Weird Darkness: Paranormal & True Crime Stories

His fiancée disappears without a trace the night they were supposed to set their wedding date, and the deeper Peter digs, the closer he gets to a secret the government would rather keep buried.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/OTRCHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “Vanishing Lady” (February 23, 1978) ***WD00:47:12.759 = Lux Radio Theater, “Strangers On a Train” (December 03, 1951)01:42:29.027 = Macabre, “Man In The Mirror” (November 27, 1961) ***WD02:11:29.529 = Philip Marlowe, “Ladies Night” (February 21, 1950)02:42:27.542 = The Black Mass, “Nightmare” (January 18, 1964) ***WD03:09:50.427 = Michael Shayne, “Date With a Wedding” (May 14, 1945) ***WD03:39:01.077 = Beyond Midnight, “Sheriff’s Wife” (1969) ***WD (LQ)04:07:02.485 = Mindwebs, “When It Changed” (1976-1984) ***WD04:34:02.016 = Mystery In The Air, “Horla” (August 21, 1947) ***WD05:03:52.064 = 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/WDRR0698

A woman screamed inside a Serra apartment for the better part of an hour, and the man with her told police he beat her to drive out the demons he believed had taken hold.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/marceli-gottardoLook 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.

Police reached a home in Meerstad at 2:45 in the morning and found a married couple stabbed to death, the family dog wounded, and the couple's 15-year-old daughter in custody a short distance away.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/meerstad-murdersLook 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.

The spirit had vowed to put John Bell in his grave, and on a December morning in 1820 a coma, a smoky vial of black poison, and a dead barn cat proved she meant every word.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/bellwitchfinallaughREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yfpsnbfwFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Did a malevolent spirit cause the death of John Bell, or was it something else that brought his demise? (The Death of John Bell) *** A man is awoken in the middle of the night by a piano – being played by no one. (Rock Isn’t Dead) *** Is it possible that ancient human skulls are conscious? (Cult of Human Skulls) *** Did the Watergate scandal hide a secret agenda? (Watergate: Wilderness of Mirrors)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:00:51.735 = Show Open00:02:11.866 = The Death of John Bell00:09:41.045 = Rock Isn’t Dead ***00:13:58.971 = Cult of Human Skulls00:20:31.984 = Watergate: Wilderness of Mirrors ***00:43:34.192 = Show Close*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad breakLISTEN 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:“Watergate: Wilderness of Mirrors” posted at The Unredacted: http://bit.ly/2JjZ0pr“Rock Isn’t Dead” by UnQuiet: http://bit.ly/2HfOZax“The Death of John Bell” by Troy Taylor: http://bit.ly/2HgkJwq“Cult of Human Skulls” by A. Sutherland: http://bit.ly/2Q1WbtT(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, 2021Weird Darkness gathers four accounts of the inexplicable across this episode — a frontier farmer poisoned by a spirit, a midnight keyboard played by no one, the worldwide superstitions surrounding human skulls, and a hidden reading of the Watergate burglary.It opens with the death of John Bell, the Tennessee gentleman farmer remembered as the only man ever murdered by a spirit. For nearly four years the entity known as the Bell Witch had tormented his household with attacks, flying objects, and a disembodied voice, singling out Bell and his daughter Elizabeth, called Betsy, for the worst of it. On the morning of December 19, 1820, Bell could not be roused from a deep stupor, and his son John Jr. found the cupboard of prescribed medicines emptied and replaced by a smoky-looking vial holding a dark, nearly black liquid. The witch laughed over his bed and admitted she had dosed "Old Jack" the night before; when Alex Gunn brought in a barn cat and a straw of the liquid was drawn across its tongue, the animal screeched, whirled, and dropped dead. Dr. Hopson confirmed Bell had swallowed the contents, Frank Miles hurled the vial into the fire where it flared blue up the chimney, and Bell died early on December 20, 1820, never having woken.From there the episode turns to a quieter haunting, recounted by a father awakened at 1:14 a.m. on March 9, 2018 by a few composed notes from his twelve-year-old son's electronic keyboard. He found the boy sound asleep and the cat sitting upright on the bed, staring at the instrument, and when he pressed the keys himself no sound came because the power was switched off. The next morning he woke his son for school and recognized the boy's shirt, worn for the first time, as one that had belonged to his late brother, who died suddenly in 2015 and whose lifelong dream had been to play in his band, called Ghost Of. The shirt read "Rock Isn't Dead… it's just played by Ghost Of," and the brothers had shared a love of ghost stories and a standing joke that he would return to visit after death.Next comes a survey of the human skull as an object of dread and reverence stretching back through cultures on every continent, rooted in the old belief that the head housed the soul and offered a channel to the Other World. The segment weighs the disputed Celtic "Cult of the Head," with historian Ronald Hutton arguing the recurring head motif on Celtic metalwork reflects artistic fashion rather than worship, and moves through the 1612 trial of Lancashire witch Anne Chattox, hanged after she was accused of robbing graves for skulls and teeth. It gathers the screaming-skull legends of England, including Anne Griffiths of Burton Agnes Hall in Yorkshire, whose exhumed head was bricked into a staircase wall to quiet the slamming and crashing, and the skull at Bettiscombe Manor in Dorset, said to belong to an enslaved man brought from Nevis by the Pinney family and denied his promised burial in the Caribbean.The episode closes with a long, skeptical reexamination of Watergate that treats the official account as a fabrication. It returns to the June 17, 1972 arrest of five burglars inside the Democratic National Committee offices and the address book linking E. Howard Hunt to Nixon's White House, then argues, following journalist Jim Hougan's 1984 book Secret Agenda, that the men never actually bugged the building at all. James McCord, a senior figure in the CIA's Office of Security rather than the low-level technician he claimed, rented a line-of-sight surveillance room facing the wrong side of the complex, paid an employee to transcribe conversations from nonexistent wiretaps, and twice taped the stairwell locks horizontally across the door face so guards could not miss them. A key found on burglar Eugenio Martinez fit the desk of DNC secretary Ida Wells and pointed toward a suspected call-girl ring run out of the adjacent Columbia Plaza apartments, raising the possibility that Hunt and McCord, both career CIA men who lied about a decade-long association, sabotaged the break-in to shield a clandestine operation, to topple a president who had sidelined the agency, or both, taking the full truth with them to their graves.

Step right up, Weirdos! Got a strange idea rattling around in your skull — a haunting nobody believes, a cryptid your uncle swears he saw, some true-crime case that still keeps you up at night? Jukebox Weirdo turns it into a real, honest-to-goodness song. You bring the weird, you pick the band off the Weird Darkness Records roster, and I write it and produce it — with your name on the idea. And if it's a keeper, I'll send it out to Spotify, iHeart Radio, YouTube Music, and everywhere else, so you can crank it for everybody you know and holler, "THAT'S my song!" Want in? Become an Official Weirdo at https://WeirdDarkness.com/OFFICIAL and send me your idea. Let's make something strange together!

A Phoenix musician snapped two clear photos of a flying saucer in 1947 — then government agents with hidden names showed up, took his negatives, and made the evidence vanish into federal archives forever.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/RhodesMIBREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8z656hFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Natalie Bollinger seemed to have her whole life ahead of her, but beneath the surface was a dark and tragic story that would end in obsession, danger, and a horrifying Craigslist ad that no one saw coming. (Natalie Bollinger – Stalked, Betrayed, and Forgotten) *** Oregon’s scenic beauty hides a darker side, where ghostly encounters and eerie legends bring the state’s haunted history to life. We’ll look at five of the most haunted places in The Union State. (Five Haunted Locations in Oregon) *** Andrew Keegan went from ’90s heartthrob to the charismatic leader of a crystal-charged spiritual group, where eerie rituals and strange coincidences blur the line between community and cult. (Teen Heartthrob to Cult Leader) *** The Dakota is more than just a historic NYC landmark—its dark history of ghostly encounters, untimely celebrity deaths, and eerie connections will leave you with chills. (Famous Phantoms of the Dark Dakota Building) *** A wild night in 1979 – Chicago’s Comiskey Park turned into a chaotic battlefield as tens of thousands of disco-hating fans lit records on fire, sparked a riot, and may have sealed the fate of an entire music genre. It’s the night “Disco Inferno” turned literal. (The Night Disco Burned) *** When a man in 1947 captured stunning photos of a UFO over Phoenix, he unknowingly invited the shadowy Men in Black into his life, sparking one of the earliest and most chilling accounts of government secrecy and dark intimidation. (First Documented Encounter With The Men In Black) *** The U.S. has a seven-step plan for meeting aliens, and it’s a mix of science fiction, strategy, and some downright unsettling steps you won’t believe. (First Contact or Planetary Catastrophe?)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:01:56.144 = Show Open00:04:35.317 = The First Documented Encounter With The Men In Black00:18:57.349 = First Contact, Or Planetary Catastrophe ***00:26:17.432 = Natalie Bollinger – Stalked, Betrayed, and Forgotten00:35:41.483 = Five Haunted Locations in Oregon ***00:48:27.369 = The Night Disco Burned00:55:11.587 = Teen Heartthrob to Cult Leader01:03:27.692 = Famous Phantoms of the Dark Dakota Building ***01:07:45.841 = Facing Fear For Fun01:10:30.883 = Show Close*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad breakLISTEN 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:“The First Documented Encounter With The Men In Black”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhodes_UFO_photographs,https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/the-original-men-in-black-3849054,https://www.history.com/news/men-in-black-real-origins, https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2024/08/Are-Men-in-Black-Real-At-Least-One-Was/“Natalie Bollinger – Stalked, Betrayed, and Forgotten”: https://cattstruecrimecorner.com/the-case-of-natalie-bollinger/,https://genwhypod.com/blogs/the-generation-why-podcast-blog/the-murder-of-natalie-bollinger,https://lauthmissingpersons.com/murder-natalie-bollinger/, https://klakstrom.medium.com/the-strange-murder-of-natalie-bollinger-16110ddaefb7, https://www.truecasefiles.com/2019/12/the-murder-of-natalie-bollinger.html,https://bekah302.medium.com/of-stalking-craigslist-and-social-media-the-case-of-natalie-bollinger-6846c98a8cc5“Five Haunted Locations In Oregon”: https://the-line-up.com/haunted-places-in-oregon (used verbatim with permission)“Facing Fear For Fun”: https://www.southernfriedtruecrime.com/annalisa-netherly,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Read_House_Hotel, https://www.clthomas.org/post/the-read-house-hauntings-and-legends, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/thoughts-thinking/201810/5-reasons-we-enjoy-being-scared,https://health.clevelandclinic.org/why-do-we-like-to-get-scared, https://www.healthline.com/health-news/why-we-like-to-be-scared, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/why-fear-feels-good“Teen Heartthrob To Cult Leader”: https://people.com/andrew-keegan-looks-back-insane-spirituality-venture-cost-tens-of-thousands-sparked-cult-rumors-8576493, https://ew.com/andrew-keegan-responds-rumors-he-started-cult-8576464,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Keegan, https://www.ranker.com/list/andrew-keegan-cult-facts/carly-silver“Famous Phantoms of the Dark Dakota Building”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_John_Lennon,https://jessicajewettonline.com/ghosts-of-the-dakota-building, https://the-line-up.com/the-dakota-building,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dakota, https://www.ranker.com/list/dakota-building-curse/april-a-taylor,“First Contact or Planetary Catastrophe”: https://www.nsa.gov/portals/75/documents/news-features/declassified-documents/cryptologic-spectrum/communications_with_extraterrestrial.pdf, https://www.livescience.com/19360-humans-discover-aliens.html, https://listverse.com/2017/03/12/10-laws-rules-and-regulations-for-extraterrestrial-contact/, https://www.livescience.com/alien-contact-protocol.html, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-detection_policy,https://www.ranker.com/list/facts-about-the-seven-steps-to-contact/laura-allan“The Night Disco Burned”: https://www.britannica.com/event/Disco-Demolition-Night,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disco_Demolition_Night, https://edm.com/features/remembering-disco-demolition-night-1979, https://www.ranker.com/list/facts-about-disco-demolition-night/melissa-sartore; Audio Clips: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAJfOcnYYEQ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWCRu-yVEFU(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

Jamie Varley told police his adopted son drowned in the bath, but the baby's hair was dry, his nappy was still on, and a post-mortem found forty injuries.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/babyprestonLook 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.

Three men walked into Kyle Bevan's cell at one of England's most secure prisons, stabbed him more than 25 times, tucked his body into bed to look asleep, and walked out four minutes and 39 seconds later.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/three-inmates-wakefieldLook 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.PHOTO INFO:Top Left: Mark Fellows, known as “The Iceman,” was already serving a whole-life term for two gangland murders. West Yorkshire Police / SWNSTop Center: David Taylor was also serving time for murder and awaiting trial over a separate killing when the prison attack took place. West Yorkshire Police / SWNSTop Right: Lee Newell was previously convicted of killing another child killer inside his prison cell in 2013. West Yorkshire Police / SWNSBottom Center: Kyle Bevan, who was serving a life sentence for killing his partner’s toddler, was stabbed to death by three inmates. Dyfed-Powys Police / SWNS

Across four decades on Heswall's Dawstone Road, drivers and a motorcyclist reported a seven-foot horned figure that seized their vehicles and threw them into the sandstone wall.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/DawstoneDemonREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2en5ubwwFEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Dawstone Road is where some say the veil between our reality and the unknown is thin. A motorist's brush with death in 1961 sparked a chain of inexplicable events. From encounters with horned entities to unexplained accidents, the road holds secrets that seem to defy rational explanation. (The Demon of Dawstone Road) *** There is a dark history and supernatural secrets at the Manila Film Center. Built as a symbol of power and prestige during the Marcos regime, its construction was rushed, resulting in a catastrophic collapse that claimed numerous lives. But the horror didn't end there. Stories of hauntings, spectral hands reaching out, and cries for help still echo through its halls. (Horrors At Manila Film Center) *** When 19-year-old Kenneka Jenkins vanished during a hotel party, it sparked a viral whirlwind of speculation and suspicion. Despite authorities ruling her death an accident, questions lingered – as they should, seeing as her body was found in the hotel freezer. (Frozen Corpse at Crown Plaza) *** For over a century, these ghostly orbs have captivated and spooked travelers in Queensland, Australia. Are they supernatural spirits or mere mirages? (The Ghostly Orbs of Min Min) *** AND MORE!CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:02:07.004 = Demon of Dawstone Road00:11:30.917 = Horrors at Manila Film Center ***00:31:46.055 = Frozen Corpse at Crown Plaza ***00:40:24.583 = Ghostly Orbs of Min Min00:50:15.674 = Blowing Smoke Up Your Enema ***00:56:56.461 = Show Close*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad breakLISTEN 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:“Blowing Smoke Up Your Enema” by Bipin Dimri for Historic Mysteries: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yckujv2n“The Demon of Dawstone Road” by Tom Slemen for Anomalien.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/muvz6wbv“Horrors At Manila Film Center” by Lucia for TheGhostInMyMachine.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/9es3ka3j“Frozen Corpse at Crown Plaza” by Amanda Sedlak-Hevener for Graveyard Shift: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8drf6j“The Ghostly Orbs of Min Min” by Kimberly Lin for Historic Mysteries: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/ea9zway9(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: April 15, 2024This episode of Weird Darkness travels from a haunted stretch of English road and a tower built on dead workers to a teenager found frozen in a hotel kitchen, a century of phantom lights in the Australian Outback, and an 18th-century medical practice involving tobacco and a part of the body it had no business near.It opens on Dawstone Road in Heswall, where a Neston motorist crashed through a six-foot sandstone wall in the winter of 1961 and later told a surgeon at Clatterbridge Hospital that a horrible devil had pushed his car sideways, despite no alcohol in his blood. That March, a 23-year-old Wallasey man named Rory was thrown from his motorbike at the Baskervyle Road junction by a seven-foot horned figure that seized his handlebars, and he woke to a face with pointed ears and luminous eyes muttering about the pit. The road's reputation reaches back to November 1934, when a posse hunted a demonic creature that a wealthy mansion owner blamed on his escaped bulldog, an explanation a local policeman rejected by asking how a broad bulldog squeezed through iron gate bars. The pattern continued through a stalled Hillman Imp shoved backwards in 1969 and a nurse's 1978 sighting of a horned man in black standing beside a ten-foot hole that glowed red and echoed with screaming.From there the episode moves to the Manila Film Center, the cinema palace Imelda Marcos rushed to completion for the first Manila International Film Festival in January 1982, where part of the structure collapsed on November 17, 1981 and buried workers in wet cement during a 24-hour construction schedule. Eyewitness Nena Benigno described seeing men carried out frozen in cement that had not fully hardened, while official counts from the Marcos regime claimed only a handful of deaths against outside estimates ranging as high as 169. Architect Froilan Hong put the toll at seven and denied the burial stories, yet legends persisted that the dead were entombed in the walls, and a medium reportedly brought in by Imelda Marcos to exorcise the building announced during a trance that the spirits now numbered 169 after the road death of project supervisor Betty Benitez.Next comes the death of 19-year-old Kenneka Jenkins, found face-down in a walk-in freezer at the Crowne Plaza Chicago O'Hare in Rosemont on the morning of September 11, 2017, nearly a full day after security footage caught her stumbling through the hotel and entering an unused kitchen. The Cook County Medical Examiner ruled the death an accident from hypothermia, with a blood-alcohol level of 0.112 and epilepsy medication cited as contributing factors, but her mother Teresa Martin questioned how a teenager could open the freezer's heavy steel doors and filed a $50 million lawsuit against the hotel. Viral speculation drew comparisons to the 2013 death of Elisa Lam at the Cecil Hotel, fueled by footage in which background music was mistaken for a cry of help and an anonymous tip claiming a gang had killed her for $200.The episode then crosses to the Outback near Boulia in Queensland, where Min Min lights have trailed travelers since Europeans first documented them in 1838, hovering about three feet off the ground, changing color, and following people on foot, on horseback, and in cars. A stockman riding past the burned ruins of the Min Min Hotel reported a glow the size of a watermelon that chased him to the edge of town, and Arrernte elder Mavis Malbunka tied the lights to a Dreamtime story of a mother searching for a child fallen from the Milky Way. University of Queensland physiologist Jack Pettigrew traced the phenomenon to a Fata Morgana, an optical illusion in which warm air over cold bends light from sources hundreds of kilometers beyond the horizon, a finding he published in 2003 after recreating the effect with car headlights ten kilometers away.The episode closes on the tobacco enema, the 18th-century practice of blowing smoke into a patient's rectum to revive the drowned, with resuscitation kits hung near English waterways for emergency use. Nicholas Culpeper adapted the method from Native American medicine and Richard Mead carried it forward, and an early 1746 account credits a husband with reviving his apparently drowned wife by inserting a pipe stem and puffing smoke through it. Nicotine absorbed this way could raise a patient's heart rate, which gave the treatment a plausible mechanism, and the 1774 Institution for Affording Immediate Relief to Persons Apparently Dead from Drowning built its work around it before being renamed the Royal Humane Society, which still operates in England today.

A 36-year-old bartender came home from her overnight shift in Brooklyn, and within hours her teenage son and her sister found her dead on the floor with her neck cut.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/santos-floresLook 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.

Five drivers were shot along Interstate 70 the evening Kansas City opened its World Cup, and the man police are hunting has not been found.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/kc-world-cup-shootingsLook 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.

Centuries before Hollywood dressed it in a nun's habit, the demon Valak prowled the pages of forbidden grimoires as a winged boy astride a two-headed dragon, commanding legions of serpents to do his bidding.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources):https://weirddarkness.com/valekREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/24s8nzb9FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Although Valak is depicted in the films "The Nun" and in “The Conjuring 2” as a habit-wearing spirit, the real demon appears as a child riding a two-headed dragon — at least according to a 17th-century demon-hunting manual. (The Reality Behind The Demon, Valak) *** The Vatican is one of the most well-guarded areas in the world. But if rumors are to be believed, all that security isn’t only to protect the pontiff… but some dark, disturbing secrets… and a machine that could change everything we know to be true. (The Vatican’s Secret Machine) *** We’ll look at that time a force field was accidentally created at a 3M plant. (3M’s Accidental Force Field) *** In 1872 George Wheeler met and married May Tillson in Boston. He made a home for May and her younger sister Della, first in New York, then in California. Along the way, George fell in love with young Della and when she planned to marry someone else he was faced with a dilemma: he could not marry her himself and he could not bear to see her wed to another. The solution he chose pleased no one. (Thus She Passed Away) *** In the 1800s scientists and doctors needed cadavers to study human anatomy and practice their skills. To help accommodate the need, it was made legal to sell dead bodies. What could possibly go wrong? (The Unsettling Anatomy Act)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:01:16.547 = Show Open00:03:31.777 = The Reality Behind The Demon Valak00:11:37.807 = The Unsettling Anatomy Act ***00:24:33.689 = 3M’s Accidental Force Field00:34:11.149 = Thus She Passed Away ***00:44:01.086 = The Vatican’s Secret Machine00:53:13.339 = Show Close*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad breakLISTEN 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:“The Reality Behind The Demon, Valak” by Gina Dimuro for All That’s Interesting:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/43vu356n“3M’s Accidental Force Field” by Brent Swancer for Mysterious Universe: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/3vvnwbpv“Thus She Passed Away” by Robert Wilhelm for Murder By Gaslight: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yyztmnat“The Unsettling Anatomy Act” by SM for ListVerse: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8vdns9“The Vatican’s Secret Machine” by Ellen Lloyd for Ancient Pages: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8kxxz8(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, 2021This episode of Weird Darkness moves from a centuries-old demon mistaken for a nun, through the Victorian trade in stolen corpses and a force field that appeared inside a 1980 factory, to a San Francisco trunk murder and a Catholic priest who claimed to have built a machine that could film the past.It opens with the demon Valak, who reaches modern audiences through The Nun and The Conjuring 2 as a pale, nun-robed figure but appears in the 17th-century grimoire Clavicula Salomonis Regis, or The Key of Solomon, as the 62nd spirit: a boy with angel's wings riding a two-headed dragon, commanding a legion of serpents and an army of thirty demons while hunting snakes and hidden treasure. The nun costume was the invention of director James Wan, who reshaped a vision the medium Lorraine Warren described to him — a swirling hooded figure carrying female energy — into a holy icon turned against her Catholic faith. Warren and her husband Ed, the demonologists who rose to fame after the 1976 Amityville investigation, reportedly met a spectral hooded figure at the Borley church in southern England, where lore held that a nun had been bricked alive in the convent walls after an affair with a monk. The Key of Solomon, which lists the seventy-two demons King Solomon was said to have vanquished, sat on the Vatican's Index librorum prohibitorum until the Church abandoned that list of prohibited books in 1966, though copies kept turning up in the hands of Catholic priests.From there the episode turns to the Anatomy Act of 1832, the British law that legalized dissecting unclaimed bodies from workhouses and hospitals to end the grave-robbing of the resurrectionists, yet instead built an organized corpse trade across Victorian England. The twelfth-century St. Bartholomew's left wicker baskets beneath its King Henry VIII gate for body dealers to fill, while a Liverpool Street express known as the "dead train" carried sealed funeral wagons of stacked corpses toward Cambridge. Deepening the trade, the New Poor Law of 1834 confined the destitute to workhouses whose officials profited from selling the dead, and in 1858 the master of St. Mary Newington workhouse, Alfred Feist, was caught funneling pauper bodies to Guy's Hospital through the undertaker Robert Hogg, who staged fake funerals and collected double payment. Anatomists prized the bodies of fetuses and children, keeping their skulls intact — only one of fifty-four specimens in a Cambridge collection had received a craniotomy — and the public's dread boiled over in Manchester in 1832, when a grandfather opened the coffin of a three-year-old who had died at the Swan Street Cholera Hospital and found a brick where the boy's head should have been.Next comes a stranger kind of dread, set in the summer of 1980 at a 3M plant in South Carolina, where workers slitting twenty-foot-wide polypropylene film at a thousand feet per minute walked into an invisible wall they could not push through. The static-charged field, which one worker measured past the limit of a 200-kilovolt handheld electrometer, pulled people toward it so strongly they had to back away on foot, swallowed a passing fly, and by one account could have held a bird in its grip before vanishing as abruptly as it formed. Managers reproduced the effect the next morning under lower humidity, and the plant production manager reportedly said he didn't know whether to fix it or sell tickets; later accounts claim a researcher who published on the phenomenon was contacted by NASA and federal agencies before the grounding fault was corrected and the field never returned.The episode then moves to a true-crime case in San Francisco, where around midnight on October 20, 1880, George A. Wheeler walked into a police station and confessed to strangling his sister-in-law Della Tillson and packing her body into a trunk in their room at 23 Kearney Street. Wheeler had fathered two children with Della, both of whom died, while her sister — his deaf wife, May — lived across the hall posing as his sister-in-law, and the arrival of the miner George Peckham, who hoped to marry Della and take her to Sacramento, drove Wheeler to kill rather than let the two leave together. He told reporters that Della sat in his lap and asked him to end her life, that she died with her head on his shoulder, and his defense of hereditary insanity failed across two trials, the second forced by a California Supreme Court ruling over improperly admitted testimony from a book on medical jurisprudence. On January 23, 1884, five thousand people gathered outside the jail, entrance tickets sold for ten dollars apiece, and Wheeler — newly drawn toward Catholic conversion under Father Cottle — kissed a crucifix, commended his spirit, and dropped to a broken neck.The episode closes inside the Vatican with Father Pellegrino Ernetti, an Italian priest, exorcist, and musical scholar who claimed in the 1950s to have helped build a device called the Chronovisor that could see and hear the past. Ernetti said a team of twelve anonymous scientists, among them the physicist Enrico Fermi and the rocket engineer Wernher von Braun, tuned the machine to a speech by Mussolini, then Napoleon, a Roman market under Emperor Trajan, a Cicero oration, and a 169 B.C. performance of Quintus Ennius's lost tragedy Thyestes, which he said let him publish its full text. When the magazine La Domenica del Corriere printed a Chronovisor image of Christ's face on the cross on May 2, 1972, it was soon matched to a mirrored photograph of a wood carving by the sculptor Cullot Valera, and Ernetti — who said the machine was too dangerous to exist and had been dismantled and hidden — left behind no device, no named living witnesses, and a 1993 presentation to four cardinals whose contents were never disclosed.

Four aged friends gather in an eccentric doctor's shadowed study, where he offers each of them a single glass of water he swears was drawn from the Fountain of Youth.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/OTRCHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” (February 07, 1978) ***WD00:47:39.915 = Arch Oboler’s Plays, “Engulfed Cathedral” (May 06, 1939) ***WD01:17:52.594 = BBC Radio 4/Radio 7 Ghost Story, “Jonas” (mid 1970s)02:46:16.760 = Night Beat, “They” (August 17, 1951)03:15:39.186 = Beyond The Green Door, “Mrs Curlew — Poisoner Marries Major” (1966) ***WD03:19:27.495 = The Black Book, “My Favorite Corpse” (February 24, 1952) ***WD03:35:06.168 = *SHOW NAME UNKNOWN*, “Black Ghost” (1930) ***WD04:01:09.186 = Barry Craig, “The Judge And The Champ” (October 17, 1951) ***WD04:31:00.486 = Box 13, “The Hot Box” (December 26, 1948)04:57:42.628 = 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/WDRR0693