Wide Atlantic Weird

Enjoy a wee drop of whiskey at the cabin for a chat about the infamous Great Grey Man of Ben Macdhui - whether it be a cryptozoological Bigfoot-like creature, or a more mystical being of folklore. The Grey Man is only one of many strange tales told about high elevations. In this episode, we investigate: -the 1975 Bonighton Everest ghost -Dan Simmons’ novels ‘The Terror’ and ‘The Abominable’ -1920s...

Join Cian at the cabin for a beer as he gets to know influential Welsh writer of the strange, the inimitable Arthur Machen, and focuses on his 1895 tale of a Victorian scientist searching for a forgotten race of malevolent ab-human ‘fairy folk’ living in (or under?) the Welsh hills. Discussion covers: -Psychogeography & hauntology of Machen’s work -the ‘orientalising’ of Britain’s Celtic fring...

Join Cian & Dónal at the cabin for another October monster episode .... this time, the monsters of Gulliver's Travels! We discuss: -Swift's life and identity as an Irishman -The place of the Anglo-Irish and Church of Ireland in the 18th Century -Gullivar's Travels, the four books -The Lilliputians, The Brobdingnagians, Laputa, & the Yahoos Wide Atlantic Weird Store https://teespring.com/st...

Cian is delighted to invite to the cabin in the woods W. Scott Poole, author of In The Mountains Of Madness: The Life And Extraordinary Afterlife of H.P. Lovecraft for a chat about the great New England horror writer! In this episode we have an enormously fun conversation that includes: -Lovecraft's short story The Moon-Bog, set in Ireland -Lovecraft's racial worldview and how the Celts/Irish feat...

Join Cian at the cabin in the woods for an informal, off-the-cuff bonus episode on the 1968 classic The Devil Rides Out! There's folk horror, Hammer horror, 1930s glamour, and dashed bad company Satanists in this episode! Enjoy one of our favourite films of all time with comparisons to the original 1934 book and extra notes on the life and work of the inestimate Dennis Wheatley. Take a glass of Im...

Join Cian on a bright cold Autumn morning for a cup of green tea and a deep-dive into the history of America's most mysterious bird. Special Guest: Mr Brent Burton, naturalist & science educator. -the life of American birding hero John James Audubon -his 'sighting' of the elusive and massive Washington Sea Eagle -new evidence on Audubon's personal situation when he made the claim -did Audubon...

Join Cian for a coffee on an autumn morning at the cabin in the woods to discuss: -Thomas Harris' 1981 book Red Dragon -memories of serial killers from the N64 game Shadowman from 1999 -the literary debut of Hannibal Lecter -the stereotype of the genius serial killer in fiction -the stereotype of the super-smart FBI profiler -serial killer and the occult -who serial killers target and the society...

Hi folks – this episode is part two of a two-part miniseries! To get the full story of the background of Dublin’s infamous Hellfire Club, and the site we visit in this episode, I strongly encourage you to go back and listen to the previous episode if you haven’t already– it’s rather soberly named The Hellfire Club: Lore Of Dublin’s Hell House, and it’ll fill you in on the details of the supposed b...

On a wooded hill overlooking Dublin city sits a mysterious stone lodge shrouded in legend and lore. Dubliners know it as the haunt of the Hellfire Club, a secret group of devil-worshippers who carried out ghastly and terrible rites there in times gone by. Join me as I find out the truth and learn of the strange men who once shocked eighteenth-century Dublin with their wild escapades and hard livin...

In the early 1970s, two men climbed into the Sierra Nevada mountains in California. They came to a remote spot in the woods, miles from civilization. There, they recorded the sounds of a group of creatures whose existence is still debated. The sounds they captured remain to this day the most extensive collected of purported sasquatch evidence on record. At the cabin we enjoy a beer and discuss: -t...

Not a fun episode, but one that had to happen. Cian and Dónal (now a Dr of political science) talk about: -the origins of Qanon and 4chan 'fake insider' culture -what do Qanon followers believe -why did Qanon become mainstream during lockdown -a detailed breakdown of Qanon-proponents now entering the US govenrment -the so-called 'save the children' and its connections to Qanon -why Qanon is alread...

In 2016, tabloid newspapers were telling tales of a werewolf-like creature sighted in Yorkshire. Variously known as 'Old Stinker' and 'The Beast Of Barmston Drain,' this creature seems to have sprung from the misty centuries of English werewolf lore. Or has it? On this episode, Cian sinks a Black Sheep ale while looking into: -what is the real history or werewolf lore in England? -is lycanthropy a...

In 1899, a group representing the so-called British-Israelite movement descended upon the ancient ceremonial burial site at the Hill Of Tara in County Meath, Ireland. This band of eccentric pseudo-archaeologists believed that the Anglo-Saxon British were the true descendants of the ten Lost Tribes of Israel, and that the fabled Arc Of The Covenant was hidden beneath this ancient Irish site. But th...

Cian welcomes Faye Sewell from Youtube's The Ghost Trail to the cabin in the woods to talk about a curious subdivision of ghost stories: Timeslips! There are various famous cases of these from around the UK primarily. Are they ghost sightings? An example of the 'stone tape?' Is it time travel? Is quantum physics involved? Trace the history of this idea with us as we focus on the famous 1901 Versai...

An unexpected and relatively short BONUS EPISODE about the 'weird western' short story The Monster Of Lake LaMetrie written by Warden Allen Curtis in 1899. Join us for a quick chat about this cryptozoological oddity: there's a prehistoric lake in the wilds of Wyoming, some Victorian mad science, and of course prehistoric reptiles! Sources: The eText of the story from Famous And Forgotten Fiction h...

It's a quiet night in the woods by the cabin, and the stars are out. That means it's time for a tale of UFOs - but this one is darker than usual. Released the same year as Whitley Strieber’s influential book Communion , and spawning a TV movie/miniseries that was broadcast just a year before the debut of the X-Files, Intruders (1987) remains a key artefact in the history of the development of UFO...

In 1969, a small group of international monster-hunters came to the wind-swept west of Ireland in response to a spate of recent lake monster sightings. They were a colourful bunch, and included one Ted Holiday, a John Keel-like figure who came to believe that lake monsters were mystical symbols of ancient evil, just as UFOs were symbols of good. Join us for a romp with this monster-hunting expedit...

Mothman has been done. A lot. So here at the cabin in the woods, we said we wouldn't cover this weirdest of all cryptid creatures unless we had a personal take on it. So in this episode, we investigate extra elements associated with the Mothman mythos. In 1966 and 1967, the West Virginia town of Point Pleasant endured a 13-month period of seeming invasion by MIBs, UFOs, and a winged bird-like crea...

You're very welcome to the cabin in the woods once again! Usually on Wide Atlantic Weird, we investigate real-life stories of ghosts, monsters and UFOs, taking a critical, almost-academic look at the origins of these tales.  This episode is something a little different, and something very special. Just this once, we’re proudly presenting a short AUDIODRAMA (an audio play) about the birth of t...

Cian cracks a can of Native IPA at the cabin in the woods to investigate a classic American haunting from Georgia, USA. The Walsingham Ghosts case has a spectacular series of dramatic elements: poltergeists break the neck of a dog, manifest invisibly in front of a mirror, drip blood onto a dinner party, and manifest as a horrifying blue floating human head! Follow the investigation as Cian traces...

Ulsterman and Victorian celebrity Lord Dufferin held the highest positions in the British Empire during its heyday, but he was most famous for a classic ghost story he told about a strange happening at Tullamore. It's a brandy-and-cigar kind of tale. Dive down the rabbithole with us as we try to find the source of the story in an adventure that involves Charles Dickens, the madness-inducing King I...

In 1921, an Anglo-Irish explorer leading a reconnaissance expedition on Mount Everest reported seeing strange footprints on the slopes of that mighty peak. Newspapers around the world went into a frenzy, speculating on the existence of a race of strange creatures in the high snowy peaks of the Himalayas. It was to be the beginning of the West's fascination with the Yeti. At the cabin in the woods,...

Cian takes another trip into the realms of folklore. A stray Reddit tale introduces our host to the Native American legends of disembodied voices that mimic humans to trick and trap travellers in the wild. Always a fan of campfire lore, Cian investigates this idea as it turns up in contemporary legends, the original mythology of native peoples, and how folks have used the idea of malevolent forest...

In the summer of 1985, a strange phenomenon broke out all over Ireland. Statues of the Virgin Mary were seen to move, hover and speak. Whether this was an example of mass hysteria or a manifestation of the country's discomfort with modernization, it's a story that straddles the worlds of the religious and the Fortean. Join Cian for a beer at the cabin in the woods as he dusts off a classic episode...

It sometimes seems the human need to believe in unspoiled wildernesses full of large, overlooked creatures knows no bounds! And it feels like there's hardly an 'impossible' animal that doesn't have some folkloric core of supposed 'real life' sightings. And so it is with the woolly mammoth. At the cabin in the woods, Cian nurses a beer and investigates an almost-forgotten tale: the legend of the li...