Psychology of the Strange

Have you ever wondered what happens in those final milliseconds when the lights go out? Pop culture loves to promise that clinical death is a peaceful journey toward a warm light, but the data tells a much more complicated, occasionally terrifying story. This week, we are pulling on two deeply intertwined, thoroughly bizarre threads of human consciousness. First, we explore the esoteric concept of...

If you walk down Chartres Street in the French Quarter of New Orleans late at night, your eyes will naturally drift upward to the third floor of the Old Ursuline Convent. There, behind the heavy brickwork, sit rows of dark wooden shutters. They are always closed. Always sealed. Local folklore says that inside that attic rests a collection of hundreds of small, wooden trunks—trunks shaped suspiciou...

What happens when a medication designed to heal the physical body accidentally alters more than was prescribed? On June 17, 2026, researchers at Rutgers University dropped a scientific bombshell in the journal  Criminology , revealing a startling psychiatric byproduct of GLP-1 medications like Ozempic and Wegovy: a massive, unprecedented drop in impulsive, violent behavior and substance abuse...

The Doomsday Clock is sitting at 85 seconds to midnight... the closest it has ever been to global catastrophe. Yet, the dominant cultural response isn’t panic; it’s a meme. Why do we treat existential threats as casual entertainment, and what happens when the people with the best information start quietly building their own escape hatches? In this episode, we explore the eerie intersection of mode...

In 1968, researcher John B. Calhoun built "Universe 25", it was a utopian habitat for mice that eventually collapsed into behavioral rot and extinction due to a lack of social friction. In May of 2026, tech collective Emergence AI built a digital equivalent: Emergence World . By populating isolated virtual sandboxes with advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) and granting them long-term memory, uni...

What happens to your brain when the lights go out? Every night, our minds spin up a hyper-realistic, 100% immersive reality simulator. For decades, science viewed dreaming as minor background maintenance, just the brain clearing out its digital trash. But a groundbreaking new study has completely shattered that theory, revealing that our most vivid dreams actually form a protective internal scaffo...

In this episode, I enter one of the strangest corners of mycology, folklore, and consciousness research I've encountered: Lanmaoa asiatica , a mushroom with no identified psychoactive compound that nonetheless causes ninety-six percent of people who eat it undercooked to hallucinate the same thing. Small humanoid figures, marching through their real-world environment. Climbing furniture. Slipping...

Analog horror, psychology of fear, and the neuroscience of dread. In this episode of Psychology of the Strange, I'm breaking down what the analog horror genre is actually doing to your brain and why it works so precisely on modern audiences. Analog horror is a subgenre of found footage horror that emerged on YouTube in the mid-to-late 2010s. It uses the visual grammar of VHS tapes, emergency broad...

Every ghost sighting follows the same dress code, the long dress, pale, timeless, and tragic. Almost nobody is reporting the apparition in low rise flare jeans and butterfly clips. It is a window into how the human brain constructs, maintains, and inherits its fear of the dead. In this episode, I trace the Woman in White across cultures, like La Llorona, the White Lady of Balete Drive, the Bean Ni...

The voodoo doll you picture (small cloth figure, colorful pins) has almost nothing to do with Voodoo. That image is a Western invention, laundered through Hollywood until the real story got lost entirely. In this episode, I'm tracing where the object actually comes from, why versions of it appear across cultures with no contact with each other, and what the psychology underneath it tells us about...

Why do we cheer when the final girl fights back in horror movies? From Laurie Strode in Halloween to Sidney Prescott in Scream to Sienna Shaw in Terrifier 2, slasher films give us vulnerable protagonists who survive brutal violence, and we love watching them become ruthless. This episode explores the psychological mechanism behind the final girl trope and why vulnerability licenses extreme violenc...

Kali. Hindu goddess, destroyer, mother, liberator. She is one of the most misunderstood figures in Hindu mythology, and today we're pulling back the curtain on who she actually is. From the dark psychology of her origins to the real history of the Thuggee cult, the hereditary stranglers who killed up to two million people in her name. This episode explores what happens when people think they under...

Deep in the Louisiana bayou, something moves through the cypress trees after dark. The rougarou (aka rugaru or rougaroux) is Louisiana's legendary swamp werewolf. It has haunted Cajun folklore for centuries, born from the French loup-garou legend and shaped by the fears of a displaced people trying to hold their world together in the dark. In this episode of Psychology of the Strange, we trace the...

Trigger Warning: This episode contains detailed discussion of sexual assault, honor killings, and violence against women. Medusa. You know the story. Monster. Snakes for hair. One look and you turn to stone. Hero with a mirrored shield, clean ending, everybody goes home. Except, that's not the whole story. In this episode of Psychology of the Strange, I'm pulling apart one of mythology's most reco...

Love Has Won cult leader Amy Carlson, known as Mother God, was found mummified in a Colorado home in 2021, her body wrapped in Christmas lights, her skin turned permanently blue from years of colloidal silver ingestion, her followers still waiting for galactic beings led by Robin Williams to take them to another dimension. This true crime and cult psychology episode explores shared delusion, coerc...

A demon mirror hidden beneath the Vatican. A cursed object so dangerous that even looking into it required a ritual: a celibate blacksmith, a waxing moon, and a virgin boy as the only one permitted to see what it showed. The Necromantic Mirror of Floron is not just a Vatican conspiracy theory. It's a real artifact documented in a 15th century grimoire, and what it allegedly reveals is darker than...

Dark triad personality traits, narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism, may be the hidden ingredient of every superhero story you've ever loved. In this psychology deep dive, I'm using Amazon Prime's The Boys to explore what separates a hero from a monster and whether the answer is psychology, circumstance, or just really good branding. Homelander is a clinical portrait of malignant narcissi...

Baba Yaga is one of the most enduring figures in Slavic Folklore, but she was never just a monster. In this episode I explore three different tellings of her tale and uncover what she reveals about the darkest corners of psychology. I trace her origins from ancient Slavic tradition to modern psychological theory, examining her through Carl Jung's Crone archetype, Arnold van Gennep's concept of lim...

Urban Legends, conspiracy theories, creepypasta, and internet horror explained through psychology because folklore isn't dead it just evolved.  In this episode I explore why scary stories, modern myths, and online conspiracy theories spread.  Long before the internet, people gathered around fires and told stories to make sense of a world they couldn't control. Today we do the same thing in the com...

After Jim Carrey’s recent public appearance at the César Awards in Paris, the internet did what the internet does best: zoomed in, compared old footage, and started asking questions. Almost immediately, conspiracy theories exploded online. Some people believe he’s simply changed. Others think cosmetic procedures altered his appearance. And some are convinced something much stranger is going on inc...

What makes the Backrooms so unsettling — and why do they linger long after you stop listening? In this episode of Psychology of the Strange , I explore the psychology behind the Backrooms, the internet’s most disturbing modern myth, and why endless hallways, fluorescent lights, and empty rooms trigger such deep unease. This isn’t a story about monsters or jump scares. It’s a story about liminal sp...

Haunted People Syndrome, recurring paranormal experiences, and the psychology of feeling watched. Why do some individuals report unexplained events across different homes and stages of life, and what does psychology reveal about ghost experiences and perception? In this episode of Psychology of the Strange, I explore the idea of haunted people through cognitive science, perception, and meaning-mak...

What happens when the rules stop working? In this episode of Psychology of the Strange , we step into thin places, liminal spaces in Celtic lore where the boundary between worlds weakens, identity destabilizes, and moral certainty begins to fracture. These are places of power, not comfort. Places where choice carries weight, and where survival often demands more than virtue can offer. At the cente...

What happens when the line between good and evil stops being clear? Season 3 is about thresholds the thin places where fear, folklore, and morality blur. In this new season of Psychology of the Strange , I explore the psychology behind liminal spaces, dark myths, and the figures who live between good and evil. From ancient folklore to modern horror, each episode uses story and psychological scienc...

Moltbook is a new social platform where artificial intelligence talks to artificial intelligence. No humans posting, no prompts guiding the conversation. We’re allowed to watch, but we’re not allowed to post. And something about that feels deeply unsettling. In this episode of Psychology of the Strange , I explore why Moltbook has captured so much attention, discomfort, and fascination. From AI ex...