He Summons the Dead, And Steals Daughters | Sophia And The Pilgrim | #RetroRadio

A coffin lid scratched from the inside, a stalker hiding in the basement, and a plate of "fresh venison" served by a man who was never a hunter — Redditors share the true moments that still keep them up at night.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/RedditHorrorsREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4ywsvu9vLISTEN 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:“Creepy True Occurrences From Redditors” posted at Factinate.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/h9zz8vka(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, 2021Here's the blog synopsis in plain text, ready for your review pass before HTML conversion.Weird Darkness gathers dozens of true creepy stories submitted by Redditors, ranging from a grandmother buried alive in a backyard coffin to phantom police officers, a haunted hotel painter, a 1980s kidnapping attempt, and a dinner of "fresh venison" served by a cannibal.It opens with a coworker's family story about exhuming a grandmother who had been buried in a wooden box in the backyard, as was once customary. When the family lifted the lid to move her to a cemetery plot years later, they found claw marks covering the inside of the coffin — she had been buried alive.From there, a babysitter hears pans falling in the basement after putting the children to bed and calls the police expecting a single patrol officer. A full SWAT team arrives at the door instead, because the dispatcher heard a second phone on the line hang up after the call ended. A man wanted for multiple assaults had been listening from the basement extension.A secluded spring campground follows, where a father and his friends befriended a quiet neighbor living out of a makeshift truck camper. Days later, driving out, they spotted him hanging from a tree beside his untouched campsite, a note pinned to the trunk with a buck knife — the suicide had happened at the father's favorite camping spot, the same one where he finally told his children the story years later.Next comes a twelve-year-old girl living in a backyard trailer who heard footsteps crossing the metal roof at night, always when she was alone. Months later she woke to find the trailer sweltering, the heater cranked to full blast, and fled on instinct; investigators later found the door lock tampered with and a kitchen knife hidden behind a chair beside the heating controls, where the staring neighbor had apparently crouched in wait.After the first break, a traveler in Taiwan steps into an elevator near a night market and stops on a pitch-dark, abandoned floor that shouldn't exist. The building's fourth floor — omitted from the panel entirely, in keeping with Chinese numerical superstition — had been sealed after a hair salon employee died by suicide there, and the elevator had been professionally reprogrammed to never stop on it. It sometimes does anyway, and riders report a figure in a gown moving toward the doors.Then a 2 a.m. street fight ends with a stabbing, a daughter catching her bleeding stepfather on the porch, and an answering machine message recorded at the exact time of the attack: a school friend across town, crying, describing a dream of screaming, a fight, and her friend covered in blood — in the late 1980s, long before cell phones could have carried the news.A college student renting a basement room recounts his dog growling at one corner of the room, followed by the small dirt-floored closet under the stairs creaking open on its own with deliberate slowness, leaving him frozen in the dark hallway for five full minutes.A seven-year-old girl visiting her mother's best friend watches a burned family — a mother, a teenage boy, and two younger girls — walk the house and beckon her to come with them. Years later the friend admitted the family had moved out over hauntings: baby toys scattered overnight, blankets and pillows arranged on the floor as if people had slept there.A smashed flower pot follows, found twenty feet from its shelf in the middle of a family room floor with no dirt trail, as if it had been carried and dropped straight down. Then two brothers named Jack and Tom each spend a night silently furious at the other's loud guests, only to meet in the hallway and discover the living room full of chattering old people belonged to neither of them — the room stood empty, smelling of musk.A college party flips from paranormal dread to absurdity when a bleeding, pantsless man with wild hair forces his way through the door screaming "please"; the supposed intruder turned out to be a friend of a friend on a catastrophic acid trip who had lost his pants running through a field.The block closes with a runner who caught a prospective neighbor — a man who had complimented his physique two days earlier — standing at his bedroom window at midnight, having entered the house earlier to adjust the blinds for a better view. The chase across gravel driveways ended with a written confession, a photographed license plate, and, a full year later, a knock on the door from the same man, apologizing.Out of the second break comes a Hollywood Hills doorstep in the early 1980s: a distraught woman babbling about blood, two LAPD officers who collect her within ten minutes, and then two more officers thirty minutes later — the ones actually dispatched to the call, with no record of who the first pair were or where they took her.The night crew of a 24-hour Subway describes their resident "SubGhost," blamed for disembodied conversations, crashing noises, items sliding off counters, and a new automatic paper towel dispenser that unspooled an entire roll, sheet by sheet, in an empty room.Three children watch a white figure of a man sit atop a telephone pole, grinning at them, before he stands, jumps, and vanishes before reaching the ground. Then a basement-apartment tenant describes a man watching him through the window for ten minutes, followed weeks later by an air conditioner cover pried off in the night — and a police department that could do nothing until someone actually broke in.A newspaper carrier on a rural route in 2000 describes a drenched man in a white shirt charging out of a rain-filled ditch at 2 a.m. with what looked like a hatchet in his hand; the man took his own life within the hour, and the carrier had to pound on a farmhouse door to report it because his Motorola flip phone had no signal.A bus rider chats with an oddly unsettling woman at the stop, boards an empty bus, and hears "Hey! Remember me?" from a little girl who resembles the woman exactly — on a bus the rider is certain was empty.The episode then travels to South Africa's Eastern Cape in July 2010, where a humanitarian worker and a missionary named Piet arrive at a Xhosa village to find it deserted. A naked woman covered in cuts, missing an ear, and running on all fours charged their truck, screeching and clawing at the windows as they fled. The villagers later said only that "a bad presence" had been in the village and was now gone.Gentler hauntings follow: a clock radio scraping across a desk to face a grandson and playing opera — the late grandfather's wake-up music of choice — two weeks after the funeral; a glass bowl that shattered downstairs during a sleepover and was found already swept up, its pieces gathered into another bowl on the table; and a dying grandfather whose eyes opened wide on his final breath as he smiled, looking happier than he had in years.The dread returns with a woman home alone who hears something working at her front door lock and sees two silhouettes — one at the door, one at the living room window — standing motionless, watching her watch them. They vanished before help arrived, and she found the basement window partially kicked in the next morning.A Sacramento man recounts surviving an attempted kidnapping around age nine or ten: a white van stopped beside a late-night Frisbee game, the sliding door opened, and a man in black flew out on a rigged telescoping harness operated from inside, missing his grab by inches. The three boys hid on a school roof for nearly an hour while the van circled, searching.A small-town yard sale yields a dented silver cigarette case for two dollars; months later the same elderly seller has the identical case — same dent, same brand of cigarette inside — while the original has vanished from the buyer's nightstand drawer. A man recalls childhood dreams of gripping toys hard enough to wake up holding them, including the Skeletor figure his family swore they never bought.Then a sixteen-year-old new driver and her four-year-old half-sister are stalked across town by a purple-faced man in a white pickup truck who blocked intersections, revealed a gun under his shirt, rammed their car toward oncoming traffic, and drew a finger across his throat. The older sister's gas station escape plan — coaching the four-year-old to jump out and run to the counter — ended the pursuit, though polic

“The Enchanted Child”: A polite little boy keeps pushing away his favorite dessert at Sunday dinner — and every time he does, somebody in the family doesn't live to see Monday.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/OTRCHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “The Enchanted Child” (January 20, 1978) ***WD00:47:10.132 = House of Mystery, “The Ghost Who Forgot Halloween” (October 27, 1945) ***WD01:18:31.060 = Incredible But True, “The Stowaway” (1950-1951)01:22:03.585 = Inner Sanctum, “Death Is a Joker” (June 10, 1944) ***WD01:52:21.712 = Jeff Regan, “The Prodigal Daughter” (July 17, 1948) ***WD02:22:26.847 = The Key, “Escape Artist” (1956) ***WD02:48:46.905 = Lights Out, “Death Robbery” (June 16, 1947) ***WD03:17:47.487 = Lux Radio Theater, “The Big Clock” (November 22, 1948)04:18:09.933 = Macabre, “Weekend” (November 20, 1961) ***WD04:45:27.936 = 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/WDRR0687

A tiny tagging system nobody had ever studied in the brain turned out to be hard at work locking in fear — and only in the females in the lab.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/Fear-StudyLook 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.#WeirdDarkness, #WeirdDarkNEWS

A Florida man heading to court for a burglary charge stopped to attempt another burglary along the way, telling police he just wanted a shirt to wear in front of the judge.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/burglary-commute/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.#WeirdDarkness, #WeirdDarkNEWS

Behind the walls of H.H. Holmes' "World's Fair Hotel" waited trap doors, gas chambers, and a basement of acid vats — and more than a century after the Murder Castle burned, something still lingers at 63rd and Wallace.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/HHHolmesHotelREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/57djvd7fFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: It’s one of the most infamous and macabre subjects of Chicago history – it even served as inspiration for TV’s “American Horror Story: Hotel”. It’s what has become known as “The Murder Castle” where serial killer H.H. Holmes committed his monstrous crimes. But even today, Holmes continues to terrify… in spectral form. (H.H. Holmes’ Hellish Hotel And Lingering Haunting) *** A woman tries to save the soul of her daughter, believing her to be possessed… but her solution to drive out the demon was to murder her daughter using a holy crucifix. (Murder By Crucifix) *** What’s worse than proclaiming yourself to be a supernatural being and starting your own cult? How about telling your followers you are God so you could do drugs and have sex with teenage girls? It’s the disturbing true story of the cult called “The Group”. (Theodore Rinaldo – The Drug Cult Rapist) *** Shrunken heads – believe it or not, they are real. And some tribal peoples create them even today – from real human heads. But why do it at all? We’ll look at the reality behind shrunken heads, the reason they are created… and even how they are created. (The History and How of Shrunken Heads) *** A terrifying series of paranormal activities invade a family’s home in Wales. (The Swansea Entity) *** Tenome is a Japanese Urban Legend about a blind man who was robbed and murdered. His dying wish? To have eyes on his hands so he could see. (The Seeing Hands of Tenome) *** Unsolved mysteries are intriguing simply because they are unsolved. That’s why we are so fascinated by stories of people disappearing without a trace. But one man’s disappearance is so bizarre, so weird, that upon hearing the story you’ll be scratching your head wondering what the heck you just heard. (The Strangest Disappearance at Sea in History) CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:01:27.539 = Show Open00:04:09.416 = H.H. Holmes’ Hellish Hotel and Lingering Haunting00:22:02.613 = The Seeing Hands of Tenome ***00:25:29.843 = The Strangest Disappearance at Sea In History00:36:31.904 = Murder By Crucifix ***00:42:31.316 = The Swansea Entity00:52:22.872 = The History and How of Shrunken Heads ***00:58:56.160 = Theodore Rinaldo: The Drug Cult Rapist01:05:34.000 = Show Close*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad breakLISTEN 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 Swansea Entity” by Brent Swancer for Mysterious Universe: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/3pt262t4“Murder By Crucifix” by Inigo Gonzalez for Ranker’s Graveyard Shift: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4h6mjabw“The Strangest Disappearance at Sea in History” from Strange Company: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/nsrhjdew“Theodore Rinaldo – The Drug Cult Rapist” by Matthew Lavelle for Ranker’s Unspeakable Times:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yx2hmzus“The Seeing Hands of Tenome” from The Scare Chamber: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/y4dnxee6“The History and How of Shrunken Heads” by Bipin Dimri for Historic Mysteries: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4wdznwwc“H.H. Holmes’ Hellish Hotel and Lingering Haunting” from Chicago Hauntings: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/pvthp98(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, 2021This episode of Weird Darkness moves from the haunted ground of H.H. Holmes' Chicago Murder Castle to a flesh-eating Japanese yokai, a millionaire's impossible vanishing at sea, an Oklahoma exorcism that ended in murder, a violent Welsh poltergeist, the real-world practice of shrinking human heads, and the Washington State drug cult led by a man who claimed to be God.It opens in Chicago's Englewood neighborhood, where Herman W. Mudgett — better known as H.H. Holmes, America's first serial killer and the inspiration for the Hotel Cortez in American Horror Story: Hotel — built his three-story "World's Fair Hotel" at 63rd and Wallace to prey on visitors to the 1893 Columbian Exposition. The building held sixty rooms riddled with trap doors, hidden staircases, gas chambers, and a basement furnished with a dissecting table and vats of acid and lime. Holmes confessed to 27 murders before his hanging in Philadelphia on May 7, 1896, though some historians put his victim count at 200 or more, and the strange deaths that followed his execution — a poisoned forensics expert, a suicidal prison superintendent, a priest beaten to death in his own churchyard — fed talk of a Holmes curse for decades. The site was never excavated, and employees at the Englewood post office built beside the old Castle property still report stacking chairs, a singing woman no one can find, and apparitions on the grass where the hotel once stood. Even Holmes' own descendant, Jeff Mudgett, author of Bloodstains and the figure behind the History Channel's American Ripper, walked out of that basement a changed man.From there the episode crosses to Japan and the legend of Tenome, a blind old man robbed and beaten to death in a field who returned as a vengeful yokai with eyes on the palms of his hands. First recorded in the Gazu Hyakki Yagyō, the creature hunts graveyards and open fields by scent, feeds on fresh human bones, and inspired the Pale Man of Pan's Labyrinth. The segment ends with the Kyoto tale of a young man who hid from the Tenome inside a locked temple chest — and was found afterward as an empty sack of skin, his bones sucked out through his flesh.Next comes the 1931 disappearance of Hisashi Fujimura, the Japanese-born silk millionaire who vanished from the Red Star liner Belgenland somewhere between Halifax and New York on the night of August 13. Fujimura had told a friend he feared gamblers would follow him aboard, his mistress Mary Reissner was registered under a false name as a governess, and his bank account had dropped from over $333,000 to $2.65 in five months. The ship's captain saw him talking to an unseen person at 2:45 a.m.; by morning his bed was unslept-in and his seven-year-old daughter was alone in the stateroom. Federal investigators closed the case without answers, a dust-free wallet bearing his name later surfaced in an empty Manhattan flat, and Fujimura was declared legally dead in 1938 — leaving murder, suicide, accident, and a staged escape all equally possible.The darkness turns domestic with the 2016 killing of 33-year-old Geneva Gomez in Oklahoma City, beaten to death by her own mother, Juanita Gomez, who claimed she was performing an exorcism to drive Satan from her daughter. Juanita punched Geneva repeatedly, forced a crucifix and religious medallion down her throat, then arranged the body in the shape of a cross with a wooden crucifix on her chest. A forensic psychologist concluded she was feigning incompetence, the insanity plea collapsed, and in January 2018 a jury needed only 20 minutes to convict her of first-degree murder and recommend life without parole.The episode then travels to Rhondda Street in Swansea, Wales, where in 1965 Marcia and David Howells, their two small children, and Marcia's grandmother endured a poltergeist that began with choking sensations in the night and escalated to bottles flying off mantelpieces, rooms ransacked in minutes, the gas stove turning itself on, and a double bed found hurled on top of the baby's empty cot behind a barred door. Police, reporters, and a priest all came to the little house; the only room ever left untouched was the grandmother's. The family finally moved out, the activity stopped, and no tragedy in the home's history was ever found to explain it — leaving psychokinesis, spirit attachment, and Marcia's own verdict, a demon, on the table.From haunted houses the show turns to a practice that is grimly real: the shrunken heads, or tsantsas, of the Jivaro people of northern Peru and southern Ecuador. Warriors severed the heads of slain enemies in the belief that shrinking them enslaved the victim's vengeful spirit, then boiled the skin free of the skull, packed it with hot stones and sand, blackened it with charcoal ash, and sewed the lips shut to seal the spirit inside — reducing a human head to a third of its size. Genu

A skeptical census taker's idle curiosity about a mystic who can summon the dead draws his old friend's beautiful, restless daughter into the stranger's orbit — and she may never come back.Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneInRadio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/OTRCHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “Sophia And The Pilgrim” (June 19, 1978) ***WD00:46:22.976 = BBC Ghosts From The Past, “The Boat Hook” (April 15, 1992)01:29:50.477 = Calling All Cars, “Triple Cross” (May 22, 1936) ***WD02:00:23.302 = Hall of Fantasy, “Man-Size in Marble” (April 10, 1947)02:26:39.527 = Harry Lime, “Ticket To Tangier” (August 24, 1951)02:53:34.654 = Haunted Tales of the Supernatural, “The Dead Man of Varley Grange” (July 28, 1984)03:20:37.249 = The Haunting Hour, “Breakdown” (May 05, 1945) ***WD03:34:56.875 = Hermit’s Cave, “Author of Murder” (May 02, 1937)04:02:13.875 = Mystery Is My Hobby, “Faithless Life” (1945-1950)04:25:11.416 = Sherlock Holmes, “The Devil’s Foot” (January 11, 1947)04:54:23.916 = 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/WDRR0686

Two months after walking away from the Tombstone feud a free man, Johnny Ringo was found dead against a tree with a Colt in his hand. He had survived the Hoodoo War, jail breaks, and a showdown with Doc Holliday — but no one can agree on what finally killed him.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/JohnnyRingoREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/24j5xybkFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: A gentleman gunslinger who could quote Shakespeare, Johnny Ringo was a mythic gunslinger who died a mysterious death befitting his legend. (The Mysterious Death of Outlaw Johnny Ringo) *** To his family and neighbors, Richard Kuklinski was the all-American man. To the mafia and his victims, he was the "devil himself" known as the Iceman killer. (The Mafia’s Most Prolific Hitman) *** Wherever tragedies happen, urban legends settle. And for almost every urban legend, there is a road to take you there… a road often just as terrifying as the urban legend it takes you to. (Roads that Lead to Urban Legends) *** We’ll look at the true story of a bar bouncer accused of killing his wife… which is odd, seeing as the incident took place before he killed a man while defending her honor. (A Broad-Shouldered Bully Was Wiener) *** Extraterrestrials come in all shapes and sizes if you believe what you see on television, film, and even online in the fringe conversations of UFO enthusiasts. The most famous of the aliens are usually depicted in the very realistic, humanoid form… the Greys. But what exactly are the Greys? And is it possible they aren’t extraterrestrial at all? (What Are The Greys) *** We’ll meet a man who has an amazing superpower. He is especially proficient at passing gas. (Mister Methane: The Gas Man)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:00:59.394 = Show Open00:03:16.488 = The Mysterious Death of Outlaw Johnny Ringo00:15:42.451 = A Broad-Shouldered Bully Was Wiener ***00:19:08.842 = Roads That Lead To Urban Legends00:30:46.873 = The Mafia’s Most Prolific Hitman ***00:39:46.230 = Mister Methane: The Gas Man00:45:59.461 = What Are The Greys? ***00:52:15.959 = Show Close*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad breakLISTEN 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 Mysterious Death of Outlaw Johnny Ringo” by Kuroski for All That’s Interesting:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/n4d9yce6“Roads that Lead to Urban Legends” by Estelle for ListVerse: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2fkp8nkt“The Mafia’s Most Prolific Hitman” by Katie Serena for All That’s Interesting: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/5xe6xx4s“What Are The Greys” from Anomalien: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/5u5cknde“Mister Methane: The Gas Man” by Spooky for Oddity Central: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2hje4vs9 (VIDEO: https://youtu.be/kaRZeuZDAVI)“A Broad-Shouldered Bully Was Wiener” by Robert Wilhelm for Murder By Gaslight: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/34rnu2y9=====(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, 2021This episode of Weird Darkness travels from a gunfighter's unexplained death under an Arizona oak tree to a mafia hitman's freezer, a tour of the world's most haunted highways, a St. Louis hanging, a British flatulence performer, and the enduring question of what the Grey aliens actually are.It opens with Johnny Ringo, the Shakespeare-quoting outlaw and cousin to the Younger and James brothers, who survived the Hoodoo War of Mason County, Texas, a jailbreak, multiple murder charges, and a near-shootout with Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday on the streets of Tombstone — only to be found dead on July 13, 1882, slumped against a tree with a .45 caliber Colt in his right hand. The coroner called it suicide. Others pointed to the cartridges in his gun, the absence of powder burns, the odd position of his hat, and later confessions attributed to Earp himself, and called it murder. Biographers Jack Burrows and David Johnson weighed the same evidence a century later and sided with suicide, a quiet end for a man newspapers once misspelled into legend as "Ringgold."From there the episode moves to St. Louis in 1877, where Billy Wieners — a hulking bouncer at the Theatre Comique saloon, already out on bond for trying to kill his wife — shot assistant barkeeper A.V. Lawrence dead for insulting that same wife. The Missouri Supreme Court found nothing in the record to soften a verdict of deliberate murder, and after his sister Annie's commutation campaign failed to move Governor Phelps, Wieners hanged in the St. Louis jail yard on February 1, 1878, using his last words to warn other men away from whiskey.Next comes a road trip through the world's haunted highways: Zombie Road in Wildwood, Missouri; India's cursed Ranchi-Jamshedpur NH33, where 245 people died in three years and a woman in a white saree patrols the asphalt; South Africa's N9 with the hitchhiking ghost of Maria Roux; Australia's "Street With No Name" in Annandale; the werewolf sightings on Yorkshire's B1249; Malaysia's Karak Highway, where a creature was seen battering a husband's head against his own car roof; Scotland's A75 Kinmount Straight and its phantom animals; Long Island's Mount Misery and Sweet Hollow roads; the unearthed Hawaiian warrior bones beneath Oahu's H-1; Thailand's temple-haunting murdered wife on Chak Phra Road; and the ghosts scattered along old Route 66.The darkness deepens with Richard Kuklinski, the Gambino-affiliated contract killer known as the Iceman, who froze his victims' bodies in industrial freezers so the time of death could never be fixed. Convicted of six murders, he claimed hundreds, killing with cyanide nasal spray, ice picks, hand grenades, and his bare hands while coaching his children's barbecues and ushering Sunday Mass in suburban New Jersey. An ATF sting through his only friend, Phil Solimene, ended the run in 1986, and Kuklinski spent his remaining years giving prison interviews until his death in 2006 — a week after his wife Barbara declined, one last time, to lift the do-not-resuscitate order she had signed.The mood lifts with Paul Oldfield of Macclesfield, England, the performer called Mr. Methane, who discovered during a teenage yoga session that he could draw air into his colon at will and built a stage career on controlled flatulence — playing Phil Collins parodies, alarming Howard Stern, and logging 86 farts in a single minute for a 2018 Guinness World Records attempt, a talent the record book had refused to touch back in 1990.The episode closes among the Greys, the large-eyed, gray-skinned beings that dominate alien abduction reports from Betty and Barney Hill onward. Ufologists describe two castes — tall telepathic leaders and smaller cloned workers — originating in the Zeta Reticuli binary star system 38 light years away, harvesting human sperm and eggs to repair DNA ruined by generations of cloning. A rival theory holds that the Greys are not extraterrestrials at all but human beings from a distant future: taller, thinner, larger-brained time travelers returning to collect healthy genetic material from before whatever catastrophe awaits us.

Twenty years after she was locked away for taking a hatchet to her own sister, fragile Ann Pettigrew comes home obsessed with one desire — and on a storm-lit night, with candles burning and a circle drawn on the floor, she works a forbidden rite to summon back the only man she ever loved, no matter what comes walking up the veranda steps to answer.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/OTRCHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “A Model Murderer” (January 17, 1978) ***WD00:47:24.875 = The Strange Dr. Weird, “Survival Of The Fittest” (January 23, 1945) ***WD00:59:08.508 = The Eleventh Hour, “Black Magic” (ADU)01:23:55.381 = Escape, “The Drums of the Fore And Aft” (July 14, 1949)01:53:55.440 = Everyman’s Theater, “Cat Wife” (January 18, 1940)02:22:54.327 = Murder By Experts, “Murder By Prescription” (July 11, 1949)02:53:20.176 = Exploring Tomorrow, “Hunting Lodge, aka Trouble With Robots” (May 28, 1958) ***WD03:12:48.537 = Faces In The Window, “Lightning Rod Man” (January 17, 1953) ***WD (LQ)03:37:34.837 = Dark Fantasy, “Letter From Yesterday” (May 01, 1942) ***WD04:01:41.360 = BBC Fear on 4, “The Yellow Wallpaper” (December 27, 1990) ***WD04:31:41.320 = Future Tense, “The Defenders” (May 28, 1974) ***WD04:57:56.341 = 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/WDRR0685

A scheming wife and her spineless lover pull off the perfect murder of her wealthy husband — until the dead man starts turning up in the snow, at the bar, waiting in the shadows, and refuses to stay buried.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/OTRCHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “In Another Place” (January 16, 1978) ***WD00:47:10.460 = The Clock, “Ghost Story” (December 13, 1955) ***WD01:13:55.372 = Creeps By Night, “The Final Reckoning” (July 12, 1944) ***WD01:43:11.958 = The Crime Club, “Fear Came First” (March 13, 1947) ***WD02:13:07.451 = Crime Classics, “The Crime of Bathsheba Spooner” (December 03, 1952)02:41:09.611 = Danger Dr. Danfield, “The Tunnel Smelled of Death” (January 26, 1947) ***WD03:05:39.762 = CBC Deep Night, “Man Radio” (July 29, 2005)03:40:38.324 = The Devil and Mr. O, “Going Down” (December 17, 1971)04:09:19.922 = Diary of Fate, “David Dexter” (May 04, 1948) ***WD04:40:36.758 = Dimension X, “The Martian Chronicles” (August 18, 1950) ***WD05:09:57.556 = 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/WDRR0684

In 1977, a calm, otherworldly voice broke into the British evening news across five transmitters at once, identified itself as an alien envoy, and warned humanity to abandon nuclear weapons before time ran out. Was it a hoax, or first contact?EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/AlienVoicesOnTVAndRadioREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/mrxcfak4FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: While scientists at SETI are continually monitoring for extraterrestrial contact from the cosmos, ordinary people are already hearing from them – via radio and television. (Aliens Voices Over Radio and Television) *** 
The death of a Hollywood movie producer is still unsolved – and his spirit on the lot is still at unrest. (The Mysterious Death of Thomas Ince) *** A family moves into a new home, and it’s not long before they begin hearing strange sounds coming from the home bar in their living room. (Something In That Part of the House) *** In years past, baby boys were dressed in pink. So why the change to the color blue for boys? The answer is a dark one. (Baby Blues) *** In just 30 seconds, 30 rounds were fired when the tension between a crew of thieving cowboys and vigilante lawmen came to an explosive head in the frontier town of Tombstone, Arizona. (The True Story Behind the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Klaatu’s speech from “The Day The Earth Stood Still” (1951)00:02:45.959 = Show Open00:04:39.005 = Alien Voices Over Radio And Television00:16:13.874 = The Mysterious Death of Thomas Ince and the Haunting of Culver Studios00:33:04.222 = Something in That Part of the House ***00:39:31.873 = Baby Blues00:45:22.653 = The True Story Behind the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral ***00:54:32.710 = Show Close*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad breakLISTEN 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 True Story Behind the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral” by Mark Oliver: http://ow.ly/RmAm30oaHWt“The Mysterious Death of Thomas Ince” by Troy Taylor: http://ow.ly/WVUu30oaHvS“Something In That Part of the House” by Haven: http://ow.ly/qMeU30oaHxn“Baby Blues” by Conny Waters: http://ow.ly/zcGj30oaI32“Alien Voices Over Radio and Television” posted at the Conspiracy Journal: https://tinyurl.com/y2ht47pt“Klaatu’s Speech From ‘The Day The Earth Stood Still’”: (link no longer available)(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, 2021Weird Darkness moves across five unsettling true tales — alleged alien voices breaking into broadcast signals, the unexplained death of a Hollywood pioneer, a possessed home bar in Mexico, the superstitious roots of dressing infant boys in blue, and the bloody thirty seconds behind the O.K. Corral.It opens with the alleged extraterrestrial transmissions that have arrived through ordinary radios and televisions rather than from deep space. On November 26, 1977, at 5:12 PM, a deep, water-logged voice overrode five Southern Television transmitters across southern England, speaking over news reader Ivor Mills for five and a half minutes; the voice named itself Gramaha — also transcribed as Vrillon, Gillon, or Glon — a representative of the Ashtar Galactic Command, and warned humanity to abandon nuclear energy before the dawning New Age of Aquarius. The Independent Broadcasting Authority never logged the interruption and could not explain how its instant switch-off monitoring was bypassed. Years earlier, in July 1961, an eighteen-year-old ham radio operator named Robert P. Renaud had picked up a soft feminine voice high in the 25-meter band claiming to broadcast from a planet called Korendor, eventually trading images on his television's vidicon tube with a contact named Lin-Erri, an episode investigator Allen Griese found oddly free of showmanship or profit. A decade after Renaud, in January 1971, British UFO researcher Rex Dutta took a call on a radio talk show from a voice that registered no echo, no feedback, and no movement on the station's VU meter.From there the episode crosses to November 1924 and the death of Thomas Ince, the producer who founded Culver Studios in 1918 and earned the title Father of the Western. Ince died days after celebrating his birthday aboard William Randolph Hearst's yacht, the Oneida, on a weekend cruise to San Diego that also carried actress Marion Davies and, by rumor, Charlie Chaplin. The official account blamed acute indigestion, but Hollywood whispered that Hearst, jealous over Davies, fired a diamond-studded revolver in the dark and put a bullet meant for Chaplin into Ince's head instead. The body was cremated, no inquest was held, San Diego district attorney Chester Kemply closed the case after a single session, and gossip columnist Louella Parsons soon received a lifetime Hearst contract. Decades later, workers at Culver Studios reported a man in a bowler-type hat watching them from the catwalks during 1988 renovations, frowning, declaring that he disliked what they were doing to his studio, and walking through a wall.Next comes a listener's account of a house in Mexico, bought by the family about twenty years earlier, where a heavy tavern-style wooden bar in the living room became the source of growling, clinking glassware, and slamming cabinet doors that sounded like two animals fighting inside an empty cupboard. The housekeeper, Letty, threw the cabinet open to find nothing disturbed. Weeks later the mother and Letty dug up jars in the front yard containing rag dolls pierced with pins, buried directly on the other side of the wall behind the bar. A framed mirror reading BAR shattered at three in the morning during a housewarming party, a barred window slid open on its own after being latched, and a photograph of a single bar stool showed a clear horned, devil-like face the family begged to have deleted. Letty, it turned out, was a bruja — a witch.Color superstition drives the next story: infant boys, dressed in blue today, were once dressed in pink, and a June 1918 article in the trade journal Earnshaw's Infants' Department called pink the stronger, more decided color suited to boys and blue the daintier choice for girls. The return to blue revived a far older practice, since the ancient Egyptians and Greeks regarded blue as divine and used it to repel evil spirits, dressing pharaohs in it and, as author Douglas B. Smith recounts, painting nurseries to keep satanic spirits from slipping into young children's bodies. Boys received that protection because they were valued above girls, who were thought too unimportant for evil spirits to trouble. The same fear survives in the Evil Eye and in protective amulets like the Hamsa and the Turkish Nazar, hung in homes and cars and worked into jewelry across the Balkans and the Middle East.The episode closes behind the O.K. Corral on October 26, 1881, where thirty rounds were fired in roughly thirty seconds. Tombstone, Arizona had been founded in 1877 by prospector Ed Schieffelin, who struck a silver vein worth more than thirty-seven million dollars after being warned that all he would find out there was his own tombstone. Wyatt, Virgil, Morgan, and James Earp, joined by the gun-slinging ex-dentist Doc Holliday, clashed with the Cochise County Cowboys, a feud that hardened after Curly Bill Brocius accidentally killed city marshal Fred White in 1880 and Virgil took the post. The gunfight left Frank McLaury, Tom McLaury, and nineteen-year-old Billy Clanton dead while Ike Clanton and Billy Claiborne fled, and Judge Wells Spicer afterward released the Earps as having committed an unwise but not criminal act. The reckoning continued past the verdict, with Virgil shotgunned in the back, Morgan assassinated over a game of pool in a plot tied to Ike Clanton, and Wyatt Earp drifting west until his death in California in 1929 at the age of eighty.