Weird Darkness: Paranormal & True Crime Stories

Oliver Carsons has spent three nights trying to stay awake in a locked, barred bedroom, and every night a tall man with a face like a skull comes in to tell him he'll pay for killing a girl named Sally.
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, “Family Ties” (October 25, 1978) ***WD
00:47:00.989 = The Shadow, “Brief Fame Of John Cooper” (March 11, 1945)
01:15:53.457 = Sleep No More, “Mr. Mergenthwirker’s Lobblies” and “August Heat” (November 28, 1956) ***WD
01:41:15.406 = BBC Radio 4 Spinechillers, “By The Light Of The Moon” (December 1980)
01:55:11.803 = The Strange Dr. Weird, “When Killers Meet” (April 10, 1945) ***WD (LQ)
02:08:13.332 = Strange, “Hillbilly Feud” (1955) ***WD
02:22:30.113 = Suspense, “Visitor” (May 11, 1944)
02:53:03.171 = Tales of Tomorrow, “The Other Now” (January 22, 1953)
03:22:57.225 = The Creaking Door, “Aunt Mae” (1964-1968)
03:52:57.666 = The Saint, “Fake Amnesia Killer” (November 13, 1949)
04:17:23.399 = Theater 1030, “Two Little Punctures” (July 12, 1953) ***WD
04:45:20.856 = Beyond The Green Door, “Frank Davis And Magic” (1966) ***WD
04:49:24.892 = Tales From The Tomb, “Spirit Of The Dead” (1960s)
04:51:35.602 = Incredible But True, “Beware My Son” (1950-1951)
04:55:10.822 = Strange Adventure, “The Man Who Stared” (1945)
04:58:24.519 = 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/WDRR0784

When the sun sets over the Navajo reservation, ancient legends come alive — and those who’ve seen the skinwalkers will never forget the eyes watching from the shadows.

EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/FaceToFaceWithFear

READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p927m85

FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Numerous Reddit users describe their own personal encounters with strange creatures that might be described as werewolves or wendigos… but even further skin deep. (Skinwalkers and Shapeshifters) *** In 1836, an unsuspecting passerby entered the Gardette-LePrete mansion and uncovered a scene of unimaginable horror. (Blood Soaked Gardette LePrete Mansion) *** Is it possible that some classic UFO events were actually hallucinations by people on drugs? (Psychedelic UFO Sightings) *** Ann Hodges, the only person struck by a meteorite who survived it, suffered a nervous breakdown after a media frenzy and a court battle for meteorite ownership. (Struck By a Meteor) *** A mysterious sighting in the night spawned the legend of one of West Virginia's creepiest cryptids. (The Legend of the Flatwoods Monster) *** A Weirdo family member tells the story of a ghost named Matilda. (Matilda)
CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding
00:01:35.685 = Show Open
00:03:27.394 = True Stories of Skinwalkers And Shapeshifters
00:45:36.764 = Blood Soaked Gardette-LePrete Mansion ***
00:50:42.066 = Psychedelic UFO Sightings
01:00:00.794 = Struck By A Meteor ***
01:07:47.832 = Legend Of The Flatwoods Monster
01:16:07.232 = Matilda ***
01:19:25.669 = 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:
“Skinwalkers and Shapeshifters” by Nida Sea: http://bit.ly/2Xzkaml
“Blood Soaked Gardette-LePrete Mansion” by Adam Karlin: http://bit.ly/2Lb3RKI
“Psychedelic UFO Sightings” by Nick Redfern: http://bit.ly/2LSsETx
“Struck By a Meteor” by Martin Chalakoski: http://bit.ly/2xBwmZ5
“The Legend of the Flatwoods Monster” by Orin Grey: http://bit.ly/32jIImG
“Matilda” submitted anonymously to WeirdDarkness.com
(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 2022
LIKE WHAT YOU’RE HEARING? WEIRD DARKNESS posts episodes 7 DAYS A WEEK! Listen FREE wherever you get podcasts or visit https://weirddarkness.com/listen. • Paranormal • True Crime • Ghosts • UFOs • Cryptids • Unexplained • Want even more? Become an OFFICIAL WEIRDO for commercial-free episodes, bonus episodes, weeknight live chats, audiobooks & more at https://WeirdDarkness.com/OFFICIAL

Weird Darkness host Darren Marlar covers firsthand skinwalker encounters, a massacre legend from a French Quarter mansion, UFO cases that may trace back to hallucinogens, an Alabama woman struck by a meteorite, West Virginia's Flatwoods Monster, and a ghost named Matilda.
It opens with the skinwalker of Navajo tradition, a witch or medicine man said to take an animal's shape by wearing its skin, and with accounts of meeting one: a blood-matted creature with a half-bear, half-human face sitting in the road between Window Rock, Arizona, and Gallup, New Mexico, and a figure that paced a high school basketball bus at 85 miles an hour before dropping to all fours as a coyote. Other sightings range from Bandelier National Monument to the Australian bush, and a New Mexico highway patrol officer's two encounters come from George Knapp and Colm Kelleher's book Hunt for the Skinwalker.
From there, it goes to the Gardette-LePrete mansion at 716 Dauphine Street in New Orleans, where legend says a passerby in 1836 followed a trickle of blood inside and found a courtyard strewn with hacked-apart bodies and a man who'd been buried alive, said to be the brother of an Ottoman sultan, though no historical record mentions the prince or the murders.
Next, Rich Reynolds of the UFO Conjectures blog points to the CIA's MK-Ultra LSD experiments and suggests that some classic UFO encounters were drug-induced. The cases include contactee Orfeo Angelucci swallowing a pill in a Twentynine Palms, California, diner in December 1954, the 1957 abduction of Antonio Villas Boas in Brazil, and the 1973 Pascagoula, Mississippi, abduction of Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker near the World War II biological-warfare site on Horn Island, in an area where local tales tell of later experiments with the hallucinogen BZ.
After that, on November 30th, 1954, a nine-pound meteorite crashed through the ceiling of a rented house in Oak Grove, near Sylacauga, Alabama, bounced off the radio, and struck Ann Hodges on the hip as she napped. A lawsuit from her landlady, Birdie Guy, was settled with the Hodges family paying $500 for the rock, which Ann later gave to the Alabama Museum of Natural History; she suffered a nervous breakdown, split from her husband in 1964, and died in a nursing home in 1972.
Then comes West Virginia's Flatwoods Monster, the figure with a round red face, a dark green body, and a hood shaped like the ace of spades that Kathleen May and six children saw on a farm hillside in Flatwoods on September 12th, 1952, after three boys watched something streak across the sky. In 2000, Joe Nickell of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry traced it to a meteor, an aircraft beacon, and a barn owl, and Braxton County still celebrates the creature with a museum, monster-shaped chairs, and Flatwoods Days.
The episode closes with an anonymous listener's story of Matilda, the ghost in a grandmother's big double house, where a door swung shut in a windowless room, a radio switched on in the night, and police kept answering calls nobody in the house had made. An obituary in an old newspaper in the attic named a woman called Matilda who had died there, and the activity stopped once the grandmother got a dog.

A 53-year-old computer executive lets his 29-year-old boss push a receptionist of 31 years out the door, then chases the company's youth craze onto the tennis court with a heart his doctor has already warned him about.

Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/OTR

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = Show Open
00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “The Lazarus Syndrome” (October 23, 1978) ***WD
00:47:07.172 = Peril, “The Diary” (1953) ***WD
01:12:43.894 = Mystery Playhouse, “Breakdown” (June 12, 1945)
01:39:59.820 = Philip Morris Playhouse, “Lady From The Sea” (March 11, 1949) ***WD
02:08:06.004 = Ellery Queen, “Singing Rat” (January 09, 1943) (LQ)
02:38:41.468 = Quiet Please, “The Little Morning” (May 15, 1949)
03:08:01.335 = Radio City Playhouse, “Long Distance” (July 03, 1948) ***WD
03:37:56.079 = Starlight Theater, “Man Hires Hit Man To Kill Him” (Late 1940s-Early 1950s) ***WD
04:05:36.331 = Sam Spade, “Mad Scientist Caper” (July 25, 1948) ***WD
04:31:47.975 = Sealed Book “Queen of Cats” (June 24, 1945)
05:01:17.327 = 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/WDRR0783

A college professor's ordinary morning visit is interrupted when he suddenly finds himself alone in a strange, blurred world where nothing seems quite real—except for a few unsettling exceptions.

EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/ShoddyLands

SOURCES and RESOURCES: “The Shoddy Lands” by C.S. Lewis (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction February 1956)

WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.

Midnight In The Macabre (MITM), originally aired: September 25, 2026

LIKE WHAT YOU’RE HEARING? WEIRD DARKNESS posts episodes 7 DAYS A WEEK! Listen FREE wherever you get podcasts or visit https://weirddarkness.com/listen. • Paranormal • True Crime • Ghosts • UFOs • Cryptids • Unexplained • Want even more? Become an OFFICIAL WEIRDO for commercial-free episodes, bonus episodes, weeknight live chats, audiobooks & more at https://WeirdDarkness.com/OFFICIAL

A struggling young doctor answers a newspaper ad for a strong, steady-nerved beetle expert, and the lawyer who hires him at a hundred pounds a day won't tell him what the job is.

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, “Never Answer An Advertisement” (October 18, 1978) ***WD
00:47:04.513 = Mr. Keen, “Yellow Talon Murder” (September 22, 1949)
01:16:44.287 = Murder At Midnight, “Death Across The Board” (September 18, 1946)
01:44:18.775 = The Black Museum, “The Wool Jacket” (July 13, 1952) ***WD
02:09:55.734 = Mysterious Traveler, “Out of the Past” (April 02, 1944) ***WD
02:35:02.637 = House of Mystery, “Gift From The Dead” (August 03, 1947) ***WD
03:04:45.442 = CBC Nightfall, “Wind Chill” (September 19, 1980) ***WD
03:34:18.477 = Obsession, “Faith Is The Evidence” (May 12, 1952) ***WD
04:03:38.533 = Origin of Superstition, “Rabbit’s Foot” (1935) ***WD
04:18:10.056 = Pat Novak, “Wendy Morris” (April 30, 1949)
04:46:56.685 = Incredible But True, “The Playful Spirit” (1950-1951) ***WD
04:51:40.680 = Strange Adventure, “Squaw Gold” (1945)
04:54:58.161 = Tales of the Frightened, “Ladder” (November 28, 1957)
05:00:00.973 = 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/WDRR0782