Weird Darkness: Paranormal & True Crime Stories

A man wakes up convinced he murdered someone in his sleep, and the marks on his own body say the dream might not have been a dream at all.

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, “Cool Killer Carl” (May 05, 1978) ***WD
00:46:18.874 = Mystery Playhouse, “Nightmare” (November 28, 1944)
01:15:15.928 = Price of Fear, “Remains To Be Seen” (September 01, 1973) ***WD
01:42:19.483 = Adventures of Ellery Queen, “Terrified Man” (January 15, 1948) ***WD (LQ)a
02:06:01.040 = Quiet Please, “The Smell of High Wines” (March 20, 1949) ***WD
02:35:22.653 = Radio City Playhouse, “Interval” (November 27, 1949) ***WD
03:03:46.860 = Half Hour To Kill, “Blackout Never Aired” (October 29, 1946) ***WD
03:32:04.765 = Sam Spade, “Adam Figg Caper” (October 05, 1947) ***WD
03:55:50.400 = The Sealed Book, “Stranger In The House” (May 06, 1945) ***WD
04:25:19.830 = The Shadow, “Bubbling Death” (December 05, 1943) ***WD
04:50:39.793 = Strange Adventure, “Title Unknown – Episode 69” (1945) ***WD
04:53:57.077 = Calling All Detectives, “Jerry Investigates a Mysterious Increase in Hospital Deaths” (July 06, 1948) ***WD (LQ)
05:01:43.438 = 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/WDRR0728

Six strangers board a night train crawling through the worst winter in years — a divorced businessman, a runaway couple, a wealthy man running out of time, and an elderly woman being shipped off by her own family — each quietly hoping this trip might be the one that changes everything, for better or worse.

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, “Journey To Somewhere” (May 04, 1978) ***WD
00:44:26.457 = Molle Mystery Theater, “Killer Come Back To Me” (May 17, 1946)
01:13:35.047 = Mr. Keen, “The Leaping Dog” (April 13, 1944) ***WD
01:42:41.788 = Murder at Midnight, “The Man With The Black Beard” (May 08, 1950) ***WD
02:08:37.327 = The Black Museum, “The Tan Shoe” (January 15, 1952)
02:33:18.183 = Mysterious Traveler, “The Green Plague” (June 17, 1952)
03:00:29.228 = CBC Nightfall, “Hands Off” (July 25, 1980)
03:27:14.184 = Obsession, “Clinging Hate” (May 14, 1951) ***WD
03:49:55.235 = Origin of Superstition, “Kissing Under Mistletoe” (1935) ***WD
04:04:07.297 = Pat Novak For Hire, “Rory Malone” (March 20, 1949)
04:33:03.187 = Peril, “Lucky Lady” (1953) ***WD
04:58:54.597 = 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/WDRR0727

Four friends went into the Massachusetts woods looking for a paved road that starts in the middle of nowhere, and they found what was waiting at the end of it.

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

SOURCES and RESOURCES:
“The Asylum In The Woods” by Redditor R.L. Rogers: https://www.creepypasta.com/the-asylum-in-the-woods/

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

Midnight In The Macabre (MITM), originally aired: July 28, 2026

In 1947, the Army announced it had recovered a crashed "flying disc" near Roswell, then reversed itself within a day — a contradiction the Air Force didn't explain until 1994, when it revealed a classified spy program called Project Mogul. Roswell wasn't even the first: unidentified wreckage and bodies had been turning up for decades before it.

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

FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: When you hear the words “UFO crash” you likely think of Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. And while that is the most famous of supposed extraterrestrial spaceship crashes, it is by no means the first. In fact, there were several taking place before Roswell became a household name. (UFO Crashes Before Roswell) *** But first – we’ll take a look at Roswell itself… and what might have been behind the crash, the UFOs, and the aliens! (Behind Roswell’s Aliens) *** Numerous travelers have gone missing in Nahanni Valley… and many whose bodies have been found, have been decapitated. It’s no wonder it has been nicknamed “The Valley of Headless Men”. (The Valley of Headless Men) *** In 2016, construction in a San Francisco family’s backyard unearthed a terrifying find… a glass coffin. And the history behind it tells a morbid history of the city. (The Karner’s Backyard Glass Coffin) *** Former Green Beret Jeffrey MacDonald claimed that a gang of acid-crazed Manson Family copycats brutally murdered his pregnant wife and two daughters in 1970, but then he was found guilty. Did he commit the crime, or did the law convict the wrong man? (The Evil Deeds of Jeffrey MacDonald) *** It’s understood that scientifically, alchemy – attempting to turn a substance or element into gold – is impossible. But then, there is that one incident that took place in the early seventeenth century that has some people wondering if that’s wrong. (The Alchemy Master)

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding
00:01:27.594 = Show Open
00:03:47.621 = Behind Roswell’s Aliens / UFO Crashes Before Roswell
00:19:45.640 = The Valley of Headless Men ***
00:33:18.357 = The Karner’s Backyard Glass Coffin
00:44:54.640 = The Evil Deeds of Jeffrey MacDonald ***
00:55:31.498 = The Alchemy Master
01:02:26.698 = 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:
“Behind Roswell’s Aliens” by Adam Janos for History.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yd5fhudu
“UFO Crashes Before Roswell” from Anomalien.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2w6d76yh
“The Valley of Headless Men” by Aleksa Vuckovic for Ancient-Origins.net: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p9c6zf4
“The Evil Deeds of Jeffrey MacDonald” by Marco Margaritoff for AllThatsInteresting.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8eant7
“The Alchemy Master” by Ellen Lloyd for AncientPages.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4xzysbwc
“The Karner’s Backyard Glass Coffin” by Trilby Beresford for Ranker.com’s Graveyard Shift:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/3mpvk9jh
(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 moves from a classified Cold War balloon program in the New Mexico desert to a Canadian valley littered with decapitated bodies, a Victorian child's glass coffin dug up in a San Francisco backyard, a Green Beret convicted of butchering his own family, and a seventeenth-century alchemist tortured for the secret of turning lead into gold.It opens with the 1947 Roswell crash, tracing how rancher W.W. "Mac" Brazel's discovery of wreckage on his Lincoln County property led Colonel William Blanchard's Roswell Army Air Field to announce the capture of a "flying disc," only for the Army to reverse itself within days and blame a weather balloon, complete with staged photos of Major Jesse Marcel posing with the debris. The story follows the account through the U.S. Air Force's 1994 admission that the wreckage actually came from Project Mogul, a secret high-altitude balloon array built to detect Soviet atomic tests, and its 1997 explanation that reported alien bodies were fallen parachute test dummies, then weighs those official conclusions against UFO researcher Donald Schmitt's objections and journalist Annie Jacobsen's competing claim that the crash involved deformed children deployed by Joseph Stalin and designed by Nazi doctor Josef Mengele.From there, the episode moves through six UFO crash reports that predate Roswell by decades, including an 1897 cigar-shaped craft said to have destroyed Judge Proctor's windmill in Aurora, Texas, and left a small humanoid body buried in the local cemetery; an 1862 wreck witnessed by shipwrecked sailors from the vessel Christine on a deserted Indian Ocean island, where they found twelve-foot-tall bodies with bronze beards; a UFO crash near Stavropol, Russia, whose three survivors reportedly died from being unable to breathe Earth's atmosphere; a 1941 crash in the Carolinas recovered by the U.S. Army during a military exercise involving soldier Guy Simeone; an 1884 debris field of gear-like metal fragments found by rancher John Ellis in Dundy County, Nebraska; and a wartime British crash investigated by journalist Dorothy Kilgallen, who died shortly after publishing claims that the recovered craft's crew stood under four feet tall.Next, the story shifts to Canada's Nahanni Valley, where at least 44 people have died or vanished since 1908, beginning with prospector brothers Willie and Frank McLeod, whose headless skeletons were found at their camp two years after they disappeared, and continuing through the decapitations of Swiss prospector Martin Jorgenson and outlaw "Yukon" Fisher, the mysterious cabin fire that killed Phil Powers, and the vanishing of Annie Laferte, who was later spotted wandering naked and disoriented near the Flat River — deaths locals attribute variously to the legendary Naha tribe, the valley's hot sulphur springs, or predators, while Dene oral history holds that the warlike Naha people simply disappeared without explanation.The episode then turns to 2016, when a construction crew remodeling John and Ericka Karner's San Francisco home unearthed a 19th-century glass-and-cast-iron coffin containing the preserved body of a toddler, later identified through DNA testing led by genealogist Elissa Davey as Edith Howard Cook, who died of malnutrition in 1876 and was accidentally left behind when San Francisco's Odd Fellows Cemetery was relocated to Colma in the 1930s — a discovery the Karner family says ended years of unexplained footsteps they'd heard from a toddler no longer in the house.From there, the story follows former Green Beret Jeffrey MacDonald, convicted of stabbing his pregnant wife Colette and daughters Kimberly and Kristen to death at Fort Bragg in 1970 after claiming a blonde intruder chanting about acid and "pigs" oversaw the killings, an account investigators concluded was staged using details from the recent Manson Family murders; the case follows his decades of appeals, including the 1983 bestseller "A Fatal Vision" that branded him a psychopath and filmmaker Errol Morris's later book arguing the evidence against him was mishandled.The episode closes with the story of Alexander Seton, a secretive Scottish alchemist known as the Cosmopolitan, who in 1602 convinced skeptical Swiss professor Wolfgang Drenheim that he had transmuted lead into gold using nothing but a wrapped powder and a goldsmith's crucible in Fribourg. Seton's success drew the attention of Emperor Rudolf II and later trapped him in the custody of Christian II, Elector of Saxony, who had him pierced with iron spikes and burned with molten lead in an attempt to force him to reveal his formula; Seton escaped in 1603 with the help of his friend Michael Sendivogius but died a broken man soon after, and the alchemical text he was said to have written, the Book of Twelve Chapters, was destroyed, leaving his method lost.

This isn’t one of my usual stories or episodes – but it is still terrifying (to me, at least). Over the weekend, a devastating cyberattack locked me out of my Google account, YouTube channels, Dropbox, and many of the tools I rely on to produce Weird Darkness. For several days, I genuinely didn’t know if the show would survive.In this special emergency update, I explain what happened, why new episodes suddenly stopped, what became of the YouTube channels, where things stand now, and why this has been one of the darkest weeks of my life—both professionally and personally.The good news? Weird Darkness is still here.Thank you for your patience, your encouragement, and your prayers. It means more than you know.Listen and subscribe at: https://WeirdDarkness.com