The Devil Within

The Haunted Houses We Built

The New Monsters – Story Four, Episode Three

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The Things That Wait Between the Walls

The New Monsters – Backrooms, Part Two

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You Have Been Here Before

The New Monsters – Story Four, Episode One

What if the most terrifying place you've ever imagined isn't a haunted mansion, an abandoned asylum, or a forgotten cemetery?

What if it's an office building?

This week on The Devil Within, Branden Morgan begins a new three-part investigation into one of the internet's most extraordinary pieces of modern folklore: The Backrooms.

What started as a single anonymous photograph posted online in 2019 quickly became a global phenomenon, inspiring millions of people to ask an unsettling question:

"Why does this place feel so familiar?"

Unlike the monsters we've explored throughout The New Monsters, the Backrooms have no ancient legend, no centuries of oral tradition, and no historical eyewitness accounts stretching back through time. Instead, they represent something entirely new—a mythology born from architecture itself.

In this first chapter, we trace the mysterious origins of the now-famous photograph and examine

the surprising psychology behind liminal spaces. Why do empty airports after midnight, deserted shopping malls, abandoned school hallways, and silent office buildings evoke such powerful feelings of unease? Why do so many people insist they've experienced the Backrooms long before they ever heard the name?

Along the way, we explore the concept of "no-clipping," the language of modern video games that gave birth to one of the internet's most enduring horror concepts, and discover why the Backrooms resonate so deeply with a generation raised in a world of fluorescent lights, endless hallways, and anonymous commercial spaces.

This isn't merely the story of an internet meme.

It's the story of how an ordinary photograph revealed something extraordinary about the human mind—and how the buildings we constructed for efficiency may have accidentally become the haunted houses of the twenty-first century.

Next week, the empty hallways won't remain empty for long. Thousands of strangers begin expanding the mythology, creating new levels, impossible creatures, explorer journals, survival guides, and one of the richest collaborative horror universes ever assembled online. We'll explore how the internet transformed a single unsettling image into an entire ecosystem of modern folklore, and why every civilization eventually feels compelled to populate its nightmares.

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miss an episode.

⭐ Rate & Review

If you're enjoying The New Monsters, please leave a 5-star rating and review. It helps more listeners discover the show and supports independent storytelling.

📺 Watch on YouTube

Watch full episodes, companion visuals, and exclusive content on the Evio Creative YouTube Channel.

📱 Join the Conversation

Follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube @thedevilwithinpod, and tell us what you think. Have you experienced something strange? Have a local legend you'd like us to investigate? We'd love to hear from you.

📧 Share Your Story

Email us anytime at info@eviocreative.com. Your story could inspire a future episode of The Devil Within.

👹 New Episodes Every Week

Because every civilization invents monsters... and we're still creating ours.
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The Devil's Ledger — Week of August 17, 2026

The universe put on one hell of a show this week.

We begin with Spain's spectacular August 12 solar eclipse and humanity's long, occasionally unhinged relationship with watching the sun disappear. For The Creepiest Thing I Heard This Week, we travel from ancient Greece—where an eclipse could signal that the gods had essentially abandoned humanity—to Choctaw stories of a giant black squirrel attempting to devour the sun and Vietnamese legends of a celestial frog swallowing it whole.

And apparently scientific literacy hasn't completely saved us. Modern eclipse superstitions warn of poisoned food, birthday curses and even the possibility that washing your hair during an eclipse could somehow affect your sanity. Three thousand years ago we feared an angry god had extinguished the sun. Today we're worried about the potato salad. Progress remains uneven.

Then, across the Evio Universe this week:

On The Devil Within, The New Monsters continues with The Backrooms, the internet-born nightmare built around the idea that reality itself has seams. Slip through the wrong one and you could find yourself trapped inside an apparently endless maze of yellow wallpaper, stained carpeting, fluorescent lights and empty rooms. What began as an unsettling image evolved into an enormous collaborative mythology of levels, entities, rules and stories—and ultimately escaped the internet into games, movies and mainstream popular culture.

On Criminal Mischief, Carolyn Ossorio breaks down the extraordinary new developments surrounding Luigi Mangione. Following his federal guilty plea in connection with the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, attention now turns toward New York's pending murder case and an increasingly important question: double jeopardy. Federal and state governments are generally treated as separate sovereigns under federal constitutional law, while New York provides additional statutory protections against successive prosecutions. Carolyn examines what Mangione's plea means, what it doesn't mean, and why the next major battle may happen before another jury ever hears the case.

On The Slippery, we meet Olga Rutterschmidt and Helen Golay, the elderly Los Angeles women whose apparent efforts to help unhoused men concealed an astonishing insurance scheme. Prosecutors established that the pair befriended vulnerable men, obtained numerous life-insurance policies on them and eventually murdered Paul Vados and Kenneth McDavid in staged hit-and-run incidents before collecting millions in insurance proceeds. The scheme began unraveling when one detective overheard another discussing a suspicious death and remembered an eerily similar case. The same two women appeared in both files. From there came insurance investigators, undercover operations and the slow dismantling of an extraordinary criminal enterprise.

And This Week in Horror, we're talking Ice Cream Man, Eli Roth's gleefully deranged throwback to the excesses of 1980s horror: an idyllic summer town, a mysterious ice cream man and frozen treats capable of turning children into homicidal killers. It's bloody, ridiculous and precisely the sort of movie that understands sometimes the best horror premise begins by taking something completely innocent and ruining it forever.

So keep looking toward the stars, enjoy these final weeks of summer, and we'll see you somewhere this week across the Evio Universe.

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📧 STORIES, TIPS & FEEDBACK

Have a story we should investigate? A case we somehow missed? Something creepy, criminal, inexplicable or simply too strange to ignore? Send your stories, tips and suggestions to info@eviocreative.com.

Until next week, stay curious, keep looking toward the stars, and we'll see you somewhere across the Evio Universe.

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When the Story Drew Blood

The New Monsters : Slender Man - Part Three

Some stories entertain us. Others change us.

This week's episode of The Devil Within explores the moment when one of the internet's most famous legends collided with the real world, forever changing how we think about digital folklore, childhood, and the stories we tell ourselves.

In May of 2014, two twelve-year-old girls led their best friend into the woods outside Waukesha, Wisconsin, believing they were acting on behalf of Slender Man. The shocking attack dominated headlines around the world and immediately sparked fears that an internet horror story had somehow escaped the screen. But as investigators, psychologists, and psychiatrists began examining the case, a far more complicated picture emerged.

This episode follows that investigation—not to sensationalize a tragedy, but to understand it. We separate documented psychiatric evidence from public speculation, exploring how mythology, mental illness, childhood development, and the digital world intersected in ways that defied the simple explanations so many desperately wanted.

From courtroom testimony and psychological evaluations to the broader cultural aftermath, we examine why Slender Man became much more than an internet character. He became a case study in how modern folklore spreads, how vulnerable minds can incorporate cultural symbols into delusional beliefs, and why stories have always reflected the fears of the societies that create them.

The journey doesn't end in Waukesha. We follow Slender Man's transformation from internet horror icon into a subject of academic research, documentaries, and popular culture, asking what historians may one day conclude about the first monster humanity watched being born in real time.

Ultimately, this isn't a story about whether Slender Man was real.

It's about the very real power of stories, the responsibility we carry as storytellers, and the timeless human instinct to search for meaning in places where certainty is impossible.

Next week, The New Monsters turns away from creatures entirely and steps into a place that has never existed—and yet somehow feels hauntingly familiar. It begins with a single photograph of an empty office hallway. No blood. No ghost. No monster. Just fluorescent lights, stained carpeting, and the unsettling feeling that you've been there before. Welcome to The Backrooms, where the internet didn't create a monster...

It created a memory.

🎧 Listen & Follow
Listen to The Devil Within wherever you get your podcasts, and be sure to follow so you never miss an episode.

⭐ Rate & Review
If you're enjoying The New Monsters, please leave a 5-star rating and review. It helps more listeners discover the show and supports independent storytelling.

📺 Watch on YouTube
Watch full episodes, companion visuals, and exclusive content on the Evio Creative YouTube Channel.

📱 Join the Conversation
Follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube @thedevilwithinpod, and tell us what you think. Have you experienced something strange? Have a local legend you'd like us to investigate? We'd love to hear from you.

📧 Share Your Story
Email us anytime at info@eviocreative.com. Your story could inspire a future episode of The Devil Within.

👹 New Episodes Every Week
Because every civilization invents monsters... and we're still creating ours.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices