The Strange Possession of Maria Talarico

The Strange Possession of Maria Talarico

Mysterious murders and deaths are nothing new. History is rife with them, and I have written of such things many times before. Yet some are more bizarre than others, merging the paranormal and unsolved crimes in interesting and often mind boggling ways. One such case is the ghost who managed to possess a young woman in order to solve his own murder, and it is every bit as strange as it sounds.

The day of February 13, 1936 brought with it a gruesome discovery under the Morandi bridge in the city of Catanzaro, Italy. There sprawled upon the rocky riverbed below was the shattered body of a local man named Giuseppe “Pepe” Veraldi. Considering the severe trauma that the body had received and its location, it seemed fairly obvious that the man had plummeted from the bridge above to his death. At the time there was no foul play suspected, and the authorities came to the conclusion that Veraldi had, for whatever reasons, chosen to end his own life on that bridge, leaping to his doom. The victim’s family challenged this official explanation, saying that he had not been suicidal and vehemently denying that he would have killed himself, crying murder, but police held their stance and that was pretty much the end of that, although the death spurred no end of gossip and rumors as it made the rounds in the news before fading away.