Weird Darkness: Paranormal & True Crime Stories

Every time David Delano tries to propose to the beautiful Charlotte Marsden, a figure in old-fashioned evening dress appears in the room — visible only to him and to Charlotte's mother — and neither of them will explain who he is or why he keeps coming back.

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, “Edmund Orme” (May 15, 1978) ***WD
00:46:57.073 = The Crime Club, “Topaz Flower” (April 24, 1947)
01:16:53.148 = Crime Classics, “Death Picture Hanger” (July 20, 1953)
01:46:38.330 = Danger Dr. Danfield, “Nola Jerrold Wants To Kill Her Husband” (September 15, 1946)
02:10:54.934 = The Devil and Mr. O, “Three Thousand Dollars” (January 21, 1972) ***WD
02:36:19.806 = Diary of Fate, “Victor Wakeman” (June 29, 1948) ***WD
03:03:06.121 = Dimension X, “Dr. Grimshaw’s Sanitorium” (September 22, 1950) ***WD
03:32:38.297 = The Eleventh Hour, “Country Road” (ADU)
03:58:20.749 = Escape, “The Sure Thing” (October 15, 1949)
04:26:55.837 = Exploring Tomorrow, “Sourdough” (February 05, 1958)
04:46:02.408 = Tales of the Frightened, “Chung Ling Soo” (December 16, 1957) ***WD
04:50:22.457 = Tales From the Tomb, “The Lick” (1960s)
04:53:51.912 = Incredible But True, “Naked Man of Newbury” (1950-1951)
04:57:38.785 = Strange Adventure, “Crossroads” (1945) ***WD
05:00:55.441 = 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/WDRR0732

From a New Mexico ranch in 1947 to a Navy fighter jet in 2004, we trace ten of history's most famous UFO encounters — the eyewitnesses who saw them, the governments who denied them, and the questions that still won't go away."

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

READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4hfn747d

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding
00:06:39.225 = Show Open
00:07:58.582 = The Roswell UFO Incident
00:12:38.079 = The Westall UFO Encounter
00:15:33.497 = The Pascagoula Abduction
00:19:27.674 = The Allagash Abductions ***
00:22:35.165 = The Tehran UFO Incident
00:25:46.548 = The Cash-Landrum Incident
00:29:03.352 = The Rendlesham Forest Incident
00:32:19.175 = The Belgian UFO Wave
00:36:28.126 = The Phoenix Lights ***
00:40:52.495 = The Nimitz UFO Encounter
00:44:15.325 = 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:

- Paranormality Magazine article; (link no longer valid)

- Halt, Charles. "Halt Memo," January 1981, archived by the UK National Archives.
- Penniston, Jim, and John Burroughs. "Encounter in Rendlesham Forest." Thomas & Mercer, 2014.
- BBC News. "Rendlesham Forest: 'Britain's Roswell' UFO spotted off Suffolk coast," September 2011.
- Pope, Nick. "You Can't Tell the People." Pan Books, 2001 – A book by a former MoD UFO investigator discussing the cover-ups and inside stories of the British government's responses to UFO sightings, including the Rendlesham Forest incident.
- Bruni, Georgina. "You Can't Tell the People: The Definitive Account of the Rendlesham Forest UFO Mystery." Sidgwick & Jackson, 2000.
- SOBEPS Reports on the Belgian UFO Wave
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdEALPvl_4Q
- "Belgium in UFO Fever" - Brussels Times
- "The Cash-Landrum UFO Incident," by John F. Schuessler, provides an extensive analysis of the event, including medical records and witness testimonies.
- "UFOs and Government: A Historical Inquiry," a comprehensive study by Michael Swords and others, details the government's response to UFO sightings, including the Cash-Landrum case.
- "Fire in the Sky: The Cash-Landrum UFO Incident," an article in the MUFON UFO Journal that revisits the incident, detailing the investigation and subsequent legal battle.
- "Westall '66: A Suburban UFO Mystery," a documentary by Shane Ryan, explores the events through witness testimonies and expert interviews.
- "The Westall UFO: A Suburban Mystery," a book by Keith Basterfield, provides a detailed account of the sighting, including the social and governmental context.
- Articles and interviews archived by the Victorian UFO Action group, which has collected and analyzed first-hand accounts from witnesses and former students of Westall High School.
- U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency Report: This declassified document provides a detailed account of the Tehran UFO Incident, including descriptions from the pilots and ground control.
- "Iranian Jet Chased UFO, Got Light Show": This article in the New York Times archives covers the public's reaction and the international reporting following the incident.
- Interview with Lt. Parviz Jafari: Several interviews with Jafari provide first-hand accounts of the encounter, including technical details of the aircraft's malfunctions.
- CIA Document on the Tehran UFO Incident: A collection of declassified CIA documents that discuss the implications of the encounter and its analysis by various intelligence agencies.
- The New York Times: Articles from December 2017 that first revealed the Nimitz encounter to the public.
- Department of Defense Releases: Official statements and declassified videos of the encounters.
- Interviews with Commander David Fravor: His firsthand accounts provide detailed observations of the encounter.
- "Unidentified: Inside America's UFO Investigation" on History Channel: This television series features interviews with the pilots and analysis of the encounters.
- Raymond E. Fowler, the investigator and author of "The Allagash Abductions: Undeniable Evidence of Alien Intervention," which details the incident and the hypnosis sessions.
- Interviews and Appearances: The men involved have given numerous interviews and appeared on various television programs to recount their experiences.
- "Unsolved Mysteries" Television Series: Featured the Allagash abductions, providing a dramatized account and interviews with the witnesses.
- Skeptical Analysis by Robert Sheaffer and others, who critique the method of hypnosis used and the financial aspects related to the publicity of the case.
- "The Pascagoula UFO Incident" by Charles Hickson – Hickson wrote a detailed account of his experience.
- "UFOs: Past, Present, and Future" by Robert Emenegger – Includes interviews and analysis of the Pascagoula incident.
- Interviews and documentaries – Multiple television programs and documentaries have featured interviews with the witnesses and analyses by UFO researchers.
- Articles in major newspapers – Numerous articles were written at the time in publications like the Washington Post and New York Times, providing contemporary accounts of the events and follow-ups.

(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: May 06, 2024

This episode of Weird Darkness moves chronologically through ten of history's most frequently cited UFO encounters, opening with a 1947 debris field on a New Mexico ranch and closing with a 2004 Navy radar encounter off the California coast.In July 1947, rancher William "Mac" Brazel discovers unusual metallic debris scattered across the Foster homestead north of Roswell, New Mexico, and reports it to Sheriff George Wilcox, who alerts the Roswell Army Air Field. Intelligence officer Major Jesse Marcel collects the material, and on July 8th the RAAF issues a press release announcing the recovery of a "flying disc." The story runs in newspapers nationwide before General Roger Ramey holds a press conference the next day identifying the debris as a weather balloon. The retraction does little to end the speculation; decades later, ufologists raise claims of recovered alien bodies and a government cover-up, and in 1994 the Air Force publishes "Case Closed: Final Report on the Roswell Crash," attributing the debris to the classified high-altitude balloon program Project Mogul.From there, the episode moves to April 6th, 1966, when more than two hundred students, teachers, and residents near Westall High School in the Melbourne suburb of Westall, Australia, watch a gray, saucer-shaped craft descend, hover for roughly twenty minutes, and shoot skyward at high speed after a second object appears to intercept it. Students who walk into the nearby field known as The Grange afterward find circular patches of flattened grass. Australian authorities attribute the sighting to a weather balloon, an explanation many witnesses reject, and researcher Shane Ryan later interviews dozens of them for the documentary "Westall '66: A Suburban UFO Mystery."Next comes the Pascagoula Abduction: shipyard coworkers Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker are fishing on the Pascagoula River in Mississippi on the night of October 11th, 1973, when a whirring oval craft with flashing lights hovers roughly forty feet above them and three robotic, wrinkled-skinned beings pull them aboard for what they describe as a twenty-minute physical examination. The men report the encounter to the local sheriff's office, which secretly records their conversation while leaving them alone in a room, capturing Hickson's visible distress rather than any hint of a hoax. Both men pass polygraph tests and undergo hypnosis, and UFO researchers J. Allen Hynek and James Harder investigate the case and find no evidence of fabrication.A similar pattern surfaces three years later in Maine, where twin brothers Jack and Jim Weiner and fellow art students Chuck Rak and Charlie Foltz are camping on Eagle Lake in the Allagash wilderness in August 1976 when a glowing orb appears to follow their canoe. After Charlie Foltz signals it with a flashlight, the light expands and engulfs the group, and the men find themselves back at a campsite fire that has burned down to embers with no memory of the intervening time. Years later, recurring nightmares send the four men to psychiatrist and UFO researcher Dr. Raymond Fowler, whose hypnotic regression sessions produce matching accounts of grey-alien medical examinations aboard a craft, a story that eventually reaches national audiences through "Unsolved Mysteries" and multiple books.Military personnel take center

Look for this podcast on YouTube Music, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and numerous other podcast apps. Get the full list of options here: https://pod.link/1651062114

Two doctored photographs posted to a comedy forum in 2009 spread, through thousands of anonymous contributors, into a mythology detailed enough that two eleven-year-old girls stabbed a friend nineteen times to prove their worth to it. Six years later, a South Dakota reservation would recognize pieces of the same figure inside a legend of its own, one that predated the internet by generations.

EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources and print version): https://weirddarkness.com/cotu-slenderman

Weird Darkness® and Church Of The Undead™ are trademarked. Copyright © 2026.

A young bride's uncanny knowledge of history's deadliest catastrophes convinces her husband she's hiding something — but the truth behind her secret is older than he could ever imagine.

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 Secret of Shen-Si” (May 22, 1978) ***WD
00:45:23.731 = BBC Radio 4 / Radio 7 GhostStory, “The Crowd” (December 30, 1986)
00:59:43.519 = Night Beat, “Expectant Father” (December 28, 1951) ***WD
01:27:08.605 = The Black Book, “Different Readings, Parts 1 & 2” (November 21, 1951) ***WD
01:52:20.091 = Challenge of the Yukon, “Magnanimous Ghost” (August 28, 1945)
02:06:45.867 = Box 13, “Three To Die” (January 23, 1949)
02:33:16.175 = Calling All Cars, “Missing Mexican Sheiks” (January 03, 1934) ***WD (LQ)
03:05:07.603 = Casey Crime Photographer, “Handkerchief” (September 05, 1946)
03:34:32.775 = CBC Mystery Theater, “The Hitch Hiker” (June 02, 1967) ***WD
04:00:52.848 = Chet Chetters, “If You Can’t Stand The Heat” (1992)
04:29:31.575 = The Clock, “Time In Reverse” (January 17, 1956)
04:53:57.175 = Beyond The Green Door, “Edgar Hayes – Amazon Trip Seek” (1966)
04:57:50.162 = Calling All Detectives, “Jerry Is Framed for the Murder of Mrs. Mayner” (July 07, 1948) ***WD (LQ)
05:05:52.977 = 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/WDRR0731

The Slender Man began as two photographs and a caption, submitted to an internet forum in 2009 as nothing more than a creepy image contest. Within five years, people across the country were treating him as real – and some proved just how far that belief could go.

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

READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8ka2re

FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: In 2009, a photograph appeared on an internet forum, submitted as an entry in a contest to create convincing fake paranormal images. The figure in it had no face, arms too long for its body, and a caption written like a piece of found history. Within a few years, that figure had a name recognized across the internet, a following that treated the images as more than fiction, and a reputation for turning up in places far stranger than a photo contest ever intended.

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding
00:02:02.673 = Show Open
00:03:13.025 = Slenderman: Blurring The Lines of Reality, Part 1
00:09:24.860 = Slenderman: Blurring The Lines of Reality, Part 2 ***
00:22:48.484 = Slenderman: Blurring The Lines of Reality, Part 3 ***
00:34:59.166 = Slenderman: Blurring The Lines of Reality, Part 4 ***
00:41:57.606 = Slenderman: Blurring The Lines of Reality, Part 5 ***
00:54:09.889 = 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:
“Slenderman: Blurring The Lines Of Reality” by Marcus Lowth for UFOInsight.com:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p9e9srj
(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: March, 2022

This episode of Weird Darkness traces the Slender Man from an internet photo contest into real-world stabbings, arson, and a wave of suicides on a South Dakota reservation, then weighs whether an invented internet legend can, in some sense, become real.It opens with the character's exact origin: on June 10th, 2009, Eric Knudsen, posting under the name Victor Surge on the forum Something Awful, submitted two doctored photographs as part of a contest to create convincing paranormal images. Each carried a caption inventing a backstory, one referencing a photographer "presumed dead" in 1983 and another tying the figure to a fire at the Stirling City Library and the disappearance of a photographer named Mary Thomas in 1986. The figure in both images, faceless and unnaturally tall with elongated arms, spread across the internet within days and took on the name Slender Man, along with a folklore of his own: a preference for woods and abandoned buildings, the ability to travel at will, and warning signs that included nosebleeds, nightmares, and sudden paranoia.From there, the episode turns to the Waukesha stabbing of May 31st, 2014, in Wisconsin, when twelve-year-old Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser led their friend Payton Leutner into nearby woods and stabbed her nineteen times, telling investigators the attack was meant to prove Slender Man's existence and make them his "proxies." Leutner survived and crawled to a roadside where a cyclist found her. Geyser was sentenced to forty years to life and remains held in a psychiatric facility; Weier, sentenced to twenty-five years to life, was released from institutional care in the summer of 2021 and placed under supervision.Next, the episode covers the string of incidents that followed within months: a thirteen-year-old girl's knife attack on her mother in Hamilton County, Ohio, in June 2014; a Las Vegas shooting in which the gunman, who reportedly dressed as Slender Man, killed two police officers and a bystander before killing his wife and himself; and a house fire set by a fourteen-year-old girl in Port Richey, Florida, in September 2014, who told police she had "been reading a lot" about the character online. It also details a separate wave of youth suicides on South Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation between late 2014 and mid-2015, which the New York Times reported topped one hundred in six months, some tied by officials to the Slender Man and to a local legend of a "suicide spirit" known as Walking Sam or the Tall Man, and a mass hanging attempt in nearby woods that a local pastor, John Two Bulls, intervened to stop.The episode also relays an account researcher Nick Redfern collected from a Pennsylvania flight attendant trainee named Lacy, who said her laptop began displaying Slender Man's face and, on one occasion, a voice, after she read Robin Swope's book Slenderman: From Fiction to Fact in 2016.The episode closes by comparing Slender Man to Spring-Heeled Jack, a figure reported across Victorian England from the 1830s onward and long suspected of being one person's stunt copied by others in later decades, before turning to researcher Peter McCue's Psychic Internet Theory and the ancient Egyptian god Ptah, weighing whether shared belief circulated across the internet might account for why so many people came to treat a fictional character as something they could encounter.