Paranormia

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.