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

Before sixteen children were found in a single room in Hamden, the Siders family left behind another house in Gallia County — and a renovator says he found it in the same condition.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/siderscase20260722Look 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.

Al Capone begged his way into the prison band, Robert Stroud spent eleven years in the hospital, and every inmate at Alcatraz learned fast that on the Rock, almost everything beyond a meal and a cot had to be earned... and a single broken rule could send you into total silence and darkness in the hole.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/alcatrazREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/y7sjc7zwCHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:01:23.422 = Show Open00:02:30.901 = Being An Alcatraz Inmate00:19:49.953 = The Impossibility of Escaping Alcatraz ***00:40:10.152 = Prisons More terrifying Than Alcatraz ***00:52:59.621 = 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:“Being An Alcatraz Inmate” by Melissa Sartore for Ranker.com's Weird History:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/535vhu7n“The Impossibility of Escaping Alcatraz” by Melissa Sartore for Ranker.com's Weird History:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/bdfj2ypt“More Terrifying Than Alcatraz” by Michelle Nati for Ranker.com's Unspeakable Times: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/3jwhh268(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: February, 2021Weird Darkness takes listeners inside the federal penitentiary on Alcatraz Island — what daily life was actually like behind its walls, the fourteen escape attempts that mostly ended in the San Francisco Bay, and a tour of American prisons whose conditions make the Rock look mild by comparison.It opens with the texture of everyday survival at Alcatraz, where the prison held roughly 330 men in cells measuring five feet by nine, and where food, clothing, shelter, and medical care were the only four rights an inmate had — everything else, from library access to a spot in the prison band, had to be earned. Warden James A. Johnston enforced a code of silence that lasted until 1937, so inmates like Jim Quillen talked through the pipes between cells, and Quillen described nineteen days in solitary as total silence and darkness. Al Capone begged his way into the Rock Islanders band and learned tenor guitar, tenor banjo, and mandola; Robert Stroud, the Birdman of Alcatraz, spent eleven of his seventeen years there in the hospital, studying law and languages. Prisoners were counted thirteen times a day, allowed a single two-page letter each week to a blood relative, and served food widely regarded as the best in the federal system — and still, by inmate Bryan Conway's account, fourteen of three hundred seventeen men went violently insane during his last year, one dock worker chopping off the fingers of his own left hand with an ax.From there, the episode turns to the men who tried to leave. Joseph "Dutch" Bowers became the first, shot off a fence on April 27th, 1936, while working the incinerator detail. Theodore Cole and Ralph Roe sawed through a window in the Model Industries Building and vanished into a storm-driven current in December 1937, their bodies never found. The 1938 breakout by James Limerick, Jimmy Lucas, and Rufus "Whitey" Franklin killed guard Royal C. Cline with a hammer; Arthur "Doc" Barker, son of Ma Barker, was shot in the head near the shoreline in January 1939. The May 1946 "Battle of Alcatraz" pulled in the Coast Guard and the Marines over two days and left guards William Miller and Harold Stites dead. And the most famous attempt of all came in June 1962, when Frank Morris and brothers John and Clarence Anglin chipped through their cell walls with spoons, left dummy heads made of soap and hair in their beds, and disappeared on a raft stitched from raincoats — three men the FBI never found.The episode closes by leaving Alcatraz behind for prisons still standing. ADX Florence in Colorado, the "Alcatraz of the Rockies," holds inmates like Ted Kaczynski and Ramzi Yousef in seventy-five-square-foot concrete cells for twenty-three hours a day. At the Polunsky Unit in Livingston, Texas, an inmate named Andre Thomas removed his own eye. Sheriff Joe Arpaio's Maricopa County Tent City Jail in Phoenix housed people outdoors in the Arizona heat until it was dismantled in 2017. Orleans Parish Prison in New Orleans has stood on the same ground for three hundred years, first used to hold enslaved people who tried to escape. San Quentin, built in 1852 and once home to Charles Manson and Richard Ramirez, drew a court-appointed report describing a facility so old, dirty, and overcrowded that housing people there was called dangerous.

A 2023 book collects accounts of shapeshifting strangers, reptilian visitors, and living doubles, arguing the aliens John Carpenter put on screen may have been walking among us all along.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/TheyLiveREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/ycktrfu5FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Have you ever felt like something was off about someone you met? What if the truth was more bizarre than you could imagine - that aliens walk secretly among us, perfectly disguised? (Mimic In The Mirror) *** The short story “Eight O'Clock In The Morning” by Ray Nelson – the inspiration for the movie “They Live!” *** Left-handedness: once a mark of the devil, now a unique trait celebrated across the globe. From the Salem Witch Trials to modern-day challenges with spiral notebooks, left-handers have been forced to navigate a world designed for righties, despite the historical stigmas, surprising advantages, and the evolving recognition of left-handers in combat, culture, and commerce. (Left-Handers Are In League With The Devil) *** In the shadow of Switzerland's majestic Eiger mountain, 29-year-old Aidan Roche vanished without a trace during a solo hiking trip. Despite an unlocked camper-van and one last eerie messages sent from the trail, his disappearance remained shrouded in mystery. Months later, a grim discovery brought more questions than answers. (The Disappearance of Aidan Roche) *** In the summer of 1948, a series of inexplicable fires ravaged the Willey farm near Macomb, Illinois, destroying the family's home and barns. Despite the efforts of local authorities and the U.S. Air Force, no logical explanation could be found for the hundreds of mysterious blazes that seemed to start spontaneously. At the center of this baffling case was 13-year-old Wanet McNeil, whose alleged confession to arson left many unconvinced. Was Wanet truly responsible? Could she have been starting the fires with her mind? (The Macomb Firestarter) *** In 1991, 63-year-old Vasile Gorgos left his home in Romania to visit a cattle market and never returned, leaving his family to believe he had met a tragic fate. But 30 years later, Vasile shocked everyone when he mysteriously reappeared, wearing the same clothes as the day he vanished and carrying an unused train ticket from 1991 in his pocket. With no memory of where he'd been for three decades, Vasile's strange case has left people wondering if his disappearance could be tied to supernatural phenomena like portals, alien abduction, or shifts in time and space itself. (The Mysterious Vanishing of Vasile Gorgos)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = “Eight O'Clock In The Morning” (short fiction)00:12:38.092 = Show Open00:15:46.852 = Mimic In The Mirror: Are Aliens Among Us? ***00:26:13.246 = Left-Handers Are In League With The Devil00:32:35.305 = The Disappearance of Aidan Roche ***00:38:57.889 = The Macomb Firestarter00:48:20.167 = The Mysterious Vanishing of Vasile Gorgos ***00:55:50.605 = 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:“Eight O'Clock In The Morning” by Ray Nelson: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/mu7tmynm“Mimic In The Mirror” source: Sean Casteel at Spectral Vision: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yckjpyz8BOOK: “Mimics – The Others Among Us” by Sean Casteel and Tim R. Swartz: https://amzn.to/3Ws07IJBOOK: “Sky Crash Throughout Time (A Cosmic Conspiracy)” by Philip Kinsella and Brenda Butler: https://amzn.to/3WlE2v2“Left-Handers Are In League With The Devil” source: Baiily Benningfield at Ranker's Graveyard Shift:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8acbdh“The Disappearance of Aidan Roche” source: Strange Outdoors: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/mrxvj87r“The Macomb Firestarter” by Troy Taylor: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/5n7dbzmh (used with permission)“The Mysterious Vanishing of Vasile Gorgos” source: Marcus Lowth at UFO Insight:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/jxztu8nd(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 30, 2024In this episode of Weird Darkness, listeners move through alien impostors, the long history of left-handed stigma, a hiker who vanished in the Swiss Alps, a farm besieged by fires no one could explain, and a Romanian cattle trader who came home after thirty years.It opens with the mimics. Ray Nelson's 1963 story "Eight O'Clock in the Morning" — the basis for John Carpenter's 1988 film "They Live" — imagined reptilian aliens ruling Earth from behind human faces, and the 2023 book "Mimics: The Others Among Us" argues that scenario may not be fiction. The book collects accounts like that of Brenda Butler, co-author of a book on the Rendlesham Forest UFO incident, who in 1984 met a tall, blue-eyed man calling himself David Daniels and claiming to be from the Pleiades star cluster, then watched his skin turn scaly and reptilian before he shifted back to human. It recounts author Chris Holly's memory of a strikingly similar white-haired, blue-eyed family she later connected to the extraterrestrial "Tall Whites," alongside cases of living ghosts, doppelgangers, and a 1970s poltergeist blamed on a mimic wearing a teenage girl's face.From there the episode traces why left-handedness was treated as sinister for centuries. During the Salem Witch Trials, favoring the left hand could bring an accusation of witchcraft, and as late as the 1970s schools still forced left-handed children to write with their right. The Book of Matthew places the righteous on the right and the cursed on the left, the Zulu scalded children's left hands to stop their use, and communities along the Niger River tied left-handed cooking to witchcraft — while the ancient Celts prized left-handed warriors, Rome read left-side omens as favorable, and the Inca chief Lloque Yupanqui was admired for his left-handedness. The stigma softened by the late 1960s, when William Gruby opened Anything Left-Handed, Ltd. to sell scissors, kitchen tools, and watches built for lefties.Next comes the disappearance of Aidan Roche, a 29-year-old chemical engineer from Middlesbrough who vanished on June 22nd, 2023, while hiking the Eiger Trail in Switzerland's Bernese Oberland. His campervan sat unlocked and abandoned near the trailhead with everything inside intact, and his final messages placed him two hours from Grindelwald in clear weather on a well-traveled path. Swiss police, mountain rescue teams, dogs, and drones searched for five days, and his brothers Connor and Niall raised over £30,000 for helicopter surveillance and screen advertisements in twenty-four locations, yet found nothing until September 24th, 2023, when Aidan's body was discovered near the trail with the cause of death still unreleased.The episode then settles on the Willey farm outside Macomb, Illinois, where hundreds of fires broke out in the summer of 1948. They started on August 7th as small brown spots that appeared on the living room wallpaper, spread, smoldered, and burst into flame — more than 200 of them in one week, igniting curtains, an ironing board, and newspapers sealed inside a closed cupboard, often erupting on walls and ceilings while witnesses watched. The blazes consumed the farmhouse on August 14th and both barns soon after, drew over 1,000 spectators on August 22nd, and even brought in the U.S. Air Force, which floated directed radiation from the Russians as a possible cause. Officials declared the case solved on August 30th by pinning it on 13-year-old Wanet McNeil, who confessed to using kitchen matches after hours of questioning despite never being seen holding any; psychiatrist Dr. Sophie Schroeder found her mentally normal, researcher Vincent Gaddis called it poltergeist activity, and Fire Chief Fred Wilson retired still convinced something unexplainable had happened.The episode closes with Vasile Gorgos, a 63-year-old cattle trader from Bacău, Romania, who left for a market in 1991 and disappeared for three decades. His wife reported him missing, an extensive police search turned up no trace, and his family eventually held a ceremony and accepted that he was dead. On a Sunday afternoon in August 2021, a car pulled up outside his old house and drove off before anyone could read the plate, leaving behind a 93-year-old Vasile in the same clothes he had worn in 1991, carrying an unused train ticket from that year and an old identity card listing an address in another part of Romania. Doctor

A waterlogged model boat that keeps appearing wherever Professor Anders goes — dripping, shivering, impossible to be rid of — carries a name, a drowning, and a debt that refuses to stay buried.Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/OTRCHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “The Avocado Jungle” (April 20, 1978) ***WD00:46:14.846 = BBC Radio 4 / Radio 7, “The Boat Hook” (April 15, 1992)01:30:17.027 = Night Beat, “Five Days Off For Christmas” (December 21, 1951) ***WD01:58:08.526 = Beyond The Green Door, “Mr. Fritz-Hugh And Poisoned Knife Blade” (1966)02:02:01.418 = Campbell Playhouse, “A Christmas Carol” (December 24, 1939) ***WD03:00:24.073 = Box 13, “The Dowager And Dan Holiday” (November 16, 1949)03:27:06.293 = Calling All Cars, “Cookie Vejar Killing” (December 27, 1933)03:56:51.245 = Casey Crime Photographer, “Red Raincoat” (August 29, 1946)04:26:26.709 = CBC Mystery Theater, “The Ghost Town Hermit” (May 19, 1967) ***WD04:57:04.004 = 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/WDRR0722

A 2-year-old in Chambers County was found bound at the wrists, legs, and ankles and left face-down on a bed for more than half a day, and one of the two suspects was dead by his own hand before the arrest ever came.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/bound-toddler-alabamaLook 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 man climbed into the waste tank beneath a portable toilet to fish out a dropped bottle of Mountain Dew, and stayed there long enough to require power tools and a fire hose.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/portadewLook 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 murderer insists he is perfectly sane, even as he explains in careful detail how he killed the old man and hid the body beneath the floorboards.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/mitm-telltaleheartWeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Midnight In The Macabre (MITM), originally aired: July 21, 2026

When Martian invaders armed with deadly alien weapons arrive in the Kentucky hills to test their arsenal on unsuspecting humans, they make the fatal mistake of choosing Lem Coy—the local moonshiner's 'simple' son who's too dumb to die and strong enough to make extraterrestrials wish they'd stayed home.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/mitm-martiansandthecoysSOURCES and RESOURCES: “The Martians And The Coys” by Mark Reynolds, originally published in “Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy,” June 1951WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Midnight In The Macabre (MITM), originally aired: July 21, 2026

A Christmas Eve margin call sends a rich man's nephew scrambling for six thousand dollars he doesn't have, with a voice in his head whispering that theft and worse would be so easy.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, “Murder at Troyte's Hill” (April 17, 1978) ***WD00:45:26.180 = Weird Circle, “Markheim” (May 20, 1945)01:13:15.849 = The Whistler, “Return of Innocent” (April 02, 1945)01:42:35.169 = Strange Wills, “Margin For Love” (September 07, 1946)02:12:13.142 = Witch's Tale, “Suicide” (January 22, 1937) ***WD02:35:32.097 = X-Minus-1, “The Moon Is Green” (January 02, 1957)03:03:54.289 = Zero Hour, “Mind of the Beholder” (May 21, 1974) ***WD03:21:09.669 = ABC Mystery Time, “My Adventure in Norfolk” (1957) ***WD (LQ)03:45:10.191 = Strange Adventure, “The Friendly Ghost” (1945) ***WD03:48:27.530 = Arch Obeler's Plays, “Another World” (July 29, 1939) ***WD (LQ)04:17:11.933 = Barrie Craig, “The Case of the Borrowed Knife” (November 07, 1951)04:45:37.476 = 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/WDRR0721

A serial killer who kept his victims' heads, a woman held under a waterbed for seven years, and a phantom passenger who vanishes from the back seat — the open road has taken more than its share.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/HitchhikingHorrorsREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/29xmnbkaFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: The open road is a beautiful place where you can make friends that you'd otherwise never meet and have adventures that will change your life. But there are also extreme dangers to traveling with strangers on highways and backroads. No matter how trustworthy or well-intentioned a driver might seem, it's nearly impossible to tell if they are actually a predator or murderer, preying upon innocent hitchhikers. Creepy, true hitchhiker stories can make you think twice before picking up that stranger at the side of the road - or trying to "thumb it" yourself.LISTEN ON PODCAST APPS: Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.com/wdapps*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*SOURCES and RESOURCES:“The Hitchhiker” original story at the beginning of this episode was written by HoneyBunny00:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8b53e2“Hitchhiking Horror Stories” by Isadora Teich for Ranker.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/3yj8t3ka, by Jacob Shelton for Ranker.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2s4a2wkz, Eric Redding for ThoughtCatalog.com:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/hk8pn8rf, and from ScaryCarries.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2aead59t“Phantom Hitchhikers” posted at Anomalien.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/y4dxkv7m, Kelly Agan for Medium.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/36wucpzm, Paul Adams for The History Press:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8z538u, and Krystal DeCosta for ScientificAmerican.com:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/mr29nkpa(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, 2021Weird Darkness gathers the true horrors of the open road and the ghosts said to haunt it, moving from real hitchhiker murders across the United States and abroad to the phantom passengers who vanish from the back seat before the ride is over.It opens with the account of a newly married couple driving through a rainstorm who stop for a soaked hitchhiker, drop him at a crossroads, and later break down on a dark stretch of highway, only for the wife to wake to police floodlights and the sight of the same man atop their car with a machete over her husband's dismembered body, an escaped prison inmate cut down by gunfire moments after she runs.From there the show turns to a long run of documented and reported cases. Jacci Ansell-Lamb was last seen hitchhiking from London toward Manchester in May 1970 and found sexually assaulted and strangled with electrical wire outside Knutsford, England, a killing police have linked to serial murderer Peter Tobin though no suspect was ever charged. A German traveler on foot near Timaru, New Zealand had all his belongings stolen by a man in a white Honda in February 2016. Along Australia's outback near the cattle town of Hughenden, as many as twelve hitchhikers including eighteen-year-old Catherine Graham and thirty-two-year-old Tony Jones turned up dead over roughly two decades on a stretch dubbed the Highway of Death, the murders still unsolved. On May 19, 1977, twenty-year-old Colleen Stan was hitchhiking to a friend's birthday in California when Cameron Hooker picked her up and held her as a sex slave for seven years, keeping her in a box beneath his waterbed until his wife helped her escape in 1984 and Hooker drew a 104-year sentence.Next comes the case of Edmund Kemper, the six-foot-nine "Co-ed Killer" born December 18, 1948, who shot his grandmother and grandfather at fifteen, was released from a psychiatric hospital into his mother's care, and between May 1972 and February 1973 picked up hitchhiking female students, killed and decapitated them, and had sex with the corpses before murdering his mother with a claw hammer on Good Friday 1973 and phoning the same local police he drank with to confess. Woven among these are firsthand accounts shared online, among them a driver whose kindness reportedly talked a would-be killer out of his plan, a New Zealand couple who vanished in 1989 near Thames leading to the disputed conviction of David Tamihere, and a backpacker in Austria who fled a trucker's advances barefoot at a gas station.From there the episode moves deeper into unsolved and predatory cases. Between 1972 and 1973 the Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murders claimed at least seven women in Sonoma County, California, beginning with nineteen-year-old Kim Wendy Allen found bound and strangled in a creek bed on March 5, 1972, and including twelve-year-olds Maureen Sterling and Yvonne Weber, thirteen-year-old Lori Lee Kursa, fourteen-year-old Carolyn Davis, and twenty-three-year-old Theresa Walsh, the case never closed. The segment also gathers the crimes of clown-costumed killer John Wayne Gacy, trucker Keith Hunter Jesperson who dragged one victim beneath his rig, photographer Joseph Naso the "Alphabet Killer," the spree killers Douglas Gretzler and Willie Steelman, and sadistic trucker Ben Rhoades, caught when an Arizona trooper found a shackled woman inside his cab.The episode closes on the phantom hitchhiker, tracing the folk formula of the vanishing passenger before laying out the strongest real-world cases. One belongs to Maria Roux, killed on the N9 near Uniondale, South Africa on Good Friday 1968, whose specter was reported by driver Anton Le Grange in 1976 and motorcyclist Dawie Van Jaarsveld in 1978, her rear door seen opening and closing by a following officer. Another is "Lydia" of Jamestown, North Carolina, the white-gowned figure sighted at a railroad underpass since the 1920s and possibly rooted in the 1920 traffic death of Annie Jackson on the High Point Road. The final account belongs to carpet fitter Roy Fulton of Dunstable, England, who picked up a silent young man on Station Road near Stanbridge on October 12, 1979, turned to offer him a cigarette, and found the seat empty, a story he repeated without change on Arthur C. Clarke's World of Strange Powers in 1985.

A Baldwin County 911 call brought deputies to a Daphne family's front yard, where a mother lay dead and a father had run house to house leaving bloody handprints on the doors.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/bakerstabbingLook 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 Pennsylvania man came home to an opened bottle of wine, a bedroom light he swore he'd left off, and the woman he'd stopped dating months earlier shouting his name through the glass.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/match-date-stalkerLook 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.

You can rent a bedroom where a little girl in a yellow dress still hums lullabies, a miner's casita in a Texas ghost town, or a schoolhouse tucked inside a working cemetery — and every one of these haunted Airbnbs is bookable tonight.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/AirBNBREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/3s9xb4btFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Spending the night in a haunted house is always unnerving, but would you pay for the experience? If you're looking for a spooky escape, maybe you could try a haunted AirBNB! You might not rest in peace in these haunted homes, but you're bound to have a memorable night preparing for paranormal activity, seeking the supernatural, and greeting ghosts. (Book A Stay At a Haunted AirBNB) *** Sawney Bean, said to be the leader of a 45-member clan in Scotland, is infamously accused of murdering and cannibalizing over 1,000 people in the early 16th century. His story inspired the horror film, ‘The Hills Have Eyes.' But did Sawney Bean ever truly exist? (The Man Who Inspired ‘The Hills Have Eyes') *** Nestled in the Kentish Weald, the quaint village of Stalisfield boasts a thousand-year-old church and timeless tranquility. But beneath its serene surface, whispers of ancient pagan rites and dark ceremonies linger. Could the chilling past of sacrificial rituals still echo through the village today? (The Stalisfield Blade) *** As dusk fell, a pickup truck pulled up to a motel outside Tarzana. Inside, Brother Elzibah and his monks prepared for a perilous mission, recording martyr statements and arming themselves with explosives. Their target on December 10, 1958: Krishna Venta, a self-styled prophet in Box Canyon. This night promised a dramatic showdown that would mark a violent chapter in the history of American spiritual communes, and the country's cults. (The Bizarre Story Behind The Suicide Bombing Of A Southern California Cult)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:01:41.053 = Show Open00:04:08.300 = Book A Stay At a Haunted AirBNB00:27:56.736 = The Man Who Inspired ‘The Hills Have Eyes' ***00:32:42.960 = The Stalisfield Blade00:40:06.667 = The Bizarre Story Behind the Suicide Bombing of a Southern California Cult ***00:51:40.417 = 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 Stalisfield Blade” by Ken DaSilva-Hill (used with permission)“The Bizarre Story Behind The Suicide Bombing Of A SoCal Cult” by Mattew Duersten, LAist, December 10, 2018: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4s27xpf7“The Man Who Inspired ‘The Hills Have Eyes'” source: Leah Silverman at AllThatsInteresting.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8zy3ec“Book A Stay At a Haunted AirBNB” sources: Lauren Mack at TimeOut.com, https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4h75fc6c; Daily Barringer and Caitlin Morton at Thrillest.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8eubbj; Jersey Griggs at TheDiscoverer.com, https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yttxryn6; Marissa Laliberte at Reader's Digest:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p86y2em; Julie Pennell at Today.com, https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2kwzmdfs; Alexa Erickson at FamilyHandyman.com, https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8w39nh(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 29, 2024This episode of Weird Darkness roams from haunted rental homes you can book for the night to a Scottish cannibal legend, a Kentish village's whispered sacrifice rites, and the dynamite that ended a Southern California cult.It opens with a tour of haunted Airbnbs scattered across the United States and beyond, from Hobo Hill House in Jefferson City, Missouri — a 1910 American Foursquare where sightings of a man in a top hat drove the Clark family out and onto "The Dead Files" — to the Parks-Bowman Mansion in New Orleans, where guests booking the dead girl's bedroom report a young spirit in a yellow dress who hums lullabies and paces with a limp. The Kahn Hotel in Jefferson, Texas has logged over 300 paranormal investigations and one recording of a woman's scream followed by a gunshot; Farnam Manor in Richfield, Ohio traces its haunting to the owner's daughter drowning in a well in 1834; and a converted 1900 schoolhouse sits inside Cedar Park Cemetery in Hudson, New York, complete with an 18th-century opium wedding bed. The Creole Mansion in New Orleans, built in 1855 for Louise Vitry, and the Terlingua ghost-town casita overlooking Big Bend round out a list that stretches from Salem, Massachusetts to York, England.From there the episode turns to Sawney Bean, the legendary patriarch of a 45-member clan said to have lived in Bennane Cave along the Scottish coast, robbing, murdering, and cannibalizing more than 1,000 travelers across roughly 25 years before King James VI led a manhunt that ended in the men being executed and the women burned at the stake. Historical records first mention Bean in 1755, a century after he supposedly lived, and Scottish historian Dr. Louise Yeoman argues the tale may have started as English propaganda, with the name "Sawney" serving as a period slur against Scots. Wes Craven credited the Bean legend as the direct inspiration for his film The Hills Have Eyes.Next comes Stalisfield, a tiny hamlet in the Kentish Weald with a thousand-year-old church and The Plough Inn, where old villagers speak of pagan harvest rites tied to a flint sacrifice knife hewn from Kentish stone. The stories describe animals slaughtered on a sarsen stone and, in the darkest tellings, a golden-haired virgin tied to a stake, dismembered with the flint blade, her blood collected in a golden vessel and her ashes mixed with seed and scattered into the corners of the fields — corners locals still avoid after dark, marked by their overgrowth.The episode closes with Krishna Venta, born Francis Herman Pencovic in San Francisco in 1911, a barefoot self-styled prophet who claimed to have been born half a million years earlier on a planet called Neophrates and founded the WKFL Foundation on a 23-acre glen in Box Canyon. Two disaffected monks, Ralph Muller and Peter Kamenoff — who had taken the names Elzibah and Jeroham and accused Venta of sleeping with their wives — recorded martyr statements at a Tarzana motel and drove to the commune on December 10, 1958 with twenty sticks of dynamite in a musette bag. The blast lifted the top off the stone monastery, was heard more than 20 miles away, and killed ten people, including Venta, Cardinal Gene, and two children from the dormitories, seven-year-old Keela Baker and eleven-year-old Elwyn; survivors later scattered into other movements, among them members who died in Jonestown alongside Jim Jones' Peoples Temple in 1978.

Two crossed pencils, a sheet of paper marked yes and no, and a name spoken twice — and by the time an Italian priest was called into a Calabrian primary school, the children had already asked Charlie their questions. | July 19, 2026==========HOUR ONE: Just because the Ouija board is made by a board game manufacturer does not mean it should be treated like a toy – as many have discovered. *** The similar game, Charlie Charlie seems more innocent – but is so dangerous that in one school where children were playing it, they had to call in an exorcist. *** And you never know when playing any of these types of games what kind of spirit you might be inviting into our realm – but I can tell you this…. It's never good. They might pretend to be good, but that's far from the truth. And one particular demon has found notoriety through the Ouija board community, a demon you don't want to risk opening a door for. It's name is Zozo.==========HOUR TWO: Did lost cosmonauts make it into space before Yuri Gagarin? (The Tombs in Space) *** Don't take a gift from Gracie Watson's grave... or her life-like statue might cry tears of blood. (Gracie's Ghost) *** Did Bonnie Scott run away? Was she kidnapped? Murdered perhaps? All anyone knew was that no one had a clue where she was. She had simply disappeared without a trace. (The Murder of Bonnie Leigh Scott) *** A latchkey kid comes home to an empty house… or so they thought until they heard footsteps in another room. (The Laundry Room)==========SUDDEN DEATH OVERTIME: People often encounter strange and frightening things when they experience sleep paralysis – but in one particular story, the horrors began well before going to bed. (Sleep Paralysis in Bangkok) *** Samuel Joselyn was buried in 1810 in a North Carolina cemetery.  Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that Samuel was actually DEAD at the time of his burial! (Buried Alive in Wilmington) *** in 1894 Rosa Lochner was a witness to murder, but she had been deaf since birth and her spoken vocabulary was limited. So how could she testify against the accused? (Murder In Pantomime) *** A boy wakes to find his previously closed curtains now open – and the only explanation involves a previous resident of the house he's now living in. (Strange Manifestations) *** Mention the word “Chupacabra” and most people will think of a strange, hairless dog-like animal. They are never described as having the ability to fly… until now. (Winged Chupacabras) *** These UFOs aren't shiny metallic discs or cigar-shaped spaceships. They are humanoid – and they fly without the help of a jetpack, wings, cape or even a broom to sit on. And the sightings are still coming in all throughout Mexico. (The Flying Humanoids of Mexico) *** The North Carolina Cherokee have a story about how dangerous it can be even near a calm river – where the waters can suddenly foam and a giant beast can appear on the rocks. (James and the Giant Leech) *** Supernatural women, shadowy men, odd animal sightings, and more… they can all be found at late-night truck stops if you're not careful. (Truck Stop Horror Stories)==========SOURCES AND REFERENCES FROM TONIGHT'S SHOW:“Charlie Charlie” https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/ydpwych9, and “Ouija Boards” https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/mzyfmweeby Jacob Shelton for Graveyard Shift“ZoZo the Ouija Board Demon” by Maggie Clendenin for Ranker: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/xtc8x9pe“The Tombs in Space” posted at The Unredacted: http://ow.ly/nW5U30mwbWw“Gracie's Ghost” by Gary Sweeney for The Line Up: http://ow.ly/arFz30mwaLc“The Murder of Bonnie Leigh Scott” by Troy Taylor for American Hauntings Ink: http://ow.ly/v6wX30mwbwW“The Laundry Room” submitted anonymously to Weird Darkness“Sleep Paralysis in Bangkok” by MarkiO for YourGhostStories.com: http://ow.ly/FUOD30mwc0C“Truckstop Horror Stories” by Erin McCann for Ranker: https://tinyurl.com/wldxxnl“Buried Alive in Wilmington” by TheresaHPIR for Theresa's Haunted History of the Tri-State: https://tinyurl.com/rr4cvoh“Murder in Pantomime” by Robert Wilhelm for Murder By Gaslight: https://tinyurl.com/y97rswf5“Strange Manifestation” by Brian Abraham posted at My Haunted Life Too: https://tinyurl.com/wmlzd22“Winged Chupacabras” by Nick Redfern for Mysterious Universe: https://tinyurl.com/th8p7ox“The Flying Humanoids of Mexico” by Brent Swancer for Mysterious Universe: https://tinyurl.com/urxujoc“James and the Giant Leech” by James Mooney from the book “Myths of the Cherokee”: https://amzn.to/2JHpUFo==========(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).==========

A fortune-teller's crystal globe shows his clients a single vision of their own deaths — and one by one, they begin to make it come true.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, “Chapter of Errors” (April 14, 1978) ***WD00:46:44.968 = The Shadow, “The Crystal Globe” (October 03, 1943) ***WD01:15:25.364 = Sleep No More, “Escape of Mr. Trimm” (March 13, 1957) ***WD01:44:07.395 = BBC SpineChillers, “Rituals” (1984)02:10:33.653 = Strange, “The Ghost Train” (September 18, 1955)02:24:07.878 = Suspense, “Sneak Preview” (March 23, 1944)02:53:48.488 = Tales of the Frightened, “Voice From The Grave' (1957)02:58:36.645 = The Creaking Door, “Don't Take My Blood” (January 05, 1965) ***WD03:29:31.418 = The Saint, “The Saint Goes Underground” (December 17, 1947) ***WD03:53:55.525 = Tales From The Tomb, “Spirits of the Dead” (1960s)03:56:08.118 = 2000 Plus, “Rocket And Skull” (October 10, 1951) ***WD04:24:16.114 = The Unexpected, “Twilight Meeting” (1948) ***WD04:36:22.835 = Unsolved Mysteries, “Rue Morgue Mystery” (June 17, 1942) ***WD04:51:16.528 = 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/WDRR0720

A film crew arrives at Wicklow Manor to shoot on location, where a centuries-old legend says a mandrake's shriek lures the heartbroken to their deaths from the tower — and within a day of filming, two men fall.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, ”Shriek of the Mandrake” (April 13, 1978) ***WDZ00:46:51.627 = Peril, “Last Man” (1953) ***WD01:13:31.419= Mystery Playhouse, “Fifty Candles” (July 25, 1944) ***WD (LQ)01:43:17.831 = Price of Fear, “Out of the Mouths” (June 20, 1983)02:10:43.064 = Adventures of Ellery Queen, “Man In The Street” (December 04, 1947) ***WD02:39:53.920 = Quiet Please, “Dark Rosaleen” (March 13, 1949)03:09:16.689 = Radio City Playhouse, “Deception” (November 20, 1949) ***WD03:37:20.995 = Suspense, “Cat – Audition Episode” (October 21, 1946) ***WD03:53:18.121 = Sam Spade, “Convertible Caper” (June 15, 1947) ***WD04:16:34.427 = The Sealed Book, “Accusing Corpse” (April 29, 1945)04:46:03.073 = The Shadow, “The Gibbering Thing” (September 26, 1943)05:14:27.773 = 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/WDRR0719

Everyone hears "bottomless pit" and braces for a sermon about hell — this one goes somewhere stranger, to the only hole in all of Scripture that keeps what you throw in.Look for this podcast on YouTube Music, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and numerous other podcast apps. Get the full list of options here: https://pod.link/1651062114EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources and print version): https://weirddarkness.com/cotu-melsholeREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/m3k2ae6wWeird Darkness® and Church Of The Undead™ are trademarked. Copyright © 2026.

A chemist, lost on a lonely country road at nightfall, keeps glimpsing a laughing little girl no one else in the isolated mansion will admit exists.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, “Childish Laughter” (April 10, 1978)00:44:45.782 = Mystery In The Air, “Mask of Medusa” (September 04, 1947) ***WD01:13:44.235 = Molle Mystery Theater, “”Further Adventures of Kenny Andrews” (May 10, 1946) ***WD01:43:04.502 = Mr. Keen, “The Strange Display” (March 16, 1944) ***WD02:11:54.148 = Murder at Midnight, “Dead Hand” (May 01, 1950) ***WD02:35:49.001 = The Black Museum, “The Straight Razor” (November 11, 1952) ***WD03:01:04.966 = Mysterious Traveler, “The Haunted Trailer” (June 03, 1952) 03:33:30.017 = CBC Nightfall, “Love And The Lonely One” (July 04, 1980) ***WD03:56:45.698 = Obsession, “Tailored For Murder” (February 26, 1951) ***WD04:24:03.027 = Origin of Superstition, “Boogey Man” (1935)04:38:19.922 = Pat Novak For Hire, “Rubin Callaways Pictures” (March 13, 1949)05:06:43.866 = 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/WDRR0718

A nervous first visit to his girlfriend's rural Alberta home turns into a late-night hunting trip with her father, and something in the pines is watching them both.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/mitm-thepackSOURCES and RESOURCES: “The Pack” by MisterNailBrain75: https://www.creepypasta.com/the-pack/WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: July 19, 2026

A child's mutilated torso surfaced from the Thames near Shakespeare's Globe in 2001, and more than two decades later no one has been convicted of killing the boy investigators could only call Adam.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/TorsoInTheThamesREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/3h6yrmk5FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Most people, when they think of the end of their lives, want to feel that they have accomplished something of significance. To leave a lasting legacy. But it is much more rare for someone to accomplish something significant – after they are dead! (Done By The Dead) *** Mrs. Elizabeth G. Wharton was a pillar of society in Baltimore, Maryland in the late 1800s. That is, until she was accused of murdering General William Scott Ketchum. (The Baltimore Borgia) *** For every legitimate and fascinating find by geologists, there seems to be a fraudulent find somewhere else trying to fool the masses. This has been a problem since geology became a thing – and one of the most fascinating of these true tales is the one about Baringer's Lying Stones. (The Lying Stones) *** A strange, ape-like creature with glowing eyes in England might really be, as some believe, a specter of the night. (Man-Monkey of the Night) *** It's hard to understand how human sacrifice has ever been a reality in any point in history – but what if you were to learn that evidence of it showed up in London, England… in 2001? (Torso In The River) *** A would-be geisha murders her lover… but the events leading up to and during the death make for a fascinatingly dark story. (The Murderess Geisha) *** When it comes to spectral animals, we're more than familiar with black dogs or hell hounds, ghostly cats, horses carrying a headed or headless phantom, even a ghost bear rumored to haunt the Tower of London… but have you ever heard of the American Southwest's ghost camels? (America's Ghost Camels)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:02:24.699 = America's Ghost Camels00:09:18.422 = Done By The Dead ***00:22:00.457 = The Baltimore Borgia ***00:27:35.655 = The Lying Stones00:36:08.415 = Torso In The River ***00:42:13.573 = The Murderess Geisha00:54:03.666 = Man-Monkey of the Night ***00:58:48.550 = 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:“Man-Monkey Of The Night” by Nick Redfern for MysteriousUniverse.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/bdhdevrr“Done By The Dead” by Kyle D. Walter for ListVerse.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/y62afnj6“America's Ghost Camels” by Kathy Weiser-Alexander for LegendsOfAmerica.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p979beb“The Baltimore Borgia” by Robert Wilhelm for MurderByGaslight.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/y2whacb9“Torso In The River” by Richard Hoskins for MysteryConfidential.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/bdd5u543“The Murderess Geisha” by Dr. Romeo Vitelli for Providentia: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yzy4v3wy“The Lying Stones” by Brent Swancer for MysteriousUniverse.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p854d9e(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: January, 2021This episode of Weird Darkness moves from ghost camels haunting the Arizona desert to corpses that kept making history after death, a Baltimore poisoning that gripped a courtroom for weeks, a professor fooled by carved stones, a child's murder in the Thames that London police have never solved, a Tokyo geisha who killed the man she loved, and a glowing-eyed creature on an English canal bridge.It opens in the American southwest, where the U.S. War Department imported some seventy-two camels in 1857 to haul supplies, only to turn the animals loose in the desert when the Civil War broke out and the soldiers tired of their foul temper and habit of spooking horses. Wild camels roamed Arizona for decades afterward, and one became legend as the Red Ghost — a beast blamed for trampling a woman to death in 1883 and later seen carrying a dead man lashed to its back, a rider who eventually decayed until a human skull dropped from the saddle in front of a group of startled prospectors. An Arizona farmer finally shot the animal in 1893, still wearing the leather straps that had held its corpse rider in place.From there the episode turns to figures who kept shaping the world after they died. A gang of Chicago counterfeiters led by "Big Jim" Kennally plotted in 1876 to steal Abraham Lincoln's body from his Springfield tomb and ransom it for a jailed engraver, foiled by a Secret Service informant working for the very agency Lincoln himself had signed into existence. A grave robber broke into George Washington's crypt at Mount Vernon in 1830 hunting the president's skull and made off with the wrong one. The British philosopher Jeremy Bentham left instructions to have his body dissected and mummified, and it sits on display at University College London to this day. And in the ninth century Pope Stephen VI dug up his predecessor Formosus, dressed the rotting corpse in papal vestments, propped it up for trial, found it guilty, and had it thrown into the Tiber.Next comes Baltimore in 1871, where Elizabeth Wharton, a respected society widow, hosted General William Scott Ketchum in her home on Hamilton Place until he fell suddenly ill and died with twenty grains of tartar emetic in his stomach — fifteen is enough to kill. Police discovered she had bought sixty grains days earlier, and a financial advisor named Eugene Van Ness nearly died the same way after she served him a drink. Her forty-two-day poison trial in Annapolis exhausted the medical and chemical experts of the day, and after deliberating through the night the jury acquitted her of murder.The episode then crosses to Germany, where Johann Beringer, a celebrated professor at the University of Würzburg, spent 1725 collecting strange carved stones dug up on Mount Eibelstadt by teenage boys he had hired — figures of birds, lizards, comets, and the name of God rendered in Hebrew. Convinced they were the handiwork of God himself, he published a book on them called the Lithographiae Wirceburgensis, only to learn the nearly two thousand stones had been planted by two envious colleagues, J. Ignatz Roderick and Johann Georg von Eckhart, who thought him an arrogant know-it-all and wanted to humble him.From an academic hoax the episode moves to an unsolved horror. On September 21st, 2001, a child's headless, limbless torso surfaced from the Thames near the Globe Theatre, wrapped in orange cloth, and London's Metropolitan Police could give the boy no name but Adam. Forensic analysis of poison and minerals in his remains traced him to the Benin region of Nigeria and showed he had been paralyzed and drained of blood in what investigators believed was a muti ritual killing. Nelson Mandela made an international appeal for information, and traffickers including Kingsley Ojo and a caregiver named Joyce Osagiede were investigated, but no one has ever been convicted and the boy's true identity has never been confirmed.The episode carries that darkness into 1936 Tokyo, where Sada Abe strangled her lover Kichizo Ishida in an inn after a days-long affair, then took a kitchen knife to his body and carried a severed part of him away in her handbag. Her capture two days later set off a national obsession the papers called "Sada mania," and her testimony about killing the man she refused to share became a bestseller in a country where such candor was scandalous. She was sentenced to six years, served her time as a model prisoner, and vanished from public life sometime after 1970.The episode closes on a cold English night in January 1879, when a furniture hauler crossing Bridge 39 over the Shropshire Union Canal near the village of Ranton was charged by a shaggy, ape-like creature with glowing eyes that leapt onto his cart and terrified his horse. When he swung his whip at the thing, the lash passed straight through its body, and the creature bolted down toward the canal and vanished. The folklorist Charlotte Burne later learned from the village constable that the sightings had begun only days after a man drowned in that same canal, in a place where people believed a violent death could send someone back in the shape of a beast.

Max spends his Friday nights broadcasting homemade radio signals toward the Kuiper Belt hoping to reach alien life, and one summer evening, something finally answers back.Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://pod.link/1655277373Find more family-friendly frights and creepy games to play on our website at http://MicroTerrors.com!Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/microterrorsOther stories, novels, and more from author Scott Donnelly: https://amzn.to/3LymHaUOther narrations, podcasts, and audiobooks from voice artist Darren Marlar: https://WeirdDarkness.com= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =Weird Darkness©, 2026Micro Terrors: Scary Stories for Kids™, 2026#MicroTerrors #WeirdDarkness

A late-shift barista alone in a small-town cafe finds himself watched by a bald, mud-smeared stranger in a spotless black suit — a man who leaks something dark from his mouth and refuses to leave.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/mitm-blacksludgeSOURCES and RESOURCES: “Black Sludge” by Time Freak: https://www.creepypasta.com/black-sludge/WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: July 17, 2026

Travelers on the Kansas trail stopped at a lonely inn run by a family of Spiritualists — and the ones who sat in the seat nearest the curtain were never seen leaving it.

Something new is coming to Weird Darkness. Starting this Friday night, horror fiction gets its own identity — a dedicated series called Midnight in the Macabre, airing primarily Friday nights at the stroke of twelve. Classic horror stories, creepypastas, and modern horror fiction, plus a little horror-tinged science fiction, all under one clearly-marked banner. In this episode, Darren explains why he's making the change, what it means for listeners who love the fiction, and what it means for those who come to Weird Darkness strictly for the true crime, real hauntings, and dark history. The regular Weird Darkness episodes stay purely non-fiction — every one a true story — while Midnight in the Macabre carries all the fiction. Each series has its own cover art and its own look, so one glance at the thumbnail tells you exactly what you're about to hear before you ever press play. The first Midnight in the Macabre drops this Friday night at midnight.

Los Angeles hides an almost overwhelming number of ghosts behind its glamour, from the piano-playing spirit at Hollywood's Magic Castle and the body found in the Cecil Hotel's water tank to the sex-magick rocket scientist, Father Yod's robed disciples, and the cults that made the City of Angels a capital of the occult.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/hauntedlaREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p98dtw7CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:01:24.727 = Hollywood's Haunted Magic Castle00:09:13.905 = Los Angeles' Haunted Hotels ***00:27:05.636 = Los Angeles: City of the Occult ***00:51:50.907 = L.A. Ghosts ***01:01:24.337 = 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:“Hollywood's Haunted Magic Castle” by Christina Sanza for Graveyard Shift: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/nhdf2f29“Los Angeles' Haunted Hotels” by Andy Miller from Weird History: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/mvbdcwac“L.A. Ghosts” by Jen Lennon for Graveyard Shift: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/39xypc6c“Los Angeles: City Of The Occult” by Christine Aprile for Weird History: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4y9rj77r(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, 2021This episode of Weird Darkness turns to Los Angeles, the City of Angels, and the almost overwhelming number of ghosts, haunted hotels, and occult history hiding behind its glamour, from the Magic Castle and the Cecil Hotel to the sex-magick rocket scientist Jack Parsons, cult leader Father Yod, and the ghosts of Griffith Park.It opens inside Hollywood's Magic Castle at 7001 Franklin Avenue, the private clubhouse of the Academy of Magical Arts, where the Houdini Séance Room honors a magician who spent his career trying to debunk spiritualism and left his wife Bess the code phrase "Rosabelle, believe" for contact from the afterlife. The castle carries the story of Irma, the piano-playing ghost said to have died in 1932 and returned to the mansion built in 1909 by Rollin B. Lane, along with the ghost of magician Dai Vernon near his favorite seat in the Palace of Prestidigitation, the unidentified girl in the Haunted Cellar, and a Halloween 2011 fire that started at the exact time of Houdini's 1926 death and gutted the Dante Room while sparing the Houdini Room.From there the episode checks into the haunted hotels of Los Angeles, beginning with the Knickerbocker, which opened in Hollywood in July of 1929, hosted Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio on their honeymoon, and staged Bess Houdini's tenth and final rooftop séance the night an isolated thunderstorm struck the building alone. It moves through the Ambassador on Wilshire Boulevard, where Robert F. Kennedy was gunned down by Sirhan Sirhan in the kitchen on June 4, 1968, the Rosslyn Annex with its forgotten Prohibition speakeasy, the Alexandria and its bricked-off phantom wing, the Biltmore where Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia, was last seen before her 1947 murder, and the Cecil Hotel, home to serial killers Richard Ramirez and Jack Unterweger and the site where guest Elisa Lam was found dead in the rooftop water tank in 2013 after guests complained the water tasted strange.Next the episode traces L.A.'s long history of the occult, running from Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard and his early Pasadena partnership with rocket scientist Jack Parsons, who performed the "Babalon Working" ritual and later died at 37 in a home laboratory explosion, to Charles Manson and the Family murders of August 1969 that killed Sharon Tate and six others, Carlos Castaneda and the Yaqui shaman Don Juan Matus who launched the New Age movement, and Jim Baker, the marine turned messiah Father Yod, who took fourteen wives and led the Source Family from a Hollywood Hills mansion. It covers avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger and the witch Marjorie Cameron, the 1920 LAPD raid on the Mazdaznan sun-worshipers, the love-cult of Edith Maida Lessing at Mount Helios, the Devil's Gate Dam in Pasadena, and the curse Petronilla Feliz laid on the land that became Griffith Park.The episode closes with a tour of famous L.A. ghosts: the more than one hundred jumpers off Pasadena's Colorado Street "suicide bridge," including Myrtle Ward, whose daughter survived the fall; the body parts Marines found in a freezer at the abandoned Rancho Los Amigos hospital in 2006; picnic table number 29 in Griffith Park, where a couple was crushed by a falling tree in 1976; Bela Lugosi's hearse drifting past his favorite cigar shop; the many spirits of the Queen Mary docked in Long Beach; the unsolved 1929 deaths of Ned Doheny and Hugh Plunkett at Greystone Mansion; the ghost of Superman actor George Reeves; and Bob Baker, still haunting his marionette theater alongside the dead puppeteers who worked there.

A skeptical London professor sets out to expose a plain, lame hypnotist as a fraud, never suspecting that the woman he dismisses has already decided he belongs to her.Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/OTRCHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “The Parasite” (April 07, 1978) ***WD00:46:20.039 = Lux Radio Theater, “Ghost And Mrs. Muir” (December 01, 1947) ***WD01:43:56.937 = Philip Marlowe, “Monkey's Uncle” (March 07, 1950)02:13:33.368 = Boston Blackie, “The Worthington Ghost” (March 19, 1946) ***WD02:40:01.156 = The Black Mass, “Boarded Window” (February 12, 1964) ***WD03:12:59.922 = Michael Shayne, “Recreate A Murder” (May 28, 1945)03:42:41.656 = Beyond Midnight, “Something On His Mind” (May 30, 1969)04:11:54.838 = MindWebs, “The Last Question” (March 05, 1983) ***WD04:41:25.495 = Adventures In The Supernatural, “The Mysterious Carriage” (1932) ***WD05:05:51.277 = 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/WDRR0717

An unknown gunman murders the last of the wealthy Van Cleek line, and when two reporters break into the family's boarded-up mansion to photograph it before demolition, they find two people living inside as though it were still the 1890s.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, “Shark Bait” (March 31, 1978) ***WD00:46:07.462 = Haunting Hour, “Homicide House” (May 27, 1945) ***WD01:10:57.188 = Hermit's Cave, “Buried Alive” (October 06, 1940)01:35:16.710 = Mystery is My Hobby, “Kid Brown Is KO'd” (1945-1950)01:59:17.833 = Sherlock Holmes, “Strange Case of the Persecuted Millionaire” (February 10, 1947)02:28:34.256 = Mystery House, “Murder Me Gently” (May 12, 1946)02:54:20.575 = Incredible But True, “The Temple of Beal” (1950-1951) ***WD02:58:04.060 = Inner Sanctum, “Color Blind Formula” (December 06, 1944) ***WD03:24:45.575 = Jeff Regan, “The Man Who Liked The Mountains” (August 07, 1948) ***WD (LQ)03:54:30.797 = The Key, “Lost In The Amazon” (1956) ***WD04:19:43.987 = Lights Out, “Baby” (March 28, 1941) ***WD04:44:12.185 = Macabre, “Midnight Horseman” (December 11, 1961) ***WD (LQ)05:11:20.993 = 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/WDRR0716

A Soho painter can't stop painting the same 19th-century woman — until she starts talking back, insisting she was murdered and thrown down a Manhattan well, and demanding he hear the truth the courtroom refused to believe.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 Ghost In The Well” (March 28, 1978) ***WD00:46:05.307 = The Strange Dr. Weird, “Secret Room” (February 13, 1945) ***WD00:57:55.158 = Eleventh Hour, “Cast Giant Shadow” (ADU)01:21:29.218 = Escape, “Evening Primrose” (August 25, 1949)01:49:36.901 = Exploring Tomorrow, “Space Baby / aka First Baby in Space” (June 18, 1958) ***WD02:09:35.315 = Dark Fantasy, “Dead Hands Reaching” (May 22, 1942) ***WD02:33:49.707 = BBC Fear on 4, “The Monkey's Revenge” (January 10, 1991)03:03:18.954 = Theater Five, “A Nothin' Place” (November 20, 1964)03:26:01.748 = Guests of Doom, “Program 11 & 12” (1930s) ***WD03:51:44.458 = The Hall of Fantasy, “He Who Follows” (March 11, 1950)04:16:11.455 = Harry Lime, “Love Affair” (September 14, 1951)04:40:16.602 = BBC Haunted Tales of the Supernatural, “What Was It” (June 28, 1980) ***WD05:07:37.608 = 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/WDRR0715

Sixteen children were found in a single room on Ohmer Street, and their mother had been delivering them in hospitals for seventeen years.READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.com/siders-caseWeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: July 15, 2026

In 1912, an axe killed all eight people sleeping in a Villisca, Iowa farmhouse, and the two men suspected of it — a traveling preacher and a business rival — both walked free.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/VilliscaReverendRivalREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p84usw4FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Conspiracy theories, while often dark, can also be kind of humorous due to being so outlandishly unbelievable. For example… is the Earth's moon artificial, and actually an extraterrestrial spaceship? We'll look at the strange theory. (Could Our Moon Be An Alien Spaceship?) *** In 1912 one of the most brutal slayings in America took place in the small town of Villisca, Iowa… a murder so brutal that numerous documentaries have been made about it, books have been written, and amateur detectives have poured over the facts and suspects still trying to find out who the murderer was that swung the bloody axe. (The Unsolved Villisca Ax Murders) *** The President of the United States, no matter who is in the position at the time, is always in danger from those who would like to see someone else in office. We'll hear on the news of the assassination attempts that came close, but we more often than not are completely unaware of the attempts and plans that have been thwarted – and some of those attempts to kill a sitting U.S. President have been extremely bizarre. (Bizarre Assassination Attempts on U.S. Presidents) *** Some Biblical accounts seem unbelievable and we tend to dismiss them as fantasies, or dreams of the person writing the events down. But what if some of the strange creatures described in the bible are actually real – but come from another dimension, or even outer space? (Are Extraterrestrials in the Bible?) *** If you are told there is a city that has been built specifically for the dead, you probably think of some ancient culture that worshipped their ancestors. Personally, I think of pyramids in Egypt… but I never would've thought of the suburbs in California, USA. (California's City of the Dead)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:02:33.183 = Could Our Moon Be An Alien Spaceship?00:08:21.362 = The Unsolved Villisca Axe Murders ***00:20:59.742 = California's City of the Dead00:31:12.990 = Are Extraterrestrials in the Bible? ***00:39:47.780 = Bizarre Assassination Attempts on U.S. Presidents00:48:06.915 = 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:“Could Our Moon Be An Alien Spaceship?” posted at Anomalien.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/bdhz5563“The Unsolved Villisca Ax Murders” by Joe Turner for HistoricMysteries.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8mnfp6, and from HauntedRoom.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/36b6k2h4“California's City of the Dead” by Hugh Landman for Ranker.com's Graveyard Shift:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yckrxjzd“Are Extraterrestrials in the Bible?” by Ellen Lloyd for AncientPages.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/mr3d8dpk“Bizarre Assassination Attempts on U.S. Presidents” by Richard Stockton for AllThatsInteresting.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/26avtuhr(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, 2022This episode of Weird Darkness runs from a Cold War theory that the Moon is a hollow alien spacecraft, through the 1912 Villisca ax murders that left eight people dead in a single Iowa night, into the California cemetery city of Colma where the dead outnumber the living a thousand to one, on to a former NASA engineer's claim that the prophet Ezekiel witnessed a UFO, and closing with some of the strangest attempts ever made on the lives of sitting U.S. presidents.It opens with the Spaceship Moon Theory, proposed in July of 1970 by Soviet Academy of Sciences members Michael Vasin and Alexander Shcherbakov, who argued the Moon is a hollowed-out planetoid engineered by unknown beings and steered into Earth's orbit. Darren walks through the claims stacked behind the idea — the Moon ringing like a bell for more than an hour after the Apollo 12 crew crashed their lunar module into it on November 20th, 1969, craters of wildly different widths that all share the same shallow depth, moon rocks dated older than the Earth itself, and the near-perfect circular orbit that lets the Moon exactly cover the Sun during an eclipse.From there the episode turns to Villisca, Iowa, and the night of June 9th, 1912, when someone entered the home of Josiah and Sarah Moore and killed all six members of the family along with two young house guests, Lena and Ina Stillinger, striking each victim with an axe as they slept. Darren lays out the crime scene that neighbor Mary Peckham and Josiah's brother Ross discovered the next morning — cloth draped over the mirrors, two cigarette butts in the attic, a slab of bacon left beside the Stillinger girls, and a bloody basin in the kitchen — and the suspects who never brought closure, from traveling minister Reverend George Kelly, who spoke of eight dead bodies before the news broke and later gave a confession the court dismissed, to Josiah's embittered business rival Frank Jones. More than a century on, the boarded-up house survives as a museum where investigators report a heaviness on the stairs, drifting fog, and the sound of dripping blood after the 2 a.m. train whistle.Next the show travels to Colma, California, the suburb built for the dead, where roughly 1,600 living residents share the ground with more than 1.5 million graves across 17 cemeteries. Darren traces how San Francisco banned burials in 1900 and evicted its dead, triggering the largest grave relocation in history after the 1906 earthquake, with more than 150,000 bodies hauled south and tens of thousands reburied in mass graves when families wouldn't pay the ten-dollar transfer fee. He points out the famous names resting there — Wyatt Earp, Levi Strauss, William Randolph Hearst, Joe DiMaggio, brain-injury case Phineas Gage, and self-declared Emperor of the United States Joshua Norton — alongside the darker footnotes of looted skeletons, discarded headstones repurposed as gutters and seawalls, and the town's own gallows-humor slogan, "it's great to be alive in Colma."The episode then examines whether extraterrestrials appear in the Bible, centering on the vision of the prophet Ezekiel by the river Chebar and the four winged creatures with human hands, calf-shaped feet, and four faces that rose out of a fiery whirlwind. Darren details how former NASA chief engineer Joseph F. Blumrich, honored in 1972 for his work on the Saturn and Apollo programs, set out to disprove Erich von Däniken's ancient-astronaut claims and instead became convinced, arguing in his book The Spaceships of Ezekiel that the prophet had described a landing spacecraft — rotor blades, fairing housings, landing legs with round footpads, and remote mechanical arms rendered in the only words an ancient man had for them.The episode closes with a run of bizarre presidential assassination attempts, from John Hinckley's 1981 shooting of Ronald Reagan over an obsession with actress Jodie Foster, to the 2013 ricin letters mailed to the Obama White House by a man framing an Elvis impersonator over an online feud, to truck driver Samuel Byck's 1974 plot to hijack a DC-9 and crash it into the White House to kill Richard Nixon. Darren ends on the two women who tried to kill Gerald Ford seventeen days apart in September of 1974 — Manson follower Lynette Fromme, who never chambered a round, and Sarah Jane Moore, whose shot missed by six inches because her replacement revolver's sights were misaligned.

Read an even deeper-dive into the werewolf trials here: https://weirddarkness.com/wolves-on-trial/Across four centuries of European court records, dozens of men, women, and children confessed to shedding their skins for wolf-hides and hunting under the moon — and the magistrates who heard them believed every word.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/RealWerewolfTrialsREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/43rjhjvpFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: We're all familiar with the concept of werewolves – they are all over pop culture, movies, television, comic books, novels, and every other medium you could possibly imagine. And while they are considered fictional, or at least in the realm of cryptids, that doesn't mean there aren't true stories of reported werewolves in history. (Real Historic Accounts of Werewolves) *** Just the idea of going to prison is enough to scare people into living a squeaky-clean life, but if you're one of the most dangerous prisoners known to exist, ordinary prison would look like a vacation as compared to life in the Florence ADX Supermax Prison. (Life In The Supermax) *** What was supposed to be a two day trip turned into a maritime mystery when the ship, the MV Joyita was discovered floating with no crew on board. What happened? (The Mysterious Abandonment of the MV Joyita)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:01:37.814 = Show Open00:03:32.506 = Real Historic Accounts of Werewolves, Part 100:28:44.978 = Real Historic Accounts of Werewolves, Part 2 ***00:42:51.099 = The Mysterious Abandonment of the MV Joyita ***01:02:49.562 = Life In The Supermax ***01:15:37.977 = Show Close*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad breakLISTEN ON PODCAST APPS: Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.com/wdapps*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*SOURCES and RESOURCES:“Real Historic Accounts of Werewolves” by Miss Celania for MentalFloss.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p84ut66, Nick Redfern for Mysterious Universe: http://bit.ly/2MFFx5p, WolvesRox on Playbuzz.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p9bjcht, and Tim Flight for HistoricCollection.com:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p87s85sThe short fable, “The Werewolf” was written by Angela Carter: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yckt8fn6“The Mysterious Abandonment of the MV Joyita” by Marcus Lowth for UFOInsight.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8sux2j“Life In The Supermax” by Jacob Shelton for Ranker.com's Unspeakable Times: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8u82p9(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: January, 2022Weird Darkness digs into three dark corners this time out — the real men and women who were tried and executed as werewolves across Early Modern Europe, the South Pacific ghost ship MV Joyita found drifting with all 25 aboard vanished, and daily life inside America's most locked-down prison, the ADX Supermax in Florence, Colorado.It opens with the documented history of lycanthropy trials, tracing the term back through the Old English werwulf and the Greek myth of King Lycaon, whom Ovid recorded being turned into a wolf by Zeus. From there the episode walks through the real cases: the Gandillon family, burned in France in 1598 after the witch hunter Henri Boguet arranged their arrest; Thiess of Livonia, an eighty-year-old man tried in 1692 who claimed to be a benevolent werewolf who fought the Devil for the year's harvest; Peter Stubbe, the "Werewolf of Bedburg," broken on the wheel and beheaded on October 31st, 1589; Gilles Garnier, the "Hermit of Dole," burned alive in 1573 for killing and eating children; the Werewolves of Poligny; the Wolf of Ansbach, an ordinary wolf hanged from a gibbet in a wig and beard in 1685; teenaged Hans the Werewolf, executed in Estonia in 1651; fourteen-year-old Jean Grenier of Gascony, spared the stake and sent to a friary; the "Demon Tailor" of Chalons; and the more modern Spanish serial killer Manuel Blanco Romasanta, the "Werewolf of Allariz," who used lycanthropy as his legal defense, alongside the Ludwigslust and Angers cases and the cannibal beggar Swiatek of Poland.From there the show turns to the MV Joyita, the yacht built in 1931 in Los Angeles for director Roland West and named for his wife, Jewel Carmen. On October 3rd, 1955, she left Apia, Samoa, for the Tokelau Islands carrying 16 crew and nine passengers, and vanished; found over a month later on November 10th by the merchant captain Gerald Douglas, she was drifting more than 600 miles off course, partially submerged but afloat thanks to her cork-lined refrigerated hold. Investigators found the cabin lights on, the clocks stopped at 10:25, the radio tuned to the distress frequency, a doctor's bag holding a scalpel and blood-stained bandages, mattresses stacked over the engine, and all four escape craft gone — with the cargo, and all 25 people, never recovered. Captain Thomas Miller took the blame for sailing on one engine, but the theories that followed ran from mutiny to Japanese fishermen, Soviet submarines, pirates, and insurance fraud, with researcher Robin Maugham laying out the mutiny case in his book The Joyita Mystery.The episode closes inside the United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility in Florence, Colorado, the ADX Supermax that has held Ted Kaczynski, Terry Nichols, Robert Hanssen, Ramzi Yousef, and Zacarias Moussaoui since 1994. Inmates spend 23 hours a day alone in 7-by-12-foot concrete cells with a single 4-inch window angled so the sky and the surrounding mountains stay out of view, communicating through drained toilet pipes and "finger handshakes" through recreation-cage fencing. Former inmates and staff — including warden Robert Hood, who called the architecture itself the control, and prisoner Travis Dusenbury — describe a facility that strips away nearly every trace of ordinary life, the suicide of mentally ill inmate Jose Vega in 2010, and the ongoing lawsuits over medical and mental-health treatment that forced ADX to reevaluate its practices in the mid-2010s.

The man who invented solid rocket fuel and helped found the Jet Propulsion Laboratory spent his nights performing sex rituals in a Pasadena mansion with a struggling science fiction writer named L. Ron Hubbard, trying to incarnate a goddess who would give birth to the Antichrist.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/RocketMagicREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/9enkrtn5FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: The creator of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard, was so fascinated by the occult, he believed he was the actual devil himself… and was even upset when his own son turned out to not be the antichrist. (The Devil L. Ron Hubbard) *** Scientology is already scary and mysterious – which may not be surprising once you learn how much black magic had to do with its creation. (Scientology and the Occult) *** A house in the Altamaha River Swamp in Georgia becomes darker and more dangerous than the swamp itself. (A Terrifying Haunting in Georgia) *** Was a well known UFOlogist murdered shortly before a scheduled speech he was about to give? (The Bleached Computer of a UFO Researcher) *** Some believe we all have a guardian angel watching over us. One infamous yet respected witch hunter many years ago wrote that we all – each one of us – have a personal demon. And many people believed him. (The Demon Witch Hunter) *** For some time now, Area 51 has been seen as ground zero for conspiracies and government coverups. However, a plot of land in Utah has started to attract much of the same kind of attention. Welcome to Dugway – also known as Area 52. (Welcome to Area 52)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:01:37.371 = Show Open00:03:45.021 = Rocket Fuel, Sex Magic, and the Birth of Scientology00:25:54.957 = A Terrifying Haunting In Georgia ***00:34:49.445 = The Demon Witch Hunter00:46:33.406 = The Bleached Computer of a UFO Researcher ***00:50:09.122 = Area 5201:00:20.603 = 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:“Scientology and the Occult” by Annalee Newitz: http://bit.ly/31KIGnA“The Devil L. Ron Hubbard” by Jacob Shelton: http://bit.ly/2ISSjIy“A Terrifying Haunting In Georgia” by Brent Swancer: http://bit.ly/2Ip9m5Y“The Bleached Computer of a UFO Researcher” by Paul Seaburn: http://bit.ly/2KpSyhm“The Demon Witch Hunter” by Melissa Brinks: http://bit.ly/2MXHdaf“Welcome to Area 52” by Hannah Collins: http://bit.ly/2WNDFY1(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 through black magic, hauntings, demonology, unsolved death, and government secrecy in this episode, running from the occult roots of Scientology to a Utah military base that has earned the nickname Area 52.It opens with L. Ron Hubbard, the science fiction novelist who founded Scientology, and the claim from his own eldest son — Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, Jr., who left the church in 1959 and renamed himself Ronald DeWolf — that black magic sat at the inner core of the religion. In a 1983 Penthouse interview, DeWolf described a father deeply involved in the occult who did not worship Satan so much as believe he was Satan, the Beast 666 incarnate. The story runs through Hubbard's obsession with Aleister Crowley and the Ordo Templi Orientis, the "moonchild" ritual he and rocket scientist Jack Parsons attempted in Pasadena to conceive an astral child and bring the goddess Babalon into the world, the poltergeist activity that followed at the Parsons house, the alleged OT Level VIII passage in which Hubbard claimed the Antichrist mantle for himself, the numerology hidden in the New Era logo's two sixty-degree triangles, and the shared contempt both Hubbard and Crowley held for psychoanalysis even as both leaned on hypnosis and past-life regression to control their followers.From there the episode digs into Jack Parsons himself — the college-dropout chemist who invented solid rocket fuel, helped found the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and claimed to have summoned Satan at thirteen. Drawing on John Carter's Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons and Lawrence Wright's Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief, the story follows Parsons through the Pasadena mansion he filled with pagans, artists, and writers; the bonfires that drew police reports from the neighbors; the arrival of Hubbard, who slept with Parsons' girlfriend Betty; the red-headed artist Marjorie Cameron, whom both men decided was Babalon made flesh; Crowley's own disgust at the pair, whom he dismissed as goats in a letter; and the boat-buying scheme in Florida that cost Parsons his last twenty thousand dollars. Parsons died in 1952 handling explosives on his front porch, two years after Dianetics made Hubbard famous.Next comes the Surrency haunting, one of the most heavily witnessed poltergeist cases on record. In October of 1872, sawmill operator Allen Surrency returned to his two-story farmhouse on the edge of the Altamaha River Swamp in Georgia to find tumblers sliding off the slab, crockery shattering on the floor, and bricks, irons, and potatoes falling through the rooms of his own house. The activity never let up: clocks spinning backward, mirrors exploding, utensils bending in the family's hands, a pan of biscuits levitating out of the oven and flying out the back door, hot bricks raining down on his daughter Clementine, an andiron chasing his son across the room and then returning itself to the fireplace. Hundreds of visitors — reporters and a minister among them — watched objects fly in plain view. The haunting followed the family when they moved away, stopped abruptly with Allen's death in 1877, and the house burned down in 1925, leaving nothing behind but the orb of light still reported along the town's railway tracks.The episode then turns to Peter Binsfeld, the sixteenth-century German witch hunter whose enthusiasm for torture was matched by his taste for taxonomy. His De confessionibus maleficorum et sagarum laid out the Seven Princes of Hell — Lucifer for pride, Beelzebub for gluttony, Satan for wrath, Belphegor for sloth, Mammon for greed, Asmodeus for lust, and Leviathan for envy — and argued that each living person is shadowed by a personal demon who knows their habits intimately, the dark counterpart to a guardian angel. Binsfeld held that women were more prone to witchcraft, that girls under twelve and boys under fourteen were usually too young to be guilty, and that anyone who claimed to have seen a witch shapeshift had been deceived by the Devil.The unsolved death of British ufologist Max Spiers follows. Spiers died in Poland on July 16, 2016, days before a scheduled conspiracy conference appearance and shortly after reportedly vomiting two liters of black liquid, having texted his mother that he was in trouble and to investigate if anything happened to him. His death was ruled natural causes. At a pre-inquest review at Guildhall in Sandwich, Kent, in August of 2018, lawyers for his mother Vanessa Bates revealed that his laptop had been wiped clean and his phone's SIM card erased or removed before being returned to the family, with Spiers found dead on the couch of his girlfriend Monika Duval and the four-day inquest set for the Archbishops Palace in Maidstone.The episode closes at Dugway Proving Ground, the 800,000-acre Utah military installation that UFO researchers call Area 52. Founded during the second World War for biological and chemical weapons work, Dugway is best known for the 1968 VX nerve agent test that drifted into Skull Valley and killed thousands of sheep, an incident the Army compensated farmers for without accepting blame. Freedom of Information requests filed by MuckRock founder Michael Morisy surfaced records of entomological munitions — mosquitoes loaded with what the Army called inert pathogens and released over American civilian populations — and of soldiers used as test subjects. The story takes in the 2011 disappearance of Joseph Bushling, whose empty car, hat, and shoes turned up sixty-five miles from the main gate with no body ever found; the runway in the base's southern expansion that never appears on Dugway's own maps; Lockheed engineer Don Phillips and former CEO Ben Rich on flying saucer technology; and Steven Greer's claim in The Sirius Project that trillions in defense funding has been siphoned into a shadow government beyond the reach of the Department of Defense.

The Master Constipator discovers another galaxy ripe for conquest and sets out to bring it under his rule, placing him on a collision course with Lord Primasludge. The story is a deliberately ridiculous space-opera adventure built around galactic tyrants, extravagant threats, absurd character names, and broad science-fiction parody.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 Pretend Person” (March 27, 1978) ***WD00:46:23.028 = CBC Mystery Theater, “The Duel” (September 18, 1967) ***WD01:15:59.465 = Chet Chetters, “Conquest of the Master Constipator” (1993)01:46:42.173 = The Clock, “The Bank Vault” (December 27, 1955)02:12:13.607 = The Crime Club, “Sun Is a Witness” (April 03, 1947)02:42:07.075 = Crime Classics, “Shrapnelled Body Charles Drew Sr.” (July 06, 1953)03:11:50.167 = Danger Dr. Danfield, “Murder of Cora Rogers” (September 01, 1946) ***WD03:36:00.066 = Calling All Detectives, “Mr. Frobish Pays to Have Himself Killed” (September 11, 1947) ***WD03:49:54.181 = The Devil and Mr. O, “Official Killer” (January 07, 1972)04:18:43.513 = Diary of Fate, “Marvin Thomas Entry” (June 08, 1948) ***WD04:47:48.773 = Dimension X, “The Outer Limit” (June 08, 1950)05:15:46.853 = 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/WDRR0714

A discontented Long Island housewife and the forgettable corset salesman she seduced hatch a clumsy plot to murder her sleeping husband — a scheme so poorly executed that one famous newsman couldn't resist giving it a name.==========HOUR ONE: Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray devised a scheme to get rid of Ruth's husband – and they planned it so well that, okay… actually no. They were so inept they were caught immediately, and even the police publicly called them incompetent. (The Dumb-Bell Murder) *** For over 2,000 years across South and Southeast Asia, trained elephants served as living instruments of execution, crushing condemned prisoners with calculated brutality under the control of their handlers. (Execution By Elephant) *** Before he became a Civil War general, Congressman Dan E. Sickles' scandalous murder trial changed our legal system forever. He said outright that he had killed his wife's lover. So how did he avoid being found guilty of the crime he admitted to committing? (How A Congressman Got Away With Murder) *** In 1150, two children were found near Woolpit in England – they wore strange clothes, spoke oddly, but the most identifiable characteristic for both children was their skin was green. The children themselves were a mystery – but what happened when they grew up? Did they marry? Did they have children? Could there be decedents of the green children of Woolpit living among us today? (Great Grandkids of Green Children) *** In the summer of 1518, a mysterious dancing plague seized the French town of Strasbourg, compelling hundreds to dance without rest for months—some until they collapsed and died—in a frenzy that baffled authorities and remains unexplained to this day. (Dancing Plague)==========HOUR TWO: When it comes to receiving the death sentence, history has given us several ways to go about the execution. Hanging, firing squad, gas chamber, being stoned to death or burned at the stake… but you have to be some whole new level of “hated” by the people if your death blow comes by way of molten gold being poured down your throat. (Death By Golden Throat) *** Typically, when you hear the phrase “high speed chase”, you think of law enforcement trying to catch the bad guys who are in a getaway vehicle. Perhaps after a bank robbery, or after blowing a stop sign and simply refusing to pull over. But have you heard about the time that the police were involved in a high-speed chase up to 100-miles-per hour, trying to catch up to a flying saucer? (The 100mph UFO Chase) *** When the Black Plague arrived at their doorsteps, the villagers were forced to choose between life or certain doom. It's the tragic tale of England's Plague Village – the village of Eyam. (The Black Death Comes to Eyam) *** In the 1800s, women finding themselves “with child” but unmarried, were treated like second-class citizens or worse. And during a time when birth control was limited or even unavailable outside of the rhythm method, what was a girl to do if she found herself in such dire circumstances? Fortunately, there was a woman there ready to help – to take the baby off their hands and give it a good home. Or so everyone thought. (Minnie, The Baby Farmer) *** On frozen lakes near Manitowish Waters, a hooded figure appears to ice fishermen, silently guiding them to the best spots for a catch before vanishing into the winter air. (The Ice Fisherman Ghost)==========SUDDEN DEATH OVERTIME: “Tom" and "Lena" are in a loving relationship and have a young child together. It sounds like the perfect family – except for one tiny detail about their relationship. Tom and Lena are biological brother and sister. (I Fell In Love With My Sister) *** In Norfolk, England the village of Eccles was slowly gobbled by the rising waters of the sea in the early 1600s. But even today, sometimes during a particularly heavy story, you can see St. Mary's Church mysteriously reappear… bringing with it, the dead buried in the church graveyard who cannot find rest. (The Disappearing And Reappearing Village of Eccles) *** Lory Price and his wife Ethel mysteriously disappeared from Marion, Illinois. But then, sometimes that happens when you are mixed up with the mob or may have learned something you weren't supposed to. (The Vanishing of Lory Price) *** The Catacombs of St. Callixtus in Rome, Italy, hold the remains of sixteen popes, several martyrs, and around half a million Christians, and according to on author, a not-of-this world entity. (The Callixtus Catacombs Entity)==========SOURCES AND REFERENCES FROM TONIGHT'S SHOW:“Death By Golden Throat” by Genevieve Carlton for Weird History https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/3586qeqk, Rachel Nuwer for Smithsonian Magazine https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/18pu2d9b, and Laurie L. Dove for History https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/3vy6r2a9“The Black Death Comes to Eyam” by Stephanie Almazan for The Line Up: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/1aptirxk“Minnie, The Baby Farmer” from The Scare Chamber: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2eqd77xa“The 100MPH UFO Chase” from The Parajournal for The Times Online: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/ntcaqk3y“The Ice Fisherman Ghost” by Charlie Hinz: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8nzemt“The Dumb-Bell Murder” by Troy Taylor: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/jsut4w93 (includes photo)“I Fell In Love With My Sister” by Jennifer Tillman for Vice: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/y2dmtp2e“Execution by Elephant” by Joanna Gillan for Ancient Origins: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8jj255“The Cursing of Christopher Case” by Gurnoor Kaur for Conspiracy Theories: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/145d147q“The Disappearing And Reappearing Village of Eccles” by Stacia Briggs for Eastern Daily Press:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/5fopg2hq“The Vanishing of Lory Price” by Troy Taylor from his book “Bloody Illinois”: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/lsi06qet“How A Congressman Got Away With Murder” by Genevieve Carlton for All That's Interesting:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2jantfjj“Great Grandkids of Green Children” from Ancient Code: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4u4xdypk“The Callixtus Catacombs Entity” by Ellen Lloyd for Ancient Pages: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/aqhlme0r“Dancing Plague” by Cassandra Yorgey at HubPages: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/ycke4fwe==========(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).The podcast version of the syndicated weekend radio show posts Sunday night/Monday morning at midnight after the show has aired nationally on radio stations Sunday evening.

Something tall and black is standing on the mountain above the Arctic outpost, it hasn't moved in days, and every man who sees it is a man who has something to answer for.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/shapeinthesnowFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: A machinist ships out to an Arctic research outpost for a one-month government contract, keeping a journal at his wife's insistence to pass the time. The work is dull and the crew gets along. Then he sees something standing on the mountainside — tall, black, motionless, miles off — and finds he isn't the only man in camp who can see it. His roommate has heard of it before, from a grandfather who spent his life being watched by it, and who left behind a single line copied from an asylum patient's journal: “All of our mistakes are never forgotten.” Day by day, the thing on the mountain is closer.LISTEN ON PODCAST APPS: Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.com/wdapps*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*SOURCES and RESOURCES:https://www.creepypasta.com/forgotten_mistakes/(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: February 01, 2024

In the quiet village of Maxley, where shadows stretch long and the dead refuse to rest, an unsuspecting community is about to uncover a horror that has slept for centuries.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/mrsamworthREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/mr2n9c8mFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: “Mrs. Amworth” by E.F. Benson *** “The White Death” by Christina Skelton *** “My Old Home Videos Showed Me a Life I Never Lived” by Richard SaxonCHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:01:28.161 = “The White Death” by Christina Skelton00:06:24.330 = “My Old Home Videos Showed Me a Life I Never Lived” by Richard Saxon ***00:26:30.035 = “Mrs. Amworth” by E.F. Benson ***01:03:48.287 = 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:“Mrs. Amworth” by E.F. Benson: https://tinyurl.com/yyvqdwub“The White Death” by Christina Skelton: https://tinyurl.com/yxjcujwx“My Old Home Videos Showed Me a Life I Never Lived” by Richard Saxon: https://tinyurl.com/y4l9zzgq(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: August 20, 2020Weird Darkness returns with a night of urban legend, found-footage horror, and classic vampire fiction, moving from a South American death-spirit to a stack of home videos that shouldn't exist to an English village with a very sociable widow.It opens with "The White Death" by Christina Skelton, told by a narrator sitting at his computer waiting to die. A friend's aunt, drunk the night before, finally explained how the boy's parents had died: they were doing mission work in a small South American country when a terrified man burst into the mission hospital claiming a Muerta blanca — the White Death, the White Devil Girl — had killed his sister and was coming for him. She was a girl with dead black eyes that wept bile, who moved without moving her legs, and who knocked on the doors and mirrors between her and her victim: once for the skin she uses to patch her own rotting flesh, twice for the muscle, three times for bones she carves into knives, four for the heart she wears around her neck, and on through the teeth, the eyes, and finally the soul. She can only find you if you saw her kill someone, or if someone tells you about her. The missionaries phoned the aunt about it that same night, and were found in the morning skinned and dismembered, their bodies covered in small, child-like handprints. The aunt was murdered the night she told the story, the friend died on the phone while the narrator listened to the door come off its hinges, and now the knocking has started on the narrator's own door — twenty-eight times on the front door, twenty-eight on the hall mirror, twenty-eight on the bedroom door.From there the episode turns to "My Old Home Videos Showed Me a Life I Never Lived" by Richard Saxon, from Creepypasta.com. Adam Davies, thirty-something and unremarkable, digs a box of VHS tapes out of his parents' basement hoping nostalgia will shake loose whatever ambition he lost. The first tape looks like his childhood exactly as he remembers it, except for a dog named Doug he never owned and cannot recall, and except for the ending: a stranger with a camera follows him out of a bar on October 7th, 2006, and films him burning alive in a car wreck. Every tape after it does the same thing. His grandfather dies in 1999 instead of 1993, his first car changes from black to red, and the film always closes on Adam dying while an unspeaking cameraman watches — shot in the throat in an alley in 2002, drowned in a submerged car in 2004, bleeding out at the bottom of a cliff in 2005. His parents deny the tapes exist; their own footage, digitized and locked in a fireproof safe, ends with no deaths at all. Then Adam finds one labeled 1985 to 2021, watches his mother die in a hospital bed on December 17th, 2020, and watches himself open his own arm with a pocket knife in a motel room a month later while the cameraman films. He hands everything to the police, locks his doors, covers his windows — and an hour later his father calls to say his mother has collapsed in the bathroom.The episode closes with Darren narrating E.F. Benson's 1922 vampire tale "Mrs. Amworth", set in the Sussex village of Maxley. Mrs. Amworth, the widow of an Indian civil servant who died at Peshawar, arrives to enliven a sleepy street of Georgian houses with luncheons, piano playing, and games of piquet — charming everyone except Francis Urcombe, a former Cambridge physiology professor who abandoned his chair to study vampirism and the other borderland subjects his colleagues had filed away as superstition. A plague of night-flying gnats bites the villagers on the throat, a gardener's son wastes away with two small punctures on his neck and no inflammation, and Urcombe keeps watch at a twenty-foot-high window where Mrs. Amworth's face appears in the dark. Her maiden name was Chaston — the name on the gravestones in Maxley's disused churchyard, and the name of the woman blamed for an outbreak of vampirism there three centuries earlier. Death does not end her, and the story finishes at dawn in the cemetery with a pick, a shovel, a coil of rope, and a coffin lid slid aside.

A man who has feared death every day of his life wakes among strangers who cannot die — and finds that to them, he is something called an “atavus” — drawn by lot into what they have waited five hundred years to do.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, “Wise Child” (March 24, 1978) ***WD00:45:57.515 = Arch Oboler's Plays, “Immortal Gentleman” (June 17, 1939) ***WD01:14:01.420 = Barry Craig, “Corpse On Delivery” (November 31, 1951)01:41:53.419 = BBC Radio 4/Radio 7, “Mortmain” (April 22, 1992)02:26:10.177 = Night Beat, “Lost Souls” (November 16, 1951) ***WD02:55:47.576 = Beyond The Green Door, “Mk. Arkady Bradian, Bolder and TNT” (1966)02:58:57.644 = Man In Black (The Black Book), “The Price of the Head” (February 02, 1952) ***WD03:13:42.390 = Blackstone The Magic Detective, “The Ghost That Wasn't” (November 28, 1948) ***WD03:26:24.838 = Box 13, “The Professor And The Puzzle” (January 09, 1949)03:52:53.344 = Calling All Cars, “The Human Bomb” (December 20, 1933) ***WD04:22:42.424 = Casey Crime Photographer, “A Tooth For a Tooth” (July 15, 1946) ***WD04:48:33.183 = 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/WDRR0713Weird Darkness presents Retro Radio: Old Time Radio in the Dark, a collection of vintage broadcasts spanning psychological horror, hard-boiled detective work, ghost stories, and the strange corners where the two overlap.It opens with the CBS Radio Mystery Theater and E.G. Marshall's presentation of "Wise Child," written by Sam Dann and starring Ralph Bell. Joyce and Calvin Spurlock argue their way off a turnpike into a storm near a place called Kiowa Flats, sleep the night in their stalled car, and wake to find a newborn baby lying naked on a hillside — alive, unharmed, and abandoned. Joyce insists the child is a miracle and claims him as her own, inventing a birth story to secure a certificate. Calvin Junior never grows, not an ounce, not a fraction of an inch, while doctors find him perfectly healthy. Then a newspaper report reveals that the wilderness north of Kiowa Flats had been used as a secret dumping ground for atomic waste — and Calvin begins to sense something in the air, a force, a light, a power that lets him read the minds of his boss, his sister, and his customers, reshaping his entire life around whatever entered that child during the storm.From there, Arch Oboler's "Immortal Gentleman" arrives with Edmund O'Brien and Anne Shepherd, in which a man terrified of death his entire life screams aloud in a crowded auditorium and then explains why to the woman beside him. Sitting through a political speech, he found himself displaced into a future where science has abolished death entirely — a world of young people conditioned for fifty years, filled with all human knowledge, living two hundred, three hundred, five hundred years with nothing to do because "the old ones" never die and never surrender their positions. They call him an atavus, a throwback that surfaces once in every two thousand embryos. Twenty-four of them draw lots in a darkened room, and he is handed a black box and told to throw it at a woman who has lived five thousand years.Next, William Gargan stars as Barry Craig, confidential investigator, in "Corpse On Delivery." Bail bondsman Sam Solloway hires Craig to find Joey Florio, a racketeer who jumped a fifty-thousand-dollar bond, and offers ten percent to get him back. A merchant seaman named Stacy Crocker is stabbed four separate times outside Craig's office door before he can deliver whatever he came to sell. A blonde in ballerina sweaters frisks the corpse for its papers, a rifle shot grazes Craig's skull along West Street, and monogrammed pillows in a room at the Hotel Mohansic spell out the answer in two letters.The episode continues with John Metcalfe's "Mortmain," dramatized for radio by Rebecca Wilmshurst, set in the south of England before the war. Salome Clare marries Humphrey Ramsden Child, a man obsessed with moths, boats, and his dead mother Harriet, who vows at the altar that marriage binds souls beyond death throughout eternity. At an anniversary dinner deliberately set for thirteen guests aboard his houseboat, a woman is attacked by a swarm of moths in an upstairs bathroom, and a decomposing dog is dragged from the linen closet. Humphrey is committed as criminally insane, dresses in his mother's clothing, and promises from inside a straitjacket that death shall not part them. After his death, Salome marries John Temple — and on their honeymoon, a rotting pink boat begins rising out of the water behind them.Frank Lovejoy follows as Randy Stone in "Lost Souls," walking South State Street on Chicago's Skid Row, where a woman named Ruth Martin has spent eight hundred dollars buying steaks, clean sheets, and champagne for every derelict on the block. She refuses to answer a ringing telephone. Her purse holds a hotel key and a brand-new loaded .32. Twenty years earlier, watching police drag a screaming thirty-year-old woman into a wagon, Ruth made her friend Vivian Clark promise to kill her if she ever turned out the same way. Vivian Clark died at eleven years old — and every night for three weeks, the phone has rung wherever Ruth runs, from St. Louis to Kansas City to Duluth to Chicago.Basil Rathbone then delivers a short piece from Beyond the Green Door about a magician turned bank robber who kills two guards in Croesus, Maine, and hides in an abandoned granite quarry by disguising himself as a boulder — until a truck from the Eastern Maine Gravel Corporation pulls in to set the dynamite charges. The Man in Black, starring Paul Frees, presents John Russell's South Seas story "The Price of the Head," in which Christopher Pellet, a red-whiskered drunk with a bad name in the islands, murders a bartender at Fufuti and is saved by a Bougainville native named Karaki, who steals a canoe, sails eight hundred miles, nurses him through withdrawal, kills two white men in a cutter, gives him the last of the water, and combs his red hair and whiskers twice every day.Blackstone the Magic Detective investigates "The Ghost That Wasn't" at the Weldon mansion, where Mortimer Weldon's brother Clarence accepted a dare to spend the night in the tower room and was found in the courtyard with a broken neck behind a door locked from the inside — and where a grandfather clock that has always kept excellent time is suddenly two minutes slow. Alan Ladd stars as Dan Holliday in "The Professor And The Puzzle," a Box 13 adventure in which a college crystallographer named Martin Gardner is found shot through the heart with his own gun, his niece abruptly breaks her engagement to marry her uncle's lab assistant Ed Macklin, and Macklin turns up stabbed with his own knife. Registered mail receipts and a bank book under the name Samuel Stoner lead Holliday to an office building and a case of illicit diamond cutting.Calling All Cars reaches back into the records for "The Human Bomb," the true story of Carl Weiss, who walked into police headquarters wearing a sheepskin hood, green goggles, and a soldier's campaign hat, carrying a blood-red box packed with sixty-six sticks of dynamite and holding a spring-loaded trigger that would fire the moment he let go. He demanded to see Paul Shoup, president of the Pacific Electric Railway, and threatened to level the building unless the railroad workers got a raise. Two hundred and sixty prisoners were evacuated by streetcar while Chief Sebastian stalled him, and Officer Sam Brown eventually thrust his bare hand through the glass top of the box to smother the lit fuse.The episode closes with Staats Cotsworth as Casey, Crime Photographer, in "A Tooth For a Tooth" by Charles Holden. Rewrite man Henry Brower confesses a premonition of his own death and admits that a man named Renat — no licensed dentist, but a self-described research scientist on River Road — filled his teeth for free to test a new metal. Brower vanishes that night, and Lieutenant Logan writes him off as a debtor who skipped town. Casey recognizes the shape of a Colorado cattleman's case from 1931, and a bartender's habit of spelling words backward hands him the name he needs.

“Judas Kiss: The Traveling Clairvoyant of Tipton Mountain” — A hermit who claims he can watch distant events from inside a hollow pine tree becomes convinced the woman renting the cabin above his is a murderer — and only he knows what she's done.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 Judas Kiss” (March 23, 1978) ***WD00:45:48.210 = Tales From The Tomb, “Spirit Calling” (1960s)00:50:20.385 = Two Thousand Plus, “World's Apart” (November 29, 1950) ***WD01:19:02.978 = The Unexpected, “Heat Wave” (1947-1948)01:31:11.637 = Unsolved Mysteries, “Indian Fakir” (February 17, 1944) ***WD01:44:47.860 = Dark Venture, “Elizabeth Is Frightened” (July 22, 1947)02:14:43.934 = The Weird Circle, “Haunted Hotel” (May 13, 1945)02:42:15.220 = The Whistler, “Murder Will Shout” (March 19, 1945)03:11:41.385 = Strange Wills, “Emily” (August 31, 1946)03:41:20.826 = Witch's Tale, “Statue of Thor” (May 22, 1933)04:04:13.136 = X Minus One, “Honeymoon In Hell” (December 26, 1956)04:33:07.327 = ABC Mystery Time, “Murder In Haste” (1957) ***WD04:56:48.877 = Strange Adventure, “Death Rides The Carousel” (1945) ***WD05:00:05.724 = 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/WDRR0712Weird Darkness presents Retro Radio, a night of classic dark radio drama spanning three decades of murder, madness, and the supernatural.It opens with the CBS Radio Mystery Theater's "The Judas Kiss," in which Oscar Absecker, a solitary handyman living on a dying mountain outside the village of Tipton, believes a big black dog barks three times whenever someone dies — and believes he can watch distant events unfold by standing inside a lightning-struck, hollow pine tree. When Deputy Luke Marbury rents the cabin above his to a woman named Enid Grant, Oscar becomes convinced that she is destroying the much younger man who joins her there, and his visions show him one killing after another. Fred Gwynne stars, with E.G. Marshall hosting.From there comes "Spirit Calling" from Tales From The Tomb, a short piece about a nine-year-old girl named Amy, alone in the house during a violent summer storm after her uncle Stanley's death, and the telephone call that comes through on a dead line.Next is Two Thousand Plus and "World's Apart," in which rocket engineer Jim Granger talks his way onto Flight 17, the first crewed voyage to Neptune, only for the spaceship Phoenix to be dragged off course by an uncharted comet. Crippled and lost, the ship limps to a landing at a place called Green Valley, where Commander Dijkstra can hear heartbeats across a room, the milk is green, and gravity does not behave the way it should.The Unexpected follows with "Heat Wave," starring Barry Sullivan as Whitey Malone, a fugitive sweating out a 110-degree heat wave in a fifth-floor garret while the police close in — and burning to settle accounts with the woman he thinks tipped them off.Then Unsolved Mysteries brings "Indian Fakir," a story told at the United Services Club in Simla, where a colonel recounts what happened when his young English bride, alone in their Bangalore bungalow, tried to outsmart a fakir who demanded a strand of her hair — and handed him threads pulled from a Chinese rug instead.Dark Venture presents "Elizabeth Is Frightened," with Joan Banks as a wealthy woman who marries Philip Bailey, a widower fascinated by the power of one mind to dominate another. As the whole town starts believing Elizabeth is ill and suicidal, only her housekeeper Flora and Dr. Davis suspect what her husband is really doing.The Weird Circle offers "Haunted Hotel," in which Henry Westwick travels to Venice and takes room fourteen at a converted castle to learn how his brother Philip died weeks after marrying the mysterious Countess Narona — and finds the answers coming to him in dreams.The Whistler tells "Murder Will Shout," the story of garage owner George Kramer, buried in debt to a man named Albion, and the small-time racketeer Peanut Marola who offers a black-market car racket, a partnership, and a solution to the Albion problem that goes very wrong on Miller Highway.Strange Wills, starring Warren William, tells "Emily," tracing a violin built by Antonio Stradivarius in Cremona in 1732 through the hands of gypsies, Niccolò Paganini, and the Heller family of Vienna, until it turns up at a barn dance in the Tennessee hills as a GI's war souvenir.The Witch's Tale delivers "Statue of Thor," in which sculptor Neil Redding, bored and cruel, mocks his enormous Swedish model Olaf, seduces Olaf's fiancée Hedwig, and takes the big man to the foundry to watch the statue of Thor cast in bronze — a casting that comes out of the mold wearing a face Redding never sculpted.X Minus One presents "Honeymoon In Hell," set in the late 1960s, when male births stop worldwide and the cybernetics machine known as Junior recommends sending a married couple to the moon. Rocket pilot Ray Carmody is wed to Eastern Alliance pilot Anya Borisovna hours before launch, and on the lunar surface they find an unidentified craft that does not belong to either alliance.ABC Mystery Time offers "Murder In Haste," in which Elbert Taylor kills his wife Ellen, flees Miami by train under an assumed name, and — after a derailment in Georgia — steals the identity of a dead mystery writer named Leslie Jameson, only to have Jameson's wife walk into his New York hotel room.The episode closes with Strange Adventure and "Death Rides The Carousel," where a lawyer named Jeffrey Ford is found stabbed through the heart on a merry-go-round chariot at a village carnival in Merrimack, and Inspector Jonathan Hawke spots the flaw in the ticket taker's account.

Three kids track down a forgotten swimming hole behind the abandoned Duncan Quarry, rediscover it for the summer — and find out why everyone stopped coming.Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://pod.link/1655277373Find more family-friendly frights and creepy games to play on our website at http://MicroTerrors.com!Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/microterrorsOther stories, novels, and more from author Scott Donnelly: https://amzn.to/3LymHaUOther narrations, podcasts, and audiobooks from voice artist Darren Marlar: https://WeirdDarkness.comhttps://weirddarkness.com/mt-sludge= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =Weird Darkness©, 2026Micro Terrors: Scary Stories for Kids™, 2026#MicroTerrors #WeirdDarkness

Between 1997 and 2006, an overweight pizza delivery man named Ronald Dominique strangled 23 men across rural Louisiana, and almost no one has ever heard his name.A deep-dive article on all of the obscure legends featured in the first section of tonight's podcast: https://weirddarkness.com/obscure-legends/EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/BayouStranglerREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/3fyw74cjFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Spine-tingling ghost stories and eerie myths... come to life! Are any of them actually true? We'll explore the more obscure side of folklore with ghosts and legends that don't get the same amount of attention others do – but are certainly not to be ignored! (Myths And Ghosts You May Never Have Heard Of) *** In the quiet town of Essex, Maryland, the disappearance of nine-year-old Alva Jean Parris shattered the peace of summer 1960. Walking just three blocks to her aunt's house, she vanished without a trace, only for her body to be found days later, hidden beneath a makeshift grave. Decades have passed, but the mystery of who took Alva Jean and why remains unsolved. (Who Killed Alva Jean?) *** He's a little-known serial killer. Ronald J. Dominique, dubbed the Bayou Strangler, went on a decade-long murder spree in rural Louisiana, killing 23 men. (The Bayou Strangler)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:01:49.323 = Myths And Ghosts You May Never Have Heard Of00:33:02.110 = The Bayou Strangler ***00:49:50.242 = Who Killed Alva Jean?00:54:23.489 = 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:“Myths And Ghosts You May Never Have Heard Of” sources: Cara Duke at ListVerse.com:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/bddryv6h; Mysteries of Canada: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yckwn5y5; Brendan-Noble.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8audhk; Factschology.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/ycxzdhwa,https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/v7rdp57c, https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/bdfcswwk; InuitMyths.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/puzuc272, TheIrishRoadTrip.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/vj824vwb; DallasTerrors.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8s8crn; NewEnglandHistoricalSociety.com:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/8r4zmkpt“The Bayou Strangler” by Oliver Mason for The-Line-Up.com, used with permission: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/mt8tnyh4 (BOOK: “The Bayou Strangler” by Fred Rosen: https://amzn.to/49RIiWj) “Who Killed Alva Jean?” source: Robert A. Waters at KidnappingMurderAndMayhem.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8ab932(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 23, 2024This episode of Weird Darkness travels from obscure folklore across four continents to a little-known Louisiana serial killer and a Maryland child murder that has gone unsolved for more than sixty years.It opens with a tour through the ghosts and monsters that rarely make the usual lists: the Dungarvon Whooper, the murdered lumber-camp cook named Ryan whose whoops still echo along New Brunswick's Dungarvon River; the strzyga of Slavic myth, a two-hearted, twin-souled demon that takes the form of a barn owl before it feeds; Lady Koi Koi, the red-heeled teacher whose clicking footsteps haunt boarding schools across Nigeria, Ghana, and South Africa; the banshee of North Carolina's Tar River, tied to a flour miller named Dave Warner and the Revolutionary War redcoats who drowned him in 1781; the Headless Nun of Miramichi, the murdered Sister Marie who wanders French Fort Cove asking where her head has gone; the Kludde, a chain-rattling shapeshifting dog from Belgian and Dutch folklore; the Inupasugjuk, the rarely-seen giants of Inuit tradition; the Dearg Due of County Waterford, an abused Irish bride who rose from her grave near the Tree of Strongbow to drain the blood of her father and husband; the Goatman of Old Alton Bridge near Denton, Texas, an 1884 iron truss bridge also tied to the lynching of black goat farmer Oscar Washburn; and the Stratford Knockings of 1850, the poltergeist that draped Reverend Eliakim Phelps's Connecticut mansion in funeral crepe and centered on his eleven-year-old stepson Harry.From there the episode turns to Ronald Joseph Dominique, the Louisiana pizza delivery man dubbed the Bayou Strangler, who raped and strangled twenty-three men between 1997 and 2006 while evading police for nearly a decade. Drawing on Fred Rosen's book The Bayou Strangler, the segment follows the killing of Oliver LeBanks, beaten with a tire iron and dumped beneath a highway overpass near Metairie, and traces Dominique's earlier victims across St. Charles Parish, from nineteen-year-old David Mitchell in July 1997 to twenty-year-old Gary Pierre and thirty-eight-year-old Larry Ranson, most of them gay African American men lured with the promise of paid sex. It introduces Detective Lieutenant Dennis Thornton of the Jefferson Parish sheriff's office, who worked the LeBanks scene and set himself the task of linking the killings that DNA evidence would finally tie to Dominique.The episode closes with the June 10, 1960 disappearance of nine-year-old Alva Jean Parris, who vanished walking three blocks to her aunt's house from the Riverdale Apartments in Essex, Maryland. Five days later, searchers found her shoes in a marsh and her body in a shallow grave concealed with linoleum, sod, and twigs beside an abandoned farmhouse, her abdomen and pelvis coated in lye. Assistant Medical Examiner Dr. William Lovitt found decomposition too advanced to confirm a cause of death, though strangulation was suspected, and despite polygraph tests, a solid alibi clearing her mother Fredonia, and tips about a man seen in a sailor's hat, no suspect was ever charged in a case that remains open today.

Two researchers built a mathematical model of human cannibalism and discovered, after considerable effort, that the answer is no.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/average-mealLook 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.

Flying jackets, faces frozen mid-scream, a coven convinced they needed David Bowie's blood, and a demon that crashed a text at exactly 666 megabytes — these are the paranormal encounters the famous swear actually happened to them.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/CelebrityGhostEncountersREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/ff82f8yuFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Don't try and tell some celebrities that ghosts don't exist, because they've seen all the paranormal proof they need to believe. (Celebrity Encounters With The Paranormal) *** A prayer for food resulted in fish raining down from the sky in Yoro, Honduras. And now it happens regularly – sometimes twice a year – with still no definitive explanation. (Cloudy With a Chance of Sardines) *** Is it possible that UFO sightings and sightings of the Chupacabra are somehow related? Even stranger – is it possible the strange dog-lizard-like creatures came from crashed spaceships? (UFOs And The Chupacabra) *** Weirdo family member Laura tells a strange story about a candy store – and its resident ghost. (Haunted Candy Store)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:01:13.649 = Show Open00:02:50.627 = Celebrity Encounters With The Paranormal00:31:59.645 = UFOs And The Chupacabras ***00:39:37.674 = Cloudy With a Chance of Sardines00:46:26.106 = Haunted Candy Store ***00:50:58.248 = 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:“Celebrity Encounters With The Paranormal” by Brent Swancer: http://bit.ly/2ZAzYGX“Celebs Who Have Had Ghost Encounters by Lydia Price: http://bit.ly/2Iq0bCm“UFOs And The Chupacabra” by Nick Redfern: http://bit.ly/2XS41cy“Cloudy With a Chance of Sardines” by Panchali Dey: http://bit.ly/2IQ9p9Y“Haunted Candy Store” by Weirdo family member, Laura(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: January, 2021This episode of Weird Darkness gathers famous names who swear the paranormal found them, a Puerto Rican legend that ties dead Chupacabras to a crashed UFO, a Honduran town where fish fall from the sky, and a Wisconsin candy store with a listener's uneasy childhood dream folded in.It opens with celebrities who came away convinced. Carrie Fisher described lights and electronics switching on and off in her Beverly Hills home after her friend R. Gregory Stevens died there; Matthew McConaughey named the blue-dressed spirit he confronted in his house Madame Blu; and a young Keanu Reeves watched an empty jacket drift through a doorway in his New York apartment, the reality of it confirmed only by his nanny's face. Patrick Stewart saw a man in a beige coat vanish in the wings of the Theatre Royal Haymarket during Waiting for Godot, later matched to the ghost of 19th-century actor-manager Baldwin Buckstone, who died in 1879. Peter Jackson woke to a woman with a screaming face at the foot of his bed near London's St. James Theatre, a ghost his wife had seen two years earlier. Miley Cyrus fled a London flat over a boy she kept seeing on the bathroom sink; Ariana Grande photographed what she called textbook demon faces at Kansas's Stull Cemetery and found the file measured 666 megabytes; and David Bowie spent much of the 1970s certain a coven of witches wanted his semen, lighting black candles and hiring white magician Walli Elmlark to exorcise his swimming pool. John Lennon, by Uri Geller's account, described bug-like beings outside his apartment and an alien metal egg left in his hands, while Sammy Hagar claimed aliens plugged his sleeping brain into a machine and uploaded numerical code in 1967. Shorter accounts follow from Megan Mullally, Kendall Jenner, Gigi Hadid, Chloe Sevigny at the Lizzie Borden house, NASCAR's Dale Earnhardt Jr., Kate Hudson, Jessica Alba, Lucy Hale, Laura Linney at Broadway's Belasco Theater, Claudia Schiffer, Emma Stone, Selena Gomez, Alyson Hannigan, Demi Lovato, Jenna Bush-Hager in the White House, and Megan Fox.From there the episode travels to Puerto Rico, where writer Nick Redfern chases the claim that the shuttered Roosevelt Roads Naval Station once held the bodies of dead Chupacabras the way Wright-Patterson Air Force Base is rumored to hold dead aliens. On visits between 2004 and 2015, Redfern and monster-hunter Jon Downes collect accounts of a 1957 UFO crash in the hills of Canovanas, sealed off by the military for roughly three weeks, and a second reported crash in the El Yunque rain forest in February 1984 — both said to have left dead Chupacabras in the wreckage, though the creature angle only attached itself to the older case after the Chupacabra panic began in 1995.Next comes Yoro, Honduras, and the Lluvia de Peces, the Rain of Fish that residents trace to Father Jose Manuel Subirana, a Spanish missionary who prayed three days and nights over the region's hunger in the 1850s or '60s. Once or twice a year after a heavy May or June storm, live sardine-like fish cover the streets of a town more than 100 miles from the ocean, and a National Geographic team in the 1970s found the stranded fish were completely blind, hypothesizing underground rivers forced above ground by flooding rather than the waterspouts others propose. The town of roughly 93,000 celebrates with a festival, a parade, and a Miss Fish Rain crowned to ride a float dressed as a mermaid, and locals refuse to sell the catch, sharing it instead as a blessing.The episode closes with Weirdo family member Laura, who worked summers at a haunted candy store in a Wisconsin tourist town, a converted house where a ceramic jar once flew across a room at a coworker. That coworker, a Canadian tribeswoman from a family with the 'sight,' listened to Laura describe a dream that returned every Christmas Eve until she was six or seven — a black, pulsing void of indistinct voices that rose to screams and a pressure closing on her chest, replaced in its final occurrence by an overhead view of a storage yard before it stopped for good. When Laura finished, the coworker told her it was a good thing she never listened to the voices, and suggested Laura had unconsciously sealed off her own ability to sense the spiritual after something that was not benevolent kept trying to reach her.

Christa Pike carried a piece of Colleen Slemmer's skull back to the Job Corps dorm as a souvenir, and on September 30th, 2026, Tennessee is scheduled to execute her for the murder that produced it.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources and transcript): https://weirddarkness.com/christa-pikeMusic by Shadows Symphony. Weird Darkness theme music by Alibi Music.LISTEN ON PODCAST APPS: Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.com/wdapps*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: July 09, 2026Weird Darkness host Darren Marlar traces the 1995 Job Corps murder of Colleen Slemmer, the jealousy and Satanism behind it, and the three decades of appeals, prison violence, and stalled executions that have brought Christa Pike to a September 2026 death date in Tennessee.It opens on the morning of January 13th, 1995, when a groundskeeper at the University of Tennessee Agricultural Institute outside Knoxville found a body so badly beaten he mistook it for an animal carcass — nineteen-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a Florida girl who loved computers and had taken a bus to Knoxville on Halloween of 1994 for a six-month course at the Knoxville Job Corps Center. The night before, four students had signed out together, and only three signed back in. Eighteen-year-old Christa Gail Pike, her seventeen-year-old boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp, and eighteen-year-old Shadolla Peterson had lured Slemmer to a wooded stretch near an abandoned steam plant with the promise of marijuana in Tyson Park, and over roughly half an hour Pike and Shipp beat and cut her while Peterson held a flashlight. Pike carved a pentagram into Slemmer's chest while she was alive, cut her throat six times with a box cutter after pausing to check that no one was watching, threw asphalt at her head, and afterward pried loose a fragment of her skull to keep. Pike had come to believe Slemmer wanted Shipp, a jealousy Slemmer denied, and she and Shipp had bonded over Satanism and the occult; Pike wore a small devil tattoo on her chest, and searches later turned up satanic altars and occult literature in both their rooms.From there the episode follows what Pike did with the bone. She returned to campus around 11 p.m., went to her friend Kim Iloilo's room dancing and singing, and produced the skull fragment as a souvenir, warning Iloilo she would be killed too if she talked. Pike carried the piece in a napkin in her leather jacket, bragged at breakfast that she was eating with it, and showed it around class along with the blood still on her shoes and clothing — behavior that turned investigator Randy York toward her within forty-eight hours. Pike confessed in a forty-six-page recorded statement, and York described her as giddy, acting out how Slemmer had begged for her life. The episode also lays out the childhood documented in her later post-conviction filings: parents who struggled with alcohol, sexual and physical abuse by multiple people, a mother's suicide attempt she witnessed, and neurological evaluations finding structural brain abnormalities alongside later diagnoses of bipolar disorder and PTSD, none of which the jury ever heard.Next comes the trial and the long aftermath. In March 1996, before Judge Mary Beth Leibowitz in Knox County Criminal Court, Pike was convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy, and on March 30th, weeks after her twentieth birthday, sentenced to death by electrocution, making her the youngest woman on death row in the modern era. Within hours she wrote Shipp an unrepentant letter framing the killing as a kindness because she had ended it quickly. Shipp, ineligible for death because he was seventeen, drew a life sentence and was denied parole in October 2025; Peterson received six years of probation. In 2001 Pike choked fellow inmate Patricia Jones with a shoestring until officers revived her, earning another twenty-five years, and around 2011 a New Jersey personal trainer named Donald Kohut and a correctional officer named Justin Heflin were caught in a plot to trace and duplicate a prison key to free her. Her appeals failed through the federal courts, an execution set for August 27th, 2020 was postponed by COVID-19, and on September 30th, 2025 the Tennessee Supreme Court reset her death for September 30th, 2026.The episode closes on what remains unresolved as that date approaches. Tennessee's 2026 execution schedule has already faltered — Governor Bill Lee granted Tony Carruthers a last-minute reprieve on May 21st after medical staff couldn't establish a backup IV line, media witnesses reported signs of pain in the 2025 executions of Byron Black and Harold Nichols, and Senate Republicans led by Tom Hatcher have asked Lee to pause executions pending review. Pike has filed suit over the pentobarbital protocol, arguing it excludes her Buddhist spiritual advisor and risks a torturous death, while advocates gather signatures asking Lee to commute her sentence over her age, abuse, and mental illness. If carried out, she would be the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than two hundred years. The last piece belongs to Slemmer's mother, Mae Martinez, who for more than twenty years has asked the state to return the skull fragment still held in evidence so she can bury her daughter whole — a nineteen-year-old who liked bowling and shrimping on the river back home in Florida and had gone to Tennessee to build a life around computers.

Stranded in the Nicaraguan jungle beside an ancient temple, three adventurers and their companions discover its priests serve a horror that's all too real — man-sized vampire bats with an appetite for human blood."Temple of Vampires," an installment of Carlton E. Morse's I Love a Mystery (originally aired January 02-27, 1950), follows adventurers Jack, Doc, and Reggie as they fly toward Central America with heiress Sonny Richards and a mysterious stowaway boy named Hermie. Water-tainted gasoline forces their plane down on the shore of Lake Nicaragua, near an ancient jungle temple. Exploring it, they find a blood-drained Indian corpse and a pit of human bones, then encounter the temple's inhabitants — a beautiful priestess named Angelina and a priest named Manuel — who claim to be servants of "sacred vampires," giant man-sized bats bred over generations for human sacrifice. Angelina fixates on carrying off Hermie for his pale skin, while Manuel abducts Sonny with designs of his own. Trapped by nightfall and a tropical storm, the comrades face a harrowing ordeal of rope-swings between dizzying high ledges, captures, and near-sacrifices as they fight to get everyone out of the temple alive.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 = I Love a Mystery, “Temple of Vampires – Part 01”00:18:09.039 = I Love a Mystery, “Temple of Vampires – Part 02”00:30:24.993 = I Love a Mystery, “Temple of Vampires – Part 03”00:42:29.450 = I Love a Mystery, “Temple of Vampires – Part 04”00:54:51.162 = I Love a Mystery, “Temple of Vampires – Part 05” 01:08:25.386 = I Love a Mystery, “Temple of Vampires – Part 06”01:20:09.836 = I Love a Mystery, “Temple of Vampires – Part 07”01:32:02.555 = I Love a Mystery, “Temple of Vampires – Part 08”01:46:00.195 = I Love a Mystery, “Temple of Vampires – Part 09”01:59:57.396 = I Love a Mystery, “Temple of Vampires – Part 10”02:12:07.077 = I Love a Mystery, “Temple of Vampires – Part 11”02:23:02.698 = I Love a Mystery, “Temple of Vampires – Part 12”02:35:06.736 = I Love a Mystery, “Temple of Vampires – Part 13”02:48:27.963 = I Love a Mystery, “Temple of Vampires – Part 14”03:01:52.639 = I Love a Mystery, “Temple of Vampires – Part 15”03:14:12.994 = I Love a Mystery, “Temple of Vampires – Part 16”03:32:42.168 = I Love a Mystery, “Temple of Vampires – Part 17”03:38:57.971 = I Love a Mystery, “Temple of Vampires – Part 18”03:51:41.050 = I Love a Mystery, “Temple of Vampires – Part 19”04:05:39.729 = I Love a Mystery, “Temple of Vampires – Part 20”04:19:53.687 = 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/WDRR0711

A young samurai's forbidden love for a warlord's daughter follows him past the grave, when her returning ghost lures him into a fatal embrace no sacred charm can prevent.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 Golden Amulet” (March 21, 1978) ***WD00:45:50.420 = Sam Spade, “The Calcutta Trunk Caper” (June 08, 1947)01:10:25.646 = The Sealed Book, “Devil Island” (April 0, 1945) ***WD01:39:45.947 = The Shadow, “Death Prowls At Night” (March 23, 1941)02:05:40.407 = Sleep No More, “Thus I Refute Beezly” and “The Bookshop” (March 06, 1957) ***WD02:34:17.055 = BBC Spinechillers, “Kappa” (1984)02:59:07.403 = Strange, “Flying Dutchman” (1955) ***WD03:12:02.153 = Suspense, “Narrative About Clarence” (March 16, 1944)03:41:27.199 = Tales of the Frightened, “Never Kick a Black Cat” (1963)03:46:04.004 = The Creaking Door, “White Scarf Strangler” (March 01, 1965) ***WD (LQ)04:13:55.896 = The Saint, “Mr. Richie's Loss” (October 29, 1947) ***WD04:38:20.419 = Theater 1030, “Two Little Punctures” (July 12, 1953) ***WD05:05:20.921 = 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/WDRR0710

A mother of five bled out on a Del Rio street on a Thursday afternoon, and by that evening the two sisters accused of killing her were caught on camera grinning in handcuffs.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/caropenaLook 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 Pritchard family moved into 30 East Drive, they thought a broken pipe was flooding the kitchen. But the hooded thing they came to call the Black Monk would flood their home with water, drag their daughter up the stairs, and become one of the most violent hauntings England has ever recorded.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/blackmonkREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p88xknwFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: A family moves into a home and almost immediately begins to experience escalating supernatural activity – which then introduces a sinister, dark menacing entity. (The Black Monk) *** Urban legends are typically dark, strange stories which for the most part are only that – legend. Harmless tales meant to frighten the listener with no more repercussions than some goose bumps and perhaps a restless night of trying to sleep. But some legends are based on truth – and those are the ones that truly make our skin crawl and our faces turn white. (Urban Legends Which Are Actually True) *** Why would a U.S. state vote to have an official state demon? It really happened – and stories about the Jersey Devil continue to this day. We'll look at the history and horrors of this bizarre cryptid and see if it's more than urban legend. (Legend of the Jersey Devil) *** Delano, California is a small, uninteresting town that many may think twice before visiting. East of this town is an equally dreary road known as Browning Road. If you're a paranormal enthusiast, you know that this is one road you shouldn't dare travel alone. (Hitchhiking Ghost of Delano) *** A woman shares her horrifying true story of an evil entity she encountered on Browning Road in Delano, California. (Evil Walks Browning Road) *** In the summer of 2014 a series of UFOs were being reported by Navy pilots – the most elite of our airborne military. Not only were the sightings becoming more frequent – they would last up to 12-hours at a time. (Navy Pilots Report UFOs)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:00:55.732 = Show Open00:03:16.616 = The Black Monk00:19:05.635 = Navy Pilot Reports UFOs ***00:24:26.222 = Urban Legends Which Are Actually True00:31:27.802 = Legend of the Jersey Devil ***00:40:09.038 = Hitchhiking Ghost in Delano / Evil Walks Browning Road00:45:37.698 = Show Close*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad breakLISTEN ON PODCAST APPS: Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.com/wdapps*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*SOURCES and RESOURCES:The Black Monk” by Brent Swancer”: http://bit.ly/2Fg0QUV“Navy Pilots Report UFOs” by Helene Cooper: http://bit.ly/2ImqbhP“Urban Legends Which Are Actually True” by DeAnna Janes: http://bit.ly/2WIlbId“The Legend of the Jersey Devil” by Carolyn Cox: http://bit.ly/2Im39rq“Hitchhiking Ghost in Delano” posted at Backpackerverse.com: http://bit.ly/2IkU6XM“Evil Walks Browning Road” by Amy S.: http://bit.ly/2N7inoL(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, 2022This episode of Weird Darkness moves from a violent English poltergeist to Navy encounters with unexplained aircraft, a run of urban legends with real-world roots, the New Jersey cryptid born of a colonial grudge, and a haunted California roadway. It opens at 30 East Drive in Pontefract, West Yorkshire, England, where in 1966 Jean and Joe Pritchard and their children Phillip and Diane began living alongside an entity the family first nicknamed "Fred" and later called the Black Monk. Cold gusts, pooling water, rattling crockery, slashed portraits, and inverted crosses scrawled in red and black ink escalated over years, with Diane singled out for choking, scratches, and being dragged up the stairs in front of witnesses. Investigator Tom Cuniff tied the site to a former gallows and to a Cluniac monk hanged for raping and killing a girl, and decades later Nick Groff and Katrina Weidman of Paranormal Lockdown spent 100 hours locked inside, recording a Latin EVP, a rolling ball, a knife left on the stairs, and Katrina being scratched.From there the episode turns to the skies off the East Coast, where from the summer of 2014 into March 2015 Navy pilots including Lieutenant Ryan Graves of the VFA-11 "Red Rippers" reported objects with no visible engines that reached 30,000 feet and hypersonic speeds and stayed aloft for up to twelve hours. A Super Hornet nearly collided with one in late 2014, footage captured an object skimming the ocean off the USS Theodore Roosevelt, and the sightings reached the Pentagon's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, whose former head Luis Elizondo called them a striking series of incidents while Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysicist Leon Golub pointed toward mundane explanations.Next comes a set of urban legends that turned out to have true counterparts, from the 1997 organ-theft chain email set against a 2008 ABC News account of Indian men drugged and cut open near Delhi, to the body-in-the-bed frame tale debunked by folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand yet echoed by killer Richard Kuklinski, to Halloween hanging-stunt deaths of teenagers Brian Jewell, William Anthony Odom, and Caleb Rebh, to intruders like 1941 Denver attic-dweller Theodore Coneys, to explorer John Hanning Speke and British traveler Rochelle Harris and the creatures found inside human ears.The show then digs into the Jersey Devil, the winged Pine Barrens beast the 1939 WPA guide dubbed New Jersey's official state demon, and traces its origin to almanac maker Daniel Leeds, his son Titan's feud with Benjamin Franklin, and the family crest's wyverns, alongside a claimed sighting by Joseph Bonaparte and the January 1909 panic that closed schools and mills across the Delaware Valley.The episode closes on Browning Road in Delano, California, where locals say a young woman struck and killed decades ago haunts the lonely stretch marked by a roadside memorial, appearing in backseats and on the yellow divider lines, followed by the first-person account of a driver named Amy who saw pale gray eyes in her rearview mirror before the figure screamed, vanished, and reappeared standing in the middle of the road.

A man who searched his estranged father's name once a year for closure instead found a 1998 arrest record naming himself as the victim.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/cody-jacob/Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://pod.link/1078714736*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.

A nightgown-clad stranger in a flying saucer repeats two nonsense words to everyone who'll listen—but only a lonely hospital cleaner can understand what he's really saying, and the warning is one no one wants to believe.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, “Identified Flying Objects” (March 17, 1978) ***WD00:45:34.637 = Obsession, “Amnesia” (February 19, 1951) ***WD01:08:44.909 = Origin of Superstition, “Throwing Salt” (1935)01:23:20.108 = Pat Novak, “Fleet Lady” (March 06, 1949) ***WD01:53:23.239 = Peril, “Killer” (1953) ***WD02:16:39.256 = Mystery Playhouse, “Criminal At Large” (April 11, 1944) ***WD (LQ)02:46:09.318 = Price of Fear, “Not Wanted On This Voyage” (1973-1983) ***WD03:14:05.007 = Adventures of Ellery Queen, “Saga of Ruffy Rux” (November 27, 1947) (LQ)03:42:57.592 = Quiet Please, “The Man Who Knew Everything” (March 06, 1949)04:11:53.022 = Radio City Playhouse, “Problem Child” (November 13, 1949)04:37:02.732 = Adventures In The Supernatural, “The Mysterious Carriage” (1932) ***WD05:01:28.304 = 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/WDRR0709

The most evil among us are sometimes sentenced to death — but by cutting their lives short, are we unknowingly creating malevolent entities that haunt us forever?EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/DeathRowGhostsREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/mr3vu756FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: The most evil of lawbreakers in our society – the murderers and rapists – are usually confined to life in prison. The most evil of the evil are sometimes sentenced to death. But is it possible that by cutting short the lives of the horrific individuals on Death Row, we are unknowingly creating new malevolent entities that continue to torment us from the grave? (The Ghosts of Death Row) *** From beatings to murders to a handful of escape attempts made by Alcatraz's prisoners, the terrifying history of Alcatraz prison contains plenty of ghosts. (The Hauntings of Alcatraz) *** What if UFOs aren't from another planet – or even another dimension? What if they are actually machines built right here on Earth, piloted by human time travelers? (Time Machine Flying Saucers) *** Weirdo family member Amber Harris shares a true story called “Darkness Was My Neighbor”. (Darkness Was My Neighbor)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:00:51.953 = Show Open00:02:45.176 = Ghosts of Death Row00:23:40.720 = Hauntings of Alcatraz ***00:40:46.307 = Time Machine Flying Saucers ***00:47:37.172 = Darkness Was My Neighbor00:53:53.392 = 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 Ghosts of Death Row” by Brent Swancer: http://bit.ly/2KzEFw9“The Hauntings of Alcatraz” by Erin McCann: http://bit.ly/2QSsuM6“Time Machine Flying Saucers” posted at UFO Digest (link no longer available)“Darkness Was My Neighbor” by Amber Harris – submitted directly to Weird Darkness(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: January, 2022Weird Darkness journeys into haunted prisons, botched executions, secret time-travel technology, and a neighbor's death that seemed to linger after the funeral, spanning true crime, the paranormal, and a firsthand ghost story from a listener.It opens with the ghosts of Death Row, where condemned killers appear to keep terrorizing long after execution. German immigrant Frederick Hollman, one of America's earliest serial killers, was hanged at the Ford County Jail in Paxton, Illinois, on May 14, 1897, after promising to return and rap on the windows of the witnesses and jurors who convicted him — and the jail is now a paranormal hotspot where his face has been photographed glaring into his old cell. Lavinia Fisher and her husband John ran the Six Mile House near Charleston, South Carolina, in the early 1820s, allegedly poisoning and dropping wealthy travelers through a trapdoor before their hanging for highway robbery, and her aggressive spirit is still blamed for choking sensations and foul stenches at the Old Charleston Jail. Raymond Snowden, dubbed Idaho's Jack the Ripper for the 1956 stabbing of Cora Dean, endured a botched twenty-minute hanging at the Old Idaho Penitentiary in Boise in 1957 and reportedly haunts the gallows site alongside inmate Douglas Van Vlack, who leaped to his death from the cell block rafters. Ted Bundy, executed in Florida's electric chair on January 24, 1989, has supposedly been seen grinning atop the chair and telling guards he beat them all, while Willie Lloyd Turner — executed by lethal injection in 1995 after fifteen years and five aborted trips to the chamber — appeared so lifelike after death that inmates mistook him for the living. The segment closes across the Atlantic with executioner John Ellis, who hanged more than a hundred people at Manchester's Strangeways Jail before killing himself in 1932 and is said to still patrol B Wing to keep the prison's other ghosts, including poisoner Mrs. Merrifield, in line.From there the episode moves to Alcatraz, the federal penitentiary that operated on its fog-bound San Francisco Bay island from 1934 to 1963 and earned a reputation as one of America's most haunted sites. The solitary cells of D-Block known as "the hole" are tied to the 1940s strangulation death of a screaming inmate in cell 14D, possibly the work of former occupant Rufus McCain, and visitors report icy fingers and unnatural cold there. The 1946 Battle of Alcatraz left two guards and three escapees dead in a utility corridor where clanging noises still echo, psychic Sylvia Browne sensed murdered hitman Abie "Butcher" Maldowitz in the laundry room, and the catacomb "dungeon" beneath A-Block preserves the screams of prisoners once chained naked to its walls. Al Capone spent part of his 1934 sentence strumming a banjo to hold off insanity, and that banjo music is still reportedly heard in the halls, while "Birdman" Robert Stroud haunts the hospital wing where he was confined among his canary research. The island carried dark associations long before the prison, from Ohlone tribal beliefs that it gathered evil spirits to the Civil War soldiers who died chained in its guardhouse basement, and even the 1969 to 1971 Native American occupation ended in fire and loss before the ghosts reportedly stayed behind.Next the episode turns to a fringe theory that reframes flying saucers as human technology rather than alien craft, arguing that a secretive commercial group used patent-law secrecy to build working time machines in twentieth-century laboratories. The account claims these machines can move an ion through time in both directions, that short-range "trans-burst" devices let a person leap across nearby distances, and that the UFOs people photograph are previews of future mankind rather than extraterrestrial visitors. It ties the idea to Einstein's 1901 work as a patent clerk and to E=mc², and recasts Area 51 as cover not for alien bodies but for a commercial experiment involving four trained monkeys linked to a 1961 interstellar flight.The episode closes with a listener account from Amber Harris, who lived at the end of a cul-de-sac in Williamsburg, Virginia, in a house set down in a ditch so the second floor sat level with the street. After her next-door neighbor died suddenly in his home and his widow moved away, the house sat unsold for months, and one night past midnight the hallway light outside Amber's bedroom switched on without the telltale sound of anyone climbing the loud staircase, casting the shadow of a male figure beneath her door before it went dark. Weeks later her sister woke her by text to watch the dead neighbor's dog standing beneath the orange street light, barking at the empty house before turning its head directly toward the two of them at the window and then vanishing, an image that stayed with the family until a job moved them to Indiana, with the neighbor's house still unsold when they drove past it the following May.

When a corporate jet is torn through a fold in space and time, its passengers find themselves offered a second chance a thousand years from home — if they're willing to leave everything behind.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 Time Fold” (March 16, 1978)00:45:45.739 = Beyond Midnight, “Signalman” (March 28, 1969)01:14:36.277 = MindWebs, “Sword Game” (February 26, 1983)01:37:43.928 = Mystery In The Air, “Beyond Good And Evil” (August 28, 1947) ***WD02:06:30.486 = Molle Mystery Theater, “Murder Without Crime” (May 03, 1946)02:35:54.321 = Mr. Keen, “Murder In The Air” (February 24, 1944) ***WD03:04:51.982 = Murder at Midnight, “Murder Out of Mind” (September 15, 1947 – Never Aired)03:31:07.980 = Black Museum, “The Spotted Bedsheet” (October 21, 1952)03:57:04.381 = Mysterious Traveler, “Murder In 2952” (April 29, 1952)04:27:01.192 = CBC Nightfall, “The Appetite of Mr Lucraft” (December 26, 1980)04:58:34.157 = 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/WDRR0708