Weird Darkness: Paranormal & True Crime Stories

Martha Whitman doesn't think her six-year-old son Osmond is as sick as his doctors and his father say, so she makes him a deal: she'll throw his pills down the kitchen drain, morning and night, and he'll tell his father he's been taking them. EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/stickman SOURCES and RESOURCES: “Stick Man” by Donte-highwater: https://www.inkitt.com/howard...

A Fresno, California, family set up a camera by the garage after their dogs kept barking into the dark, and the next morning's footage showed two pale figures with no arms anyone could make out, walking across the front lawn on long legs that seem to bend backward. ========== HOUR ONE: There are roads on Long Island that are much more than a line between two points. Some roads contain legends that...

Masha and Dasha Krivoshlyapova were born joined at the waist in Moscow in January of 1950; their mother was told they’d died of pneumonia, and Soviet scientists kept the girls for experiments, packing one sister in ice while they took the other’s temperature. Decades later, the British journalist who befriended them came to believe one twin had all the traits of a psychopath and the other had beco...

A Scottish poet published the rules in 1786: a candle, a mirror, an apple, and the face of your future husband looking over your shoulder. The girls who play it now chant a dead woman's name in a dark bathroom instead, a book that sold thirty million copies turned the same trick into a self-help plan, and some of us have carried it into the prayer closet without noticing. Listen through the end fo...

The doors are locked, the library is dark, and ten-year-old Lucy is about to find out she isn't the only one still inside behind those locked doors. EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/Creeger SOURCES and RESOURCES: “Creeger the Creeper” by Scott Donnelly, written for http://www. MicroTerrors.com . WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darknes...

On the morning he was to hang at Exeter in 1885, John Lee told his warders he'd dreamed the scaffold wouldn't work. Then the hangman pulled the lever again and again, and the trapdoor under Lee never opened. From the book “BOTCHED EXECUTIONS: Four Centuries Of Failed Hangings, Electrocutions, Gassings, Injections And Firing Squads” by Darren Marlar at  https://weirddarkness.com/botchedexecutions W...

A small-town Russian doctor who's given up on his filthy hospital starts spending hours in the ward for the insane out back, talking philosophy with one of the patients. 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...

For more than a century, doctors have been recording patients whose hands act on their own, from unbuttoning a shirt to closing around the patient's own throat. Hollywood was making movies about murderous hands by the 1930s, decades after the reality of it was discovered. EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/AlienHandSyndrome READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this...

In March 1879, the Supreme Court said a firing squad wasn't cruel and unusual punishment. Two months later in Provo, Wallace Wilkerson refused the blindfold, the rifles missed his heart, and he took 27 minutes to die. From the book “BOTCHED EXECUTIONS: Four Centuries Of Failed Hangings, Electrocutions, Gassings, Injections And Firing Squads” by Darren Marlar at  https://weirddarkness.com/botchedex...

Seventeen months after the war's official end, a six-man survey crew of ex-servicemen hikes into the jungle behind Co Khao to lay markers for a French power company, and on their first night, after a ball of blue light crosses the twilight sky, they find a smooth black sphere hanging a foot off the ground at the edge of the trees. EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/Dar...

In 1829 New Orleans, a shoemaker whose slippers are the softest in town turns down the fabric a wealthy father brings in for his daughter's debut and insists on using his own material. 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 & T...

Santa Cruz students were told to accept rides only from cars with a university parking sticker, and Edmund Kemper, a six-foot-nine man who'd killed his grandparents at fifteen, had one because his mother worked on campus. EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/EdmundKemper READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/59bkpj6y FEATURED...

A Vinton County judge has dismissed all 16 counts against Gary Siders Sr. while keeping jurisdiction over him for a possible civil commitment; his wife's lawyer now wants a dementia specialist, and the lawyer for the mother of the 16 children won't say whether she's pregnant again. SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/SidersCase20261008 Look for this podcast on Apple Podcas...

A lanky schoolmaster from Connecticut rides home alone from an autumn party at the Van Tassel farm on a borrowed plow horse named Gunpowder, along the same roads the people of Sleepy Hollow say belong at night to the ghost of a Hessian trooper, still out looking for the head a cannonball took from him. EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/LegendOfSleepyHollow SOURCES and...

In 1957, a young surgeon finds an aneurysm the size of a grapefruit on the chest X-rays of the man his sister is about to marry, and that night his dead father sits down across the fire to talk the case through. Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.t...

Margaret Dickson was hanged in Edinburgh in 1724 and began moving in her coffin when the men taking her home stopped for a drink. In 1803, in Sydney, three ropes in a row failed to hang Joseph Samuel. From the book “BOTCHED EXECUTIONS: Four Centuries Of Failed Hangings, Electrocutions, Gassings, Injections And Firing Squads” by Darren Marlar at  https://weirddarkness.com/botchedexecutions WeirdDar...

Two men who said they were newspaper reporters spent forty-five minutes inside Danny Gordon's house while he was chasing the Wytheville, Virginia, UFO sightings, one asking the questions while the other walked the rooms with a camera, and the paper they named had no record of either man. EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/SinisterMIB READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcrip...

In the spring of 1942, seven-year-old Scott Paradine was playing hooky down by the creek when a scorched metal box tumbled down the bank, packed with toys no store on Earth had ever stocked – an abacus whose beads slid off in a direction no grown-up could follow, a crystal cube full of tiny people who did whatever he thought at them, and a doll whose insides didn't match any anatomy chart. Scott a...

Lord Carnavan's wife lends a visiting sheikh her carved Indian jewel box for one afternoon, and the morning after she wears her diamond necklace to Buckingham Palace, the necklace is gone from the locked box and her husband wants the psychic detective next door on the case. Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps....

Tennessee gave Christa Pike two doses of pentobarbital on September 30th, 2026, and she survived both. In 1650, Anne Greene hung for almost half an hour at Oxford, and when the anatomists opened her coffin, she was breathing. From the book “BOTCHED EXECUTIONS: Four Centuries Of Failed Hangings, Electrocutions, Gassings, Injections And Firing Squads” by Darren Marlar, https://amzn.to/4yLF5oo , sour...

You go to bed like any other night… but by morning, someone is dead — was it a dream, or did you kill while still deep in sleep? EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/HomicidalSleepwalking READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yckud24p FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: At least 68 cases of sleepwalking murder have reached a co...

Six members of a space expedition find themselves hunted by a shapeshifting monster that appears from nowhere on a desolate alien world, seeming to pick them off one by one. EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/SixFrightenedMen SOURCES and RESOURCES: “Six Frightened Men” by Randall Garrett (Originally published in ‘Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy’ June 1957) W...

The skyrockets at a Mars casino town's Marsy Gras keep ruining $1,000 photographs of the night sky at the Mars Observatory, so the astronomers start offering tourists free horoscopes, and every one warns the reader he'll lose consistently at Harvey's Club. EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/HoroscopeRacket SOURCES and RESOURCES: “$1,000 A Plate” by Jack McKenty: https:...

On The Joe Rogan Experience, former intelligence officer David Grusch described video of human-looking bodies at a crash site, passed along a secondhand account of a deadly clash with living reptilians, and alleged a criminal ring inside a federal agency. Author Timothy Alberino says most of it should come as no shock to longtime UFO researchers, and Grusch predicts the evidence he says exists, no...

The Shadow: A young chemist tells Lamont Cranston he woke in the night to find a skull burning green and grinning at him in the dark, and by the next morning he's vanished from his own house. 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...