Pleasing Terrors

The railroad tracks over the Tsavo river are flanked on either side with lush grasses. A picturesque river runs below, providing a calming base for the trains that rush from Uganda to Kenya and back again. During it's construction, men from all over India and far parts of Africa gathered at the Tsavo river, working for months on end. At first, the men were oblivious to the twin pairs of golden eyes stalking them from the grasses… until half-devoured bodies and screams in the night became commonplace.

From a distance, from a viewpoint high above the clouds, the Kenya-Uganda Railway snakes its way across deserts and through forests of thorns, trailing bloodshed and pain in its wake.

Episode Highlights:

• Demons in the Forest of Thorns
• Lieutenant-Colonel John Henry Patterson and the Tsavo River
• Devoured men and lion prints: A campsite surrounded
• Patterson's hunt for a pride of unordinary lions
• The figure on the platform
• Blood on the desert sand
• The price of the railroad

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Throughout history, disasters of astronomical proportions have taken place on one auspicious day -- Friday the Thirteenth. Shipwrecks, tsunamis, raging forest fires, brutal murderers, and horrifying accidents have all claimed victims on a day that many believe has been cursed since the fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The same serpent who tested the pair has become the dark figurehead of Friday the Thirteenth, feared by ancient cultures for centuries.

The fear of 13 seems like old suspicions that were born and died in ancient times, but as an asteroid headed straight for the Earth threatens to destroy civilization as we know it, the due date of Friday the Thirteenth might be more relevant than ever.

Episode Highlights:

• Shipwrecks, gruesome murders, natural disasters, and cannibalism: A trail of death through history
• The fear of Friday the 13th
• Numerology and mysticism
• Adam, Eve, the Serpent, and 13
• Symbolism in the works of Edgar Allan Poe
• Sinister snakes and dark evil in Ancient Egypt
• Flying asteroids to strike the Earth

Resources:

Friday the Thirteenth by Thomas William Lawson

"The Cask of Amontillado" by Edgar Allan Poe

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Underneath our world lies a twisting and complicated maze, a dark mass of underground caves, passageways, and secrets. In part two of our Labyrinth series, we delve into the explorations of Greg Newkirk into the heart of the Kentucky goblin mystery.

Episode Highlights:

• The m-cave mystery in the desert
• The "other grandma"
• Return of the Kentucky goblins
• Secret missions and underground battles
• Amazing Stories
• Brown Mountain: Finding a way into the Labyrinth
• Mummified remains
• Following the numbers
• The Mammoth

Resources:

Secret Cipher of the UFONAUTS by Allen Greenfield

"As Above, So Below" Episode of Euphomet Podcast

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The brave Greek hero Theseus made a name for himself when he defeated the monstrous Minotaur and escaped the depths of the Labyrinth by mapping his path back to safety with a ball of red string. The story of the Kentucky Goblins is much like the twisting, mysterious Labyrinth. Many researchers have found themselves lost within the details of the tale, searching for the truth of what lives in the middle of the maze.

Was 1950's Hopkinsville, Kentucky, really home to a colony of extraterrestrial beings? And if so… have they finally made their return?

Episode Highlights:

• The Greeks and the Minotaur
• The mystical Edgar Cayce
• Flying saucers in Kentucky
• A sighting in Roswell, New Mexico
• Shots fired in Hopkinsville, Kentucky
• Owls or little green men?
• Greg Newkirk and the Week in Weird
• The return of the Kentucky Goblins

Resources:

Movies:

• Close Encounters of the Third Kind

• E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

• Poltergeist

• Gremlins

• Critters

• Signs

• The Bigfoot Hunter:Still Searching

Week in Weird

Traveling Museum of the Paranormal and the Occult

"Have the Kentucky Goblins Returned?" Article by Greg Newkirk

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The stories of Charleston, South Carolina are composed of a tangled web of dreams and memories. They've been passed through historians, artists, writers, and tour guides, twisting into a new shape with each retelling.

Deep within the historic city lies a graveyard. Cloaked in ivy and wildflowers, the cemetery is a tranquil spot for a walk and a popular sightseeing destination… as long as the sun is shining. In the dark of night, the graveyard belonging to the Unitarian Church of Charleston transforms from peaceful to terrifying, leaving late-night tour participants shrieking in fear at the ghostly woman lurking behind tombstones. Are the stories surrounding the graveyard's mistress a true account of a pair of star-crossed lovers still searching for each other beyond the grave, or are they nothing but a spooky story to tell in the dark?

Where does fact begin and fiction end?

Episode Highlights:

• Mike Brown's graveyard
• The history of Charleston, South Carolina
• Ghostly residents of King and Queens Street
• The curse of King's Street Gate at the Unitarian Church of South Carolina
• A scream in the graveyard
• What is folklore?
• Life and times of Edgar Perry
• Star-crossed lovers
• Annabel Lee
• Folklore, facts, and fiction

Resources:

• Doctor to the Dead: Grotesque Legends and Folk Tales of Old Charleston by John Bennett
• The Gold Bug by Edgar Allan Poe
• Kingdom By the Sea, Mark Robert. Jones, East Atlantic Publishing, 2013
• The Journal of English and Germanic Philoligy. Vol 21, No. 2 (April, 1922) Robert Adger Law
• Southern Cultures Vol. 22, No. 2 Summerville 2016 Scott Peeples and Michelle Van Parys

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The city of dreams, the city that never sleeps, the city with streets paved with opportunities… for many of us, New York represents a glittering place where absolutely anything is possible. Yet for all its glamour and sparkle, there are dark secrets lurking within its shadows, and history has done little to wash away the blood that once soaked New York's prosperous streets.

They say the population of New York City reaches nearly 8.5 million people. Does that count the haunted souls whose ghosts still roam the streets?

Episode Highlights:

• Bloody history of the Empire State Building
• A Beautiful Suicide: Evelyn McHale
• Visiting the House of Death in Washington Square
• The Hangman's Elm
• Walking with Edgar Allan Poe
• Charred bodies in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory
• A beating heart in 14th West 10th Street
• The Bartell Experience
• Mediums and paranormal researchers
• The tragedy continues

Resources:

"Beautiful Suicide" photograph of Evelyn McHale

Haunted Greenwich Village: Bohemian Banshee, Spooky Sites and Gonzalez Ghost Walks by Tom Ogden, published by Globe Pequot Press, 2012"Gang of Ghosts Ready to Rumble" by William Grimes, New York Times article, published October 29, 1993

"Terror on 10th Street" by Tim Donnelly, New York Post article, October 28, 2012

Spindrift: Spray from a Psychic Sea by Jan Bryant Bartell

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The idyllic Fox Hollow Farm boasts of a basement-level swimming pool and sprawling acres of land. But all is not as it seems. A man creeps through the woods nearby, his legs transparent in the flashlight's beam. There is an incessant knocking at the front door by hands unseen. Night swims in the pool end with ghostly fingers clenched tight around a throat.

For Joe Leblanc, Fox Hollow Farm was meant to be an escape from a long commute and skyrocketing rent. For the dozens of men buried on its grounds, Fox Hollow Farm had come to represent something much more sinister.

Episode Highlights:

• Joe Leblanc
• Fox Hollow Farm and the Graves family
• The man with no legs
• Herb and Julie Baumeister
• A knock in the night
• Herb's dark history
• Bones in the yard
• Twisted games
• An altar in the woods

Resources:

• "While Julie Was Away" People Magazine Article, 1996
• Where the Bodies are Buried by Frannie Weinstein and Melinda Wilson
• "Fox Hollow Farm" Paranormal Witness, Season 2, Episode 8

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Mysteries are a rarity in our world. What used to be unexplainable is now quickly answered by the modern marvels of technology and science. So when a new mystery appears, we drive ourselves crazy searching for an explanation, haunted by what we can't explain.

One modern mystery is reasoning behind the strange events that took place on a Siberian mountain in 1959, in which a group of experienced hikers were found dead in bizarre circumstances. Since the day of the discovery, many have been tormented by one simple question: What happened on Dyatlov Pass?

Was it a Yeti, an avalanche, a top secret military test gone horribly wrong that killed the group? Or was it something simply incomprehensible to modern listeners– an ill-fated encounter with goddesses and myths of old?

Episode Highlights:

• Dyatlov Pass Incident: Ski Tourists in Siberia
• The search begins
• First disturbing discoveries
• Nine sets of footprints in the snow
• Charred and frozen bodies
• Conflicting and confusing evidence
• Timeline of events: What went wrong?
• Theories and speculations
• Spheres of light in ancient lands

Resources:

• Mountain of the Dead by Keith McCloskey

• Dead Mountain by Donnie Eichar

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Werewolves have been portrayed in folklore, books, movies and television for centuries. Rageful howls under the full moon. Fangs, claws, fur, muscle and legend. Is it a monster? A ghost or a demon? Is it real? Historic folk tales about werewolves often evoke images of crisp nights in dark ages of Europe. Yet in the United States, the state of Georgia has one of the longest histories of werewolf encounters in the country. This is the story of the Georgia Werewolf.

Personal accounts and anecdotes in modern times give us a glimpse of this creature, not yet verified by science. Small-town legends passed down since the 1800s led ghost-hunters to the local cemetery. Rumors swirled around a well-known farm and the unusual behavior of a young family member. What if the monster was not in the woods, but amongst us?

Episode Highlights:

• Personal accounts of close encounters with werewolves in Georgia
• Author Linda S. Godfrey's research on the American Werewolf
• Ghost-hunters investigate the cemetery linked to the monster
• Livestock slaughters and oral history in rural Georgia
• Hunting parties searching for a killer wolf
• The troubling story of Isabella Burt
• Theories on the origins of a werewolf

Resources:

Hunting the American Werewolf by Linda S. Godfrey - Amazon

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A haunted house should loom out of the darkness, its windows boarded up, ghosts and dust as the only occupants. But horror dwells inside two beautifully decorated homes in the Benedict Canyon of Beverly Hills. While its name means "heaven" in Spanish, 10050 Cielo Drive was nothing but Hell for the five victims brutally murdered by Charles Manson's "Family" within its walls. Some say their spirits still haunt the area, having taken up residence in the nearby Oman House.

Two men, film director David Oman and Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor, have turned the blood-soaked history of Cielo Drive into a booming source of revenue. Both men show signs of struggling with their own inner demons – are the spirits still trapped within their homes disturbed and vengeful at the business created around their murders, or is it the morality of the situation haunting the living?

Episode Highlights:

• History of the Oman House
• David Oman: homeowner, movie director, and tour guide
• Dr. Barry Taff investigates
• Trapped spirits in the Oman House
• Charles Manson & The Family
• The Tate Murders on Cielo Drive
• Trent Reznor on 10050 Cielo Drive

Resources:

• David Oman's interview with Dread Central

• The House at the End of the Drive (2014 Film)

• The Oman House website for tour tickets, seances, and merchandise
• Listen to Dr. Taff's radio interview with Dark Matter: "The Entity Hauntings, Poltergeists, & the Manson Murders"
• "Gave Up" Nine Inch Nails music video
• The Long Hard Road Out of Hell by Marilyn Manson

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