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

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.

A Newport Beach physician who ran a Riverside skin-care clinic pleaded guilty to the sexual battery of three patients during their exams, and he will never hold a medical license again.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/SannoufiLook 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 Paris auction house expected half a million dollars for the world's first lab-grown Tyrannosaurus rex handbag, and the bidding gave out at a hundred and fifty thousand for a purse paleontologists say is mostly chicken.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/trexpurseLook 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.

At her own party, a wealthy widow watches her trusted investment counselor's fingers close around a small copper idol — the Queen of Thieves — as if the little goddess had reached out of the shadows and chosen him for her own.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, “Ranee of Rajputana” (January 24, 1978) ***WD00:47:42.858 = Mr. Keen, “the Boy Who Used Big Words” (February 10, 1944) ***WD01:16:48.935 = Murder at Midnight, “Black Swan” (August 18, 1947)01:44:05.862 = The Black Museum, “Shilling” (1952) ***WD02:09:13.868 = Mysterious Traveler, “Stranger In The House” (January 29, 1952)02:40:26.038 = Mystery House, “Murder Takes Practice” (April 21, 1946) ***WD03:07:28.614 = Night Beat, “Antonio's Return” (July 13, 1951) ***WD03:36:51.555 = Nightfall, “After Sunset” (April 29, 1983)04:03:47.330 = Obsession, “Dynamite” (October 09, 1950) ***WD04:34:36.912 = Pat Novak For Hire, “Jack of Clubs” (February 20, 1949) ***WD05:04:05.819 = 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/WDRR0689

Sometime before dawn on July 2, 1951, a 67-year-old St. Petersburg widow was reduced to ash in her own armchair while the room around her sat almost untouched, leaving behind little more than a shrunken skull, a piece of spine, and a single foot still resting in its slipper.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/MaryHardyReeserREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p88de8vFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: When police found her in 1951, she was almost entirely ash. But mysteriously, the rest of her apartment remained almost perfectly intact. We'll look at the death of Mary Reeser – which became known as “The Cinder Woman Case”. (Did Mary Hardy Reeser Spontaneously Combust?) *** Most crimes are pretty ordinary – assault, robbery, the occasional murder, but once in a while a crime is committed in a strange, shocking way – to the point it's almost hard to believe what you are hearing is a true story. I'll share a few of those strange crimes. (Creepy Crimes and Crazy Criminals) *** One of the reasons we find chimpanzees so interesting is because they are so much like humans – in body shape, the way they express themselves, it's eerie sometimes. But still, we know they are just apes. Then there is the strange case of Oliver – a chimpanzee that also appeared to be human. Or was he a human that appeared to be a chimpanzee? Or, is it possible, that Oliver was a genuine genetic hybrid of the two? We'll look at his incredibly strange story. (Oliver, The Humanzee) *** Some hauntings are more terrifying than others – and some are stranger than others. What happened to the Palzon family in Zaragoza, Spain possibly qualifies for both. They didn't have a typical haunting – this was no poltergeist or spirit of a recently passed person… they were terrorized by a horrifying goblin. (The Zaragoza Goblin) *** Most haunted paintings are hundreds of years old – but one in particular was painted in the late 20th Century, and to many, it is the most disturbing painting they've ever laid eyes on. (The Hands Resist Him)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:01:14.404 = Show Open00:03:53.182 = Did Mary Hardy Reeser Spontaneously Combust?00:14:39.389 = The Hands Resist Him ***00:29:00.706 = Oliver, the Humanzee ***00:44:04.298 = Creepy Crimes and Crazy Criminals ***00:59:07.540 = The Zaragoza Goblin ***01:09:16.862 = 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 Hands Resist Him” by Jenne Gentry for ListVerse: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/mtmj2ysr“Oliver, The Humanzee” by Bipin Dimri for Historic Mysteries: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2ttc3p8s“The Zaragoza Goblin” by Brent Swancer for Mysterious Universe: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2jxxdd6b“Did Mary Hardy Reeser Spontaneously Combust?” by Tommy Thompson for Talk Murder: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p937wec“Creepy Crimes and Crazy Criminals” by C.J. Phillips for ListVerse: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8b3dyw(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, 2021This episode of Weird Darkness ranges from a 1951 Florida death that investigators could not explain, to a painting blamed for three deaths, a chimpanzee long mistaken for a human hybrid, a catalog of bizarre real-world crimes, and a disembodied voice that terrorized a Spanish apartment building in 1934.It opens with the morning of July 2, 1951, when landlady Pansy Carpenter found the doorknob to apartment 1200 Cherry Street in St. Petersburg, Florida hot to the touch and called police, who discovered that 67-year-old widow Mary Hardy Reeser had been reduced almost entirely to ash. Only her skull, shrunken to roughly the size of a teacup, a section of spine, and a left foot still in its slipper remained, while the apartment around her showed little more than soot on the ceiling and a recliner burned down to its springs. A greasy film coating the walls and floor was later identified by the FBI, which devoted a 115-page report to the case, as melted human fat. Her son, Dr. Richard Reeser, had left her around 8 p.m. the night before, resting in her favorite recliner in a Van Raalte rayon-acetate nightgown with a freshly lit cigarette. Investigators ruled out lightning, accelerants, and any motive for murder, which left two explanations in contention — a dropped cigarette that set her flammable nightgown alight and rendered her body into a slow-burning wick, or spontaneous human combustion — for the death that came to be known as the Cinder Woman case.From there the episode turns to William Stoneham's 1972 oil painting The Hands Resist Him, a 36-by-24-inch canvas showing a young boy beside a hollow-eyed, life-size doll while disembodied hands press against a glass door behind them. Stoneham based the boy on a photograph of himself at age five at his grandmother's Chicago apartment and drew the title from a 1971 poem by his first wife, Rhoann Ponseti. The work gained its reputation in February 2000, when a couple listed it on eBay as a haunted painting, claiming their four-and-a-half-year-old daughter saw the figures leave the canvas at night and that a motion-sensor camera caught the boy crawling out and the doll holding a gun; the listing drew more than 30,000 views and sold for $1,050. Its lore also ties three deaths to the painting — art critic Henry Seldis in 1978, gallery owner Charles Feingarten in 1981, and Godfather actor John Marley in 1984 — and the canvas now sits in the back room of Kim Smith's Perception Fine Art Gallery in Grand Rapids, Michigan.Next comes the story of Oliver, a chimpanzee captured in the Congo around 1957 who walked upright by nature, had a flatter and more human-looking face, light-colored eyes, pattern baldness, and a soft voice, and was marketed as a humanzee, a supposed human-chimpanzee hybrid and missing link. Owned by animal trainers Frank and Janet Berger, who featured him on The Ed Sullivan Show, Oliver drank morning coffee, mixed his own evening cocktails, and moved loads with a wheelbarrow, and early claims that he carried 47 chromosomes fed the hybrid theory. After being passed among several owners and confined for years in a small cage at the Buckshire Company laboratory, where he developed arthritis and muscular atrophy, he was rescued in 1996 to a chimpanzee sanctuary, where University of Chicago testing established that he had the ordinary chimpanzee count of 48 chromosomes and belonged to a Central African subspecies already known for human-like features. Oliver died in his sleep on June 2, 2012, beside a companion named Raisin, and his ashes were spread on the sanctuary grounds.After that, the episode collects a series of strange real-world crimes, starting with California inmate Jaime Osuna, already serving a life sentence for the 2011 murder of Yvette Pena, who killed his cellmate Luis Romero in 2019 and fashioned parts of the body into a necklace. It then moves to Michigan and the 2019 murder of 25-year-old Kevin Bacon by Mark Latunski, a man Bacon had met through a Christmas Eve date on Grindr, and to Scotland, where a crew of thieves made off with roughly £280,000 in blue WKD alcopops from Caledonian Bottlers. Other cases include a Chennai airport smuggling ring caught in March 2021 with gold paste hidden beneath hairpieces, a Cleveland man named Michael Harrel who handed a bank teller a robbery note for $206 with his own name and contact details written on the back, and a Florida man, Matthew Leatham, arrested after dialing 911 twice to ask for a ride home, his forehead tattooed with the outline of the state. The grimmest case belongs to Shabaz Khan of Burnley, England, who blamed two djinn he called Robert and Rita for driving him to murder Dr. Saman Mir Sacharvi and her 14-year-old daughter Vian Mangrio before setting their home on fire.The episode closes with the Goblin of Zaragoza, which began on September 27, 1934, when a maid named Pascuala Alcocer, alone in the kitchen of the Palazon family's second-floor apartment on Gascón de Gotor street in Zaragoza, Spain, heard a child-like male voice rise from the stove complaining that she was hurting it. Over the following weeks the disembodied voice spoke from the stove, the chimney, and the walls, by turns playful and menacing, and grew into laughter, growls, and screaming that at one point seemed to shake the entire building. Spanish police, a psychiatrist named Joaquin Jimen Orriera, and an architect all investigated, and the voice continued even after Pascuala was led

Thirteen years after The Empire Strikes Back, the long-delayed finale arrived in 1996 — six episodes that brought the original trilogy to a close. Funding cuts had stalled production for more than a decade, but the conclusion was completed at last, with Anthony Daniels returning one final time as C-3PO, joined by Brock Peters as Darth Vader, John Lithgow's Yoda, and Ed Asner as Jabba the Hutt. Still carried by John Williams' score and the original sound effects, it's Return of the Jedi as you've never heard it. | #RRStarWarsLook 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 Open00:02:37.835 = Episode 01: Tatooine Haunts00:34:52.858 = Episode 02: Fast Friends01:04:58.749 = Episode 03: Prophecies And Destinies 01:38:38.890 = Episode 04: Pattern And Web02:06:06.595 = Episode 05: So Turns a Galaxy, So Turns a Wheel02:40:27.908 = Episode 06: Blood of a Jedi03:14:07.134 = 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/WDRRSW03

A dying woman swears there's a prowler downstairs, but what her husband finds in the dark kitchen is a timid little ghost who can't remember why he's come.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 Forgetful Ghost” (January 23, 1978) ***WD00:46:42.148 = Philip Marlowe, “Grim Echo” (February 14, 1950)01:16:14.347 = Yours Truly Johnny Dollar, “The Ghost To Ghost Matter” (May 18, 1958) ***WD01:41:29.916 = The Black Mass, “Ash Tree” (December 18, 1963) ***WD02:11:43.744 = Michael Shayne, “Big Voice Means a Big Body” (May 07, 1945)02:42:36.427 = Beyond Midnight, “The Yellow Room” (June 06, 1969) ***WD03:13:43.776 = MindWebs, “Desertion” (February 18, 1982)03:44:37.897 = Mystery In The Air, “The Marvelous Barastro” (August 07, 1947)04:13:52.519 = Molle Mystery Theater, “Follow That Cab” (April 19, 1946)04:43:19.587 = 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/WDRR0688This #RetroRadio episode, "A Ghost Who Forgot Why He Came, a Dying Wife, a Final Anniversary," gathers nine vintage old-time-radio broadcasts of mystery, horror, and the supernatural — from a haunted ash tree in 17th-century England to a converted man walking the crushing surface of Jupiter.The CBS Radio Mystery Theater opens the night with "The Forgetful Ghost," in which a dying Eve Gordon wakes her husband Sam in the small hours, certain a prowler is moving through their locked-up house — but when Sam creeps down to the dark kitchen with his hickory walking stick raised, the intruder turns out to be a meek, see-through little man named Peter Pruitt, a ghost who can't recall why he was sent or whom he came to fetch, even as the couple's fortieth wedding anniversary draws closer by the hour. Host E.G. Marshall, a script by Ian Martin, and Mandel Kramer in the lead carry this January 23, 1978 tale of a haunting that proves gentler, and far stranger, than it first appears.Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles private detective Philip Marlowe takes the wheel in "The Grim Echo," skidding off a blizzard-blind mountain road and into a snow-filled culvert directly in front of Echo Lodge — the one place on earth where the name Philip Marlowe is pure poison. Six months earlier Marlowe shot and killed Virgil Barucki in a Los Angeles alley, and now the storm has trapped him with Barucki's grieving widow Helen, his sister Donna, his mother, and the handyman Ralph Tolman, while an "accidental" cabin explosion and a stolen .38 revolver make it clear that someone inside Echo Lodge wants him frozen, or dead. Gerald Mohr stars in this February 14, 1950 chiller.Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar sends the freelance insurance investigator with the action-packed expense account into "The Ghost To Ghost Matter," after a frantic Oscar Trimley telephones from the sleepy mill town of Lake City, New Jersey, swearing that Ian McAndrews — the town's founder, dead five years and already paid out at $55,000 on his life policy — has come back to haunt the streets. Every midnight the old clock tower strikes thirteen, bats pour from the belfry, and a wail rises over the lake, so Dollar brings along old flame Nancy Turner to size up a town that insists its founder's ghost simply won't rest. Bob Bailey stars in this May 18, 1958 mystery out of Hartford, Connecticut.The Black Mass adapts M.R. James's classic "The Ash Tree," set at Castringham Hall in Suffolk, England, where the witch trials of 1690 brought the hanging of Mrs. Mothersole — condemned largely on the testimony of Sir Matthew Fell, who swore he watched her climb the great ash tree beside the house at the full of the moon to cut twigs with a peculiarly curved knife. When Sir Matthew is found dead and black in his bed beneath that same tree, the curse the witch promised begins working its way down through the generations of the Fell family and through whatever still lives inside the hollow trunk of the ash. A December 18, 1963 telling of one of the most quietly horrifying ghost stories ever written.The Adventures of Michael Shayne brings private detective Mike Shayne and his secretary Phyllis Knight into "Big Voice Means a Big Body," when 230-pound opera star Madame Jolene Toulot sweeps into the office waving an anonymous letter that threatens her life if she publishes her scandalous tell-all memoirs. With a roster of suspects who'd all rather stay out of the book — old suitor Roderick MacKenzie of the Newport MacKenzies, ex-husband and aspiring congressman Edwin Buck, rival soprano Leonora Baril, and the maestro Savadel — Shayne heads to the Figaro Theatre for a double bill of Pagliacci and Cavalleria Rusticana, where the diva's fifth farewell performance takes a fatal turn. Wally Maher and Cathy Lewis star in this May 7, 1945 case.Beyond Midnight, the eerie South African series, presents "The Yellow Room," in which the avowed atheist Ronald Todd accepts a wager from the elderly Mrs. Watts: one thousand pounds to spend a single night, entirely alone, in the haunted north wing of Chancellors — the very room where the ghost-hunting sixth Duke of Wallingford lost his sanity and a captain of the Hussars leapt to his death. Over Father Doyle's warnings, Todd is locked in with seven candles for company and a copy of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, and as the clock passes midnight the candles begin going out one by one. Michael McCabe produced this June 6, 1969 broadcast.MindWebs turns to science fiction with Clifford Simak's "Desertion," set in Dome Number Three of the Jovian Survey Commission on the surface of Jupiter, where the planet's crushing fifteen thousand pounds per square inch of pressure and its ammonia rains make unprotected human life impossible. To conquer it, Kent Fowler has been converting his men into "lopers," the planet's native life form — but four men have already loped out into the howling gale two by two and never come back, and now young Harold Allen is next through Miss Stanley's converter. When Fowler at last sends out his own aging dog, Towser, the truth about why no one returns finally begins to surface. A February 18, 1982 reading hosted by Michael Hansen.Mystery in the Air stars Peter Lorre in Ben Hecht's "The Marvelous Barastro," opening as the magician and hypnotist Barastro walks into the office of criminal lawyer Amos G. Hall and calmly announces that he intends to commit a murder before the night is out. His target is Rico Sansoni, a rival hypnotist who once stole away the affections of Barastro's blind wife Anna by studying and mastering the magician's own voice — close enough to deceive even her in the dark. As Barastro recounts hunting his enemy from country to country and city to city, the line between the two illusionists grows harder and harder to draw. An August 7, 1947 broadcast sponsored by Camel cigarettes.Molle Mystery Theater closes the night on a lighter note with the comedy "Follow That Cab," starring two New York City cabbies, Mo and Julius, who have read so many issues of Absolutely Authentic True Crime Fiction — and idolized its hero, detective Daniel Daremore — that they're convinced they can crack any case. When a fare leaps from the cab without paying and a song publisher named Larkin turns up shot dead in his apartment, the pair wipe away the fingerprints to make the murder "more baffling," let their prime suspect walk, and bumble their way toward a stolen song called "Joan," a desperate songwriter named Boynton, and a mysterious redhead. Written by Sid and Larry Sloan, this April 19, 1946 farce sends up the whole hardboiled detective genre with host Jeffrey Barnes presiding.

When the Hale-Bopp comet swung past Earth in 1997, thirty-nine people put on matching black shirts and brand-new Nikes, swallowed a lethal mix of barbiturates and vodka, and lay down beneath purple shrouds to die — certain their souls were about to board the alien ship they believed was hiding in the comet's tail.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/heavensgateREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/343j2ju2FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Following an anonymous tip, police enter a mansion in Rancho Santa Fe, an exclusive suburb of San Diego, California, and discover 39 victims of a mass suicide. The deceased–21 women and 18 men of varying ages–were all found lying peaceably in matching dark clothes and Nike sneakers and had no noticeable signs of blood or trauma. It was later revealed that the men and women were members of the “Heaven's Gate” religious cult, whose leaders preached that suicide would allow them to leave their bodily “containers” and enter an alien spacecraft hidden behind the Hale-Bopp comet. *** PLUS, the creepy true-crime story of two men who were caught trying to steal the body of the 16th President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln. But that is by no means the end of this story full of twists, turns, myths, and conspiracies.CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Heaven's Gate, Part 1 00:00:53.808 = Show Open00:02:37.373 = Heaven's Gate, Part 200:04:59.269 = Heaven's Gate, Part 300:09:37.695 = Heaven's Gate, Part 4 ***00:23:22.776 = Stealing Lincoln's Bones, Part 1 ***00:44:45.437 = Stealing Lincoln's Bones, Part 2 ***00:57:58.687 = 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:“Heavens Gate” by Rolling Stone: http://bit.ly/WeirdDarkness2D7tbeZ, Ranker: http://bit.ly/weirddarkness2UIsK4O, and History.com: http://bit.ly/WeirdDarkness2G3uqfN“Stealing Lincoln's Bones” by Troy Taylor: https://www.americanhauntingsink.com/stealing-lincolns-bones(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 28, 2021Weird Darkness runs from the 1997 mass suicide of the Heaven's Gate UFO cult outside San Diego to an 1876 counterfeiting gang's attempt to steal Abraham Lincoln's corpse from his tomb in Springfield, Illinois.It opens with the discovery, on March 26, 1997, of thirty-nine members of Heaven's Gate inside a rented mansion in the San Diego suburb of Rancho Santa Fe — twenty-one women and eighteen men lying beneath purple shrouds in matching black shirts and new black-and-white Nike sneakers, plastic bags over their heads, after swallowing phenobarbital and vodka. They believed the deaths would free their souls to board an alien spacecraft trailing the Hale-Bopp comet, which was making its closest approach to Earth that month. Former music professor Marshall Applewhite had started the group in 1975 with his nurse Bonnie Lu Nettles, the two of them renaming themselves Bo and Peep and later Do and Ti before persuading about twenty people in Oregon to leave their families and wait in eastern Colorado for a ship that never arrived. Applewhite preached that human bodies were disposable containers, that he was the second coming of Jesus, and that God was an alien. Nettles died in 1985, but he held the group together, and by the 1990s it had become the first well-known internet-era cult, paying its bills by building web pages under the business name Higher Source. The members watched Star Trek: The Next Generation, sewed Heaven's Gate Away Team patches onto their uniforms, severed contact with relatives through a practice Applewhite called breaking away, and submitted to a ban on sex that several of the men, Applewhite among them, enforced on themselves through castration.The episode closes with the 1876 plot to steal Abraham Lincoln's body from his tomb at Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, Illinois. A Chicago counterfeiting ring run by James "Big Jim" Kneally had lost its master engraver, Benjamin Boyd, to a ten-year term in Joliet Penitentiary, so the gang resolved to seize the president's corpse and ransom it for Boyd's freedom. On election night, November 7, 1876, gang members Terence Mullen and Jack Hughes filed through the lock and split the marble sarcophagus with an ax, unaware that the grave robber they knew as Jim Morrissey was Secret Service operative Lewis Swegles, and that Captain Patrick Tyrell's agents and Pinkerton detectives hired by Robert Lincoln were hidden elsewhere in the monument. The trap fell apart when the lawmen fired on one another in the dark and the two robbers wandered off and escaped, though both were captured on November 18 and, with grave robbery barely a crime in Illinois at the time, served only a year in Joliet. What the public would not learn for years was that custodian John C. Power and a secret brotherhood calling itself the Lincoln Guard of Honor had already dragged the five-hundred-pound coffin into a damp labyrinth beneath the monument and buried it under loose boards and dirt, leaving visitors to grieve over an empty sarcophagus. The body was shifted from hiding place to hiding place until 1901, when Robert Lincoln ordered his father's casket lowered ten feet, locked inside a steel cage, and sealed under two tons of concrete, following one last viewing in which Leon P. Hopkins, the plumber who had closed the coffin back in 1865, studied a chalk-whitened but recognizable face and soldered the lead shut for good.

A newly declassified FBI form describes a meter-wide red sphere with a white plasma core hovering in a backyard one evening, among dozens of glowing-orb sightings in the Pentagon's third batch of UFO files.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/UFO-Batch-3Look 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.

After her 24-year-old daughter died by suicide in Montreal, Kristie Carrier read the months of ChatGPT conversations on Alice's phone — and filed suit against OpenAI and Sam Altman.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/openai-suicide-lawsuitLook for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://pod.link/1078714736*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.

When the luxury liner SS Morro Castle erupted in flames off the New Jersey coast in 1934, it left behind 137 dead, a captain's corpse that vanished before it could be examined, and a heroic radio operator whose criminal past suggested he may have started the fire himself. | #WDRadio June 14, 2026==========HOUR ONE: Jeannie Saffin already had a tough life, being born with a birth defect that stunted her mental growth, leaving her with the mind of a child, never getting married and having kids, never dating… but that all pales in comparison to how she died: bursting into flames for no apparent reason. Was Jeannie Saffin the victim of spontaneous human combustion? (The Spontaneous Combustion of Jeannie Saffin) *** Sometimes it's easy to get a girl to go out with you – just be polite and ask. Some men resort to cheesy pickup lines thinking it will help their chances. But one man chose to call upon a woman in a very unusual way… by purchasing a gravestone. (Pitching Woo With a Tombstone) *** If a man demands his girlfriend give up the baby they conceived, otherwise he would no longer be with the woman – what is that newborn's mother to do? Sadly, Emily Dunn made the wrong decision – with tragic results. (The Durbin Baby Murder) *** The transplanting of an organ is almost a routine procedure now in the 21st century – even doing a transplant of an arm or a leg isn't uncommon. But when you talk about transplanting a living head onto a dead body – that's when things get tricky. But Robert White thought it could be done – and even tried doing it. (The Man Who Wanted To Do a Head Transplant) *** Imagine getting onto a plane and once in the air finding out that the pilot wasn't qualified to fly that kind of plane – and that he was only there because the original pilot wasn't available due to being dead. That's what happened in 1934 on the boat, the SS Morro Castle. And it was the beginning of tragedy after tragedy. (Mystery, Mismanagement, and Mayhem on the SS Morro Castle)==========HOUR TWO: In June of 2009 a man calling himself Peter Bergmann checked in to a hotel in Sligo Town. Five days later his body was found on Rosses Point Beach. But Peter Bergmann was not Peter Bergmann – so who was he? (The Peter Bergmann Mystery) *** Sharing stories from people who are frightened by a bump in the night or a strange shadow on the wall in their bedroom is one thing, but when you get professional ghost hunters telling of the scariest experiences they've had, you know it has to be some freaky stuff. (Scariest Experiences of Ghost Hunters) ==========SUDDEN DEATH OVERTIME: More of the scariest experiences of ghost hunters! *** I'll tell you about that time when a dam failed – and because of it, people were legally allowed to marry the dead. And still do to this day. (That Time A Failed Dam Led to Marrying Corpses) *** Personal experiences of those who have stayed at the Wolf Creek Inn, plus some hard evidence, seems to indicate that spirits who haunt the place are not only benign in nature, but even protect the guests and owners from other malevolent spirits which roam there as well. (Haunts at Wolf Creek Inn)==========SOURCES AND REFERENCES FROM TONIGHT'S SHOW:“Mystery, Mismanagement, and Mayhem on the SS Morro Castle” by Brent Swancer for Mysterious Universe:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/56jb9c7j“The Man Who Wanted To Do a Head Transplant” by Gary Krist for the Washington Post: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/39d2k9pw“The Durbin Baby Murder” posted at Murders In History: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/c96z9kst“Pitching Woo With a Tombstone” from the New York Journal, posted at The Victorian Book of the Dead website:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/utw6vh45“The Spontaneous Combustion of Jeannie Saffin” by Brent Swancer for Mysterious Universe:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/e6as67fn“That Time A Failed Dam Led to Marrying Corpses” by Kaushik Patowary for Amusing Planet: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/zyrxx43k“Scariest Experiences of Ghost Hunters” by Amanda Ashley for Graveyard Shift:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/y7tx3a2t“Haunts at Wolf Creek Inn” posted at HauntedHouses.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yadzm4ae“The Peter Bergmann Mystery” by Rosita Boland for Irish Times: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/9b44kfs==========(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 mailto:affiliates@radioamerica.com, or call 800-807-4703 (press 2 or dial ext 250).==========https://weirddarkness.com/WDR20260614This episode of Weird Darkness moves from a burning luxury liner off the New Jersey coast to a fire-scarred kitchen in London, a body on an Irish beach, a drowned infant in Illinois, a collapsed French dam that legalized marrying the dead, and a haunted stagecoach inn in Oregon — with a head-transplant surgeon and a tombstone-shopping widower along the way.It opens with the SS Morro Castle, the 508-foot American ocean liner that ferried wealthy passengers between New York and Havana during Prohibition until September 8, 1934, when its captain, Robert Wilmott, dropped dead the night before departure and a fire of unknown origin erupted in a B Deck storage locker on the voyage home. Replacement captain William Warms steered into gale-force winds and waited 38 minutes to send a distress call, paint-gummed lifeboats refused to lower, untrained passengers broke their necks jumping in faulty life jackets, and at least 137 of the 549 aboard died before the charred hulk ran aground at Asbury Park, New Jersey, where souvenir stands sprang up around the wreck. Suspicion later fell on chief radio operator George White Rogers, the disaster's celebrated hero, whose hidden history of arson convictions, an aquarium-heater bomb built to maim a police lieutenant asking too many questions, and a double murder ended with his sudden death in Trenton State Prison — and the disappearance of his prison records.From there the episode lightens briefly with a pair of newspaper accounts of courtship by gravestone: an 1896 story from the Cincinnati Enquirer about a widower who finally bought a $50 monument for his wife of five years past — not out of grief, but to impress a wealthy widow who had called him too cheap to mark the grave — and a 1924 item from the Kansas City Star about a Kansas woman who married a widower precisely because he kept his first wife's grave so well.Next comes Dr. Robert J. White, the Cleveland neurosurgeon who watched the first successful human kidney transplant in Boston in 1954 and spent the rest of his life pursuing something far stranger: transplanting a living human head onto a donor body. In March 1970 he performed the operation on monkeys, moving one animal's head onto another's decapitated body in an 18-hour surgery; the hybrid lived nine days. White, a devout Catholic who sparred publicly with journalist Oriana Fallaci and animal rights activist Ingrid Newkirk, came close to attempting the procedure on a quadriplegic human volunteer through Russia's medical system before he died in 2010, leaving behind questions about consciousness, identity, and death that medicine has yet to answer.The hour then turns to Jeannie Saffin, a 61-year-old London woman with the mental capacity of a child who, on September 15, 1982, burst into flames while sitting calmly at her father's kitchen table in Edmonton with her hands in her lap. Her father Jack and brother-in-law Don Carroll doused the fire, but Jeannie — burned to the subcutaneous fat on her face, hands, and abdomen — never screamed, slipped into a coma, and died eight days later. The chair she sat in was unmarked, the nearest flame was a shielded pilot light five feet away, and a police constable concluded it was spontaneous human combustion, a verdict the coroner rejected. Skeptic Joe Nickell's pipe-ember theory accounts for some details, but not how a human body ignited so completely in under two minutes while burning nothing around it.Then the mystery of Peter Bergmann: the tall, gray-haired man with an Austrian accent who arrived in Sligo, Ireland by bus on June 12, 2009, checked into the Sligo City Hotel under a false name and a fabricated Vienna address, and over three days left the hotel thirteen times carrying a full purple plastic bag — returning empty-handed each time, never once caught by CCTV disposing of anything. He bought ten international stamps, cut the labels from his clothes, folded them neatly on a rock at Rosses Point Beach, and was found dead at the water's edge the next morning near Dead Man's Point. The autopsy revealed terminal prostate cancer he could not have been unaware of, yet he died of cardiac arrest, not dr

In Steven Spielberg's Disclosure Day, a former nun clutches a crucifix, prays the words Jesus prayed the night before the cross, and then lets it fall to the floor.EPISODE PAGE (Includes Sources and Transcript): https://weirddarkness.com/cotu-disclosuredayLISTEN 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 for Weird Darkness: https://pod.link/1078714736. For Church of the Undead episodes specifically, you can find a list of apps here: https://pod.link/1651062114.*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: June 14, 2026