Weird Darkness: Paranormal & True Crime Stories

Four aged friends gather in an eccentric doctor's shadowed study, where he offers each of them a single glass of water he swears was drawn from the Fountain of Youth.

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, “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” (February 07, 1978) ***WD
00:47:39.915 = Arch Oboler’s Plays, “Engulfed Cathedral” (May 06, 1939) ***WD
01:17:52.594 = BBC Radio 4/Radio 7 Ghost Story, “Jonas” (mid 1970s)
02:46:16.760 = Night Beat, “They” (August 17, 1951)
03:15:39.186 = Beyond The Green Door, “Mrs Curlew — Poisoner Marries Major” (1966) ***WD
03:19:27.495 = The Black Book, “My Favorite Corpse” (February 24, 1952) ***WD
03:35:06.168 = *SHOW NAME UNKNOWN*, “Black Ghost” (1930) ***WD
04:01:09.186 = Barry Craig, “The Judge And The Champ” (October 17, 1951) ***WD
04:31:00.486 = Box 13, “The Hot Box” (December 26, 1948)
04:57:42.628 = 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/WDRR0693

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

A burglar, a car thief, a pickpocket, and a roof full of teenagers all heard the same thing in the dark — a voice that wasn't there, telling them to get out before it was too late.

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

READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/y7mzj4ap

FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Creepy, paranormal encounters sometimes cause people to stop short of committing an action they might regret. (Supernatural Intervention) *** Weird family member Atreada tells of a horrifying series of nights when she and her sister encountered a demon under one of their beds. (Man Beneath The Bed) *** In York County, Pennsylvania a suspected witch is murdered – and thus began the dark story of the Hex House. (Dark Magic in Hex Hollow) *** Was there a conspiracy to murder Hollywood actress Marilyn Monroe? We’ll look at the theories and evidence for and against the idea. (Killing Marilyn)

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding
00:00:36.259 = Show Open
00:01:59.484 = Supernatural Intervention
00:28:49.825 = Man Beneath The Bed ***
00:33:42.600 = Dark Magic of Hex Hollow
00:39:33.099 = Killing Marilyn ***
00:59:36.847 = 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:
“Supernatural Intervention” by Anna Lindwasser: http://bit.ly/2IHZl58
“Man Beneath the Bed” by Weirdo family member Atreadia, submitted directly to WeirdDarkness.com
“Dark Magic in Hex Hollow” by Orrin Grey: http://bit.ly/2GD8860
“Killing Marilyn” posted at The Unredacted: http://bit.ly/2GGF7GS
(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: December 06, 2021

Weird Darkness moves through four shades of the unexplained in this episode: the unseen voices and strangers that talk people out of crimes and catastrophes, the demon that lived under two sisters' bed in Texas, the 1928 witch-killing that gave a Pennsylvania hollow its name, and the still-contested death of Marilyn Monroe.It opens with a run of first-person accounts pulled from Reddit, each describing the moment something unseen stepped in to stop a crime or a catastrophe. A burglar hiding in the closet of an elderly woman's house watches a ghostly old man pat a departing paramedic on the back, then feels breath on the neck and a voice ordering the intruder out. Middle-schoolers creeping through their darkened school are warned off by a voice none of them claims, and they avoid a library that proved to be wired with a silent alarm and motion detectors. In California, a fourteen-year-old abandons a car-theft job a mile from the pickup, spooked by a rising sense of dread, and later learns the vehicle was bait in a police sting that swept up everyone else sent after it. A pickpocket lifts a wallet clean off a stranger, only for the man — blind, sunglasses raised — to calmly ask for it back. Threaded among them are a blown tire that derails a despairing teenager's suicide plan, church doors that lock the instant two thieves reach for them, and a Hobby Lobby shopper whose five stolen pieces of balsa wood seem to trail straight to a table saw and a flesh-eating MRSA infection.From there the episode turns to a listener named Atreada, who shared a room and a bed with her older sister in SunRay, Texas. For a week the bed shook hard enough to slam against the wall and wake the whole house, blamed each night on two children supposedly roughhousing. On the fourth night a hand rose from the gap between bed and wall as an evil laugh filled the room, and on the last night the sisters aimed a flashlight and saw the thing climb out and bolt — an old man in rags, barefoot, with glowing eyes, talon-like fingers, broken teeth, ears jutting at odd angles, and thin transparent strands hanging from an otherwise bald, corpse-like head.Next comes the true story behind Spring Valley County Park in York County, Pennsylvania, a place once called Hex Hollow. In 1928 a Powwow folk-magic practitioner named John Blymire became convinced he was cursed, and a witch called Nellie Noll — the Marietta River Witch — named Nelson Rehmeyer as the source. To break the hex, Blymire needed a lock of Rehmeyer's hair and his copy of The Long Lost Friend, an 1820 spellbook by John George Hohman. On November 26, 1928, Blymire and two accomplices, John Curry and Wilbert Hess, beat Rehmeyer to death in his home and tried to burn it down; the house refused to burn, which locals took as proof of his power. Blymire and Curry drew life sentences and Hess ten to twenty years, and the surviving hex house opened as a museum in 2007 — its story helping to inspire horror novelist Brian Keene and Shane Free's 2015 documentary on the killing.The episode closes with the death of Marilyn Monroe, found nude and lifeless in her Brentwood home in the early hours of August 5, 1962, a telephone in her hand and empty pill bottles on the nightstand. The official verdict was probable suicide by barbiturate overdose, but Sergeant Jack Clemmons, the first officer on the scene, found no glass or water for swallowing some sixty pills, no vomit, and housekeeper Eunice Murray running laundry while the body lay cooling. Thomas Noguchi's autopsy turned up lethal levels of Nembutal and chloral hydrate in her blood and liver, yet not a trace in her stomach. Witnesses placed Attorney General Robert Kennedy at the house that day and again near 10 p.m., tied to rumors of a red diary detailing her affairs with Robert and President John F. Kennedy and referencing a plot against Castro. A competing account, advanced years later by a Court TV investigation, holds that her psychiatrist Ralph Greenson gave her a chloral hydrate enema to wean her off Nembutal, unaware that her internist Hyman Engelberg was still prescribing it, and that the fatal drug interaction — not the Kennedys, and not her own hand — is what killed her.

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

A Turkish team has government clearance to drill, scan, and lower a drone beneath a boat-shaped mound near Mount Ararat that some believe is the wreck of Noah's Ark.

SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/NoahsArk2026

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.

On a Saturday morning in São Paulo, three instructors hoisted Maria Eduarda over the edge of an abandoned bridge — and her safety rope never left the platform.

SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/MariaEduardaRodrigues

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.

A federal judge ordered sixteen-year-old Timothy Hudson jailed until trial for the killing of his stepsister Anna Kepner aboard a Carnival cruise ship, finding that no monitor could be trusted to contain him.

SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/AnnaKepner20260619

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.

A 12-year-old in southern Brazil told her family kidnappers had beaten her and would kill her unless they paid — and police spent sixteen hours hunting captors who never existed.

SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/12-year-old-fake-kidnapping

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.

From the Texas Killing Fields and Gilgo Beach to a corpse left decomposing in a hotel water tank and three infants found frozen in a family freezer, these are the notorious dump sites where killers hide their victims — and the strangest places human remains have ever turned up.

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

READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yckm2tkw

FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Where are bodies dumped most often? What are some of the strangest places bodies have been found, and what odd situations ended up in death? We’ll look at some weird stories of dead bodies being found. (Strange Dumping Grounds) *** A man is found dead – obviously murdered. But even after a positive identification, some believed the body was not of the man authorities thought it was – and an even larger mystery was, whose monogrammed handkerchief was stuffed in the corpse’s mouth? (The Ruttinger Mystery) *** In Florida, there is a short stretch of freeway that is so full of incidents of danger, death, and the paranormal, that many consider it cursed – and most definitely haunted. Locals have deemed it, the Dead Zone. (Hauntings On Highway I-4)

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding
00:02:23.979 = Show Open
00:04:03.422 = Strange Dumping Grounds
00:24:34.042 = Oddest Places Bodies Found ***
00:35:56.964 = Hauntings On Highway I-4
00:49:22.317 = The Ruttinger Mystery ***
00:59:26.329 = 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:
“Strange Dumping Grounds” by Jessika M. Thomas (http://bit.ly/2XwwVyc), Mariel Loveland (http://bit.ly/2XzEog1), and Rachel Stewart
“The Ruttinger Mystery” by Robert Wilhelm: http://bit.ly/2IAzhJh
“Hauntings On Highway I-4” by Brent Swancer: http://bit.ly/2XB62JG
(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: December 06, 2021

Weird Darkness maps the ground where the dead are hidden, traveling from America's most notorious body-dumping fields to a cursed quarter-mile of Florida interstate and a strangled German lace salesman pulled from the Staten Island mud in 1891.It opens with the dump sites scattered across the United States, where unidentified victims are still pulled from soil and water decades after they were left. In the New York Central Pine Barrens of Long Island, as many as eleven bodies have surfaced, four of them between 2000 and 2003 and two decapitated, in killings attributed to the Butcher of Manorville. Lake Tahoe keeps its secrets through physics rather than concealment, its thousand-foot depths holding a near-constant 39 degrees that stops bodies—rumored to date to Mafia disposals in the 1950s—from decomposing enough to float. Sugar planter Edgar Watson terrorized the Florida Everglades in the early 1900s, allegedly killing laborers each harvest to dodge their wages, and in 2016 two alligators were found feeding on a corpse in the same swamp. Leakin Park in Baltimore has given up roughly 70 bodies since 1946, while the Texas Killing Fields along I-45 between Houston and Galveston have yielded 30 since 13-year-old Colette Wilson vanished in 1971—among them Krystal Jean Baker, whose 1986 murder was tied to Kevin Edison Smith by DNA in 2012. Over 100 bodies have come out of the Mojave Desert, sending photographer William Bradford and William Floyd Zamastil to prison, and the still-unidentified Gilgo Beach killer dumped as many as 17 victims along Ocean Parkway, three of them strangled, bagged in burlap, and linked to the Long Island Serial Killer. Pelham Bay Park concealed at least 65 bodies between 1986 and 1995, the East River surrendered 26 in the spring of 2010 alone, and Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, confessed to ending at least 49 women's lives.From there the episode turns to bodies found where no one thinks to look. Canadian student Elisa Lam decomposed for as long as 19 days inside a rooftop water cistern at Downtown Los Angeles's Cecil Hotel while guests drank and bathed from the same supply and complained the water tasted off. In Xi'an, China, a woman starved to death trapped in an elevator over the Chinese New Year, her hands mangled from a month of clawing at the doors after workers skipped a required inspection. Elmer McCurdy, killed by police in 1911 after robbing a train of $46 and two jugs of whiskey, was embalmed with arsenic and toured carnivals as a sideshow attraction until a film crew for The Six Million Dollar Man snapped his arm off at a Long Beach amusement park in 1976 and found bone beneath the wax; he was finally buried in Guthrie, Oklahoma, in 1977. A Disneyland Paris worker was electrocuted behind the scenes of the Phantom Manor ride in 2016, a German mother kept three of her infants in freezer wrapping for some 30 years until her grown children uncovered them while digging for frozen pizza, and Joshua Maddox, missing since 2008, was discovered seven years later wedged in the chimney of his parents' Colorado cabin with no sign of injury.Next comes a quarter-mile of Interstate 4 near Lake Monroe, Florida, that locals call the Dead Zone. The asphalt covers four unmarked graves of Dutch immigrants who died in the Yellow Fever epidemic that erased the 1870s settlement of St. Joseph's, graves that landowner Albert Hawkins fenced and protected after stumbling on them in 1905, and which earned a reputation for lightning strikes, house fires, and a fatal hit-and-run befalling anyone who disturbed them. The state promised to relocate the remains before construction but paved over them, and as work began in 1960 Hurricane Donna changed course to follow the road's path; the highway opened in 1963 with a deadly truck crash at that exact spot. Somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 accidents have clustered along the short stretch since, Hurricane Charley retraced Donna's route over it in 2004, and drivers report their radios filling with growls, children's laughter, and disembodied voices in a place with no nearby transmitters.The episode closes with the 1891 murder of Karl Emanuel Ruttinger, a German lace salesman from Dresden whose body watchman Samuel Mortin found half-floating in the mud below Tottenville, Staten Island, his arms bound behind his back and a linen handkerchief monogrammed "W.W." rammed down his throat with a stick. Suspicion fell on his brother-in-law, William Wright, who had sailed with him from Liverpool and shared his boarding-house room, yet Wright stood only five-foot-four at 120 pounds, far too slight to overpower a six-foot, 200-pound man alone. The trail twisted through a throat-cutting suicide at the Astor House by a man calling himself Fred Evans, a string of conflicting witness identifications, and the discovery that Ruttinger's life had been insured for more than $20,000 just a month before the voyage—raising the possibility that the corpse was not Ruttinger at all. A Tottenville inquest ruled that it was indeed Ruttinger, suffocated by persons unknown, and in 1892 the Equitable Life Assurance Society paid his mother Therese roughly $22,000, conceding privately that settling was cheaper than proving the fraud they suspected.

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

A lonely Massachusetts crossroads has been claiming the lives of lawmen for over two hundred years—each one stabbed in the back in a spot so open no killer could possibly reach him, while the only sound in the dark is a woman's cold laughter.
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 Talking Women” (February 06, 1978) ***WD
00:47:04.966 = 2000 Plus, “The Giant Walks” (November 08, 1950) ***WD
01:15:57.050 = The Unexpected, “Nightmare” (October 31, 1948)
01:29:30.334 = Unsolved Mysteries, “Writing On The Wall” (October 05, 1949) ***WD
01:44:12.246 = Dark Venture, “Hideout” (January 07, 1947) ***WD
02:09:03.788 = The Weird Circle, “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (1945)
02:36:35.446 = The Whistler, “Danger Is a Beautiful Blonde” (March 05, 1945)
03:07:19.667 = Strange Wills, “Madman’s Diary” (August 17, 1946)
03:37:02.993 = Witch’s Tale, “Haunted Crossroads” (October 17, 1932) ***WD
04:01:39.046 = X Minus One, “Hostess” (December 12, 1956)
04:29:47.425 = ABC Mystery Time, “Four Fatal Jugglers” (1957) ***WD
04:53:37.561 = Strange Adventure, “Diamonds In The Desert”
04:56:54.720 = 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/WDRR0692
This installment of #RetroRadio — old-time radio in the dark — gathers twelve vintage broadcasts spanning crime, science fiction, the supernatural, and the just plain strange, drawn from CBS Radio Mystery Theater, 2000 Plus, The Unexpected, Unsolved Mysteries, Dark Venture, The Weird Circle, The Whistler, Strange Wills, The Witch's Tale, X Minus One, Masters of Mystery, and Strange Adventure.

• CBS Radio Mystery Theater opens the night with "The Talking Women," written by Sam Dan and starring Ed Ames, as host E.G. Marshall introduces wealthy executive Robert Bayswell, a man whose endless "business trips" to New York have quietly covered a five-year affair with his mistress, Lolly "Dolores" Harbison. When Bayswell decides to end the relationship and return to his wife Martha, a struggle over a loaded .38 revolver sets a chain of events in motion — one that draws in nightclub photographer Julie Palmer and homicide detective Sergeant DeLuca, both circling a death no one can quite explain.
• 2000 Plus delivers the science-gone-wrong terror of "The Giant Walks," in which the obsessed Dr. Ellsworth, having used a pituitary revitalizer to breed giant rats four feet long, sets his sights on the next logical subject — a human being. His powerfully built test subject Barstow is grown to thirty feet of muscle and bone, while uneasy assistant Weston watches the experiment spiral past anything Ellsworth can hope to control.
• The Unexpected stars radio's Lurene Tuttle in "Nightmare," the tale of understudy actress Jenny, who answers her door to a hideous, dwarf-like old peddler selling two dolls — one that cries and one that laughs. Against the peddler's strange warning, she chooses the laughing doll, and its contagious, mocking laughter begins to follow her everywhere she goes, into the theater, the subway, and her sleepless nights.
• Unsolved Mysteries presents a true-style ghost story told by foreign correspondent Jackson, who recalls a visit to a centuries-old medieval castle in Northumberland, England, complete with drawbridge, moat, and turrets — and its resident phantom, the Lady Evelyn, said to warn the family of any impending disaster. Sleeping in the haunted wing, Jackson is roused by a figure who writes a message in letters of fire across the stone wall, a warning tied to the RMS Titanic.
• Dark Venture stars William Conrad in "Hideout," the confession of small-time gambler Sam, who sits in on one of Phil Collins's famous high-stakes poker games, wins and loses a fortune, and ends the night shooting political big shot Mike Barnes. Fleeing to Chicago and a rooming house run by Dave Jordan, Sam stumbles into a carnival fortune teller, Madame Zara, who reads the cards and tells him he will die within three days at the hands of a man with white hair — just as hired killer Whitey Burke begins closing in.
• The Weird Circle summons its bellkeeper for the immortal Robert Louis Stevenson tale "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," in which Dr. Henry Jekyll brews a potion meant to separate the good and evil halves of a single man. The draught gives life to the stooped, deformed, and wholly malevolent Edward Hyde, who terrorizes the streets of London while lawyer Mr. Utterson, Dr. Lanyon, and the faithful butler Poole try to understand what their friend has unleashed.
• The Whistler brings the Signal-sponsored noir "Danger Is a Beautiful Blonde," as bored construction engineer Van Stevens, killing time in a small coast city on a Saturday night, is picked up on the street by a beautiful young blonde in a slick convertible. She drives him to a seaside mansion full of priceless art, and the flirtation turns to ice the moment she asks him to look under her bed — where a dead man lies hidden.
• Strange Wills stars distinguished Hollywood actor Warren William as attorney John Francis O'Connell in "Madman's Diary," a probate-court reading of the last testament of the late Professor Lucifer Nicolai. The diary records the professor's decade-long obsession: an electromagnetic experiment to separate the human mind from the body and hurl it backward along light waves into the past. His subject, a young orphan named Alice, is sent first to the age of King Arthur and Guinevere, then far deeper — a quarter-million years before Christ.
• The Witch's Tale, narrated by 122-year-old Nancy, the Witch of Salem, and her wise black cat Satan, tells "The Haunted Crossroads," where state troopers keep dying at a barren Massachusetts intersection — each one stabbed in the back in a spot so open no killer could possibly reach him and flee unseen. After young Trooper Tom Fallon falls beside his uncle Sergeant Pat McGee and friend Gene Hardy, the only clue is a woman's cold laughter in the dark and a curse reaching back to 1721 and a hanged woman named Goody Fairfax.
• X Minus One, hosted by Isaac Asimov, presents "Hostess," the story of biologist Rose Smollett, who brings home a guest from another world — the Hawkinsite physician Dr. Harg Tolan, a six-limbed being who breathes cyanide from a cylinder at his mouth. Tolan has come to Earth to study the dreaded "inhibition death," the wasting illness that kills his people, and his quiet questions about the missing persons bureau begin to unsettle Rose's policeman husband, Drake.
• Masters of Mystery offers the island thriller "Four Fatal Jugglers," in which business partners Gordon Penrose and Dave Copeland — tangled together by Gordon's wife Lydia and her demands for a divorce — head off for a weekend of duck hunting on a tiny, isolated island in the middle of a lake. Lydia's protective brother Bob is drawn in too, and with old grudges, suspicions of murder-by-hunting-accident, and a hunting knife in play, the trip becomes a deadly game of who can be trusted.
• Strange Adventure closes the night with a desert tale of two weather-beaten prospectors, gangling Slim Sandstone and his stocky partner Geordie Gaines, who walk into the bank of George Alden and deposit a canvas sack half-filled with uncut diamonds. Their secret field out on the desert is rich beyond belief, and the greedy banker schemes to maneuver the pair out of their claim — never suspecting what a salted diamond strike can teach a smart financial tycoon.

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

In 1954, hundreds of Glasgow schoolchildren armed with makeshift weapons stormed the Southern Necropolis, hunting a towering, iron-toothed vampire they believed had already claimed two victims.

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

READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4xtvswmm

FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: What caused hundreds of Scottish children in the 1950s to suddenly become vampire hunters? (The Gorbals Vampire) *** Over the years, from ancient to more modern times there have been a number of incredible cases of mass hysteria. Some are so unbelievable it’s difficult to understand how they happened at all. (Ancient Cases of Mass Hysteria) *** Zachary Davis had a history of mental disturbance, but no one could have predicted the horrors he was truly capable of. (The Disturbing Story of Zachary Davis) *** When poor travelers are found dead in the frozen winter, could it be that there is something more to their story? Could they have been killed not by the cold, but by a demon of the snow? (Demon of the Snow) *** Southwest of Tombstone, Arizona are the remains of a simple adobe cabin nicknamed ‘the bloodiest cabin in Arizona’. (Brunkow’s Cabin) *** Oscar Beckwith was a hermit who lived in the woods, in a small, squalid shack with no furnishings but a bunk, two stools, and a stove… on which he cooked human flesh. (The Cannibal of Austerlitz)

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding
00:01:02.525 = Show Open
00:03:13.218 = The Gorbals Vampire
00:07:54.447 = Ancient Cases of Mass Hysteria
00:23:57.158 = The Disturbing Story of Zachary Davis ***
00:32:13.121 = Demon of the Snow
00:38:22.972 = Brunkow’s Cabin ***
00:43:01.745 = The Cannibal of Austerlitz
00:48:36.810 = 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:
“The Gorbals Vampire” by Cynthia McKanzie for Message to Eagle: (link no longer valid)
“Ancient Cases of Mass Hysteria” posted at Ancient Pages: http://bit.ly/2Iw12SX
“The Disturbing Story of Zachary Davis” by William DeLong for All That’s Interesting: http://bit.ly/2UOxLd6
“Demon of the Snow” by A. Sutherland for Ancient Pages: http://bit.ly/2UlTX97
“Brunkow’s Cabin” by Amanda Penn: http://bit.ly/2GojnOB
“The Cannibal of Austerlitz” by Robert Wilhelm for Murder By Gaslight: http://bit.ly/2ZjADwV
(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, 2019
Weird Darkness moves from a 1950s Scottish vampire panic and centuries of mass hysteria through a Tennessee teenager's matricide, the vengeful Japanese snow demon Yuki-Onna, the bloodiest cabin in the Arizona desert, and a New York hermit who cooked the man he murdered.It opens on the evening of September 23, 1954, when hundreds of schoolchildren poured into the Southern Necropolis cemetery in the Gorbals district of Glasgow, Scotland, armed with sharpened stakes and knives to hunt a creature they called the vampire with iron teeth, blamed for abducting and killing two missing boys. Police could not clear the children from among the headstones, and only the rain finally drove them home, though the hunt resumed over the next two days. Although no children were actually missing, newspapers and Parliament blamed American horror comics such as Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror, a panic that drew in Labour MP Alice Cullen and led to the 1955 Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act, while others traced the iron-toothed monster to the Book of Daniel or to the Glasgow Green bogeywoman Jenny Wee. From the Gorbals the episode widens into centuries of mass hysteria: the first recorded case on an Egyptian papyrus dated to 1990 BC, children in a 1676 Dutch orphanage who barked and crawled like dogs, the 1374 dancing plague known as choreomania that seized the German town of Aachen, the Swedish witch panic of 1664 to 1676 and its children flown to the devil's meadow of Blakula, and French convent nuns who meowed in unison until soldiers threatened them with rods. The same survey takes in the 1630 poisoning terror of Milan that sent the barber Mora to torture and execution, the 1771 Okage Mairi pilgrimage that drew five million Japanese to the Ise Grand Shrine of Amaterasu Omikami, Richard A. Locke's 1835 Great Moon Hoax describing winged bat-men called Vespertilio-homo in the New York Sun, the Salem witch trials of 1692 that hanged nineteen people after the slave Tituba's confession, and the Hammersmith ghost of 1804 that ended when Francis Smith shot the plasterer Thomas Millwood dead in the dark.From there the focus shifts to Sumner County, Tennessee, where on August 10, 2012, fifteen-year-old Zachary Davis killed his sleeping mother, Melanie, striking her nearly twenty times with a sledgehammer he had carried up from the basement, acting on what he believed was the voice of his dead father. His father, Chris, had died of ALS in 2007, after which Vanderbilt psychiatrist Dr. Bradley Freeman diagnosed the boy with schizophrenia and depression before Melanie pulled him out of therapy. After the killing Davis doused the family game room in whiskey and gasoline and set it ablaze to kill his sixteen-year-old brother Josh, who woke to a smoke alarm and escaped while Davis fled on foot and was found roughly ten miles away. He told investigators he felt nothing when he killed her, laughed during a televised interview with Dr. Phil McGraw as he described the weapon and the wet sound it made, and was sentenced to life in prison after Judge D. David Gay told him he had gone to the dark side, with parole possible only after fifty-one years.Next the episode crosses into Japanese folklore and Yuki-Onna, the Lady of the Snow, a vengeful Onryo spirit said to have begun as a pregnant woman left to freeze in a mountain storm and to return on snowy nights as a tall, pale figure with blue lips and long black hair who floats over the drifts without leaving footprints. Her most famous tale follows two woodcutters, the old Mosaku and the young Minokichi, who shelter in a mountain hut where Yuki-Onna breathes a killing cold over Mosaku but spares Minokichi on the condition that he never speak of her. Years later Minokichi marries a woman named Oyuki who never seems to age, and when he finally recounts his strange night in the hut, Oyuki reveals that she is the snow demon herself and vanishes, sparing his life only for the sake of their children.After that the episode turns to the desert of Cochise County, southwest of Tombstone, Arizona, where the ruined adobe Brunckow Cabin earned its reputation as the bloodiest cabin in Arizona through at least twenty-one deaths. The German miner Frederick Brunckow built it in 1858 to work a San Pedro silver claim and was murdered there by his own laborers, killed with a rock drill driven into his abdomen alongside the chemist John Moss and the miner James Williams. The owners who followed met similar ends: Milton Duffield, the first U.S. Marshal of Arizona Territory, was shot dead at the cabin by James T. Holmes during an eviction, N.M. Rogers was killed by Apaches, and five thieves who hid there gunned one another down in a quarrel over stolen loot. Ed Scheifelin used the cabin as a base camp in 1877 before he founded and named nearby Tombstone, and visitors today report an apparition that fades when approached and the phantom sound of mining machinery drifting through the ruins.The episode closes with Oscar Beckwith, a seventy-two-year-old hermit living in a squalid shack in Austerlitz, New York, who on January 10, 1882, killed his mining partner Simon Vanderkoek over a soured gold claim near Alford, Massachusetts, then dismembered and cooked the body. A neighbor named Harrison Calkins smelled burning flesh at the shack and was told Beckwith was only frying pork rinds, but he returned the next day to find the mutilated remains, a blood-stained axe, and charred bones in the stove. Beckwith fled to Canada and evaded capture until the detective J.B. Gildersleeve tracked him to Bracebridge, Ontario, in 1885, by which time rumor had branded him the Cannibal of Austerlitz. Six trials sent him to the gallows in Hudson, New York, on March 1, 1888, where at seventy-eight he became both the oldest man and the last person hanged in the state, struggling at the end of the rope for eighteen minutes before he died.

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A fragile young mother, alone with her infant daughter in a remote old mill, becomes certain that something is moving in the deep black pool behind her bedroom wall, and that the villagers fighting to keep it filled know exactly what it wants.

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CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = Show Open
00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “The Ice Palace” (January 31, 1978) ***WD
00:46:31.886 = BBC Radio 4 Spinechillers, “Witch Water Green” (1984) ***WD
01:43:45.218 = Strange Wills, “Girl From Shadowland” (August 10, 1946)
02:13:05.441 = Strange, “Phantom Wagoneer” (March 21, 1955) ***WD
02:26:39.689 = Suspense, “Portrait Without a Face” (March 02, 1944) ***WD
02:57:22.906 = Tales of the Frightened, “Man in a Raincoat” (1957)
03:02:18.144 = The Creaking Door, “A Day of Truce” (October 12, 1964) ***WD (LQ)
03:32:29.501 = The Saint, “Murder On The High Seas” (October 01, 1947)
03:56:44.596 = Theater Five, “A Little Piece of Candle” (November 18, 1964)
04:16:57.180 = Theater 1030, “The Thing In The Hall” (1968-1971) ***WD
04:46:19.007 = Tales From The Tomb, “Don’t Drink With Strangers (1960s)
04:49:56.396 = 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/WDRR0691

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