Is your Laz 1.8RC4 a 32 bit or 64 bit?
You need to put the same bitness dll's from openssl in your exe directory. If you use the wrong ones you can get this error.
The ones included there could be 32 bit and your Lazarus could be 64 bit. So get the latest correct ones from
http://indy.fulgan.com/SSL/openssl-1.0.2l-i386-win32.zip for 32 bit Lazarus
and openssl-1.0.2l-x64_86-win64.zip for 64 bit Lazarus.