True Weird Stuff

Today's True Weird Stuff - Hammersmith Ghost (Airdate 11/15/2024)

In 1803, residents of the Hammersmith district of London reported being terrorized by a ghost. The hysteria was so intense that a man named Francis Smith did the unthinkable: he shot and killed a man wearing white clothing, having mistaken the man for the Hammersmith Ghost. Can a man be found guilty of trying to kill a ghost? It's a decision that would take English courts 180 years to figure out.

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Today's True Werid Stuff - Cokey & Lucky

His name is Lucky Luciano. An Italian-born gangster, Luciano was credited as the Godfather of American organized crime. From extortion, to bootlegging, and prostitution, Luciano was on top of the world as he rose to power beyond his wildest dreams. That is, until a woman named "Cokey Flo" helped expose his prostitution ring in front of a jury, causing Luciano's luck to finally run out.

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Today's True Weird Stuff - Welcome to the Multiverse

Do you remember as a kid it being called the Berenstein Bears with an "e?" It was actually spelled with an "A". How about the Monopoly man's monocle? Turns out he never actually had one. Oh, and Ed McMahon never showed up on anyone's doorstep during the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes. These collective false memories we share with others are called the "Mandela Effect." Is this a coincidental phenomenon, or part of something bigger in a multiverse reality?

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Today's True Weird Stuff - The DUNE Project

Neutrinos are tiny, fundamental particles that may contain a key to better understanding the universe. Roughly a thousand trillion of these mysterious particles harmlessly pass through your body every second. In order to better understand them, scientists shoot an intense beam of neutrinos from a facility in Illinois to an underground detector 1,300 kilometers away in South Dakota. They call it The DUNE Project.

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Today's True Weird Stuff - Rest In Peace

London in the early 1800s had a graveyard problem. A lack of space led to unsanitary burial practices as the smell of rotting corpses and overflowing sewers consumed the city. One such place was Enon Chapel, a church in which the pastor was getting paid to allow bodies to be buried in the chapel's basement. But a man nicknamed "Graveyard Walker" made it his mission to put an end to these filthy practices.

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Today True Weird Stuff - The Rightest Stuff

Astronaut Gordon Cooper had to manually control his spacecraft after a series of equipment failures. Edgar Mitchell avoided disaster by deactivating spaceship abort commands caused by a faulty switch. Becoming an astronaut has been the dream of generations of children, but it's more than exploring strange new worlds. The job of an astronaut is stressful, demanding and requires quick life-or-death decision making. This episode looks at a few tales in space where astronauts rose to the occasion to avoid catastrophe.

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Today's True Weird Stuff - Beavers on the Moon 

Claims that the Apollo 11 moon landing was a hoax have existed for decades. Meet the grandaddy of moon landing conspiracy theories, Bill Kaysing. He believed the Apollo Moon landings between 1969 and 1972 were faked. However, this isn't the only lunar conspiracy...The Great Moon Hoax of 1835 went as far as to trick people into believing that animals lived on the moon.

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Today's True Weird Stuff - The Pineys

The Pine Barrens of New Jersey may be a forbidding wilderness, but people have called the place home for hundreds of years. It's also where folks have reported sightings of a terrifying beast, capable of a blood-curdling scream that can send chills down the sturdiest spines. It's the legend of the Jersey Devil that haunts the Pineys.

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Today's True Weird Stuff - Legend of the Pines

Joe Mulliner was known as the “Robin Hood of the Pines.” Forced to flee his home in 1779, Mulliner went on a crime spree through the Pine Barrens of Southern New Jersey...never killing anyone, but robbing and kidnapping his way into the history books.

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Today's True Weird Stuff - King Of Quacks

Curtis Howe Springer was a radio evangelist, self-proclaimed medical doctor and minister. In 1944, he laid claim to 12,000 acres of land in California's Mohave Desert and created his own town. The only problem? The land wasn't his. He was also a medical fraud who used his radio show to sell fake miracle potions. Springer was the ultimate con man known as the "King of Quacks."

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