Black magic murder. I'm Jason Horton. I'm Rebecca Leib. And this is Ghost Town.

In the fall of 1929, 66-year-old Nancy Bowen and 36-year-old Lyla Jimerson decided to play with the Ouija board.

The two women were friends from the community and both members of the Seneca original nations, a tribe based out of Western New York, and lived on the Cataragos reservation near Buffalo.

Bowen was a healer and Jimerson worked at the reservation school. While good-natured, it had been a rough time for Nancy Bowen.

The recent death of her husband, Sassafras Charlie Bowen, another Seneca healer, had thrown her into a deep depression, one that she thought she could ease if perhaps she made spiritual contact.

As Nancy and Lyla learned over the board, the planchette started to reveal a message to them from Charlie. It said, they killed me. Who killed you? The woman asked.

The board spelled out the answer, letter by letter. C-L-O-T-H-I-L-D-E. Clothild. A strange name, but one Lyla Jimerson knew very, very well.

What happened next would spiral into a supremely lured and chaotic case, characterized by accusations of black magic, bigotry, sexual exploits, supernatural communication, murder, and educational dioramas.

Today we're talking about the bizarre and fascinating death of Clothild Marshond, also known as the Ouija board murder.

So here we have Nancy and Lyla sitting in front of a Ouija board and get the first name of the woman who allegedly killed Nancy's husband, Clothild.

Nancy of course is beside herself and becomes even more emotional when the Ouija board spells out some helpful specifics, the killer's address on Riley Street in downtown Buffalo, New York, and her description, short with bobbed hair and missing teeth.

Equipped with information from quote, the great beyond, Nancy Bowen of course wants to confront this woman, Clothild. At the time Buffalo is not very big and with the address and a fairly detailed description, she can find this woman easily.

The add to suspicions after the say-ons Bowen received several letters signed Mrs. Dooley, explaining that Clothild was a witch who had hexed Sassafras Charlie out of jealousy.

Quote, her witchcraft didn't work so good so she decided to kill him, one letter said.

With this mounting evidence Bowen became more and more convinced that Clothild killed her husband, and that she was next.

For months, things are quiet. Then in March of 1930, 12-year-old Henri Marchandt Jr. comes home from school to discover his mother, a painter and mother of four named Clothild Marchandt dead, beaten to death with a hammer and chlorophyll papers shoved down her throat.

Henri Jr. runs over to the Buffalo Museum of Science to tell his father, world-renowned sculptor, Henri Marchandt Sr., what he just saw.

Henri Marchandt is a bit of a celebrity. A French-born sculptor, Henri's big claim to fame is that he studied under one of the great sculptors of all time, August Rodin, known by many as the founder of modern sculpture.

In the early 1900s, Henri and Clothildt emigrated to the US for an opportunity Marchandt received to work as a diorama artist for the New York State Museum in Albany and had particular success depicting original nation's people in various settings.

His work in 1918 on the museum's Iroquois dioramas earned him more attention and recognition, which led to his next big opportunity. In 1925, Marchandt and his family moved to Buffalo, New York, where, along with his sons Paul and George, he was commissioned to construct larger-scale dioramas for the Buffalo Museum of Science.

While at first Henri Marchandt is looked into as the killer, he vehemently denies any involvement in his wife's violent death.

But police soon learned from neighbors that a Seneca woman had cased the house earlier that day, which clears Marchandt and begs new unanswered questions.

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