Weird Darkness: Paranormal & True Crime Stories

A midwife is driven north to a castle at the top of the world to deliver a baby, and when she reaches the birthing room there is no cradle in it. She has brought hundreds of children into the world, but never one she was ordered not to save.

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

SOURCES and RESOURCES: 
“The Snow Queen’s Children” by Louise Latham, submitted directly to WeirdDarkness.com

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

Midnight In The Macabre (MITM), originally aired: August 19, 2026

LIKE WHAT YOU’RE HEARING? WEIRD DARKNESS posts episodes 7 DAYS A WEEK! Listen FREE wherever you get podcasts or visit https://weirddarkness.com/listen. • Paranormal • True Crime • Ghosts • UFOs • Cryptids • Unexplained • Want even more? Become an OFFICIAL WEIRDO for commercial-free episodes, bonus episodes, weeknight live chats, audiobooks & more at https://WeirdDarkness.com/OFFICIAL

In 2006 Ukraine, beams split the sky. Time stopped. Something inhuman came to Earth — and took people from their homes.

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

SOURCES and RESOURCES:
“The Ukraine Alien Abduction” by Marcus Lowth for UFO Insight: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p82rjjp
VIDEO: UFO Spotted Near Explosion In Ukraine: https://weirddarkness.com/ufo-spotted-near-explosion-in-ukraine/
(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, 2022
Weird Darkness digs into Ukraine's decades-long record of UFO sightings and humanoid encounters, from a husband and wife carried aboard a disc-shaped craft outside their own front door, to horned figures stripping orchards near an ancient fortress honeycombed with tunnels, to a truck driver who described being walked across the surface of the moon by three men who had flagged him down for car trouble.It opens with the case reported in the June 20th, 2008 edition of the Ukrainian newspaper Facts, in which 34-year-old Vladimir Voronezhskiy and his 29-year-old wife Olga described being taken aboard a disc-shaped craft outside their home in the early hours of the morning. The evening began when their daughters Vanessa and Angelica came back from a nearby shop describing a "flying star", then drew matching sketches of a round object flashing white, yellow and red. Olga and Vladimir went outside and watched an object hovering over a distant river, and Olga's mobile phone captured only a blurred yellow smear. Around 2 am the bedroom filled with white light, the roof appeared to turn transparent, and the couple ran outside to find a disc hanging roughly 350 feet from the house. Olga rose into the air in a spiraling motion while Vladimir grabbed for her leg and missed, and the two of them found themselves inside a bare room with glass-like walls, surrounded by three-foot entities with gray skin, oversized heads and three fingers on each hand, moving without visible legs in the manner of a caterpillar. Olga was placed in a medical chair and watched the entities open an incision across her abdomen with instruments she had never seen before, feeling no pain, then close it so completely that no scar remained; Vladimir, held back by what felt like an invisible wall, was paralyzed by four metal rods laid on his chest after he struggled, and a voice entered his head promising he would be home soon. A taller figure, roughly five feet tall with its face fully covered, told him only that the procedures "had to be done". The couple were then seated in front of transparent walls where the sun looked like a diffused spot of light and the Earth appeared no bigger than a tennis ball, taken down to a world where the inhabitants lived in open pits below the surface, and told that humans and cattle alike had been brought to Earth from another planet. Vladimir refused repeated attempts to make him copulate with a female entity, even after it took the form of a beautiful human woman, and the conversation turned instead to human emotion and why our species has not yet destroyed itself. UFO researcher Yuriy Stepanov later placed Vladimir under hypnotic regression, which produced detailed sketches of the craft and its occupants along with the claim that a plasma field surrounding the ship rendered it invisible to the eye and undetectable on radar. Medical examination of the family turned up no implants, though Vladimir's gray hair regained its color, Olga's lifelong stomach pain never came back, and she claimed she could sober up a drunk person by resting a hand on his forehead for two minutes. Their neighbors mocked them for all of it.From there the episode backs up to the June 9th, 2006 edition of the same newspaper, which reported that residents across Mariupol spent an evening watching six disc-shaped objects over the city and jammed the phone lines of local papers with calls, while the Ukrainian Air Force and air traffic control at Mariupol Airport both said their radar showed nothing unusual; the next morning a watchman named Nikolay Trinitsyn counted around twenty fast-flying lighted spheres over an industrial district in full daylight, visible to his coworkers for about ten minutes before they were gone. Older encounters follow. In the summer of 1952, according to an account in Interesting Newspaper, a boy named Ivan Sergeevich was left alone at a campfire with an elderly woman after a sudden violent wind scattered the group's horses, and three helmeted figures about six feet tall walked out of a bright domed object rising from the woods, halted twice by handfuls of powder the woman threw into the fire to make it crackle. Around the same season in Belgorod-Dnestrovskiy, Komsomolskaya Pravda documented an insomniac watching five horned figures in his neighbor's yard, followed the next day by an apple tree stripped bare, part of a run of horned-creature sightings and vanishing food near a fortress that local legend says sits atop a network of secret tunnels used by creatures living underground and, in other tellings, by survivors of a UFO crash. Anton Anfalov of the Yaroslavl UFO Group recorded a three-day encounter in Zhdanivka in August of 1953, where Lina Ivanovna Kravets watched a silver globe descend behind the houses and a neighbor found three figures in dark overalls, gloves and helmets cutting fruit-laden branches from apple, plum and cherry trees while carrying wheat, rye and transparent tubes holding a frog, a lizard and a fish; in broken Russian they told her they had flown from up there, that they were searching for a lost scout ship they feared humans had destroyed, that Earth's wars affected natural disasters on their own world, and they offered her a piece of their bread before leaving. The segment ends with the 1971 Odesa catacombs account published in The Secret Doctrine, in which a young woman named Masha followed the sound of a child crying down a side passage, was struck from behind and disappeared for three days, later gave birth to a son with a large head, small mouth and outsized eyes who read academic material as a child, and who vanished in those same catacombs in the late 1990s and was never found.The final stretch runs through four more abduction reports and into the present day. Outside Chernivtsi in the early hours of January 8th, 1976, a glass-factory truck driver identified only as Nikolay N was woken by knocking on his cab window by three men who said their car had broken down, and was led instead to an upright cylinder with a glowing dome, blacked out on board, woke on a table wired with cables and devices, and was told he was at his hosts' base on the moon before being suited up and taken by elevator to the surface, where he could see the Earth's cloud cover; years later a man stopped him on the street and asked how his trip to the moon had been. On the night of April 17th into the 18th of 1982 in Simferopol, Crimea, researchers Vladimir A Borominskiy and Vladimir A Belozyerov of the Simferopol UFO Research Group documented electrician Yuriy Vasilievich Zbroy watching a shape push through his bedroom wall, touching it, feeling himself become magnetized, and then facing three creatures that emerged from a saucer the size of a toy and grew as they approached before telling him telepathically that they intended to take sperm for a hybridization program. In June of 1989 near Kharkiv, the Kirov UFO Group reported Ivan Rybchenko stopping his car for a descending luminous spot, stepping through two doors that opened in its side, being placed in a box lined with soft material, and waking to a tearing pain in his left hand before viewing an alien world dotted with communication towers and a base he was told ran automatically, without crew. In February of 1990, in an account from Gennadiy Ya Leszshenko's book At The Edge of the Unknown or What is Behind the Curtain, relayed by veteran researcher Albert Rosales, 68-year-old Ivan Nikanorovich went outside to quiet his barking dogs in the Donetsk region and was confronted by three figures around ten feet tall whose outer suits peeled away by themselves once aboard, and who flew him past planets before returning him home so ill he could not eat for three days. Sightings have not stopped: a white triangular craft with no wings, windows or markings was filmed over the country in August of 2019 and attributed by some to the rumored American TR-3B, two metallic objects roughly the size of a small van were filmed over Odesa in February of 2022, and on March 1st of that year a disc-shaped object was recorded from an apartment window in an area under shelling, hanging in the distance while the explosions went off below it.

A trapeze flyer chasing a somersault no one has ever landed shares a drink with a circus fire eater who calls himself Lou Cipher, and walks away believing a bargain has been struck.

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 Quadruple” (June 28, 1978) ***WD
00:45:39.406 = Witch’s Tale, “Tourists Accommodated” (March 03, 1938) ***WD(LQ)
01:09:36.259 = X Minus One, “Open Warfare” (January 23, 1957) ***WD
01:30:53.254 = Zero Hour, ‘Death Is The Puppeteer” (May 24, 1974) ***WD
01:48:16.561 = ABC Mystery Time, “Success Story” (1957) ***WD(LQ)
02:12:17.632 = Appointment With Fear, “The Clock Strikes Eight” (May 18, 1944) ***WD
02:41:04.353 = Arch Oboler’s Plays, “Truth” (January 13, 1940) ***WD
03:09:34.283 = Barry Craig, “The Case of the Naughty Necklace” (November 28, 1951)
03:37:22.883 = BBC Radio 4, “The Murders In The Rue Morgue” (January 22, 2000)
04:33:33.619 = Night Beat, “Pay Up Or Die” (May 01, 1952) ***WD
05:01:46.546 = 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/WDRR0748

He hated the clown doll his great aunt left him, so he locked it in the closet, which is exactly where the laughing came from.

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

SOURCES and RESOURCES: 
“I’ve Always Hated Dolls” by Devin Hoover: https://www.creepypasta.com/ive-always-hated-dolls/

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

Midnight In The Macabre (MITM), originally aired: August 18, 2026

LIKE WHAT YOU’RE HEARING? WEIRD DARKNESS posts episodes 7 DAYS A WEEK! Listen FREE wherever you get podcasts or visit https://weirddarkness.com/listen. • Paranormal • True Crime • Ghosts • UFOs • Cryptids • Unexplained • Want even more? Become an OFFICIAL WEIRDO for commercial-free episodes, bonus episodes, weeknight live chats, audiobooks & more at https://WeirdDarkness.com/OFFICIAL

Jim Harker kills a traffic constable on a fog-blind road at midnight and drives away without reporting it, and from that night forward every trip down that same stretch of road brings the sound of a police siren only he can hear.

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, “Lady Bluebeard” (June 26, 1978) ***WD
00:46:20.038 = The Creaking Door, “Death On The Road” (December 07, 1964) ***WD
01:15:09.868 = The Saint, “Conley Silver Mine” (July 31, 1949) ***WD
01:39:33.865 = Theater 1030, “The Pedestrian” (1968-1971) ***WD
02:05:17.574 = 2000 Plus, “The Other Man” (June 07, 1950) ***WD
02:35:51.037 = The Unexpected, “ The Necklace” (1947-1948)
02:47:49.587 = Columbia Workshop, “Carmilla” (July 28, 1940) (LQ)
03:17:15.893 = Dark Venture, “Ten Dollar Bill” (August 14, 1945)
03:46:13.757 = The Weird Circle, “Fall of the House of Usher” (1943)
04:13:26.305 = The Whistler, “Masters Tree” (April 30, 1945)
04:42:57.851 = Strange Wills, “So Deep Stream” (September 28, 1946)
05:12:41.544 = 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/WDRR0747