Weird Darkness: Paranormal & True Crime Stories

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.