Weird Darkness: Paranormal & True Crime Stories

A drifter set to die in the gas chamber for a murder he didn't commit offers one last gift to the man who framed him — never imagining what that gift might carry.

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, “Second Sight” (February 27, 1978) ***WD
00:46:14.838 = Origin of Superstition, “Three On A Match” (December 16, 1932) ***WD
01:00:44.894 = Pat Novak For Hire, “Don’t Tell Hilda” (February 27, 1949)
01:29:14.739 = Peril, “Darkness Within” (1953) ***WD (LQ)
01:58:15.099 = Mystery Playhouse, “Death is a Joker” (May 25, 1941) ***WD
02:28:27.475 = Price of Fear, “Meeting In Athens” (July 07, 1973) ***WD
02:55:48.036 = Ellery Queen, “Number Thirty-One” (September 07, 1947) ***WD
03:24:14.186 = Quiet Please, “If I Should Die Before I Wake” (February 27, 1949)
03:53:27.551 = Radio City Playhouse, “The Wind” (October 30, 1949) ***WD
04:22:21.175 = Sam Spade, “Death of Dr. Denhoff Caper” (August 09, 1946) ***WD
04:51:19.818 = 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.

This episode of #RetroRadio — Old Time Radio in the Dark, hosted by Darren Marlar at WeirdDarkness.com, runs ten classic mystery, crime, and horror broadcasts back to back, from a condemned man who donates his eyes to the very person who framed him to Ray Bradbury's tale of a living, intelligent wind that hunts a man across the globe.
CBS Radio Mystery Theater opens the night with "Second Sight," a February 27, 1978 drama hosted by E.G. Marshall in which drifter Larry Millard, condemned to die in the gas chamber for the shotgun murder of farmer Jason Hadley, volunteers his own eyes for an anonymous corneal transplant — handing his sight to Glen Plaxton, the businessman who actually pulled the trigger and framed him to protect a secret reservoir land-grab. After the surgery, Plaxton and his partner Tip Foster begin to suspect that the dead man's eyes may have carried more than vision.
Next, Origin of Superstition traces the famous taboo against lighting three cigarettes from a single flame in "Three On A Match," a December 16, 1932 sketch that carries listeners back to 1899 and the Boer War in South Africa, where British officer Captain Frank Mattox laughs off the fire-reading warning of a Zulu medicine man named Grumbo, who reads ruin in the ashes and cautions of "danger in three."
In "Don't Tell Hilda," the hard-boiled Pat Novak For Hire (February 27, 1949, starring Jack Webb) finds the San Francisco waterfront boat-for-hire man tangled in murder when a beautiful blonde claiming amnesia collapses dead in a coffee joint after a fatal dose of sleeping pills. Hounded by Inspector Hellman and helped by boozy ex-doctor Jocko Madigan, Novak traces her to a long-vanished heiress named Marcia Halpern and a fortune up on Pacific Heights.
Peril offers the 1953 psychological case "Darkness Within," where Mrs. Diana Carson walks into the office of psychiatrist Dr. James Bancroft insisting that her mild-mannered stockbroker husband, Lionel Carson, seized the fireplace tongs and tried to murder her — then woke with no memory of the attack, much like the family cat she found poisoned in the basement. Bancroft must decide whether Lionel suffers a blackout-driven split personality or something far more deliberate.
Mystery Playhouse, hosted by Peter Lorre, stages "Death is a Joker" (May 25, 1941), the courtroom confession of Charles Luther, a homely stage comedian on trial for his life who recounts strangling his friend Robert Langwell in a fit of jealousy over the beautiful Julie Wenthoff — and then, hour by terrible hour, is forced to think and act like the cunning criminal he never meant to become.
The Price of Fear sends Vincent Price into the August heat of Athens for "Meeting In Athens," a July 7, 1973 chiller in which he befriends young English couple Mark Haxton and Gillian Gilroy on the Acropolis. When Mark vanishes after a late-night seaside villa party arranged by a heavyset stranger named Yannis, Price and Greek police officer Costas Polides uncover a black-market horror in which a man's rarest possession — his AB Rhesus-negative blood, recorded in the diary he kept on everything — can be worth killing for.
Ellery Queen investigates "Number Thirty-One" (September 7, 1947), in which suspected international diamond smuggler George Arcaris always books Cabin 31 aboard the steamship Aegea, and a Park Avenue butler from Harlem named Arthur Prine — who liked to play the number 31 in the numbers game — turns up dead in the East River. Ellery and Inspector Queen connect the recurring number to a smuggling ring involving wealthy socialites Pip Istram and Susu Mounting, with guest armchair detective Kent Smith invited to solve it first.
Quiet Please turns apocalyptic with "If I Should Wake Before I Die" (February 27, 1949), Wyllis Cooper's parable of Dr. Anderson, a coldly rational scientist who cares only for pure knowledge and never for its uses — even after his own brother Edward dies alone in an orbiting satellite rocket, and even as Project Phaeton, an atomic-fission projectile fired at the moon, sets loose consequences no equation predicted.
Radio City Playhouse adapts Ray Bradbury's "The Wind" (October 30, 1949), in which Allen Henderson telephones his friend Herb Thompson again and again, convinced that a living, intelligent wind — one that has stalked him from a crash in the Himalayas across every typhoon and hurricane he survived — has finally surrounded his lonely stone house to claim him, while Herb's wife Jane dismisses the whole thing as madness.
Sam Spade closes the night with the "Death of Dr. Denhoff Caper" (August 9, 1946), as Howard Duff's wisecracking detective is hired by psychoanalyst Dr. Gregory Denhoff to fend off a blackmailer named Nicolaitis — only for Denhoff to plunge from his penthouse window, the police to rule it suicide, and a stolen, microfilmed case history on actress Constance Brent to throw suspicion across the grieving widow, a Vienna-trained rival named Dr. Zoya, and Brent's hot-tempered husband.

CUSTOM WEBPAGE: https://weirddarkness.com/WDRR0700

Five prisoners are kept awake for fifteen days in a sealed chamber — and what the researchers find when they open the door no longer wants to be set free. A blockbuster film series trails a string of real-life deaths its cast can't explain. On the back roads of Maryland, a half-goat figure waits for teenagers who wander too far. And one ordinary night in El Paso, a couple walks out of their home — dishes still in the sink, cat unfed — and is never seen again.

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

READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/3rr9mhjx

FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: The Russian Sleep Experiment *** The Poltergeist Film Curse *** The Goat-Man of Maryland *** The Patterson Family Disappearance *** The Legend of the Leprechaun

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding
00:01:06.939 = Show Open
00:01:55.409 = The Poltergeist Curse
00:06:21.074 = The Goatman of Prince George’s County
00:14:07.417 = The Lore of the Leprechaun ***
00:16:55.345 = Vanishing of the Pattersons
00:27:39.437 = The Russian Sleep Experiment ***
00:43:05.653 = 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 Russian Sleep Experiment”: http://bit.ly/36mHCc9
"Leprechaun: One Of The Most Famous And Powerful Creatures Of The Irish Faerie Folk" (link no longer available)
“The El Paso Vanishing (What Happened To The Pattersons?)”: http://bit.ly/2JHq3cW
“Maryland’s Goat-Man Is Half Man, Half Goat, and Out For Blood”: http://bit.ly/2pEciVw
“The Poltergeist Curse?”: http://bit.ly/36oH857
(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: July 22, 2018
Weird Darkness travels from a cursed Hollywood film set to a Maryland goat-monster, the cobbler-fairies of Irish legend, a vanished El Paso couple, and a blood-soaked Soviet sleep laboratory where the test subjects no longer wanted to be set free.It opens with the deaths that shadow the Poltergeist films, beginning with Heather O'Rourke, who played Carol Anne Freeling from the original 1982 release through both sequels and died at twelve in San Diego in February 1986 during surgery for a bowel obstruction later traced to a congenital intestinal flaw. Dominique Dunne, who played older sister Dana Freeling, was strangled in 1982 by John Sweeney outside her Hollywood home, and Sweeney served just three years and seven months. Julian Beck, the gaunt preacher Kane of Poltergeist II, died of stomach cancer in 1983, and Will Sampson, who played the shaman Taylor, died after a heart-lung transplant — four deaths that fed a curse legend later thickened by JoBeth Williams' claim that Steven Spielberg used real human skeletons as cheaper props and by Sampson's own ritual cleansing of the set.From there the episode crosses into Prince George's County, Maryland, where the Goatman has stalked local legend for decades. One origin story sets him at the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, a half-man, half-goat creature born from a USDA experiment gone wrong; another makes him a herdsman driven mad after teenagers slaughtered his flock. University of Maryland folklorist Barry Pearson traces his heyday to the 1970s and the 1971 decapitation of a puppy named Ginger in Bowie, an incident the Washington Post covered and locals pinned on the creature haunting Fletchertown and Lottsford roads, while Beltsville spokesperson Kim Kaplan dryly wonders whether a goatman that old would be collecting Social Security by now.Next the show turns to Irish folklore and the leprechaun, the solitary fairy whose name traces to a Gaelic root for a small body or a shoemaker. Standing two to three feet tall in a green or red coat and buckled shoes, he works as a fairy cobbler who stitches only a single shoe and never a pair, guards a hidden pot of gold, and trades three wishes for his freedom when a human manages to catch him. He lives in cave networks reached through rabbit holes and the hollow trunks of fairy trees, and damaging one of those trees is said to draw a lifetime of bad luck.From the green hills of Ireland the episode moves to El Paso, Texas, where William and Margaret Patterson left their home at 3000 Piedmont Drive on March 5, 1957 and were never seen again, dinner dishes still in the sink and their cat Tommy left without food. The owners of Patterson Photo Supply vanished without packing a suitcase, their associate Doyle Kirkland turned up driving William's Cadillac with a thin story about a vacation, and a telegram from Dallas signed with the wrong middle initial named Kirkland as William's replacement at the store. Decades on, caretaker Reinaldo Nangre claimed he had cleaned blood from the garage and found a piece of scalp on the boat propeller before dying in a car crash, and Sheriff Leo Samaniego floated the theory that the couple were Soviet spies photographing Fort Bliss, leaving a disappearance that was declared a death in 1964 and has never been solved.The episode closes in the late 1940s, when Soviet researchers sealed five political prisoners in a chamber and kept them awake for fifteen days with an experimental gas-based stimulant, promising freedom in exchange for thirty sleepless days. Paranoia set in after five days, screaming after nine, and when the chamber was opened on the fifteenth the soldiers found four men still alive amid their own torn-out organs, having eaten their own flesh and blocked the floor drain with it, fighting any attempt to remove them and begging for the gas rather than sleep. One subject, pinned for surgery without anesthetic, wrote only the words "keep cutting," and as the last of them was shot through the heart he claimed to be the madness that lurks in every sleeping mind, choking out that he was so nearly free.

A writer obsessed with the occult and forbidden knowledge uncovers a nightmarish secret lurking within a long-abandoned church—one that watches, waits, and is drawn to the dark.

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

READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p9ecf8y

FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: I’m back with a classic horror story, requested by one of you, my Weirdo family members. “The Haunter in the Dark” written by horror writer H.P. Lovecraft.

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = Show Open
00:00:59.102 = About The Story
00:03:15.896 = The Haunter of the Dark ***
01:05:59.476 = 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:
POEM: “Nemesis” by H.P. Lovecraft: https://tinyurl.com/y466z69v
The Cthulhu Mythos: https://tinyurl.com/y22oe79f
“The Haunter of the Dark” by H.P. Lovecraft: https://tinyurl.com/y33eprua
(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: July 30, 2020
On this listener-requested episode of Weird Darkness, Darren Marlar narrates H.P. Lovecraft's last known story, "The Haunter in the Dark," the centerpiece of a three-part collaboration with fellow horror writer Robert Bloch.The episode opens with how the story came to be written. Robert Bloch, then a young admirer of Lovecraft, published "The Shambler From the Stars" in the September 1935 issue of Weird Tales, setting his tale inside Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. Two months later, in early November 1935, Lovecraft answered the homage by writing "The Haunter in the Dark" and dedicating it to Bloch; the story ran in Weird Tales in December 1936 (Volume 28, Number 5). It was the last story Lovecraft is known to have written before he died on March 15, 1937, and Bloch eventually closed the trilogy in 1950 with "The Shadow of the Steeple." The story's epigraph comes from the second stanza of Lovecraft's own 1917 poem "Nemesis."From there, the narration follows Robert Harrison Blake, a writer and painter of weird fiction who leaves 620 East Knapp Street in Milwaukee and takes the upper floor of an old house on College Hill in Providence during the winter of 1934–35. Blake grows obsessed with a black, abandoned church across the city on Federal Hill — a steeple shunned by birds and feared by the Italian neighborhood around it — and eventually breaks in, finding the moldering relics of the Starry Wisdom sect, a cult that took root after Professor Enoch Bowen returned from Egypt in 1844 carrying an artifact called the Shining Trapezohedron. In the windowless tower he uncovers the stone itself, a four-inch red-striated polyhedron that opens like a window onto other worlds, resting beside the charred skeleton of Edwin M. Lillibridge, a Providence Telegram reporter who vanished inside the same building in 1893. Gazing into the crystal rouses the Haunter of the Dark — an avatar of Nyarlathotep that can move only in blackness and is driven back by light — and the rest of the tale tracks Blake's collapse into sleepwalking, scorched hair, and frantic diary entries as a violent August thunderstorm threatens the streetlights keeping the entity penned in. When the power fails over Providence at 2:12 in the morning, the thing leaves its steeple, and Blake is found dead at his desk the next day with bulging eyes and a face frozen in terror, his final scrawled line describing a three-lobed burning eye — after which the physician Dr. Dexter hurls the box and the glowing stone into the deepest channel of Narragansett Bay.

A New York teenager lit a piece of paper, threw it at a sleeping homeless man on a Manhattan subway, and stepped back onto the platform as the doors closed behind him. 

SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/carrero-subway-fire

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

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

Investigators now believe the two February ransom notes sent to the Guthrie family came from the person who took Nancy — and one of them said she was already dead. *** ANYONE WITH INFORMATION CAN CONTACT THE FBI AT 1-800-CALL-FBI, OR THE PIMA COUNTY SHERIFF'S DEPARTMENT AT 520-351-4900.

SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/guthrie20260627

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.