Afleveringen
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A chemist, lost on a lonely country road at nightfall, keeps glimpsing a laughing little girl no one else in the isolated mansion will admit exists.
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)âŠ
00:00:00.000 = Show Open
00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, âChildish Laughterâ (April 10, 1978)
00:44:45.782 = Mystery In The Air, âMask of Medusaâ (September 04, 1947) ***WD
01:13:44.235 = Molle Mystery Theater, ââFurther Adventures of Kenny Andrewsâ (May 10, 1946) ***WD
01:43:04.502 = Mr. Keen, âThe Strange Displayâ (March 16, 1944) ***WD
02:11:54.148 = Murder at Midnight, âDead Handâ (May 01, 1950) ***WD
02:35:49.001 = The Black Museum, âThe Straight Razorâ (November 11, 1952) ***WD
03:01:04.966 = Mysterious Traveler, âThe Haunted Trailerâ (June 03, 1952)
03:33:30.017 = CBC Nightfall, âLove And The Lonely Oneâ (July 04, 1980) ***WD
03:56:45.698 = Obsession, âTailored For Murderâ (February 26, 1951) ***WD
04:24:03.027 = Origin of Superstition, âBoogey Manâ (1935)
04:38:19.922 = Pat Novak For Hire, âRubin Callaways Picturesâ (March 13, 1949)
05:06:43.866 = 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/WDRR0718 -
A nervous first visit to his girlfriend's rural Alberta home turns into a late-night hunting trip with her father, and something in the pines is watching them both.
EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/mitm-thepack
SOURCES and RESOURCES:
âThe Packâ by MisterNailBrain75: https://www.creepypasta.com/the-pack/
WeirdDarknessŸ is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.
Originally aired: July 19, 2026 -
Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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A child's mutilated torso surfaced from the Thames near Shakespeare's Globe in 2001, and more than two decades later no one has been convicted of killing the boy investigators could only call Adam.
EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/TorsoInTheThames
READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/3h6yrmk5
FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Most people, when they think of the end of their lives, want to feel that they have accomplished something of significance. To leave a lasting legacy. But it is much more rare for someone to accomplish something significant â after they are dead! (Done By The Dead) *** Mrs. Elizabeth G. Wharton was a pillar of society in Baltimore, Maryland in the late 1800s. That is, until she was accused of murdering General William Scott Ketchum. (The Baltimore Borgia) *** For every legitimate and fascinating find by geologists, there seems to be a fraudulent find somewhere else trying to fool the masses. This has been a problem since geology became a thing â and one of the most fascinating of these true tales is the one about Baringerâs Lying Stones. (The Lying Stones) *** A strange, ape-like creature with glowing eyes in England might really be, as some believe, a specter of the night. (Man-Monkey of the Night) *** Itâs hard to understand how human sacrifice has ever been a reality in any point in history â but what if you were to learn that evidence of it showed up in London, England⊠in 2001? (Torso In The River) *** A would-be geisha murders her lover⊠but the events leading up to and during the death make for a fascinatingly dark story. (The Murderess Geisha) *** When it comes to spectral animals, weâre more than familiar with black dogs or hell hounds, ghostly cats, horses carrying a headed or headless phantom, even a ghost bear rumored to haunt the Tower of London⊠but have you ever heard of the American Southwestâs ghost camels? (Americaâs Ghost Camels)
CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)âŠ
00:00:00.000 = Show Open
00:02:24.699 = Americaâs Ghost Camels
00:09:18.422 = Done By The Dead ***
00:22:00.457 = The Baltimore Borgia ***
00:27:35.655 = The Lying Stones
00:36:08.415 = Torso In The River ***
00:42:13.573 = The Murderess Geisha
00:54:03.666 = Man-Monkey of the Night ***
00:58:48.550 = 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:
âMan-Monkey Of The Nightâ by Nick Redfern for MysteriousUniverse.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/bdhdevrr
âDone By The Deadâ by Kyle D. Walter for ListVerse.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/y62afnj6
âAmericaâs Ghost Camelsâ by Kathy Weiser-Alexander for LegendsOfAmerica.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p979beb
âThe Baltimore Borgiaâ by Robert Wilhelm for MurderByGaslight.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/y2whacb9
âTorso In The Riverâ by Richard Hoskins for MysteryConfidential.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/bdd5u543
âThe Murderess Geishaâ by Dr. Romeo Vitelli for Providentia: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yzy4v3wy
âThe Lying Stonesâ by Brent Swancer for MysteriousUniverse.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p854d9e
(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.)
WeirdDarknessŸ is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.
Originally aired: January, 2021
This episode of Weird Darkness moves from ghost camels haunting the Arizona desert to corpses that kept making history after death, a Baltimore poisoning that gripped a courtroom for weeks, a professor fooled by carved stones, a child's murder in the Thames that London police have never solved, a Tokyo geisha who killed the man she loved, and a glowing-eyed creature on an English canal bridge.It opens in the American southwest, where the U.S. War Department imported some seventy-two camels in 1857 to haul supplies, only to turn the animals loose in the desert when the Civil War broke out and the soldiers tired of their foul temper and habit of spooking horses. Wild camels roamed Arizona for decades afterward, and one became legend as the Red Ghost â a beast blamed for trampling a woman to death in 1883 and later seen carrying a dead man lashed to its back, a rider who eventually decayed until a human skull dropped from the saddle in front of a group of startled prospectors. An Arizona farmer finally shot the animal in 1893, still wearing the leather straps that had held its corpse rider in place.From there the episode turns to figures who kept shaping the world after they died. A gang of Chicago counterfeiters led by "Big Jim" Kennally plotted in 1876 to steal Abraham Lincoln's body from his Springfield tomb and ransom it for a jailed engraver, foiled by a Secret Service informant working for the very agency Lincoln himself had signed into existence. A grave robber broke into George Washington's crypt at Mount Vernon in 1830 hunting the president's skull and made off with the wrong one. The British philosopher Jeremy Bentham left instructions to have his body dissected and mummified, and it sits on display at University College London to this day. And in the ninth century Pope Stephen VI dug up his predecessor Formosus, dressed the rotting corpse in papal vestments, propped it up for trial, found it guilty, and had it thrown into the Tiber.Next comes Baltimore in 1871, where Elizabeth Wharton, a respected society widow, hosted General William Scott Ketchum in her home on Hamilton Place until he fell suddenly ill and died with twenty grains of tartar emetic in his stomach â fifteen is enough to kill. Police discovered she had bought sixty grains days earlier, and a financial advisor named Eugene Van Ness nearly died the same way after she served him a drink. Her forty-two-day poison trial in Annapolis exhausted the medical and chemical experts of the day, and after deliberating through the night the jury acquitted her of murder.The episode then crosses to Germany, where Johann Beringer, a celebrated professor at the University of WĂŒrzburg, spent 1725 collecting strange carved stones dug up on Mount Eibelstadt by teenage boys he had hired â figures of birds, lizards, comets, and the name of God rendered in Hebrew. Convinced they were the handiwork of God himself, he published a book on them called the Lithographiae Wirceburgensis, only to learn the nearly two thousand stones had been planted by two envious colleagues, J. Ignatz Roderick and Johann Georg von Eckhart, who thought him an arrogant know-it-all and wanted to humble him.From an academic hoax the episode moves to an unsolved horror. On September 21st, 2001, a child's headless, limbless torso surfaced from the Thames near the Globe Theatre, wrapped in orange cloth, and London's Metropolitan Police could give the boy no name but Adam. Forensic analysis of poison and minerals in his remains traced him to the Benin region of Nigeria and showed he had been paralyzed and drained of blood in what investigators believed was a muti ritual killing. Nelson Mandela made an international appeal for information, and traffickers including Kingsley Ojo and a caregiver named Joyce Osagiede were investigated, but no one has ever been convicted and the boy's true identity has never been confirmed.The episode carries that darkness into 1936 Tokyo, where Sada Abe strangled her lover Kichizo Ishida in an inn after a days-long affair, then took a kitchen knife to his body and carried a severed part of him away in her handbag. Her capture two days later set off a national obsession the papers called "Sada mania," and her testimony about killing the man she refused to share became a bestseller in a country where such candor was scandalous. She was sentenced to six years, served her time as a model prisoner, and vanished from public life sometime after 1970.The episode closes on a cold English night in January 1879, when a furniture hauler crossing Bridge 39 over the Shropshire Union Canal near the village of Ranton was charged by a shaggy, ape-like creature with glowing eyes that leapt onto his cart and terrified his horse. When he swung his whip at the thing, the lash passed straight through its body, and the creature bolted down toward the canal and vanished. The folklorist Charlotte Burne later learned from the village constable that the sightings had begun only days after a man drowned in that same canal, in a place where people believed a violent death could send someone back in the shape of a beast. -
Max spends his Friday nights broadcasting homemade radio signals toward the Kuiper Belt hoping to reach alien life, and one summer evening, something finally answers back.
Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://pod.link/1655277373
Find more family-friendly frights and creepy games to play on our website at http://MicroTerrors.com!
Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/microterrors
Other stories, novels, and more from author Scott Donnelly: https://amzn.to/3LymHaU
Other narrations, podcasts, and audiobooks from voice artist Darren Marlar: https://WeirdDarkness.com
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
Weird Darkness©, 2026
Micro Terrors: Scary Stories for Kidsâą, 2026#MicroTerrors #WeirdDarkness -
A late-shift barista alone in a small-town cafe finds himself watched by a bald, mud-smeared stranger in a spotless black suit â a man who leaks something dark from his mouth and refuses to leave.
EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/mitm-blacksludge
SOURCES and RESOURCES: âBlack Sludgeâ by Time Freak: https://www.creepypasta.com/black-sludge/
WeirdDarknessŸ is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.
Originally aired: July 17, 2026 -
Travelers on the Kansas trail stopped at a lonely inn run by a family of Spiritualists â and the ones who sat in the seat nearest the curtain were never seen leaving it.
đ” Stick around to the end of the episode for a CROSSROADS HAINT song about the Benders!
READ A DEEP-DIVE ARTICLE ABOUT THE BENDERS: https://weirddarkness.com/bloody-benders
EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/bloodybenders
READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yckuftrv
FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: When you think of monsters in America, you probably think of Bigfoot in the American Northwest â or perhaps the Chupacabra in the South. Maybe you think of Dogman in the upper Midwest. But people donât typically think of the American lakes and shores, where we have our own collection of monsters and sea serpents. (American Sea Monsters) *** As the saying goes â donât do the crime if you canât do the time. But once in a while the punishment goes far beyond what the crime calls for. (Cruel and Unusual Punishments) *** Marilyn Monroe was found dead of a drug overdose on August 5, 1962. And while the facts of her death are shocking, her troubling childhood wasnât pretty either. Weâll look at the life and death of this Hollywood bombshell. (The Troubled Life And Shocking Death of Marilyn Monroe) *** Weâll take a look at, not the very first serial killer - but the first serial killer FAMILY in America! The bloody Benders! (Americaâs First Serial Killer Family)
CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)âŠ
00:00:00.000 = Show Open
00:01:45.702 = American Sea Monsters
00:15:00.217 = The Troubled Life and Shocking Death of Marilyn Monroe ***
00:36:04.254 = Cruel and Unusual Punishments ***
00:46:15.542 = Americaâs First Serial Killer Family
00:54:12.123 = Show Close
= Song: âDonât Stay at the Bendersâ by Crossroads Haint (https://weirddarkness.com/music)
*** = 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:
âAmerican Sea Monstersâ by Charles M. Skinner, posted at LegendsOfAmerica.com:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/ycy9tdes
âCruel and Unusual Punishmentsâ by Jonathan Hastad for ListVerse.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/y994jmsf
âThe Troubled Life And Shocking Death of Marilyn Monroeâ by Margarita Hirapetian: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/55bv7naw, and Kelly Kreiss: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/432bykfc for Ranker.com
âAmericaâs First Serial Killer Familyâ by Miss Celania for MentalFloss.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yz7mbn7v
(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.)
WeirdDarknessŸ is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.
Originally aired: January, 2021
This episode of Weird Darkness travels from the sea serpents and lake monsters lurking in American waters to the drug overdose that killed Marilyn Monroe, through history's most gruesome execution methods, and out to a lonely Kansas inn run by the country's first family of serial killers.It opens with a survey of American sea monsters drawn from Charles Skinner's 1896 writings, cataloguing the hundred-foot serpent sighted off Cape Ann and Nahant, Massachusetts as far back as 1638, the fifty-foot finned snakes two men reported battling in Devil's Lake, Wisconsin in 1892, the leonine-skulled creature three women watched churn the Wabash River at Huntington, Indiana, and the Native legends behind them â the Huron horned serpent Okniont, the child-drowning Amhuluk of Oregon, and the water-devils of Crater Lake who hurled a Klamath man from a two-thousand-foot cliff.From there it turns to the troubled life and death of Marilyn Monroe, found dead of a barbiturate overdose on August 5th, 1962 at her home on Fifth Helena Drive in Brentwood â a death coroner Thomas Noguchi complicated when he found no pills in her stomach and learned her organ samples had been destroyed before toxicology testing. The episode traces the conspiracy theories that grew from her final phone calls to Peter Lawford and Joe DiMaggio Jr., the strange gap between when housekeeper Eunice Murray found her and when police were called at 4:25 am, and the 1982 review by District Attorney John Van de Kamp that ruled out foul play, before reaching back into the childhood of Norma Jeane Baker â the schizophrenic mother, the orphanage, the string of foster homes, and the marriage at sixteen that pulled her out of the system.Next comes a tour of cruel and unusual punishments across history, from the Norse Blood Eagle carved into a father's murderer to the Chinese lingchi or death by a thousand cuts, execution by elephant in India and Thailand, being blown from the mouth of a cannon in British-controlled Punjab, boiling alive under Henry VIII, the Roman poena cullei that sewed a parricide into a sack with a rooster, snake, monkey, and dog, and scaphism â the horror of being force-fed milk and honey, smeared with the rest, and left between two boats to be eaten alive.The episode closes with the Bloody Benders, the Spiritualist family who settled near the Osage Trail outside Cherryvale, Kansas in 1870 and turned their one-room inn into a slaughterhouse, seating travelers against a canvas curtain and crushing their skulls with a hammer from behind it before dropping the bodies through a trap door to a blood-soaked cellar. When the prominent Dr. William York vanished off the trail in March 1873 and his brothers â a colonel and a Kansas senator â came looking, the Benders fled, leaving behind a garden of buried corpses that may have numbered as many as twenty-one, and though real names later surfaced (Pa was John Flickinger, Kate was Eliza Griffith), no one ever learned where the family went or brought back proof of their fate. -
Something new is coming to Weird Darkness. Starting this Friday night, horror fiction gets its own identity — a dedicated series called Midnight in the Macabre, airing primarily Friday nights at the stroke of twelve. Classic horror stories, creepypastas, and modern horror fiction, plus a little horror-tinged science fiction, all under one clearly-marked banner. In this episode, Darren explains why he's making the change, what it means for listeners who love the fiction, and what it means for those who come to Weird Darkness strictly for the true crime, real hauntings, and dark history. The regular Weird Darkness episodes stay purely non-fiction — every one a true story — while Midnight in the Macabre carries all the fiction. Each series has its own cover art and its own look, so one glance at the thumbnail tells you exactly what you're about to hear before you ever press play. The first Midnight in the Macabre drops this Friday night at midnight.
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Los Angeles hides an almost overwhelming number of ghosts behind its glamour, from the piano-playing spirit at Hollywood's Magic Castle and the body found in the Cecil Hotel's water tank to the sex-magick rocket scientist, Father Yod's robed disciples, and the cults that made the City of Angels a capital of the occult.
EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/hauntedla
READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p98dtw7
CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)âŠ
00:00:00.000 = Show Open
00:01:24.727 = Hollywoodâs Haunted Magic Castle
00:09:13.905 = Los Angelesâ Haunted Hotels ***
00:27:05.636 = Los Angeles: City of the Occult ***
00:51:50.907 = L.A. Ghosts ***
01:01:24.337 = 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:
âHollywoodâs Haunted Magic Castleâ by Christina Sanza for Graveyard Shift: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/nhdf2f29
âLos Angelesâ Haunted Hotelsâ by Andy Miller from Weird History: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/mvbdcwac
âL.A. Ghostsâ by Jen Lennon for Graveyard Shift: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/39xypc6c
âLos Angeles: City Of The Occultâ by Christine Aprile for Weird History: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4y9rj77r
(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.)
WeirdDarknessŸ is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.
Originally aired: April, 2021
This episode of Weird Darkness turns to Los Angeles, the City of Angels, and the almost overwhelming number of ghosts, haunted hotels, and occult history hiding behind its glamour, from the Magic Castle and the Cecil Hotel to the sex-magick rocket scientist Jack Parsons, cult leader Father Yod, and the ghosts of Griffith Park.It opens inside Hollywood's Magic Castle at 7001 Franklin Avenue, the private clubhouse of the Academy of Magical Arts, where the Houdini Séance Room honors a magician who spent his career trying to debunk spiritualism and left his wife Bess the code phrase "Rosabelle, believe" for contact from the afterlife. The castle carries the story of Irma, the piano-playing ghost said to have died in 1932 and returned to the mansion built in 1909 by Rollin B. Lane, along with the ghost of magician Dai Vernon near his favorite seat in the Palace of Prestidigitation, the unidentified girl in the Haunted Cellar, and a Halloween 2011 fire that started at the exact time of Houdini's 1926 death and gutted the Dante Room while sparing the Houdini Room.From there the episode checks into the haunted hotels of Los Angeles, beginning with the Knickerbocker, which opened in Hollywood in July of 1929, hosted Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio on their honeymoon, and staged Bess Houdini's tenth and final rooftop séance the night an isolated thunderstorm struck the building alone. It moves through the Ambassador on Wilshire Boulevard, where Robert F. Kennedy was gunned down by Sirhan Sirhan in the kitchen on June 4, 1968, the Rosslyn Annex with its forgotten Prohibition speakeasy, the Alexandria and its bricked-off phantom wing, the Biltmore where Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia, was last seen before her 1947 murder, and the Cecil Hotel, home to serial killers Richard Ramirez and Jack Unterweger and the site where guest Elisa Lam was found dead in the rooftop water tank in 2013 after guests complained the water tasted strange.Next the episode traces L.A.'s long history of the occult, running from Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard and his early Pasadena partnership with rocket scientist Jack Parsons, who performed the "Babalon Working" ritual and later died at 37 in a home laboratory explosion, to Charles Manson and the Family murders of August 1969 that killed Sharon Tate and six others, Carlos Castaneda and the Yaqui shaman Don Juan Matus who launched the New Age movement, and Jim Baker, the marine turned messiah Father Yod, who took fourteen wives and led the Source Family from a Hollywood Hills mansion. It covers avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger and the witch Marjorie Cameron, the 1920 LAPD raid on the Mazdaznan sun-worshipers, the love-cult of Edith Maida Lessing at Mount Helios, the Devil's Gate Dam in Pasadena, and the curse Petronilla Feliz laid on the land that became Griffith Park.The episode closes with a tour of famous L.A. ghosts: the more than one hundred jumpers off Pasadena's Colorado Street "suicide bridge," including Myrtle Ward, whose daughter survived the fall; the body parts Marines found in a freezer at the abandoned Rancho Los Amigos hospital in 2006; picnic table number 29 in Griffith Park, where a couple was crushed by a falling tree in 1976; Bela Lugosi's hearse drifting past his favorite cigar shop; the many spirits of the Queen Mary docked in Long Beach; the unsolved 1929 deaths of Ned Doheny and Hugh Plunkett at Greystone Mansion; the ghost of Superman actor George Reeves; and Bob Baker, still haunting his marionette theater alongside the dead puppeteers who worked there. -
A skeptical London professor sets out to expose a plain, lame hypnotist as a fraud, never suspecting that the woman he dismisses has already decided he belongs to her.
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)âŠ
00:00:00.000 = Show Open
00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, âThe Parasiteâ (April 07, 1978) ***WD
00:46:20.039 = Lux Radio Theater, âGhost And Mrs. Muirâ (December 01, 1947) ***WD
01:43:56.937 = Philip Marlowe, âMonkeyâs Uncleâ (March 07, 1950)
02:13:33.368 = Boston Blackie, âThe Worthington Ghostâ (March 19, 1946) ***WD
02:40:01.156 = The Black Mass, âBoarded Windowâ (February 12, 1964) ***WD
03:12:59.922 = Michael Shayne, âRecreate A Murderâ (May 28, 1945)
03:42:41.656 = Beyond Midnight, âSomething On His Mindâ (May 30, 1969)
04:11:54.838 = MindWebs, âThe Last Questionâ (March 05, 1983) ***WD
04:41:25.495 = Adventures In The Supernatural, âThe Mysterious Carriageâ (1932) ***WD
05:05:51.277 = 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/WDRR0717 -
An unknown gunman murders the last of the wealthy Van Cleek line, and when two reporters break into the family's boarded-up mansion to photograph it before demolition, they find two people living inside as though it were still the 1890s.
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)âŠ
00:00:00.000 = Show Open
00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, âShark Baitâ (March 31, 1978) ***WD
00:46:07.462 = Haunting Hour, âHomicide Houseâ (May 27, 1945) ***WD
01:10:57.188 = Hermitâs Cave, âBuried Aliveâ (October 06, 1940)
01:35:16.710 = Mystery is My Hobby, âKid Brown Is KOâdâ (1945-1950)
01:59:17.833 = Sherlock Holmes, âStrange Case of the Persecuted Millionaireâ (February 10, 1947)
02:28:34.256 = Mystery House, âMurder Me Gentlyâ (May 12, 1946)
02:54:20.575 = Incredible But True, âThe Temple of Bealâ (1950-1951) ***WD
02:58:04.060 = Inner Sanctum, âColor Blind Formulaâ (December 06, 1944) ***WD
03:24:45.575 = Jeff Regan, âThe Man Who Liked The Mountainsâ (August 07, 1948) ***WD (LQ)
03:54:30.797 = The Key, âLost In The Amazonâ (1956) ***WD
04:19:43.987 = Lights Out, âBabyâ (March 28, 1941) ***WD
04:44:12.185 = Macabre, âMidnight Horsemanâ (December 11, 1961) ***WD (LQ)
05:11:20.993 = 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/WDRR0716 -
A Soho painter can't stop painting the same 19th-century woman â until she starts talking back, insisting she was murdered and thrown down a Manhattan well, and demanding he hear the truth the courtroom refused to believe.
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)âŠ
00:00:00.000 = Show Open
00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, âThe Ghost In The Wellâ (March 28, 1978) ***WD
00:46:05.307 = The Strange Dr. Weird, âSecret Roomâ (February 13, 1945) ***WD
00:57:55.158 = Eleventh Hour, âCast Giant Shadowâ (ADU)
01:21:29.218 = Escape, âEvening Primroseâ (August 25, 1949)
01:49:36.901 = Exploring Tomorrow, âSpace Baby / aka First Baby in Spaceâ (June 18, 1958) ***WD
02:09:35.315 = Dark Fantasy, âDead Hands Reachingâ (May 22, 1942) ***WD
02:33:49.707 = BBC Fear on 4, âThe Monkeyâs Revengeâ (January 10, 1991)
03:03:18.954 = Theater Five, âA Nothinâ Placeâ (November 20, 1964)
03:26:01.748 = Guests of Doom, âProgram 11 & 12â (1930s) ***WD
03:51:44.458 = The Hall of Fantasy, âHe Who Followsâ (March 11, 1950)
04:16:11.455 = Harry Lime, âLove Affairâ (September 14, 1951)
04:40:16.602 = BBC Haunted Tales of the Supernatural, âWhat Was Itâ (June 28, 1980) ***WD
05:07:37.608 = 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/WDRR0715 -
Sixteen children were found in a single room on Ohmer Street, and their mother had been delivering them in hospitals for seventeen years.
READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.com/siders-case
WeirdDarknessŸ is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.
Originally aired: July 15, 2026 -
In 1912, an axe killed all eight people sleeping in a Villisca, Iowa farmhouse, and the two men suspected of it â a traveling preacher and a business rival â both walked free.
EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/VilliscaReverendRival
READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p84usw4
FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Conspiracy theories, while often dark, can also be kind of humorous due to being so outlandishly unbelievable. For example⊠is the Earthâs moon artificial, and actually an extraterrestrial spaceship? Weâll look at the strange theory. (Could Our Moon Be An Alien Spaceship?) *** In 1912 one of the most brutal slayings in America took place in the small town of Villisca, Iowa⊠a murder so brutal that numerous documentaries have been made about it, books have been written, and amateur detectives have poured over the facts and suspects still trying to find out who the murderer was that swung the bloody axe. (The Unsolved Villisca Ax Murders) *** The President of the United States, no matter who is in the position at the time, is always in danger from those who would like to see someone else in office. Weâll hear on the news of the assassination attempts that came close, but we more often than not are completely unaware of the attempts and plans that have been thwarted â and some of those attempts to kill a sitting U.S. President have been extremely bizarre. (Bizarre Assassination Attempts on U.S. Presidents) *** Some Biblical accounts seem unbelievable and we tend to dismiss them as fantasies, or dreams of the person writing the events down. But what if some of the strange creatures described in the bible are actually real â but come from another dimension, or even outer space? (Are Extraterrestrials in the Bible?) *** If you are told there is a city that has been built specifically for the dead, you probably think of some ancient culture that worshipped their ancestors. Personally, I think of pyramids in Egypt⊠but I never wouldâve thought of the suburbs in California, USA. (Californiaâs City of the Dead)
CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)âŠ
00:00:00.000 = Show Open
00:02:33.183 = Could Our Moon Be An Alien Spaceship?
00:08:21.362 = The Unsolved Villisca Axe Murders ***
00:20:59.742 = Californiaâs City of the Dead
00:31:12.990 = Are Extraterrestrials in the Bible? ***
00:39:47.780 = Bizarre Assassination Attempts on U.S. Presidents
00:48:06.915 = 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:
âCould Our Moon Be An Alien Spaceship?â posted at Anomalien.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/bdhz5563
âThe Unsolved Villisca Ax Murdersâ by Joe Turner for HistoricMysteries.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8mnfp6, and from HauntedRoom.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/36b6k2h4
âCaliforniaâs City of the Deadâ by Hugh Landman for Ranker.comâs Graveyard Shift:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yckrxjzd
âAre Extraterrestrials in the Bible?â by Ellen Lloyd for AncientPages.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/mr3d8dpk
âBizarre Assassination Attempts on U.S. Presidentsâ by Richard Stockton for AllThatsInteresting.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/26avtuhr
(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.)
WeirdDarknessŸ is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.
Originally aired: January, 2022
This episode of Weird Darkness runs from a Cold War theory that the Moon is a hollow alien spacecraft, through the 1912 Villisca ax murders that left eight people dead in a single Iowa night, into the California cemetery city of Colma where the dead outnumber the living a thousand to one, on to a former NASA engineer's claim that the prophet Ezekiel witnessed a UFO, and closing with some of the strangest attempts ever made on the lives of sitting U.S. presidents.It opens with the Spaceship Moon Theory, proposed in July of 1970 by Soviet Academy of Sciences members Michael Vasin and Alexander Shcherbakov, who argued the Moon is a hollowed-out planetoid engineered by unknown beings and steered into Earth's orbit. Darren walks through the claims stacked behind the idea â the Moon ringing like a bell for more than an hour after the Apollo 12 crew crashed their lunar module into it on November 20th, 1969, craters of wildly different widths that all share the same shallow depth, moon rocks dated older than the Earth itself, and the near-perfect circular orbit that lets the Moon exactly cover the Sun during an eclipse.From there the episode turns to Villisca, Iowa, and the night of June 9th, 1912, when someone entered the home of Josiah and Sarah Moore and killed all six members of the family along with two young house guests, Lena and Ina Stillinger, striking each victim with an axe as they slept. Darren lays out the crime scene that neighbor Mary Peckham and Josiah's brother Ross discovered the next morning â cloth draped over the mirrors, two cigarette butts in the attic, a slab of bacon left beside the Stillinger girls, and a bloody basin in the kitchen â and the suspects who never brought closure, from traveling minister Reverend George Kelly, who spoke of eight dead bodies before the news broke and later gave a confession the court dismissed, to Josiah's embittered business rival Frank Jones. More than a century on, the boarded-up house survives as a museum where investigators report a heaviness on the stairs, drifting fog, and the sound of dripping blood after the 2 a.m. train whistle.Next the show travels to Colma, California, the suburb built for the dead, where roughly 1,600 living residents share the ground with more than 1.5 million graves across 17 cemeteries. Darren traces how San Francisco banned burials in 1900 and evicted its dead, triggering the largest grave relocation in history after the 1906 earthquake, with more than 150,000 bodies hauled south and tens of thousands reburied in mass graves when families wouldn't pay the ten-dollar transfer fee. He points out the famous names resting there â Wyatt Earp, Levi Strauss, William Randolph Hearst, Joe DiMaggio, brain-injury case Phineas Gage, and self-declared Emperor of the United States Joshua Norton â alongside the darker footnotes of looted skeletons, discarded headstones repurposed as gutters and seawalls, and the town's own gallows-humor slogan, "it's great to be alive in Colma."The episode then examines whether extraterrestrials appear in the Bible, centering on the vision of the prophet Ezekiel by the river Chebar and the four winged creatures with human hands, calf-shaped feet, and four faces that rose out of a fiery whirlwind. Darren details how former NASA chief engineer Joseph F. Blumrich, honored in 1972 for his work on the Saturn and Apollo programs, set out to disprove Erich von DĂ€niken's ancient-astronaut claims and instead became convinced, arguing in his book The Spaceships of Ezekiel that the prophet had described a landing spacecraft â rotor blades, fairing housings, landing legs with round footpads, and remote mechanical arms rendered in the only words an ancient man had for them.The episode closes with a run of bizarre presidential assassination attempts, from John Hinckley's 1981 shooting of Ronald Reagan over an obsession with actress Jodie Foster, to the 2013 ricin letters mailed to the Obama White House by a man framing an Elvis impersonator over an online feud, to truck driver Samuel Byck's 1974 plot to hijack a DC-9 and crash it into the White House to kill Richard Nixon. Darren ends on the two women who tried to kill Gerald Ford seventeen days apart in September of 1974 â Manson follower Lynette Fromme, who never chambered a round, and Sarah Jane Moore, whose shot missed by six inches because her replacement revolver's sights were misaligned. -
Read an even deeper-dive into the werewolf trials here: https://weirddarkness.com/wolves-on-trial/
Across four centuries of European court records, dozens of men, women, and children confessed to shedding their skins for wolf-hides and hunting under the moon â and the magistrates who heard them believed every word.
EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/RealWerewolfTrials
READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/43rjhjvp
FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Weâre all familiar with the concept of werewolves â they are all over pop culture, movies, television, comic books, novels, and every other medium you could possibly imagine. And while they are considered fictional, or at least in the realm of cryptids, that doesnât mean there arenât true stories of reported werewolves in history. (Real Historic Accounts of Werewolves) *** Just the idea of going to prison is enough to scare people into living a squeaky-clean life, but if youâre one of the most dangerous prisoners known to exist, ordinary prison would look like a vacation as compared to life in the Florence ADX Supermax Prison. (Life In The Supermax) *** What was supposed to be a two day trip turned into a maritime mystery when the ship, the MV Joyita was discovered floating with no crew on board. What happened? (The Mysterious Abandonment of the MV Joyita)
CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)âŠ
00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding
00:01:37.814 = Show Open
00:03:32.506 = Real Historic Accounts of Werewolves, Part 1
00:28:44.978 = Real Historic Accounts of Werewolves, Part 2 ***
00:42:51.099 = The Mysterious Abandonment of the MV Joyita ***
01:02:49.562 = Life In The Supermax ***
01:15:37.977 = 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:
âReal Historic Accounts of Werewolvesâ by Miss Celania for MentalFloss.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p84ut66, Nick Redfern for Mysterious Universe: http://bit.ly/2MFFx5p, WolvesRox on Playbuzz.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p9bjcht, and Tim Flight for HistoricCollection.com:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p87s85s
The short fable, âThe Werewolfâ was written by Angela Carter: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yckt8fn6
âThe Mysterious Abandonment of the MV Joyitaâ by Marcus Lowth for UFOInsight.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8sux2j
âLife In The Supermaxâ by Jacob Shelton for Ranker.comâs Unspeakable Times: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8u82p9
(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.)
WeirdDarknessŸ is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.
Originally aired: January, 2022
Weird Darkness digs into three dark corners this time out â the real men and women who were tried and executed as werewolves across Early Modern Europe, the South Pacific ghost ship MV Joyita found drifting with all 25 aboard vanished, and daily life inside America's most locked-down prison, the ADX Supermax in Florence, Colorado.It opens with the documented history of lycanthropy trials, tracing the term back through the Old English werwulf and the Greek myth of King Lycaon, whom Ovid recorded being turned into a wolf by Zeus. From there the episode walks through the real cases: the Gandillon family, burned in France in 1598 after the witch hunter Henri Boguet arranged their arrest; Thiess of Livonia, an eighty-year-old man tried in 1692 who claimed to be a benevolent werewolf who fought the Devil for the year's harvest; Peter Stubbe, the "Werewolf of Bedburg," broken on the wheel and beheaded on October 31st, 1589; Gilles Garnier, the "Hermit of Dole," burned alive in 1573 for killing and eating children; the Werewolves of Poligny; the Wolf of Ansbach, an ordinary wolf hanged from a gibbet in a wig and beard in 1685; teenaged Hans the Werewolf, executed in Estonia in 1651; fourteen-year-old Jean Grenier of Gascony, spared the stake and sent to a friary; the "Demon Tailor" of Chalons; and the more modern Spanish serial killer Manuel Blanco Romasanta, the "Werewolf of Allariz," who used lycanthropy as his legal defense, alongside the Ludwigslust and Angers cases and the cannibal beggar Swiatek of Poland.From there the show turns to the MV Joyita, the yacht built in 1931 in Los Angeles for director Roland West and named for his wife, Jewel Carmen. On October 3rd, 1955, she left Apia, Samoa, for the Tokelau Islands carrying 16 crew and nine passengers, and vanished; found over a month later on November 10th by the merchant captain Gerald Douglas, she was drifting more than 600 miles off course, partially submerged but afloat thanks to her cork-lined refrigerated hold. Investigators found the cabin lights on, the clocks stopped at 10:25, the radio tuned to the distress frequency, a doctor's bag holding a scalpel and blood-stained bandages, mattresses stacked over the engine, and all four escape craft gone â with the cargo, and all 25 people, never recovered. Captain Thomas Miller took the blame for sailing on one engine, but the theories that followed ran from mutiny to Japanese fishermen, Soviet submarines, pirates, and insurance fraud, with researcher Robin Maugham laying out the mutiny case in his book The Joyita Mystery.The episode closes inside the United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility in Florence, Colorado, the ADX Supermax that has held Ted Kaczynski, Terry Nichols, Robert Hanssen, Ramzi Yousef, and Zacarias Moussaoui since 1994. Inmates spend 23 hours a day alone in 7-by-12-foot concrete cells with a single 4-inch window angled so the sky and the surrounding mountains stay out of view, communicating through drained toilet pipes and "finger handshakes" through recreation-cage fencing. Former inmates and staff â including warden Robert Hood, who called the architecture itself the control, and prisoner Travis Dusenbury â describe a facility that strips away nearly every trace of ordinary life, the suicide of mentally ill inmate Jose Vega in 2010, and the ongoing lawsuits over medical and mental-health treatment that forced ADX to reevaluate its practices in the mid-2010s. -
The man who invented solid rocket fuel and helped found the Jet Propulsion Laboratory spent his nights performing sex rituals in a Pasadena mansion with a struggling science fiction writer named L. Ron Hubbard, trying to incarnate a goddess who would give birth to the Antichrist.
EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/RocketMagic
READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/9enkrtn5
FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: The creator of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard, was so fascinated by the occult, he believed he was the actual devil himself⊠and was even upset when his own son turned out to not be the antichrist. (The Devil L. Ron Hubbard) *** Scientology is already scary and mysterious â which may not be surprising once you learn how much black magic had to do with its creation. (Scientology and the Occult) *** A house in the Altamaha River Swamp in Georgia becomes darker and more dangerous than the swamp itself. (A Terrifying Haunting in Georgia) *** Was a well known UFOlogist murdered shortly before a scheduled speech he was about to give? (The Bleached Computer of a UFO Researcher) *** Some believe we all have a guardian angel watching over us. One infamous yet respected witch hunter many years ago wrote that we all â each one of us â have a personal demon. And many people believed him. (The Demon Witch Hunter) *** For some time now, Area 51 has been seen as ground zero for conspiracies and government coverups. However, a plot of land in Utah has started to attract much of the same kind of attention. Welcome to Dugway â also known as Area 52. (Welcome to Area 52)
CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)âŠ
00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding
00:01:37.371 = Show Open
00:03:45.021 = Rocket Fuel, Sex Magic, and the Birth of Scientology
00:25:54.957 = A Terrifying Haunting In Georgia ***
00:34:49.445 = The Demon Witch Hunter
00:46:33.406 = The Bleached Computer of a UFO Researcher ***
00:50:09.122 = Area 52
01:00:20.603 = 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:
âScientology and the Occultâ by Annalee Newitz: http://bit.ly/31KIGnA
âThe Devil L. Ron Hubbardâ by Jacob Shelton: http://bit.ly/2ISSjIy
âA Terrifying Haunting In Georgiaâ by Brent Swancer: http://bit.ly/2Ip9m5Y
âThe Bleached Computer of a UFO Researcherâ by Paul Seaburn: http://bit.ly/2KpSyhm
âThe Demon Witch Hunterâ by Melissa Brinks: http://bit.ly/2MXHdaf
âWelcome to Area 52â by Hannah Collins: http://bit.ly/2WNDFY1
(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.)
WeirdDarknessŸ is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.
Originally aired: January, 2019
Weird Darkness moves through black magic, hauntings, demonology, unsolved death, and government secrecy in this episode, running from the occult roots of Scientology to a Utah military base that has earned the nickname Area 52.It opens with L. Ron Hubbard, the science fiction novelist who founded Scientology, and the claim from his own eldest son â Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, Jr., who left the church in 1959 and renamed himself Ronald DeWolf â that black magic sat at the inner core of the religion. In a 1983 Penthouse interview, DeWolf described a father deeply involved in the occult who did not worship Satan so much as believe he was Satan, the Beast 666 incarnate. The story runs through Hubbard's obsession with Aleister Crowley and the Ordo Templi Orientis, the "moonchild" ritual he and rocket scientist Jack Parsons attempted in Pasadena to conceive an astral child and bring the goddess Babalon into the world, the poltergeist activity that followed at the Parsons house, the alleged OT Level VIII passage in which Hubbard claimed the Antichrist mantle for himself, the numerology hidden in the New Era logo's two sixty-degree triangles, and the shared contempt both Hubbard and Crowley held for psychoanalysis even as both leaned on hypnosis and past-life regression to control their followers.From there the episode digs into Jack Parsons himself â the college-dropout chemist who invented solid rocket fuel, helped found the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and claimed to have summoned Satan at thirteen. Drawing on John Carter's Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons and Lawrence Wright's Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief, the story follows Parsons through the Pasadena mansion he filled with pagans, artists, and writers; the bonfires that drew police reports from the neighbors; the arrival of Hubbard, who slept with Parsons' girlfriend Betty; the red-headed artist Marjorie Cameron, whom both men decided was Babalon made flesh; Crowley's own disgust at the pair, whom he dismissed as goats in a letter; and the boat-buying scheme in Florida that cost Parsons his last twenty thousand dollars. Parsons died in 1952 handling explosives on his front porch, two years after Dianetics made Hubbard famous.Next comes the Surrency haunting, one of the most heavily witnessed poltergeist cases on record. In October of 1872, sawmill operator Allen Surrency returned to his two-story farmhouse on the edge of the Altamaha River Swamp in Georgia to find tumblers sliding off the slab, crockery shattering on the floor, and bricks, irons, and potatoes falling through the rooms of his own house. The activity never let up: clocks spinning backward, mirrors exploding, utensils bending in the family's hands, a pan of biscuits levitating out of the oven and flying out the back door, hot bricks raining down on his daughter Clementine, an andiron chasing his son across the room and then returning itself to the fireplace. Hundreds of visitors â reporters and a minister among them â watched objects fly in plain view. The haunting followed the family when they moved away, stopped abruptly with Allen's death in 1877, and the house burned down in 1925, leaving nothing behind but the orb of light still reported along the town's railway tracks.The episode then turns to Peter Binsfeld, the sixteenth-century German witch hunter whose enthusiasm for torture was matched by his taste for taxonomy. His De confessionibus maleficorum et sagarum laid out the Seven Princes of Hell â Lucifer for pride, Beelzebub for gluttony, Satan for wrath, Belphegor for sloth, Mammon for greed, Asmodeus for lust, and Leviathan for envy â and argued that each living person is shadowed by a personal demon who knows their habits intimately, the dark counterpart to a guardian angel. Binsfeld held that women were more prone to witchcraft, that girls under twelve and boys under fourteen were usually too young to be guilty, and that anyone who claimed to have seen a witch shapeshift had been deceived by the Devil.The unsolved death of British ufologist Max Spiers follows. Spiers died in Poland on July 16, 2016, days before a scheduled conspiracy conference appearance and shortly after reportedly vomiting two liters of black liquid, having texted his mother that he was in trouble and to investigate if anything happened to him. His death was ruled natural causes. At a pre-inquest review at Guildhall in Sandwich, Kent, in August of 2018, lawyers for his mother Vanessa Bates revealed that his laptop had been wiped clean and his phone's SIM card erased or removed before being returned to the family, with Spiers found dead on the couch of his girlfriend Monika Duval and the four-day inquest set for the Archbishops Palace in Maidstone.The episode closes at Dugway Proving Ground, the 800,000-acre Utah military installation that UFO researchers call Area 52. Founded during the second World War for biological and chemical weapons work, Dugway is best known for the 1968 VX nerve agent test that drifted into Skull Valley and killed thousands of sheep, an incident the Army compensated farmers for without accepting blame. Freedom of Information requests filed by MuckRock founder Michael Morisy surfaced records of entomological munitions â mosquitoes loaded with what the Army called inert pathogens and released over American civilian populations â and of soldiers used as test subjects. The story takes in the 2011 disappearance of Joseph Bushling, whose empty car, hat, and shoes turned up sixty-five miles from the main gate with no body ever found; the runway in the base's southern expansion that never appears on Dugway's own maps; Lockheed engineer Don Phillips and former CEO Ben Rich on flying saucer technology; and Steven Greer's claim in The Sirius Project that trillions in defense funding has been siphoned into a shadow government beyond the reach of the Department of Defense. -
The Master Constipator discovers another galaxy ripe for conquest and sets out to bring it under his rule, placing him on a collision course with Lord Primasludge. The story is a deliberately ridiculous space-opera adventure built around galactic tyrants, extravagant threats, absurd character names, and broad science-fiction parody.
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)âŠ
00:00:00.000 = Show Open
00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, âThe Pretend Personâ (March 27, 1978) ***WD
00:46:23.028 = CBC Mystery Theater, âThe Duelâ (September 18, 1967) ***WD
01:15:59.465 = Chet Chetters, âConquest of the Master Constipatorâ (1993)
01:46:42.173 = The Clock, âThe Bank Vaultâ (December 27, 1955)
02:12:13.607 = The Crime Club, âSun Is a Witnessâ (April 03, 1947)
02:42:07.075 = Crime Classics, âShrapnelled Body Charles Drew Sr.â (July 06, 1953)
03:11:50.167 = Danger Dr. Danfield, âMurder of Cora Rogersâ (September 01, 1946) ***WD
03:36:00.066 = Calling All Detectives, âMr. Frobish Pays to Have Himself Killedâ (September 11, 1947) ***WD
03:49:54.181 = The Devil and Mr. O, âOfficial Killerâ (January 07, 1972)
04:18:43.513 = Diary of Fate, âMarvin Thomas Entryâ (June 08, 1948) ***WD
04:47:48.773 = Dimension X, âThe Outer Limitâ (June 08, 1950)
05:15:46.853 = 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/WDRR0714 -
A discontented Long Island housewife and the forgettable corset salesman she seduced hatch a clumsy plot to murder her sleeping husband â a scheme so poorly executed that one famous newsman couldn't resist giving it a name.
==========
HOUR ONE: Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray devised a scheme to get rid of Ruthâs husband â and they planned it so well that, okay⊠actually no. They were so inept they were caught immediately, and even the police publicly called them incompetent. (The Dumb-Bell Murder) *** For over 2,000 years across South and Southeast Asia, trained elephants served as living instruments of execution, crushing condemned prisoners with calculated brutality under the control of their handlers. (Execution By Elephant) *** Before he became a Civil War general, Congressman Dan E. Sickles' scandalous murder trial changed our legal system forever. He said outright that he had killed his wifeâs lover. So how did he avoid being found guilty of the crime he admitted to committing? (How A Congressman Got Away With Murder) *** In 1150, two children were found near Woolpit in England â they wore strange clothes, spoke oddly, but the most identifiable characteristic for both children was their skin was green. The children themselves were a mystery â but what happened when they grew up? Did they marry? Did they have children? Could there be decedents of the green children of Woolpit living among us today? (Great Grandkids of Green Children) *** In the summer of 1518, a mysterious dancing plague seized the French town of Strasbourg, compelling hundreds to dance without rest for monthsâsome until they collapsed and diedâin a frenzy that baffled authorities and remains unexplained to this day. (Dancing Plague)
==========
HOUR TWO: When it comes to receiving the death sentence, history has given us several ways to go about the execution. Hanging, firing squad, gas chamber, being stoned to death or burned at the stake⊠but you have to be some whole new level of âhatedâ by the people if your death blow comes by way of molten gold being poured down your throat. (Death By Golden Throat) *** Typically, when you hear the phrase âhigh speed chaseâ, you think of law enforcement trying to catch the bad guys who are in a getaway vehicle. Perhaps after a bank robbery, or after blowing a stop sign and simply refusing to pull over. But have you heard about the time that the police were involved in a high-speed chase up to 100-miles-per hour, trying to catch up to a flying saucer? (The 100mph UFO Chase) *** When the Black Plague arrived at their doorsteps, the villagers were forced to choose between life or certain doom. Itâs the tragic tale of Englandâs Plague Village â the village of Eyam. (The Black Death Comes to Eyam) *** In the 1800s, women finding themselves âwith childâ but unmarried, were treated like second-class citizens or worse. And during a time when birth control was limited or even unavailable outside of the rhythm method, what was a girl to do if she found herself in such dire circumstances? Fortunately, there was a woman there ready to help â to take the baby off their hands and give it a good home. Or so everyone thought. (Minnie, The Baby Farmer) *** On frozen lakes near Manitowish Waters, a hooded figure appears to ice fishermen, silently guiding them to the best spots for a catch before vanishing into the winter air. (The Ice Fisherman Ghost)
==========
SUDDEN DEATH OVERTIME: âTom" and "Lena" are in a loving relationship and have a young child together. It sounds like the perfect family â except for one tiny detail about their relationship. Tom and Lena are biological brother and sister. (I Fell In Love With My Sister) *** In Norfolk, England the village of Eccles was slowly gobbled by the rising waters of the sea in the early 1600s. But even today, sometimes during a particularly heavy story, you can see St. Maryâs Church mysteriously reappear⊠bringing with it, the dead buried in the church graveyard who cannot find rest. (The Disappearing And Reappearing Village of Eccles) *** Lory Price and his wife Ethel mysteriously disappeared from Marion, Illinois. But then, sometimes that happens when you are mixed up with the mob or may have learned something you werenât supposed to. (The Vanishing of Lory Price) *** The Catacombs of St. Callixtus in Rome, Italy, hold the remains of sixteen popes, several martyrs, and around half a million Christians, and according to on author, a not-of-this world entity. (The Callixtus Catacombs Entity)
==========
SOURCES AND REFERENCES FROM TONIGHTâS SHOW:
âDeath By Golden Throatâ by Genevieve Carlton for Weird History https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/3586qeqk, Rachel Nuwer for Smithsonian Magazine https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/18pu2d9b, and Laurie L. Dove for History https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/3vy6r2a9
âThe Black Death Comes to Eyamâ by Stephanie Almazan for The Line Up: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/1aptirxk
âMinnie, The Baby Farmerâ from The Scare Chamber: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2eqd77xa
âThe 100MPH UFO Chaseâ from The Parajournal for The Times Online: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/ntcaqk3y
âThe Ice Fisherman Ghostâ by Charlie Hinz: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8nzemt
âThe Dumb-Bell Murderâ by Troy Taylor: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/jsut4w93 (includes photo)
âI Fell In Love With My Sisterâ by Jennifer Tillman for Vice: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/y2dmtp2e
âExecution by Elephantâ by Joanna Gillan for Ancient Origins: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8jj255
âThe Cursing of Christopher Caseâ by Gurnoor Kaur for Conspiracy Theories: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/145d147q
âThe Disappearing And Reappearing Village of Ecclesâ by Stacia Briggs for Eastern Daily Press:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/5fopg2hq
âThe Vanishing of Lory Priceâ by Troy Taylor from his book âBloody Illinoisâ: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/lsi06qet
âHow A Congressman Got Away With Murderâ by Genevieve Carlton for All Thatâs Interesting:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2jantfjj
âGreat Grandkids of Green Childrenâ from Ancient Code: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4u4xdypk
âThe Callixtus Catacombs Entityâ by Ellen Lloyd for Ancient Pages: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/aqhlme0r
âDancing Plagueâ by Cassandra Yorgey at HubPages: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/ycke4fwe
==========(Over time links seen above may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for material I use whenever possible. If I have overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it immediately. Some links may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)
==========
"I have come into the world as a light, so that no one who believes in me should stay in darkness." â John 12:46
==========
WeirdDarknessŸ, WeirdDarkness© 2026
==========
To become a Weird Darkness Radio Show affiliate, contact Radio America at [email protected], or call 800-807-4703 (press 2 or dial ext 250).
The podcast version of the syndicated weekend radio show posts Sunday night/Monday morning at midnight after the show has aired nationally on radio stations Sunday evening. -
Something tall and black is standing on the mountain above the Arctic outpost, it hasn't moved in days, and every man who sees it is a man who has something to answer for.
EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/shapeinthesnow
FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: A machinist ships out to an Arctic research outpost for a one-month government contract, keeping a journal at his wife's insistence to pass the time. The work is dull and the crew gets along. Then he sees something standing on the mountainside â tall, black, motionless, miles off â and finds he isn't the only man in camp who can see it. His roommate has heard of it before, from a grandfather who spent his life being watched by it, and who left behind a single line copied from an asylum patient's journal: âAll of our mistakes are never forgotten.â Day by day, the thing on the mountain is closer.
LISTEN ON PODCAST APPS:
Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.com/wdapps
*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*
SOURCES and RESOURCES:
https://www.creepypasta.com/forgotten_mistakes/
(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)
WeirdDarknessŸ is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.
Originally aired: February 01, 2024 -
In the quiet village of Maxley, where shadows stretch long and the dead refuse to rest, an unsuspecting community is about to uncover a horror that has slept for centuries.
EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/mrsamworth
READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/mr2n9c8m
FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: âMrs. Amworthâ by E.F. Benson *** âThe White Deathâ by Christina Skelton *** âMy Old Home Videos Showed Me a Life I Never Livedâ by Richard Saxon
CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)âŠ
00:00:00.000 = Show Open
00:01:28.161 = âThe White Deathâ by Christina Skelton
00:06:24.330 = âMy Old Home Videos Showed Me a Life I Never Livedâ by Richard Saxon ***
00:26:30.035 = âMrs. Amworthâ by E.F. Benson ***
01:03:48.287 = Show Close
*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad break
LISTEN ON PODCAST APPS:
Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.com/wdapps
*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*
SOURCES and RESOURCES:
âMrs. Amworthâ by E.F. Benson: https://tinyurl.com/yyvqdwub
âThe White Deathâ by Christina Skelton: https://tinyurl.com/yxjcujwx
âMy Old Home Videos Showed Me a Life I Never Livedâ by Richard Saxon: https://tinyurl.com/y4l9zzgq
(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)
WeirdDarknessŸ is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.
Originally aired: August 20, 2020
Weird Darkness returns with a night of urban legend, found-footage horror, and classic vampire fiction, moving from a South American death-spirit to a stack of home videos that shouldn't exist to an English village with a very sociable widow.
It opens with "The White Death" by Christina Skelton, told by a narrator sitting at his computer waiting to die. A friend's aunt, drunk the night before, finally explained how the boy's parents had died: they were doing mission work in a small South American country when a terrified man burst into the mission hospital claiming a Muerta blanca â the White Death, the White Devil Girl â had killed his sister and was coming for him. She was a girl with dead black eyes that wept bile, who moved without moving her legs, and who knocked on the doors and mirrors between her and her victim: once for the skin she uses to patch her own rotting flesh, twice for the muscle, three times for bones she carves into knives, four for the heart she wears around her neck, and on through the teeth, the eyes, and finally the soul. She can only find you if you saw her kill someone, or if someone tells you about her. The missionaries phoned the aunt about it that same night, and were found in the morning skinned and dismembered, their bodies covered in small, child-like handprints. The aunt was murdered the night she told the story, the friend died on the phone while the narrator listened to the door come off its hinges, and now the knocking has started on the narrator's own door â twenty-eight times on the front door, twenty-eight on the hall mirror, twenty-eight on the bedroom door.
From there the episode turns to "My Old Home Videos Showed Me a Life I Never Lived" by Richard Saxon, from Creepypasta.com. Adam Davies, thirty-something and unremarkable, digs a box of VHS tapes out of his parents' basement hoping nostalgia will shake loose whatever ambition he lost. The first tape looks like his childhood exactly as he remembers it, except for a dog named Doug he never owned and cannot recall, and except for the ending: a stranger with a camera follows him out of a bar on October 7th, 2006, and films him burning alive in a car wreck. Every tape after it does the same thing. His grandfather dies in 1999 instead of 1993, his first car changes from black to red, and the film always closes on Adam dying while an unspeaking cameraman watches â shot in the throat in an alley in 2002, drowned in a submerged car in 2004, bleeding out at the bottom of a cliff in 2005. His parents deny the tapes exist; their own footage, digitized and locked in a fireproof safe, ends with no deaths at all. Then Adam finds one labeled 1985 to 2021, watches his mother die in a hospital bed on December 17th, 2020, and watches himself open his own arm with a pocket knife in a motel room a month later while the cameraman films. He hands everything to the police, locks his doors, covers his windows â and an hour later his father calls to say his mother has collapsed in the bathroom.
The episode closes with Darren narrating E.F. Benson's 1922 vampire tale "Mrs. Amworth", set in the Sussex village of Maxley. Mrs. Amworth, the widow of an Indian civil servant who died at Peshawar, arrives to enliven a sleepy street of Georgian houses with luncheons, piano playing, and games of piquet â charming everyone except Francis Urcombe, a former Cambridge physiology professor who abandoned his chair to study vampirism and the other borderland subjects his colleagues had filed away as superstition. A plague of night-flying gnats bites the villagers on the throat, a gardener's son wastes away with two small punctures on his neck and no inflammation, and Urcombe keeps watch at a twenty-foot-high window where Mrs. Amworth's face appears in the dark. Her maiden name was Chaston â the name on the gravestones in Maxley's disused churchyard, and the name of the woman blamed for an outbreak of vampirism there three centuries earlier. Death does not end her, and the story finishes at dawn in the cemetery with a pick, a shovel, a coil of rope, and a coffin lid slid aside. -
A man who has feared death every day of his life wakes among strangers who cannot die â and finds that to them, he is something called an âatavusâ â drawn by lot into what they have waited five hundred years to do.
Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/OTR
CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)âŠ
00:00:00.000 = Show Open
00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, âWise Childâ (March 24, 1978) ***WD
00:45:57.515 = Arch Obolerâs Plays, âImmortal Gentlemanâ (June 17, 1939) ***WD
01:14:01.420 = Barry Craig, âCorpse On Deliveryâ (November 31, 1951)
01:41:53.419 = BBC Radio 4/Radio 7, âMortmainâ (April 22, 1992)
02:26:10.177 = Night Beat, âLost Soulsâ (November 16, 1951) ***WD
02:55:47.576 = Beyond The Green Door, âMk. Arkady Bradian, Bolder and TNTâ (1966)
02:58:57.644 = Man In Black (The Black Book), âThe Price of the Headâ (February 02, 1952) ***WD
03:13:42.390 = Blackstone The Magic Detective, âThe Ghost That Wasnâtâ (November 28, 1948) ***WD
03:26:24.838 = Box 13, âThe Professor And The Puzzleâ (January 09, 1949)
03:52:53.344 = Calling All Cars, âThe Human Bombâ (December 20, 1933) ***WD
04:22:42.424 = Casey Crime Photographer, âA Tooth For a Toothâ (July 15, 1946) ***WD
04:48:33.183 = Show Close
(ADU) = Air Date Unknown
(LQ) = Low Quality
***WD = Remastered, edited, or cleaned up by Weird Darkness to make the episode more listenable. Audio may not be pristine, but it will be better than the original file which may have been unusable or more difficult to hear without editing.
CUSTOM WEBPAGE: https://weirddarkness.com/WDRR0713
Weird Darkness presents Retro Radio: Old Time Radio in the Dark, a collection of vintage broadcasts spanning psychological horror, hard-boiled detective work, ghost stories, and the strange corners where the two overlap.
It opens with the CBS Radio Mystery Theater and E.G. Marshall's presentation of "Wise Child," written by Sam Dann and starring Ralph Bell. Joyce and Calvin Spurlock argue their way off a turnpike into a storm near a place called Kiowa Flats, sleep the night in their stalled car, and wake to find a newborn baby lying naked on a hillside â alive, unharmed, and abandoned. Joyce insists the child is a miracle and claims him as her own, inventing a birth story to secure a certificate. Calvin Junior never grows, not an ounce, not a fraction of an inch, while doctors find him perfectly healthy. Then a newspaper report reveals that the wilderness north of Kiowa Flats had been used as a secret dumping ground for atomic waste â and Calvin begins to sense something in the air, a force, a light, a power that lets him read the minds of his boss, his sister, and his customers, reshaping his entire life around whatever entered that child during the storm.From there, Arch Oboler's "Immortal Gentleman" arrives with Edmund O'Brien and Anne Shepherd, in which a man terrified of death his entire life screams aloud in a crowded auditorium and then explains why to the woman beside him. Sitting through a political speech, he found himself displaced into a future where science has abolished death entirely â a world of young people conditioned for fifty years, filled with all human knowledge, living two hundred, three hundred, five hundred years with nothing to do because "the old ones" never die and never surrender their positions. They call him an atavus, a throwback that surfaces once in every two thousand embryos. Twenty-four of them draw lots in a darkened room, and he is handed a black box and told to throw it at a woman who has lived five thousand years.Next, William Gargan stars as Barry Craig, confidential investigator, in "Corpse On Delivery." Bail bondsman Sam Solloway hires Craig to find Joey Florio, a racketeer who jumped a fifty-thousand-dollar bond, and offers ten percent to get him back. A merchant seaman named Stacy Crocker is stabbed four separate times outside Craig's office door before he can deliver whatever he came to sell. A blonde in ballerina sweaters frisks the corpse for its papers, a rifle shot grazes Craig's skull along West Street, and monogrammed pillows in a room at the Hotel Mohansic spell out the answer in two letters.The episode continues with John Metcalfe's "Mortmain," dramatized for radio by Rebecca Wilmshurst, set in the south of England before the war. Salome Clare marries Humphrey Ramsden Child, a man obsessed with moths, boats, and his dead mother Harriet, who vows at the altar that marriage binds souls beyond death throughout eternity. At an anniversary dinner deliberately set for thirteen guests aboard his houseboat, a woman is attacked by a swarm of moths in an upstairs bathroom, and a decomposing dog is dragged from the linen closet. Humphrey is committed as criminally insane, dresses in his mother's clothing, and promises from inside a straitjacket that death shall not part them. After his death, Salome marries John Temple â and on their honeymoon, a rotting pink boat begins rising out of the water behind them.Frank Lovejoy follows as Randy Stone in "Lost Souls," walking South State Street on Chicago's Skid Row, where a woman named Ruth Martin has spent eight hundred dollars buying steaks, clean sheets, and champagne for every derelict on the block. She refuses to answer a ringing telephone. Her purse holds a hotel key and a brand-new loaded .32. Twenty years earlier, watching police drag a screaming thirty-year-old woman into a wagon, Ruth made her friend Vivian Clark promise to kill her if she ever turned out the same way. Vivian Clark died at eleven years old â and every night for three weeks, the phone has rung wherever Ruth runs, from St. Louis to Kansas City to Duluth to Chicago.Basil Rathbone then delivers a short piece from Beyond the Green Door about a magician turned bank robber who kills two guards in Croesus, Maine, and hides in an abandoned granite quarry by disguising himself as a boulder â until a truck from the Eastern Maine Gravel Corporation pulls in to set the dynamite charges. The Man in Black, starring Paul Frees, presents John Russell's South Seas story "The Price of the Head," in which Christopher Pellet, a red-whiskered drunk with a bad name in the islands, murders a bartender at Fufuti and is saved by a Bougainville native named Karaki, who steals a canoe, sails eight hundred miles, nurses him through withdrawal, kills two white men in a cutter, gives him the last of the water, and combs his red hair and whiskers twice every day.Blackstone the Magic Detective investigates "The Ghost That Wasn't" at the Weldon mansion, where Mortimer Weldon's brother Clarence accepted a dare to spend the night in the tower room and was found in the courtyard with a broken neck behind a door locked from the inside â and where a grandfather clock that has always kept excellent time is suddenly two minutes slow. Alan Ladd stars as Dan Holliday in "The Professor And The Puzzle," a Box 13 adventure in which a college crystallographer named Martin Gardner is found shot through the heart with his own gun, his niece abruptly breaks her engagement to marry her uncle's lab assistant Ed Macklin, and Macklin turns up stabbed with his own knife. Registered mail receipts and a bank book under the name Samuel Stoner lead Holliday to an office building and a case of illicit diamond cutting.Calling All Cars reaches back into the records for "The Human Bomb," the true story of Carl Weiss, who walked into police headquarters wearing a sheepskin hood, green goggles, and a soldier's campaign hat, carrying a blood-red box packed with sixty-six sticks of dynamite and holding a spring-loaded trigger that would fire the moment he let go. He demanded to see Paul Shoup, president of the Pacific Electric Railway, and threatened to level the building unless the railroad workers got a raise. Two hundred and sixty prisoners were evacuated by streetcar while Chief Sebastian stalled him, and Officer Sam Brown eventually thrust his bare hand through the glass top of the box to smother the lit fuse.The episode closes with Staats Cotsworth as Casey, Crime Photographer, in "A Tooth For a Tooth" by Charles Holden. Rewrite man Henry Brower confesses a premonition of his own death and admits that a man named Renat â no licensed dentist, but a self-described research scientist on River Road â filled his teeth for free to test a new metal. Brower vanishes that night, and Lieutenant Logan writes him off as a debtor who skipped town. Casey recognizes the shape of a Colorado cattleman's case from 1931, and a bartender's habit of spelling words backward hands him the name he needs. - Laat meer zien
