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.

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.

Flying jackets, faces frozen mid-scream, a coven convinced they needed David Bowie's blood, and a demon that crashed a text at exactly 666 megabytes — these are the paranormal encounters the famous swear actually happened to them.

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

READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/ff82f8yu

FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Don't try and tell some celebrities that ghosts don't exist, because they've seen all the paranormal proof they need to believe. (Celebrity Encounters With The Paranormal) *** A prayer for food resulted in fish raining down from the sky in Yoro, Honduras. And now it happens regularly – sometimes twice a year – with still no definitive explanation. (Cloudy With a Chance of Sardines) *** Is it possible that UFO sightings and sightings of the Chupacabra are somehow related? Even stranger – is it possible the strange dog-lizard-like creatures came from crashed spaceships? (UFOs And The Chupacabra) *** Weirdo family member Laura tells a strange story about a candy store – and its resident ghost. (Haunted Candy Store)

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding
00:01:13.649 = Show Open
00:02:50.627 = Celebrity Encounters With The Paranormal
00:31:59.645 = UFOs And The Chupacabras ***
00:39:37.674 = Cloudy With a Chance of Sardines
00:46:26.106 = Haunted Candy Store ***
00:50:58.248 = 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:
“Celebrity Encounters With The Paranormal” by Brent Swancer: http://bit.ly/2ZAzYGX
“Celebs Who Have Had Ghost Encounters by Lydia Price: http://bit.ly/2Iq0bCm
“UFOs And The Chupacabra” by Nick Redfern: http://bit.ly/2XS41cy
“Cloudy With a Chance of Sardines” by Panchali Dey: http://bit.ly/2IQ9p9Y
“Haunted Candy Store” by Weirdo family member, Laura
(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: January, 2021
This episode of Weird Darkness gathers famous names who swear the paranormal found them, a Puerto Rican legend that ties dead Chupacabras to a crashed UFO, a Honduran town where fish fall from the sky, and a Wisconsin candy store with a listener's uneasy childhood dream folded in.It opens with celebrities who came away convinced. Carrie Fisher described lights and electronics switching on and off in her Beverly Hills home after her friend R. Gregory Stevens died there; Matthew McConaughey named the blue-dressed spirit he confronted in his house Madame Blu; and a young Keanu Reeves watched an empty jacket drift through a doorway in his New York apartment, the reality of it confirmed only by his nanny's face. Patrick Stewart saw a man in a beige coat vanish in the wings of the Theatre Royal Haymarket during Waiting for Godot, later matched to the ghost of 19th-century actor-manager Baldwin Buckstone, who died in 1879. Peter Jackson woke to a woman with a screaming face at the foot of his bed near London's St. James Theatre, a ghost his wife had seen two years earlier. Miley Cyrus fled a London flat over a boy she kept seeing on the bathroom sink; Ariana Grande photographed what she called textbook demon faces at Kansas's Stull Cemetery and found the file measured 666 megabytes; and David Bowie spent much of the 1970s certain a coven of witches wanted his semen, lighting black candles and hiring white magician Walli Elmlark to exorcise his swimming pool. John Lennon, by Uri Geller's account, described bug-like beings outside his apartment and an alien metal egg left in his hands, while Sammy Hagar claimed aliens plugged his sleeping brain into a machine and uploaded numerical code in 1967. Shorter accounts follow from Megan Mullally, Kendall Jenner, Gigi Hadid, Chloe Sevigny at the Lizzie Borden house, NASCAR's Dale Earnhardt Jr., Kate Hudson, Jessica Alba, Lucy Hale, Laura Linney at Broadway's Belasco Theater, Claudia Schiffer, Emma Stone, Selena Gomez, Alyson Hannigan, Demi Lovato, Jenna Bush-Hager in the White House, and Megan Fox.From there the episode travels to Puerto Rico, where writer Nick Redfern chases the claim that the shuttered Roosevelt Roads Naval Station once held the bodies of dead Chupacabras the way Wright-Patterson Air Force Base is rumored to hold dead aliens. On visits between 2004 and 2015, Redfern and monster-hunter Jon Downes collect accounts of a 1957 UFO crash in the hills of Canovanas, sealed off by the military for roughly three weeks, and a second reported crash in the El Yunque rain forest in February 1984 — both said to have left dead Chupacabras in the wreckage, though the creature angle only attached itself to the older case after the Chupacabra panic began in 1995.Next comes Yoro, Honduras, and the Lluvia de Peces, the Rain of Fish that residents trace to Father Jose Manuel Subirana, a Spanish missionary who prayed three days and nights over the region's hunger in the 1850s or '60s. Once or twice a year after a heavy May or June storm, live sardine-like fish cover the streets of a town more than 100 miles from the ocean, and a National Geographic team in the 1970s found the stranded fish were completely blind, hypothesizing underground rivers forced above ground by flooding rather than the waterspouts others propose. The town of roughly 93,000 celebrates with a festival, a parade, and a Miss Fish Rain crowned to ride a float dressed as a mermaid, and locals refuse to sell the catch, sharing it instead as a blessing.The episode closes with Weirdo family member Laura, who worked summers at a haunted candy store in a Wisconsin tourist town, a converted house where a ceramic jar once flew across a room at a coworker. That coworker, a Canadian tribeswoman from a family with the 'sight,' listened to Laura describe a dream that returned every Christmas Eve until she was six or seven — a black, pulsing void of indistinct voices that rose to screams and a pressure closing on her chest, replaced in its final occurrence by an overhead view of a storage yard before it stopped for good. When Laura finished, the coworker told her it was a good thing she never listened to the voices, and suggested Laura had unconsciously sealed off her own ability to sense the spiritual after something that was not benevolent kept trying to reach her.

Stranded in the Nicaraguan jungle beside an ancient temple, three adventurers and their companions discover its priests serve a horror that's all too real — man-sized vampire bats with an appetite for human blood.

"Temple of Vampires," an installment of Carlton E. Morse's I Love a Mystery (originally aired January 02-27, 1950), follows adventurers Jack, Doc, and Reggie as they fly toward Central America with heiress Sonny Richards and a mysterious stowaway boy named Hermie. Water-tainted gasoline forces their plane down on the shore of Lake Nicaragua, near an ancient jungle temple. Exploring it, they find a blood-drained Indian corpse and a pit of human bones, then encounter the temple's inhabitants — a beautiful priestess named Angelina and a priest named Manuel — who claim to be servants of "sacred vampires," giant man-sized bats bred over generations for human sacrifice. Angelina fixates on carrying off Hermie for his pale skin, while Manuel abducts Sonny with designs of his own. Trapped by nightfall and a tropical storm, the comrades face a harrowing ordeal of rope-swings between dizzying high ledges, captures, and near-sacrifices as they fight to get everyone out of the temple alive.

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 = I Love a Mystery, “Temple of Vampires – Part 01”
00:18:09.039 = I Love a Mystery, “Temple of Vampires – Part 02”
00:30:24.993 = I Love a Mystery, “Temple of Vampires – Part 03”
00:42:29.450 = I Love a Mystery, “Temple of Vampires – Part 04”
00:54:51.162 = I Love a Mystery, “Temple of Vampires – Part 05”
01:08:25.386 = I Love a Mystery, “Temple of Vampires – Part 06”01:20:09.836 = I Love a Mystery, “Temple of Vampires – Part 07”
01:32:02.555 = I Love a Mystery, “Temple of Vampires – Part 08”
01:46:00.195 = I Love a Mystery, “Temple of Vampires – Part 09”
01:59:57.396 = I Love a Mystery, “Temple of Vampires – Part 10”
02:12:07.077 = I Love a Mystery, “Temple of Vampires – Part 11”
02:23:02.698 = I Love a Mystery, “Temple of Vampires – Part 12”
02:35:06.736 = I Love a Mystery, “Temple of Vampires – Part 13”
02:48:27.963 = I Love a Mystery, “Temple of Vampires – Part 14”
03:01:52.639 = I Love a Mystery, “Temple of Vampires – Part 15”
03:14:12.994 = I Love a Mystery, “Temple of Vampires – Part 16”
03:32:42.168 = I Love a Mystery, “Temple of Vampires – Part 17”
03:38:57.971 = I Love a Mystery, “Temple of Vampires – Part 18”
03:51:41.050 = I Love a Mystery, “Temple of Vampires – Part 19”
04:05:39.729 = I Love a Mystery, “Temple of Vampires – Part 20”
04:19:53.687 = 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/WDRR0711

A young samurai's forbidden love for a warlord's daughter follows him past the grave, when her returning ghost lures him into a fatal embrace no sacred charm can prevent.

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 Golden Amulet” (March 21, 1978) ***WD
00:45:50.420 = Sam Spade, “The Calcutta Trunk Caper” (June 08, 1947)
01:10:25.646 = The Sealed Book, “Devil Island” (April 0, 1945) ***WD
01:39:45.947 = The Shadow, “Death Prowls At Night” (March 23, 1941)
02:05:40.407 = Sleep No More, “Thus I Refute Beezly” and “The Bookshop” (March 06, 1957) ***WD
02:34:17.055 = BBC Spinechillers, “Kappa” (1984)
02:59:07.403 = Strange, “Flying Dutchman” (1955) ***WD
03:12:02.153 = Suspense, “Narrative About Clarence” (March 16, 1944)
03:41:27.199 = Tales of the Frightened, “Never Kick a Black Cat” (1963)
03:46:04.004 = The Creaking Door, “White Scarf Strangler” (March 01, 1965) ***WD (LQ)
04:13:55.896 = The Saint, “Mr. Richie’s Loss” (October 29, 1947) ***WD
04:38:20.419 = Theater 1030, “Two Little Punctures” (July 12, 1953) ***WD
05:05:20.921 = 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/WDRR0710

A mother of five bled out on a Del Rio street on a Thursday afternoon, and by that evening the two sisters accused of killing her were caught on camera grinning in handcuffs.

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

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.

When the Pritchard family moved into 30 East Drive, they thought a broken pipe was flooding the kitchen. But the hooded thing they came to call the Black Monk would flood their home with water, drag their daughter up the stairs, and become one of the most violent hauntings England has ever recorded.

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

READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p88xknw

FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: A family moves into a home and almost immediately begins to experience escalating supernatural activity – which then introduces a sinister, dark menacing entity. (The Black Monk) *** Urban legends are typically dark, strange stories which for the most part are only that – legend. Harmless tales meant to frighten the listener with no more repercussions than some goose bumps and perhaps a restless night of trying to sleep. But some legends are based on truth – and those are the ones that truly make our skin crawl and our faces turn white. (Urban Legends Which Are Actually True) *** Why would a U.S. state vote to have an official state demon? It really happened – and stories about the Jersey Devil continue to this day. We’ll look at the history and horrors of this bizarre cryptid and see if it’s more than urban legend. (Legend of the Jersey Devil) *** Delano, California is a small, uninteresting town that many may think twice before visiting. East of this town is an equally dreary road known as Browning Road. If you’re a paranormal enthusiast, you know that this is one road you shouldn’t dare travel alone. (Hitchhiking Ghost of Delano) *** A woman shares her horrifying true story of an evil entity she encountered on Browning Road in Delano, California. (Evil Walks Browning Road) *** In the summer of 2014 a series of UFOs were being reported by Navy pilots – the most elite of our airborne military. Not only were the sightings becoming more frequent – they would last up to 12-hours at a time. (Navy Pilots Report UFOs)

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding
00:00:55.732 = Show Open
00:03:16.616 = The Black Monk
00:19:05.635 = Navy Pilot Reports UFOs ***
00:24:26.222 = Urban Legends Which Are Actually True
00:31:27.802 = Legend of the Jersey Devil ***
00:40:09.038 = Hitchhiking Ghost in Delano / Evil Walks Browning Road
00:45:37.698 = 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 Black Monk” by Brent Swancer”: http://bit.ly/2Fg0QUV
“Navy Pilots Report UFOs” by Helene Cooper: http://bit.ly/2ImqbhP
“Urban Legends Which Are Actually True” by DeAnna Janes: http://bit.ly/2WIlbId
“The Legend of the Jersey Devil” by Carolyn Cox: http://bit.ly/2Im39rq
“Hitchhiking Ghost in Delano” posted at Backpackerverse.com: http://bit.ly/2IkU6XM
“Evil Walks Browning Road” by Amy S.: http://bit.ly/2N7inoL
(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: January, 2022
This episode of Weird Darkness moves from a violent English poltergeist to Navy encounters with unexplained aircraft, a run of urban legends with real-world roots, the New Jersey cryptid born of a colonial grudge, and a haunted California roadway. It opens at 30 East Drive in Pontefract, West Yorkshire, England, where in 1966 Jean and Joe Pritchard and their children Phillip and Diane began living alongside an entity the family first nicknamed "Fred" and later called the Black Monk. Cold gusts, pooling water, rattling crockery, slashed portraits, and inverted crosses scrawled in red and black ink escalated over years, with Diane singled out for choking, scratches, and being dragged up the stairs in front of witnesses. Investigator Tom Cuniff tied the site to a former gallows and to a Cluniac monk hanged for raping and killing a girl, and decades later Nick Groff and Katrina Weidman of Paranormal Lockdown spent 100 hours locked inside, recording a Latin EVP, a rolling ball, a knife left on the stairs, and Katrina being scratched.From there the episode turns to the skies off the East Coast, where from the summer of 2014 into March 2015 Navy pilots including Lieutenant Ryan Graves of the VFA-11 "Red Rippers" reported objects with no visible engines that reached 30,000 feet and hypersonic speeds and stayed aloft for up to twelve hours. A Super Hornet nearly collided with one in late 2014, footage captured an object skimming the ocean off the USS Theodore Roosevelt, and the sightings reached the Pentagon's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, whose former head Luis Elizondo called them a striking series of incidents while Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysicist Leon Golub pointed toward mundane explanations.Next comes a set of urban legends that turned out to have true counterparts, from the 1997 organ-theft chain email set against a 2008 ABC News account of Indian men drugged and cut open near Delhi, to the body-in-the-bed frame tale debunked by folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand yet echoed by killer Richard Kuklinski, to Halloween hanging-stunt deaths of teenagers Brian Jewell, William Anthony Odom, and Caleb Rebh, to intruders like 1941 Denver attic-dweller Theodore Coneys, to explorer John Hanning Speke and British traveler Rochelle Harris and the creatures found inside human ears.The show then digs into the Jersey Devil, the winged Pine Barrens beast the 1939 WPA guide dubbed New Jersey's official state demon, and traces its origin to almanac maker Daniel Leeds, his son Titan's feud with Benjamin Franklin, and the family crest's wyverns, alongside a claimed sighting by Joseph Bonaparte and the January 1909 panic that closed schools and mills across the Delaware Valley.The episode closes on Browning Road in Delano, California, where locals say a young woman struck and killed decades ago haunts the lonely stretch marked by a roadside memorial, appearing in backseats and on the yellow divider lines, followed by the first-person account of a driver named Amy who saw pale gray eyes in her rearview mirror before the figure screamed, vanished, and reappeared standing in the middle of the road.

A man who searched his estranged father's name once a year for closure instead found a 1998 arrest record naming himself as the victim.

SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/cody-jacob/

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.

A nightgown-clad stranger in a flying saucer repeats two nonsense words to everyone who'll listen—but only a lonely hospital cleaner can understand what he's really saying, and the warning is one no one wants to believe.

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, “Identified Flying Objects” (March 17, 1978) ***WD
00:45:34.637 = Obsession, “Amnesia” (February 19, 1951) ***WD
01:08:44.909 = Origin of Superstition, “Throwing Salt” (1935)
01:23:20.108 = Pat Novak, “Fleet Lady” (March 06, 1949) ***WD
01:53:23.239 = Peril, “Killer” (1953) ***WD
02:16:39.256 = Mystery Playhouse, “Criminal At Large” (April 11, 1944) ***WD (LQ)
02:46:09.318 = Price of Fear, “Not Wanted On This Voyage” (1973-1983) ***WD
03:14:05.007 = Adventures of Ellery Queen, “Saga of Ruffy Rux” (November 27, 1947) (LQ)
03:42:57.592 = Quiet Please, “The Man Who Knew Everything” (March 06, 1949)
04:11:53.022 = Radio City Playhouse, “Problem Child” (November 13, 1949)
04:37:02.732 = Adventures In The Supernatural, “The Mysterious Carriage” (1932) ***WD
05:01:28.304 = 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/WDRR0709

The most evil among us are sometimes sentenced to death — but by cutting their lives short, are we unknowingly creating malevolent entities that haunt us forever?

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

READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/mr3vu756

FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: The most evil of lawbreakers in our society – the murderers and rapists – are usually confined to life in prison. The most evil of the evil are sometimes sentenced to death. But is it possible that by cutting short the lives of the horrific individuals on Death Row, we are unknowingly creating new malevolent entities that continue to torment us from the grave? (The Ghosts of Death Row) *** From beatings to murders to a handful of escape attempts made by Alcatraz's prisoners, the terrifying history of Alcatraz prison contains plenty of ghosts. (The Hauntings of Alcatraz) *** What if UFOs aren’t from another planet – or even another dimension? What if they are actually machines built right here on Earth, piloted by human time travelers? (Time Machine Flying Saucers) *** Weirdo family member Amber Harris shares a true story called “Darkness Was My Neighbor”. (Darkness Was My Neighbor)

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding
00:00:51.953 = Show Open
00:02:45.176 = Ghosts of Death Row
00:23:40.720 = Hauntings of Alcatraz ***
00:40:46.307 = Time Machine Flying Saucers ***
00:47:37.172 = Darkness Was My Neighbor
00:53:53.392 = 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 Ghosts of Death Row” by Brent Swancer: http://bit.ly/2KzEFw9
“The Hauntings of Alcatraz” by Erin McCann: http://bit.ly/2QSsuM6
“Time Machine Flying Saucers” posted at UFO Digest (link no longer available)
“Darkness Was My Neighbor” by Amber Harris – submitted directly to Weird Darkness
(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: January, 2022

Weird Darkness journeys into haunted prisons, botched executions, secret time-travel technology, and a neighbor's death that seemed to linger after the funeral, spanning true crime, the paranormal, and a firsthand ghost story from a listener.It opens with the ghosts of Death Row, where condemned killers appear to keep terrorizing long after execution. German immigrant Frederick Hollman, one of America's earliest serial killers, was hanged at the Ford County Jail in Paxton, Illinois, on May 14, 1897, after promising to return and rap on the windows of the witnesses and jurors who convicted him — and the jail is now a paranormal hotspot where his face has been photographed glaring into his old cell. Lavinia Fisher and her husband John ran the Six Mile House near Charleston, South Carolina, in the early 1820s, allegedly poisoning and dropping wealthy travelers through a trapdoor before their hanging for highway robbery, and her aggressive spirit is still blamed for choking sensations and foul stenches at the Old Charleston Jail. Raymond Snowden, dubbed Idaho's Jack the Ripper for the 1956 stabbing of Cora Dean, endured a botched twenty-minute hanging at the Old Idaho Penitentiary in Boise in 1957 and reportedly haunts the gallows site alongside inmate Douglas Van Vlack, who leaped to his death from the cell block rafters. Ted Bundy, executed in Florida's electric chair on January 24, 1989, has supposedly been seen grinning atop the chair and telling guards he beat them all, while Willie Lloyd Turner — executed by lethal injection in 1995 after fifteen years and five aborted trips to the chamber — appeared so lifelike after death that inmates mistook him for the living. The segment closes across the Atlantic with executioner John Ellis, who hanged more than a hundred people at Manchester's Strangeways Jail before killing himself in 1932 and is said to still patrol B Wing to keep the prison's other ghosts, including poisoner Mrs. Merrifield, in line.From there the episode moves to Alcatraz, the federal penitentiary that operated on its fog-bound San Francisco Bay island from 1934 to 1963 and earned a reputation as one of America's most haunted sites. The solitary cells of D-Block known as "the hole" are tied to the 1940s strangulation death of a screaming inmate in cell 14D, possibly the work of former occupant Rufus McCain, and visitors report icy fingers and unnatural cold there. The 1946 Battle of Alcatraz left two guards and three escapees dead in a utility corridor where clanging noises still echo, psychic Sylvia Browne sensed murdered hitman Abie "Butcher" Maldowitz in the laundry room, and the catacomb "dungeon" beneath A-Block preserves the screams of prisoners once chained naked to its walls. Al Capone spent part of his 1934 sentence strumming a banjo to hold off insanity, and that banjo music is still reportedly heard in the halls, while "Birdman" Robert Stroud haunts the hospital wing where he was confined among his canary research. The island carried dark associations long before the prison, from Ohlone tribal beliefs that it gathered evil spirits to the Civil War soldiers who died chained in its guardhouse basement, and even the 1969 to 1971 Native American occupation ended in fire and loss before the ghosts reportedly stayed behind.Next the episode turns to a fringe theory that reframes flying saucers as human technology rather than alien craft, arguing that a secretive commercial group used patent-law secrecy to build working time machines in twentieth-century laboratories. The account claims these machines can move an ion through time in both directions, that short-range "trans-burst" devices let a person leap across nearby distances, and that the UFOs people photograph are previews of future mankind rather than extraterrestrial visitors. It ties the idea to Einstein's 1901 work as a patent clerk and to E=mc², and recasts Area 51 as cover not for alien bodies but for a commercial experiment involving four trained monkeys linked to a 1961 interstellar flight.The episode closes with a listener account from Amber Harris, who lived at the end of a cul-de-sac in Williamsburg, Virginia, in a house set down in a ditch so the second floor sat level with the street. After her next-door neighbor died suddenly in his home and his widow moved away, the house sat unsold for months, and one night past midnight the hallway light outside Amber's bedroom switched on without the telltale sound of anyone climbing the loud staircase, casting the shadow of a male figure beneath her door before it went dark. Weeks later her sister woke her by text to watch the dead neighbor's dog standing beneath the orange street light, barking at the empty house before turning its head directly toward the two of them at the window and then vanishing, an image that stayed with the family until a job moved them to Indiana, with the neighbor's house still unsold when they drove past it the following May.

When a corporate jet is torn through a fold in space and time, its passengers find themselves offered a second chance a thousand years from home — if they're willing to leave everything behind.

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CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = Show Open
00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “The Time Fold” (March 16, 1978)
00:45:45.739 = Beyond Midnight, “Signalman” (March 28, 1969)
01:14:36.277 = MindWebs, “Sword Game” (February 26, 1983)
01:37:43.928 = Mystery In The Air, “Beyond Good And Evil” (August 28, 1947) ***WD
02:06:30.486 = Molle Mystery Theater, “Murder Without Crime” (May 03, 1946)
02:35:54.321 = Mr. Keen, “Murder In The Air” (February 24, 1944) ***WD
03:04:51.982 = Murder at Midnight, “Murder Out of Mind” (September 15, 1947 – Never Aired)
03:31:07.980 = Black Museum, “The Spotted Bedsheet” (October 21, 1952)
03:57:04.381 = Mysterious Traveler, “Murder In 2952” (April 29, 1952)
04:27:01.192 = CBC Nightfall, “The Appetite of Mr Lucraft” (December 26, 1980)
04:58:34.157 = 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/WDRR0708