Weird Darkness: Paranormal & True Crime Stories

Betty and Barney Hill left Howard's Restaurant in Colebrook, New Hampshire at 10:05 on the night of September 19th, 1961; a light kept pace with their car down U.S. Route 3, and by the time the kitchen clock in Portsmouth read shortly after five, neither of them could remember a thirty-five-mile stretch of the drive. Betty called Pease Air Force Base two days later, and in November two NICAP membe...

Her nephew sent her exotic plants from every port of call across the solar system, but there was something about his latest gift from Venus that made the old captain uneasy. EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/FloweringEvil SOURCES and RESOURCES: “Flowering Evil” by Margaret St. Clair (Planet Stories Summer 1950) WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026...

On August 6th, 1890, William Kemmler became the first man put to death in the electric chair. After seventeen seconds, a doctor said he was dead, and then the witnesses saw his chest rising and falling. From the book “BOTCHED EXECUTIONS: Four Centuries Of Failed Hangings, Electrocutions, Gassings, Injections And Firing Squads” by Darren Marlar at  https://weirddarkness.com/botchedexecutions WeirdD...

A retired navy captain walks home through the Dublin fog on the night his proposal is accepted and hears footsteps behind him the whole way, though every time he turns around, the street is empty. CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)… 00:00:00.000 = Show Open 00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “The Familiar Ghost” (December 18, 1978) ***WD 00:47:10.481 = Inner Sanctum, “The Gi...

A week after losing a bitter election to lead an ancient college, the archaeologist who wanted the job most raises a toast to the winner and hands him a small black figurine from a dig in Syria. CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)… 00:00:00.000 = Show Open 00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “The Search for Myra” (December 15, 1978) ***WD 00:45:11.054 = BBC Ghosts From The Pas...

In November 1971, John List shot his mother, his wife, and his three children inside their Westfield, New Jersey, mansion, then walked out the next morning and stayed free for nearly 18 years. Criminologists at Birmingham City University later went through three decades of British cases like his and found that most of the men responsible had steady jobs, everything from surgeons to postmen to serv...

In 1991 a New York appeals court ruled a house in Nyack haunted as a matter of law, and a survey posted on October 12th says more than half of Americans could be talked into buying a house they knew was haunted. Of the four states said to have laws on it, only two mention the paranormal in a statute, and in both of them the seller doesn't have to bring it up. SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: htt...

A Western Alliance ship circles Mars at the equator and again from pole to pole, and Captain Thomas H. Griswold, already picturing his name in the history books, finds no buildings and no ruins below, only iron ore and long straight canals that the young civilian expert aboard calls evidence of something. EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/werecivilized SOURCES and RES...

In 1887, Roxalana Druse became the last woman New York ever hanged, on a secondhand gallows that used a falling 213-pound weight to jerk her into the air. Her neck didn’t break, and fifteen minutes passed before the doctors pronounced her dead. From the book “BOTCHED EXECUTIONS: Four Centuries Of Failed Hangings, Electrocutions, Gassings, Injections And Firing Squads” by Darren Marlar at  https://...

Witnesses around the world describe the same faceless man in a wide-brimmed hat, and they say once he appears to one person in a house, another family member is often next. ADDITIONAL ARTICLE ABOUT THE HAT MAN:  https://weirddarkness.com/hat-man/ ADDITIONAL ARTICLE ABOUT SHADOW PEOPLE: https://weirddarkness.com/shadow-people/ EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/HatManAn...

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...