True Weird Stuff

Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting Charlie No-Face - The Tragic Truth Behind the Green Man Legend   For decades, teenagers in western Pennsylvania whispered about a faceless figure walking the roads at night. They called him Charlie No-Face, or the Green Man. But behind the urban legend was Raymond Robinson, a real man horribly injured in a childhood electrical accident, who chose the cover of darkness because daylight brought cruelty, fear, and stares.  

Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting Rest In Peace: The Church Built Over a Pit of Corpses   In the 1800s, London was running out of room for the dead. At Enon Chapel, bodies were crammed beneath the church floor while worshippers gathered above the stench of decay. As overcrowded graveyards became a public health nightmare, George “Graveyard” Walker exposed the horrors hiding beneath the city’s chapels and burial grounds.

Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting Hammer Time - The Hollywood Love Triangle That Ended in Murder   In 1922, former showgirl Clara Phillips became convinced her husband was having an affair with 19-year-old Alberta Meadows. What followed was one of Los Angeles’ most sensational crimes: a jealous confrontation, a claw hammer, and a murder so brutal the press gave Phillips a chilling nickname: the “Tiger Woman.”

Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting Teenage Nazi Hunters: The Sisters Who Became Nazi Assassins   Freddie and Truus Oversteegen were teenage girls who exploited society's tendency to underestimate them, turning innocence into one of the most effective weapons against the Nazi occupation. Their courage, deception, and deadly missions remain among the most extraordinary stories of WWII.

Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting Ballsy: The Prison Doctor Who Experimented on Thousands of Inmates   At California's San Quentin Prison, Dr. Leo Stanley believed crime could be cured through surgery. Over the course of decades, inmates became subjects in a series of bizarre and disturbing experiments involving forced sterilizations, gland transplants, and testicles taken from executed prisoners. Stanley claimed he was advancing science. Others saw something far more sinister: a prison doctor using human beings as laboratory specimens.  

Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting Human Product 12 - The Man Secretly Injected With Plutonium   In 1945, Ebb Cade survived a car accident near Oak Ridge, Tennessee, only to become part of a secret experiment. Without his consent, doctors injected him with plutonium to study how radiation moved through the human body. Also known as "Human Product 12,” Cade became the first of 18 victims of one of the most disturbing human radiation experiments in American history.  

Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting The Enema King: Louis XIV's Strangest Obsession   Louis XIV was known as the Sun King, but history gave him another, far less majestic nickname. At Versailles, doctors prescribed them for everything from headaches to digestive problems. Convinced that enemas were the key to good health, Louis XIV received them by the thousands, making enemas both a medical treatment and a status symbol.

Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting Shock Doc - Inside Bellevue’s Horrific Child Psychiatry Experiments   Dr. Lauretta Bender became one of the most controversial child psychiatrists in America. At Bellevue Hospital, she used electroshock therapy on children diagnosed with childhood schizophrenia. Her work became tangled in the dark history of government-backed mind control research and society's terrifying faith in experimental psychiatry.

Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting Corpse Medicine - When Doctors Prescribed Human Remains   Before modern medicine, some cures came from the grave. For centuries, Europeans swallowed powdered skull, drank human blood, and consumed ground-up mummies in the belief that the dead could heal the living. It sounds like folklore, but corpse medicine was once accepted as a real treatment for everything from headaches to epilepsy.

Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting King of Quacks: The Greatest Medical Fraud in American History   Curtis Howe Springer claimed to be a doctor. He wasn't. He also claimed to be a minister. That was questionable, too. Yet somehow he convinced thousands of people to trust him with their health, their money, and their dreams. Selling miracle cures from his desert empire, Springer built a fortune on deception and became one of the most successful medical frauds in American history...the self-crowned King of Quacks.

Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting The Baroness: The Galápagos Murder Mystery Nobody Solved   The Galápagos Islands were supposed to be an escape from the world. But for a handful of European settlers, jealousy, betrayal, and suspicion turned their isolated paradise into the setting for one of history's strangest mysteries. When the self-proclaimed Baroness of this remote island suddenly vanished, everyone became a suspect.

Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting Unholy City: The Cult Leader Who Built His Own Town   His followers called him a prophet. Everyone else called him dangerous. In the hills of California, cult leader William E. Riker built a community known as Holy City...a town founded on racial segregation, strict control, and his own twisted interpretation of Christianity. What began as a religious movement grew into one of the strangest cult compounds in American history.

Today's True Weird Stuff - The Phantom Barber   In the summer of 1942, paranoia gripped the town of Pascagoula, Mississippi. An unknown intruder began sneaking into homes at night, not to steal valuables, but to cut the hair of sleeping children. As the attacks escalated into violence, mass hysteria took hold. A shadowy figure called “The Phantom Barber” terrorized families, then suddenly vanished without a trace.  

Today's True Weird Stuff - Bloody Bishop   In 1976, a respected U.S. diplomat named  William Bradford Bishop murdered his wife, mother, and three sons. He drove their bodies 275 miles to a swamp and set them on fire. Bishop vanished soon after, abandoning his car near the Great Smoky Mountains. He spent nearly 42 years on the FBI’s Most Wanted list and was never captured. No one knows if he died in those mountains…or if he simply became someone else.  

Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting The Living Corpse: The Man Who Made a Career Being Buried Alive   Before modern mortuary science, being buried alive was a real and terrifying possibility. But in mid-century America, one man turned that fear into a career. Meet “Country” Bill White, aka "The Living Corpse." Country Bill spent over two years of his life underground, chasing world records across drive-in theaters and car dealerships. This is the strange, wildly American story of a man who made a living cheating death.  

Today's True Weird Stuff - The Morlok 4   In 1930, four identical baby girls were born against impossible odds. The medical marvel of the Morlok quadruplets brought hope to a society ravaged by the Great Depression. But what the world didn't see was the strict, authoritarian home life behind closed doors. As their fame grew, so did their father’s control, transforming their celebrity into captivity.  

Today's True Weird Stuff - The Hello Girls: The Women Who Helped Win WWI...and Were Forgotten   Before women could vote or officially serve in the Army, 223 American women were sent to the front lines of World War I to run battlefield communications. They worked under bombardment, wore gas masks at their desks, and connected 26 million calls that helped secure Allied victory. They were sworn in as soldiers...and then denied recognition for 60 years. This is the story of the Hello Girls.  

Today's True Weird Stuff - The Angel Makers    In a quiet Hungarian village with no doctor and no escape from abusive marriages, the women found salvation in a midwife called Auntie Suzy. She delivered babies by day and, by night, brewed arsenic from flypaper. Husbands, lovers, parents, even children began to die. For nearly twenty years, no one asked questions. Mysterious deaths in the community became the status quo, creating the murderous legacy of the Angel Makers.  

Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting Beavers On The Moon   Claims that the Apollo 11 moon landing was a hoax have existed for decades. Meet the grandaddy of moon landing conspiracy theories, Bill Kaysing. He believed the Apollo Moon landings between 1969 and 1972 were faked. However, this isn't the only lunar conspiracy...The Great Moon Hoax of 1835 went as far as to trick people into believing that animals lived on the moon.

Get 15% off OneSkin with the code TRUEWEIRDSTUFF at https://www.oneskin.co/trueweirdstuff  #oneskinpod #sponsored   Today's True Weird Stuff - Amelia's SOS   In 1937, the world was told that Amelia Earhart simply vanished — swallowed whole by the Pacific, leaving nothing behind but silence. But what if there wasn’t silence? What if, in the days after her disappearance, faint and frantic distress calls crackled through the static? Amateur radio operators claimed they heard her pleading for help. A warship reported similar transmissions. And yet, history brushed them aside as hoaxes.

Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting Tripping Johns   One of our first episodes of True Weird Stuff was about the CIA dosing unsuspecting men with LSD and luring them to surveillance brothels. We're doing something a little different in this episode; we're providing live commentary as we listen back to "Tripping Johns."  

Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting Talking To Heaven   What happens when we die? Are you a person who believes that we flicker into and out of existence like earthbound fireflies, here and then gone? Or maybe you believe in an eternal soul that recycles itself lifetime after lifetime? What if you could know, what if you did know what happens when we die? In this episode, you’ll hear from internationally acclaimed spiritual medium James Van Praagh.  

Today's True Weird Stuff - Killer Ouija Board   Some say the Ouija board is just a game. A toy. A harmless way to pass the time. But in 1933, Dorothea Turley—once celebrated as America’s ideal of beauty—found herself trapped in a life she no longer wanted. Isolated, restless, and searching for answers, she turned to a Ouija board. What she got back was a sinister command: kill your husband.

Today's True Weird Stuff - Cursed Bread   In 1951, a quiet French village descended into chaos after people began hallucinating, screaming about monsters, and even jumping from windows—all after eating bread. Officially blamed on contaminated grain, the case took a darker turn when connections to CIA LSD experiments and the mysterious death of a government scientist surfaced. Was this a tragic accident… or a secret test on an entire town?  

Today's True Weird Stuff - The Jumper   On November 28, 1953, a man crashed through a tenth-floor window at New York City’s Hotel Statler. His name was Frank Olson — a scientist working on some of the most disturbing top-secret programs of the Cold War. Days earlier, the CIA had secretly dosed him with LSD. The official story? A troubled man had a breakdown and jumped. But decades later, new evidence raised a terrifying possibility: Frank Olson didn’t jump...he was thrown.  

Today's True Weird Stuff - Open Wide   In the early 1900s, psychiatrist Dr. Henry Cotton claimed he could cure mental illness by removing hidden infections in the body. His theory led to a shocking medical practice at the New Jersey State Hospital for the Insane in Trenton—patients had all of their teeth pulled, tonsils removed, and even parts of their intestines surgically removed in an attempt to eliminate bacteria believed to cause insanity.  What started as a revolutionary medical theory quickly spiraled into one of the most disturbing chapters in psychiatric history.

Today's True Weird Stuff - Scarlett Sisters   Born into Southern privilege, sisters Ada and Minna Simms escaped violent marriages, stumbled into show business, and eventually pivoted into running what became the most luxurious brothel in America. The Everleigh Club catered exclusively to millionaires, politicians, gangsters, and royalty. Ada and Minna transformed prostitution into an elite, curated luxury experience that also brought controversy to their front door.  

Today's True Weird Stuff - Jeffrey Epstein, Vampire   How do you build a conspiracy theory? Start with a villain. Add power. Stir in mystery. True Weird Stuff examines the internet's bizarre claim that Jeffrey Epstein is an immortal vampire who once lived as President Andrew Jackson. We trace the ingredients: the suspicious timing of press releases, strange digital footprints after Epstein’s death, the uncanny resemblance to the face on the $20 bill — and society's refusal to accept an unsatisfying ending.

Today's True Weird Stuff - Swing Your Partner   From 17th-century folk traditions to 20th-century propaganda, the square dance traveled a long road before landing in your elementary school gym. What looks like homespun Americana hides a secret: a powerful man’s fear that jazz was a threat to white America. Sometimes the most wholesome traditions carry the darkest fingerprints.  

Today's True Weird Stuff - Chronovision   In 1972, a Vatican priest claimed he built a machine that could watch past events like a television...everything from ancient Rome to the crucifixion of Christ. Father Pellegrino Ernetti called his invention the Chronovisor, and Ernetti claimed the Vatican saw the machine, feared it, and hid it away forever. The Chronovisor promised answers that no religion or government could survive. Was it the greatest secret ever buried, or a warning about wanting proof too badly?

Today's True Weird Stuff - Internal Sunshine   William J.A. Bailey wasn’t a doctor, but he convinced the public to trust him anyway—selling radium-laced water as a cure for nearly everything. One of those believers was Eben Byers, a wealthy athlete who drank more than a thousand doses, slowly poisoning himself until his jaw disintegrated and his skull began to rot before his death. The death of Eben Byers forced the world to finally confront the cost of pseudoscience that goes unchecked.  

Today's True Weird Stuff - The Perfect Baby   In 1919, a toddler known as one of America’s “Perfect Babies” vanished from his New Jersey home. Searchers scoured the woods. Accusations spread. Theories multiplied. When his remains were found deep in the swamp, they answered nothing. The disappearance and death of 2-year-old Billy Dansey spun a web of fear, superstition, prejudice, and failed justice.

Today's True Werid Stuff - Lynnewood Hall   Lynnewood Hall was built as a monument to wealth, power, and permanence—an American Versailles, commissioned by the Widener family, meant to last for generations. But tragedy struck the Widener family at the height of their fortune, tying the mansion forever to the sinking of the Titanic and a grief no amount of money could undo. As decades passed, the house was stripped, sold, misused, and left to decay, becoming a silent witness to hubris, loss, and the slow collapse of a gilded dream.

Today's True Weird Stuff - Tiny Pedro   In 1932, a prospector blasting for gold in Wyoming uncovered something no one expected: a tiny mummified human seated upright in a cave. Scientists examined it. Crowds paid to see it. And then—like so many pieces of ancient history—it disappeared. Join us as we uncover the legend of Tiny Pedro.

Today's True Weird Stuff - The Award Winning "Doomsday Clock"   True Weird Stuff is currently on hiatus, but Sheri and Max will be back with a brand new episode next week. Until then, we present to you another one of their award winning episodes. Winner of two Signal Awards for best history episode and best editing, "Doomsday Clock" explores the origins of the clock, and its lingering flirtation with striking midnight.

The Award Winning "Once Upon A Shroom"   Sheri and Max have placed True Weird Stuff on hiatus through the holiday season. Today, we present to you another one of their award winning episodes. Winner of a W3 Award for best history episode, Once Upon A Shroom dives into the story of the man who popularized shrooms in America.

Today's True Weird Stuff - The Award Winning "Cokey & Lucky"   Sheri and Max have placed True Weird Stuff on hiatus as we enter the chaotic crunch time of the Christmas season, In their stead, we present to you one of their award-winning episodes. Winner of a W3 Award for best history episode, Cokey and Lucky explores the rise and fall of the architect of the modern mafia.   Rula patients typically pay $15 per session when using insurance. Connect with quality therapists and mental health experts who specialize in you at https://www.rula.com/trueweirdstuff #rulapod

Today's True Weird Stuff - The Phantom Killer   In 1946, the twin cities of Texarkana were gripped by terror; an unknown person began attacking couples in the night, murdering five people over the course of weeks. As the murders mounted, fear and paranoia consumed the community. Despite an exhaustive investigation fueled by endless false tips, bogus confessions, and hundreds of possible suspects, the actual perpetrator was never found. They'd vanished without a trace and will forever be known as the Phantom Killer.

Today's True Weird Stuff - Dopey & Sad: The Year In Review   It's been quite the year for the True Weird Stuff crew. We won awards and spent countless hours writing and editing dozens of stories that may or may not have been lost to time. We don't have a story for you in this episode, per se, but it is the tale of how we've managed to build True Weird Stuff into something we're really proud of.   Rula patients typically pay $15 per session when using insurance. Connect with quality therapists and mental health experts who specialize in you at https://www.rula.com/trueweirdstuff #rulapod      

Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting The First War On Christmas   We're off for the Thanksgiving holiday, so in honor of Christmas here's a tale about a group of Grinches who hated the holiday. The Puritans in Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 17th Century, people like Governor William Bradford and Reverend Increase Mather, hated Christmas so much that they chose to ban it.     Rula patients typically pay $15 per session when using insurance. Connect with quality therapists and mental health experts who specialize in you at https://www.rula.com/trueweirdstuff #rulapod    

Today's True Weird Stuff - Road Zoo   As cars and family road trips exploded across America in the early 20th century, hundreds of mom-and-pop zoos sprang up along the highways, promising exotic animals, cheap thrills, and quick profits. But behind the quirky billboards and hand-painted signs, many of these zoos operated with little to no oversight. Lax regulations opened the door for questionable practices: cramped cages, animal mistreatment, and even the smuggling of dangerous species that sometimes resulted in serious injuries—or worse.    

Today's True Weird Stuff - The Fall of Fatty   In 1921, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was one of Hollywood’s biggest stars—beloved, bankable, and untouchable. But a wild party at San Francisco’s St. Francis Hotel changed everything. When young actress Virginia Rappe fell mysteriously ill and later died, Arbuckle was accused of murdering her, igniting one of the first major celebrity scandals in American history. The tabloids turned the tragedy into a feeding frenzy, but the truth of what really happened that night remains murky over a century later.  

Today's True Weird Stuff - Gorillas in the Myth   Long before Bigfoot roamed through modern folklore, there was another giant said to haunt the jungles. For centuries, explorers called it a monster, a savage man-beast that couldn’t possibly exist. Then one day, proof was uncovered. From cryptid legend to reality, this is the tale of the gorilla and its emergence from the mythical shadows.

Today's True Weird Stuff - Bright Lights, Big Sleepy Revisited   This was one of the first True Weird Stuff episodes we did...it's a deeply personal story for Sheri, who shared the time she and her family experienced a "lost time" phenomenon. This episode has been updated to include a newly recorded Post-Mortem, in which Sheri reveals new information she recently learned while visiting her mom.  

Today's True Weird Stuff - Flat Earth City   Wilbur Glenn Voliva was a self-proclaimed prophet, flat-earth crusader, and autocratic ruler of Zion, Illinois. This fiery preacher took over John Alexander Dowie’s religious utopia in the early 1900s, ruling with an iron fist, Volivabanning everything from whistling to reading newspapers on Sundays. But his most infamous crusade was against science itself: Voliva loudly declared that the Earth was flat, even offering thousands of dollars to anyone who could prove it was round.  

Today's True Weird Stuff - The Littlest Survivor   In 1846, the Donner Party set out westward seeking new land and opportunity, but their journey turned into a nightmare when they became trapped by snow in the unforgiving Sierra Nevada. Starvation, freezing temperatures, and impossible choices claimed the lives of many members of the Donner Party. Eliza Donner Houghton, the youngest survivor and among the last to be rescued, witnessed the loss of both parents and bore witness to fear, desperation, and horrors no child should endure.

Today's True Weird Stuff - A Demon Named Bob   In 1878, a quiet town in Nova Scotia became the stage for one of the most chilling hauntings in North American history. After a near-death experience, a young woman named Esther Cox began to suffer strange attacks — unseen forces that scratched messages into walls, set fires, and hurled objects through the air. Was she the victim of a violent haunting, or the center of a psychological storm misunderstood by her time?  

Today's True Weird Stuff - Liar, Liar, Plants on Fire   In 1966, Cleve Backster, an interrogation specialist for the CIA, claimed to have discovered something shocking: plants seemed to respond to human thoughts and emotions. He came to this conclusion by hooking up plants to a polygraph machine to measure their response. His controversial experiments with polygraphs suggested that living things might share a hidden form of communication, and sparked a wave of fascination and skepticism that still lingers today.  

Today/s True Weird Stuff - The Terrordome   Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia became notorious for unethical medical experiments conducted on inmates from the 1950s through the 1970s. Prisoners, many of them poor and Black, were lured into participating with small payments; doctors also lied to prisoners about the risks. Under dermatologist Albert Kligman, inmates were exposed to chemicals, viruses, asbestos, and other toxic chemicals that caused lifelong physical and psychological damage. The horrors of this institution are why Holmesburg Prison was given the nickname, "The Terrordome."      

Today's True Weird Stuff - Wild Child (Airdate 9/19/2025)   In 1797, a young boy was discovered in the woods of France. He would eventually be found and taken into towns to be cared for by the locals. This boy, known as Victor, couldn't speak, was covered in scars, and behaved like a wild animal. Victor would escape many times, but he was eventually taken in by a French physician, who vowed to turn Victor into a civilized member of society.