Weird Darkness: Paranormal & True Crime Stories

In the sleet of a Cincinnati November in 1880, a grave robber collapses in the grave he’s digging, wide awake and unable to move, and his partner can’t find a pulse.

SOURCES and RESOURCES: “A Resurrectionist’s Last Delivery” by Darren Marlar, https://link.amazon/B0gU1J6fa

WeirdDarkness® | Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness | Midnight In The Macabre™

More episodes, additional podcasts, books, original music, in-depth paranormal and true-crime articles, and much more at https://weirddarkness.com.

In May 1973, Judy Doraty pulled over outside Houston to watch a strange light in the sky, and years later, under hypnosis, she described a cow lifted into a chamber aboard a craft and worked on by two small beings while she watched. From Colorado's San Luis Valley to a stretch of Welsh mountains nicknamed the sheep mutilation corridor, UFO reports and dead livestock share the same ground, and when a Texas man's sheep turned up mutilated in 2013, the sheriff said, "This was too clean to be an animal."

From the book “CONNECTIVE TISSUE: How Cattle Mutilations Link Bigfoot, Alien Abductions, Mind Control, And The Men In Black” by Darren Marlar at https://weirddarkness.com/ConnectiveTissue

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

Originally aired: November 09, 2026
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HKTS19Z1

More episodes, additional podcasts, books, original music, in-depth paranormal and true-crime articles, and much more at https://weirddarkness.com.

Li Shizhen, a 16th-century Chinese apothecary, wrote of aged holy men in Arabia who ate nothing but honey until they died, then lay sealed in honey for a century to become a sugary remedy for broken bones. In Europe, King Charles II of England drank powdered human skull in alcohol, and the poor paid for cups of still-warm blood at executions.

READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/mrd72v94

FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Of all the instances of cannibalism found in human history, no one quite practiced it like some in China used to. In these cases, cannibalism came in the form of eating mellified flesh for medicinal purposes. In 16th century China, mellification was a way for elderly people nearing the end of their lives to donate their body to science. The idea, originally derived from an Arabic recipe, was that they could turn their bodies into medicine that would be ingested by their descendants to alleviate ailments like broken bones. The process of mellification was a gruesome one. In short, it consisted of very slowly turning one’s body into a mummified human candy bar. And that’s not even the worst part — for mellification to be the most effective, the process started while the person was still alive.

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding
00:01:10.417 = Show Open
00:02:28.924 = And Mellified Man For Dessert
00:04:27.887 = Honey, I’m Dead
00:09:57.010 = Sugar-Glazed Grandpa
00:16:02.121 = Better Health Through Cannibalism
00:27:31.137 = Self-Mummification
00:30:39.753 = Corpse Medicine
00:39:58.915 = Show Close

*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad break

SOURCES and RESOURCES:
“And Mellified Man for Dessert” by Katie Serena: https://tinyurl.com/rjwv5cw
“Honey, I’m Dead” by Paul Salopek: https://tinyurl.com/wz23h9d
“Sugar-Glazed Grandpa” by Brent Swancer: https://tinyurl.com/w2mqzyp
“Self-Mummification” from Stranger Remains: https://tinyurl.com/w795gxp
“Better Health Through Cannibalism” by Natalie Zarrelli: https://tinyurl.com/tsqhqbl
“Corpse Medicine” by Maria Dolan: https://tinyurl.com/y6spcbcb
(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.

*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*

EPISODE SYNOPSIS:
This episode of Weird Darkness covers the legend of the mellified man, a 4,300-year-old Bronze Age tomb in Georgia filled with honey-cured offerings, the self-mummifying Buddhist monks of Japan, and the centuries Europeans spent swallowing powdered skull, human fat, and fresh blood as medicine.
It opens with mellification, in which an elderly volunteer ate and bathed in nothing but honey until death, then lay in a stone coffin of honey for up to a century before the remains were sold at market to treat wounds and broken bones, a practice historians have never confirmed with physical evidence.
From there, archaeologist Zurab Makharadze describes cutting into the Ananauri 3 burial mound beside Georgia's Alazani River in 2015, where wild berries cured in honey 4,300 years ago were still red and still smelled sweet, buried with two full-size wagons, gold jewelry, and bones dusted in flower pollen.
Next, the legend is traced to the 16th-century Chinese pharmacologist Li Shizhen, who heard of the Arabian "honey person" secondhand from Tao Jiucheng, and set beside other honey burials, from the golden sarcophagus of honey Alexander the Great was reportedly placed in to the wax-and-honey-coated body of King Edward I of England.
The 17th-century English writer Richard Baxter, who treated his bleeding with moss grown on a human skull, leads into Europe's corpse medicine: King Charles II's King's Drops of powdered skull in alcohol, German physician Johann Schroeder's recipe for curing the flesh of an executed redheaded man, and French pharmacist Antoine-François de Fourcroy's instructions for rendering human fat.
After that come the Shingon Buddhist monks of Japan who practiced sokushinbutsu, starving away their body fat for years, drinking tea from the toxic urushi tree, and ringing a bell inside a tomb until the ringing stopped and their fellow monks sealed it.
The episode closes with Louise Noble's search for why a John Donne poem calls women "mummy, possessed", a trail that led her and Richard Sugg of England's University of Durham to Thomas Willis's drink of powdered skull and chocolate, a 1679 recipe for blood marmalade, and a last known attempt in 1908 to swallow blood at a German scaffold.

More episodes, additional podcasts, books, original music, in-depth paranormal and true-crime articles, and much more at https://weirddarkness.com.

On a domed colony on Neptune in the year 2120, a young man who wants to stop thinking, hands his living body over to a doctor, and the doctor's wife can't understand why she's now carrying pounds of baby food up to a laboratory she isn't allowed to enter.

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = Show Open
00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “The Permanent Man” (April 09, 1979) ***WD
00:46:03.374 = Witch’s Tale, “Troth of Death” (May 29, 1933)
01:10:27.352 = X Minus 1, “Protection” (March 20, 1957)
01:33:38.134 = ABC Mystery Time, “Four Time Loser” (1957) ***WD
01:58:35.807 = Appointment With Fear, “The Deep Shuddered” (November 20, 1945) ***WD
02:25:18.270 = Arch Oboloer’s Plays, “Mirage” (September 06, 1945)
02:55:41.718 = Barrie Craig, “The Deadly Fight” (January 23, 1952)
03:26:15.448 = Ghost Story, “A Recluse” (December 2010)
03:55:45.497 = Night Beat, “Flight From Fear” (July 31, 1952)
04:25:15.731 = The Man In Black, “The Price of the Head” (February 02, 1952) ***WD
04:40:53.651 = Box 13, “Mexican Maze” (April 10, 1949)
05:07:21.336 = 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.

More episodes, additional podcasts, books, original music, in-depth paranormal and true-crime articles, and much more at https://weirddarkness.com.

Legend says a mermaid driven out of a village cursed the shores of Nevada's Pyramid Lake, where locals say someone vanishes at least once a year during fishing season; on Italy's Poveglia Island, everyone who has bought land to build a home has packed up and left.

READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/3a88b2an

FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: From haunted houses and cursed lakes to mysterious roads where ghostly figures appear out of thin air, our planet is home to some truly chilling locations. (Lurid Locations, Spooky Spots, and Paranormal Places) *** How could a person seemingly burst into flames without any external ignition source? We’ll look at the chilling story of Mary Reeser and others like her, that continue to baffle and intrigue both scientists and the public, leaving us to ponder the true nature of what has been termed “spontaneous human combustion.” (The Bizarre Phenomenon of Spontaneous Human Combustion) *** The remains of nearly a dozen sex workers were carelessly discarded in the New Mexico desert between the years of 2001 and 2005. And today it is still not known who is responsible. (Unsolved: The West Mesa Bone Collector) *** Have you seen the mischievous spirits of Tinker Swiss Cottage or met Galena’s Lady in Black? Perhaps you’ve had a run-in at DeKalb’s Egyptian Theatre? These are all areas within a short distance of each other, northwest of Chicago, that can give the Windy City spooks a run for their money. (Rock River’s Residual Revenants)

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = Dedication To Paul Spangler
00:00:46.440 = The Foreboding
00:02:24.858 = Show Open
00:04:22.537 = Lurid Locations, Spooky Spots, and Paranormal Places ***
00:30:44.528 = The West Mesa Bone Collector ***
00:37:11.308 = Spontaneous Human Combustion
00:48:01.545 = Rock River’s Residual Revenants ***
01:07:44.813 = Show Close
*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad break

SOURCES and RESOURCES:
***If you have an information regarding the West Mesa murders, Albuquerque CrimeStoppers is still offering a $100,000 reward. Call (505)768-2450 or Crime Stopper at (505)843-STOP.***
“The West Mesa Bone Collector” by Kelsey Christine McConnell for The-Line-Up.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yckux8v6
“Lurid Locations, Spooky Spots, and Paranormal Places” by Marcus Lowth for UFOInsight.com,https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/mty2p4eb
“The Bizarre Phenomenon of Spontaneous Human Combustion” by Rachel Elizabeth for The-Line-Up.com:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/3a4vdzue
“Rock River’s Residual Revenants” by Jim Taylor for the Northwest Quarterly: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/mr6k3hwm

(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.

*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*

EPISODE SYNOPSIS:
This episode of Weird Darkness runs from a cursed lake in Nevada to an unsolved string of murders in the New Mexico desert, a woman reduced to ash in a Florida apartment, and three haunted landmarks in Illinois.
It opens at Nevada's Pyramid Lake, where legend says a mermaid banished from a village cursed the shoreline, then moves on to the albino creatures said to stalk Hicks Road in San Jose, the burned asylum ruins and hooded cult of Turnbull Canyon, the curse on Los Angeles's Griffith Park, the blue Firewater Ghost of Mississippi's Deer Island, Russia's Molyobka Triangle, and Italy's Poveglia Island.
From there, the episode turns to the West Mesa of Albuquerque, New Mexico, where a woman walking her dog in February 2009 found the first bones of 11 women and girls buried there between 2001 and 2005. The killer known as the West Mesa Bone Collector has never been identified, and Albuquerque Crime Stoppers still offers a $100,000 reward.
Next comes spontaneous human combustion and the case of Mary Reeser, found on July 2nd, 1951, as a smoldering pile of ash with part of one leg and a black slipper in her St. Petersburg, Florida, apartment. Her death is set beside those of Matilda Rooney in Seneca, Illinois, Margaret Hogan in Dublin, and Michael Faherty in Galway, the first death in Ireland a coroner ruled spontaneous human combustion, and weighed against the forensic explanation called the wick effect.
The episode closes in the Rock River Valley northwest of Chicago, where staff say former mayor Robert Hall Tinker still moves the silverware around at Rockford's Tinker Swiss Cottage and tour guides place the Lady in Black in the basement of Galena's DeSoto House Hotel. At DeKalb's Egyptian Theatre, staff report shadow figures in Aisle One, where Irv Kummerfeldt, a co-founder of the group behind the theater's restoration, died of a heart attack while cleaning up after a show.

More episodes, additional podcasts, books, original music, in-depth paranormal and true-crime articles, and much more at https://weirddarkness.com.