True Crime Sleep Stories
by True Crime Sleep Stories
Hello and welcome to True Crime Sleep Stories, where you can settle in with a good true crime tale while drifting off into a safe sleepy slumber. Maybe you want to sip on a cup of hot tea, grab a warm fleece blanket, or cozy up by the fire. Whatever you decide to do, just make sure you’re comfortable and ready for relaxation.And now it’s time to get comfy… because I’m going to tell you a bedtime story.
Episodes
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113: The Life & Death of Edgar Allan Poe | 31 Nights of Frights Halloween Special Finale on True Crime Sleep Stories
Tonight’s extra-long Halloween special covers Edgar Allan Poe’s full life story, the crimes that influenced his writing, and the still-unsolved mystery of his death in Baltimore in 1849. This is the finale of 31 Nights of Frights! :-) From his birth in Boston in 1809 and his mother’s death from...
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113: The Greenbrier Ghost | 31 Nights of Frights on True Crime Sleep Stories
A real Halloween true-crime-meets-ghost-story-crossover from West Virginia: In 1897, young Zona Shue was found dead and her death was ruled natural. Her mother, Mary Jane Heaster, claimed Zona’s spirit returned to reveal her husband had broken her neck. An autopsy confirmed the murder, and Edward...
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112: The Salem Witch Trials | 31 Night of Frights on True Crime Sleep Stories
Snow on the fields in Salem Village, Massachusetts. It’s January 1692, and 2 young girls in the village minister’s house begin having unexplained fits. Within months, more than 200 people are accused of witchcraft. 19 are hanged. One is pressed to death under heavy stones. Tonight we follow the...
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111: The Hopkinsville Goblins | 31 Nights of Frights on True Crime Sleep Stories
On August 21, 1955, a family near Kelly, Kentucky reported small glowing creatures (the so-called Kelly Green Men or little green men) attacking their farmhouse. Billy Ray Taylor saw a bright light, then a silvery figure with a large head and clawed arms. The men opened fire. All 11 people fled…
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110: The Winchester "Mystery" House | 31 Nights of Frights of True Crime Sleep Stories
You've heard the Winchester Mystery House legends: staircases to nowhere, doors that open onto nothing, and a widow haunted by the ghosts of everyone killed by a Winchester rifle. The true story of Sarah Winchester is far more interesting. Sarah "Sallie" Winchester lost her baby daughter, her...
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109: Whispers By The Fire: A Cozy Look At October 31 Nights of Frights | True Crime Sleep Stories
Pull up a blanket, friends. Tonight on True Crime Sleep Stories, I'm sitting by the fire and looking back at my favorite true crime and unexplained mysteries from our 31 Nights of Frights. We'll revisit your listener stories (including the Captain from True Crime Garage), the legend of the…
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108: The Campden Wonder | 31 Nights of Frights on True Crime Sleep Stories
In this True Crime Sleep Stories episode, we cover the Campden Wonder, the nearly 400-year-old unsolved disappearance of William Harrison in Chipping Campden, Cotswolds, in 1660. After the estate steward vanished while collecting rent, his servant John Perry and the Perry family (Joan and…
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107: The Mothman of Point Pleasant | 31 Nights of Frights on True Crime Sleep Stories
2 couples drive past the old TNT plant outside Point Pleasant, West Virginia, when headlights catch the Mothman... tall, gray, with glowing red eyes. It follows their car at nearly a hundred miles an hour. They go straight to the courthouse. The deputy says they weren’t lying. Tonight’s episode…
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106: The Bell Witch of Adams, Tennessee | 31 Nights of Frights on True Crime Sleep Stories
A lot of people might not think the Bell Witch story is “true crime.” It sounds like folklore or a classic ghost tale. But it is true crime for one simple reason: John Bell was murdered. Welcome to another 31 Nights of Frights on True Crime Sleep Stories. In 1820, on the Bell family farm along…
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105: Near Misses: The Ones Who Walked Away | 31 Nights of Frights on True Crime Sleep Stories
In this True Crime Sleep Stories episode, hear five quiet near-miss stories of ordinary people who came close to dangerous men, including Rodney Alcala, Ted Bundy, and Israel Keyes... and went home safe. None of them knew the full picture at the time. Most only learned years later. These gentle...
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104: The Ghost Ship on Diamond Shoals: The Carroll A. Deering | 31 Nights of Frights on True Crime Sleep Stories
In January 1921, the five-masted schooner Carroll A. Deering was found abandoned on Diamond Shoals off Cape Hatteras in the Graveyard of the Atlantic, sails set, food in the galley, and her entire crew of eleven missing. This classic Outer Banks ghost ship mystery has the shape of true crime…
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103: The Missing Flannan Isles Lighthouse Keepers of Eilean Mòr | 31 Nights of Frights on True Crime Sleep Stories
The Flannan Isles Lighthouse Mystery: three lighthouse keepers vanish without a trace on Eilean Mòr, Scotland, in December 1900. A calm, cozy true crime sleep story for 31 Nights of Frights on True Crime Sleep Stories. In December 1900, three lighthouse keepers vanished from the remote Flannan...
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102: Charles Bravo & The Priory Mystery | 31 Nights of Frights On True Crime Sleep Stories
Welcome to another 31 Nights of Frights On True Crime Sleep Stories. In the spring of 1876, Balham still felt almost like a village on London's southern edge. On Bedford Hill stood The Priory, a large white house with turrets, horses in the stables, and an ordinary Tuesday dinner waiting indoors....
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101: Our Old House + Lenox College Paranormal Investigation Part 2 | 31 Nights of Frights on True Crime Sleep Stories
Welcome to another night of our 31 Nights of Frights on True Crime Sleep Stories. Tonight I'm telling you about the litle house we lived in for five years, and the Halloween night, before we ever moved in, when our neighbors watched a hearse pull into its driveway while trick-or-treaters filled…
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100: The Secrets of Madeleine Smith | 31 Nights of Frights on True Crime Sleep Stories
Welcome to another night of 31 Nights of Frights on True Crime Sleep Stories. Tonight we travel to Glasgow in the late 1850s, to Blythswood Square and the stone townhouses above the busy streets. An architect’s daughter writes secret letters to a packing clerk from Jersey. Three purchases of...
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99: The Pascagoula UFO Incident | 31 Nights of Frights on True Crime Sleep Stories
Welcome to another night of "31 Nights of Frights" on True Crime Sleep Stories. Tonight we venture down to the banks of the Pascagoula River in Mississippi on the evening of October 11, 1973. This is the story of two shipyard workers, Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker, who went fishing after work...
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98: It Wasn’t Just A Halloween Decoration | 31 Nights of Frights on True Crime Sleep Stories
Welcome back to 31 Nights of Frights on True Crime Sleep Stories... You’ve heard the urban legend. Someone’s driving past the pumpkins and fog machines in late October when one house seems to have gone too far. There’s a body hanging from a tree, or slumped on a porch, so realistic that people…
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97: The Borley Rectory Hauntings | 31 Nights of Frights on True Crime Sleep Stories
Welcome back to 31 Nights of Frights on True Crime Sleep Stories. Tonight's episode is about the Borley Rectory, and it is a ghost story with a dash of possible true crime. If you grew up reading old ghost books like I did, Borley was always in there, usually with that grainy photo of the big…
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96: The Devil's Footprints | 31 Nights of Frights on True Crime Sleep Stories
Welcome to another night of 31 Nights of Frights on True Crime Sleep Stories. On the night of February 8, 1855, snow fell over the villages along the River Exe in South Devon, England. The next morning, people in Topsham, Lympstone, Exmouth, Woodbury, Starcross, Dawlish, and Teignmouth found a…
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95: The Disappearance of Judge Crater | 31 Nights of Frights on True Crime Sleep Stories
Welcome to 31 Nights of Frights on True Crime Sleep Stories... On August 6, 1930, New York Supreme Court Justice Joseph Force Crater disappeared after dinner at a West 45th Street chophouse in Manhattan. He had returned from Maine earlier that week, spent the morning with files in his chambers,...
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94: The Death of Jeannette DePalma, Revisited | 31 Nights of Frights on True Crime Sleep Stories
Tonight’s episode is one of the oldest on the show, from back when True Crime Sleep Stories was still new and I was often recording on my cell phone. Most of you never heard the original, so for 31 Nights of Frights it felt like the right time to tell it again. This is the 1972 case of…
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93: Lenox College & Haunted Hopkinton Part 1 | 31 Nights of Frights on True Crime Sleep Stories
Welcome back to 31 Nights of Frights on True Crime Sleep Stories. This weekend I’ll be walking the halls of Lenox College in Hopkinton, Iowa, after dark. Not alone. Joining me are several true crime podcasters crossing over for a paranormal investigation: Justin from Generation Why, Lauren and…
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92: The Boy in the Box | 31 Nights of Frights on True Crime Sleep Stories
Welcome to 31 Nights of Frights on True Crime Sleep Stories. In the late winter of 1957, Fox Chase was a quiet corner of northeast Philadelphia, all rowhouses, corner stores, and rough fields at the edge of town. In February, in a brushy field off Susquehanna Road, a little boy was found wrapped…
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91: Listener Stories | 31 Nights of Frights on True Crime Sleep Stories
Welcome to 31 Nights of Frights on True Crime Sleep Stories. Tonight, three listener letters. A childhood house. A gas station after midnight. A rental where a staircase was not supposed to be used. Denise, winter of 1994, outside Moline. A mushroom nightlight. Her sister’s red parka on the hook.…
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90: Lizzie Borden & the House on Second Street | 31 Nights of Frights on True Crime Sleep Stories
Welcome to another night of 31 Nights of Frights on True Crime Sleep Stories... "Lizzie Borden took an axe, And gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, She gave her father forty-one." The kids jump-rope rhyme got almost everything wrong. It was not an axe, it was not her...
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89: HH Holmes & The World's Fair Hotel | True Crime Sleep Stories
Welcome back to “31 Nights of Frights” on True Crime Sleep Stories. Tonight we go to Chicago in the 1890s, when the World's Columbian Exposition was filling the city with light and crowds, and a block of brick and glass on Sixty-Third Street in Englewood was being run by a man who called himself...
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88: The Disappearance of Joan Risch | 31 Nights of Frights on True Crime Sleep Stories
Lincoln, Massachusetts. October 24, 1961. Joan Risch, 31, spends an ordinary Tuesday morning with her two small children while her husband is on an overnight business trip to New York. A dentist visit. Lunch, a nap, a little pruning in the yard. Around 2:15 a neighbor sees her moving quickly up…
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87: Shari's Scary Stories | 31 Nights of Frights on True Crime Sleep Stories
Welcome to 31 Nights of Frights on True Crime Sleep Stories. :-) Tonight Kelli reads 2 stories from a listener & friend of the show, Shari. A little girl in a doorway, a handprint on the inside of a car window, and a road her brother never took. Then a rental house, a growling cat, and a voice on...
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86: The Freeway Phantom | 31 Nights of Frights on True Crime Sleep Stories
Welcome to 31 Nights of Frights on True Crime Sleep Stories. In 1971 and 1972, six young Black girls and young women were killed in and around Washington, D.C. Their bodies were found along freeways in the District and Prince George’s County. The killer was never caught. The case is still open....
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85: John's Letter: The Haunted House on 7th Street | 31 Nights of Frights on True Crime Sleep Stories
Good evening, dear listeners. A listener wrote to me and asked for his story to be featured on our October "31 Nights of Frights" series on True Crime Sleep Stories. He asked to be called John. That's not his real name. What he sent was a family story they've been telling for 30 years. They still...
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83: The Captain & the Vanishing Boy | 31 Nights of Frights on True Crime Sleep Stories
Welcome to Night 1 of "31 Nights of Frights" on True Crime Sleep Stories, in honor of Spooky Season. My friend The Captain from True Crime Garage told me a weird & creepy story the other day, and I knew it belonged here. This is that story. You can also find it as a bonus episode on True Crime...
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84: 31 Nights of Frights: Coming in October, on True Crime Sleep Stories
Welcome to True Crime Sleep Stories... October is coming... And this year, we're not waiting for Halloween. Starting October 1st, True Crime Sleep Stories will release a new episode every single night. 31 nights. 31 stories. True crime that still doesn’t sit right... Paranormal encounters that…
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82: Belle Gunness & the Farm on McClung Road | True Crime Sleep Stories
Tonight we travel to northern Indiana in the spring of 1908. La Porte. A farm on McClung Road. A Norwegian widow named Belle Gunness lives there with three children. She keeps hogs. She writes letters. Neighbors see men come and go, trunks left behind, a life that looks busy and respectable...
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81: When The Nights Get Longer... | True Crime Sleep Stories
Tonight on True Crime Sleep Stories, 3 quiet disappearances for the soft start of spooky season. Tara Leigh Calico, 19, left home near Belen, New Mexico, on the morning of September 20, 1988, on her mother’s neon-pink Huffy. She told her mother, Patty Doel, to come get her if she was not back by...
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80: A Handle Worn Smooth: Haunting Axe Murders | True Crime Sleep Stories
Tonight on True Crime Sleep Stories, we follow a tool (the axe) instead of a single town or a single crime. In the late 1800s & early 1900s, an axe hung in nearly every woodshed. It split kindling to keep the stove roaring. Because it already belonged to the house, it sometimes became the last...
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79: The Red Barn Murder | True Crime Sleep Stories
Tonight on True Crime Sleep Stories, a young woman leaves her father’s cottage on a May afternoon and does not come home. The last place she was seen was a barn on a Suffolk hill. Months of letters follow. Then, strange dreams plague her stepmother. Tonight we walk the lanes of Polstead... ponds,...
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78: The Lady of the Dunes: The Woman Behind the Mystery | True Crime Sleep Stories
For nearly 50 years, the identity of a woman found murdered in the dunes of Provincetown, Massachusetts, remained a mystery. Known only as the “Lady of the Dunes,” investigators searched for decades to discover who she was, & who was responsible for her death. In 2022, advances in genetic…
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77: The Wineville Chicken Coop Murders | True Crime Sleep Stories
Tonight on True Crime Sleep Stories, we travel back to 1920s Southern California to explore the Wineville Chicken Coop Murders, the strange and conflicting evidence surrounding the case, and the families left searching for answers. In 1928, a quiet chicken ranch in Wineville, California, became…
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76: Starvation Heights | True Crime Sleep Stories
Tonight, on True Crime Sleep Stories... In the rainy woods of Olalla on Washington’s Kitsap Peninsula, Linda Burfield Hazzard ran the Institute of Natural Therapeutics. Neighbors called the hill "Starvation Heights". In 1911, British sisters Claire and Dora Williamson crossed Puget Sound for...
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75: The Unsolved Mystery of Room 1046: Who Killed Artemus Ogletree? True Crime Sleep Stories
On this episode of True Crime Sleep Stories... A young man checks into a Kansas City hotel under a false name. He has almost no belongings, keeps his room dark, and appears to be waiting for someone named Don. Then, in January 1935, he is found critically injured inside Room 1046. His real…
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74: The London Beer Flood of 1814 | True Crime Sleep Stories
In tonight's episode of True Crime Sleep Stories... On October 17, 1814, a massive vat at London's Horse Shoe Brewery burst, sending more than 300,000 gallons of porter flooding into the streets of St. Giles. Eight people died in one of London's strangest and most tragic disasters. Tonight, we...
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73: Shadows of Yellowstone: Into the Vastness | True Crime Sleep Stories
Shadows of Yellowstone: Into the Vastness In this episode of True Crime Sleep Stories, we step into the vast and quiet landscape of Yellowstone National Park. -We examine the strange 1970 murder of James Schlosser, a young social worker who offered two hitchhikers a ride near the park and never...
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72: The Mysterious Murder of Julia Wallace | True Crime Sleep Stories
In this episode of True Crime Sleep Stories, we'll gently explore the remarkable case of Julia Wallace, a quiet musician whose tragic death has puzzled detectives, judges, crime writers, and historians for more than ninety years. Step back into the rain-soaked streets of Liverpool in the winter…
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71: Mysteries in the Woods | True Crime Sleep Stories
On tonight's episode of True Crime Sleep Stories, we journey deep into the forest, where ancient legends of watchful spirits meet real-life tales of isolation and mystery. From shape-shifting guardians to vanished skiers, innocent victims at a camp for kids, a severed hand in Yosemite, and...
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70: Shadows of the Shoemaker: The Crimes of Joseph Kallinger | True Crime Sleep Stories
On tonight's episode of True Crime Sleep Stories... Joseph Kallinger, a Philadelphia shoemaker and father of seven, was shaped by severe childhood abuse and untreated mental illness. In 1974–1975, delusions of divine commands led him, and tragically, his 12-year-old son Michael, into a brief but...
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69: “It’s 10 p.m. Do You Know Where Your Children Are?” | True Crime Sleep Stories
Tonight on True Crime Sleep Stories, we revisit one of the most haunting public service announcements in American television history: the nightly reminder that began airing in the late 1960s... “It’s 10 p.m. Do you know where your children are?” What started as a simple, well-meaning nudge amid...
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68: Shadows in the Vatican: What Happened to Emanuela Orlandi? True Crime Sleep Stories
Welcome to True Crime Sleep Stories. In the summer of 1983, 15-year-old Emanuela Orlandi, a Vatican citizen and daughter of a papal household employee, left home for a routine music lesson in Rome... and never returned. What began as a simple missing person case quickly unraveled into one of the...
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67: The Monster With 21 Faces | True Crime Sleep Stories
In 1984, Japan was gripped by one of its strangest true crime sagas: a shadowy group calling themselves the "Monster with 21 Faces" kidnapped a candy company president from his bathtub, demanded millions in ransom, then escalated to taunting letters, arson, acid bombs, and actual cyanide-laced...
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66: The Black Moon Visitor: An Eeerie Bonus Episode | True Crime Sleep Stories
In this True Crime Sleep Stories bonus episode, host Kelli shares a real, personal mystery she first told on The Disclosure Lounge podcast. On a pitch-black "Black Moon" night in August 2025, while tent camping alone along a river, something intelligent moved through the darkness—circling,...
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65: Bigfoot Took Her? The Disappearance of Theresa Ann Bier | True Crime Sleep Stories
In this episode of True Crime Sleep Stories, we explore the unsolved 1987 disappearance of 16-year-old Theresa Ann Bier from Fresno, California. What began as an exciting day trip into the Sierra Nevada mountains—searching for the legendary Bigfoot—ended in mystery when the man she went with...
About this show
Hello and welcome to True Crime Sleep Stories, where you can settle in with a good true crime tale while drifting off into a safe sleepy slumber. Maybe you want to sip on a cup of hot tea, grab a warm fleece blanket, or cozy up by the fire. Whatever you decide to do, just make sure you’re comfortable and ready for relaxation.And now it’s time to get comfy… because I’m going to tell you a bedtime story.
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