Weird Darkness: Paranormal & True Crime Stories

An unknown gunman murders the last of the wealthy Van Cleek line, and when two reporters break into the family's boarded-up mansion to photograph it before demolition, they find two people living inside as though it were still the 1890s.

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, “Shark Bait” (March 31, 1978) ***WD
00:46:07.462 = Haunting Hour, “Homicide House” (May 27, 1945) ***WD
01:10:57.188 = Hermit’s Cave, “Buried Alive” (October 06, 1940)
01:35:16.710 = Mystery is My Hobby, “Kid Brown Is KO’d” (1945-1950)
01:59:17.833 = Sherlock Holmes, “Strange Case of the Persecuted Millionaire” (February 10, 1947)
02:28:34.256 = Mystery House, “Murder Me Gently” (May 12, 1946)
02:54:20.575 = Incredible But True, “The Temple of Beal” (1950-1951) ***WD
02:58:04.060 = Inner Sanctum, “Color Blind Formula” (December 06, 1944) ***WD
03:24:45.575 = Jeff Regan, “The Man Who Liked The Mountains” (August 07, 1948) ***WD (LQ)
03:54:30.797 = The Key, “Lost In The Amazon” (1956) ***WD
04:19:43.987 = Lights Out, “Baby” (March 28, 1941) ***WD
04:44:12.185 = Macabre, “Midnight Horseman” (December 11, 1961) ***WD (LQ)
05:11:20.993 = 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/WDRR0716

A Soho painter can't stop painting the same 19th-century woman — until she starts talking back, insisting she was murdered and thrown down a Manhattan well, and demanding he hear the truth the courtroom refused to believe.

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 Ghost In The Well” (March 28, 1978) ***WD
00:46:05.307 = The Strange Dr. Weird, “Secret Room” (February 13, 1945) ***WD
00:57:55.158 = Eleventh Hour, “Cast Giant Shadow” (ADU)
01:21:29.218 = Escape, “Evening Primrose” (August 25, 1949)
01:49:36.901 = Exploring Tomorrow, “Space Baby / aka First Baby in Space” (June 18, 1958) ***WD
02:09:35.315 = Dark Fantasy, “Dead Hands Reaching” (May 22, 1942) ***WD
02:33:49.707 = BBC Fear on 4, “The Monkey’s Revenge” (January 10, 1991)
03:03:18.954 = Theater Five, “A Nothin’ Place” (November 20, 1964)
03:26:01.748 = Guests of Doom, “Program 11 & 12” (1930s) ***WD
03:51:44.458 = The Hall of Fantasy, “He Who Follows” (March 11, 1950)
04:16:11.455 = Harry Lime, “Love Affair” (September 14, 1951)
04:40:16.602 = BBC Haunted Tales of the Supernatural, “What Was It” (June 28, 1980) ***WD
05:07:37.608 = 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/WDRR0715

Sixteen children were found in a single room on Ohmer Street, and their mother had been delivering them in hospitals for seventeen years.

READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.com/siders-case

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

Originally aired: July 15, 2026

In 1912, an axe killed all eight people sleeping in a Villisca, Iowa farmhouse, and the two men suspected of it — a traveling preacher and a business rival — both walked free.

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

READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p84usw4

FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Conspiracy theories, while often dark, can also be kind of humorous due to being so outlandishly unbelievable. For example… is the Earth’s moon artificial, and actually an extraterrestrial spaceship? We’ll look at the strange theory. (Could Our Moon Be An Alien Spaceship?) *** In 1912 one of the most brutal slayings in America took place in the small town of Villisca, Iowa… a murder so brutal that numerous documentaries have been made about it, books have been written, and amateur detectives have poured over the facts and suspects still trying to find out who the murderer was that swung the bloody axe. (The Unsolved Villisca Ax Murders) *** The President of the United States, no matter who is in the position at the time, is always in danger from those who would like to see someone else in office. We’ll hear on the news of the assassination attempts that came close, but we more often than not are completely unaware of the attempts and plans that have been thwarted – and some of those attempts to kill a sitting U.S. President have been extremely bizarre. (Bizarre Assassination Attempts on U.S. Presidents) *** Some Biblical accounts seem unbelievable and we tend to dismiss them as fantasies, or dreams of the person writing the events down. But what if some of the strange creatures described in the bible are actually real – but come from another dimension, or even outer space? (Are Extraterrestrials in the Bible?) *** If you are told there is a city that has been built specifically for the dead, you probably think of some ancient culture that worshipped their ancestors. Personally, I think of pyramids in Egypt… but I never would’ve thought of the suburbs in California, USA. (California’s City of the Dead)

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = Show Open
00:02:33.183 = Could Our Moon Be An Alien Spaceship?
00:08:21.362 = The Unsolved Villisca Axe Murders ***
00:20:59.742 = California’s City of the Dead
00:31:12.990 = Are Extraterrestrials in the Bible? ***
00:39:47.780 = Bizarre Assassination Attempts on U.S. Presidents
00:48:06.915 = 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:
“Could Our Moon Be An Alien Spaceship?” posted at Anomalien.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/bdhz5563
“The Unsolved Villisca Ax Murders” by Joe Turner for HistoricMysteries.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8mnfp6, and from HauntedRoom.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/36b6k2h4
“California’s City of the Dead” by Hugh Landman for Ranker.com’s Graveyard Shift:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yckrxjzd
“Are Extraterrestrials in the Bible?” by Ellen Lloyd for AncientPages.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/mr3d8dpk
“Bizarre Assassination Attempts on U.S. Presidents” by Richard Stockton for AllThatsInteresting.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/26avtuhr
(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: January, 2022
This episode of Weird Darkness runs from a Cold War theory that the Moon is a hollow alien spacecraft, through the 1912 Villisca ax murders that left eight people dead in a single Iowa night, into the California cemetery city of Colma where the dead outnumber the living a thousand to one, on to a former NASA engineer's claim that the prophet Ezekiel witnessed a UFO, and closing with some of the strangest attempts ever made on the lives of sitting U.S. presidents.It opens with the Spaceship Moon Theory, proposed in July of 1970 by Soviet Academy of Sciences members Michael Vasin and Alexander Shcherbakov, who argued the Moon is a hollowed-out planetoid engineered by unknown beings and steered into Earth's orbit. Darren walks through the claims stacked behind the idea — the Moon ringing like a bell for more than an hour after the Apollo 12 crew crashed their lunar module into it on November 20th, 1969, craters of wildly different widths that all share the same shallow depth, moon rocks dated older than the Earth itself, and the near-perfect circular orbit that lets the Moon exactly cover the Sun during an eclipse.From there the episode turns to Villisca, Iowa, and the night of June 9th, 1912, when someone entered the home of Josiah and Sarah Moore and killed all six members of the family along with two young house guests, Lena and Ina Stillinger, striking each victim with an axe as they slept. Darren lays out the crime scene that neighbor Mary Peckham and Josiah's brother Ross discovered the next morning — cloth draped over the mirrors, two cigarette butts in the attic, a slab of bacon left beside the Stillinger girls, and a bloody basin in the kitchen — and the suspects who never brought closure, from traveling minister Reverend George Kelly, who spoke of eight dead bodies before the news broke and later gave a confession the court dismissed, to Josiah's embittered business rival Frank Jones. More than a century on, the boarded-up house survives as a museum where investigators report a heaviness on the stairs, drifting fog, and the sound of dripping blood after the 2 a.m. train whistle.Next the show travels to Colma, California, the suburb built for the dead, where roughly 1,600 living residents share the ground with more than 1.5 million graves across 17 cemeteries. Darren traces how San Francisco banned burials in 1900 and evicted its dead, triggering the largest grave relocation in history after the 1906 earthquake, with more than 150,000 bodies hauled south and tens of thousands reburied in mass graves when families wouldn't pay the ten-dollar transfer fee. He points out the famous names resting there — Wyatt Earp, Levi Strauss, William Randolph Hearst, Joe DiMaggio, brain-injury case Phineas Gage, and self-declared Emperor of the United States Joshua Norton — alongside the darker footnotes of looted skeletons, discarded headstones repurposed as gutters and seawalls, and the town's own gallows-humor slogan, "it's great to be alive in Colma."The episode then examines whether extraterrestrials appear in the Bible, centering on the vision of the prophet Ezekiel by the river Chebar and the four winged creatures with human hands, calf-shaped feet, and four faces that rose out of a fiery whirlwind. Darren details how former NASA chief engineer Joseph F. Blumrich, honored in 1972 for his work on the Saturn and Apollo programs, set out to disprove Erich von Däniken's ancient-astronaut claims and instead became convinced, arguing in his book The Spaceships of Ezekiel that the prophet had described a landing spacecraft — rotor blades, fairing housings, landing legs with round footpads, and remote mechanical arms rendered in the only words an ancient man had for them.The episode closes with a run of bizarre presidential assassination attempts, from John Hinckley's 1981 shooting of Ronald Reagan over an obsession with actress Jodie Foster, to the 2013 ricin letters mailed to the Obama White House by a man framing an Elvis impersonator over an online feud, to truck driver Samuel Byck's 1974 plot to hijack a DC-9 and crash it into the White House to kill Richard Nixon. Darren ends on the two women who tried to kill Gerald Ford seventeen days apart in September of 1974 — Manson follower Lynette Fromme, who never chambered a round, and Sarah Jane Moore, whose shot missed by six inches because her replacement revolver's sights were misaligned.

Read an even deeper-dive into the werewolf trials here: https://weirddarkness.com/wolves-on-trial/

Across four centuries of European court records, dozens of men, women, and children confessed to shedding their skins for wolf-hides and hunting under the moon — and the magistrates who heard them believed every word.

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

READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/43rjhjvp

FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: We’re all familiar with the concept of werewolves – they are all over pop culture, movies, television, comic books, novels, and every other medium you could possibly imagine. And while they are considered fictional, or at least in the realm of cryptids, that doesn’t mean there aren’t true stories of reported werewolves in history. (Real Historic Accounts of Werewolves) *** Just the idea of going to prison is enough to scare people into living a squeaky-clean life, but if you’re one of the most dangerous prisoners known to exist, ordinary prison would look like a vacation as compared to life in the Florence ADX Supermax Prison. (Life In The Supermax) *** What was supposed to be a two day trip turned into a maritime mystery when the ship, the MV Joyita was discovered floating with no crew on board. What happened? (The Mysterious Abandonment of the MV Joyita)

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding
00:01:37.814 = Show Open
00:03:32.506 = Real Historic Accounts of Werewolves, Part 1
00:28:44.978 = Real Historic Accounts of Werewolves, Part 2 ***
00:42:51.099 = The Mysterious Abandonment of the MV Joyita ***
01:02:49.562 = Life In The Supermax ***
01:15:37.977 = 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:
“Real Historic Accounts of Werewolves” by Miss Celania for MentalFloss.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p84ut66, Nick Redfern for Mysterious Universe: http://bit.ly/2MFFx5p, WolvesRox on Playbuzz.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p9bjcht, and Tim Flight for HistoricCollection.com:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p87s85s
The short fable, “The Werewolf” was written by Angela Carter: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yckt8fn6
“The Mysterious Abandonment of the MV Joyita” by Marcus Lowth for UFOInsight.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8sux2j
“Life In The Supermax” by Jacob Shelton for Ranker.com’s Unspeakable Times: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8u82p9
(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: January, 2022
Weird Darkness digs into three dark corners this time out — the real men and women who were tried and executed as werewolves across Early Modern Europe, the South Pacific ghost ship MV Joyita found drifting with all 25 aboard vanished, and daily life inside America's most locked-down prison, the ADX Supermax in Florence, Colorado.It opens with the documented history of lycanthropy trials, tracing the term back through the Old English werwulf and the Greek myth of King Lycaon, whom Ovid recorded being turned into a wolf by Zeus. From there the episode walks through the real cases: the Gandillon family, burned in France in 1598 after the witch hunter Henri Boguet arranged their arrest; Thiess of Livonia, an eighty-year-old man tried in 1692 who claimed to be a benevolent werewolf who fought the Devil for the year's harvest; Peter Stubbe, the "Werewolf of Bedburg," broken on the wheel and beheaded on October 31st, 1589; Gilles Garnier, the "Hermit of Dole," burned alive in 1573 for killing and eating children; the Werewolves of Poligny; the Wolf of Ansbach, an ordinary wolf hanged from a gibbet in a wig and beard in 1685; teenaged Hans the Werewolf, executed in Estonia in 1651; fourteen-year-old Jean Grenier of Gascony, spared the stake and sent to a friary; the "Demon Tailor" of Chalons; and the more modern Spanish serial killer Manuel Blanco Romasanta, the "Werewolf of Allariz," who used lycanthropy as his legal defense, alongside the Ludwigslust and Angers cases and the cannibal beggar Swiatek of Poland.From there the show turns to the MV Joyita, the yacht built in 1931 in Los Angeles for director Roland West and named for his wife, Jewel Carmen. On October 3rd, 1955, she left Apia, Samoa, for the Tokelau Islands carrying 16 crew and nine passengers, and vanished; found over a month later on November 10th by the merchant captain Gerald Douglas, she was drifting more than 600 miles off course, partially submerged but afloat thanks to her cork-lined refrigerated hold. Investigators found the cabin lights on, the clocks stopped at 10:25, the radio tuned to the distress frequency, a doctor's bag holding a scalpel and blood-stained bandages, mattresses stacked over the engine, and all four escape craft gone — with the cargo, and all 25 people, never recovered. Captain Thomas Miller took the blame for sailing on one engine, but the theories that followed ran from mutiny to Japanese fishermen, Soviet submarines, pirates, and insurance fraud, with researcher Robin Maugham laying out the mutiny case in his book The Joyita Mystery.The episode closes inside the United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility in Florence, Colorado, the ADX Supermax that has held Ted Kaczynski, Terry Nichols, Robert Hanssen, Ramzi Yousef, and Zacarias Moussaoui since 1994. Inmates spend 23 hours a day alone in 7-by-12-foot concrete cells with a single 4-inch window angled so the sky and the surrounding mountains stay out of view, communicating through drained toilet pipes and "finger handshakes" through recreation-cage fencing. Former inmates and staff — including warden Robert Hood, who called the architecture itself the control, and prisoner Travis Dusenbury — describe a facility that strips away nearly every trace of ordinary life, the suicide of mentally ill inmate Jose Vega in 2010, and the ongoing lawsuits over medical and mental-health treatment that forced ADX to reevaluate its practices in the mid-2010s.