Weird Darkness: Paranormal & True Crime Stories

Four friends went into the Massachusetts woods looking for a paved road that starts in the middle of nowhere, and they found what was waiting at the end of it.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/mitm-asyluminthewoodsSOURCES and RESOURCES:“The Asylum In The Woods” by Redditor R.L. Rogers: https://www.creepypasta.com/the-asylum-in-the-woods/WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Midnight In The Macabre (MITM), originally aired: July 28, 2026

In 1947, the Army announced it had recovered a crashed "flying disc" near Roswell, then reversed itself within a day — a contradiction the Air Force didn't explain until 1994, when it revealed a classified spy program called Project Mogul. Roswell wasn't even the first: unidentified wreckage and bodies had been turning up for decades before it.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/RoswellWasntFirstFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: When you hear the words “UFO crash” you likely think of Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. And while that is the most famous of supposed extraterrestrial spaceship crashes, it is by no means the first. In fact, there were several taking place before Roswell became a household name. (UFO Crashes Before Roswell) *** But first – we’ll take a look at Roswell itself… and what might have been behind the crash, the UFOs, and the aliens! (Behind Roswell’s Aliens) *** Numerous travelers have gone missing in Nahanni Valley… and many whose bodies have been found, have been decapitated. It’s no wonder it has been nicknamed “The Valley of Headless Men”. (The Valley of Headless Men) *** In 2016, construction in a San Francisco family’s backyard unearthed a terrifying find… a glass coffin. And the history behind it tells a morbid history of the city. (The Karner’s Backyard Glass Coffin) *** Former Green Beret Jeffrey MacDonald claimed that a gang of acid-crazed Manson Family copycats brutally murdered his pregnant wife and two daughters in 1970, but then he was found guilty. Did he commit the crime, or did the law convict the wrong man? (The Evil Deeds of Jeffrey MacDonald) *** It’s understood that scientifically, alchemy – attempting to turn a substance or element into gold – is impossible. But then, there is that one incident that took place in the early seventeenth century that has some people wondering if that’s wrong. (The Alchemy Master)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:01:27.594 = Show Open00:03:47.621 = Behind Roswell’s Aliens / UFO Crashes Before Roswell00:19:45.640 = The Valley of Headless Men ***00:33:18.357 = The Karner’s Backyard Glass Coffin00:44:54.640 = The Evil Deeds of Jeffrey MacDonald ***00:55:31.498 = The Alchemy Master01:02:26.698 = 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:“Behind Roswell’s Aliens” by Adam Janos for History.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yd5fhudu“UFO Crashes Before Roswell” from Anomalien.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2w6d76yh“The Valley of Headless Men” by Aleksa Vuckovic for Ancient-Origins.net: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p9c6zf4“The Evil Deeds of Jeffrey MacDonald” by Marco Margaritoff for AllThatsInteresting.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8eant7“The Alchemy Master” by Ellen Lloyd for AncientPages.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4xzysbwc“The Karner’s Backyard Glass Coffin” by Trilby Beresford for Ranker.com’s Graveyard Shift:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/3mpvk9jh(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 2021This episode of Weird Darkness moves from a classified Cold War balloon program in the New Mexico desert to a Canadian valley littered with decapitated bodies, a Victorian child's glass coffin dug up in a San Francisco backyard, a Green Beret convicted of butchering his own family, and a seventeenth-century alchemist tortured for the secret of turning lead into gold.It opens with the 1947 Roswell crash, tracing how rancher W.W. "Mac" Brazel's discovery of wreckage on his Lincoln County property led Colonel William Blanchard's Roswell Army Air Field to announce the capture of a "flying disc," only for the Army to reverse itself within days and blame a weather balloon, complete with staged photos of Major Jesse Marcel posing with the debris. The story follows the account through the U.S. Air Force's 1994 admission that the wreckage actually came from Project Mogul, a secret high-altitude balloon array built to detect Soviet atomic tests, and its 1997 explanation that reported alien bodies were fallen parachute test dummies, then weighs those official conclusions against UFO researcher Donald Schmitt's objections and journalist Annie Jacobsen's competing claim that the crash involved deformed children deployed by Joseph Stalin and designed by Nazi doctor Josef Mengele.From there, the episode moves through six UFO crash reports that predate Roswell by decades, including an 1897 cigar-shaped craft said to have destroyed Judge Proctor's windmill in Aurora, Texas, and left a small humanoid body buried in the local cemetery; an 1862 wreck witnessed by shipwrecked sailors from the vessel Christine on a deserted Indian Ocean island, where they found twelve-foot-tall bodies with bronze beards; a UFO crash near Stavropol, Russia, whose three survivors reportedly died from being unable to breathe Earth's atmosphere; a 1941 crash in the Carolinas recovered by the U.S. Army during a military exercise involving soldier Guy Simeone; an 1884 debris field of gear-like metal fragments found by rancher John Ellis in Dundy County, Nebraska; and a wartime British crash investigated by journalist Dorothy Kilgallen, who died shortly after publishing claims that the recovered craft's crew stood under four feet tall.Next, the story shifts to Canada's Nahanni Valley, where at least 44 people have died or vanished since 1908, beginning with prospector brothers Willie and Frank McLeod, whose headless skeletons were found at their camp two years after they disappeared, and continuing through the decapitations of Swiss prospector Martin Jorgenson and outlaw "Yukon" Fisher, the mysterious cabin fire that killed Phil Powers, and the vanishing of Annie Laferte, who was later spotted wandering naked and disoriented near the Flat River — deaths locals attribute variously to the legendary Naha tribe, the valley's hot sulphur springs, or predators, while Dene oral history holds that the warlike Naha people simply disappeared without explanation.The episode then turns to 2016, when a construction crew remodeling John and Ericka Karner's San Francisco home unearthed a 19th-century glass-and-cast-iron coffin containing the preserved body of a toddler, later identified through DNA testing led by genealogist Elissa Davey as Edith Howard Cook, who died of malnutrition in 1876 and was accidentally left behind when San Francisco's Odd Fellows Cemetery was relocated to Colma in the 1930s — a discovery the Karner family says ended years of unexplained footsteps they'd heard from a toddler no longer in the house.From there, the story follows former Green Beret Jeffrey MacDonald, convicted of stabbing his pregnant wife Colette and daughters Kimberly and Kristen to death at Fort Bragg in 1970 after claiming a blonde intruder chanting about acid and "pigs" oversaw the killings, an account investigators concluded was staged using details from the recent Manson Family murders; the case follows his decades of appeals, including the 1983 bestseller "A Fatal Vision" that branded him a psychopath and filmmaker Errol Morris's later book arguing the evidence against him was mishandled.The episode closes with the story of Alexander Seton, a secretive Scottish alchemist known as the Cosmopolitan, who in 1602 convinced skeptical Swiss professor Wolfgang Drenheim that he had transmuted lead into gold using nothing but a wrapped powder and a goldsmith's crucible in Fribourg. Seton's success drew the attention of Emperor Rudolf II and later trapped him in the custody of Christian II, Elector of Saxony, who had him pierced with iron spikes and burned with molten lead in an attempt to force him to reveal his formula; Seton escaped in 1603 with the help of his friend Michael Sendivogius but died a broken man soon after, and the alchemical text he was said to have written, the Book of Twelve Chapters, was destroyed, leaving his method lost.

This isn’t one of my usual stories or episodes – but it is still terrifying (to me, at least). Over the weekend, a devastating cyberattack locked me out of my Google account, YouTube channels, Dropbox, and many of the tools I rely on to produce Weird Darkness. For several days, I genuinely didn’t know if the show would survive.In this special emergency update, I explain what happened, why new episodes suddenly stopped, what became of the YouTube channels, where things stand now, and why this has been one of the darkest weeks of my life—both professionally and personally.The good news? Weird Darkness is still here.Thank you for your patience, your encouragement, and your prayers. It means more than you know.Listen and subscribe at: https://WeirdDarkness.com

A young scholar’s visit to his reclusive uncle on a lonely Shetland island leads him into a nightmare of black rituals, impossible memories, and a mystery that defies time itself.Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/OTRCHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “The Figure in the Moonlight” (May 02, 1978) ***WD00:45:48.366 = Macabre, “The Avenger” (December 18, 1961) ***WD01:14:37.183 = Philip Marlowe, “Vital Statistic” (March 14, 1950)01:44:11.159 = Boson Blackie, Ghost of Flo Newton” (May 28, 1947)02:09:18.137 = The Black Mass, “O Mirror Mirror” (February 12, 1964) ***WD02:24:19.861 = Michael Shayne, “Judge Stanton Murdered” (June 04, 1945) ***WD02:54:00.924 = Beyond Midnight, “Tangled Way” (ADU) ***WD (LQ)03:19:56.143 = MindWebs, “Eurema’s Dam” (1975-1984) ***WD03:49:08.226 = CBS Radio Workshop, “The Case of the White Kitten” (July 13, 1956) ***WD04:18:13.876 = Mystery in the Air, “Queen of Spades” (September 1, 1947)04:45:13.199 = Strange Adventure “The Imposter” (1945) ***WD04:48:29.470 = Calling All Detectives, “The Ship Julia Louise” (July 05, 1948) ***WD (LQ)04:56:29.725 = Incredible But True, “Dragon of Buren County” (1950-1951)04:59:59.123 = Show Close(ADU) = Air Date Unknown(LQ) = Low Quality***WD = Remastered, edited, or cleaned up by Weird Darkness to make the episode more listenable. Audio may not be pristine, but it will be better than the original file which may have been unusable or more difficult to hear without editing.CUSTOM WEBPAGE: https://weirddarkness.com/WDRR0726

A blues legend, a saint, a haunted squire, and a possessed tailor — five people who, across four centuries, were each said to have come face to face with the Devil himself.==========HOUR ONE: Many tales describe encounters with the devil himself. Yet not all are the same. Sometimes Satan approaches his prey… other times, the lost soul goes seeking Lucifer to make a deal. Either way, the results are never favorable. (Diabolical Dealings With The Devil) *** It wasn’t until recently that I’d even heard of the cryptid, Ahool. In case it’s new to you as well, it’s a winged cryptid that some portray as a giant bat, others claim it’s a flying primate. Personally, I think it looks like a werewolf with bat wings. Whatever it is, we’ll learn a bit more about the Ahool. (The Cry Of The Ahool)==========HOUR TWO: 

Of course a lot of people likely don’t believe in heaven or hell and many will dismiss such things as mythical tales or folklore. However there are places on Earth that could be considered hell – no not Detroit or Wichita. We’re talking about actual places that look like the entrances to purgatory. And perhaps they really are. (Secret Doors to the Underworld) *** A king, a gossoon and a bear walked into a bar. No, this is not the first line of a joke, but a common occurrence in Potrero Hill in San Francisco, California, during the 1880s. The king was Frank McManus, the gossoon was Frank’s baseball-playing brother, Cornelius, and the bear was a large inebriated ursine. (King of the Irish Hill) *** Why are some people suddenly vigorous, alert, and feeling much better shortly before they pass away? It is something that has happened since time began, but medical experts are still baffled by it. (Terminal Lucidity Phenomenon) *** While many say the most haunted hotel is the one in Colorado that was used in the film “The Shining” - there is evidence that one in Eureka Springs, Arkansas deals with even more paranormal activity. (The Crescent Hotel)==========SUDDEN DEATH OVERTIME: Two men were found dead in the bushes, beheaded… and emasculated. But that was just the beginning of the Mad Butcher’s killing spree. (The Cleveland Torso Murders) *** Seeing reptiles in Oklahoma isn’t all that uncommon – even dinosaur fossils are found in the state. But there have also been reports of something much stranger – a snake/human hybrid creature more terrifying than it sounds. (Oklahoma Snake Man)==========SOURCES AND REFERENCES FROM TONIGHT’S SHOW:“Baba Vanga” from Paranormality Magazine: https://weirddarkness.com/magazine“Diabolical Dealings With The Devil” by Laura for Paranormal Scholar: https://tinyurl.com/y94czoxt,https://tinyurl.com/yc5uy7mj“The Cry of the Ahool” by Gary Brandt from Paranormality Magazine: https://weirddarkness.com/magazine“Secret Doors To The Underworld”, by Facts Verse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gU6-lfWk3Zo“King of the Irish Hill” by Paul Drexler for Crime Traveller: https://tinyurl.com/y7tmp6lz“Terminal Lucidity Phenomenon” by Cynthia McKanzie for Message to Eagle: http://ow.ly/5G8W30ocL0Q“The Cleveland Torso Murders” by Doug MacGowan for Historic Mysteries: https://tinyurl.com/ycwha94c“The Crescent Hotel” by Amanda Penn for Vocal Media Horror: https://tinyurl.com/ycvral8j“Oklahoma Snake Man” by Bab Salam (link to story no longer exists)==========(Over time links seen above may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for material I use whenever possible. If I have overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it immediately. Some links may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)=========="I have come into the world as a light, so that no one who believes in me should stay in darkness." — John 12:46==========WeirdDarkness®, WeirdDarkness© 2026==========To become a Weird Darkness Radio Show affiliate, contact Radio America at [email protected], or call 800-807-4703 (press 2 or dial ext 250).

On their third date she told him her face was removable, that she had to clean it every night behind a locked door, and that he must never look at what was underneath.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/mitm-wiferemovablefaceSOURCES and RESOURCES: “My Wife Has a Removable Face” by Redditor N.S. Lewis: https://www.reddit.com/user/nslewis, https://www.creepypasta.com/my-wife-has-a-removable-face/WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Midnight In The Macabre (MITM), originally aired: July 27, 2026

An insomniac walking a Massachusetts cemetery after midnight spots a light in the groundskeeper's shack, and finds nine men in blue shrouds beside a freshly dug pit.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/mitm-bloodkeeperSOURCES and RESOURCES:“The Blood Keeper” by Christopher Maxim at https://www.reddit.com/r/ChristopherMaxim/WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Midnight In The Macabre (MITM), originally aired: July 26, 2026

A Broadway couple buys the vacant Connecticut house no agent in town will touch, covers the den wall with a floor-to-ceiling photograph of an African jungle, and begins to notice that the lion in the picture doesn't always hold the same pose.Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/OTRCHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “The House on Chimney Pot Lane” (April 28, 1978) ***WD00:45:28.916 = The Haunting Hour, “Date In The Dark” (June 03, 1945) ***WD01:10:28.151 = The Hermit’s Cave, “The House With a Past” (June 27, 1937)01:34:32.198 = Mystery Is My Hobby, “Millionaire Threatened” (1945)01:59:10.650 = Sherlock Holmes, “The Haunted Bagpipes” (February 17, 1947)02:28:37.363 = Mystery House, “Bury Me Not” (May 26, 1946) ***WD02:54:24.361 = Inner Sanctum, “Desert Death” (January 09, 1945)03:23:44.926 = Jeff Regan, “The Diamond Quartet” (August 14, 1948)03:52:43.766 = The Key, “Night Prowler” (1956)04:16:47.055 = Lights Out, “Uninhabited” (December 22, 1937) ***WD (LQ)04:45:34.772 = Strange Adventure, “The Five Tickets” (1945) ***WD04:48:49.470 = Calling All Detectives, “A Man Admits To Murder” (June 15, 1948) ***WD (LQ)04:56:47.879 = Incredible But True, “The Face of Death” (1950-1951)05:00:28.938 = Show Close(ADU) = Air Date Unknown(LQ) = Low Quality***WD = Remastered, edited, or cleaned up by Weird Darkness to make the episode more listenable. Audio may not be pristine, but it will be better than the original file which may have been unusable or more difficult to hear without editing.CUSTOM WEBPAGE: https://weirddarkness.com/WDRR0725

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

A beautiful young woman knocks on an old soldier's door one summer evening asking to use his phone — and the six-year-old hiding in the back bedroom knows, before anyone says a word, that something is terribly wrong.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/mitm-NeverTrustAPrettyFaceSOURCES and RESOURCES: “Never Trust a Pretty Face” by Weirdo family member Angie Trafford: https://www.facebook.com/AngieTraffordauthor/WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: July 24, 2026

A Louisiana woman vanished from her home in pink pajamas, a K9 search went cold, and a medium she'd never met told her daughters exactly where to find the body in the woods — and now, after a private forensic review, the sheriff's office has reopened the case it once closed as an accidental drowning.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources and transcript): https://weirddarkness.com/TheresaDawnJonesLISTEN 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 24, 2026This episode of Weird Darkness follows the disappearance and death of Theresa Dawn Jones near Bernice, Louisiana, a case that ran from a missing persons report to an accidental-drowning ruling to a homicide reinvestigation — and the phone call from a psychic medium a thousand miles away that pointed her family straight to the body.On the night of February 2nd, 2023, fifty-six-year-old Theresa Jones walked out of her home in the Evergreen community on Lake D'Arbonne wearing pink pajamas, leaving behind her phone, her wallet, her car keys, and the eyeglasses she needed to see, and by the time her boyfriend returned from a work trip in Lake Charles he found the house torn apart and Theresa gone. The Union Parish Sheriff's Office searched with a Lincoln Parish K9 unit that tracked her scent out to Highway 2 before losing it, chased sightings of a woman carrying gas cans and a stop at a Circle K in West Monroe, then stalled. Her daughters Ashley Deese and Brittany turned to Carolyn Clapper, a Wisconsin medium who took their call at 10:48 at night and, over forty-five minutes, described a fallen log at a tree line, a creek, and a sickness that would come over whoever went looking — directions that led Ashley to her mother's body in Edmonds Creek the next morning, found nude from the waist down with the water still shallow around her. Dr. Frank Peretti's autopsy in Little Rock ruled the death an accidental drowning with methamphetamine intoxication as a contributing factor, and the sheriff's office closed the case in August 2023, but Ashley never accepted it, and a retired Texas aquatic-death investigator named Greg Lawson publicly questioned why no rape kit or fingernail scraping was ever done. More than a year later, private forensic consultant John Oliveira of Applied Forensic Solutions reviewed the file and found only 150 milliliters of water in the lungs, livor mortis fixed in the legs rather than the face-down position she was found in, a clean upper jacket above the waterline, and bruising the autopsy never recorded — evidence pointing away from drowning and toward a body staged in the water after death. At the end of October 2025, Oliveira presented those findings to Union Parish detectives, and the sheriff's office reopened Theresa Jones's death as a possible homicide, more than two years after the paperwork first called it an accident.

In the summer of 1958, phantom fires struck the Tuck family's Talladega, Alabama home more than fifty times — bread igniting on its own, single garments bursting into flame, sulfur-smelling fires that followed the family across three homes before a nine-year-old confessed to a scheme that never explained the blaze witnessed by police in the yard, or the fires that started when the boy was gone.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/paranormalflamesREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yc4nrtujFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: In the late 1950s, the Tuck family of Alabama found themselves at the center of a terrifying ordeal as mysterious fires spontaneously erupted in their home. Despite their best efforts to escape the flames, the fiery phenomenon followed them from one residence to another, consuming their possessions and leaving them homeless. We’ll look at this case and other similar ones where the seeming explanation is nothing short of paranormal. (Paranormal Flames) *** In the sleepy Kentish hamlet of Charing, a centuries-old mystery unfolds every May Day. As the clock strikes midnight, ghostly children emerge from their moss-encrusted graves, their ethereal feet dancing to the silent fiddle's tune. It’s all part of the "Night of the Dancing Feet." (Dancing After Death) *** Before his wife's murder in June 2009, Eli Weaver had numerous affairs with women he met through online dating sites, where he called himself an "Amish Stud." But only one mistress was willing to kill for him. (Eli Weaver, Amish Stud and Murderer) *** The American West evokes iconic images often seen in movies: bold adventures, noon shootouts, resolute sheriffs and marshals maintaining order, and the cavalry arriving just in time. However, the history of the Wild West, replete with myths and stereotypes, presents a more complex and sometimes disturbing reality about justice in that era. (Wild West Justice) *** On the morning of July 13, 1997, the body of Denise Johnson was discovered inside her burning childhood home in Kill Devil Hills, NC. Emergency responders quickly realized they weren't dealing with a simple arson, but a murder as well.  Now, more than two decades later, the case remains unsolved. (The Unsolved Murder of Denise Johnson) *** Hachishakusama, often referred to as the "Japanese Slender Man," is a haunting figure from Japanese urban legends that rivals the terror of her American counterpart. While the Slender Man has gained a cult-like following and has even inspired real-life horror stories, Hachishakusama's tale is equally spine-chilling and capable of keeping you up at night. (The Japanese Slender Man)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:01:21.690 = Show Open00:04:30.483 = Paranormal Flames00:23:29.009 = The Unsolved Murder of Denise Johnson ***00:37:06.405 = Dancing After Death (Night of the Dancing Feet)00:44:39.904 = Wild West Justice ***00:54:40.356 = Eli Weaver, Amish Stud and Murderer01:03:17.535 = The Japanese Slender Man ***01:08:47.360 = 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:BOOK: “Ablaze – The Mysterious Fires of Spontaneous Human Combustion” by Larry E. Arnold:https://amzn.to/3UqdhmzBOOK: “A Killing In Amish Country” by Gregg Olsen and Rebecca Morris: https://amzn.to/44wghmb“Paranormal Flames” source: Marcus Lowth at UFO Insight: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4eb8xht2“The Unsolved Murder of Denise Johnson” source: Jacob Shelton at Ranker: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8t3b7p“Dancing After Death” by Ken DaSilva-Hill submitted directly to Weird Darkness and used with permission“Wild West Justice” source: Christy Box at Weird History: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8db9vj“Eli Weaver, Amish Stud and Murderer” source: Hannah Reilly Holtz at AllThatsInteresting.com:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4jfmybjh“The Japanese Slender Man” source: Curry L Mitchell at ListVerse: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/bdd7fthz(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 01, 2024

Fourteen years after Irasema Chavez was stabbed more than a hundred times in her Arlington apartment, a single drop of blood on her bedroom television stand and two plastic forks left on a restaurant table have led police to charge one of her former close friends with capital murder.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/IrasemaChavezLook 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.

Two sisters flying to Puerto Rico to clear out their grandmother's house find a shoebox of bloodied feathers in the kitchen cupboard, and thirty handwritten journals hidden under a loose tile in the garage.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/mitm-grandmothergrimoireSOURCES and RESOURCES: “My Grandmother Left Behind Some Really Dark Secrets” by Evelyn Bertrand: https://tinyurl.com/yy8gx627WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Midnight In The Macabre (MITM), originally aired: July 24, 2026

In an update to the Caroline Peña murder case, the lead detective has testified that while Kitty Diaz drove the car and threw punches during the assault, she never stabbed anyone — and a judge has dropped her bond from five million dollars to two million, which she still cannot afford to post.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/diazsisters20260723GO FUND ME: https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-for-caroline-penas-childrenLook 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.

From the vengeful Bell Witch to the lingering spirits of Gettysburg, America is packed with haunted spots that refuse to let go of their ghosts – whether it’s eerie voices in old asylums, shadowy figures in historic mansions, or phantom footsteps in forgotten graveyards. If you’re looking for a brush with the supernatural, these legendary (and lesser-known) locations won’t disappoint.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/HauntedAmericaREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/36de8fpnLISTEN 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:“America’s Most Haunted Places” by Troy Taylor and April Slaughter for AmericanHauntingsInk.com:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/582mh58k (used with permission)“America’s Not-So-Famous Haunted Houses” by Troy Taylor for AmericanHauntingsInk.com:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p979tsv (used with permission)(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, 2022Weird Darkness tours fifteen haunted American locations, starting with the ones every ghost hunter already knows. The Bell Witch Cave in Adams, Tennessee, where a spirit claiming to be the witch of Kate Batts tormented the Bell family for years and, some say, retreated into a cave near the Red River. Waverly Hills Sanatorium in Louisville, where tuberculosis patients died in numbers large enough to require a body chute running down the hill and out of sight. The Myrtles Plantation, whose most famous ghost stories turn out to be false, though the apparitions on the grounds keep getting reported anyway. The Lemp Mansion in St. Louis, where four members of one brewing family took their own lives across five decades. Gettysburg's Devil's Den, the Stanley Hotel that inspired Stephen King, the Winchester Mystery House with its staircases to nowhere, Bachelor's Grove Cemetery outside Chicago, Yorktown Memorial Hospital in Texas, and the Villisca Ax Murder House in Iowa, where eight people were killed in their beds in June of 1912 and no one was ever convicted.Then the show turns to the houses that never made the lists. Nemacolin Castle in Brownsville, Pennsylvania, built on the site of a French and Indian War garrison and later a stop on the Underground Railroad. Tinker Swiss Cottage in Rockford, Illinois, a twenty-seven-room Swiss-style home on a limestone bluff where children's laughter is heard by staff who came in as skeptics. The McCune Mansion in Salt Lake City, where a little girl walks in and out of a mirror. Taliesin in Spring Green, Wisconsin, where a fired servant locked seven people in Frank Lloyd Wright's home in August of 1914, set it on fire, and killed them with a hatchet as they tried to escape. And Prospect Place in Trinway, Ohio, built by an abolitionist who used a cupola signal light to tell escaping slaves that food and shelter waited inside — some of whom never left.

“Adventure of the Beauty Queen”: A woman wakes to a voice from a thousand years in the future, telling her a machine has searched all of history for beauty and found her.Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/OTRCHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “The Queen of Palmyra” (April 27, 1978) ***WD00:45:45.877 = The Eleventh Hour, “Codeword Silver” (ADU)01:11:24.672 = Escape, “The Fortune of Vargas” (September 21, 1949)01:40:04.624 = Exploring Tomorrow, “Adventure of the Beauty Queen” (June 25, 1958) ***WD01:59:42.274 = Dark Fantasy, “Rendezvous With Satan” (May 29, 1942)02:28:27.595 = Fear on 4, “Fat Andy” (March 06, 1988)02:57:32.941 = Theater Five, “Dark Appointment” (November 23, 1964) ***WD03:18:08.219 = Adventures of Superman, “Mystery of the Walking Dead” (November 05, 1949)03:47:56.562 = Hall of Fantasy, “The Judge’s House” (April 03, 1947) ***WD04:14:35.484 = Harry Lime, “Rogues Holiday” (September 21, 1951)04:39:24.955 = BBC Haunted Tales of the Supernatural, “The Family” (July 05, 1980) ***WD05:07:30.568 = Show Close(ADU) = Air Date Unknown(LQ) = Low Quality***WD = Remastered, edited, or cleaned up by Weird Darkness to make the episode more listenable. Audio may not be pristine, but it will be better than the original file which may have been unusable or more difficult to hear without editing.CUSTOM WEBPAGE: https://weirddarkness.com/WDRR0724

A coroner's inquest convenes over a mutilated body in a lonely California cabin, where the only witness swears the thing that killed his friend was standing in plain sight the whole time. (Originally published in the magazine “Town Topics” on December 7th in 1893… a magazine, interestingly enough, not known for horror at all, but more for art, music, and society.)EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/mitm-thedamnedthingSOURCES and RESOURCES:“The Damned Thing” by Ambrose Bierce: https://tinyurl.com/y6amz952WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Midnight In The Macabre (MITM), originally aired: July 23, 2026

A lifelong friend's death leaves Jason Clark hearing that friend's voice picking winners at the track, an unbroken streak that draws the attention of the bookmakers he's bleeding dry — and when they demand his system at knifepoint, what proof can he offer?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, “Bet With The Angels” (April 21, 1978) ***WD00:46:18.058 = Chet Chetter, “Elmer And The Book of Absolute Truth” (1991)01:16:14.133 = The Clock, “The Hitchhiker” (January 03, 1956) ***WD01:40:44.592 = The Crime Club, “Grey Mist Murders” (April 10, 1947)02:10:32.203 = Crime Classics, “The Terrible Deed of John White Webster” (July 13, 1953)02:40:14.956 = Danger Dr Danfield, “Norman Miles” (September 08, 1946) ***WD03:05:54.976 = Calling All Detectives, “Casebook of J. Browning” (June 14, 1948)03:14:16.749 = The Devil and Mr. O, “Hungry One” (January 14, 1972)03:42:57.931 = Diary of Fate, “Nelson Walker” (June 15, 1948) ***WD04:10:44.961 = Dimension X, “Hello Tomorrow” (September 15, 1950) ***WD04:39:05.898 = The Strange Dr. Weird, “Knife of Death” (February 20, 1945) ***WD (LQ)04:51:32.354 = Strange Adventure, “The Island of Mystery” (1945) ***WD04:54:56.292 = Show Close(ADU) = Air Date Unknown(LQ) = Low Quality***WD = Remastered, edited, or cleaned up by Weird Darkness to make the episode more listenable. Audio may not be pristine, but it will be better than the original file which may have been unusable or more difficult to hear without editing.CUSTOM WEBPAGE: https://weirddarkness.com/WDRR0723

Before sixteen children were found in a single room in Hamden, the Siders family left behind another house in Gallia County — and a renovator says he found it in the same condition.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/siderscase20260722Look 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.

Al Capone begged his way into the prison band, Robert Stroud spent eleven years in the hospital, and every inmate at Alcatraz learned fast that on the Rock, almost everything beyond a meal and a cot had to be earned... and a single broken rule could send you into total silence and darkness in the hole.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/alcatrazREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/y7sjc7zwCHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:01:23.422 = Show Open00:02:30.901 = Being An Alcatraz Inmate00:19:49.953 = The Impossibility of Escaping Alcatraz ***00:40:10.152 = Prisons More terrifying Than Alcatraz ***00:52:59.621 = 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:“Being An Alcatraz Inmate” by Melissa Sartore for Ranker.com’s Weird History:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/535vhu7n“The Impossibility of Escaping Alcatraz” by Melissa Sartore for Ranker.com’s Weird History:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/bdfj2ypt“More Terrifying Than Alcatraz” by Michelle Nati for Ranker.com’s Unspeakable Times: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/3jwhh268(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: February, 2021Weird Darkness takes listeners inside the federal penitentiary on Alcatraz Island — what daily life was actually like behind its walls, the fourteen escape attempts that mostly ended in the San Francisco Bay, and a tour of American prisons whose conditions make the Rock look mild by comparison.It opens with the texture of everyday survival at Alcatraz, where the prison held roughly 330 men in cells measuring five feet by nine, and where food, clothing, shelter, and medical care were the only four rights an inmate had — everything else, from library access to a spot in the prison band, had to be earned. Warden James A. Johnston enforced a code of silence that lasted until 1937, so inmates like Jim Quillen talked through the pipes between cells, and Quillen described nineteen days in solitary as total silence and darkness. Al Capone begged his way into the Rock Islanders band and learned tenor guitar, tenor banjo, and mandola; Robert Stroud, the Birdman of Alcatraz, spent eleven of his seventeen years there in the hospital, studying law and languages. Prisoners were counted thirteen times a day, allowed a single two-page letter each week to a blood relative, and served food widely regarded as the best in the federal system — and still, by inmate Bryan Conway's account, fourteen of three hundred seventeen men went violently insane during his last year, one dock worker chopping off the fingers of his own left hand with an ax.From there, the episode turns to the men who tried to leave. Joseph "Dutch" Bowers became the first, shot off a fence on April 27th, 1936, while working the incinerator detail. Theodore Cole and Ralph Roe sawed through a window in the Model Industries Building and vanished into a storm-driven current in December 1937, their bodies never found. The 1938 breakout by James Limerick, Jimmy Lucas, and Rufus "Whitey" Franklin killed guard Royal C. Cline with a hammer; Arthur "Doc" Barker, son of Ma Barker, was shot in the head near the shoreline in January 1939. The May 1946 "Battle of Alcatraz" pulled in the Coast Guard and the Marines over two days and left guards William Miller and Harold Stites dead. And the most famous attempt of all came in June 1962, when Frank Morris and brothers John and Clarence Anglin chipped through their cell walls with spoons, left dummy heads made of soap and hair in their beds, and disappeared on a raft stitched from raincoats — three men the FBI never found.The episode closes by leaving Alcatraz behind for prisons still standing. ADX Florence in Colorado, the "Alcatraz of the Rockies," holds inmates like Ted Kaczynski and Ramzi Yousef in seventy-five-square-foot concrete cells for twenty-three hours a day. At the Polunsky Unit in Livingston, Texas, an inmate named Andre Thomas removed his own eye. Sheriff Joe Arpaio's Maricopa County Tent City Jail in Phoenix housed people outdoors in the Arizona heat until it was dismantled in 2017. Orleans Parish Prison in New Orleans has stood on the same ground for three hundred years, first used to hold enslaved people who tried to escape. San Quentin, built in 1852 and once home to Charles Manson and Richard Ramirez, drew a court-appointed report describing a facility so old, dirty, and overcrowded that housing people there was called dangerous.

A 2023 book collects accounts of shapeshifting strangers, reptilian visitors, and living doubles, arguing the aliens John Carpenter put on screen may have been walking among us all along.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/TheyLiveREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/ycktrfu5FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Have you ever felt like something was off about someone you met? What if the truth was more bizarre than you could imagine - that aliens walk secretly among us, perfectly disguised? (Mimic In The Mirror) *** The short story “Eight O’Clock In The Morning” by Ray Nelson – the inspiration for the movie “They Live!” *** Left-handedness: once a mark of the devil, now a unique trait celebrated across the globe. From the Salem Witch Trials to modern-day challenges with spiral notebooks, left-handers have been forced to navigate a world designed for righties, despite the historical stigmas, surprising advantages, and the evolving recognition of left-handers in combat, culture, and commerce. (Left-Handers Are In League With The Devil) *** In the shadow of Switzerland's majestic Eiger mountain, 29-year-old Aidan Roche vanished without a trace during a solo hiking trip. Despite an unlocked camper-van and one last eerie messages sent from the trail, his disappearance remained shrouded in mystery. Months later, a grim discovery brought more questions than answers. (The Disappearance of Aidan Roche) *** In the summer of 1948, a series of inexplicable fires ravaged the Willey farm near Macomb, Illinois, destroying the family's home and barns. Despite the efforts of local authorities and the U.S. Air Force, no logical explanation could be found for the hundreds of mysterious blazes that seemed to start spontaneously. At the center of this baffling case was 13-year-old Wanet McNeil, whose alleged confession to arson left many unconvinced. Was Wanet truly responsible? Could she have been starting the fires with her mind? (The Macomb Firestarter) *** In 1991, 63-year-old Vasile Gorgos left his home in Romania to visit a cattle market and never returned, leaving his family to believe he had met a tragic fate. But 30 years later, Vasile shocked everyone when he mysteriously reappeared, wearing the same clothes as the day he vanished and carrying an unused train ticket from 1991 in his pocket. With no memory of where he'd been for three decades, Vasile's strange case has left people wondering if his disappearance could be tied to supernatural phenomena like portals, alien abduction, or shifts in time and space itself. (The Mysterious Vanishing of Vasile Gorgos)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = “Eight O’Clock In The Morning” (short fiction)00:12:38.092 = Show Open00:15:46.852 = Mimic In The Mirror: Are Aliens Among Us? ***00:26:13.246 = Left-Handers Are In League With The Devil00:32:35.305 = The Disappearance of Aidan Roche ***00:38:57.889 = The Macomb Firestarter00:48:20.167 = The Mysterious Vanishing of Vasile Gorgos ***00:55:50.605 = 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:“Eight O’Clock In The Morning” by Ray Nelson: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/mu7tmynm“Mimic In The Mirror” source: Sean Casteel at Spectral Vision: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yckjpyz8BOOK: “Mimics – The Others Among Us” by Sean Casteel and Tim R. Swartz: https://amzn.to/3Ws07IJBOOK: “Sky Crash Throughout Time (A Cosmic Conspiracy)” by Philip Kinsella and Brenda Butler: https://amzn.to/3WlE2v2“Left-Handers Are In League With The Devil” source: Baiily Benningfield at Ranker’s Graveyard Shift:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8acbdh“The Disappearance of Aidan Roche” source: Strange Outdoors: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/mrxvj87r“The Macomb Firestarter” by Troy Taylor: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/5n7dbzmh (used with permission)“The Mysterious Vanishing of Vasile Gorgos” source: Marcus Lowth at UFO Insight:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/jxztu8nd(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: April 30, 2024In this episode of Weird Darkness, listeners move through alien impostors, the long history of left-handed stigma, a hiker who vanished in the Swiss Alps, a farm besieged by fires no one could explain, and a Romanian cattle trader who came home after thirty years.It opens with the mimics. Ray Nelson's 1963 story "Eight O'Clock in the Morning" — the basis for John Carpenter's 1988 film "They Live" — imagined reptilian aliens ruling Earth from behind human faces, and the 2023 book "Mimics: The Others Among Us" argues that scenario may not be fiction. The book collects accounts like that of Brenda Butler, co-author of a book on the Rendlesham Forest UFO incident, who in 1984 met a tall, blue-eyed man calling himself David Daniels and claiming to be from the Pleiades star cluster, then watched his skin turn scaly and reptilian before he shifted back to human. It recounts author Chris Holly's memory of a strikingly similar white-haired, blue-eyed family she later connected to the extraterrestrial "Tall Whites," alongside cases of living ghosts, doppelgangers, and a 1970s poltergeist blamed on a mimic wearing a teenage girl's face.From there the episode traces why left-handedness was treated as sinister for centuries. During the Salem Witch Trials, favoring the left hand could bring an accusation of witchcraft, and as late as the 1970s schools still forced left-handed children to write with their right. The Book of Matthew places the righteous on the right and the cursed on the left, the Zulu scalded children's left hands to stop their use, and communities along the Niger River tied left-handed cooking to witchcraft — while the ancient Celts prized left-handed warriors, Rome read left-side omens as favorable, and the Inca chief Lloque Yupanqui was admired for his left-handedness. The stigma softened by the late 1960s, when William Gruby opened Anything Left-Handed, Ltd. to sell scissors, kitchen tools, and watches built for lefties.Next comes the disappearance of Aidan Roche, a 29-year-old chemical engineer from Middlesbrough who vanished on June 22nd, 2023, while hiking the Eiger Trail in Switzerland's Bernese Oberland. His campervan sat unlocked and abandoned near the trailhead with everything inside intact, and his final messages placed him two hours from Grindelwald in clear weather on a well-traveled path. Swiss police, mountain rescue teams, dogs, and drones searched for five days, and his brothers Connor and Niall raised over £30,000 for helicopter surveillance and screen advertisements in twenty-four locations, yet found nothing until September 24th, 2023, when Aidan's body was discovered near the trail with the cause of death still unreleased.The episode then settles on the Willey farm outside Macomb, Illinois, where hundreds of fires broke out in the summer of 1948. They started on August 7th as small brown spots that appeared on the living room wallpaper, spread, smoldered, and burst into flame — more than 200 of them in one week, igniting curtains, an ironing board, and newspapers sealed inside a closed cupboard, often erupting on walls and ceilings while witnesses watched. The blazes consumed the farmhouse on August 14th and both barns soon after, drew over 1,000 spectators on August 22nd, and even brought in the U.S. Air Force, which floated directed radiation from the Russians as a possible cause. Officials declared the case solved on August 30th by pinning it on 13-year-old Wanet McNeil, who confessed to using kitchen matches after hours of questioning despite never being seen holding any; psychiatrist Dr. Sophie Schroeder found her mentally normal, researcher Vincent Gaddis called it poltergeist activity, and Fire Chief Fred Wilson retired still convinced something unexplainable had happened.The episode closes with Vasile Gorgos, a 63-year-old cattle trader from Bacău, Romania, who left for a market in 1991 and disappeared for three decades. His wife reported him missing, an extensive police search turned up no trace, and his family eventually held a ceremony and accepted that he was dead. On a Sunday afternoon in August 2021, a car pulled up outside his old house and drove off before anyone could read the plate, leaving behind a 93-year-old Vasile in the same clothes he had worn in 1991, carrying an unused train ticket from that year and an old identity card listing an address in another part of Romania. Doctor

A waterlogged model boat that keeps appearing wherever Professor Anders goes — dripping, shivering, impossible to be rid of — carries a name, a drowning, and a debt that refuses to stay buried.Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/OTRCHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “The Avocado Jungle” (April 20, 1978) ***WD00:46:14.846 = BBC Radio 4 / Radio 7, “The Boat Hook” (April 15, 1992)01:30:17.027 = Night Beat, “Five Days Off For Christmas” (December 21, 1951) ***WD01:58:08.526 = Beyond The Green Door, “Mr. Fritz-Hugh And Poisoned Knife Blade” (1966)02:02:01.418 = Campbell Playhouse, “A Christmas Carol” (December 24, 1939) ***WD03:00:24.073 = Box 13, “The Dowager And Dan Holiday” (November 16, 1949)03:27:06.293 = Calling All Cars, “Cookie Vejar Killing” (December 27, 1933)03:56:51.245 = Casey Crime Photographer, “Red Raincoat” (August 29, 1946)04:26:26.709 = CBC Mystery Theater, “The Ghost Town Hermit” (May 19, 1967) ***WD04:57:04.004 = Show Close(ADU) = Air Date Unknown(LQ) = Low Quality***WD = Remastered, edited, or cleaned up by Weird Darkness to make the episode more listenable. Audio may not be pristine, but it will be better than the original file which may have been unusable or more difficult to hear without editing.CUSTOM WEBPAGE: https://weirddarkness.com/WDRR0722

A 2-year-old in Chambers County was found bound at the wrists, legs, and ankles and left face-down on a bed for more than half a day, and one of the two suspects was dead by his own hand before the arrest ever came.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/bound-toddler-alabamaLook 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.

A man climbed into the waste tank beneath a portable toilet to fish out a dropped bottle of Mountain Dew, and stayed there long enough to require power tools and a fire hose.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/portadewLook 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.

A murderer insists he is perfectly sane, even as he explains in careful detail how he killed the old man and hid the body beneath the floorboards.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/mitm-telltaleheartWeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Midnight In The Macabre (MITM), originally aired: July 21, 2026

When Martian invaders armed with deadly alien weapons arrive in the Kentucky hills to test their arsenal on unsuspecting humans, they make the fatal mistake of choosing Lem Coy—the local moonshiner's 'simple' son who's too dumb to die and strong enough to make extraterrestrials wish they'd stayed home.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/mitm-martiansandthecoysSOURCES and RESOURCES: “The Martians And The Coys” by Mark Reynolds, originally published in “Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy,” June 1951WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Midnight In The Macabre (MITM), originally aired: July 21, 2026

A Christmas Eve margin call sends a rich man's nephew scrambling for six thousand dollars he doesn't have, with a voice in his head whispering that theft and worse would be so easy.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, “Murder at Troyte’s Hill” (April 17, 1978) ***WD00:45:26.180 = Weird Circle, “Markheim” (May 20, 1945)01:13:15.849 = The Whistler, “Return of Innocent” (April 02, 1945)01:42:35.169 = Strange Wills, “Margin For Love” (September 07, 1946)02:12:13.142 = Witch’s Tale, “Suicide” (January 22, 1937) ***WD02:35:32.097 = X-Minus-1, “The Moon Is Green” (January 02, 1957)03:03:54.289 = Zero Hour, “Mind of the Beholder” (May 21, 1974) ***WD03:21:09.669 = ABC Mystery Time, “My Adventure in Norfolk” (1957) ***WD (LQ)03:45:10.191 = Strange Adventure, “The Friendly Ghost” (1945) ***WD03:48:27.530 = Arch Obeler’s Plays, “Another World” (July 29, 1939) ***WD (LQ)04:17:11.933 = Barrie Craig, “The Case of the Borrowed Knife” (November 07, 1951)04:45:37.476 = Show Close(ADU) = Air Date Unknown(LQ) = Low Quality***WD = Remastered, edited, or cleaned up by Weird Darkness to make the episode more listenable. Audio may not be pristine, but it will be better than the original file which may have been unusable or more difficult to hear without editing.CUSTOM WEBPAGE: https://weirddarkness.com/WDRR0721

A serial killer who kept his victims' heads, a woman held under a waterbed for seven years, and a phantom passenger who vanishes from the back seat — the open road has taken more than its share.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/HitchhikingHorrorsREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/29xmnbkaFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: The open road is a beautiful place where you can make friends that you’d otherwise never meet and have adventures that will change your life. But there are also extreme dangers to traveling with strangers on highways and backroads. No matter how trustworthy or well-intentioned a driver might seem, it's nearly impossible to tell if they are actually a predator or murderer, preying upon innocent hitchhikers. Creepy, true hitchhiker stories can make you think twice before picking up that stranger at the side of the road - or trying to "thumb it" yourself.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*SOURCES and RESOURCES:“The Hitchhiker” original story at the beginning of this episode was written by HoneyBunny00:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8b53e2“Hitchhiking Horror Stories” by Isadora Teich for Ranker.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/3yj8t3ka, by Jacob Shelton for Ranker.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2s4a2wkz, Eric Redding for ThoughtCatalog.com:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/hk8pn8rf, and from ScaryCarries.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2aead59t“Phantom Hitchhikers” posted at Anomalien.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/y4dxkv7m, Kelly Agan for Medium.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/36wucpzm, Paul Adams for The History Press:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8z538u, and Krystal DeCosta for ScientificAmerican.com:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/mr29nkpa(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, 2021Weird Darkness gathers the true horrors of the open road and the ghosts said to haunt it, moving from real hitchhiker murders across the United States and abroad to the phantom passengers who vanish from the back seat before the ride is over.It opens with the account of a newly married couple driving through a rainstorm who stop for a soaked hitchhiker, drop him at a crossroads, and later break down on a dark stretch of highway, only for the wife to wake to police floodlights and the sight of the same man atop their car with a machete over her husband's dismembered body, an escaped prison inmate cut down by gunfire moments after she runs.From there the show turns to a long run of documented and reported cases. Jacci Ansell-Lamb was last seen hitchhiking from London toward Manchester in May 1970 and found sexually assaulted and strangled with electrical wire outside Knutsford, England, a killing police have linked to serial murderer Peter Tobin though no suspect was ever charged. A German traveler on foot near Timaru, New Zealand had all his belongings stolen by a man in a white Honda in February 2016. Along Australia's outback near the cattle town of Hughenden, as many as twelve hitchhikers including eighteen-year-old Catherine Graham and thirty-two-year-old Tony Jones turned up dead over roughly two decades on a stretch dubbed the Highway of Death, the murders still unsolved. On May 19, 1977, twenty-year-old Colleen Stan was hitchhiking to a friend's birthday in California when Cameron Hooker picked her up and held her as a sex slave for seven years, keeping her in a box beneath his waterbed until his wife helped her escape in 1984 and Hooker drew a 104-year sentence.Next comes the case of Edmund Kemper, the six-foot-nine "Co-ed Killer" born December 18, 1948, who shot his grandmother and grandfather at fifteen, was released from a psychiatric hospital into his mother's care, and between May 1972 and February 1973 picked up hitchhiking female students, killed and decapitated them, and had sex with the corpses before murdering his mother with a claw hammer on Good Friday 1973 and phoning the same local police he drank with to confess. Woven among these are firsthand accounts shared online, among them a driver whose kindness reportedly talked a would-be killer out of his plan, a New Zealand couple who vanished in 1989 near Thames leading to the disputed conviction of David Tamihere, and a backpacker in Austria who fled a trucker's advances barefoot at a gas station.From there the episode moves deeper into unsolved and predatory cases. Between 1972 and 1973 the Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murders claimed at least seven women in Sonoma County, California, beginning with nineteen-year-old Kim Wendy Allen found bound and strangled in a creek bed on March 5, 1972, and including twelve-year-olds Maureen Sterling and Yvonne Weber, thirteen-year-old Lori Lee Kursa, fourteen-year-old Carolyn Davis, and twenty-three-year-old Theresa Walsh, the case never closed. The segment also gathers the crimes of clown-costumed killer John Wayne Gacy, trucker Keith Hunter Jesperson who dragged one victim beneath his rig, photographer Joseph Naso the "Alphabet Killer," the spree killers Douglas Gretzler and Willie Steelman, and sadistic trucker Ben Rhoades, caught when an Arizona trooper found a shackled woman inside his cab.The episode closes on the phantom hitchhiker, tracing the folk formula of the vanishing passenger before laying out the strongest real-world cases. One belongs to Maria Roux, killed on the N9 near Uniondale, South Africa on Good Friday 1968, whose specter was reported by driver Anton Le Grange in 1976 and motorcyclist Dawie Van Jaarsveld in 1978, her rear door seen opening and closing by a following officer. Another is "Lydia" of Jamestown, North Carolina, the white-gowned figure sighted at a railroad underpass since the 1920s and possibly rooted in the 1920 traffic death of Annie Jackson on the High Point Road. The final account belongs to carpet fitter Roy Fulton of Dunstable, England, who picked up a silent young man on Station Road near Stanbridge on October 12, 1979, turned to offer him a cigarette, and found the seat empty, a story he repeated without change on Arthur C. Clarke's World of Strange Powers in 1985.

A Baldwin County 911 call brought deputies to a Daphne family's front yard, where a mother lay dead and a father had run house to house leaving bloody handprints on the doors.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/bakerstabbingLook 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.

A Pennsylvania man came home to an opened bottle of wine, a bedroom light he swore he'd left off, and the woman he'd stopped dating months earlier shouting his name through the glass.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/match-date-stalkerLook 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.

You can rent a bedroom where a little girl in a yellow dress still hums lullabies, a miner's casita in a Texas ghost town, or a schoolhouse tucked inside a working cemetery — and every one of these haunted Airbnbs is bookable tonight.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/AirBNBREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/3s9xb4btFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Spending the night in a haunted house is always unnerving, but would you pay for the experience? If you’re looking for a spooky escape, maybe you could try a haunted AirBNB! You might not rest in peace in these haunted homes, but you're bound to have a memorable night preparing for paranormal activity, seeking the supernatural, and greeting ghosts. (Book A Stay At a Haunted AirBNB) *** Sawney Bean, said to be the leader of a 45-member clan in Scotland, is infamously accused of murdering and cannibalizing over 1,000 people in the early 16th century. His story inspired the horror film, ‘The Hills Have Eyes.’ But did Sawney Bean ever truly exist? (The Man Who Inspired ‘The Hills Have Eyes’) *** Nestled in the Kentish Weald, the quaint village of Stalisfield boasts a thousand-year-old church and timeless tranquility. But beneath its serene surface, whispers of ancient pagan rites and dark ceremonies linger. Could the chilling past of sacrificial rituals still echo through the village today? (The Stalisfield Blade) *** As dusk fell, a pickup truck pulled up to a motel outside Tarzana. Inside, Brother Elzibah and his monks prepared for a perilous mission, recording martyr statements and arming themselves with explosives. Their target on December 10, 1958: Krishna Venta, a self-styled prophet in Box Canyon. This night promised a dramatic showdown that would mark a violent chapter in the history of American spiritual communes, and the country’s cults. (The Bizarre Story Behind The Suicide Bombing Of A Southern California Cult)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:01:41.053 = Show Open00:04:08.300 = Book A Stay At a Haunted AirBNB00:27:56.736 = The Man Who Inspired ‘The Hills Have Eyes’ ***00:32:42.960 = The Stalisfield Blade00:40:06.667 = The Bizarre Story Behind the Suicide Bombing of a Southern California Cult ***00:51:40.417 = 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 Stalisfield Blade” by Ken DaSilva-Hill (used with permission)“The Bizarre Story Behind The Suicide Bombing Of A SoCal Cult” by Mattew Duersten, LAist, December 10, 2018: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4s27xpf7“The Man Who Inspired ‘The Hills Have Eyes’” source: Leah Silverman at AllThatsInteresting.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8zy3ec“Book A Stay At a Haunted AirBNB” sources: Lauren Mack at TimeOut.com, https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4h75fc6c; Daily Barringer and Caitlin Morton at Thrillest.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8eubbj; Jersey Griggs at TheDiscoverer.com, https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yttxryn6; Marissa Laliberte at Reader’s Digest:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p86y2em; Julie Pennell at Today.com, https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2kwzmdfs; Alexa Erickson at FamilyHandyman.com, https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8w39nh(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: April 29, 2024This episode of Weird Darkness roams from haunted rental homes you can book for the night to a Scottish cannibal legend, a Kentish village's whispered sacrifice rites, and the dynamite that ended a Southern California cult.It opens with a tour of haunted Airbnbs scattered across the United States and beyond, from Hobo Hill House in Jefferson City, Missouri — a 1910 American Foursquare where sightings of a man in a top hat drove the Clark family out and onto "The Dead Files" — to the Parks-Bowman Mansion in New Orleans, where guests booking the dead girl's bedroom report a young spirit in a yellow dress who hums lullabies and paces with a limp. The Kahn Hotel in Jefferson, Texas has logged over 300 paranormal investigations and one recording of a woman's scream followed by a gunshot; Farnam Manor in Richfield, Ohio traces its haunting to the owner's daughter drowning in a well in 1834; and a converted 1900 schoolhouse sits inside Cedar Park Cemetery in Hudson, New York, complete with an 18th-century opium wedding bed. The Creole Mansion in New Orleans, built in 1855 for Louise Vitry, and the Terlingua ghost-town casita overlooking Big Bend round out a list that stretches from Salem, Massachusetts to York, England.From there the episode turns to Sawney Bean, the legendary patriarch of a 45-member clan said to have lived in Bennane Cave along the Scottish coast, robbing, murdering, and cannibalizing more than 1,000 travelers across roughly 25 years before King James VI led a manhunt that ended in the men being executed and the women burned at the stake. Historical records first mention Bean in 1755, a century after he supposedly lived, and Scottish historian Dr. Louise Yeoman argues the tale may have started as English propaganda, with the name "Sawney" serving as a period slur against Scots. Wes Craven credited the Bean legend as the direct inspiration for his film The Hills Have Eyes.Next comes Stalisfield, a tiny hamlet in the Kentish Weald with a thousand-year-old church and The Plough Inn, where old villagers speak of pagan harvest rites tied to a flint sacrifice knife hewn from Kentish stone. The stories describe animals slaughtered on a sarsen stone and, in the darkest tellings, a golden-haired virgin tied to a stake, dismembered with the flint blade, her blood collected in a golden vessel and her ashes mixed with seed and scattered into the corners of the fields — corners locals still avoid after dark, marked by their overgrowth.The episode closes with Krishna Venta, born Francis Herman Pencovic in San Francisco in 1911, a barefoot self-styled prophet who claimed to have been born half a million years earlier on a planet called Neophrates and founded the WKFL Foundation on a 23-acre glen in Box Canyon. Two disaffected monks, Ralph Muller and Peter Kamenoff — who had taken the names Elzibah and Jeroham and accused Venta of sleeping with their wives — recorded martyr statements at a Tarzana motel and drove to the commune on December 10, 1958 with twenty sticks of dynamite in a musette bag. The blast lifted the top off the stone monastery, was heard more than 20 miles away, and killed ten people, including Venta, Cardinal Gene, and two children from the dormitories, seven-year-old Keela Baker and eleven-year-old Elwyn; survivors later scattered into other movements, among them members who died in Jonestown alongside Jim Jones' Peoples Temple in 1978.

Two crossed pencils, a sheet of paper marked yes and no, and a name spoken twice — and by the time an Italian priest was called into a Calabrian primary school, the children had already asked Charlie their questions. | July 19, 2026==========HOUR ONE: Just because the Ouija board is made by a board game manufacturer does not mean it should be treated like a toy – as many have discovered. *** The similar game, Charlie Charlie seems more innocent – but is so dangerous that in one school where children were playing it, they had to call in an exorcist. *** And you never know when playing any of these types of games what kind of spirit you might be inviting into our realm – but I can tell you this…. It’s never good. They might pretend to be good, but that’s far from the truth. And one particular demon has found notoriety through the Ouija board community, a demon you don’t want to risk opening a door for. It’s name is Zozo.==========HOUR TWO: Did lost cosmonauts make it into space before Yuri Gagarin? (The Tombs in Space) *** Don't take a gift from Gracie Watson's grave... or her life-like statue might cry tears of blood. (Gracie’s Ghost) *** Did Bonnie Scott run away? Was she kidnapped? Murdered perhaps? All anyone knew was that no one had a clue where she was. She had simply disappeared without a trace. (The Murder of Bonnie Leigh Scott) *** A latchkey kid comes home to an empty house… or so they thought until they heard footsteps in another room. (The Laundry Room)==========SUDDEN DEATH OVERTIME: People often encounter strange and frightening things when they experience sleep paralysis – but in one particular story, the horrors began well before going to bed. (Sleep Paralysis in Bangkok) *** Samuel Joselyn was buried in 1810 in a North Carolina cemetery.  Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that Samuel was actually DEAD at the time of his burial! (Buried Alive in Wilmington) *** in 1894 Rosa Lochner was a witness to murder, but she had been deaf since birth and her spoken vocabulary was limited. So how could she testify against the accused? (Murder In Pantomime) *** A boy wakes to find his previously closed curtains now open – and the only explanation involves a previous resident of the house he’s now living in. (Strange Manifestations) *** Mention the word “Chupacabra” and most people will think of a strange, hairless dog-like animal. They are never described as having the ability to fly… until now. (Winged Chupacabras) *** These UFOs aren’t shiny metallic discs or cigar-shaped spaceships. They are humanoid – and they fly without the help of a jetpack, wings, cape or even a broom to sit on. And the sightings are still coming in all throughout Mexico. (The Flying Humanoids of Mexico) *** The North Carolina Cherokee have a story about how dangerous it can be even near a calm river – where the waters can suddenly foam and a giant beast can appear on the rocks. (James and the Giant Leech) *** Supernatural women, shadowy men, odd animal sightings, and more… they can all be found at late-night truck stops if you’re not careful. (Truck Stop Horror Stories)==========SOURCES AND REFERENCES FROM TONIGHT’S SHOW:“Charlie Charlie” https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/ydpwych9, and “Ouija Boards” https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/mzyfmweeby Jacob Shelton for Graveyard Shift“ZoZo the Ouija Board Demon” by Maggie Clendenin for Ranker: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/xtc8x9pe“The Tombs in Space” posted at The Unredacted: http://ow.ly/nW5U30mwbWw“Gracie’s Ghost” by Gary Sweeney for The Line Up: http://ow.ly/arFz30mwaLc“The Murder of Bonnie Leigh Scott” by Troy Taylor for American Hauntings Ink: http://ow.ly/v6wX30mwbwW“The Laundry Room” submitted anonymously to Weird Darkness“Sleep Paralysis in Bangkok” by MarkiO for YourGhostStories.com: http://ow.ly/FUOD30mwc0C“Truckstop Horror Stories” by Erin McCann for Ranker: https://tinyurl.com/wldxxnl“Buried Alive in Wilmington” by TheresaHPIR for Theresa’s Haunted History of the Tri-State: https://tinyurl.com/rr4cvoh“Murder in Pantomime” by Robert Wilhelm for Murder By Gaslight: https://tinyurl.com/y97rswf5“Strange Manifestation” by Brian Abraham posted at My Haunted Life Too: https://tinyurl.com/wmlzd22“Winged Chupacabras” by Nick Redfern for Mysterious Universe: https://tinyurl.com/th8p7ox“The Flying Humanoids of Mexico” by Brent Swancer for Mysterious Universe: https://tinyurl.com/urxujoc“James and the Giant Leech” by James Mooney from the book “Myths of the Cherokee”: https://amzn.to/2JHpUFo==========(Over time links seen above may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for material I use whenever possible. If I have overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it immediately. Some links may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)=========="I have come into the world as a light, so that no one who believes in me should stay in darkness." — John 12:46==========WeirdDarkness®, WeirdDarkness© 2026==========To become a Weird Darkness Radio Show affiliate, contact Radio America at [email protected], or call 800-807-4703 (press 2 or dial ext 250).==========

A fortune-teller's crystal globe shows his clients a single vision of their own deaths — and one by one, they begin to make it come true.Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/OTRCHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “Chapter of Errors” (April 14, 1978) ***WD00:46:44.968 = The Shadow, “The Crystal Globe” (October 03, 1943) ***WD01:15:25.364 = Sleep No More, “Escape of Mr. Trimm” (March 13, 1957) ***WD01:44:07.395 = BBC SpineChillers, “Rituals” (1984)02:10:33.653 = Strange, “The Ghost Train” (September 18, 1955)02:24:07.878 = Suspense, “Sneak Preview” (March 23, 1944)02:53:48.488 = Tales of the Frightened, “Voice From The Grave’ (1957)02:58:36.645 = The Creaking Door, “Don’t Take My Blood” (January 05, 1965) ***WD03:29:31.418 = The Saint, “The Saint Goes Underground” (December 17, 1947) ***WD03:53:55.525 = Tales From The Tomb, “Spirits of the Dead” (1960s)03:56:08.118 = 2000 Plus, “Rocket And Skull” (October 10, 1951) ***WD04:24:16.114 = The Unexpected, “Twilight Meeting” (1948) ***WD04:36:22.835 = Unsolved Mysteries, “Rue Morgue Mystery” (June 17, 1942) ***WD04:51:16.528 = Show Close(ADU) = Air Date Unknown(LQ) = Low Quality***WD = Remastered, edited, or cleaned up by Weird Darkness to make the episode more listenable. Audio may not be pristine, but it will be better than the original file which may have been unusable or more difficult to hear without editing.CUSTOM WEBPAGE: https://weirddarkness.com/WDRR0720

A film crew arrives at Wicklow Manor to shoot on location, where a centuries-old legend says a mandrake's shriek lures the heartbroken to their deaths from the tower — and within a day of filming, two men fall.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, ”Shriek of the Mandrake” (April 13, 1978) ***WDZ00:46:51.627 = Peril, “Last Man” (1953) ***WD01:13:31.419= Mystery Playhouse, “Fifty Candles” (July 25, 1944) ***WD (LQ)01:43:17.831 = Price of Fear, “Out of the Mouths” (June 20, 1983)02:10:43.064 = Adventures of Ellery Queen, “Man In The Street” (December 04, 1947) ***WD02:39:53.920 = Quiet Please, “Dark Rosaleen” (March 13, 1949)03:09:16.689 = Radio City Playhouse, “Deception” (November 20, 1949) ***WD03:37:20.995 = Suspense, “Cat – Audition Episode” (October 21, 1946) ***WD03:53:18.121 = Sam Spade, “Convertible Caper” (June 15, 1947) ***WD04:16:34.427 = The Sealed Book, “Accusing Corpse” (April 29, 1945)04:46:03.073 = The Shadow, “The Gibbering Thing” (September 26, 1943)05:14:27.773 = Show Close(ADU) = Air Date Unknown(LQ) = Low Quality***WD = Remastered, edited, or cleaned up by Weird Darkness to make the episode more listenable. Audio may not be pristine, but it will be better than the original file which may have been unusable or more difficult to hear without editing.CUSTOM WEBPAGE: https://weirddarkness.com/WDRR0719

Everyone hears "bottomless pit" and braces for a sermon about hell — this one goes somewhere stranger, to the only hole in all of Scripture that keeps what you throw in.Look for this podcast on YouTube Music, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and numerous other podcast apps. Get the full list of options here: https://pod.link/1651062114EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources and print version): https://weirddarkness.com/cotu-melsholeREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/m3k2ae6wWeird Darkness® and Church Of The Undead™ are trademarked. Copyright © 2026.

A chemist, lost on a lonely country road at nightfall, keeps glimpsing a laughing little girl no one else in the isolated mansion will admit exists.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, “Childish Laughter” (April 10, 1978)00:44:45.782 = Mystery In The Air, “Mask of Medusa” (September 04, 1947) ***WD01:13:44.235 = Molle Mystery Theater, “”Further Adventures of Kenny Andrews” (May 10, 1946) ***WD01:43:04.502 = Mr. Keen, “The Strange Display” (March 16, 1944) ***WD02:11:54.148 = Murder at Midnight, “Dead Hand” (May 01, 1950) ***WD02:35:49.001 = The Black Museum, “The Straight Razor” (November 11, 1952) ***WD03:01:04.966 = Mysterious Traveler, “The Haunted Trailer” (June 03, 1952) 03:33:30.017 = CBC Nightfall, “Love And The Lonely One” (July 04, 1980) ***WD03:56:45.698 = Obsession, “Tailored For Murder” (February 26, 1951) ***WD04:24:03.027 = Origin of Superstition, “Boogey Man” (1935)04:38:19.922 = Pat Novak For Hire, “Rubin Callaways Pictures” (March 13, 1949)05:06:43.866 = Show Close(ADU) = Air Date Unknown(LQ) = Low Quality***WD = Remastered, edited, or cleaned up by Weird Darkness to make the episode more listenable. Audio may not be pristine, but it will be better than the original file which may have been unusable or more difficult to hear without editing.CUSTOM WEBPAGE: https://weirddarkness.com/WDRR0718

A nervous first visit to his girlfriend's rural Alberta home turns into a late-night hunting trip with her father, and something in the pines is watching them both.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/mitm-thepackSOURCES and RESOURCES: “The Pack” by MisterNailBrain75: https://www.creepypasta.com/the-pack/WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: July 19, 2026

A child's mutilated torso surfaced from the Thames near Shakespeare's Globe in 2001, and more than two decades later no one has been convicted of killing the boy investigators could only call Adam.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/TorsoInTheThamesREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/3h6yrmk5FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Most people, when they think of the end of their lives, want to feel that they have accomplished something of significance. To leave a lasting legacy. But it is much more rare for someone to accomplish something significant – after they are dead! (Done By The Dead) *** Mrs. Elizabeth G. Wharton was a pillar of society in Baltimore, Maryland in the late 1800s. That is, until she was accused of murdering General William Scott Ketchum. (The Baltimore Borgia) *** For every legitimate and fascinating find by geologists, there seems to be a fraudulent find somewhere else trying to fool the masses. This has been a problem since geology became a thing – and one of the most fascinating of these true tales is the one about Baringer’s Lying Stones. (The Lying Stones) *** A strange, ape-like creature with glowing eyes in England might really be, as some believe, a specter of the night. (Man-Monkey of the Night) *** It’s hard to understand how human sacrifice has ever been a reality in any point in history – but what if you were to learn that evidence of it showed up in London, England… in 2001? (Torso In The River) *** A would-be geisha murders her lover… but the events leading up to and during the death make for a fascinatingly dark story. (The Murderess Geisha) *** When it comes to spectral animals, we’re more than familiar with black dogs or hell hounds, ghostly cats, horses carrying a headed or headless phantom, even a ghost bear rumored to haunt the Tower of London… but have you ever heard of the American Southwest’s ghost camels? (America’s Ghost Camels)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:02:24.699 = America’s Ghost Camels00:09:18.422 = Done By The Dead ***00:22:00.457 = The Baltimore Borgia ***00:27:35.655 = The Lying Stones00:36:08.415 = Torso In The River ***00:42:13.573 = The Murderess Geisha00:54:03.666 = Man-Monkey of the Night ***00:58:48.550 = 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:“Man-Monkey Of The Night” by Nick Redfern for MysteriousUniverse.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/bdhdevrr“Done By The Dead” by Kyle D. Walter for ListVerse.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/y62afnj6“America’s Ghost Camels” by Kathy Weiser-Alexander for LegendsOfAmerica.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p979beb“The Baltimore Borgia” by Robert Wilhelm for MurderByGaslight.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/y2whacb9“Torso In The River” by Richard Hoskins for MysteryConfidential.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/bdd5u543“The Murderess Geisha” by Dr. Romeo Vitelli for Providentia: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yzy4v3wy“The Lying Stones” by Brent Swancer for MysteriousUniverse.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p854d9e(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, 2021This episode of Weird Darkness moves from ghost camels haunting the Arizona desert to corpses that kept making history after death, a Baltimore poisoning that gripped a courtroom for weeks, a professor fooled by carved stones, a child's murder in the Thames that London police have never solved, a Tokyo geisha who killed the man she loved, and a glowing-eyed creature on an English canal bridge.It opens in the American southwest, where the U.S. War Department imported some seventy-two camels in 1857 to haul supplies, only to turn the animals loose in the desert when the Civil War broke out and the soldiers tired of their foul temper and habit of spooking horses. Wild camels roamed Arizona for decades afterward, and one became legend as the Red Ghost — a beast blamed for trampling a woman to death in 1883 and later seen carrying a dead man lashed to its back, a rider who eventually decayed until a human skull dropped from the saddle in front of a group of startled prospectors. An Arizona farmer finally shot the animal in 1893, still wearing the leather straps that had held its corpse rider in place.From there the episode turns to figures who kept shaping the world after they died. A gang of Chicago counterfeiters led by "Big Jim" Kennally plotted in 1876 to steal Abraham Lincoln's body from his Springfield tomb and ransom it for a jailed engraver, foiled by a Secret Service informant working for the very agency Lincoln himself had signed into existence. A grave robber broke into George Washington's crypt at Mount Vernon in 1830 hunting the president's skull and made off with the wrong one. The British philosopher Jeremy Bentham left instructions to have his body dissected and mummified, and it sits on display at University College London to this day. And in the ninth century Pope Stephen VI dug up his predecessor Formosus, dressed the rotting corpse in papal vestments, propped it up for trial, found it guilty, and had it thrown into the Tiber.Next comes Baltimore in 1871, where Elizabeth Wharton, a respected society widow, hosted General William Scott Ketchum in her home on Hamilton Place until he fell suddenly ill and died with twenty grains of tartar emetic in his stomach — fifteen is enough to kill. Police discovered she had bought sixty grains days earlier, and a financial advisor named Eugene Van Ness nearly died the same way after she served him a drink. Her forty-two-day poison trial in Annapolis exhausted the medical and chemical experts of the day, and after deliberating through the night the jury acquitted her of murder.The episode then crosses to Germany, where Johann Beringer, a celebrated professor at the University of Würzburg, spent 1725 collecting strange carved stones dug up on Mount Eibelstadt by teenage boys he had hired — figures of birds, lizards, comets, and the name of God rendered in Hebrew. Convinced they were the handiwork of God himself, he published a book on them called the Lithographiae Wirceburgensis, only to learn the nearly two thousand stones had been planted by two envious colleagues, J. Ignatz Roderick and Johann Georg von Eckhart, who thought him an arrogant know-it-all and wanted to humble him.From an academic hoax the episode moves to an unsolved horror. On September 21st, 2001, a child's headless, limbless torso surfaced from the Thames near the Globe Theatre, wrapped in orange cloth, and London's Metropolitan Police could give the boy no name but Adam. Forensic analysis of poison and minerals in his remains traced him to the Benin region of Nigeria and showed he had been paralyzed and drained of blood in what investigators believed was a muti ritual killing. Nelson Mandela made an international appeal for information, and traffickers including Kingsley Ojo and a caregiver named Joyce Osagiede were investigated, but no one has ever been convicted and the boy's true identity has never been confirmed.The episode carries that darkness into 1936 Tokyo, where Sada Abe strangled her lover Kichizo Ishida in an inn after a days-long affair, then took a kitchen knife to his body and carried a severed part of him away in her handbag. Her capture two days later set off a national obsession the papers called "Sada mania," and her testimony about killing the man she refused to share became a bestseller in a country where such candor was scandalous. She was sentenced to six years, served her time as a model prisoner, and vanished from public life sometime after 1970.The episode closes on a cold English night in January 1879, when a furniture hauler crossing Bridge 39 over the Shropshire Union Canal near the village of Ranton was charged by a shaggy, ape-like creature with glowing eyes that leapt onto his cart and terrified his horse. When he swung his whip at the thing, the lash passed straight through its body, and the creature bolted down toward the canal and vanished. The folklorist Charlotte Burne later learned from the village constable that the sightings had begun only days after a man drowned in that same canal, in a place where people believed a violent death could send someone back in the shape of a beast.

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

A late-shift barista alone in a small-town cafe finds himself watched by a bald, mud-smeared stranger in a spotless black suit — a man who leaks something dark from his mouth and refuses to leave.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/mitm-blacksludgeSOURCES and RESOURCES: “Black Sludge” by Time Freak: https://www.creepypasta.com/black-sludge/WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: July 17, 2026

Travelers on the Kansas trail stopped at a lonely inn run by a family of Spiritualists — and the ones who sat in the seat nearest the curtain were never seen leaving it.🎵 Stick around to the end of the episode for a CROSSROADS HAINT song about the Benders!READ A DEEP-DIVE ARTICLE ABOUT THE BENDERS: https://weirddarkness.com/bloody-bendersEPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/bloodybendersREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yckuftrvFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: When you think of monsters in America, you probably think of Bigfoot in the American Northwest – or perhaps the Chupacabra in the South. Maybe you think of Dogman in the upper Midwest. But people don’t typically think of the American lakes and shores, where we have our own collection of monsters and sea serpents. (American Sea Monsters) *** As the saying goes – don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time. But once in a while the punishment goes far beyond what the crime calls for. (Cruel and Unusual Punishments) *** Marilyn Monroe was found dead of a drug overdose on August 5, 1962. And while the facts of her death are shocking, her troubling childhood wasn’t pretty either. We’ll look at the life and death of this Hollywood bombshell. (The Troubled Life And Shocking Death of Marilyn Monroe) *** We’ll take a look at, not the very first serial killer - but the first serial killer FAMILY in America! The bloody Benders! (America’s First Serial Killer Family)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:01:45.702 = American Sea Monsters00:15:00.217 = The Troubled Life and Shocking Death of Marilyn Monroe ***00:36:04.254 = Cruel and Unusual Punishments ***00:46:15.542 = America’s First Serial Killer Family00:54:12.123 = Show Close= Song: “Don’t Stay at the Benders” by Crossroads Haint (https://weirddarkness.com/music)*** = 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:“American Sea Monsters” by Charles M. Skinner, posted at LegendsOfAmerica.com:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/ycy9tdes“Cruel and Unusual Punishments” by Jonathan Hastad for ListVerse.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/y994jmsf“The Troubled Life And Shocking Death of Marilyn Monroe” by Margarita Hirapetian: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/55bv7naw, and Kelly Kreiss: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/432bykfc for Ranker.com“America’s First Serial Killer Family” by Miss Celania for MentalFloss.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yz7mbn7v(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, 2021This episode of Weird Darkness travels from the sea serpents and lake monsters lurking in American waters to the drug overdose that killed Marilyn Monroe, through history's most gruesome execution methods, and out to a lonely Kansas inn run by the country's first family of serial killers.It opens with a survey of American sea monsters drawn from Charles Skinner's 1896 writings, cataloguing the hundred-foot serpent sighted off Cape Ann and Nahant, Massachusetts as far back as 1638, the fifty-foot finned snakes two men reported battling in Devil's Lake, Wisconsin in 1892, the leonine-skulled creature three women watched churn the Wabash River at Huntington, Indiana, and the Native legends behind them — the Huron horned serpent Okniont, the child-drowning Amhuluk of Oregon, and the water-devils of Crater Lake who hurled a Klamath man from a two-thousand-foot cliff.From there it turns to the troubled life and death of Marilyn Monroe, found dead of a barbiturate overdose on August 5th, 1962 at her home on Fifth Helena Drive in Brentwood — a death coroner Thomas Noguchi complicated when he found no pills in her stomach and learned her organ samples had been destroyed before toxicology testing. The episode traces the conspiracy theories that grew from her final phone calls to Peter Lawford and Joe DiMaggio Jr., the strange gap between when housekeeper Eunice Murray found her and when police were called at 4:25 am, and the 1982 review by District Attorney John Van de Kamp that ruled out foul play, before reaching back into the childhood of Norma Jeane Baker — the schizophrenic mother, the orphanage, the string of foster homes, and the marriage at sixteen that pulled her out of the system.Next comes a tour of cruel and unusual punishments across history, from the Norse Blood Eagle carved into a father's murderer to the Chinese lingchi or death by a thousand cuts, execution by elephant in India and Thailand, being blown from the mouth of a cannon in British-controlled Punjab, boiling alive under Henry VIII, the Roman poena cullei that sewed a parricide into a sack with a rooster, snake, monkey, and dog, and scaphism — the horror of being force-fed milk and honey, smeared with the rest, and left between two boats to be eaten alive.The episode closes with the Bloody Benders, the Spiritualist family who settled near the Osage Trail outside Cherryvale, Kansas in 1870 and turned their one-room inn into a slaughterhouse, seating travelers against a canvas curtain and crushing their skulls with a hammer from behind it before dropping the bodies through a trap door to a blood-soaked cellar. When the prominent Dr. William York vanished off the trail in March 1873 and his brothers — a colonel and a Kansas senator — came looking, the Benders fled, leaving behind a garden of buried corpses that may have numbered as many as twenty-one, and though real names later surfaced (Pa was John Flickinger, Kate was Eliza Griffith), no one ever learned where the family went or brought back proof of their fate.

Something new is coming to Weird Darkness. Starting this Friday night, horror fiction gets its own identity — a dedicated series called Midnight in the Macabre, airing primarily Friday nights at the stroke of twelve. Classic horror stories, creepypastas, and modern horror fiction, plus a little horror-tinged science fiction, all under one clearly-marked banner. In this episode, Darren explains why he's making the change, what it means for listeners who love the fiction, and what it means for those who come to Weird Darkness strictly for the true crime, real hauntings, and dark history. The regular Weird Darkness episodes stay purely non-fiction — every one a true story — while Midnight in the Macabre carries all the fiction. Each series has its own cover art and its own look, so one glance at the thumbnail tells you exactly what you're about to hear before you ever press play. The first Midnight in the Macabre drops this Friday night at midnight.

Los Angeles hides an almost overwhelming number of ghosts behind its glamour, from the piano-playing spirit at Hollywood's Magic Castle and the body found in the Cecil Hotel's water tank to the sex-magick rocket scientist, Father Yod's robed disciples, and the cults that made the City of Angels a capital of the occult.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/hauntedlaREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p98dtw7CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:01:24.727 = Hollywood’s Haunted Magic Castle00:09:13.905 = Los Angeles’ Haunted Hotels ***00:27:05.636 = Los Angeles: City of the Occult ***00:51:50.907 = L.A. Ghosts ***01:01:24.337 = 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:“Hollywood’s Haunted Magic Castle” by Christina Sanza for Graveyard Shift: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/nhdf2f29“Los Angeles’ Haunted Hotels” by Andy Miller from Weird History: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/mvbdcwac“L.A. Ghosts” by Jen Lennon for Graveyard Shift: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/39xypc6c“Los Angeles: City Of The Occult” by Christine Aprile for Weird History: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4y9rj77r(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: April, 2021This episode of Weird Darkness turns to Los Angeles, the City of Angels, and the almost overwhelming number of ghosts, haunted hotels, and occult history hiding behind its glamour, from the Magic Castle and the Cecil Hotel to the sex-magick rocket scientist Jack Parsons, cult leader Father Yod, and the ghosts of Griffith Park.It opens inside Hollywood's Magic Castle at 7001 Franklin Avenue, the private clubhouse of the Academy of Magical Arts, where the Houdini Séance Room honors a magician who spent his career trying to debunk spiritualism and left his wife Bess the code phrase "Rosabelle, believe" for contact from the afterlife. The castle carries the story of Irma, the piano-playing ghost said to have died in 1932 and returned to the mansion built in 1909 by Rollin B. Lane, along with the ghost of magician Dai Vernon near his favorite seat in the Palace of Prestidigitation, the unidentified girl in the Haunted Cellar, and a Halloween 2011 fire that started at the exact time of Houdini's 1926 death and gutted the Dante Room while sparing the Houdini Room.From there the episode checks into the haunted hotels of Los Angeles, beginning with the Knickerbocker, which opened in Hollywood in July of 1929, hosted Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio on their honeymoon, and staged Bess Houdini's tenth and final rooftop séance the night an isolated thunderstorm struck the building alone. It moves through the Ambassador on Wilshire Boulevard, where Robert F. Kennedy was gunned down by Sirhan Sirhan in the kitchen on June 4, 1968, the Rosslyn Annex with its forgotten Prohibition speakeasy, the Alexandria and its bricked-off phantom wing, the Biltmore where Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia, was last seen before her 1947 murder, and the Cecil Hotel, home to serial killers Richard Ramirez and Jack Unterweger and the site where guest Elisa Lam was found dead in the rooftop water tank in 2013 after guests complained the water tasted strange.Next the episode traces L.A.'s long history of the occult, running from Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard and his early Pasadena partnership with rocket scientist Jack Parsons, who performed the "Babalon Working" ritual and later died at 37 in a home laboratory explosion, to Charles Manson and the Family murders of August 1969 that killed Sharon Tate and six others, Carlos Castaneda and the Yaqui shaman Don Juan Matus who launched the New Age movement, and Jim Baker, the marine turned messiah Father Yod, who took fourteen wives and led the Source Family from a Hollywood Hills mansion. It covers avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger and the witch Marjorie Cameron, the 1920 LAPD raid on the Mazdaznan sun-worshipers, the love-cult of Edith Maida Lessing at Mount Helios, the Devil's Gate Dam in Pasadena, and the curse Petronilla Feliz laid on the land that became Griffith Park.The episode closes with a tour of famous L.A. ghosts: the more than one hundred jumpers off Pasadena's Colorado Street "suicide bridge," including Myrtle Ward, whose daughter survived the fall; the body parts Marines found in a freezer at the abandoned Rancho Los Amigos hospital in 2006; picnic table number 29 in Griffith Park, where a couple was crushed by a falling tree in 1976; Bela Lugosi's hearse drifting past his favorite cigar shop; the many spirits of the Queen Mary docked in Long Beach; the unsolved 1929 deaths of Ned Doheny and Hugh Plunkett at Greystone Mansion; the ghost of Superman actor George Reeves; and Bob Baker, still haunting his marionette theater alongside the dead puppeteers who worked there.

A skeptical London professor sets out to expose a plain, lame hypnotist as a fraud, never suspecting that the woman he dismisses has already decided he belongs to her.Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/OTRCHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “The Parasite” (April 07, 1978) ***WD00:46:20.039 = Lux Radio Theater, “Ghost And Mrs. Muir” (December 01, 1947) ***WD01:43:56.937 = Philip Marlowe, “Monkey’s Uncle” (March 07, 1950)02:13:33.368 = Boston Blackie, “The Worthington Ghost” (March 19, 1946) ***WD02:40:01.156 = The Black Mass, “Boarded Window” (February 12, 1964) ***WD03:12:59.922 = Michael Shayne, “Recreate A Murder” (May 28, 1945)03:42:41.656 = Beyond Midnight, “Something On His Mind” (May 30, 1969)04:11:54.838 = MindWebs, “The Last Question” (March 05, 1983) ***WD04:41:25.495 = Adventures In The Supernatural, “The Mysterious Carriage” (1932) ***WD05:05:51.277 = Show Close(ADU) = Air Date Unknown(LQ) = Low Quality***WD = Remastered, edited, or cleaned up by Weird Darkness to make the episode more listenable. Audio may not be pristine, but it will be better than the original file which may have been unusable or more difficult to hear without editing.CUSTOM WEBPAGE: https://weirddarkness.com/WDRR0717

An unknown gunman murders the last of the wealthy Van Cleek line, and when two reporters break into the family's boarded-up mansion to photograph it before demolition, they find two people living inside as though it were still the 1890s.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, “Shark Bait” (March 31, 1978) ***WD00:46:07.462 = Haunting Hour, “Homicide House” (May 27, 1945) ***WD01:10:57.188 = Hermit’s Cave, “Buried Alive” (October 06, 1940)01:35:16.710 = Mystery is My Hobby, “Kid Brown Is KO’d” (1945-1950)01:59:17.833 = Sherlock Holmes, “Strange Case of the Persecuted Millionaire” (February 10, 1947)02:28:34.256 = Mystery House, “Murder Me Gently” (May 12, 1946)02:54:20.575 = Incredible But True, “The Temple of Beal” (1950-1951) ***WD02:58:04.060 = Inner Sanctum, “Color Blind Formula” (December 06, 1944) ***WD03:24:45.575 = Jeff Regan, “The Man Who Liked The Mountains” (August 07, 1948) ***WD (LQ)03:54:30.797 = The Key, “Lost In The Amazon” (1956) ***WD04:19:43.987 = Lights Out, “Baby” (March 28, 1941) ***WD04:44:12.185 = Macabre, “Midnight Horseman” (December 11, 1961) ***WD (LQ)05:11:20.993 = Show Close(ADU) = Air Date Unknown(LQ) = Low Quality***WD = Remastered, edited, or cleaned up by Weird Darkness to make the episode more listenable. Audio may not be pristine, but it will be better than the original file which may have been unusable or more difficult to hear without editing.CUSTOM WEBPAGE: https://weirddarkness.com/WDRR0716

A Soho painter can't stop painting the same 19th-century woman — until she starts talking back, insisting she was murdered and thrown down a Manhattan well, and demanding he hear the truth the courtroom refused to believe.Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/OTRCHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “The Ghost In The Well” (March 28, 1978) ***WD00:46:05.307 = The Strange Dr. Weird, “Secret Room” (February 13, 1945) ***WD00:57:55.158 = Eleventh Hour, “Cast Giant Shadow” (ADU)01:21:29.218 = Escape, “Evening Primrose” (August 25, 1949)01:49:36.901 = Exploring Tomorrow, “Space Baby / aka First Baby in Space” (June 18, 1958) ***WD02:09:35.315 = Dark Fantasy, “Dead Hands Reaching” (May 22, 1942) ***WD02:33:49.707 = BBC Fear on 4, “The Monkey’s Revenge” (January 10, 1991)03:03:18.954 = Theater Five, “A Nothin’ Place” (November 20, 1964)03:26:01.748 = Guests of Doom, “Program 11 & 12” (1930s) ***WD03:51:44.458 = The Hall of Fantasy, “He Who Follows” (March 11, 1950)04:16:11.455 = Harry Lime, “Love Affair” (September 14, 1951)04:40:16.602 = BBC Haunted Tales of the Supernatural, “What Was It” (June 28, 1980) ***WD05:07:37.608 = Show Close(ADU) = Air Date Unknown(LQ) = Low Quality***WD = Remastered, edited, or cleaned up by Weird Darkness to make the episode more listenable. Audio may not be pristine, but it will be better than the original file which may have been unusable or more difficult to hear without editing.CUSTOM WEBPAGE: https://weirddarkness.com/WDRR0715

Sixteen children were found in a single room on Ohmer Street, and their mother had been delivering them in hospitals for seventeen years.READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.com/siders-caseWeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: July 15, 2026

In 1912, an axe killed all eight people sleeping in a Villisca, Iowa farmhouse, and the two men suspected of it — a traveling preacher and a business rival — both walked free.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/VilliscaReverendRivalREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p84usw4FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Conspiracy theories, while often dark, can also be kind of humorous due to being so outlandishly unbelievable. For example… is the Earth’s moon artificial, and actually an extraterrestrial spaceship? We’ll look at the strange theory. (Could Our Moon Be An Alien Spaceship?) *** In 1912 one of the most brutal slayings in America took place in the small town of Villisca, Iowa… a murder so brutal that numerous documentaries have been made about it, books have been written, and amateur detectives have poured over the facts and suspects still trying to find out who the murderer was that swung the bloody axe. (The Unsolved Villisca Ax Murders) *** The President of the United States, no matter who is in the position at the time, is always in danger from those who would like to see someone else in office. We’ll hear on the news of the assassination attempts that came close, but we more often than not are completely unaware of the attempts and plans that have been thwarted – and some of those attempts to kill a sitting U.S. President have been extremely bizarre. (Bizarre Assassination Attempts on U.S. Presidents) *** Some Biblical accounts seem unbelievable and we tend to dismiss them as fantasies, or dreams of the person writing the events down. But what if some of the strange creatures described in the bible are actually real – but come from another dimension, or even outer space? (Are Extraterrestrials in the Bible?) *** If you are told there is a city that has been built specifically for the dead, you probably think of some ancient culture that worshipped their ancestors. Personally, I think of pyramids in Egypt… but I never would’ve thought of the suburbs in California, USA. (California’s City of the Dead)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:02:33.183 = Could Our Moon Be An Alien Spaceship?00:08:21.362 = The Unsolved Villisca Axe Murders ***00:20:59.742 = California’s City of the Dead00:31:12.990 = Are Extraterrestrials in the Bible? ***00:39:47.780 = Bizarre Assassination Attempts on U.S. Presidents00:48:06.915 = 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:“Could Our Moon Be An Alien Spaceship?” posted at Anomalien.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/bdhz5563“The Unsolved Villisca Ax Murders” by Joe Turner for HistoricMysteries.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8mnfp6, and from HauntedRoom.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/36b6k2h4“California’s City of the Dead” by Hugh Landman for Ranker.com’s Graveyard Shift:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yckrxjzd“Are Extraterrestrials in the Bible?” by Ellen Lloyd for AncientPages.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/mr3d8dpk“Bizarre Assassination Attempts on U.S. Presidents” by Richard Stockton for AllThatsInteresting.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/26avtuhr(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, 2022This episode of Weird Darkness runs from a Cold War theory that the Moon is a hollow alien spacecraft, through the 1912 Villisca ax murders that left eight people dead in a single Iowa night, into the California cemetery city of Colma where the dead outnumber the living a thousand to one, on to a former NASA engineer's claim that the prophet Ezekiel witnessed a UFO, and closing with some of the strangest attempts ever made on the lives of sitting U.S. presidents.It opens with the Spaceship Moon Theory, proposed in July of 1970 by Soviet Academy of Sciences members Michael Vasin and Alexander Shcherbakov, who argued the Moon is a hollowed-out planetoid engineered by unknown beings and steered into Earth's orbit. Darren walks through the claims stacked behind the idea — the Moon ringing like a bell for more than an hour after the Apollo 12 crew crashed their lunar module into it on November 20th, 1969, craters of wildly different widths that all share the same shallow depth, moon rocks dated older than the Earth itself, and the near-perfect circular orbit that lets the Moon exactly cover the Sun during an eclipse.From there the episode turns to Villisca, Iowa, and the night of June 9th, 1912, when someone entered the home of Josiah and Sarah Moore and killed all six members of the family along with two young house guests, Lena and Ina Stillinger, striking each victim with an axe as they slept. Darren lays out the crime scene that neighbor Mary Peckham and Josiah's brother Ross discovered the next morning — cloth draped over the mirrors, two cigarette butts in the attic, a slab of bacon left beside the Stillinger girls, and a bloody basin in the kitchen — and the suspects who never brought closure, from traveling minister Reverend George Kelly, who spoke of eight dead bodies before the news broke and later gave a confession the court dismissed, to Josiah's embittered business rival Frank Jones. More than a century on, the boarded-up house survives as a museum where investigators report a heaviness on the stairs, drifting fog, and the sound of dripping blood after the 2 a.m. train whistle.Next the show travels to Colma, California, the suburb built for the dead, where roughly 1,600 living residents share the ground with more than 1.5 million graves across 17 cemeteries. Darren traces how San Francisco banned burials in 1900 and evicted its dead, triggering the largest grave relocation in history after the 1906 earthquake, with more than 150,000 bodies hauled south and tens of thousands reburied in mass graves when families wouldn't pay the ten-dollar transfer fee. He points out the famous names resting there — Wyatt Earp, Levi Strauss, William Randolph Hearst, Joe DiMaggio, brain-injury case Phineas Gage, and self-declared Emperor of the United States Joshua Norton — alongside the darker footnotes of looted skeletons, discarded headstones repurposed as gutters and seawalls, and the town's own gallows-humor slogan, "it's great to be alive in Colma."The episode then examines whether extraterrestrials appear in the Bible, centering on the vision of the prophet Ezekiel by the river Chebar and the four winged creatures with human hands, calf-shaped feet, and four faces that rose out of a fiery whirlwind. Darren details how former NASA chief engineer Joseph F. Blumrich, honored in 1972 for his work on the Saturn and Apollo programs, set out to disprove Erich von Däniken's ancient-astronaut claims and instead became convinced, arguing in his book The Spaceships of Ezekiel that the prophet had described a landing spacecraft — rotor blades, fairing housings, landing legs with round footpads, and remote mechanical arms rendered in the only words an ancient man had for them.The episode closes with a run of bizarre presidential assassination attempts, from John Hinckley's 1981 shooting of Ronald Reagan over an obsession with actress Jodie Foster, to the 2013 ricin letters mailed to the Obama White House by a man framing an Elvis impersonator over an online feud, to truck driver Samuel Byck's 1974 plot to hijack a DC-9 and crash it into the White House to kill Richard Nixon. Darren ends on the two women who tried to kill Gerald Ford seventeen days apart in September of 1974 — Manson follower Lynette Fromme, who never chambered a round, and Sarah Jane Moore, whose shot missed by six inches because her replacement revolver's sights were misaligned.

Read an even deeper-dive into the werewolf trials here: https://weirddarkness.com/wolves-on-trial/Across four centuries of European court records, dozens of men, women, and children confessed to shedding their skins for wolf-hides and hunting under the moon — and the magistrates who heard them believed every word.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/RealWerewolfTrialsREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/43rjhjvpFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: We’re all familiar with the concept of werewolves – they are all over pop culture, movies, television, comic books, novels, and every other medium you could possibly imagine. And while they are considered fictional, or at least in the realm of cryptids, that doesn’t mean there aren’t true stories of reported werewolves in history. (Real Historic Accounts of Werewolves) *** Just the idea of going to prison is enough to scare people into living a squeaky-clean life, but if you’re one of the most dangerous prisoners known to exist, ordinary prison would look like a vacation as compared to life in the Florence ADX Supermax Prison. (Life In The Supermax) *** What was supposed to be a two day trip turned into a maritime mystery when the ship, the MV Joyita was discovered floating with no crew on board. What happened? (The Mysterious Abandonment of the MV Joyita)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:01:37.814 = Show Open00:03:32.506 = Real Historic Accounts of Werewolves, Part 100:28:44.978 = Real Historic Accounts of Werewolves, Part 2 ***00:42:51.099 = The Mysterious Abandonment of the MV Joyita ***01:02:49.562 = Life In The Supermax ***01:15:37.977 = 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:“Real Historic Accounts of Werewolves” by Miss Celania for MentalFloss.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p84ut66, Nick Redfern for Mysterious Universe: http://bit.ly/2MFFx5p, WolvesRox on Playbuzz.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p9bjcht, and Tim Flight for HistoricCollection.com:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p87s85sThe short fable, “The Werewolf” was written by Angela Carter: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yckt8fn6“The Mysterious Abandonment of the MV Joyita” by Marcus Lowth for UFOInsight.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8sux2j“Life In The Supermax” by Jacob Shelton for Ranker.com’s Unspeakable Times: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8u82p9(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, 2022Weird Darkness digs into three dark corners this time out — the real men and women who were tried and executed as werewolves across Early Modern Europe, the South Pacific ghost ship MV Joyita found drifting with all 25 aboard vanished, and daily life inside America's most locked-down prison, the ADX Supermax in Florence, Colorado.It opens with the documented history of lycanthropy trials, tracing the term back through the Old English werwulf and the Greek myth of King Lycaon, whom Ovid recorded being turned into a wolf by Zeus. From there the episode walks through the real cases: the Gandillon family, burned in France in 1598 after the witch hunter Henri Boguet arranged their arrest; Thiess of Livonia, an eighty-year-old man tried in 1692 who claimed to be a benevolent werewolf who fought the Devil for the year's harvest; Peter Stubbe, the "Werewolf of Bedburg," broken on the wheel and beheaded on October 31st, 1589; Gilles Garnier, the "Hermit of Dole," burned alive in 1573 for killing and eating children; the Werewolves of Poligny; the Wolf of Ansbach, an ordinary wolf hanged from a gibbet in a wig and beard in 1685; teenaged Hans the Werewolf, executed in Estonia in 1651; fourteen-year-old Jean Grenier of Gascony, spared the stake and sent to a friary; the "Demon Tailor" of Chalons; and the more modern Spanish serial killer Manuel Blanco Romasanta, the "Werewolf of Allariz," who used lycanthropy as his legal defense, alongside the Ludwigslust and Angers cases and the cannibal beggar Swiatek of Poland.From there the show turns to the MV Joyita, the yacht built in 1931 in Los Angeles for director Roland West and named for his wife, Jewel Carmen. On October 3rd, 1955, she left Apia, Samoa, for the Tokelau Islands carrying 16 crew and nine passengers, and vanished; found over a month later on November 10th by the merchant captain Gerald Douglas, she was drifting more than 600 miles off course, partially submerged but afloat thanks to her cork-lined refrigerated hold. Investigators found the cabin lights on, the clocks stopped at 10:25, the radio tuned to the distress frequency, a doctor's bag holding a scalpel and blood-stained bandages, mattresses stacked over the engine, and all four escape craft gone — with the cargo, and all 25 people, never recovered. Captain Thomas Miller took the blame for sailing on one engine, but the theories that followed ran from mutiny to Japanese fishermen, Soviet submarines, pirates, and insurance fraud, with researcher Robin Maugham laying out the mutiny case in his book The Joyita Mystery.The episode closes inside the United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility in Florence, Colorado, the ADX Supermax that has held Ted Kaczynski, Terry Nichols, Robert Hanssen, Ramzi Yousef, and Zacarias Moussaoui since 1994. Inmates spend 23 hours a day alone in 7-by-12-foot concrete cells with a single 4-inch window angled so the sky and the surrounding mountains stay out of view, communicating through drained toilet pipes and "finger handshakes" through recreation-cage fencing. Former inmates and staff — including warden Robert Hood, who called the architecture itself the control, and prisoner Travis Dusenbury — describe a facility that strips away nearly every trace of ordinary life, the suicide of mentally ill inmate Jose Vega in 2010, and the ongoing lawsuits over medical and mental-health treatment that forced ADX to reevaluate its practices in the mid-2010s.