Weird Darkness Records

A great-grandmother's candle on the cellar stairs, a dead girl's name chanted into a bathroom mirror, and a blessing claimed out loud in church all count to three, and so did Jesus in Gethsemane, praying for a cup that never passed.

SONG SYNOPSIS:
A great-grandmother walks backward down the cellar stairs on Halloween with a candle and a looking glass, waiting for her future husband's face to appear over her shoulder. Generations later, kids in a dark bathroom say a dead girl's name into the mirror three times and wait for her face behind the candle flame. One of them grows up and trades the candle for a vision board and a hardback book that promises his thoughts are magnets and the universe hears every request, then carries the same chant into church, where he learns to name it and claim it, never speak a doubt, and blame himself for every no. Two other prayers were said three times long before his: Jesus in Gethsemane asked for the cup to pass and handed it back to His Father every time, and Paul begged for the thorn in his flesh to go and was told that grace was enough. Both heard no from a Father who was listening, which leaves the man with the mirror, the vision board, and the church chant asking who has been doing the answering all along.

SONG DESCRIPTION:
Based on the Weird Darkness Church of the Undead episode "SAY IT THREE TIMES: Bloody Mary, The Secret, And Who Is Really Answering", a sermon that starts with the candle-and-mirror charm Robert Burns put in print in 1786 and follows it to sleepover bathrooms, vision boards, and name-it-and-claim-it preaching.Great-grandma walked the cellar stairs backward with a candle and a glass, looking for a husband's face over her shoulder. The kids who came after her turned off the bathroom lights and chanted a dead girl's name into the mirror, and one of them grew up to trade the candle for a vision board and a god inside his own head, then carried the chant into church. Jesus prayed three times in Gethsemane and Paul begged three times for his thorn to go, and both heard no from a Father who was listening. The mirror, the universe, and the formula make a different promise: ask the dark for anything, and say it three times.

Incorruption is a Christian rock band building post-grunge, arena-sized anthems out of real theology and hard questions. Songs that wrestle instead of preach, that land somewhere between the pulpit and the mosh pit.



LYRICS:

[VERSE]
Great-grandma took the cellar stairs
Backward with a candle and a glass,
Waiting for a husband's face to stare
Over her shoulder as she passed.
Then we traded cellars for a bathroom door,
Lights out, a candle, and a dead girl's name,
Three times, like the girls who'd gone before,
Waiting for her face behind the flame.

[PRE-CHORUS]
Will Mary show you your heart’s desire,
To get what you want, what will it require?

[CHORUS]
Say it three times
To the mirror, nice and slow,
Say it three times,
Like the words can make it so,
You can ask the dark for anything,
But who is doing the answering?
Say it three times,
Say it three times,Say it three times.

[VERSE]
I traded candles for a vision board,
A hardback book beside my bed,
Said, "It's already mine", and reached for more,
Trusting in the god inside my head.
Thoughts are magnets, that's the secret, they say,
The universe can hear you when you call,
Ask, then believe it's on its way,
Don’t ask who's answering it all.

[PRE-CHORUS]
Speak it out loud and you’ll get your desire,
Are you hearing from God or is it a liar?

[CHORUS]
Say it three times
To the mirror, nice and slow,
Say it three times,
Like the words can make it so,
You can ask the dark for anything,
But who is doing the answering?
Say it three times,
Say it three times,Say it three times.

[INSTRUMENTAL BREAK]

[BRIDGE]
"Let this cup pass", He prayed it three times,
And three times gave it back, "Your will, not Mine",
Paul begged three times for the thorn to go,
And the Father answered no,
The cup that wouldn't pass was the cup that set me free,
And the grace that was enough for Paul is enough for me.

[VERSE]
Then I brought the chant into the church,
Name it, claim it, never speak a doubt,
Piled up words to make the heavens work,
Praying like a Pharisee, long and loud,
Asking just to spend it on my pleasures,
They said every no was my own shame,
Like His love was something I could measure,
Just believe you have what you have claimed.

[PRE-CHORUS]
Name it, claim it, shout it to the choir,
So why did Jesus pray, “Not what I desire”?

[CHORUS]
Say it three times
To the mirror, nice and slow,
Say it three times,
Like the words can make it so,
You can ask the dark for anything,
But who is doing the answering?

Say it three times
To the mirror, nice and slow,
Say it three times,
Like the words can make it so,
You can ask the dark for anything,
But who is doing the answering?
Say it three times,
Say it three times,Say it three times.

Hear more original music from Weird Darkness Records at https://WeirdDarkness.com/music. Explore hundreds of original songs by Dark Weirdness, Static Wax, Incorruption, Monster Flakes, Maggie Cross, Alena Ingram, and more!

Weird Darkness Records is the music division of the Weird Darkness brand, transforming the show’s strange, dark, true-crime, paranormal, supernatural, and macabre stories into original songs spanning multiple artists and musical styles.

All songs are also available on major streaming services including Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Pandora, iHeartRadio, and most other music platforms worldwide.

This episode includes AI-generated content.

What if a classic radio story became a song — in the time it takes place? Static Wax reimagines featured RetroRadio stories as songs from their era.

"The Sound of the Old Man's Cane" is a 1930s-style big band number inspired by Dead Walk at Night, an episode of Inner Sanctum Mysteries originally broadcast on September 20, 1942. The story follows a man who murders his blind uncle to claim his inheritance and escape a life of servitude — only to find that the dead don't stay silent, and the sound of a tapping cane follows him long after the old man is gone. 
Static Wax from Weird Darkness Retro Radio brings old radio drama back to life through original songs written in the musical style of the era each story takes place in. Every song is a standalone journey into a different time and a different tale.  This one takes you to the 1930s — and into a darkened hallway where something is coming down the stairs.

Hear more original music from Weird Darkness Records at https://WeirdDarkness.com/music. Explore hundreds of original songs by Dark Weirdness, Static Wax, Incorruption, Monster Flakes, Maggie Cross, Alena Ingram, and more!

Weird Darkness Records is the music division of the Weird Darkness brand, transforming the show’s strange, dark, true-crime, paranormal, supernatural, and macabre stories into original songs spanning multiple artists and musical styles.

All songs are also available on major streaming services including Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Pandora, iHeartRadio, and most other music platforms worldwide.

The song is about Flying Tiger Line Flight 739, a chartered Lockheed Super Constellation that went missing over the western Pacific on March 16th, 1962, with 107 people aboard. It had lifted off from Travis Air Force Base in California two days earlier and was working toward Saigon by way of Honolulu, Wake Island, Guam, and Clark Air Base in the Philippines. Ninety-three of the passengers were Ranger-trained Army communications specialists flying in civilian clothes with their uniforms and identification packed away, three were South Vietnamese servicemen, and the remaining eleven were the civilian crew. The soldiers were going over to relieve men already in Saigon who were training South Vietnamese troops, years before the United States acknowledged what it was doing there. Eighty minutes out of Guam the captain radioed a routine position report from 280 nautical miles west of the island, and when the ground station called for the next one, nothing came back. Roughly ninety minutes after that, the crew of the Liberian tanker T.L. Lenzen watched a vapor trail cross the sky above them, then an explosion bright enough to light the ship's decks, an intensely luminous white center ringed in reddish orange, and two burning objects falling toward the water at different speeds. The Lenzen turned and searched six hours in the dark without finding anything. Over the next eight days, 48 aircraft and eight surface ships covered more than 200,000 square miles of ocean and logged upward of 3,400 flying hours, and they recovered nothing at all. The Civil Aeronautics Board concluded the aircraft had been destroyed in flight and then stated plainly that it couldn't say with any certainty what had actually happened. Because the men died outside a designated combat zone, their names were kept off the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington; the monument that does carry them stands in Columbia Falls, Maine, and went up in 2021.

Hear more original music from Weird Darkness Records at https://WeirdDarkness.com/music. Explore hundreds of original songs by Dark Weirdness, Static Wax, Incorruption, Monster Flakes, Maggie Cross, Alena Ingram, and more!

Weird Darkness Records is the music division of the Weird Darkness brand, transforming the show’s strange, dark, true-crime, paranormal, supernatural, and macabre stories into original songs spanning multiple artists and musical styles.

All songs are also available on major streaming services including Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Pandora, iHeartRadio, and most other music platforms worldwide.

[Verse 1]
Day after day they seek me out
Eager to know my holy ways
As if they do only what is right not wrong
As if they do only what I say
They ask me for my just decisions
They pray that I will always be near
Why have we fasted, have you not seen it
We are so humble is your vision clear
[Chorus]
Is this the kind of fast I've chosen
Because you learn it awful slow
When you fast for the Lord
Don't be slow to feed the hungry
When you fast for the Lord
Don't be slow to give to the poor
When you fast for the Lord
Don't be slow to forgive a neighbor
You can't expect your voice to be heard
When you won't follow His word
[Verse 2]
You want to be a well-watered garden
Like a spring that's never dry
But you keep breaking the Sabbath as you please
With arguments and strife and lies
You hook up the yoke of oppression
You bring your workers to the edge of tears
Hey look at me, hey can't you see
I am so holy and better than you
[Chorus]
Is this the kind of fast I've chosen
Because you learn it awful slow
When you fast for the Lord
Don't be slow to feed the hungry
When you fast for the Lord
Don't be slow to give to the poor
When you fast for the Lord
Don't be slow to forgive a neighbor
You can't expect your voice to be heard
When you won't follow His word
[guitar solo]
[Bridge]
Your light can shine in the darkest place
If you keep my Sabbath holy
And follow my ways
[guitar solo]
[Outro]
You ask me for my just decisions
You pray that I will always be near
Why have we fasted, have you not seen it
We are so humble is your vision clear
Is this the kind of fast I've chosen
Because you learn it awful slow
When you fast for the Lord
Don't be slow to feed the hungry
When you fast for the Lord
Don't be slow to give to the poor
When you fast for the Lord
Don't be slow to forgive a neighbor
You can't expect your voice to be heard
When you won't follow His word

Hear more original music from Weird Darkness Records at https://WeirdDarkness.com/music. Explore hundreds of original songs by Dark Weirdness, Static Wax, Incorruption, Monster Flakes, Maggie Cross, Alena Ingram, and more!

Weird Darkness Records is the music division of the Weird Darkness brand, transforming the show’s strange, dark, true-crime, paranormal, supernatural, and macabre stories into original songs spanning multiple artists and musical styles.

All songs are also available on major streaming services including Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Pandora, iHeartRadio, and most other music platforms worldwide.

The song is about the four people who ran a roadside inn and general store on the Great Osage Trail in Labette County, Kansas, roughly seven miles northeast of Cherryvale, from the fall of 1871 until May of 1873. John Bender Sr., his wife Elvira, and the pair who passed as their grown son and daughter, John Jr. and Kate, took in travelers crossing the plains. Kate handed out flyers advertising herself as a healer and spiritualist who could cure disease and speak with the dead, and she held séances for anyone who asked. A canvas curtain divided the single room. A guest seated with his back to that curtain would be struck in the head with a hammer from behind it, dropped through a trapdoor into the cellar and his throat cut, and whatever he had brought with him, money and horses and wagon, stayed with the Benders. Dr. William York vanished on March 9th, 1873, riding from Fort Scott toward Independence, and his brother, Colonel Alexander York, came looking for him with a party of about fifty men, stopped at the inn, and put questions to Kate, who offered to locate the missing man by her second sight. York was already in the orchard. The Benders were gone inside of a month, and a neighbor riding past noticed the place standing open with a calf dead of neglect. Searchers pried up a trapdoor that had been nailed shut and found a cellar caked with clotted blood, then went out to the apple orchard and dug up nine bodies, throats cut and skulls crushed, among them the Loncher girl, who had been put in the ground with her father and was believed to have been buried alive. Nobody was ever tried for any of it. The chief of police at Cherryvale said the old man's wagon turned up beside the road riddled with bullets and that you would have to guess the rest, and the chief at Independence said it was his opinion they never got away.

Hear more original music from Weird Darkness Records at https://WeirdDarkness.com/music. Explore hundreds of original songs by Dark Weirdness, Static Wax, Incorruption, Monster Flakes, Maggie Cross, Alena Ingram, and more!

Weird Darkness Records is the music division of the Weird Darkness brand, transforming the show’s strange, dark, true-crime, paranormal, supernatural, and macabre stories into original songs spanning multiple artists and musical styles.

All songs are also available on major streaming services including Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Pandora, iHeartRadio, and most other music platforms worldwide.

Loosely based on the story, “The Impossible Is True” by CBS Radio Mystery Theater (March 14, 1978), as heard in the Weird Darkness #RetroRadio episode, “Three Witnesses, a Locked-Room Murder, And a Ghost On The Marble Stairs”: https://weirddarkness.com/wdrr0707/

An old mansion narrates the history of the wealthy family that has lived and died inside it across generations — a locked-room death, a woman drawn down the marble stairs by a beckoning figure, one heir after another falling to the same slow doom. But the house has watched it all too many times to grieve or even care, and its weary indifference becomes the darkest thing in the story. Inspired by the premise of a classic haunted-mansion mystery, the song withholds every answer and leaves the ghost on the stairs unresolved.

ABOUT THE SONG: "I Am the One Who Bears Witness to All" is told from the most unusual narrator imaginable: the house itself. An ancient mansion recounts the long line of a wealthy family that has lived and died within its walls — a father dead behind a locked door, a woman drawn down cold marble stairs by a beckoning figure, generation after generation falling to the same slow curse. But the house feels nothing. It has watched too many of them come and go to care who's next. What emerges is a ghost story where the real chill isn't the apparition on the stairs — it's the indifference of the walls that have seen it all before. 

ABOUT MAGGIE CROSS: Maggie Cross brings a worn, weathered contralto to Weird Darkness Records — a Southern Gothic folk-blues voice built for telling stories from the shadows. Chicago-Delta blues pulled back into acoustic-forward murder balladry and dark Americana, all storytelling and grit exactly where it's needed. Brooding, unhurried, and haunted, hers is the voice of someone who has seen everything and isn't rattled by any of it.

Hear more original music from Weird Darkness Records at https://WeirdDarkness.com/music. Explore hundreds of original songs by Dark Weirdness, Static Wax, Incorruption, Monster Flakes, Maggie Cross, Alena Ingram, and more!

Weird Darkness Records is the music division of the Weird Darkness brand, transforming the show’s strange, dark, true-crime, paranormal, supernatural, and macabre stories into original songs spanning multiple artists and musical styles.

All songs are also available on major streaming services including Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Pandora, iHeartRadio, and most other music platforms worldwide.

The song is about the voice Harriet Tubman said guided her, and it runs from the blow that opened her up to it to the last years of her life. In 1835, when she was about thirteen, she was inside a dry-goods store in Bucktown, Maryland, when an overseer threw a two-pound iron weight at another enslaved person who had left without permission; it hit Harriet in the head instead and fractured her skull. She was carried back to the quarters and left there for days. For the rest of her life she had what she called sleeping spells, sudden blackouts that took her mid-sentence without warning, and with them came visions she understood as instruction from God. She escaped in 1849, then went back roughly thirteen times over the next decade and brought out about seventy people, carrying a revolver and telling anyone who wanted to turn back that they'd go on or die. Thomas Garrett, the Quaker stationmaster in Wilmington who sheltered her groups, wrote in 1868 that he had never met any person of any color with more confidence in the voice of God as spoken direct to her soul, and it's Garrett who preserved the night the voice told her to leave the road: she waded into a tidewater stream in March with the water up to her armpits, and the two men with her wouldn't follow until they saw her safe on the other side. Harriet died in Auburn, New York, in March of 1913, at ninety-one. The line the song ends on is her own, spoken at a suffrage convention in 1896, that she never ran her train off the track and never lost a passenger.

Hear more original music from Weird Darkness Records at https://WeirdDarkness.com/music. Explore hundreds of original songs by Dark Weirdness, Static Wax, Incorruption, Monster Flakes, Maggie Cross, Alena Ingram, and more!

Weird Darkness Records is the music division of the Weird Darkness brand, transforming the show’s strange, dark, true-crime, paranormal, supernatural, and macabre stories into original songs spanning multiple artists and musical styles.

All songs are also available on major streaming services including Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Pandora, iHeartRadio, and most other music platforms worldwide.

Based on the story, "The Strange Burial of Alexander Jordan" from the #RetroRadio episode, "The Burial of Alexander Jordan: The Coffin Bell That Rang Six Nights After the Funeral."  

Old Alexander Jordan, terrified of being buried alive during one of his cataleptic fits, rigs a bell from his crypt to his nephew's bedroom — so that if he wakes inside the coffin, he can ring for help. But his nephew Ramsey has been waiting a long time to inherit the Jordan place, and a bell that rings in the dead of night can be silenced more than one way.

ABOUT THE SONG: "The Dead Man's Bell" is a smoky funeral blues in the 1944 tradition — minor key, mournful muted trumpet, weeping clarinet, walking upright bass, brushed drums, and a tolling brass bell threaded through the arrangement like a second heartbeat. The narrator lays the tale out from a detached, knowing distance, the way a bartender or an undertaker might tell it across a quiet room after the lights go down. It's a song about a man who built his own escape hatch from the grave, the wicked nephew who silenced it, and the ironic fate that sealed them both inside a stone vault no living soul could open.

ABOUT THE EPISODE: The song is drawn from Creeps by Night — "The Strange Burial of Alexander Jordan," originally broadcast July 13, 1944, on the Blue Network and hosted by the anonymous "Dr. X." This episode starred celebrated English character actor Edmund Gwenn — who would later win the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Miracle on 34th Street — in the role of Ramsey, with Everett Sloan as Alexander Jordan, Abby Lewis as Martha, and Gregory Morton as Dr. Rutledge. The story turns on one of the oldest human fears — premature burial — and the elaborate precautions a wealthy old man takes to make sure it never happens to him. Whether those precautions save him, doom him, or do something stranger still, you'll have to listen to find out. The full original episode airs on Weird Darkness Retro Radio.

ABOUT STATIC WAX: Static Wax is a music project from Weird Darkness, where every track is an original song written and produced in the musical style of the era that produced the vintage radio episode it draws from. A 1944 horror drama gets a 1944-styled funeral blues. A 1955 tale gets doo-wop or rockabilly. A 1968 episode gets garage rock. The songs aren't covers, parodies, or pastiches — they're original compositions designed to feel like records that could have been pressed the same year as the broadcast they honor.



Hear more original music from Weird Darkness Records at https://WeirdDarkness.com/music. Explore hundreds of original songs by Dark Weirdness, Static Wax, Incorruption, Monster Flakes, Maggie Cross, Alena Ingram, and more!

Weird Darkness Records is the music division of the Weird Darkness brand, transforming the show’s strange, dark, true-crime, paranormal, supernatural, and macabre stories into original songs spanning multiple artists and musical styles.

All songs are also available on major streaming services including Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Pandora, iHeartRadio, and most other music platforms worldwide.

In October 1919, silent film actress Marie Empress boarded a steamship bound for New York — and was never seen again. Her bed unslept in. Her sandwiches untouched. No one saw her leave. A pop-punk ballad telling the story of one of cinema's most baffling, and mostly forgotten, unsolved disappearances.

THE VANISHING OF MARIE EMPRESS
Marie Ann Louisa Taylor — known to audiences as Marie Empress — was a rising star of the silent film era. Born in England, she built a successful career in music halls before crossing to American vaudeville and eventually the screen, where her dark beauty and natural charisma made her a consistent box office draw. In the fall of 1919, she sailed to England for personal appearances and film negotiations, then boarded the Cunard steamer Orduna on October 16 for her return to New York. On the evening of October 26, two and a half hours out of Halifax, her stewardess brought dinner to her stateroom and found her in good spirits. Marie ordered sandwiches for 9:30. When the stewardess returned at precisely that time, the room was empty. By morning, it was clear she had never come back — the bed unslept in, the sandwiches untouched, her trunks still aboard. No one had seen her leave. The porthole was locked from the inside and too small to climb through. The passageways and decks were brightly lit and crowded with passengers. How she vanished without a single witness remains unexplained. Whether she fell, jumped, or met with foul play was never determined. A London man named Oliver Williams was said to know something, but nothing came of it. Some believed it was an elaborate publicity stunt — she was known for her talent at male disguise — but she was never seen again. Her films played on in theaters for months. Then those too faded away.



Hear more original music from Weird Darkness Records at https://WeirdDarkness.com/music. Explore hundreds of original songs by Dark Weirdness, Static Wax, Incorruption, Monster Flakes, Maggie Cross, Alena Ingram, and more!

Weird Darkness Records is the music division of the Weird Darkness brand, transforming the show’s strange, dark, true-crime, paranormal, supernatural, and macabre stories into original songs spanning multiple artists and musical styles.

All songs are also available on major streaming services including Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Pandora, iHeartRadio, and most other music platforms worldwide.

Static Wax takes the stories told on vintage radio broadcasts and reimagines them as era-appropriate songs — the way they might have sounded if they'd been written for the jukebox instead of the airwaves. "Nine Score Years a-Waiting" is an Appalachian mountain ballad in the high lonesome tradition, drawn from the Dark Fantasyepisode "Pennsylvania Turnpike," originally broadcast March 20, 1942 over NBC from station WKY in Oklahoma City. The song carries the weight of an older form — clawhammer banjo, mournful fiddle, close harmony, the modal minor tonality of British Isles ballads transplanted to the Allegheny hills — to tell a story of a wronged man who waited a hundred and eighty years to settle a score. The original radio play sends a red-haired traveler named K. Miner down a stretch of the Pennsylvania Turnpike looking for a town called Pine Knob, only to find an old timer at a roadside filling station who knows exactly where it is — and exactly what's waiting there. The road behind them vanishes. The pavement turns to clay. A stagecoach murder from 1762 plays out in front of them like it's happening for the first time, and the sins of a great-great-grandfather come due on a son who never knew his name was a debt. The song honors the source while finding its own gravity in the long American tradition of ghost-rider laments and frontier murder ballads. Released through Weird Darkness Records, Static Wax is part of the Weird Darkness ecosystem — paranormal, true crime, and strange history storytelling created and hosted by Darren Marlar. New tracks pull from the deep catalog of golden-age radio horror, mystery, and the supernatural, reimagined in the musical voice of their era.

Hear more original music from Weird Darkness Records at https://WeirdDarkness.com/music. Explore hundreds of original songs by Dark Weirdness, Static Wax, Incorruption, Monster Flakes, Maggie Cross, Alena Ingram, and more!

Weird Darkness Records is the music division of the Weird Darkness brand, transforming the show’s strange, dark, true-crime, paranormal, supernatural, and macabre stories into original songs spanning multiple artists and musical styles.

All songs are also available on major streaming services including Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Pandora, iHeartRadio, and most other music platforms worldwide.