Weird Darkness: Paranormal & True Crime Stories

Get the full story in my book, "Two Lost Hours: The Betty And Barney Hill UFO Abduction, 65 Years Later" at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HJY8N8CT Sixty-five years ago this week, a Portsmouth couple drove home through the White Mountains and arrived hours later than they’d planned; the story of what happened in that gap became the template for the modern alien abduction  narrative, and the psychiatr...

Test pilot Steve Weston chased something impossible at the edge of Earth's atmosphere and returned ten hours later – yet only with enough fuel for ten minute flight. He returns, convinced he has an urgent warning to save Earth. Is it delusion from his time in space – or something we must all pay attention to in order to preserve humanity?  EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarknes...

A physicist who has spent five years and twenty million dollars chasing one missing equation leaves his attaché case in a highway diner, where the seventeen-year-old at the cash register reads the twelve pages inside and understands every line. Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening a...

Philadelphia homicide detectives are working through 50 hard drives pulled from a boarded-up house in Olney where a violent pornographer lived for two decades, and among the 70,000 videos is one they believe shows him strangling a woman to death – while five women tied to the address remain missing and not a single body has been found. SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/h...

A 27-year-old who spent three years building AI at two of the industry's leading labs quit on a Tuesday and said the people he'd worked beside privately expect the technology could wipe us out within the decade. The man in charge of keeping Anthropic's AI in line replied in public that he was right about the fear. But how frightened should we really be? SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://w...

The Wild West wasn’t all shootouts and saloons – but when danger came, it carved legends in blood, bullets, and bone. EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/ToDieInTheOldWest READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p9b8rax FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: The Wild West, where no matter how tough and rugged you might be, you can...

A forensic report found Gary Siders Sr. incompetent to stand trial and beyond restoring, the prosecutor stipulated to it without objection, and the same two lawyers who expect his case dismissed within weeks have now been appointed to defend Brandon Henderson. SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/SidersCase20260911 Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Ra...

The Pilton Super Opener opens a can in no time at all, and nobody at the company, least of all the man who designed it, can say where the can disappears to in the process. EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/mitm-superopener SOURCES and RESOURCES: “The Super Opener” by Michael Zuroy (“Worlds of If” Science Fiction magazine from August, 1958) WeirdDarkness® is a register...

During the Black Death, medieval Europeans bathed in vinegar, slept on rotting straw, dumped waste in the streets — and still couldn’t figure out why everyone was dying. ========== HOUR ONE: During the bubonic plague in the early Middle-Ages, those who became sick and were even suspected of having the plague, were forced to relocate to a quarantined island – Poveglia Island. The gruesomeness that...

New Orleans high society adored the charming Jacques St. Germain, right up until they started asking why a man who claimed to be forty could describe the 1700s like he'd lived them. Now more than a century later people are still arguing over whether Jacques St. Germain was a con man, an immortal, or a true-life vampire. EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/ImmortalVampir...

A movie actress worn down by a lifetime of asthma puts her hand in a bald doctor's and agrees to let him remove her head, on his promise that a prettier one is on the way. Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/OTR CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (A...

In 1896 the visitors pedaled airships. In 1952 they were blond and worried about the bomb. Today they're gray, from forty light-years away, and worried about the climate. Somebody keeps updating the aliens, and it might be us. Look for this podcast on YouTube Music, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and numerous other podcast apps. Get the full list of opt...

Four thousand light-years from Earth, a survey ship deep inside the Crab Nebula picks up something on its locator that no human built, and within the hour both crews understand the same thing: whichever ship leaves first can be followed home, so neither one can be allowed to leave. A NOTE FROM YOUR NARRATOR: I’ve been on an old-time radio kick recently, listening to shows like “The Whistler”, “Dim...

An actress found with her throat cut on Christmas morning, a socialite on trial for arsenic, a child butchered in Bradford, and not one of the cases found the end of the rope. EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/HorrorByGaslight READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/489cffte FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE:Nine murders from...

A young intern at a state asylum wires a homemade telepathy set to the forehead of a dying, illiterate mountain man whose ravings describe palaces of fire he could never have read about. Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/OTR CHAPTERS &...

A man with a past he won't discuss buys a house deep in the woods, miles from anyone, and starts keeping a record of what comes out of the trees at night; the one he calls Skinny wears the faces of the dead, and it's already carved a message into the side of his house. EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/mitm-myproperty SOURCES and RESOURCES:  “My Property Isn’t Normal”...

Three MicroTerrors listeners wrote in with their own scary stories: a girl who sneaks out at night to see the T-Rex every parent in town warns about, a free doll on the sidewalk that introduces itself as Mr. Stevenson, and a family cruise with nothing but one-star reviews and something big moving under the boat. Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora,...

Starring Barbara Stanwyck and Burt Lancaster, a bedridden heiress alone in a New York townhouse asks the operator to ring her husband's office, gets crossed into a stranger's call, and listens to two men schedule a killing for 11:15 that night. Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening a...

She claimed she could predict your death to the exact day — and somehow, she was always correct. But how did she know? EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkess.com/TillieKlimek READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8wt2ep FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Tillie Klimek had been convicted of only a single murder, but the authorities...

On Friday, September 11th, three weeks before anyone could buy it, I played the entire audiobook of my new book live on Patreon, start to finish, with the chat open the whole time.  Something I only do for my Patreon members! https://weirddarkness.com/patreon   Since 1997, young men have walked out of bars alone and turned up in rivers. Two retired New York detectives say it's a serial killer netw...

Sorting through the papers of his late great-uncle, a Providence professor of ancient languages, Francis Thurston finds a clay bas-relief of a winged, tentacled thing, a file of newspaper clippings from around the world, and a set of notes connecting a young sculptor's fever dreams to a swamp cult in Louisiana and a word no human tongue was built to pronounce. EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources):...

Our alien visitors have changed their looks, their home planets, and their warnings every generation or so – always right in step with what we happened to believe at the time. Airships, ghost rockets, flying saucers, black triangles – for more than a century our UFOs and aliens have kept pace with our imaginations, and one longtime researcher wonders whether that's because our imaginations are whe...

A stroke has left a wealthy recluse unable to speak or move, and every night after dark his eyes fix on something beside his bed that nobody else in the room can see. Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/OTR CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Ti...

In a kingdom where the accused settle their own guilt by opening one of two identical doors, a starving tiger waiting behind one and a bride behind the other, a young courtier walks into the arena for the crime of loving the king's daughter. EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/mitm-LadyOrTheTiger SOURCES and RESOURCES: “The Lady or the Tiger?” Frank R. Stockton (The Cen...

In the mid-1970s, David Bowie became convinced something was living in his swimming pool – and instead of a priest, he called a witch. A few years later and a few hundred miles north, a married couple set out to rid America of witches one body at a time. EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/davidbowie READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddar...