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

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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

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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.

In tonight's dead letter… three families lived in the same old house across the years, none of them knowing each other, and each one wound up sharing the place with the same two ghostly visitors. As kids, our listener Heather and her sister kept seeing a little boy who was never actually there when they looked closer. The adults saw someone different — an old man, solid enough that Heather's stepmother screamed for her father, certain a stranger had walked in. The corroboration of everything shows up in the form of a psychic.

REFERENCE LINKS

Related Astonishing Legends Episodes

Astonishing Legends — The Sallie House: Ghost in the Machine, Part 1 (Spotify)

Astonishing Legends — The True Story Behind the Conjuring, Part 1 (Spotify)

Astonishing Legends — Sam the Sandown Clown, Ep 183 (Spotify)

Astonishing Legends — The Fermi Paradox, Ep 022 (Spotify)

Astonishing Legends — Battle at Cisco Grove, Ep 246 (Spotify)

Astonishing Legends — Mantis Men, Ep 258 (episode page)

Topic & Background References

Pareidolia: why we see faces and figures in random shapes (Britannica)

The doppelgänger, the living double of folklore (Britannica)

Vic Tandy and the 19 Hz "haunted" frequency of infrasound (Wikipedia)

The Sallie House of Atchison, Kansas (Wikipedia)

The Perron family haunting, the true story behind "The Conjuring" (All That's Interesting)

Sam the Sandown Clown: the 1973 Isle of Wight encounter (OnTheWight)

The Cisco Grove alien encounter of 1964 (UFO Casebook)

John Keel and the "ultraterrestrials" (Wikipedia)

The Fermi paradox: "Where is everybody?" (Britannica)

Wormholes and the Einstein–Rosen bridge (Wikipedia)

Natalie and Tara, "doers of things" on YouTube (Natalie and Tara)

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This week's episode is sponsored by Mint Mobile — get premium wireless for $15 a month at mintmobile.com/dlo.

In tonight's dead letter… our listener Daniel moves into a freshly built ranch house in the Salt Lake Valley back in 2011 — a house barely five years old, no tragic past, nothing "old and storied" about it. The first odd thing he notices is that every doorknob in the basement is on backwards, rigged to lock someone in from the outside. He's sixteen, he's got the whole basement to himself, and from the very first night down there he can't shake the feeling that he's being watched. Then one night around eleven, three sharp knocks land on the wall right behind his head — and that's only the start. 

REFERENCE LINKS

Lake Bonneville – Wikipedia

Kanashibari (Japanese sleep paralysis) – Yokai.com

Sleep Paralysis and the Hag Phenomenon – Neurolaunch

Sudden Unexpected Nocturnal Death Syndrome – The Order of the Good Death

Bell Witch – Wikipedia

Skinwalker Ranch – Wikipedia

Skinwalker Ranch of Uintah County, Utah (the locks the Shermans found) – Legends of America

Baba Yaga – Wikipedia

Astonishing Legends: Skinwalker Ranch Part 1

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In tonight's dead letter, we head about as far from the Office as you can get — the Hutt Valley near Wellington, New Zealand — for a story from Billy, a working artist who'd call himself a cautious skeptic. His wife was deep into a spiritualist church and her own psychic abilities, and he mostly kept his distance from all of it. Then something started visiting their bed at night, something that felt exactly like a cat walking up the covers, even though their actual cat was nowhere near the room. Weeks later, a message about it came back to the family through his wife that no one was expecting.

Windy Wellington — Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand: https://teara.govt.nz/en/diagram/13182/windy-wellington

Cook Strait — Toitū Te Whenua Land Information New Zealand: https://www.linz.govt.nz/our-work/new-zealand-geographic-board/place-name-stories/place-names-cooks-voyages/cook-strait

Kupe — Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand: https://teara.govt.nz/en/first-peoples-in-maori-tradition/page-6

Hutt Valley — Wellington places — Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand: https://teara.govt.nz/en/wellington-places/page-8

Capital city: Wellington since 1865 — Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand: https://teara.govt.nz/en/capital-city

Can Our Dead Pets Come Back to Visit Us? — Rupert Sheldrake: https://www.sheldrake.org/essays/can-our-dead-pets-come-back-to-visit-us

Kaitiaki — guardians — Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand: https://teara.govt.nz/en/kaitiakitanga-guardianship-and-conservation/page-4

Sleep Paralysis, the "Bedroom Intruder," and the Sensed Presence — NIH / NCBI: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5329044/

Wellington Paranormal — Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wellington_Paranormal

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

Thanks to Mint Mobile for sponsoring tonight's episode. Ditch the overpriced wireless bill, bring your own phone and number, and get premium coverage on the nation's largest 5G network for $15 a month — three months at that price at mintmobile.com/dlo.

In tonight's dead letter, listener Dean takes us to his grandmother's old Victorian house in a region of Scott’s home state of North Carolina known as the Sandhills. His family has traded strange stories about the family home for generations, from slamming doors in an empty house to a lady in white under the apple tree. He spent years as the family skeptic, right up until he started helping his aunt sort through the massive Americana collection left behind by her late husband we’ll simply call  ‘D’, a mechanic with a passion for old gas pumps, slot cars, and vintage toys. A series of events that were too strange to chalk up to coincidence finally convinced Dean that something unexplained was going on, and frankly…we agree.

Reference Links

Mr. Machine from Ideal (1960) — Toy Tales

Mr. Machine — Wikipedia

Horikawa Robots and the Space Explorer "TV Robot" — Fab Tin Toys

House in the Horseshoe — NC Historic Sites

The Coastal Plain and Sandhills — NCpedia

"Haint Blue" — Historic New England

Black Shuck — Wikipedia

The Beast of Bladenboro — North Carolina Ghosts

What a Hospice Physician Can Tell Us About End-of-Life Visions — Discover Magazine

Ep 209: The Phantom Horse of Greensboro — Astonishing Legends

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This episode is sponsored by Firstleaf. Take a quick quiz, and Firstleaf matches premium, award-winning wines to your taste and delivers them right to your door — with tasting notes and pairing tips in every box. You control the schedule, skip shipments anytime, and every bottle is backed by a 100% satisfaction guarantee. Go to TryFirstleaf.com/dlo for 50% off your first box PLUS free shipping for a whole year.

In 1977, a remote dairy farm on the cliffs of southwest Wales became the center of one of the strangest and most enduring UFO cases in British history. What began with a glowing object hovering over Ripperston Farm escalated into months of unexplained phenomena: failing electronics, mysterious figures at the windows, silent visitors in a silver car, missing cattle that appeared miles away, and an encounter Pauline Coombs believed took place aboard an otherworldly craft. As sightings spread across the region — including the famous Broad Haven school incident witnessed by fourteen children — the area became known as the Welsh Triangle. With declassified government investigations, admitted hoaxes, and a mystery that remains unresolved nearly fifty years later, we ask: what really happened over St Brides Bay?

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

In tonight's dead letter, Daniel, a self-described skeptic writes in about the one thing he's never been able to explain away. He was a third-grader in northeast Washington in 1985, riding home one evening, when an intense green light blinded him and his mom in their car. For years he figured he'd made it up, or pulled it from some movie. Then it came up years later over lunch with his sister, and he found out he wasn't the only one in the car who never forgot it.

REFERENCE LINKS

When Mysterious Green Fireballs Worried the U.S. Government — HISTORY

Project Twinkle and the Green Fireball Investigation

The Green Flash: What Causes the Rare Sunset Phenomenon — EarthSky

Fairchild Air Force Base History — HistoryLink.org

Faded Giant by Robert Salas and James Klotz

The 1967 Malmstrom Missile Shutdown — CUFON Archive

Robert Hastings — UFOs and Nukes

Astonishing Legends Ep. 155: Abduction at Devil's Den (Terry Lovelace)

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