A mysterious gentleman who never aged, never ate, and never seemed to die charmed the high society of two centuries — until police found his wine bottles filled with blood.
EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/stgermain
READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/WD20260625-StGermain.txt
FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: The mystery surrounding Count St. Germain is more than a little strange. Some think him to be a centuries old vampire. Others believe him to be a time traveler. And still others believe the whole thing to be a complete fraud. (The Vampire Time-Traveler) *** Escaping jail isn't easy, but we’ll look at some who did the impossible – escaping the most secure prisons, in the most daring of ways. (History’s Most Daring Prison Breaks) *** What would you do if you discovered that the church you attend every Sunday has a dark past that involves hauntings and supernatural phenomena? We’ll look at some of the most haunted churches in the United States – perhaps you attend one of them and don’t even realize it! (Most Haunted Churches in America) *** Benny Binion was one of the friendliest mobsters in Las Vegas… unless, of course, you made him mad. (Benny Binion, The Nice Guy Brute)
CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding
00:01:46.615 = Show Open
00:03:35.546 = St. Germain: The Vampire Time Traveler
00:15:55.827 = Daring Prison Breaks ***
00:35:47.335 = Benny Binion, The Nice Guy Brute ***
00:52:51.426 = Most Haunted Churches in America ***
01:00:52.327 = Show Close
*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad break
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*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*
SOURCES and RESOURCES:
“The Vampire Time-Traveler” by Marcus Lowth for UFO Insight: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2f2psdnm
“History’s Most Daring Prison Breaks” by Mike Rothschild for Ranker’s Unspeakable Times:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p948z5e
“Most Haunted Churches in America” by Rain-Screaming-For-Horror, posted at Vocal.Media:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8we2se
“Benny Binion, The Nice Guy Brute” by Melissa Sartore for Weird History: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4rczaf27
(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.)
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Originally aired: December, 2021
This episode of Weird Darkness moves from an immortal vampire said to haunt two centuries of high society, through history's most audacious prison escapes, into the bloody rise of a Las Vegas gambling kingpin, and ends among the haunted pews of America's churches.It opens in London in the early 1740s, where a man known as the Count of St. Germain charmed the upper classes with flawless violin playing, fluency in several languages, and a habit of handing out diamonds, prompting Horace Walpole — son of Prime Minister Robert Walpole — to describe him in a letter as odd and mad before the Count was arrested on suspicion of spying and released without charge. He surfaced next in Paris as a regular guest of Louis XV, working in a commissioned laboratory on fabric dyes and carrying out discreet missions, while gossip held that he could turn ordinary stones into jewels and had lived for hundreds or thousands of years, even claiming presence at the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD. After reported appearances aiding Catherine the Great in Russia and a friendship with Prince Charles of Hesse-Cassel in Germany, where he was said to die in 1784, the story jumps to early-1900s New Orleans and a wealthy newcomer named Jacques St. Germain, who threw lavish parties yet never ate or drank, claimed descent from the Count, and bore an uncanny resemblance to him. The account turns dark when a woman leapt from his balcony into the street, telling police he had bitten her neck; St. Germain vanished overnight, leaving his belongings behind and several open bottles that proved to hold a mixture of wine and blood.From there the episode trades immortality for ingenuity, walking through the boldest jailbreaks on record. It runs from the 2016 Orange County escape, where Jonathan Tieu, Bac Duong, and Hossein Nayeri cut through walls and rappelled to a sixteen-hour head start, to Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán slipping out of Altiplano through a mile-long lighted tunnel in 2015, and Clinton Correctional inmates David Sweat and Richard Matt crawling through a steam pipe with tools handed over by prison worker Joyce Mitchell. Ted Bundy jumped from a Colorado courthouse library window, John Dillinger bluffed his way out of an Indiana jail with a wooden pistol painted in shoe polish, and yoga master Choi Gap Bok greased himself and squeezed through a six-by-eighteen-inch food slot in thirty-four seconds. The larger breakouts carry heavier counts: three men vanished from Alcatraz in 1962 on a raft of raincoats, more than 480 Taliban prisoners filed out of Kandahar's Sarpoza Prison through a thousand-foot tunnel in 2011, over a thousand Japanese prisoners stormed the wire at Australia's Cowra camp in 1944, and inmates at the Nazi death camp Sobibor killed eleven SS guards with homemade knives before running for the treeline.Next the episode settles in Dallas and then Las Vegas with Lester Ben "Benny" Binion, the cowboy-hatted racketeer who founded the World Series of Poker and shot rival bootlegger Frank Bolding in the neck in 1931, walking away with a two-year suspended sentence and the nickname the Cowboy. He killed gambling competitor Ben Frieden in 1936 and beat the charge after witnesses vanished, ran dice games and bookies out of Dallas hotels for high rollers like Howard Hughes and H.L. Hunt, then moved to Las Vegas in 1946 and turned the Eldorado into the no-limit Horseshoe, laying down the first carpet in a Vegas casino. His feud with Dallas gambler Herbert "the Cat" Noble ran through eleven attempts on Noble's life and killed Noble's wife Mildred with a car bomb before a mailbox blast ended Noble in 1951. Binion died on Christmas Day 1989 and was carried to the cemetery behind six black horses, while his son Ted was found dead in 1998 in a case that convicted Sandy Murphy and Rick Tabish of burglary but acquitted them of the slaying, with the missing silver bullion never recovered.The episode closes inside America's churches, where worship shares the building with the dead. At Most Holy Trinity in Brooklyn, built over a former cemetery, parishioners report the spirit of clerk George Stelz, murdered in 1897, alongside bells that ring on their own and a bloody handprint in the bell tower stairway. The Washington National Cathedral carries the echo of Woodrow Wilson's cane and charred figures from a 1946 fire, while New Orleans' St. Louis Cathedral is tied to voodoo queen Marie Laveau, socialite Delphine Lalaurie, and six men executed on its grounds. At St. Mark's Episcopal in Cheyenne, a Swedish immigrant is said to have sealed his dead coworker inside the unfinished bell tower wall to avoid deportation, and at St. Paul's Chapel in New York — where George Washington prayed on his inauguration day — the spirit of actor George Frederick Cooke is said to wander still, his actual skull having traveled from a Philadelphia medical library and, by lore, onto the stage as a prop in Hamlet.
USA