So here we are, the last episode of the third season of the Some weird podcast. So far this season, we have told you some extraordinary tales about aliens, strange medical conditions, and inspirations for some of the scariest movies ever filmed. For this episode, we decided to go back to where it all began, Newfoundland. It as the inspiration for the genesis of the podcast. And although we have branched off to tell stories from all over the world, we didn’t want the entire season to go by without dedicating an episode to our homeland. But we are going to do it with a twist…For this episode each host are going to each tell your three stories. Two will be real, one, a complete fabrication. We invite you, the loyal listeners to play along and see if you can figure out which ones are real and which fake. So sit back, and get ready to play a guessing game, guaranteed to be some weird.

Warning: some language or themes may not be suitable for all ages.

Check out our website: www.someweirdpodcast.com

Have your own story or your own take on our stories? Email us at [email protected] or on twitter @SomeWeirdPod

Ever have a dream where something in the dream mirrored something in the real world? I can remember having a dream where I was sitting in class in my elementary school and I heard the bells of the church that was next door ringing only to wake and realize that my real-life alarm clock was going off (probably longer than it should have). It’s pretty common for things happening in real life to affect things happening in the dream life. Usually when this happens, you realize what is going on, give yourself a ‘yes b’y’ and move on with your life. But what if the opposite were true? What if things in the dream world affected things in the real world? Given how strange dreams sometimes are, that seems quite a lot more terrifying yet this exact thing was surprisingly common among a specific group of mostly men in the United States in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Horror king Wes Craven caught wind of this story and the idea of a villain who hunted his victims in their sleep was formed. That’s right – the 1984 classic “A Nightmare on Elm Street” was inspired by true events that were, indeed, some weird.

Warning: some language or themes may not be suitable for all ages.

Check out our website: www.someweirdpodcast.com

Have your own story or your own take on our stories? Email us at [email protected] or on twitter @SomeWeirdPod

Death is a part of life. Although they are polar opposites you can’t have one without the other. Dealing with the loss of a loved one can be very difficult. Death can also be very cruel taking someone from this Earth way too soon and making them suffer as they make their journey to the other side. When this happens, you take time to mourn your loss. You don’t ever truly get over it but eventually you learn how to cope without your loved one. You remember the good times, honor their memory, and go on living because that is what your loved one would want you to do. Some people are better equipped to deal with loss than others. There’s no playbook on how to do it. One of the natural emotions is denial. You say to yourself “that’s not true. I just spoke to them last week.” For most, you eventually come to accept the cruel fact that death is a part of life. But how long does it take to get to this point? Are some people in denial to the point that it didn’t happen? Or think that they can actually bring someone back? For this episode of the podcast we are going to share a few stories of people who tried to cheat death and the lengths they would go through in order to do so. There is only one way to explain these stories that you are about to hear and that is: Some Weird.

Warning: some language or themes may not be suitable for all ages.

Check out our website: www.someweirdpodcast.com

Have your own story or your own take on our stories? Email us at [email protected] or on twitter @SomeWeirdPod

Tale as old as time. No, not Beauty and the Beast: a story of bestiality and Stockholm Syndrome thinly veiled as a romance for the ages and cleaned up and sanitized by Disney for your viewing pleasure. No not that one, I am talking about a much older story: that of the eternal struggle of good vs evil. This theme is woven in the threads of almost all our stories at some level. If you are a Christian or even if you are familiar with Christian iconography, these are personified as the omnipotent creator and one and only God and Satan, the fallen angel and devil himself. In 1971, a humorist named William Peter Blatty published a horror novel that would be turned into a movie often dubbed the most terrifying film of all time based on this exact struggle. That novel and subsequent movie was, of course, The Exorcist. Spoiler alert: The Exorcist tells the story of an innocent young girl who becomes possessed by a demon after she uses a Ouija board and of the Catholic priests who exorcise said demon after must persistence and turmoil. Good triumphs over evil and there is much rejoicing. Where on Earth did Blatty come up with such a dark and disturbing story? Well, as it turns out, he did not need to look too far. The idea actually came from of an article he read in a Washington newspaper. This article was about the supposed real-life possession and exorcism of a young boy in 1949. Blatty was all in – he changed it from a boy to a girl and dramatized the events and the horror movie industry was never the same. So why are we at the Some Weird Podcast doing a whole episode about this? Simple: the real story was far more terrifying. Nowadays, the tagline “Based on a true story” is pretty loose but if we are to believe the diaries of the priests who were there in 1949, we can certainly say that truth is stranger than fiction or, if you are a Newfoundlander like us, we can certainly say that true story that inspired The Exorcist is some weird.

Warning: some language or themes may not be suitable for all ages.

Check out our website: www.someweirdpodcast.com

Have your own story or your own take on our stories? Email us at [email protected] or on twitter @SomeWeirdPod

Have you ever heard the expression “your mind is playing tricks on you”? you wake up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. As you stumble your way to the door, you catch a glimpse of a shadowy figure out of the corner of your eye. Or, maybe you go to the local grocery store and see a monkey man hanging around the train tracks behind the building. You quickly shake your head to refocus and suddenly the figure is no longer there. Did you imagine it? You couldn’t have. It looked real. It felt real. These mind tricks are for the most part quick and painless. It happens for a second and the illusion goes away. Despite the trick only lasting a short period of time, the memory of it lasts much longer. Maybe even forever. Think about how vivid that memory is and of how much of an impact it had. Now, imagine if that mind trick just doesn’t go away. What if that trick was actually reality to you but unknown to the rest of the world? The human mind is a powerful thing. It can create works of art and inventions that can change the world. But it is also fragile. Just like you can catch a cold or break a leg you can become mentally ill. It was something that was taboo to talk about years ago but luckily the diagnosis and treatment of mental health issues have come a long way. Long gone are the days of getting a free fruit basket for admitting someone to a mental institution. Of all the mental health issues that exist, one the strangest, excuse me, some weirdest, of these conditions is the Folie A Deux aka the madness of two. This condition is defined by an individual experienced delusional beliefs and hallucinations that are transferred from one person to another. That’s right: you can pass the tricks in your mind onto somebody else. I know what you’re thinking: “this can’t be real”, right? Before you decide, have a listen to a few stories about this phenomenon. Guaranteed to be some weird.

Warning: some language or themes may not be suitable for all ages.

Check out our website: www.someweirdpodcast.com

Have your own story or your own take on our stories? Email us at [email protected] or on twitter @SomeWeirdPod

B’ys. What was on the go in colonial times? European nations were fighting over which sovereign got to own lands all around the globe. Lands which were already clearly occupied by people but still acquired for the glory - or perhaps more precisely for the coffers - of this crown or that. The sun never set on the British Empire, am I right? Look at our own island of Newfoundland – here was Britain’s first colony and through the jigs and the reels over a few hundred years even our own parents were not technically born in Canada but rather in Newfoundland, a not-really-independent semi-colony of the fast-fading British Empire that was governed by a Royal Commission of officials appointed by His Royal Majesty’s government. But the British weren’t the only baddies. The French were equally imperialistic despite their loud and involved support of American independence (I’m looking at you, Lafayette. Yes, I’ve seen Hamilton). While they were gifting the Americans the Statue of Liberty and singing about guns and ships, they also held these beliefs to be self-evident but only for white land-owning men. Their support for American independence probably had everything to do with their historic rivalry with Britain and far less to do with the pursuit of liberty. Case in point: Haiti. The French colonized the western side of the island now known as Hispaniola in the early 1600s because of its rich sugar and coffee and to work these plantations they accumulated tons of slaves from West Africa. These people came from cultures that were both similar and conversely disparate but they had one incredibly unfortunate circumstance in common – they were all people struggling to remain people in the unfathomable institution of slavery. Guess what? You cannot keep a peoples’ spirit down and in the case on Haiti, the slave population rose up and in 1804 defeated their French oppressors and declared their independence becoming the only slave population to do so in all of history. In the 200 hundred years of a slavery though, a distinct Haitian culture emerged borrowing from various West African cultures and one of the most recognizable parts of this culture is what we call Voodoo or Voodun. When we think of Voodoo we think of the voodoo doll (not a real thing), possession, sacrifice and all manner of strange practices at least from the Western eye’s perspective. But above all of this is the idea of the zombie. In voodoo, the zombie is a person whose free will has been removed. Whose soul belongs to someone else and who can do nothing but what its master commands. Is it really that strange that fear of becoming a zombie is a method of social control given the history of slavery in Haiti? But this is more than a fairy story told to keep you off a forest path at night. Scientists have tried to find the source of the alleged zombie powder that can give the appearance of death with the absence of pain for medical reasons and in the story of at least one Haitian man, they may have done so. But there is more than just the science of slowing a person’s vitals. There is the magic of the soul, the magic of the voodoo teachings. There is an art to creating the zombie and the whole thing is some weird.

Warning: some language or themes may not be suitable for all ages.

Check out our website: www.someweirdpodcast.com

Have your own story or your own take on our stories? Email us at [email protected] or on twitter @SomeWeirdPod

What is time?  Not an easy thing to define yet we are all slaves to it.  I wish I could do that, but I don't have enough time.  Excuse me, do you have the time?  Oh no, I'm going to be late.  But time is not just the hours minutes and seconds in which we schedule our daily routines, history is defined by time.  Watch a John Hughes movie and you are instantly brought back to a moment in time, specifically the 1980's.  That is, if you are as old as the Some Weird Podcast hosts.  Hear a disco tune?  That's the 1970's.  Watch Jimi Hendrix playing the Star Spangled Banner in a field in upstate New York during a three day music festival, the 1960's.  For people that lived through these times, all it takes is one little cue and BAM, your mind instantly brings you back.  You don't go there physically, it's just a vivid memory brought on by a sound, sight or smell.  The idea of time travel is as old as the first fog.  From Doc Brown creating a time machine out of a DeLorean to the Vatican having a chrono trigger to view all of history's greatest events, many people have tried to figure it out.  We'll let you decide if they've been successful.  One thing about these people is that they were trying to go back in time.  Is it possible for someone to slip through time?  Could someone be walking through the forest and suddenly be transferred 100 years in the past unbeknownst to them.  Could it be that time keeps on slippin' slippin slippin', into the future?  Many people have claimed to have experienced this phenomenon and we here at the Some Weird Podcast are going to share a few of these stories with you.  I just hope we have enough time.

Warning: some language or themes may not be suitable for all ages.

Check out our website: www.someweirdpodcast.com

Have your own story or your own take on our stories? Email us at [email protected] or on twitter @SomeWeirdPod

Human beings have invented some pretty impressive stuff. From the wheel to the printing press to the iPhone and beyond in, from the perspective of all of time, the blink of the eye. Some human-made experimental weapons may have even caused our friends at the Dyatlov Pass Incident from our last episode to flee their tent in the dead of the Russian winter to meet their deaths. Speaking of everything that has ever happened ever, here’s a question for you: is time travel possible? Seems impossible but let’s says it is not. Let’s say you travel back in time to Europe to the early 1600s and show the townsfolk what level of Best Fiends you’ve reached on you iPhone (no internet required). Not only would this totally normal 21st century thing seem impossible to them but you’d probably also find your ass thrown into the closest pond with an anxious crowd watching to see if you’d float and are therefore a witch who must be executed or sink and drown proving your innocence but also you’re dead. My point is this – maybe given the right smarty pants people in the right circumstance time travel is possible. In this episode, we’ll tell you about a couple of guys who claimed to invent their own version of a time machine. I don’t know how true these stories are but I do know this: they are some weird.

Warning: some language or themes may not be suitable for all ages.

Check out our website: www.someweirdpodcast.com

Have your own story or your own take on our stories? Email us at [email protected] or on twitter @SomeWeirdPod

On January 23rd, 1959, a 23 year old engineering student named Igor Dyatlov led a group of ten experienced hikers on an expedition to earn his grade 3 certification. At the time, this was the highest certification available in the Soviet Union and brought great honor to those that achieved it. On what should have been a trip of a lifetime ended in disaster when "an unusual event of unknown origin" caused all but one member of the group to perish in the harsh winter climate. The circumstances around their deaths have left people baffled as to what caused them to meet their ultimate demise. There are a lot of theories as to what happened, some plausible and some.....well let's just say they're out there. The only thing people can say about what happened with certainty is that it was Some Weird.

Warning: some language or themes may not be suitable for all ages.

Check out our website: www.someweirdpodcast.com

Have your own story or your own take on our stories? Email us at [email protected] or on twitter @SomeWeirdPod

On a clear morning following a raging thunderstorm in November of 1980, the family of a 32 year old British Columbian man named Granger Taylor woke to find him missing and in his place was this bizarre note:

Dear Mother and Father,

I have gone away to walk aboard an alien spaceship. As recurring dreams assured me a 42 month interstellar voyage to explore the vast universe, then return.

I am leaving behind all my possessions to you as I will no longer require the use of any. Please use the instructions in my will as a guide to help.

Love, Granger

Neither he nor his remains were ever seen again. Some people think he actually did willingly go with aliens on a spaceship. Others think he walked away to start a new life albeit here on Earth. Still others think his life ended there and then on a BC mountainside. Whatever actually happened to Granger Taylor over 40 years ago is still unknown and is most certainly Some Weird.

Warning: some language or themes may not be suitable for all ages.

Check out our website: www.someweirdpodcast.com

Have your own story or your own take on our stories? Email us at [email protected] or on twitter @SomeWeirdPod