Podcast
Weird Darkness: Paranormal & True Crime Stories
Hosted by Darren Marlar | Weird Darkness · EN
Award-winning podcast of true stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, the strange and bizarre, true crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and unexplained -- seven days a week! Hosted by professional voice actor Darren Marlar, named one of the “Best Storytellers in Podcasting” by Podcast Business Journal.
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Jesse Butler Walks Free in Stillwater as DA Vows to Go Federal | #WeirdDarkNEWS
2d ago00:13:06Tap to summarizeA Stillwater high school student who pleaded no contest to raping and strangling two of his ex-girlfriends finished his youthful offender probation this week without a single day in prison, and a newly sworn district attorney is now asking the federal government to take the case Oklahoma no longer can.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/jessebutler20260805Look 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.
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THE GREAT AIRSHIP HOAX OF 1909: History’s Non-Existent Flying Machine
2d ago00:51:39Tap to summarizeIn 1909, all eyes turned to Worcester, Massachusetts, as a well-dressed businessman claimed he’d built a flying machine — and the world wanted to believe him so badly, they saw it in the sky whether it was there or not.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/airshiphoaxREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/ye27xce4FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: We’ll look at the crazy story of the Great Worcester Airship Hoax of 1909! *** We’ll meet a cat that must have more than nine lives, as it survived three World War Two shipwrecks and lived to meow about it! (Unsinkable Sam) *** UFO crash stories are somewhat ubiquitous, with most immediately pointing to Roswell, New Mexico… or Aurora, Texas… or even the so-called “Battle Over Los Angeles”. But there are many other stories of flying saucers crashing to Earth – and we’ll look at one that took place in Bolivia, in 1978. (The Bolivia UFO Crash) *** A hidden artifact found in a mysterious hill in Oklahoma reveals a terrifying story! (Oklahoma’s Mysterious Hollow Hill)CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:00:53.694 = Show Open 00:02:30.154 = The Great Worcester Airship Hoax of 1909, Part 100:13:35.660 = The Great Worcester Airship Hoax of 1909, Part 2 ***00:23:58.982 = Unsinkable Sam00:31:02.011 = Oklahoma’s Mysterious Hollow Hill ***00:44:45.651 = The Bolivia UFO Crash ***00:50:06.348 = Show Close*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad breakLISTEN 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:“Oklahoma’s Mysterious Hollow Hill” by Ellen Lloyd for AncientPages.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/44s54rmp,https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p86uyt7“Unsinkable Sam” by Natasha Ishak for AllThatsInteresting.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8j9nkz“The Bolivia UFO Crash” posted at Anomalien.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/3f4b2rr7“The Great Worcester Airship Hoax of 1909” from SlightlyOddFitchburg.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2adehevb,https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yckp2hh9(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, 2022On this episode of Weird Darkness, host Darren Marlar follows a flying machine that may never have flown, a cat credited with surviving three warships in a single year, a silver cylinder buried under a haunted Oklahoma mound, and a cylindrical object that tore into a Bolivian mountain in broad daylight.It opens in Worcester, Massachusetts, in December of 1909, where Wallace E. Tillinghast, vice-president of the Sure Seal Manufacturing Company, told the Boston Herald he had invented a heavier-than-air flying machine that could carry three passengers some three hundred miles at a hundred and twenty miles an hour, only a few years after the Wright brothers had struggled to keep a powered aircraft aloft for a few hundred feet. Wallace never produced the machine, yet crowds across Massachusetts and out into Arkansas, New York, Connecticut, and Rhode Island reported a mysterious airship moving silently through the night sky, with one witness in Revere describing seventy-foot wings and an engine he claimed he could hear rumbling from the ground. In Providence, a young H.P. Lovecraft cut through the excitement by identifying the light everyone was pointing at as the planet Venus. The New England Skeptical Society would later attribute the whole affair to collective wish-fulfillment, while the UFOlogist John A. Keel traced it back to an unnamed inventor who had been working his way east since the great California airship sightings of 1896, recruiting well-liked local men like Wallace to serve as the public face of a flying machine that never quite worked.From there the show crosses to the North Atlantic and the tale of Unsinkable Sam, a black-and-white tuxedo cat said to have survived three shipwrecks during a single stretch of the Second World War. As the legend runs, he began the war aboard the German battleship Bismarck, was pulled from a floating plank by the crew of the British destroyer HMSCossack after the Bismarck went down on May 27th, 1941, and was renamed Oscar. When the Cossack was torpedoed months later, the cat was said to have been rescued again, this time by the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal, which is where the nickname Unsinkable Sam took hold; after the Ark Royal itself was torpedoed on November 14th, 1941, he reportedly turned up unharmed once more and was carried off by the HMS Legion. Darren measures the story against the record, noting that Bismarck survivors recalled no cat aboard, that a well-known photograph tied to Sam actually shows a different ship's cat named Simon of the HMS Amethyst, and that the seagoing cat was a genuine naval tradition even if this particular survivor may have been assembled from several.Next comes a haunted mound outside Binger, in Caddo County, Oklahoma, and a silver cylinder said to hold the reason the local people would not go near it. The account reaches print through a 1930s newspaper clipping rediscovered by Mrs. Cossette Willoughby of San Jose, California, in which a traveling reporter digs at dawn beside a mound her friends Pat and Louis warned was watched by two phantoms, a woman by day and a headless man by night. Inside the cylinder are papers written in Castilian Spanish, describing how a soldier named Alfonzo, separated from Francisco Vázquez de Coronado's 1541 hunt for the Seven Cities of Gold, wandered into a cave and down into a hidden underground country called Kenyan, ruled by long-headed people and guarded by hairless, dog-like beasts that gave off a musty animal odor. Drawing on Timothy Green Beckley's book Subterranean Worlds Inside Earth, the segment lays out Alfonzo's account of his wife Teen, their failed escape on the back of one of those beasts, and the sentence that supposedly set their preserved bodies walking the mound to frighten off anyone who might find the passage.The episode closes on the afternoon of May 6th, 1978, when something cylindrical slammed into the El Taire mountain along the Bermejo River, on the border between the Bolivian province of Tarija and Argentina, with a supersonic blast heard 150 miles away and windowpanes cracked 30 miles out in every direction. Border policemen described a metallic object trailing white smoke; Corporal Natalio Farfan Ruiz felt the ground tremble as it fell, and Policeman Juan Hurtado said the thing passed directly over his head before it struck the slope. The Buenos Aires newspaper Clarín reported that a police chief in Tarija had located a dented metal cylinder roughly twelve feet long, and while a promised NASA expert never arrived, two United States Air Force officers, Colonel Robert Simmons and Major John Heise, did, later confirmed through released State Department documents to have flown in under a program called Project Moon Dust. Darren ends on the stranger thread running through those files, the 1127th field activities group's interest in HUMINT, the gathering of UFO information from human sources through what the documents themselves describe as a game of deceit.
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The Clockwork Confession (Ninety-Three-Year-Old Man) | #RetroRadio
3d ago05:11:23Tap to summarizeAn aging millionaire’s fixation on a battered toy car draws his family into a tense mystery rooted in a tragedy from the past.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/OTRCHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “The Hundred Dollar Difference” (May 19, 1978) ***WD00:44:49.646 = Sherlock Holmes, “Horseless Carriage” (February 24, 1947) ***WD01:13:45.557 = Mystery House, “A Killing In Market” (May 31, 1946)01:39:11.056 = Inner Sanctum, “Death Is An Artist” (January 23, 1945)02:08:47.121 = Jeff Regan, “The Man Who Came Back” (August 21, 1948) ***WD02:37:47.050 = The Key, “Ninety-Three-Year-Old Man” (1956) ***WD03:03:15.060 = Lights Out, “The Story of Mr. Maggs” (December 01, 1942) ***WD03:29:48.621 = Macabre, “Crystalline Man” (January 01, 1962) ***WD03:58:09.534 = Philip Marlowe, “Deep Shadow” (March 21, 1950)04:27:44.319 = Blackstone The Magic Magician, “The Ghost That Trapped a Killer” (October 03, 1948) ***WD04:39:26.334 = The Black Mass, “Death of Halpin Fraser” (May 20, 1964) ***WD05:10:33.358 = 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/WDRR0734
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The Birth of the Nebraska Sea – The Ocean That Ate the Midwest | #MidnightInTheMacabre
3d ago00:27:00Tap to summarizeIt started with dust instead of smoke over an empty stretch of Colorado in the summer of 1973, and by the time anyone understood what the land was actually doing, the middle of the country had already begun to drop.EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/mitm-nebraskaseaSOURCES and RESOURCES:“The Great Nebraska Sea” by Allan Danzig (Galaxy Magazine August 1963)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Midnight In The Macabre (MITM), originally aired: August 05, 2026
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(AUG 04, 2026 UPDATE) Siders Case: Grandfather Freed, All Four Now Seek Competency | #WeirdDarkNEWS
3d ago00:07:15Tap to summarizeOne Siders defendant walks free on a signature bond. The last of the four asks a judge whether she's fit to stand trial at all.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/SidersCase20260804Siders Case: Vinton County Child Endangerment Case, July 15 Coverage – Weird DarkNEWSThe Siders Family's Other House and Their Years Off the Grid – Weird DarkNEWS, July 22The 16 Siders Children: Vinton County Seeks Permanent Custody – Weird DarkNEWS, July 29Look 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.
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A Disc Beside the Wing: Gatwick's Flying-Saucer Airprox | #WeirdDarkNEWS
3d ago00:05:50Tap to summarizeA commercial crew descending into Gatwick watched a dark-rimmed disc pass within a few hundred feet of the right wing, and the radar recorded nothing there at all.SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/gatwicksaucer/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.
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Montague Summers – The Priest Who Hunted Vampires, Witches, and Werewolves” #WeirdDarkness
3d ago01:06:59Tap to summarizeDressed 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/montaguesummersREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/montague20260803FEATURED 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 Foreboding00:01:19.350 = Show Open00:04:01.662 = Montague Summers Believed In Monsters00:12:33.941 = Visiting Our Next Door Neighbors in a Parallel Universe ***00:16:55.866 = Code Black: The USS Kennedy UFO Incident00:27:48.566 = Murder in Texas: The Strange Death of Joan Robinson Hill ***00:36:51.664 = The Man Who Survived An Atomic Blast Through His Skull00:40:06.356 = Walking Dead: The Syndrome That Makes You Think You Are Deceased00:46:04.042 = The Witch, The Shadow, and the Secrets of Bloods Point ***00:51:53.221 = The Grinning Man: The Legend of Indrid Cold01:05:38.345 = Show Close*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad breakLISTEN 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
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Naked Man Claiming to Be Jesus Crashes Into Detroit Church | #WeirdDarkNEWS
4d ago00:04:58Tap to summarizeAround 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/NakedJesusCrashLook 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.
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The Harmon Children: Six Dead in a Mechanicville Apartment | #WeirdDarkNEWS
4d ago00:13:36Tap to summarizeSix 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/HarmonChildren20260804Look 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.
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THE STATEMENT OF RANDOLPH CARTER (H.P. Lovecraft) | #MidnightInTheMacabre
4d ago00:17:24Tap to summarizeTwo 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-randolphcarterSOURCES 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
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