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

In 1981, National Public Radio turned the biggest movie in the world into a thirteen-episode radio epic that went on to break the network's listening records. George Lucas sold the rights for a single dollar and handed over the original sound effects and John Williams' score, letting a full cast bring the galaxy to life in sound alone. Mark Hamill and Anthony Daniels reprised Luke Skywalker and C-3PO in a sweeping retelling that expands well beyond the film — the original Star Wars as you've never heard it.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 Open00:02:26.702 = Episode 01: A Wind To Shake The Stars00:29:28.616 = Episode 02: Points of Origin00:57:12.772 = Episode 03: Black Knight, White Princess and Pawns01:24:56.510 = Episode 04: While Giants Mark Time01:52:19.601 = Episode 05: Jedi That Was, Jedi To Be02:19:58.041 = Episode 06: The Millennium Falcon Deal02:46:11.104 = Episode 07: The Han Solo Solution03:11:18.777 = Episode 08: Death Star's Transit03:39:30.428 = Episode 09: Rogues, Rebels and Robots04:07:04.628 = Episode 10: The Luke Skywalker Initiative04:31:53.682 = Episode 11: The Jedi Nexus04:58:33.511 = Episode 12: The Case For Rebellion05:26:28.922 = Episode 13: Force And Counter Force05:54:27.266 = 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/WDRRSW01

Louisiana troopers stopped a banged-up Toyota Supra on Interstate 310 on June 7th, and the driver's escape attempt ran through two swamps, one alligator, and a sheriff's drone.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/gator-getawayLook 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.#WeirdDarkness, #WeirdDarkNEWS

A terrifying vision, a terrifying UFO encounter, and evidence of the encounter buried in his arm – if true, Tim Cullen's story could change everything we think we know about extraterrestrials.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/timcullenREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/433fftc2FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Tim Cullen's life changed forever after a chilling dream in 1978. It wasn't long after that he had bizarre encounters with UFOs, was abducted by aliens, and found a strange piece of metal embedded in his arm. Were these encounters real? If so, what secrets lie within the alien implant removed from his body? (The Alien Abduction of Tim Cullen) *** The life of Martha Place took a dark turn in 1899. Convicted of a brutal murder, Martha faced a horrifying punishment… she was about to become the first woman to be executed by the electric chair. (The First Woman in the Electric Chair) *** We'll look at a double-murder case where real crime collides with reality TV, resulting in real-life horror. (The Wife-Swap Murders) *** Steve's childhood was marked by inexplicable and spine-chilling encounters. Eerie breathing sounds, a manifestation at his bedside, being pushed down the stairs… all without a rational explanation. Even moving away wouldn't bring his paranormal tormenting to an end. (The Entity That Follows) *** The urban legend of "The Licked Hand” is a chilling tale that has been whispered around campfires and shared at sleepovers for generations, tapping into our deepest fears of invasion and vulnerability. But this isn't just any ghost story; it's a timeless warning about the dangers lurking in the darkness, waiting to infiltrate our homes and lives… and it even has a bit of truth to it. (Licking The ‘Humans Can Lick Too' Urban Legend)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:01:22.108 = Show Open00:03:49.182 = Alien Abduction of Tim Cullen00:15:23.331 = The First Woman in the Electric Chair ***00:20:45.119 = Licking The “Humans Can Lick Too' Urban Legend00:32:36.414 = Wife-Swap Murders00:40:47.468 = The Entity That Follows ***00:57:00.607 = 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 Alien Abduction of Tim Cullen” by Marcus Lowth for UFO Insight: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p9xv3u2“The Wife-Swap Murders” by Rayven Crawford for Unspeakable Crimes: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/5n93fc8e“Licking The ‘Humans Can Lick Too' Urban Legend” by Jacob Shelton for Graveyard Shift:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8bbakk, and UrbanLegendsAndHorror.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/y39ytjpk“The First Woman in the Electric Chair” by Troy Taylor: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/ydbd6ae8“The Entity That Follows” by Marcus Lowth for UFO Insight: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/ykycurch(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 10, 2024This episode of Weird Darkness moves from a recovered alien implant in a Colorado man's forearm to the first woman ever sent to the electric chair, through the campfire legend of the licked hand, a Wife Swap family destroyed by one son's gunfire, and a breathing entity that stalked a boy from one English city to another.It opens with Tim Cullen, who dreamed on April 2nd, 1978 that he would be in a violent traffic accident, then lived it a week later on April 9th when his friend Ken Ruberg's car rolled over multiple times and left Cullen with a broken neck. Recovering in the hospital, he had a second vivid dream, this one of a UFO, and on May 30th of that year, while driving Highway 59 home from a checkup with his pregnant wife Janet, the couple watched a silent, glowing craft roughly 100 feet long hover over a pasture with two diffused lights — one yellow, one red — glowing at its rear. Cullen reported two more sightings along the same Yuma, Colorado stretch of road, one in 1980 and another in 1994 witnessed by his wife and three daughters, but the encounters faded from his mind until 1998, when he hit his thumb with a hammer and Dr. Mark Hubner at the Yuma Clinic spotted a piece of metal lodged in his forearm on the X-ray. Convinced the object was an alien implant, Cullen contacted Roger K. Leir, who surgically removed it on February 5th, 2000 in Thousand Oaks, California — a melon-seed-shaped fragment about 7 centimeters long, wrapped in a reddish-brown membrane, with a magnetic core that leapt half an inch off the table toward a magnet.From there the episode turns to March 20th, 1899, when Martha Place became the first woman executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison in New York, a procedure so unfamiliar with a female prisoner that her executioners cut a slit in the black dress she had sewn herself to reach her ankles. Born Martha Garrettson in Millstone, New Jersey in 1849, she had been struck in the head by a sleigh at 23 and, her brother believed, never fully recovered. After marrying widower William Place and coming to hate her teenage stepdaughter Ida, she threw acid into the 17-year-old girl's face on February 7th, 1898, smothered her with bedding, and waited with an ax for William, whom she wounded as he stepped through the door. Governor Theodore Roosevelt refused to commute her sentence, and after the words "God help me," 1,760 volts ended her life at the age of 49.Next comes the urban legend of the licked hand, in which a girl left home alone with her German Shepherd reaches down through the night to feel a reassuring lick, only to wake and find her dog skinned in the shower and the words "Humans can lick too" scrawled on the mirror. The legend's roots reach back to an 1871 entry in The Diary of a Victorian Squire by Dearman Birchall, run through M.R. James's 1919 story "The Diary of Mr. Poynter," and surface in the film Urban Legend with its "aren't you glad you didn't turn on the lights" variant. Folklorists including Trevor Blank of SUNY Potsdam account for the tale's endurance, and its dread finds a real-world echo in Dennis Rader, the BTK strangler, who cut the phone lines at Marine Hedge's home on April 27th, 1985 and hid in her closet for hours before she returned.The episode then examines a double murder rooted in reality television, the case of the Stockdale family, who appeared on an April 23rd, 2008 episode of Wife Swap trading mothers with the easygoing Tonkovic household. Raised under a strict religious regime that banned video games, dating, and most contact with the outside world, Jacob Stockdale fatally shot his mother Kathy and his brother James in the head on June 15th, 2017 in Beach City, Ohio, then survived a self-inflicted gunshot. He pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity and tried more than once to flee the mental institution holding him, including a plan to hide behind stacks of books being carted out, but Dr. Arcangela Wood judged him sane at the time of the killings. Jacob ultimately pleaded guilty and received two consecutive 15-year terms, 30 years for the deaths of his mother and brother.The episode closes with an account written by UFO Insight's Marcus Lowth and told to him by a man he calls Steve, who first heard breathing beside his face at age three or four in 1970s Newcastle, England. The encounters escalated over the following years — an invisible finger shoving his cheek, the manifestation of a grey-haired man around 50 in an old-fashioned suit at his bedside, and a push that sent him tumbling down a full flight of stairs in daylight. When the family moved to a semi-detached house near Sheffield in Yorkshire, the presence followed, culminating one night around midnight when Steve, then eight or nine, felt invisible knees pin him to the mattress and unseen hands tighten around his throat until the grip suddenly released and the breathing drained away into the distance. It never returned, leaving unresolved whether the entity was a poltergeist drawn to a child, the lingering ghost of an old man, or something demonic that fixed on a person rather than a place.

A three-year-old who could not sit up, walk, or speak arrived at a Rockford hospital with a brain bleed in July of 2023, and Loves Park detectives would spend nearly three years trying to learn how it happened.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/lovespark2023Look 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.#WeirdDarkness, #WeirdDarkNEWS

A candlemaker guards one dying flame through the night while ravenous things in the dark demand the soul of a frozen stranger. An old woman stares through a second-floor window with no ledge to stand on, and the shadow man behind her inches closer with every passing night. And a small-town officer commits a man to a psychiatric hold for claiming a five-year-old suicide was really a murder — until the same vision starts playing out in front of his own eyes.FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: I have three stories in this episode for you! Andrew Pendragon pens the tale, “Candles” to start things off. Weirdo Family member Randy Hogan shares a fictional tale called “Old Woman in the Window”. And then our final story is from S.F. Barkley called “I'm a Cop And I Institutionalized Someone I Knew Wasn't Crazy”.CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:01:10.223 = Chandler's Candles00:19:35.808 = The Old Woman in the Window00:24:35.615 = I'm A Cop And I Institutionalized Someone I Knew Wasn't Crazy, Part 1 ***01:03:09.029 = I'm A Cop And I Institutionalized Someone I Knew Wasn't Crazy, Part 2 ***01:29:19.732 = 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:“I'm a Cop And I Institutionalized Someone I Knew Wasn't Crazy” by S.F. Barkley: https://sfbarkley.com/,https://www.reddit.com/user/Barkles52/“Candles” by Andrew Pendragon: https://www.creepypasta.com/candles/“The Old Woman in the Window” by Weird family member, Randy Hogan(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: September 10, 2020Weird Darkness gathers three works of horror fiction for Creepypasta Thursday, moving from a candlemaker's nightly bargain with the dark, to a watcher at an upstairs window, to a small-town murder reopened by a vision no evidence could explain.It opens with a candlemaker in the small town of Clovetown, the last practitioner of an inherited art he calls Chandler's candles, passed to him from his father and grandmother and kept alive mostly through monthly orders from the Catholic church down the road. His after-hours visitors come only once, telling him sad stories before they go, and on a freezing Tuesday a muddy, shivering man named Basim arrives — a wanderer whose family left Israel before settling in a Midwestern state he refuses to name. The candlemaker warms Basim with tea, tends a bruise left when local children pelted him with a rock, and sends him off with a vanilla-scented sculpted candle and a box of matches. That night the shop window shatters under another volley of stones, and Basim is found frozen to death on a bench outside. As the power fails and darkness floods the shop, ravenous shadow-creatures his family has sheltered against for centuries surround him and demand Basim's marked soul, and he survives the night only by shielding the dying flame of that single candle with his own body until dawn.From there the episode turns to a teenage boy who finds an old woman staring through his second-floor bedroom window, her face blank and dead, though no ledge or balcony exists for anyone to stand on. She returns each night after 10:30 for eight months, and the pattern eventually breaks — she appears in the living room window in daylight, then inside the house, and finally seated beside him with the same lifeless expression. A second figure joins her, a shadow man with masculine features who edges closer with each appearance, and his presence twists the old woman's blank stare into one of horror and terror. By the end, both stand within inches of the boy, and he does not know whether he will live to see another night.The episode closes with Sean Barkley, a Crisis Intervention Team officer working the night shift in rural Pennsylvania, dispatched on a freezing-rain night to a farmhouse where a man named Kevin claims to have witnessed a murder. Kevin's sister, Melissa Watson, died in that house five years earlier in a death ruled a suicide, but he now sees a recurring vision in the upstairs bedroom — Melissa pleading for her life as her husband Andrew fires a gun — and Barkley glimpses the same muzzle flash in the window. Rather than let Kevin hunt Andrew down, Barkley commits him on an involuntary hold and quietly reopens the case with fellow officer Tim, uncovering an autopsy that recorded old bruises and a broken rib never investigated, a handgun bullet buried in the mattress, and a shotgun shell hidden in an air duct. The trail leads to Virginia Beach, where a search warrant turns up Melissa's missing .380 and a destroyed external hard drive holding child exploitation material, some of it filmed in the basement of the farmhouse. Andrew is arrested and then released on bail before he is found dead in a motel room, an apparent suicide with a note only Barkley can see, and a final vision of Melissa's spirit reveals that she had drawn the investigation toward exposing her husband so that she could claim her own revenge.

In one of Ontario's least forested regions, a witness reported two creatures scavenging garbage at dawn — and when they knocked on wood to scare them off, something knocked back.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/ontariobigfootLook 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.#WeirdDarkness, #WeirdDarkNEWS

A coffin lid scratched from the inside, a stalker hiding in the basement, and a plate of "fresh venison" served by a man who was never a hunter — Redditors share the true moments that still keep them up at night.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/RedditHorrorsREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4ywsvu9vLISTEN 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:“Creepy True Occurrences From Redditors” posted at Factinate.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/h9zz8vka(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: November, 2021Here's the blog synopsis in plain text, ready for your review pass before HTML conversion.Weird Darkness gathers dozens of true creepy stories submitted by Redditors, ranging from a grandmother buried alive in a backyard coffin to phantom police officers, a haunted hotel painter, a 1980s kidnapping attempt, and a dinner of "fresh venison" served by a cannibal.It opens with a coworker's family story about exhuming a grandmother who had been buried in a wooden box in the backyard, as was once customary. When the family lifted the lid to move her to a cemetery plot years later, they found claw marks covering the inside of the coffin — she had been buried alive.From there, a babysitter hears pans falling in the basement after putting the children to bed and calls the police expecting a single patrol officer. A full SWAT team arrives at the door instead, because the dispatcher heard a second phone on the line hang up after the call ended. A man wanted for multiple assaults had been listening from the basement extension.A secluded spring campground follows, where a father and his friends befriended a quiet neighbor living out of a makeshift truck camper. Days later, driving out, they spotted him hanging from a tree beside his untouched campsite, a note pinned to the trunk with a buck knife — the suicide had happened at the father's favorite camping spot, the same one where he finally told his children the story years later.Next comes a twelve-year-old girl living in a backyard trailer who heard footsteps crossing the metal roof at night, always when she was alone. Months later she woke to find the trailer sweltering, the heater cranked to full blast, and fled on instinct; investigators later found the door lock tampered with and a kitchen knife hidden behind a chair beside the heating controls, where the staring neighbor had apparently crouched in wait.After the first break, a traveler in Taiwan steps into an elevator near a night market and stops on a pitch-dark, abandoned floor that shouldn't exist. The building's fourth floor — omitted from the panel entirely, in keeping with Chinese numerical superstition — had been sealed after a hair salon employee died by suicide there, and the elevator had been professionally reprogrammed to never stop on it. It sometimes does anyway, and riders report a figure in a gown moving toward the doors.Then a 2 a.m. street fight ends with a stabbing, a daughter catching her bleeding stepfather on the porch, and an answering machine message recorded at the exact time of the attack: a school friend across town, crying, describing a dream of screaming, a fight, and her friend covered in blood — in the late 1980s, long before cell phones could have carried the news.A college student renting a basement room recounts his dog growling at one corner of the room, followed by the small dirt-floored closet under the stairs creaking open on its own with deliberate slowness, leaving him frozen in the dark hallway for five full minutes.A seven-year-old girl visiting her mother's best friend watches a burned family — a mother, a teenage boy, and two younger girls — walk the house and beckon her to come with them. Years later the friend admitted the family had moved out over hauntings: baby toys scattered overnight, blankets and pillows arranged on the floor as if people had slept there.A smashed flower pot follows, found twenty feet from its shelf in the middle of a family room floor with no dirt trail, as if it had been carried and dropped straight down. Then two brothers named Jack and Tom each spend a night silently furious at the other's loud guests, only to meet in the hallway and discover the living room full of chattering old people belonged to neither of them — the room stood empty, smelling of musk.A college party flips from paranormal dread to absurdity when a bleeding, pantsless man with wild hair forces his way through the door screaming "please"; the supposed intruder turned out to be a friend of a friend on a catastrophic acid trip who had lost his pants running through a field.The block closes with a runner who caught a prospective neighbor — a man who had complimented his physique two days earlier — standing at his bedroom window at midnight, having entered the house earlier to adjust the blinds for a better view. The chase across gravel driveways ended with a written confession, a photographed license plate, and, a full year later, a knock on the door from the same man, apologizing.Out of the second break comes a Hollywood Hills doorstep in the early 1980s: a distraught woman babbling about blood, two LAPD officers who collect her within ten minutes, and then two more officers thirty minutes later — the ones actually dispatched to the call, with no record of who the first pair were or where they took her.The night crew of a 24-hour Subway describes their resident "SubGhost," blamed for disembodied conversations, crashing noises, items sliding off counters, and a new automatic paper towel dispenser that unspooled an entire roll, sheet by sheet, in an empty room.Three children watch a white figure of a man sit atop a telephone pole, grinning at them, before he stands, jumps, and vanishes before reaching the ground. Then a basement-apartment tenant describes a man watching him through the window for ten minutes, followed weeks later by an air conditioner cover pried off in the night — and a police department that could do nothing until someone actually broke in.A newspaper carrier on a rural route in 2000 describes a drenched man in a white shirt charging out of a rain-filled ditch at 2 a.m. with what looked like a hatchet in his hand; the man took his own life within the hour, and the carrier had to pound on a farmhouse door to report it because his Motorola flip phone had no signal.A bus rider chats with an oddly unsettling woman at the stop, boards an empty bus, and hears "Hey! Remember me?" from a little girl who resembles the woman exactly — on a bus the rider is certain was empty.The episode then travels to South Africa's Eastern Cape in July 2010, where a humanitarian worker and a missionary named Piet arrive at a Xhosa village to find it deserted. A naked woman covered in cuts, missing an ear, and running on all fours charged their truck, screeching and clawing at the windows as they fled. The villagers later said only that "a bad presence" had been in the village and was now gone.Gentler hauntings follow: a clock radio scraping across a desk to face a grandson and playing opera — the late grandfather's wake-up music of choice — two weeks after the funeral; a glass bowl that shattered downstairs during a sleepover and was found already swept up, its pieces gathered into another bowl on the table; and a dying grandfather whose eyes opened wide on his final breath as he smiled, looking happier than he had in years.The dread returns with a woman home alone who hears something working at her front door lock and sees two silhouettes — one at the door, one at the living room window — standing motionless, watching her watch them. They vanished before help arrived, and she found the basement window partially kicked in the next morning.A Sacramento man recounts surviving an attempted kidnapping around age nine or ten: a white van stopped beside a late-night Frisbee game, the sliding door opened, and a man in black flew out on a rigged telescoping harness operated from inside, missing his grab by inches. The three boys hid on a school roof for nearly an hour while the van circled, searching.A small-town yard sale yields a dented silver cigarette case for two dollars; months later the same elderly seller has the identical case — same dent, same brand of cigarette inside — while the original has vanished from the buyer's nightstand drawer. A man recalls childhood dreams of gripping toys hard enough to wake up holding them, including the Skeletor figure his family swore they never bought.Then a sixteen-year-old new driver and her four-year-old half-sister are stalked across town by a purple-faced man in a white pickup truck who blocked intersections, revealed a gun under his shirt, rammed their car toward oncoming traffic, and drew a finger across his throat. The older sister's gas station escape plan — coaching the four-year-old to jump out and run to the counter — ended the pursuit, though polic

“The Enchanted Child”: A polite little boy keeps pushing away his favorite dessert at Sunday dinner — and every time he does, somebody in the family doesn't live to see Monday.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 Enchanted Child” (January 20, 1978) ***WD00:47:10.132 = House of Mystery, “The Ghost Who Forgot Halloween” (October 27, 1945) ***WD01:18:31.060 = Incredible But True, “The Stowaway” (1950-1951)01:22:03.585 = Inner Sanctum, “Death Is a Joker” (June 10, 1944) ***WD01:52:21.712 = Jeff Regan, “The Prodigal Daughter” (July 17, 1948) ***WD02:22:26.847 = The Key, “Escape Artist” (1956) ***WD02:48:46.905 = Lights Out, “Death Robbery” (June 16, 1947) ***WD03:17:47.487 = Lux Radio Theater, “The Big Clock” (November 22, 1948)04:18:09.933 = Macabre, “Weekend” (November 20, 1961) ***WD04:45:27.936 = 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/WDRR0687

A tiny tagging system nobody had ever studied in the brain turned out to be hard at work locking in fear — and only in the females in the lab.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/Fear-StudyLook 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.#WeirdDarkness, #WeirdDarkNEWS

A Florida man heading to court for a burglary charge stopped to attempt another burglary along the way, telling police he just wanted a shirt to wear in front of the judge.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/burglary-commute/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.#WeirdDarkness, #WeirdDarkNEWS

Behind the walls of H.H. Holmes' "World's Fair Hotel" waited trap doors, gas chambers, and a basement of acid vats — and more than a century after the Murder Castle burned, something still lingers at 63rd and Wallace.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/HHHolmesHotelREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/57djvd7fFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: It's one of the most infamous and macabre subjects of Chicago history – it even served as inspiration for TV's “American Horror Story: Hotel”. It's what has become known as “The Murder Castle” where serial killer H.H. Holmes committed his monstrous crimes. But even today, Holmes continues to terrify… in spectral form. (H.H. Holmes' Hellish Hotel And Lingering Haunting) *** A woman tries to save the soul of her daughter, believing her to be possessed… but her solution to drive out the demon was to murder her daughter using a holy crucifix. (Murder By Crucifix) *** What's worse than proclaiming yourself to be a supernatural being and starting your own cult? How about telling your followers you are God so you could do drugs and have sex with teenage girls? It's the disturbing true story of the cult called “The Group”. (Theodore Rinaldo – The Drug Cult Rapist) *** Shrunken heads – believe it or not, they are real. And some tribal peoples create them even today – from real human heads. But why do it at all? We'll look at the reality behind shrunken heads, the reason they are created… and even how they are created. (The History and How of Shrunken Heads) *** A terrifying series of paranormal activities invade a family's home in Wales. (The Swansea Entity) *** Tenome is a Japanese Urban Legend about a blind man who was robbed and murdered. His dying wish? To have eyes on his hands so he could see. (The Seeing Hands of Tenome) *** Unsolved mysteries are intriguing simply because they are unsolved. That's why we are so fascinated by stories of people disappearing without a trace. But one man's disappearance is so bizarre, so weird, that upon hearing the story you'll be scratching your head wondering what the heck you just heard. (The Strangest Disappearance at Sea in History) CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:01:27.539 = Show Open00:04:09.416 = H.H. Holmes' Hellish Hotel and Lingering Haunting00:22:02.613 = The Seeing Hands of Tenome ***00:25:29.843 = The Strangest Disappearance at Sea In History00:36:31.904 = Murder By Crucifix ***00:42:31.316 = The Swansea Entity00:52:22.872 = The History and How of Shrunken Heads ***00:58:56.160 = Theodore Rinaldo: The Drug Cult Rapist01:05:34.000 = 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 Swansea Entity” by Brent Swancer for Mysterious Universe: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/3pt262t4“Murder By Crucifix” by Inigo Gonzalez for Ranker's Graveyard Shift: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4h6mjabw“The Strangest Disappearance at Sea in History” from Strange Company: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/nsrhjdew“Theodore Rinaldo – The Drug Cult Rapist” by Matthew Lavelle for Ranker's Unspeakable Times:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yx2hmzus“The Seeing Hands of Tenome” from The Scare Chamber: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/y4dnxee6“The History and How of Shrunken Heads” by Bipin Dimri for Historic Mysteries: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4wdznwwc“H.H. Holmes' Hellish Hotel and Lingering Haunting” from Chicago Hauntings: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/pvthp98(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: November, 2021This episode of Weird Darkness moves from the haunted ground of H.H. Holmes' Chicago Murder Castle to a flesh-eating Japanese yokai, a millionaire's impossible vanishing at sea, an Oklahoma exorcism that ended in murder, a violent Welsh poltergeist, the real-world practice of shrinking human heads, and the Washington State drug cult led by a man who claimed to be God.It opens in Chicago's Englewood neighborhood, where Herman W. Mudgett — better known as H.H. Holmes, America's first serial killer and the inspiration for the Hotel Cortez in American Horror Story: Hotel — built his three-story "World's Fair Hotel" at 63rd and Wallace to prey on visitors to the 1893 Columbian Exposition. The building held sixty rooms riddled with trap doors, hidden staircases, gas chambers, and a basement furnished with a dissecting table and vats of acid and lime. Holmes confessed to 27 murders before his hanging in Philadelphia on May 7, 1896, though some historians put his victim count at 200 or more, and the strange deaths that followed his execution — a poisoned forensics expert, a suicidal prison superintendent, a priest beaten to death in his own churchyard — fed talk of a Holmes curse for decades. The site was never excavated, and employees at the Englewood post office built beside the old Castle property still report stacking chairs, a singing woman no one can find, and apparitions on the grass where the hotel once stood. Even Holmes' own descendant, Jeff Mudgett, author of Bloodstains and the figure behind the History Channel's American Ripper, walked out of that basement a changed man.From there the episode crosses to Japan and the legend of Tenome, a blind old man robbed and beaten to death in a field who returned as a vengeful yokai with eyes on the palms of his hands. First recorded in the Gazu Hyakki Yagyō, the creature hunts graveyards and open fields by scent, feeds on fresh human bones, and inspired the Pale Man of Pan's Labyrinth. The segment ends with the Kyoto tale of a young man who hid from the Tenome inside a locked temple chest — and was found afterward as an empty sack of skin, his bones sucked out through his flesh.Next comes the 1931 disappearance of Hisashi Fujimura, the Japanese-born silk millionaire who vanished from the Red Star liner Belgenland somewhere between Halifax and New York on the night of August 13. Fujimura had told a friend he feared gamblers would follow him aboard, his mistress Mary Reissner was registered under a false name as a governess, and his bank account had dropped from over $333,000 to $2.65 in five months. The ship's captain saw him talking to an unseen person at 2:45 a.m.; by morning his bed was unslept-in and his seven-year-old daughter was alone in the stateroom. Federal investigators closed the case without answers, a dust-free wallet bearing his name later surfaced in an empty Manhattan flat, and Fujimura was declared legally dead in 1938 — leaving murder, suicide, accident, and a staged escape all equally possible.The darkness turns domestic with the 2016 killing of 33-year-old Geneva Gomez in Oklahoma City, beaten to death by her own mother, Juanita Gomez, who claimed she was performing an exorcism to drive Satan from her daughter. Juanita punched Geneva repeatedly, forced a crucifix and religious medallion down her throat, then arranged the body in the shape of a cross with a wooden crucifix on her chest. A forensic psychologist concluded she was feigning incompetence, the insanity plea collapsed, and in January 2018 a jury needed only 20 minutes to convict her of first-degree murder and recommend life without parole.The episode then travels to Rhondda Street in Swansea, Wales, where in 1965 Marcia and David Howells, their two small children, and Marcia's grandmother endured a poltergeist that began with choking sensations in the night and escalated to bottles flying off mantelpieces, rooms ransacked in minutes, the gas stove turning itself on, and a double bed found hurled on top of the baby's empty cot behind a barred door. Police, reporters, and a priest all came to the little house; the only room ever left untouched was the grandmother's. The family finally moved out, the activity stopped, and no tragedy in the home's history was ever found to explain it — leaving psychokinesis, spirit attachment, and Marcia's own verdict, a demon, on the table.From haunted houses the show turns to a practice that is grimly real: the shrunken heads, or tsantsas, of the Jivaro people of northern Peru and southern Ecuador. Warriors severed the heads of slain enemies in the belief that shrinking them enslaved the victim's vengeful spirit, then boiled the skin free of the skull, packed it with hot stones and sand, blackened it with charcoal ash, and sewed the lips shut to seal the spirit inside — reducing a human head to a third of its size. Genu

A skeptical census taker's idle curiosity about a mystic who can summon the dead draws his old friend's beautiful, restless daughter into the stranger's orbit — and she may never come back.Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneInRadio, 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, “Sophia And The Pilgrim” (June 19, 1978) ***WD00:46:22.976 = BBC Ghosts From The Past, “The Boat Hook” (April 15, 1992)01:29:50.477 = Calling All Cars, “Triple Cross” (May 22, 1936) ***WD02:00:23.302 = Hall of Fantasy, “Man-Size in Marble” (April 10, 1947)02:26:39.527 = Harry Lime, “Ticket To Tangier” (August 24, 1951)02:53:34.654 = Haunted Tales of the Supernatural, “The Dead Man of Varley Grange” (July 28, 1984)03:20:37.249 = The Haunting Hour, “Breakdown” (May 05, 1945) ***WD03:34:56.875 = Hermit's Cave, “Author of Murder” (May 02, 1937)04:02:13.875 = Mystery Is My Hobby, “Faithless Life” (1945-1950)04:25:11.416 = Sherlock Holmes, “The Devil's Foot” (January 11, 1947)04:54:23.916 = 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/WDRR0686

Two months after walking away from the Tombstone feud a free man, Johnny Ringo was found dead against a tree with a Colt in his hand. He had survived the Hoodoo War, jail breaks, and a showdown with Doc Holliday — but no one can agree on what finally killed him.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/JohnnyRingoREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/24j5xybkFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: A gentleman gunslinger who could quote Shakespeare, Johnny Ringo was a mythic gunslinger who died a mysterious death befitting his legend. (The Mysterious Death of Outlaw Johnny Ringo) *** To his family and neighbors, Richard Kuklinski was the all-American man. To the mafia and his victims, he was the "devil himself" known as the Iceman killer. (The Mafia's Most Prolific Hitman) *** Wherever tragedies happen, urban legends settle. And for almost every urban legend, there is a road to take you there… a road often just as terrifying as the urban legend it takes you to. (Roads that Lead to Urban Legends) *** We'll look at the true story of a bar bouncer accused of killing his wife… which is odd, seeing as the incident took place before he killed a man while defending her honor. (A Broad-Shouldered Bully Was Wiener) *** Extraterrestrials come in all shapes and sizes if you believe what you see on television, film, and even online in the fringe conversations of UFO enthusiasts. The most famous of the aliens are usually depicted in the very realistic, humanoid form… the Greys. But what exactly are the Greys? And is it possible they aren't extraterrestrial at all? (What Are The Greys) *** We'll meet a man who has an amazing superpower. He is especially proficient at passing gas. (Mister Methane: The Gas Man)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:00:59.394 = Show Open00:03:16.488 = The Mysterious Death of Outlaw Johnny Ringo00:15:42.451 = A Broad-Shouldered Bully Was Wiener ***00:19:08.842 = Roads That Lead To Urban Legends00:30:46.873 = The Mafia's Most Prolific Hitman ***00:39:46.230 = Mister Methane: The Gas Man00:45:59.461 = What Are The Greys? ***00:52:15.959 = 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 Mysterious Death of Outlaw Johnny Ringo” by Kuroski for All That's Interesting:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/n4d9yce6“Roads that Lead to Urban Legends” by Estelle for ListVerse: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2fkp8nkt“The Mafia's Most Prolific Hitman” by Katie Serena for All That's Interesting: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/5xe6xx4s“What Are The Greys” from Anomalien: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/5u5cknde“Mister Methane: The Gas Man” by Spooky for Oddity Central: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2hje4vs9 (VIDEO: https://youtu.be/kaRZeuZDAVI)“A Broad-Shouldered Bully Was Wiener” by Robert Wilhelm for Murder By Gaslight: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/34rnu2y9=====(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: November, 2021This episode of Weird Darkness travels from a gunfighter's unexplained death under an Arizona oak tree to a mafia hitman's freezer, a tour of the world's most haunted highways, a St. Louis hanging, a British flatulence performer, and the enduring question of what the Grey aliens actually are.It opens with Johnny Ringo, the Shakespeare-quoting outlaw and cousin to the Younger and James brothers, who survived the Hoodoo War of Mason County, Texas, a jailbreak, multiple murder charges, and a near-shootout with Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday on the streets of Tombstone — only to be found dead on July 13, 1882, slumped against a tree with a .45 caliber Colt in his right hand. The coroner called it suicide. Others pointed to the cartridges in his gun, the absence of powder burns, the odd position of his hat, and later confessions attributed to Earp himself, and called it murder. Biographers Jack Burrows and David Johnson weighed the same evidence a century later and sided with suicide, a quiet end for a man newspapers once misspelled into legend as "Ringgold."From there the episode moves to St. Louis in 1877, where Billy Wieners — a hulking bouncer at the Theatre Comique saloon, already out on bond for trying to kill his wife — shot assistant barkeeper A.V. Lawrence dead for insulting that same wife. The Missouri Supreme Court found nothing in the record to soften a verdict of deliberate murder, and after his sister Annie's commutation campaign failed to move Governor Phelps, Wieners hanged in the St. Louis jail yard on February 1, 1878, using his last words to warn other men away from whiskey.Next comes a road trip through the world's haunted highways: Zombie Road in Wildwood, Missouri; India's cursed Ranchi-Jamshedpur NH33, where 245 people died in three years and a woman in a white saree patrols the asphalt; South Africa's N9 with the hitchhiking ghost of Maria Roux; Australia's "Street With No Name" in Annandale; the werewolf sightings on Yorkshire's B1249; Malaysia's Karak Highway, where a creature was seen battering a husband's head against his own car roof; Scotland's A75 Kinmount Straight and its phantom animals; Long Island's Mount Misery and Sweet Hollow roads; the unearthed Hawaiian warrior bones beneath Oahu's H-1; Thailand's temple-haunting murdered wife on Chak Phra Road; and the ghosts scattered along old Route 66.The darkness deepens with Richard Kuklinski, the Gambino-affiliated contract killer known as the Iceman, who froze his victims' bodies in industrial freezers so the time of death could never be fixed. Convicted of six murders, he claimed hundreds, killing with cyanide nasal spray, ice picks, hand grenades, and his bare hands while coaching his children's barbecues and ushering Sunday Mass in suburban New Jersey. An ATF sting through his only friend, Phil Solimene, ended the run in 1986, and Kuklinski spent his remaining years giving prison interviews until his death in 2006 — a week after his wife Barbara declined, one last time, to lift the do-not-resuscitate order she had signed.The mood lifts with Paul Oldfield of Macclesfield, England, the performer called Mr. Methane, who discovered during a teenage yoga session that he could draw air into his colon at will and built a stage career on controlled flatulence — playing Phil Collins parodies, alarming Howard Stern, and logging 86 farts in a single minute for a 2018 Guinness World Records attempt, a talent the record book had refused to touch back in 1990.The episode closes among the Greys, the large-eyed, gray-skinned beings that dominate alien abduction reports from Betty and Barney Hill onward. Ufologists describe two castes — tall telepathic leaders and smaller cloned workers — originating in the Zeta Reticuli binary star system 38 light years away, harvesting human sperm and eggs to repair DNA ruined by generations of cloning. A rival theory holds that the Greys are not extraterrestrials at all but human beings from a distant future: taller, thinner, larger-brained time travelers returning to collect healthy genetic material from before whatever catastrophe awaits us.

Twenty years after she was locked away for taking a hatchet to her own sister, fragile Ann Pettigrew comes home obsessed with one desire — and on a storm-lit night, with candles burning and a circle drawn on the floor, she works a forbidden rite to summon back the only man she ever loved, no matter what comes walking up the veranda steps to answer.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, “A Model Murderer” (January 17, 1978) ***WD00:47:24.875 = The Strange Dr. Weird, “Survival Of The Fittest” (January 23, 1945) ***WD00:59:08.508 = The Eleventh Hour, “Black Magic” (ADU)01:23:55.381 = Escape, “The Drums of the Fore And Aft” (July 14, 1949)01:53:55.440 = Everyman's Theater, “Cat Wife” (January 18, 1940)02:22:54.327 = Murder By Experts, “Murder By Prescription” (July 11, 1949)02:53:20.176 = Exploring Tomorrow, “Hunting Lodge, aka Trouble With Robots” (May 28, 1958) ***WD03:12:48.537 = Faces In The Window, “Lightning Rod Man” (January 17, 1953) ***WD (LQ)03:37:34.837 = Dark Fantasy, “Letter From Yesterday” (May 01, 1942) ***WD04:01:41.360 = BBC Fear on 4, “The Yellow Wallpaper” (December 27, 1990) ***WD04:31:41.320 = Future Tense, “The Defenders” (May 28, 1974) ***WD04:57:56.341 = 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/WDRR0685

A scheming wife and her spineless lover pull off the perfect murder of her wealthy husband — until the dead man starts turning up in the snow, at the bar, waiting in the shadows, and 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, “In Another Place” (January 16, 1978) ***WD00:47:10.460 = The Clock, “Ghost Story” (December 13, 1955) ***WD01:13:55.372 = Creeps By Night, “The Final Reckoning” (July 12, 1944) ***WD01:43:11.958 = The Crime Club, “Fear Came First” (March 13, 1947) ***WD02:13:07.451 = Crime Classics, “The Crime of Bathsheba Spooner” (December 03, 1952)02:41:09.611 = Danger Dr. Danfield, “The Tunnel Smelled of Death” (January 26, 1947) ***WD03:05:39.762 = CBC Deep Night, “Man Radio” (July 29, 2005)03:40:38.324 = The Devil and Mr. O, “Going Down” (December 17, 1971)04:09:19.922 = Diary of Fate, “David Dexter” (May 04, 1948) ***WD04:40:36.758 = Dimension X, “The Martian Chronicles” (August 18, 1950) ***WD05:09:57.556 = 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/WDRR0684

In 1977, a calm, otherworldly voice broke into the British evening news across five transmitters at once, identified itself as an alien envoy, and warned humanity to abandon nuclear weapons before time ran out. Was it a hoax, or first contact?EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/AlienVoicesOnTVAndRadioREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/mrxcfak4FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: While scientists at SETI are continually monitoring for extraterrestrial contact from the cosmos, ordinary people are already hearing from them – via radio and television. (Aliens Voices Over Radio and Television) *** 
The death of a Hollywood movie producer is still unsolved – and his spirit on the lot is still at unrest. (The Mysterious Death of Thomas Ince) *** A family moves into a new home, and it's not long before they begin hearing strange sounds coming from the home bar in their living room. (Something In That Part of the House) *** In years past, baby boys were dressed in pink. So why the change to the color blue for boys? The answer is a dark one. (Baby Blues) *** In just 30 seconds, 30 rounds were fired when the tension between a crew of thieving cowboys and vigilante lawmen came to an explosive head in the frontier town of Tombstone, Arizona. (The True Story Behind the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Klaatu's speech from “The Day The Earth Stood Still” (1951)00:02:45.959 = Show Open00:04:39.005 = Alien Voices Over Radio And Television00:16:13.874 = The Mysterious Death of Thomas Ince and the Haunting of Culver Studios00:33:04.222 = Something in That Part of the House ***00:39:31.873 = Baby Blues00:45:22.653 = The True Story Behind the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral ***00:54:32.710 = 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 True Story Behind the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral” by Mark Oliver: http://ow.ly/RmAm30oaHWt“The Mysterious Death of Thomas Ince” by Troy Taylor: http://ow.ly/WVUu30oaHvS“Something In That Part of the House” by Haven: http://ow.ly/qMeU30oaHxn“Baby Blues” by Conny Waters: http://ow.ly/zcGj30oaI32“Alien Voices Over Radio and Television” posted at the Conspiracy Journal: https://tinyurl.com/y2ht47pt“Klaatu's Speech From ‘The Day The Earth Stood Still'”: (link no longer available)(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: November, 2021Weird Darkness moves across five unsettling true tales — alleged alien voices breaking into broadcast signals, the unexplained death of a Hollywood pioneer, a possessed home bar in Mexico, the superstitious roots of dressing infant boys in blue, and the bloody thirty seconds behind the O.K. Corral.It opens with the alleged extraterrestrial transmissions that have arrived through ordinary radios and televisions rather than from deep space. On November 26, 1977, at 5:12 PM, a deep, water-logged voice overrode five Southern Television transmitters across southern England, speaking over news reader Ivor Mills for five and a half minutes; the voice named itself Gramaha — also transcribed as Vrillon, Gillon, or Glon — a representative of the Ashtar Galactic Command, and warned humanity to abandon nuclear energy before the dawning New Age of Aquarius. The Independent Broadcasting Authority never logged the interruption and could not explain how its instant switch-off monitoring was bypassed. Years earlier, in July 1961, an eighteen-year-old ham radio operator named Robert P. Renaud had picked up a soft feminine voice high in the 25-meter band claiming to broadcast from a planet called Korendor, eventually trading images on his television's vidicon tube with a contact named Lin-Erri, an episode investigator Allen Griese found oddly free of showmanship or profit. A decade after Renaud, in January 1971, British UFO researcher Rex Dutta took a call on a radio talk show from a voice that registered no echo, no feedback, and no movement on the station's VU meter.From there the episode crosses to November 1924 and the death of Thomas Ince, the producer who founded Culver Studios in 1918 and earned the title Father of the Western. Ince died days after celebrating his birthday aboard William Randolph Hearst's yacht, the Oneida, on a weekend cruise to San Diego that also carried actress Marion Davies and, by rumor, Charlie Chaplin. The official account blamed acute indigestion, but Hollywood whispered that Hearst, jealous over Davies, fired a diamond-studded revolver in the dark and put a bullet meant for Chaplin into Ince's head instead. The body was cremated, no inquest was held, San Diego district attorney Chester Kemply closed the case after a single session, and gossip columnist Louella Parsons soon received a lifetime Hearst contract. Decades later, workers at Culver Studios reported a man in a bowler-type hat watching them from the catwalks during 1988 renovations, frowning, declaring that he disliked what they were doing to his studio, and walking through a wall.Next comes a listener's account of a house in Mexico, bought by the family about twenty years earlier, where a heavy tavern-style wooden bar in the living room became the source of growling, clinking glassware, and slamming cabinet doors that sounded like two animals fighting inside an empty cupboard. The housekeeper, Letty, threw the cabinet open to find nothing disturbed. Weeks later the mother and Letty dug up jars in the front yard containing rag dolls pierced with pins, buried directly on the other side of the wall behind the bar. A framed mirror reading BAR shattered at three in the morning during a housewarming party, a barred window slid open on its own after being latched, and a photograph of a single bar stool showed a clear horned, devil-like face the family begged to have deleted. Letty, it turned out, was a bruja — a witch.Color superstition drives the next story: infant boys, dressed in blue today, were once dressed in pink, and a June 1918 article in the trade journal Earnshaw's Infants' Department called pink the stronger, more decided color suited to boys and blue the daintier choice for girls. The return to blue revived a far older practice, since the ancient Egyptians and Greeks regarded blue as divine and used it to repel evil spirits, dressing pharaohs in it and, as author Douglas B. Smith recounts, painting nurseries to keep satanic spirits from slipping into young children's bodies. Boys received that protection because they were valued above girls, who were thought too unimportant for evil spirits to trouble. The same fear survives in the Evil Eye and in protective amulets like the Hamsa and the Turkish Nazar, hung in homes and cars and worked into jewelry across the Balkans and the Middle East.The episode closes behind the O.K. Corral on October 26, 1881, where thirty rounds were fired in roughly thirty seconds. Tombstone, Arizona had been founded in 1877 by prospector Ed Schieffelin, who struck a silver vein worth more than thirty-seven million dollars after being warned that all he would find out there was his own tombstone. Wyatt, Virgil, Morgan, and James Earp, joined by the gun-slinging ex-dentist Doc Holliday, clashed with the Cochise County Cowboys, a feud that hardened after Curly Bill Brocius accidentally killed city marshal Fred White in 1880 and Virgil took the post. The gunfight left Frank McLaury, Tom McLaury, and nineteen-year-old Billy Clanton dead while Ike Clanton and Billy Claiborne fled, and Judge Wells Spicer afterward released the Earps as having committed an unwise but not criminal act. The reckoning continued past the verdict, with Virgil shotgunned in the back, Morgan assassinated over a game of pool in a plot tied to Ike Clanton, and Wyatt Earp drifting west until his death in California in 1929 at the age of eighty.

Security cameras filmed a live goat led into a black-and-red room in a Hackney office block — the working shrine of an Afro-Brazilian religion that feeds its spirits in blood.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/hackney-goat-shrineLook 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.#WeirdDarkness, #WeirdDarkNEWSNOTE: Some of this content may have been created with assistance from AI tools, but it has been reviewed, edited, narrated, produced, and approved by Darren Marlar, creator and host of Weird Darkness — who, despite popular conspiracy theories, is NOT an AI voice.

A girl named Gabriela walked into a church in Joinville, Brazil, claiming she had fled an abusive home. Fourteen months later a family was preparing to adopt her until the truth was revealed about who Gabriela really was.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/gabriela-joinvilleLook 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.#WeirdDarkness, #WeirdDarkNEWS

Some monsters don't lurk in the dark — they wear a familiar face and sit down at your table. | June 07, 2026 #WDRadio==========HOUR ONE: In the 1960s, Brian Leathley-Andrew investigated and reported on numerous cases of strange objects in the sky, trying to get to the truth of what people were seeing. But when sinister events began happening to him, he knew he had to walk away from his career in Ufology – or the government might make him go away. (UFO Hunter Becomes The Hunted) *** Saying the disappearance of David Glenn Lewis is bizarre doesn't even begin to scratch the surface. What started out as a strange missing person's case would eventually be resolved. But the answer that would come would pose even more questions, proving the adage that “truth is stranger than fiction”. (The Disappearance of David Glenn Lewis) *** The idea of a person changing into a wolf, or shape-shifting into some type of animal or cryptid is mostly confined to the authors of fictional horror. But not all societies and cultures are so quick to label shape-shifting as make-believe. (Shapeshifters And Therianthropes)==========HOUR TWO: “The Gadsden Hotel in Cochise County, Arizona” *** When you hear the name “Transylvania” the immediate image in your mind is probably that of Dracula. But this Romanian town has more creepiness than just the Count's castle – it is also a hot spot for UFO activity and mysterious unexplained happenings. Some even think it could be the location of a portal to another dimension. (Is There A Dimensional Portal in Transylvania?) *** Sightings of unidentified flying objects might seem like a recent phenomena, with most reports occurring in the 20th and 21stcenturies. But UFO sightings go a lot further back in human history – and our ancient ancestors were just as shocked, confused and sometimes terrified, as we are today. (Ancient UFO Sightings)==========SUDDEN DEATH OVERTIME: A man goes off for supplies, leaving his wife behind to tend to the home in his absence – but not only did he never come home with the groceries, but a ghost story grew out of it. (The Ghosts of Hunger Valley) *** A UFO incident which we have covered before, but is worth looking at again, is an incident in 1952. This was one of the first admitted entity sightings and probably also one of the earliest close encounters of the third kind investigated officially at the time it took place.==========SOURCES AND REFERENCES FROM TONIGHT'S SHOW:“The Gadsden Hotel in Cochise County, Arizona” from Paranormality Magazine“Is There A Dimensional Portal in Transylvania?” by A. Sutherland for the Message to Eagle: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/ghvx2jxy“Ancient UFO Sightings” by A. Sutherland for Message to Eagle https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/8y3dlh5c,https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/1rucr7et, https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/3sxyfr93, https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/swo6sglh,https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/17o2c3i5“UFO Hunter Becomes The Hunted“ by Mike Lockley for Anomalien.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/1fxu6h8y“The Ghosts of Hunger Valley” by Charles Skinner, edited by Kathy Weiser, posted at LegendsOfAmerica.com:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/111pegi3“Shapeshifters And Therianthropes” by James Fenner for List Verse: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/1qqh0ult“The Disappearance of David Glenn Lewis” by CrystalDawn for Lost N Found Blogs: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/1shqwhrt==========Weird Darkness theme by Alibi Music Library. Background music provided by Alibi Music Library, EpidemicSound and/or StoryBlocks with paid license. Music from Shadows Symphony (https://tinyurl.com/yyrv987t), Midnight Syndicate (http://amzn.to/2BYCoXZ) Kevin MacLeod (https://tinyurl.com/y2v7fgbu), Tony Longworth (https://tinyurl.com/y2nhnbt7), and Nicolas Gasparini (https://tinyurl.com/lnqpfs8) is used with permission of the artists.==========(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).==========

An Alabama prosecutor called the murder of a mother and her two children one of the most demonic crimes he had ever seen, and for fifty years other killers have gone a step further and told police a demon made them do it.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/cotu-devilmademedoit/READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yckk9bhjLISTEN 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: June 07, 2026

For over a century, Pennsylvania has been a hotspot for UFO encounters that baffle experts and leave witnesses questioning reality. From glowing discs in remote lakes to crafts that defy physics, the Keystone State's skies are filled with the mysterious, paranormal, and extraterrestrial.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources):  https://weirddarkness.com/PennsylvaniaUFOsREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/ye247nxkFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Pennsylvania has always been a land of mysteries in the skies. It has become one of the most intriguing destinations for UFO sightings throughout the years, with tales that date back long before the term “flying saucer” was even coined. From glowing discs hovering over fields, to objects that break the laws of physics, the state's history is filled with encounters that leave you wondering what might actually be out there. And these are not mere passing glimpses; these are encounters that can leave a witness profoundly shaken – altered for life. There's the Carbondale incident, where strange lights in a lake sent people into a panic. There's the experienced aviator who encountered something that decades in the cockpit could not explain. There are numerous accounts of silent craft and disc-shaped objects, eerie lights in the sky — occasions when the stars were blotted out. There are reports of the stopping of time, an encounter that had state troopers speechless, and even an extraterrestrial werewolf-like entity. From the earliest sightings in 1917 through more modern accounts, Pennsylvania's connection to the UFO phenomenon is undeniable, if not unbelievable. What's going on in the skies over the Keystone State? And why is it happening there in particular?CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:01:37.162 = Show Open00:02:45.008 = Chapter 01: Lanterns and Lies: The Carbondale UFO Mystery00:11:48.101 = Chapter 02: Eerie Lights in Erie ***00:15:12.728 = Chapter 03: The Oil City Light Show00:16:46.996 = Chapter 04: Saylor's Lake, Silent Lights, and a Stunned State Trooper00:18:09.833 = Chapter 05: A Tent, A Grandmother, And A Silent Visitor Overhead00:20:02.281 = Chapter 06: The Wainwright's Werewolf00:25:33.631 = Chapter 07: The Black Circle In The Sky ***00:27:55.349 = Chapter 08: Friday Night Lights In The Sky00:30:36.853 = Chapter 09: Playing Chicken With An Experienced Pilot00:32:40.481 = Chapter 10: Mind Probing and Time Stopping00:35:41.135 = Chapter 11: The First Saucers00:41:31.466 = Chapter 12: Why Pennsylvania? ***00:44:16.924 = Show Close & Bloopers*** = 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:UFOs in Pennsylvania: Encounters with Extraterrestrials in the Keystone State, Patty A. Wilson, ISBN 9780811 706483The Carbondale UFO Crash, 11-11-1974, The Reality, the Hoaxes and the Legend, M.J. Graeber https://www.ufocasebook.com/carbondalecrash1974.htmlHovered- Colored lights went out- sped away -left trail, National UFO Reporting Centerhttp://www.nuforc.org/webreports/068/S68976.htmlUFO Over Westline, National UFO Reporting Center http://www.nuforc.org/webreports/032/S32964.htmlUFO Over Erie, National UFO Reporting Center http://www.nuforc.org/webreports/019/S19817.htmlBright lights in the sky seperated by several miles, National UFO Reporting Centerhttp://www.nuforc.org/webreports/043/S43145.htmlWar of the Worlds Sighting, National UFO Reporting Center http://www.nuforc.org/webreports/054/S54491.htmlVery large circular craft with engine problem, descends, stabilizes, restores engines and tests them, National UFO Reporting Center http://www.nuforc.org/webreports/016/S16875.htmlOne larger white object & 2 smaller round white objects, National UFO Reporting Center http://www.nuforc.org/webreports/048/S48591.htmlUFO Sighting Johnstown 1951, National UFO Reporting Center http://www.nuforc.org/webreports/132/S132897.htmlBright Blue Object Sighting, National UFO Reporting Center http://www.nuforc.org/webreports/035/S35223.htmlSix craft observed that brought people out of their homes to look up, National UFO Reporting Center http://www.nuforc.org/webreports/043/S43006.htmlThe Discreetly Intriguing Carbondale Case – A Downed UFO In Pennsylvania, Marcus Lowth, UFO Insighthttps://www.ufoinsight.com/ufos/cover-ups/carbondale-case-downed-ufo-pennsylvania(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 24, 2025Weird Darkness traces more than a century of unexplained encounters in the skies over Pennsylvania, from a glowing disc submerged in a Carbondale lake to a werewolf-faced figure tied to a silent craft, the apparent stopping of time outside New Kensington, and the geography researchers believe may explain why the Keystone State draws so many sightings.It opens with the Carbondale incident of November 1974, when teenagers Bill Lloyd, John Lloyd, and Bob Gillette watched a golden-white light streak from the direction of Salem Mountain and drop near the lake outside Russell Park. A disc-shaped glow moved beneath the water, the surface fizzed and turned a sickly green-yellow, and when Officers Barbero and Jacobina fired their weapons at it, the object appeared to dodge the shots. The boys overheard a police radio order to hold off the news media, watched a scuba diver surface screaming, and saw a crane and delivery truck brought to the water's edge under the eye of Police Chief Francis Dottle — only for divers to later produce a single old railroad worker's lantern and declare the whole thing a hoax. Matt Graeber of the UFO Report and Information Center in Philadelphia arrived at five in the morning to find a crowd of between fifteen hundred and three thousand people ringing the lake.From there the episode moves to February 1975 in Simpson, where a driver on Route 171 joined other motorists pulled over to watch red and green lights hover before a white beam appeared and the object shot off faster than a fighter jet. That June, two friends fishing at Red Bank near the Allegheny Reservoir tracked a craft that stopped dead in midair and hovered for roughly an hour, then heard KDKA radio report at six-thirty that morning that a UFO had crashed into an eastern Pennsylvania lake and the National Guard had it surrounded, before the story disappeared from every outlet. Near Erie around the same stretch, two motorists stopped to study a silent disc about eighty feet across hanging a thousand feet up, ringed with red, yellow, blue, and green lights, and afterward never spoke of it to each other again.Next comes Oil City on November 1, 1974, where CB radio chatter about lights near the Vocational Technical Center across from Oil City High School drew a group of brothers out to look. They found three or four bright lights spread miles apart, moving in geometric formations no aircraft could manage, performing for nearly two hours in front of hundreds of onlookers.The account then shifts to Saylor's Lake in Monroe County on the evening of March 1, 1973, where lights began darting fifteen hundred feet above the water around seven-thirty, shifting between white, red, and blue. State Trooper Jeffrey Hontz, sent to investigate, later told the press the display looked like Christmas trees flying in the air. Witnesses counted roughly forty separate lights, all of them silent at an altitude where planes or helicopters would have roared, and the spectacle lasted until just before eleven.That summer of 1973 in Erie, a teenager sleeping in a backyard tent to escape the heat saw a red, star-like object cross the sky with apparent purpose and ran inside to fetch his grandmother. By the time the two returned, the sky had filled with colored star-like objects moving at impossible angles and near-collisions before they winked out of existence rather than flying away, and the grandmother, though she had watched the whole half-hour, afterward refused to discuss any of it.The most frightening encounter belongs to Bensalem on August 27, 1973, when Alan and Elsie Wainwright saw a boomerang-shaped craft glide silently over their home, halt overhead, and d

Two wealthy couples settle in for a lavish Christmas dinner at a lovingly restored country cottage, until the lights die, the wine turns to blood, and the house itself seals them inside with something that remembers what once happened within its walls.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 Laughing Maiden” (January 13, 1978)00:45:48.046 = BBC Radio 4/Radio 7 Ghost Story, “Exorcism” (December 28, 1992)02:11:59.037 = Beyond the Green Door, “Ogden Family” (1966) ***WD02:15:59.632 = The Black Book, “On Schedule” (February 17, 1952) ***WD02:31:30.285 = Boston Blackie, “Lighthouse Ghost” (September 10, 1947)02:55:56.212 = Box 13, “The Sad Night” (December 19, 1948)03:23:36.223 = Casey Crime Photographer, “Case of the Switched Plates” (July 07, 1943)03:52:57.163 = CBC Mystery Theater, ‘The Breaking Strain” (1968) ***WD04:21:52.588 = Chet Chetter's Tales From The Morgue, “1-800-Big-Bang” (1990-1992) ***WD05:17:51.890 = 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/WDRR0683

A betrothal feast turns to terror when the man who comes courting Lady Margaret may be the same Earl of Dunbar who was stabbed to death on the road to claim her — and a Highland prophecy that the last of her line would be the bride of death seems to be coming 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, “Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater” (January 02, 1978) ***WD00:47:10.839 = Nick Carter Master Detective, “Death After Dark” (February 19, 1944) ***WD01:16:26.535 = Dark Venture, “Miser” (December 09, 1946)01:46:44.791 = Weird Circle, ‘Bride of Death” (1945)02:14:12.621 = The Whistler, “Dead Man Laughed” (February 19, 1945)02:44:38.214 = Witch's Tale, “Firing Squad” (August 31, 1931) ***WD (LQ)03:10:47.939 = X Minus One, “The Castaways” (November 28, 1956)03:33:51.090 = Zero Hour, “The Strange Odyssey” (May 17, 1945) (LQ)03:51:09.995 = ABC Mystery Time, “Death Walked In” (1956-1957) ***WD04:15:57.703 = Strange Adventure, “Damage Below” (1945)04:19:33.278 = Appointment With Fear, “My Fate Cries Out” (December 04, 1976) ***WD04:47:07.133 = Arch Oboler's Plays, “Cliff” (April 29, 1939) ***WD05:16:13.771 = 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/WDRR0682

A regular nineteen-year-old with no criminal record stabbed his landlord to death with a pocketknife, then later claimed the demon he'd taunted into possessing him — instead of his fiancée's eleven-year-old brother — had crawled out of a well and into his body to commit the murder.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources and full transcript): https://weirddarkness.com/arnejohnsonREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8n97s9FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: The third Conjuring film is based on the true story of Arne Cheyenne Johnson who claimed he committed murder because a demon made him do it. But how much truth is there to that story? (The Devil Made Him Do It) *** A tribe living in the Amazon Jungle tells about a strange encounter they had with an extraterrestrial and a strange beam of light. (That Time An Alien Visited the Kayapo People) *** An elderly man decides he needs to hire someone to help him care for his property… but who he chose would bring only death and a mystery that still goes unsolved. (The Wonnangatta Station Murders) *** Lizard people. Reptilians. It's one of the strangest and most controversial conspiracy theories in existence – and we'll look at some of the history behind the idea, as well as what science says about the possibility of it being a reality. (The Myths and Modern Science of Reptilians) *** A nun who wasn't very good at being a nun ended up being a nun without a head. (The Headless Nun of Watton Priory) *** We've all been asked the question, “How do you want to die when it comes your time?” Aside from the boring but realistic answer of “quietly in my sleep” some would prefer to go out in a blaze of glory, doing something heroic to save a person or persons from imminent doom. But of course that does not happen for most of us. In fact, there are probably more people going out in a blaze of stupidity! (Dumbest Deaths) *** In 1995 Mike Marcum got it in his head to build a time machine. Did he succeed? We may never know – because he disappeared without a trace. (The Mike Marcum Time Machine)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:00:16.342 = Show Open00:02:43.182 = The Devil Made Him Do It00:13:06.595 = The Wonnangatta Station Murders ***00:21:13.768 = That Time An Alien Visited The Kayapo People00:31:32.636 = Myths and Modern Science of Reptilians ***00:36:18.232 = Headless Nun of Watton Priory00:50:09.790 = Dumbest Deaths ***01:02:12.268 = The Mike Marcum Time Machine ***01:06:33.695 = Show Close & Bloopers*** = 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 Myths and Modern Science of Reptilians” from Anomalien: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/b7m27fbr“The Devil Made Him Do It” by Marco Margaritoff for All That's Interesting: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/pxfxa423“That Time An Alien Visited The Kayapo People” by Ellen Lloyd for Ancient Pages: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/sauzjxp2“The Wonnangatta Station Murders” by Brent Swancer for Mysterious Universe: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/ceycy3k“The Headless Nun of Watton Priory” from Esoterx: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/x4sknt6r“Dumbest Deaths” by Katie Chilton for ListVerse: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/sm6mwmj7“The Mike Marcum Time Machine” from Earth Chronicles: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/hytc7552(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: November 17, 2021Weird Darkness host Darren Marlar leads listeners through seven dark tales spanning a courtroom plea of demonic possession, an unsolved double murder on a remote Australian cattle station, an Amazon tribe's memory of a sky visitor, the serpent-race conspiracy of reptilians, a centuries-old English haunting, history's most absurd deaths, and a Missouri man who vanished after trying to build a time machine.It opens with the 1981 killing of forty-year-old landlord Alan Bono in Brookfield, Connecticut, the first murder in the town's 193-year history, committed by his nineteen-year-old tenant Arne Cheyenne Johnson with a five-inch pocket knife. Johnson's attorney Martin Minnella attempted a plea of not guilty by reason of demonic possession, tracing the violence to months of torment suffered by eleven-year-old David Glatzel, the brother of Johnson's fiancée Debbie, who described a tormentor with black eyes, animal features, and hooves. Paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren declared it a genuine possession and claimed David levitated and stopped breathing across three exorcisms overseen by priests, while psychiatrists countered that the boy had a learning disability. Judge Robert Callahan rejected the supernatural defense as unprovable, Johnson was convicted of first-degree manslaughter on November 24, 1981, and the case later inspired the film The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It.From there the episode travels to the remote Wonnangatta Station in Australia's Victorian Alps, where caretaker James Barclay hired English handyman John Bamford in 1917, a man rumored to have killed his own wife. After the two rode to Talbotville to vote on the Reinforcement Referendum in December 1917, mailman Harry Smith found the homestead empty but for the words "Home Tonight" chalked on the kitchen door, and weeks later he and Jack Jebb uncovered Barclay's decomposed body in a shallow creekside grave, dead from a shotgun blast to the back. The following November, Bamford's body surfaced in a log pile on the Howitt Plains with a bullet in the head, leaving investigators with a recently fired shotgun, traces of strychnine in the kitchen pepper, and no answer as to who killed the second man.Next comes the legend of the Kayapo people of the Brazilian Amazon, who tell of a sky visitor named Bep Kororoti who descended from the mountains of Pukato-Ti amid thunder, wielding a weapon that reduced trees and stones to dust and a beam of light that paralyzed anyone who fled his lessons. The being neither ate nor drank, taught the villagers practical skills, and eventually ascended back into the sky, and the account drew international attention when young Kayapo men touring Rio de Janeiro reportedly pointed at an Apollo 11 astronaut display and shouted that he had returned. Erich von Däniken cited photographs of Kayapo men in straw ritual costumes resembling spacesuits, taken by Joao Americo Peret in 1952, nearly a decade before Yuri Gagarin's 1961 spaceflight, as supposed support for the ancient astronaut theory.The discussion then turns to reptilians, tracing serpent-race myths found across Sumeria, Babylonia, India, China, and Mesoamerica, alongside the modern claims of David Icke that some humans are disguised lizard people. Set against the folklore, researcher Bjarke Jensen of Aarhus University lays out the actual biology: the human reptilian brain that governs heart rate and breathing, eyes structured much like a reptile's, and conductive heart tissue whose molecular building blocks Jensen's team located hidden in the spongy hearts of lizards, frogs, and zebrafish.The episode then visits Watton Priory in East Riding of Yorkshire, a Gilbertine community where, according to the twelfth-century account of Saint Aelred of Rievaulx, an orphaned girl named Elfleda fell in love with a young lay brother, was beaten and chained in a dungeon by the nuns, and was forced to watch as the man was mutilated. A second tragedy fastened itself to the same site after the 1644 Battle of Marston Moor, when Parliamentarian soldiers beheaded the Catholic Lady of Watton and killed her child, and over the centuries the two women blurred into a single spectral figure remembered as the Headless Nun, said to stand at the foot of the bed in blood-stained garments before vanishing.From there the show catalogs history's most absurd deaths, beginning with English Channel swimmer Matthew Webb, who drowned in the Niagara rapids in 1883, and the Spartan general Pausanias, sealed inside a temple of Athena and starved until he died moments after his release. The roll continues with Draco of Athens, smothered around 600 BC beneath cloaks and hats thrown in tribute; Sir Arthur Aston, beaten to death with his own wooden leg; the philosopher Heraclitus, who buried himself in cow dung hoping to cure his dropsy; lawyer Clement Vallandigham, who fatally shot himself in 1871 while demonstrating how a victim might have shot himself by accident; the Viking Sigurd the Mighty, killed by an infection from the sev

A missing-child call about a six-year-old girl led Aberdeen detectives to her four-year-old brother, dead and buried in a tote beneath the house for nearly a year.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/jacob-bevinsLook 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.#WeirdDarkness, #WeirdDarkNEWSNOTE: Some of this content may have been created with assistance from AI tools, but it has been reviewed, edited, narrated, produced, and approved by Darren Marlar, creator and host of Weird Darkness — who, despite popular conspiracy theories, is NOT an AI voice.

Nineteen years as the Archdiocese of Washington's exorcist ended within a week of Monsignor Stephen Rossetti posting a video that called most UFO sightings demonic.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/exorcist-ufosLook 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.#WeirdDarkness, #WeirdDarkNEWSNOTE: Some of this content may have been created with assistance from AI tools, but it has been reviewed, edited, narrated, produced, and approved by Darren Marlar, creator and host of Weird Darkness — who, despite popular conspiracy theories, is NOT an AI voice.

A 46-year-old Myrtle Beach detective drew his department-issued handgun on a patrolman over the smell of microwaved fish, and a felony charge and the end of his career followed within days.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/fish-felon-debiaseLook 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.#WeirdDarkness, #WeirdDarkNEWSNOTE: Some of this content may have been created with assistance from AI tools, but it has been reviewed, edited, narrated, produced, and approved by Darren Marlar, creator and host of Weird Darkness — who, despite popular conspiracy theories, is NOT an AI voice.

Pennsylvania authorities say a 29-year-old volunteer firefighter set three fires in roughly thirty hours, then responded to two of them alongside the company he served.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/justin-shollyLook 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.#WeirdDarkness, #WeirdDarkNEWSNOTE: Some of this content may have been created with assistance from AI tools, but it has been reviewed, edited, narrated, produced, and approved by Darren Marlar, creator and host of Weird Darkness — who, despite popular conspiracy theories, is NOT an AI voice.

A 71-year-old Baltimore traffic investigator stopped to tell a driver another car was waiting for her parking spot, and the favor cost him his life six weeks later.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/parking-spot-killingLook 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.#WeirdDarkness, #WeirdDarkNEWSNOTE: Some of this content may have been created with assistance from AI tools, but it has been reviewed, edited, narrated, produced, and approved by Darren Marlar, creator and host of Weird Darkness — who, despite popular conspiracy theories, is NOT an AI voice.

A young geologist drilling four miles into a Rocky Mountain ridge breaks through into a sealed chamber and finds something impossible: a fully furnished modern house, twelve billion years old, holding a library that has already written the history of a world exactly like ours — including the volume that tells how it ends.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 Ninth Volume” (December 30, 1977)00:46:54.045 = Strange Wills, “Seven Flights to Glory” (August 03, 1946)01:16:39.826 = Strange, “Hillbilly Feud” (1955) ***WD01:30:56.519 = Suspense, “Sorry Wrong Number” (February 24, 1944)02:01:42.070 = Tales of the Frightened, “Ladder” (November 28, 1957)02:06:44.881 = Tales of Tomorrow, “The Old Die Rich” (March 26, 1953) ***WD02:38:30.884 = The Creaking Door, “Girl, Gold, Getaway (1960s-1970s) ***WD03:08:23.441 = Theater Five, “Contract Maker” (November 17, 1964)03:28:37.136 = Theater 1030, “The Sandman” (October 31, 1954) ***WD (LQ)03:55:35.978 = Tales From The Tomb, “Do You Know Where The Children Are” (1960s)04:00:46.397 = 2000 Plus, “The Giant Walk” (November 05, 1950) ***WD (LQ)04:29:46.536 = The Unexpected, “Mirage” (October 24, 1948)04:41:54.647 = Unsolved Mysteries, “Mystery of the Zombie” (1936) ***WD04:56:22.751 = 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/WDRR0681

For more than a year, a seven-foot creature with glowing red eyes and folded wings terrorized Point Pleasant, West Virginia—and just weeks after the sightings stopped, the Silver Bridge collapsed and killed 46 people, leaving the town to wonder whether the Mothman had been a monster, a warning, or something far worse.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources and full transcript): https://weirddarkness.com/RedEyesOfMothmanREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8s2fxtFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Most everyone is familiar with the King James Bible, but did you know that King James also wrote a book on demonology during the witch hunts and trials? (The King James Book of Demonology) *** Her gravestone, decorated with a cross and flowers, reads “Jerrilynn S. Mullins — Beloved wife and best friend.” It could also be added, “a victim of a crime that will likely never be solved.” (The Unsolved Mystery of Jerrilyn Mullins) *** It was on November 15th 1966 that Point Pleasant, West Virginia had its first experience with what later became known as the Mothman. Many believe it was either the cause of a horrific bridge collapse, or perhaps a harbinger of the doom that was soon to come. The mystery remains to this day – as do some of the eerie happenings in the area. (Mothman Attacks) ** 17-year-old Kendrick Johnson was found dead in his high school's gym – but the circumstances of his death have brought more questions than answers. Was Kendrick's death a tragic accident – or cold-blooded murder? (The Mysterious Death of Kendrick Johnson)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:01:56.519 = Mothman Attacks00:12:50.814 = The Mysterious Death of Kendrick Johnson ***00:32:56.273 = Unsolved Mystery of Jerrilyn Mullins ***00:44:05.678 = The King James Book of Demonology ***00:54:07.021 = 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 Mysterious Death of Kendrick Johnson” from The Scare Chamber: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/dkuavkb3“The King James Book of Demonology” by Jacob Shelton for Graveyard Shift: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/34vaad3z“Mothman Attacks” by Troy Taylor: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/5ac64hhn“The Unsolved Mystery of Jerrilyn Mullins” by Troy Taylor: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/224xc2w7(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: November 15, 2021This episode of Weird Darkness, hosted by Darren Marlar, moves from a winged cryptid haunting a West Virginia river town to a Georgia teenager found dead inside a rolled wrestling mat, a Minnesota newlywed who vanished from a restaurant parking lot, and a king of England who wrote a manual on demons.It opens with the Mothman, first reported on November 15, 1966, when two young married couples driving past an abandoned World War II TNT plant near Point Pleasant, West Virginia, spotted a six- or seven-foot gray figure with folded wings and glowing red eyes that rose into the air and pursued their car down Highway 62 at over 100 miles per hour. That same night, contractor Newell Partridge of Salem watched his television fill with a strange pattern before his dog Bandit chased two red eyes toward the hay barn and disappeared forever, and the next day Roger Scarberry described passing a large dog's body near the city limits that was gone minutes later. Over the following year roughly 100 people, including Marcella Bennett, reported the creature alongside UFO sightings and men in black, and on December 15, 1967, the 700-foot Silver Bridge linking Point Pleasant to Ohio collapsed during rush hour and killed 46 people, cementing the belief that the Mothman had been a harbinger of the disaster.From there the episode turns to Kendrick Johnson, the 17-year-old three-sport athlete found dead on January 11, 2013, stuffed head-down inside a rolled wrestling mat in the old gym at Lowndes High School in Valdosta, Georgia. Investigators ruled the death an accidental positional asphyxia, theorizing the boy fell in reaching for a shoe, but his 19-inch shoulders could not fit through the mat's 14-inch opening, an hour of footage from all four gym cameras was missing and altered, and his organs were found removed and replaced with newspaper. A second and third autopsy revealed blunt force trauma to his neck and right chest, a fabricated confession recording sold to his family for $1,000 was exposed as a hoax by Sheriff Ashley Paulk, and the case, which once entangled FBI agent Randy Bell's sons Brandon and Brian Bell, was officially reopened on March 10, 2021.Vanishing from a restaurant parking lot is what happened next to Jerrilyn Mullins, a 28-year-old Oakdale, Minnesota, newlywed who left the dinner table at a Chi Chi's in Richfield around 9:00 p.m. on November 15, 1978, and was last seen by her husband's coworker Patrick Melbourne, who said he drove her 22 miles back to a Howard Johnson's and left her there. Her decomposed body surfaced in a Lake Elmo swamp on June 30, 1979, identified through dental records and jewelry, with two autopsies unable to determine a cause of death though her stomach contents placed her killing within an hour of leaving the restaurant. Melbourne, who carried a long record of sexual assault allegations and was later convicted of crimes against a 10-year-old girl, remained the prime suspect; husband Ron Mullins lost a 1989 wrongful-death civil suit for lack of evidence, and the Washington County case stayed unsolved when Melbourne died in 2015.The episode closes with King James VI and I, who returned from a 1589 trip to Denmark obsessed with witchcraft and published Daemonologie in 1597, the only treatise of its kind written by a reigning monarch. In its pages he catalogued the signs of demonic possession, describing superhuman strength exceeding six men, iron-hard skin that could not be pierced, and victims speaking languages they never learned, while arguing that demons inhabit the corpses of the pious and that only prayer and fasting, not Catholic ritual, could repel them. He acknowledged werewolves as men suffering an excess of melancholy rather than cursed creatures, dismissed fairies as illusions sent by the Devil, fixed the ratio of female to male witches at 20 to 1 by reasoning that women were more easily deceived as Eve had been, and produced a work that fueled the European and colonial witch hunts and shaped the weird sisters of William Shakespeare's Macbeth.

An Arkansas father who shot the man accused of abusing his 13-year-old daughter walked free after a sheriff's deputy lost the one piece of footage that might have shown what happened on that highway.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/aaron-spencer-dismissedLook 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.#WeirdDarkness, #WeirdDarkNEWSNOTE: Some of this content may have been created with assistance from AI tools, but it has been reviewed, edited, narrated, produced, and approved by Darren Marlar, creator and host of Weird Darkness — who, despite popular conspiracy theories, is NOT an AI voice.

A man called 911 in Tarzana to report he had just killed someone, and the person bleeding in the front yard turned out to be a character actor whose face millions had seen in Top Gun: Maverick and Jumanji.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/james-handy-deathLook 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.#WeirdDarkness, #WeirdDarkNEWS

A forest lookout sits alone in a glass tower at 2AM and spots flames crowning two distant pines — a fire only he can see. By dawn there's no smoke, no ash, no scorched earth... and no fire at all. From phantom flames that burn and vanish to the burned Bigfoot pulled from a Nevada blaze and the UFOs caught streaking through wildfire smoke, tonight we wander into the strange and unsettling things that appear when the forests burn.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources and full transcript): https://weirddarkness.com/ghostflamesREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yjwtx7awFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: The author of Frankenstein always saw love and death as connected. She visited the cemetery to commune with her dead mother. And with her lover. (Mary Shelley's Obsession With The Cemetery) *** A girl moves into a new apartment and discovers that a haunting doesn't necessarily have to be frightening. (Ghostly Happenings In My Old Apartment) *** The July 1886 murder at the Shawmut Avenue laundry was so shrouded in mystery that even the victim's name was uncertain. (The Wash-House Murder) *** Ghosts, high strangeness, and even Bigfoot – it appears they may all have something in common, and that would be forest fires. (Forest Fires and the Paranormal) *** How do you explain an experienced lookout reporting a blazing forest fire, only for it to disappear less than an hour later – leaving no trace? (Phantom Flames)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:03:57.045 = Show Open00:05:40.844 = Phantom Flames00:21:25.265 = Forest Fires and the Paranormal00:35:10.279 = Mary Shelley's Obsession With The Cemetery ***0048:57.368 = Ghostly Happenings In My Old Apartment00:52:28.197 = The Wash-House Murder ***01:01:09.811 = 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:“Phantom Flames” by F.A.Loomis from Idaho Magazine: http://ow.ly/beq730nL94u“Forest Fires and the Paranormal” by Brent Swancer for Mysterious Universe: http://ow.ly/ROYC30nL8n1“Mary Shelley's Obsession With The Cemetery” by Bess Lovejoy for the JSTOR Daily: https://tinyurl.com/y9cgd29w“Ghostly Happenings In My Old Apartment” by Cassie D, posted at MyHauntedLifeToo,com: https://tinyurl.com/ycexszvm
“The Wash-House Murder” by Robert Wilhelm, from the book “Wicked Victorian Boston”: https://amzn.to/2BGJOO0(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: March, 2021Weird Darkness opens a fire-themed descent that runs from a vanished forest blaze in 1976 Idaho through ghosts, Bigfoot, and UFOs born of wildfires, into Mary Shelley's graveyard education, a gentle apartment haunting, and an unsolved 1886 Boston murder.It opens with a U.S. Forest Service lookout stationed atop Pilot Peak in the Payette National Forest near Warren, high above the South Fork of the Salmon River, who woke sleepless at two a.m. in July 1976 and saw a bright orange triangle near a distant crest, then confirmed through binoculars two huge trees crowning out with flame. He calculated an azimuth with his fire-finder, radioed a two- to four-acre fire to the station fifteen air miles away, and watched it recede and vanish completely within forty minutes, leaving no smoke, no flame, and no charred ground at dawn six air miles out. Supervisors dubbed it the Pilot Peak phantom fire and sent smokejumper aircraft and hotshot crews to circle the ridge for nearly a week without finding a trace, until two months later a thousand-acre blaze on Zena Creek burned in roughly the same location he had reported.From there the episode widens into wildfires laced with the paranormal, beginning with the Curve Fire that struck South Mount Hawkins in the San Gabriel Mountains of California's Angeles National Forest on September 1, 2002, traced to a brittle 1935 wooden lookout tower and rumored to follow a cult ritual, after which hikers reported eyeless animals with hardened flesh and tall shadow figures akin to the Dark Watchers. It moves to the Battle Mountain Complex Fire near Battle Mountain, Nevada on August 6, 1999, where a letter forwarded to the Bigfoot Field Research Organization and a later call to investigator Thom Powell described firefighters capturing a burned, roughly seven-and-a-half-foot creature with a strong equine odor and near-human features. It closes with a July 2014 wildfire at West Kelowna near Vancouver, Canada, where a Castanet news video appeared to show an object shooting from a cloud, and a 2017 sighting by Arthur Frenette in New Hampshire's White Mountains, who watched a ball of fire plunge into Kinsman Ridge ahead of an out-of-control blaze.Next the episode turns to Mary Shelley, who in her 1831 introduction to Frankenstein traced her writing to her literary parents, though her mother, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman author Mary Wollstonecraft, died of puerperal fever days after her birth when Dr. Poignand removed the placenta with unwashed hands. Raised partly at her mother's grave in the St. Pancras churchyard, where she read her mother's work and escaped a strained home after father William Godwin remarried, the teenage Mary met Percy Shelley through the household and, at sixteen, declared love and reportedly first had sex among the tombstones. That fusion of reading, death, and forbidden knowledge surfaces in Victor Frankenstein's graveyard study of decay and in Godwin's 1809 Essay on Sepulchres, which framed visiting the illustrious dead as a form of communion the daughter carried into her novel of a creature assembled from corpses.From there the tone softens with a benign haunting recounted by a woman named Cassie, who moved into a larger, better-kept apartment over Christmas 2018 and lived there three months before moving in with her boyfriend. The internet blinked off repeatedly, cell reception failed in parts of the unit, electrical sockets quit working, bulbs burned out fast, and the shower switched itself on while she was away at classes. One night around one a.m. she and her boyfriend both heard the pitter-patter of bare feet in the kitchen, yet she never felt threatened, and when she left she said goodbye to whatever shared the space with her.The episode closes with the Wash-House Murder, the July 1886 killing of a Chinese laundryman found stabbed fourteen times in his Shawmut Avenue laundry in Boston's South End, his braided queue cut off and the five hundred dollars he had saved for a return to China gone. The victim's name was never certain, printed variously as Bin Chong, Ding Chong, and Wong Kong, and the case drew the Boston Police into a Chinatown governed by rival companies named Moy, Ching, Lee, and Sing. Detectives questioned the violent Moy company leader Ah Moy Chong and brought in New York interpreter Warry S. Charles, but the murder was never solved, and Charles himself was convicted of first-degree murder in 1908 after importing hatchet-armed assassins as a tong leader, leaving four dead in Chinatown.

“Hands of Death”: A wheelchair-bound collector of murder relics decides the only things missing from his macabre collection are a murderer and a victim — so he engineers his own killer brother's downfall to acquire both. But the dead don't always stay in their boxes, and a pair of severed hands may yet keep a promise of vengeance.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 Witching Well” (December 23, 1977) ***WD00:47:28.447 = Adventures of Ellery Queen, “Armchair Detective” (march 27, 1946) ***WD (LQ)01:17:54.860 = Quiet Please, “Valentine” (February 13, 1949) ***WD01:48:08.576 = Radio City Playhouse, “Duet” (October 16, 1949) ***WD02:17:13.009 = The Croupier, “The Roman” (September 21, 1949) ***WD02:47:28.792 = Sam Spade, “Same And Guiana Sovereign Caper” (July 12, 1946) ***WD03:16:41.034 = The Sealed Book, “Hands of Death” (March 18, 1945) ***WD03:47:40.901 = The Shadow, “Death Rides a Broomstick” (March 02, 1941)04:16:17.053 = Sleep No More, “Jilting of Granny Weatherall” (January 30, 1957) ***WD04:45:27.614 = BBC Spinechillers, “Origami” (February 28, 1984) ***WD05:29:33.275 = 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/WDRR0680

Researchers in Italy spent three months baking sourdough from yeast they pulled out of the meltwater inside a 5,300-year-old murder victim.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/otzibreadLook 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.#WeirdDarkness, #WeirdDarkNEWS

“Brothers of the Angle”: A grieving widow believes a stranger can carry messages from her dead husband — messages only the couple could have known. But in a story about baiting hooks and landing fortunes, the real question is who's fishing, and who's the catch.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, “Brothers of the Angle” (December 19, 1977) ***WD00:46:41.705 = Mystery House, “Laugh? I Thought I'd Die!” (April 14, 1946)01:11:23.715 = Night Beat, “Bell Perrin Amnesia Case” (July 06, 1951) ***WD01:41:38.347 = CBC Nightfall, “Hypnotized” (April 22, 1983)02:11:33.366 = Nightmare, “The Leech” (April 07, 1954)02:34:12.420 = “The Leech” by Static Wax (SONG: https://weirddarkness.com/music)02:36:59.340 = Obsession, “Surrender Is Farewell” (January 29, 1951)03:00:13.100 = Origin of Superstition, “No News Is Good News” (1935) ***WD03:15:10.285 = Pat Novak For Hire, “Jack of Clubs Better Encode” (February 20, 1949) ***WD03:44:34.186 = Peril, “Cup of Tea” (ADU) ***WD04:11:15.983 = Mystery Playhouse, “Challenge to Listener” (July 04, 1947) ***WD04:36:15.645 = Price of Fear, “Guy Fawkes Night” (November 17, 1973)05:04:00.821 = 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/WDRR0679

Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb should never have been friends, they were too different from on another. But they did have one thing in common – they both agreed to create the perfect murder – and a mundane pair of eyeglasses would be their undoing. EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources and full transcript): https://weirddarkness.com/BobbyFranksREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/ywzfbb6bLISTEN 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 Perfect Murder of Bobby Franks” by Troy Taylor – from the book “Suffer the Children: American Horrors, Homicides and Hauntings”: https://amzn.to/3lo6CvP (Available on Kindle, paperback, and as an audiobook narrated by Darren Marlar)(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: November, 2021

Scientists ground a tooth from a 2,000-year-old elongated skull into powder to settle whether the Paracas Coneheads were human, and the genetic machines still came up short.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/paracas-skullsLook 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.#WeirdDarkness, #WeirdDarkNEWS

One engineer built an AI laser to roast every mosquito in his house, Google wants federal permission to release 32 million more, and the agency built to stop pests can't clear bed bugs out of its own offices.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/BugWarsLook 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.#WeirdDarkness, #WeirdDarkNEWS

Two women camping along a public trail on the Fourth of July woke near midnight to a man cutting through their tent, and for nearly two years no one knew who he was.The FBI believes there may be more victims. Investigators have asked anyone who thinks they were harmed by McLenithan, or who knows anything about other possible crimes involving him, to contact the bureau at (503) 224-4181 or to submit a tip at http://tips.fbi.gov. SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/TillamookTentLook 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.#WeirdDarkness, #WeirdDarkNEWS

A double boom rattled homes across New England on a Saturday afternoon, and the cause turned out to be a five-foot meteor breaking apart miles above the coast before its remains splashed into Cape Cod Bay.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/CapeCodMeteorLook 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.#WeirdDarkness, #WeirdDarkNEWS

A young Long Island couple discovers that the knife-wielding ghost stalking their cellar and terrorizing their four-year-old son may not be the threat they assumed.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 With a Knife” (December 16, 1977) ***WD00:47:13.694 = Beyond Midnight, “The Party” (1968-1970) ***WD01:18:25.389 = MindWebs, “The Night He Cried” (1975-1984)01:39:31.543 = Voice In The Night, “Necklace” (June 14, 1948)02:09:24.196 = Mystery In The Air, “Lodger” (August 14, 1947)02:40:19.177 = Molle Mystery Theater, “Night Must Fall” (April 12, 1946)03:09:20.782 = Mr. Keen, “The Girl Who Flirted” (February 03, 1944)03:39:48.543 = Murder at Midnight, “The Man Who Died Yesterday” (June 30, 1947) ***WD04:06:14.829 = The Black Museum, “The Shopping Bag” (1952) ***WD04:33:04.964 = Mysterious Traveler, “Change of Address” (January 22, 1952)05:02:31.652 = 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/WDRR0678

Back in 1818, the same year *Frankenstein* hit the shelves, a Scottish professor named Andrew Ure decided to see if electricity could actually bring a dead body back to life—so he hooked up a freshly executed murderer to a current and watched in fascination as the corpse twitched, "breathed," and even made terrifying expressions that sent witnesses into a panic.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources and full transcript): https://weirddarkness.com/AndrewUreREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/58czndx7FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: In 1800s numerous scientists were trying to find the reason for life in the hopes of staving off death or even bringing the recently dead back to life. But in 1818 one scientist named Andrew Ure attempted to do even more – to bring the brain of dead human back into the living. And ironically, his experiments took place the very same year the novel “Frankenstein” was published. (The Real-Life Dr. Frankenstein) *** They say the family that plays together stays together… but does that also mean that the family that crimes together does time together? We'll look at a few true cases of parents committing crimes – and getting help from their children in doing so. (The Family That Preys Together) *** A hunter comes across a wild man in the woods… but what he hears from the humanoid doesn't sound like a man at all. (The Man I Saw Through My Night Vision Scope) *** What would you do if you showed up to work one morning and your employer asked you to help dispose of a dead body? Don't be so quick to say that would never happen. That's just one part of the story of one of the most notorious crimes of 19th century America – the murder of John Parkman. (Dr. Coolidge Settles a Debt) *** Skipping church to go fishing might get you more than just a guilty conscience – especially if you believe the strange story of the Lambton Worm. (The Legend of the Lambton Worm)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Excerpt from Mary Shelley's “Frankenstein”00:00:49.707 = Show Open00:03:06.456 = The Real-Life Dr. Frankenstein00:11:54.238 = The Family That Preys Together ***00:31:59.759 = The Man I Saw Through My Night-Vision Scope ***00:40:02.958 = Dr. Coolidge Settles a Debt00:50:44.058 = Legend of the Lambton Worm ***00:59:16.928 = 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 Family That Preys Together” by Chrys for ListVerse: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2sv76asj“The Real-Life Dr. Frankenstein” by Rachel Souerbry for Weird History: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4pevzd6e“Dr. Coolidge Settles a Debt” from Strange Company: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/7tpj8wmv“The Man I Saw Through My Night Vision Scope” from PerpetualConnection: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4e6nrd3h“The Legend of the Lambton Worm” by Brent Swancer for Mysterious Universe: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/52t8cfnc(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: November 09, 2021

In Nazi-occupied France, German officers repeatedly try to execute a young French woman by hanging — but each time, she returns alive. The woman becomes less a normal person than an allegorical embodiment of France/liberty/resistance: the Nazis can murder bodies, but they cannot kill the spirit they are fighting.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 Death Slot” (December 14, 1977) ***WD00:47:44.298 = The Key, “Dear John Letter” (1956) ***WD01:12:44.958 = Lights Out, “Execution” (April 27, 1943)01:42:40.945 = Lux Radio Theater, “Sorry Wrong Number” (January 09, 1950) ***WD02:42:19.825 = Macabre, “Final Resting Place” (November 13, 1961) ***WD03:09:51.480 = Philip Marlowe, “Long Arm” (February 07, 1950)03:39:16.182 = Theater Royal, “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (September 13, 1954) ***WD03:59:23.539 = Black Mass, “All Hallows” (September 06, 1963)04:38:13.336 = Michael Shayne, “Pirates in San Francisco Bay” (April 30, 1945)05:07:46.083 = 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/WDRR0677

The bones Spanish conquistadors pulled from the Ecuadorian earth were far too large to belong to any man they had ever seen, and the strange trail those giants leave behind runs straight back to the fallen Watchers of Genesis and the towering Nephilim they fathered.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/AncientGiantsREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/mpmkprwyFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Ancient giants in Ecuador were supposedly killed by fire from the sky. Tales of giants in North America. The stories of giants living in the days of Noah. How much of these stories about giants can be believed – and how much should be considered tall-tales?CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Fictional giant story “Jack O' Legs”00:04:09.349 = Show Open00:05:14.221 = Ancient Giants, Part 100:17:20.430 = Ancient Giants, Part 2 ***00:36:02.900 = Ancient Giants, Part 3 ***00:46:36.422 = 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:“Jack O' Legs” by Ellen Lloyd for Ancient Pages: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/emv9rr46“Giants of Yore” by GotQuestions.org: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/fu4dx579, and Ellen Lloyd for Ancient Pages:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/5enmwfzb, https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/5c2w4xbb,https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/tk4nr88n, https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4bu4e4mh,https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/76wab36r, https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/8j5zympd, https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/tfdf8jfn(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: March, 2022

A stressed-out new office worker's encounters with increasingly massive spiders takes a deeply disturbing turn when the creatures start following him home.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/SpidersUnderYourSkinFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: If creatures with eight legs wig you out, the hairs of your body are going to stand straight up when I tell the story from Jonathan Byrd called “The Spiders Under Your Skin. But first, I'll start with a short one. It's written by Melody Grace, and it's called “There's Something Off About The Lights Next Door”.CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:01:10.579 = There's Something About The Lights Next Door (Fictional Story)00:07:12.147 = Spiders Under Your Skin (Fictional Story) ***00:32:36.771 = 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:“There's Something Off About The Lights Next Door” by Melody Grace for Thought Catalog: (site no longer exists)“The Spiders Under Your Skin” by Jonathan Byrd for Thought Catalog: (site no longer exists)(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: May 14, 2020

May 31, 2026: They say the fires at Caledonia Mills started on their own, but anyone who spent a night there knew something far more sinister was at work.==========HOUR ONE: “The Witching Hour of 3AM” *** You don't have to go to a cemetery or haunted house to experience the supernatural. You don't need to drive a cursed road to encounter a ghost. Sometimes the paranormal takes place on military bases. (The Military And The Mysterious) *** The corpse of a murderer winds up doing advertising for a drug store. (The Murder of Maggie Walker) *** In 1922, an otherwise unremarkable farmhouse in Novia Scotia was the site of alleged poltergeist activity which made headlines all over Canada and the United States. A poltergeist that liked to set fires. (The Fire Spook of Caledonia Mills)==========HOUR TWO: Claiming to audibly hear from God either makes you crazy, or a prophet – and only time can tell which is true. If you claim things are going to happen because God says they will – and then they don't happen – that means you're cray cray, and a false prophet. That also makes your followers a bunch of dupes. Sadly, the 19th and 20th centuries were full of crazy false prophets with mindless sheep worshipping them. (Creating False Prophets) *** Headline: “Exciting Wake!” When you see the words “exciting” and “wake” in the same headline, you can make a guess that someone is not resting in peace! (Exciting Wake)==========SUDDEN DEATH OVERTIME: A smitten fan falls in love with a talented actress, and convinces himself she loves him in return. This sounds very much like a story out of today's entertainment magazines – but this tale of unrequited love took place in the 1880's. (The Lunatic James Dougherty) *** The terrifying Aswang is the most feared creature of Philippine folklore—and with good reason. I'll tell you why. (The Deadly Aswang) ** Reports have been coming in from people claiming to see full-sized African lions not in the Savannah or in the wilderness – but in North America. But is there any truth to the their claims? (Phantom Lions of North America)==========SOURCES AND REFERENCES FROM TONIGHT'S SHOW:BOOK: “Mysterious America” by Loren Coleman: https://amzn.to/3lZIviBBOOK: “Creatures of Philippine Lower Mythology”: https://amzn.to/3m2Re3kDOCUMENTARY: “The Aswang Phenomenon”: https://amzn.to/3jQrNjC“Creating False Prophets” by Dr. Romeo Vitelli for Providentia: https://tinyurl.com/y5bqt97p,https://tinyurl.com/y26vpmga, https://tinyurl.com/y6tgpcl3, https://tinyurl.com/y2jy3eqf“Phantom Lions of North America” by Brent Swancer for MysteriousUniverse.com: https://tinyurl.com/yygdg3eh“Exciting Wake” from the Huntington, IN “Daily Democrat”, reposted on the Strange Company website: https://tinyurl.com/y5cy4ksa“The Deadly Aswang” by Professor Geller for Mythology.net: https://tinyurl.com/yxhcrcxc“The Witching Hour of 3AM” from Paranormality Magazine“The Fire Spook of Caledonia Mills” by Hammerson Peters for MysteriesOfCanada.com: https://tinyurl.com/y43ug999“The Lunatic James Dougherty” by Robert Wilhelm for MurderByGaslight.com: https://tinyurl.com/yxkxo8b6“The Military and the Mysterious” by Brent Swancer for MysteriousUniverse.org: https://tinyurl.com/y46jdmks“The Murder of Maggie Walker” posted on the website Murders In History: https://tinyurl.com/y2qw2rup==========Join the Weird Darkness Syndicate: https://weirddarkness.com//syndicateWeird Darkness theme by Alibi Music Library. Background music provided by Alibi Music Library, EpidemicSound and/or StoryBlocks with paid license. Music from Shadows Symphony (https://tinyurl.com/yyrv987t), Midnight Syndicate (http://amzn.to/2BYCoXZ) Kevin MacLeod (https://tinyurl.com/y2v7fgbu), Tony Longworth (https://tinyurl.com/y2nhnbt7), and Nicolas Gasparini (https://tinyurl.com/lnqpfs8) is used with permission of the artists.==========PODCASTS I HOST:Weird Darkness: https://weirddarkness.com/listenParanormality Magazine: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/paranormalitymagMicro Terrors: Scary Stories for Kids: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/microterrorsRetro Radio – Old Time Radio In The Dark: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/retroradioChurch of the Undead: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/churchoftheundead==========(Over time links seen above 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.)=========="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® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.==========

In 1956, Italy's most opulent ocean liner went down off Nantucket after a head-on collision in the fog, taking 46 lives and earning a place among the worst maritime disasters in history. But the dying didn't stop there — in the seven decades since, the wreck dubbed the "Mt. Everest of Wreck Diving" has claimed roughly 18 more souls, swallowing the divers drawn to its depths and feeding whispers that something down there is cursed.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources and full transcript): https://weirddarkness.com/andreadoriaFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Movies like Shaun of the Dead, Night of the Living Dead, World War Z, and TV shows like The Walking Dead, have made the subject of zombies a fairly popular topic over recent years. And while we all know these undead creatures are purely make-believe, the idea of the zombie has been around for thousands of years… and in the Voodoo culture, they've found a way to make zombies a real, horrifying thing. (The Disturbing Truth Behind Voodoo Zombies) *** In July of 1956, the SS Andrea Doria collided with another ship and quickly sank to the bottom of the ocean. Today it is a tourist destination for brave divers who not only want to see something hauntingly beautiful, but who also dare to investigate a wreck that has been deemed by many to be cursed – and for good reason. (The Cursed Remains of the SS Andrea Doria) *** Paranormal author and researcher G. Michael Vasey tells of a personal incident that took place recently where he saw what could be described as a “peripheral person”. (Peripheral People) *** Sir Clive Sinclair might have been a man ahead of his time. The late inventor created all manner of strange and wonderful gadgets – most of which you've likely never heard of. But that doesn't mean you can say they were failures. (The Inventor of Weird Contraptions) *** If the legends are to believed, you'll want to avoid driving down Nan Tucks Lane in East Sussex - unless you don't mind coming into contact with a vengeful ghost. (The Witch of Nan Tucks Lane) *** Where in the bible do we see the story of fallen angels sleeping with women to produce a breed of giants? Most would point to the book of Genesis – but in the unincluded book of Enoch, it tells a more-detailed account, worthy of a horror movie. (The Story of Giants and Fallen Angels) *** Some people collect baseball cards, others coins, and others Pokemon. There's no telling what someone might find enough of an interest in to begin collecting. And collecting books is one of the most common – but when your collecting becomes a compulsion and you can't stop yourself, it can get out of hand. Just ask Thomas Phillipps… the man who was addicted to books… to an extreme level. (The Man Who Was Addicted To Books)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:03:02.691 = The Man Who Was Addicted To Books00:16:01.182 = The Cursed Remains of the SS Andrea Doria ***00:24:02.882 = The Disturbing Truth Behind Voodoo Zombies00:36:21.496 = Peripheral People ***00:38:29.738 = The Inventor of Weird Contraptions00:45:10.163 = The Story of Giants and Fallen Angels ***00:57:10.346 = The Witch of Nan Tucks Lane01:00:03.285 = 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 Story of Giants and Fallen Angels” from Anomalien: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/akvusfjf“The Man Who Was Addicted to Books” from Strange Company: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/uysau9d7“The Cursed Remains of the SS Andrea Doria” by Brent Swancer for Mysterious Universe:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/y67su94a“Peripheral People” by G. Michael Vasey: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/py9xu4n4 (RELATED VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxpTsDeH-p0)“The Disturbing Truth Behind Voodoo Zombies” by Christopher Myers for Graveyard Shift: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/u6vthjn6“The Inventor of Weird Contraptions” by Mike Reddy for The Conversation: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4uez883r“The Witch of Nan Tucks Lane” by Jocelyne LeBlanc: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/t28azc3k(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: March 18, 2019

Two American relic hunters ignore every warning and dig their way into a flooded Yucatán cavern the locals swear belongs to the dead — who, as it turns out, keep very careful inventory.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 Lost Tomorrows” (December 05, 1977) ***WD00:47:01.586 = Big Town, “Fatal Joke” (March 01, 1949) ***WD01:16:27.616 = Hall of Fantasy, “The Judge's House” (April 03, 1947) ***WD01:42:44.816 = Harry Lime, “Clay Pigeon” (August 17, 1951)02:09:25.917 = BBC Haunted Tales of the Supernatural, “The Liberated Tiger” (July 21, 1984)02:36:33.133 = The Haunting Hour, “If The Shoe Fits” (April 28, 1945) ***WD03:00:48.355 = The Hermit's Cave, “House of Purple Shadows” (November 10, 1940) ***WD03:25:16.362 = Mystery Is My Hobby, “Case of 65 Women” (1945-1950) ***WD03:49:48.832 = Sherlock Holmes, “Darlington Substitution Case” (January 04, 1947)04:19:03.800 = House of Mystery, “Haunters and Haunted” (June 13, 1945) ***WD04:33:24.744 = Incredible But True, “The Wanderer” (1950-1951)04:37:02.657 = Inner Sanctum, “Silent Hands” (May 13, 1944) ***WD05:01:38.945 = 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/WDRR0676

A friendship gift from across the Iron Curtain rode into orbit with five American astronauts, and the only thing that came back was the teddy bear.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, “Teddy Bear” (November 30, 1977)00:44:19.048 = The Eleventh Hour, “The Bitter End” (1963-1965)01:09:54.163 = Escape, “The Fourth Man” (July 07, 1949)01:38:40.425 = Everyman's Theater, “This Precious Freedom” (October 04, 1940) ***WD02:05:55.966 = Murder By Experts, “Two Coffins To Fill” (July 04, 1949)02:35:22.121 = Exploring Tomorrow, “Time Traveller, aka Meddler's Moon” (May 21, 1958)02:53:02.191 = Faces In The Window, “Black Cat” (November 22, 1952) ***WD03:16:42.212 = Dark Fantasy, “Edge of Shadow” (April 10, 1942) ***WD03:41:21.216 = BBC Fear on 4, “The Beast With Five Fingers” (January 31, 1988)04:10:16.659 = Future Tense, “The Parade” (May 27, 1974) ***WD (LQ)04:36:17.087 = BBC Ghosts From The Past, “Black Stockings / Broken Mirrors” (April 08, 1992)05:19:57.526 = 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/WDRR0675