Paranormia

In January 1804, a man was shot dead on a dark lane in West London after residents of Hammersmith became convinced a ghost was haunting their streets. When Francis Smith fired at what he thought was the figure, he killed Thomas Millwood, a bricklayer walking home in his white work clothes. This episode retraces how fear spread through the community, leading to that moment, and follows the case int...

In November 1978, more than 900 people died in Jonestown, Guyana, an event often reduced to a warning about blind obedience. This episode looks at what led up to it, from the early days of the Peoples Temple offering support and community, to the slow loss of choice and control that made leaving feel impossible. It also explores daily life in Jonestown and the final days, showing how a place meant...

For years, children on Staten Island were warned about Cropsey, a boogeyman said to haunt the abandoned Willowbrook buildings. It began as a way to keep kids away, but in the 1970s and 80s, children started going missing. This episode looks at the real cases behind the legend, and how fear and tragedy became blurred into myth. *** If you have a story where crime and the otherworldly intertwine, so...

In January 2013, a 21 year old Canadian student named Elisa Lam checked into The Cecil Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. She was travelling alone, documenting her journey online, and calling her parents every day. Then the calls stopped. Weeks later, her body was discovered in a rooftop water tank above the hotel. Police released surveillance footage of Elisa behaving erratically in a hotel elevator....

In February 1959, nine experienced hikers disappeared in the northern Ural Mountains. When searchers found their tent weeks later, it was cut open from the inside. Boots were left neatly behind, food sat untouched, and footprints, some barefoot, led into the snow. Over the months that followed, the bodies were recovered in stages. Some had died of exposure and others suffered catastrophic internal...

In 2001, a small wooden wine cabinet appeared in an eBay listing from Portland. Its seller claimed it had belonged to a 103 year old Holocaust survivor and that it contained a dybbuk, a restless spirit from Jewish folklore. He warned that opening it had brought illness, nightmares, and a sense of being watched. Over the years, the cabinet passed through multiple owners, each reporting disturbing e...

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Michael and Suzan Carson drifted through the American West, moving between communes, shared apartments, and marijuana farms. They changed their names, adopted a patchwork belief system of mysticism and religion, and came to see themselves as warriors in a hidden war. Between 1981 and 1983, they killed three people and insisted their victims were witches. This epi...

After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans was a city stripped bare. Zack Bowen, a former soldier, and Addie Hall, a poet and bartender, stayed behind, scavenging and living in the streets while photographed as symbols of defiance. A year later, Addie was killed, and Zack took his own life, leaving behind a shocking crime scene. This episode explores how disaster, trauma, and addiction turned a brief ro...

On Christmas Eve 1945, a fire tore through a family home in the hills of West Virginia. Four children escaped, but five never came out. When the smoke cleared, there were no bodies in the ashes and no bones. In the years that followed, the Sodder family rejected the official story. They spoke of cut phone lines, a missing ladder, warnings from strangers, and a photograph mailed decades later that...

In 1972, a group of Canadians invented a fictional ghost named Philip to test whether belief alone could make him appear. Each week, they gathered around a table, and soon knocks and moving furniture seemed to respond to them. This episode explores the Philip Experiment and the uneasy space where psychology, ritual, and expectation collide, showing how belief can shape reality, or at least how it...

In early 1994, the murder of Harry and Nicola Fuller brought twelve jurors to a Brighton hotel, locked away from the world with nothing but silence, photographs, and each other. As the pressure mounted, four of them reached for a Ouija board, half a joke, half a plea for clarity, and asked the dead for answers. The verdict that followed would crumble under the weight of its own strangeness. This e...

In March 1989, Spring Break in South Texas was alive with crowds and music, until 21-year-old Mark Kilroy vanished somewhere between the bars of Matamoros and the quiet roads beyond the border. What began as a missing-person search soon led investigators to Santa Elena Ranch, a remote compound tied to a group calling themselves a religious society, a place where superstition, ritual, and violence...

In May 2014, the quiet suburb of Waukesha, Wisconsin, became the setting for one of the strangest and most unsettling crimes in modern history. Two twelve-year-old girls lured their best friend into the woods and stabbed her nineteen times, leaving her for dead. When police found them hours later, walking calmly down a highway, they said they’d done it for Slender Man, a faceless figure born from...

Are you ever awake in the cruellest hours of the night, when the world is quiet but your mind isn’t? That’s where Paranormia begins, a weekly podcast where true crime collides with the supernatural. Journalist and parapsychologist Elizabeth McCafferty uncovers real cases where belief turns deadly and fear becomes evidence. In this opening episode, she traces her fascination with the unexplain...

Journalist and parapsychologist Elizabeth McCafferty introduces Paranormia, a podcast exploring crimes touched by the supernatural. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.