An Arkansas father who shot the man accused of abusing his 13-year-old daughter walked free after a sheriff's deputy lost the one piece of footage that might have shown what happened on that highway.

SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/aaron-spencer-dismissed

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.
#WeirdDarkness, #WeirdDarkNEWS

NOTE: Some of this content may have been created with assistance from AI tools, but it has been reviewed, edited, narrated, produced, and approved by Darren Marlar, creator and host of Weird Darkness — who, despite popular conspiracy theories, is NOT an AI voice.

A man called 911 in Tarzana to report he had just killed someone, and the person bleeding in the front yard turned out to be a character actor whose face millions had seen in Top Gun: Maverick and Jumanji.

SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/james-handy-death

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.
#WeirdDarkness, #WeirdDarkNEWS

A forest lookout sits alone in a glass tower at 2AM and spots flames crowning two distant pines — a fire only he can see. By dawn there's no smoke, no ash, no scorched earth... and no fire at all. From phantom flames that burn and vanish to the burned Bigfoot pulled from a Nevada blaze and the UFOs caught streaking through wildfire smoke, tonight we wander into the strange and unsettling things that appear when the forests burn.

EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources and full transcript): https://weirddarkness.com/ghostflames

READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yjwtx7aw

FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: The author of Frankenstein always saw love and death as connected. She visited the cemetery to commune with her dead mother. And with her lover. (Mary Shelley’s Obsession With The Cemetery) *** A girl moves into a new apartment and discovers that a haunting doesn’t necessarily have to be frightening. (Ghostly Happenings In My Old Apartment) *** The July 1886 murder at the Shawmut Avenue laundry was so shrouded in mystery that even the victim’s name was uncertain. (The Wash-House Murder) *** Ghosts, high strangeness, and even Bigfoot – it appears they may all have something in common, and that would be forest fires. (Forest Fires and the Paranormal) *** How do you explain an experienced lookout reporting a blazing forest fire, only for it to disappear less than an hour later – leaving no trace? (Phantom Flames)

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding
00:03:57.045 = Show Open
00:05:40.844 = Phantom Flames
00:21:25.265 = Forest Fires and the Paranormal
00:35:10.279 = Mary Shelley’s Obsession With The Cemetery ***
0048:57.368 = Ghostly Happenings In My Old Apartment
00:52:28.197 = The Wash-House Murder ***
01:01:09.811 = 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:
“Phantom Flames” by F.A.Loomis from Idaho Magazine: http://ow.ly/beq730nL94u
“Forest Fires and the Paranormal” by Brent Swancer for Mysterious Universe: http://ow.ly/ROYC30nL8n1
“Mary Shelley’s Obsession With The Cemetery” by Bess Lovejoy for the JSTOR Daily: https://tinyurl.com/y9cgd29w
“Ghostly Happenings In My Old Apartment” by Cassie D, posted at MyHauntedLifeToo,com: https://tinyurl.com/ycexszvm

“The Wash-House Murder” by Robert Wilhelm, from the book “Wicked Victorian Boston”: https://amzn.to/2BGJOO0
(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: March, 2021
Weird Darkness opens a fire-themed descent that runs from a vanished forest blaze in 1976 Idaho through ghosts, Bigfoot, and UFOs born of wildfires, into Mary Shelley's graveyard education, a gentle apartment haunting, and an unsolved 1886 Boston murder.It opens with a U.S. Forest Service lookout stationed atop Pilot Peak in the Payette National Forest near Warren, high above the South Fork of the Salmon River, who woke sleepless at two a.m. in July 1976 and saw a bright orange triangle near a distant crest, then confirmed through binoculars two huge trees crowning out with flame. He calculated an azimuth with his fire-finder, radioed a two- to four-acre fire to the station fifteen air miles away, and watched it recede and vanish completely within forty minutes, leaving no smoke, no flame, and no charred ground at dawn six air miles out. Supervisors dubbed it the Pilot Peak phantom fire and sent smokejumper aircraft and hotshot crews to circle the ridge for nearly a week without finding a trace, until two months later a thousand-acre blaze on Zena Creek burned in roughly the same location he had reported.From there the episode widens into wildfires laced with the paranormal, beginning with the Curve Fire that struck South Mount Hawkins in the San Gabriel Mountains of California's Angeles National Forest on September 1, 2002, traced to a brittle 1935 wooden lookout tower and rumored to follow a cult ritual, after which hikers reported eyeless animals with hardened flesh and tall shadow figures akin to the Dark Watchers. It moves to the Battle Mountain Complex Fire near Battle Mountain, Nevada on August 6, 1999, where a letter forwarded to the Bigfoot Field Research Organization and a later call to investigator Thom Powell described firefighters capturing a burned, roughly seven-and-a-half-foot creature with a strong equine odor and near-human features. It closes with a July 2014 wildfire at West Kelowna near Vancouver, Canada, where a Castanet news video appeared to show an object shooting from a cloud, and a 2017 sighting by Arthur Frenette in New Hampshire's White Mountains, who watched a ball of fire plunge into Kinsman Ridge ahead of an out-of-control blaze.Next the episode turns to Mary Shelley, who in her 1831 introduction to Frankenstein traced her writing to her literary parents, though her mother, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman author Mary Wollstonecraft, died of puerperal fever days after her birth when Dr. Poignand removed the placenta with unwashed hands. Raised partly at her mother's grave in the St. Pancras churchyard, where she read her mother's work and escaped a strained home after father William Godwin remarried, the teenage Mary met Percy Shelley through the household and, at sixteen, declared love and reportedly first had sex among the tombstones. That fusion of reading, death, and forbidden knowledge surfaces in Victor Frankenstein's graveyard study of decay and in Godwin's 1809 Essay on Sepulchres, which framed visiting the illustrious dead as a form of communion the daughter carried into her novel of a creature assembled from corpses.From there the tone softens with a benign haunting recounted by a woman named Cassie, who moved into a larger, better-kept apartment over Christmas 2018 and lived there three months before moving in with her boyfriend. The internet blinked off repeatedly, cell reception failed in parts of the unit, electrical sockets quit working, bulbs burned out fast, and the shower switched itself on while she was away at classes. One night around one a.m. she and her boyfriend both heard the pitter-patter of bare feet in the kitchen, yet she never felt threatened, and when she left she said goodbye to whatever shared the space with her.The episode closes with the Wash-House Murder, the July 1886 killing of a Chinese laundryman found stabbed fourteen times in his Shawmut Avenue laundry in Boston's South End, his braided queue cut off and the five hundred dollars he had saved for a return to China gone. The victim's name was never certain, printed variously as Bin Chong, Ding Chong, and Wong Kong, and the case drew the Boston Police into a Chinatown governed by rival companies named Moy, Ching, Lee, and Sing. Detectives questioned the violent Moy company leader Ah Moy Chong and brought in New York interpreter Warry S. Charles, but the murder was never solved, and Charles himself was convicted of first-degree murder in 1908 after importing hatchet-armed assassins as a tong leader, leaving four dead in Chinatown.

“Hands of Death”: A wheelchair-bound collector of murder relics decides the only things missing from his macabre collection are a murderer and a victim — so he engineers his own killer brother's downfall to acquire both. But the dead don't always stay in their boxes, and a pair of severed hands may yet keep a promise of vengeance.

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 Witching Well” (December 23, 1977) ***WD
00:47:28.447 = Adventures of Ellery Queen, “Armchair Detective” (march 27, 1946) ***WD (LQ)
01:17:54.860 = Quiet Please, “Valentine” (February 13, 1949) ***WD
01:48:08.576 = Radio City Playhouse, “Duet” (October 16, 1949) ***WD
02:17:13.009 = The Croupier, “The Roman” (September 21, 1949) ***WD
02:47:28.792 = Sam Spade, “Same And Guiana Sovereign Caper” (July 12, 1946) ***WD
03:16:41.034 = The Sealed Book, “Hands of Death” (March 18, 1945) ***WD
03:47:40.901 = The Shadow, “Death Rides a Broomstick” (March 02, 1941)
04:16:17.053 = Sleep No More, “Jilting of Granny Weatherall” (January 30, 1957) ***WD
04:45:27.614 = BBC Spinechillers, “Origami” (February 28, 1984) ***WD
05:29:33.275 = 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/WDRR0680

Researchers in Italy spent three months baking sourdough from yeast they pulled out of the meltwater inside a 5,300-year-old murder victim.

SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/otzibread

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.
#WeirdDarkness, #WeirdDarkNEWS

“Brothers of the Angle”: A grieving widow believes a stranger can carry messages from her dead husband — messages only the couple could have known. But in a story about baiting hooks and landing fortunes, the real question is who's fishing, and who's the catch.

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, “Brothers of the Angle” (December 19, 1977) ***WD
00:46:41.705 = Mystery House, “Laugh? I Thought I’d Die!” (April 14, 1946)
01:11:23.715 = Night Beat, “Bell Perrin Amnesia Case” (July 06, 1951) ***WD
01:41:38.347 = CBC Nightfall, “Hypnotized” (April 22, 1983)
02:11:33.366 = Nightmare, “The Leech” (April 07, 1954)
02:34:12.420 = “The Leech” by Static Wax (SONG: https://weirddarkness.com/music)
02:36:59.340 = Obsession, “Surrender Is Farewell” (January 29, 1951)
03:00:13.100 = Origin of Superstition, “No News Is Good News” (1935) ***WD
03:15:10.285 = Pat Novak For Hire, “Jack of Clubs Better Encode” (February 20, 1949) ***WD
03:44:34.186 = Peril, “Cup of Tea” (ADU) ***WD
04:11:15.983 = Mystery Playhouse, “Challenge to Listener” (July 04, 1947) ***WD
04:36:15.645 = Price of Fear, “Guy Fawkes Night” (November 17, 1973)
05:04:00.821 = 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/WDRR0679

Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb should never have been friends, they were too different from on another. But they did have one thing in common – they both agreed to create the perfect murder – and a mundane pair of eyeglasses would be their undoing. 

EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources and full transcript): https://weirddarkness.com/BobbyFranks

READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode:
https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/ywzfbb6b

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 Perfect Murder of Bobby Franks” by Troy Taylor – from the book “Suffer the Children: American Horrors, Homicides and Hauntings”: https://amzn.to/3lo6CvP (Available on Kindle, paperback, and as an audiobook narrated by Darren Marlar)
(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: November, 2021

Scientists ground a tooth from a 2,000-year-old elongated skull into powder to settle whether the Paracas Coneheads were human, and the genetic machines still came up short.

SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/paracas-skulls

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.
#WeirdDarkness, #WeirdDarkNEWS

One engineer built an AI laser to roast every mosquito in his house, Google wants federal permission to release 32 million more, and the agency built to stop pests can't clear bed bugs out of its own offices.

SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/BugWars

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.
#WeirdDarkness, #WeirdDarkNEWS

Two women camping along a public trail on the Fourth of July woke near midnight to a man cutting through their tent, and for nearly two years no one knew who he was.

The FBI believes there may be more victims. Investigators have asked anyone who thinks they were harmed by McLenithan, or who knows anything about other possible crimes involving him, to contact the bureau at (503) 224-4181 or to submit a tip at http://tips.fbi.gov. 

SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/TillamookTent

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.
#WeirdDarkness, #WeirdDarkNEWS

A double boom rattled homes across New England on a Saturday afternoon, and the cause turned out to be a five-foot meteor breaking apart miles above the coast before its remains splashed into Cape Cod Bay.

SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/CapeCodMeteor

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.
#WeirdDarkness, #WeirdDarkNEWS