Weird World Podcast

What would you do if you were kidnapped by an invader in the middle of the night? He holds you, he threatens you, he assaults you. But then what would you do if you were finally released and the police didn’t believe a word you said? Sources: https://abc7news.com/vallejo-gone-girl-kidnapping-case-denise-huskins-police-misconduct/6339403/ https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/How-Vallejo-police...

Discover which of our April Fool’s stories was real and which two were fake. Quasi-spoiler alert - we tricked most of you.

The Phantom Slayer commits his most horrific attack on a couple in their own home. Texarkana devolves into panic and paranoia. Will we ever know who this monster was?

First you see a man walking toward your car in the dead of the night in a deserted lovers' lane. Then you see he is wearing some kind of hood over his head. Then you see he is holding a gun. The Phantom Slayer has begun his reign of terror in Texarkana.

If you invented a working submarine, would you: A) Humble brag this in every conversation (“Oh, you started a yeast culture? Hm, that reminds me of when I made a working submarine in my garage.”), B) Go on Shark Tank and ask for a billion dollars to start Underwater Uber, or C) Use it to lure women into close confines to do something unspeakable? You can probably guess the answer.

It's April Fool's Day but no one is going to trick our listeners. Except us. Three strange stories. Two are made up, one is real. Your job is to figure out which one. Go to our Facebook page to vote on which story is real.

Betsy wore a red dress to the library on the day after Thanksgiving in 1969. That way, no one could see the blood… Sources: https://medium.com/crimebeat/stabbing-in-the-stacks-the-unsolved-murder-of-betsy-aardsma-5c19a50d8060 Murder in the Stacks: 50 Years Later Still No Answers, by Erin Hogge in The Daily Collegian – Penn State https://www.collegian.psu.edu/news/campus/article_b6280ed6-1a18-11ea-...

It is sadly common for one person to disappear, but an entire family? Ken and Barbara Martin and their three youngest children vanished on a Christmas outing. It took days to realize they were gone and months for the first solid clues to arise, but we still do not know what happened to the Martin Family.

With surprising speed, the mood in Mattoon turns from vigilance to skepticism. Who and what was behind the mad gassings in Mattoon? Or, to some, did they even occur?

The attacks started with a sickly sweet odor that paralyzed and sickened its victims. Soon a small town in World War Two-Era middle America was in a panic. Was there a mad gasser in their midst?

Nick Lotz led a normal college freshman life getting blackout drunk and high on opiates and Adderol. But then he realized he was different - he was the star of his own TV show. About him. Every day. All day. And when the producer who speaks directly into your head tells you to do something, you do it. Nick did.

When the people of Devon in the UK awoke to find single file trails of cloven or horseshoe footprints in the snow, they wondered what had caused them. But when they realized they went on for mile after mile, crossed rivers, danced atop roofs, and leapt high walls, they feared what might have caused them.

Who were those old women who had spent the last 24 years in a hotel, never seen, never spoken to? It would take a dead body to re-discover Ida Wood, millionaire socialite who had disappeared over two decades before. Sources: https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/02/05/ida-wood-recluse/ https://www.nytimes.com/1964/10/04/archives/mrs-woods-rubbish-pile-the-recluse-of-herald-square-by-joseph-a-cox.htm...

When Maria Gomez Pereira saw a stain appear on her kitchen floor in Spain in 1971 she was annoyed. When the next morning that stain had morphed into a human face, she was scared. When more faces started appearing the world came to Belmez to see the miraculous faces on her kitchen floor.

What happened to Tom Young, the man whose disappearance obsessed Keith Reinhard? Then what happened to Keith? What drove him up a treacherous mountain as darkness loomed, never to be seen again?

Keith Reinhard fled his mundane life to a living ghost town in the Rocky Mountains. There he obsessed over the disappearance of Tom Young - the man who had rented his shop space before him. Then Keith followed Tom into oblivion.

He was from out of town. He called himself Roland T. Owen. He was tortured and left to die in his hotel room in Kansas City. But who killed him, why and who was he? Because he was definitely not named Roland T. Owen. Sources: https://medium.com/true-crime-by-cat-leigh/anonymous-man-is-tortured-in-hotel-room-later-dies-from-injuries-59c9975dee68 https://the-line-up.com/roland-t-owen https://allthat...

Christmas Day 1964 brought strange sounds to the English village of Warminster. Something raked and scratched their roofs and even knocked them to the ground. Then pigeons died. Then they found mice with holes in them. Then, obviously, came the UFOS…

Everyone knows Men in Black. Tommy Lee. Will. Chris and Tessa. But did you know who invented MIBs? Did you know just how nuts the original story was? Well now you will.

“The Man” wants you to believe those are birds flying through the air, watching you from the telephone line, and pooping on your car window. They’re not. They are something far more insidious than even pigeons. Sources: https://www.audubon.org/news/are-birds-actually-government-issued-drones-so-says-new-conspiracy-theory-making https://birdsarentreal.com/pages/who-are-we https://www.vice.com/en/ar...

When another Fall Riverite is axe murdered just before the start of Lizzie’s trial, the town starts to wonder if the killings are connected. Did this help Lizzie get away with murder?

The latest on the Utah monolith - we might know who took it and Monolith-mania begins, starting in Romania.

What is that ten-foot high metal monolith in the middle of the rugged Utah desert? A beacon? An art piece? An ode to 2001: Space Odyssey? Or something left by people from a place far, far away?

The Borden House in Fall River, Mass in 1892 was a tense place. When Andrew and Abby Borden are axed to death in August of 1892, one of the most infamous murder in American history begins. And daughter Lizzie has some explaining to do.

We take our first stab at a review - The Haunting of Bly Manor. Join us as we dissect and distill this spooky but imperfect nine-part Netflix original. Warning: Pretty much everything is spoiled.