Our friend Richard Hatem is taking his Paranormal Bookshelf on the road! The Light in the Dark Tour 2026 is an all new live show playing six cities in seven days, September 13th through 19th, and it winds up at the Mothman Festival in Point Pleasant, West Virginia. Richard and Susan Lambert will be at the festival both days selling Mothman and podcast merch, and on Saturday night, September 19th, he's performing an episode of the podcast picked especially for Point Pleasant.

Hear Scott and Rich talk about the tour in his most recent post on the RHPB feed:
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We're looking for more stories! Send your Dead Letter to [email protected]!

We're looking for more stories! Send your Dead Letter to [email protected]!

In tonight's dead letter, listener John is nineteen, home from his freshman year and a few shifts into a summer dishwashing job at a grand old house on Michigan's Old Mission Peninsula that has been a restaurant since the 1950s. The staff there blame anything strange in the building on a ghost they call Genevieve, and John doesn't believe in any of that. One warm night he goes upstairs to change out of his kitchen clothes, and the bulb pops the second he flips the switch. Strange enough on its own, but what happens next is why this particular night stuck with him.

Note: The room referenced at Waverly in the Episode is 503. It should have been 502.

Relevant Prior Episodes

Greyfriar's Kirkyard Halloween Special

The Sallie House – Ghost in the Machine Part 1

Lockdown at Waverly Sanatorium

The True Story behind the Conjuring Part 1

A Live Reading with Jim Hunt - Psychic Medium

Links and Further Reading

The Mission Table Restaurant of Bowers Harbor: A Splendid Building, But Not a Residence for a Ghost — Julie Schopieray, Grand Traverse Journal

Would the Real Mrs. Stickney Please Stand Up? Setting the Old Mission Ghost Story Straight — Northern Express

The Haunting of Bowers Harbor Inn – Is It Genevieve Stickney's Ghost? — Old Mission Gazette

Bowers Harbor Inn — Wikipedia, on the 1927 fire and the house built around the old farmhouse

Mission Point Lighthouse — History, the light at the tip of Old Mission Peninsula near the 45th parallel

Occupational Folklife — American Folklife Center, Library of Congress

Meet the Mackenzie Poltergeist of Greyfriars Kirkyard — Icy Sedgwick, on the grabs and marks reported on the tours

Waverly Hills Sanatorium — American Hauntings, on Room 502 and the nurse story

The Buxton Inn — Wikipedia, the Granville, Ohio inn Forrest visited

We're looking for more stories! Send your Dead Letter to [email protected]!

In 1673, Rebecca Cornell was found dead beside the hearth in her Rhode Island home. Afterward, her ghost allegedly appeared to accuse someone of murder and her son was tried and hanged. Her story is just one of nearly sixty strange intersections of true crime, hauntings, history, and food collected in Cuisine to Kill For, the new cookbook from veteran paranormal investigator and television personality Amy Bruni. This week, Amy joins us to talk about the haunted restaurants, infamous deaths, cocktails, dinners, desserts, and recipes that reveal just how naturally the paranormal and the culinary can share a table.

Visit our website for a lot more information on this episode.

In tonight's dead letter, listener Mary is on a ghost tour in Key West when the guide stands her group under an old, unmarked movie marquee and asks them what happened there. Before he says another word, Mary smells smoke. The story he tells the group involves a church fire, and more strange events unfold from there.

Relevant Prior Episodes

Conjuring Philip Part 1

The True Story behind the Conjuring Part 1

Resurrection Mary Part 1

The Count of St Germain Part 1

Links and Further Reading

Great Fire of Key West (1886) — Wikipedia

Our History — St. Paul's Episcopal Church of Key West

Strand Theater, 527 Duval Street — Cinema Treasures

San Carlos Institute — Wikipedia

Chicago Hauntings: The Horrors of the Iroquois Theater Fire That Killed 602 People Downtown in 1903 — CBS Chicago

American Ghost Walks — the ghost tour company the hosts recommend

Dowsing — Britannica

The Philip Experiment — Wikipedia

We're looking for more stories! Send your Dead Letter to [email protected]!

In tonight's dead letter, a truck-riding barn cat named Milo becomes the witness our listener Amy needs to affirm that she’s not seeing and hearing things. The old stone house they occupy seems to have some very strange and unusual visitors. One defying any conventional explanation or even paranormal categorization. 

Related Astonishing Legends Episodes

Dyatlov Pass Part 1

Monsters Among Us 

Background & Further Reading

Infrasound and the Paranormal — Vic Tandy's "fear frequency" research

That Ghostly Presence May Just Be Bad Plumbing — Popular Science, on infrasound and haunted-house perception

Beast of Bray Road — Wikipedia background on the Linda Godfrey dog-man case Forrest references

Ghosts of the Kent Stage — KentStater, on the haunted Kent, Ohio venue Scott 

We're looking for more stories! Send your Dead Letter to [email protected]!

In tonight's dead letter, Eric, a longtime listener on active duty in the Navy, pulls into Juneau, Alaska for a port call in the summer of 2009 and hikes up the Mount Roberts trail for the view over the harbor. Around eleven in the morning, in full daylight, he watches a perfectly round patch of light — a little bigger than a manhole cover, a shade lighter than the water — glide from boat to boat, slip under the cruise-ship dock, and circle a small float out in the middle of the channel. It never changes shape, never touches anything but the water, and as best he can tell, he's the only one who sees it. Then he hikes all the way down to that dock to find out what it was.

REFERENCE LINKS

Related Astonishing Legends Episodes

The Edgar Cayce Story Part 1

The Sallie House – Ghost in the Machine Part 1

The Sludge Entity Part 1

Background & Topics

Unidentified Submerged Objects (USOs) — Wikipedia

Investigation Alien (George Knapp) — Netflix

The "Plasmoids" Paper — Journal of Modern Physics (2024)

Foo Fighters (WWII) — Wikipedia

Nikola Tesla's Wardenclyffe Tower — Wikipedia

Lake Pend Oreille Acoustic Research Detachment (U.S. Navy)

Mount Roberts Trail, Juneau — Alaska.org

American Ghost Walks: Ketchikan Ghost Tour

We're looking for more stories! Send your Dead Letter to [email protected]!

In tonight's dead letter, our listener Kayla takes her two-and-a-half-year-old son to a private family viewing for his great-grandmother and keeps him in a back room so his last memory won't be the casket. All night, unprompted, he pulls relatives into that room to show them a ghost sitting in the corner with an unusual facial feature…or lack of one. As they leave, his mother — who'll tell you straight out she's a skeptic — stops at the chair and quietly tells whatever's there it's not welcome to follow them home. What happens over the next few weeks is why she finally wrote to us.

REFERENCE LINKS

Related Astonishing Legends Episodes

Ep 85: The Bell Witch Part 1 

Background & Further Reading

The Bell Witch — Wikipedia

Adams, Tennessee (the Bell Witch's Red River community) — Wikipedia

Shadow Person — Wikipedia

Discussing Death With Young Children — ZERO TO THREE

We're looking for more stories! Send your Dead Letter to [email protected]!

Chris McKinnell grew up as the grandson of Ed and Lorraine Warren, surrounded by haunted objects and terrifying investigations that left him afraid of the dark until one unforgettable night changed everything. In this special interview, he shares firsthand stories from inside the Warren family, including the infamous Lee, Massachusetts haunting, and why, after a lifetime chasing the paranormal, he's convinced the answers are far stranger than demons.

Visit our website for a lot more information on this episode.