Weird Darkness: Paranormal & True Crime Stories

It’s two sentences. The first is Bloody Mary as kids still play it. The second is the 1700s mirror ritual: girls ate an apple at a candlelit mirror and watched for a face over their shoulder. It was supposed to be their future husband’s, and a skeleton’s meant they’d die before they married. It leaves out the science explanation at the end of the segment, so the episode still gets to deliver that.

READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/5n88rm8a

FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Could there be floating balls of light not only possessed of some sort of intelli­gence, but which are capable of forming a unique bond with a person and even delivering painful stings when they so choose? (Sentient Fireballs and Biting Lights) *** Cattle sometimes die suddenly on Silvies Valley Ranch’s 140,000 acres in Harney County — struck by disease or felled by a broken leg and unable to find a way out of the rugged, forested terrain. But by the time ranch hands discovered four more dead bulls within 24 hours, they knew they were likely dealing with deliberate, premeditated killings. (Oregon Cattle Mutilations) *** To quote one survivor of a near-death experience: “I know of no English words for the combination of joy, ecstasy, love, and requited longing that burned within me. It carried me to a dimension I never knew existed. In that moment, there was no pain of loss, only unity, rapture and reunion.” Is it possible that we may soon have scientific evidence for what lies beyond the veil? (New Evidence of Life After Death) *** Seeing specters in the reflection of a mirror or piece of glass is not just a cliché movie trope. There is a history that goes along with the happening. (Ghost In The Mirror) *** We’ve all heard of haunted forests – but there is one that is so disturbing it drives some people to want to commit murder! (Where The Woods Entice You To Murder) *** When it comes to ghostly apparitions, the White Lady are ubiquitous. But a theater in Sunderland, England has not just a White Lady specter, but also the haunting Grey Lady… and the ghost of a comedian. (Haunted Empire Theater)

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = Show Open
00:02:34.930 = Where The Woods Entice You To Murder
00:06:00.684 = Sentient Fireballs and Biting Lights
00:18:48.818 = Ghost In The Mirror ***
00:42:17.288 = The Haunted Empire Theater ***
00:50:01.495 = Oregon Cattle Mutilations
01:00:12.085 = New Evidence of Life After Death ***
01:05:48.430 = Show Close
01:07:28.182 = “Say It Three Times” by Incorruption (SONG)
*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad break

SOURCES and RESOURCES:
Essex Ghost Hunters FB Page: https://www.facebook.com/EssexGhostHunters
“Sentient Fireballs and Biting Lights” from the Fortean Times: (link no longer available)
“Oregon Cattle Mutilations” by Diana Kruzman for Oregon Live: https://tinyurl.com/y3sg3gle
“New Evidence for Life After Death” by Michael Grosso for Consciousness Unbound: https://tinyurl.com/wou5am3“Ghost in the Mirror” by Micah Hanks for the Gralien Report: https://tinyurl.com/wuxunbx; Erin McCann for Graveyard Shift: https://weirddarkness.com/archives/2587; and Lyra Radford for Ranker: https://tinyurl.com/wnzk58k
“Where The Woods Entice You To Murder” by Claire Reid for Lad Bible: https://tinyurl.com/tg9ylqo
“The Haunted Empire Theater” by Ian at Mysterious Britain and Ireland: https://tinyurl.com/tvxswbr
(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 haunted well in the Essex countryside to stinging balls of light, the ghosts said to live in mirrors, a theater haunted by a vanished stage manager and a comedian, mutilated bulls in Oregon, and a man who says he went into the light with a mother and her dying son.
It opens at Cash's Well in Langdon Hills Country Park near Basildon, England, where ghost sightings go back to 1924 and ghost hunter Russell Old says the spirits of as many as 20 children take visitors by the hand. On one tour, Old says, a gentle seven-foot man turned so aggressive at the top of a hill that he said afterward, "I just wanted to kill everybody."
From there it's on to lights that seem to choose their targets, like the tiny ones Martha Grieswell of Richmond, Indiana, said crawled over her at night in 1978, stung like sweat bees, survived two days underwater and a stretch in her freezer, and turned up at her mother's house in Decatur. Others were deadlier: near Palestine, Texas, a boy reported that a ball of fire had struck a woman on horseback and set her ablaze, and she died the next day.
Next comes the ghost in the mirror, from the Bloody Mary ritual chanted in candlelit bathrooms at sleepovers back to the obsidian scrying mirrors of ancient Egypt and the psychomanteum, which Raymond Moody says the ancient Greeks used to contact the dead. In China, mirrors were turned over after a death so the departed wouldn't see a reflection and realize they'd become a ghost, and in the 1700s, girls in the British Isles ate an apple before a candlelit mirror to glimpse a future husband, while a skeleton's face meant death before the wedding. Bloody Mary herself has been tied to Mary I of England and to a witch called Mary Worth, burned at the stake around the Civil War; Japan's schoolchildren summon Hanako-san instead, knocking three times on the third stall of a third-floor girls' restroom.
After that, Sunderland's Empire Theatre in England is home to a White Lady thought to be Molly Moselle, an assistant stage manager who stepped out for a birthday card on January 14th, 1949, and was never seen again. Sid James suffered a fatal heart attack on the same stage in 1976 while the audience laughed, thinking it was part of the show, and actors say they've heard his laugh in dressing room one.
From England the episode crosses to the Silvies Valley Ranch in Harney County, Oregon, where five Hereford bulls were found dead on July 30th and 31st with their genitals and tongues cut away, no wounds, and no sign of a struggle. The killings echo the cattle mutilations of the 1970s, which led to a 1979 FBI investigation that found the animals had likely died of natural causes.
The episode closes with Michael Grosso's look at near-death experiences, deathbed visions, terminal lucidity, and shared death experiences. Mary Fran was killed instantly in a car crash, and her son, Nolan, died in the hospital days later with Scott M. Taylor, president of the Monroe Institute, at the boy's bedside. Taylor says he was in two places at once, standing among the weeping family while Mary Fran lifted Nolan from his body and the three of them went into the light.

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

A mail carrier finds a mailbox taped shut and a note on the front door that says "9-1-1 Inside". In Spain, a woman lifts the lid of her late mother's chest freezer and finds a newborn inside. A hunter in Ghana points his gun at a coffin sitting above ground in a cemetery and threatens to shoot whoever's in it. Trick-or-treaters in San Diego bring home gummies printed with the words "psilocybin mushrooms". And a woman wanted for murder since 2009 calls the DMV to ask why her driver's license won't renew.

EXPANDED STORIES & SOURCES:
https://weirddarkness.com/mount-holly-911-note-baby-freezer-weird-darknews

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

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

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.