Arcane Station

Send us Fan Mail This time on Arcane Station, our host Mike Porter shares experiences that he and his family have had over the years.  Ghosts, mysterious scratching at the window, and a Bigfoot howl in the dead of night. This episode is personal. Support the show

Send us Fan Mail Seven miles south of Denton, Texas, an 1884 iron bridge carries a name locals have used for generations: Goatman's Bridge.  This episode starts there, with the legend of Oscar Washburn and what county historians found when they checked the records. From there we follow the half-human, half-goat figure back 4,000 years, from the Babylonian goat-fish and the goat demons of the...

Send us Fan Mail Crisis apparitions are documented reports of people perceiving a distant loved one, through sight, sound, or touch, at the exact moment that person is dying or in acute danger.  These aren't ghost stories. They've been systematically collected, investigated, and published by researchers since 1882. We look at the data from the Society for Psychical Research's Census...

Send us Fan Mail  In 1849, a child was abandoned in a forest in Fukien Province, China, not because his parents were cruel, but because he looked like a demon.  Born with hypertrichosis, a condition so rare that fewer than 50 cases exist in all of recorded history, he was found by Shaolin monks and raised inside their temple. He became a martial artist, a sideshow performer, and eventually a legen...

Send us Fan Mail The CDC published a zombie apocalypse comic book. That is a fact. Tonight on Arcane Station, we examine why and follow that thread through the biology of behavior modification, documented cases of aberrant human behavior, the spread of a prion disease through North American deer populations, and what scripture has said for thousands of years about the dead returning.  Support the...

Send us Fan Mail  If our universe exists inside a black hole, then every sibling universe spawned alongside ours represents a different set of physical parameters running simultaneously, a controlled experiment with isolated chambers and results encoded on the boundary for outside observation.  In this episode, we take that structure somewhere the physics papers won't follow: what if the fine...

Send us Fan Mail What if our universe isn't just expanding into space, but exists entirely inside a black hole? This isn't fringe speculation. Physicists Lee Smolin and Nikodem Poplawski have published peer-reviewed work suggesting every black hole spawns a new universe, and the math reflecting our own observable cosmos back at us is hard to ignore.  In this episode, we break down the re...

Send us Fan Mail  AI-generated video has changed the rules for cryptid research, and not just because fakes are easier to make. When footage can't be trusted, what does meaningful evidence actually look like?  This episode examines the growing burden-of-proof problem across the cryptid research field, with a focus on Bigfoot and Dogman accounts. We look at how to spot AI-generated footage, th...

Send us Fan Mail  France sold its most vulnerable women a lie, and shipped them across an ocean in chains when they stopped believing it.  In this episode, we trace the full arc of France's colonial women programs, from the carefully vetted Filles du Roi of 1663 to the prisoners and orphans dragged from the streets of Paris and forced onto ships bound for Louisiana.  We cover who these women...

Send us Fan Mail What lies beneath the streets of Paris isn't just history; it's a pitch-black labyrinth packed with six million human skeletons. Join us as we venture sixty feet underground into the Paris Catacombs. From sinkholes swallowing whole blocks to WWII resistance bunkers, illegal secret cinemas, unsolved missing persons cases, and the chilling found-footage that inspired moder...

Send us Fan Mail North Carolina has always had something beneath the surface,  and tonight, we dig into six of its most documented paranormal cases. From a hitchhiker on a rainy road in Jamestown with a real death certificate behind her legend, to a 729-foot WWII battleship in Wilmington where the night security guard spent thirty years reporting two distinct presences aboard. From a psychiatric h...

Send us Fan Mail  North Carolina isn't just strange; it's geographically, historically, and verifiably strange. In this episode we cover the weird locations: two mountains twenty miles apart that independently share the same name for their supernatural power seat, the Brown Mountain Lights and the two federal investigations that failed to close the case, the Maco Light that appeared for...

Send us Fan Mail  North Carolina's monster map runs from Cherokee oral tradition to a small town swarmed by 800 armed hunters. In this overview episode, we survey the state's cryptid history region by region: the giant Tsul 'Kalu and the shapeshifting stone witch Spearfinger from pre-contact Cherokee tradition, the Appalachian legend of the Wampus Cat, and the Uwharrie National Fore...

Send us Fan Mail  In the finale of the Altered States series, Mike Porter makes the full case for and against the simulation hypothesis. From Nick Bostrom's trilemma to James Gates' error-correcting code buried in string theory, from the pixelation of reality at the Planck scale to David Kipping's Bayesian analysis, the evidence is laid out honestly. Then the question goes deeper: w...

Send us Fan Mail No drugs. No trauma. No dying, just a quiet room and a trained mind reaching toward a location it has never seen.  In episode five of the Altered States series, Mike Porter investigates remote viewing and the CIA's Stargate program, which ran for over twenty years and cost roughly twenty million dollars. From Ingo Swann describing Jupiter's rings before Pioneer 10 confir...

Send us Fan Mail  The brain in crisis floods with endorphins, gamma waves, and possibly its own DMT,  but does that explain everything? In episode four of the Altered States series, Mike Porter examines near-death and out-of-body experiences, starting with the strongest neurochemical explanations science has to offer.  Then he digs into the cases that explanation struggles with: Pim van Lommel&apo...

Send us Fan Mail  What if the code people see in altered states isn't a hallucination — but the actual structure of reality? In episode three of the Altered States series, Mike Porter traces a phenomenon that predates computers by centuries: a flowing, symbolic, structured language that appears consistently across DMT, psilocybin, ayahuasca, and deep meditation experiences. From the Shipibo k...

Send us Fan Mail  Who are they? In this episode, we meet the beings themselves. The entities that people consistently encounter when consciousness is altered. From the playful, mischievous machine elves described by Terence McKenna to the clinical, observing insectoid beings studied by psychiatrist Rick Strassman.  From the classic grey aliens, appearing in DMT experiences independent of UFO lore,...

Send us Fan Mail  What if the visions people experience on DMT, psilocybin, and other psychedelics aren't hallucinations created by a malfunctioning brain, but actual windows into something that exists independently of us? Thousands of people across cultures and continents report encountering the same entities, describing identical beings, geometric structures, and, strangely, computer code....

Send us Fan Mail  From the depths of Loch Ness to the remote lakes of Oklahoma, creatures lurk in the dark waters of our world. For centuries, eyewitnesses across continents have reported encounters with intelligent, elusive lake monsters, yet tangible proof remains elusive.  Today, we explore seven distinct types of lake cryptids through specific accounts, locations, and dates. We examine the bio...

Send us Fan Mail Why do mountains appear again and again in ancient mythology, religious texts, paranormal encounters, and stories of supernatural beings? Across cultures and throughout history, humanity has viewed mountains as places where the physical world and the divine intersect. From Mount Olympus and Mount Sinai to Mount Hermon and the Himalayas, towering peaks have long been associated wit...

Send us Fan Mail In the forests of southern Washington, there are reports of a creature that looks like a black cougar, but with a face that doesn’t belong to any known animal. It’s been called the Klickitat Ape Cat. But unlike most cryptids, this one doesn’t come with decades of sightings, multiple witnesses, or independent reports. In this episode of Arcane Station, we break the case down from t...

Send us Fan Mail In 1888, the streets of Whitechapel were more than just dangerous, they were disorienting, oppressive, and on edge. Thick industrial fog choked the air, gaslights distorted what people thought they saw, and entire neighborhoods lived under constant stress, poverty, and fear. This episode goes beyond the surface of Jack the Ripper murders. We break down the timeline of the canonica...

Send us Fan Mail Across continents and across centuries, cultures around the world have told stories of small humanlike beings who live in forests, mountains, caves, mounds, and hidden places beneath the earth. From the Cherokee Yunwi Tsunsdi and the Pukwudgie traditions of New England to the Muqui of the Andes, the hidden folk of Europe, the Koropokkuru of Japan, and the mysterious Ebu Gogo of Fl...

Send us Fan Mail What happens when history, mythology, sacred sites, and wartime legend begin to overlap? In this episode of Arcane Station , Mike Porter takes a deep dive into the world surrounding the Ahnenerbe , the SS research organization tied to ancestry, archaeology, and some of the most enduring legends of the twentieth century. From the ideological roots of Thule , to the traditions surro...