Weird Darkness: Paranormal & True Crime Stories

A cartoon says I have no soul, a hair-dye company says I'm going extinct, and a folklorist in Illinois says you should rub my head. I've been a redhead for fifty-seven years, and this is what the world thinks about me… and what God thinks of me. Oh, and you too if you are a redhead, a Ginger, a copper top, or whatever other moniker you've been tagged with due to your hair color.

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

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

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

A London land agent sent to appraise two Highland fields for a wealthy client takes an interest in the crooked hill on the horizon, and learns that the village has no owner's name for it, no road left open to it, and no intention of discussing it with him.

EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/mitm-BestLeaveAlone

SOURCES and RESOURCES: “On a Hill” by Michael Whitehouse: https://amzn.to/4ewUEGK

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

Midnight In The Macabre (MITM), originally aired: September 20, 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

Three months out of Dundee and anchored to unbroken Arctic ice, a whaling crew starts hearing something come aboard at night and go straight down into the captain's locked cabin.

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 Captain of the Polestar” (October 06, 1978) ***WD
00:47:05.828 = Future Tense, “Cold Equation” (May 08, 1975) ***WD
01:10:30.076 = BBC Ghosts From The Past, “Mortmain” (April 22, 1992)
01:55:29.808 = Adventures of Superman, “Mystery Of The Walking Dead” (November 05, 1949)
02:25:18.151 = Hall of Fantasy, “Death In The Bayous” (March 06, 1947)
02:56:20.699 = Harry Lime, “Mexican Hat Trick” (November 02, 1951)
03:22:18.906 = BBC Haunted Tales of the Supernatural, “Christina” (August 16, 1980) ***WD
03:49:42.160 = Haunting Hour, ‘People In The House” (August 17, 1945) ***WD
04:14:32.964 = Hermit’s Cave, “The House of Murder” (April 13, 1947) ***WD
04:39:58.868 = Mystery Is My Hobby, “Monica Feels Threatened” (1945-1950)
05:03:28.357 = 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/WDRR0779

When a detective’s daughter vanished in 1930s Denver, it looked like a kidnapping — but what unfolded behind closed doors was a domestic nightmare involving poison, deception, and a stepmother with a deadly secret.

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

READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p9xsnde

FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: They found the first body stuffed inside the church library’s closet. Then a second body turned up. It’s the creepy case of Theo Durrant – better known in San Francisco as the Demon of the Belfry. (Demon of the Belfry) *** In 1989 a man anonymously claimed he had worked at Area 51 where alien technology was being reverse-engineered for the Pentagon. It sounded like the crazed thoughts of a madman at the time. But now, thirty years later, it does not seem so absurd. (Bob Lazar, The Pentagon, And UFOs) *** One of our Weirdo family members tells the true story of a young child told not to be sad when her grandfather passes away… before anyone knew he had died. (The Old Woman In The Basement) *** Some very strange things have been taking place in Sedona Arizona – including ghosts, UFOs, and even people supposedly seeing living dinosaurs. (Strangeness at the Bradshaw Ranch) *** Is it possible that the reason Jack The Ripper was never caught, is because he was only visiting London at the time and then returned to his home in Missouri, USA? (Was Jack The Ripper From St. Louis?) *** 
It’s a story called “Murder Without Motive”. It’s a chapter from the upcoming audiobook I’m narrating called “Suffer The Children: American Horrors, Homicides, and Hauntings” by Troy Taylor.

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding
00:03:25.609 = Show Open
00:05:39.964 = Murder Without Motive
00:41:07.245 = Was Jack The Ripper From St. Louis? ***
00:54:42.147 = Strangeness At Bradshaw Ranch ***
01:07:18.745 = The Old Woman In The Basement
01:12:45.448 = Bob Lazar, The Pentagon, and UFOs ***
01:17:10.404 = Demon Of The Belfry
01:21:57.234 = 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:
“Murder Without Motive” by Troy Taylor from the audiobook “Suffer The Children”: https://amzn.to/2YNrSdk
“Was Jack The Ripper From St. Louis?” by Troy Taylor: http://bit.ly/2HG5QUh
“Demon of the Belfry” by Orrin Grey: http://bit.ly/2JJbsiO
“Bob Lazar, The Pentagon, And UFOs” by George Knapp and Matt Adams: http://bit.ly/30IC60u
“Strangeness at the Bradshaw Ranch” by Brent Swancer: http://bit.ly/2JI4Dhz
“The Old Woman In The Basement” by Ashley Delia, submitted directly 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 brings together six accounts of murder and high strangeness: a Denver stepmother who fed her family crushed glass, a St. Louis patent-medicine salesman accused of being Jack the Ripper, an Arizona ranch the government bought and sealed, a second-grader warned of two deaths before anyone made the calls, the man who said he took apart alien craft at Area 51, and a Sunday school superintendent who left bodies inside his own church.It opens on the October 1930 disappearance of ten-year-old Leona O'Loughlin, daughter of Denver police detective Leo O'Loughlin, whose body was found floating in Berkeley Park Lake two days later. Her stomach held ground glass, and so did her father's, both of them served from the bowl of rice her stepmother Pearl O'Loughlin had set on the table between them. Pearl had already tried the same method on her father-in-law's sugar bowl and on her sister's cat and dog, and the story comes from Troy Taylor's "Suffer the Children – American Horrors, Homicides and Hauntings."From there the show turns to Dr. Francis J. Tumblety, an uneducated patent-medicine peddler who kept a collection of women's uteruses in jars and was renting rooms on Batty Street in Whitechapel when the 1888 Ripper murders began. Inspector John Littlechild of Scotland Yard named him as a suspect in 1913, and the whole theory rests on one disputed date – whether Tumblety made bail on November 8th or November 16th, with Mary Kelly butchered in her bed on the 9th. He died at St. John's Hospital in St. Louis in May 1903, an estate of more than $135,000 behind him.Next is Bradshaw Ranch, 140 acres outside Sedona in the Verde Valley, where Linda Bradshaw reported orbs, shadow people, four short gray aliens in tan one-piece uniforms, a Bigfoot she nicknamed Big Girl, and a five-foot bipedal lizard standing on a dirt path one evening. She wrote it up with ufologist Tom Dongo in "Merging Dimensions: The Opening Portals of Sedona," and instrument readings on the property measured a magnetic field hundreds of times stronger than the surrounding desert. The U.S. government bought the ranch in May 2003 and closed it to the public without explanation.Then a Weirdo family member named Ashley Delia describes the morning her family drove out to tell her second-grade cousin that their grandfather had died in a hotel room in Effingham, Illinois. The girl wasn't surprised – a little old lady in the basement of their newly built house had already told her it was his time, and told her not to be sad. Four months later the lady came back to say the girl's other grandfather was going next, and the phone rang twenty minutes after that.After that comes Bob Lazar, who sat for a KLAS-TV interview in May 1989 under the name Dennis and said the military was reverse-engineering alien craft at a facility near Groom Lake. He described a ship that turns its belly toward its destination before it moves, which is close to what Navy aviators recorded in the Gimbal and Tic Tac encounters the Pentagon released decades later.The episode closes on Easter week of 1895 at Emanuel Baptist Church in San Francisco, where someone opened a closet in the church library and found Minnie Williams strangled and stabbed, her hands nearly severed. A search of the building turned up Blanche Lamont in the belfry, stripped and posed with her hands folded. Sunday school superintendent William Henry Theodore Durrant had courted both women, and the jury convicted him in five minutes, then sat and finished their cigars before walking back in so the verdict wouldn't look rushed.

A man who can't bear to be touched, let alone loved, comes home one night convinced that something in the house has grown fond of him.

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, “Shadow of Love” (October 04, 1978) ***WD
00:47:11.996 = Dimension X, “Shanghaied” (January 12, 1950) ***WD
01:16:50.607 = The Eleventh Hour, “Engulf Cathedral” (ADU)
01:43:00.257 = Escape, “Maracas” (November 22, 1949) ***WD
02:11:45.075 = Murder By Experts, “Summer Heat” (June 13, 1949) ***WD
02:42:18.154 = Exploring Tomorrow, “Country Boy” (December 18, 1957)
03:00:48.514 = Faces In The Window, “Pit And The Pendulum” (January 24, 1953) ***WD
03:32:39.474 = Dark Fantasy, “Demon Tree” (December 05, 1941)
03:56:20.651 = Fear on 4, “Willam And Mary” (January 10, 1988)
04:26:04.060 = Theater Five, “Finders Can Be Losers” (December 01, 1964)
04:46:52.582 = Tales Of The Frightened, “Just Inside The Cemetery” (December 06, 1957)
04:51:47.243 = Beyond The Green Door, “Philip Baine In The Yukon” (1966) ***WD
04:55:27.633 = Tales From The Tomb, “Spirit Calling” (1960s)
05:00:01.495 = 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/WDRR0778