Podcast appearances and mentions of darren marlar

Five Navy bombers vanished on a routine training flight in 1945, and so did a rescue plane sent out to find them; the Bermuda Triangle is one of 12 Vile Vortices Ivan Sanderson mapped around the globe, and the oceans have their own sea serpents and ghost ships too.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/VileVorticesREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/55c3tyxyFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: The Bermuda Triangle, also called the Devil's Triangle, is a famous part of the ocean where many ships and planes have mysteriously disappeared. Located between Bermuda, Puerto Rico, and the tip of Florida, this area has puzzled people for over 100 years. From the spooky disappearance of the USS Cyclops with 306 crew members in 1918 to the more recent sinking of the SS El Faro in 2015, the Bermuda Triangle becomes more mysterious year after year. Tonight we'll look at some of the strangest events in the Triangle, like Flight 19, which vanished during a routine training mission; and the Witchcraft, a boat that disappeared just minutes after calling for help. We'll look at other locations around the world similar to the Bermuda Triangle that don't get the same recognition – but are just as mysterious. And while we're in the water, we'll touch on a few ocean ghost stories, and reports of sea monsters. So before we get started, if you tend to get sea sick, you might want to grab your Dramamine.CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:01:21.662 = Show Open00:02:05.707 = Bermuda Triangle: A History of Mystery00:10:18.399 = Vile Vortices Around the World ***00:20:14.052 = Monsters Beneath The Waves ***00:38:09.122 = Ocean Ghost Stories00:47:18.818 = 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:Bermuda Triangle sources: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/6sw5aj4j, https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/3mf3vvw6Vile Vortices source: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8fhp3bOcean Ghost Stories source: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/rmhs277yMonsters Beneath The Waves source: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/596estzu(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: June 10, 2024LIKE WHAT YOU'RE HEARING? WEIRD DARKNESS posts episodes 7 DAYS A WEEK! Listen FREE wherever you get podcasts or visit https://weirddarkness.com/listen. • Paranormal • True Crime • Ghosts • UFOs • Cryptids • Unexplained • Want even more? Become an OFFICIAL WEIRDO for commercial-free episodes, bonus episodes, weeknight live chats, audiobooks & more at https://WeirdDarkness.com/OFFICIALWeird Darkness host Darren Marlar covers the ships and planes lost in the Bermuda Triangle, the 11 other Vile Vortices said to swallow travelers around the globe, centuries of sea serpent and mermaid sightings, and the ghost ships still said to sail the open ocean.It opens with the USS Cyclops, which vanished with all 306 people aboard in March 1918 on its way from Brazil to Baltimore, and with Flight 19, the five Navy Avenger torpedo bombers lost out of Fort Lauderdale on December 5th, 1945, along with the rescue plane sent after them. The cabin cruiser Witchcraft was gone by the time the Coast Guard arrived, about 20 minutes after Dan Burack radioed for a tow off Miami in December 1967, and the SS El Faro went down in Hurricane Joaquin on October 1st, 2015, and was later found sitting upright 15,000 feet below the surface.From there, it follows the map biologist Ivan T. Sanderson drew in the early 1970s of 12 Vile Vortices, among them Japan's Devil's Sea, where the research vessel Kaio Maru No. 5 disappeared with 31 aboard in 1952, and the Wharton Basin in the Indian Ocean, a possible resting place for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370.Next come the sea monsters, starting with the serpent hundreds of people reported off the Massachusetts coast in 1817 and again in 1819. Captain Peter M'Quhae of HMS Daedalus told the Royal Navy in 1848 that he and his officers had watched a 60-foot serpent for 20 minutes, and Christopher Columbus wrote in his journal on January 9th, 1493, that the three mermaids he'd seen were "not half as beautiful as they are said to be".The episode closes with ghost ships, from the SS Ourang Medan, whose crew was said to be found dead in the Strait of Malacca in the 1940s before the ship burst into flames, to the Mary Celeste, found drifting near Portugal in 1872 with its lifeboat and 10-person crew gone, and the SS Baychimo, an abandoned cargo ship spotted drifting in the Arctic until 1969.

People living and working in remote areas often encounter things far creepier than just silence. These are real-life stories of unsettling encounters, from faces at the window to gruesome discoveries deep in the woods.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/ForestHorrorREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8cuh5yFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: People who live and work in remote areas know that sometimes too much quiet can make your mind race. However, some experiences stick with people long after they occur because of the degree of creepiness. On Reddit, plenty of people who live in rural areas or make their livelihood there, share their scary stories for the rest of us to freak out over. We know that often strange people linger around woods, parks, and other desolate areas. And we have all heard plenty of the kind of creepy stories that backpackers experience. However, in this episode, the stories are more than a little unpleasant, because the people who suffered them weren't just out and about anywhere; they were at their homes, or doing their jobs. Imagine living in the woods, and looking up from your bathtub to see a face looking back at you. Or imagine you are working as a forest ranger and come across a thumb nailed to a tree. Tonight I will share some of the terrifying real-life stories, stories that are the stuff of nightmares.CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:01:39.734 = Show Open00:02:35.745 = Living In Remote Places00:21:34.077 = Park Ranger Scares ***00:40:20.539 = Backpacker Terrors ***01:00:46.336 = 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:“Terrors of People Living In Remote Areas” by Matthew Lavelle: http://bit.ly/2Y5j1r2“Park Ranger Scares” by Rosa Pasquarella: http://bit.ly/2xNbZZ6“Horrifying Backpacker Stories” by Jen Lennon: http://bit.ly/2LXcfNs(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: July, 2021LIKE WHAT YOU'RE HEARING? WEIRD DARKNESS posts episodes 7 DAYS A WEEK! Listen FREE wherever you get podcasts or visit https://weirddarkness.com/listen. • Paranormal • True Crime • Ghosts • UFOs • Cryptids • Unexplained • Want even more? Become an OFFICIAL WEIRDO for commercial-free episodes, bonus episodes, weeknight live chats, audiobooks & more at https://WeirdDarkness.com/OFFICIALWeird Darkness host Darren Marlar shares wilderness horror stories from Reddit, told by people who live out in the country, park rangers who work the backcountry, and backpackers from Alabama to the Adirondacks.It opens with a woman alone at night on a rural property who saw a man's face at her kitchen window, and the next day she and her husband found his makeshift cabin on their land, where he'd stashed canned goods from their kitchen and pinned up selfies taken in their bed. Others describe an intruder in rural Louisiana with a white sheet tied over his head and a peeper in the Australian desert who stacked wooden pallets under a bathroom window to see in.From there, the park rangers take over, starting with a trip leader on Mount Sterling in North Carolina who watched a man with no headlamp or gear sit under a tree and stare at a camp of middle schoolers until 3:30 in the morning. Rangers also came across a human thumb nailed to a tree, a child's stuffed animal hanging from a noose, and a cleanly severed deer head with no blood, lying on a trail in Yellowstone's Lamar Valley.The episode closes with backpackers, including a 12-year-old and his older brother who hid on an Alabama hilltop while hog hunters with dogs fired into the woods around their campsite, and two friends in the Adirondacks who watched a man with a shotgun search their tent. A solo hiker's Kodak disposable camera came back from Costco with ten pictures of the hiker asleep inside the tent, and another backpacker found a cell phone deep in the woods, still switched on, with 911 as the last number dialed.

Gwen Archer's new house has crooked shutters, cracked windows, and dozens of bent nails in her bedroom wall where the girl who lived there before hung her paintings and photos. That family packed up every bit of it when they moved out, everything except a doll named Darcy. A doll that lives in the attic.Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://pod.link/1655277373Find more family-friendly frights and creepy games to play on our website at http://MicroTerrors.com!Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/microterrorsOther stories, novels, and more from author Scott Donnelly: https://amzn.to/3LymHaUOther narrations, podcasts, and audiobooks from voice artist Darren Marlar: https://WeirdDarkness.com= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =Weird Darkness©, 2026Micro Terrors: Scary Stories for Kids™, 2026#MicroTerrors #WeirdDarkness

When the sun sets over the Navajo reservation, ancient legends come alive — and those who've seen the skinwalkers will never forget the eyes watching from the shadows.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/FaceToFaceWithFearREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p927m85FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Numerous Reddit users describe their own personal encounters with strange creatures that might be described as werewolves or wendigos… but even further skin deep. (Skinwalkers and Shapeshifters) *** In 1836, an unsuspecting passerby entered the Gardette-LePrete mansion and uncovered a scene of unimaginable horror. (Blood Soaked Gardette LePrete Mansion) *** Is it possible that some classic UFO events were actually hallucinations by people on drugs? (Psychedelic UFO Sightings) *** Ann Hodges, the only person struck by a meteorite who survived it, suffered a nervous breakdown after a media frenzy and a court battle for meteorite ownership. (Struck By a Meteor) *** A mysterious sighting in the night spawned the legend of one of West Virginia's creepiest cryptids. (The Legend of the Flatwoods Monster) *** A Weirdo family member tells the story of a ghost named Matilda. (Matilda)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:01:35.685 = Show Open00:03:27.394 = True Stories of Skinwalkers And Shapeshifters00:45:36.764 = Blood Soaked Gardette-LePrete Mansion ***00:50:42.066 = Psychedelic UFO Sightings01:00:00.794 = Struck By A Meteor ***01:07:47.832 = Legend Of The Flatwoods Monster01:16:07.232 = Matilda ***01:19:25.669 = 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:“Skinwalkers and Shapeshifters” by Nida Sea: http://bit.ly/2Xzkaml“Blood Soaked Gardette-LePrete Mansion” by Adam Karlin: http://bit.ly/2Lb3RKI“Psychedelic UFO Sightings” by Nick Redfern: http://bit.ly/2LSsETx“Struck By a Meteor” by Martin Chalakoski: http://bit.ly/2xBwmZ5“The Legend of the Flatwoods Monster” by Orin Grey: http://bit.ly/32jIImG“Matilda” submitted anonymously to WeirdDarkness.com(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: June 2022LIKE WHAT YOU'RE HEARING? WEIRD DARKNESS posts episodes 7 DAYS A WEEK! Listen FREE wherever you get podcasts or visit https://weirddarkness.com/listen. • Paranormal • True Crime • Ghosts • UFOs • Cryptids • Unexplained • Want even more? Become an OFFICIAL WEIRDO for commercial-free episodes, bonus episodes, weeknight live chats, audiobooks & more at https://WeirdDarkness.com/OFFICIALWeird Darkness host Darren Marlar covers firsthand skinwalker encounters, a massacre legend from a French Quarter mansion, UFO cases that may trace back to hallucinogens, an Alabama woman struck by a meteorite, West Virginia's Flatwoods Monster, and a ghost named Matilda.It opens with the skinwalker of Navajo tradition, a witch or medicine man said to take an animal's shape by wearing its skin, and with accounts of meeting one: a blood-matted creature with a half-bear, half-human face sitting in the road between Window Rock, Arizona, and Gallup, New Mexico, and a figure that paced a high school basketball bus at 85 miles an hour before dropping to all fours as a coyote. Other sightings range from Bandelier National Monument to the Australian bush, and a New Mexico highway patrol officer's two encounters come from George Knapp and Colm Kelleher's book Hunt for the Skinwalker.From there, it goes to the Gardette-LePrete mansion at 716 Dauphine Street in New Orleans, where legend says a passerby in 1836 followed a trickle of blood inside and found a courtyard strewn with hacked-apart bodies and a man who'd been buried alive, said to be the brother of an Ottoman sultan, though no historical record mentions the prince or the murders.Next, Rich Reynolds of the UFO Conjectures blog points to the CIA's MK-Ultra LSD experiments and suggests that some classic UFO encounters were drug-induced. The cases include contactee Orfeo Angelucci swallowing a pill in a Twentynine Palms, California, diner in December 1954, the 1957 abduction of Antonio Villas Boas in Brazil, and the 1973 Pascagoula, Mississippi, abduction of Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker near the World War II biological-warfare site on Horn Island, in an area where local tales tell of later experiments with the hallucinogen BZ.After that, on November 30th, 1954, a nine-pound meteorite crashed through the ceiling of a rented house in Oak Grove, near Sylacauga, Alabama, bounced off the radio, and struck Ann Hodges on the hip as she napped. A lawsuit from her landlady, Birdie Guy, was settled with the Hodges family paying $500 for the rock, which Ann later gave to the Alabama Museum of Natural History; she suffered a nervous breakdown, split from her husband in 1964, and died in a nursing home in 1972.Then comes West Virginia's Flatwoods Monster, the figure with a round red face, a dark green body, and a hood shaped like the ace of spades that Kathleen May and six children saw on a farm hillside in Flatwoods on September 12th, 1952, after three boys watched something streak across the sky. In 2000, Joe Nickell of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry traced it to a meteor, an aircraft beacon, and a barn owl, and Braxton County still celebrates the creature with a museum, monster-shaped chairs, and Flatwoods Days.The episode closes with an anonymous listener's story of Matilda, the ghost in a grandmother's big double house, where a door swung shut in a windowless room, a radio switched on in the night, and police kept answering calls nobody in the house had made. An obituary in an old newspaper in the attic named a woman called Matilda who had died there, and the activity stopped once the grandmother got a dog.

Gwen Archer's new house has crooked shutters, cracked windows, and dozens of bent nails in her bedroom wall where the girl who lived there before hung her paintings and photos. That family packed up every bit of it when they moved out, everything except a doll named Darcy. A doll that lives in the attic.Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://pod.link/1655277373Find more family-friendly frights and creepy games to play on our website at http://MicroTerrors.com!Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/microterrorsOther stories, novels, and more from author Scott Donnelly: https://amzn.to/3LymHaUOther narrations, podcasts, and audiobooks from voice artist Darren Marlar: https://WeirdDarkness.com= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =Weird Darkness©, 2026Micro Terrors: Scary Stories for Kids™, 2026#MicroTerrors #WeirdDarkness

A 1950s passenger plane vanishes without a trace – then lands 35 years later with 92 skeletons still buckled in their seats. What is the truth of the story?EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/Flight513READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2dvtrc9sFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Critics of the Santiago Flight 513 story insist it's nothing more than an urban myth or an attempt to sell newspapers. But is there evidence to contradict their conclusions? (The Time Warp of Santiago Flight 513) *** Help! Help! Oh, my God! Frank is murdering the whole family. Rouse the neighbors!” These cries from a terrified woman led to the story of several attempted murders – and a song that most have forgotten. (The 30th Street Murder) *** After a series of attacks on farm animals in Puerto Rico, numerous people reported sightings of the creature at fault. But the strange thing is that none of the reports seemed to match – as if each sighting was of a different unknown animal. (Chupacabra Shapeshifter) *** Behind his friendly demeanor lurked a deadly obsession with torture and murder. He soon earned the label, “The Butcher of Kansas City.” (Robert Berdella) *** Weirdo family member Chris Misulich tells the true story of him and his friends getting exactly what they asked for… and wishingthey hadn't. (Be Careful What You Wish For)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:00:55.109 = Show Open00:03:02.086 = The Time Warp of Santiago Flight 51300:09:04.058 = The 30th Street Murder00:17:00.393 = Chupacabra Shapeshifter ***00:22:50.557 = Robert Berdella, The Butcher of Kansas City00:28:17.405 = Be Careful What You Wish For00:33:38.779 = 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 Time Warp of Santiago Flight 513” by Lew Hewitt: http://bit.ly/2xDYI56“The 30th Street Murder” by Robert Wilhelm: http://bit.ly/2XwTlnz. “Chupacabra Shapeshifter” by Nick Redfern: http://bit.ly/2NIGfz5“Robert Berdella – Butcher of Kansas City” by Orrin Grey: http://bit.ly/30sRCwJ“Be Careful What You Wish For” by Weird family member Chris Misulich(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: June 2021LIKE WHAT YOU'RE HEARING? WEIRD DARKNESS posts episodes 7 DAYS A WEEK! Listen FREE wherever you get podcasts or visit https://weirddarkness.com/listen. • Paranormal • True Crime • Ghosts • UFOs • Cryptids • Unexplained • Want even more? Become an OFFICIAL WEIRDO for commercial-free episodes, bonus episodes, weeknight live chats, audiobooks & more at https://WeirdDarkness.com/OFFICIALWeird Darkness host Darren Marlar spends this episode on an airliner said to have landed in Brazil 35 years after it took off, a hatchet attack on a New York family in 1858, the shape-shifting chupacabra of Puerto Rico, Kansas City serial killer Robert Berdella, and a campfire wish in Pennsylvania's Allegheny National Forest.It opens with Santiago Flight 513, a Lockheed Super Constellation that a 1989 Weekly World News story claimed left Aachen, West Germany, on September 4th, 1954, vanished over the Atlantic, and landed at Porto Alegre, Brazil, on October 12th, 1989, with 92 skeletons in their seats and the captain's skeleton still holding the controls. Critics dismiss it as an urban myth written to sell newspapers, and the segment sets it beside Einstein's relativity and the atomic clocks that run faster at altitude and slower at high speed.From there, it goes back to October 26th, 1858, when servant Elizabeth Carr ran from 217 West 30th Street in New York City in her nightclothes, screaming, "Frank is murdering the whole family!" Frank Gouldy, confronted by his father over $10 taken from a bank account meant to start him in business, had gone through the house with a dull hatchet, striking his father, his pregnant stepmother, his two young brothers, and both servants before shooting himself; Elizabeth, who had wrestled the hatchet away from him, was the only victim to die, and the Saugerties Bard, Henry S. Backus, turned the attack into the ballad "The Thirtieth Street Murder".Next comes the chupacabra of Canóvanas, Puerto Rico, blamed for the goats, chickens, and pigs found dead there in August 1995 with deep puncture wounds in their necks. Madelyne Tolentino described a creature that hopped along on two legs with a row of feathers down its head and spine, but later witnesses reported spikes, four legs and the stalk of a big cat, blue eyes or glowing red ones, bat wings, bird wings, or none at all, and eleven reports have it changing into a hairy, Bigfoot-like beast inside a blinding white light.After that comes April 2nd, 1988, when a naked man in a dog collar leapt from a second-story window on Charlotte Street in Kansas City's Hyde Park neighborhood, and police broke into the house to find more than 200 Polaroids and detailed logs of how Robert Berdella tortured and killed at least six young men between 1984 and 1987. Berdella, soon known as the Butcher of Kansas City, also ran Bob's Bazaar Bizarre, a Westport Flea Market booth selling skulls, shrunken heads, and occult books, and he died of a heart attack in prison in 1992.The episode closes with Weird Darkness listener Chris Misulich's account of a camping trip in the Allegheny National Forest, where he said aloud around the fire, "I wish we could see something we couldn't explain". That night the tents were soaked through, a figure sat gripping the steering wheel of a friend's car, and Chris's moonlit shadow, the only one in the group, whipped away into the woods; a shrine-like table in a clearing vanished as he got within five feet of it, and back at camp someone stoked the fire and strummed his guitar outside a friend's tent.

What really happened inside the Borden house that bloody summer morning — and could Lizzie's silence have been hiding more than just guilt?EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/LizzieBordenFinalTestimonyREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/mb5xas3dFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: She looms large in the annals of American crime lore. A romantic relationship gone awry and troubles at home could explain why many still believe Lizzie Borden killed her parents. (Spending The Night With Lizzie Borden) *** Many years before Adolph Hitler and Germany's Nazis created Auschwitz, there was another concentration camp that experienced deaths in tens of thousands. But this encampment of turpitude wasn't located in Germany – or anywhere near Europe. It was located in the land of the free… the home of the brave. The USA. (The Devil's Punchbowl) *** Several people have returned from their near-death experiences reporting they were briefly in the fiery pits of hell. Is there any truth to their claims? (They Escaped Hell's Clutches) *** Have you ever seen what appears to be a shadow person or dark figure (stationary or moving) with your own eyes, close up or far away, ​maybe even in your peripheral vision or dream state? Perhaps you have felt the sensation of someone  standing behind you and then you turn around but no one was there? What is it that you are seeing when this happens? (Who Are The Shadow People?)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:00:50.704 = Show Open00:02:54.240 = Spending The Night With Lizzie Borden00:20:37.798 = They Escaped Hell's Clutches ***00:27:49.967 = The Devil's Punchbowl: America's Concentration Camp00:35:51.569 = Who Are The Shadow People? ***01:03:24.576 = 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:“Spending The Night With Lizzie Borden” written by Darren Marlar ***Sources include Aliza Polkes:http://bit.ly/2X60g70, Zillow: http://bit.ly/2X6TmOM, Kelly McClure: http://bit.ly/2KDy3hj, Catherine Phelan: http://bit.ly/2xkNsdv, Sarah Mangiola: http://bit.ly/2xdVd55. Lizzie Borden monologue written by Brandy Purdy:https://amzn.to/2IRCCTb, female narration by voice actor Katrina Carpenter: http://bit.ly/2Jdd8hZ“The Devil's Punchbowl: America's Concentration Camp” by Claire Bernish: http://bit.ly/2YeAlqd“They Escaped Hell's Clutches” posted at Earth Chronicles: http://bit.ly/2xoGl49“Who Are The Shadow People?” by Natalia Kuna: http://bit.ly/2X10esl(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: June 05, 2022LIKE WHAT YOU'RE HEARING? WEIRD DARKNESS posts episodes 7 DAYS A WEEK! Listen FREE wherever you get podcasts or visit https://weirddarkness.com/listen. • Paranormal • True Crime • Ghosts • UFOs • Cryptids • Unexplained • Want even more? Become an OFFICIAL WEIRDO for commercial-free episodes, bonus episodes, weeknight live chats, audiobooks & more at https://WeirdDarkness.com/OFFICIALWeird Darkness host Darren Marlar spends this episode on the 1892 Borden murders in Fall River, Massachusetts, visions of hell brought back from near-death experiences, a disputed Union Army camp for freed slaves in Natchez, Mississippi, and the dark figures known as shadow people.It opens in Fall River, where the Second Street house in which Andrew and Abby Borden were killed on August 4th, 1892, now takes overnight guests as the Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast. Andrew's daughter, Lizzie Borden, was tried and acquitted in June 1893, and the episode covers the dress she burned days after the murders, the real count of 18 or 19 blows for Abby and 10 or 11 for Andrew against the rhyme's 40 and 41, and author Brandy Purdy's novel The Secrets of Lizzie Borden, which builds a motive around a suitor named David Anthony. Columnist Kelly McClure booked a night in the John V. Morse room, where Abby was killed, and fled to a friend's house in the middle of the night, coming back only for the complimentary breakfast.From there, it turns to people who say their near-death experiences took them to hell. Matthew Botsford, shot in the head outside an Atlanta restaurant in 1992, says that during a 27-day coma he hung bound hand and foot over a pit of something like magma; Howard Storm, an atheist art professor who later became a pastor, describes being led into a fog by figures that turned on him and bit him until he started shouting a prayer; and in his 1978 book Return from Tomorrow, George Ritchie, a young Army private declared dead during World War II, wrote about the tormented souls he saw.Next comes the Devil's Punchbowl, a bowl-shaped gulch in the bluffs above the Mississippi River at Natchez, where Paula Westbrook and former Natchez City Cemetery director Don Estes say the Union Army confined freed slaves in a camp and as many as 20,000 died of smallpox and starvation. History professor Jim Wiggins calls that figure inflated tenfold, and local stories, none of them verified, tell of human bones washing out of the ravine after heavy rains.The episode closes with shadow people, the dark human outlines reported in bedrooms at night and at the edge of sight, including the Hat Man in his hat and long coat or cape. Psychic Natalia Kuna shares her own encounters and runs through the theories, from demons and jinn to astral travelers, time travelers, and entities drawn to electromagnetic energy, along with Cherokee elder Thunder Strike's belief that people see them through a "dream eye", and the protection she recommends, starting with the name of Jesus.

Livia is the three-time champion of her school's scary story contest, and then a new boy shows up in fourth grade with a book he's already published and a red notebook he never opens where anyone can see.“Write Or Very Wrong” by Evan BaughfmanLook for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://pod.link/1655277373Find more family-friendly frights and creepy games to play on our website at http://MicroTerrors.com!Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/microterrorsOther stories, novels, and more from author Scott Donnelly: https://amzn.to/3LymHaUOther narrations, podcasts, and audiobooks from voice artist Darren Marlar: https://WeirdDarkness.com= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =Weird Darkness©, 2026Micro Terrors: Scary Stories for Kids™, 2026#MicroTerrors #WeirdDarkness

Livia is the three-time champion of her school's scary story contest, and then a new boy shows up in fourth grade with a book he's already published and a red notebook he never opens where anyone can see.“Write Or Very Wrong” by Evan BaughfmanLook for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://pod.link/1655277373Find more family-friendly frights and creepy games to play on our website at http://MicroTerrors.com!Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/microterrorsOther stories, novels, and more from author Scott Donnelly: https://amzn.to/3LymHaUOther narrations, podcasts, and audiobooks from voice artist Darren Marlar: https://WeirdDarkness.com= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =Weird Darkness©, 2026Micro Terrors: Scary Stories for Kids™, 2026#MicroTerrors #WeirdDarkness

Three MicroTerrors listeners wrote in with their own scary stories: a girl who sneaks out at night to see the T-Rex every parent in town warns about, a free doll on the sidewalk that introduces itself as Mr. Stevenson, and a family cruise with nothing but one-star reviews and something big moving under the boat.Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://pod.link/1655277373Find more family-friendly frights and creepy games to play on our website at http://MicroTerrors.com!Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/microterrorsOther stories, novels, and more from author Scott Donnelly: https://amzn.to/3LymHaUOther narrations, podcasts, and audiobooks from voice artist Darren Marlar: https://WeirdDarkness.com= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =Weird Darkness©, 2026Micro Terrors: Scary Stories for Kids™, 2026#MicroTerrors #WeirdDarkness

Three MicroTerrors listeners wrote in with their own scary stories: a girl who sneaks out at night to see the T-Rex every parent in town warns about, a free doll on the sidewalk that introduces itself as Mr. Stevenson, and a family cruise with nothing but one-star reviews and something big moving under the boat.Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://pod.link/1655277373Find more family-friendly frights and creepy games to play on our website at http://MicroTerrors.com!Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/microterrorsOther stories, novels, and more from author Scott Donnelly: https://amzn.to/3LymHaUOther narrations, podcasts, and audiobooks from voice artist Darren Marlar: https://WeirdDarkness.com= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =Weird Darkness©, 2026Micro Terrors: Scary Stories for Kids™, 2026#MicroTerrors #WeirdDarkness

Three Micro Terrors listeners, ages seven to twelve, wrote this week's stories: a boy wakes up on the first morning of spring break to a kitchen that's a little too tidy and birds that chirp right on cue; a puddle of red slime shows up beside a dinner chair just before bedtime; and two brothers spot a strange light on long pole legs on the walk home from school… and then it starts moving.Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://pod.link/1655277373Find more family-friendly frights and creepy games to play on our website at http://MicroTerrors.com!Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/microterrorsOther stories, novels, and more from author Scott Donnelly: https://amzn.to/3LymHaUOther narrations, podcasts, and audiobooks from voice artist Darren Marlar: https://WeirdDarkness.com= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =Weird Darkness©, 2026Micro Terrors: Scary Stories for Kids™, 2026#MicroTerrors #WeirdDarkness

Three Micro Terrors listeners, ages seven to twelve, wrote this week's stories: a boy wakes up on the first morning of spring break to a kitchen that's a little too tidy and birds that chirp right on cue; a puddle of red slime shows up beside a dinner chair just before bedtime; and two brothers spot a strange light on long pole legs on the walk home from school… and then it starts moving.Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://pod.link/1655277373Find more family-friendly frights and creepy games to play on our website at http://MicroTerrors.com!Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/microterrorsOther stories, novels, and more from author Scott Donnelly: https://amzn.to/3LymHaUOther narrations, podcasts, and audiobooks from voice artist Darren Marlar: https://WeirdDarkness.com= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =Weird Darkness©, 2026Micro Terrors: Scary Stories for Kids™, 2026#MicroTerrors #WeirdDarkness

The thrilling conclusion! Scout Brooks and Mandy Lee have fought their way across the alien world of Thryos, battling monstrous Throats in a desperate search for Professor Nog's captured friend, Farrow. But with danger closing in from every direction — and Scout's own friend Chuck now caught snooping around Fort Nogs back home — nothing about this mission has gone according to plan.Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://pod.link/1655277373Find more family-friendly frights and creepy games to play on our website at http://MicroTerrors.com!Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/microterrorsOther stories, novels, and more from author Scott Donnelly: https://amzn.to/3LymHaUOther narrations, podcasts, and audiobooks from voice artist Darren Marlar: https://WeirdDarkness.com= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =Weird Darkness©, 2026Micro Terrors: Scary Stories for Kids™, 2026#MicroTerrors #WeirdDarkness

The thrilling conclusion! Scout Brooks and Mandy Lee have fought their way across the alien world of Thryos, battling monstrous Throats in a desperate search for Professor Nog's captured friend, Farrow. But with danger closing in from every direction — and Scout's own friend Chuck now caught snooping around Fort Nogs back home — nothing about this mission has gone according to plan.Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://pod.link/1655277373Find more family-friendly frights and creepy games to play on our website at http://MicroTerrors.com!Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/microterrorsOther stories, novels, and more from author Scott Donnelly: https://amzn.to/3LymHaUOther narrations, podcasts, and audiobooks from voice artist Darren Marlar: https://WeirdDarkness.com= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =Weird Darkness©, 2026Micro Terrors: Scary Stories for Kids™, 2026#MicroTerrors #WeirdDarkness

Nobody in the Victorian era who claimed to see a ghost described lace and corsets – that look came from the magazine trade that discovered ghost stories were cheap to print and easy to cut to length.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/VictorianGhostsREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4p69wekwFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Victorian-era ghosts… they seem to haunt not only our imaginations, but also our Halloween wardrobes. Why were people in the mid-to-late 1800s so obsessed with the supernatural? And why are we so fascinated by Victorian ghost stories still today? (What's The Deal With Victorian Ghosts?) *** The story of Queen Esther is chilling – full of an Iroquois warrior woman's quest for vengeance, brutal warfare, haunting legends, ghostly wails, and a curse that many believe still has power even today. (The Curse of Queen Esther) *** No one can remember exactly when the ghost story began, but records show it dates back to at least 1926. The tale centers around the Administration Offices of Rockford School District 205 on South Madison Street, formerly Rockford High School. Built in 1885, the school gained a spooky reputation due to eerie events reported in its underground tunnels. After a tragic accident in the school's swimming pool claimed the life of a student named Gosta Anderson, strange sightings and sounds fueled the legend of his restless spirit, haunting the very site where he died. (Gosta's Ghost) *** Plumas County, California, holds a chilling mystery that dates back to 1978. On a winter night with a half-moon, five friends left a basketball game at California State University, Chico, and drove away, never to be seen again. Their car was found abandoned on a remote mountain road, leading to a series of eerie discoveries, unanswered questions, and clues that still baffle investigators today. (The 5 Boys Who Never Came Back)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00.00.000 = Short fiction story “Lost Hearts” by M.R. James00:24:29.734 = Show Open00:27:12.649 = What's The Deal With Victorian Ghosts?00:36:13.257 = The Curse of Queen Esther ***00:46:07.677 = The Five Boys Who Never Came Back01:06:21.586 = Gosta's Ghost01:12:56.658 = 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:Free Audiobook: “A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens, narrated by Darren Marlar:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/AChristmasCarolNarration: “The Signalman” by Charles Dickens, narrated by Darren Marlar: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/TheSignalman“What's The Deal With Victorian Ghosts?” source = Dan Nosowitz at Atlas Obscura: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p94894t“Lost Hearts” by M.R. James (public domain)“The Curse of Queen Esther” source = Creative History Stories: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/3bn9kwe8“Gosta's Ghost” written by Kathi Kresol for Haunted Rockford: https://www.hauntedrockford.com/gostas-ghost/“The 5 Boys Who Never Came Back” written by Cynthia Gorney in 1978 for the Washington Post:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8hkyef(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 17, 2024LIKE WHAT YOU'RE HEARING? WEIRD DARKNESS posts episodes 7 DAYS A WEEK! Listen FREE wherever you get podcasts or visit https://weirddarkness.com/listen. • Paranormal • True Crime • Ghosts • UFOs • Cryptids • Unexplained • Want even more? Become an OFFICIAL WEIRDO for commercial-free episodes, bonus episodes, weeknight live chats, audiobooks & more at https://WeirdDarkness.com/OFFICIAL

Scout Brooks has spent one day training to become an intergalactic hero, preparing to rescue Professor Nog's old friend Farrow from a hostile alien race holding him captive somewhere among the stars. But as the mission prepares to launch, someone has been secretly watching Fort Nogs from the shadows outside — and their intentions remain a mystery.Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://pod.link/1655277373Find more family-friendly frights and creepy games to play on our website at http://MicroTerrors.com!Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/microterrorsOther stories, novels, and more from author Scott Donnelly: https://amzn.to/3LymHaUOther narrations, podcasts, and audiobooks from voice artist Darren Marlar: https://WeirdDarkness.com= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =Weird Darkness©, 2026Micro Terrors: Scary Stories for Kids™, 2026#MicroTerrors #WeirdDarkness

Scout Brooks has spent one day training to become an intergalactic hero, preparing to rescue Professor Nog's old friend Farrow from a hostile alien race holding him captive somewhere among the stars. But as the mission prepares to launch, someone has been secretly watching Fort Nogs from the shadows outside — and their intentions remain a mystery.https://weirddarkness.com/scoutbrooks004Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://pod.link/1655277373Find more family-friendly frights and creepy games to play on our website at http://MicroTerrors.com!Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/microterrorsOther stories, novels, and more from author Scott Donnelly: https://amzn.to/3LymHaUOther narrations, podcasts, and audiobooks from voice artist Darren Marlar: https://WeirdDarkness.com= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =Weird Darkness©, 2026Micro Terrors: Scary Stories for Kids™, 2026#MicroTerrors #WeirdDarkness

A woman from Cleveland moved to Wisconsin, took the surname of Watts – a man serving five life sentences for killing his entire family – and filed to marry him. Women have been doing this for well over a century, and the ones who later walked away have almost never been asked why.BOOK: “They Told Me My Newborn Died – They Lied” by Darren Marlar: https://amzn.to/4ihvu3kEPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/wattsandlizzieREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yzmw3jdnThis episode includes references to suicide and to the deaths of children. If you are struggling, you are not alone, and help is available. https://WeirdDarkness.com/HOPE is a free directory of mental health resources, organized by country, for anyone anywhere in the world who needs somebody to talk to. And if you're in the United States or Canada, you can get immediate help over the phone by dialing 988.FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Eight years after Chris Watts strangled his pregnant wife and smothered their two daughters, a woman from Cleveland has moved to Wisconsin, started signing his surname, and filed paperwork that now sits on a prison warden's desk. And Chris Watts is not the only man in permanent lockup who is seeking matrimony. Later, we'll look at the women who build relationships with men who will die behind bars, and what draws them in.CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:01:51.635 = Show Open00:03:19.353 = Ten Seconds At Dodge Correctional00:20:26.768 = Shannan, Bella, Celeste and Nico ***00:48:21.294 = He Will Write Back ***01:04:25.333 = Dead In All Respects ***01:24:35.204 = Nobody Counts Any Of This ***01:29:55.177 = 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*WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: August 19, 2026This episode of Weird Darkness covers the marriage application Chris Watts filed from a Wisconsin prison eight years after murdering his pregnant wife and their two young daughters, and the long record of women who write to, visit and marry men who will never get out.It opens at Dodge Correctional Institution in Waupun, Wisconsin, where an inmate may touch a visitor twice, once at the start of a visit and once at the end, an embrace reporting puts at roughly ten seconds. On August 12th, 2026 the Daily Mail reported that Chris Watts, 41, and a 39-year-old Cleveland realtor named Lizzie Henderson had applied to marry inside the Wisconsin prison system. Lizzie had moved from Ohio to Wisconsin with her mother, filed a sealed petition for a confidential name change on September 12th, 2025, and appeared in prison visitor logs roughly twenty times during 2025, plus a visit on Christmas Day of 2024. Wisconsin handles these requests under policy 309.00.06, PIOC Marriages, which routes the application through a marriage coordinator and leaves the decision with the warden. No ceremony or license has been documented, and Watts has no projected release date.From there the episode goes back to the family. The Watts family doorbell camera recorded Shanann Watts arriving home at 1:48 in the morning on August 13th, 2018 at 2825 Saratoga Trail in Frederick, Colorado. She was 34 and fifteen weeks pregnant with a son the couple had named Nico, raising daughters Bella, four, and Celeste, three, and selling Thrive for Le-Vel while her husband worked for Anadarko Petroleum and carried on an affair with co-worker Nichol Kessinger. Watts failed a polygraph administered by Colorado Bureau of Investigation agent Tammy Lee, blamed Shanann for the girls' deaths, then retracted it. A drone over an Anadarko site called CERVI 319 found Shanann in a shallow grave and both girls submerged in crude oil inside storage tanks with eight-inch hatches. Judge Marcelo Kopcow sentenced him on November 19th, 2018 to five life sentences plus 84 years. In a February 2019 interview at Waupun, Watts described smothering Celeste in his truck while Bella sat beside her, and hearing Bella's last two words, "Daddy, no!", every time he closes his eyes.The second half opens in the autumn of 1921, when French railways ran extra trains to Versailles for the trial of Henri Désiré Landru, a furniture dealer who placed lonely-hearts advertisements in Paris newspapers and murdered eleven people. Women mailed him proposals of marriage while he awaited the guillotine. The modern version runs through Meet-An-Inmate, launched in 1998, and WriteAPrisoner, founded by Adam Lovell in 2000, which post profiles written on paper because American prisons allow no internet access; Susan Smith drew more than six thousand letters before pulling her listing in 2003. Hybristophilia, the term journalists reach for, was coined by sexologist John Money in 1986 and has never appeared in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Sheila Isenberg's Women Who Love Men Who Kill, forensic psychologist Katherine Ramsland's "perfect boyfriend" model, and sociologist Megan Comfort's San Quentin fieldwork in Doing Time Together supply what the women themselves say they are getting.Two 2025 studies found that actively seeking out romanticizing TikTok content correlated with attraction while passive exposure predicted nothing. The risk is documented in the killings of Regina Capobianco and John Mann by her pen pal Thomas Knuff in Parma Heights, Ohio, and in the strangling deaths of Stephanie Dowells and Tania Thomas during family visits at Mule Creek State Prison. The marriages run from Nina Van Zandt, who married Haymarket defendant August Spies by proxy in 1887 and may have married an innocent man, through Ted Bundy and Carole Ann Boone, Doreen Lioy and Richard Ramirez at San Quentin, the Twinkie that served as Erik Menendez and Tammi Saccoman's wedding cake, and James Whitehouse, who wrote to Susan Atkins in 1985 and went on to Harvard Law School to serve as her attorney. All of it rests on Turner v. Safley, the 1987 Supreme Court decision in which Justice Sandra Day O'Connor noted that most inmates are eventually released, leaving the man who never will be an untested case. Rhode Island's 1909 civil death statute declared lifers "dead in all respects", and Britain barred whole-life prisoners from marrying in 2024 after Milly Dowler's murderer Levi Bellfield was granted permission.The episode closes on the women who leave, absent from every study in the field. Lynn Hartman ended her engagement to Steven Avery in October of 2016 and wrote that she had been fooled by the Netflix documentary. Paula Williamson married Charles Bronson at HMP Wakefield in November of 2017, had it annulled in 2019, and died that July at thirty-eight. Anna Eriksson divorced Lyle Menendez in 2001 and still argues for his release. No agency counts prison marriages, and every figure circulating online is unsourced. Chris Watts belongs to a long file rather than a new one, having received his first letters from strangers within weeks of his December 2018 sentencing, before he had written a word to any of them.LIKE WHAT YOU'RE HEARING? WEIRD DARKNESS has new episodes 7 DAYS A WEEK! Listen FREE wherever you get podcasts or visit WeirdDarkness.com/Listen • Paranormal • True Crime • Ghosts • UFOs • Cryptids • Unexplained • Want even more? Become an OFFICIAL WEIRDO for commercial-free episodes, bonus episodes, weeknight live chats, audiobooks & more at WeirdDarkness.com/OFFICIAL

They wore caps and gowns to celebrate the future — but before the night was over, some would lie dead in pools of blood, their dreams buried with them.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/capsgownscasketsREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4d8r6tb9FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Graduation is a special time in just about everyone's life when they make their way from childhood, to adulthood. And while that step might be a bit scary for some, we all get past it – we have to. But what if there is something truly to be afraid of at your graduation? Like the possibility of being murdered? (Murdered During Graduation) *** Joseph McKinnon strangled his girlfriend Patricia Dent, then died while trying to bury her body in their garden. (Killed By Karma) *** When you die, do you know that you are dead? A new study says that maybe… yes. You might still be conscious enough to know you are dead even after your body ceases to live. But for how long? (When You Die, You Are Conscious Long Enough To Know It) *** The term Zodiac in true crime circles invokes images of serial murder, cryptograms and bragging letters in and around San Francisco. But the California Zodiac is not the only Zodiac out there. (A Tale of Two Zodiacs)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00.00.000 = Show Open00:01:54.162 = Murdered During Graduation00:13:33.644 = A Tale Of Two Zodiacs ***00:35:21.731 = When You Die You Are Conscious Long Enough To Know It ***00:44:27.121 = Killed By Karma00:48:08.338 = 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:“A Tale of Two Zodiacs” by Paul Drexler for Crime Traveller: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/ycknuxfd“Killed By Karma” by Kaleena Fraga for All That's Interesting: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/pzrdsmsy“When You Die, You Are Conscious Long Enough To Know It” by Matthew Lavelle for Ranker's Graveyard Shift:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4kkcc9m7“Murdered During Graduation” by Mary Fetzer for ListVerse: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p92rn29(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, 2022This episode of Weird Darkness, hosted by Darren Marlar, moves from a string of graduation celebrations that ended in murder to a comparison of the Korean and California Zodiac killers, a scientific claim that human consciousness lingers briefly after death, and the case of a South Carolina man who died burying the girlfriend he had just strangled.It opens with a survey of graduation celebrations turned deadly, beginning with the May 2020 party in southwest Indiana where 47-year-old William Baker carried a .30-06 rifle into a shed and shot 18-year-old South Dearborn High School graduate Paycin Kritlow in the back, claiming his daughter had been raped even though she and her friends denied any assault occurred, a killing that earned Baker a 55-year sentence in November 2021. The segment moves through Menhaz Zaman, a 24-year-old outside Toronto who murdered his father, mother, sister, and grandmother with a crowbar-like weapon and a knife the day before a York University graduation he had faked after failing out of Seneca College; the June 2020 shooting of 19-year-old Tyana Johnson in a Bronx park while her friend Ahamad Branch worked as the DJ; and the June 2017 ambush of Maryland teenagers Shadi Adi Najjar and Artem Ziberov, shot thirty times between them by a group who had searched online for a song called "I Kill for My Family" and killed over a stolen handful of marijuana. Other cases stretch across Pennsylvania, Mississippi, Ohio, South Carolina, and Louisiana, including 18-year-old Hailey Deickman, who died days before her high school graduation after Franklin Senfles sold her fentanyl she believed was oxycodone.From there, the show sets two very different Zodiac cases side by side. The first is the Korean "Zodiac Killer," the Hwaseong murders that began on September 15th, 1986 with the rape and strangling of 71-year-old Lee Wan-im and continued as women were strangled with their own clothing on dark rural roads, a case that drew a manhunt of more than 21,000 suspects and sent a disabled man named Yoon Sung-yeo to prison on a coerced confession, until DNA identified Lee Choon-jae in 2019, a man already jailed since 1995 who confessed to 14 murders and 30 rapes and had escaped suspicion because police wrongly believed the killer's blood was type B rather than his actual type O. Darren places that against the California Zodiac, who killed at least five people around San Francisco between 1968 and 1971, taunted newspapers with cryptograms and threats against schoolchildren, and drew suspicion onto former schoolteacher Arthur Leigh Allen without ever being caught. The segment weighs how each case reached the screen, contrasting Bong Joon-ho's 2003 film Memories of Murder, made while the Korean killer was still unknown, with David Fincher's 2007 Zodiac, built on Robert Graysmith's books, and argues that a competent investigation on either continent might have swapped the outcomes.Next, the episode turns to research suggesting that human consciousness may briefly outlast the body. Dr. Sam Parnia, director of critical care and resuscitation research at NYU Langone in New York City, describes cardiac-arrest patients who were revived and could recall specific conversations and the actions of the doctors and nurses working to save them, and his work points to conscious awareness continuing for as long as three minutes after the heart stops even though the brain's electrical activity typically flatlines within twenty to thirty seconds. The segment adds microbiologist Peter Noble of the University of Washington, whose studies on mice and zebrafish found certain genes increasing in activity in the hours after death, and it frames both findings as evidence that cells shut down gradually rather than switching instantly from living to dead.The episode closes with the death of Joseph McKinnon in Trenton, South Carolina, whom deputies first found lying unresponsive in his yard, dead of a heart attack he suffered while filling in a pit a neighbor believed was meant for a new water feature. When investigators could not locate McKinnon's girlfriend, 65-year-old Patricia Dent, and learned she had missed her shift at the Mount Vintage Golf Club, they dug into the pit and uncovered black garbage bags holding her bound, bruised, and strangled body. Edgefield County Sheriff Jody Rowland and Coroner David Burnett concluded that McKinnon had attacked and choked Dent inside their home, wrapped her, and collapsed from cardiac arrest as he covered her over, and her twin sister Pamela Briggs spoke of her grief while police noted the couple had no known history of domestic violence, meaning that had McKinnon lived, Dent might simply have vanished.

Scout Brooks just wanted to survive his first day of seventh grade. Instead, he found himself recruited into a mysterious after-school club, named 'The Chosen One' by the strange Professor Nog, and handed a box of secrets he's not allowed to talk about. Meanwhile, somewhere far beyond the stars, a man named Farrow remains a prisoner of creatures no one back on Earth even knows exist.https://weirddarkness.com/scoutbrooks003Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://pod.link/1655277373Find more family-friendly frights and creepy games to play on our website at http://MicroTerrors.com!Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/microterrorsOther stories, novels, and more from author Scott Donnelly: https://amzn.to/3LymHaUOther narrations, podcasts, and audiobooks from voice artist Darren Marlar: https://WeirdDarkness.com= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =Weird Darkness©, 2026Micro Terrors: Scary Stories for Kids™, 2026#MicroTerrors #WeirdDarkness

Scout Brooks just wanted to survive his first day of seventh grade. Instead, he found himself recruited into a mysterious after-school club, named 'The Chosen One' by the strange Professor Nog, and handed a box of secrets he's not allowed to talk about. Meanwhile, somewhere far beyond the stars, a man named Farrow remains a prisoner of creatures no one back on Earth even knows exist.https://weirddarkness.com/scoutbrooks003Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://pod.link/1655277373Find more family-friendly frights and creepy games to play on our website at http://MicroTerrors.com!Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/microterrorsOther stories, novels, and more from author Scott Donnelly: https://amzn.to/3LymHaUOther narrations, podcasts, and audiobooks from voice artist Darren Marlar: https://WeirdDarkness.com= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =Weird Darkness©, 2026Micro Terrors: Scary Stories for Kids™, 2026#MicroTerrors #WeirdDarkness

A three-year-old girl's imaginary friend turned out to be a real man – one who had been dead for fifteen years before she was born.BOOK: “They Told Me My Newborn Died – They Lied: A Global History of Stolen Babies” by Darren Marlar: https://amzn.to/45fNXptEPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/heidiwyrickREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/5a4fwj7tFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Deep in the Balsam Mountains of North Carolina, a shaggy eight-foot creature has been stealing gems and watching women bathe since the early 1900s — and the word used to name him came from a Lewis Carroll poem written the moment after a sleepless night at a dying man's bedside. (The Boojum) *** In 1980, a group of artists in Baltimore took out an ad in a major international magazine — not to sell anything, and not to promote a show. They were sending an invitation. The guests they were hoping to attract just hadn't been born yet. (Krononauts Party) *** A three-year-old girl in rural Georgia started playing with an imaginary friend — and then her family found out he was real, and had been dead for fifteen years. The question that nobody has been able to answer isn't whether she knew him. It's how. (The Heidi Wyrick Haunting)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:01:23.333 = Show Open00:03:14.569 = The Heidi Wyrick Haunting, Part 100:13:30.069 = The Heidi Wyrick Haunting, Part 2 ***00:32:01.091 = The Boojum ***00:53:27.330 = Krononauts Party ***01:01:57.222 = SONG: “Krononauts Party” by Dark Weirdness (https://weirddarkness.com/music)01:06:24.212 = 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 Heidi Wyrick Haunting: https://weirddarkness.com/heidi-wyrick/The Boojum: https://weirddarkness.com/boojum/Krononauts Party: https://weirddarkness.com/krononauts-party/(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: August 11, 2026Weird Darkness moves through three cases this episode: a decade-long haunting in rural Georgia that a university parapsychologist wired with scientific instruments, an eight-foot gem-hoarding creature that Appalachian locals have hunted for over a century, and a 1980 Baltimore art stunt that advertised a party for time travelers.It opens with the Wyrick haunting, which began in March of 1989 when three-year-old Heidi Wyrick walked in from the backyard of her family's new home on Swint Loop in Ellerslie, Georgia, and asked to keep swinging with an old man her mother couldn't see. The friend Heidi called Mr. Gordy matched James Gordy, a former caretaker of the property who had died in 1974, down to his silver hair, dark suit, and top hat; a second, wounded visitor she named Con matched Lon Batchelor, a man who lost his hand in a cotton gin accident and died in 1957. Before she could read, Heidi ran straight to Gordy's headstone in a cemetery of hundreds and later picked his face from a blind photo lineup. By 1993 the activity had turned violent, with a faceless dark figure, claw marks appearing on Heidi and her father Andy across consecutive nights, and a ribbon found wound around the throat of infant daughter Jordan, and the family brought in Dr. William Roll, a parapsychologist known from Unsolved Mysteries, who recorded an electromagnetic spike past 40 milligauss, elevated positive ions, and nearby seismic activity, then admitted he could not explain the scratches. Medium Amy Allan, later of The Dead Files, and a second psychic working separately placed the same entities in the same rooms, and the Wyricks finally left the house after Andy and Lisa found Heidi suspended upside down above her bed. The case appears in the Discovery Channel's 2002 film A Haunting in Georgia and the 2013 movie The Haunting in Connecticut 2: Ghosts of Georgia, and in The Veil: The Heidi Wyrick Story, the firsthand account written by Heidi's aunt Joyce.From there the episode climbs into the Balsam Mountains of western North Carolina for the legend of the Boojum, a creature said to stand six to eight feet tall, covered in shaggy gray hair, with a disturbingly human face. According to Haywood County lore, the Boojum hoards the region's real gemstones – North Carolina is the only state that holds all four major precious gems, and the 1,869-carat uncut emerald pulled from the North American Emerald Mine in Hiddenite in 2003 is a matter of record – stashing them in moonshine jugs buried in hidden caves. The first written accounts cluster around the Eagle Nest Hotel, a forty-room hay-fever resort that opened on Eagle Nest Mountain in 1900 and burned in 1918, where guests were warned that the Boojum hid in the mountain laurel to watch women bathing in the forest pools. At the center of the legend is a woman named Annie, who chose to live with him as his wife and whose calls across the ridges are said, in local folk etymology, to have given the word "hootenanny" its name. The segment traces the creature's name back to Lewis Carroll's 1876 nonsense poem The Hunting of the Snark, sets the story against the Cherokee removal along the Trail of Tears and the eviction of Appalachian families to create Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and lands in present-day Waynesville, where Boojum Brewing carries the legend's name.The episode closes with the Krononauts, a group from Baltimore's avant-garde art scene who, in January of 1980, ran an advertisement on page 90 of Artforum magazine inviting time travelers to a party in Baltimore on March 9th, 1982, a date chosen because all nine planets would line up more closely than they had in nearly two hundred years, an alignment popularized by the 1974 book The Jupiter Effect. Hundreds of people came, the New York Times covered it and described the scene as an epidemic of temporary lunacy, and no one produced any evidence of time travel, since the organizers' real aim was the permanent paper trail, built on the logic that a documented invitation could be found and answered from any point in the future. The segment follows the same experiment forward through MIT graduate student Amal Dorai's 2005 Time Traveler Convention and physicist Stephen Hawking's 2009 reception at Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge, where Hawking mailed the invitations only after the party had ended and took the empty room as evidence for his chronology protection conjecture, and it ends with an original song, "Krononauts Party," by Dark Weirdness.LIKE WHAT YOU'RE HEARING? Get the daily WEIRD DARKNESS podcast (seven days per week) at WeirdDarkness.com • Paranormal, true crime, UFO, cryptid, ghost, and unexplained stories every day • Listen FREE wherever you get podcasts • My “OFFICIAL WEIRDOS” at https://WeirdDarkness.com/OFFICIAL get the commercial-free version, along with at least two bonus episodes each week, live chats every weeknight, free audiobooks I narrate, and more!

What happens when self-declared prophets, alien messengers, and doomsday fanatics build secret empires in plain sight — and convince others to follow them to the end of the world?EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/cultsREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/utz5hrfdSOURCES and RESOURCES:New York Post - “Inside Manhattan's secret ‘cult'”. *** News.com.au - “Congregation for the Light: Inside New York's ‘cult next door'” *** Sinisterhood Podcast - Episode 16: “Congregation for the Light” *** The Commentator - “The Cult Around the Corner” *** Brooklyn Magazine - “Murray Hill Has A Secret Homophobic Aryan Doomsday Cult” *** https://yucommentator.org/2018/10/cult-stern-35th-the-light *** https://nypost.com/2014/11/02/the-secret-society-cult-that-operates-out-of-murray-hill/ ***https://www.researchgate.net/publication/381978851_Raelism_An_Unconventional_Religious_Pathway_to_Transhumanism*** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ra%C3%ABlism *** https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/religion-and-philosophy/raelism *** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clonaid *** https://www.bota.org/ ***https://www.botaineurope.org/ *** https://articles.skeptics.nz/2023/04/24/builders-of-the-adytum-the-tarot-cards-and-qabalah-in-naenae *** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Builders_of_the_Adytum *** https://ilovehistory.utah.gov/1847-1904-lds-practice-of-polygamy/ *** https://www.watchman.org/profiles/pdf/fldsprofile.pdf ***https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentalist_Church_of_Jesus_Christ_of_Latter-Day_Saints *** https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ching_Hai ***https://www.godsdirectcontact.org/spiritualpractice/Master_Ching_Hai.htm *** https://suprememastertv.com/en1/v/211271952624.html *** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ching_Hai *** https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ching_Hai *** https://nypost.com/2018/01/11/the-cult-leader-behind-the-worlds-fast-growing-vegan-chain/ ***https://open.library.ubc.ca/cIRcle/collections/ubccommunityandpartnerspublicati/52387/items/1.0385823 *** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Science *** https://eng.the-liberty.com/2016/6323/ *** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happiness_Realization_Party *** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryuho_Okawa *** https://www.cdamm.org/articles/cut-tsl *** https://summitlighthouse.org/aboutus/church-universal-and-triumphant/ *** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Universal_and_Triumphant ***https://articles1.icsahome.com/articles/denouement-of-the-prophets--cult-the-church-universal-and-triumphant-in-decline *** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Clare_Prophet *** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_Tribes_communities *** https://people.com/adam-arthur-rosenthal-twelve-tribes-religious-sect-accused-murder-8753907 *** https://nypost.com/2018/06/05/religious-cult-probed-for-child-labor-after-factory-expose/ *** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostles_of_Infinite_Love *** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Gaston_Tremblay *** https://ktxs.com/news/big-country/ktxs-special-report-mystery-still-surrounds-house-of-yahweh-*** https://www.watchman.org/profiles/pdf/houseofyahwehprofile.pdf ***https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unfulfilled_Watch_Tower_Society_predictions *** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Yahweh *** https://www.apologeticsindex.org/316-house-of-yahweh *** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuwaubian_Nation *** https://people.com/crime/story-behind-united-nuwaubian-nation-moors-georgia-cult *** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwight_York *** https://www.adl.org/resources/news/leader-anti-government-sect-sentenced-135-years *** https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/nuwaubian-nation-moors/ *** https://billygraham.org/answers/how-is-christianity-different-from-other-religions(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 28, 2025Weird Darkness host Darren Marlar pulls back the curtain on modern cults hiding in plain sight, from city apartments to desert compounds to Montana doomsday bunkers. This episode profiles more than a dozen secretive groups, including Manhattan's Congregation for the Light, the alien-worshipping Raëlian Movement and its Clonaid cloning claims, the polygamist FLDS led by imprisoned prophet Warren Jeffs, Supreme Master Ching Hai, Japan's Happy Science, Eckankar, Elizabeth Clare Prophet's Church Universal and Triumphant, the Twelve Tribes, the House of Yahweh, and the pyramid-building Nuwaubian Nation of Malachi Z. York. Along the way, Darren digs into why people get drawn in, the warning signs of a dangerous group, and what sets biblical Christianity apart from them all.

Scout Brooks just wanted to survive his first day of seventh grade. Instead, he found himself recruited into a mysterious after-school club, named 'The Chosen One' by the strange Professor Nog, and handed a box of secrets he's not allowed to talk about. Meanwhile, somewhere far beyond the stars, a man named Farrow remains a prisoner of creatures no one back on Earth even knows exist.Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://pod.link/1655277373Find more family-friendly frights and creepy games to play on our website at http://MicroTerrors.com!Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/microterrorsOther stories, novels, and more from author Scott Donnelly: https://amzn.to/3LymHaUOther narrations, podcasts, and audiobooks from voice artist Darren Marlar: https://WeirdDarkness.com= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =Weird Darkness©, 2026Micro Terrors: Scary Stories for Kids™, 2026#MicroTerrors #WeirdDarkness

Scout Brooks just wanted to survive his first day of seventh grade. Instead, he found himself recruited into a mysterious after-school club, named 'The Chosen One' by the strange Professor Nog, and handed a box of secrets he's not allowed to talk about. Meanwhile, somewhere far beyond the stars, a man named Farrow remains a prisoner of creatures no one back on Earth even knows exist.Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://pod.link/1655277373Find more family-friendly frights and creepy games to play on our website at http://MicroTerrors.com!Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/microterrorsOther stories, novels, and more from author Scott Donnelly: https://amzn.to/3LymHaUOther narrations, podcasts, and audiobooks from voice artist Darren Marlar: https://WeirdDarkness.com= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =Weird Darkness©, 2026Micro Terrors: Scary Stories for Kids™, 2026#MicroTerrors #WeirdDarkness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A bored kid trapped in a powerless, sweltering house sneaks into his father's off-limits basement lab, where a machine that turns AI drawings into living creatures is about to make his worst summer unforgettable.Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://pod.link/1655277373Find more family-friendly frights and creepy games to play on our website at http://MicroTerrors.com!Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/microterrorsOther stories, novels, and more from author Scott Donnelly: https://amzn.to/3LymHaUOther narrations, podcasts, and audiobooks from voice artist Darren Marlar: https://WeirdDarkness.com= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =Weird Darkness©, 2026Micro Terrors: Scary Stories for Kids™, 2026#MicroTerrors #WeirdDarkness

A writer obsessed with the occult and forbidden knowledge uncovers a nightmarish secret lurking within a long-abandoned church—one that watches, waits, and is drawn to the dark.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/haunterofthedarkREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p9ecf8yFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: I'm back with a classic horror story, requested by one of you, my Weirdo family members. “The Haunter in the Dark” written by horror writer H.P. Lovecraft.CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:00:59.102 = About The Story00:03:15.896 = The Haunter of the Dark ***01:05:59.476 = Show Close*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad breakLISTEN ON PODCAST APPS: Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.com/wdapps*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*SOURCES and RESOURCES:POEM: “Nemesis” by H.P. Lovecraft: https://tinyurl.com/y466z69vThe Cthulhu Mythos: https://tinyurl.com/y22oe79f“The Haunter of the Dark” by H.P. Lovecraft: https://tinyurl.com/y33eprua(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: July 30, 2020On this listener-requested episode of Weird Darkness, Darren Marlar narrates H.P. Lovecraft's last known story, "The Haunter in the Dark," the centerpiece of a three-part collaboration with fellow horror writer Robert Bloch.The episode opens with how the story came to be written. Robert Bloch, then a young admirer of Lovecraft, published "The Shambler From the Stars" in the September 1935 issue of Weird Tales, setting his tale inside Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. Two months later, in early November 1935, Lovecraft answered the homage by writing "The Haunter in the Dark" and dedicating it to Bloch; the story ran in Weird Tales in December 1936 (Volume 28, Number 5). It was the last story Lovecraft is known to have written before he died on March 15, 1937, and Bloch eventually closed the trilogy in 1950 with "The Shadow of the Steeple." The story's epigraph comes from the second stanza of Lovecraft's own 1917 poem "Nemesis."From there, the narration follows Robert Harrison Blake, a writer and painter of weird fiction who leaves 620 East Knapp Street in Milwaukee and takes the upper floor of an old house on College Hill in Providence during the winter of 1934–35. Blake grows obsessed with a black, abandoned church across the city on Federal Hill — a steeple shunned by birds and feared by the Italian neighborhood around it — and eventually breaks in, finding the moldering relics of the Starry Wisdom sect, a cult that took root after Professor Enoch Bowen returned from Egypt in 1844 carrying an artifact called the Shining Trapezohedron. In the windowless tower he uncovers the stone itself, a four-inch red-striated polyhedron that opens like a window onto other worlds, resting beside the charred skeleton of Edwin M. Lillibridge, a Providence Telegram reporter who vanished inside the same building in 1893. Gazing into the crystal rouses the Haunter of the Dark — an avatar of Nyarlathotep that can move only in blackness and is driven back by light — and the rest of the tale tracks Blake's collapse into sleepwalking, scorched hair, and frantic diary entries as a violent August thunderstorm threatens the streetlights keeping the entity penned in. When the power fails over Providence at 2:12 in the morning, the thing leaves its steeple, and Blake is found dead at his desk the next day with bulging eyes and a face frozen in terror, his final scrawled line describing a three-lobed burning eye — after which the physician Dr. Dexter hurls the box and the glowing stone into the deepest channel of Narragansett Bay.

A drifter set to die in the gas chamber for a murder he didn't commit offers one last gift to the man who framed him — never imagining what that gift might carry.Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/OTRCHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “Second Sight” (February 27, 1978) ***WD00:46:14.838 = Origin of Superstition, “Three On A Match” (December 16, 1932) ***WD01:00:44.894 = Pat Novak For Hire, “Don't Tell Hilda” (February 27, 1949)01:29:14.739 = Peril, “Darkness Within” (1953) ***WD (LQ)01:58:15.099 = Mystery Playhouse, “Death is a Joker” (May 25, 1941) ***WD02:28:27.475 = Price of Fear, “Meeting In Athens” (July 07, 1973) ***WD02:55:48.036 = Ellery Queen, “Number Thirty-One” (September 07, 1947) ***WD03:24:14.186 = Quiet Please, “If I Should Die Before I Wake” (February 27, 1949)03:53:27.551 = Radio City Playhouse, “The Wind” (October 30, 1949) ***WD04:22:21.175 = Sam Spade, “Death of Dr. Denhoff Caper” (August 09, 1946) ***WD04:51:19.818 = Show Close(ADU) = Air Date Unknown(LQ) = Low Quality***WD = Remastered, edited, or cleaned up by Weird Darkness to make the episode more listenable. Audio may not be pristine, but it will be better than the original file which may have been unusable or more difficult to hear without editing.This episode of #RetroRadio — Old Time Radio in the Dark, hosted by Darren Marlar at WeirdDarkness.com, runs ten classic mystery, crime, and horror broadcasts back to back, from a condemned man who donates his eyes to the very person who framed him to Ray Bradbury's tale of a living, intelligent wind that hunts a man across the globe.CBS Radio Mystery Theater opens the night with "Second Sight," a February 27, 1978 drama hosted by E.G. Marshall in which drifter Larry Millard, condemned to die in the gas chamber for the shotgun murder of farmer Jason Hadley, volunteers his own eyes for an anonymous corneal transplant — handing his sight to Glen Plaxton, the businessman who actually pulled the trigger and framed him to protect a secret reservoir land-grab. After the surgery, Plaxton and his partner Tip Foster begin to suspect that the dead man's eyes may have carried more than vision.Next, Origin of Superstition traces the famous taboo against lighting three cigarettes from a single flame in "Three On A Match," a December 16, 1932 sketch that carries listeners back to 1899 and the Boer War in South Africa, where British officer Captain Frank Mattox laughs off the fire-reading warning of a Zulu medicine man named Grumbo, who reads ruin in the ashes and cautions of "danger in three."In "Don't Tell Hilda," the hard-boiled Pat Novak For Hire (February 27, 1949, starring Jack Webb) finds the San Francisco waterfront boat-for-hire man tangled in murder when a beautiful blonde claiming amnesia collapses dead in a coffee joint after a fatal dose of sleeping pills. Hounded by Inspector Hellman and helped by boozy ex-doctor Jocko Madigan, Novak traces her to a long-vanished heiress named Marcia Halpern and a fortune up on Pacific Heights.Peril offers the 1953 psychological case "Darkness Within," where Mrs. Diana Carson walks into the office of psychiatrist Dr. James Bancroft insisting that her mild-mannered stockbroker husband, Lionel Carson, seized the fireplace tongs and tried to murder her — then woke with no memory of the attack, much like the family cat she found poisoned in the basement. Bancroft must decide whether Lionel suffers a blackout-driven split personality or something far more deliberate.Mystery Playhouse, hosted by Peter Lorre, stages "Death is a Joker" (May 25, 1941), the courtroom confession of Charles Luther, a homely stage comedian on trial for his life who recounts strangling his friend Robert Langwell in a fit of jealousy over the beautiful Julie Wenthoff — and then, hour by terrible hour, is forced to think and act like the cunning criminal he never meant to become.The Price of Fear sends Vincent Price into the August heat of Athens for "Meeting In Athens," a July 7, 1973 chiller in which he befriends young English couple Mark Haxton and Gillian Gilroy on the Acropolis. When Mark vanishes after a late-night seaside villa party arranged by a heavyset stranger named Yannis, Price and Greek police officer Costas Polides uncover a black-market horror in which a man's rarest possession — his AB Rhesus-negative blood, recorded in the diary he kept on everything — can be worth killing for.Ellery Queen investigates "Number Thirty-One" (September 7, 1947), in which suspected international diamond smuggler George Arcaris always books Cabin 31 aboard the steamship Aegea, and a Park Avenue butler from Harlem named Arthur Prine — who liked to play the number 31 in the numbers game — turns up dead in the East River. Ellery and Inspector Queen connect the recurring number to a smuggling ring involving wealthy socialites Pip Istram and Susu Mounting, with guest armchair detective Kent Smith invited to solve it first.Quiet Please turns apocalyptic with "If I Should Wake Before I Die" (February 27, 1949), Wyllis Cooper's parable of Dr. Anderson, a coldly rational scientist who cares only for pure knowledge and never for its uses — even after his own brother Edward dies alone in an orbiting satellite rocket, and even as Project Phaeton, an atomic-fission projectile fired at the moon, sets loose consequences no equation predicted.Radio City Playhouse adapts Ray Bradbury's "The Wind" (October 30, 1949), in which Allen Henderson telephones his friend Herb Thompson again and again, convinced that a living, intelligent wind — one that has stalked him from a crash in the Himalayas across every typhoon and hurricane he survived — has finally surrounded his lonely stone house to claim him, while Herb's wife Jane dismisses the whole thing as madness.Sam Spade closes the night with the "Death of Dr. Denhoff Caper" (August 9, 1946), as Howard Duff's wisecracking detective is hired by psychoanalyst Dr. Gregory Denhoff to fend off a blackmailer named Nicolaitis — only for Denhoff to plunge from his penthouse window, the police to rule it suicide, and a stolen, microfilmed case history on actress Constance Brent to throw suspicion across the grieving widow, a Vienna-trained rival named Dr. Zoya, and Brent's hot-tempered husband.CUSTOM WEBPAGE: https://weirddarkness.com/WDRR0700

The official story has Lee Harvey Oswald firing three shots from a sixth-floor window, yet the witnesses on the stairs never saw him flee, the paraffin test on his cheek came back clean, and J. Edgar Hoover himself admitted the voice on the Oswald tape from Mexico City belonged to another man.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/ConspiracyInDallasREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8hjttrFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Was there a conspiracy to murder President John F. Kennedy in Dealey Plaza in 1963? (Conspiracy In Dallas) *** A Weirdo family member tells of his own personal experience with what might've been a hell hound. (The Dog That Wasn't There) *** One island, one couple, one murder. We'll look at the strange life and death of Rolf Neslund. (The Rolf Neslund Murder) *** She was murdered in November of 1901. Her lover spent more than a dozen years in prison, proclaiming his innocence, before being pardoned by the governor. So why did he commit suicide soon after getting out of prison? We'll look at the strange murder of – and eventual haunting by - Nell Cropsey. (The Lingering Ghost of Nell Cropsey)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:01:09.039 = Show Open00:02:46.404 = Conspiracy In Dallas00:20:59.391 = The Dog That Wasn't There ***00:22:36.375 = The Rolf Neslund Murder 00:31:41.043 = Lingering Ghost of Nell Cropsey ***00:40:08.752 = 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:
“Conspiracy In Dallas” posted at The Unredacted: http://bit.ly/weirddarkness2YVxMdq“The Dog That Wasn't There” by Weirdo family member Daniel Mulberry“The Rolf Neslund Murder” by Elizabeth Tilsa: http://bit.ly/weirddarkness2KywOAX“The Lingering Ghost of Nell Cropsey” by Troy Taylor: http://bit.ly/weirddarkness2UnJ2Rb(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: November 28, 2021Weird Darkness host Darren Marlar moves from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas to a phantom black dog in the English county of Dorset, the murder and dismemberment of a retired sea captain on a quiet island in Washington's San Juan archipelago, and the 1901 killing of a young woman in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, whose spirit is said to still walk her family home.It opens in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963, where President John F. Kennedy was shot and the Warren Commission, headed by Judge Earl Warren, concluded in 1964 that ex-Marine Lee Harvey Oswald fired three shots alone from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. Eyewitnesses undercut that account from the start: Arnold Rowland saw two men at the window minutes earlier, one holding a rifle and neither matching Oswald, while secretaries Victoria Adams and Sandra Styles and caretaker Jack Dougherty never saw Oswald flee down the only staircase he could have used. The episode dismantles Arlen Specter's single-bullet theory — the claim that Commission Exhibit 399 passed through Kennedy's neck and inflicted five separate wounds on Governor John Connally before turning up nearly pristine on a Parkland Hospital stretcher — a conclusion Connally and his wife Nellie both rejected and Abraham Zapruder's home film contradicts on timing. Oswald's negative paraffin test, his suspicious 1959 defection to the Soviet Union and fluent Russian, his leafleting against the Fair Play for Cuba Committee alongside FBI-linked investigator Guy Banister, and a Mexico City impersonation so plain that J. Edgar Hoover told President Lyndon Johnson the recorded voice and surveillance photograph did not match the man in custody all steer the evidence away from a lone gunman. The thread ends with Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby, whose out-of-state mob contacts spiked twenty-fivefold before he shot Oswald on live television and whose 1965 hint that the truth would never surface still shadows the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle that remains the strongest piece against the accused.From there the tone turns to folklore and a listener's firsthand sighting of Black Shuck, the spectral black dog reported for centuries across Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, and East Anglia and long treated as an omen of coming disaster. Camping alone beside a medieval moat near Raoul Castle in East Dorset, he watched the dark shape of a large dog settle on the far embankment and stare back at him, then rise and dissolve into nothing as every nearby sound of wildlife cut out, leaving him zipped inside his tent until morning.Next comes the disappearance of Rolf Neslund, an 83-year-old retired sea captain who in 1978 drove a 550-foot freighter into the West Seattle Bridge before retreating into a drink-soaked marriage on Lopez Island in Washington's San Juan Islands. When Rolf vanished in August 1980, his wife Ruth insisted he had flown home to Norway, yet his prescriptions went unfilled, his American and Norwegian bank accounts went untouched, and no Christmas card reached his relatives that December. In 1982 Ruth's brother told police she had confessed that on August 8, 1980, a second brother held Rolf down while she shot him twice in the head, after which the body was dismembered in the bathtub, burned in a backyard barrel, and scattered on the manure pile. A search turned up replaced carpet over bloodstains, spatter on the ceiling, and a bloodstained .38-caliber Smith & Wesson hidden in Ruth's dresser, tying her to a killing that began as a fight over the roughly $80,000 she had quietly moved into an account bearing only her name; convicted in 1985 and sentenced to twenty years, she maintained her innocence until her death at seventy-three.The episode closes with nineteen-year-old Nell Cropsey, who walked onto the front porch of her family's Elizabeth City, North Carolina home with her suitor Jim Wilcox on the night of November 20, 1901, and was never seen alive again. Her body surfaced in the Pasquotank River on December 27, her death caused by a violent blow to the left temple, and Wilcox — the son of the local sheriff, known for a fierce temper — was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to thirty years before Governor Thomas Walter Bickett pardoned him in 1918. Once freed, Wilcox sought out newspaper editor W.O. Saunders to reveal something so startling that Saunders began planning a book, but Wilcox killed himself with a shotgun before he could tell it, Saunders died soon afterward in a car wreck, and whatever he knew went with them. More than a century on, the former Cropsey home still answers with lights that switch on and off, doors that open by themselves, faucets that run with no hand on the tap, and a pale young woman glimpsed crossing empty rooms and gazing from an upstairs window — recognized by more than one resident as Nell, her killing never truly solved.

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 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

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Ronald Gene Simmons turned Christmas week into a nightmare, methodically murdering 16 people—including his own family—before calmly surrendering to the police.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources and full transcript): https://weirddarkness.com/MockingbirdHillFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: The story of serial killer Ronald G. Simmons from the audiobook, “Murderous Minds, Vol2” by Ryan Becker. (Weekend Murder Spree of Ronald G. Simmons) *** Long before the disastrous Philadelphia Experiment, partially based on Nikola Tesla's technology, Tesla is rumored to have discovered by accident the secrets of traveling through time and the inherent dangers of tampering with the cosmic framework that governs the laws of time and space. (Nikola Tesla's Secret Time Travel Experiments) *** Four friends get lost on a country dirt road, and try to find their way back following what turns out to be a phantom vehicle. (Ghost Car of Picton) *** In the 1800s seven nuns set up a school for girls, and when they added a chapel to that school, what many thought was a miracle occurred in the construction of the chapel stairs. (The Legend of the Loretto Chapel Staircase) *** Police officers and first responders share their own experiences with the supernatural. (Paranormal 911) *** I'll share the very dark and classic creepypasta “Holes” by S. R. Underschultz. (Holes)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:01:53.906 = Show Open00:03:50.173 = Ronald Gene Simmons00:28:11.542 = Holes (Fictional Story) ***00:42:57.539 = Paranormal 911, Part 1 ***00:59:24.778 = Paranormal 911, Part 2 ***01:26:09.206 = Nikola Tesla's Secret Time Travel Experiments ***01:35:23.932 = Ghost Car of Picton ***01:38:00.599 = Legend of the Loretto Chapel Staircase01:45:30.570 = 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 Ronald G. Simmons is from the book, “Murderous Minds, Vol2” by Ryan Becker – audiobook version narrated by Darren Marlar. Get the full-length audiobook https://amzn.to/3JD94rK“Holes” by S. R. Underschultz, posted at Creepypasta.com: https://tinyurl.com/sncw8rs
“Paranormal 911” by Jessika M. Thomas for Ranker's Paranormal Activity: https://tinyurl.com/urodzgu“Nikola Tesla's Secret Time Travel Experiments” by CommanderX for UFO Review: https://tinyurl.com/yhjoyjm“Ghost Car of Picton” by ‘James' in Sydney Australia for Ghost Attic: https://tinyurl.com/udn36zy“Legend of the Loretto Chapel Staircase” by Les Hewitt for Historic Mysteries: https://tinyurl.com/vm299qr(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: January 2019

A killer kitten. A coffin at the door. A werewolf in the closet. Three horror stories — all written by kids!Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://pod.link/1655277373Find more family-friendly frights and creepy games to play on our website at http://MicroTerrors.com!Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/microterrorsOther stories, novels, and more from author Scott Donnelly: https://amzn.to/3LymHaUOther narrations, podcasts, and audiobooks from voice artist Darren Marlar: https://WeirdDarkness.com= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =Weird Darkness©, 2026Micro Terrors: Scary Stories for Kids™, 2026#MicroTerrors #WeirdDarkness