Weird Darkness: Paranormal & True Crime Stories

Dressed like a 17th-century priest and armed with a library of ancient texts, Montague Summers devoted his life to proving that witches, vampires, and werewolves weren’t just folklore — they were terrifyingly real.

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

READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/montague20260803

FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Can a priest believe in witches, werewolves, and vampires? The answer is yes – and his name was Montague Summers. Was he a kook, or was he seeing the truth that others ignored? (Montague Summers Believed in Monsters) *** He smiled without speaking, appeared alongside UFOs, and promised to return – who, or what, was the mysterious Indrid Cold? (The Grinning Man – The Legend of Indrid Cold) *** Somewhere out there, another version of you made a different choice – that’s the multiverse theory. And the key to proving it could lie in changing someone else’s history. (Visiting Our Neighbors in a Parallel Universe) *** Anatoli Bugorski accidentally stuck his head in the world’s most powerful particle accelerator in 1978; he saw a flash brighter than a thousand suns, and somehow lived to tell about it. (The Man Who Survived An Atomic Blast Through His Skull) *** In 1971, a massive glowing sphere hovered silently over a U.S. Navy carrier — and for twenty minutes, the entire ship went dark. (Code Black: The USS Kennedy UFO Incident) *** She was a Houston socialite raised like royalty, but Joan Robinson Hill’s glittering life came to a mysterious end – followed by affairs, secret autopsies, a sensational trial, and a murder that still raises more questions than answers. (Murder in Texas: The Strange Death of Joan Robinson Hill) *** Imagine calling 911 because a perfectly healthy and alive loved one insists they’re dead – and wants to be taken to the morgue to join the other corpses! (Walking Dead: The Syndrome That Makes You Think You Are Deceased) *** Locals whisper about witches and shadows at Blood’s Point Cemetery, but the real horror lies in a forgotten tragedy no ghost story could match. (The Witch, The Shadow, and the Secrets of Bloods Point)

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding
00:01:19.350 = Show Open
00:04:01.662 = Montague Summers Believed In Monsters
00:12:33.941 = Visiting Our Next Door Neighbors in a Parallel Universe ***
00:16:55.866 = Code Black: The USS Kennedy UFO Incident
00:27:48.566 = Murder in Texas: The Strange Death of Joan Robinson Hill ***
00:36:51.664 = The Man Who Survived An Atomic Blast Through His Skull
00:40:06.356 = Walking Dead: The Syndrome That Makes You Think You Are Deceased
00:46:04.042 = The Witch, The Shadow, and the Secrets of Bloods Point ***
00:51:53.221 = The Grinning Man: The Legend of Indrid Cold
01:05:38.345 = 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:
“Code Black: The USS Kennedy UFO Incident”: https://rense.com/ufo/kennedy.htm,https://www.ufoinsight.com/ufos/cover-ups/the-1971-bermuda-triangle-ufo-incident
“Visiting our Next Door Neighbors in a Parallel Universe”: https://weirddarkness.com/visiting-our-next-door-neighbors-in-a-parallel-universe/, https://www.space.com/the-universe/could-we-travel-to-parallel-universes
“The Man Who Survived An Atomic Blast Through His Skull”: https://weirddarkness.com/the-man-who-survived-an-atomic-blast-through-his-skull/
“Montague Summers Believed In Monsters”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montague_Summers,https://libraryblog.lbrut.org.uk/2017/10/montague-summers/,https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/8955270/montague-summers, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Montague-Summers, https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/32006.Montague_Summers,https://www.bloodynews.ro/article/the-controversial-life-of-montague-summers-a-priest-who-believed-in-vampires-and-witches/
“Murder in Texas: The Strange Death of Joan Robinson Hill”: https://the-line-up.com/murder-in-texas-the-strange-death-of-joan-robinson-hill
“Walking Dead: The Syndrome That Makes You Think You’re Deceased”: https://the-line-up.com/cotards-syndrome-the-living-dead
“The Witch, The Shadow, and the Secrets of Bloods Point”: https://www.hauntedrockford.com/hidden-in-the-shadows/
“The Grinning Man: The Legend of Indrid Cold”: https://believingthebizarre.com/indrid-cold-the-grinning-man/
(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 25, 2025

Around three in the morning on July 31st, a naked man drove his car through the front doors of a Baptist church on Detroit's west side, rolled to a stop inside the vestibule, and told the people who arrived that he was Jesus Christ; nobody was hurt, and Detroit police say any charges wait on the results of a mental health evaluation.

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

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.

Six members of one family were found dead in a Mechanicville, New York apartment in June; by August, investigators had ruled the four children's deaths homicides and the mother's and grandmother's deaths suicides, and said the two women planned the killings by text in the days before the kids were to leave for a court-ordered summer with their father.

SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/HarmonChildren20260804

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.

Two men carried spades and a telephone line into an ancient swamp cemetery after midnight, and only one of them stayed above ground.

EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/mitm-randolphcarter

SOURCES and RESOURCES: 
“The Statement of Randolph Carter” by H.P. Lovecraft: https://www.creepypasta.com/the-statement-of-randolph-carter/

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

Midnight In The Macabre (MITM), originally aired: August 04, 2026

Alien abductions, cryptid creatures, secret government programs, portals to other worlds, cattle mutilations – the San Luis Valley may be the strangest and most terrifying place you’ve never heard of.

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

FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: We’ve had several episodes before about mysterious locations that are host to strange, paranormal activity. Skinwalker Ranch, for example, or The Bennington Triangle, or even the harsh terrain of Alaska. Perhaps one of the locations that appears to persistently slip under the radar is the San Luis Valley in Colorado. The region is home to very much the same variety of paranormal activity as other apparent hot spots. UFO sightings here are in abundance, for example. As are cases of cattle mutilation, sightings of strange creatures, and even alien abduction. In short, the San Luis Valley could be one of the most interesting locations in the world.
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 Paranormal, Extraterrestrial, and Otherworldly Explanations for Cattle Mutilations” by Marcus Lowth for UFOInsight.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/66a64hu5, https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/vhykeezp
(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 2022

Weird Darkness devotes a full episode to Colorado's San Luis Valley, moving from Native American creation myths through the 1967 mutilation of a horse named Lady, decades of Bigfoot encounters, and a global run of cattle mutilation cases tied to UFO sightings, secret government programs, and alien abduction.It opens with the valley's own history: the region passed from Mexican to American territory after the 1846-1848 Mexican-American War, and archaeological evidence places human habitation there for roughly 7,000 years across close to a dozen Native American tribes. Several of those tribes describe the surrounding peaks as the Sipapu, a place of creation and emergence, and the Navajo specifically name the Blanca Massif as the point where "star people" enter this world aboard what their oral tradition calls flying seed pods, a phrase researchers have since compared to modern disc-shaped UFO reports. The same traditions include legends of shapeshifting beasts roaming the valley, stories some investigators now link to the Bigfoot sightings still reported there.From there the episode turns to the case that first brought cattle mutilation into national headlines: the September 27, 1967 death of a three-year-old Appaloosa mare named Lady, discovered by Harry King and his mother, Agnes, on land belonging to his sister, Nellie Lewis. The horse's head had been stripped completely to the bone with surgically precise cuts, no blood was found anywhere at the scene despite the wounds, and a strong chemical odor hung in the air near the body. Investigators also noted that the horse's own tracks stopped abruptly about 100 feet from where she was found, that scorch marks including a distinct circular pattern marked the ground nearby, and that Agnes King recalled an unidentified object flying over her house in the days before the discovery. The Aerial Phenomena Research Organization investigated, and pathologist Dr. John Altshuler, examining the remains, found the heart, lungs, thyroid, and abdominal organs removed with medical precision and the body completely drained of blood. Alamosa County Sheriff Ben Phillips attributed the death to a lightning strike without visiting the site, and the Condon Committee later reported no evidence of abnormal causes, addressing neither the missing blood nor the burns. Press coverage mistakenly named the horse Snippy, after her sire, and the name stuck permanently. Researcher Christopher O'Brien would go on to document more than 200 further mutilation reports in the San Luis Valley alone, estimating the true, unreported total closer to 1,000.Next comes a survey of the valley's stranger residents, starting with a 1992 sighting known regionally as the Woman in Red, in which a driver picked up a hitchhiking woman who vanished after he noticed she had goat-like legs and hooves. The same stretch of the episode covers a wave of Bigfoot encounters that struck a seven-square-mile radius between late December 1993 and early January 1994, including a December 31 sighting with footprint tracks clear enough to show toenail impressions and partially captured on police video, plus a 2000 report from two ATV riders near Blanca Peak who tracked a seven-foot, brown-haired creature before losing it in the trees. Christopher O'Brien's files also record a white buffalo that appeared and then vanished without a trace near Winchell Lake in the early 1980s, a 1993 wave of legless, slug-like creatures locals call prairie dragons, and a report of an out-of-place platypus. The segment also revisits the Old Scratch legend, a century-old story of a well-dressed stranger who appears in a cantina during Lent and reveals claws, cloven hooves, and a tail before fleeing when confronted, last reported in 1984, then covers mid-1960s witness Robert Whitting, who claimed a craft pulled alongside his car and telepathically warned him of a dead black dog in the road ahead. It closes at the modern UFO Watchtower, a platform built for its 360-degree view of the valley that still draws UFO sightings and researchers year-round.The episode then widens its scope to cattle mutilation as a global phenomenon, opening with a 1606 case recorded in the court records of England's King James I describing sheep found with only their tallow and inner organs removed, and a Texas horse whose entire nervous system was surgically extracted in the same territory that saw a wave of sheep mutilations in 2013. It cites an FBI report from the late 1970s tallying roughly 8,000 mutilations in Colorado alone and lays out the pattern researchers keep finding: animals drained completely of blood, organs removed with surgical precision, unusual chemical readings in tissue samples, and a consistent absence of scavengers at the scene. From there it crosses to Cannock Chase in Staffordshire, England, where in 1985 a father and son watched a silent, triangular craft with three underside lights hover over a field, followed two days later by a duck hunter who saw a similar object stop over grazing cattle and fire light beams in his direction as he approached.A string of British cases follows, beginning with the 2010 mutilations of sheep near Shrewsbury, England, where animals were found with faces skillfully stripped of flesh and drilled holes where their brains had been removed, witnessed in part by a 16-person investigative team who reported both UFOs and apparent laser-style attacks on the flock in March of that year. It moves next to a 2011-2012 wave of mutilated horses across the United Kingdom, tentatively tied by some researchers to an equine herpesvirus type 1 outbreak rather than to ritual dates such as St. Winebald Day, then to Wales, where the Animal Pathology Field Unit spent twelve years, from 2001 to 2013, investigating sheep mutilations and, through investigator Phil Hoyle, concluded extraterrestrial involvement was the most likely explanation. The segment also returns to the 1977 discovery of 15 mutilated wild ponies in Cherry Brook Valley, Dartmoor, found by Alan Hicks, a case later investigated by Jonathan Downes of the Center for Fortean Zoology, who reported suspicious interference and elaborate hoax calls resembling Men in Black activity. It ends with Rob Lea's account, given to researcher Nick Redfern, of a Bristol-based group he called the Cult of the Moon Beast, allegedly performing animal sacrifices in Newport, England since the late 1980s to summon entities from a coexisting dimension on behalf of wealthy patrons.Back in North America, the episode covers Manuel Sanchez's discovery of a fourth mutilated calf on his Colorado ranch in December 2009 and Tom Miller's similar March 2009 find near Trinidad, Colorado, both missing tongues, udders, and eyes with no blood or tracks at the scene. It continues with Kit Metzger's decades of mutilations at the Flying M Ranch in Arizona, dating back to the late 1970s and clustering between June and October, and with the 1978 case of Manuel Gomez's bull in Dulce, New Mexico, examined by officer Gabriel Valdez, whose lab tests found the heart and liver reduced to a mushy, peanut-butter texture with abnormal zinc, phosphorus, and potassium levels and no copper at all. The segment covers a summer of 1990 mutilations on Richard Fazio's land in Vancouver, Washington, which Oregon State University matched to laser-type electrosurgical injury, alongside Christopher O'Brien's own assessment that mutilations are "more complicated than aliens" and more likely tied to covert environmental monitoring. It closes with 2013 sheep mutilations in Texas tha