Weird Darkness: Paranormal & True Crime Stories

Strangers in dozens of countries now meet over tea and cake to talk openly about dying, and in New Zealand, retirees gather every week to build and paint the coffins they'll one day be buried in.

READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8tmdrd

FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Have you heard of the “Death Positive” movement? Would you visit a Death Cafe? Would you join a Coffin Club? Why the sudden positive twist on what is typically so morbid? What’s so great about death? (Discourse At The Death Diner) *** When it comes to homes, the ghosts go bump in the night. When it comes to automobiles, do they go honk in the night? (Cursed Cars and Haunted Hoopties) *** Airline pilots in the UK are reporting strange objects in the sky. Not just one pilot, but several. And not just one UFO, but many. And the sightings were close. Very close. So close that they are being described as “near misses”. (Airliners Almost Crash Into UFOs) *** In today’s world, parents often worry about whether their kids are eating healthy and getting a good education, and in the case of long car trips, whether the children have their phones fully charged. It’s tough being a modern parent, but at least you don’t have to worry like Europeans did about your spawn being snatched by fairies. (Child Snatching Fairies) *** Two men go out for a weekend of elk hunting – and come back with the story of a creature so strange they don’t know what to call it. (Close Encounter at Pot Mountain) *** At a downtown Chicago church, people are turning up in droves – not for the preaching or the powerful worship band – but to see a painting of the Virgin Mary, crying real tears. (The Crying Madonna)

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = Show Open
00:02:23.730 = Discourse At The Death Diner
00:08:43.721 = Cursed Cars And Haunted Hoopies
00:19:56.590 = Airliners Almost Crash Into UFOs ***
00:32:23.263 = Child-Snatching Fairies
00:39:18.693 = Close Encounters on Pot Mountain ***
00:45:36.275 = The Crying Madonna
00:48:48.583 = Show Close
*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad break

SOURCES and RESOURCES:
“Discourse At The Death Diner” by Marilyn A. Mendoza Ph.D. for Psychology Today: https://tinyurl.com/vd6ober
“Cursed Cars and Haunted Hoopties” by Erin Marquis for AutoBlog: https://tinyurl.com/r35gcjc
“Airliners Almost Crash Into UFOs” from The Bolton News: https://tinyurl.com/vsn8rer
“Child Snatching Fairies” by Tristan Shaw from Bizarre And Grotesque: https://tinyurl.com/u84989q
“Close Encounter at Pot Mountain” by Staci Matlock for the Santa Fe New Mexican: https://tinyurl.com/soo5l6z
“The Crying Madonna” by Cate Cauguiran for ABC7 Chicago: https://tinyurl.com/v4cv4sg
(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 moves from Death Cafes and Coffin Clubs to cursed cars, near misses between airliners and unknown objects over Britain, changelings left by fairies, a vanishing structure on a New Mexico mountain, and a weeping icon of the Virgin Mary in Chicago.It opens with the Death Positive Movement, from the first Death Cafe, started in London in 2011 by Jon Underwood so strangers could talk about dying over tea and cake, to the Coffin Clubs of New Zealand, where older adults meet each week to build and decorate their own coffins, along with green burials, end-of-life doulas, and the WeCroak app that sends five reminders of death a day.
From there, the episode turns to cars said to be cursed or haunted: the Graf & Stift limousine in which Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot in 1914, a wrecked Vauxhall Astra found in 2002 off Surrey's A3 after callers reported headlights veering off the road, a Renault Megane in Cape Town that witnesses say started itself in 2004, John F. Kennedy's limousine SS-100-X at the Henry Ford Museum, and James Dean's Porsche 550 Spyder, Little Bastard.
Next come reports to the UK Airprox Board of aircraft nearly colliding with unidentified objects, including a lit object that passed between three and ten feet from an Embraer 175 approaching Glasgow Airport on December 30th, 2018, with former Ministry of Defence UFO investigator Nick Pope arguing that many cases blamed on drones should be logged as unknown.
As late as the second half of the 1800s, European courts were still hearing cases of children abused or killed as changelings, the sickly stand-ins parents believed fairies had left in place of their own babies, and the episode traces that belief through the accounts George Waldron collected on the Isle of Man for his 1726 book A Description of the Isle of Man.
After that, Santa Fe County bow hunters Josh Brinkley and Daniel Lucero describe what they saw while hunting elk on Cerro de la Olla, or Pot Mountain, northwest of Taos, New Mexico: two tall hooded figures at the rim of a caldera, and the next day a white tent-like structure 50 to 60 feet tall that vanished in the five seconds they lost sight of it.
The episode closes in Chicago in 2019 at Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church, the oldest Greek Orthodox church in the Midwest, where worshippers saw an oil-like substance streaming from the eyes of an icon of the Virgin Mary as a bankruptcy court approved the sale of the church for $2.5 million.

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

On vacation in Taxco, Mexico, an 18-year-old American watches a woman stabbed in an upstairs window by a hand wearing a blood-red ring, and a few days later her father's old friend sits down to dinner wearing one just like it.

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = Show Open
00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “Ring of Evil” (April 16, 1979) ***WD
00:45:51.422 = The Devil And Mr. O, “Revolt of Worms” (October 01, 1971)
01:16:15.872 = Diary of Fate, “Tina Crowley” (March 09, 1948) ***WD
01:45:43.665 = Dimension X, “The Martian Death March” (January 14, 1951) ***WD
02:12:23.911 = The Eleventh Hour, “Ghost Town” (ADU)
02:41:55.156 = Escape, “Seeds of Greed” (December 27, 1949)
03:11:36.356 = Everyman’s Theater, “Cat Wife” (October 18, 1940)
03:41:39.116 = Exploring Tomorrow, “The Moon Is New” (January 22, 1958) ***WD(LQ)
04:01:09.064 = Faces In The Window, “Lightning Rod Man” (January 17, 1953) **WD(LQ)
04:26:42.927 = Dark Fantasy, “Debt From The Past” (January 16, 1942)
04:51:48.576 = Strange Adventure, “Shots In The Night” (1945)
04:55:01.236 = Tales of the Frightened, “Chung Ling Soo” (December 16, 1957) ***WD
04:59:21.285 = 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.
https://weirddarkness.com/old-time-radio-horror-ring-of-evil

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

Jane Pryor comes home from Vienna to visit her father at a famous seaside clinic, is told at the door that he died two weeks ago, and is talked into staying on at a place where attack dogs roam the grounds after dark and the new young doctor keeps begging her to leave.

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = Show Open
00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “The Charnel House” (April 11, 1979) ***WD
00:46:05.113 = Casey Crime Photographer, “Gentle Strangler” (April 24, 1947)
01:16:31.244 = CBC Mystery Theater, “Two Little Punctures” (September 22, 1967) ***WD
01:44:34.174 = All Star Western Theater, “Ghost In Little Deer Canyon” (November 29, 1947) ***WD
02:14:00.822 = Chet Chetter, “It Came From Video” (1990) ***WD
02:42:53.880 = The Clock, “Only Death is Timeless” (March 27, 1956)
03:08:33.201 = The Creaking Door, “Imposter” (July 20, 1964) ***WD
03:36:29.873 = The Crime Club, “Coney Island Nocturne” (July 10, 1947) ***WD
04:06:38.739 = Crime Classics, “Seven-Layered Arsenic Cake” (October 14, 1953)
04:38:06.894 = Danger Dr. Danfield, “Life Insurance Claim” (December 08, 1946)
05:03:06.270 = 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.

In September 1988, a boy with a slingshot found Joaquim Sebastião Gonçalves in the marsh grass at São Paulo's Billings Reservoir, three days after he'd swum across the water to fish, and the autopsy listed his eyes, ears, lips and abdominal organs as missing, with some of the wounds made while his blood was still circulating. Five years later, a researcher writing in a Brazilian UFO magazine concluded the crew of a flying saucer had killed him, and the case still goes by the name of a different reservoir several kilometers away, Guarapiranga.

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 11, 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.

A space zoologist sends his mind into the creatures of a jungle planet to judge whether it's safe for colonists, and finds thousands of insects in the treetops sitting perfectly still, all of them staring at the ground, all of them waiting for something he can't see.

SOURCES and RESOURCES: “A Matter of Protocol” by Jack Sharkey: https://amzn.to/4ePZ1MG

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.