WARRINGTON-based best-selling author, Conrad Jones, has launched a new podcast: “Tales from the Darkside.”
‘Tales from the Dark Side’ is inspired by the Plague Pit Horrors and the Mass Graves of Liverpool, Conrad’s take on two macabre stories about Liverpool’s Old Swan area.
The inspiration for the story to follow: His new Liverpool based Crime Horror ‘The Priest and the Devil’. Told to you by the master storyteller himself, with chapters dropping weekly.
In the first episode, Conrad shares two stories that have always intrigued him: the plague pits and the discovery of 3,561 people buried in a mass grave in Old Swan, which was discovered in 1973. The stories are the inspiration for the rest of the fictional episodes.
All of Conrad’s 38 best sellers are inspired by true stories, either historical or in the news, and ‘The Priest and Devil’, launched first as a podcast, is no different.
Conrad said: “I don’t think the history of Old Swan is well known. I used to go to the Skate Park at Rathbone Road as a kid and loved the place, not knowing then what lay beneath.”
As part of the research for this podcast series, Conrad wanted to see if there is any further explanation as to what happened to those 3,561 people whose coffins were found when construction work for a school started in 1973 at St Oswald’s.
There are only a few accounts on line one an interview with a senior council worker who is reported to have been directed by the Home Office to cremate the bodies and stories of the site itself on the Discover Liverpool website.
The Liverpool Archives team kindly confirmed the lead agency at the time of the macabre discovery was reported as the Home Office. The Home Office advised that we would need to submit a Freedom of Information Request to obtain further details, as the press team was unable to easily find an official line on record to the 50-year-old question: “What happened to those 3561 people whose bodies were discovered under a building site in Old Swan in 1973?”
An F.O.I has been submitted and Conrad expects to receive more details about the mass graves mid-August.
It is understood the discovery was the subject of a Defence and Security Media Advisory Notice in 1973, requesting the press at the time to exercise voluntary censorship on coverage.
Conrad added: “I am enjoying sitting down and recording these stories. Readers, unless they have been to one of my events, won’t have heard me telling my stories before, so I hope that gives the podcast an added dimension.
“It isn’t an audio-book. It is me sat on my sofa telling you the story.”
Link to Conrad Jones’ Tales from the Dark Side for free on Spotify
