The Darker Side of Life Podcast

Happy Halloween Week, listeners! We are very excited for our first collaboration with another podcast! And for Halloween, no less! Please welcome CeCe, Alex and James from the 13th Floor as we sit down with our new friends and talk about our favorite Halloween memories and personal spooky tales to get you in the mood for October 31. 

Most Halloween haunted houses are good-natured fun, hoping to give you a good scare and a probably few laughs. But McKamey Manor is different. Here, participants are subjected to extreme physical, verbal, and mental horrors - but agree to it by signing an extremely long and detailed waiver. Broken bones, cuts, and worse are possible.  We discuss what happens at McKamey Manor, the legalities of its...

A group of colonists in North America disappeared from their new home on Roanoke Island sometime between 1587 and 1590. They left behind one word and many questions. It's bee over 400 years later and we're still asking: What happened to the Lost Colony of Roanoke?

On March 13, 1997, something strange was reported moving across the sky from Henderson, Nevada, travelling across the state of Arizona and disappearing into the Sonoran Desert. Hundreds of people reported the event, telling officials what they saw - and their stories are all similar. A V-shaped aircraft with bright lights appeared to be moving across Arizona. But when it reached Phoenix, people go...

When Bruce and Andrea Leininger's two-year old son, James, started becoming fascinated by WWII planes, they thought it was normal for a boy his age. But when little James started experiencing vivid nightmares about plane crashes and recalling events and people he couldn't possibly know about, Andrea knew her son was experiencing something more. Was he remembering a past life as a WWII fi...

When a man who made a living at being an inventor, travelling showman, and radio broadcaster announced that he had the cure for cancer, people were thrilled. Finally, there was a cure for this terrible disease. Except the man, Norman Baker, was no hero - he was simply a fraud, who conned thousands of people out of millions of dollars with his so-called "cure." Yet he was able to open and...

It is said to be one of the worst events of racial violence in the history of the United States. And yet almost 100 years later, many people don't know much, if anything, about it. From May 31 to June 1, white mobs attacked the Greenwood District and its black residents from the ground and from the air. When it was all over, the black community was left in ashes and it would be years before t...

The early 2000s were a time of peak reality TV, and few networks reached the success of shows as Vh1. Their "Of Love" series, as it came to be called, provided hit after hit after hit for the network and the production company in charge. But in 2009, production came to a screeching halt when Jasmine Fiore, the wife of a former contestant, was found murdered, her body left in a suitcase i...

Something wasn't quite right about the girls who walked off the boat and into the newly settled French colony of New Orleans in 1728. They were sickly and pale. They traveled  with large, heavy trunks that looked different than the ones previous new arrivals had carried. They had been sent to New Orleans to help settle the colony and become wives to the men. But were the new arrivals pious an...

It started off as an annual family outing. In December 1958, the Martin family left their Portland, Oregon, home to go find a Christmas tree and gather greens for holiday decorations. Ken, his wife Barbara, and their three young daughters piled into the family station wagon and ventured along the Columbia River on a Sunday afternoon. They would never come home.  A massive search never found the fa...

On February 8, 1933, police in the small Appalachian town of Tomahawk, Kentucky started receiving calls from locals talking about screaming and loud noises coming from the cabin of the Mills family. When authorities showed up to the remote cabin and forced their way in, they walked into a horror show being directed by members of the Mills family. And in the middle of all the chaos, was the body of...

WARNING: This episode discusses several instance of suicide and may be difficult to listen to for many.  It was meant to be a luxury hotel for business travelers and wealthy tourists, but instead turned into a place of crime, mystery, and death. The Cecil Hotel, opened in 1927, instead earned a reputation of violence and became known as "The Suicide Hotel." We talk a little about past in...

In 2013, residents of the Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles noticed a strange odor, look and taste to their tap water. A hotel worker found the cause of the murky, reddish water - the body of a young woman was floating in the rooftop water tank. Elisa Lam had gone missing from the hotel two weeks before, and the discovery of her body solved that mystery but raised more questions than it answered. How did...

"Dearest neighbor...allow me to welcome you to the neighborhood."  Imagine receiving a letter that starts out with that sentence as you get ready to move your family into your new home. You'd probably be touched at the heartfelt message. But as you read on, the welcoming words turn sinister and you realize your family is in the sights of someone unseen but who knows everything. This...

It is a piece of property once known as "America's Village of the Damned." Since the 1700s, almost everyone who has been plagued with tragedy - houses burned, children went missing, people would fall into insanity and die. Today, the property is carefully guarded by a group of people who refuse to allow entry to anyone. Did the founding family bring a curse with them from England wh...

Brian Shaffer went out the night of March 31, 2006, like many other college students that night. It was the beginning of spring break for Ohio State University and it had been a tough few weeks for Brian after suffering a family tragedy. Blowing off steam, Brian bar hopped with friends around popular spots in Columbus, Ohio. When no one could find Brian at last call at The Ugly Tuna Saloona, his f...

Stuck inside over coronavirus? Be glad you're not this man. We tell a tale of famed Kentucky caver Floyd Collins - one of the bravest, most determined and skilled cavers in the country during the 1920s. That was, until he found himself in a precarious position - literally.  And you thought your quarantine was bad. 

Between 1852 and 1946, the penal colony of French Guiana was sent thousands of men to serve out their sentences in brutal conditions. Sentences ranged from murder to minor offenses such as theft. But all men were forced into hard labor and had little hope to ever return to mainland France, even when their sentences were completed. The Prison of Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni and the Salvation Islands off...

Moving to a new home can be stressful enough, but for the Ammons family, moving to a new home caused strife unknown to most of us. What began at first as a simple pest problem quickly escalated into something much more sinister. Soon, a mother and her three children found themselves tormented by spirits unknown. And while most hauntings or spiritual activity are usually witnessed by only the affli...

Pearl Bryan's murder and the execution of her killers has left a mark on the Northern Kentucky and Cincinnati area for over a century. But her story hasn't ended and continues to live on in an unlikely place. Bobby Mackey's Music World in Wilder, Kentucky is where locals go for music, drinks and line dancing. But there could be more to this bar than meets the eye. A reportedly haunt...

The nation was shocked when the body of a woman was found on a farm in the small town of Fort Thomas, Kentucky on February 1, 1896. The woman was a young socialite from Greencastle, Indiana named Pearl Bryan. She was well known in her hometown, the daughter of a big family that was liked and admired. But the events that would send her on a trip to Cincinnati would set something terrible into motio...

It's an act mostly unheard of today, but was once a more common practice. While the notion of eating another human disgusts many, one man said he has felt the desire his entire life. One day in 1981, Issei Sagawa murdered his friend Renee Hartevelt, keeping her body in his fridge for days as he gradually ate her. He was arrested shortly after her killing, but what happens next will infuriate...

It all started out seemingly well. A man named Jim Jones formed a church with progressive ideas of desegregation, helping the homeless and lifting up your fellow man. He called it The Peoples Temple.  Membership would reach into the thousands. But when Peoples Temple started receiving criticism from people who left the church, Jim Jones fled to Guyana with church members and formed a settlement. T...

If you think what happened in Hungary was bad, wait until you hear this. In Renaissance Italy, Giulia Tofana was ultimately responsible for about 600 men who were abusive to their wives. However, she evaded capture for several years, and moved around hiding in plain sight with her poison that was so effective and sought after, it even had its own brand.

Early 1900s Nagyrev, Hungary, was a time of struggle for the women who lived there. Poverty was rampant, children were burdensome, and forced marriages meant abuse, neglect and strife. Divorce was forbidden, and to make it all worse, war came. Fed up with a life no better than that of a slave, one woman led others into "fixing" their problems .... with murder.