Weird Darkness: Paranormal & True Crime Stories

A dying woman swears there's a prowler downstairs, but what her husband finds in the dark kitchen is a timid little ghost who can't remember why he's come.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 Forgetful Ghost” (January 23, 1978) ***WD00:46:42.148 = Philip Marlowe, “Grim Echo” (February 14, 1950)01:16:14.347 = Yours Truly Johnny Dollar, “The Ghost To Ghost Matter” (May 18, 1958) ***WD01:41:29.916 = The Black Mass, “Ash Tree” (December 18, 1963) ***WD02:11:43.744 = Michael Shayne, “Big Voice Means a Big Body” (May 07, 1945)02:42:36.427 = Beyond Midnight, “The Yellow Room” (June 06, 1969) ***WD03:13:43.776 = MindWebs, “Desertion” (February 18, 1982)03:44:37.897 = Mystery In The Air, “The Marvelous Barastro” (August 07, 1947)04:13:52.519 = Molle Mystery Theater, “Follow That Cab” (April 19, 1946)04:43:19.587 = 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/WDRR0688This #RetroRadio episode, "A Ghost Who Forgot Why He Came, a Dying Wife, a Final Anniversary," gathers nine vintage old-time-radio broadcasts of mystery, horror, and the supernatural — from a haunted ash tree in 17th-century England to a converted man walking the crushing surface of Jupiter.The CBS Radio Mystery Theater opens the night with "The Forgetful Ghost," in which a dying Eve Gordon wakes her husband Sam in the small hours, certain a prowler is moving through their locked-up house — but when Sam creeps down to the dark kitchen with his hickory walking stick raised, the intruder turns out to be a meek, see-through little man named Peter Pruitt, a ghost who can't recall why he was sent or whom he came to fetch, even as the couple's fortieth wedding anniversary draws closer by the hour. Host E.G. Marshall, a script by Ian Martin, and Mandel Kramer in the lead carry this January 23, 1978 tale of a haunting that proves gentler, and far stranger, than it first appears.Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles private detective Philip Marlowe takes the wheel in "The Grim Echo," skidding off a blizzard-blind mountain road and into a snow-filled culvert directly in front of Echo Lodge — the one place on earth where the name Philip Marlowe is pure poison. Six months earlier Marlowe shot and killed Virgil Barucki in a Los Angeles alley, and now the storm has trapped him with Barucki's grieving widow Helen, his sister Donna, his mother, and the handyman Ralph Tolman, while an "accidental" cabin explosion and a stolen .38 revolver make it clear that someone inside Echo Lodge wants him frozen, or dead. Gerald Mohr stars in this February 14, 1950 chiller.Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar sends the freelance insurance investigator with the action-packed expense account into "The Ghost To Ghost Matter," after a frantic Oscar Trimley telephones from the sleepy mill town of Lake City, New Jersey, swearing that Ian McAndrews — the town's founder, dead five years and already paid out at $55,000 on his life policy — has come back to haunt the streets. Every midnight the old clock tower strikes thirteen, bats pour from the belfry, and a wail rises over the lake, so Dollar brings along old flame Nancy Turner to size up a town that insists its founder's ghost simply won't rest. Bob Bailey stars in this May 18, 1958 mystery out of Hartford, Connecticut.The Black Mass adapts M.R. James's classic "The Ash Tree," set at Castringham Hall in Suffolk, England, where the witch trials of 1690 brought the hanging of Mrs. Mothersole — condemned largely on the testimony of Sir Matthew Fell, who swore he watched her climb the great ash tree beside the house at the full of the moon to cut twigs with a peculiarly curved knife. When Sir Matthew is found dead and black in his bed beneath that same tree, the curse the witch promised begins working its way down through the generations of the Fell family and through whatever still lives inside the hollow trunk of the ash. A December 18, 1963 telling of one of the most quietly horrifying ghost stories ever written.The Adventures of Michael Shayne brings private detective Mike Shayne and his secretary Phyllis Knight into "Big Voice Means a Big Body," when 230-pound opera star Madame Jolene Toulot sweeps into the office waving an anonymous letter that threatens her life if she publishes her scandalous tell-all memoirs. With a roster of suspects who'd all rather stay out of the book — old suitor Roderick MacKenzie of the Newport MacKenzies, ex-husband and aspiring congressman Edwin Buck, rival soprano Leonora Baril, and the maestro Savadel — Shayne heads to the Figaro Theatre for a double bill of Pagliacci and Cavalleria Rusticana, where the diva's fifth farewell performance takes a fatal turn. Wally Maher and Cathy Lewis star in this May 7, 1945 case.Beyond Midnight, the eerie South African series, presents "The Yellow Room," in which the avowed atheist Ronald Todd accepts a wager from the elderly Mrs. Watts: one thousand pounds to spend a single night, entirely alone, in the haunted north wing of Chancellors — the very room where the ghost-hunting sixth Duke of Wallingford lost his sanity and a captain of the Hussars leapt to his death. Over Father Doyle's warnings, Todd is locked in with seven candles for company and a copy of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, and as the clock passes midnight the candles begin going out one by one. Michael McCabe produced this June 6, 1969 broadcast.MindWebs turns to science fiction with Clifford Simak's "Desertion," set in Dome Number Three of the Jovian Survey Commission on the surface of Jupiter, where the planet's crushing fifteen thousand pounds per square inch of pressure and its ammonia rains make unprotected human life impossible. To conquer it, Kent Fowler has been converting his men into "lopers," the planet's native life form — but four men have already loped out into the howling gale two by two and never come back, and now young Harold Allen is next through Miss Stanley's converter. When Fowler at last sends out his own aging dog, Towser, the truth about why no one returns finally begins to surface. A February 18, 1982 reading hosted by Michael Hansen.Mystery in the Air stars Peter Lorre in Ben Hecht's "The Marvelous Barastro," opening as the magician and hypnotist Barastro walks into the office of criminal lawyer Amos G. Hall and calmly announces that he intends to commit a murder before the night is out. His target is Rico Sansoni, a rival hypnotist who once stole away the affections of Barastro's blind wife Anna by studying and mastering the magician's own voice — close enough to deceive even her in the dark. As Barastro recounts hunting his enemy from country to country and city to city, the line between the two illusionists grows harder and harder to draw. An August 7, 1947 broadcast sponsored by Camel cigarettes.Molle Mystery Theater closes the night on a lighter note with the comedy "Follow That Cab," starring two New York City cabbies, Mo and Julius, who have read so many issues of Absolutely Authentic True Crime Fiction — and idolized its hero, detective Daniel Daremore — that they're convinced they can crack any case. When a fare leaps from the cab without paying and a song publisher named Larkin turns up shot dead in his apartment, the pair wipe away the fingerprints to make the murder "more baffling," let their prime suspect walk, and bumble their way toward a stolen song called "Joan," a desperate songwriter named Boynton, and a mysterious redhead. Written by Sid and Larry Sloan, this April 19, 1946 farce sends up the whole hardboiled detective genre with host Jeffrey Barnes presiding.

16/06/2026 • 284:10

When the Hale-Bopp comet swung past Earth in 1997, thirty-nine people put on matching black shirts and brand-new Nikes, swallowed a lethal mix of barbiturates and vodka, and lay down beneath purple shrouds to die — certain their souls were about to board the alien ship they believed was hiding in the comet's tail.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/heavensgateREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/343j2ju2FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Following an anonymous tip, police enter a mansion in Rancho Santa Fe, an exclusive suburb of San Diego, California, and discover 39 victims of a mass suicide. The deceased–21 women and 18 men of varying ages–were all found lying peaceably in matching dark clothes and Nike sneakers and had no noticeable signs of blood or trauma. It was later revealed that the men and women were members of the “Heaven’s Gate” religious cult, whose leaders preached that suicide would allow them to leave their bodily “containers” and enter an alien spacecraft hidden behind the Hale-Bopp comet. *** PLUS, the creepy true-crime story of two men who were caught trying to steal the body of the 16th President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln. But that is by no means the end of this story full of twists, turns, myths, and conspiracies.CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Heaven’s Gate, Part 1 00:00:53.808 = Show Open00:02:37.373 = Heaven’s Gate, Part 200:04:59.269 = Heaven’s Gate, Part 300:09:37.695 = Heaven’s Gate, Part 4 ***00:23:22.776 = Stealing Lincoln’s Bones, Part 1 ***00:44:45.437 = Stealing Lincoln’s Bones, Part 2 ***00:57:58.687 = 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:“Heavens Gate” by Rolling Stone: http://bit.ly/WeirdDarkness2D7tbeZ, Ranker: http://bit.ly/weirddarkness2UIsK4O, and History.com: http://bit.ly/WeirdDarkness2G3uqfN“Stealing Lincoln’s Bones” by Troy Taylor: https://www.americanhauntingsink.com/stealing-lincolns-bones(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: November 28, 2021Weird Darkness runs from the 1997 mass suicide of the Heaven's Gate UFO cult outside San Diego to an 1876 counterfeiting gang's attempt to steal Abraham Lincoln's corpse from his tomb in Springfield, Illinois.It opens with the discovery, on March 26, 1997, of thirty-nine members of Heaven's Gate inside a rented mansion in the San Diego suburb of Rancho Santa Fe — twenty-one women and eighteen men lying beneath purple shrouds in matching black shirts and new black-and-white Nike sneakers, plastic bags over their heads, after swallowing phenobarbital and vodka. They believed the deaths would free their souls to board an alien spacecraft trailing the Hale-Bopp comet, which was making its closest approach to Earth that month. Former music professor Marshall Applewhite had started the group in 1975 with his nurse Bonnie Lu Nettles, the two of them renaming themselves Bo and Peep and later Do and Ti before persuading about twenty people in Oregon to leave their families and wait in eastern Colorado for a ship that never arrived. Applewhite preached that human bodies were disposable containers, that he was the second coming of Jesus, and that God was an alien. Nettles died in 1985, but he held the group together, and by the 1990s it had become the first well-known internet-era cult, paying its bills by building web pages under the business name Higher Source. The members watched Star Trek: The Next Generation, sewed Heaven's Gate Away Team patches onto their uniforms, severed contact with relatives through a practice Applewhite called breaking away, and submitted to a ban on sex that several of the men, Applewhite among them, enforced on themselves through castration.The episode closes with the 1876 plot to steal Abraham Lincoln's body from his tomb at Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, Illinois. A Chicago counterfeiting ring run by James "Big Jim" Kneally had lost its master engraver, Benjamin Boyd, to a ten-year term in Joliet Penitentiary, so the gang resolved to seize the president's corpse and ransom it for Boyd's freedom. On election night, November 7, 1876, gang members Terence Mullen and Jack Hughes filed through the lock and split the marble sarcophagus with an ax, unaware that the grave robber they knew as Jim Morrissey was Secret Service operative Lewis Swegles, and that Captain Patrick Tyrell's agents and Pinkerton detectives hired by Robert Lincoln were hidden elsewhere in the monument. The trap fell apart when the lawmen fired on one another in the dark and the two robbers wandered off and escaped, though both were captured on November 18 and, with grave robbery barely a crime in Illinois at the time, served only a year in Joliet. What the public would not learn for years was that custodian John C. Power and a secret brotherhood calling itself the Lincoln Guard of Honor had already dragged the five-hundred-pound coffin into a damp labyrinth beneath the monument and buried it under loose boards and dirt, leaving visitors to grieve over an empty sarcophagus. The body was shifted from hiding place to hiding place until 1901, when Robert Lincoln ordered his father's casket lowered ten feet, locked inside a steel cage, and sealed under two tons of concrete, following one last viewing in which Leon P. Hopkins, the plumber who had closed the coffin back in 1865, studied a chalk-whitened but recognizable face and soldered the lead shut for good.

16/06/2026 • 59:16

A newly declassified FBI form describes a meter-wide red sphere with a white plasma core hovering in a backyard one evening, among dozens of glowing-orb sightings in the Pentagon's third batch of UFO files.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/UFO-Batch-3Look 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.

15/06/2026 • 09:32

After her 24-year-old daughter died by suicide in Montreal, Kristie Carrier read the months of ChatGPT conversations on Alice's phone — and filed suit against OpenAI and Sam Altman.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/openai-suicide-lawsuitLook 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.

15/06/2026 • 12:36

When the luxury liner SS Morro Castle erupted in flames off the New Jersey coast in 1934, it left behind 137 dead, a captain's corpse that vanished before it could be examined, and a heroic radio operator whose criminal past suggested he may have started the fire himself. | #WDRadio June 14, 2026==========HOUR ONE: Jeannie Saffin already had a tough life, being born with a birth defect that stunted her mental growth, leaving her with the mind of a child, never getting married and having kids, never dating… but that all pales in comparison to how she died: bursting into flames for no apparent reason. Was Jeannie Saffin the victim of spontaneous human combustion? (The Spontaneous Combustion of Jeannie Saffin) *** Sometimes it’s easy to get a girl to go out with you – just be polite and ask. Some men resort to cheesy pickup lines thinking it will help their chances. But one man chose to call upon a woman in a very unusual way… by purchasing a gravestone. (Pitching Woo With a Tombstone) *** If a man demands his girlfriend give up the baby they conceived, otherwise he would no longer be with the woman – what is that newborn’s mother to do? Sadly, Emily Dunn made the wrong decision – with tragic results. (The Durbin Baby Murder) *** The transplanting of an organ is almost a routine procedure now in the 21st century – even doing a transplant of an arm or a leg isn’t uncommon. But when you talk about transplanting a living head onto a dead body – that’s when things get tricky. But Robert White thought it could be done – and even tried doing it. (The Man Who Wanted To Do a Head Transplant) *** Imagine getting onto a plane and once in the air finding out that the pilot wasn’t qualified to fly that kind of plane – and that he was only there because the original pilot wasn’t available due to being dead. That’s what happened in 1934 on the boat, the SS Morro Castle. And it was the beginning of tragedy after tragedy. (Mystery, Mismanagement, and Mayhem on the SS Morro Castle)==========HOUR TWO: In June of 2009 a man calling himself Peter Bergmann checked in to a hotel in Sligo Town. Five days later his body was found on Rosses Point Beach. But Peter Bergmann was not Peter Bergmann – so who was he? (The Peter Bergmann Mystery) *** Sharing stories from people who are frightened by a bump in the night or a strange shadow on the wall in their bedroom is one thing, but when you get professional ghost hunters telling of the scariest experiences they’ve had, you know it has to be some freaky stuff. (Scariest Experiences of Ghost Hunters) ==========SUDDEN DEATH OVERTIME: More of the scariest experiences of ghost hunters! *** I’ll tell you about that time when a dam failed – and because of it, people were legally allowed to marry the dead. And still do to this day. (That Time A Failed Dam Led to Marrying Corpses) *** Personal experiences of those who have stayed at the Wolf Creek Inn, plus some hard evidence, seems to indicate that spirits who haunt the place are not only benign in nature, but even protect the guests and owners from other malevolent spirits which roam there as well. (Haunts at Wolf Creek Inn)==========SOURCES AND REFERENCES FROM TONIGHT’S SHOW:“Mystery, Mismanagement, and Mayhem on the SS Morro Castle” by Brent Swancer for Mysterious Universe:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/56jb9c7j“The Man Who Wanted To Do a Head Transplant” by Gary Krist for the Washington Post: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/39d2k9pw“The Durbin Baby Murder” posted at Murders In History: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/c96z9kst“Pitching Woo With a Tombstone” from the New York Journal, posted at The Victorian Book of the Dead website:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/utw6vh45“The Spontaneous Combustion of Jeannie Saffin” by Brent Swancer for Mysterious Universe:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/e6as67fn“That Time A Failed Dam Led to Marrying Corpses” by Kaushik Patowary for Amusing Planet: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/zyrxx43k“Scariest Experiences of Ghost Hunters” by Amanda Ashley for Graveyard Shift:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/y7tx3a2t“Haunts at Wolf Creek Inn” posted at HauntedHouses.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yadzm4ae“The Peter Bergmann Mystery” by Rosita Boland for Irish Times: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/9b44kfs==========(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 mailto:affiliates@radioamerica.com, or call 800-807-4703 (press 2 or dial ext 250).==========https://weirddarkness.com/WDR20260614This episode of Weird Darkness moves from a burning luxury liner off the New Jersey coast to a fire-scarred kitchen in London, a body on an Irish beach, a drowned infant in Illinois, a collapsed French dam that legalized marrying the dead, and a haunted stagecoach inn in Oregon — with a head-transplant surgeon and a tombstone-shopping widower along the way.It opens with the SS Morro Castle, the 508-foot American ocean liner that ferried wealthy passengers between New York and Havana during Prohibition until September 8, 1934, when its captain, Robert Wilmott, dropped dead the night before departure and a fire of unknown origin erupted in a B Deck storage locker on the voyage home. Replacement captain William Warms steered into gale-force winds and waited 38 minutes to send a distress call, paint-gummed lifeboats refused to lower, untrained passengers broke their necks jumping in faulty life jackets, and at least 137 of the 549 aboard died before the charred hulk ran aground at Asbury Park, New Jersey, where souvenir stands sprang up around the wreck. Suspicion later fell on chief radio operator George White Rogers, the disaster's celebrated hero, whose hidden history of arson convictions, an aquarium-heater bomb built to maim a police lieutenant asking too many questions, and a double murder ended with his sudden death in Trenton State Prison — and the disappearance of his prison records.From there the episode lightens briefly with a pair of newspaper accounts of courtship by gravestone: an 1896 story from the Cincinnati Enquirer about a widower who finally bought a $50 monument for his wife of five years past — not out of grief, but to impress a wealthy widow who had called him too cheap to mark the grave — and a 1924 item from the Kansas City Star about a Kansas woman who married a widower precisely because he kept his first wife's grave so well.Next comes Dr. Robert J. White, the Cleveland neurosurgeon who watched the first successful human kidney transplant in Boston in 1954 and spent the rest of his life pursuing something far stranger: transplanting a living human head onto a donor body. In March 1970 he performed the operation on monkeys, moving one animal's head onto another's decapitated body in an 18-hour surgery; the hybrid lived nine days. White, a devout Catholic who sparred publicly with journalist Oriana Fallaci and animal rights activist Ingrid Newkirk, came close to attempting the procedure on a quadriplegic human volunteer through Russia's medical system before he died in 2010, leaving behind questions about consciousness, identity, and death that medicine has yet to answer.The hour then turns to Jeannie Saffin, a 61-year-old London woman with the mental capacity of a child who, on September 15, 1982, burst into flames while sitting calmly at her father's kitchen table in Edmonton with her hands in her lap. Her father Jack and brother-in-law Don Carroll doused the fire, but Jeannie — burned to the subcutaneous fat on her face, hands, and abdomen — never screamed, slipped into a coma, and died eight days later. The chair she sat in was unmarked, the nearest flame was a shielded pilot light five feet away, and a police constable concluded it was spontaneous human combustion, a verdict the coroner rejected. Skeptic Joe Nickell's pipe-ember theory accounts for some details, but not how a human body ignited so completely in under two minutes while burning nothing around it.Then the mystery of Peter Bergmann: the tall, gray-haired man with an Austrian accent who arrived in Sligo, Ireland by bus on June 12, 2009, checked into the Sligo City Hotel under a false name and a fabricated Vienna address, and over three days left the hotel thirteen times carrying a full purple plastic bag — returning empty-handed each time, never once caught by CCTV disposing of anything. He bought ten international stamps, cut the labels from his clothes, folded them neatly on a rock at Rosses Point Beach, and was found dead at the water's edge the next morning near Dead Man's Point. The autopsy revealed terminal prostate cancer he could not have been unaware of, yet he died of cardiac arrest, not dr

15/06/2026 • 125:26

In Steven Spielberg's Disclosure Day, a former nun clutches a crucifix, prays the words Jesus prayed the night before the cross, and then lets it fall to the floor.EPISODE PAGE (Includes Sources and Transcript): https://weirddarkness.com/cotu-disclosuredayLISTEN 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 for Weird Darkness: https://pod.link/1078714736. For Church of the Undead episodes specifically, you can find a list of apps here: https://pod.link/1651062114.*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: June 14, 2026

15/06/2026 • 31:44

Three nine-year-old boys in a Massachusetts port town go looking for the schoolyard ghost called Skeleton Jack and instead find a tree that should not exist — black and leafless, cold enough to seem to drink the life out of the air — a tree one of them is dared to carve his name into, while something he can't see breathes in the dark just behind him.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/BlackTreeFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: "The Abandoned Drive-In Theater" — A newcomer to North Carolina, biking past the ruins of a drive-in theater that's been dead for decades, hears an engine roar and turns to see a film flickering across the filthy, torn screen — then finds every speaker smashed and every wire long since severed, with no way the movie could have been playing at all. *** "He Showed Up To Work After His Funeral" — Six days before Christmas, a security guard helps lower his coworker Jake into the ground after a fatal heart attack — and two mornings later, arriving alone at the snowed-in, empty worksite, he finds Jake's car already parked in the lot. *** "The Black Tree in the Woods" — In a Massachusetts port town haunted by the schoolyard legend of a flayed pirate ghost, three nine-year-old boys push deep into a forbidden forest and find a short, withered tree that grows no leaves and seems to drink the life out of the air — and when one of them is dared to carve his name into its strangely soft bark, something he cannot see begins breathing in his ear.CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:02:17.025 = The Abandoned Drive-In Theater00:07:35.119 = He Showed Up To Work After His Funeral ***00:17:39.759 = The Black Tree In The Woods ***00:58:35.975 = 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 Abandoned Drive-In Theater” by January Nelson, from Thought Catalog: https://tinyurl.com/ybwbdgev“He Showed Up To Work After His Funeral” by Thomas J. Sotvedt: https://tinyurl.com/yckfue5w“The Black Tree In The Woods” submitted anonymously to Thought Catalog: https://tinyurl.com/y7rocj8v(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: June 10, 2020

15/06/2026 • 60:00

Thirteen years after The Empire Strikes Back, the long-delayed finale arrived in 1996 — six episodes that brought the original trilogy to a close. Funding cuts had stalled production for more than a decade, but the conclusion was completed at last, with Anthony Daniels returning one final time as C-3PO, joined by Brock Peters as Darth Vader, John Lithgow's Yoda, and Ed Asner as Jabba the Hutt. Still carried by John Williams' score and the original sound effects, it's Return of the Jedi as you've never heard it. | #RRStarWarsLook 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 Open00:02:37.835 = Episode 01: Tatooine Haunts00:34:52.858 = Episode 02: Fast Friends01:04:58.749 = Episode 03: Prophecies And Destinies 01:38:38.890 = Episode 04: Pattern And Web02:06:06.595 = Episode 05: So Turns a Galaxy, So Turns a Wheel02:40:27.908 = Episode 06: Blood of a Jedi03:14:07.134 = 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/WDRRSW03

14/06/2026 • 261:44

A mother tracking her daughter's phone led police to a New Hampshire Olive Garden, where the daughter ran out in tears with cigarette burns on her legs and a story about a forced marriage and a satanic ritual.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/DanielOuelletLook for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://pod.link/1078714736*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.#WeirdDarkness, #WeirdDarkNEWS

14/06/2026 • 06:07

A bored New York commuter who passes the time on the A train by quietly sorting his fellow riders into types becomes fixated on one unremarkable man whose blank stillness never breaks — a man who takes the same seat in the same car to ride to the end of the line and right back again — until the need to know what he really is pulls the commuter off his own route and down into the tunnels after him.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/StrangersOnTheSubwayFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: "The Statues" — Forced to babysit his toddler cousin in his aunt's house full of religious statues, a teenager finds a black gargoyle crouched in the baby's room that his aunt swears she never owned — right before she starts screaming at him to get the child out. *** "The Strangers" — A bored subway commuter who passes the time sorting strangers into types becomes obsessed with one blank, silent man who rides to the end of the line and back for no reason — until learning what he really is pulls him down into the tunnels after him.CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:00:58.163 = The Statues00:14:23.981 = The Strangers (On The Subway) ***00:50:09.127 = 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 Statues” by Sammy Ruiz: https://tinyurl.com/ydxzvtfm“The Strangers” submitted anonymously to Creepypasta.com: https://tinyurl.com/ycv86sfs(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: July 02, 2020

14/06/2026 • 51:22

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

14/06/2026 • 41:25

In 1983, the team behind NPR's record-breaking Star Wars returned for the darker, colder middle chapter — The Empire Strikes Back, told across ten episodes. Mark Hamill and Anthony Daniels were back as Luke and C-3PO, Billy Dee Williams reprised Lando Calrissian from the film, and a young John Lithgow voiced Yoda, all set to the original sound effects and John Williams' score. From the frozen wastes of Hoth to the clouds of Bespin, it's the Star Wars sequel as you've never heard it. | #RRStarWarsLook 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 Open00:02:18.293 = Episode 01: Freedom’s Winter00:27:42.852 = Episode 02: The Coming Storm00:53:25.863 = Episode 03: A Question of Survival01:17:59.498 = Episode 04: Fire And Ice01:44:01.903 = Episode 05: The Millennium Falcon Pursuit02:09:29.038 = Episode 06: Way of the Jedi02:36:34.560 = Episode 07: New Allies, New Enemies03:03:42.954 = Episode 08: Dark Lord’s Fury03:28:52.899 = Episode 09: Gambler’s Choice03:52:56.581 = Episode 10: The Clash of Lightsabers04:20:16.969 = 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/WDRRSW02

13/06/2026 • 261:44

In 1981, National Public Radio turned the biggest movie in the world into a thirteen-episode radio epic that went on to break the network's listening records. George Lucas sold the rights for a single dollar and handed over the original sound effects and John Williams' score, letting a full cast bring the galaxy to life in sound alone. Mark Hamill and Anthony Daniels reprised Luke Skywalker and C-3PO in a sweeping retelling that expands well beyond the film — the original Star Wars as you've never heard it.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 Open00:02:26.702 = Episode 01: A Wind To Shake The Stars00:29:28.616 = Episode 02: Points of Origin00:57:12.772 = Episode 03: Black Knight, White Princess and Pawns01:24:56.510 = Episode 04: While Giants Mark Time01:52:19.601 = Episode 05: Jedi That Was, Jedi To Be02:19:58.041 = Episode 06: The Millennium Falcon Deal02:46:11.104 = Episode 07: The Han Solo Solution03:11:18.777 = Episode 08: Death Star’s Transit03:39:30.428 = Episode 09: Rogues, Rebels and Robots04:07:04.628 = Episode 10: The Luke Skywalker Initiative04:31:53.682 = Episode 11: The Jedi Nexus04:58:33.511 = Episode 12: The Case For Rebellion05:26:28.922 = Episode 13: Force And Counter Force05:54:27.266 = 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/WDRRSW01

13/06/2026 • 355:55

Louisiana troopers stopped a banged-up Toyota Supra on Interstate 310 on June 7th, and the driver's escape attempt ran through two swamps, one alligator, and a sheriff's drone.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/gator-getawayLook for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://pod.link/1078714736*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.#WeirdDarkness, #WeirdDarkNEWS

13/06/2026 • 04:25

A terrifying vision, a terrifying UFO encounter, and evidence of the encounter buried in his arm – if true, Tim Cullen’s story could change everything we think we know about extraterrestrials.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/timcullenREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/433fftc2FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Tim Cullen’s life changed forever after a chilling dream in 1978. It wasn’t long after that he had bizarre encounters with UFOs, was abducted by aliens, and found a strange piece of metal embedded in his arm. Were these encounters real? If so, what secrets lie within the alien implant removed from his body? (The Alien Abduction of Tim Cullen) *** The life of Martha Place took a dark turn in 1899. Convicted of a brutal murder, Martha faced a horrifying punishment… she was about to become the first woman to be executed by the electric chair. (The First Woman in the Electric Chair) *** We’ll look at a double-murder case where real crime collides with reality TV, resulting in real-life horror. (The Wife-Swap Murders) *** Steve’s childhood was marked by inexplicable and spine-chilling encounters. Eerie breathing sounds, a manifestation at his bedside, being pushed down the stairs… all without a rational explanation. Even moving away wouldn’t bring his paranormal tormenting to an end. (The Entity That Follows) *** The urban legend of "The Licked Hand” is a chilling tale that has been whispered around campfires and shared at sleepovers for generations, tapping into our deepest fears of invasion and vulnerability. But this isn't just any ghost story; it's a timeless warning about the dangers lurking in the darkness, waiting to infiltrate our homes and lives… and it even has a bit of truth to it. (Licking The ‘Humans Can Lick Too’ Urban Legend)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:01:22.108 = Show Open00:03:49.182 = Alien Abduction of Tim Cullen00:15:23.331 = The First Woman in the Electric Chair ***00:20:45.119 = Licking The “Humans Can Lick Too’ Urban Legend00:32:36.414 = Wife-Swap Murders00:40:47.468 = The Entity That Follows ***00:57:00.607 = 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 Alien Abduction of Tim Cullen” by Marcus Lowth for UFO Insight: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p9xv3u2“The Wife-Swap Murders” by Rayven Crawford for Unspeakable Crimes: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/5n93fc8e“Licking The ‘Humans Can Lick Too’ Urban Legend” by Jacob Shelton for Graveyard Shift:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8bbakk, and UrbanLegendsAndHorror.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/y39ytjpk“The First Woman in the Electric Chair” by Troy Taylor: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/ydbd6ae8“The Entity That Follows” by Marcus Lowth for UFO Insight: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/ykycurch(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 10, 2024This episode of Weird Darkness moves from a recovered alien implant in a Colorado man's forearm to the first woman ever sent to the electric chair, through the campfire legend of the licked hand, a Wife Swap family destroyed by one son's gunfire, and a breathing entity that stalked a boy from one English city to another.It opens with Tim Cullen, who dreamed on April 2nd, 1978 that he would be in a violent traffic accident, then lived it a week later on April 9th when his friend Ken Ruberg's car rolled over multiple times and left Cullen with a broken neck. Recovering in the hospital, he had a second vivid dream, this one of a UFO, and on May 30th of that year, while driving Highway 59 home from a checkup with his pregnant wife Janet, the couple watched a silent, glowing craft roughly 100 feet long hover over a pasture with two diffused lights — one yellow, one red — glowing at its rear. Cullen reported two more sightings along the same Yuma, Colorado stretch of road, one in 1980 and another in 1994 witnessed by his wife and three daughters, but the encounters faded from his mind until 1998, when he hit his thumb with a hammer and Dr. Mark Hubner at the Yuma Clinic spotted a piece of metal lodged in his forearm on the X-ray. Convinced the object was an alien implant, Cullen contacted Roger K. Leir, who surgically removed it on February 5th, 2000 in Thousand Oaks, California — a melon-seed-shaped fragment about 7 centimeters long, wrapped in a reddish-brown membrane, with a magnetic core that leapt half an inch off the table toward a magnet.From there the episode turns to March 20th, 1899, when Martha Place became the first woman executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison in New York, a procedure so unfamiliar with a female prisoner that her executioners cut a slit in the black dress she had sewn herself to reach her ankles. Born Martha Garrettson in Millstone, New Jersey in 1849, she had been struck in the head by a sleigh at 23 and, her brother believed, never fully recovered. After marrying widower William Place and coming to hate her teenage stepdaughter Ida, she threw acid into the 17-year-old girl's face on February 7th, 1898, smothered her with bedding, and waited with an ax for William, whom she wounded as he stepped through the door. Governor Theodore Roosevelt refused to commute her sentence, and after the words "God help me," 1,760 volts ended her life at the age of 49.Next comes the urban legend of the licked hand, in which a girl left home alone with her German Shepherd reaches down through the night to feel a reassuring lick, only to wake and find her dog skinned in the shower and the words "Humans can lick too" scrawled on the mirror. The legend's roots reach back to an 1871 entry in The Diary of a Victorian Squire by Dearman Birchall, run through M.R. James's 1919 story "The Diary of Mr. Poynter," and surface in the film Urban Legend with its "aren't you glad you didn't turn on the lights" variant. Folklorists including Trevor Blank of SUNY Potsdam account for the tale's endurance, and its dread finds a real-world echo in Dennis Rader, the BTK strangler, who cut the phone lines at Marine Hedge's home on April 27th, 1985 and hid in her closet for hours before she returned.The episode then examines a double murder rooted in reality television, the case of the Stockdale family, who appeared on an April 23rd, 2008 episode of Wife Swap trading mothers with the easygoing Tonkovic household. Raised under a strict religious regime that banned video games, dating, and most contact with the outside world, Jacob Stockdale fatally shot his mother Kathy and his brother James in the head on June 15th, 2017 in Beach City, Ohio, then survived a self-inflicted gunshot. He pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity and tried more than once to flee the mental institution holding him, including a plan to hide behind stacks of books being carted out, but Dr. Arcangela Wood judged him sane at the time of the killings. Jacob ultimately pleaded guilty and received two consecutive 15-year terms, 30 years for the deaths of his mother and brother.The episode closes with an account written by UFO Insight's Marcus Lowth and told to him by a man he calls Steve, who first heard breathing beside his face at age three or four in 1970s Newcastle, England. The encounters escalated over the following years — an invisible finger shoving his cheek, the manifestation of a grey-haired man around 50 in an old-fashioned suit at his bedside, and a push that sent him tumbling down a full flight of stairs in daylight. When the family moved to a semi-detached house near Sheffield in Yorkshire, the presence followed, culminating one night around midnight when Steve, then eight or nine, felt invisible knees pin him to the mattress and unseen hands tighten around his throat until the grip suddenly released and the breathing drained away into the distance. It never returned, leaving unresolved whether the entity was a poltergeist drawn to a child, the lingering ghost of an old man, or something demonic that fixed on a person rather than a place.

13/06/2026 • 58:12

A three-year-old who could not sit up, walk, or speak arrived at a Rockford hospital with a brain bleed in July of 2023, and Loves Park detectives would spend nearly three years trying to learn how it happened.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/lovespark2023Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://pod.link/1078714736*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.#WeirdDarkness, #WeirdDarkNEWS

13/06/2026 • 05:52

A candlemaker guards one dying flame through the night while ravenous things in the dark demand the soul of a frozen stranger. An old woman stares through a second-floor window with no ledge to stand on, and the shadow man behind her inches closer with every passing night. And a small-town officer commits a man to a psychiatric hold for claiming a five-year-old suicide was really a murder — until the same vision starts playing out in front of his own eyes.FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: I have three stories in this episode for you! Andrew Pendragon pens the tale, “Candles” to start things off. Weirdo Family member Randy Hogan shares a fictional tale called “Old Woman in the Window”. And then our final story is from S.F. Barkley called “I’m a Cop And I Institutionalized Someone I Knew Wasn’t Crazy”.CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:01:10.223 = Chandler’s Candles00:19:35.808 = The Old Woman in the Window00:24:35.615 = I’m A Cop And I Institutionalized Someone I Knew Wasn’t Crazy, Part 1 ***01:03:09.029 = I’m A Cop And I Institutionalized Someone I Knew Wasn’t Crazy, Part 2 ***01:29:19.732 = 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:“I’m a Cop And I Institutionalized Someone I Knew Wasn’t Crazy” by S.F. Barkley: https://sfbarkley.com/,https://www.reddit.com/user/Barkles52/“Candles” by Andrew Pendragon: https://www.creepypasta.com/candles/“The Old Woman in the Window” by Weird family member, Randy Hogan(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: September 10, 2020Weird Darkness gathers three works of horror fiction for Creepypasta Thursday, moving from a candlemaker's nightly bargain with the dark, to a watcher at an upstairs window, to a small-town murder reopened by a vision no evidence could explain.It opens with a candlemaker in the small town of Clovetown, the last practitioner of an inherited art he calls Chandler's candles, passed to him from his father and grandmother and kept alive mostly through monthly orders from the Catholic church down the road. His after-hours visitors come only once, telling him sad stories before they go, and on a freezing Tuesday a muddy, shivering man named Basim arrives — a wanderer whose family left Israel before settling in a Midwestern state he refuses to name. The candlemaker warms Basim with tea, tends a bruise left when local children pelted him with a rock, and sends him off with a vanilla-scented sculpted candle and a box of matches. That night the shop window shatters under another volley of stones, and Basim is found frozen to death on a bench outside. As the power fails and darkness floods the shop, ravenous shadow-creatures his family has sheltered against for centuries surround him and demand Basim's marked soul, and he survives the night only by shielding the dying flame of that single candle with his own body until dawn.From there the episode turns to a teenage boy who finds an old woman staring through his second-floor bedroom window, her face blank and dead, though no ledge or balcony exists for anyone to stand on. She returns each night after 10:30 for eight months, and the pattern eventually breaks — she appears in the living room window in daylight, then inside the house, and finally seated beside him with the same lifeless expression. A second figure joins her, a shadow man with masculine features who edges closer with each appearance, and his presence twists the old woman's blank stare into one of horror and terror. By the end, both stand within inches of the boy, and he does not know whether he will live to see another night.The episode closes with Sean Barkley, a Crisis Intervention Team officer working the night shift in rural Pennsylvania, dispatched on a freezing-rain night to a farmhouse where a man named Kevin claims to have witnessed a murder. Kevin's sister, Melissa Watson, died in that house five years earlier in a death ruled a suicide, but he now sees a recurring vision in the upstairs bedroom — Melissa pleading for her life as her husband Andrew fires a gun — and Barkley glimpses the same muzzle flash in the window. Rather than let Kevin hunt Andrew down, Barkley commits him on an involuntary hold and quietly reopens the case with fellow officer Tim, uncovering an autopsy that recorded old bruises and a broken rib never investigated, a handgun bullet buried in the mattress, and a shotgun shell hidden in an air duct. The trail leads to Virginia Beach, where a search warrant turns up Melissa's missing .380 and a destroyed external hard drive holding child exploitation material, some of it filmed in the basement of the farmhouse. Andrew is arrested and then released on bail before he is found dead in a motel room, an apparent suicide with a note only Barkley can see, and a final vision of Melissa's spirit reveals that she had drawn the investigation toward exposing her husband so that she could claim her own revenge.

13/06/2026 • 90:50

In one of Ontario's least forested regions, a witness reported two creatures scavenging garbage at dawn — and when they knocked on wood to scare them off, something knocked back.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/ontariobigfootLook for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://pod.link/1078714736*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.#WeirdDarkness, #WeirdDarkNEWS

12/06/2026 • 11:39

A coffin lid scratched from the inside, a stalker hiding in the basement, and a plate of "fresh venison" served by a man who was never a hunter — Redditors share the true moments that still keep them up at night.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/RedditHorrorsREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4ywsvu9vLISTEN 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:“Creepy True Occurrences From Redditors” posted at Factinate.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/h9zz8vka(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: November, 2021Here's the blog synopsis in plain text, ready for your review pass before HTML conversion.Weird Darkness gathers dozens of true creepy stories submitted by Redditors, ranging from a grandmother buried alive in a backyard coffin to phantom police officers, a haunted hotel painter, a 1980s kidnapping attempt, and a dinner of "fresh venison" served by a cannibal.It opens with a coworker's family story about exhuming a grandmother who had been buried in a wooden box in the backyard, as was once customary. When the family lifted the lid to move her to a cemetery plot years later, they found claw marks covering the inside of the coffin — she had been buried alive.From there, a babysitter hears pans falling in the basement after putting the children to bed and calls the police expecting a single patrol officer. A full SWAT team arrives at the door instead, because the dispatcher heard a second phone on the line hang up after the call ended. A man wanted for multiple assaults had been listening from the basement extension.A secluded spring campground follows, where a father and his friends befriended a quiet neighbor living out of a makeshift truck camper. Days later, driving out, they spotted him hanging from a tree beside his untouched campsite, a note pinned to the trunk with a buck knife — the suicide had happened at the father's favorite camping spot, the same one where he finally told his children the story years later.Next comes a twelve-year-old girl living in a backyard trailer who heard footsteps crossing the metal roof at night, always when she was alone. Months later she woke to find the trailer sweltering, the heater cranked to full blast, and fled on instinct; investigators later found the door lock tampered with and a kitchen knife hidden behind a chair beside the heating controls, where the staring neighbor had apparently crouched in wait.After the first break, a traveler in Taiwan steps into an elevator near a night market and stops on a pitch-dark, abandoned floor that shouldn't exist. The building's fourth floor — omitted from the panel entirely, in keeping with Chinese numerical superstition — had been sealed after a hair salon employee died by suicide there, and the elevator had been professionally reprogrammed to never stop on it. It sometimes does anyway, and riders report a figure in a gown moving toward the doors.Then a 2 a.m. street fight ends with a stabbing, a daughter catching her bleeding stepfather on the porch, and an answering machine message recorded at the exact time of the attack: a school friend across town, crying, describing a dream of screaming, a fight, and her friend covered in blood — in the late 1980s, long before cell phones could have carried the news.A college student renting a basement room recounts his dog growling at one corner of the room, followed by the small dirt-floored closet under the stairs creaking open on its own with deliberate slowness, leaving him frozen in the dark hallway for five full minutes.A seven-year-old girl visiting her mother's best friend watches a burned family — a mother, a teenage boy, and two younger girls — walk the house and beckon her to come with them. Years later the friend admitted the family had moved out over hauntings: baby toys scattered overnight, blankets and pillows arranged on the floor as if people had slept there.A smashed flower pot follows, found twenty feet from its shelf in the middle of a family room floor with no dirt trail, as if it had been carried and dropped straight down. Then two brothers named Jack and Tom each spend a night silently furious at the other's loud guests, only to meet in the hallway and discover the living room full of chattering old people belonged to neither of them — the room stood empty, smelling of musk.A college party flips from paranormal dread to absurdity when a bleeding, pantsless man with wild hair forces his way through the door screaming "please"; the supposed intruder turned out to be a friend of a friend on a catastrophic acid trip who had lost his pants running through a field.The block closes with a runner who caught a prospective neighbor — a man who had complimented his physique two days earlier — standing at his bedroom window at midnight, having entered the house earlier to adjust the blinds for a better view. The chase across gravel driveways ended with a written confession, a photographed license plate, and, a full year later, a knock on the door from the same man, apologizing.Out of the second break comes a Hollywood Hills doorstep in the early 1980s: a distraught woman babbling about blood, two LAPD officers who collect her within ten minutes, and then two more officers thirty minutes later — the ones actually dispatched to the call, with no record of who the first pair were or where they took her.The night crew of a 24-hour Subway describes their resident "SubGhost," blamed for disembodied conversations, crashing noises, items sliding off counters, and a new automatic paper towel dispenser that unspooled an entire roll, sheet by sheet, in an empty room.Three children watch a white figure of a man sit atop a telephone pole, grinning at them, before he stands, jumps, and vanishes before reaching the ground. Then a basement-apartment tenant describes a man watching him through the window for ten minutes, followed weeks later by an air conditioner cover pried off in the night — and a police department that could do nothing until someone actually broke in.A newspaper carrier on a rural route in 2000 describes a drenched man in a white shirt charging out of a rain-filled ditch at 2 a.m. with what looked like a hatchet in his hand; the man took his own life within the hour, and the carrier had to pound on a farmhouse door to report it because his Motorola flip phone had no signal.A bus rider chats with an oddly unsettling woman at the stop, boards an empty bus, and hears "Hey! Remember me?" from a little girl who resembles the woman exactly — on a bus the rider is certain was empty.The episode then travels to South Africa's Eastern Cape in July 2010, where a humanitarian worker and a missionary named Piet arrive at a Xhosa village to find it deserted. A naked woman covered in cuts, missing an ear, and running on all fours charged their truck, screeching and clawing at the windows as they fled. The villagers later said only that "a bad presence" had been in the village and was now gone.Gentler hauntings follow: a clock radio scraping across a desk to face a grandson and playing opera — the late grandfather's wake-up music of choice — two weeks after the funeral; a glass bowl that shattered downstairs during a sleepover and was found already swept up, its pieces gathered into another bowl on the table; and a dying grandfather whose eyes opened wide on his final breath as he smiled, looking happier than he had in years.The dread returns with a woman home alone who hears something working at her front door lock and sees two silhouettes — one at the door, one at the living room window — standing motionless, watching her watch them. They vanished before help arrived, and she found the basement window partially kicked in the next morning.A Sacramento man recounts surviving an attempted kidnapping around age nine or ten: a white van stopped beside a late-night Frisbee game, the sliding door opened, and a man in black flew out on a rigged telescoping harness operated from inside, missing his grab by inches. The three boys hid on a school roof for nearly an hour while the van circled, searching.A small-town yard sale yields a dented silver cigarette case for two dollars; months later the same elderly seller has the identical case — same dent, same brand of cigarette inside — while the original has vanished from the buyer's nightstand drawer. A man recalls childhood dreams of gripping toys hard enough to wake up holding them, including the Skeletor figure his family swore they never bought.Then a sixteen-year-old new driver and her four-year-old half-sister are stalked across town by a purple-faced man in a white pickup truck who blocked intersections, revealed a gun under his shirt, rammed their car toward oncoming traffic, and drew a finger across his throat. The older sister's gas station escape plan — coaching the four-year-old to jump out and run to the counter — ended the pursuit, though polic

12/06/2026 • 88:54

“The Enchanted Child”: A polite little boy keeps pushing away his favorite dessert at Sunday dinner — and every time he does, somebody in the family doesn't live to see Monday.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 Enchanted Child” (January 20, 1978) ***WD00:47:10.132 = House of Mystery, “The Ghost Who Forgot Halloween” (October 27, 1945) ***WD01:18:31.060 = Incredible But True, “The Stowaway” (1950-1951)01:22:03.585 = Inner Sanctum, “Death Is a Joker” (June 10, 1944) ***WD01:52:21.712 = Jeff Regan, “The Prodigal Daughter” (July 17, 1948) ***WD02:22:26.847 = The Key, “Escape Artist” (1956) ***WD02:48:46.905 = Lights Out, “Death Robbery” (June 16, 1947) ***WD03:17:47.487 = Lux Radio Theater, “The Big Clock” (November 22, 1948)04:18:09.933 = Macabre, “Weekend” (November 20, 1961) ***WD04:45:27.936 = 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/WDRR0687

11/06/2026 • 286:19

A tiny tagging system nobody had ever studied in the brain turned out to be hard at work locking in fear — and only in the females in the lab.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/Fear-StudyLook for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://pod.link/1078714736*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.#WeirdDarkness, #WeirdDarkNEWS

11/06/2026 • 09:31

A Florida man heading to court for a burglary charge stopped to attempt another burglary along the way, telling police he just wanted a shirt to wear in front of the judge.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/burglary-commute/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/1078714736*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.#WeirdDarkness, #WeirdDarkNEWS

11/06/2026 • 04:12

Behind the walls of H.H. Holmes' "World's Fair Hotel" waited trap doors, gas chambers, and a basement of acid vats — and more than a century after the Murder Castle burned, something still lingers at 63rd and Wallace.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/HHHolmesHotelREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/57djvd7fFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: It’s one of the most infamous and macabre subjects of Chicago history – it even served as inspiration for TV’s “American Horror Story: Hotel”. It’s what has become known as “The Murder Castle” where serial killer H.H. Holmes committed his monstrous crimes. But even today, Holmes continues to terrify… in spectral form. (H.H. Holmes’ Hellish Hotel And Lingering Haunting) *** A woman tries to save the soul of her daughter, believing her to be possessed… but her solution to drive out the demon was to murder her daughter using a holy crucifix. (Murder By Crucifix) *** What’s worse than proclaiming yourself to be a supernatural being and starting your own cult? How about telling your followers you are God so you could do drugs and have sex with teenage girls? It’s the disturbing true story of the cult called “The Group”. (Theodore Rinaldo – The Drug Cult Rapist) *** Shrunken heads – believe it or not, they are real. And some tribal peoples create them even today – from real human heads. But why do it at all? We’ll look at the reality behind shrunken heads, the reason they are created… and even how they are created. (The History and How of Shrunken Heads) *** A terrifying series of paranormal activities invade a family’s home in Wales. (The Swansea Entity) *** Tenome is a Japanese Urban Legend about a blind man who was robbed and murdered. His dying wish? To have eyes on his hands so he could see. (The Seeing Hands of Tenome) *** Unsolved mysteries are intriguing simply because they are unsolved. That’s why we are so fascinated by stories of people disappearing without a trace. But one man’s disappearance is so bizarre, so weird, that upon hearing the story you’ll be scratching your head wondering what the heck you just heard. (The Strangest Disappearance at Sea in History) CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:01:27.539 = Show Open00:04:09.416 = H.H. Holmes’ Hellish Hotel and Lingering Haunting00:22:02.613 = The Seeing Hands of Tenome ***00:25:29.843 = The Strangest Disappearance at Sea In History00:36:31.904 = Murder By Crucifix ***00:42:31.316 = The Swansea Entity00:52:22.872 = The History and How of Shrunken Heads ***00:58:56.160 = Theodore Rinaldo: The Drug Cult Rapist01:05:34.000 = 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 Swansea Entity” by Brent Swancer for Mysterious Universe: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/3pt262t4“Murder By Crucifix” by Inigo Gonzalez for Ranker’s Graveyard Shift: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4h6mjabw“The Strangest Disappearance at Sea in History” from Strange Company: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/nsrhjdew“Theodore Rinaldo – The Drug Cult Rapist” by Matthew Lavelle for Ranker’s Unspeakable Times:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yx2hmzus“The Seeing Hands of Tenome” from The Scare Chamber: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/y4dnxee6“The History and How of Shrunken Heads” by Bipin Dimri for Historic Mysteries: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4wdznwwc“H.H. Holmes’ Hellish Hotel and Lingering Haunting” from Chicago Hauntings: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/pvthp98(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: November, 2021This episode of Weird Darkness moves from the haunted ground of H.H. Holmes' Chicago Murder Castle to a flesh-eating Japanese yokai, a millionaire's impossible vanishing at sea, an Oklahoma exorcism that ended in murder, a violent Welsh poltergeist, the real-world practice of shrinking human heads, and the Washington State drug cult led by a man who claimed to be God.It opens in Chicago's Englewood neighborhood, where Herman W. Mudgett — better known as H.H. Holmes, America's first serial killer and the inspiration for the Hotel Cortez in American Horror Story: Hotel — built his three-story "World's Fair Hotel" at 63rd and Wallace to prey on visitors to the 1893 Columbian Exposition. The building held sixty rooms riddled with trap doors, hidden staircases, gas chambers, and a basement furnished with a dissecting table and vats of acid and lime. Holmes confessed to 27 murders before his hanging in Philadelphia on May 7, 1896, though some historians put his victim count at 200 or more, and the strange deaths that followed his execution — a poisoned forensics expert, a suicidal prison superintendent, a priest beaten to death in his own churchyard — fed talk of a Holmes curse for decades. The site was never excavated, and employees at the Englewood post office built beside the old Castle property still report stacking chairs, a singing woman no one can find, and apparitions on the grass where the hotel once stood. Even Holmes' own descendant, Jeff Mudgett, author of Bloodstains and the figure behind the History Channel's American Ripper, walked out of that basement a changed man.From there the episode crosses to Japan and the legend of Tenome, a blind old man robbed and beaten to death in a field who returned as a vengeful yokai with eyes on the palms of his hands. First recorded in the Gazu Hyakki Yagyō, the creature hunts graveyards and open fields by scent, feeds on fresh human bones, and inspired the Pale Man of Pan's Labyrinth. The segment ends with the Kyoto tale of a young man who hid from the Tenome inside a locked temple chest — and was found afterward as an empty sack of skin, his bones sucked out through his flesh.Next comes the 1931 disappearance of Hisashi Fujimura, the Japanese-born silk millionaire who vanished from the Red Star liner Belgenland somewhere between Halifax and New York on the night of August 13. Fujimura had told a friend he feared gamblers would follow him aboard, his mistress Mary Reissner was registered under a false name as a governess, and his bank account had dropped from over $333,000 to $2.65 in five months. The ship's captain saw him talking to an unseen person at 2:45 a.m.; by morning his bed was unslept-in and his seven-year-old daughter was alone in the stateroom. Federal investigators closed the case without answers, a dust-free wallet bearing his name later surfaced in an empty Manhattan flat, and Fujimura was declared legally dead in 1938 — leaving murder, suicide, accident, and a staged escape all equally possible.The darkness turns domestic with the 2016 killing of 33-year-old Geneva Gomez in Oklahoma City, beaten to death by her own mother, Juanita Gomez, who claimed she was performing an exorcism to drive Satan from her daughter. Juanita punched Geneva repeatedly, forced a crucifix and religious medallion down her throat, then arranged the body in the shape of a cross with a wooden crucifix on her chest. A forensic psychologist concluded she was feigning incompetence, the insanity plea collapsed, and in January 2018 a jury needed only 20 minutes to convict her of first-degree murder and recommend life without parole.The episode then travels to Rhondda Street in Swansea, Wales, where in 1965 Marcia and David Howells, their two small children, and Marcia's grandmother endured a poltergeist that began with choking sensations in the night and escalated to bottles flying off mantelpieces, rooms ransacked in minutes, the gas stove turning itself on, and a double bed found hurled on top of the baby's empty cot behind a barred door. Police, reporters, and a priest all came to the little house; the only room ever left untouched was the grandmother's. The family finally moved out, the activity stopped, and no tragedy in the home's history was ever found to explain it — leaving psychokinesis, spirit attachment, and Marcia's own verdict, a demon, on the table.From haunted houses the show turns to a practice that is grimly real: the shrunken heads, or tsantsas, of the Jivaro people of northern Peru and southern Ecuador. Warriors severed the heads of slain enemies in the belief that shrinking them enslaved the victim's vengeful spirit, then boiled the skin free of the skull, packed it with hot stones and sand, blackened it with charcoal ash, and sewed the lips shut to seal the spirit inside — reducing a human head to a third of its size. Genu

11/06/2026 • 66:44

A skeptical census taker's idle curiosity about a mystic who can summon the dead draws his old friend's beautiful, restless daughter into the stranger's orbit — and she may never come back.Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneInRadio, 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, “Sophia And The Pilgrim” (June 19, 1978) ***WD00:46:22.976 = BBC Ghosts From The Past, “The Boat Hook” (April 15, 1992)01:29:50.477 = Calling All Cars, “Triple Cross” (May 22, 1936) ***WD02:00:23.302 = Hall of Fantasy, “Man-Size in Marble” (April 10, 1947)02:26:39.527 = Harry Lime, “Ticket To Tangier” (August 24, 1951)02:53:34.654 = Haunted Tales of the Supernatural, “The Dead Man of Varley Grange” (July 28, 1984)03:20:37.249 = The Haunting Hour, “Breakdown” (May 05, 1945) ***WD03:34:56.875 = Hermit’s Cave, “Author of Murder” (May 02, 1937)04:02:13.875 = Mystery Is My Hobby, “Faithless Life” (1945-1950)04:25:11.416 = Sherlock Holmes, “The Devil’s Foot” (January 11, 1947)04:54:23.916 = 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/WDRR0686

10/06/2026 • 295:15

Two months after walking away from the Tombstone feud a free man, Johnny Ringo was found dead against a tree with a Colt in his hand. He had survived the Hoodoo War, jail breaks, and a showdown with Doc Holliday — but no one can agree on what finally killed him.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/JohnnyRingoREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/24j5xybkFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: A gentleman gunslinger who could quote Shakespeare, Johnny Ringo was a mythic gunslinger who died a mysterious death befitting his legend. (The Mysterious Death of Outlaw Johnny Ringo) *** To his family and neighbors, Richard Kuklinski was the all-American man. To the mafia and his victims, he was the "devil himself" known as the Iceman killer. (The Mafia’s Most Prolific Hitman) *** Wherever tragedies happen, urban legends settle. And for almost every urban legend, there is a road to take you there… a road often just as terrifying as the urban legend it takes you to. (Roads that Lead to Urban Legends) *** We’ll look at the true story of a bar bouncer accused of killing his wife… which is odd, seeing as the incident took place before he killed a man while defending her honor. (A Broad-Shouldered Bully Was Wiener) *** Extraterrestrials come in all shapes and sizes if you believe what you see on television, film, and even online in the fringe conversations of UFO enthusiasts. The most famous of the aliens are usually depicted in the very realistic, humanoid form… the Greys. But what exactly are the Greys? And is it possible they aren’t extraterrestrial at all? (What Are The Greys) *** We’ll meet a man who has an amazing superpower. He is especially proficient at passing gas. (Mister Methane: The Gas Man)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:00:59.394 = Show Open00:03:16.488 = The Mysterious Death of Outlaw Johnny Ringo00:15:42.451 = A Broad-Shouldered Bully Was Wiener ***00:19:08.842 = Roads That Lead To Urban Legends00:30:46.873 = The Mafia’s Most Prolific Hitman ***00:39:46.230 = Mister Methane: The Gas Man00:45:59.461 = What Are The Greys? ***00:52:15.959 = Show Close*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad breakLISTEN ON PODCAST APPS: Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.com/wdapps*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*SOURCES and RESOURCES:“The Mysterious Death of Outlaw Johnny Ringo” by Kuroski for All That’s Interesting:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/n4d9yce6“Roads that Lead to Urban Legends” by Estelle for ListVerse: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2fkp8nkt“The Mafia’s Most Prolific Hitman” by Katie Serena for All That’s Interesting: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/5xe6xx4s“What Are The Greys” from Anomalien: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/5u5cknde“Mister Methane: The Gas Man” by Spooky for Oddity Central: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2hje4vs9 (VIDEO: https://youtu.be/kaRZeuZDAVI)“A Broad-Shouldered Bully Was Wiener” by Robert Wilhelm for Murder By Gaslight: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/34rnu2y9=====(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: November, 2021This episode of Weird Darkness travels from a gunfighter's unexplained death under an Arizona oak tree to a mafia hitman's freezer, a tour of the world's most haunted highways, a St. Louis hanging, a British flatulence performer, and the enduring question of what the Grey aliens actually are.It opens with Johnny Ringo, the Shakespeare-quoting outlaw and cousin to the Younger and James brothers, who survived the Hoodoo War of Mason County, Texas, a jailbreak, multiple murder charges, and a near-shootout with Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday on the streets of Tombstone — only to be found dead on July 13, 1882, slumped against a tree with a .45 caliber Colt in his right hand. The coroner called it suicide. Others pointed to the cartridges in his gun, the absence of powder burns, the odd position of his hat, and later confessions attributed to Earp himself, and called it murder. Biographers Jack Burrows and David Johnson weighed the same evidence a century later and sided with suicide, a quiet end for a man newspapers once misspelled into legend as "Ringgold."From there the episode moves to St. Louis in 1877, where Billy Wieners — a hulking bouncer at the Theatre Comique saloon, already out on bond for trying to kill his wife — shot assistant barkeeper A.V. Lawrence dead for insulting that same wife. The Missouri Supreme Court found nothing in the record to soften a verdict of deliberate murder, and after his sister Annie's commutation campaign failed to move Governor Phelps, Wieners hanged in the St. Louis jail yard on February 1, 1878, using his last words to warn other men away from whiskey.Next comes a road trip through the world's haunted highways: Zombie Road in Wildwood, Missouri; India's cursed Ranchi-Jamshedpur NH33, where 245 people died in three years and a woman in a white saree patrols the asphalt; South Africa's N9 with the hitchhiking ghost of Maria Roux; Australia's "Street With No Name" in Annandale; the werewolf sightings on Yorkshire's B1249; Malaysia's Karak Highway, where a creature was seen battering a husband's head against his own car roof; Scotland's A75 Kinmount Straight and its phantom animals; Long Island's Mount Misery and Sweet Hollow roads; the unearthed Hawaiian warrior bones beneath Oahu's H-1; Thailand's temple-haunting murdered wife on Chak Phra Road; and the ghosts scattered along old Route 66.The darkness deepens with Richard Kuklinski, the Gambino-affiliated contract killer known as the Iceman, who froze his victims' bodies in industrial freezers so the time of death could never be fixed. Convicted of six murders, he claimed hundreds, killing with cyanide nasal spray, ice picks, hand grenades, and his bare hands while coaching his children's barbecues and ushering Sunday Mass in suburban New Jersey. An ATF sting through his only friend, Phil Solimene, ended the run in 1986, and Kuklinski spent his remaining years giving prison interviews until his death in 2006 — a week after his wife Barbara declined, one last time, to lift the do-not-resuscitate order she had signed.The mood lifts with Paul Oldfield of Macclesfield, England, the performer called Mr. Methane, who discovered during a teenage yoga session that he could draw air into his colon at will and built a stage career on controlled flatulence — playing Phil Collins parodies, alarming Howard Stern, and logging 86 farts in a single minute for a 2018 Guinness World Records attempt, a talent the record book had refused to touch back in 1990.The episode closes among the Greys, the large-eyed, gray-skinned beings that dominate alien abduction reports from Betty and Barney Hill onward. Ufologists describe two castes — tall telepathic leaders and smaller cloned workers — originating in the Zeta Reticuli binary star system 38 light years away, harvesting human sperm and eggs to repair DNA ruined by generations of cloning. A rival theory holds that the Greys are not extraterrestrials at all but human beings from a distant future: taller, thinner, larger-brained time travelers returning to collect healthy genetic material from before whatever catastrophe awaits us.

10/06/2026 • 53:35

Twenty years after she was locked away for taking a hatchet to her own sister, fragile Ann Pettigrew comes home obsessed with one desire — and on a storm-lit night, with candles burning and a circle drawn on the floor, she works a forbidden rite to summon back the only man she ever loved, no matter what comes walking up the veranda steps to answer.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, “A Model Murderer” (January 17, 1978) ***WD00:47:24.875 = The Strange Dr. Weird, “Survival Of The Fittest” (January 23, 1945) ***WD00:59:08.508 = The Eleventh Hour, “Black Magic” (ADU)01:23:55.381 = Escape, “The Drums of the Fore And Aft” (July 14, 1949)01:53:55.440 = Everyman’s Theater, “Cat Wife” (January 18, 1940)02:22:54.327 = Murder By Experts, “Murder By Prescription” (July 11, 1949)02:53:20.176 = Exploring Tomorrow, “Hunting Lodge, aka Trouble With Robots” (May 28, 1958) ***WD03:12:48.537 = Faces In The Window, “Lightning Rod Man” (January 17, 1953) ***WD (LQ)03:37:34.837 = Dark Fantasy, “Letter From Yesterday” (May 01, 1942) ***WD04:01:41.360 = BBC Fear on 4, “The Yellow Wallpaper” (December 27, 1990) ***WD04:31:41.320 = Future Tense, “The Defenders” (May 28, 1974) ***WD04:57:56.341 = 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/WDRR0685

09/06/2026 • 298:47

A scheming wife and her spineless lover pull off the perfect murder of her wealthy husband — until the dead man starts turning up in the snow, at the bar, waiting in the shadows, and 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, “In Another Place” (January 16, 1978) ***WD00:47:10.460 = The Clock, “Ghost Story” (December 13, 1955) ***WD01:13:55.372 = Creeps By Night, “The Final Reckoning” (July 12, 1944) ***WD01:43:11.958 = The Crime Club, “Fear Came First” (March 13, 1947) ***WD02:13:07.451 = Crime Classics, “The Crime of Bathsheba Spooner” (December 03, 1952)02:41:09.611 = Danger Dr. Danfield, “The Tunnel Smelled of Death” (January 26, 1947) ***WD03:05:39.762 = CBC Deep Night, “Man Radio” (July 29, 2005)03:40:38.324 = The Devil and Mr. O, “Going Down” (December 17, 1971)04:09:19.922 = Diary of Fate, “David Dexter” (May 04, 1948) ***WD04:40:36.758 = Dimension X, “The Martian Chronicles” (August 18, 1950) ***WD05:09:57.556 = 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/WDRR0684

09/06/2026 • 310:49

In 1977, a calm, otherworldly voice broke into the British evening news across five transmitters at once, identified itself as an alien envoy, and warned humanity to abandon nuclear weapons before time ran out. Was it a hoax, or first contact?EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/AlienVoicesOnTVAndRadioREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/mrxcfak4FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: While scientists at SETI are continually monitoring for extraterrestrial contact from the cosmos, ordinary people are already hearing from them – via radio and television. (Aliens Voices Over Radio and Television) *** 
The death of a Hollywood movie producer is still unsolved – and his spirit on the lot is still at unrest. (The Mysterious Death of Thomas Ince) *** A family moves into a new home, and it’s not long before they begin hearing strange sounds coming from the home bar in their living room. (Something In That Part of the House) *** In years past, baby boys were dressed in pink. So why the change to the color blue for boys? The answer is a dark one. (Baby Blues) *** In just 30 seconds, 30 rounds were fired when the tension between a crew of thieving cowboys and vigilante lawmen came to an explosive head in the frontier town of Tombstone, Arizona. (The True Story Behind the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Klaatu’s speech from “The Day The Earth Stood Still” (1951)00:02:45.959 = Show Open00:04:39.005 = Alien Voices Over Radio And Television00:16:13.874 = The Mysterious Death of Thomas Ince and the Haunting of Culver Studios00:33:04.222 = Something in That Part of the House ***00:39:31.873 = Baby Blues00:45:22.653 = The True Story Behind the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral ***00:54:32.710 = 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 True Story Behind the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral” by Mark Oliver: http://ow.ly/RmAm30oaHWt“The Mysterious Death of Thomas Ince” by Troy Taylor: http://ow.ly/WVUu30oaHvS“Something In That Part of the House” by Haven: http://ow.ly/qMeU30oaHxn“Baby Blues” by Conny Waters: http://ow.ly/zcGj30oaI32“Alien Voices Over Radio and Television” posted at the Conspiracy Journal: https://tinyurl.com/y2ht47pt“Klaatu’s Speech From ‘The Day The Earth Stood Still’”: (link no longer available)(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: November, 2021Weird Darkness moves across five unsettling true tales — alleged alien voices breaking into broadcast signals, the unexplained death of a Hollywood pioneer, a possessed home bar in Mexico, the superstitious roots of dressing infant boys in blue, and the bloody thirty seconds behind the O.K. Corral.It opens with the alleged extraterrestrial transmissions that have arrived through ordinary radios and televisions rather than from deep space. On November 26, 1977, at 5:12 PM, a deep, water-logged voice overrode five Southern Television transmitters across southern England, speaking over news reader Ivor Mills for five and a half minutes; the voice named itself Gramaha — also transcribed as Vrillon, Gillon, or Glon — a representative of the Ashtar Galactic Command, and warned humanity to abandon nuclear energy before the dawning New Age of Aquarius. The Independent Broadcasting Authority never logged the interruption and could not explain how its instant switch-off monitoring was bypassed. Years earlier, in July 1961, an eighteen-year-old ham radio operator named Robert P. Renaud had picked up a soft feminine voice high in the 25-meter band claiming to broadcast from a planet called Korendor, eventually trading images on his television's vidicon tube with a contact named Lin-Erri, an episode investigator Allen Griese found oddly free of showmanship or profit. A decade after Renaud, in January 1971, British UFO researcher Rex Dutta took a call on a radio talk show from a voice that registered no echo, no feedback, and no movement on the station's VU meter.From there the episode crosses to November 1924 and the death of Thomas Ince, the producer who founded Culver Studios in 1918 and earned the title Father of the Western. Ince died days after celebrating his birthday aboard William Randolph Hearst's yacht, the Oneida, on a weekend cruise to San Diego that also carried actress Marion Davies and, by rumor, Charlie Chaplin. The official account blamed acute indigestion, but Hollywood whispered that Hearst, jealous over Davies, fired a diamond-studded revolver in the dark and put a bullet meant for Chaplin into Ince's head instead. The body was cremated, no inquest was held, San Diego district attorney Chester Kemply closed the case after a single session, and gossip columnist Louella Parsons soon received a lifetime Hearst contract. Decades later, workers at Culver Studios reported a man in a bowler-type hat watching them from the catwalks during 1988 renovations, frowning, declaring that he disliked what they were doing to his studio, and walking through a wall.Next comes a listener's account of a house in Mexico, bought by the family about twenty years earlier, where a heavy tavern-style wooden bar in the living room became the source of growling, clinking glassware, and slamming cabinet doors that sounded like two animals fighting inside an empty cupboard. The housekeeper, Letty, threw the cabinet open to find nothing disturbed. Weeks later the mother and Letty dug up jars in the front yard containing rag dolls pierced with pins, buried directly on the other side of the wall behind the bar. A framed mirror reading BAR shattered at three in the morning during a housewarming party, a barred window slid open on its own after being latched, and a photograph of a single bar stool showed a clear horned, devil-like face the family begged to have deleted. Letty, it turned out, was a bruja — a witch.Color superstition drives the next story: infant boys, dressed in blue today, were once dressed in pink, and a June 1918 article in the trade journal Earnshaw's Infants' Department called pink the stronger, more decided color suited to boys and blue the daintier choice for girls. The return to blue revived a far older practice, since the ancient Egyptians and Greeks regarded blue as divine and used it to repel evil spirits, dressing pharaohs in it and, as author Douglas B. Smith recounts, painting nurseries to keep satanic spirits from slipping into young children's bodies. Boys received that protection because they were valued above girls, who were thought too unimportant for evil spirits to trouble. The same fear survives in the Evil Eye and in protective amulets like the Hamsa and the Turkish Nazar, hung in homes and cars and worked into jewelry across the Balkans and the Middle East.The episode closes behind the O.K. Corral on October 26, 1881, where thirty rounds were fired in roughly thirty seconds. Tombstone, Arizona had been founded in 1877 by prospector Ed Schieffelin, who struck a silver vein worth more than thirty-seven million dollars after being warned that all he would find out there was his own tombstone. Wyatt, Virgil, Morgan, and James Earp, joined by the gun-slinging ex-dentist Doc Holliday, clashed with the Cochise County Cowboys, a feud that hardened after Curly Bill Brocius accidentally killed city marshal Fred White in 1880 and Virgil took the post. The gunfight left Frank McLaury, Tom McLaury, and nineteen-year-old Billy Clanton dead while Ike Clanton and Billy Claiborne fled, and Judge Wells Spicer afterward released the Earps as having committed an unwise but not criminal act. The reckoning continued past the verdict, with Virgil shotgunned in the back, Morgan assassinated over a game of pool in a plot tied to Ike Clanton, and Wyatt Earp drifting west until his death in California in 1929 at the age of eighty.

09/06/2026 • 55:46

Security cameras filmed a live goat led into a black-and-red room in a Hackney office block — the working shrine of an Afro-Brazilian religion that feeds its spirits in blood.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/hackney-goat-shrineLook for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://pod.link/1078714736*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.#WeirdDarkness, #WeirdDarkNEWSNOTE: Some of this content may have been created with assistance from AI tools, but it has been reviewed, edited, narrated, produced, and approved by Darren Marlar, creator and host of Weird Darkness — who, despite popular conspiracy theories, is NOT an AI voice.

08/06/2026 • 09:28

A girl named Gabriela walked into a church in Joinville, Brazil, claiming she had fled an abusive home. Fourteen months later a family was preparing to adopt her until the truth was revealed about who Gabriela really was.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/gabriela-joinvilleLook for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://pod.link/1078714736*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.#WeirdDarkness, #WeirdDarkNEWS

08/06/2026 • 05:51