Down the Crooked Path

Content note: This episode discusses an attempted sexual assault and poltergeist activity. This week we are revisiting a segment from our Tuesday show over on the Canadian Creepies podcast. Every Tuesday we take a deep dive into a paranormal or totally creepy Canadian mystery. In Amherst, Nova Scotia, in 1878, 18-year-old Esther Cox lived with her sister Olive Teed, Olive's husband Daniel, and the...

An alien. A spacecraft. A UFO conspiracy that reaches the Pentagon. On March 16, 1957, an alien visitor landed in a spacecraft in a field in Alexandria, Virginia, walked out, and said, in clear English, that he needed to see the president. His name was Valiant Thor, and he said he had come from Venus, sent by the High Council of his own people, with a warning about nuclear war, and an offer that s...

Welcome back, When we last left off, our hosts were in a perilous position, coming to you from an abandoned radio station with a Halloween broadcast that had gone awry. Forced to continue the show (and continue enduring some seriously unsettling tales recorded by their friends in the Collective), the entity on the phone has not only started to make those stories a reality, but It has now begun to...

On a fog-choked Valentine’s Day in 1945, seventy-four-year-old farm laborer Charles Walton walked up Warwickshire's Meon Hill to trim hedges. He never made it home. By nightfall, his niece Edith would discover his body pinned to the earth in a scene so brutal and mechanically violent, it looked less like a crime and more like a ritual execution. Surrounded by a tight-lipped community, a landscape...

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Welcome, Tonight we come to you from an abandoned radio station for a very special Halloween two part series to broadcast some of the scariest stories, urban legends and real events live on air. Five friends have broken in with the plan to create something spectacularly and unforgettably spooky...

In the summer of 1518, a woman stepped into a Strasbourg street and started dancing. This is the story of the dancing plague, the strangest outbreak in medieval history. She did not stop. Not that day, not the next. Within weeks the streets were full of people dancing day and night, their feet bleeding and their bodies giving out, and no one could say why. The woman history calls Frau Troffea beca...

On February 24, 1978, five friends left a college basketball game in Chico, California and never came home. Days later their car was found abandoned on a remote mountain road in the Plumas National Forest, seventy miles in the wrong direction. Four of the men were eventually found dead. The fifth, Gary Mathias, was never found at all. In this episode: The night of the game and the drive that went...

In November 1929, a young London occultist named Norah "Netta" Fornario traveled to the remote, wind-swept Scottish island of Iona. Deeply embedded in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn lineage and Alpha et Omega temple, Netta was searching for a "thin place"—a geographic portal where the earthly veil drops and nature spirits can be summoned. Days later, she was dead. Was she the victim of a ca...

Step into the overgrown, foggy paths of London's historic graveyard as we uncover one of the most bizarre chapters in modern vampire lore . In the early 1970s, a media-fueled frenzy gripped the city, transforming a local ghost hunt into a full-blown paranormal media circus. At the center of this unexplained mystery were two rival researchers, David Farrant and Sean Manchester, whose bitter obsessi...

This week on Down the Crooked Path, we are stepping aside from our usual chapter to bring you a special crossover episode from our Thursday segment on the Canadian Creepies Podcast ! Your host Amanda Joy teams up with her frequent partner-in-creepy, Valerie, to wander down a distinctly French-Canadian path. Quebec is legendary for its European charm, cobblestone streets, and stunning landscapes—bu...

In the winter of 1803, a terrifying specter held a small English village in a state of total mass panic . Long before the Victorian era, witnesses were already reporting chilling encounters with a phantom lurking in the pitch-black lanes, leaping out from behind tombstones, and physically assaulting residents. The paranormal terror grew so intense that armed citizen patrols took to the streets to...

In Part 2 of our true crime deep dive into the 1982 Chicago Tylenol murders, we look past the initial nationwide panic and focus directly on the aftermath, the primary suspects, and the intense manhunt that gripped Illinois. We break down how the newly formed Tylenol Murders Task Force scrambled to track down who was slipping lethal doses of potassium cyanide into Extra-Strength capsules. The traj...

A true Crime Classic: The security of daily life vanished over a few terrifying days in late September 1982. What started as a localized nightmare in the suburbs of Chicago quickly exploded into a nationwide panic, fundamentally changing the way we look at household items forever. In this episode, we trace the heartbreaking chronological timeline of the seven Chicago victims, the frantic street-le...

A historical True crime story dealing with witches and hexes and perhaps, some midguided ideas. On November 27, 1928, in Rehmeyer’s Hollow, Pennsylvania, three men brutally murdered 60-year-old folk healer Nelson Rehmeyer. Believing Rehmeyer had cast a fatal curse, John Blymire and his accomplices hunted him down to steal his copy of the traditional healing text Long Lost Friend and break the spel...

True crime meets ghost story: Teresita Basa was a Filipina immigrant living in Chicago in 1977, known for her quiet routine and her work as a respiratory therapist at Edgewater Hospital. She was studying music at Loyola University and taught piano from her apartment, keeping a small circle and a steady life. On the night of February 21st, a fire in her 15th‑floor unit led to the discovery of her d...

Are they a cryptid? Are they Aliens? OR are they some sort of ultra-terrestrial super being? When a paranormal investigator starts receiving these unusual emails from a man claiming to be a Dr. Christie whose home under siege, it send Greg Newark down a rabbit hole he never expected. The writer claims these little men are coming of of an abandoned cave system behind his yard and kidnapped his dog....

This week on Down the Crooked Path, we’re stepping aside from our usual chapter and sharing one of our Tuesday segments from the Canadian Creepies podcast. It’s filling in for our regular episode while we work on what’s coming next, and it fits naturally into the crooked world we’ve been building. We’re bringing you the story of Barbe Hallay. Born around 1646, she was a young settler in 17th‑centu...

During the UFO crazy in the 1950's this case of possible Alien encounter is considered to be taken seriously and coined the term little green from outer space. The Kelly–Hopkinsville encounter remains one of the most detailed multi‑witness creature reports in American folklore. Eleven people described small, silver beings moving around the Sutton farmhouse for hours, returning even after police an...

This week, Down the Crooked Path is taking a short pause while we celebrate a busy week of milestones and good chaos. We’ll be back next week with fresh stories, strange history, and more crooked paths to wander. Today’s mini‑episode covers Canadian Project Magnet — the government’s mid‑20th‑century investigation into UFOs, aerial anomalies, and unexplained phenomena. We touch on what the project...

On this episode, we walk through the 1952 Flatwoods encounter in Braxton County, West Virginia. We cover the eyewitness accounts from the May family and Eugene Lemon, the reported crash on the hill, the physical symptoms described by the boys, and the immediate media attention that followed. We look at the government response, including National Guard involvement, Project Blue Book’s on‑site inves...

A grounded look at the Keddie Cabin murders, the 1981 crime that left investigators with conflicting evidence, missing records, and a case that continues to raise questions more than four decades later. This episode covers the known timeline, the recovered evidence, the documented investigative errors, and the modern re‑examination that brought new leads back into focus. All details are sourced fr...

This episode looks at the reports that came in before the Aberfan disaster. It covers the dreams, warnings, and statements people made before the collapse, and the way these reports were collected and reviewed. The episode also goes through the early work that led Dr John Barker to focus on premonitions and the question of whether a warning can ever stop an event. Find us on TikTok and Instagram a...

In this episode, we go through the historyconnected to the Sallie House, the claims that built the story, and the details that followed the Pickman family after they moved in. We cover the background of the property, the origins of the “Sallie” name, the reports that came out of the house in the 1990s, and the parts of the story that never matched the records. We also include the theories that for...

In this episode we walk through the case of Pazuzu Algarad, a story shaped by neglect, untreated mental illness, and a community that missed every warning sign. We look at the victims, the failures that allowed the violence to continue, and the impact on the people who lived around that house on Knob Hill Drive. This is not a story about the occult. It is a story about what happens when systems br...

This week, we’re pulling from our Tuesday segment on the Canadian Creepies podcast and heading out to Bird Rock off the coast of Quebec — a place with more trouble than landmass. The lighthouse out there has a long history of bad luck, disappearances, and one story that locals still talk about in lowered voices. Keep in mind, this is a rock barely big enough to stand on, yet somehow it managed to...