robert couldn't remember his mother's name,
only that she'd been quite large, with dark hair, and
that she wore glasses. But I'm your mother, Vow would say,
whenever Carl got too carried away, her voice gently breaking.

(11:52):
I know, Carl would reply, but she's my mother too.
According to Karl, in his past life, as Robert. He
would often have to do household chores. He had to
chop up wood and bring it home in a wheelbarrow

(12:15):
or else face the wrath of his mother, who bossed
him about with her glasses perched delicately on the end
of her nose. When she wasn't ordering him to chop wood,
she would be standing by the stove making a soup
dark red in color like nothing Val had ever made.
He had had brothers too, who also fought in the war,

(12:39):
including a younger brother who was apparently killed shortly after
Robert had supposedly been killed. It is strange when Karl
thinks about it, the way the pictures come to him
in moments like he's watching clips from a TV show,
moments like Robert's apparent enlistenment in the Luftwaffe. One minute,

(13:01):
he is a seven year old boy playing with toys
in his bedroom. The next he is apparently transported into
the mind of a nineteen year old who lives on
a kind of camp with lots of small huts lined
up in rows. The next moment, he's inside one of
the huts. It's lined with bunk beds. Then he's outside again,

(13:24):
watching grown ups collecting water from a pump. Another time,
he'll find himself putting bandages on others, as if playing
at first aid, or standing in a large hall surrounded
on all sides by row upon row of young men
in uniform. In this hall is a large framed picture

(13:45):
of a man he recognizes as Adolf Hitler. Together, he
and the other young men are stamping their feet and
raising their arms outstretched above their heads in that way,
with the palm held down and pointing forward at a
sharp angle. Valerie feels uneasy as Karl repeats the gesture

(14:08):
for his mother to hear that name spoken aloud by
her young son, when it had never been mentioned in
the home before, sends shivers down her spine. One morning,
a noddly subdued Karl tells his mother about a new
dream from the night before. It was nineteen forty two,

(14:30):
and he was Robbert again, who he now says was
twenty three years old, and he was sitting in what
seemed like the cockpit of a plane. He couldn't say
if he was flying it or not, but it was
shaking all over the place. The aircraft came down over
some buildings, then everything went black. When he woke again

(14:53):
in the plane. It was still falling, with the buildings
on the ground rushing up towards him, and in that moment,
Robert knew he was going to die. When the plane
finally crashed, it must have gone through a window, he thought,
because there was glass everywhere. He saw again that his
leg had been cut off, and he felt sad, but

(15:16):
it was a different sadness than anything he'd felt before.
It wasn't for himself, but someone else, someone Robert had
left behind in that moment, a young woman he'd wanted
to marry back home in his village. Valerie listens in
horror as Carl finishes the account by describing his final

(15:38):
moments bleeding to death alone in the plane. The following year,
at the age of nine, Carl Eden is interviewed by
Women's Own magazine after a local journalist caught wind of

(15:59):
his extraordinary claims and published a small piece in the
local paper later that year. The story even makes it
as far as Germany when it is picked up by
Berlin's Morgan Post. Inevitably, with the exposure comes ridicule at school.
Within days of the articles appearing, Karl's classmates begin calling

(16:23):
him Hitler and a Nazi and throw their arms up
in Nazi salutes whenever he walks by. Most days, Karl
returns home in tears from all the teasing. As the
attention becomes increasingly unbearable, the young Karl decides on the
only course of action he has available to him. He

(16:45):
stops talking about it. Unfortunately for Karl, the interest in
its case is only beginning to grow. It's some time
toward the end of nineteen eighty three when the woman's
own article finds its way to the desk of Professor
Ian Stevenson in Virginia, USA. At the time, the American

(17:08):
Canadian Stephenson was Carlson Professor of Psychiatry at the University
of Virginia School of Medicine. A fascinating but controversial figure.
For the past twenty five years, he's dedicated himself to
investigating the validity of so called reincarnation cases. He'd even

(17:29):
established a specific department, the University's Division of Perceptual Studies,
to better conduct his research. Despite much criticism from his peers,
Stephenson's dogged research ultimately earned him some begrudging respect in
the psychiatric community. Stevenson's interest in reincarnation sprang initially from

(17:53):
a fascination with how certain characteristic traits or unusual illnesses
often seemed to him incompatible with environmental or hereditary influences.
It suggested to him that perhaps there was a third
type of influence on character. Stephenson postulated that this might

(18:15):
be the result of a type of memory transfer between individuals.
One feature that occurred in many of Stephenson's case studies,
of which there were hundreds, was the appearance of birthmarks
or birth defects in places that held a deep significance
to the alleged past life. For example, in Reincarnation and Biology,

(18:40):
a Contribution to the Eteology of Birthmarks and birth Defects
from nineteen ninety seven, Stephenson recounts the story of a
young boy who became convinced that he'd shot himself in
a past life. The boy's recollections eventually led him to
a woman whose brother had indeed shot himself in the throat.

(19:02):
When Stephenson examined the boy, he found a birthmark on
his throat where the man's bullet was alleged to have entered.
Stevenson then suggested they checked for a mark where an
exit wound might be sure enough, when they pulled back
the hair on top of his head, they found a
birthmark there too. Stevenson is immediately fascinated by Carl, and

(19:29):
in particular the birthmark on his right leg. Although Stevenson
is unable to make the trip himself early in the
new year, he sends UK associate doctor Nicholas McLain rice
to interview Carl and his family. After analyzing the various
anecdotes and stories compiled by doctor Nicholas Stephenson concludes that

(19:55):
reincarnation was at least a plausible explanation for Carl's story.
By the age of thirteen, any lingering traits of so
called Robert, the mysterious Luftwaffe pilot whose memories Karl had

(20:19):
seemingly found in his head, have all but vanished. Time
goes by. At sixteen, Carl finishes school and takes up
a job with British Rail preparing freight trains for the
various industrial estates that line the banks of the River Tees.
Five years later, Carl agrees to one final interview, this

(20:43):
time with doctor Ian Stephenson. Determined to analyze Karl's story
for himself, the psychologist travels personally to Middlesbrough to meet
with him. The meeting proves disappointing for Stevenson when Karl
is unable to off for any greater insights into his
apparent past life. However, on another level, Stephenson is pleased

(21:07):
to find the young man happy and in love, having
just moved in with his girlfriend twelve months later, and
the couple welcome their first child into the world. When
Carl's proposal of marriage is accepted the following year, and
now with a second baby on the way, his life

(21:27):
seems finally to have truly become his own, and the
specter of the mysterious German Pilot has finally been laid
to rest. In the summer of nineteen ninety five, a
heat wave sweeps across the United Kingdom that stretches throughout
July and into August. On the evening of Wednesday, August second,

(21:53):
a heavy stillness hangs in the air when officers on
duty at Middlesbrough's South Bank Police station hear a car
screeching to a halt outside. They watch with some alarm
as the hul king frame of a young man well
over six feet tall burst through the front door. And

(22:13):
into the waiting area, his clothes covered in blood. He
got angry and came at me, says the man in
a state of shock. He identifies himself as Gary vinter As.
The twenty five year old Gary breathlessly explains he's just

(22:33):
come from Teeside, where he's been working the evening ship
at a train signal box. For some reason, he and
his colleague got into an argument. He can't remember exactly
what happened, only that when it was over, his colleague
was dead. Gary is immediately taken for questioning. Later, he

(22:56):
draws a map for the police to help locate the body,
and a squad car is promptly dispatched to investigate. Out
on the industrial fringes of Middlesbrough, the squad car takes
a left onto Teesdock Road and heads for the scrub
lands beyond. It's a haunting landscape of carved earth, slag

(23:20):
heaps and silently smoking chimneys. Pinpricks of red and green
lights hang like stars on the silhouettes of distant cranes.
Such locations can make you feel like you've stumbled upon
the very edges of the world. Sparse tapestries populated by

(23:40):
the strange breedings, as writer Robert McFarlane puts it, of
urban archaeology and those more organic elements of the natural
world that twist and grab wherever they can get a hold.

(24:02):
They almost miss it at first. The unassuming red bricked
building with the flat tarmac roof its perch just off
the road behind a short piece of rail track. It
branches off like a frayed nerve toward the myriad warehouses
and sidings that dot the land. To its left is

(24:23):
the small train preparer's cabin that Gary Vinter had mentioned
in his statement the place where the fight had broken out.
To the right, an electricity pylon towers above them, seeming
to mark the spot as a strange nexus point between
the old Dorman Long steel works just behind and the

(24:46):
dock yards way off in the distance. Hawlage trucks rattle
past in the dark. As the officers step out into
the warm night air tinged with the light chemical whiff
of heavy industry, a distant, gentle clanging can be heard,
carried on the wind from somewhere off. As they cross

(25:07):
the tracks and proceed into the small cabin on the left,
the door gives a slight creak as they push it aside.
Sweeping their torches across the space, they soon spot the
body of a man lying in a thick pool of
blood on the cabin floor. Some kind of implement still

(25:29):
protrudes from his body. The dead man has evidently bled
to death, and he is Carl Eden. Only later, with
the full extent of the brutal attack come to light.
Karl was stabbed thirty seven times with two knives. Gary

(25:51):
Vinter had grabbed the second after he thrust the other
with such intensity that it had broken in half. The
autopsy revealed that Karl had been stabbed broadly across the
entirety of his body, with most internal organs punctured. The
pathologist's findings seemed to contradict Vinter's initial claim that he

(26:15):
had acted in self defense, a fact agreed by the
jury at his trial. He was convicted of murder the
following year and sentenced to life in prison. Carl Eden
was laid to rest in Acklam Cemetery in Middlesbrough. Two

(26:37):
months later, his second daughter was born. Not only was
Karl's death a tragedy that wrought untold sorrow on his family,
it seemed also to finally put an end to any
speculation about whether he really did possess the memories of
a German airman who himself died young, apparently shot down

(26:58):
over England during the Second World War. But that was
by no means the end of Carl's story. For just
over two years after his death, an extraordinary discovery not
far from where Carl grew up will bring everything back
into shocking relief. So join us next week for the

(27:20):
third and final part of Unexplained, Season eight, episode twenty one,
East of Eden. This episode was written by Richard McLain smith.
Unexplained is an Avy Club Productions podcast created by Richard
McClain Smith. All other elements of the podcast, including the music,

(27:44):
were also produced by me Richard McClain smith. Unexplained. The
book and audiobook is now available to buy worldwide. You
can purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones and other bookstores.
Please subscribe to and rate the show wherever you get
your podcasts, and feel free to get in touch with

(28:04):
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