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Weird Darkness: Paranormal & True Crime Stories

Darren Marlar | Weird Darkness
Weird Darkness: Paranormal & True Crime Stories
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  • Weird Darkness: Paranormal & True Crime Stories

    The Traveling Clairvoyant of Tipton Mountain | #RetroRadio

    07/11/2026 | 5h
    “Judas Kiss: The Traveling Clairvoyant of Tipton Mountain” — A hermit who claims he can watch distant events from inside a hollow pine tree becomes convinced the woman renting the cabin above his is a murderer — and only he knows what she's done.

    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, “The Judas Kiss” (March 23, 1978) ***WD
    00:45:48.210 = Tales From The Tomb, “Spirit Calling” (1960s)
    00:50:20.385 = Two Thousand Plus, “World’s Apart” (November 29, 1950) ***WD
    01:19:02.978 = The Unexpected, “Heat Wave” (1947-1948)
    01:31:11.637 = Unsolved Mysteries, “Indian Fakir” (February 17, 1944) ***WD
    01:44:47.860 = Dark Venture, “Elizabeth Is Frightened” (July 22, 1947)
    02:14:43.934 = The Weird Circle, “Haunted Hotel” (May 13, 1945)
    02:42:15.220 = The Whistler, “Murder Will Shout” (March 19, 1945)
    03:11:41.385 = Strange Wills, “Emily” (August 31, 1946)
    03:41:20.826 = Witch’s Tale, “Statue of Thor” (May 22, 1933)
    04:04:13.136 = X Minus One, “Honeymoon In Hell” (December 26, 1956)
    04:33:07.327 = ABC Mystery Time, “Murder In Haste” (1957) ***WD
    04:56:48.877 = Strange Adventure, “Death Rides The Carousel” (1945) ***WD
    05:00:05.724 = 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/WDRR0712

    Weird Darkness presents Retro Radio, a night of classic dark radio drama spanning three decades of murder, madness, and the supernatural.
    It opens with the CBS Radio Mystery Theater's "The Judas Kiss," in which Oscar Absecker, a solitary handyman living on a dying mountain outside the village of Tipton, believes a big black dog barks three times whenever someone dies — and believes he can watch distant events unfold by standing inside a lightning-struck, hollow pine tree. When Deputy Luke Marbury rents the cabin above his to a woman named Enid Grant, Oscar becomes convinced that she is destroying the much younger man who joins her there, and his visions show him one killing after another. Fred Gwynne stars, with E.G. Marshall hosting.
    From there comes "Spirit Calling" from Tales From The Tomb, a short piece about a nine-year-old girl named Amy, alone in the house during a violent summer storm after her uncle Stanley's death, and the telephone call that comes through on a dead line.
    Next is Two Thousand Plus and "World's Apart," in which rocket engineer Jim Granger talks his way onto Flight 17, the first crewed voyage to Neptune, only for the spaceship Phoenix to be dragged off course by an uncharted comet. Crippled and lost, the ship limps to a landing at a place called Green Valley, where Commander Dijkstra can hear heartbeats across a room, the milk is green, and gravity does not behave the way it should.
    The Unexpected follows with "Heat Wave," starring Barry Sullivan as Whitey Malone, a fugitive sweating out a 110-degree heat wave in a fifth-floor garret while the police close in — and burning to settle accounts with the woman he thinks tipped them off.
    Then Unsolved Mysteries brings "Indian Fakir," a story told at the United Services Club in Simla, where a colonel recounts what happened when his young English bride, alone in their Bangalore bungalow, tried to outsmart a fakir who demanded a strand of her hair — and handed him threads pulled from a Chinese rug instead.
    Dark Venture presents "Elizabeth Is Frightened," with Joan Banks as a wealthy woman who marries Philip Bailey, a widower fascinated by the power of one mind to dominate another. As the whole town starts believing Elizabeth is ill and suicidal, only her housekeeper Flora and Dr. Davis suspect what her husband is really doing.
    The Weird Circle offers "Haunted Hotel," in which Henry Westwick travels to Venice and takes room fourteen at a converted castle to learn how his brother Philip died weeks after marrying the mysterious Countess Narona — and finds the answers coming to him in dreams.
    The Whistler tells "Murder Will Shout," the story of garage owner George Kramer, buried in debt to a man named Albion, and the small-time racketeer Peanut Marola who offers a black-market car racket, a partnership, and a solution to the Albion problem that goes very wrong on Miller Highway.
    Strange Wills, starring Warren William, tells "Emily," tracing a violin built by Antonio Stradivarius in Cremona in 1732 through the hands of gypsies, Niccolò Paganini, and the Heller family of Vienna, until it turns up at a barn dance in the Tennessee hills as a GI's war souvenir.
    The Witch's Tale delivers "Statue of Thor," in which sculptor Neil Redding, bored and cruel, mocks his enormous Swedish model Olaf, seduces Olaf's fiancée Hedwig, and takes the big man to the foundry to watch the statue of Thor cast in bronze — a casting that comes out of the mold wearing a face Redding never sculpted.
    X Minus One presents "Honeymoon In Hell," set in the late 1960s, when male births stop worldwide and the cybernetics machine known as Junior recommends sending a married couple to the moon. Rocket pilot Ray Carmody is wed to Eastern Alliance pilot Anya Borisovna hours before launch, and on the lunar surface they find an unidentified craft that does not belong to either alliance.
    ABC Mystery Time offers "Murder In Haste," in which Elbert Taylor kills his wife Ellen, flees Miami by train under an assumed name, and — after a derailment in Georgia — steals the identity of a dead mystery writer named Leslie Jameson, only to have Jameson's wife walk into his New York hotel room.
    The episode closes with Strange Adventure and "Death Rides The Carousel," where a lawyer named Jeffrey Ford is found stabbed through the heart on a merry-go-round chariot at a village carnival in Merrimack, and Inspector Jonathan Hawke spots the flaw in the ticket taker's account.
  • Weird Darkness: Paranormal & True Crime Stories

    SLUDGE: The Swimming Hole Behind the Duncan Quarry | #MicroTerrors

    07/11/2026 | 15 mins.
    Three kids track down a forgotten swimming hole behind the abandoned Duncan Quarry, rediscover it for the summer — and find out why everyone stopped coming.

    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://pod.link/1655277373

    Find more family-friendly frights and creepy games to play on our website at http://MicroTerrors.com!

    Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/microterrors

    Other stories, novels, and more from author Scott Donnelly: https://amzn.to/3LymHaU

    Other narrations, podcasts, and audiobooks from voice artist Darren Marlar: https://WeirdDarkness.com
    https://weirddarkness.com/mt-sludge
    = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
    Weird Darkness©, 2026
    Micro Terrors: Scary Stories for Kids™, 2026#MicroTerrors #WeirdDarkness
  • Weird Darkness: Paranormal & True Crime Stories

    Ronald Dominique, The Bayou Strangler Who Killed 23 Men

    07/11/2026 | 55 mins.
    Between 1997 and 2006, an overweight pizza delivery man named Ronald Dominique strangled 23 men across rural Louisiana, and almost no one has ever heard his name.

    A deep-dive article on all of the obscure legends featured in the first section of tonight's podcast: https://weirddarkness.com/obscure-legends/

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

    READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/3fyw74cj

    FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Spine-tingling ghost stories and eerie myths... come to life! Are any of them actually true? We’ll explore the more obscure side of folklore with ghosts and legends that don’t get the same amount of attention others do – but are certainly not to be ignored! (Myths And Ghosts You May Never Have Heard Of) *** In the quiet town of Essex, Maryland, the disappearance of nine-year-old Alva Jean Parris shattered the peace of summer 1960. Walking just three blocks to her aunt's house, she vanished without a trace, only for her body to be found days later, hidden beneath a makeshift grave. Decades have passed, but the mystery of who took Alva Jean and why remains unsolved. (Who Killed Alva Jean?) *** He’s a little-known serial killer. Ronald J. Dominique, dubbed the Bayou Strangler, went on a decade-long murder spree in rural Louisiana, killing 23 men. (The Bayou Strangler)

    CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open
    00:01:49.323 = Myths And Ghosts You May Never Have Heard Of
    00:33:02.110 = The Bayou Strangler ***
    00:49:50.242 = Who Killed Alva Jean?
    00:54:23.489 = 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:
    “Myths And Ghosts You May Never Have Heard Of” sources: Cara Duke at ListVerse.com:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/bddryv6h; Mysteries of Canada: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yckwn5y5; Brendan-Noble.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8audhk; Factschology.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/ycxzdhwa,https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/v7rdp57c, https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/bdfcswwk; InuitMyths.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/puzuc272, TheIrishRoadTrip.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/vj824vwb; DallasTerrors.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8s8crn; NewEnglandHistoricalSociety.com:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/8r4zmkpt
    “The Bayou Strangler” by Oliver Mason for The-Line-Up.com, used with permission: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/mt8tnyh4 (BOOK: “The Bayou Strangler” by Fred Rosen: https://amzn.to/49RIiWj)
    “Who Killed Alva Jean?” source: Robert A. Waters at KidnappingMurderAndMayhem.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8ab932
    (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 23, 2024
    This episode of Weird Darkness travels from obscure folklore across four continents to a little-known Louisiana serial killer and a Maryland child murder that has gone unsolved for more than sixty years.It opens with a tour through the ghosts and monsters that rarely make the usual lists: the Dungarvon Whooper, the murdered lumber-camp cook named Ryan whose whoops still echo along New Brunswick's Dungarvon River; the strzyga of Slavic myth, a two-hearted, twin-souled demon that takes the form of a barn owl before it feeds; Lady Koi Koi, the red-heeled teacher whose clicking footsteps haunt boarding schools across Nigeria, Ghana, and South Africa; the banshee of North Carolina's Tar River, tied to a flour miller named Dave Warner and the Revolutionary War redcoats who drowned him in 1781; the Headless Nun of Miramichi, the murdered Sister Marie who wanders French Fort Cove asking where her head has gone; the Kludde, a chain-rattling shapeshifting dog from Belgian and Dutch folklore; the Inupasugjuk, the rarely-seen giants of Inuit tradition; the Dearg Due of County Waterford, an abused Irish bride who rose from her grave near the Tree of Strongbow to drain the blood of her father and husband; the Goatman of Old Alton Bridge near Denton, Texas, an 1884 iron truss bridge also tied to the lynching of black goat farmer Oscar Washburn; and the Stratford Knockings of 1850, the poltergeist that draped Reverend Eliakim Phelps's Connecticut mansion in funeral crepe and centered on his eleven-year-old stepson Harry.From there the episode turns to Ronald Joseph Dominique, the Louisiana pizza delivery man dubbed the Bayou Strangler, who raped and strangled twenty-three men between 1997 and 2006 while evading police for nearly a decade. Drawing on Fred Rosen's book The Bayou Strangler, the segment follows the killing of Oliver LeBanks, beaten with a tire iron and dumped beneath a highway overpass near Metairie, and traces Dominique's earlier victims across St. Charles Parish, from nineteen-year-old David Mitchell in July 1997 to twenty-year-old Gary Pierre and thirty-eight-year-old Larry Ranson, most of them gay African American men lured with the promise of paid sex. It introduces Detective Lieutenant Dennis Thornton of the Jefferson Parish sheriff's office, who worked the LeBanks scene and set himself the task of linking the killings that DNA evidence would finally tie to Dominique.The episode closes with the June 10, 1960 disappearance of nine-year-old Alva Jean Parris, who vanished walking three blocks to her aunt's house from the Riverdale Apartments in Essex, Maryland. Five days later, searchers found her shoes in a marsh and her body in a shallow grave concealed with linoleum, sod, and twigs beside an abandoned farmhouse, her abdomen and pelvis coated in lye. Assistant Medical Examiner Dr. William Lovitt found decomposition too advanced to confirm a cause of death, though strangulation was suspected, and despite polygraph tests, a solid alibi clearing her mother Fredonia, and tips about a man seen in a sailor's hat, no suspect was ever charged in a case that remains open today.
  • Weird Darkness: Paranormal & True Crime Stories

    Scientists Confirm Eating People Is Bad For You, Especially in Bulk | #WeirdDarkNEWS

    07/10/2026 | 6 mins.
    Two researchers built a mathematical model of human cannibalism and discovered, after considerable effort, that the answer is no.

    SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/average-meal

    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://pod.link/1078714736

    *No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*

    WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.
  • Weird Darkness: Paranormal & True Crime Stories

    Christa Pike, the Job Corps Skull Killer, Faces Execution in 2026

    07/10/2026 | 25 mins.
    Christa Pike carried a piece of Colleen Slemmer’s skull back to the Job Corps dorm as a souvenir, and on September 30th, 2026, Tennessee is scheduled to execute her for the murder that produced it.

    EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources and transcript): https://weirddarkness.com/christa-pike

    Music by Shadows Symphony. Weird Darkness theme music by Alibi Music.

    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*

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

    Originally aired: July 09, 2026

    Weird Darkness host Darren Marlar traces the 1995 Job Corps murder of Colleen Slemmer, the jealousy and Satanism behind it, and the three decades of appeals, prison violence, and stalled executions that have brought Christa Pike to a September 2026 death date in Tennessee.It opens on the morning of January 13th, 1995, when a groundskeeper at the University of Tennessee Agricultural Institute outside Knoxville found a body so badly beaten he mistook it for an animal carcass — nineteen-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a Florida girl who loved computers and had taken a bus to Knoxville on Halloween of 1994 for a six-month course at the Knoxville Job Corps Center. The night before, four students had signed out together, and only three signed back in. Eighteen-year-old Christa Gail Pike, her seventeen-year-old boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp, and eighteen-year-old Shadolla Peterson had lured Slemmer to a wooded stretch near an abandoned steam plant with the promise of marijuana in Tyson Park, and over roughly half an hour Pike and Shipp beat and cut her while Peterson held a flashlight. Pike carved a pentagram into Slemmer's chest while she was alive, cut her throat six times with a box cutter after pausing to check that no one was watching, threw asphalt at her head, and afterward pried loose a fragment of her skull to keep. Pike had come to believe Slemmer wanted Shipp, a jealousy Slemmer denied, and she and Shipp had bonded over Satanism and the occult; Pike wore a small devil tattoo on her chest, and searches later turned up satanic altars and occult literature in both their rooms.From there the episode follows what Pike did with the bone. She returned to campus around 11 p.m., went to her friend Kim Iloilo's room dancing and singing, and produced the skull fragment as a souvenir, warning Iloilo she would be killed too if she talked. Pike carried the piece in a napkin in her leather jacket, bragged at breakfast that she was eating with it, and showed it around class along with the blood still on her shoes and clothing — behavior that turned investigator Randy York toward her within forty-eight hours. Pike confessed in a forty-six-page recorded statement, and York described her as giddy, acting out how Slemmer had begged for her life. The episode also lays out the childhood documented in her later post-conviction filings: parents who struggled with alcohol, sexual and physical abuse by multiple people, a mother's suicide attempt she witnessed, and neurological evaluations finding structural brain abnormalities alongside later diagnoses of bipolar disorder and PTSD, none of which the jury ever heard.Next comes the trial and the long aftermath. In March 1996, before Judge Mary Beth Leibowitz in Knox County Criminal Court, Pike was convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy, and on March 30th, weeks after her twentieth birthday, sentenced to death by electrocution, making her the youngest woman on death row in the modern era. Within hours she wrote Shipp an unrepentant letter framing the killing as a kindness because she had ended it quickly. Shipp, ineligible for death because he was seventeen, drew a life sentence and was denied parole in October 2025; Peterson received six years of probation. In 2001 Pike choked fellow inmate Patricia Jones with a shoestring until officers revived her, earning another twenty-five years, and around 2011 a New Jersey personal trainer named Donald Kohut and a correctional officer named Justin Heflin were caught in a plot to trace and duplicate a prison key to free her. Her appeals failed through the federal courts, an execution set for August 27th, 2020 was postponed by COVID-19, and on September 30th, 2025 the Tennessee Supreme Court reset her death for September 30th, 2026.The episode closes on what remains unresolved as that date approaches. Tennessee's 2026 execution schedule has already faltered — Governor Bill Lee granted Tony Carruthers a last-minute reprieve on May 21st after medical staff couldn't establish a backup IV line, media witnesses reported signs of pain in the 2025 executions of Byron Black and Harold Nichols, and Senate Republicans led by Tom Hatcher have asked Lee to pause executions pending review. Pike has filed suit over the pentobarbital protocol, arguing it excludes her Buddhist spiritual advisor and risks a torturous death, while advocates gather signatures asking Lee to commute her sentence over her age, abuse, and mental illness. If carried out, she would be the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than two hundred years. The last piece belongs to Slemmer's mother, Mae Martinez, who for more than twenty years has asked the state to return the skull fragment still held in evidence so she can bury her daughter whole — a nineteen-year-old who liked bowling and shrimping on the river back home in Florida and had gone to Tennessee to build a life around computers.
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About Weird Darkness: Paranormal & True Crime Stories
Award-winning podcast of true stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, the strange and bizarre, true crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and unexplained -- seven days a week! Hosted by professional voice actor Darren Marlar, named one of the “Best Storytellers in Podcasting” by Podcast Business Journal.
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