Avsnitt
-
In 1954, hundreds of Glasgow schoolchildren armed with makeshift weapons stormed the Southern Necropolis, hunting a towering, iron-toothed vampire they believed had already claimed two victims.
EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/GorbalsVampire
READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4xtvswmm
FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: What caused hundreds of Scottish children in the 1950s to suddenly become vampire hunters? (The Gorbals Vampire) *** Over the years, from ancient to more modern times there have been a number of incredible cases of mass hysteria. Some are so unbelievable it’s difficult to understand how they happened at all. (Ancient Cases of Mass Hysteria) *** Zachary Davis had a history of mental disturbance, but no one could have predicted the horrors he was truly capable of. (The Disturbing Story of Zachary Davis) *** When poor travelers are found dead in the frozen winter, could it be that there is something more to their story? Could they have been killed not by the cold, but by a demon of the snow? (Demon of the Snow) *** Southwest of Tombstone, Arizona are the remains of a simple adobe cabin nicknamed ‘the bloodiest cabin in Arizona’. (Brunkow’s Cabin) *** Oscar Beckwith was a hermit who lived in the woods, in a small, squalid shack with no furnishings but a bunk, two stools, and a stove… on which he cooked human flesh. (The Cannibal of Austerlitz)
CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding
00:01:02.525 = Show Open
00:03:13.218 = The Gorbals Vampire
00:07:54.447 = Ancient Cases of Mass Hysteria
00:23:57.158 = The Disturbing Story of Zachary Davis ***
00:32:13.121 = Demon of the Snow
00:38:22.972 = Brunkow’s Cabin ***
00:43:01.745 = The Cannibal of Austerlitz
00:48:36.810 = Show Close
*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad break
LISTEN ON PODCAST APPS:
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.com/wdapps
*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*
SOURCES and RESOURCES:
“The Gorbals Vampire” by Cynthia McKanzie for Message to Eagle: (link no longer valid)
“Ancient Cases of Mass Hysteria” posted at Ancient Pages: http://bit.ly/2Iw12SX
“The Disturbing Story of Zachary Davis” by William DeLong for All That’s Interesting: http://bit.ly/2UOxLd6
“Demon of the Snow” by A. Sutherland for Ancient Pages: http://bit.ly/2UlTX97
“Brunkow’s Cabin” by Amanda Penn: http://bit.ly/2GojnOB
“The Cannibal of Austerlitz” by Robert Wilhelm for Murder By Gaslight: http://bit.ly/2ZjADwV
(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)
WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.
Originally aired: January, 2019
Weird Darkness moves from a 1950s Scottish vampire panic and centuries of mass hysteria through a Tennessee teenager's matricide, the vengeful Japanese snow demon Yuki-Onna, the bloodiest cabin in the Arizona desert, and a New York hermit who cooked the man he murdered.It opens on the evening of September 23, 1954, when hundreds of schoolchildren poured into the Southern Necropolis cemetery in the Gorbals district of Glasgow, Scotland, armed with sharpened stakes and knives to hunt a creature they called the vampire with iron teeth, blamed for abducting and killing two missing boys. Police could not clear the children from among the headstones, and only the rain finally drove them home, though the hunt resumed over the next two days. Although no children were actually missing, newspapers and Parliament blamed American horror comics such as Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror, a panic that drew in Labour MP Alice Cullen and led to the 1955 Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act, while others traced the iron-toothed monster to the Book of Daniel or to the Glasgow Green bogeywoman Jenny Wee. From the Gorbals the episode widens into centuries of mass hysteria: the first recorded case on an Egyptian papyrus dated to 1990 BC, children in a 1676 Dutch orphanage who barked and crawled like dogs, the 1374 dancing plague known as choreomania that seized the German town of Aachen, the Swedish witch panic of 1664 to 1676 and its children flown to the devil's meadow of Blakula, and French convent nuns who meowed in unison until soldiers threatened them with rods. The same survey takes in the 1630 poisoning terror of Milan that sent the barber Mora to torture and execution, the 1771 Okage Mairi pilgrimage that drew five million Japanese to the Ise Grand Shrine of Amaterasu Omikami, Richard A. Locke's 1835 Great Moon Hoax describing winged bat-men called Vespertilio-homo in the New York Sun, the Salem witch trials of 1692 that hanged nineteen people after the slave Tituba's confession, and the Hammersmith ghost of 1804 that ended when Francis Smith shot the plasterer Thomas Millwood dead in the dark.From there the focus shifts to Sumner County, Tennessee, where on August 10, 2012, fifteen-year-old Zachary Davis killed his sleeping mother, Melanie, striking her nearly twenty times with a sledgehammer he had carried up from the basement, acting on what he believed was the voice of his dead father. His father, Chris, had died of ALS in 2007, after which Vanderbilt psychiatrist Dr. Bradley Freeman diagnosed the boy with schizophrenia and depression before Melanie pulled him out of therapy. After the killing Davis doused the family game room in whiskey and gasoline and set it ablaze to kill his sixteen-year-old brother Josh, who woke to a smoke alarm and escaped while Davis fled on foot and was found roughly ten miles away. He told investigators he felt nothing when he killed her, laughed during a televised interview with Dr. Phil McGraw as he described the weapon and the wet sound it made, and was sentenced to life in prison after Judge D. David Gay told him he had gone to the dark side, with parole possible only after fifty-one years.Next the episode crosses into Japanese folklore and Yuki-Onna, the Lady of the Snow, a vengeful Onryo spirit said to have begun as a pregnant woman left to freeze in a mountain storm and to return on snowy nights as a tall, pale figure with blue lips and long black hair who floats over the drifts without leaving footprints. Her most famous tale follows two woodcutters, the old Mosaku and the young Minokichi, who shelter in a mountain hut where Yuki-Onna breathes a killing cold over Mosaku but spares Minokichi on the condition that he never speak of her. Years later Minokichi marries a woman named Oyuki who never seems to age, and when he finally recounts his strange night in the hut, Oyuki reveals that she is the snow demon herself and vanishes, sparing his life only for the sake of their children.After that the episode turns to the desert of Cochise County, southwest of Tombstone, Arizona, where the ruined adobe Brunckow Cabin earned its reputation as the bloodiest cabin in Arizona through at least twenty-one deaths. The German miner Frederick Brunckow built it in 1858 to work a San Pedro silver claim and was murdered there by his own laborers, killed with a rock drill driven into his abdomen alongside the chemist John Moss and the miner James Williams. The owners who followed met similar ends: Milton Duffield, the first U.S. Marshal of Arizona Territory, was shot dead at the cabin by James T. Holmes during an eviction, N.M. Rogers was killed by Apaches, and five thieves who hid there gunned one another down in a quarrel over stolen loot. Ed Scheifelin used the cabin as a base camp in 1877 before he founded and named nearby Tombstone, and visitors today report an apparition that fades when approached and the phantom sound of mining machinery drifting through the ruins.The episode closes with Oscar Beckwith, a seventy-two-year-old hermit living in a squalid shack in Austerlitz, New York, who on January 10, 1882, killed his mining partner Simon Vanderkoek over a soured gold claim near Alford, Massachusetts, then dismembered and cooked the body. A neighbor named Harrison Calkins smelled burning flesh at the shack and was told Beckwith was only frying pork rinds, but he returned the next day to find the mutilated remains, a blood-stained axe, and charred bones in the stove. Beckwith fled to Canada and evaded capture until the detective J.B. Gildersleeve tracked him to Bracebridge, Ontario, in 1885, by which time rumor had branded him the Cannibal of Austerlitz. Six trials sent him to the gallows in Hudson, New York, on March 1, 1888, where at seventy-eight he became both the oldest man and the last person hanged in the state, struggling at the end of the rope for eighteen minutes before he died. -
A fragile young mother, alone with her infant daughter in a remote old mill, becomes certain that something is moving in the deep black pool behind her bedroom wall, and that the villagers fighting to keep it filled know exactly what it wants.
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 Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = Show Open
00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “The Ice Palace” (January 31, 1978) ***WD
00:46:31.886 = BBC Radio 4 Spinechillers, “Witch Water Green” (1984) ***WD
01:43:45.218 = Strange Wills, “Girl From Shadowland” (August 10, 1946)
02:13:05.441 = Strange, “Phantom Wagoneer” (March 21, 1955) ***WD
02:26:39.689 = Suspense, “Portrait Without a Face” (March 02, 1944) ***WD
02:57:22.906 = Tales of the Frightened, “Man in a Raincoat” (1957)
03:02:18.144 = The Creaking Door, “A Day of Truce” (October 12, 1964) ***WD (LQ)
03:32:29.501 = The Saint, “Murder On The High Seas” (October 01, 1947)
03:56:44.596 = Theater Five, “A Little Piece of Candle” (November 18, 1964)
04:16:57.180 = Theater 1030, “The Thing In The Hall” (1968-1971) ***WD
04:46:19.007 = Tales From The Tomb, “Don’t Drink With Strangers (1960s)
04:49:56.396 = Show Close
(ADU) = Air Date Unknown
(LQ) = Low Quality
***WD = Remastered, edited, or cleaned up by Weird Darkness to make the episode more listenable. Audio may not be pristine, but it will be better than the original file which may have been unusable or more difficult to hear without editing.
CUSTOM WEBPAGE: https://weirddarkness.com/WDRR0691 -
Saknas det avsnitt?
-
Two Green Squad officers pulled on the foam heads of Clutch the Bald Eagle and Maple the Moose, hefted a battering ram, and went hunting for a drug dealer who loved football a little too much.
SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/mascot-raid
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://pod.link/1078714736
*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*
WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness. -
Elena Katherine Moore left her Lexington gym on foot the night of June 11th, and six days later searchers found a body in the woods wearing the same olive-green hoodie.
SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/elena-katherine-moore
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://pod.link/1078714736
*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*
WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness. -
Six gay men were stabbed to death near San Francisco's Ocean Beach in the mid-1970s, and the detective working the case today believes their killer is still alive in the East Bay.
SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/doodler-sf
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://pod.link/1078714736
*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*
WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness. -
A new CBS News poll shows that most Americans believe intelligent life exists beyond Earth, and one in five think contact with extraterrestrials has already happened.
SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/alien-contact-poll
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://pod.link/1078714736
*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*
WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness. -
A nuclear test deep beneath the Nevada desert stirs something that should have died out two hundred thousand years ago, and when two old colleagues climb into the mountains to find it, only one of them grasps what it will cost to bring a living giant back down.
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 Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = Show Open
00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Feature, “Yesterday’s Giant” (January 30, 1978) ***WD
00:46:59.714 = Peril, “Curse of Ramses” (1953) ***WD
01:08:50.479 = Price of Fear, “Lot 132” (October 06, 1973) ***WD
01:36:58.947 = Adventures of Ellery Queen, “Green Gorilla” (February 12, 1947) ***WD
02:03:05.560 = Quiet Please, “Where Do You Get Your Ideas” (February 20, 1949)
02:31:39.004 = Radio City Playhouse, “Ground Floor Window” (October 23, 1949)
03:00:46.400 = Sam Spade, “Sam And Psyche” (August 02, 1946) ***WD
03:30:35.617 = The Sealed Book, “King of the World” (March 25, 1945)
04:00:32.188 = The Shadow, “The Murder Underground” (March 09, 1941)
04:27:34.089 = Sleep No More, “Banquos Chair Coward” (February 06, 1957) ***WD
04:55:56.262 = Show Close
(ADU) = Air Date Unknown
(LQ) = Low Quality
***WD = Remastered, edited, or cleaned up by Weird Darkness to make the episode more listenable. Audio may not be pristine, but it will be better than the original file which may have been unusable or more difficult to hear without editing.
CUSTOM WEBPAGE: https://weirddarkness.com/WDRR0690 -
Because the canvas roof had been waterproofed with gasoline, the small flame that touched it on July 6, 1944 swept across the Hartford circus big top in seconds, and most of the 167 people it killed were children.
EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/HartfordCircusFire
READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/39d8nfwh
FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Three boys fishing in the middle of the night hear a blood-curdling scream. But it wasn’t a human making all that noise – it was an extraterrestrial. And thus began a series of meetings with alien beings! (What Do You Say When Meeting An Extraterrestrial?) *** A day of hilarity turns into a day of horror as an uncontrollable fire breaks out at the Ringling Bros Barnum & Bailey Circus – resulting in the most deadly circus disaster in history. (The Day The Clowns Cried) *** Most ghosts and specters do a great job of scaring the pants off you – and some can get creative with how they do it, with stacking chairs, making toys talk, slamming doors, etc. But apparently not all spooks are worried about their reputation – and when it comes to haunting, they just phone it in, doing the bare minimum. (Lazy Phantasms)
CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = Show Open
00:01:39.923 = Lazy Phantasms
00:12:35.047 = What Do You Say When Meeting An Extraterrestrial? ***
00:42:41.671 = The Day The Clowns Cried ***
00:52:38.951 = Show Close
*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad break
LISTEN ON PODCAST APPS:
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.com/wdapps
*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*
SOURCES and RESOURCES:
“What Do You Say When Meeting An Extraterrestrial?” from Anomalien.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/44h5ykk9
“Lazy Phantasms” posted at Esoterx.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2y69m7hu
“The Day The Clowns Cried” by Rachel Souerby for Weird History: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4ek5rsup
(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)
WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.
Originally aired: November, 2021
Weird Darkness ranges from a shapeless apparition that appeared inside the Tower of London in 1817, to a string of close-range UFO and humanoid encounters reported across North America, to the Hartford circus fire of 1944 that killed 167 people in under ten minutes.It opens inside the Tower of London in October 1817, where a cylinder of dense, white and pale-azure fluid about the thickness of a man's arm materialized over the supper table of Edmund Lenthal Swifte, the Keeper of the Crown Jewels. Swifte was holding a glass of wine and water to his wife's lips in the Jewel House, with her sister and his young son present, when the shape hovered for roughly two minutes, drifted around the room, and settled over his wife's right shoulder, at which she cried out that it had seized her. He struck at the wood paneling behind her with his chair, but the figure left no mark, and a scientific friend who afterward examined the sealed, curtained, candle-lit room could account for none of it. The thing wore no period costume and delivered no message, and forty-three years later Swifte set the encounter down in the journal Notes and Queries, insisting at eighty-three that he had neither amplified nor abridged a word of it.From there it moves to a wave of close-range encounters, beginning on a cold January night in 1972 when sixteen-year-old John Yeries and three companions, fishing near Battle Creek Bridge east of Anderson, California, saw a seven-foot, greenish-brown humanoid with a large teardrop-shaped ear on one side of its head and heard it loose a scream that sent them sprinting for their car. Darrell Rich's father Dean returned to the bridge with a pistol, only to back away when a deep growl rose from the brush, and a police search of the area turned up nothing. The following year, on October 4, 1973, insurance agent Gary Chase pulled over at the Santa Susana Pass near Simi Valley, California and watched an elliptical craft roughly seventy feet long, marked with a nested V insignia, hover above a creek while a figure in a wetsuit-like suit crawled across its hull toward a protruding hose. Other witnesses report the same intrusions: patrolman Lonnie Zamora saw two small, white-clad figures beside a landed craft in New Mexico in 1964, and Mrs. Wallace Bowers found fifteen-inch footprints in the snow and watched an orange disk hover over the power lines outside her home in Vader, Washington. Bernice Niblett spent the winter of 1967 alone on Keats Island in British Columbia, where she watched lights maneuver over the water night after night and became convinced that the two stiff, oddly formal Hydro men who appeared at her cabin were not the utility workers they claimed to be — a year-long ordeal documented by Canadian UFO researcher John Magor that eventually drove her off the island.The episode closes with the Hartford circus fire of July 6, 1944, when the canvas big top of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey circus, waterproofed with a mixture of white gasoline and paraffin wax, caught at the edge and was consumed in under ten minutes, killing 167 of the roughly 7,000 people inside, most of them children. As the flames climbed the roof, the bandleader struck up 'Stars and Stripes Forever,' the circus's coded signal for an emergency, while the Great Wallendas scrambled down from their high wire unhurt. Ringmaster Fred Bradna called for a calm exit, but the crowd ignored him as burning canvas and hot wax fell from above. Two of the exits were blocked by the steel chutes used to move animals in and out, so many of the dead were trampled there rather than burned, and a photograph of the clown Emmett Kelly carrying a single bucket of water toward the blaze fixed the catastrophe in memory as the day the clowns cried. Investigators never settled the cause, though the state fire marshal leaned toward a carelessly dropped cigarette. A fifteen-year-old circus hand named Robert Dale Segee confessed to setting the fire years later and then recanted. And one young victim, her face barely touched by the flames, was never claimed — buried under the name Little Miss 1565 and identified only decades afterward, and only disputably, as Eleanor Cook. -
A Newport Beach physician who ran a Riverside skin-care clinic pleaded guilty to the sexual battery of three patients during their exams, and he will never hold a medical license again.
SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/Sannoufi
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://pod.link/1078714736
*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*
WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness. -
A Paris auction house expected half a million dollars for the world's first lab-grown Tyrannosaurus rex handbag, and the bidding gave out at a hundred and fifty thousand for a purse paleontologists say is mostly chicken.
SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/trexpurse
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://pod.link/1078714736
*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*
WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness. -
At her own party, a wealthy widow watches her trusted investment counselor's fingers close around a small copper idol — the Queen of Thieves — as if the little goddess had reached out of the shadows and chosen him for her own.
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 Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = Show Open
00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “Ranee of Rajputana” (January 24, 1978) ***WD
00:47:42.858 = Mr. Keen, “the Boy Who Used Big Words” (February 10, 1944) ***WD
01:16:48.935 = Murder at Midnight, “Black Swan” (August 18, 1947)
01:44:05.862 = The Black Museum, “Shilling” (1952) ***WD
02:09:13.868 = Mysterious Traveler, “Stranger In The House” (January 29, 1952)
02:40:26.038 = Mystery House, “Murder Takes Practice” (April 21, 1946) ***WD
03:07:28.614 = Night Beat, “Antonio’s Return” (July 13, 1951) ***WD
03:36:51.555 = Nightfall, “After Sunset” (April 29, 1983)
04:03:47.330 = Obsession, “Dynamite” (October 09, 1950) ***WD
04:34:36.912 = Pat Novak For Hire, “Jack of Clubs” (February 20, 1949) ***WD
05:04:05.819 = Show Close
(ADU) = Air Date Unknown
(LQ) = Low Quality
***WD = Remastered, edited, or cleaned up by Weird Darkness to make the episode more listenable. Audio may not be pristine, but it will be better than the original file which may have been unusable or more difficult to hear without editing.
CUSTOM WEBPAGE: https://weirddarkness.com/WDRR0689 -
Sometime before dawn on July 2, 1951, a 67-year-old St. Petersburg widow was reduced to ash in her own armchair while the room around her sat almost untouched, leaving behind little more than a shrunken skull, a piece of spine, and a single foot still resting in its slipper.
EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/MaryHardyReeser
READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p88de8v
FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: When police found her in 1951, she was almost entirely ash. But mysteriously, the rest of her apartment remained almost perfectly intact. We’ll look at the death of Mary Reeser – which became known as “The Cinder Woman Case”. (Did Mary Hardy Reeser Spontaneously Combust?) *** Most crimes are pretty ordinary – assault, robbery, the occasional murder, but once in a while a crime is committed in a strange, shocking way – to the point it’s almost hard to believe what you are hearing is a true story. I’ll share a few of those strange crimes. (Creepy Crimes and Crazy Criminals) *** One of the reasons we find chimpanzees so interesting is because they are so much like humans – in body shape, the way they express themselves, it’s eerie sometimes. But still, we know they are just apes. Then there is the strange case of Oliver – a chimpanzee that also appeared to be human. Or was he a human that appeared to be a chimpanzee? Or, is it possible, that Oliver was a genuine genetic hybrid of the two? We’ll look at his incredibly strange story. (Oliver, The Humanzee) *** Some hauntings are more terrifying than others – and some are stranger than others. What happened to the Palzon family in Zaragoza, Spain possibly qualifies for both. They didn’t have a typical haunting – this was no poltergeist or spirit of a recently passed person… they were terrorized by a horrifying goblin. (The Zaragoza Goblin) *** Most haunted paintings are hundreds of years old – but one in particular was painted in the late 20th Century, and to many, it is the most disturbing painting they’ve ever laid eyes on. (The Hands Resist Him)
CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding
00:01:14.404 = Show Open
00:03:53.182 = Did Mary Hardy Reeser Spontaneously Combust?
00:14:39.389 = The Hands Resist Him ***
00:29:00.706 = Oliver, the Humanzee ***
00:44:04.298 = Creepy Crimes and Crazy Criminals ***
00:59:07.540 = The Zaragoza Goblin ***
01:09:16.862 = Show Close
*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad break
LISTEN ON PODCAST APPS:
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.com/wdapps
*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*
SOURCES and RESOURCES:
““The Hands Resist Him” by Jenne Gentry for ListVerse: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/mtmj2ysr
“Oliver, The Humanzee” by Bipin Dimri for Historic Mysteries: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2ttc3p8s
“The Zaragoza Goblin” by Brent Swancer for Mysterious Universe: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2jxxdd6b
“Did Mary Hardy Reeser Spontaneously Combust?” by Tommy Thompson for Talk Murder: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p937wec
“Creepy Crimes and Crazy Criminals” by C.J. Phillips for ListVerse: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8b3dyw
(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)
WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.
Originally aired: November, 2021
This episode of Weird Darkness ranges from a 1951 Florida death that investigators could not explain, to a painting blamed for three deaths, a chimpanzee long mistaken for a human hybrid, a catalog of bizarre real-world crimes, and a disembodied voice that terrorized a Spanish apartment building in 1934.It opens with the morning of July 2, 1951, when landlady Pansy Carpenter found the doorknob to apartment 1200 Cherry Street in St. Petersburg, Florida hot to the touch and called police, who discovered that 67-year-old widow Mary Hardy Reeser had been reduced almost entirely to ash. Only her skull, shrunken to roughly the size of a teacup, a section of spine, and a left foot still in its slipper remained, while the apartment around her showed little more than soot on the ceiling and a recliner burned down to its springs. A greasy film coating the walls and floor was later identified by the FBI, which devoted a 115-page report to the case, as melted human fat. Her son, Dr. Richard Reeser, had left her around 8 p.m. the night before, resting in her favorite recliner in a Van Raalte rayon-acetate nightgown with a freshly lit cigarette. Investigators ruled out lightning, accelerants, and any motive for murder, which left two explanations in contention — a dropped cigarette that set her flammable nightgown alight and rendered her body into a slow-burning wick, or spontaneous human combustion — for the death that came to be known as the Cinder Woman case.From there the episode turns to William Stoneham's 1972 oil painting The Hands Resist Him, a 36-by-24-inch canvas showing a young boy beside a hollow-eyed, life-size doll while disembodied hands press against a glass door behind them. Stoneham based the boy on a photograph of himself at age five at his grandmother's Chicago apartment and drew the title from a 1971 poem by his first wife, Rhoann Ponseti. The work gained its reputation in February 2000, when a couple listed it on eBay as a haunted painting, claiming their four-and-a-half-year-old daughter saw the figures leave the canvas at night and that a motion-sensor camera caught the boy crawling out and the doll holding a gun; the listing drew more than 30,000 views and sold for $1,050. Its lore also ties three deaths to the painting — art critic Henry Seldis in 1978, gallery owner Charles Feingarten in 1981, and Godfather actor John Marley in 1984 — and the canvas now sits in the back room of Kim Smith's Perception Fine Art Gallery in Grand Rapids, Michigan.Next comes the story of Oliver, a chimpanzee captured in the Congo around 1957 who walked upright by nature, had a flatter and more human-looking face, light-colored eyes, pattern baldness, and a soft voice, and was marketed as a humanzee, a supposed human-chimpanzee hybrid and missing link. Owned by animal trainers Frank and Janet Berger, who featured him on The Ed Sullivan Show, Oliver drank morning coffee, mixed his own evening cocktails, and moved loads with a wheelbarrow, and early claims that he carried 47 chromosomes fed the hybrid theory. After being passed among several owners and confined for years in a small cage at the Buckshire Company laboratory, where he developed arthritis and muscular atrophy, he was rescued in 1996 to a chimpanzee sanctuary, where University of Chicago testing established that he had the ordinary chimpanzee count of 48 chromosomes and belonged to a Central African subspecies already known for human-like features. Oliver died in his sleep on June 2, 2012, beside a companion named Raisin, and his ashes were spread on the sanctuary grounds.After that, the episode collects a series of strange real-world crimes, starting with California inmate Jaime Osuna, already serving a life sentence for the 2011 murder of Yvette Pena, who killed his cellmate Luis Romero in 2019 and fashioned parts of the body into a necklace. It then moves to Michigan and the 2019 murder of 25-year-old Kevin Bacon by Mark Latunski, a man Bacon had met through a Christmas Eve date on Grindr, and to Scotland, where a crew of thieves made off with roughly £280,000 in blue WKD alcopops from Caledonian Bottlers. Other cases include a Chennai airport smuggling ring caught in March 2021 with gold paste hidden beneath hairpieces, a Cleveland man named Michael Harrel who handed a bank teller a robbery note for $206 with his own name and contact details written on the back, and a Florida man, Matthew Leatham, arrested after dialing 911 twice to ask for a ride home, his forehead tattooed with the outline of the state. The grimmest case belongs to Shabaz Khan of Burnley, England, who blamed two djinn he called Robert and Rita for driving him to murder Dr. Saman Mir Sacharvi and her 14-year-old daughter Vian Mangrio before setting their home on fire.The episode closes with the Goblin of Zaragoza, which began on September 27, 1934, when a maid named Pascuala Alcocer, alone in the kitchen of the Palazon family's second-floor apartment on Gascón de Gotor street in Zaragoza, Spain, heard a child-like male voice rise from the stove complaining that she was hurting it. Over the following weeks the disembodied voice spoke from the stove, the chimney, and the walls, by turns playful and menacing, and grew into laughter, growls, and screaming that at one point seemed to shake the entire building. Spanish police, a psychiatrist named Joaquin Jimen Orriera, and an architect all investigated, and the voice continued even after Pascuala was led -
Thirteen years after The Empire Strikes Back, the long-delayed finale arrived in 1996 — six episodes that brought the original trilogy to a close. Funding cuts had stalled production for more than a decade, but the conclusion was completed at last, with Anthony Daniels returning one final time as C-3PO, joined by Brock Peters as Darth Vader, John Lithgow's Yoda, and Ed Asner as Jabba the Hutt. Still carried by John Williams' score and the original sound effects, it's Return of the Jedi as you've never heard it. | #RRStarWars
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 Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = Show Open
00:02:37.835 = Episode 01: Tatooine Haunts
00:34:52.858 = Episode 02: Fast Friends
01:04:58.749 = Episode 03: Prophecies And Destinies
01:38:38.890 = Episode 04: Pattern And Web
02:06:06.595 = Episode 05: So Turns a Galaxy, So Turns a Wheel
02:40:27.908 = Episode 06: Blood of a Jedi
03:14:07.134 = Show Close
(ADU) = Air Date Unknown
(LQ) = Low Quality
***WD = Remastered, edited, or cleaned up by Weird Darkness to make the episode more listenable. Audio may not be pristine, but it will be better than the original file which may have been unusable or more difficult to hear without editing.
CUSTOM WEBPAGE: https://weirddarkness.com/WDRRSW03 -
A dying woman swears there's a prowler downstairs, but what her husband finds in the dark kitchen is a timid little ghost who can't remember why he's come.
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 Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = Show Open
00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “The Forgetful Ghost” (January 23, 1978) ***WD
00:46:42.148 = Philip Marlowe, “Grim Echo” (February 14, 1950)
01:16:14.347 = Yours Truly Johnny Dollar, “The Ghost To Ghost Matter” (May 18, 1958) ***WD
01:41:29.916 = The Black Mass, “Ash Tree” (December 18, 1963) ***WD
02:11:43.744 = Michael Shayne, “Big Voice Means a Big Body” (May 07, 1945)
02:42:36.427 = Beyond Midnight, “The Yellow Room” (June 06, 1969) ***WD
03:13:43.776 = MindWebs, “Desertion” (February 18, 1982)
03:44:37.897 = Mystery In The Air, “The Marvelous Barastro” (August 07, 1947)
04:13:52.519 = Molle Mystery Theater, “Follow That Cab” (April 19, 1946)
04:43:19.587 = Show Close
(ADU) = Air Date Unknown
(LQ) = Low Quality
***WD = Remastered, edited, or cleaned up by Weird Darkness to make the episode more listenable. Audio may not be pristine, but it will be better than the original file which may have been unusable or more difficult to hear without editing.
CUSTOM WEBPAGE: https://weirddarkness.com/WDRR0688
This #RetroRadio episode, "A Ghost Who Forgot Why He Came, a Dying Wife, a Final Anniversary," gathers nine vintage old-time-radio broadcasts of mystery, horror, and the supernatural — from a haunted ash tree in 17th-century England to a converted man walking the crushing surface of Jupiter.
The CBS Radio Mystery Theater opens the night with "The Forgetful Ghost," in which a dying Eve Gordon wakes her husband Sam in the small hours, certain a prowler is moving through their locked-up house — but when Sam creeps down to the dark kitchen with his hickory walking stick raised, the intruder turns out to be a meek, see-through little man named Peter Pruitt, a ghost who can't recall why he was sent or whom he came to fetch, even as the couple's fortieth wedding anniversary draws closer by the hour. Host E.G. Marshall, a script by Ian Martin, and Mandel Kramer in the lead carry this January 23, 1978 tale of a haunting that proves gentler, and far stranger, than it first appears.
Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles private detective Philip Marlowe takes the wheel in "The Grim Echo," skidding off a blizzard-blind mountain road and into a snow-filled culvert directly in front of Echo Lodge — the one place on earth where the name Philip Marlowe is pure poison. Six months earlier Marlowe shot and killed Virgil Barucki in a Los Angeles alley, and now the storm has trapped him with Barucki's grieving widow Helen, his sister Donna, his mother, and the handyman Ralph Tolman, while an "accidental" cabin explosion and a stolen .38 revolver make it clear that someone inside Echo Lodge wants him frozen, or dead. Gerald Mohr stars in this February 14, 1950 chiller.
Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar sends the freelance insurance investigator with the action-packed expense account into "The Ghost To Ghost Matter," after a frantic Oscar Trimley telephones from the sleepy mill town of Lake City, New Jersey, swearing that Ian McAndrews — the town's founder, dead five years and already paid out at $55,000 on his life policy — has come back to haunt the streets. Every midnight the old clock tower strikes thirteen, bats pour from the belfry, and a wail rises over the lake, so Dollar brings along old flame Nancy Turner to size up a town that insists its founder's ghost simply won't rest. Bob Bailey stars in this May 18, 1958 mystery out of Hartford, Connecticut.
The Black Mass adapts M.R. James's classic "The Ash Tree," set at Castringham Hall in Suffolk, England, where the witch trials of 1690 brought the hanging of Mrs. Mothersole — condemned largely on the testimony of Sir Matthew Fell, who swore he watched her climb the great ash tree beside the house at the full of the moon to cut twigs with a peculiarly curved knife. When Sir Matthew is found dead and black in his bed beneath that same tree, the curse the witch promised begins working its way down through the generations of the Fell family and through whatever still lives inside the hollow trunk of the ash. A December 18, 1963 telling of one of the most quietly horrifying ghost stories ever written.
The Adventures of Michael Shayne brings private detective Mike Shayne and his secretary Phyllis Knight into "Big Voice Means a Big Body," when 230-pound opera star Madame Jolene Toulot sweeps into the office waving an anonymous letter that threatens her life if she publishes her scandalous tell-all memoirs. With a roster of suspects who'd all rather stay out of the book — old suitor Roderick MacKenzie of the Newport MacKenzies, ex-husband and aspiring congressman Edwin Buck, rival soprano Leonora Baril, and the maestro Savadel — Shayne heads to the Figaro Theatre for a double bill of Pagliacci and Cavalleria Rusticana, where the diva's fifth farewell performance takes a fatal turn. Wally Maher and Cathy Lewis star in this May 7, 1945 case.
Beyond Midnight, the eerie South African series, presents "The Yellow Room," in which the avowed atheist Ronald Todd accepts a wager from the elderly Mrs. Watts: one thousand pounds to spend a single night, entirely alone, in the haunted north wing of Chancellors — the very room where the ghost-hunting sixth Duke of Wallingford lost his sanity and a captain of the Hussars leapt to his death. Over Father Doyle's warnings, Todd is locked in with seven candles for company and a copy of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, and as the clock passes midnight the candles begin going out one by one. Michael McCabe produced this June 6, 1969 broadcast.
MindWebs turns to science fiction with Clifford Simak's "Desertion," set in Dome Number Three of the Jovian Survey Commission on the surface of Jupiter, where the planet's crushing fifteen thousand pounds per square inch of pressure and its ammonia rains make unprotected human life impossible. To conquer it, Kent Fowler has been converting his men into "lopers," the planet's native life form — but four men have already loped out into the howling gale two by two and never come back, and now young Harold Allen is next through Miss Stanley's converter. When Fowler at last sends out his own aging dog, Towser, the truth about why no one returns finally begins to surface. A February 18, 1982 reading hosted by Michael Hansen.
Mystery in the Air stars Peter Lorre in Ben Hecht's "The Marvelous Barastro," opening as the magician and hypnotist Barastro walks into the office of criminal lawyer Amos G. Hall and calmly announces that he intends to commit a murder before the night is out. His target is Rico Sansoni, a rival hypnotist who once stole away the affections of Barastro's blind wife Anna by studying and mastering the magician's own voice — close enough to deceive even her in the dark. As Barastro recounts hunting his enemy from country to country and city to city, the line between the two illusionists grows harder and harder to draw. An August 7, 1947 broadcast sponsored by Camel cigarettes.
Molle Mystery Theater closes the night on a lighter note with the comedy "Follow That Cab," starring two New York City cabbies, Mo and Julius, who have read so many issues of Absolutely Authentic True Crime Fiction — and idolized its hero, detective Daniel Daremore — that they're convinced they can crack any case. When a fare leaps from the cab without paying and a song publisher named Larkin turns up shot dead in his apartment, the pair wipe away the fingerprints to make the murder "more baffling," let their prime suspect walk, and bumble their way toward a stolen song called "Joan," a desperate songwriter named Boynton, and a mysterious redhead. Written by Sid and Larry Sloan, this April 19, 1946 farce sends up the whole hardboiled detective genre with host Jeffrey Barnes presiding. -
When the Hale-Bopp comet swung past Earth in 1997, thirty-nine people put on matching black shirts and brand-new Nikes, swallowed a lethal mix of barbiturates and vodka, and lay down beneath purple shrouds to die — certain their souls were about to board the alien ship they believed was hiding in the comet's tail.
EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/heavensgate
READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/343j2ju2
FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Following an anonymous tip, police enter a mansion in Rancho Santa Fe, an exclusive suburb of San Diego, California, and discover 39 victims of a mass suicide. The deceased–21 women and 18 men of varying ages–were all found lying peaceably in matching dark clothes and Nike sneakers and had no noticeable signs of blood or trauma. It was later revealed that the men and women were members of the “Heaven’s Gate” religious cult, whose leaders preached that suicide would allow them to leave their bodily “containers” and enter an alien spacecraft hidden behind the Hale-Bopp comet. *** PLUS, the creepy true-crime story of two men who were caught trying to steal the body of the 16th President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln. But that is by no means the end of this story full of twists, turns, myths, and conspiracies.
CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Heaven’s Gate, Part 1
00:00:53.808 = Show Open
00:02:37.373 = Heaven’s Gate, Part 2
00:04:59.269 = Heaven’s Gate, Part 3
00:09:37.695 = Heaven’s Gate, Part 4 ***
00:23:22.776 = Stealing Lincoln’s Bones, Part 1 ***
00:44:45.437 = Stealing Lincoln’s Bones, Part 2 ***
00:57:58.687 = Show Close
*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad break
LISTEN ON PODCAST APPS:
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.com/wdapps
*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*
SOURCES and RESOURCES:
“Heavens Gate” by Rolling Stone: http://bit.ly/WeirdDarkness2D7tbeZ, Ranker: http://bit.ly/weirddarkness2UIsK4O, and History.com: http://bit.ly/WeirdDarkness2G3uqfN
“Stealing Lincoln’s Bones” by Troy Taylor: https://www.americanhauntingsink.com/stealing-lincolns-bones
(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)
WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.
Originally aired: November 28, 2021
Weird Darkness runs from the 1997 mass suicide of the Heaven's Gate UFO cult outside San Diego to an 1876 counterfeiting gang's attempt to steal Abraham Lincoln's corpse from his tomb in Springfield, Illinois.It opens with the discovery, on March 26, 1997, of thirty-nine members of Heaven's Gate inside a rented mansion in the San Diego suburb of Rancho Santa Fe — twenty-one women and eighteen men lying beneath purple shrouds in matching black shirts and new black-and-white Nike sneakers, plastic bags over their heads, after swallowing phenobarbital and vodka. They believed the deaths would free their souls to board an alien spacecraft trailing the Hale-Bopp comet, which was making its closest approach to Earth that month. Former music professor Marshall Applewhite had started the group in 1975 with his nurse Bonnie Lu Nettles, the two of them renaming themselves Bo and Peep and later Do and Ti before persuading about twenty people in Oregon to leave their families and wait in eastern Colorado for a ship that never arrived. Applewhite preached that human bodies were disposable containers, that he was the second coming of Jesus, and that God was an alien. Nettles died in 1985, but he held the group together, and by the 1990s it had become the first well-known internet-era cult, paying its bills by building web pages under the business name Higher Source. The members watched Star Trek: The Next Generation, sewed Heaven's Gate Away Team patches onto their uniforms, severed contact with relatives through a practice Applewhite called breaking away, and submitted to a ban on sex that several of the men, Applewhite among them, enforced on themselves through castration.The episode closes with the 1876 plot to steal Abraham Lincoln's body from his tomb at Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, Illinois. A Chicago counterfeiting ring run by James "Big Jim" Kneally had lost its master engraver, Benjamin Boyd, to a ten-year term in Joliet Penitentiary, so the gang resolved to seize the president's corpse and ransom it for Boyd's freedom. On election night, November 7, 1876, gang members Terence Mullen and Jack Hughes filed through the lock and split the marble sarcophagus with an ax, unaware that the grave robber they knew as Jim Morrissey was Secret Service operative Lewis Swegles, and that Captain Patrick Tyrell's agents and Pinkerton detectives hired by Robert Lincoln were hidden elsewhere in the monument. The trap fell apart when the lawmen fired on one another in the dark and the two robbers wandered off and escaped, though both were captured on November 18 and, with grave robbery barely a crime in Illinois at the time, served only a year in Joliet. What the public would not learn for years was that custodian John C. Power and a secret brotherhood calling itself the Lincoln Guard of Honor had already dragged the five-hundred-pound coffin into a damp labyrinth beneath the monument and buried it under loose boards and dirt, leaving visitors to grieve over an empty sarcophagus. The body was shifted from hiding place to hiding place until 1901, when Robert Lincoln ordered his father's casket lowered ten feet, locked inside a steel cage, and sealed under two tons of concrete, following one last viewing in which Leon P. Hopkins, the plumber who had closed the coffin back in 1865, studied a chalk-whitened but recognizable face and soldered the lead shut for good. -
A newly declassified FBI form describes a meter-wide red sphere with a white plasma core hovering in a backyard one evening, among dozens of glowing-orb sightings in the Pentagon's third batch of UFO files.
SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/UFO-Batch-3
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://pod.link/1078714736
*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*
WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness. -
After her 24-year-old daughter died by suicide in Montreal, Kristie Carrier read the months of ChatGPT conversations on Alice's phone — and filed suit against OpenAI and Sam Altman.
SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/openai-suicide-lawsuit
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://pod.link/1078714736
*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*
WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness. -
When the luxury liner SS Morro Castle erupted in flames off the New Jersey coast in 1934, it left behind 137 dead, a captain's corpse that vanished before it could be examined, and a heroic radio operator whose criminal past suggested he may have started the fire himself. | #WDRadio June 14, 2026
==========
HOUR ONE: Jeannie Saffin already had a tough life, being born with a birth defect that stunted her mental growth, leaving her with the mind of a child, never getting married and having kids, never dating… but that all pales in comparison to how she died: bursting into flames for no apparent reason. Was Jeannie Saffin the victim of spontaneous human combustion? (The Spontaneous Combustion of Jeannie Saffin) *** Sometimes it’s easy to get a girl to go out with you – just be polite and ask. Some men resort to cheesy pickup lines thinking it will help their chances. But one man chose to call upon a woman in a very unusual way… by purchasing a gravestone. (Pitching Woo With a Tombstone) *** If a man demands his girlfriend give up the baby they conceived, otherwise he would no longer be with the woman – what is that newborn’s mother to do? Sadly, Emily Dunn made the wrong decision – with tragic results. (The Durbin Baby Murder) *** The transplanting of an organ is almost a routine procedure now in the 21st century – even doing a transplant of an arm or a leg isn’t uncommon. But when you talk about transplanting a living head onto a dead body – that’s when things get tricky. But Robert White thought it could be done – and even tried doing it. (The Man Who Wanted To Do a Head Transplant) *** Imagine getting onto a plane and once in the air finding out that the pilot wasn’t qualified to fly that kind of plane – and that he was only there because the original pilot wasn’t available due to being dead. That’s what happened in 1934 on the boat, the SS Morro Castle. And it was the beginning of tragedy after tragedy. (Mystery, Mismanagement, and Mayhem on the SS Morro Castle)==========
HOUR TWO: In June of 2009 a man calling himself Peter Bergmann checked in to a hotel in Sligo Town. Five days later his body was found on Rosses Point Beach. But Peter Bergmann was not Peter Bergmann – so who was he? (The Peter Bergmann Mystery) *** Sharing stories from people who are frightened by a bump in the night or a strange shadow on the wall in their bedroom is one thing, but when you get professional ghost hunters telling of the scariest experiences they’ve had, you know it has to be some freaky stuff. (Scariest Experiences of Ghost Hunters)
==========
SUDDEN DEATH OVERTIME: More of the scariest experiences of ghost hunters! *** I’ll tell you about that time when a dam failed – and because of it, people were legally allowed to marry the dead. And still do to this day. (That Time A Failed Dam Led to Marrying Corpses) *** Personal experiences of those who have stayed at the Wolf Creek Inn, plus some hard evidence, seems to indicate that spirits who haunt the place are not only benign in nature, but even protect the guests and owners from other malevolent spirits which roam there as well. (Haunts at Wolf Creek Inn)
==========
SOURCES AND REFERENCES FROM TONIGHT’S SHOW:
“Mystery, Mismanagement, and Mayhem on the SS Morro Castle” by Brent Swancer for Mysterious Universe:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/56jb9c7j
“The Man Who Wanted To Do a Head Transplant” by Gary Krist for the Washington Post: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/39d2k9pw
“The Durbin Baby Murder” posted at Murders In History: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/c96z9kst
“Pitching Woo With a Tombstone” from the New York Journal, posted at The Victorian Book of the Dead website:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/utw6vh45
“The Spontaneous Combustion of Jeannie Saffin” by Brent Swancer for Mysterious Universe:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/e6as67fn
“That Time A Failed Dam Led to Marrying Corpses” by Kaushik Patowary for Amusing Planet: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/zyrxx43k
“Scariest Experiences of Ghost Hunters” by Amanda Ashley for Graveyard Shift:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/y7tx3a2t
“Haunts at Wolf Creek Inn” posted at HauntedHouses.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yadzm4ae
“The Peter Bergmann Mystery” by Rosita Boland for Irish Times: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/9b44kfs
==========(Over time links seen above may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for material I use whenever possible. If I have overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it immediately. Some links may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)
==========
"I have come into the world as a light, so that no one who believes in me should stay in darkness." — John 12:46
==========
WeirdDarkness®, WeirdDarkness© 2026
==========
To become a Weird Darkness Radio Show affiliate, contact Radio America at mailto:[email protected], or call 800-807-4703 (press 2 or dial ext 250).
==========
https://weirddarkness.com/WDR20260614
This episode of Weird Darkness moves from a burning luxury liner off the New Jersey coast to a fire-scarred kitchen in London, a body on an Irish beach, a drowned infant in Illinois, a collapsed French dam that legalized marrying the dead, and a haunted stagecoach inn in Oregon — with a head-transplant surgeon and a tombstone-shopping widower along the way.It opens with the SS Morro Castle, the 508-foot American ocean liner that ferried wealthy passengers between New York and Havana during Prohibition until September 8, 1934, when its captain, Robert Wilmott, dropped dead the night before departure and a fire of unknown origin erupted in a B Deck storage locker on the voyage home. Replacement captain William Warms steered into gale-force winds and waited 38 minutes to send a distress call, paint-gummed lifeboats refused to lower, untrained passengers broke their necks jumping in faulty life jackets, and at least 137 of the 549 aboard died before the charred hulk ran aground at Asbury Park, New Jersey, where souvenir stands sprang up around the wreck. Suspicion later fell on chief radio operator George White Rogers, the disaster's celebrated hero, whose hidden history of arson convictions, an aquarium-heater bomb built to maim a police lieutenant asking too many questions, and a double murder ended with his sudden death in Trenton State Prison — and the disappearance of his prison records.From there the episode lightens briefly with a pair of newspaper accounts of courtship by gravestone: an 1896 story from the Cincinnati Enquirer about a widower who finally bought a $50 monument for his wife of five years past — not out of grief, but to impress a wealthy widow who had called him too cheap to mark the grave — and a 1924 item from the Kansas City Star about a Kansas woman who married a widower precisely because he kept his first wife's grave so well.Next comes Dr. Robert J. White, the Cleveland neurosurgeon who watched the first successful human kidney transplant in Boston in 1954 and spent the rest of his life pursuing something far stranger: transplanting a living human head onto a donor body. In March 1970 he performed the operation on monkeys, moving one animal's head onto another's decapitated body in an 18-hour surgery; the hybrid lived nine days. White, a devout Catholic who sparred publicly with journalist Oriana Fallaci and animal rights activist Ingrid Newkirk, came close to attempting the procedure on a quadriplegic human volunteer through Russia's medical system before he died in 2010, leaving behind questions about consciousness, identity, and death that medicine has yet to answer.The hour then turns to Jeannie Saffin, a 61-year-old London woman with the mental capacity of a child who, on September 15, 1982, burst into flames while sitting calmly at her father's kitchen table in Edmonton with her hands in her lap. Her father Jack and brother-in-law Don Carroll doused the fire, but Jeannie — burned to the subcutaneous fat on her face, hands, and abdomen — never screamed, slipped into a coma, and died eight days later. The chair she sat in was unmarked, the nearest flame was a shielded pilot light five feet away, and a police constable concluded it was spontaneous human combustion, a verdict the coroner rejected. Skeptic Joe Nickell's pipe-ember theory accounts for some details, but not how a human body ignited so completely in under two minutes while burning nothing around it.Then the mystery of Peter Bergmann: the tall, gray-haired man with an Austrian accent who arrived in Sligo, Ireland by bus on June 12, 2009, checked into the Sligo City Hotel under a false name and a fabricated Vienna address, and over three days left the hotel thirteen times carrying a full purple plastic bag — returning empty-handed each time, never once caught by CCTV disposing of anything. He bought ten international stamps, cut the labels from his clothes, folded them neatly on a rock at Rosses Point Beach, and was found dead at the water's edge the next morning near Dead Man's Point. The autopsy revealed terminal prostate cancer he could not have been unaware of, yet he died of cardiac arrest, not dr -
In Steven Spielberg's Disclosure Day, a former nun clutches a crucifix, prays the words Jesus prayed the night before the cross, and then lets it fall to the floor.
EPISODE PAGE (Includes Sources and Transcript): https://weirddarkness.com/cotu-disclosureday
LISTEN ON PODCAST APPS:
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 for Weird Darkness: https://pod.link/1078714736. For Church of the Undead episodes specifically, you can find a list of apps here: https://pod.link/1651062114.
*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*
WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.
Originally aired: June 14, 2026 -
Three nine-year-old boys in a Massachusetts port town go looking for the schoolyard ghost called Skeleton Jack and instead find a tree that should not exist — black and leafless, cold enough to seem to drink the life out of the air — a tree one of them is dared to carve his name into, while something he can't see breathes in the dark just behind him.
EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/BlackTree
FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: "The Abandoned Drive-In Theater" — A newcomer to North Carolina, biking past the ruins of a drive-in theater that's been dead for decades, hears an engine roar and turns to see a film flickering across the filthy, torn screen — then finds every speaker smashed and every wire long since severed, with no way the movie could have been playing at all. *** "He Showed Up To Work After His Funeral" — Six days before Christmas, a security guard helps lower his coworker Jake into the ground after a fatal heart attack — and two mornings later, arriving alone at the snowed-in, empty worksite, he finds Jake's car already parked in the lot. *** "The Black Tree in the Woods" — In a Massachusetts port town haunted by the schoolyard legend of a flayed pirate ghost, three nine-year-old boys push deep into a forbidden forest and find a short, withered tree that grows no leaves and seems to drink the life out of the air — and when one of them is dared to carve his name into its strangely soft bark, something he cannot see begins breathing in his ear.
CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = Show Open
00:02:17.025 = The Abandoned Drive-In Theater
00:07:35.119 = He Showed Up To Work After His Funeral ***
00:17:39.759 = The Black Tree In The Woods ***
00:58:35.975 = Show Close
*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad break
LISTEN ON PODCAST APPS:
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.com/wdapps
*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*
SOURCES and RESOURCES:
“The Abandoned Drive-In Theater” by January Nelson, from Thought Catalog: https://tinyurl.com/ybwbdgev
“He Showed Up To Work After His Funeral” by Thomas J. Sotvedt: https://tinyurl.com/yckfue5w
“The Black Tree In The Woods” submitted anonymously to Thought Catalog: https://tinyurl.com/y7rocj8v
(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)
WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.
Originally aired: June 10, 2020 - Visa fler
