In tonight's dead letter, Keith takes us back to the spring of 1997, when he was a freshman at Rutgers living on the third floor of Clothier Hall, a brick dorm in downtown New Brunswick, New Jersey. Early one Saturday morning, with the first light coming in around the curtain, he opened his eyes and someone was sitting on the floor against his roommate's bed, six feet away, in a room he had locked the night before. Someone, or some…thing…that shouldn’t have been there.
Relevant Prior Episodes
Ep 26: Shadow People
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts
Ep 338: Your True Halloween Stories IV, Part 3
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts
Ep 87: Black Eyed Kids Part 1
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts
Links and Further Reading
Clothier Hall (Rutgers Residence Life)
Weird NJ
Shadow person (Wikipedia)
Note: We call Benadryl's active ingredient pseudoephedrine in the episode. It's diphenhydramine.
Hypnagogia and the hypnopompic state (Wikipedia)
Hypnic jerk (Wikipedia)
Jim Harold's Campfire
Miyamoto Musashi (Wikipedia)
Wild Talents, by Charles Fort (1932), free to read at sacred-texts.com
We're looking for more stories! Send your Dead Letter to [email protected]!

We're back, and this time we’re lucky enough to have paranormal investigator, researcher and author Michelle Belanger join us to help answer the question connecting this week's stories: does this phenomenon have a name?

At a Southern California shopping mall, Amy gets in line for food when two young women behind her suddenly fill her with an intense feeling of dread.

In Los Angeles, Zee picks up two young women from an unlikely spot near a freeway overpass, and before long, an ordinary ride begins to feel anything but.

Lastly, Mike takes us back to a Chicago suburb in 1988, where a routine walk near a cemetery leads to a passing encounter with two women he has never forgotten.

Turn down the lights and join us for the final set of this year’s true Halloween mysteries.

Visit our website for a lot more information on this episode.

In tonight's dead letter, we're in Cluj-Napoca, Transylvania in the 1990s, a few years after the revolution, where our listener Nadina, six at the time, had the run of a Soviet-era apartment block with her older sister and their best friend while their nanny visited a friend upstairs. They climbed past the last floor of apartments to the metal door at the top, and before anyone could touch it, something huge, aggressive and feral sounding on the other side began attacking it so hard they fled. Nadina still doesn't know what was up there.
Relevant Prior Episodes
Ep 49: Monsters Among Us
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts
Ep 116: Small Town Monsters
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts
Ep 183: Sam the Sandown Clown
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts
Ep 203: The Beast of Gévaudan
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts
Links and Further Reading
Hoia Baciu Forest (Astonishing Legends)
History of Cluj-Napoca
Systematization in Romania
Transylvanian Superstitions, Emily Gerard, 1885 (Project Gutenberg)
Pricolici
Strigoi
Tracing the Roots of Lycanthropy (Astonishing Legends)
The Beast of Bray Road (Astonishing Legends)
Blonde Venus (1932)
Classic Sideshow Acts: The Girl into the Gorilla (Museum of the Weird)
Pepper's Ghost
We're looking for more stories! Send your Dead Letter to [email protected]!

Our Halloween tradition continues with three more listeners sharing encounters they still can’t explain.

At a church summer camp in the mountains above Southern California, Ray and two fellow counselors spot a girl standing alone in the parking lot after lights-out. She silently returns to the bunkhouse when they call to her… but that won’t be the last time they see her.

In San Luis Obispo, Brian and his wife move into a guest house with a long history and a curious warning from their elderly landlady: most tenants don’t stay very long. Soon they begin to understand why.

And Terry takes us back to the night shift of a hospital coronary care unit, where a dying patient starts asking every nurse the same unsettling question: “Who’s that behind you?”

Turn down the lights and settle in for Part Two of our Halloween listener stories.

Visit our website for a lot more information on this episode.

In tonight's dead letter, our listener TM was the office manager at a Catholic parish in the upper Mississippi river area, and part of her job was digitizing the cemetery's paper records, so she'd walk the rows with a camera, say hello to everyone, and tell them what she was there to do. One marker sat outside the cemetery’s plot map entirely: a boy who drowned in the river in 1936, with fresh flowers by his stone and no file in the office. One July afternoon, someone or something unseen let her know it was there.
Relevant Prior Episodes
Ep 247: Massacre at Duffy's Cut Part 1
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts
Ep 317: The Screaming Skulls
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts
Ep 85: The Bell Witch Part 1
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts
Ep 123: The Sallie House: Ghost in the Machine Part 1
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts
Ep 4: Amelia Earhart Vanishes Part 1
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts
Links and Further Reading
Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 1032 (Vatican.va)
St. John Chrysostom (Britannica)
All Souls' Day (Catholic Encyclopedia, New Advent)
Columbarium (Merriam-Webster)
Duffy's Cut (Wikipedia)
Historic Bell Witch Cave, Adams, Tennessee
Electronic Voice Phenomena: An Overview (Astonishing Legends blog)
Stahl House, Case Study House #22 (LA Conservancy)
Scared All The Time (podcast)

We're looking for more stories! Send your Dead Letter to [email protected]!

Once more, our favorite Halloween tradition rises from the grave, as three listeners join us to personally share encounters they still can’t explain.

In the North of England, district nurse Luke and a trainee see someone inside the home of a patient who lives alone. In Idaho Falls, Krystina tells us about small dark figures lurking at the edge of a woman’s vision and their attempt to get answers. Then, Jennifer takes us to 1980s Southern Oregon, where a childhood encounter with a blinding figure rushing into her bedroom became only the first of many visits.

Turn down the lights and join us for three true stories, told by the people who experienced them.

Visit our website for a lot more information on this episode.

In tonight's dead letter, Corey takes us back to Omaha, Nebraska in the year 2000, when he was the overnight host on a Top 40 station and a call-in topic about haunted places kept circling back to one private family cemetery. He sent a carload of listeners out there on a Friday night to report back live on the air. A few days later his boss got a phone call from the cemetery's caretakers. And, to paraphrase a Dateline episode…things got weirder from there.

We mentioned a TON of old eps in this one!

Relevant Prior Episodes
Ep 48: Choose Your Own Adventure
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts
Ep 71: Pere Cheney: The Town that Disappeared
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts
Ep 87: Black Eyed Kids Part 1
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts
Ep 50: Mothman Part 1
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts
Ep 14: What's Gotten Into You?
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts
Ep 209: The Phantom Horse of Greensboro
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts
Ep 120: The Grim Reaper
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts
Ep 154: Lockdown at the Waverly Hills Sanatorium
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts
Ep 156: The Ax Murder House in Villisca Part 1
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts
Ep 49: Monsters Among Us
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts
Ep 310: The Rhine Research Center: Extraordinary Evidence
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts
Links and Further Reading
Church Grims, by Tess Pfeifle (Astonishing Legends blog)
Strange Intruders, by David Weatherly
G.N.M. Tyrrell (Psi Encyclopedia, Society for Psychical Research)
Ghosts and Apparitions in Psi Research (Psi Encyclopedia)
Phantasms of the Living, Volume 1 (1886), free at the Internet Archive
Phantasms of the Living, Volume 2 (1886), free at the Internet Archive
Jim Harold's Campfire
The Mothman of Point Pleasant (Small Town Monsters, 2017)
The Ankou
The Case Against Reality, by Donald Hoffman
A Game of Pool, The Twilight Zone (1961)
On a Pale Horse, by Piers Anthony
The Villisca Axe Murder House
Live and Let Die (1973)
Twin Peaks: The Return (2017)

We're looking for more stories! Send your Dead Letter to [email protected]!

In 1933, a Scottish botanist watched a seemingly abandoned steamship drift past the Alaskan coast on an ice floe. It appeared upside down in a strange mirage, with no crew and no one at the wheel. This ship was the Baychimo, which was abandoned two years earlier, but refused to disappear. Having repeatedly resurfaced across the Arctic, it earning a reputation as one of history’s great ghost ships.

In this episode, we explore the strange history of ghost ships from the the Baychimo, to the frozen Octavius, and the Ourang Medan, whose crew was reportedly found mysteriously dead shortly before the ship itself exploded and sank. Three ships, three enduring legends, and at least one vessel whose final resting place remains unknown.

Visit our website for a lot more information on this episode.

In tonight's dead letter, our listener Ed and his wife are newlyweds, sharing the apartment he's lived in for about two years in Clay Center, Nebraska. One morning in early 2020, he hits snooze on his alarm and sees a figure walking out of their bedroom, silhouetted by the living room lights he'd set on a timer, and it looks just like his wife, but it’s not.
Relevant Prior Episodes
Ep 26: Shadow People
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts
Ep 64: Electronic Fog
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts
Ep 226: Boundless Remote Viewing with Lori Williams Part 1
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts
Links and Further Reading
Ed's Floor Plan of the Apartment
Clay Center, Nebraska, Wikipedia
World's Largest Ball of Twine, Kansas Tourism
Note: We call it the world's biggest ball of yarn in the episode. It's actually a ball of sisal twine. I always mess that up! (Scott)
Doppelganger, Britannica
Hypnagogic Hallucinations, Cleveland Clinic
A-Yokai-A-Day: Ikiryo, Matthew Meyer
Alexander Cannon (psychiatrist), Wikipedia
STAR GATE [Controlled Remote Viewing], Federation of American Scientists
Astral Projection Hypnosis by Dr. Steve G. Jones
Journeys Out of the Body by Robert A. Monroe
Richard Hatem's Paranormal Bookshelf
Beyond the Bermuda Triangle by Bruce Gernon and Rob MacGregor
We're looking for more stories! Send your Dead Letter to [email protected]!

In tonight's dead letter, our listener named Mark is driving through western Michigan at two in the morning in 1978, working off a paper map and handwritten directions to a house he's never been to. He comes up a hill and into a curve on US 131, and there are four people standing in his lane. Two of them are waving him over to the right, and the other two have their arms raised above their heads in an X. Had they not been there he may have had a fatal collision, and when he went to find them shortly after, they had vanished.
Relevant Prior Episodes
Ep 102: Resurrection Mary Part 1
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts
Ep 116: Small Town Monsters
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts
Links and Further Reading
Lydia: The Ghost of Jamestown Bridge, NCpedia
A History of the Vanishing Hitchhiker, Beardsley and Hankey, 1943
The Bray Road Beast, Small Town Monsters
Jim Harold's Campfire: True Ghost Stories, Books 1 through 6
Note: We call it the National Highway Transportation Safety Association in the episode. The ‘A’ is actually for Administration.
  
We're looking for more stories! Send your Dead Letter to [email protected]!

In tonight's dead letter, listener Mothmaiden remembers a time when she was four years old and an only child in a neighborhood with no other kids, and she had an imaginary friend named Cindy Cora who looked exactly like Betty Rubble from The Flintstones. Then on a sunny afternoon, in her own bedroom with the light coming through the window, she saw an elderly woman with white and gray hair piled high on her head, sitting in a rocking chair, calm and gentle and completely solid. Were these things connected?
Relevant Prior Episodes
Abduction at Devil's Den
Devil's Den: The Reckoning Part 1
Chris McKinnell and the Warren Legacy
Dan, Susan, Micah Hanks and Missing Time
Links and Further Reading
Two-thirds of school-age children have an imaginary companion by age 7, University of Washington
Note: We say about one in three for the invisible-only friends. In the study, about two thirds of kids have had an imaginary companion by age seven, and about one in three have one at the time they are asked.
The psychological significance of play with imaginary companions in early childhood, Learning & Behavior
Childhood amnesia, Wikipedia
Ghosts and Apparitions in Psi Research, the Society for Psychical Research's Psi Encyclopedia
Phantasms of the Living (1886) by Gurney, Myers and Podmore, Internet Archive
Strange Intruders by David Weatherly
Devils Den: The Reckoning by Terry Lovelace
Contact (1997), Wikipedia
Note: We say David Morse was one of the doctors on ER. He played Dr. Jack Morrison on St. Elsewhere.
Sesame Street debuts, November 10, 1969, HISTORY
Wall Street crash of 1929, Wikipedia
The History of Bettys in Pop Culture, Refinery29
Natalie and Tara on YouTube

We're looking for more stories! Send your Dead Letter to [email protected]!