Weird Darkness: Paranormal & True Crime Stories

A phony spiritualist who fakes contact with the dead to swindle grieving clients gets more than she bargained for when the voices calling back from Summerland might not be fake after all.

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, “Death And Desire” (May 08, 1978) ***WD
00:45:30.201 = Sleep No More, “Woman in Grey” and “Suspicious Gift” (March 20, 1957)
01:14:18.462 = BBC Radio 4 Spine Chillers, “Fresh Blood Series: A Fare To Remember” (March 2006)
01:27:08.082 = The Strange Dr. Weird, “Murder Will Out” (February 27, 1945) ***WD
01:39:45.502 = Suspense, “Cat And Mouse” (March 30, 1944)
02:09:03.700 = The Creaking Door, “Isle of Lost Souls” (November 23, 1964) ***WD
02:37:51.669 = The Saint, “Case of Unhappy Homicide” (March 03, 1948) ***WD
03:01:54.083 = 2000 Plus, “When Worlds Met” (May 03, 1950) ***WD
03:30:56.223 = The Unexpected, “Heard But Not Seen” (1947-1948)
03:43:03.263 = Unsolved Mysteries, “The Witch Doctor” (1936) ***WD
03:57:59.514 = Dark Venture, “Pursuit” (July 31, 1945) ***WD
04:27:44.521 = The Weird Circle, “Black Parchment” (1945)
04:55:17.899 = Tales of the Frightened, “The Vampire Sleeps” (1963)
05:00:07.048 = 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/WDRR0729

A man who claims he can see invisible Martians controlling humanity finds an unlikely ally in a stranger at a bar who has photographed something impossible with infrared film. But in a world where the watchers are always watching, proving the truth might be the most dangerous thing of all.

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

SOURCES and RESOURCES: “Don’t Look Now” by Henry Kuttner, originally published in Startling Stories, March 1948

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

Midnight In The Macabre (MITM), originally aired: July 30, 2026

In a single week, Vinton County told the world it does not intend to give the Siders children back. Three of the four adults charged with harming them have now asked the court to decide whether they are fit to stand trial at all. And two reporters who went looking for the family's past came back with the same address from different directions.

SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/siderscase20260729

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://pod.link/1078714736

*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*

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

When a beautiful cigar shop girl is found dead under mysterious circumstances, a troubled Edgar Allan Poe becomes obsessed with solving the real-life crime—turning tragedy into fiction in a desperate search for truth.

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

FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: I’m sharing a chapter from the book “Nevermore: The Haunted Life and Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe” by Troy Taylor, which I narrated the audiobook for. But this chapter by itself was so interesting to me that I thought it would make a great episode of Weird Darkness – plus, it gives you a little peek into what you might get if you purchase the book itself. I’ve left a link to the book in the show notes below. This is the true story about the murder of a girl who worked in a cigar shop, the investigation of it by law enforcement, how Edgar Allan Poe saw it as an opportunity to escalate his career and name… and how it all almost blew up in his face, even with some claiming Poe was the murderer of the poor girl!

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:
“Nevermore: The Haunted Life and Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe” by Troy Taylor: https://amzn.to/41e7BxJ
(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: March 2022
Weird Darkness devotes this episode to the unsolved 1841 murder of New York shopgirl Mary Cecilia Rogers and its strange collision with the unraveling life of Edgar Allan Poe. It opens with the July 28, 1841 discovery of Rogers's body floating in the Hudson River near Hoboken's Sybil's Cave, tracing her path from a Connecticut-born clerk at John Anderson's Tobacco Emporium on Manhattan's Nassau Street to the local celebrity known as "the beautiful cigar girl," then following the search led by her fiancé, cork-cutter Daniel Payne, and former suitor Alfred Crommelin, through the police suspicion cast on Payne and on Anderson, the September discovery of her bloodied clothing in a Weehawken thicket, and Payne's own laudanum suicide at that same spot that October.From there, the episode moves to Philadelphia, where Poe was following the case from a distance while his household came apart around him: his wife Virginia's sudden pulmonary hemorrhage during a parlor performance on January 20, 1842, the day after Poe turned thirty-three, marked the onset of the tuberculosis that would eventually kill her, and the strain bled directly into stories like "The Masque of the Red Death" and "Eleonora." It follows Poe's collapse at Graham's Magazine, including his refused request for a salary advance on an $800-a-year wage, his failed bid for a Philadelphia Custom House post that ended with a fumbled meeting tied to President John Tyler, and his abrupt exit from the magazine after being passed over for associate editor Charles Peterson.Next comes Poe's attempt to solve the Rogers case through fiction, recreating how he pitched a sequel to "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" to Baltimore editor Joseph Evans Snodgrass and Boston's George Roberts before selling it to William Snowden's The Ladies' Companion as "The Mystery of Marie Roget," transplanting the murder to Paris and casting the sleuth C. Auguste Dupin as the man who would name the killer. It details the disastrous timing by which Weehawken tavern keeper Frederica Loss, shot by her own son on November 1, 1842, gave a deathbed account claiming Rogers died during a botched abortion, undercutting Poe's carefully built naval-officer theory just as his final installment was headed to press.The episode closes with the suspects who have circulated around the case ever since, from the hanged Somers mutineer Philip Spencer, floated by biographer John Ingram, to Daniel Payne and Alfred Crommelin, to tobacco magnate John Anderson, who lived out his final years in a Tarrytown mansion behind steel-lined shutters, convinced his cook was poisoning his roast beef and claiming to speak with Mary Rogers's spirit, and it ends on the long-running question of whether Poe himself carried knowledge of, or any personal connection to, the murder he spent his career trying to solve on paper.

A bored twenty-one-year-old in New Orleans got an anonymous email inviting him to a bar with no name, and it gave him three separate chances to turn around before the elevator stopped going down.

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

SOURCES and RESOURCES: 
“Secret Bar” by K. Banning Kellum: https://www.creepypasta.com/secret-bar/ (find more creepiness in K. Banning Kellum’s book “Gris Gris and Ju Ju, A New Orleans Horror” https://amzn.to/2EaYeH6)

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

Midnight In The Macabre (MITM), originally aired: July 29, 2026