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

A drifter set to die in the gas chamber for a murder he didn't commit offers one last gift to the man who framed him — never imagining what that gift might carry.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, “Second Sight” (February 27, 1978) ***WD00:46:14.838 = Origin of Superstition, “Three On A Match” (December 16, 1932) ***WD01:00:44.894 = Pat Novak For Hire, “Don't Tell Hilda” (February 27, 1949)01:29:14.739 = Peril, “Darkness Within” (1953) ***WD (LQ)01:58:15.099 = Mystery Playhouse, “Death is a Joker” (May 25, 1941) ***WD02:28:27.475 = Price of Fear, “Meeting In Athens” (July 07, 1973) ***WD02:55:48.036 = Ellery Queen, “Number Thirty-One” (September 07, 1947) ***WD03:24:14.186 = Quiet Please, “If I Should Die Before I Wake” (February 27, 1949)03:53:27.551 = Radio City Playhouse, “The Wind” (October 30, 1949) ***WD04:22:21.175 = Sam Spade, “Death of Dr. Denhoff Caper” (August 09, 1946) ***WD04:51:19.818 = 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.This episode of #RetroRadio — Old Time Radio in the Dark, hosted by Darren Marlar at WeirdDarkness.com, runs ten classic mystery, crime, and horror broadcasts back to back, from a condemned man who donates his eyes to the very person who framed him to Ray Bradbury's tale of a living, intelligent wind that hunts a man across the globe.CBS Radio Mystery Theater opens the night with "Second Sight," a February 27, 1978 drama hosted by E.G. Marshall in which drifter Larry Millard, condemned to die in the gas chamber for the shotgun murder of farmer Jason Hadley, volunteers his own eyes for an anonymous corneal transplant — handing his sight to Glen Plaxton, the businessman who actually pulled the trigger and framed him to protect a secret reservoir land-grab. After the surgery, Plaxton and his partner Tip Foster begin to suspect that the dead man's eyes may have carried more than vision.Next, Origin of Superstition traces the famous taboo against lighting three cigarettes from a single flame in "Three On A Match," a December 16, 1932 sketch that carries listeners back to 1899 and the Boer War in South Africa, where British officer Captain Frank Mattox laughs off the fire-reading warning of a Zulu medicine man named Grumbo, who reads ruin in the ashes and cautions of "danger in three."In "Don't Tell Hilda," the hard-boiled Pat Novak For Hire (February 27, 1949, starring Jack Webb) finds the San Francisco waterfront boat-for-hire man tangled in murder when a beautiful blonde claiming amnesia collapses dead in a coffee joint after a fatal dose of sleeping pills. Hounded by Inspector Hellman and helped by boozy ex-doctor Jocko Madigan, Novak traces her to a long-vanished heiress named Marcia Halpern and a fortune up on Pacific Heights.Peril offers the 1953 psychological case "Darkness Within," where Mrs. Diana Carson walks into the office of psychiatrist Dr. James Bancroft insisting that her mild-mannered stockbroker husband, Lionel Carson, seized the fireplace tongs and tried to murder her — then woke with no memory of the attack, much like the family cat she found poisoned in the basement. Bancroft must decide whether Lionel suffers a blackout-driven split personality or something far more deliberate.Mystery Playhouse, hosted by Peter Lorre, stages "Death is a Joker" (May 25, 1941), the courtroom confession of Charles Luther, a homely stage comedian on trial for his life who recounts strangling his friend Robert Langwell in a fit of jealousy over the beautiful Julie Wenthoff — and then, hour by terrible hour, is forced to think and act like the cunning criminal he never meant to become.The Price of Fear sends Vincent Price into the August heat of Athens for "Meeting In Athens," a July 7, 1973 chiller in which he befriends young English couple Mark Haxton and Gillian Gilroy on the Acropolis. When Mark vanishes after a late-night seaside villa party arranged by a heavyset stranger named Yannis, Price and Greek police officer Costas Polides uncover a black-market horror in which a man's rarest possession — his AB Rhesus-negative blood, recorded in the diary he kept on everything — can be worth killing for.Ellery Queen investigates "Number Thirty-One" (September 7, 1947), in which suspected international diamond smuggler George Arcaris always books Cabin 31 aboard the steamship Aegea, and a Park Avenue butler from Harlem named Arthur Prine — who liked to play the number 31 in the numbers game — turns up dead in the East River. Ellery and Inspector Queen connect the recurring number to a smuggling ring involving wealthy socialites Pip Istram and Susu Mounting, with guest armchair detective Kent Smith invited to solve it first.Quiet Please turns apocalyptic with "If I Should Wake Before I Die" (February 27, 1949), Wyllis Cooper's parable of Dr. Anderson, a coldly rational scientist who cares only for pure knowledge and never for its uses — even after his own brother Edward dies alone in an orbiting satellite rocket, and even as Project Phaeton, an atomic-fission projectile fired at the moon, sets loose consequences no equation predicted.Radio City Playhouse adapts Ray Bradbury's "The Wind" (October 30, 1949), in which Allen Henderson telephones his friend Herb Thompson again and again, convinced that a living, intelligent wind — one that has stalked him from a crash in the Himalayas across every typhoon and hurricane he survived — has finally surrounded his lonely stone house to claim him, while Herb's wife Jane dismisses the whole thing as madness.Sam Spade closes the night with the "Death of Dr. Denhoff Caper" (August 9, 1946), as Howard Duff's wisecracking detective is hired by psychoanalyst Dr. Gregory Denhoff to fend off a blackmailer named Nicolaitis — only for Denhoff to plunge from his penthouse window, the police to rule it suicide, and a stolen, microfilmed case history on actress Constance Brent to throw suspicion across the grieving widow, a Vienna-trained rival named Dr. Zoya, and Brent's hot-tempered husband.CUSTOM WEBPAGE: https://weirddarkness.com/WDRR0700

Five prisoners are kept awake for fifteen days in a sealed chamber — and what the researchers find when they open the door no longer wants to be set free. A blockbuster film series trails a string of real-life deaths its cast can't explain. On the back roads of Maryland, a half-goat figure waits for teenagers who wander too far. And one ordinary night in El Paso, a couple walks out of their home — dishes still in the sink, cat unfed — and is never seen again.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/russiansleepexperiment/READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/3rr9mhjxFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: The Russian Sleep Experiment *** The Poltergeist Film Curse *** The Goat-Man of Maryland *** The Patterson Family Disappearance *** The Legend of the LeprechaunCHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:01:06.939 = Show Open00:01:55.409 = The Poltergeist Curse00:06:21.074 = The Goatman of Prince George's County00:14:07.417 = The Lore of the Leprechaun ***00:16:55.345 = Vanishing of the Pattersons00:27:39.437 = The Russian Sleep Experiment ***00:43:05.653 = 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:“The Russian Sleep Experiment”: http://bit.ly/36mHCc9"Leprechaun: One Of The Most Famous And Powerful Creatures Of The Irish Faerie Folk" (link no longer available)“The El Paso Vanishing (What Happened To The Pattersons?)”: http://bit.ly/2JHq3cW“Maryland's Goat-Man Is Half Man, Half Goat, and Out For Blood”: http://bit.ly/2pEciVw“The Poltergeist Curse?”: http://bit.ly/36oH857(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: July 22, 2018Weird Darkness travels from a cursed Hollywood film set to a Maryland goat-monster, the cobbler-fairies of Irish legend, a vanished El Paso couple, and a blood-soaked Soviet sleep laboratory where the test subjects no longer wanted to be set free.It opens with the deaths that shadow the Poltergeist films, beginning with Heather O'Rourke, who played Carol Anne Freeling from the original 1982 release through both sequels and died at twelve in San Diego in February 1986 during surgery for a bowel obstruction later traced to a congenital intestinal flaw. Dominique Dunne, who played older sister Dana Freeling, was strangled in 1982 by John Sweeney outside her Hollywood home, and Sweeney served just three years and seven months. Julian Beck, the gaunt preacher Kane of Poltergeist II, died of stomach cancer in 1983, and Will Sampson, who played the shaman Taylor, died after a heart-lung transplant — four deaths that fed a curse legend later thickened by JoBeth Williams' claim that Steven Spielberg used real human skeletons as cheaper props and by Sampson's own ritual cleansing of the set.From there the episode crosses into Prince George's County, Maryland, where the Goatman has stalked local legend for decades. One origin story sets him at the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, a half-man, half-goat creature born from a USDA experiment gone wrong; another makes him a herdsman driven mad after teenagers slaughtered his flock. University of Maryland folklorist Barry Pearson traces his heyday to the 1970s and the 1971 decapitation of a puppy named Ginger in Bowie, an incident the Washington Post covered and locals pinned on the creature haunting Fletchertown and Lottsford roads, while Beltsville spokesperson Kim Kaplan dryly wonders whether a goatman that old would be collecting Social Security by now.Next the show turns to Irish folklore and the leprechaun, the solitary fairy whose name traces to a Gaelic root for a small body or a shoemaker. Standing two to three feet tall in a green or red coat and buckled shoes, he works as a fairy cobbler who stitches only a single shoe and never a pair, guards a hidden pot of gold, and trades three wishes for his freedom when a human manages to catch him. He lives in cave networks reached through rabbit holes and the hollow trunks of fairy trees, and damaging one of those trees is said to draw a lifetime of bad luck.From the green hills of Ireland the episode moves to El Paso, Texas, where William and Margaret Patterson left their home at 3000 Piedmont Drive on March 5, 1957 and were never seen again, dinner dishes still in the sink and their cat Tommy left without food. The owners of Patterson Photo Supply vanished without packing a suitcase, their associate Doyle Kirkland turned up driving William's Cadillac with a thin story about a vacation, and a telegram from Dallas signed with the wrong middle initial named Kirkland as William's replacement at the store. Decades on, caretaker Reinaldo Nangre claimed he had cleaned blood from the garage and found a piece of scalp on the boat propeller before dying in a car crash, and Sheriff Leo Samaniego floated the theory that the couple were Soviet spies photographing Fort Bliss, leaving a disappearance that was declared a death in 1964 and has never been solved.The episode closes in the late 1940s, when Soviet researchers sealed five political prisoners in a chamber and kept them awake for fifteen days with an experimental gas-based stimulant, promising freedom in exchange for thirty sleepless days. Paranoia set in after five days, screaming after nine, and when the chamber was opened on the fifteenth the soldiers found four men still alive amid their own torn-out organs, having eaten their own flesh and blocked the floor drain with it, fighting any attempt to remove them and begging for the gas rather than sleep. One subject, pinned for surgery without anesthetic, wrote only the words "keep cutting," and as the last of them was shot through the heart he claimed to be the madness that lurks in every sleeping mind, choking out that he was so nearly free.

A writer obsessed with the occult and forbidden knowledge uncovers a nightmarish secret lurking within a long-abandoned church—one that watches, waits, and is drawn to the dark.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/haunterofthedarkREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p9ecf8yFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: I'm back with a classic horror story, requested by one of you, my Weirdo family members. “The Haunter in the Dark” written by horror writer H.P. Lovecraft.CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:00:59.102 = About The Story00:03:15.896 = The Haunter of the Dark ***01:05:59.476 = 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:POEM: “Nemesis” by H.P. Lovecraft: https://tinyurl.com/y466z69vThe Cthulhu Mythos: https://tinyurl.com/y22oe79f“The Haunter of the Dark” by H.P. Lovecraft: https://tinyurl.com/y33eprua(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: July 30, 2020On this listener-requested episode of Weird Darkness, Darren Marlar narrates H.P. Lovecraft's last known story, "The Haunter in the Dark," the centerpiece of a three-part collaboration with fellow horror writer Robert Bloch.The episode opens with how the story came to be written. Robert Bloch, then a young admirer of Lovecraft, published "The Shambler From the Stars" in the September 1935 issue of Weird Tales, setting his tale inside Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. Two months later, in early November 1935, Lovecraft answered the homage by writing "The Haunter in the Dark" and dedicating it to Bloch; the story ran in Weird Tales in December 1936 (Volume 28, Number 5). It was the last story Lovecraft is known to have written before he died on March 15, 1937, and Bloch eventually closed the trilogy in 1950 with "The Shadow of the Steeple." The story's epigraph comes from the second stanza of Lovecraft's own 1917 poem "Nemesis."From there, the narration follows Robert Harrison Blake, a writer and painter of weird fiction who leaves 620 East Knapp Street in Milwaukee and takes the upper floor of an old house on College Hill in Providence during the winter of 1934–35. Blake grows obsessed with a black, abandoned church across the city on Federal Hill — a steeple shunned by birds and feared by the Italian neighborhood around it — and eventually breaks in, finding the moldering relics of the Starry Wisdom sect, a cult that took root after Professor Enoch Bowen returned from Egypt in 1844 carrying an artifact called the Shining Trapezohedron. In the windowless tower he uncovers the stone itself, a four-inch red-striated polyhedron that opens like a window onto other worlds, resting beside the charred skeleton of Edwin M. Lillibridge, a Providence Telegram reporter who vanished inside the same building in 1893. Gazing into the crystal rouses the Haunter of the Dark — an avatar of Nyarlathotep that can move only in blackness and is driven back by light — and the rest of the tale tracks Blake's collapse into sleepwalking, scorched hair, and frantic diary entries as a violent August thunderstorm threatens the streetlights keeping the entity penned in. When the power fails over Providence at 2:12 in the morning, the thing leaves its steeple, and Blake is found dead at his desk the next day with bulging eyes and a face frozen in terror, his final scrawled line describing a three-lobed burning eye — after which the physician Dr. Dexter hurls the box and the glowing stone into the deepest channel of Narragansett Bay.

A New York teenager lit a piece of paper, threw it at a sleeping homeless man on a Manhattan subway, and stepped back onto the platform as the doors closed behind him. SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/carrero-subway-fireLook 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/1078714736WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.

Investigators now believe the two February ransom notes sent to the Guthrie family came from the person who took Nancy — and one of them said she was already dead. *** ANYONE WITH INFORMATION CAN CONTACT THE FBI AT 1-800-CALL-FBI, OR THE PIMA COUNTY SHERIFF'S DEPARTMENT AT 520-351-4900.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/guthrie20260627Look 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.

Pulled out of Iran after his Strike Eagle went down, an American fighter pilot told intelligence officers he had watched a cluster of drones hover and move together as one body, like a jellyfish, in the seconds before he ejected.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/f15-jellyfishLook 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.

Dublin, Ohio spent $67,548 on a five-foot, four-hundred-pound robot that patrolled a parking garage for nearly ten months and never made an arrest, wrote a ticket, or flagged a single incident.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/dubbotREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: 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.

A grieving farmer's seance vow and a healer's vision of buried iron built the world's only school for talking to the dead — and left the town of Whitewater steeped in legends of witches, haunted cemeteries, and things that crawl out of the lake.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/HauntedWhitewaterREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/WD20260626B-HauntedWhitewater-transcript.txtFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Whitewater legend says that the bizarre experiments conducted at the Morris Pratt Institute of Spiritualism in Wisconsin, to communicate with the dead, have left the town cursed by witches and haunted by restless spirits. It's no wonder it has garnered the nickname of “Second Salem.” (Whitewater: The Second Salem) *** The Wild West had many drifters with troubled pasts. One found himself at the heart of one of the most infamous crimes in American history. Ben Kuhl went from horse theft, to stagecoach robbery, to murder – from notoriety to infamy – all in pursuit of elusive riches. Finally arrested and convicted due to a bloody handprint (The Last Stagecoach Robbery) *** Fred West was just a regular boy, or so it seemed. But behind closed doors, in reality, he was becoming evil incarnate. And upon meeting his future wife Rose, it only expanded his predatory predilections. Fred and Rose descended from petty crimes to unspeakable horrors of rape and murder – even of the most young and innocent. From their "House of Horrors" the depths of their depravity was acted out — hidden from site. But as the walls closed in and the truth emerged, the true horror of their crimes was laid bare. (The Evils of Fred And Rose West) *** AND MORE!CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:02:20.946 = Show Open00:04:34.008 = Whitewater: The Second Salem00:24:07.841 = The Evils of Fred And Rose West ***00:40:14.638 = The Last Stagecoach Robbery ***00:53:46.205 = Bygone Gluttons ***01:06:32.360 = 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:“Whitewater: The Second Salem” by Charlie Hintz for Wisconsin Frights: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p9bktup“Bygone Gluttons” by Ben Gazur for ListVerse: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p99hjxj“The Evils of Fred and Rose West” from Biography: https://www.biography.com/crime/fred-west“The Last Stagecoach Robbery” from Creative History Stories: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/bdh3h8h5(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: April 16, 2024This episode of Weird Darkness travels from a Wisconsin school built to teach the living how to speak with the dead, through the cellar of one of Britain's most notorious murder houses, to the last stagecoach robbery in American history and a gallery of history's most ravenous eaters.It opens in Whitewater, Wisconsin, where farmer Morris Pratt vowed during an 1880s seance to build a temple to the spirit world if he ever grew rich. A trance medium named Mary Hayes-Chynoweth steered him toward a barren tract on Michigan's Upper Peninsula that turned out to sit atop the Gogebic iron range, and the fortune that followed funded the Morris Pratt Institute, the world's only school dedicated to spiritualism, which locals nicknamed the "Spook Temple." Students studied clairvoyance, levitation, and psychic surgery in a three-story building whose white-painted top floor was closed to non-believers, and even agnostic Chicago attorney Clarence Darrow left it admitting he was mystified. The school later relocated to Milwaukee and still operates, but Whitewater kept its reputation, earning the name "Second Salem" for its tales of the axe-murdering witch Mary Worth in Oak Grove Cemetery, the inward-pointing spikes on the Starin Park water tower, the haunted Witches Triangle formed by its three cemeteries, and a tentacled creature said to have overturned a fishing boat on Whitewater Lake in 1923.From there the episode moves to Gloucester, England, and the crimes of Fred and Rose West, who tortured, raped, and murdered young women and girls across roughly two decades. Fred, born in 1941 and shaped in part by head injuries from a teenage motorcycle crash, killed his pregnant lover Anna McFall in 1967 and removed her fingers and toes, a mutilation he repeated on later victims including his first wife Rena Costello and his own daughter Heather. He and Rose buried nine victims beneath 25 Cromwell Street, the address the press called the "House of Horrors," and added Heather to the back garden. Detective Constable Hazel Savage's investigation finally exposed them; Fred hanged himself in his cell on January 1, 1995, and Rose was convicted of ten murders that November and handed a whole life order.Next the show heads to the snowbound mountains around Jarbidge, Nevada, where on December 5, 1916, drifter Ben Kuhl ambushed the Rogerson-Jarbidge mail stage, shot driver Fred Searcy in the back of the head with a .44 revolver, and made off with a mailbag holding four thousand dollars in cash. A stray dog led searchers to the buried money, and Kuhl's ivory-handled pistol marked him as a suspect, but the conviction turned on a bloody palm print found on an envelope from the coach, the first time such forensic evidence sent a man to prison for murder in the United States. Kuhl drew a death sentence later commuted to life, served nearly twenty-eight years, and died of tuberculosis in San Francisco in 1946 without ever revealing where the loot was hidden.The episode closes with a parade of history's most extreme eaters, from Georgian London's Edward Dando, who downed hundreds of oysters at a sitting and walked out without paying until cholera killed him in prison in 1832, to seventeenth-century Kentishman Nicholas Wood, who ate raw sheep wool and horns included. It runs through Roman emperor Vitellius, who vomited between courses to keep feasting and invented a dish of flamingo tongues and lamprey entrails; the corpulent King George IV, lampooned as the "Prince of Whales"; the geologist William Buckland, who tasted moles, panthers, and a preserved fragment of a king's heart; and Elvis Presley and his pound-of-bacon Fool's Gold Sandwich. It ends with the most disturbing case of all, the eighteenth-century Frenchman Tarrare, whose bottomless hunger drove him to eat stones, live animals, and raw offal, and who was expelled from a hospital after he was suspected of devouring a fourteen-month-old child.

The circus came overnight, but when it left, three boys were dead—and I was no longer human. *** There are contestants from TV's reality show “Alone” whom you've never seen—because they never made it back.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/CircusCameToTownCHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:01:29.387 = When The Circus Came To Town00:13:52.485 = Alone ***00:51:09.612 = 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:“When The Circus Came to Town” by Stephanie Scissom: https://tinyurl.com/y7slhth9“Alone” by 5yn: https://tinyurl.com/ybcllfpn(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: June 25, 2020

Two downed pilots wash up on a deserted Pacific island and discover that the atomic bomb tests there have bred something monstrous in the lagoon — and it's coming ashore. | Mysterious Traveler: “Strange New World”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, “Loser Take it All” (February 24, 1978) ***WD00:46:58.849 = Molle Mystery Theater, “Doctor And Lunatic” (April 26, 1946)01:16:08.715 = Mr. Keen, “Mr. Trevor's Secret” (February 17, 1944)01:46:10.329 = Murder at Midnight, “Death Across The Board” (September 18, 1946)02:12:35.073 = The Black Museum, “A Silencer” (1951-1952) ***WD02:39:11.673 = Mysterious Traveler, “Strange New World” (February 19, 1952) ***WD03:09:18.423 = CBC Nightfall, “The Chrysalids, Part 1” (June 10, 1983)03:39:33.359 = CBC Nightfall, “The Chrysalids, Part 2” (June 17, 1983) ***WD (LQ)04:07:01.729 = CBC Nightfall, “The Chrysalids, Part 3” (June 24, 1983)04:37:59.139 = Obsession, “Wind Song” (1950-1951)05:07:42.417 = 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/WDRR0699

His fiancée disappears without a trace the night they were supposed to set their wedding date, and the deeper Peter digs, the closer he gets to a secret the government would rather keep buried.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, “Vanishing Lady” (February 23, 1978) ***WD00:47:12.759 = Lux Radio Theater, “Strangers On a Train” (December 03, 1951)01:42:29.027 = Macabre, “Man In The Mirror” (November 27, 1961) ***WD02:11:29.529 = Philip Marlowe, “Ladies Night” (February 21, 1950)02:42:27.542 = The Black Mass, “Nightmare” (January 18, 1964) ***WD03:09:50.427 = Michael Shayne, “Date With a Wedding” (May 14, 1945) ***WD03:39:01.077 = Beyond Midnight, “Sheriff's Wife” (1969) ***WD (LQ)04:07:02.485 = Mindwebs, “When It Changed” (1976-1984) ***WD04:34:02.016 = Mystery In The Air, “Horla” (August 21, 1947) ***WD05:03:52.064 = 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/WDRR0698

A mysterious gentleman who never aged, never ate, and never seemed to die charmed the high society of two centuries — until police found his wine bottles filled with blood.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/stgermainREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/WD20260625-StGermain.txtFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: The mystery surrounding Count St. Germain is more than a little strange. Some think him to be a centuries old vampire. Others believe him to be a time traveler. And still others believe the whole thing to be a complete fraud. (The Vampire Time-Traveler) *** Escaping jail isn't easy, but we'll look at some who did the impossible – escaping the most secure prisons, in the most daring of ways. (History's Most Daring Prison Breaks) *** What would you do if you discovered that the church you attend every Sunday has a dark past that involves hauntings and supernatural phenomena? We'll look at some of the most haunted churches in the United States – perhaps you attend one of them and don't even realize it! (Most Haunted Churches in America) *** Benny Binion was one of the friendliest mobsters in Las Vegas… unless, of course, you made him mad. (Benny Binion, The Nice Guy Brute)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:01:46.615 = Show Open00:03:35.546 = St. Germain: The Vampire Time Traveler00:15:55.827 = Daring Prison Breaks ***00:35:47.335 = Benny Binion, The Nice Guy Brute ***00:52:51.426 = Most Haunted Churches in America ***01:00:52.327 = 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:“The Vampire Time-Traveler” by Marcus Lowth for UFO Insight: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2f2psdnm“History's Most Daring Prison Breaks” by Mike Rothschild for Ranker's Unspeakable Times:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p948z5e“Most Haunted Churches in America” by Rain-Screaming-For-Horror, posted at Vocal.Media:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8we2se“Benny Binion, The Nice Guy Brute” by Melissa Sartore for Weird History: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4rczaf27(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: December, 2021This episode of Weird Darkness moves from an immortal vampire said to haunt two centuries of high society, through history's most audacious prison escapes, into the bloody rise of a Las Vegas gambling kingpin, and ends among the haunted pews of America's churches.It opens in London in the early 1740s, where a man known as the Count of St. Germain charmed the upper classes with flawless violin playing, fluency in several languages, and a habit of handing out diamonds, prompting Horace Walpole — son of Prime Minister Robert Walpole — to describe him in a letter as odd and mad before the Count was arrested on suspicion of spying and released without charge. He surfaced next in Paris as a regular guest of Louis XV, working in a commissioned laboratory on fabric dyes and carrying out discreet missions, while gossip held that he could turn ordinary stones into jewels and had lived for hundreds or thousands of years, even claiming presence at the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD. After reported appearances aiding Catherine the Great in Russia and a friendship with Prince Charles of Hesse-Cassel in Germany, where he was said to die in 1784, the story jumps to early-1900s New Orleans and a wealthy newcomer named Jacques St. Germain, who threw lavish parties yet never ate or drank, claimed descent from the Count, and bore an uncanny resemblance to him. The account turns dark when a woman leapt from his balcony into the street, telling police he had bitten her neck; St. Germain vanished overnight, leaving his belongings behind and several open bottles that proved to hold a mixture of wine and blood.From there the episode trades immortality for ingenuity, walking through the boldest jailbreaks on record. It runs from the 2016 Orange County escape, where Jonathan Tieu, Bac Duong, and Hossein Nayeri cut through walls and rappelled to a sixteen-hour head start, to Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán slipping out of Altiplano through a mile-long lighted tunnel in 2015, and Clinton Correctional inmates David Sweat and Richard Matt crawling through a steam pipe with tools handed over by prison worker Joyce Mitchell. Ted Bundy jumped from a Colorado courthouse library window, John Dillinger bluffed his way out of an Indiana jail with a wooden pistol painted in shoe polish, and yoga master Choi Gap Bok greased himself and squeezed through a six-by-eighteen-inch food slot in thirty-four seconds. The larger breakouts carry heavier counts: three men vanished from Alcatraz in 1962 on a raft of raincoats, more than 480 Taliban prisoners filed out of Kandahar's Sarpoza Prison through a thousand-foot tunnel in 2011, over a thousand Japanese prisoners stormed the wire at Australia's Cowra camp in 1944, and inmates at the Nazi death camp Sobibor killed eleven SS guards with homemade knives before running for the treeline.Next the episode settles in Dallas and then Las Vegas with Lester Ben "Benny" Binion, the cowboy-hatted racketeer who founded the World Series of Poker and shot rival bootlegger Frank Bolding in the neck in 1931, walking away with a two-year suspended sentence and the nickname the Cowboy. He killed gambling competitor Ben Frieden in 1936 and beat the charge after witnesses vanished, ran dice games and bookies out of Dallas hotels for high rollers like Howard Hughes and H.L. Hunt, then moved to Las Vegas in 1946 and turned the Eldorado into the no-limit Horseshoe, laying down the first carpet in a Vegas casino. His feud with Dallas gambler Herbert "the Cat" Noble ran through eleven attempts on Noble's life and killed Noble's wife Mildred with a car bomb before a mailbox blast ended Noble in 1951. Binion died on Christmas Day 1989 and was carried to the cemetery behind six black horses, while his son Ted was found dead in 1998 in a case that convicted Sandy Murphy and Rick Tabish of burglary but acquitted them of the slaying, with the missing silver bullion never recovered.The episode closes inside America's churches, where worship shares the building with the dead. At Most Holy Trinity in Brooklyn, built over a former cemetery, parishioners report the spirit of clerk George Stelz, murdered in 1897, alongside bells that ring on their own and a bloody handprint in the bell tower stairway. The Washington National Cathedral carries the echo of Woodrow Wilson's cane and charred figures from a 1946 fire, while New Orleans' St. Louis Cathedral is tied to voodoo queen Marie Laveau, socialite Delphine Lalaurie, and six men executed on its grounds. At St. Mark's Episcopal in Cheyenne, a Swedish immigrant is said to have sealed his dead coworker inside the unfinished bell tower wall to avoid deportation, and at St. Paul's Chapel in New York — where George Washington prayed on his inauguration day — the spirit of actor George Frederick Cooke is said to wander still, his actual skull having traveled from a Philadelphia medical library and, by lore, onto the stage as a prop in Hamlet.

A woman screamed inside a Serra apartment for the better part of an hour, and the man with her told police he beat her to drive out the demons he believed had taken hold.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/marceli-gottardoLook 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.

Stephen Chavez got his eighteen-year-old daughter drunk and had sex with her two days after she moved across the country to live with him; she died by suicide five months later, and a Ventura County judge gave him one year in jail.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/makayla-settlesLook 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.

Police reached a home in Meerstad at 2:45 in the morning and found a married couple stabbed to death, the family dog wounded, and the couple's 15-year-old daughter in custody a short distance away.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/meerstad-murdersLook 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 Gold Coast illusionist drove into the rainforest before dawn, switched off his phone, and was found ten days later in the bushland he loved.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/magician-hidden-foundLook 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.

The spirit had vowed to put John Bell in his grave, and on a December morning in 1820 a coma, a smoky vial of black poison, and a dead barn cat proved she meant every word.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/bellwitchfinallaughREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yfpsnbfwFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Did a malevolent spirit cause the death of John Bell, or was it something else that brought his demise? (The Death of John Bell) *** A man is awoken in the middle of the night by a piano – being played by no one. (Rock Isn't Dead) *** Is it possible that ancient human skulls are conscious? (Cult of Human Skulls) *** Did the Watergate scandal hide a secret agenda? (Watergate: Wilderness of Mirrors)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:00:51.735 = Show Open00:02:11.866 = The Death of John Bell00:09:41.045 = Rock Isn't Dead ***00:13:58.971 = Cult of Human Skulls00:20:31.984 = Watergate: Wilderness of Mirrors ***00:43:34.192 = 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:“Watergate: Wilderness of Mirrors” posted at The Unredacted: http://bit.ly/2JjZ0pr“Rock Isn't Dead” by UnQuiet: http://bit.ly/2HfOZax“The Death of John Bell” by Troy Taylor: http://bit.ly/2HgkJwq“Cult of Human Skulls” by A. Sutherland: http://bit.ly/2Q1WbtT(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: December, 2021Weird Darkness gathers four accounts of the inexplicable across this episode — a frontier farmer poisoned by a spirit, a midnight keyboard played by no one, the worldwide superstitions surrounding human skulls, and a hidden reading of the Watergate burglary.It opens with the death of John Bell, the Tennessee gentleman farmer remembered as the only man ever murdered by a spirit. For nearly four years the entity known as the Bell Witch had tormented his household with attacks, flying objects, and a disembodied voice, singling out Bell and his daughter Elizabeth, called Betsy, for the worst of it. On the morning of December 19, 1820, Bell could not be roused from a deep stupor, and his son John Jr. found the cupboard of prescribed medicines emptied and replaced by a smoky-looking vial holding a dark, nearly black liquid. The witch laughed over his bed and admitted she had dosed "Old Jack" the night before; when Alex Gunn brought in a barn cat and a straw of the liquid was drawn across its tongue, the animal screeched, whirled, and dropped dead. Dr. Hopson confirmed Bell had swallowed the contents, Frank Miles hurled the vial into the fire where it flared blue up the chimney, and Bell died early on December 20, 1820, never having woken.From there the episode turns to a quieter haunting, recounted by a father awakened at 1:14 a.m. on March 9, 2018 by a few composed notes from his twelve-year-old son's electronic keyboard. He found the boy sound asleep and the cat sitting upright on the bed, staring at the instrument, and when he pressed the keys himself no sound came because the power was switched off. The next morning he woke his son for school and recognized the boy's shirt, worn for the first time, as one that had belonged to his late brother, who died suddenly in 2015 and whose lifelong dream had been to play in his band, called Ghost Of. The shirt read "Rock Isn't Dead… it's just played by Ghost Of," and the brothers had shared a love of ghost stories and a standing joke that he would return to visit after death.Next comes a survey of the human skull as an object of dread and reverence stretching back through cultures on every continent, rooted in the old belief that the head housed the soul and offered a channel to the Other World. The segment weighs the disputed Celtic "Cult of the Head," with historian Ronald Hutton arguing the recurring head motif on Celtic metalwork reflects artistic fashion rather than worship, and moves through the 1612 trial of Lancashire witch Anne Chattox, hanged after she was accused of robbing graves for skulls and teeth. It gathers the screaming-skull legends of England, including Anne Griffiths of Burton Agnes Hall in Yorkshire, whose exhumed head was bricked into a staircase wall to quiet the slamming and crashing, and the skull at Bettiscombe Manor in Dorset, said to belong to an enslaved man brought from Nevis by the Pinney family and denied his promised burial in the Caribbean.The episode closes with a long, skeptical reexamination of Watergate that treats the official account as a fabrication. It returns to the June 17, 1972 arrest of five burglars inside the Democratic National Committee offices and the address book linking E. Howard Hunt to Nixon's White House, then argues, following journalist Jim Hougan's 1984 book Secret Agenda, that the men never actually bugged the building at all. James McCord, a senior figure in the CIA's Office of Security rather than the low-level technician he claimed, rented a line-of-sight surveillance room facing the wrong side of the complex, paid an employee to transcribe conversations from nonexistent wiretaps, and twice taped the stairwell locks horizontally across the door face so guards could not miss them. A key found on burglar Eugenio Martinez fit the desk of DNC secretary Ida Wells and pointed toward a suspected call-girl ring run out of the adjacent Columbia Plaza apartments, raising the possibility that Hunt and McCord, both career CIA men who lied about a decade-long association, sabotaged the break-in to shield a clandestine operation, to topple a president who had sidelined the agency, or both, taking the full truth with them to their graves.

David and Jane Francis come home from a European holiday to find the wealthy widow who'd sublet their country house dead of fright — and the rooms left behind tell of melted mirrors, scorched floors, and a circle burned into the wood that no living tenant should have known how to draw.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 Church of Hell” (February 17, 1978) ***WD00:44:41.163 = The Haunting Hour, “Case of the Lonesome Corpse” (May 12, 1945) ***WD00:58:44.462 = The Hermit's Cave, “The Nameless Day” (ADU)01:23:36.914 = Mystery Is My Hobby, “Faithless Wife” (ADU)01:46:32.934 = Sherlock Holmes, “Babbling Butler” (January 27, 1947) ***WD02:15:53.849 = Mystery House, “Death With a Punch” (April 28, 1946) ***WD02:41:53.489 = House of Mystery, “Gift From The Dead” (August 03, 1947) ***WD03:11:32.618 = Incredible But True, “Appointment Stockholm” (1950-51)03:15:09.461 = Inner Sanctum, “Dead Man's Vengeance” (October 07, 1944) ***WD (LQ)03:35:40.413 = Jeff Regan Investigator, “The Lonesome Lady” (July 24, 1948)04:06:15.379 = The Key, “Extension of Time” (1956) ***WD04:31:17.317 = Lights Out, “The Signalman” (August 24, 1946)05:00:40.818 = 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/WDRR0697

Step right up, Weirdos! Got a strange idea rattling around in your skull — a haunting nobody believes, a cryptid your uncle swears he saw, some true-crime case that still keeps you up at night? Jukebox Weirdo turns it into a real, honest-to-goodness song. You bring the weird, you pick the band off the Weird Darkness Records roster, and I write it and produce it — with your name on the idea. And if it's a keeper, I'll send it out to Spotify, iHeart Radio, YouTube Music, and everywhere else, so you can crank it for everybody you know and holler, "THAT'S my song!" Want in? Become an Official Weirdo at https://WeirdDarkness.com/OFFICIAL and send me your idea. Let's make something strange together!

Two young Parisians dreaming of artistic greatness stumble upon a squalid countryside farm, where one becomes fatally transfixed by a strange, silent girl the family keeps like livestock — and the price of his masterpiece may be more than either of them can 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, “Nighteyes” (February 13, 1978) ***WD00:44:52.381 = Faces In The Window, “Pit And the Pendulum” January 24, 1953) ***WD01:16:57.706 = Dark Fantasy, “Cup of Gold” (May 08, 1942) ***WD01:41:08.547 = BBC Fear on 4, “By The River, Fountainebleau” (February 14, 1988)02:11:47.932 = Future Tense, “Protection” (May 29, 1974) ***WD (LQ)02:35:01.801 = BBC Ghosts From The Past, “Mortmain” (April 22, 1992)03:20:24.273 = Columbia Workshop, “Half Pint Flask” (July 06, 1939)03:49:41.327 = Hall of Fantasy, “The Tell-Tale Heart” (June 01, 1953) ***WD04:13:19.188 = Harry Lime, “Voodoo” (August 31, 1951) ***WD04:37:18.634 = BBC Haunted Tales of the Supernatural, “The Grey Ones” (August 11, 1984)05:03:59.833 = 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/WDRR0696

A Phoenix musician snapped two clear photos of a flying saucer in 1947 — then government agents with hidden names showed up, took his negatives, and made the evidence vanish into federal archives forever.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/RhodesMIBREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8z656hFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Natalie Bollinger seemed to have her whole life ahead of her, but beneath the surface was a dark and tragic story that would end in obsession, danger, and a horrifying Craigslist ad that no one saw coming. (Natalie Bollinger – Stalked, Betrayed, and Forgotten) *** Oregon's scenic beauty hides a darker side, where ghostly encounters and eerie legends bring the state's haunted history to life. We'll look at five of the most haunted places in The Union State. (Five Haunted Locations in Oregon) *** Andrew Keegan went from '90s heartthrob to the charismatic leader of a crystal-charged spiritual group, where eerie rituals and strange coincidences blur the line between community and cult. (Teen Heartthrob to Cult Leader) *** The Dakota is more than just a historic NYC landmark—its dark history of ghostly encounters, untimely celebrity deaths, and eerie connections will leave you with chills. (Famous Phantoms of the Dark Dakota Building) *** A wild night in 1979 – Chicago's Comiskey Park turned into a chaotic battlefield as tens of thousands of disco-hating fans lit records on fire, sparked a riot, and may have sealed the fate of an entire music genre. It's the night “Disco Inferno” turned literal. (The Night Disco Burned) *** When a man in 1947 captured stunning photos of a UFO over Phoenix, he unknowingly invited the shadowy Men in Black into his life, sparking one of the earliest and most chilling accounts of government secrecy and dark intimidation. (First Documented Encounter With The Men In Black) *** The U.S. has a seven-step plan for meeting aliens, and it's a mix of science fiction, strategy, and some downright unsettling steps you won't believe. (First Contact or Planetary Catastrophe?)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:01:56.144 = Show Open00:04:35.317 = The First Documented Encounter With The Men In Black00:18:57.349 = First Contact, Or Planetary Catastrophe ***00:26:17.432 = Natalie Bollinger – Stalked, Betrayed, and Forgotten00:35:41.483 = Five Haunted Locations in Oregon ***00:48:27.369 = The Night Disco Burned00:55:11.587 = Teen Heartthrob to Cult Leader01:03:27.692 = Famous Phantoms of the Dark Dakota Building ***01:07:45.841 = Facing Fear For Fun01:10:30.883 = 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:“The First Documented Encounter With The Men In Black”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhodes_UFO_photographs,https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/the-original-men-in-black-3849054,https://www.history.com/news/men-in-black-real-origins, https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2024/08/Are-Men-in-Black-Real-At-Least-One-Was/“Natalie Bollinger – Stalked, Betrayed, and Forgotten”: https://cattstruecrimecorner.com/the-case-of-natalie-bollinger/,https://genwhypod.com/blogs/the-generation-why-podcast-blog/the-murder-of-natalie-bollinger,https://lauthmissingpersons.com/murder-natalie-bollinger/, https://klakstrom.medium.com/the-strange-murder-of-natalie-bollinger-16110ddaefb7, https://www.truecasefiles.com/2019/12/the-murder-of-natalie-bollinger.html,https://bekah302.medium.com/of-stalking-craigslist-and-social-media-the-case-of-natalie-bollinger-6846c98a8cc5“Five Haunted Locations In Oregon”: https://the-line-up.com/haunted-places-in-oregon (used verbatim with permission)“Facing Fear For Fun”: https://www.southernfriedtruecrime.com/annalisa-netherly,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Read_House_Hotel, https://www.clthomas.org/post/the-read-house-hauntings-and-legends, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/thoughts-thinking/201810/5-reasons-we-enjoy-being-scared,https://health.clevelandclinic.org/why-do-we-like-to-get-scared, https://www.healthline.com/health-news/why-we-like-to-be-scared, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/why-fear-feels-good“Teen Heartthrob To Cult Leader”: https://people.com/andrew-keegan-looks-back-insane-spirituality-venture-cost-tens-of-thousands-sparked-cult-rumors-8576493, https://ew.com/andrew-keegan-responds-rumors-he-started-cult-8576464,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Keegan, https://www.ranker.com/list/andrew-keegan-cult-facts/carly-silver“Famous Phantoms of the Dark Dakota Building”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_John_Lennon,https://jessicajewettonline.com/ghosts-of-the-dakota-building, https://the-line-up.com/the-dakota-building,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dakota, https://www.ranker.com/list/dakota-building-curse/april-a-taylor,“First Contact or Planetary Catastrophe”: https://www.nsa.gov/portals/75/documents/news-features/declassified-documents/cryptologic-spectrum/communications_with_extraterrestrial.pdf, https://www.livescience.com/19360-humans-discover-aliens.html, https://listverse.com/2017/03/12/10-laws-rules-and-regulations-for-extraterrestrial-contact/, https://www.livescience.com/alien-contact-protocol.html, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-detection_policy,https://www.ranker.com/list/facts-about-the-seven-steps-to-contact/laura-allan“The Night Disco Burned”: https://www.britannica.com/event/Disco-Demolition-Night,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disco_Demolition_Night, https://edm.com/features/remembering-disco-demolition-night-1979, https://www.ranker.com/list/facts-about-disco-demolition-night/melissa-sartore; Audio Clips: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAJfOcnYYEQ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWCRu-yVEFU(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

A pickup driver who told troopers he had just seen the anti-Christ ran past every first responder on a closed stretch of I-75 and yanked open the pilot's door of the helicopter sent to airlift the two people he had badly injured.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/antichrist-helicopter-heistLook 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.

Jamie Varley told police his adopted son drowned in the bath, but the baby's hair was dry, his nappy was still on, and a post-mortem found forty injuries.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/babyprestonLook 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 21-year-old Plymouth State student was shot in the head inside her own family's home, and the person charged with pulling the trigger is her teenage brother.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/leah-andersonLook 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.

Three men walked into Kyle Bevan's cell at one of England's most secure prisons, stabbed him more than 25 times, tucked his body into bed to look asleep, and walked out four minutes and 39 seconds later.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/three-inmates-wakefieldLook 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.PHOTO INFO:Top Left: Mark Fellows, known as “The Iceman,” was already serving a whole-life term for two gangland murders. West Yorkshire Police / SWNSTop Center: David Taylor was also serving time for murder and awaiting trial over a separate killing when the prison attack took place. West Yorkshire Police / SWNSTop Right: Lee Newell was previously convicted of killing another child killer inside his prison cell in 2013. West Yorkshire Police / SWNSBottom Center: Kyle Bevan, who was serving a life sentence for killing his partner's toddler, was stabbed to death by three inmates. Dyfed-Powys Police / SWNS

A ransom note sent five days after 84-year-old Nancy Guthrie vanished from her Tucson home opened with an apology for her death — and offered to return her body for a price.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/Guthrie20260622Look 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.

Across four decades on Heswall's Dawstone Road, drivers and a motorcyclist reported a seven-foot horned figure that seized their vehicles and threw them into the sandstone wall.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/DawstoneDemonREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2en5ubwwFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Dawstone Road is where some say the veil between our reality and the unknown is thin. A motorist's brush with death in 1961 sparked a chain of inexplicable events. From encounters with horned entities to unexplained accidents, the road holds secrets that seem to defy rational explanation. (The Demon of Dawstone Road) *** There is a dark history and supernatural secrets at the Manila Film Center. Built as a symbol of power and prestige during the Marcos regime, its construction was rushed, resulting in a catastrophic collapse that claimed numerous lives. But the horror didn't end there. Stories of hauntings, spectral hands reaching out, and cries for help still echo through its halls. (Horrors At Manila Film Center) *** When 19-year-old Kenneka Jenkins vanished during a hotel party, it sparked a viral whirlwind of speculation and suspicion. Despite authorities ruling her death an accident, questions lingered – as they should, seeing as her body was found in the hotel freezer. (Frozen Corpse at Crown Plaza) *** For over a century, these ghostly orbs have captivated and spooked travelers in Queensland, Australia. Are they supernatural spirits or mere mirages? (The Ghostly Orbs of Min Min) *** AND MORE!CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:02:07.004 = Demon of Dawstone Road00:11:30.917 = Horrors at Manila Film Center ***00:31:46.055 = Frozen Corpse at Crown Plaza ***00:40:24.583 = Ghostly Orbs of Min Min00:50:15.674 = Blowing Smoke Up Your Enema ***00:56:56.461 = 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:“Blowing Smoke Up Your Enema” by Bipin Dimri for Historic Mysteries: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yckujv2n“The Demon of Dawstone Road” by Tom Slemen for Anomalien.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/muvz6wbv“Horrors At Manila Film Center” by Lucia for TheGhostInMyMachine.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/9es3ka3j“Frozen Corpse at Crown Plaza” by Amanda Sedlak-Hevener for Graveyard Shift: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8drf6j“The Ghostly Orbs of Min Min” by Kimberly Lin for Historic Mysteries: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/ea9zway9(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: April 15, 2024This episode of Weird Darkness travels from a haunted stretch of English road and a tower built on dead workers to a teenager found frozen in a hotel kitchen, a century of phantom lights in the Australian Outback, and an 18th-century medical practice involving tobacco and a part of the body it had no business near.It opens on Dawstone Road in Heswall, where a Neston motorist crashed through a six-foot sandstone wall in the winter of 1961 and later told a surgeon at Clatterbridge Hospital that a horrible devil had pushed his car sideways, despite no alcohol in his blood. That March, a 23-year-old Wallasey man named Rory was thrown from his motorbike at the Baskervyle Road junction by a seven-foot horned figure that seized his handlebars, and he woke to a face with pointed ears and luminous eyes muttering about the pit. The road's reputation reaches back to November 1934, when a posse hunted a demonic creature that a wealthy mansion owner blamed on his escaped bulldog, an explanation a local policeman rejected by asking how a broad bulldog squeezed through iron gate bars. The pattern continued through a stalled Hillman Imp shoved backwards in 1969 and a nurse's 1978 sighting of a horned man in black standing beside a ten-foot hole that glowed red and echoed with screaming.From there the episode moves to the Manila Film Center, the cinema palace Imelda Marcos rushed to completion for the first Manila International Film Festival in January 1982, where part of the structure collapsed on November 17, 1981 and buried workers in wet cement during a 24-hour construction schedule. Eyewitness Nena Benigno described seeing men carried out frozen in cement that had not fully hardened, while official counts from the Marcos regime claimed only a handful of deaths against outside estimates ranging as high as 169. Architect Froilan Hong put the toll at seven and denied the burial stories, yet legends persisted that the dead were entombed in the walls, and a medium reportedly brought in by Imelda Marcos to exorcise the building announced during a trance that the spirits now numbered 169 after the road death of project supervisor Betty Benitez.Next comes the death of 19-year-old Kenneka Jenkins, found face-down in a walk-in freezer at the Crowne Plaza Chicago O'Hare in Rosemont on the morning of September 11, 2017, nearly a full day after security footage caught her stumbling through the hotel and entering an unused kitchen. The Cook County Medical Examiner ruled the death an accident from hypothermia, with a blood-alcohol level of 0.112 and epilepsy medication cited as contributing factors, but her mother Teresa Martin questioned how a teenager could open the freezer's heavy steel doors and filed a $50 million lawsuit against the hotel. Viral speculation drew comparisons to the 2013 death of Elisa Lam at the Cecil Hotel, fueled by footage in which background music was mistaken for a cry of help and an anonymous tip claiming a gang had killed her for $200.The episode then crosses to the Outback near Boulia in Queensland, where Min Min lights have trailed travelers since Europeans first documented them in 1838, hovering about three feet off the ground, changing color, and following people on foot, on horseback, and in cars. A stockman riding past the burned ruins of the Min Min Hotel reported a glow the size of a watermelon that chased him to the edge of town, and Arrernte elder Mavis Malbunka tied the lights to a Dreamtime story of a mother searching for a child fallen from the Milky Way. University of Queensland physiologist Jack Pettigrew traced the phenomenon to a Fata Morgana, an optical illusion in which warm air over cold bends light from sources hundreds of kilometers beyond the horizon, a finding he published in 2003 after recreating the effect with car headlights ten kilometers away.The episode closes on the tobacco enema, the 18th-century practice of blowing smoke into a patient's rectum to revive the drowned, with resuscitation kits hung near English waterways for emergency use. Nicholas Culpeper adapted the method from Native American medicine and Richard Mead carried it forward, and an early 1746 account credits a husband with reviving his apparently drowned wife by inserting a pipe stem and puffing smoke through it. Nicotine absorbed this way could raise a patient's heart rate, which gave the treatment a plausible mechanism, and the 1774 Institution for Affording Immediate Relief to Persons Apparently Dead from Drowning built its work around it before being renamed the Royal Humane Society, which still operates in England today.

A young woman hired to care for an invalid widow in a crumbling Hudson River mansion soon learns why her brooding employer forbids every mirror in the house—and why the dogs are always watching.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, “Reflected Terror” (February 10, 1978) ***WD00:46:05.827 = Deep Night CBC, “Ice Screams” (August 05, 2005)01:20:02.229 = Calling All Detectives, “The Necktie” (1947)01:29:12.083 = The Devil and Mr. O, “Balance Sheet” (December 24, 1971(01:59:18.938 = Diary of Fate, “Walter Vincent” (May 25, 1948) ***WD02:28:14.559 = Dimension X, “The Parade” (August 25, 1950) ***WD02:55:28.216 = The Strange Dr. Weird, “The Man Who Lived Twice” (January 30, 1945) ***WD03:08:09.231 = The Eleventh Hour, “Bomb” (ADU)03:34:51.891 = Escape, “Action” (July 21, 1949)04:04:04.818 = Murder By Experts, “The Big Money” (July 25, 1949)04:33:28.472 = Exploring Tomorrow, “Diamond Mountain of Venus / aka Inferiority” (June 04, 1958)04:53:28.724 = 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/WDRR0695

A 36-year-old bartender came home from her overnight shift in Brooklyn, and within hours her teenage son and her sister found her dead on the floor with her neck cut.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/santos-floresLook 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 three-year-old visiting Johnson's of Old Hurst ended up inside the crocodile enclosure, was pulled out by a member of the family that runs the zoo, and the stranger arrested over it was assessed as unfit for police interview.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/croc-enclosure-boyLook 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.

Five drivers were shot along Interstate 70 the evening Kansas City opened its World Cup, and the man police are hunting has not been found.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/kc-world-cup-shootingsLook 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.

On a bright July afternoon in 1986, twenty-five-year-old London estate agent Suzy Lamplugh left her office to show a house to a client her diary noted only as "Mr Kipper," and she was never seen again.==========HOUR ONE: It is considered by many, Britain's most well-known disappearing person case. Even now, over three decades later, people in the UK are still fascinated and intrigued by the unexplained vanishing of Suzy Lamplugh. (The Suzy Lamplugh Mystery) *** John List planned the murders of his own family so carefully, he almost got away with it. In fact, it took 18 years to catch him. (The Family Man Who Murdered His Family) *** We'll look at what it was like to be a woman in the 17th Century… and accused of witchcraft. (Witchly Accusations) *** If you drink whiskey, or even if you don't, you're likely familiar with “Jameson Irish Whiskey.” But did you know that cannibalism played a part in its history? (Whiskey and Cannibalism) *** A strange phenomenon takes place in Arkansas, and despite the numerous sightings and investigations, there is still no explanation for it. (Unexplained In Arkansas)==========HOUR TWO: Seeing a lifelike human skeleton in a doctor's office, especially in the past couple of centuries, was – and in many cases still is - commonplace. But where did one go to get such lifelike skeletons if you were a doctor in the 1800s? Why, a skeleton factory, of course! (The Skeleton Factory) *** The story of Kate Watson is a grim one – living as a prostitute in the Old West, and when that wasn't enough she took up cattle rustling. Her husband wasn't any better. So it's probably no surprise that she was strung up until dead. But maybe you should wait to pass judgement until you hear the whole story. (The Lynching of Cattle Kate) *** In March of 2004, teenager Brianna Maitland left work in the late evening hours and was never seen again. To this day it is still one of Vermont's most infamous mysteries. (The Vanishing of Brianna Maitland) *** Plus, “The Haunted Adirondack Mountains”==========SUDDEN DEATH OVERTIME: Parents always feel their child is special in some way – something that makes their child better in some way than other children. Parents of indigo children are no different, with some parents thinking their children have psychic abilities. Doctors say that these children have ADD or ADHD, but one parapsychologist says indigo children have something even more special – possibly even paranormal - inside them. (Supernatural Indigo Children) *** When you think of a mad scientist you most likely think of Victor Frankenstein – but it's rumored Mary Shelley took inspiration for the character from a real mad scientist by the name of Andrew Ure. (Andrew Ure: A Real Life Mad Scientist) *** The story of Kate Watson is a grim one – living as a prostitute in the Old West, and when that wasn't enough she took up cattle rustling. Her husband wasn't any better. So it's probably no surprise that she was strung up until dead. But maybe you should wait to pass judgement until you hear the whole story. (The Lynching of Cattle Kate)==========SOURCES AND REFERENCES FROM TONIGHT'S SHOW:"The Suzy Lamplugh Mystery” by Amelia Gentleman for The Guardian: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2v2z6tp6“The Family Man Who Murdered His Family” from The Line Up: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/392yt322“Witchly Accusations” by Jessica Nelson for the UK's National Archives: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/j7nnd3ax“Whiskey and Cannibalism” posted at The Scare Chamber: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/9rx24777“Supernatural Indigo Children” by Gina Dimuro for All That's Interesting: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/apk85b29“Unexplained in Arkansas” by Ellen Lloyd for Ancient Pages: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/27zaptdb“Haunted Adirondack Mountains” by Molly Briggs for Paranormality Magazine: http://weirddarkness.com/magazine“The Skeleton Factory” from Strange Ago: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2j8reje3“Andrew Ure: A Real Life Mad Scientist” posted at The Scare Chamber: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/3n5tfpeh“The Murder of Nurse Cindy” posted the The Trouble With Justice: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2kfah7mv“The Lynching of Cattle Kate” posted at Strange Company: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/utdy2sh6“The Vanishing of Brianna Maitland” by Orrin Grey for The Line Up: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/je9s98ru==========(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).

Centuries before Hollywood dressed it in a nun's habit, the demon Valak prowled the pages of forbidden grimoires as a winged boy astride a two-headed dragon, commanding legions of serpents to do his bidding.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources):https://weirddarkness.com/valekREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/24s8nzb9FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Although Valak is depicted in the films "The Nun" and in “The Conjuring 2” as a habit-wearing spirit, the real demon appears as a child riding a two-headed dragon — at least according to a 17th-century demon-hunting manual. (The Reality Behind The Demon, Valak) *** The Vatican is one of the most well-guarded areas in the world. But if rumors are to be believed, all that security isn't only to protect the pontiff… but some dark, disturbing secrets… and a machine that could change everything we know to be true. (The Vatican's Secret Machine) *** We'll look at that time a force field was accidentally created at a 3M plant. (3M's Accidental Force Field) *** In 1872 George Wheeler met and married May Tillson in Boston. He made a home for May and her younger sister Della, first in New York, then in California. Along the way, George fell in love with young Della and when she planned to marry someone else he was faced with a dilemma: he could not marry her himself and he could not bear to see her wed to another. The solution he chose pleased no one. (Thus She Passed Away) *** In the 1800s scientists and doctors needed cadavers to study human anatomy and practice their skills. To help accommodate the need, it was made legal to sell dead bodies. What could possibly go wrong? (The Unsettling Anatomy Act)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:01:16.547 = Show Open00:03:31.777 = The Reality Behind The Demon Valak00:11:37.807 = The Unsettling Anatomy Act ***00:24:33.689 = 3M's Accidental Force Field00:34:11.149 = Thus She Passed Away ***00:44:01.086 = The Vatican's Secret Machine00:53:13.339 = 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:“The Reality Behind The Demon, Valak” by Gina Dimuro for All That's Interesting:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/43vu356n“3M's Accidental Force Field” by Brent Swancer for Mysterious Universe: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/3vvnwbpv“Thus She Passed Away” by Robert Wilhelm for Murder By Gaslight: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yyztmnat“The Unsettling Anatomy Act” by SM for ListVerse: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8vdns9“The Vatican's Secret Machine” by Ellen Lloyd for Ancient Pages: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8kxxz8(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: December, 2021This episode of Weird Darkness moves from a centuries-old demon mistaken for a nun, through the Victorian trade in stolen corpses and a force field that appeared inside a 1980 factory, to a San Francisco trunk murder and a Catholic priest who claimed to have built a machine that could film the past.It opens with the demon Valak, who reaches modern audiences through The Nun and The Conjuring 2 as a pale, nun-robed figure but appears in the 17th-century grimoire Clavicula Salomonis Regis, or The Key of Solomon, as the 62nd spirit: a boy with angel's wings riding a two-headed dragon, commanding a legion of serpents and an army of thirty demons while hunting snakes and hidden treasure. The nun costume was the invention of director James Wan, who reshaped a vision the medium Lorraine Warren described to him — a swirling hooded figure carrying female energy — into a holy icon turned against her Catholic faith. Warren and her husband Ed, the demonologists who rose to fame after the 1976 Amityville investigation, reportedly met a spectral hooded figure at the Borley church in southern England, where lore held that a nun had been bricked alive in the convent walls after an affair with a monk. The Key of Solomon, which lists the seventy-two demons King Solomon was said to have vanquished, sat on the Vatican's Index librorum prohibitorum until the Church abandoned that list of prohibited books in 1966, though copies kept turning up in the hands of Catholic priests.From there the episode turns to the Anatomy Act of 1832, the British law that legalized dissecting unclaimed bodies from workhouses and hospitals to end the grave-robbing of the resurrectionists, yet instead built an organized corpse trade across Victorian England. The twelfth-century St. Bartholomew's left wicker baskets beneath its King Henry VIII gate for body dealers to fill, while a Liverpool Street express known as the "dead train" carried sealed funeral wagons of stacked corpses toward Cambridge. Deepening the trade, the New Poor Law of 1834 confined the destitute to workhouses whose officials profited from selling the dead, and in 1858 the master of St. Mary Newington workhouse, Alfred Feist, was caught funneling pauper bodies to Guy's Hospital through the undertaker Robert Hogg, who staged fake funerals and collected double payment. Anatomists prized the bodies of fetuses and children, keeping their skulls intact — only one of fifty-four specimens in a Cambridge collection had received a craniotomy — and the public's dread boiled over in Manchester in 1832, when a grandfather opened the coffin of a three-year-old who had died at the Swan Street Cholera Hospital and found a brick where the boy's head should have been.Next comes a stranger kind of dread, set in the summer of 1980 at a 3M plant in South Carolina, where workers slitting twenty-foot-wide polypropylene film at a thousand feet per minute walked into an invisible wall they could not push through. The static-charged field, which one worker measured past the limit of a 200-kilovolt handheld electrometer, pulled people toward it so strongly they had to back away on foot, swallowed a passing fly, and by one account could have held a bird in its grip before vanishing as abruptly as it formed. Managers reproduced the effect the next morning under lower humidity, and the plant production manager reportedly said he didn't know whether to fix it or sell tickets; later accounts claim a researcher who published on the phenomenon was contacted by NASA and federal agencies before the grounding fault was corrected and the field never returned.The episode then moves to a true-crime case in San Francisco, where around midnight on October 20, 1880, George A. Wheeler walked into a police station and confessed to strangling his sister-in-law Della Tillson and packing her body into a trunk in their room at 23 Kearney Street. Wheeler had fathered two children with Della, both of whom died, while her sister — his deaf wife, May — lived across the hall posing as his sister-in-law, and the arrival of the miner George Peckham, who hoped to marry Della and take her to Sacramento, drove Wheeler to kill rather than let the two leave together. He told reporters that Della sat in his lap and asked him to end her life, that she died with her head on his shoulder, and his defense of hereditary insanity failed across two trials, the second forced by a California Supreme Court ruling over improperly admitted testimony from a book on medical jurisprudence. On January 23, 1884, five thousand people gathered outside the jail, entrance tickets sold for ten dollars apiece, and Wheeler — newly drawn toward Catholic conversion under Father Cottle — kissed a crucifix, commended his spirit, and dropped to a broken neck.The episode closes inside the Vatican with Father Pellegrino Ernetti, an Italian priest, exorcist, and musical scholar who claimed in the 1950s to have helped build a device called the Chronovisor that could see and hear the past. Ernetti said a team of twelve anonymous scientists, among them the physicist Enrico Fermi and the rocket engineer Wernher von Braun, tuned the machine to a speech by Mussolini, then Napoleon, a Roman market under Emperor Trajan, a Cicero oration, and a 169 B.C. performance of Quintus Ennius's lost tragedy Thyestes, which he said let him publish its full text. When the magazine La Domenica del Corriere printed a Chronovisor image of Christ's face on the cross on May 2, 1972, it was soon matched to a mirrored photograph of a wood carving by the sculptor Cullot Valera, and Ernetti — who said the machine was too dangerous to exist and had been dismantled and hidden — left behind no device, no named living witnesses, and a 1993 presentation to four cardinals whose contents were never disclosed.

A young doctor returns to her childhood slum to open a free clinic, but when a dying patient vanishes from her examination room and his grieving cousin swears the boy has simply gone home, she begins to wonder what kind of people she's really been treating.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, “All Unregistered Aliens” (February 09, 1978) ***WD00:45:43.486 = Calling All Cars, “Burma White Case” (December 06, 1933) ***WD (LQ)01:14:27.499 = Casey Crime Photographer, “Clue In The Clouds” (February 26, 1944) ***WD01:45:06.776 = CBC Mystery Theater, “The Cable Car Incident” (1967) ***WD (LQ)02:11:42.746 = Chet Chetter's, “Biloxi And the Bogus Beavers From Bornac” (1990-1992) ***WD02:40:43.122 = The Clock, “Ghost Story” (December 13, 1955)03:07:11.394 = Creeps By Night, “Strange Burial of Alexander Jordan03:36:40.775 = SONG: Static Wax, “The Dead Man's Bell” (based on the Strange Burial of Alexander Jordan): https://weirddarkness.com/music03:43:07.328 = The Crime Club, “Dead Man Control” (March 20, 1947) ***WD04:11:24.922 = Crime Classics, “Peaceful Pass T. Edwin Bartlett Grocer” (June 22, 1953)04:40:59.478 = Danger Dr. Danfield, “Little Meteorite Wanted To Be a Star” (February 02, 1947)05:07:17.930 = 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/WDRR0694

Introducing: JUKEBOX WEIRDO!Official Weirdos, you've got a new perk — and it's yours alone. (https://weirddarkness.com/official) JUKEBOX WEIRDO is a members-only music feature, and it works just like the name suggests: you punch in the request, you pick who plays it. Send me a topic — anything you'd want a song about — and tell me which act from the Weird Darkness Records roster should perform it.Static Wax? Dark Weirdness? Crossroads Haint? Incorruption,? Monster Flakes? Alena Ingram? You send me the song topic and the artist you want to perform it! It's your call!Here's what makes these special: they never leave the building. Unlike the rest of the Weird Darkness Records catalog (https://weirddarkness.com/music), JUKEBOX WEIRDO tracks won't go to Spotify, Apple Music, iHeart Radio, Pandora, YouTube Music, or anywhere else. They live only behind the Patreon wall, for Official Weirdos only. And the topic doesn't have to come from an episode or a story. Any fun, strange, dark, or downright weird idea that fits the Weird Darkness mold works — that's the whole point. It's YOUR choice!To request a song, if you are a Patreon member (https://weirddarkness.com/official), send me a private message there with two things: your song idea, and the artist you want singing it.The first few tracks are coming straight from my own weirdo brain to get the ball rolling — so watch for posts on Patreon marked "JUKEBOX WEIRDO," followed by the artist and the song title! Then start sending me your song ideas and requests!

Four aged friends gather in an eccentric doctor's shadowed study, where he offers each of them a single glass of water he swears was drawn from the Fountain of Youth.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, “Dr. Heidegger's Experiment” (February 07, 1978) ***WD00:47:39.915 = Arch Oboler's Plays, “Engulfed Cathedral” (May 06, 1939) ***WD01:17:52.594 = BBC Radio 4/Radio 7 Ghost Story, “Jonas” (mid 1970s)02:46:16.760 = Night Beat, “They” (August 17, 1951)03:15:39.186 = Beyond The Green Door, “Mrs Curlew — Poisoner Marries Major” (1966) ***WD03:19:27.495 = The Black Book, “My Favorite Corpse” (February 24, 1952) ***WD03:35:06.168 = *SHOW NAME UNKNOWN*, “Black Ghost” (1930) ***WD04:01:09.186 = Barry Craig, “The Judge And The Champ” (October 17, 1951) ***WD04:31:00.486 = Box 13, “The Hot Box” (December 26, 1948)04:57:42.628 = 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/WDRR0693

A burglar, a car thief, a pickpocket, and a roof full of teenagers all heard the same thing in the dark — a voice that wasn't there, telling them to get out before it was too late.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/somethingunseenREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/y7mzj4apFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Creepy, paranormal encounters sometimes cause people to stop short of committing an action they might regret. (Supernatural Intervention) *** Weird family member Atreada tells of a horrifying series of nights when she and her sister encountered a demon under one of their beds. (Man Beneath The Bed) *** In York County, Pennsylvania a suspected witch is murdered – and thus began the dark story of the Hex House. (Dark Magic in Hex Hollow) *** Was there a conspiracy to murder Hollywood actress Marilyn Monroe? We'll look at the theories and evidence for and against the idea. (Killing Marilyn)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:00:36.259 = Show Open00:01:59.484 = Supernatural Intervention00:28:49.825 = Man Beneath The Bed ***00:33:42.600 = Dark Magic of Hex Hollow00:39:33.099 = Killing Marilyn ***00:59:36.847 = 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:“Supernatural Intervention” by Anna Lindwasser: http://bit.ly/2IHZl58“Man Beneath the Bed” by Weirdo family member Atreadia, submitted directly to WeirdDarkness.com“Dark Magic in Hex Hollow” by Orrin Grey: http://bit.ly/2GD8860“Killing Marilyn” posted at The Unredacted: http://bit.ly/2GGF7GS(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: December 06, 2021Weird Darkness moves through four shades of the unexplained in this episode: the unseen voices and strangers that talk people out of crimes and catastrophes, the demon that lived under two sisters' bed in Texas, the 1928 witch-killing that gave a Pennsylvania hollow its name, and the still-contested death of Marilyn Monroe.It opens with a run of first-person accounts pulled from Reddit, each describing the moment something unseen stepped in to stop a crime or a catastrophe. A burglar hiding in the closet of an elderly woman's house watches a ghostly old man pat a departing paramedic on the back, then feels breath on the neck and a voice ordering the intruder out. Middle-schoolers creeping through their darkened school are warned off by a voice none of them claims, and they avoid a library that proved to be wired with a silent alarm and motion detectors. In California, a fourteen-year-old abandons a car-theft job a mile from the pickup, spooked by a rising sense of dread, and later learns the vehicle was bait in a police sting that swept up everyone else sent after it. A pickpocket lifts a wallet clean off a stranger, only for the man — blind, sunglasses raised — to calmly ask for it back. Threaded among them are a blown tire that derails a despairing teenager's suicide plan, church doors that lock the instant two thieves reach for them, and a Hobby Lobby shopper whose five stolen pieces of balsa wood seem to trail straight to a table saw and a flesh-eating MRSA infection.From there the episode turns to a listener named Atreada, who shared a room and a bed with her older sister in SunRay, Texas. For a week the bed shook hard enough to slam against the wall and wake the whole house, blamed each night on two children supposedly roughhousing. On the fourth night a hand rose from the gap between bed and wall as an evil laugh filled the room, and on the last night the sisters aimed a flashlight and saw the thing climb out and bolt — an old man in rags, barefoot, with glowing eyes, talon-like fingers, broken teeth, ears jutting at odd angles, and thin transparent strands hanging from an otherwise bald, corpse-like head.Next comes the true story behind Spring Valley County Park in York County, Pennsylvania, a place once called Hex Hollow. In 1928 a Powwow folk-magic practitioner named John Blymire became convinced he was cursed, and a witch called Nellie Noll — the Marietta River Witch — named Nelson Rehmeyer as the source. To break the hex, Blymire needed a lock of Rehmeyer's hair and his copy of The Long Lost Friend, an 1820 spellbook by John George Hohman. On November 26, 1928, Blymire and two accomplices, John Curry and Wilbert Hess, beat Rehmeyer to death in his home and tried to burn it down; the house refused to burn, which locals took as proof of his power. Blymire and Curry drew life sentences and Hess ten to twenty years, and the surviving hex house opened as a museum in 2007 — its story helping to inspire horror novelist Brian Keene and Shane Free's 2015 documentary on the killing.The episode closes with the death of Marilyn Monroe, found nude and lifeless in her Brentwood home in the early hours of August 5, 1962, a telephone in her hand and empty pill bottles on the nightstand. The official verdict was probable suicide by barbiturate overdose, but Sergeant Jack Clemmons, the first officer on the scene, found no glass or water for swallowing some sixty pills, no vomit, and housekeeper Eunice Murray running laundry while the body lay cooling. Thomas Noguchi's autopsy turned up lethal levels of Nembutal and chloral hydrate in her blood and liver, yet not a trace in her stomach. Witnesses placed Attorney General Robert Kennedy at the house that day and again near 10 p.m., tied to rumors of a red diary detailing her affairs with Robert and President John F. Kennedy and referencing a plot against Castro. A competing account, advanced years later by a Court TV investigation, holds that her psychiatrist Ralph Greenson gave her a chloral hydrate enema to wean her off Nembutal, unaware that her internist Hyman Engelberg was still prescribing it, and that the fatal drug interaction — not the Kennedys, and not her own hand — is what killed her.

A Turkish team has government clearance to drill, scan, and lower a drone beneath a boat-shaped mound near Mount Ararat that some believe is the wreck of Noah's Ark.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/NoahsArk2026Look 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.

On a Saturday morning in São Paulo, three instructors hoisted Maria Eduarda over the edge of an abandoned bridge — and her safety rope never left the platform.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/MariaEduardaRodriguesLook 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 federal judge ordered sixteen-year-old Timothy Hudson jailed until trial for the killing of his stepsister Anna Kepner aboard a Carnival cruise ship, finding that no monitor could be trusted to contain him.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/AnnaKepner20260619Look 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 12-year-old in southern Brazil told her family kidnappers had beaten her and would kill her unless they paid — and police spent sixteen hours hunting captors who never existed.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/12-year-old-fake-kidnappingLook 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 Texas Killing Fields and Gilgo Beach to a corpse left decomposing in a hotel water tank and three infants found frozen in a family freezer, these are the notorious dump sites where killers hide their victims — and the strangest places human remains have ever turned up.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/BodyDumpSitesREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yckm2tkwFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Where are bodies dumped most often? What are some of the strangest places bodies have been found, and what odd situations ended up in death? We'll look at some weird stories of dead bodies being found. (Strange Dumping Grounds) *** A man is found dead – obviously murdered. But even after a positive identification, some believed the body was not of the man authorities thought it was – and an even larger mystery was, whose monogrammed handkerchief was stuffed in the corpse's mouth? (The Ruttinger Mystery) *** In Florida, there is a short stretch of freeway that is so full of incidents of danger, death, and the paranormal, that many consider it cursed – and most definitely haunted. Locals have deemed it, the Dead Zone. (Hauntings On Highway I-4)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:02:23.979 = Show Open00:04:03.422 = Strange Dumping Grounds00:24:34.042 = Oddest Places Bodies Found ***00:35:56.964 = Hauntings On Highway I-400:49:22.317 = The Ruttinger Mystery ***00:59:26.329 = 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:“Strange Dumping Grounds” by Jessika M. Thomas (http://bit.ly/2XwwVyc), Mariel Loveland (http://bit.ly/2XzEog1), and Rachel Stewart “The Ruttinger Mystery” by Robert Wilhelm: http://bit.ly/2IAzhJh“Hauntings On Highway I-4” by Brent Swancer: http://bit.ly/2XB62JG(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: December 06, 2021Weird Darkness maps the ground where the dead are hidden, traveling from America's most notorious body-dumping fields to a cursed quarter-mile of Florida interstate and a strangled German lace salesman pulled from the Staten Island mud in 1891.It opens with the dump sites scattered across the United States, where unidentified victims are still pulled from soil and water decades after they were left. In the New York Central Pine Barrens of Long Island, as many as eleven bodies have surfaced, four of them between 2000 and 2003 and two decapitated, in killings attributed to the Butcher of Manorville. Lake Tahoe keeps its secrets through physics rather than concealment, its thousand-foot depths holding a near-constant 39 degrees that stops bodies—rumored to date to Mafia disposals in the 1950s—from decomposing enough to float. Sugar planter Edgar Watson terrorized the Florida Everglades in the early 1900s, allegedly killing laborers each harvest to dodge their wages, and in 2016 two alligators were found feeding on a corpse in the same swamp. Leakin Park in Baltimore has given up roughly 70 bodies since 1946, while the Texas Killing Fields along I-45 between Houston and Galveston have yielded 30 since 13-year-old Colette Wilson vanished in 1971—among them Krystal Jean Baker, whose 1986 murder was tied to Kevin Edison Smith by DNA in 2012. Over 100 bodies have come out of the Mojave Desert, sending photographer William Bradford and William Floyd Zamastil to prison, and the still-unidentified Gilgo Beach killer dumped as many as 17 victims along Ocean Parkway, three of them strangled, bagged in burlap, and linked to the Long Island Serial Killer. Pelham Bay Park concealed at least 65 bodies between 1986 and 1995, the East River surrendered 26 in the spring of 2010 alone, and Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, confessed to ending at least 49 women's lives.From there the episode turns to bodies found where no one thinks to look. Canadian student Elisa Lam decomposed for as long as 19 days inside a rooftop water cistern at Downtown Los Angeles's Cecil Hotel while guests drank and bathed from the same supply and complained the water tasted off. In Xi'an, China, a woman starved to death trapped in an elevator over the Chinese New Year, her hands mangled from a month of clawing at the doors after workers skipped a required inspection. Elmer McCurdy, killed by police in 1911 after robbing a train of $46 and two jugs of whiskey, was embalmed with arsenic and toured carnivals as a sideshow attraction until a film crew for The Six Million Dollar Man snapped his arm off at a Long Beach amusement park in 1976 and found bone beneath the wax; he was finally buried in Guthrie, Oklahoma, in 1977. A Disneyland Paris worker was electrocuted behind the scenes of the Phantom Manor ride in 2016, a German mother kept three of her infants in freezer wrapping for some 30 years until her grown children uncovered them while digging for frozen pizza, and Joshua Maddox, missing since 2008, was discovered seven years later wedged in the chimney of his parents' Colorado cabin with no sign of injury.Next comes a quarter-mile of Interstate 4 near Lake Monroe, Florida, that locals call the Dead Zone. The asphalt covers four unmarked graves of Dutch immigrants who died in the Yellow Fever epidemic that erased the 1870s settlement of St. Joseph's, graves that landowner Albert Hawkins fenced and protected after stumbling on them in 1905, and which earned a reputation for lightning strikes, house fires, and a fatal hit-and-run befalling anyone who disturbed them. The state promised to relocate the remains before construction but paved over them, and as work began in 1960 Hurricane Donna changed course to follow the road's path; the highway opened in 1963 with a deadly truck crash at that exact spot. Somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 accidents have clustered along the short stretch since, Hurricane Charley retraced Donna's route over it in 2004, and drivers report their radios filling with growls, children's laughter, and disembodied voices in a place with no nearby transmitters.The episode closes with the 1891 murder of Karl Emanuel Ruttinger, a German lace salesman from Dresden whose body watchman Samuel Mortin found half-floating in the mud below Tottenville, Staten Island, his arms bound behind his back and a linen handkerchief monogrammed "W.W." rammed down his throat with a stick. Suspicion fell on his brother-in-law, William Wright, who had sailed with him from Liverpool and shared his boarding-house room, yet Wright stood only five-foot-four at 120 pounds, far too slight to overpower a six-foot, 200-pound man alone. The trail twisted through a throat-cutting suicide at the Astor House by a man calling himself Fred Evans, a string of conflicting witness identifications, and the discovery that Ruttinger's life had been insured for more than $20,000 just a month before the voyage—raising the possibility that the corpse was not Ruttinger at all. A Tottenville inquest ruled that it was indeed Ruttinger, suffocated by persons unknown, and in 1892 the Equitable Life Assurance Society paid his mother Therese roughly $22,000, conceding privately that settling was cheaper than proving the fraud they suspected.

A lonely Massachusetts crossroads has been claiming the lives of lawmen for over two hundred years—each one stabbed in the back in a spot so open no killer could possibly reach him, while the only sound in the dark is a woman's cold laughter.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 Talking Women” (February 06, 1978) ***WD00:47:04.966 = 2000 Plus, “The Giant Walks” (November 08, 1950) ***WD01:15:57.050 = The Unexpected, “Nightmare” (October 31, 1948)01:29:30.334 = Unsolved Mysteries, “Writing On The Wall” (October 05, 1949) ***WD01:44:12.246 = Dark Venture, “Hideout” (January 07, 1947) ***WD02:09:03.788 = The Weird Circle, “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (1945)02:36:35.446 = The Whistler, “Danger Is a Beautiful Blonde” (March 05, 1945)03:07:19.667 = Strange Wills, “Madman's Diary” (August 17, 1946)03:37:02.993 = Witch's Tale, “Haunted Crossroads” (October 17, 1932) ***WD04:01:39.046 = X Minus One, “Hostess” (December 12, 1956)04:29:47.425 = ABC Mystery Time, “Four Fatal Jugglers” (1957) ***WD04:53:37.561 = Strange Adventure, “Diamonds In The Desert” 04:56:54.720 = 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/WDRR0692This installment of #RetroRadio — old-time radio in the dark — gathers twelve vintage broadcasts spanning crime, science fiction, the supernatural, and the just plain strange, drawn from CBS Radio Mystery Theater, 2000 Plus, The Unexpected, Unsolved Mysteries, Dark Venture, The Weird Circle, The Whistler, Strange Wills, The Witch's Tale, X Minus One, Masters of Mystery, and Strange Adventure.CBS Radio Mystery Theater opens the night with "The Talking Women," written by Sam Dan and starring Ed Ames, as host E.G. Marshall introduces wealthy executive Robert Bayswell, a man whose endless "business trips" to New York have quietly covered a five-year affair with his mistress, Lolly "Dolores" Harbison. When Bayswell decides to end the relationship and return to his wife Martha, a struggle over a loaded .38 revolver sets a chain of events in motion — one that draws in nightclub photographer Julie Palmer and homicide detective Sergeant DeLuca, both circling a death no one can quite explain.2000 Plus delivers the science-gone-wrong terror of "The Giant Walks," in which the obsessed Dr. Ellsworth, having used a pituitary revitalizer to breed giant rats four feet long, sets his sights on the next logical subject — a human being. His powerfully built test subject Barstow is grown to thirty feet of muscle and bone, while uneasy assistant Weston watches the experiment spiral past anything Ellsworth can hope to control.The Unexpected stars radio's Lurene Tuttle in "Nightmare," the tale of understudy actress Jenny, who answers her door to a hideous, dwarf-like old peddler selling two dolls — one that cries and one that laughs. Against the peddler's strange warning, she chooses the laughing doll, and its contagious, mocking laughter begins to follow her everywhere she goes, into the theater, the subway, and her sleepless nights.Unsolved Mysteries presents a true-style ghost story told by foreign correspondent Jackson, who recalls a visit to a centuries-old medieval castle in Northumberland, England, complete with drawbridge, moat, and turrets — and its resident phantom, the Lady Evelyn, said to warn the family of any impending disaster. Sleeping in the haunted wing, Jackson is roused by a figure who writes a message in letters of fire across the stone wall, a warning tied to the RMS Titanic.Dark Venture stars William Conrad in "Hideout," the confession of small-time gambler Sam, who sits in on one of Phil Collins's famous high-stakes poker games, wins and loses a fortune, and ends the night shooting political big shot Mike Barnes. Fleeing to Chicago and a rooming house run by Dave Jordan, Sam stumbles into a carnival fortune teller, Madame Zara, who reads the cards and tells him he will die within three days at the hands of a man with white hair — just as hired killer Whitey Burke begins closing in.The Weird Circle summons its bellkeeper for the immortal Robert Louis Stevenson tale "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," in which Dr. Henry Jekyll brews a potion meant to separate the good and evil halves of a single man. The draught gives life to the stooped, deformed, and wholly malevolent Edward Hyde, who terrorizes the streets of London while lawyer Mr. Utterson, Dr. Lanyon, and the faithful butler Poole try to understand what their friend has unleashed.The Whistler brings the Signal-sponsored noir "Danger Is a Beautiful Blonde," as bored construction engineer Van Stevens, killing time in a small coast city on a Saturday night, is picked up on the street by a beautiful young blonde in a slick convertible. She drives him to a seaside mansion full of priceless art, and the flirtation turns to ice the moment she asks him to look under her bed — where a dead man lies hidden.Strange Wills stars distinguished Hollywood actor Warren William as attorney John Francis O'Connell in "Madman's Diary," a probate-court reading of the last testament of the late Professor Lucifer Nicolai. The diary records the professor's decade-long obsession: an electromagnetic experiment to separate the human mind from the body and hurl it backward along light waves into the past. His subject, a young orphan named Alice, is sent first to the age of King Arthur and Guinevere, then far deeper — a quarter-million years before Christ.The Witch's Tale, narrated by 122-year-old Nancy, the Witch of Salem, and her wise black cat Satan, tells "The Haunted Crossroads," where state troopers keep dying at a barren Massachusetts intersection — each one stabbed in the back in a spot so open no killer could possibly reach him and flee unseen. After young Trooper Tom Fallon falls beside his uncle Sergeant Pat McGee and friend Gene Hardy, the only clue is a woman's cold laughter in the dark and a curse reaching back to 1721 and a hanged woman named Goody Fairfax.X Minus One, hosted by Isaac Asimov, presents "Hostess," the story of biologist Rose Smollett, who brings home a guest from another world — the Hawkinsite physician Dr. Harg Tolan, a six-limbed being who breathes cyanide from a cylinder at his mouth. Tolan has come to Earth to study the dreaded "inhibition death," the wasting illness that kills his people, and his quiet questions about the missing persons bureau begin to unsettle Rose's policeman husband, Drake.Masters of Mystery offers the island thriller "Four Fatal Jugglers," in which business partners Gordon Penrose and Dave Copeland — tangled together by Gordon's wife Lydia and her demands for a divorce — head off for a weekend of duck hunting on a tiny, isolated island in the middle of a lake. Lydia's protective brother Bob is drawn in too, and with old grudges, suspicions of murder-by-hunting-accident, and a hunting knife in play, the trip becomes a deadly game of who can be trusted.Strange Adventure closes the night with a desert tale of two weather-beaten prospectors, gangling Slim Sandstone and his stocky partner Geordie Gaines, who walk into the bank of George Alden and deposit a canvas sack half-filled with uncut diamonds. Their secret field out on the desert is rich beyond belief, and the greedy banker schemes to maneuver the pair out of their claim — never suspecting what a salted diamond strike can teach a smart financial tycoon.

In 1954, hundreds of Glasgow schoolchildren armed with makeshift weapons stormed the Southern Necropolis, hunting a towering, iron-toothed vampire they believed had already claimed two victims.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/GorbalsVampireREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4xtvswmmFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: What caused hundreds of Scottish children in the 1950s to suddenly become vampire hunters? (The Gorbals Vampire) *** Over the years, from ancient to more modern times there have been a number of incredible cases of mass hysteria. Some are so unbelievable it's difficult to understand how they happened at all. (Ancient Cases of Mass Hysteria) *** Zachary Davis had a history of mental disturbance, but no one could have predicted the horrors he was truly capable of. (The Disturbing Story of Zachary Davis) *** When poor travelers are found dead in the frozen winter, could it be that there is something more to their story? Could they have been killed not by the cold, but by a demon of the snow? (Demon of the Snow) *** Southwest of Tombstone, Arizona are the remains of a simple adobe cabin nicknamed ‘the bloodiest cabin in Arizona'. (Brunkow's Cabin) *** Oscar Beckwith was a hermit who lived in the woods, in a small, squalid shack with no furnishings but a bunk, two stools, and a stove… on which he cooked human flesh. (The Cannibal of Austerlitz)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:01:02.525 = Show Open00:03:13.218 = The Gorbals Vampire00:07:54.447 = Ancient Cases of Mass Hysteria00:23:57.158 = The Disturbing Story of Zachary Davis ***00:32:13.121 = Demon of the Snow00:38:22.972 = Brunkow's Cabin ***00:43:01.745 = The Cannibal of Austerlitz00:48:36.810 = 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:“The Gorbals Vampire” by Cynthia McKanzie for Message to Eagle: (link no longer valid)“Ancient Cases of Mass Hysteria” posted at Ancient Pages: http://bit.ly/2Iw12SX“The Disturbing Story of Zachary Davis” by William DeLong for All That's Interesting: http://bit.ly/2UOxLd6“Demon of the Snow” by A. Sutherland for Ancient Pages: http://bit.ly/2UlTX97“Brunkow's Cabin” by Amanda Penn: http://bit.ly/2GojnOB“The Cannibal of Austerlitz” by Robert Wilhelm for Murder By Gaslight: http://bit.ly/2ZjADwV(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, 2019Weird Darkness moves from a 1950s Scottish vampire panic and centuries of mass hysteria through a Tennessee teenager's matricide, the vengeful Japanese snow demon Yuki-Onna, the bloodiest cabin in the Arizona desert, and a New York hermit who cooked the man he murdered.It opens on the evening of September 23, 1954, when hundreds of schoolchildren poured into the Southern Necropolis cemetery in the Gorbals district of Glasgow, Scotland, armed with sharpened stakes and knives to hunt a creature they called the vampire with iron teeth, blamed for abducting and killing two missing boys. Police could not clear the children from among the headstones, and only the rain finally drove them home, though the hunt resumed over the next two days. Although no children were actually missing, newspapers and Parliament blamed American horror comics such as Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror, a panic that drew in Labour MP Alice Cullen and led to the 1955 Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act, while others traced the iron-toothed monster to the Book of Daniel or to the Glasgow Green bogeywoman Jenny Wee. From the Gorbals the episode widens into centuries of mass hysteria: the first recorded case on an Egyptian papyrus dated to 1990 BC, children in a 1676 Dutch orphanage who barked and crawled like dogs, the 1374 dancing plague known as choreomania that seized the German town of Aachen, the Swedish witch panic of 1664 to 1676 and its children flown to the devil's meadow of Blakula, and French convent nuns who meowed in unison until soldiers threatened them with rods. The same survey takes in the 1630 poisoning terror of Milan that sent the barber Mora to torture and execution, the 1771 Okage Mairi pilgrimage that drew five million Japanese to the Ise Grand Shrine of Amaterasu Omikami, Richard A. Locke's 1835 Great Moon Hoax describing winged bat-men called Vespertilio-homo in the New York Sun, the Salem witch trials of 1692 that hanged nineteen people after the slave Tituba's confession, and the Hammersmith ghost of 1804 that ended when Francis Smith shot the plasterer Thomas Millwood dead in the dark.From there the focus shifts to Sumner County, Tennessee, where on August 10, 2012, fifteen-year-old Zachary Davis killed his sleeping mother, Melanie, striking her nearly twenty times with a sledgehammer he had carried up from the basement, acting on what he believed was the voice of his dead father. His father, Chris, had died of ALS in 2007, after which Vanderbilt psychiatrist Dr. Bradley Freeman diagnosed the boy with schizophrenia and depression before Melanie pulled him out of therapy. After the killing Davis doused the family game room in whiskey and gasoline and set it ablaze to kill his sixteen-year-old brother Josh, who woke to a smoke alarm and escaped while Davis fled on foot and was found roughly ten miles away. He told investigators he felt nothing when he killed her, laughed during a televised interview with Dr. Phil McGraw as he described the weapon and the wet sound it made, and was sentenced to life in prison after Judge D. David Gay told him he had gone to the dark side, with parole possible only after fifty-one years.Next the episode crosses into Japanese folklore and Yuki-Onna, the Lady of the Snow, a vengeful Onryo spirit said to have begun as a pregnant woman left to freeze in a mountain storm and to return on snowy nights as a tall, pale figure with blue lips and long black hair who floats over the drifts without leaving footprints. Her most famous tale follows two woodcutters, the old Mosaku and the young Minokichi, who shelter in a mountain hut where Yuki-Onna breathes a killing cold over Mosaku but spares Minokichi on the condition that he never speak of her. Years later Minokichi marries a woman named Oyuki who never seems to age, and when he finally recounts his strange night in the hut, Oyuki reveals that she is the snow demon herself and vanishes, sparing his life only for the sake of their children.After that the episode turns to the desert of Cochise County, southwest of Tombstone, Arizona, where the ruined adobe Brunckow Cabin earned its reputation as the bloodiest cabin in Arizona through at least twenty-one deaths. The German miner Frederick Brunckow built it in 1858 to work a San Pedro silver claim and was murdered there by his own laborers, killed with a rock drill driven into his abdomen alongside the chemist John Moss and the miner James Williams. The owners who followed met similar ends: Milton Duffield, the first U.S. Marshal of Arizona Territory, was shot dead at the cabin by James T. Holmes during an eviction, N.M. Rogers was killed by Apaches, and five thieves who hid there gunned one another down in a quarrel over stolen loot. Ed Scheifelin used the cabin as a base camp in 1877 before he founded and named nearby Tombstone, and visitors today report an apparition that fades when approached and the phantom sound of mining machinery drifting through the ruins.The episode closes with Oscar Beckwith, a seventy-two-year-old hermit living in a squalid shack in Austerlitz, New York, who on January 10, 1882, killed his mining partner Simon Vanderkoek over a soured gold claim near Alford, Massachusetts, then dismembered and cooked the body. A neighbor named Harrison Calkins smelled burning flesh at the shack and was told Beckwith was only frying pork rinds, but he returned the next day to find the mutilated remains, a blood-stained axe, and charred bones in the stove. Beckwith fled to Canada and evaded capture until the detective J.B. Gildersleeve tracked him to Bracebridge, Ontario, in 1885, by which time rumor had branded him the Cannibal of Austerlitz. Six trials sent him to the gallows in Hudson, New York, on March 1, 1888, where at seventy-eight he became both the oldest man and the last person hanged in the state, struggling at the end of the rope for eighteen minutes before he died.

A fragile young mother, alone with her infant daughter in a remote old mill, becomes certain that something is moving in the deep black pool behind her bedroom wall, and that the villagers fighting to keep it filled know exactly what it wants.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 Ice Palace” (January 31, 1978) ***WD00:46:31.886 = BBC Radio 4 Spinechillers, “Witch Water Green” (1984) ***WD01:43:45.218 = Strange Wills, “Girl From Shadowland” (August 10, 1946)02:13:05.441 = Strange, “Phantom Wagoneer” (March 21, 1955) ***WD02:26:39.689 = Suspense, “Portrait Without a Face” (March 02, 1944) ***WD02:57:22.906 = Tales of the Frightened, “Man in a Raincoat” (1957)03:02:18.144 = The Creaking Door, “A Day of Truce” (October 12, 1964) ***WD (LQ)03:32:29.501 = The Saint, “Murder On The High Seas” (October 01, 1947)03:56:44.596 = Theater Five, “A Little Piece of Candle” (November 18, 1964)04:16:57.180 = Theater 1030, “The Thing In The Hall” (1968-1971) ***WD04:46:19.007 = Tales From The Tomb, “Don't Drink With Strangers (1960s)04:49:56.396 = 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/WDRR0691

Two Green Squad officers pulled on the foam heads of Clutch the Bald Eagle and Maple the Moose, hefted a battering ram, and went hunting for a drug dealer who loved football a little too much.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/mascot-raidLook 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.

Elena Katherine Moore left her Lexington gym on foot the night of June 11th, and six days later searchers found a body in the woods wearing the same olive-green hoodie.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/elena-katherine-mooreLook 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 gay men were stabbed to death near San Francisco's Ocean Beach in the mid-1970s, and the detective working the case today believes their killer is still alive in the East Bay.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/doodler-sfLook 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 new CBS News poll shows that most Americans believe intelligent life exists beyond Earth, and one in five think contact with extraterrestrials has already happened.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/alien-contact-pollLook 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 nuclear test deep beneath the Nevada desert stirs something that should have died out two hundred thousand years ago, and when two old colleagues climb into the mountains to find it, only one of them grasps what it will cost to bring a living giant back down.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 Feature, “Yesterday's Giant” (January 30, 1978) ***WD00:46:59.714 = Peril, “Curse of Ramses” (1953) ***WD01:08:50.479 = Price of Fear, “Lot 132” (October 06, 1973) ***WD01:36:58.947 = Adventures of Ellery Queen, “Green Gorilla” (February 12, 1947) ***WD02:03:05.560 = Quiet Please, “Where Do You Get Your Ideas” (February 20, 1949)02:31:39.004 = Radio City Playhouse, “Ground Floor Window” (October 23, 1949)03:00:46.400 = Sam Spade, “Sam And Psyche” (August 02, 1946) ***WD03:30:35.617 = The Sealed Book, “King of the World” (March 25, 1945)04:00:32.188 = The Shadow, “The Murder Underground” (March 09, 1941)04:27:34.089 = Sleep No More, “Banquos Chair Coward” (February 06, 1957) ***WD04:55:56.262 = 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/WDRR0690

Because the canvas roof had been waterproofed with gasoline, the small flame that touched it on July 6, 1944 swept across the Hartford circus big top in seconds, and most of the 167 people it killed were children.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/HartfordCircusFireREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/39d8nfwhFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Three boys fishing in the middle of the night hear a blood-curdling scream. But it wasn't a human making all that noise – it was an extraterrestrial. And thus began a series of meetings with alien beings! (What Do You Say When Meeting An Extraterrestrial?) *** A day of hilarity turns into a day of horror as an uncontrollable fire breaks out at the Ringling Bros Barnum & Bailey Circus – resulting in the most deadly circus disaster in history. (The Day The Clowns Cried) *** Most ghosts and specters do a great job of scaring the pants off you – and some can get creative with how they do it, with stacking chairs, making toys talk, slamming doors, etc. But apparently not all spooks are worried about their reputation – and when it comes to haunting, they just phone it in, doing the bare minimum. (Lazy Phantasms)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:01:39.923 = Lazy Phantasms00:12:35.047 = What Do You Say When Meeting An Extraterrestrial? ***00:42:41.671 = The Day The Clowns Cried ***00:52:38.951 = 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:“What Do You Say When Meeting An Extraterrestrial?” from Anomalien.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/44h5ykk9“Lazy Phantasms” posted at Esoterx.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2y69m7hu“The Day The Clowns Cried” by Rachel Souerby for Weird History: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4ek5rsup(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: November, 2021Weird Darkness ranges from a shapeless apparition that appeared inside the Tower of London in 1817, to a string of close-range UFO and humanoid encounters reported across North America, to the Hartford circus fire of 1944 that killed 167 people in under ten minutes.It opens inside the Tower of London in October 1817, where a cylinder of dense, white and pale-azure fluid about the thickness of a man's arm materialized over the supper table of Edmund Lenthal Swifte, the Keeper of the Crown Jewels. Swifte was holding a glass of wine and water to his wife's lips in the Jewel House, with her sister and his young son present, when the shape hovered for roughly two minutes, drifted around the room, and settled over his wife's right shoulder, at which she cried out that it had seized her. He struck at the wood paneling behind her with his chair, but the figure left no mark, and a scientific friend who afterward examined the sealed, curtained, candle-lit room could account for none of it. The thing wore no period costume and delivered no message, and forty-three years later Swifte set the encounter down in the journal Notes and Queries, insisting at eighty-three that he had neither amplified nor abridged a word of it.From there it moves to a wave of close-range encounters, beginning on a cold January night in 1972 when sixteen-year-old John Yeries and three companions, fishing near Battle Creek Bridge east of Anderson, California, saw a seven-foot, greenish-brown humanoid with a large teardrop-shaped ear on one side of its head and heard it loose a scream that sent them sprinting for their car. Darrell Rich's father Dean returned to the bridge with a pistol, only to back away when a deep growl rose from the brush, and a police search of the area turned up nothing. The following year, on October 4, 1973, insurance agent Gary Chase pulled over at the Santa Susana Pass near Simi Valley, California and watched an elliptical craft roughly seventy feet long, marked with a nested V insignia, hover above a creek while a figure in a wetsuit-like suit crawled across its hull toward a protruding hose. Other witnesses report the same intrusions: patrolman Lonnie Zamora saw two small, white-clad figures beside a landed craft in New Mexico in 1964, and Mrs. Wallace Bowers found fifteen-inch footprints in the snow and watched an orange disk hover over the power lines outside her home in Vader, Washington. Bernice Niblett spent the winter of 1967 alone on Keats Island in British Columbia, where she watched lights maneuver over the water night after night and became convinced that the two stiff, oddly formal Hydro men who appeared at her cabin were not the utility workers they claimed to be — a year-long ordeal documented by Canadian UFO researcher John Magor that eventually drove her off the island.The episode closes with the Hartford circus fire of July 6, 1944, when the canvas big top of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey circus, waterproofed with a mixture of white gasoline and paraffin wax, caught at the edge and was consumed in under ten minutes, killing 167 of the roughly 7,000 people inside, most of them children. As the flames climbed the roof, the bandleader struck up 'Stars and Stripes Forever,' the circus's coded signal for an emergency, while the Great Wallendas scrambled down from their high wire unhurt. Ringmaster Fred Bradna called for a calm exit, but the crowd ignored him as burning canvas and hot wax fell from above. Two of the exits were blocked by the steel chutes used to move animals in and out, so many of the dead were trampled there rather than burned, and a photograph of the clown Emmett Kelly carrying a single bucket of water toward the blaze fixed the catastrophe in memory as the day the clowns cried. Investigators never settled the cause, though the state fire marshal leaned toward a carelessly dropped cigarette. A fifteen-year-old circus hand named Robert Dale Segee confessed to setting the fire years later and then recanted. And one young victim, her face barely touched by the flames, was never claimed — buried under the name Little Miss 1565 and identified only decades afterward, and only disputably, as Eleanor Cook.