PODCAST · society
Astonishing Legends
by Astonishing Legends Productions
The world is more mysterious than most people are comfortable imagining. We cross paths with the mystical from time to time and may not even notice it. If we do, we quickly return to our usually mundane daily existence. But what if we not only acknowledged the unknown, we investigated it and spoke with those in the know? That's what co-hosts Scott Philbrook & Forrest Burgess, and co-executive producer Tess Pfeifle do at Astonishing Legends. Over 100 million downloads and hundreds of thousands of listeners have discovered the thrill of exploring the mysteries of our world, showing that the unknown can be both captivating and intriguing. Welcome to Astonishing Legends!
Episodes
-
S2 Ep38: Hello, James.
In tonight's dead letter, our listener TM was the office manager at a Catholic parish in the upper Mississippi river area, and part of her job was digitizing the cemetery's paper records, so she'd walk the rows with a camera, say hello to everyone, and tell them what she was there to do. One…
more -
Your True Halloween Stories IV Part 1
In 1933, a Scottish botanist watched a seemingly abandoned steamship drift past the Alaskan coast on an ice floe. It appeared upside down in a strange mirage, with no crew and no one at the wheel. This ship was the Baychimo, which was abandoned two years earlier, but refused to disappear. Having...
-
S2 Ep37: The Old Man on the Gravestone
In tonight's dead letter, Corey takes us back to Omaha, Nebraska in the year 2000, when he was the overnight host on a Top 40 station and a call-in topic about haunted places kept circling back to one private family cemetery. He sent a carload of listeners out there on a Friday night to report…
more -
A Tale of Ghost Ships Three!
In 1933, a Scottish botanist watched a seemingly abandoned steamship drift past the Alaskan coast on an ice floe. It appeared upside down in a strange mirage, with no crew and no one at the wheel. This ship was the Baychimo, which was abandoned two years earlier, but refused to disappear. Having...
-
S2 Ep36: The Mimic
In tonight's dead letter, our listener Ed and his wife are newlyweds, sharing the apartment he's lived in for about two years in Clay Center, Nebraska. One morning in early 2020, he hits snooze on his alarm and sees a figure walking out of their bedroom, silhouetted by the living room lights he'd...
-
S2 Ep34: The Lady in the Rocking Chair
In tonight's dead letter, listener Mothmaiden remembers a time when she was four years old and an only child in a neighborhood with no other kids, and she had an imaginary friend named Cindy Cora who looked exactly like Betty Rubble from The Flintstones. Then on a sunny afternoon, in her own...
-
Special: Richard Hatem's Light in the Dark Tour 2026
Hey folks! We're gearing up to go to the Wet Hot Bad Magic Summercamp next week but after that we're back on our regular schedule! In the meanwhile here's a chat Scott and Richard had just a week ago about his new tour which is also CLOSE ABOARD! >>>>>>>>>> A special episode from our friend…
more -
S2 Ep33: The Inn at Folck's Mill
In tonight's dead letter, listener Chris takes us back to the early 2000s, when he was the head brewer at a restaurant on the east side of Cumberland, Maryland, in a building so old it served as a Civil War field hospital. One night after close, he and three coworkers were having a beer in the...
-
Richard Hatem's Light in the Dark Tour 2026!
Our friend Richard Hatem is taking his Paranormal Bookshelf on the road! The Light in the Dark Tour 2026 is an all new live show playing six cities in seven days, September 13th through 19th, and it winds up at the Mothman Festival in Point Pleasant, West Virginia. Richard and Susan Lambert will…
more -
S2 Ep32: But We didn't Break the Glass
In tonight's dead letter, a teenager in rural Arkansas in the late 2000s goes poking around an abandoned schoolhouse and comes home with a mirror she likes the look of. Years later it's hanging in her first Los Angeles apartment, and one evening while she's in the bath she catches the towel on…
more -
S2 Ep31: DLO-231: The Kids in the Parking Lot
In tonight's dead letter, in the summer of 1996, two college kids from New Jersey were road-tripping to Gen Con when they got off I-80 near Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, looking for food and a place to stay. Around 11:30 PM, at a gas station that turned out to be closed for the night, three blonde…
more -
S2 Ep30: DLO-230: A Finger Down the spine
In tonight's dead letter, listener John is nineteen, home from his freshman year and a few shifts into a summer dishwashing job at a grand old house on Michigan's Old Mission Peninsula that has been a restaurant since the 1950s. The staff there blame anything strange in the building on a ghost…
more -
Amy Bruni’s Cuisine to Kill For
In 1673, Rebecca Cornell was found dead beside the hearth in her Rhode Island home. Afterward, her ghost allegedly appeared to accuse someone of murder and her son was tried and hanged. Her story is just one of nearly sixty strange intersections of true crime, hauntings, history, and food…
more -
S2 Ep29: The Boy Who Wanted her Hand
In tonight's dead letter, listener Mary is on a ghost tour in Key West when the guide stands her group under an old, unmarked movie marquee and asks them what happened there. Before he says another word, Mary smells smoke. The story he tells the group involves a church fire, and more strange…
more -
S2 Ep28: Milo
In tonight's dead letter, a truck-riding barn cat named Milo becomes the witness our listener Amy needs to affirm that she’s not seeing and hearing things. The old stone house they occupy seems to have some very strange and unusual visitors. One defying any conventional explanation or even...
-
S2 Ep26: The Ghost with No Nose
In tonight's dead letter, our listener Kayla takes her two-and-a-half-year-old son to a private family viewing for his great-grandmother and keeps him in a back room so his last memory won't be the casket. All night, unprompted, he pulls relatives into that room to show them a ghost sitting in…
more -
Chris McKinnell and the Warren Legacy
Chris McKinnell grew up as the grandson of Ed and Lorraine Warren, surrounded by haunted objects and terrifying investigations that left him afraid of the dark until one unforgettable night changed everything. In this special interview, he shares firsthand stories from inside the Warren family,...
-
S2 Ep24: Pitched in Blue
In tonight's dead letter… our listener Daniel moves into a freshly built ranch house in the Salt Lake Valley back in 2011 — a house barely five years old, no tragic past, nothing "old and storied" about it. The first odd thing he notices is that every doorknob in the basement is on backwards,...
-
S2 Ep22: The Mechanic and Mr. Machine
In tonight's dead letter, listener Dean takes us to his grandmother's old Victorian house in a region of Scott’s home state of North Carolina known as the Sandhills. His family has traded strange stories about the family home for generations, from slamming doors in an empty house to a lady in…
more -
The Uninvited: The Ripperston Farm Invasion
In 1977, a remote dairy farm on the cliffs of southwest Wales became the center of one of the strangest and most enduring UFO cases in British history. What began with a glowing object hovering over Ripperston Farm escalated into months of unexplained phenomena: failing electronics, mysterious...
-
S2 Ep21: The Emerald Valley
In tonight's dead letter, Daniel, a self-described skeptic writes in about the one thing he's never been able to explain away. He was a third-grader in northeast Washington in 1985, riding home one evening, when an intense green light blinded him and his mom in their car. For years he figured…
more -
S2 Ep20: What Does a House Remember?
In tonight's dead letter, our listener’s family trades a rented place for an old Victorian villa tucked into the quiet border country between England and Wales. The previous owner had loved the house for more than half a century, and the neighbors were quick to say she'd have approved of the new...
-
S2 Ep19: The House on 109
In tonight's dead letter, we head into Grafton, West Virginia — a small railroad town built on a B&O junction, Civil War supply lines, and two national cemeteries. The house at the center of this story sat right in the middle of all that history. When a listener named Jonathan moved in with his...
-
The Ghost Bomber of the Monongahela
In January 1956, rush-hour drivers crossing Pittsburgh’s icy Homestead High Level Bridge watched a nightmare descend from the sky: a silent B-25 bomber gliding just feet above the roadway with both engines dead. Veteran Air Force pilot Major William Dotson pulled off a flawless emergency landing…
more -
The Case Files History Left Unsolved | Hidden History with Dr. Harini Bhat
Scott and Forrest present a preview of a new podcast called Hidden History with Dr. Harini Bhat! Dr. Harini Bhat is a clinical pharmacist and storyteller obsessed with the moments in history that still can't be fully explained. Every week she investigates real events that defy easy explanation....
-
S2 Ep18: Mom is Still Here
In tonight's dead letter, listener Andrew writes in from a quiet little back house in Monterey Park, California — a place that during the early pandemic felt even quieter than usual. He's a self-described skeptic, he disabled the motion sensor on his own bathroom light because it kept tripping on...
-
The Lead Masks of Vintem Hill Part 2
What if the infamous Lead Masks Case wasn’t a one-off tragedy, but the final step in a years-long chain of dangerous experiments? In part 2, we pull back from the image of two dead electronics technicians on Vintém Hill to uncover a much bigger world of underground spiritist circles, secret ham...
-
S2 Ep14: The Elephant Slides of Sofia
In tonight’s dead letter, we’ll take you through the brutalist monuments and ancient layers of Sofia, Bulgaria looking for what may have been the scene of a localized timeslip. After giving up the search for a playground that made a pronounced childhood impression, our listener Vili, stumbles…
more -
The Lead Masks of Vintém Hill Part 1
In one of Brazil’s strangest unsolved mysteries, two electronics technicians travel to Niterói in 1966, buy matching raincoats, hike up a remote hill with cash, water, towels, and a handwritten set of bizarre instructions, then turn up dead days later lying side by side on palm leaves, wearing...
-
S2 Ep13: No Human Could Throw Books Like This
In tonight’s dead letter, we hear from a librarian who works the desk at a fairly new building down in the Southeast. But the ground it sits on has a much heavier history: the library was built right over the exact footprint of four demolished hospitals, with the old medical cornerstones still...
-
S2 Ep12: The Carousel in the Ravine (Reposted)
In tonight’s dead letter, we hear a story from a listener who along with her husband encountered something bizarre hovering low near their land down in the southernmost part of the Australian mainland. They struggle to understand what they’re looking at and how it could even exist. Somehow it…
more -
S2 Ep11: The Nightshift Protocol
In tonight’s dead letter, a routine room cleaning following a patient's passing turns into a puzzling technological glitch. A sensor alarm designed to protect patients from hurting themselves keeps going off. The solution to silencing the machine isn't found in a manual, but in a centuries-old...
-
The Disappearance of Jim Sullivan
In the lonely New Mexico desert, police discover an abandoned Volkswagen Beetle containing a 12-string guitar, a wallet, clothes, and a box of unsold records. Things a working musician would never willingly leave behind. The car belongs to Jim Sullivan, a talented singer-songwriter who had just...
-
S2 Ep10: Stranger Danger
In tonight’s Dead Letter, Forrest and Scott read a submission from Stacey, which delves into the "Uncanny Valley" phenomenon in a true-life scenario. In a coastal town already known for its dark past and unusual coastal events, a silent, out-of-place stranger pays an unexpected visit to a college...
-
Live Junk Drawer Tonight on Patreon!
Tonight, Forrest and I are sitting down with Jeremiah Byron for an exclusive live video interview about the unprecedented, real-time flap of Bigfoot sightings currently moving through Northeast Ohio. This special broadcast is completely private and only available to Astonishing Legends Patreon...
-
S2 Ep9: Another Bunny
In tonight’s dead letter from listener Amanda, the boundary between an adorable trusted holiday icon and nocturnal terror is tested in the deep woods near the Allegheny National Forest. A massive silhouette of something that shouldn’t exist peering over the hood of a car sparks a lifelong…
more -
Through a Laser Darkly
This episode dives into one of the strangest modern consciousness experiments ever proposed. Starting with cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman’s provocative idea that reality may function like a computer desktop interface — an evolutionary illusion designed for survival rather than truth. We’ll...
-
S2 Ep8: The Camden High Street Haunting
In tonight’s dead letter… we travel back to 2010 to a hotel in the heart of Camden in the UK. Two brothers looking to soak up some local punk history find themselves sharing a room with something entirely unexpected. Sometimes the most mundane late-night activities—like eating pizza and watching...
-
S2 Ep7: Mind Invasion
In tonight’s dead letter, we dive into a bizarre encounter that proves the unexplained doesn't always wait for a dark and stormy night on boot hill. Sometimes just an ordinary walk home from a university class can transform into an unforgettable and unsettling experience. Could a seemingly…
more -
The Scole Experiment Part 3: Endgame
In the final chapter of our Scole series, the story stops looking like a séance and starts feeling like science fiction. What began with classic Spiritualist phenomena — messages from the dead and movement in the dark—escalates into self-developing film, unexplained voices on sealed recorders…
more -
S2 Ep6: The Smiling Pillar of Avoca
In tonight’s dead letter, a routine hike along a converted railroad bed transforms into a standoff with the inexplicable for Patron and Listener Zed. Standing in an open clearing along the path is a solitary, towering object that seems to possibly be a tree, but for some reason it’s hard to tell....
-
The Scole Experiment Part 2: The Germanium Receptor
This week, we return to the pitch-black depths of the Scole Experiment, where a sealed room in rural Norfolk became the testing ground for an impossible claim: that voices from beyond could speak through a crude, powerless device that shouldn’t have worked at all. What began as a strange…
more -
S2 Ep5: Kids Can be Creepy, Especially your own
In tonight’s dead letter… we explore the unsettling possibility that our children are not the blank slates conventional psychology suggests. Listener, Tim, recounts the evening his toddler, Mason, claimed he "wasn't always" his kid before describing a past life that ended in a tragic house fire.…
more -
The Scole Experiment Part 1: The Norfolk Protocol
In a quiet Norfolk village, in the early 1990s, a seventeenth-century farmhouse became the setting for one of the most controversial paranormal investigations ever conducted. In the cellar of Street Farmhouse in Scole, a small group known as the Scole Experimental Group claimed they weren’t just...
-
S2 Ep4: Something's Watching
In tonight’s dead letter… Scott and Forrest explore the intersection of the safety of the suburbs and the primeval woods of the greater Akron area. Long before "Ohio" became modern slang for the weird, it was already earning that reputation through sightings of glowing red eyes that radiated…
more -
S2 Ep3: The Maltese Phantom
In tonight’s dead letter, a simple move to a quiet farmhouse turns into a bit of an accidental science experiment between two roommates who didn't want to sound "crazy" to each other. They both lived with the same unsettling experiences for months in total silence until a conversation on their...
-
S2 Ep2: Ask and you Might Receive
In tonight’s dead letter, listener Chris and his wife venture to the highest point east of the Rockies for a night of stargazing under the Milky Way. While lying on the summit of Black Elk Peak, Chris decides to put out a silent, mental invitation to the universe to see if anything might respond....
-
The Shag Harbor Incident
This week, we revisit one of the most compelling and unsettling UFO cases on record: the Shag Harbor Incident. Often called Canada’s Roswell, but with one crucial difference — the government openly admitted it didn’t know what happened. On October 4, 1967, airline crews, fishermen, and first...
-
S2 Ep1: The Boy on 2600
In tonight’s dead letter… listener Kevin, an overnight security officer at the time, faces an unsettling experience in the silent, abandoned wing of a psychiatric hospital. He encounters an entity that isn't misty or formless, but a shimmering, blue-lit figure. The encounter takes a turn when the...
-
They’re Already Here
Humans have always scanned the skies for the unknown, from Galileo’s first telescopic observations to modern instruments peering 13 billion years into the past, always assuming that if contact ever came, it would come from space. Yet while we obsess over the heavens, we largely ignore the vast,...
We're indexing this podcast's transcripts for the first time — this can take a minute or two. We'll show results as soon as they're ready.
No matches for "" in this podcast's transcripts.
No topics indexed yet for this podcast.
Loading reviews...
ABOUT THIS SHOW
The world is more mysterious than most people are comfortable imagining. We cross paths with the mystical from time to time and may not even notice it. If we do, we quickly return to our usually mundane daily existence. But what if we not only acknowledged the unknown, we investigated it and spoke with those in the know? That's what co-hosts Scott Philbrook & Forrest Burgess, and co-executive producer Tess Pfeifle do at Astonishing Legends. Over 100 million downloads and hundreds of thousands of listeners have discovered the thrill of exploring the mysteries of our world, showing that the unknown can be both captivating and intriguing. Welcome to Astonishing Legends!
HOSTED BY
Astonishing Legends Productions
Loading similar podcasts...
Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Astonishing Legends have?
Astonishing Legends currently has 471 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Astonishing Legends about?
The world is more mysterious than most people are comfortable imagining. We cross paths with the mystical from time to time and may not even notice it. If we do, we quickly return to our usually mundane daily existence. But what if we not only acknowledged the unknown, we investigated it and spoke...
How often does Astonishing Legends release new episodes?
Astonishing Legends publishes regularly with 471 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to Astonishing Legends?
You can listen to Astonishing Legends on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Astonishing Legends?
Astonishing Legends is created and hosted by Astonishing Legends Productions.
URL copied to clipboard!