Weird World Podcast

It is getting hard to find big old houses that aren't haunted these days, but Hinton Ampner was a big old house by middle of the 18th century and even then it was terrifying master and servant alike. Groans, footsteps, slamming doors, piercing shrieks, badly buried bones, and phantoms rustling slik skirts through hallways, Hinton Ampner had it all.

You have heard this scream. It has been around for over 70 years, has been heard in over 400 movies, TV shows, and video games. From a cowboy being eaten by an alligator to a stormtrooper being light sabered by Luke Skywalker, they all share the same bloodcurdling scream.

Some things need to be handled with more care than others. Like cursed things. Parts from James Dean Porsche Spyder. Three and a half foot dolls that might be haunted. Cursed paintings that start firres. Ancient boxes and even more ancient mummified bodies.

Welcome to Hallow Weird World 2024! An all-white apparition was terrorizing the citizens of Hammersmith 220 years ago. Francis Smith had had enough. But since Egon Spengler had not yet invented the proton pack, Francis went ghost hunting with a shotgun. It did not go well for him or the ghost.

If you heard that Haitian immigrants are eating the cats and dogs of their new neighbors in Springfield, Ohio you know that crazy political conspiracy theories are having a moment.

Coney Island has long been done for amusement parks and hot dog eating contests. And now monsters.

Dorothy Martin led a pretty normal 1950s housewife life in Chicago, but she was itching for something to do with her spare time. Lucky for us, she landed on doomsday cult leader as a hobby, because her quest eventually led to the development of a foundtional theory of modern psychology.

CONTENT WARNING: TALK OF SUICIDE, DEATH AND RELIGIOUS TRAUMA - Feel free to sit this one out. In a trial of the century atomosphere, two Catholic priests and the parents of Anneliese Michel go on trial for negligent homicide. A key defense was that Anneliese really was possessed? Was she?

CONTENT WARNING - TALK OF SUICIDE, PSYCHOLOGICAL AND RELIGIOUS TRAUMA - Feel free to sit this one and next week’s second part out. When Anneliese Michel began having seizures when she was 16, she went to a doctor and was diagnosed with epiliepsy. But as her illness morphed into a severe psychological disorder and medical treatment did not work, Anneliese and her family came to believe her sickness...

We have bigfoot sightings for you - from a drone in the snowy mountains of Vermont, in the spooky woods of Louisiana, and even in broad daylight spotted from a train full of tourists. And did an Oklahoma man try to feed his friend to a sasquatch? It's a definite maybe all the way around.

Ever want to squeeze a puppy too hard and bite a baby's toes? Your not alone, it's called Cuteness Aggression and you need to be careful. Then we veer into folks in the Philippines killing people for singing "My Way" in Karaoke bars. Listen, just stick to "Don't Stop Believing" and everyone goes home safe. Music Credits: Cuteness Aggression song by Anthony Vincent https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r...

If you’re planning on going into the ocean, change your plans. If you are in the water right now while you’re listening to this podcast, get out now. Did you even read the title of this episode!? Get the f**k out of the water!

We pick up the story of the oldest missing person case in New York City with the suspects - who might have done harm to Dorothy? We then explore the best theories of what happened to the young woman now missing over 110 years. Was it murder? Suicide? Or had Dorothy had enough of the lap of luxury?

People go missing all the time, but when rich young women from Manhattan high society disappear while shopping in the middle of the day on Fifth Avenue it creates a stir. In Part 1 we track Dorothy Arnold's steps until they vanished, then the first halting attempts to find her which seemed more concerned with avoiding scandal than finding Dorothy.

If being different is hard in the 21st Century, imagine what it was like in Revolutionary War era America. So when Jemima Wilkinson recovered from a severe illness and remade herself as a genderless magical creature named PUF you have to figure things got complicated.

If ghosts had raves would they have them in crypts? In Barbados, apparently the answer is yes. How else do you explain how every time the Chase family crypt was unsealed for a new entrant the heavy lead coffins already there would be strewn across the stone floor like matchsticks?

Possibly the spawn of devil baby testicles (we'll explain), the Grunch is a chupacabra-like creature that terrorizes the swamps and bayous outside New Orleans. Is it real? If it wasn't, would so many people keep losing their cats?

Would you take a bunch of kids from their homes, deny all contact with family, and see if they could survive on their in a New Mexico ghost town? You would if you were a CBS TV executive and had no moral compass. But then we wouldn't have had the sh*tshow that was "Kid Nation."

Finally, we get to the answer - is the earth flat and how do we know? Then we wrap it up with what happened to Bob Knodel's expensive gyro experiment and Mad Mike Hughes' daring rocket test.

We continue our deep dive into our flat earth even though we don’t know how shallow the crust is. What exactly does a flat earth look like (think a sprial of continents around the North Pole at the center of a disc)? And what do scientists have to say about why the earth might actually be round?

Never have more people believed the earth is flat than right now. We know this is true because the concept of a flat earth is surprisingly recent and has really only exploded this century. We start a three-part deep dive below the flat surface of the earth by tracing its history up to the modern day.

Sure, Osama Bin-Laden was popular in some quarters in the early 2000s, but action figure popular? And would the CIA make that Osama action figure? And send them to kids in Afghanistan? There has to be more to that story. There is.

He has a receding hairline over a round face and thick dark eyebrows. You don't know him and have never seen him - except in your dreams. He is "This Man," the dream invader who might calm you or guide you - or terrify you. And thousands of others have seen the same man in their dreams too.

Two words: Vampire. Dog.

George Kenney was a school principal who thought he could help troubled kids through hypnosis. If that sounds like a bad idea you're wrong. It was a horrific idea.