Astonishing Legends

In tonight's dead letter, Patrick writes to us from Northcote, a suburb on the north side of Melbourne, Australia, where his son James, thirteen at the time, took Cookie, the family's Boston terrier, out before dawn one morning in the autumn of 2024, through a reserve that used to be part of a golf course. Cookie never barks at anyone, but at the top of the hill, beside a stand of gum trees, he stopped, stared, and started to growl at something James couldn't see. Forrest is away this week, so Richard Hatem, screenwriter of The Mothman Prophecies, sits in and reads the letter.

Relevant Prior Episodes
Ep 72: Richard Hatem - Screenwriter of The Mothman Prophecies
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Ep 50: Mothman Part 1
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Ep 37: The Delphos Ring Part 1
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Ep 45: Skinwalker Ranch Part 1
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Links and Further Reading
Last week's Dead Letter Office, DLO-240: The Visitor in Clothier Hall (Apple Podcasts)

Richard Hatem's Paranormal Bookshelf (Apple Podcasts)

The Mothman Prophecies, by John A. Keel (Bookshop.org)

Hunt for the Skinwalker, by Colm A. Kelleher and George Knapp (Bookshop.org)

Leaked "jellyfish" UFO video leaves the internet enthralled and baffled (Global News, January 2024)

Slender Man (Wikipedia)

Northcote, Victoria (Wikipedia)

Merri Creek (Wikipedia)

Whatever Remains Podcast, with Marie Mayhew (Apple Podcasts)

Loud pack of coyotes takes over abandoned West Hollywood construction site (ABC7 Los Angeles, July 2026)

We're looking for more stories! Send your Dead Letter to deadletteroffice@astonishinglegends.com!

In tonight's dead letter, Keith takes us back to the spring of 1997, when he was a freshman at Rutgers living on the third floor of Clothier Hall, a brick dorm in downtown New Brunswick, New Jersey. Early one Saturday morning, with the first light coming in around the curtain, he opened his eyes and someone was sitting on the floor against his roommate's bed, six feet away, in a room he had locked the night before. Someone, or some…thing…that shouldn’t have been there.

Relevant Prior Episodes
Ep 26: Shadow People
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Ep 338: Your True Halloween Stories IV, Part 3
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Ep 87: Black Eyed Kids Part 1
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Links and Further Reading
Clothier Hall (Rutgers Residence Life)

Weird NJ

Shadow person (Wikipedia)
Note: We call Benadryl's active ingredient pseudoephedrine in the episode. It's diphenhydramine.

Hypnagogia and the hypnopompic state (Wikipedia)

Hypnic jerk (Wikipedia)

Jim Harold's Campfire

Miyamoto Musashi (Wikipedia)

Wild Talents, by Charles Fort (1932), free to read at sacred-texts.com

We're looking for more stories! Send your Dead Letter to deadletteroffice@astonishinglegends.com!

We're back, and this time we’re lucky enough to have paranormal investigator, researcher and author Michelle Belanger join us to help answer the question connecting this week's stories: does this phenomenon have a name?
At a Southern California shopping mall, Amy gets in line for food when two young women behind her suddenly fill her with an intense feeling of dread.
In Los Angeles, Zee picks up two young women from an unlikely spot near a freeway overpass, and before long, an ordinary ride begins to feel anything but.
Lastly, Mike takes us back to a Chicago suburb in 1988, where a routine walk near a cemetery leads to a passing encounter with two women he has never forgotten.
Turn down the lights and join us for the final set of this year’s true Halloween mysteries.
Visit our website for a lot more information on this episode.

In tonight's dead letter, we're in Cluj-Napoca, Transylvania in the 1990s, a few years after the revolution, where our listener Nadina, six at the time, had the run of a Soviet-era apartment block with her older sister and their best friend while their nanny visited a friend upstairs. They climbed past the last floor of apartments to the metal door at the top, and before anyone could touch it, something huge, aggressive and feral sounding on the other side began attacking it so hard they fled. Nadina still doesn't know what was up there.

Relevant Prior Episodes

Ep 49: Monsters Among Us
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Ep 116: Small Town Monsters
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Ep 183: Sam the Sandown Clown
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Ep 203: The Beast of Gévaudan
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts

Links and Further Reading

Hoia Baciu Forest (Astonishing Legends)

History of Cluj-Napoca

Systematization in Romania

Transylvanian Superstitions, Emily Gerard, 1885 (Project Gutenberg)

Pricolici

Strigoi

Tracing the Roots of Lycanthropy (Astonishing Legends)

The Beast of Bray Road (Astonishing Legends)

Blonde Venus (1932)

Classic Sideshow Acts: The Girl into the Gorilla (Museum of the Weird)

Pepper's Ghost

We're looking for more stories! Send your Dead Letter to deadletteroffice@astonishinglegends.com!

Our Halloween tradition continues with three more listeners sharing encounters they still can’t explain.
At a church summer camp in the mountains above Southern California, Ray and two fellow counselors spot a girl standing alone in the parking lot after lights-out. She silently returns to the bunkhouse when they call to her… but that won’t be the last time they see her.
In San Luis Obispo, Brian and his wife move into a guest house with a long history and a curious warning from their elderly landlady: most tenants don’t stay very long. Soon they begin to understand why.
And Terry takes us back to the night shift of a hospital coronary care unit, where a dying patient starts asking every nurse the same unsettling question: “Who’s that behind you?”
Turn down the lights and settle in for Part Two of our Halloween listener stories.
Visit our website for a lot more information on this episode.