Weird Darkness: Paranormal & True Crime Stories

On June 19th, 1953, Julius Rosenberg died in Sing Sing's electric chair, and minutes later his wife, Ethel, took his place. After the shocks that had killed him, the doctors still heard her heartbeat, and the executioner asked, "Want another?"

From the book “BOTCHED EXECUTIONS: Four Centuries Of Failed Hangings, Electrocutions, Gassings, Injections And Firing Squads” by Darren Marlar at https://weirddarkness.com/botchedexecutions

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

Originally aired: October 19, 2026

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HM3LZM9M/

Nord Holber and Mike Doren have spent three days fishing a single rock out of the asteroid belt, and when a colonel on the visiphone reports that the pirate Dhain Kadine has robbed the Jovian Nymph and is running for the asteroids below them, they're the only ship in his way.

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

SOURCES and RESOURCES:“Space-Lane of No-Return” by George A. Whittington (Planet Stories Summer 1946)

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

Midnight In The Macabre (MITM), originally aired: October 19, 2026

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

In the first hour, Weird Darkness Radio digs into the archive for Halloween stories, with the Denver haunting behind the film The Changeling, the Halloween-night disappearance of Penn State student Cindy Song, Europe's werewolf trials, the history of the Ouija board, and how to support a friend after a paranormal experience. Weird Darkness Radio stays with Halloween itself in the second hour, covering how trick-or-treating nearly died during World War II, where the holiday's customs come from, the legend of Stingy Jack behind the jack-o'-lantern, and how the wise woman became the witch.
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HOUR ONE:It opens in Denver, where composer Russell Hunter said that in 1968 he rented the Henry Treat Rogers Mansion near Cheesman Park, found a hidden room full of a sickly boy's belongings, and followed séances to a grave beneath a house on South Dahlia Street. His account became George C. Scott's 1980 ghost film The Changeling, down to the red rubber ball, though no record places Hunter in the mansion, and Cheesman Park itself was laid out over an old cemetery where workers still turn up skeletons.From there, the hour turns to Cindy Song, a Penn State student from Seoul, South Korea, who left a Halloween party at Players Nightclub in State College dressed as a bunny and was dropped off at her apartment around 4 a.m. on November 1st, 2001. Only her keys and purse were missing. In 2003, investigators dug burned human remains out of the yard of Hugo Selenski's home near Wilkes-Barre, and Selenski was later convicted of two other murders and sentenced to life, but police have never connected him to Cindy, and her disappearance is still unsolved.Next come the werewolf trials of early modern Europe, beginning in Poligny, France, in 1521, when Pierre Burgot and Michel Verdun confessed under torture to rubbing on a devil's ointment that turned them into wolves. The roll call runs through Gilles Garnier, Jacques Roulet, the Werewolf of Caude, and Peter Stumpp, executed in 1589, on to a teenager named Hans, sentenced to death in Estonia in 1651, and Thiess of Kaltenbrun, an old man who said he was one of the hounds of God and got off with a flogging.After that, the hour traces the Ouija board from the Fox sisters' rapping messages and the planchette to the Kennard Novelty Company of Baltimore, named on the first talking-board patent in 1890, and to William Fuld, who took the business over and died in 1927 when a rib he broke falling from his factory roof pierced his heart. Parker Brothers bought the board in 1966, and the segment weighs the scientists' answer, unconscious movement of the users' fingers, against the belief that spirits push the planchette themselves.The hour closes with Rebecca Montiel's advice, from an article for Paranormality magazine, on supporting a friend who reports a shadowy visitor that comes into the bedroom every night and leaves the sleeper unable to move or scream: listen without interrupting, keep skepticism out of it unless asked, and help rule out a medical cause first.
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HOUR TWO:It opens with War Ration Book No. 1, the so-called Sugar Book handed out starting May 4th, 1942, after sugar became the first consumer good rationed in wartime America, which all but ended the young custom of trick-or-treating. Once rationing lifted in June 1947, candy-company advertising, children's magazines like Jack and Jill, Charles Schulz's Halloween Peanuts strips, and the 1966 special It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown brought it back for good, with UNICEF's cardboard collection boxes riding along.From there, after the 2016 creepy-clown sightings and the red balloons found tied to sewer grates in Lititz, Pennsylvania, the year the remake of Stephen King's It reached theaters, the hour goes back about 2,000 years to Samhain, the Celtic festival marking summer's end. Folklorist Jack Santino ties Samhain to the dead crossing over, York University historian Nicholas Rogers finds no hard evidence of that, and the customs that followed run from mumming and souling to tipped outhouses, bobbing for apples, and the midnight mirror ritual that grew into Bloody Mary.Next is the jack-o'-lantern, carved in Ireland from turnips and potatoes and tied to the legend of Stingy Jack, the drunkard who trapped the devil once in a coin and once up an apple tree, then found himself barred from both heaven and hell and left to wander with a single ember inside a hollowed turnip. Irish immigrants brought the custom to America in the mid-1800s, where pumpkins, a word that traveled from the Greek pepon through French and English, were cheaper and easier to find.The hour closes with the witch, from the healers and wise women of the ancient Middle East, as biblical scholar Carole R. Fontaine describes them, to Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger's Malleus Maleficarum, the witch hunts of France and Germany, and an estimated 60,000 executions across Europe. In Salem, the panic started in 1692 in the home of minister Samuel Parris, whose household slave Tituba was among the first three women accused, and 19 people were hanged. Margaret Murray's 1921 book The Witch-Cult in Western Europe has long since been discredited, but it helped give rise to modern Wicca.

When terror takes hold of the mind, whole communities descend into madness – meowing like beasts, dancing to exhaustion, and vanishing into the grip of something seemingly paranormal and demonic.

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

READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p94wm9p

FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Nuns that meow like cats, people who can’t stop laughing maniacally, an entire high school begins twitching… even the Salem witch trials. Just a few of the 8 cases of mass hysteria I’ll be sharing with you. *** January 7, 1950, events began in what became one of the strangest disappearances of the middle twentieth century – the vanishing of a West Point cadet. *** Visitors to Calke Abbey have reported a strange atmosphere of sadness and foreboding and many have reported being scared by the sounds of a tin whistle. *** We’ve all heard of the Bermuda Triangle – but there are strange, anomalies worldwide – and one in Russia is known as the “M Triangle”. *** As far back as the 19th century, a hairy monster has been frightening guests of an Irish castle. *** When living in a home built in the 1800s, it might be expected to have something paranormal living with you.
CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding
00:01:13.141 = Show Open
00:03:16.293 = Whispering Ghost of Calke Abbey
00:07:00.498 = The M Triangle
00:17:57.718 = Hairy Monster Frightening Guests At An Irish Castle ***
00:22:55.402 = The Haunted Farmhouse
00:31:06.493 = The Vanished Cadet ***
00:57:37.296 = Strange Cases of Mass Hysteria ***
01:08:00.199 = Show Close
= SONG: “Dance It Out” by Crossroads Haint (inspired by the mass hysteria of the dancing plague)*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad break
*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*
SOURCES and RESOURCES:
“The Whistling Ghost of Calke Abbey”: https://tinyurl.com/y53zgov3
“The M-Triangle”: https://tinyurl.com/y582ymo6
“Arkaim Anomalous Zone”: https://tinyurl.com/y465d3u7
“Hairy Monster Frightening The Guests Of The Irish Castle”: https://tinyurl.com/y5gbnbx2
“The Haunted Farmhouse”: https://tinyurl.com/yyncsbyo
“Strange Cases of Mass Hysteria”: https://tinyurl.com/y6ja9ezo
“The Vanished Cadet”: https://tinyurl.com/y4h8et3p(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: December 01, 2018

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

Edgar Logan lives at 21 South 72nd, and 2172 is the number on the taxi that sideswipes his car, on the lunch check his nephew adds up for him, and on the pink telephone in the apartment he's just gotten for a girl who reads destiny in numbers.

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = Show Open
00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “No Way Out” (December 27, 1978) ***WD
00:46:19.059 = Ellery Queen, “World Series of Crime” (October 02, 1943) ***WD
01:17:07.604 = Quiet Please, “In The House Where I Was Born” (May 28, 1949)
01:47:23.500 = Radio City Playhouse, “Whistle Daughter, Whistle” (July 31, 1948) ***WD
02:14:58.191 = Sam Spade, “Vafio Cup Caper” (August 22, 1948)
02:45:12.315 = The Sealed Book, “Till Death Do Us Part” (July 08, 1945) ***WD
03:14:36.434 = The Shadow, “The Destroyer” (March 25, 1945) ***WD
03:44:07.078 = Sleep No More, “Three O’Clock” (December 12, 1956)
= SONG: “Three O’Clock” by Static Wax
04:16:52.114 = BBC Radio 4 Spine Chillers, “Inner Critic” (April 2006)
04:32:45.322 = The Strange Dr. Weird, “Ghost Ship” (April 24, 1945) ***WD
04:44:47.003 = Strange, “Greenwood Acres” (October 10, 1955) ***WD
04:57:19.846 = Incredible But True, “The Woman Upstairs” (1950-1951)
05:00:51.525 = 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.

CUSTOM WEBPAGE: https://weirddarkness.com/WDRR0802