Weird Darkness: Paranormal & True Crime Stories

A lanky schoolmaster from Connecticut rides home alone from an autumn party at the Van Tassel farm on a borrowed plow horse named Gunpowder, along the same roads the people of Sleepy Hollow say belong at night to the ghost of a Hessian trooper, still out looking for the head a cannonball took from him.

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

SOURCES and RESOURCES: “The Legend of Sleep Hollow” by Washington Irving: https://tinyurl.com/9ra9bj4

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

Midnight In The Macabre (MITM), originally aired: October 08, 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 1957, a young surgeon finds an aneurysm the size of a grapefruit on the chest X-rays of the man his sister is about to marry, and that night his dead father sits down across the fire to talk the case through.

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 Exploding Heart” (December 08, 1978) ***WD
00:46:23.841 = ABC Mystery Time, “Death By Proxy” (June 07, 1956) ***WD
01:11:24.668 = Appointment With Fear, “Pit And The Pendulum” (September 18, 1943) ***WD
01:39:35.562 = Arch Oboler’s Plays, “Mr. Payle” (June 14, 1945) ***WD(LQ)
02:04:58.883 = Barry Craig, “Death of a Private Eye” (January 02, 1952)
02:35:08.636 = BBC Radio 4 / Radio 7 GhostStory, “Laura” (January 01, 1987)
02:49:56.334 = Night Beat, “Reformer” (June 26, 1952)
03:20:10.260 = The Black Book, “On Schedule” (February 17, 1952) ***WD
03:34:38.824 = Box 13, “One One Three Point Five” (March 20, 1949)
04:01:09.194 = Calling All Cars, “Hammers In Honduras” (April 18, 1934) ***WD
04:33:13.108 = Casey Crime Photographer, “Demon Miner” (March 20, 1947)
05:02:41.409 = 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/WDRR0795

Margaret Dickson was hanged in Edinburgh in 1724 and began moving in her coffin when the men taking her home stopped for a drink. In 1803, in Sydney, three ropes in a row failed to hang Joseph Samuel.

From the book “BOTCHED EXECUTIONS: Four Centuries Of Failed Hangings, Electrocutions, Gassings, Injections And Firing Squads” by Darren Marlar at https://weirddarkness.com/botchedexecutions

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

Originally aired: October 07, 2026

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HM3LZM9M/

Two men who said they were newspaper reporters spent forty-five minutes inside Danny Gordon's house while he was chasing the Wytheville, Virginia, UFO sightings, one asking the questions while the other walked the rooms with a camera, and the paper they named had no record of either man.

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

READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/mr2h8xt3

FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: The mysterious Men in Black have been around long before Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones put on the black suits and sunglasses. The encounters with these strange men have been taking place for decades. Sometimes unnerving, often bizarre, and almost always chilling for those they approach. (The Sinister Men In Black) *** Legend has it that a four-legged fiend with glowing eyes and a blood-curdling howl stalks the area of Devon, England. The mystery creature was seen only yards away from a party of schoolchildren, the animal has a thick, shaggy coat, rounded ears and large front limbs which would be powerful enough to tear human flesh. Is it man’s best friend – or a hell hound?  (Phantom Hound) *** Life presents people with all sorts of unexplained phenomena. One of the strangest is places disappearing. It might happen on a hiking trail, or in the forest, or alongside gravel roads in rural counties… but then some happen in the most surprising of places – for example, in the center of New York City. (Places That No Longer Exist) *** Weirdo family member Chris Francis has a dark story to tell – literally dark. As in black-hole dark. (Black Hole In The Basement)
CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding
00:02:00.566 = Show Open
00:04:08.719 = The Sinister Men In Black
00:21:18.562 = Places That No Longer Exist ***
00:56:32.806 = Phantom Hound ***
01:03:19.395 = Black Hole Basement
01:14:26.928 = 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:(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, 2018
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
This episode of Weird Darkness runs from the men in black who shadow UFO witnesses to places that vanish overnight, a shape-shifting beast photographed on Dartmoor, and a basement in Orillia, Ontario, where something climbs the stairs at night.
It opens with Ronald Reagan telling Steven Spielberg, after a 1982 White House screening of E.T., that some people in the room knew everything on the screen was true, and from there it moves into decades of men in black encounters. Radio journalist Danny Gordon's investigation of the 1987 Wytheville, Virginia, UFO sightings brought him warning calls, a break-in, and two men posing as newspaper reporters who walked through his house before some of his negatives went missing. UFO researchers John and Mary Robertson watched a man in black stand outside their apartment building for days in 1968; Harold Dahl said a stranger driving a black Buick recited his Maury Island sighting back to him the morning after it happened in 1947; a man calling himself Jack Smith filmed two identical men in fedoras at a New Orleans streetcar stop in 2014; and Rendlesham Forest researcher Brenda Butler describes a road chase, tapped phones, and warnings to stop digging.
From there, Reddit users describe places that disappeared, among them a Texas gas station where the clerk danced alone to ragtime at 2 a.m., a South Carolina diner where a grown woman spoke for a doll in a high chair, a cave on the Niagara Escarpment that swallowed three hours, a tunnel full of daylight on the Blue Ridge Parkway, and a free-pizza shop in New York's Financial District after Hurricane Sandy. None of them turned up again.
Next, falconer Martin Whitley's American clients photograph a black, pony-sized animal on Dartmoor in June 2007, about a mile from Hound Tor, and the creature seems to change shape from frame to frame, though a local woman insists it was her Newfoundland, Troy. The same moor carries the legend of the hunter Bowerman and his hounds turned to stone by witches, along with the red-eyed Wisht Hounds tied to Squire Richard Cabell and The Hound of the Baskervilles.
The episode closes with Weirdo family member Chris Francis, who moved back into his mother's century-old brick house in Orillia, where an old fieldstone foundation in the basement swallowed flashlight beams, the basement door opened and slammed on its own night after night, and a six-foot shadow climbed the stairs. A line of salt across the old servants' staircase only made it worse, and as the family drove away for good, he saw a bald man in a gray coat standing at the basement door.

In the spring of 1942, seven-year-old Scott Paradine was playing hooky down by the creek when a scorched metal box tumbled down the bank, packed with toys no store on Earth had ever stocked – an abacus whose beads slid off in a direction no grown-up could follow, a crystal cube full of tiny people who did whatever he thought at them, and a doll whose insides didn't match any anatomy chart. Scott and his two-year-old sister Emma figured the toys out fast, their father couldn't work them at all, and the child psychologist he brought home to dinner came away convinced the toys were teaching the kids to think in a way no adult could follow.

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

SOURCES and RESOURCES: "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" by Lewis Padgett, the pen name of Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, first published in Astounding Science Fiction, February 1943

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

Midnight In The Macabre (MITM), originally aired: October 07, 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