Weird Darkness: Paranormal & True Crime Stories

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“The Gorbals Vampire” by Cynthia McKanzie for Message to Eagle: (link no longer valid)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.

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

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.

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 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.

Two Green Squad officers pulled on the foam heads of Clutch the Bald Eagle and Maple the Moose, hefted a battering ram, and went hunting for a drug dealer who loved football a little too much.

SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/mascot-raid

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.

Elena Katherine Moore left her Lexington gym on foot the night of June 11th, and six days later searchers found a body in the woods wearing the same olive-green hoodie.

SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/elena-katherine-moore

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.

Six gay men were stabbed to death near San Francisco's Ocean Beach in the mid-1970s, and the detective working the case today believes their killer is still alive in the East Bay.

SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/doodler-sf

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 new CBS News poll shows that most Americans believe intelligent life exists beyond Earth, and one in five think contact with extraterrestrials has already happened.

SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/alien-contact-poll

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 nuclear test deep beneath the Nevada desert stirs something that should have died out two hundred thousand years ago, and when two old colleagues climb into the mountains to find it, only one of them grasps what it will cost to bring a living giant back down.

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 Feature, “Yesterday’s Giant” (January 30, 1978) ***WD
00:46:59.714 = Peril, “Curse of Ramses” (1953) ***WD
01:08:50.479 = Price of Fear, “Lot 132” (October 06, 1973) ***WD
01:36:58.947 = Adventures of Ellery Queen, “Green Gorilla” (February 12, 1947) ***WD
02:03:05.560 = Quiet Please, “Where Do You Get Your Ideas” (February 20, 1949)
02:31:39.004 = Radio City Playhouse, “Ground Floor Window” (October 23, 1949)
03:00:46.400 = Sam Spade, “Sam And Psyche” (August 02, 1946) ***WD
03:30:35.617 = The Sealed Book, “King of the World” (March 25, 1945)
04:00:32.188 = The Shadow, “The Murder Underground” (March 09, 1941)
04:27:34.089 = Sleep No More, “Banquos Chair Coward” (February 06, 1957) ***WD
04:55:56.262 = 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/WDRR0690

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

Because the canvas roof had been waterproofed with gasoline, the small flame that touched it on July 6, 1944 swept across the Hartford circus big top in seconds, and most of the 167 people it killed were children.

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

READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/39d8nfwh

FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Three boys fishing in the middle of the night hear a blood-curdling scream. But it wasn’t a human making all that noise – it was an extraterrestrial. And thus began a series of meetings with alien beings! (What Do You Say When Meeting An Extraterrestrial?) *** A day of hilarity turns into a day of horror as an uncontrollable fire breaks out at the Ringling Bros Barnum & Bailey Circus – resulting in the most deadly circus disaster in history. (The Day The Clowns Cried) *** Most ghosts and specters do a great job of scaring the pants off you – and some can get creative with how they do it, with stacking chairs, making toys talk, slamming doors, etc. But apparently not all spooks are worried about their reputation – and when it comes to haunting, they just phone it in, doing the bare minimum. (Lazy Phantasms)

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = Show Open
00:01:39.923 = Lazy Phantasms
00:12:35.047 = What Do You Say When Meeting An Extraterrestrial? ***
00:42:41.671 = The Day The Clowns Cried ***
00:52:38.951 = 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:
“What Do You Say When Meeting An Extraterrestrial?” from Anomalien.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/44h5ykk9
“Lazy Phantasms” posted at Esoterx.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2y69m7hu
“The Day The Clowns Cried” by Rachel Souerby for Weird History: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4ek5rsup
(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: November, 2021
Weird Darkness ranges from a shapeless apparition that appeared inside the Tower of London in 1817, to a string of close-range UFO and humanoid encounters reported across North America, to the Hartford circus fire of 1944 that killed 167 people in under ten minutes.It opens inside the Tower of London in October 1817, where a cylinder of dense, white and pale-azure fluid about the thickness of a man's arm materialized over the supper table of Edmund Lenthal Swifte, the Keeper of the Crown Jewels. Swifte was holding a glass of wine and water to his wife's lips in the Jewel House, with her sister and his young son present, when the shape hovered for roughly two minutes, drifted around the room, and settled over his wife's right shoulder, at which she cried out that it had seized her. He struck at the wood paneling behind her with his chair, but the figure left no mark, and a scientific friend who afterward examined the sealed, curtained, candle-lit room could account for none of it. The thing wore no period costume and delivered no message, and forty-three years later Swifte set the encounter down in the journal Notes and Queries, insisting at eighty-three that he had neither amplified nor abridged a word of it.From there it moves to a wave of close-range encounters, beginning on a cold January night in 1972 when sixteen-year-old John Yeries and three companions, fishing near Battle Creek Bridge east of Anderson, California, saw a seven-foot, greenish-brown humanoid with a large teardrop-shaped ear on one side of its head and heard it loose a scream that sent them sprinting for their car. Darrell Rich's father Dean returned to the bridge with a pistol, only to back away when a deep growl rose from the brush, and a police search of the area turned up nothing. The following year, on October 4, 1973, insurance agent Gary Chase pulled over at the Santa Susana Pass near Simi Valley, California and watched an elliptical craft roughly seventy feet long, marked with a nested V insignia, hover above a creek while a figure in a wetsuit-like suit crawled across its hull toward a protruding hose. Other witnesses report the same intrusions: patrolman Lonnie Zamora saw two small, white-clad figures beside a landed craft in New Mexico in 1964, and Mrs. Wallace Bowers found fifteen-inch footprints in the snow and watched an orange disk hover over the power lines outside her home in Vader, Washington. Bernice Niblett spent the winter of 1967 alone on Keats Island in British Columbia, where she watched lights maneuver over the water night after night and became convinced that the two stiff, oddly formal Hydro men who appeared at her cabin were not the utility workers they claimed to be — a year-long ordeal documented by Canadian UFO researcher John Magor that eventually drove her off the island.The episode closes with the Hartford circus fire of July 6, 1944, when the canvas big top of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey circus, waterproofed with a mixture of white gasoline and paraffin wax, caught at the edge and was consumed in under ten minutes, killing 167 of the roughly 7,000 people inside, most of them children. As the flames climbed the roof, the bandleader struck up 'Stars and Stripes Forever,' the circus's coded signal for an emergency, while the Great Wallendas scrambled down from their high wire unhurt. Ringmaster Fred Bradna called for a calm exit, but the crowd ignored him as burning canvas and hot wax fell from above. Two of the exits were blocked by the steel chutes used to move animals in and out, so many of the dead were trampled there rather than burned, and a photograph of the clown Emmett Kelly carrying a single bucket of water toward the blaze fixed the catastrophe in memory as the day the clowns cried. Investigators never settled the cause, though the state fire marshal leaned toward a carelessly dropped cigarette. A fifteen-year-old circus hand named Robert Dale Segee confessed to setting the fire years later and then recanted. And one young victim, her face barely touched by the flames, was never claimed — buried under the name Little Miss 1565 and identified only decades afterward, and only disputably, as Eleanor Cook.

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

A Newport Beach physician who ran a Riverside skin-care clinic pleaded guilty to the sexual battery of three patients during their exams, and he will never hold a medical license again.

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

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 Paris auction house expected half a million dollars for the world's first lab-grown Tyrannosaurus rex handbag, and the bidding gave out at a hundred and fifty thousand for a purse paleontologists say is mostly chicken.

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

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.