Weird Darkness: Paranormal & True Crime Stories

A discontented Long Island housewife and the forgettable corset salesman she seduced hatch a clumsy plot to murder her sleeping husband — a scheme so poorly executed that one famous newsman couldn't resist giving it a name.
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HOUR ONE: Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray devised a scheme to get rid of Ruth’s husband – and they planned it so well that, okay… actually no. They were so inept they were caught immediately, and even the police publicly called them incompetent. (The Dumb-Bell Murder) *** For over 2,000 years across South and Southeast Asia, trained elephants served as living instruments of execution, crushing condemned prisoners with calculated brutality under the control of their handlers. (Execution By Elephant) *** Before he became a Civil War general, Congressman Dan E. Sickles' scandalous murder trial changed our legal system forever. He said outright that he had killed his wife’s lover. So how did he avoid being found guilty of the crime he admitted to committing? (How A Congressman Got Away With Murder) *** In 1150, two children were found near Woolpit in England – they wore strange clothes, spoke oddly, but the most identifiable characteristic for both children was their skin was green. The children themselves were a mystery – but what happened when they grew up? Did they marry? Did they have children? Could there be decedents of the green children of Woolpit living among us today? (Great Grandkids of Green Children) *** In the summer of 1518, a mysterious dancing plague seized the French town of Strasbourg, compelling hundreds to dance without rest for months—some until they collapsed and died—in a frenzy that baffled authorities and remains unexplained to this day. (Dancing Plague)
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HOUR TWO: When it comes to receiving the death sentence, history has given us several ways to go about the execution. Hanging, firing squad, gas chamber, being stoned to death or burned at the stake… but you have to be some whole new level of “hated” by the people if your death blow comes by way of molten gold being poured down your throat. (Death By Golden Throat) *** Typically, when you hear the phrase “high speed chase”, you think of law enforcement trying to catch the bad guys who are in a getaway vehicle. Perhaps after a bank robbery, or after blowing a stop sign and simply refusing to pull over. But have you heard about the time that the police were involved in a high-speed chase up to 100-miles-per hour, trying to catch up to a flying saucer? (The 100mph UFO Chase) *** When the Black Plague arrived at their doorsteps, the villagers were forced to choose between life or certain doom. It’s the tragic tale of England’s Plague Village – the village of Eyam. (The Black Death Comes to Eyam) *** In the 1800s, women finding themselves “with child” but unmarried, were treated like second-class citizens or worse. And during a time when birth control was limited or even unavailable outside of the rhythm method, what was a girl to do if she found herself in such dire circumstances? Fortunately, there was a woman there ready to help – to take the baby off their hands and give it a good home. Or so everyone thought. (Minnie, The Baby Farmer) *** On frozen lakes near Manitowish Waters, a hooded figure appears to ice fishermen, silently guiding them to the best spots for a catch before vanishing into the winter air. (The Ice Fisherman Ghost)
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SUDDEN DEATH OVERTIME: “Tom" and "Lena" are in a loving relationship and have a young child together. It sounds like the perfect family – except for one tiny detail about their relationship. Tom and Lena are biological brother and sister. (I Fell In Love With My Sister) *** In Norfolk, England the village of Eccles was slowly gobbled by the rising waters of the sea in the early 1600s. But even today, sometimes during a particularly heavy story, you can see St. Mary’s Church mysteriously reappear… bringing with it, the dead buried in the church graveyard who cannot find rest. (The Disappearing And Reappearing Village of Eccles) *** Lory Price and his wife Ethel mysteriously disappeared from Marion, Illinois. But then, sometimes that happens when you are mixed up with the mob or may have learned something you weren’t supposed to. (The Vanishing of Lory Price) *** The Catacombs of St. Callixtus in Rome, Italy, hold the remains of sixteen popes, several martyrs, and around half a million Christians, and according to on author, a not-of-this world entity. (The Callixtus Catacombs Entity)
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SOURCES AND REFERENCES FROM TONIGHT’S SHOW:
“Death By Golden Throat” by Genevieve Carlton for Weird History https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/3586qeqk, Rachel Nuwer for Smithsonian Magazine https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/18pu2d9b, and Laurie L. Dove for History https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/3vy6r2a9
“The Black Death Comes to Eyam” by Stephanie Almazan for The Line Up: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/1aptirxk
“Minnie, The Baby Farmer” from The Scare Chamber: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2eqd77xa
“The 100MPH UFO Chase” from The Parajournal for The Times Online: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/ntcaqk3y
“The Ice Fisherman Ghost” by Charlie Hinz: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8nzemt
“The Dumb-Bell Murder” by Troy Taylor: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/jsut4w93 (includes photo)
“I Fell In Love With My Sister” by Jennifer Tillman for Vice: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/y2dmtp2e
“Execution by Elephant” by Joanna Gillan for Ancient Origins: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8jj255
“The Cursing of Christopher Case” by Gurnoor Kaur for Conspiracy Theories: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/145d147q
“The Disappearing And Reappearing Village of Eccles” by Stacia Briggs for Eastern Daily Press:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/5fopg2hq
“The Vanishing of Lory Price” by Troy Taylor from his book “Bloody Illinois”: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/lsi06qet
“How A Congressman Got Away With Murder” by Genevieve Carlton for All That’s Interesting:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2jantfjj
“Great Grandkids of Green Children” from Ancient Code: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4u4xdypk
“The Callixtus Catacombs Entity” by Ellen Lloyd for Ancient Pages: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/aqhlme0r
“Dancing Plague” by Cassandra Yorgey at HubPages: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/ycke4fwe
==========(Over time links seen above may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for material I use whenever possible. If I have overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it immediately. Some links may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)
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"I have come into the world as a light, so that no one who believes in me should stay in darkness." — John 12:46
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WeirdDarkness®, WeirdDarkness© 2026
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To become a Weird Darkness Radio Show affiliate, contact Radio America at [email protected], or call 800-807-4703 (press 2 or dial ext 250).

The podcast version of the syndicated weekend radio show posts Sunday night/Monday morning at midnight after the show has aired nationally on radio stations Sunday evening.

More episodes, additional podcasts, books, original music, in-depth paranormal and true-crime articles, and much more at https://weirddarkness.com.

Something tall and black is standing on the mountain above the Arctic outpost, it hasn't moved in days, and every man who sees it is a man who has something to answer for.

EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/shapeinthesnow

FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: A machinist ships out to an Arctic research outpost for a one-month government contract, keeping a journal at his wife's insistence to pass the time. The work is dull and the crew gets along. Then he sees something standing on the mountainside — tall, black, motionless, miles off — and finds he isn't the only man in camp who can see it. His roommate has heard of it before, from a grandfather who spent his life being watched by it, and who left behind a single line copied from an asylum patient's journal: “All of our mistakes are never forgotten.” Day by day, the thing on the mountain is closer.

LISTEN ON PODCAST APPS:
Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.com/wdapps
*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*

SOURCES and RESOURCES:
https://www.creepypasta.com/forgotten_mistakes/
(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)

WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.
Originally aired: February 01, 2024

More episodes, additional podcasts, books, original music, in-depth paranormal and true-crime articles, and much more at https://weirddarkness.com.

In the quiet village of Maxley, where shadows stretch long and the dead refuse to rest, an unsuspecting community is about to uncover a horror that has slept for centuries.

EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/mrsamworth

READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/mr2n9c8m

FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: “Mrs. Amworth” by E.F. Benson *** “The White Death” by Christina Skelton *** “My Old Home Videos Showed Me a Life I Never Lived” by Richard Saxon

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = Show Open
00:01:28.161 = “The White Death” by Christina Skelton
00:06:24.330 = “My Old Home Videos Showed Me a Life I Never Lived” by Richard Saxon ***
00:26:30.035 = “Mrs. Amworth” by E.F. Benson ***
01:03:48.287 = Show Close
*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad break

LISTEN ON PODCAST APPS:
Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.com/wdapps
*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*

SOURCES and RESOURCES:
“Mrs. Amworth” by E.F. Benson: https://tinyurl.com/yyvqdwub
“The White Death” by Christina Skelton: https://tinyurl.com/yxjcujwx
“My Old Home Videos Showed Me a Life I Never Lived” by Richard Saxon: https://tinyurl.com/y4l9zzgq
(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)

WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.
Originally aired: August 20, 2020

Weird Darkness returns with a night of urban legend, found-footage horror, and classic vampire fiction, moving from a South American death-spirit to a stack of home videos that shouldn't exist to an English village with a very sociable widow.
It opens with "The White Death" by Christina Skelton, told by a narrator sitting at his computer waiting to die. A friend's aunt, drunk the night before, finally explained how the boy's parents had died: they were doing mission work in a small South American country when a terrified man burst into the mission hospital claiming a Muerta blanca — the White Death, the White Devil Girl — had killed his sister and was coming for him. She was a girl with dead black eyes that wept bile, who moved without moving her legs, and who knocked on the doors and mirrors between her and her victim: once for the skin she uses to patch her own rotting flesh, twice for the muscle, three times for bones she carves into knives, four for the heart she wears around her neck, and on through the teeth, the eyes, and finally the soul. She can only find you if you saw her kill someone, or if someone tells you about her. The missionaries phoned the aunt about it that same night, and were found in the morning skinned and dismembered, their bodies covered in small, child-like handprints. The aunt was murdered the night she told the story, the friend died on the phone while the narrator listened to the door come off its hinges, and now the knocking has started on the narrator's own door — twenty-eight times on the front door, twenty-eight on the hall mirror, twenty-eight on the bedroom door.
From there the episode turns to "My Old Home Videos Showed Me a Life I Never Lived" by Richard Saxon, from Creepypasta.com. Adam Davies, thirty-something and unremarkable, digs a box of VHS tapes out of his parents' basement hoping nostalgia will shake loose whatever ambition he lost. The first tape looks like his childhood exactly as he remembers it, except for a dog named Doug he never owned and cannot recall, and except for the ending: a stranger with a camera follows him out of a bar on October 7th, 2006, and films him burning alive in a car wreck. Every tape after it does the same thing. His grandfather dies in 1999 instead of 1993, his first car changes from black to red, and the film always closes on Adam dying while an unspeaking cameraman watches — shot in the throat in an alley in 2002, drowned in a submerged car in 2004, bleeding out at the bottom of a cliff in 2005. His parents deny the tapes exist; their own footage, digitized and locked in a fireproof safe, ends with no deaths at all. Then Adam finds one labeled 1985 to 2021, watches his mother die in a hospital bed on December 17th, 2020, and watches himself open his own arm with a pocket knife in a motel room a month later while the cameraman films. He hands everything to the police, locks his doors, covers his windows — and an hour later his father calls to say his mother has collapsed in the bathroom.
The episode closes with Darren narrating E.F. Benson's 1922 vampire tale "Mrs. Amworth", set in the Sussex village of Maxley. Mrs. Amworth, the widow of an Indian civil servant who died at Peshawar, arrives to enliven a sleepy street of Georgian houses with luncheons, piano playing, and games of piquet — charming everyone except Francis Urcombe, a former Cambridge physiology professor who abandoned his chair to study vampirism and the other borderland subjects his colleagues had filed away as superstition. A plague of night-flying gnats bites the villagers on the throat, a gardener's son wastes away with two small punctures on his neck and no inflammation, and Urcombe keeps watch at a twenty-foot-high window where Mrs. Amworth's face appears in the dark. Her maiden name was Chaston — the name on the gravestones in Maxley's disused churchyard, and the name of the woman blamed for an outbreak of vampirism there three centuries earlier. Death does not end her, and the story finishes at dawn in the cemetery with a pick, a shovel, a coil of rope, and a coffin lid slid aside.

More episodes, additional podcasts, books, original music, in-depth paranormal and true-crime articles, and much more at https://weirddarkness.com.

A man who has feared death every day of his life wakes among strangers who cannot die — and finds that to them, he is something called an “atavus” — drawn by lot into what they have waited five hundred years to do.

Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/OTR

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = Show Open
00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “Wise Child” (March 24, 1978) ***WD
00:45:57.515 = Arch Oboler’s Plays, “Immortal Gentleman” (June 17, 1939) ***WD
01:14:01.420 = Barry Craig, “Corpse On Delivery” (November 31, 1951)
01:41:53.419 = BBC Radio 4/Radio 7, “Mortmain” (April 22, 1992)
02:26:10.177 = Night Beat, “Lost Souls” (November 16, 1951) ***WD
02:55:47.576 = Beyond The Green Door, “Mk. Arkady Bradian, Bolder and TNT” (1966)
02:58:57.644 = Man In Black (The Black Book), “The Price of the Head” (February 02, 1952) ***WD
03:13:42.390 = Blackstone The Magic Detective, “The Ghost That Wasn’t” (November 28, 1948) ***WD
03:26:24.838 = Box 13, “The Professor And The Puzzle” (January 09, 1949)
03:52:53.344 = Calling All Cars, “The Human Bomb” (December 20, 1933) ***WD
04:22:42.424 = Casey Crime Photographer, “A Tooth For a Tooth” (July 15, 1946) ***WD
04:48:33.183 = Show Close

(ADU) = Air Date Unknown
(LQ) = Low Quality
***WD = Remastered, edited, or cleaned up by Weird Darkness to make the episode more listenable. Audio may not be pristine, but it will be better than the original file which may have been unusable or more difficult to hear without editing.
CUSTOM WEBPAGE: https://weirddarkness.com/WDRR0713

Weird Darkness presents Retro Radio: Old Time Radio in the Dark, a collection of vintage broadcasts spanning psychological horror, hard-boiled detective work, ghost stories, and the strange corners where the two overlap.

• It opens with the CBS Radio Mystery Theater and E.G. Marshall's presentation of "Wise Child," written by Sam Dann and starring Ralph Bell. Joyce and Calvin Spurlock argue their way off a turnpike into a storm near a place called Kiowa Flats, sleep the night in their stalled car, and wake to find a newborn baby lying naked on a hillside — alive, unharmed, and abandoned. Joyce insists the child is a miracle and claims him as her own, inventing a birth story to secure a certificate. Calvin Junior never grows, not an ounce, not a fraction of an inch, while doctors find him perfectly healthy. Then a newspaper report reveals that the wilderness north of Kiowa Flats had been used as a secret dumping ground for atomic waste — and Calvin begins to sense something in the air, a force, a light, a power that lets him read the minds of his boss, his sister, and his customers, reshaping his entire life around whatever entered that child during the storm.
• From there, Arch Oboler's "Immortal Gentleman" arrives with Edmund O'Brien and Anne Shepherd, in which a man terrified of death his entire life screams aloud in a crowded auditorium and then explains why to the woman beside him. Sitting through a political speech, he found himself displaced into a future where science has abolished death entirely — a world of young people conditioned for fifty years, filled with all human knowledge, living two hundred, three hundred, five hundred years with nothing to do because "the old ones" never die and never surrender their positions. They call him an atavus, a throwback that surfaces once in every two thousand embryos. Twenty-four of them draw lots in a darkened room, and he is handed a black box and told to throw it at a woman who has lived five thousand years.
• Next, William Gargan stars as Barry Craig, confidential investigator, in "Corpse On Delivery." Bail bondsman Sam Solloway hires Craig to find Joey Florio, a racketeer who jumped a fifty-thousand-dollar bond, and offers ten percent to get him back. A merchant seaman named Stacy Crocker is stabbed four separate times outside Craig's office door before he can deliver whatever he came to sell. A blonde in ballerina sweaters frisks the corpse for its papers, a rifle shot grazes Craig's skull along West Street, and monogrammed pillows in a room at the Hotel Mohansic spell out the answer in two letters.
• The episode continues with John Metcalfe's "Mortmain," dramatized for radio by Rebecca Wilmshurst, set in the south of England before the war. Salome Clare marries Humphrey Ramsden Child, a man obsessed with moths, boats, and his dead mother Harriet, who vows at the altar that marriage binds souls beyond death throughout eternity. At an anniversary dinner deliberately set for thirteen guests aboard his houseboat, a woman is attacked by a swarm of moths in an upstairs bathroom, and a decomposing dog is dragged from the linen closet. Humphrey is committed as criminally insane, dresses in his mother's clothing, and promises from inside a straitjacket that death shall not part them. After his death, Salome marries John Temple — and on their honeymoon, a rotting pink boat begins rising out of the water behind them.
• Frank Lovejoy follows as Randy Stone in "Lost Souls," walking South State Street on Chicago's Skid Row, where a woman named Ruth Martin has spent eight hundred dollars buying steaks, clean sheets, and champagne for every derelict on the block. She refuses to answer a ringing telephone. Her purse holds a hotel key and a brand-new loaded .32. Twenty years earlier, watching police drag a screaming thirty-year-old woman into a wagon, Ruth made her friend Vivian Clark promise to kill her if she ever turned out the same way. Vivian Clark died at eleven years old — and every night for three weeks, the phone has rung wherever Ruth runs, from St. Louis to Kansas City to Duluth to Chicago.
• Basil Rathbone then delivers a short piece from Beyond the Green Door about a magician turned bank robber who kills two guards in Croesus, Maine, and hides in an abandoned granite quarry by disguising himself as a boulder — until a truck from the Eastern Maine Gravel Corporation pulls in to set the dynamite charges. The Man in Black, starring Paul Frees, presents John Russell's South Seas story "The Price of the Head," in which Christopher Pellet, a red-whiskered drunk with a bad name in the islands, murders a bartender at Fufuti and is saved by a Bougainville native named Karaki, who steals a canoe, sails eight hundred miles, nurses him through withdrawal, kills two white men in a cutter, gives him the last of the water, and combs his red hair and whiskers twice every day.
• Blackstone the Magic Detective investigates "The Ghost That Wasn't" at the Weldon mansion, where Mortimer Weldon's brother Clarence accepted a dare to spend the night in the tower room and was found in the courtyard with a broken neck behind a door locked from the inside — and where a grandfather clock that has always kept excellent time is suddenly two minutes slow. Alan Ladd stars as Dan Holliday in "The Professor And The Puzzle," a Box 13 adventure in which a college crystallographer named Martin Gardner is found shot through the heart with his own gun, his niece abruptly breaks her engagement to marry her uncle's lab assistant Ed Macklin, and Macklin turns up stabbed with his own knife. Registered mail receipts and a bank book under the name Samuel Stoner lead Holliday to an office building and a case of illicit diamond cutting.
• Calling All Cars reaches back into the records for "The Human Bomb," the true story of Carl Weiss, who walked into police headquarters wearing a sheepskin hood, green goggles, and a soldier's campaign hat, carrying a blood-red box packed with sixty-six sticks of dynamite and holding a spring-loaded trigger that would fire the moment he let go. He demanded to see Paul Shoup, president of the Pacific Electric Railway, and threatened to level the building unless the railroad workers got a raise. Two hundred and sixty prisoners were evacuated by streetcar while Chief Sebastian stalled him, and Officer Sam Brown eventually thrust his bare hand through the glass top of the box to smother the lit fuse.
• The episode closes with Staats Cotsworth as Casey, Crime Photographer, in "A Tooth For a Tooth" by Charles Holden. Rewrite man Henry Brower confesses a premonition of his own death and admits that a man named Renat — no licensed dentist, but a self-described research scientist on River Road — filled his teeth for free to test a new metal. Brower vanishes that night, and Lieutenant Logan writes him off as a debtor who skipped town. Casey recognizes the shape of a Colorado cattleman's case from 1931, and a bartender's habit of spelling words backward hands him the name he needs.

More episodes, additional podcasts, books, original music, in-depth paranormal and true-crime articles, and much more at https://weirddarkness.com.

“Judas Kiss: The Traveling Clairvoyant of Tipton Mountain” — A hermit who claims he can watch distant events from inside a hollow pine tree becomes convinced the woman renting the cabin above his is a murderer — and only he knows what she's done.

Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/OTR

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = Show Open
00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “The Judas Kiss” (March 23, 1978) ***WD
00:45:48.210 = Tales From The Tomb, “Spirit Calling” (1960s)
00:50:20.385 = Two Thousand Plus, “World’s Apart” (November 29, 1950) ***WD
01:19:02.978 = The Unexpected, “Heat Wave” (1947-1948)
01:31:11.637 = Unsolved Mysteries, “Indian Fakir” (February 17, 1944) ***WD
01:44:47.860 = Dark Venture, “Elizabeth Is Frightened” (July 22, 1947)
02:14:43.934 = The Weird Circle, “Haunted Hotel” (May 13, 1945)
02:42:15.220 = The Whistler, “Murder Will Shout” (March 19, 1945)
03:11:41.385 = Strange Wills, “Emily” (August 31, 1946)
03:41:20.826 = Witch’s Tale, “Statue of Thor” (May 22, 1933)
04:04:13.136 = X Minus One, “Honeymoon In Hell” (December 26, 1956)
04:33:07.327 = ABC Mystery Time, “Murder In Haste” (1957) ***WD
04:56:48.877 = Strange Adventure, “Death Rides The Carousel” (1945) ***WD
05:00:05.724 = Show Close

(ADU) = Air Date Unknown
(LQ) = Low Quality
***WD = Remastered, edited, or cleaned up by Weird Darkness to make the episode more listenable. Audio may not be pristine, but it will be better than the original file which may have been unusable or more difficult to hear without editing.

CUSTOM WEBPAGE: https://weirddarkness.com/WDRR0712



Weird Darkness presents Retro Radio, a night of classic dark radio drama spanning three decades of murder, madness, and the supernatural.

• It opens with the CBS Radio Mystery Theater's "The Judas Kiss," in which Oscar Absecker, a solitary handyman living on a dying mountain outside the village of Tipton, believes a big black dog barks three times whenever someone dies — and believes he can watch distant events unfold by standing inside a lightning-struck, hollow pine tree. When Deputy Luke Marbury rents the cabin above his to a woman named Enid Grant, Oscar becomes convinced that she is destroying the much younger man who joins her there, and his visions show him one killing after another. Fred Gwynne stars, with E.G. Marshall hosting.
• From there comes "Spirit Calling" from Tales From The Tomb, a short piece about a nine-year-old girl named Amy, alone in the house during a violent summer storm after her uncle Stanley's death, and the telephone call that comes through on a dead line.
• Next is Two Thousand Plus and "World's Apart," in which rocket engineer Jim Granger talks his way onto Flight 17, the first crewed voyage to Neptune, only for the spaceship Phoenix to be dragged off course by an uncharted comet. Crippled and lost, the ship limps to a landing at a place called Green Valley, where Commander Dijkstra can hear heartbeats across a room, the milk is green, and gravity does not behave the way it should.
• The Unexpected follows with "Heat Wave," starring Barry Sullivan as Whitey Malone, a fugitive sweating out a 110-degree heat wave in a fifth-floor garret while the police close in — and burning to settle accounts with the woman he thinks tipped them off.
• Then Unsolved Mysteries brings "Indian Fakir," a story told at the United Services Club in Simla, where a colonel recounts what happened when his young English bride, alone in their Bangalore bungalow, tried to outsmart a fakir who demanded a strand of her hair — and handed him threads pulled from a Chinese rug instead.
• Dark Venture presents "Elizabeth Is Frightened," with Joan Banks as a wealthy woman who marries Philip Bailey, a widower fascinated by the power of one mind to dominate another. As the whole town starts believing Elizabeth is ill and suicidal, only her housekeeper Flora and Dr. Davis suspect what her husband is really doing.
• The Weird Circle offers "Haunted Hotel," in which Henry Westwick travels to Venice and takes room fourteen at a converted castle to learn how his brother Philip died weeks after marrying the mysterious Countess Narona — and finds the answers coming to him in dreams.
• The Whistler tells "Murder Will Shout," the story of garage owner George Kramer, buried in debt to a man named Albion, and the small-time racketeer Peanut Marola who offers a black-market car racket, a partnership, and a solution to the Albion problem that goes very wrong on Miller Highway.
• Strange Wills, starring Warren William, tells "Emily," tracing a violin built by Antonio Stradivarius in Cremona in 1732 through the hands of gypsies, Niccolò Paganini, and the Heller family of Vienna, until it turns up at a barn dance in the Tennessee hills as a GI's war souvenir.
• The Witch's Tale delivers "Statue of Thor," in which sculptor Neil Redding, bored and cruel, mocks his enormous Swedish model Olaf, seduces Olaf's fiancée Hedwig, and takes the big man to the foundry to watch the statue of Thor cast in bronze — a casting that comes out of the mold wearing a face Redding never sculpted.
• X Minus One presents "Honeymoon In Hell," set in the late 1960s, when male births stop worldwide and the cybernetics machine known as Junior recommends sending a married couple to the moon. Rocket pilot Ray Carmody is wed to Eastern Alliance pilot Anya Borisovna hours before launch, and on the lunar surface they find an unidentified craft that does not belong to either alliance.
• ABC Mystery Time offers "Murder In Haste," in which Elbert Taylor kills his wife Ellen, flees Miami by train under an assumed name, and — after a derailment in Georgia — steals the identity of a dead mystery writer named Leslie Jameson, only to have Jameson's wife walk into his New York hotel room.
• The episode closes with Strange Adventure and "Death Rides The Carousel," where a lawyer named Jeffrey Ford is found stabbed through the heart on a merry-go-round chariot at a village carnival in Merrimack, and Inspector Jonathan Hawke spots the flaw in the ticket taker's account.

More episodes, additional podcasts, books, original music, in-depth paranormal and true-crime articles, and much more at https://weirddarkness.com.

Three kids track down a forgotten swimming hole behind the abandoned Duncan Quarry, rediscover it for the summer — and find out why everyone stopped coming.

Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://pod.link/1655277373

Find more family-friendly frights and creepy games to play on our website at http://MicroTerrors.com!

Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/microterrors

Other stories, novels, and more from author Scott Donnelly: https://amzn.to/3LymHaU

Other narrations, podcasts, and audiobooks from voice artist Darren Marlar: https://WeirdDarkness.com
https://weirddarkness.com/mt-sludge
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Weird Darkness©, 2026
Micro Terrors: Scary Stories for Kids™, 2026#MicroTerrors #WeirdDarkness

More episodes, additional podcasts, books, original music, in-depth paranormal and true-crime articles, and much more at https://weirddarkness.com.

Between 1997 and 2006, an overweight pizza delivery man named Ronald Dominique strangled 23 men across rural Louisiana, and almost no one has ever heard his name.

A deep-dive article on all of the obscure legends featured in the first section of tonight's podcast: https://weirddarkness.com/obscure-legends/

EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/BayouStrangler

READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/3fyw74cj

FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Spine-tingling ghost stories and eerie myths... come to life! Are any of them actually true? We’ll explore the more obscure side of folklore with ghosts and legends that don’t get the same amount of attention others do – but are certainly not to be ignored! (Myths And Ghosts You May Never Have Heard Of) *** In the quiet town of Essex, Maryland, the disappearance of nine-year-old Alva Jean Parris shattered the peace of summer 1960. Walking just three blocks to her aunt's house, she vanished without a trace, only for her body to be found days later, hidden beneath a makeshift grave. Decades have passed, but the mystery of who took Alva Jean and why remains unsolved. (Who Killed Alva Jean?) *** He’s a little-known serial killer. Ronald J. Dominique, dubbed the Bayou Strangler, went on a decade-long murder spree in rural Louisiana, killing 23 men. (The Bayou Strangler)

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open
00:01:49.323 = Myths And Ghosts You May Never Have Heard Of
00:33:02.110 = The Bayou Strangler ***
00:49:50.242 = Who Killed Alva Jean?
00:54:23.489 = Show Close
*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad break

LISTEN ON PODCAST APPS:
Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.com/wdapps
*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*

SOURCES and RESOURCES:
“Myths And Ghosts You May Never Have Heard Of” sources: Cara Duke at ListVerse.com:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/bddryv6h; Mysteries of Canada: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yckwn5y5; Brendan-Noble.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8audhk; Factschology.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/ycxzdhwa,https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/v7rdp57c, https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/bdfcswwk; InuitMyths.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/puzuc272, TheIrishRoadTrip.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/vj824vwb; DallasTerrors.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8s8crn; NewEnglandHistoricalSociety.com:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/8r4zmkpt
“The Bayou Strangler” by Oliver Mason for The-Line-Up.com, used with permission: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/mt8tnyh4 (BOOK: “The Bayou Strangler” by Fred Rosen: https://amzn.to/49RIiWj)
“Who Killed Alva Jean?” source: Robert A. Waters at KidnappingMurderAndMayhem.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8ab932
(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)

WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.
Originally aired: April 23, 2024
This episode of Weird Darkness travels from obscure folklore across four continents to a little-known Louisiana serial killer and a Maryland child murder that has gone unsolved for more than sixty years.It opens with a tour through the ghosts and monsters that rarely make the usual lists: the Dungarvon Whooper, the murdered lumber-camp cook named Ryan whose whoops still echo along New Brunswick's Dungarvon River; the strzyga of Slavic myth, a two-hearted, twin-souled demon that takes the form of a barn owl before it feeds; Lady Koi Koi, the red-heeled teacher whose clicking footsteps haunt boarding schools across Nigeria, Ghana, and South Africa; the banshee of North Carolina's Tar River, tied to a flour miller named Dave Warner and the Revolutionary War redcoats who drowned him in 1781; the Headless Nun of Miramichi, the murdered Sister Marie who wanders French Fort Cove asking where her head has gone; the Kludde, a chain-rattling shapeshifting dog from Belgian and Dutch folklore; the Inupasugjuk, the rarely-seen giants of Inuit tradition; the Dearg Due of County Waterford, an abused Irish bride who rose from her grave near the Tree of Strongbow to drain the blood of her father and husband; the Goatman of Old Alton Bridge near Denton, Texas, an 1884 iron truss bridge also tied to the lynching of black goat farmer Oscar Washburn; and the Stratford Knockings of 1850, the poltergeist that draped Reverend Eliakim Phelps's Connecticut mansion in funeral crepe and centered on his eleven-year-old stepson Harry.From there the episode turns to Ronald Joseph Dominique, the Louisiana pizza delivery man dubbed the Bayou Strangler, who raped and strangled twenty-three men between 1997 and 2006 while evading police for nearly a decade. Drawing on Fred Rosen's book The Bayou Strangler, the segment follows the killing of Oliver LeBanks, beaten with a tire iron and dumped beneath a highway overpass near Metairie, and traces Dominique's earlier victims across St. Charles Parish, from nineteen-year-old David Mitchell in July 1997 to twenty-year-old Gary Pierre and thirty-eight-year-old Larry Ranson, most of them gay African American men lured with the promise of paid sex. It introduces Detective Lieutenant Dennis Thornton of the Jefferson Parish sheriff's office, who worked the LeBanks scene and set himself the task of linking the killings that DNA evidence would finally tie to Dominique.The episode closes with the June 10, 1960 disappearance of nine-year-old Alva Jean Parris, who vanished walking three blocks to her aunt's house from the Riverdale Apartments in Essex, Maryland. Five days later, searchers found her shoes in a marsh and her body in a shallow grave concealed with linoleum, sod, and twigs beside an abandoned farmhouse, her abdomen and pelvis coated in lye. Assistant Medical Examiner Dr. William Lovitt found decomposition too advanced to confirm a cause of death, though strangulation was suspected, and despite polygraph tests, a solid alibi clearing her mother Fredonia, and tips about a man seen in a sailor's hat, no suspect was ever charged in a case that remains open today.

More episodes, additional podcasts, books, original music, in-depth paranormal and true-crime articles, and much more at https://weirddarkness.com.

Two researchers built a mathematical model of human cannibalism and discovered, after considerable effort, that the answer is no.

SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/average-meal

Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://pod.link/1078714736

*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*

WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.

More episodes, additional podcasts, books, original music, in-depth paranormal and true-crime articles, and much more at https://weirddarkness.com.

Flying jackets, faces frozen mid-scream, a coven convinced they needed David Bowie's blood, and a demon that crashed a text at exactly 666 megabytes — these are the paranormal encounters the famous swear actually happened to them.

EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/CelebrityGhostEncounters

READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/ff82f8yu

FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Don't try and tell some celebrities that ghosts don't exist, because they've seen all the paranormal proof they need to believe. (Celebrity Encounters With The Paranormal) *** A prayer for food resulted in fish raining down from the sky in Yoro, Honduras. And now it happens regularly – sometimes twice a year – with still no definitive explanation. (Cloudy With a Chance of Sardines) *** Is it possible that UFO sightings and sightings of the Chupacabra are somehow related? Even stranger – is it possible the strange dog-lizard-like creatures came from crashed spaceships? (UFOs And The Chupacabra) *** Weirdo family member Laura tells a strange story about a candy store – and its resident ghost. (Haunted Candy Store)

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding
00:01:13.649 = Show Open
00:02:50.627 = Celebrity Encounters With The Paranormal
00:31:59.645 = UFOs And The Chupacabras ***
00:39:37.674 = Cloudy With a Chance of Sardines
00:46:26.106 = Haunted Candy Store ***
00:50:58.248 = Show Close
*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad break

LISTEN ON PODCAST APPS:
Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.com/wdapps
*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*

SOURCES and RESOURCES:
“Celebrity Encounters With The Paranormal” by Brent Swancer: http://bit.ly/2ZAzYGX
“Celebs Who Have Had Ghost Encounters by Lydia Price: http://bit.ly/2Iq0bCm
“UFOs And The Chupacabra” by Nick Redfern: http://bit.ly/2XS41cy
“Cloudy With a Chance of Sardines” by Panchali Dey: http://bit.ly/2IQ9p9Y
“Haunted Candy Store” by Weirdo family member, Laura
(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)

WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.
Originally aired: January, 2021
This episode of Weird Darkness gathers famous names who swear the paranormal found them, a Puerto Rican legend that ties dead Chupacabras to a crashed UFO, a Honduran town where fish fall from the sky, and a Wisconsin candy store with a listener's uneasy childhood dream folded in.It opens with celebrities who came away convinced. Carrie Fisher described lights and electronics switching on and off in her Beverly Hills home after her friend R. Gregory Stevens died there; Matthew McConaughey named the blue-dressed spirit he confronted in his house Madame Blu; and a young Keanu Reeves watched an empty jacket drift through a doorway in his New York apartment, the reality of it confirmed only by his nanny's face. Patrick Stewart saw a man in a beige coat vanish in the wings of the Theatre Royal Haymarket during Waiting for Godot, later matched to the ghost of 19th-century actor-manager Baldwin Buckstone, who died in 1879. Peter Jackson woke to a woman with a screaming face at the foot of his bed near London's St. James Theatre, a ghost his wife had seen two years earlier. Miley Cyrus fled a London flat over a boy she kept seeing on the bathroom sink; Ariana Grande photographed what she called textbook demon faces at Kansas's Stull Cemetery and found the file measured 666 megabytes; and David Bowie spent much of the 1970s certain a coven of witches wanted his semen, lighting black candles and hiring white magician Walli Elmlark to exorcise his swimming pool. John Lennon, by Uri Geller's account, described bug-like beings outside his apartment and an alien metal egg left in his hands, while Sammy Hagar claimed aliens plugged his sleeping brain into a machine and uploaded numerical code in 1967. Shorter accounts follow from Megan Mullally, Kendall Jenner, Gigi Hadid, Chloe Sevigny at the Lizzie Borden house, NASCAR's Dale Earnhardt Jr., Kate Hudson, Jessica Alba, Lucy Hale, Laura Linney at Broadway's Belasco Theater, Claudia Schiffer, Emma Stone, Selena Gomez, Alyson Hannigan, Demi Lovato, Jenna Bush-Hager in the White House, and Megan Fox.From there the episode travels to Puerto Rico, where writer Nick Redfern chases the claim that the shuttered Roosevelt Roads Naval Station once held the bodies of dead Chupacabras the way Wright-Patterson Air Force Base is rumored to hold dead aliens. On visits between 2004 and 2015, Redfern and monster-hunter Jon Downes collect accounts of a 1957 UFO crash in the hills of Canovanas, sealed off by the military for roughly three weeks, and a second reported crash in the El Yunque rain forest in February 1984 — both said to have left dead Chupacabras in the wreckage, though the creature angle only attached itself to the older case after the Chupacabra panic began in 1995.Next comes Yoro, Honduras, and the Lluvia de Peces, the Rain of Fish that residents trace to Father Jose Manuel Subirana, a Spanish missionary who prayed three days and nights over the region's hunger in the 1850s or '60s. Once or twice a year after a heavy May or June storm, live sardine-like fish cover the streets of a town more than 100 miles from the ocean, and a National Geographic team in the 1970s found the stranded fish were completely blind, hypothesizing underground rivers forced above ground by flooding rather than the waterspouts others propose. The town of roughly 93,000 celebrates with a festival, a parade, and a Miss Fish Rain crowned to ride a float dressed as a mermaid, and locals refuse to sell the catch, sharing it instead as a blessing.The episode closes with Weirdo family member Laura, who worked summers at a haunted candy store in a Wisconsin tourist town, a converted house where a ceramic jar once flew across a room at a coworker. That coworker, a Canadian tribeswoman from a family with the 'sight,' listened to Laura describe a dream that returned every Christmas Eve until she was six or seven — a black, pulsing void of indistinct voices that rose to screams and a pressure closing on her chest, replaced in its final occurrence by an overhead view of a storage yard before it stopped for good. When Laura finished, the coworker told her it was a good thing she never listened to the voices, and suggested Laura had unconsciously sealed off her own ability to sense the spiritual after something that was not benevolent kept trying to reach her.

More episodes, additional podcasts, books, original music, in-depth paranormal and true-crime articles, and much more at https://weirddarkness.com.

Christa Pike carried a piece of Colleen Slemmer’s skull back to the Job Corps dorm as a souvenir, and on September 30th, 2026, Tennessee is scheduled to execute her for the murder that produced it.

EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources and transcript): https://weirddarkness.com/christa-pike

Music by Shadows Symphony. Weird Darkness theme music by Alibi Music.

LISTEN ON PODCAST APPS: 
Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.com/wdapps

*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*

WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.

Originally aired: July 09, 2026

Weird Darkness host Darren Marlar traces the 1995 Job Corps murder of Colleen Slemmer, the jealousy and Satanism behind it, and the three decades of appeals, prison violence, and stalled executions that have brought Christa Pike to a September 2026 death date in Tennessee.It opens on the morning of January 13th, 1995, when a groundskeeper at the University of Tennessee Agricultural Institute outside Knoxville found a body so badly beaten he mistook it for an animal carcass — nineteen-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a Florida girl who loved computers and had taken a bus to Knoxville on Halloween of 1994 for a six-month course at the Knoxville Job Corps Center. The night before, four students had signed out together, and only three signed back in. Eighteen-year-old Christa Gail Pike, her seventeen-year-old boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp, and eighteen-year-old Shadolla Peterson had lured Slemmer to a wooded stretch near an abandoned steam plant with the promise of marijuana in Tyson Park, and over roughly half an hour Pike and Shipp beat and cut her while Peterson held a flashlight. Pike carved a pentagram into Slemmer's chest while she was alive, cut her throat six times with a box cutter after pausing to check that no one was watching, threw asphalt at her head, and afterward pried loose a fragment of her skull to keep. Pike had come to believe Slemmer wanted Shipp, a jealousy Slemmer denied, and she and Shipp had bonded over Satanism and the occult; Pike wore a small devil tattoo on her chest, and searches later turned up satanic altars and occult literature in both their rooms.From there the episode follows what Pike did with the bone. She returned to campus around 11 p.m., went to her friend Kim Iloilo's room dancing and singing, and produced the skull fragment as a souvenir, warning Iloilo she would be killed too if she talked. Pike carried the piece in a napkin in her leather jacket, bragged at breakfast that she was eating with it, and showed it around class along with the blood still on her shoes and clothing — behavior that turned investigator Randy York toward her within forty-eight hours. Pike confessed in a forty-six-page recorded statement, and York described her as giddy, acting out how Slemmer had begged for her life. The episode also lays out the childhood documented in her later post-conviction filings: parents who struggled with alcohol, sexual and physical abuse by multiple people, a mother's suicide attempt she witnessed, and neurological evaluations finding structural brain abnormalities alongside later diagnoses of bipolar disorder and PTSD, none of which the jury ever heard.Next comes the trial and the long aftermath. In March 1996, before Judge Mary Beth Leibowitz in Knox County Criminal Court, Pike was convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy, and on March 30th, weeks after her twentieth birthday, sentenced to death by electrocution, making her the youngest woman on death row in the modern era. Within hours she wrote Shipp an unrepentant letter framing the killing as a kindness because she had ended it quickly. Shipp, ineligible for death because he was seventeen, drew a life sentence and was denied parole in October 2025; Peterson received six years of probation. In 2001 Pike choked fellow inmate Patricia Jones with a shoestring until officers revived her, earning another twenty-five years, and around 2011 a New Jersey personal trainer named Donald Kohut and a correctional officer named Justin Heflin were caught in a plot to trace and duplicate a prison key to free her. Her appeals failed through the federal courts, an execution set for August 27th, 2020 was postponed by COVID-19, and on September 30th, 2025 the Tennessee Supreme Court reset her death for September 30th, 2026.The episode closes on what remains unresolved as that date approaches. Tennessee's 2026 execution schedule has already faltered — Governor Bill Lee granted Tony Carruthers a last-minute reprieve on May 21st after medical staff couldn't establish a backup IV line, media witnesses reported signs of pain in the 2025 executions of Byron Black and Harold Nichols, and Senate Republicans led by Tom Hatcher have asked Lee to pause executions pending review. Pike has filed suit over the pentobarbital protocol, arguing it excludes her Buddhist spiritual advisor and risks a torturous death, while advocates gather signatures asking Lee to commute her sentence over her age, abuse, and mental illness. If carried out, she would be the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than two hundred years. The last piece belongs to Slemmer's mother, Mae Martinez, who for more than twenty years has asked the state to return the skull fragment still held in evidence so she can bury her daughter whole — a nineteen-year-old who liked bowling and shrimping on the river back home in Florida and had gone to Tennessee to build a life around computers.

More episodes, additional podcasts, books, original music, in-depth paranormal and true-crime articles, and much more at https://weirddarkness.com.