Weird Darkness: Paranormal & True Crime Stories

A college professor's ordinary morning visit is interrupted when he suddenly finds himself alone in a strange, blurred world where nothing seems quite real—except for a few unsettling exceptions.

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

SOURCES and RESOURCES: “The Shoddy Lands” by C.S. Lewis (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction February 1956)

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

Midnight In The Macabre (MITM), originally aired: September 25, 2026

LIKE WHAT YOU’RE HEARING? WEIRD DARKNESS posts episodes 7 DAYS A WEEK! Listen FREE wherever you get podcasts or visit https://weirddarkness.com/listen. • Paranormal • True Crime • Ghosts • UFOs • Cryptids • Unexplained • Want even more? Become an OFFICIAL WEIRDO for commercial-free episodes, bonus episodes, weeknight live chats, audiobooks & more at https://WeirdDarkness.com/OFFICIAL

A struggling young doctor answers a newspaper ad for a strong, steady-nerved beetle expert, and the lawyer who hires him at a hundred pounds a day won't tell him what the job is.

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, “Never Answer An Advertisement” (October 18, 1978) ***WD
00:47:04.513 = Mr. Keen, “Yellow Talon Murder” (September 22, 1949)
01:16:44.287 = Murder At Midnight, “Death Across The Board” (September 18, 1946)
01:44:18.775 = The Black Museum, “The Wool Jacket” (July 13, 1952) ***WD
02:09:55.734 = Mysterious Traveler, “Out of the Past” (April 02, 1944) ***WD
02:35:02.637 = House of Mystery, “Gift From The Dead” (August 03, 1947) ***WD
03:04:45.442 = CBC Nightfall, “Wind Chill” (September 19, 1980) ***WD
03:34:18.477 = Obsession, “Faith Is The Evidence” (May 12, 1952) ***WD
04:03:38.533 = Origin of Superstition, “Rabbit’s Foot” (1935) ***WD
04:18:10.056 = Pat Novak, “Wendy Morris” (April 30, 1949)
04:46:56.685 = Incredible But True, “The Playful Spirit” (1950-1951) ***WD
04:51:40.680 = Strange Adventure, “Squaw Gold” (1945)
04:54:58.161 = Tales of the Frightened, “Ladder” (November 28, 1957)
05:00:00.973 = 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/WDRR0782

A 1950s passenger plane vanishes without a trace – then lands 35 years later with 92 skeletons still buckled in their seats. What is the truth of the story?

EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/Flight513

READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2dvtrc9s

FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Critics of the Santiago Flight 513 story insist it’s nothing more than an urban myth or an attempt to sell newspapers. But is there evidence to contradict their conclusions? (The Time Warp of Santiago Flight 513) *** Help! Help! Oh, my God! Frank is murdering the whole family. Rouse the neighbors!” These cries from a terrified woman led to the story of several attempted murders – and a song that most have forgotten. (The 30th Street Murder) *** After a series of attacks on farm animals in Puerto Rico, numerous people reported sightings of the creature at fault. But the strange thing is that none of the reports seemed to match – as if each sighting was of a different unknown animal. (Chupacabra Shapeshifter) *** Behind his friendly demeanor lurked a deadly obsession with torture and murder. He soon earned the label, “The Butcher of Kansas City.” (Robert Berdella) *** Weirdo family member Chris Misulich tells the true story of him and his friends getting exactly what they asked for… and wishingthey hadn’t. (Be Careful What You Wish For)
CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding
00:00:55.109 = Show Open
00:03:02.086 = The Time Warp of Santiago Flight 513
00:09:04.058 = The 30th Street Murder
00:17:00.393 = Chupacabra Shapeshifter ***
00:22:50.557 = Robert Berdella, The Butcher of Kansas City
00:28:17.405 = Be Careful What You Wish For
00:33:38.779 = 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:
“The Time Warp of Santiago Flight 513” by Lew Hewitt: http://bit.ly/2xDYI56
“The 30th Street Murder” by Robert Wilhelm: http://bit.ly/2XwTlnz.
“Chupacabra Shapeshifter” by Nick Redfern: http://bit.ly/2NIGfz5
“Robert Berdella – Butcher of Kansas City” by Orrin Grey: http://bit.ly/30sRCwJ
“Be Careful What You Wish For” by Weird family member Chris Misulich(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: June 2021
LIKE WHAT YOU’RE HEARING? WEIRD DARKNESS posts episodes 7 DAYS A WEEK! Listen FREE wherever you get podcasts or visit https://weirddarkness.com/listen. • Paranormal • True Crime • Ghosts • UFOs • Cryptids • Unexplained • Want even more? Become an OFFICIAL WEIRDO for commercial-free episodes, bonus episodes, weeknight live chats, audiobooks & more at https://WeirdDarkness.com/OFFICIAL

Weird Darkness host Darren Marlar spends this episode on an airliner said to have landed in Brazil 35 years after it took off, a hatchet attack on a New York family in 1858, the shape-shifting chupacabra of Puerto Rico, Kansas City serial killer Robert Berdella, and a campfire wish in Pennsylvania's Allegheny National Forest.
It opens with Santiago Flight 513, a Lockheed Super Constellation that a 1989 Weekly World News story claimed left Aachen, West Germany, on September 4th, 1954, vanished over the Atlantic, and landed at Porto Alegre, Brazil, on October 12th, 1989, with 92 skeletons in their seats and the captain's skeleton still holding the controls. Critics dismiss it as an urban myth written to sell newspapers, and the segment sets it beside Einstein's relativity and the atomic clocks that run faster at altitude and slower at high speed.
From there, it goes back to October 26th, 1858, when servant Elizabeth Carr ran from 217 West 30th Street in New York City in her nightclothes, screaming, "Frank is murdering the whole family!" Frank Gouldy, confronted by his father over $10 taken from a bank account meant to start him in business, had gone through the house with a dull hatchet, striking his father, his pregnant stepmother, his two young brothers, and both servants before shooting himself; Elizabeth, who had wrestled the hatchet away from him, was the only victim to die, and the Saugerties Bard, Henry S. Backus, turned the attack into the ballad "The Thirtieth Street Murder".
Next comes the chupacabra of Canóvanas, Puerto Rico, blamed for the goats, chickens, and pigs found dead there in August 1995 with deep puncture wounds in their necks. Madelyne Tolentino described a creature that hopped along on two legs with a row of feathers down its head and spine, but later witnesses reported spikes, four legs and the stalk of a big cat, blue eyes or glowing red ones, bat wings, bird wings, or none at all, and eleven reports have it changing into a hairy, Bigfoot-like beast inside a blinding white light.
After that comes April 2nd, 1988, when a naked man in a dog collar leapt from a second-story window on Charlotte Street in Kansas City's Hyde Park neighborhood, and police broke into the house to find more than 200 Polaroids and detailed logs of how Robert Berdella tortured and killed at least six young men between 1984 and 1987. Berdella, soon known as the Butcher of Kansas City, also ran Bob's Bazaar Bizarre, a Westport Flea Market booth selling skulls, shrunken heads, and occult books, and he died of a heart attack in prison in 1992.
The episode closes with Weird Darkness listener Chris Misulich's account of a camping trip in the Allegheny National Forest, where he said aloud around the fire, "I wish we could see something we couldn't explain". That night the tents were soaked through, a figure sat gripping the steering wheel of a friend's car, and Chris's moonlit shadow, the only one in the group, whipped away into the woods; a shrine-like table in a clearing vanished as he got within five feet of it, and back at camp someone stoked the fire and strummed his guitar outside a friend's tent.

Each night, Tom slips into a world of violent, unshakable nightmares — and every morning, the names and faces from his dreams show up in tragic news stories.

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

SOURCES and RESOURCES: “Dreams Before Dying” by Keith Conrad. Hear more of his stories at http://www.auditoryanthology.com.

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

Midnight In The Macabre (MITM), originally aired: September 24, 2026

LIKE WHAT YOU’RE HEARING? WEIRD DARKNESS posts episodes 7 DAYS A WEEK! Listen FREE wherever you get podcasts or visit https://weirddarkness.com/listen. • Paranormal • True Crime • Ghosts • UFOs • Cryptids • Unexplained • Want even more? Become an OFFICIAL WEIRDO for commercial-free episodes, bonus episodes, weeknight live chats, audiobooks & more at https://WeirdDarkness.com/OFFICIAL

What really happened inside the Borden house that bloody summer morning — and could Lizzie’s silence have been hiding more than just guilt?

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

READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/mb5xas3d

FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: She looms large in the annals of American crime lore. A romantic relationship gone awry and troubles at home could explain why many still believe Lizzie Borden killed her parents. (Spending The Night With Lizzie Borden) *** Many years before Adolph Hitler and Germany’s Nazis created Auschwitz, there was another concentration camp that experienced deaths in tens of thousands. But this encampment of turpitude wasn’t located in Germany – or anywhere near Europe. It was located in the land of the free… the home of the brave. The USA. (The Devil’s Punchbowl) *** Several people have returned from their near-death experiences reporting they were briefly in the fiery pits of hell. Is there any truth to their claims? (They Escaped Hell’s Clutches) *** Have you ever seen what appears to be a shadow person or dark figure (stationary or moving) with your own eyes, close up or far away, ​maybe even in your peripheral vision or dream state? Perhaps you have felt the sensation of someone  standing behind you and then you turn around but no one was there? What is it that you are seeing when this happens? (Who Are The Shadow People?)
CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding
00:00:50.704 = Show Open
00:02:54.240 = Spending The Night With Lizzie Borden
00:20:37.798 = They Escaped Hell’s Clutches ***
00:27:49.967 = The Devil’s Punchbowl: America’s Concentration Camp
00:35:51.569 = Who Are The Shadow People? ***
01:03:24.576 = 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:
“Spending The Night With Lizzie Borden” written by Darren Marlar ***Sources include Aliza Polkes:http://bit.ly/2X60g70, Zillow: http://bit.ly/2X6TmOM, Kelly McClure: http://bit.ly/2KDy3hj, Catherine Phelan: http://bit.ly/2xkNsdv, Sarah Mangiola: http://bit.ly/2xdVd55. Lizzie Borden monologue written by Brandy Purdy:https://amzn.to/2IRCCTb, female narration by voice actor Katrina Carpenter: http://bit.ly/2Jdd8hZ
“The Devil’s Punchbowl: America’s Concentration Camp” by Claire Bernish: http://bit.ly/2YeAlqd
“They Escaped Hell’s Clutches” posted at Earth Chronicles: http://bit.ly/2xoGl49
“Who Are The Shadow People?” by Natalia Kuna: http://bit.ly/2X10esl(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: June 05, 2022
LIKE WHAT YOU’RE HEARING? WEIRD DARKNESS posts episodes 7 DAYS A WEEK! Listen FREE wherever you get podcasts or visit https://weirddarkness.com/listen. • Paranormal • True Crime • Ghosts • UFOs • Cryptids • Unexplained • Want even more? Become an OFFICIAL WEIRDO for commercial-free episodes, bonus episodes, weeknight live chats, audiobooks & more at https://WeirdDarkness.com/OFFICIAL
Weird Darkness host Darren Marlar spends this episode on the 1892 Borden murders in Fall River, Massachusetts, visions of hell brought back from near-death experiences, a disputed Union Army camp for freed slaves in Natchez, Mississippi, and the dark figures known as shadow people.
It opens in Fall River, where the Second Street house in which Andrew and Abby Borden were killed on August 4th, 1892, now takes overnight guests as the Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast. Andrew's daughter, Lizzie Borden, was tried and acquitted in June 1893, and the episode covers the dress she burned days after the murders, the real count of 18 or 19 blows for Abby and 10 or 11 for Andrew against the rhyme's 40 and 41, and author Brandy Purdy's novel The Secrets of Lizzie Borden, which builds a motive around a suitor named David Anthony. Columnist Kelly McClure booked a night in the John V. Morse room, where Abby was killed, and fled to a friend's house in the middle of the night, coming back only for the complimentary breakfast.
From there, it turns to people who say their near-death experiences took them to hell. Matthew Botsford, shot in the head outside an Atlanta restaurant in 1992, says that during a 27-day coma he hung bound hand and foot over a pit of something like magma; Howard Storm, an atheist art professor who later became a pastor, describes being led into a fog by figures that turned on him and bit him until he started shouting a prayer; and in his 1978 book Return from Tomorrow, George Ritchie, a young Army private declared dead during World War II, wrote about the tormented souls he saw.
Next comes the Devil's Punchbowl, a bowl-shaped gulch in the bluffs above the Mississippi River at Natchez, where Paula Westbrook and former Natchez City Cemetery director Don Estes say the Union Army confined freed slaves in a camp and as many as 20,000 died of smallpox and starvation. History professor Jim Wiggins calls that figure inflated tenfold, and local stories, none of them verified, tell of human bones washing out of the ravine after heavy rains.
The episode closes with shadow people, the dark human outlines reported in bedrooms at night and at the edge of sight, including the Hat Man in his hat and long coat or cape. Psychic Natalia Kuna shares her own encounters and runs through the theories, from demons and jinn to astral travelers, time travelers, and entities drawn to electromagnetic energy, along with Cherokee elder Thunder Strike's belief that people see them through a "dream eye", and the protection she recommends, starting with the name of Jesus.