Weird World Podcast

In April 2001 Branson Perry walked out his front door to put jumper cables back in the garage. He was talking to his friend at the window upstairs. Two men in front of the house never saw him leave. Yet somehow Branson Perry fell off the face of the earth, never to be seen again.

Do you know anyone from Bielefeld? Have you ever been to Bielefeld? Do you know anyone who’s ever been to Bielefeld? No? Then, how do you know that Bielefeld, a German city of 340,000 really exists?

No friends? No problem. At least in 1987 when a genius made a tape of himself absorbed by your every word and just really getting you. He called the video Rent-A-Friend and at $49.95 for a new best friend it was a hell of a bargain.

When David Hahn got a chemistry set age 10, it was only a matter of time before he got his Atomic Energy badge in the Boy Scouts. From there it was only a little more time before he built a workable nuclear reactor in his mom’s potting shed.

https://en.wikifur.com/wiki/Otherkin https://www.dailydot.com/irl/otherkin/ 2 Girls 1 Podcast – 178 Otherkin https://www.open.edu/openlearn/people-politics-law/politics-policy-people/sociology/who-are-otherkin-and-how-should-we-view-them

First came the scratches in the wall of the farmhouse on the Isle of Man. Then growls and hisses and screeches. Then Gef the mongoose told the Irving family all about himself. Because he was a talking mongoose. And soon the world wanted to hear what Gef had to say.

The Aswang of the Philippines can be a witch that curses, a shape-shifter, and a vampire-like creature that sucks your blood and viscera. And then there are the actual monsters…

Who was that mysterious leather-clad stranger who each month tramped through the same small towns in New York and Connecticut - for over 30 years? Was he an old French fur trader? A zombie? A lonely man who just— wait, did you say zombie? We vote for zombie.

Why shouldn’t we text each other by tapping on telepathic snails? Why shouldn’t we use bats to drop bombs and dolphins to do - well, all sorts of things? No one can say we haven’t tried, because we have, and this episode tells us how.

We’ve always had fun with animals. Playing frisbee with dogs. Chatting with parrots. Using canaries to tell us if a coal mine will kill us. Turning pigeons into bombs. Using leeches to predict the weather. The usual stuff.

In early 1900s Oklahoma, the Abernathy brothers decided they wanted to go see the new governor’s mansion in Santa Fe, NM. 1,300 miles away. On horseback. Alone. They had to ask their dad for permission first - since they were nine and five years old. He said go for it. Sources https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/10/19/ultimate-free-range-kids-two-boys-rode-horses-new-york-oklahoma/  ...

We don’t want to give it away, but Jack Lohrke led a charmed life on his travels from minor league baseball to World War II and back again.

So what did happen to those unlucky Roanoke colonists? Were they absorbed into the native population? Were they massacred? Enslaved by the Spanish? Lost at sea? Victims of a nefarious plot? Let’s follow the breadcrumbs.

It’s Oscar night so we bring some strangeness from the annals of the Academy Awards. And we’re not even counting Will Smith’s slap-down of Chris Rock.

When John White finally got back to Roanoke he found nothing - no daughter, no granddaughter, and none of the other 100+ colonists. The Lost Colony quickly became legend as every search brought no sign of where they had gone.

The legendary lost colony. 140 people disappear from an island off the North Carolina coast, never seen again. We start at the beginning with the rarely told story behind how the Roanoke Colony came to be before it got lost.

We are releasing this week’s episode early to update everyone on the Sherri Papini “kidnapping” case (Episode 72). Karma just might actually be a thing…

With nothing more than a girlfriend and a flashlight to guide him back, it is not surprising that Peter Gibbs disappeared when he soared his little plane into the dark Scottish night. That was mystery enough, but then they found his nearly pristine body four months later lying in plain sight on previously searched ground. Where had he gone? Why had he gone? Where was his plane? And how did his bod...

Alice Roth loved baseball. She loved her hometown Phillies and especially star center fielder Richie Ashburn. So when he came to bat against the New York Giants on a hot August night in 1957 you would think she would have been paying close attention. You would think.

In 1911, the man who would be known as Ishi walked into a slaughterhouse near Oroville, California. He had given up. His people had been wiped out. He could no longer live the ways his ancestors had for millennia. He was the last of his kind, but he was not done yet.

Mental institution, murder and creepy rotting buildings being slowly reclaimed by the forest. We took a Weird World road trip to visit a possibly haunted abandoned hospital in Gold Rush Country California.

The coroner in Beaumont, Texas said Greg Fleniken has been beaten so badly on September 15, 2010 that his innards were a bloody, ruptured mess. But Room 348 was pristine. No one suspicious had gone in or out of the room the entire night. He had a thousand dollars in his wallet and a cigarette still in his hand. What really happened to Greg Fleniken?

They sang. They danced. They did comedy. They did tragedy. They read moralistic essays. They also dodged fruits and vegetables and pulled shotguns on their audience. They were The Fabulous Cherry Sisters and they were nothing if not entertaining, intentional or otherwise.

In 2004, a high school student working at a McDonald’s in Kentucky was pulled into the manager’s office. There was a police officer on the phone. He said someone had accused her of theft. He asked her manager to detain her. She did. Then things got very out of hand.

Following some electronic bread crumbs, investigators were able to trace the last mysterious hours of Flight 370. But the biggest questions remained - what exactly happened, why, and perhaps most compelling, who?