The Cottingley Fairies might not seem like the kind of story you’d expect on Paranormia. There’s no crime scene and no shadowy figure in the woods. Instead, it begins with two cousins in a small Yorkshire village, a stream behind their house, and a borrowed camera meant to prove a simple claim… that they had been visiting fairies.

In 1917, Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright produced photographs that appeared to show tiny winged figures dancing beside Cottingley Beck. What could have stayed a family joke quickly spread far beyond the village. The images reached Theosophists who believed they were proof of hidden worlds, and eventually Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, who published them in The Strand magazine and argued they might change how people think about reality.

This episode explores how a childhood hoax became an international story, and why so many people, in a world still recovering from war and loss, wanted to believe it.

***

If you have a story where crime and the otherworldly intertwine, something strange, unexplained or just plain haunted, get in touch at [email protected].

Paranormia is an Audio Always production.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the early 2000s, a small group of teens and young adults found each other online through Final Fantasy VII fandom. It started the way so many internet friendships start with late-night chats, shared obsessions, and the relief of being understood by strangers who felt like home. Then a charismatic leader began offering something bigger than community. She claimed certain members weren’t just fans, but that their souls were “bonded” to the characters. Their real lives, she said, existed in another world, and she could help them remember.

What followed wasn’t just roleplay. Survivor accounts describe a household in State College, Pennsylvania, where the fantasy became a framework for control. Relationships were treated as “destiny,” boundaries reframed as betrayal, and “past-life” rituals that slid into coercion and confinement. 

This episode traces how a fandom became a contained world, and why its aftermath became an internet legend. Some names are pseudonyms from published reporting in Vice; others are composite characters created to reflect roles described across survivor accounts. This is not a story about the supernatural. It’s a story about vulnerability, identity, and what happens when belief stops being private, and becomes the price of belonging.

***

If you have a story where crime and the otherworldly intertwine, something strange, unexplained or just plain haunted, get in touch at [email protected].

Paranormia is an Audio Always production.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In May 1828, a teenage boy appeared at the gates of Nuremberg carrying letters and a name… Kaspar Hauser. He could barely explain where he’d come from, but the letters claimed something extraordinary, that he had been raised in isolation, kept in a dark room since infancy by a man he rarely saw, then delivered to the city like a sealed message finally opened.

Nuremberg didn’t know whether it had found a victim, a miracle, or a fraud. Officials contained him, teachers tried to educate him, doctors examined him, and crowds came to stare. Rumour quickly outgrew the boy at the centre of it; a feral child, psychological experiment, political secret, even a stolen heir. As the attention intensified, so did the violence, injuries, alleged attacks, and a public argument that hardened into two competing truths. Someone was hunting Kaspar, or Kaspar had learned that mystery was the only way to stay protected.

The story ends in December 1833, in a winter garden in Ansbach. Kaspar staggers back with a stab wound and a small purse containing a note written in mirror writing, backwards like a riddle. He dies days later, and the question survives him. Was he murdered, or did he write his own ending? This is not a story about the supernatural. It is a story about identity, public obsession, and what happens when belief becomes the price of compassion.

***

If you have a story where crime and the otherworldly intertwine, something strange, unexplained or just plain haunted, get in touch at [email protected].

Paranormia is an Audio Always production.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In January 1804, a man was shot dead on a dark lane in West London. For weeks beforehand, residents of Hammersmith believed their streets were haunted by a tall figure in white, silent, advancing, and impossible to catch. Neighbours formed armed patrols. Passwords were agreed for meeting in the dark. Rumour hardened into routine. When Francis Smith raised a shotgun and fired at what he believed was the apparition, the haunting ended instantly. The “ghost” was Thomas Millwood, a bricklayer walking home from visiting his family, dressed in the white clothes of his trade.

This episode reconstructs the long winter that led to that gunshot. We trace how fear spread through conversation, newspapers, and testimony. We examine the night itself using court records from the Old Bailey, the shouted challenge, the silence, the shot heard across Black Lion Lane. And we follow the case into the courtroom, where the trial became something far larger than a local tragedy.

Because the question was no longer whether a ghost existed. It was whether belief, even sincere belief, could excuse killing. The Hammersmith Ghost case would go on to shape the law of self-defence and criminal responsibility for generations. But before it became a legal landmark, it was a neighbourhood gripped by fear, a man misrecognised in the dark, and a community forced to confront what panic can make ordinary people do. This is not a story about the supernatural. It is a story about how fear becomes action, and how the law decides what that action is worth.

***

If you have a story where crime and the otherworldly intertwine, something strange, unexplained or just plain haunted, get in touch at [email protected].

Paranormia is an Audio Always production.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In November 1978, more than nine hundred people died in a clearing in the Guyanese rainforest. For decades, the story of Jonestown has been reduced to a phrase, a cautionary shorthand for blind obedience. But that language skips the part that matters most.

This episode traces the long, ordinary road that led there. From the early years of the Peoples Temple in the American Midwest, where food, housing, and dignity were offered to people the state routinely failed… to the slow narrowing of belief, the erosion of choice, and the creation of a world where leaving no longer felt possible.

We follow the movement south, not as exile, but as promise. We examine daily life inside Jonestown, the routines, the labour, the loudspeakers, the rehearsals, and the way fear was organised long before it was acted upon. And we reconstruct the final days, using court records, testimony, and the forty-four-minute tape that captured the end of the settlement’s logic.

This is not a story about madness. It is a story about how belief becomes an environment, and how a place built to protect people can quietly turn into one that will not let them go.

Content warning: This episode contains discussion of mass death, psychological coercion, and harm involving children. Listener discretion is advised.

***

If you have a story where crime and the otherworldly intertwine, something strange, unexplained or just plain haunted, get in touch at [email protected].

Paranormia is an Audio Always production.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For decades, children on Staten Island grew up hearing the same warning. Don’t go near the abandoned buildings. Don’t cut through the woods. Because Cropsey was waiting. Cropsey was a boogeyman said to have escaped from the ruins of the Willowbrook State School, a story parents used to keep children away from a place they didn’t know how to explain. For years, it was just folklore, a cautionary tale meant to turn geography into safety.

Then children began to disappear for real. In the 1970s and 1980s, several young people vanished during ordinary routines, sent on short errands, leaving apartment buildings, walking home. When one child’s body was later found on the grounds of Willowbrook, attention turned to a former employee who had slept in camps nearby and would later be convicted of kidnapping.

As fear spread, the boundary between myth and reality collapsed. Cropsey stopped being just a story told to children and became a way a community tried to make sense of loss and danger. This episode examines the real cases behind the legend, the history of Willowbrook, and what happens when folklore collides with true crime. revealing how easily fear can turn tragedy into myth.

***

If you have a story where crime and the otherworldly intertwine, something strange, unexplained or just plain haunted, get in touch at [email protected].

Paranormia is an Audio Always production.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In January 2013, a 21-year-old Canadian student named Elisa Lam checked into a budget hotel in downtown Los Angeles. She was travelling alone, documenting her journey online, and calling her parents every day. Then the calls stopped.

Weeks later, her body was discovered in a rooftop water tank above the hotel where she’d been staying, after guests complained that the water pressure was low, and the tap water tasted strange. Days earlier, police had released surveillance footage of Elisa behaving erratically in a hotel elevator. The video went viral, transforming a missing person investigation into a global obsession. The building was the Cecil Hotel, a place with a long history of violence, suicide, and notoriety, sitting at the edge of Skid Row. As the internet rushed to fill the gaps with theories of ghosts, conspiracies, and foul play, the facts of the case became harder to hear.

This episode examines what actually happened, how a tragic death became mythologised, and what the story reveals about mental illness, internet culture, and our collective hunger for mystery. It’s a story about how fear distorts understanding, and how easily a real person can be lost inside a legend.

Support note:

This episode discusses mental illness, suicide, and distressing themes. If you or someone you know is struggling, help is available.

UK & ROI: Samaritans — call 116 123 or visit samaritans.org

US: 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline — call or text 988

Canada: Talk Suicide — call 1-833-456-4566

Australia: Lifeline — 13 11 14

Or visit findahelpline.com for local support worldwide

***

If you have a story where crime and the otherworldly intertwine, something strange, unexplained or just plain haunted, get in touch at [email protected].

Paranormia is an Audio Always production.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In February 1959, nine experienced hikers disappeared in the northern Ural Mountains. When searchers found their tent weeks later, it was cut open from the inside. Boots were left neatly behind. Food sat untouched. Footprints, some barefoot, led into the snow.

Over the months that followed, the bodies were recovered in stages. Some had died of exposure. Others suffered catastrophic internal injuries with almost no external wounds. Two were missing their eyes. One was missing her tongue. The Soviet investigation closed the case with a single, unsettling phrase: “an insurmountable force of nature.” In the decades since, the Dyatlov Pass Incident has become one of the most debated wilderness tragedies in modern history. Theories have ranged from avalanches and extreme weather to military testing, folklore, and outright conspiracy. Each explanation reflects not only the evidence, but the era, and the fears that produced it.

This episode traces what is known, what remains disputed, and how a remote mountain became a canvas for grief, secrecy, science, and myth. It’s a story about limits: of survival, of certainty, and of how easily unanswered questions harden into legend.

If you have a story where crime and the otherworldly intertwine, something strange, unexplained or just plain haunted, get in touch at [email protected].

Paranormia is an Audio Always production.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In 2001, a small wooden wine cabinet appeared in an eBay listing from Portland. Its seller claimed it had belonged to a 103-year-old Holocaust survivor and that it contained a dybbuk, a restless spirit from Jewish folklore. He warned that opening it had brought illness, nightmares, and a sense of being watched.

Over the years, the cabinet passed through multiple owners, each reporting disturbing experiences: unexplained rashes, recurring dreams, malfunctioning electronics, panic attacks, and people fainting in its presence. The story inspired books, a Hollywood horror film, and eventually a permanent display in a Las Vegas haunted museum. But as the legend grew, investigators began to question where it came from, and whether the story attached to the box matched the traditions it claimed to draw from.

This episode traces how an ordinary object became a modern haunting, why fear persisted even as the narrative began to unravel, and what the Dybbuk Box reveals about belief, suggestion, and the uneasy space where stories begin to feel real.

If you have a story where crime and the otherworldly intertwine, something strange, unexplained or just plain haunted, get in touch at [email protected].

Paranormia is an Audio Always production.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Michael and Suzan Carson drifted through the American West, moving between communes, shared apartments, and marijuana farms. They changed their names, adopted a patchwork belief system of mysticism and religion, and came to see themselves as warriors in a hidden war. Between 1981 and 1983, three people were killed. A young woman found stabbed and bludgeoned in a San Francisco basement. A co-worker shot and buried in the woods of Humboldt County. And a man who stopped to help two hitchhikers, shot on the side of a California highway. The Carsons insisted their victims were witches. They held a five-hour jailhouse press conference, spoke of visions and holy missions, and framed murder as religious duty. Decades later, they have never renounced those beliefs.

This episode traces how an ordinary couple built a shared delusion powerful enough to justify killing, the damage it inflicted on children and families left behind, and why the story has been remembered as something occult rather than what it was: a case study in belief, control, and the human capacity to turn ideology into violence.

If you have a story where crime and the otherworldly intertwine, something strange, unexplained or just plain haunted, get in touch at [email protected].

Paranormia is an Audio Always production.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.