Weird Darkness: Stories of the Paranormal, Supernatural, Legends, Lore, Mysterious, Macabre, Unsolved

A TV studio worker wakes up to the same day he already lived — and he's the only person in the building who knows it.IN THIS EPISODE: “Frame By Frame” by Keith ConradMORE Stories Like This: https://www.auditoryanthology.comLook for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://pod.link/1078714736Originally aired: August 06, 2026EPISODE PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/framebyframe

A Stillwater high school student who pleaded no contest to raping and strangling two of his ex-girlfriends finished his youthful offender probation this week without a single day in prison, and a newly sworn district attorney is now asking the federal government to take the case Oklahoma no longer can.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/jessebutler20260805Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://pod.link/1078714736*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.

In 1909, all eyes turned to Worcester, Massachusetts, as a well-dressed businessman claimed he'd built a flying machine — and the world wanted to believe him so badly, they saw it in the sky whether it was there or not.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/airshiphoaxREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/ye27xce4FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: We'll look at the crazy story of the Great Worcester Airship Hoax of 1909! *** We'll meet a cat that must have more than nine lives, as it survived three World War Two shipwrecks and lived to meow about it! (Unsinkable Sam) *** UFO crash stories are somewhat ubiquitous, with most immediately pointing to Roswell, New Mexico… or Aurora, Texas… or even the so-called “Battle Over Los Angeles”. But there are many other stories of flying saucers crashing to Earth – and we'll look at one that took place in Bolivia, in 1978. (The Bolivia UFO Crash) *** A hidden artifact found in a mysterious hill in Oklahoma reveals a terrifying story! (Oklahoma's Mysterious Hollow Hill)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:00:53.694 = Show Open 00:02:30.154 = The Great Worcester Airship Hoax of 1909, Part 100:13:35.660 = The Great Worcester Airship Hoax of 1909, Part 2 ***00:23:58.982 = Unsinkable Sam00:31:02.011 = Oklahoma's Mysterious Hollow Hill ***00:44:45.651 = The Bolivia UFO Crash ***00:50:06.348 = Show Close*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad breakLISTEN ON PODCAST APPS: Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.com/wdapps*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*SOURCES and RESOURCES:“Oklahoma's Mysterious Hollow Hill” by Ellen Lloyd for AncientPages.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/44s54rmp,https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p86uyt7“Unsinkable Sam” by Natasha Ishak for AllThatsInteresting.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8j9nkz“The Bolivia UFO Crash” posted at Anomalien.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/3f4b2rr7“The Great Worcester Airship Hoax of 1909” from SlightlyOddFitchburg.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2adehevb,https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yckp2hh9(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: March, 2022On this episode of Weird Darkness, host Darren Marlar follows a flying machine that may never have flown, a cat credited with surviving three warships in a single year, a silver cylinder buried under a haunted Oklahoma mound, and a cylindrical object that tore into a Bolivian mountain in broad daylight.It opens in Worcester, Massachusetts, in December of 1909, where Wallace E. Tillinghast, vice-president of the Sure Seal Manufacturing Company, told the Boston Herald he had invented a heavier-than-air flying machine that could carry three passengers some three hundred miles at a hundred and twenty miles an hour, only a few years after the Wright brothers had struggled to keep a powered aircraft aloft for a few hundred feet. Wallace never produced the machine, yet crowds across Massachusetts and out into Arkansas, New York, Connecticut, and Rhode Island reported a mysterious airship moving silently through the night sky, with one witness in Revere describing seventy-foot wings and an engine he claimed he could hear rumbling from the ground. In Providence, a young H.P. Lovecraft cut through the excitement by identifying the light everyone was pointing at as the planet Venus. The New England Skeptical Society would later attribute the whole affair to collective wish-fulfillment, while the UFOlogist John A. Keel traced it back to an unnamed inventor who had been working his way east since the great California airship sightings of 1896, recruiting well-liked local men like Wallace to serve as the public face of a flying machine that never quite worked.From there the show crosses to the North Atlantic and the tale of Unsinkable Sam, a black-and-white tuxedo cat said to have survived three shipwrecks during a single stretch of the Second World War. As the legend runs, he began the war aboard the German battleship Bismarck, was pulled from a floating plank by the crew of the British destroyer HMSCossack after the Bismarck went down on May 27th, 1941, and was renamed Oscar. When the Cossack was torpedoed months later, the cat was said to have been rescued again, this time by the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal, which is where the nickname Unsinkable Sam took hold; after the Ark Royal itself was torpedoed on November 14th, 1941, he reportedly turned up unharmed once more and was carried off by the HMS Legion. Darren measures the story against the record, noting that Bismarck survivors recalled no cat aboard, that a well-known photograph tied to Sam actually shows a different ship's cat named Simon of the HMS Amethyst, and that the seagoing cat was a genuine naval tradition even if this particular survivor may have been assembled from several.Next comes a haunted mound outside Binger, in Caddo County, Oklahoma, and a silver cylinder said to hold the reason the local people would not go near it. The account reaches print through a 1930s newspaper clipping rediscovered by Mrs. Cossette Willoughby of San Jose, California, in which a traveling reporter digs at dawn beside a mound her friends Pat and Louis warned was watched by two phantoms, a woman by day and a headless man by night. Inside the cylinder are papers written in Castilian Spanish, describing how a soldier named Alfonzo, separated from Francisco Vázquez de Coronado's 1541 hunt for the Seven Cities of Gold, wandered into a cave and down into a hidden underground country called Kenyan, ruled by long-headed people and guarded by hairless, dog-like beasts that gave off a musty animal odor. Drawing on Timothy Green Beckley's book Subterranean Worlds Inside Earth, the segment lays out Alfonzo's account of his wife Teen, their failed escape on the back of one of those beasts, and the sentence that supposedly set their preserved bodies walking the mound to frighten off anyone who might find the passage.The episode closes on the afternoon of May 6th, 1978, when something cylindrical slammed into the El Taire mountain along the Bermejo River, on the border between the Bolivian province of Tarija and Argentina, with a supersonic blast heard 150 miles away and windowpanes cracked 30 miles out in every direction. Border policemen described a metallic object trailing white smoke; Corporal Natalio Farfan Ruiz felt the ground tremble as it fell, and Policeman Juan Hurtado said the thing passed directly over his head before it struck the slope. The Buenos Aires newspaper Clarín reported that a police chief in Tarija had located a dented metal cylinder roughly twelve feet long, and while a promised NASA expert never arrived, two United States Air Force officers, Colonel Robert Simmons and Major John Heise, did, later confirmed through released State Department documents to have flown in under a program called Project Moon Dust. Darren ends on the stranger thread running through those files, the 1127th field activities group's interest in HUMINT, the gathering of UFO information from human sources through what the documents themselves describe as a game of deceit.

An aging millionaire's fixation on a battered toy car draws his family into a tense mystery rooted in a tragedy from the past.Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/OTRCHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “The Hundred Dollar Difference” (May 19, 1978) ***WD00:44:49.646 = Sherlock Holmes, “Horseless Carriage” (February 24, 1947) ***WD01:13:45.557 = Mystery House, “A Killing In Market” (May 31, 1946)01:39:11.056 = Inner Sanctum, “Death Is An Artist” (January 23, 1945)02:08:47.121 = Jeff Regan, “The Man Who Came Back” (August 21, 1948) ***WD02:37:47.050 = The Key, “Ninety-Three-Year-Old Man” (1956) ***WD03:03:15.060 = Lights Out, “The Story of Mr. Maggs” (December 01, 1942) ***WD03:29:48.621 = Macabre, “Crystalline Man” (January 01, 1962) ***WD03:58:09.534 = Philip Marlowe, “Deep Shadow” (March 21, 1950)04:27:44.319 = Blackstone The Magic Magician, “The Ghost That Trapped a Killer” (October 03, 1948) ***WD04:39:26.334 = The Black Mass, “Death of Halpin Fraser” (May 20, 1964) ***WD05:10:33.358 = Show Close(ADU) = Air Date Unknown(LQ) = Low Quality***WD = Remastered, edited, or cleaned up by Weird Darkness to make the episode more listenable. Audio may not be pristine, but it will be better than the original file which may have been unusable or more difficult to hear without editing.CUSTOM WEBPAGE: https://weirddarkness.com/WDRR0734

It started with dust instead of smoke over an empty stretch of Colorado in the summer of 1973, and by the time anyone understood what the land was actually doing, the middle of the country had already begun to drop.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/mitm-nebraskaseaSOURCES and RESOURCES:“The Great Nebraska Sea” by Allan Danzig (Galaxy Magazine August 1963)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Midnight In The Macabre (MITM), originally aired: August 05, 2026

One Siders defendant walks free on a signature bond. The last of the four asks a judge whether she's fit to stand trial at all.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/SidersCase20260804Siders Case: Vinton County Child Endangerment Case, July 15 Coverage – Weird DarkNEWSThe Siders Family's Other House and Their Years Off the Grid – Weird DarkNEWS, July 22The 16 Siders Children: Vinton County Seeks Permanent Custody – Weird DarkNEWS, July 29Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://pod.link/1078714736*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.

A commercial crew descending into Gatwick watched a dark-rimmed disc pass within a few hundred feet of the right wing, and the radar recorded nothing there at all.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/gatwicksaucer/Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://pod.link/1078714736*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.

Dressed like a 17th-century priest and armed with a library of ancient texts, Montague Summers devoted his life to proving that witches, vampires, and werewolves weren't just folklore — they were terrifyingly real.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/montaguesummersREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/montague20260803FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Can a priest believe in witches, werewolves, and vampires? The answer is yes – and his name was Montague Summers. Was he a kook, or was he seeing the truth that others ignored? (Montague Summers Believed in Monsters) *** He smiled without speaking, appeared alongside UFOs, and promised to return – who, or what, was the mysterious Indrid Cold? (The Grinning Man – The Legend of Indrid Cold) *** Somewhere out there, another version of you made a different choice – that's the multiverse theory. And the key to proving it could lie in changing someone else's history. (Visiting Our Neighbors in a Parallel Universe) *** Anatoli Bugorski accidentally stuck his head in the world's most powerful particle accelerator in 1978; he saw a flash brighter than a thousand suns, and somehow lived to tell about it. (The Man Who Survived An Atomic Blast Through His Skull) *** In 1971, a massive glowing sphere hovered silently over a U.S. Navy carrier — and for twenty minutes, the entire ship went dark. (Code Black: The USS Kennedy UFO Incident) *** She was a Houston socialite raised like royalty, but Joan Robinson Hill's glittering life came to a mysterious end – followed by affairs, secret autopsies, a sensational trial, and a murder that still raises more questions than answers. (Murder in Texas: The Strange Death of Joan Robinson Hill) *** Imagine calling 911 because a perfectly healthy and alive loved one insists they're dead – and wants to be taken to the morgue to join the other corpses! (Walking Dead: The Syndrome That Makes You Think You Are Deceased) *** Locals whisper about witches and shadows at Blood's Point Cemetery, but the real horror lies in a forgotten tragedy no ghost story could match. (The Witch, The Shadow, and the Secrets of Bloods Point)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:01:19.350 = Show Open00:04:01.662 = Montague Summers Believed In Monsters00:12:33.941 = Visiting Our Next Door Neighbors in a Parallel Universe ***00:16:55.866 = Code Black: The USS Kennedy UFO Incident00:27:48.566 = Murder in Texas: The Strange Death of Joan Robinson Hill ***00:36:51.664 = The Man Who Survived An Atomic Blast Through His Skull00:40:06.356 = Walking Dead: The Syndrome That Makes You Think You Are Deceased00:46:04.042 = The Witch, The Shadow, and the Secrets of Bloods Point ***00:51:53.221 = The Grinning Man: The Legend of Indrid Cold01:05:38.345 = Show Close*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad breakLISTEN ON PODCAST APPS: Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.com/wdapps*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*SOURCES and RESOURCES:“Code Black: The USS Kennedy UFO Incident”: https://rense.com/ufo/kennedy.htm,https://www.ufoinsight.com/ufos/cover-ups/the-1971-bermuda-triangle-ufo-incident“Visiting our Next Door Neighbors in a Parallel Universe”: https://weirddarkness.com/visiting-our-next-door-neighbors-in-a-parallel-universe/, https://www.space.com/the-universe/could-we-travel-to-parallel-universes“The Man Who Survived An Atomic Blast Through His Skull”: https://weirddarkness.com/the-man-who-survived-an-atomic-blast-through-his-skull/“Montague Summers Believed In Monsters”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montague_Summers,https://libraryblog.lbrut.org.uk/2017/10/montague-summers/,https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/8955270/montague-summers, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Montague-Summers, https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/32006.Montague_Summers,https://www.bloodynews.ro/article/the-controversial-life-of-montague-summers-a-priest-who-believed-in-vampires-and-witches/“Murder in Texas: The Strange Death of Joan Robinson Hill”: https://the-line-up.com/murder-in-texas-the-strange-death-of-joan-robinson-hill“Walking Dead: The Syndrome That Makes You Think You're Deceased”: https://the-line-up.com/cotards-syndrome-the-living-dead“The Witch, The Shadow, and the Secrets of Bloods Point”: https://www.hauntedrockford.com/hidden-in-the-shadows/“The Grinning Man: The Legend of Indrid Cold”: https://believingthebizarre.com/indrid-cold-the-grinning-man/(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: March 25, 2025

Around three in the morning on July 31st, a naked man drove his car through the front doors of a Baptist church on Detroit's west side, rolled to a stop inside the vestibule, and told the people who arrived that he was Jesus Christ; nobody was hurt, and Detroit police say any charges wait on the results of a mental health evaluation.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/NakedJesusCrashLook for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://pod.link/1078714736*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.

Six members of one family were found dead in a Mechanicville, New York apartment in June; by August, investigators had ruled the four children's deaths homicides and the mother's and grandmother's deaths suicides, and said the two women planned the killings by text in the days before the kids were to leave for a court-ordered summer with their father.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/HarmonChildren20260804Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://pod.link/1078714736*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.

Two men carried spades and a telephone line into an ancient swamp cemetery after midnight, and only one of them stayed above ground.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/mitm-randolphcarterSOURCES and RESOURCES: “The Statement of Randolph Carter” by H.P. Lovecraft: https://www.creepypasta.com/the-statement-of-randolph-carter/WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Midnight In The Macabre (MITM), originally aired: August 04, 2026

Alien abductions, cryptid creatures, secret government programs, portals to other worlds, cattle mutilations – the San Luis Valley may be the strangest and most terrifying place you've never heard of.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/CattleMutilationsFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: We've had several episodes before about mysterious locations that are host to strange, paranormal activity. Skinwalker Ranch, for example, or The Bennington Triangle, or even the harsh terrain of Alaska. Perhaps one of the locations that appears to persistently slip under the radar is the San Luis Valley in Colorado. The region is home to very much the same variety of paranormal activity as other apparent hot spots. UFO sightings here are in abundance, for example. As are cases of cattle mutilation, sightings of strange creatures, and even alien abduction. In short, the San Luis Valley could be one of the most interesting locations in the world.LISTEN ON PODCAST APPS: Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.com/wdapps*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*SOURCES and RESOURCES:“The Paranormal, Extraterrestrial, and Otherworldly Explanations for Cattle Mutilations” by Marcus Lowth for UFOInsight.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/66a64hu5, https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/vhykeezp(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: March 2022Weird Darkness devotes a full episode to Colorado's San Luis Valley, moving from Native American creation myths through the 1967 mutilation of a horse named Lady, decades of Bigfoot encounters, and a global run of cattle mutilation cases tied to UFO sightings, secret government programs, and alien abduction.It opens with the valley's own history: the region passed from Mexican to American territory after the 1846-1848 Mexican-American War, and archaeological evidence places human habitation there for roughly 7,000 years across close to a dozen Native American tribes. Several of those tribes describe the surrounding peaks as the Sipapu, a place of creation and emergence, and the Navajo specifically name the Blanca Massif as the point where "star people" enter this world aboard what their oral tradition calls flying seed pods, a phrase researchers have since compared to modern disc-shaped UFO reports. The same traditions include legends of shapeshifting beasts roaming the valley, stories some investigators now link to the Bigfoot sightings still reported there.From there the episode turns to the case that first brought cattle mutilation into national headlines: the September 27, 1967 death of a three-year-old Appaloosa mare named Lady, discovered by Harry King and his mother, Agnes, on land belonging to his sister, Nellie Lewis. The horse's head had been stripped completely to the bone with surgically precise cuts, no blood was found anywhere at the scene despite the wounds, and a strong chemical odor hung in the air near the body. Investigators also noted that the horse's own tracks stopped abruptly about 100 feet from where she was found, that scorch marks including a distinct circular pattern marked the ground nearby, and that Agnes King recalled an unidentified object flying over her house in the days before the discovery. The Aerial Phenomena Research Organization investigated, and pathologist Dr. John Altshuler, examining the remains, found the heart, lungs, thyroid, and abdominal organs removed with medical precision and the body completely drained of blood. Alamosa County Sheriff Ben Phillips attributed the death to a lightning strike without visiting the site, and the Condon Committee later reported no evidence of abnormal causes, addressing neither the missing blood nor the burns. Press coverage mistakenly named the horse Snippy, after her sire, and the name stuck permanently. Researcher Christopher O'Brien would go on to document more than 200 further mutilation reports in the San Luis Valley alone, estimating the true, unreported total closer to 1,000.Next comes a survey of the valley's stranger residents, starting with a 1992 sighting known regionally as the Woman in Red, in which a driver picked up a hitchhiking woman who vanished after he noticed she had goat-like legs and hooves. The same stretch of the episode covers a wave of Bigfoot encounters that struck a seven-square-mile radius between late December 1993 and early January 1994, including a December 31 sighting with footprint tracks clear enough to show toenail impressions and partially captured on police video, plus a 2000 report from two ATV riders near Blanca Peak who tracked a seven-foot, brown-haired creature before losing it in the trees. Christopher O'Brien's files also record a white buffalo that appeared and then vanished without a trace near Winchell Lake in the early 1980s, a 1993 wave of legless, slug-like creatures locals call prairie dragons, and a report of an out-of-place platypus. The segment also revisits the Old Scratch legend, a century-old story of a well-dressed stranger who appears in a cantina during Lent and reveals claws, cloven hooves, and a tail before fleeing when confronted, last reported in 1984, then covers mid-1960s witness Robert Whitting, who claimed a craft pulled alongside his car and telepathically warned him of a dead black dog in the road ahead. It closes at the modern UFO Watchtower, a platform built for its 360-degree view of the valley that still draws UFO sightings and researchers year-round.The episode then widens its scope to cattle mutilation as a global phenomenon, opening with a 1606 case recorded in the court records of England's King James I describing sheep found with only their tallow and inner organs removed, and a Texas horse whose entire nervous system was surgically extracted in the same territory that saw a wave of sheep mutilations in 2013. It cites an FBI report from the late 1970s tallying roughly 8,000 mutilations in Colorado alone and lays out the pattern researchers keep finding: animals drained completely of blood, organs removed with surgical precision, unusual chemical readings in tissue samples, and a consistent absence of scavengers at the scene. From there it crosses to Cannock Chase in Staffordshire, England, where in 1985 a father and son watched a silent, triangular craft with three underside lights hover over a field, followed two days later by a duck hunter who saw a similar object stop over grazing cattle and fire light beams in his direction as he approached.A string of British cases follows, beginning with the 2010 mutilations of sheep near Shrewsbury, England, where animals were found with faces skillfully stripped of flesh and drilled holes where their brains had been removed, witnessed in part by a 16-person investigative team who reported both UFOs and apparent laser-style attacks on the flock in March of that year. It moves next to a 2011-2012 wave of mutilated horses across the United Kingdom, tentatively tied by some researchers to an equine herpesvirus type 1 outbreak rather than to ritual dates such as St. Winebald Day, then to Wales, where the Animal Pathology Field Unit spent twelve years, from 2001 to 2013, investigating sheep mutilations and, through investigator Phil Hoyle, concluded extraterrestrial involvement was the most likely explanation. The segment also returns to the 1977 discovery of 15 mutilated wild ponies in Cherry Brook Valley, Dartmoor, found by Alan Hicks, a case later investigated by Jonathan Downes of the Center for Fortean Zoology, who reported suspicious interference and elaborate hoax calls resembling Men in Black activity. It ends with Rob Lea's account, given to researcher Nick Redfern, of a Bristol-based group he called the Cult of the Moon Beast, allegedly performing animal sacrifices in Newport, England since the late 1980s to summon entities from a coexisting dimension on behalf of wealthy patrons.Back in North America, the episode covers Manuel Sanchez's discovery of a fourth mutilated calf on his Colorado ranch in December 2009 and Tom Miller's similar March 2009 find near Trinidad, Colorado, both missing tongues, udders, and eyes with no blood or tracks at the scene. It continues with Kit Metzger's decades of mutilations at the Flying M Ranch in Arizona, dating back to the late 1970s and clustering between June and October, and with the 1978 case of Manuel Gomez's bull in Dulce, New Mexico, examined by officer Gabriel Valdez, whose lab tests found the heart and liver reduced to a mushy, peanut-butter texture with abnormal zinc, phosphorus, and potassium levels and no copper at all. The segment covers a summer of 1990 mutilations on Richard Fazio's land in Vancouver, Washington, which Oregon State University matched to laser-type electrosurgical injury, alongside Christopher O'Brien's own assessment that mutilations are "more complicated than aliens" and more likely tied to covert environmental monitoring. It closes with 2013 sheep mutilations in Texas tha

There is a story about a man who knew everything the world would ever know because he claimed to be born ten thousand years too soon — a man who could foresee every future but his own, and who spent his life searching for the one person alive who could tell him how he would die.Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/OTRCHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “Time Out of Mind” (May 18, 1978) ***WD00: 45:49.141 = Dark Fantasy, “I Am Your Brother” (June 05, 1942) ***WD01:14:15.433 = BBC Fear on 4, “The Journey Home” (February 26, 1989)01:42:40.384 = Theater Five, “Talkers” (November 24, 1964) ***WD02:03:44.997 = Ave Maria Hour, “St Benedict of Nursia VS Poison And Witchcraft” (1939)02:27:27.651 = The Hall of Fantasy, “The Shadow People” (September 21, 1953) ***WD02:51:43.918 = Harry Lime, “Work of Art” (September 28, 1951)03:16:46.504 = BBC Haunted Tales of the Supernatural, “Walk On The Water” (July 12, 1980)03:42:17.928 = The Haunting Hour, “Thought” (June 10, 1945) ***WD04:07:12.210 = Hermit's Cave, “Hanson's Ghost” (October 29, 1944)04:35:22.568 = Mystery Is My Hobby, “Death is a Grain of Sand, aka Murder At a Magic Show” (November 26, 1947) ***WD04:57:45.862 = Beyond The Green Door, “Tom Dunlevy Wasts' Abandoned Cabin” (1966)05:01:59.177 = Show Close(ADU) = Air Date Unknown(LQ) = Low Quality***WD = Remastered, edited, or cleaned up by Weird Darkness to make the episode more listenable. Audio may not be pristine, but it will be better than the original file which may have been unusable or more difficult to hear without editing.CUSTOM WEBPAGE: https://weirddarkness.com/WDRR0733

In 1982, an 18-year-old dropped dead after playing the arcade game Berzerk — and decades of half-truths, copycat rumors, and a real murder at the same machine turned it into legend. We separate fact from fiction on the Berzerk curse and its shadowy cousin, Polybius, the government mind-control game that may or may not have ever existed.==========HOUR ONE: It's rumored that an arcade game from 1980 might lead to the real death of its players. We'll look at the death curse of Berzerk. (The Berzerk Death Curse, And The Polybius Urban Legend) *** And another arcade game in the early 80s was surrounded by controversy – because the game never existed, despite so many saying it did. Or did it exist? We'll look at the urban legend of Polybius. (The Urban Legend of Polybius)==========HOUR TWO: Was Stanley Stiers the real-life inspiration for Michael Myers in 1978's John Carpenter film, “Halloween?” (The Real Michael Myers) *** The last known words of Peter Rugg were “Let the storm increase! I will see home tonight in spite of the last tempest, or I may never see home!" Over two-hundred years later and he has yet to make it home – but that hasn't stopped his tempest! (The Eternal Ride of Peter Rugg) *** Imagine attending college for several years, only to find out that the whole time you've been studying on top of the corpses of thousands of mental patients. That's exactly what happened in 2013 when The University of Mississippi made plans to expand parking for their students and staff. (The Corpses Under The University of Mississippi) *** Dealing with a ghost or two is awful enough – but what if you're attacked by a whole gang of ghouls? It was reported as real news in 1889's Chicago Tribune! (A Whole Gang O' Ghosts) *** People With Super Powers!==========SUDDEN DEATH OVERTIME: Michael Bryson disappeared on August 5th, 2020 from Hobo Campground at Umpqua National Forest. He has yet to be found. (The Disappearance of Michael Bryson) *** When it comes to cryptids, you have many to choose from – Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, the chupacabra, the list goes on and on. But I'm willing to bet nowhere on the list of your favorite cryptids, or even the cryptids you've ever heard of, do you have an entry for “The Belled Buzzard” of Texas. (The Belled Buzzard Legend) *** When the Black Plague arrived at Eyam's doorstep in the 17th century, its villagers were forced to choose between life or certain doom. It's the tragic tale of England's Plague Village. (The Black Plague Comes to Eyam)==========SOURCES AND REFERENCES FROM TONIGHT'S SHOW:“People with Super Powers” from Paranormality Magazine: https://weirddarkness.com/magazine“The Berzerk Death Curse” by Cat DeSpira: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yckk96tv“The Polybius Conspiracy” by Ryan Houlihan for InputMag.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8h6v8z“The Real Michael Myers” from Casper McFadden at TheMorbidLibrary.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yvj6ueze, and from TheScareChamber.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/vmew9uvb; “Halloween” theme piano solo by Noud van Harskamp: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T9m-fj8K9c, “Halloween Kills | Epic Orchestral Theme” by Mike Chibante: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E82MEfQiffk“The Disappearance of Michael Bryson” posted at Strange Outdoors: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/mwvb3am8 (If you know anything that could help solve Michael Bryson's disappearance, or if you were at the Hobo Campground around August 3rd, 4th, or 5th of 2020, please reach out to the sheriff's office at (541) 682-4150, option 1, and reference case No. 20-5286.)“The Eternal Ride of Peter Rugg” posted at SlightlyOddFitchburg.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/3z7pdtzn“The Corpses Under The University of Mississippi” by Erin Wisti for Ranker.com's “Graveyard Shift”:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8tdu6k“A Whole Gang O' Ghosts” posted from Strange Company: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p9ynpev“The Belled Buzzard Legend” from Texas Cryptid Hunter: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p875fxv“The Black Plague Comes to Eyam” by Stephanie Almazan for TheLineUp.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/1aptirxk==========(Over time links seen above may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for material I use whenever possible. If I have overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it immediately. Some links may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)=========="I have come into the world as a light, so that no one who believes in me should stay in darkness." — John 12:46==========WeirdDarkness®, WeirdDarkness© 2026==========To become a Weird Darkness Radio Show affiliate, contact Radio America at affiliates@radioamerica.com, or call 800-807-4703 (press 2 or dial ext 250).

Every time David Delano tries to propose to the beautiful Charlotte Marsden, a figure in old-fashioned evening dress appears in the room — visible only to him and to Charlotte's mother — and neither of them will explain who he is or why he keeps coming back.Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/OTRCHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “Edmund Orme” (May 15, 1978) ***WD00:46:57.073 = The Crime Club, “Topaz Flower” (April 24, 1947)01:16:53.148 = Crime Classics, “Death Picture Hanger” (July 20, 1953)01:46:38.330 = Danger Dr. Danfield, “Nola Jerrold Wants To Kill Her Husband” (September 15, 1946)02:10:54.934 = The Devil and Mr. O, “Three Thousand Dollars” (January 21, 1972) ***WD02:36:19.806 = Diary of Fate, “Victor Wakeman” (June 29, 1948) ***WD03:03:06.121 = Dimension X, “Dr. Grimshaw's Sanitorium” (September 22, 1950) ***WD03:32:38.297 = The Eleventh Hour, “Country Road” (ADU)03:58:20.749 = Escape, “The Sure Thing” (October 15, 1949)04:26:55.837 = Exploring Tomorrow, “Sourdough” (February 05, 1958)04:46:02.408 = Tales of the Frightened, “Chung Ling Soo” (December 16, 1957) ***WD04:50:22.457 = Tales From the Tomb, “The Lick” (1960s)04:53:51.912 = Incredible But True, “Naked Man of Newbury” (1950-1951)04:57:38.785 = Strange Adventure, “Crossroads” (1945) ***WD05:00:55.441 = Show Close(ADU) = Air Date Unknown(LQ) = Low Quality***WD = Remastered, edited, or cleaned up by Weird Darkness to make the episode more listenable. Audio may not be pristine, but it will be better than the original file which may have been unusable or more difficult to hear without editing.CUSTOM WEBPAGE: https://weirddarkness.com/WDRR0732

From a New Mexico ranch in 1947 to a Navy fighter jet in 2004, we trace ten of history's most famous UFO encounters — the eyewitnesses who saw them, the governments who denied them, and the questions that still won't go away."EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/skiesarewatchingREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4hfn747dCHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:06:39.225 = Show Open00:07:58.582 = The Roswell UFO Incident00:12:38.079 = The Westall UFO Encounter00:15:33.497 = The Pascagoula Abduction00:19:27.674 = The Allagash Abductions ***00:22:35.165 = The Tehran UFO Incident00:25:46.548 = The Cash-Landrum Incident00:29:03.352 = The Rendlesham Forest Incident00:32:19.175 = The Belgian UFO Wave00:36:28.126 = The Phoenix Lights ***00:40:52.495 = The Nimitz UFO Encounter00:44:15.325 = Show Close*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad breakLISTEN ON PODCAST APPS: Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.com/wdapps*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*SOURCES and RESOURCES:- Paranormality Magazine article; (link no longer valid)- Halt, Charles. "Halt Memo," January 1981, archived by the UK National Archives.- Penniston, Jim, and John Burroughs. "Encounter in Rendlesham Forest." Thomas & Mercer, 2014.- BBC News. "Rendlesham Forest: 'Britain's Roswell' UFO spotted off Suffolk coast," September 2011.- Pope, Nick. "You Can't Tell the People." Pan Books, 2001 – A book by a former MoD UFO investigator discussing the cover-ups and inside stories of the British government's responses to UFO sightings, including the Rendlesham Forest incident.- Bruni, Georgina. "You Can't Tell the People: The Definitive Account of the Rendlesham Forest UFO Mystery." Sidgwick & Jackson, 2000.- SOBEPS Reports on the Belgian UFO Wave- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdEALPvl_4Q- "Belgium in UFO Fever" - Brussels Times- "The Cash-Landrum UFO Incident," by John F. Schuessler, provides an extensive analysis of the event, including medical records and witness testimonies.- "UFOs and Government: A Historical Inquiry," a comprehensive study by Michael Swords and others, details the government's response to UFO sightings, including the Cash-Landrum case.- "Fire in the Sky: The Cash-Landrum UFO Incident," an article in the MUFON UFO Journal that revisits the incident, detailing the investigation and subsequent legal battle.- "Westall '66: A Suburban UFO Mystery," a documentary by Shane Ryan, explores the events through witness testimonies and expert interviews.- "The Westall UFO: A Suburban Mystery," a book by Keith Basterfield, provides a detailed account of the sighting, including the social and governmental context.- Articles and interviews archived by the Victorian UFO Action group, which has collected and analyzed first-hand accounts from witnesses and former students of Westall High School.- U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency Report: This declassified document provides a detailed account of the Tehran UFO Incident, including descriptions from the pilots and ground control.- "Iranian Jet Chased UFO, Got Light Show": This article in the New York Times archives covers the public's reaction and the international reporting following the incident.- Interview with Lt. Parviz Jafari: Several interviews with Jafari provide first-hand accounts of the encounter, including technical details of the aircraft's malfunctions.- CIA Document on the Tehran UFO Incident: A collection of declassified CIA documents that discuss the implications of the encounter and its analysis by various intelligence agencies.- The New York Times: Articles from December 2017 that first revealed the Nimitz encounter to the public.- Department of Defense Releases: Official statements and declassified videos of the encounters.- Interviews with Commander David Fravor: His firsthand accounts provide detailed observations of the encounter.- "Unidentified: Inside America's UFO Investigation" on History Channel: This television series features interviews with the pilots and analysis of the encounters.- Raymond E. Fowler, the investigator and author of "The Allagash Abductions: Undeniable Evidence of Alien Intervention," which details the incident and the hypnosis sessions.- Interviews and Appearances: The men involved have given numerous interviews and appeared on various television programs to recount their experiences.- "Unsolved Mysteries" Television Series: Featured the Allagash abductions, providing a dramatized account and interviews with the witnesses.- Skeptical Analysis by Robert Sheaffer and others, who critique the method of hypnosis used and the financial aspects related to the publicity of the case.- "The Pascagoula UFO Incident" by Charles Hickson – Hickson wrote a detailed account of his experience.- "UFOs: Past, Present, and Future" by Robert Emenegger – Includes interviews and analysis of the Pascagoula incident.- Interviews and documentaries – Multiple television programs and documentaries have featured interviews with the witnesses and analyses by UFO researchers.- Articles in major newspapers – Numerous articles were written at the time in publications like the Washington Post and New York Times, providing contemporary accounts of the events and follow-ups.(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: May 06, 2024This episode of Weird Darkness moves chronologically through ten of history's most frequently cited UFO encounters, opening with a 1947 debris field on a New Mexico ranch and closing with a 2004 Navy radar encounter off the California coast.In July 1947, rancher William "Mac" Brazel discovers unusual metallic debris scattered across the Foster homestead north of Roswell, New Mexico, and reports it to Sheriff George Wilcox, who alerts the Roswell Army Air Field. Intelligence officer Major Jesse Marcel collects the material, and on July 8th the RAAF issues a press release announcing the recovery of a "flying disc." The story runs in newspapers nationwide before General Roger Ramey holds a press conference the next day identifying the debris as a weather balloon. The retraction does little to end the speculation; decades later, ufologists raise claims of recovered alien bodies and a government cover-up, and in 1994 the Air Force publishes "Case Closed: Final Report on the Roswell Crash," attributing the debris to the classified high-altitude balloon program Project Mogul.From there, the episode moves to April 6th, 1966, when more than two hundred students, teachers, and residents near Westall High School in the Melbourne suburb of Westall, Australia, watch a gray, saucer-shaped craft descend, hover for roughly twenty minutes, and shoot skyward at high speed after a second object appears to intercept it. Students who walk into the nearby field known as The Grange afterward find circular patches of flattened grass. Australian authorities attribute the sighting to a weather balloon, an explanation many witnesses reject, and researcher Shane Ryan later interviews dozens of them for the documentary "Westall '66: A Suburban UFO Mystery."Next comes the Pascagoula Abduction: shipyard coworkers Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker are fishing on the Pascagoula River in Mississippi on the night of October 11th, 1973, when a whirring oval craft with flashing lights hovers roughly forty feet above them and three robotic, wrinkled-skinned beings pull them aboard for what they describe as a twenty-minute physical examination. The men report the encounter to the local sheriff's office, which secretly records their conversation while leaving them alone in a room, capturing Hickson's visible distress rather than any hint of a hoax. Both men pass polygraph tests and undergo hypnosis, and UFO researchers J. Allen Hynek and James Harder investigate the case and find no evidence of fabrication.A similar pattern surfaces three years later in Maine, where twin brothers Jack and Jim Weiner and fellow art students Chuck Rak and Charlie Foltz are camping on Eagle Lake in the Allagash wilderness in August 1976 when a glowing orb appears to follow their canoe. After Charlie Foltz signals it with a flashlight, the light expands and engulfs the group, and the men find themselves back at a campsite fire that has burned down to embers with no memory of the intervening time. Years later, recurring nightmares send the four men to psychiatrist and UFO researcher Dr. Raymond Fowler, whose hypnotic regression sessions produce matching accounts of grey-alien medical examinations aboard a craft, a story that eventually reaches national audiences through "Unsolved Mysteries" and multiple books.Military personnel take center

Look for this podcast on YouTube Music, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and numerous other podcast apps. Get the full list of options here: https://pod.link/1651062114Two doctored photographs posted to a comedy forum in 2009 spread, through thousands of anonymous contributors, into a mythology detailed enough that two eleven-year-old girls stabbed a friend nineteen times to prove their worth to it. Six years later, a South Dakota reservation would recognize pieces of the same figure inside a legend of its own, one that predated the internet by generations.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources and print version): https://weirddarkness.com/cotu-slendermanWeird Darkness® and Church Of The Undead™ are trademarked. Copyright © 2026.

A young bride's uncanny knowledge of history's deadliest catastrophes convinces her husband she's hiding something — but the truth behind her secret is older than he could ever imagine.Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/OTRCHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “The Secret of Shen-Si” (May 22, 1978) ***WD00:45:23.731 = BBC Radio 4 / Radio 7 GhostStory, “The Crowd” (December 30, 1986)00:59:43.519 = Night Beat, “Expectant Father” (December 28, 1951) ***WD01:27:08.605 = The Black Book, “Different Readings, Parts 1 & 2” (November 21, 1951) ***WD01:52:20.091 = Challenge of the Yukon, “Magnanimous Ghost” (August 28, 1945)02:06:45.867 = Box 13, “Three To Die” (January 23, 1949)02:33:16.175 = Calling All Cars, “Missing Mexican Sheiks” (January 03, 1934) ***WD (LQ)03:05:07.603 = Casey Crime Photographer, “Handkerchief” (September 05, 1946)03:34:32.775 = CBC Mystery Theater, “The Hitch Hiker” (June 02, 1967) ***WD04:00:52.848 = Chet Chetters, “If You Can't Stand The Heat” (1992)04:29:31.575 = The Clock, “Time In Reverse” (January 17, 1956)04:53:57.175 = Beyond The Green Door, “Edgar Hayes – Amazon Trip Seek” (1966)04:57:50.162 = Calling All Detectives, “Jerry Is Framed for the Murder of Mrs. Mayner” (July 07, 1948) ***WD (LQ)05:05:52.977 = Show Close(ADU) = Air Date Unknown(LQ) = Low Quality***WD = Remastered, edited, or cleaned up by Weird Darkness to make the episode more listenable. Audio may not be pristine, but it will be better than the original file which may have been unusable or more difficult to hear without editing.CUSTOM WEBPAGE: https://weirddarkness.com/WDRR0731

The Slender Man began as two photographs and a caption, submitted to an internet forum in 2009 as nothing more than a creepy image contest. Within five years, people across the country were treating him as real – and some proved just how far that belief could go.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/SlendermanREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8ka2reFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: In 2009, a photograph appeared on an internet forum, submitted as an entry in a contest to create convincing fake paranormal images. The figure in it had no face, arms too long for its body, and a caption written like a piece of found history. Within a few years, that figure had a name recognized across the internet, a following that treated the images as more than fiction, and a reputation for turning up in places far stranger than a photo contest ever intended.CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:02:02.673 = Show Open00:03:13.025 = Slenderman: Blurring The Lines of Reality, Part 100:09:24.860 = Slenderman: Blurring The Lines of Reality, Part 2 ***00:22:48.484 = Slenderman: Blurring The Lines of Reality, Part 3 ***00:34:59.166 = Slenderman: Blurring The Lines of Reality, Part 4 ***00:41:57.606 = Slenderman: Blurring The Lines of Reality, Part 5 ***00:54:09.889 = Show Close*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad breakLISTEN ON PODCAST APPS: Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.com/wdapps*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*SOURCES and RESOURCES:“Slenderman: Blurring The Lines Of Reality” by Marcus Lowth for UFOInsight.com:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p9e9srj(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: March, 2022This episode of Weird Darkness traces the Slender Man from an internet photo contest into real-world stabbings, arson, and a wave of suicides on a South Dakota reservation, then weighs whether an invented internet legend can, in some sense, become real.It opens with the character's exact origin: on June 10th, 2009, Eric Knudsen, posting under the name Victor Surge on the forum Something Awful, submitted two doctored photographs as part of a contest to create convincing paranormal images. Each carried a caption inventing a backstory, one referencing a photographer "presumed dead" in 1983 and another tying the figure to a fire at the Stirling City Library and the disappearance of a photographer named Mary Thomas in 1986. The figure in both images, faceless and unnaturally tall with elongated arms, spread across the internet within days and took on the name Slender Man, along with a folklore of his own: a preference for woods and abandoned buildings, the ability to travel at will, and warning signs that included nosebleeds, nightmares, and sudden paranoia.From there, the episode turns to the Waukesha stabbing of May 31st, 2014, in Wisconsin, when twelve-year-old Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser led their friend Payton Leutner into nearby woods and stabbed her nineteen times, telling investigators the attack was meant to prove Slender Man's existence and make them his "proxies." Leutner survived and crawled to a roadside where a cyclist found her. Geyser was sentenced to forty years to life and remains held in a psychiatric facility; Weier, sentenced to twenty-five years to life, was released from institutional care in the summer of 2021 and placed under supervision.Next, the episode covers the string of incidents that followed within months: a thirteen-year-old girl's knife attack on her mother in Hamilton County, Ohio, in June 2014; a Las Vegas shooting in which the gunman, who reportedly dressed as Slender Man, killed two police officers and a bystander before killing his wife and himself; and a house fire set by a fourteen-year-old girl in Port Richey, Florida, in September 2014, who told police she had "been reading a lot" about the character online. It also details a separate wave of youth suicides on South Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation between late 2014 and mid-2015, which the New York Times reported topped one hundred in six months, some tied by officials to the Slender Man and to a local legend of a "suicide spirit" known as Walking Sam or the Tall Man, and a mass hanging attempt in nearby woods that a local pastor, John Two Bulls, intervened to stop.The episode also relays an account researcher Nick Redfern collected from a Pennsylvania flight attendant trainee named Lacy, who said her laptop began displaying Slender Man's face and, on one occasion, a voice, after she read Robin Swope's book Slenderman: From Fiction to Fact in 2016.The episode closes by comparing Slender Man to Spring-Heeled Jack, a figure reported across Victorian England from the 1830s onward and long suspected of being one person's stunt copied by others in later decades, before turning to researcher Peter McCue's Psychic Internet Theory and the ancient Egyptian god Ptah, weighing whether shared belief circulated across the internet might account for why so many people came to treat a fictional character as something they could encounter.

Scout Brooks just wants to survive his first day of seventh grade — but a mysterious after-school astronomy club, run by an even stranger professor, has him wondering exactly what he's signed up for.Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://pod.link/1655277373Find more family-friendly frights and creepy games to play on our website at http://MicroTerrors.com!Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/microterrorsOther stories, novels, and more from author Scott Donnelly: https://amzn.to/3LymHaUOther narrations, podcasts, and audiobooks from voice artist Darren Marlar: https://WeirdDarkness.comBlLOG POST URL: https://weirddarkness.com/scoutbrooks001= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =Weird Darkness©, 2026Micro Terrors: Scary Stories for Kids™, 2026#MicroTerrors #WeirdDarkness

Two best friends sneak out on the first night of summer break and find a working elevator standing alone in the middle of the woods — and the moment they step inside, the way home stops making sense.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/mitm-ElevatorInTheWoodsSOURCES and RESOURCES: “The Elevator In The Woods” by Adrian Johnson: https://www.creepypasta.com/the-elevator-in-the-woods/WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: August 01, 2026

Records that surfaced in the weeks after the Siders children were found also describe a set of conjoined twins who died in 2022, two more underage marriages inside the extended family, and a stalled Ohio bill that would have raised the marriage age before any of it happened.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/siderscase20260731Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://pod.link/1078714736*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.

From bathing in girls' blood to making homemade conjoined twins, we'll look at a few famous psychopaths who are truly some of the most terrifying people in the history of the world. Plus, whether flamboyant, miserly, or paranoid, some of history's oddest individuals put modern-day eccentricities to shame.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/oddindividualsREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/bdeejyx2CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:01:04.405 = Show Open00:02:00.371 = Diogenes : A Crazy, Homeless Philosopher00:04:07.881 = Tarrare: the Man Who Man Have Eaten a Baby00:06:39.397 = Lucky Lord Byron00:09:42.507 = Hetty Green: Taking Miserly To a New Level ***00:12:37.752 = Henry Cyril Paget: Married His Cousin And Lived Life Luxuriously00:15:47.020 = Carl Tanzler: He Couldn't Live Without His Love, Even After Her Death00:18:31.186 = Gloria Ramirez: The Toxic Woman00:21:15.035 = Anneliese Michel: She Endured 67 Exorcisms ***00:23:44.494 = Sawney Bean: The Scottish Cannibal00:25:45.378 = Margaret Howe Lovatt: Intimate Relations With a Dolphin00:28:52.014 = King Leopold II: Slaves And Slaughter For Rubber And Ivory ***00:30:38.976 = Pol Pot: Created a Nation of Peasants, Poverty and Punishments00:32:17.167 = Ivan IV of Russia: Better Known as Ivan The Terrible00:33:54.318 = Elizabeth Bathory: Eternal Youth Through Murder00:35:15.113 = Heinrich Himmler: The Second Worst Nazi00:36:23.100 = Adolph Eichmann: Claimed He Did His Duty By Killing Millions00:38:05.830 = Tomás de Torquemada: Nobody Expects The Spanish Inquisition! ***00:39:30.531 = Josef Mengele: The Angel of Death00:40:31.984 = Vlad Tepes: The Impaler That Inspired Dracula00:42:03.511 = Jim Jones: The Kool-Aid Serial Killer Cult Leader00:43:43.399 = Show Close*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad breakLISTEN ON PODCAST APPS: Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.com/wdapps*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*

This episode covers real-life horror far more extreme than usual, including a Russian professor arrested in 2011 for keeping the mummified corpses of 29 women and girls in his apartment, each one fitted with a hidden music box. It also includes the story of a 19th-century whiskey heir who paid six handkerchiefs for a 10-year-old girl so he could watch cannibals kill and eat her, and the theory that Alexander the Great was declared dead nearly a week before he actually died. Content is more graphic than usual, so listener discretion is advised.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/necropolystREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8e5emeCHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:00:47.354 = Show Open00:01:58.356 = Alexander the Great00:05:52.710 = The Ravenous Beast of Gévaudan00:09:41.943 = The Rape and Burial of Jessica Lunsford ***00:11:55.911 = The Dyatlov Pass Incident00:15:29.080 = The Torture Dungeon of Leonard Lake and Charles Ng00:19:10.197 = Robert The Doll00:23:08.785 = The Disappearance and Eerie Return of Bobby Dunbar ***00:26:33.271 = Albert Fish – The Brooklyn Vampire00:30:06.498 = The Strange Disappearance of the Sodder Children00:34:28.570 = Anatoly Moskvin, The Russian Who Mummified Dead Girls00:38:41.505 = The Jameson Whiskey Cannibal ***00:42:29.572 = Show Close*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad breakLISTEN ON PODCAST APPS: Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.com/wdapps*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*SOURCES and RESOURCES:“Real-Life Horror Stories More Freaky Than Fiction” by Marco Margaritoff for AllThatsInteresting.com:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8p9c72(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: March 2022Weird Darkness this episode gathers real-life horror too extreme for scripted television, spanning from ancient Macedonia to the Congo basin and landing, along the way, in a Russian apartment stacked with mummified girls.It opens with Alexander the Great, who collapsed in Babylon in 323 B.C. after a 24-hour drinking binge triggered a sudden fever, a stabbing pain in his back, and creeping paralysis that eventually left him speechless; doctors pronounced him dead at 32. His body reportedly stayed "pure and fresh" for six days afterward, evidence ancient Greeks took as proof of his divinity. In 2019, Dr. Katherine Hall of New Zealand's University of Otago proposed in the Ancient History Bulletin that Alexander actually suffered from Guillain-Barré Syndrome, an autoimmune disorder that paralyzes the body while leaving the mind fully intact; since fourth-century-B.C. doctors checked for breath rather than a pulse, Hall's theory suggests Alexander may have been declared dead nearly a week before he actually died, and was buried alive.From there, the story moves to 18th-century France, where a wolf-like creature killed or mauled close to 300 people across three years in the Gévaudan region, most of them women and children. Fourteen-year-old shepherdess Jeanne Boulet was the first confirmed victim in 1764; a fifteen-year-old girl killed a month later survived long enough to describe her attacker as "a horrible beast". Militia leader Jean-Baptiste Duhamel organized a 30,000-strong hunting party, and King Louis XV eventually dispatched his own bodyguard, François Antoine, who killed a large wolf in September 1765; the attacks resumed within months regardless. A farmer named Jean Chastel is credited with killing the actual beast using silver bullets, reportedly after finding human remains inside its stomach.Next, the episode turns to the 2005 murder of nine-year-old Jessica Lunsford in Homosassa, Florida. Convicted sex offender John Evander Couey broke into her family's home, took her to his trailer, raped her over three days, sealed her inside garbage bags, and buried her alive in his yard while she still clutched a stuffed dolphin her father had won her at a state fair. Prosecutors later determined Jessica may have still been alive in the house during Couey's first police interview. Couey was convicted of first-degree murder and kidnapping in March 2007 and died on death row of natural causes in 2009.From Florida, the episode jumps to the Ural Mountains and the Dyatlov Pass incident of January 1959, when hiking leader Igor Dyatlov and eight fellow students from the Ural Polytechnic Institute died during an expedition toward Otorten Mountain. Investigators found their tent slashed open from the inside and shoeless footprints leading nearly a mile into the forest; the first bodies recovered, dressed only in underwear despite temperatures near negative 20 degrees Fahrenheit, were ruled hypothermia deaths. Two of the last four bodies found, Lyudmila Dubinina and Semyon Zolotaryov, were missing their eyeballs, Lyudmila was also missing her tongue, and both had clothing that tested positive for radioactivity. More than sixty years later, no single explanation, from avalanche to secret Soviet weapons testing, has been confirmed.The episode then moves to a cabin in California's Sierra Nevada foothills, where Leonard Lake and Charles Ng tortured and killed as many as 25 people between 1983 and 1985. Lake, a Vietnam veteran discharged for psychological reasons, built a cinderblock bunker behind a one-way mirror where he and Ng held women as sex slaves before killing them, dismembering the bodies, and dissolving the remains in acid; investigators eventually recovered twelve victims' remains along with roughly 40 pounds of charred bone. The pair was caught in June 1985 after Ng tried to shoplift a bench vise; Lake swallowed a cyanide capsule sewn into his jacket lining and died in custody before trial, while Ng was convicted of eleven murders in 1999 and remains on death row at San Quentin.Next comes Robert the Doll, manufactured by Germany's Steiff Company in 1904 and given to a Key West boy named Robert Eugene "Gene" Otto, who reportedly carried the doll everywhere and spoke of it in the first person. After Gene died in 1974, new owner Myrtle Reuter said the doll continued moving through her house with no explanation and eventually donated it to the Fort East Martello Museum, where curator Cori Convertito now oversees a steady stream of visitors who claim their cameras stop working in Robert's presence.From there, the episode circles back to 1912 Louisiana and the disappearance of four-year-old Bobby Dunbar from Swayze Lake. Eight months later, authorities found a boy matching his description traveling with a man named William Cantwell Walters, who insisted the child was Bruce Anderson, son of field hand Julia Anderson; the Dunbar family claimed the boy as their own anyway. It took until 2004, after years of research by Bobby's granddaughter Margaret Dunbar Cutwright, for a DNA test to prove the man raised as Bobby Dunbar shared no blood relation to the Dunbar family, meaning the real Bobby likely died in 1912 and the family had unknowingly raised Julia's son instead.The story turns next to Albert Fish, born in 1870 and later known as the Brooklyn Vampire, who spent decades torturing, killing, and cannibalizing children after enduring severe abuse in a New York orphanage as a boy. In 1928, posing as a farmer named Frank Howard, Fish lured ten-year-old Grace Budd away from her family and killed her; he wasn't identified until November 1934, when a letter he sent to Grace's mother describing the murder in graphic detail was traced back to him. Fish was executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison on January 16th, 1936.Following that, the episode covers the unresolved 1945 Sodder children case in Fayetteville, West Virginia, where a Christmas Eve house fire killed, or apparently killed, five of George and Jennie Sodder's nine children. No bones were ever recovered from the wreckage despite a coroner attributing the deaths to the blaze, and the family spent decades chasing tips and alleged sightings after strangers had made ominous threats about the house burning down in the months before the fire. George and Jennie erected a billboard along Route 16 asking for information and died in 1968 and 1989, respectively, without ever learning their children's fate.From there, the story turns to Anatoly Moskvin, a Russian journalist and college professor fluent in thirteen languages who dubbed himself a "necropolyst" and visited 752 cemeteries around his hometown of Nizhny Novgorod. Moskvin was arrested in 2011 after police investigating the desecration of Muslim graves found him painting over photographs of the dead; a search of the apartment he shared with his parents turned up the mummified remains of 29 women and girls, dressed, made up with buttons for eyes, and fitted with music boxes inside their chests. Moskvin told investigators he dug up the bodies because he was lonely and confessed to 44 counts of abusing graves and corpses.The episode clos

A killer holes up in a snowbound hotel room with a dead woman in the closet — and finds he can't stop talking to her.Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/OTRCHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “Room 418” (May 09, 1978) ***WD00:46:24.291 = SONG: “You Can't Kill Me Twice” by Static Wax, inspired by ‘Room 418' (July 30, 2026) *** https://weirddarkness.com/music00:51:41.227 = The Whistler, “To Rent Danger” (April 16, 1945)01:20:51.876 = Strange Wills, “They Met in Monte Carlo” (September 14, 1946)01:50:12.816 = Witch's Tale, “Violin” (May 03, 1934)02:15:44.521 = X Minus One, “A Saucer of Loneliness” (January 09, 1957)02:44:29.640 = Zero Hour, “Driving Sally Insane” (May 22, 1974) ***WD03:01:45.934 = ABC Mystery Time, “Noe One Will Ever Know” (1956) ***WD03:25:46.822 = Appointment With Fear, “Pit And The Pendulum” (September 18, 1943) ***WD03:52:54.256 = Arch Oboloer's Plays, “Bathysphere” (November 18, 1939)04:22:18.566 = Barry Craig, “Dead On Arrival” (November 14, 1951)04:50:29.917 = Tales From The Tomb, “The Girl Of His Dreams” (1960s)04:54:03.798 = Incredible But True, “Premonition” (1950-1951)04:57:39.831 = Strange Adventure, “John Friday Keeps Out” (1945) ***WD05:00:56.402 = SONG: “Can't Kill Me Twice” by Maggie Cross, inspired by ‘Room 418' (July 30, 2026) *** https://weirddarkness.com05:05:51.662 = Show Close(ADU) = Air Date Unknown(LQ) = Low Quality***WD = Remastered, edited, or cleaned up by Weird Darkness to make the episode more listenable. Audio may not be pristine, but it will be better than the original file which may have been unusable or more difficult to hear without editing.CUSTOM WEBPAGE: https://weirddarkness.com/WDRR0730

A phony spiritualist who fakes contact with the dead to swindle grieving clients gets more than she bargained for when the voices calling back from Summerland might not be fake after all.Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/OTRCHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “Death And Desire” (May 08, 1978) ***WD00:45:30.201 = Sleep No More, “Woman in Grey” and “Suspicious Gift” (March 20, 1957)01:14:18.462 = BBC Radio 4 Spine Chillers, “Fresh Blood Series: A Fare To Remember” (March 2006)01:27:08.082 = The Strange Dr. Weird, “Murder Will Out” (February 27, 1945) ***WD01:39:45.502 = Suspense, “Cat And Mouse” (March 30, 1944)02:09:03.700 = The Creaking Door, “Isle of Lost Souls” (November 23, 1964) ***WD02:37:51.669 = The Saint, “Case of Unhappy Homicide” (March 03, 1948) ***WD03:01:54.083 = 2000 Plus, “When Worlds Met” (May 03, 1950) ***WD03:30:56.223 = The Unexpected, “Heard But Not Seen” (1947-1948)03:43:03.263 = Unsolved Mysteries, “The Witch Doctor” (1936) ***WD03:57:59.514 = Dark Venture, “Pursuit” (July 31, 1945) ***WD04:27:44.521 = The Weird Circle, “Black Parchment” (1945)04:55:17.899 = Tales of the Frightened, “The Vampire Sleeps” (1963)05:00:07.048 = Show Close(ADU) = Air Date Unknown(LQ) = Low Quality***WD = Remastered, edited, or cleaned up by Weird Darkness to make the episode more listenable. Audio may not be pristine, but it will be better than the original file which may have been unusable or more difficult to hear without editing.CUSTOM WEBPAGE: https://weirddarkness.com/WDRR0729

A man who claims he can see invisible Martians controlling humanity finds an unlikely ally in a stranger at a bar who has photographed something impossible with infrared film. But in a world where the watchers are always watching, proving the truth might be the most dangerous thing of all.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/mitm-dontlooknowSOURCES and RESOURCES: “Don't Look Now” by Henry Kuttner, originally published in Startling Stories, March 1948WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Midnight In The Macabre (MITM), originally aired: July 30, 2026

In a single week, Vinton County told the world it does not intend to give the Siders children back. Three of the four adults charged with harming them have now asked the court to decide whether they are fit to stand trial at all. And two reporters who went looking for the family's past came back with the same address from different directions.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/siderscase20260729Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://pod.link/1078714736*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.

When a beautiful cigar shop girl is found dead under mysterious circumstances, a troubled Edgar Allan Poe becomes obsessed with solving the real-life crime—turning tragedy into fiction in a desperate search for truth.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/PoeCigarGirlFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: I'm sharing a chapter from the book “Nevermore: The Haunted Life and Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe” by Troy Taylor, which I narrated the audiobook for. But this chapter by itself was so interesting to me that I thought it would make a great episode of Weird Darkness – plus, it gives you a little peek into what you might get if you purchase the book itself. I've left a link to the book in the show notes below. This is the true story about the murder of a girl who worked in a cigar shop, the investigation of it by law enforcement, how Edgar Allan Poe saw it as an opportunity to escalate his career and name… and how it all almost blew up in his face, even with some claiming Poe was the murderer of the poor girl! LISTEN ON PODCAST APPS: Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.com/wdapps*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*SOURCES and RESOURCES:“Nevermore: The Haunted Life and Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe” by Troy Taylor: https://amzn.to/41e7BxJ(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: March 2022Weird Darkness devotes this episode to the unsolved 1841 murder of New York shopgirl Mary Cecilia Rogers and its strange collision with the unraveling life of Edgar Allan Poe. It opens with the July 28, 1841 discovery of Rogers's body floating in the Hudson River near Hoboken's Sybil's Cave, tracing her path from a Connecticut-born clerk at John Anderson's Tobacco Emporium on Manhattan's Nassau Street to the local celebrity known as "the beautiful cigar girl," then following the search led by her fiancé, cork-cutter Daniel Payne, and former suitor Alfred Crommelin, through the police suspicion cast on Payne and on Anderson, the September discovery of her bloodied clothing in a Weehawken thicket, and Payne's own laudanum suicide at that same spot that October.From there, the episode moves to Philadelphia, where Poe was following the case from a distance while his household came apart around him: his wife Virginia's sudden pulmonary hemorrhage during a parlor performance on January 20, 1842, the day after Poe turned thirty-three, marked the onset of the tuberculosis that would eventually kill her, and the strain bled directly into stories like "The Masque of the Red Death" and "Eleonora." It follows Poe's collapse at Graham's Magazine, including his refused request for a salary advance on an $800-a-year wage, his failed bid for a Philadelphia Custom House post that ended with a fumbled meeting tied to President John Tyler, and his abrupt exit from the magazine after being passed over for associate editor Charles Peterson.Next comes Poe's attempt to solve the Rogers case through fiction, recreating how he pitched a sequel to "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" to Baltimore editor Joseph Evans Snodgrass and Boston's George Roberts before selling it to William Snowden's The Ladies' Companion as "The Mystery of Marie Roget," transplanting the murder to Paris and casting the sleuth C. Auguste Dupin as the man who would name the killer. It details the disastrous timing by which Weehawken tavern keeper Frederica Loss, shot by her own son on November 1, 1842, gave a deathbed account claiming Rogers died during a botched abortion, undercutting Poe's carefully built naval-officer theory just as his final installment was headed to press.The episode closes with the suspects who have circulated around the case ever since, from the hanged Somers mutineer Philip Spencer, floated by biographer John Ingram, to Daniel Payne and Alfred Crommelin, to tobacco magnate John Anderson, who lived out his final years in a Tarrytown mansion behind steel-lined shutters, convinced his cook was poisoning his roast beef and claiming to speak with Mary Rogers's spirit, and it ends on the long-running question of whether Poe himself carried knowledge of, or any personal connection to, the murder he spent his career trying to solve on paper.

A bored twenty-one-year-old in New Orleans got an anonymous email inviting him to a bar with no name, and it gave him three separate chances to turn around before the elevator stopped going down.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/mitm-secretbarSOURCES and RESOURCES: “Secret Bar” by K. Banning Kellum: https://www.creepypasta.com/secret-bar/ (find more creepiness in K. Banning Kellum's book “Gris Gris and Ju Ju, A New Orleans Horror” https://amzn.to/2EaYeH6)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Midnight In The Macabre (MITM), originally aired: July 29, 2026

For over a century, witnesses across Michigan and Wisconsin have described the same impossible figure – upright, wolf-headed, and aware of being watched. Some walked away with scars, others with a story they were afraid to tell for decades.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/dogmanREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yckpcp8sFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Across Michigan and Wisconsin, encounters with an upright, wolf-headed figure span more than a century – from nineteenth-century logging camps to farm roads, deer stands, and suburban backyards. Witnesses describe a creature with human-like hands, glowing eyes, and an unsettling awareness of being watched, several of them staying silent about what they saw for years rather than risk being disbelieved. Hunters, drivers, and at least one retired sheriff's deputy all report the same detail – something that watches back, and in more than one account, something that speaks.CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:06:13.435 = Show Open00:08:57.805 = Part One00:18:33.555 = Part Two ***00:46:24.349 = Part Three ***01:00:02.576 = Part Four ***01:14:17.255 = Part Five ***01:27:28.423 = Part Six ***01:34:00.844 = Part Seven ***01:46:18.276 = Show Close01:47:34.794 = SONG: “Dogman of Silver Creek” by Dark Weirdness*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad breakLISTEN ON PODCAST APPS: Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.com/wdapps*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*SOURCES and RESOURCES:PHOTO: 1961 photo of Dogman (at Strangeology.com): https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/muajp2myBOOK: “The Beast of Bray Road: Tailing Wisconsin's Werewolf” by Linda Godfrey: https://amzn.to/43xNkroThe InBetween with Carol Ann (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/@TheInBetweenTalesMichigansThumb.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p98vf2cTetZoo.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4maj49wkHangar1Publishing.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yc29e65aMythFolks.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8wdd24DiscoveryUK.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p88uxkjCreepyEncounters.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yckncywhListVerse.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/mtybyttw(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: March 22, 2025Weird Darkness devotes a full episode to the Dogman, the upright, wolf-headed cryptid reported across Michigan and Wisconsin for more than a century, moving through firsthand encounters, a claimed government cover-up, a witnessed fight between a Dogman and two Sasquatch, and a side-by-side comparison of Dogman folklore against traditional werewolf mythology.It opens with the creature's documented history, tracing the first alleged sighting to 1887, when a group of lumberjacks in Wexford County, Michigan described a being with the body of a man and the head of a dog during the state's great logging era. Similar reports followed in Allegan County in the 1950s and in Cross Village, Big Rapids, and Manistee County during the 1960s, while Elkhorn, Wisconsin became the center of activity in the early 1990s. The segment also catalogs standalone incidents tied to the legend: four horses found dead with their eyes open in 1917, seven-foot-four claw marks reported on a church door in 1957, a farmer found dead at his plow surrounded by oversized canine tracks in 1997, a 2006 backyard sighting in Shelby Township, Michigan, and an army veteran's account of a wolf-headed creature pacing his truck through Manistee National Forest. Odawa oral tradition describing a two-legged, wolf-like being near Lake Michigan predates all of it, and the episode raises the theory that Dogman sightings cluster in years ending in seven.From there, the episode turns to the case that gave the cryptid one of its best-known names: the Beast of Bray Road. Lori Endrizzi's fall 1989 sighting on Bray Road outside Elkhorn, Wisconsin, first documented by researcher Linda Godfrey in the 2003 book "The Beast of Bray Road," describes a kneeling, brownish-gray figure with long claws that turned to meet her headlights. Two years later, on Halloween night 1991, Doris Gipson struck the same stretch of road and was chased by a clawed, upright creature that clung to her car's rear bumper as she fled. Walworth County Animal Control officer Jon Fredrikson began compiling reports in a manila folder marked "Werewolf," which grew to include a December 1990 sighting by a child witness, clawed tracks near Potter's Road that led locals to nickname the creature "Pottsy," a 1990 roadside sighting by Mike Etten, and two separate encounters reported by high school student Tom Brichta. The same story traces the legend back further still, to 1936, when night watchman Mark Shackleman encountered a six-foot, black-furred creature scratching at an Indigenous burial ground outside Racine, Wisconsin's St. Coletta Convent, a creature that reportedly spoke a single word, "Gadarah," a name tied to the biblical account of Jesus casting out demons at Gadara.Next, the episode moves to a February 2012 case from rural Chenango, New York, where Brandon Close and his neighbor Gene pursued the source of a scream that had left Close's cattle huddled against an electric fence, only to be chased through the woods by an eight-foot creature that kept pace with their all-terrain vehicle at highway speed. The account continues with an unmarked black van and armed personnel arriving at Close's property the following day, ultimately removing the memory cards from his trail cameras.A separate account follows a Big Rapids, Michigan night watchman's 1961 encounter with a six-foot, grayish-brown creature outside his home near the Haymarsh State Game Area, an incident the witness says he photographed under a streetlight.The episode then recounts an anonymous 1992 camping trip in which the witness watched a black, long-armed creature stalk him along a dry creek bed before a Sasquatch intervened, leading to a violent fight that ended when a second, larger Sasquatch killed the Dogman and dragged its body into the woods.Hunting-season encounters follow, beginning with Peter's October 16, 2012 experience in Pontiac, Illinois, where a wolf-sized creature bit his arm during a chase near his family's deer stand before inexplicably retreating. A separate witness describes two Dogman sightings twenty years apart, the first in Alto, Michigan in 1988 and the second in nearby Lowell, Michigan in 2008, when a blue-eyed creature that had followed him since childhood appeared on his roof and spoke a single word, "Don't."Another segment follows Derek, an Ohio mycology enthusiast, to a 2016 night-fishing trip along the Mahoning River in Niles, Trumbull County, Ohio, where he encountered a crouching creature near an old train trestle that stood to meet his gaze before retreating into the brush.A Fitchburg, Wisconsin case follows college student Matt, who in 2006 heard a scream during a minor earthquake and glimpsed a wolf-headed, humanoid figure in a passing car's headlights. A separate story follows a man identified as Mark to his late grandfather's cabin in Sierra County, Ohio, where he discovered why his grandfather had banned the family from the property for years, after an unseen creature chased him back to the cabin and reappeared at the tree line with two others.A Reed City, Michigan hunting party's four-day encounter in November 2007 follows, in which Sam and his companions repeatedly crossed paths with a yellow-eyed, hunchbacked creature that left claw marks on a rifle stock and a cabin door. The episode then follows Gabe to a rural Montana property, where lightning revealed a broad-shouldered, upright creature in his yard, followed weeks later by a closer encounter near his satellite dish that prompted him to move.Retired law enforcement officer Laura Love's account follows, describing a nearly seven-and-a-half-foot, dark-furred creature that struck a truck near the West Weber Road overpass on U.S. Highway 31 before vanishing into roadside brush. A separate story follows Janet, who for years believed she had seen a deformed bear near Danbury, Wisconsin's Long Lake before her son's own Dogman sighting prompted her to reconsider what she and her sister-in-law Amy witnessed on Rustic Road.A November 7, 2016 account from Duluth, Minnesota follows, describing an anonymous graphic designer's sighting of a hunched, wolf-faced cr

A man wakes up convinced he murdered someone in his sleep, and the marks on his own body say the dream might not have been a dream at all.Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/OTRCHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “Cool Killer Carl” (May 05, 1978) ***WD00:46:18.874 = Mystery Playhouse, “Nightmare” (November 28, 1944)01:15:15.928 = Price of Fear, “Remains To Be Seen” (September 01, 1973) ***WD01:42:19.483 = Adventures of Ellery Queen, “Terrified Man” (January 15, 1948) ***WD (LQ)a02:06:01.040 = Quiet Please, “The Smell of High Wines” (March 20, 1949) ***WD02:35:22.653 = Radio City Playhouse, “Interval” (November 27, 1949) ***WD03:03:46.860 = Half Hour To Kill, “Blackout Never Aired” (October 29, 1946) ***WD03:32:04.765 = Sam Spade, “Adam Figg Caper” (October 05, 1947) ***WD03:55:50.400 = The Sealed Book, “Stranger In The House” (May 06, 1945) ***WD04:25:19.830 = The Shadow, “Bubbling Death” (December 05, 1943) ***WD04:50:39.793 = Strange Adventure, “Title Unknown – Episode 69” (1945) ***WD04:53:57.077 = Calling All Detectives, “Jerry Investigates a Mysterious Increase in Hospital Deaths” (July 06, 1948) ***WD (LQ)05:01:43.438 = Show Close(ADU) = Air Date Unknown(LQ) = Low Quality***WD = Remastered, edited, or cleaned up by Weird Darkness to make the episode more listenable. Audio may not be pristine, but it will be better than the original file which may have been unusable or more difficult to hear without editing.CUSTOM WEBPAGE: https://weirddarkness.com/WDRR0728

Six strangers board a night train crawling through the worst winter in years — a divorced businessman, a runaway couple, a wealthy man running out of time, and an elderly woman being shipped off by her own family — each quietly hoping this trip might be the one that changes everything, for better or worse.Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/OTRCHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “Journey To Somewhere” (May 04, 1978) ***WD00:44:26.457 = Molle Mystery Theater, “Killer Come Back To Me” (May 17, 1946)01:13:35.047 = Mr. Keen, “The Leaping Dog” (April 13, 1944) ***WD01:42:41.788 = Murder at Midnight, “The Man With The Black Beard” (May 08, 1950) ***WD02:08:37.327 = The Black Museum, “The Tan Shoe” (January 15, 1952)02:33:18.183 = Mysterious Traveler, “The Green Plague” (June 17, 1952)03:00:29.228 = CBC Nightfall, “Hands Off” (July 25, 1980)03:27:14.184 = Obsession, “Clinging Hate” (May 14, 1951) ***WD03:49:55.235 = Origin of Superstition, “Kissing Under Mistletoe” (1935) ***WD04:04:07.297 = Pat Novak For Hire, “Rory Malone” (March 20, 1949)04:33:03.187 = Peril, “Lucky Lady” (1953) ***WD04:58:54.597 = Show Close(ADU) = Air Date Unknown(LQ) = Low Quality***WD = Remastered, edited, or cleaned up by Weird Darkness to make the episode more listenable. Audio may not be pristine, but it will be better than the original file which may have been unusable or more difficult to hear without editing.CUSTOM WEBPAGE: https://weirddarkness.com/WDRR0727

Four friends went into the Massachusetts woods looking for a paved road that starts in the middle of nowhere, and they found what was waiting at the end of it.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/mitm-asyluminthewoodsSOURCES and RESOURCES:“The Asylum In The Woods” by Redditor R.L. Rogers: https://www.creepypasta.com/the-asylum-in-the-woods/WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Midnight In The Macabre (MITM), originally aired: July 28, 2026

In 1947, the Army announced it had recovered a crashed "flying disc" near Roswell, then reversed itself within a day — a contradiction the Air Force didn't explain until 1994, when it revealed a classified spy program called Project Mogul. Roswell wasn't even the first: unidentified wreckage and bodies had been turning up for decades before it.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/RoswellWasntFirstFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: When you hear the words “UFO crash” you likely think of Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. And while that is the most famous of supposed extraterrestrial spaceship crashes, it is by no means the first. In fact, there were several taking place before Roswell became a household name. (UFO Crashes Before Roswell) *** But first – we'll take a look at Roswell itself… and what might have been behind the crash, the UFOs, and the aliens! (Behind Roswell's Aliens) *** Numerous travelers have gone missing in Nahanni Valley… and many whose bodies have been found, have been decapitated. It's no wonder it has been nicknamed “The Valley of Headless Men”. (The Valley of Headless Men) *** In 2016, construction in a San Francisco family's backyard unearthed a terrifying find… a glass coffin. And the history behind it tells a morbid history of the city. (The Karner's Backyard Glass Coffin) *** Former Green Beret Jeffrey MacDonald claimed that a gang of acid-crazed Manson Family copycats brutally murdered his pregnant wife and two daughters in 1970, but then he was found guilty. Did he commit the crime, or did the law convict the wrong man? (The Evil Deeds of Jeffrey MacDonald) *** It's understood that scientifically, alchemy – attempting to turn a substance or element into gold – is impossible. But then, there is that one incident that took place in the early seventeenth century that has some people wondering if that's wrong. (The Alchemy Master)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:01:27.594 = Show Open00:03:47.621 = Behind Roswell's Aliens / UFO Crashes Before Roswell00:19:45.640 = The Valley of Headless Men ***00:33:18.357 = The Karner's Backyard Glass Coffin00:44:54.640 = The Evil Deeds of Jeffrey MacDonald ***00:55:31.498 = The Alchemy Master01:02:26.698 = Show Close*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad breakLISTEN ON PODCAST APPS: Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.com/wdapps*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*SOURCES and RESOURCES:“Behind Roswell's Aliens” by Adam Janos for History.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yd5fhudu“UFO Crashes Before Roswell” from Anomalien.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2w6d76yh“The Valley of Headless Men” by Aleksa Vuckovic for Ancient-Origins.net: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p9c6zf4“The Evil Deeds of Jeffrey MacDonald” by Marco Margaritoff for AllThatsInteresting.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8eant7“The Alchemy Master” by Ellen Lloyd for AncientPages.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4xzysbwc“The Karner's Backyard Glass Coffin” by Trilby Beresford for Ranker.com's Graveyard Shift:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/3mpvk9jh(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: January 2021This episode of Weird Darkness moves from a classified Cold War balloon program in the New Mexico desert to a Canadian valley littered with decapitated bodies, a Victorian child's glass coffin dug up in a San Francisco backyard, a Green Beret convicted of butchering his own family, and a seventeenth-century alchemist tortured for the secret of turning lead into gold.It opens with the 1947 Roswell crash, tracing how rancher W.W. "Mac" Brazel's discovery of wreckage on his Lincoln County property led Colonel William Blanchard's Roswell Army Air Field to announce the capture of a "flying disc," only for the Army to reverse itself within days and blame a weather balloon, complete with staged photos of Major Jesse Marcel posing with the debris. The story follows the account through the U.S. Air Force's 1994 admission that the wreckage actually came from Project Mogul, a secret high-altitude balloon array built to detect Soviet atomic tests, and its 1997 explanation that reported alien bodies were fallen parachute test dummies, then weighs those official conclusions against UFO researcher Donald Schmitt's objections and journalist Annie Jacobsen's competing claim that the crash involved deformed children deployed by Joseph Stalin and designed by Nazi doctor Josef Mengele.From there, the episode moves through six UFO crash reports that predate Roswell by decades, including an 1897 cigar-shaped craft said to have destroyed Judge Proctor's windmill in Aurora, Texas, and left a small humanoid body buried in the local cemetery; an 1862 wreck witnessed by shipwrecked sailors from the vessel Christine on a deserted Indian Ocean island, where they found twelve-foot-tall bodies with bronze beards; a UFO crash near Stavropol, Russia, whose three survivors reportedly died from being unable to breathe Earth's atmosphere; a 1941 crash in the Carolinas recovered by the U.S. Army during a military exercise involving soldier Guy Simeone; an 1884 debris field of gear-like metal fragments found by rancher John Ellis in Dundy County, Nebraska; and a wartime British crash investigated by journalist Dorothy Kilgallen, who died shortly after publishing claims that the recovered craft's crew stood under four feet tall.Next, the story shifts to Canada's Nahanni Valley, where at least 44 people have died or vanished since 1908, beginning with prospector brothers Willie and Frank McLeod, whose headless skeletons were found at their camp two years after they disappeared, and continuing through the decapitations of Swiss prospector Martin Jorgenson and outlaw "Yukon" Fisher, the mysterious cabin fire that killed Phil Powers, and the vanishing of Annie Laferte, who was later spotted wandering naked and disoriented near the Flat River — deaths locals attribute variously to the legendary Naha tribe, the valley's hot sulphur springs, or predators, while Dene oral history holds that the warlike Naha people simply disappeared without explanation.The episode then turns to 2016, when a construction crew remodeling John and Ericka Karner's San Francisco home unearthed a 19th-century glass-and-cast-iron coffin containing the preserved body of a toddler, later identified through DNA testing led by genealogist Elissa Davey as Edith Howard Cook, who died of malnutrition in 1876 and was accidentally left behind when San Francisco's Odd Fellows Cemetery was relocated to Colma in the 1930s — a discovery the Karner family says ended years of unexplained footsteps they'd heard from a toddler no longer in the house.From there, the story follows former Green Beret Jeffrey MacDonald, convicted of stabbing his pregnant wife Colette and daughters Kimberly and Kristen to death at Fort Bragg in 1970 after claiming a blonde intruder chanting about acid and "pigs" oversaw the killings, an account investigators concluded was staged using details from the recent Manson Family murders; the case follows his decades of appeals, including the 1983 bestseller "A Fatal Vision" that branded him a psychopath and filmmaker Errol Morris's later book arguing the evidence against him was mishandled.The episode closes with the story of Alexander Seton, a secretive Scottish alchemist known as the Cosmopolitan, who in 1602 convinced skeptical Swiss professor Wolfgang Drenheim that he had transmuted lead into gold using nothing but a wrapped powder and a goldsmith's crucible in Fribourg. Seton's success drew the attention of Emperor Rudolf II and later trapped him in the custody of Christian II, Elector of Saxony, who had him pierced with iron spikes and burned with molten lead in an attempt to force him to reveal his formula; Seton escaped in 1603 with the help of his friend Michael Sendivogius but died a broken man soon after, and the alchemical text he was said to have written, the Book of Twelve Chapters, was destroyed, leaving his method lost.

This isn't one of my usual stories or episodes – but it is still terrifying (to me, at least). Over the weekend, a devastating cyberattack locked me out of my Google account, YouTube channels, Dropbox, and many of the tools I rely on to produce Weird Darkness. For several days, I genuinely didn't know if the show would survive.In this special emergency update, I explain what happened, why new episodes suddenly stopped, what became of the YouTube channels, where things stand now, and why this has been one of the darkest weeks of my life—both professionally and personally.The good news? Weird Darkness is still here.Thank you for your patience, your encouragement, and your prayers. It means more than you know.Listen and subscribe at: https://WeirdDarkness.com

A young scholar's visit to his reclusive uncle on a lonely Shetland island leads him into a nightmare of black rituals, impossible memories, and a mystery that defies time itself.Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/OTRCHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “The Figure in the Moonlight” (May 02, 1978) ***WD00:45:48.366 = Macabre, “The Avenger” (December 18, 1961) ***WD01:14:37.183 = Philip Marlowe, “Vital Statistic” (March 14, 1950)01:44:11.159 = Boson Blackie, Ghost of Flo Newton” (May 28, 1947)02:09:18.137 = The Black Mass, “O Mirror Mirror” (February 12, 1964) ***WD02:24:19.861 = Michael Shayne, “Judge Stanton Murdered” (June 04, 1945) ***WD02:54:00.924 = Beyond Midnight, “Tangled Way” (ADU) ***WD (LQ)03:19:56.143 = MindWebs, “Eurema's Dam” (1975-1984) ***WD03:49:08.226 = CBS Radio Workshop, “The Case of the White Kitten” (July 13, 1956) ***WD04:18:13.876 = Mystery in the Air, “Queen of Spades” (September 1, 1947)04:45:13.199 = Strange Adventure “The Imposter” (1945) ***WD04:48:29.470 = Calling All Detectives, “The Ship Julia Louise” (July 05, 1948) ***WD (LQ)04:56:29.725 = Incredible But True, “Dragon of Buren County” (1950-1951)04:59:59.123 = Show Close(ADU) = Air Date Unknown(LQ) = Low Quality***WD = Remastered, edited, or cleaned up by Weird Darkness to make the episode more listenable. Audio may not be pristine, but it will be better than the original file which may have been unusable or more difficult to hear without editing.CUSTOM WEBPAGE: https://weirddarkness.com/WDRR0726

A blues legend, a saint, a haunted squire, and a possessed tailor — five people who, across four centuries, were each said to have come face to face with the Devil himself.==========HOUR ONE: Many tales describe encounters with the devil himself. Yet not all are the same. Sometimes Satan approaches his prey… other times, the lost soul goes seeking Lucifer to make a deal. Either way, the results are never favorable. (Diabolical Dealings With The Devil) *** It wasn't until recently that I'd even heard of the cryptid, Ahool. In case it's new to you as well, it's a winged cryptid that some portray as a giant bat, others claim it's a flying primate. Personally, I think it looks like a werewolf with bat wings. Whatever it is, we'll learn a bit more about the Ahool. (The Cry Of The Ahool)==========HOUR TWO: 

Of course a lot of people likely don't believe in heaven or hell and many will dismiss such things as mythical tales or folklore. However there are places on Earth that could be considered hell – no not Detroit or Wichita. We're talking about actual places that look like the entrances to purgatory. And perhaps they really are. (Secret Doors to the Underworld) *** A king, a gossoon and a bear walked into a bar. No, this is not the first line of a joke, but a common occurrence in Potrero Hill in San Francisco, California, during the 1880s. The king was Frank McManus, the gossoon was Frank's baseball-playing brother, Cornelius, and the bear was a large inebriated ursine. (King of the Irish Hill) *** Why are some people suddenly vigorous, alert, and feeling much better shortly before they pass away? It is something that has happened since time began, but medical experts are still baffled by it. (Terminal Lucidity Phenomenon) *** While many say the most haunted hotel is the one in Colorado that was used in the film “The Shining” - there is evidence that one in Eureka Springs, Arkansas deals with even more paranormal activity. (The Crescent Hotel)==========SUDDEN DEATH OVERTIME: Two men were found dead in the bushes, beheaded… and emasculated. But that was just the beginning of the Mad Butcher's killing spree. (The Cleveland Torso Murders) *** Seeing reptiles in Oklahoma isn't all that uncommon – even dinosaur fossils are found in the state. But there have also been reports of something much stranger – a snake/human hybrid creature more terrifying than it sounds. (Oklahoma Snake Man)==========SOURCES AND REFERENCES FROM TONIGHT'S SHOW:“Baba Vanga” from Paranormality Magazine: https://weirddarkness.com/magazine“Diabolical Dealings With The Devil” by Laura for Paranormal Scholar: https://tinyurl.com/y94czoxt,https://tinyurl.com/yc5uy7mj“The Cry of the Ahool” by Gary Brandt from Paranormality Magazine: https://weirddarkness.com/magazine“Secret Doors To The Underworld”, by Facts Verse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gU6-lfWk3Zo“King of the Irish Hill” by Paul Drexler for Crime Traveller: https://tinyurl.com/y7tmp6lz“Terminal Lucidity Phenomenon” by Cynthia McKanzie for Message to Eagle: http://ow.ly/5G8W30ocL0Q“The Cleveland Torso Murders” by Doug MacGowan for Historic Mysteries: https://tinyurl.com/ycwha94c“The Crescent Hotel” by Amanda Penn for Vocal Media Horror: https://tinyurl.com/ycvral8j“Oklahoma Snake Man” by Bab Salam (link to story no longer exists)==========(Over time links seen above may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for material I use whenever possible. If I have overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it immediately. Some links may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)=========="I have come into the world as a light, so that no one who believes in me should stay in darkness." — John 12:46==========WeirdDarkness®, WeirdDarkness© 2026==========To become a Weird Darkness Radio Show affiliate, contact Radio America at affiliates@radioamerica.com, or call 800-807-4703 (press 2 or dial ext 250).

On their third date she told him her face was removable, that she had to clean it every night behind a locked door, and that he must never look at what was underneath.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/mitm-wiferemovablefaceSOURCES and RESOURCES: “My Wife Has a Removable Face” by Redditor N.S. Lewis: https://www.reddit.com/user/nslewis, https://www.creepypasta.com/my-wife-has-a-removable-face/WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Midnight In The Macabre (MITM), originally aired: July 27, 2026

An insomniac walking a Massachusetts cemetery after midnight spots a light in the groundskeeper's shack, and finds nine men in blue shrouds beside a freshly dug pit.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/mitm-bloodkeeperSOURCES and RESOURCES:“The Blood Keeper” by Christopher Maxim at https://www.reddit.com/r/ChristopherMaxim/WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Midnight In The Macabre (MITM), originally aired: July 26, 2026

A Broadway couple buys the vacant Connecticut house no agent in town will touch, covers the den wall with a floor-to-ceiling photograph of an African jungle, and begins to notice that the lion in the picture doesn't always hold the same pose.Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/OTRCHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “The House on Chimney Pot Lane” (April 28, 1978) ***WD00:45:28.916 = The Haunting Hour, “Date In The Dark” (June 03, 1945) ***WD01:10:28.151 = The Hermit's Cave, “The House With a Past” (June 27, 1937)01:34:32.198 = Mystery Is My Hobby, “Millionaire Threatened” (1945)01:59:10.650 = Sherlock Holmes, “The Haunted Bagpipes” (February 17, 1947)02:28:37.363 = Mystery House, “Bury Me Not” (May 26, 1946) ***WD02:54:24.361 = Inner Sanctum, “Desert Death” (January 09, 1945)03:23:44.926 = Jeff Regan, “The Diamond Quartet” (August 14, 1948)03:52:43.766 = The Key, “Night Prowler” (1956)04:16:47.055 = Lights Out, “Uninhabited” (December 22, 1937) ***WD (LQ)04:45:34.772 = Strange Adventure, “The Five Tickets” (1945) ***WD04:48:49.470 = Calling All Detectives, “A Man Admits To Murder” (June 15, 1948) ***WD (LQ)04:56:47.879 = Incredible But True, “The Face of Death” (1950-1951)05:00:28.938 = Show Close(ADU) = Air Date Unknown(LQ) = Low Quality***WD = Remastered, edited, or cleaned up by Weird Darkness to make the episode more listenable. Audio may not be pristine, but it will be better than the original file which may have been unusable or more difficult to hear without editing.CUSTOM WEBPAGE: https://weirddarkness.com/WDRR0725

Mikka thinks space is boring and aliens are a punchline, and by the end of fifth period she has said so out loud to exactly the wrong person.Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://pod.link/1655277373Find more family-friendly frights and creepy games to play on our website at http://MicroTerrors.com!Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/microterrorsOther stories, novels, and more from author Scott Donnelly: https://amzn.to/3LymHaUOther narrations, podcasts, and audiobooks from voice artist Darren Marlar: https://WeirdDarkness.com= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =Weird Darkness©, 2026Micro Terrors: Scary Stories for Kids™, 2026#MicroTerrors #WeirdDarkness

A beautiful young woman knocks on an old soldier's door one summer evening asking to use his phone — and the six-year-old hiding in the back bedroom knows, before anyone says a word, that something is terribly wrong.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/mitm-NeverTrustAPrettyFaceSOURCES and RESOURCES: “Never Trust a Pretty Face” by Weirdo family member Angie Trafford: https://www.facebook.com/AngieTraffordauthor/WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: July 24, 2026

A Louisiana woman vanished from her home in pink pajamas, a K9 search went cold, and a medium she'd never met told her daughters exactly where to find the body in the woods — and now, after a private forensic review, the sheriff's office has reopened the case it once closed as an accidental drowning.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources and transcript): https://weirddarkness.com/TheresaDawnJonesLISTEN ON PODCAST APPS: Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.com/wdapps*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: July 24, 2026This episode of Weird Darkness follows the disappearance and death of Theresa Dawn Jones near Bernice, Louisiana, a case that ran from a missing persons report to an accidental-drowning ruling to a homicide reinvestigation — and the phone call from a psychic medium a thousand miles away that pointed her family straight to the body.On the night of February 2nd, 2023, fifty-six-year-old Theresa Jones walked out of her home in the Evergreen community on Lake D'Arbonne wearing pink pajamas, leaving behind her phone, her wallet, her car keys, and the eyeglasses she needed to see, and by the time her boyfriend returned from a work trip in Lake Charles he found the house torn apart and Theresa gone. The Union Parish Sheriff's Office searched with a Lincoln Parish K9 unit that tracked her scent out to Highway 2 before losing it, chased sightings of a woman carrying gas cans and a stop at a Circle K in West Monroe, then stalled. Her daughters Ashley Deese and Brittany turned to Carolyn Clapper, a Wisconsin medium who took their call at 10:48 at night and, over forty-five minutes, described a fallen log at a tree line, a creek, and a sickness that would come over whoever went looking — directions that led Ashley to her mother's body in Edmonds Creek the next morning, found nude from the waist down with the water still shallow around her. Dr. Frank Peretti's autopsy in Little Rock ruled the death an accidental drowning with methamphetamine intoxication as a contributing factor, and the sheriff's office closed the case in August 2023, but Ashley never accepted it, and a retired Texas aquatic-death investigator named Greg Lawson publicly questioned why no rape kit or fingernail scraping was ever done. More than a year later, private forensic consultant John Oliveira of Applied Forensic Solutions reviewed the file and found only 150 milliliters of water in the lungs, livor mortis fixed in the legs rather than the face-down position she was found in, a clean upper jacket above the waterline, and bruising the autopsy never recorded — evidence pointing away from drowning and toward a body staged in the water after death. At the end of October 2025, Oliveira presented those findings to Union Parish detectives, and the sheriff's office reopened Theresa Jones's death as a possible homicide, more than two years after the paperwork first called it an accident.

In the summer of 1958, phantom fires struck the Tuck family's Talladega, Alabama home more than fifty times — bread igniting on its own, single garments bursting into flame, sulfur-smelling fires that followed the family across three homes before a nine-year-old confessed to a scheme that never explained the blaze witnessed by police in the yard, or the fires that started when the boy was gone.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/paranormalflamesREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yc4nrtujFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: In the late 1950s, the Tuck family of Alabama found themselves at the center of a terrifying ordeal as mysterious fires spontaneously erupted in their home. Despite their best efforts to escape the flames, the fiery phenomenon followed them from one residence to another, consuming their possessions and leaving them homeless. We'll look at this case and other similar ones where the seeming explanation is nothing short of paranormal. (Paranormal Flames) *** In the sleepy Kentish hamlet of Charing, a centuries-old mystery unfolds every May Day. As the clock strikes midnight, ghostly children emerge from their moss-encrusted graves, their ethereal feet dancing to the silent fiddle's tune. It's all part of the "Night of the Dancing Feet." (Dancing After Death) *** Before his wife's murder in June 2009, Eli Weaver had numerous affairs with women he met through online dating sites, where he called himself an "Amish Stud." But only one mistress was willing to kill for him. (Eli Weaver, Amish Stud and Murderer) *** The American West evokes iconic images often seen in movies: bold adventures, noon shootouts, resolute sheriffs and marshals maintaining order, and the cavalry arriving just in time. However, the history of the Wild West, replete with myths and stereotypes, presents a more complex and sometimes disturbing reality about justice in that era. (Wild West Justice) *** On the morning of July 13, 1997, the body of Denise Johnson was discovered inside her burning childhood home in Kill Devil Hills, NC. Emergency responders quickly realized they weren't dealing with a simple arson, but a murder as well.  Now, more than two decades later, the case remains unsolved. (The Unsolved Murder of Denise Johnson) *** Hachishakusama, often referred to as the "Japanese Slender Man," is a haunting figure from Japanese urban legends that rivals the terror of her American counterpart. While the Slender Man has gained a cult-like following and has even inspired real-life horror stories, Hachishakusama's tale is equally spine-chilling and capable of keeping you up at night. (The Japanese Slender Man)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:01:21.690 = Show Open00:04:30.483 = Paranormal Flames00:23:29.009 = The Unsolved Murder of Denise Johnson ***00:37:06.405 = Dancing After Death (Night of the Dancing Feet)00:44:39.904 = Wild West Justice ***00:54:40.356 = Eli Weaver, Amish Stud and Murderer01:03:17.535 = The Japanese Slender Man ***01:08:47.360 = Show Close*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad breakLISTEN ON PODCAST APPS: Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.com/wdapps*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*SOURCES and RESOURCES:BOOK: “Ablaze – The Mysterious Fires of Spontaneous Human Combustion” by Larry E. Arnold:https://amzn.to/3UqdhmzBOOK: “A Killing In Amish Country” by Gregg Olsen and Rebecca Morris: https://amzn.to/44wghmb“Paranormal Flames” source: Marcus Lowth at UFO Insight: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4eb8xht2“The Unsolved Murder of Denise Johnson” source: Jacob Shelton at Ranker: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8t3b7p“Dancing After Death” by Ken DaSilva-Hill submitted directly to Weird Darkness and used with permission“Wild West Justice” source: Christy Box at Weird History: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8db9vj“Eli Weaver, Amish Stud and Murderer” source: Hannah Reilly Holtz at AllThatsInteresting.com:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4jfmybjh“The Japanese Slender Man” source: Curry L Mitchell at ListVerse: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/bdd7fthz(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: May 01, 2024

Fourteen years after Irasema Chavez was stabbed more than a hundred times in her Arlington apartment, a single drop of blood on her bedroom television stand and two plastic forks left on a restaurant table have led police to charge one of her former close friends with capital murder.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/IrasemaChavezLook for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://pod.link/1078714736*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.

Two sisters flying to Puerto Rico to clear out their grandmother's house find a shoebox of bloodied feathers in the kitchen cupboard, and thirty handwritten journals hidden under a loose tile in the garage.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/mitm-grandmothergrimoireSOURCES and RESOURCES: “My Grandmother Left Behind Some Really Dark Secrets” by Evelyn Bertrand: https://tinyurl.com/yy8gx627WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Midnight In The Macabre (MITM), originally aired: July 24, 2026

In an update to the Caroline Peña murder case, the lead detective has testified that while Kitty Diaz drove the car and threw punches during the assault, she never stabbed anyone — and a judge has dropped her bond from five million dollars to two million, which she still cannot afford to post.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/diazsisters20260723GO FUND ME: https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-for-caroline-penas-childrenLook for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://pod.link/1078714736*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.

From the vengeful Bell Witch to the lingering spirits of Gettysburg, America is packed with haunted spots that refuse to let go of their ghosts – whether it's eerie voices in old asylums, shadowy figures in historic mansions, or phantom footsteps in forgotten graveyards. If you're looking for a brush with the supernatural, these legendary (and lesser-known) locations won't disappoint.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/HauntedAmericaREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/36de8fpnLISTEN ON PODCAST APPS: Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.com/wdapps*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*SOURCES and RESOURCES:“America's Most Haunted Places” by Troy Taylor and April Slaughter for AmericanHauntingsInk.com:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/582mh58k (used with permission)“America's Not-So-Famous Haunted Houses” by Troy Taylor for AmericanHauntingsInk.com:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p979tsv (used with permission)(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: January, 2022Weird Darkness tours fifteen haunted American locations, starting with the ones every ghost hunter already knows. The Bell Witch Cave in Adams, Tennessee, where a spirit claiming to be the witch of Kate Batts tormented the Bell family for years and, some say, retreated into a cave near the Red River. Waverly Hills Sanatorium in Louisville, where tuberculosis patients died in numbers large enough to require a body chute running down the hill and out of sight. The Myrtles Plantation, whose most famous ghost stories turn out to be false, though the apparitions on the grounds keep getting reported anyway. The Lemp Mansion in St. Louis, where four members of one brewing family took their own lives across five decades. Gettysburg's Devil's Den, the Stanley Hotel that inspired Stephen King, the Winchester Mystery House with its staircases to nowhere, Bachelor's Grove Cemetery outside Chicago, Yorktown Memorial Hospital in Texas, and the Villisca Ax Murder House in Iowa, where eight people were killed in their beds in June of 1912 and no one was ever convicted.Then the show turns to the houses that never made the lists. Nemacolin Castle in Brownsville, Pennsylvania, built on the site of a French and Indian War garrison and later a stop on the Underground Railroad. Tinker Swiss Cottage in Rockford, Illinois, a twenty-seven-room Swiss-style home on a limestone bluff where children's laughter is heard by staff who came in as skeptics. The McCune Mansion in Salt Lake City, where a little girl walks in and out of a mirror. Taliesin in Spring Green, Wisconsin, where a fired servant locked seven people in Frank Lloyd Wright's home in August of 1914, set it on fire, and killed them with a hatchet as they tried to escape. And Prospect Place in Trinway, Ohio, built by an abolitionist who used a cupola signal light to tell escaping slaves that food and shelter waited inside — some of whom never left.

“Adventure of the Beauty Queen”: A woman wakes to a voice from a thousand years in the future, telling her a machine has searched all of history for beauty and found her.Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/OTRCHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “The Queen of Palmyra” (April 27, 1978) ***WD00:45:45.877 = The Eleventh Hour, “Codeword Silver” (ADU)01:11:24.672 = Escape, “The Fortune of Vargas” (September 21, 1949)01:40:04.624 = Exploring Tomorrow, “Adventure of the Beauty Queen” (June 25, 1958) ***WD01:59:42.274 = Dark Fantasy, “Rendezvous With Satan” (May 29, 1942)02:28:27.595 = Fear on 4, “Fat Andy” (March 06, 1988)02:57:32.941 = Theater Five, “Dark Appointment” (November 23, 1964) ***WD03:18:08.219 = Adventures of Superman, “Mystery of the Walking Dead” (November 05, 1949)03:47:56.562 = Hall of Fantasy, “The Judge's House” (April 03, 1947) ***WD04:14:35.484 = Harry Lime, “Rogues Holiday” (September 21, 1951)04:39:24.955 = BBC Haunted Tales of the Supernatural, “The Family” (July 05, 1980) ***WD05:07:30.568 = Show Close(ADU) = Air Date Unknown(LQ) = Low Quality***WD = Remastered, edited, or cleaned up by Weird Darkness to make the episode more listenable. Audio may not be pristine, but it will be better than the original file which may have been unusable or more difficult to hear without editing.CUSTOM WEBPAGE: https://weirddarkness.com/WDRR0724

A coroner's inquest convenes over a mutilated body in a lonely California cabin, where the only witness swears the thing that killed his friend was standing in plain sight the whole time. (Originally published in the magazine “Town Topics” on December 7th in 1893… a magazine, interestingly enough, not known for horror at all, but more for art, music, and society.)EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/mitm-thedamnedthingSOURCES and RESOURCES:“The Damned Thing” by Ambrose Bierce: https://tinyurl.com/y6amz952WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Midnight In The Macabre (MITM), originally aired: July 23, 2026