Weird Darkness: Paranormal & True Crime Stories

In 1957, a young surgeon finds an aneurysm the size of a grapefruit on the chest X-rays of the man his sister is about to marry, and that night his dead father sits down across the fire to talk the case through.

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 Exploding Heart” (December 08, 1978) ***WD
00:46:23.841 = ABC Mystery Time, “Death By Proxy” (June 07, 1956) ***WD
01:11:24.668 = Appointment With Fear, “Pit And The Pendulum” (September 18, 1943) ***WD
01:39:35.562 = Arch Oboler’s Plays, “Mr. Payle” (June 14, 1945) ***WD(LQ)
02:04:58.883 = Barry Craig, “Death of a Private Eye” (January 02, 1952)
02:35:08.636 = BBC Radio 4 / Radio 7 GhostStory, “Laura” (January 01, 1987)
02:49:56.334 = Night Beat, “Reformer” (June 26, 1952)
03:20:10.260 = The Black Book, “On Schedule” (February 17, 1952) ***WD
03:34:38.824 = Box 13, “One One Three Point Five” (March 20, 1949)
04:01:09.194 = Calling All Cars, “Hammers In Honduras” (April 18, 1934) ***WD
04:33:13.108 = Casey Crime Photographer, “Demon Miner” (March 20, 1947)
05:02:41.409 = 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/WDRR0795

Margaret Dickson was hanged in Edinburgh in 1724 and began moving in her coffin when the men taking her home stopped for a drink. In 1803, in Sydney, three ropes in a row failed to hang Joseph Samuel.

From the book “BOTCHED EXECUTIONS: Four Centuries Of Failed Hangings, Electrocutions, Gassings, Injections And Firing Squads” by Darren Marlar at https://weirddarkness.com/botchedexecutions

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

Originally aired: October 07, 2026

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HM3LZM9M/

Two men who said they were newspaper reporters spent forty-five minutes inside Danny Gordon's house while he was chasing the Wytheville, Virginia, UFO sightings, one asking the questions while the other walked the rooms with a camera, and the paper they named had no record of either man.

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

READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/mr2h8xt3

FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: The mysterious Men in Black have been around long before Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones put on the black suits and sunglasses. The encounters with these strange men have been taking place for decades. Sometimes unnerving, often bizarre, and almost always chilling for those they approach. (The Sinister Men In Black) *** Legend has it that a four-legged fiend with glowing eyes and a blood-curdling howl stalks the area of Devon, England. The mystery creature was seen only yards away from a party of schoolchildren, the animal has a thick, shaggy coat, rounded ears and large front limbs which would be powerful enough to tear human flesh. Is it man’s best friend – or a hell hound?  (Phantom Hound) *** Life presents people with all sorts of unexplained phenomena. One of the strangest is places disappearing. It might happen on a hiking trail, or in the forest, or alongside gravel roads in rural counties… but then some happen in the most surprising of places – for example, in the center of New York City. (Places That No Longer Exist) *** Weirdo family member Chris Francis has a dark story to tell – literally dark. As in black-hole dark. (Black Hole In The Basement)
CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding
00:02:00.566 = Show Open
00:04:08.719 = The Sinister Men In Black
00:21:18.562 = Places That No Longer Exist ***
00:56:32.806 = Phantom Hound ***
01:03:19.395 = Black Hole Basement
01:14:26.928 = 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:(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: July, 2018
LIKE WHAT YOU’RE HEARING? WEIRD DARKNESS posts episodes 7 DAYS A WEEK! Listen FREE wherever you get podcasts or visit https://weirddarkness.com/listen. • Paranormal • True Crime • Ghosts • UFOs • Cryptids • Unexplained • Want even more? Become an OFFICIAL WEIRDO for commercial-free episodes, bonus episodes, weeknight live chats, audiobooks & more at https://WeirdDarkness.com/OFFICIAL
This episode of Weird Darkness runs from the men in black who shadow UFO witnesses to places that vanish overnight, a shape-shifting beast photographed on Dartmoor, and a basement in Orillia, Ontario, where something climbs the stairs at night.
It opens with Ronald Reagan telling Steven Spielberg, after a 1982 White House screening of E.T., that some people in the room knew everything on the screen was true, and from there it moves into decades of men in black encounters. Radio journalist Danny Gordon's investigation of the 1987 Wytheville, Virginia, UFO sightings brought him warning calls, a break-in, and two men posing as newspaper reporters who walked through his house before some of his negatives went missing. UFO researchers John and Mary Robertson watched a man in black stand outside their apartment building for days in 1968; Harold Dahl said a stranger driving a black Buick recited his Maury Island sighting back to him the morning after it happened in 1947; a man calling himself Jack Smith filmed two identical men in fedoras at a New Orleans streetcar stop in 2014; and Rendlesham Forest researcher Brenda Butler describes a road chase, tapped phones, and warnings to stop digging.
From there, Reddit users describe places that disappeared, among them a Texas gas station where the clerk danced alone to ragtime at 2 a.m., a South Carolina diner where a grown woman spoke for a doll in a high chair, a cave on the Niagara Escarpment that swallowed three hours, a tunnel full of daylight on the Blue Ridge Parkway, and a free-pizza shop in New York's Financial District after Hurricane Sandy. None of them turned up again.
Next, falconer Martin Whitley's American clients photograph a black, pony-sized animal on Dartmoor in June 2007, about a mile from Hound Tor, and the creature seems to change shape from frame to frame, though a local woman insists it was her Newfoundland, Troy. The same moor carries the legend of the hunter Bowerman and his hounds turned to stone by witches, along with the red-eyed Wisht Hounds tied to Squire Richard Cabell and The Hound of the Baskervilles.
The episode closes with Weirdo family member Chris Francis, who moved back into his mother's century-old brick house in Orillia, where an old fieldstone foundation in the basement swallowed flashlight beams, the basement door opened and slammed on its own night after night, and a six-foot shadow climbed the stairs. A line of salt across the old servants' staircase only made it worse, and as the family drove away for good, he saw a bald man in a gray coat standing at the basement door.

In the spring of 1942, seven-year-old Scott Paradine was playing hooky down by the creek when a scorched metal box tumbled down the bank, packed with toys no store on Earth had ever stocked – an abacus whose beads slid off in a direction no grown-up could follow, a crystal cube full of tiny people who did whatever he thought at them, and a doll whose insides didn't match any anatomy chart. Scott and his two-year-old sister Emma figured the toys out fast, their father couldn't work them at all, and the child psychologist he brought home to dinner came away convinced the toys were teaching the kids to think in a way no adult could follow.

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

SOURCES and RESOURCES: "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" by Lewis Padgett, the pen name of Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, first published in Astounding Science Fiction, February 1943

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

Midnight In The Macabre (MITM), originally aired: October 07, 2026

LIKE WHAT YOU’RE HEARING? WEIRD DARKNESS posts episodes 7 DAYS A WEEK! Listen FREE wherever you get podcasts or visit https://weirddarkness.com/listen. • Paranormal • True Crime • Ghosts • UFOs • Cryptids • Unexplained • Want even more? Become an OFFICIAL WEIRDO for commercial-free episodes, bonus episodes, weeknight live chats, audiobooks & more at https://WeirdDarkness.com/OFFICIAL

Lord Carnavan's wife lends a visiting sheikh her carved Indian jewel box for one afternoon, and the morning after she wears her diamond necklace to Buckingham Palace, the necklace is gone from the locked box and her husband wants the psychic detective next door on the case.

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 Devil’s Bargain” (December 06, 1978) ***WD
00:46:21.922 = The Saint, “Nineteen Santa Clauses” (December 25, 1949) ***WD
01:15:28.920 = 2000 Plus, “Green Thing” (September 27, 1950) ***WD
01:46:11.949 = The Unexpected, “Cargo Unknown” (1947-1948) ***WD
02:00:49.726 = Unsolved Mysteries, “Writing On The Wall” (October 05, 1949) ***WD
02:16:31.638 = Dark Venture, “Hideout” (January 07, 1947) ***WD
02:40:04.171 = The Weird Circle, “Terribly Strange Bed” (July 29, 1943)
03:08:10.615 = The Whistler, “Death Pays a Visit” (June 11, 1945)
03:37:46.860 = Strange Wills, “Singapore Liz” (November 02, 1946)
04:08:25.983 = Witch’s Tale, “Spirits Of The Lake” (January 02, 1933)
04:39:31.712 = X Minus One, “Real Gone” (February 27, 1957)
05:01:37.400 = 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.

Tennessee gave Christa Pike two doses of pentobarbital on September 30th, 2026, and she survived both. In 1650, Anne Greene hung for almost half an hour at Oxford, and when the anatomists opened her coffin, she was breathing.

From the book “BOTCHED EXECUTIONS: Four Centuries Of Failed Hangings, Electrocutions, Gassings, Injections And Firing Squads” by Darren Marlar, https://amzn.to/4yLF5oo, sources at https://weirddarkness.com/botchedexecutions.

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

Originally aired: October 06, 2026

https://weirddarkness.com/botched01

You go to bed like any other night… but by morning, someone is dead — was it a dream, or did you kill while still deep in sleep?

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

READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yckud24p

FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: At least 68 cases of sleepwalking murder have reached a courtroom, giving a jury the unenviable task of deciding whether a murder committed while asleep means criminal responsibility for the unfortunate sleepwalker. (Homicidal Sleepwalking) *** A man begins to see and experience strange things around the house as he cares for his elderly grandmother. 
(The Other Company) *** What does uncontrollable laughing, the Chupacabra, rampant crime, witch burnings, and dancing to exhaustion all have in common? They are all examples of what experts call “mass hysteria”. (Strange Stories of Mass Hysteria) *** Weirdo family member and U.S. veteran Joe Akins shares a personal experience with the paranormal and extraterrestrial! (UFO's & Demonic Shadow Figures) *** Another Weird Darkness fan, Mathew R., sent us a short story about what happened to him while visiting the Watseka Wonder House (The Watseka Wonder)
CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding
00:00:38.261 = Show Open
00:02:29.182 = Homicidal Sleepwalking
00:18:49.261 = The Other Company ***
00:24:50.570 = Strange Stories of Mass Hysteria
00:37:01.174 = UFOs and Demonic Shadow Figures ***
00:39:58.141 = The Watseka Wonder
00:43:52.791 = 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:
“Homicidal Sleepwalking” by Fiona Guy for Crime Traveller: http://bit.ly/2nhu93j
“The Other Company” by Marc Eulo Boni for Ghost Attic: http://bit.ly/2lN5UcS
“Strange Stories of Mass Hysteria” by Doug MacGowan for Historic Mysteries: http://bit.ly/2lIJ8mp
“UFO's & Demonic Shadow Figures” by Joe Akins for Weird Darkness
“The Watseka Wonder” by Troy Taylor for American Hauntings: http://bit.ly/2nOK1dE, with a short paragraph at the end from Weirdo family member Mathew R.
(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 22, 2018

Six members of a space expedition find themselves hunted by a shapeshifting monster that appears from nowhere on a desolate alien world, seeming to pick them off one by one.

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

SOURCES and RESOURCES: “Six Frightened Men” by Randall Garrett (Originally published in ‘Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy’ June 1957)

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

Midnight In The Macabre (MITM), originally aired: October 07, 2026

LIKE WHAT YOU’RE HEARING? WEIRD DARKNESS posts episodes 7 DAYS A WEEK! Listen FREE wherever you get podcasts or visit https://weirddarkness.com/listen. • Paranormal • True Crime • Ghosts • UFOs • Cryptids • Unexplained • Want even more? Become an OFFICIAL WEIRDO for commercial-free episodes, bonus episodes, weeknight live chats, audiobooks & more at https://WeirdDarkness.com/OFFICIAL

The skyrockets at a Mars casino town's Marsy Gras keep ruining $1,000 photographs of the night sky at the Mars Observatory, so the astronomers start offering tourists free horoscopes, and every one warns the reader he'll lose consistently at Harvey's Club.

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

SOURCES and RESOURCES: “$1,000 A Plate” by Jack McKenty: https://amzn.to/3NcdSFo

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

Midnight In The Macabre (MITM), originally aired: October 06, 2026

LIKE WHAT YOU’RE HEARING? WEIRD DARKNESS posts episodes 7 DAYS A WEEK! Listen FREE wherever you get podcasts or visit https://weirddarkness.com/listen. • Paranormal • True Crime • Ghosts • UFOs • Cryptids • Unexplained • Want even more? Become an OFFICIAL WEIRDO for commercial-free episodes, bonus episodes, weeknight live chats, audiobooks & more at https://WeirdDarkness.com/OFFICIAL

On The Joe Rogan Experience, former intelligence officer David Grusch described video of human-looking bodies at a crash site, passed along a secondhand account of a deadly clash with living reptilians, and alleged a criminal ring inside a federal agency. Author Timothy Alberino says most of it should come as no shock to longtime UFO researchers, and Grusch predicts the evidence he says exists, none of it public yet, will come out before President Trump leaves office.

EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources and original article): https://weirddarkness.com/DavidGruschOnRogan

READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4jekr2mw

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: October 05, 2026

LIKE WHAT YOU’RE HEARING? WEIRD DARKNESS posts episodes 7 DAYS A WEEK! Listen FREE wherever you get podcasts or visit https://weirddarkness.com/listen. • Paranormal • True Crime • Ghosts • UFOs • Cryptids • Unexplained • Want even more? Become an OFFICIAL WEIRDO for commercial-free episodes, bonus episodes, weeknight live chats, audiobooks & more at https://WeirdDarkness.com/OFFICIAL