Astonishing Legends

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

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

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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)

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

In tonight's dead letter, we head into Grafton, West Virginia — a small railroad town built on a B&O junction, Civil War supply lines, and two national cemeteries. The house at the center of this story sat right in the middle of all that history. When a listener named Jonathan moved in with his family as a kid, it was, as he puts it, just off — and the footsteps upstairs were the easy part. Small things kept stacking up, the kind you could maybe almost explain away one at a time but never all together. Decades later he's still working through what happened in that house, and what stayed there.

REFERENCE LINKS

Grafton, West Virginia — e-WV Encyclopedia

B&O Railroad Historical Marker in Grafton

Grafton Civil War Supply Depot Historical Marker

Grafton National Cemetery — National Cemetery Administration

Thornsbury Bailey Brown — First Union Soldier Killed in the Civil War

International Mother's Day Shrine

Anna Jarvis, Founder of Mother's Day

The Grafton Monster — e-WV Encyclopedia

The Grafton Monster Festival

The Grafton Monster in Fallout 76

George Washington's Surveying of Grafton — City of Grafton

Ruth Ann Musick, West Virginia Folklorist

The Telltale Lilac Bush and Other West Virginia Ghost Tales

Astonishing Legends Ep 85: The Bell Witch Part 1

Astonishing Legends Archived Episodes — The Bell Witch Series

The Enfield Poltergeist (1977)

The Smurl Haunting (West Pittston, PA)

Skinwalkers at the Pentagon — Lacatski, Kelleher, Knapp

Hypnopompic Hallucinations — Sleep Foundation

The Old Hag Phenomenon and Sleep Paralysis

The Blemmyes — Headless Men with Faces in Their Chests

West Virginia Paranormal Investigations

Paper Moon (1973)

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

In January 1956, rush-hour drivers crossing Pittsburgh’s icy Homestead High Level Bridge watched a nightmare descend from the sky: a silent B-25 bomber gliding just feet above the roadway with both engines dead. Veteran Air Force pilot Major William Dotson pulled off a flawless emergency landing on the freezing Monongahela River, saving all six men from the crash itself. But within minutes, two crew members vanished into the current, and the bomber sank beneath only 25 feet of water… never to be seen again. How does an entire military aircraft disappear in shallow water, in front of hundreds of witnesses, and stay missing for nearly seventy years?

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

Scott and Forrest present a preview of a new podcast called Hidden History with Dr. Harini Bhat!

Dr. Harini Bhat is a clinical pharmacist and storyteller obsessed with the moments in history that still can't be fully explained. Every week she investigates real events that defy easy explanation. Mass hysterias. Vanished civilizations. Medical oddities. Strange signals. Unexplained phenomena that keep repeating across centuries, as if history is trying to tell us something.

In tonight's dead letter, listener Andrew writes in from a quiet little back house in Monterey Park, California — a place that during the early pandemic felt even quieter than usual. He's a self-described skeptic, he disabled the motion sensor on his own bathroom light because it kept tripping on him, or so he thought. But on the worst night of his life, something happened in that house he still can't quite explain. Scott and Forrest also share a few of their own recent stories — alarm clocks, flickering nightlights, dying batteries that turned out to be just dying batteries — about what's mundane and what isn't when grief is fresh.

REFERENCE LINKS

History of Monterey Park — Official City Website

The Tongva (Gabrielino) People — Wikipedia

Monterey Park, California — Wikipedia

Hello From Heaven by Bill and Judy Guggenheim

The ADC Project — After-Death Communication Research

Astonishing Legends Ep 101: ARCapalooza! Part 2

Richard Hatem's Paranormal Bookshelf — Official Site

Anomaly: Paranormal Podcast by Paul Gledhill

The Monroe Institute — Founded by Robert Monroe

Black Mirror: "White Christmas" — Wikipedia

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

In 1994, Gloria Ramirez, a 31-year-old mother of two dying from cancer, arrived at a Riverside ER with strange odors, an oily sheen on her skin, and crystalline particles in her blood — then doctors and nurses around her began collapsing, vomiting, burning, and struggling to breathe. The ER was evacuated and HAZMAT suits came out. Gloria died in the chaos, and the official explanation still leaves troubling questions. Behind the nickname “The Toxic Lady” is a human being whose final night remains one of the most haunting medical mysteries of our time.

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