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 A soldier blinks in Manila and opens his eyes in Mexico City. A couple drives into a fog in Argentina and wakes up in Mexico. A man steps into his homemade time machine and comes to 800 miles away. This episode tells some of the most famous "teleportation" stories, then traces each one back to its earliest source: a 1698 friar's chronicle, a film publicity stunt, a late-night radio call-in, and a tabloid that changed its details every time it reran the story. We end with the one case that holds up all the way down, Ansel Bourne, who really did wake up hundreds of miles from home in 1887, and with the medical explanation for what happened to him. 

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This time on Arcane Station, our host Mike Porter shares experiences that he and his family have had over the years.  Ghosts, mysterious scratching at the window, and a Bigfoot howl in the dead of night.

This episode is personal.

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Seven miles south of Denton, Texas, an 1884 iron bridge carries a name locals have used for generations: Goatman's Bridge. 

This episode starts there, with the legend of Oscar Washburn and what county historians found when they checked the records. From there we follow the half-human, half-goat figure back 4,000 years, from the Babylonian goat-fish and the goat demons of the Hebrew Bible to Pan, India's goat-headed Naigamesha, the Scottish urisk, and the goat-footed Krampus. 

We then look at the three best-documented goatman cases in America: Maryland's Goatman, the 1969 Lake Worth Monster, and the Pope Lick trestle in Louisville. We close by weighing what the goatman could be: a demon, an interdimensional being, a place-bound spirit, or a folk legend that keeps adapting to each new town. 

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Crisis apparitions are documented reports of people perceiving a distant loved one, through sight, sound, or touch, at the exact moment that person is dying or in acute danger. 

These aren't ghost stories. They've been systematically collected, investigated, and published by researchers since 1882. We look at the data from the Society for Psychical Research's Census of Hallucinations, a survey of over 17,000 people; three specific investigated cases with named witnesses; the competing explanations; and what modern physics frameworks like Relational Quantum Mechanics might offer as a lens for understanding how an experience can be genuinely real for the person who has it, even when we can't explain the mechanism. 

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 In 1849, a child was abandoned in a forest in Fukien Province, China, not because his parents were cruel, but because he looked like a demon. 

Born with hypertrichosis, a condition so rare that fewer than 50 cases exist in all of recorded history, he was found by Shaolin monks and raised inside their temple. He became a martial artist, a sideshow performer, and eventually a legend known as the Kung Fu Werewolf. 

This episode separates the documented man from the myth that swallowed him and examines the lineage chain that turned one extraordinary life into something far harder to verify. 

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The CDC published a zombie apocalypse comic book. That is a fact. Tonight on Arcane Station, we examine why and follow that thread through the biology of behavior modification, documented cases of aberrant human behavior, the spread of a prion disease through North American deer populations, and what scripture has said for thousands of years about the dead returning. 

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 If our universe exists inside a black hole, then every sibling universe spawned alongside ours represents a different set of physical parameters running simultaneously, a controlled experiment with isolated chambers and results encoded on the boundary for outside observation. 

In this episode, we take that structure somewhere the physics papers won't follow: what if the fine-tuning of our universe isn't a cosmic accident, but a signature of deliberate experimental design? 

We examine what the oldest, least-edited religious texts actually describe about the creator, and find it looks far less like the static, omniscient God of medieval theology and far more like a being operating from a higher level of the same nested hierarchy we've been mapping. From ancient dome cosmologies across unconnected cultures, to the Gnostic and Kabbalistic threads that keep getting cut from institutional religion, to the hardest question of all: why would an infinite being create anything? 

Episode 2 closes with the argument that the universe isn't a laboratory. It's a sensory apparatus. And the distance between the creator and the created may be far smaller than we've been told. 

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What if our universe isn't just expanding into space, but exists entirely inside a black hole? This isn't fringe speculation. Physicists Lee Smolin and Nikodem Poplawski have published peer-reviewed work suggesting every black hole spawns a new universe, and the math reflecting our own observable cosmos back at us is hard to ignore. 

In this episode, we break down the real science behind black hole cosmology, from the Schwarzschild radius calculation that mirrors the size of our universe, to the holographic principle that suggests everything we experience is encoded on a two-dimensional boundary surface. 

We then take that foundation somewhere the physics papers won't go: if our universe was engineered inside a black hole, simulation theory stops being about computers and starts being about spacetime itself. And if black holes are nested universes all the way down, and all the way up, what does that architecture tell us about where we sit in the structure? 

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 AI-generated video has changed the rules for cryptid research, and not just because fakes are easier to make. When footage can't be trusted, what does meaningful evidence actually look like? 

This episode examines the growing burden-of-proof problem across the cryptid research field, with a focus on Bigfoot and Dogman accounts. We look at how to spot AI-generated footage, the citizen-science methodology Shelly Covington-Montana has been building through forensic-standard DNA collection kits and eDNA techniques, and what a practical tiered evidence standard could look like for field researchers. 

We also address the harder question: what investigative tools apply when the phenomenon may not follow the rules of conventional physical biology. 

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 France sold its most vulnerable women a lie, and shipped them across an ocean in chains when they stopped believing it. 

In this episode, we trace the full arc of France's colonial women programs, from the carefully vetted Filles du Roi of 1663 to the prisoners and orphans dragged from the streets of Paris and forced onto ships bound for Louisiana. 

We cover who these women actually were, what happened to them when they arrived, and how history misremembered them as criminals and prostitutes for three centuries. 

Then we get into the part that keeps people up at night: the pale women who couldn't tolerate sunlight, the empty trunks, the sealed third floor of the Old Ursuline Convent, and the reports that have never fully stopped coming. History, witness testimony, and the space in between. 

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