You can rent a bedroom where a little girl in a yellow dress still hums lullabies, a miner's casita in a Texas ghost town, or a schoolhouse tucked inside a working cemetery — and every one of these haunted Airbnbs is bookable tonight.

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

READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/3s9xb4bt

FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Spending the night in a haunted house is always unnerving, but would you pay for the experience? If you’re looking for a spooky escape, maybe you could try a haunted AirBNB! You might not rest in peace in these haunted homes, but you're bound to have a memorable night preparing for paranormal activity, seeking the supernatural, and greeting ghosts. (Book A Stay At a Haunted AirBNB) *** Sawney Bean, said to be the leader of a 45-member clan in Scotland, is infamously accused of murdering and cannibalizing over 1,000 people in the early 16th century. His story inspired the horror film, ‘The Hills Have Eyes.’ But did Sawney Bean ever truly exist? (The Man Who Inspired ‘The Hills Have Eyes’) *** Nestled in the Kentish Weald, the quaint village of Stalisfield boasts a thousand-year-old church and timeless tranquility. But beneath its serene surface, whispers of ancient pagan rites and dark ceremonies linger. Could the chilling past of sacrificial rituals still echo through the village today? (The Stalisfield Blade) *** As dusk fell, a pickup truck pulled up to a motel outside Tarzana. Inside, Brother Elzibah and his monks prepared for a perilous mission, recording martyr statements and arming themselves with explosives. Their target on December 10, 1958: Krishna Venta, a self-styled prophet in Box Canyon. This night promised a dramatic showdown that would mark a violent chapter in the history of American spiritual communes, and the country’s cults. (The Bizarre Story Behind The Suicide Bombing Of A Southern California Cult)

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding
00:01:41.053 = Show Open
00:04:08.300 = Book A Stay At a Haunted AirBNB
00:27:56.736 = The Man Who Inspired ‘The Hills Have Eyes’ ***
00:32:42.960 = The Stalisfield Blade
00:40:06.667 = The Bizarre Story Behind the Suicide Bombing of a Southern California Cult ***
00:51:40.417 = Show Close
*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad break

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*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*

SOURCES and RESOURCES:
“The Stalisfield Blade” by Ken DaSilva-Hill (used with permission)
“The Bizarre Story Behind The Suicide Bombing Of A SoCal Cult” by Mattew Duersten, LAist, December 10, 2018: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4s27xpf7
“The Man Who Inspired ‘The Hills Have Eyes’” source: Leah Silverman at AllThatsInteresting.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8zy3ec
“Book A Stay At a Haunted AirBNB” sources: Lauren Mack at TimeOut.com, https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4h75fc6c; Daily Barringer and Caitlin Morton at Thrillest.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8eubbj; Jersey Griggs at TheDiscoverer.com, https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yttxryn6; Marissa Laliberte at Reader’s Digest:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p86y2em; Julie Pennell at Today.com, https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2kwzmdfs; Alexa Erickson at FamilyHandyman.com, https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8w39nh
(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: April 29, 2024
This episode of Weird Darkness roams from haunted rental homes you can book for the night to a Scottish cannibal legend, a Kentish village's whispered sacrifice rites, and the dynamite that ended a Southern California cult.It opens with a tour of haunted Airbnbs scattered across the United States and beyond, from Hobo Hill House in Jefferson City, Missouri — a 1910 American Foursquare where sightings of a man in a top hat drove the Clark family out and onto "The Dead Files" — to the Parks-Bowman Mansion in New Orleans, where guests booking the dead girl's bedroom report a young spirit in a yellow dress who hums lullabies and paces with a limp. The Kahn Hotel in Jefferson, Texas has logged over 300 paranormal investigations and one recording of a woman's scream followed by a gunshot; Farnam Manor in Richfield, Ohio traces its haunting to the owner's daughter drowning in a well in 1834; and a converted 1900 schoolhouse sits inside Cedar Park Cemetery in Hudson, New York, complete with an 18th-century opium wedding bed. The Creole Mansion in New Orleans, built in 1855 for Louise Vitry, and the Terlingua ghost-town casita overlooking Big Bend round out a list that stretches from Salem, Massachusetts to York, England.From there the episode turns to Sawney Bean, the legendary patriarch of a 45-member clan said to have lived in Bennane Cave along the Scottish coast, robbing, murdering, and cannibalizing more than 1,000 travelers across roughly 25 years before King James VI led a manhunt that ended in the men being executed and the women burned at the stake. Historical records first mention Bean in 1755, a century after he supposedly lived, and Scottish historian Dr. Louise Yeoman argues the tale may have started as English propaganda, with the name "Sawney" serving as a period slur against Scots. Wes Craven credited the Bean legend as the direct inspiration for his film The Hills Have Eyes.Next comes Stalisfield, a tiny hamlet in the Kentish Weald with a thousand-year-old church and The Plough Inn, where old villagers speak of pagan harvest rites tied to a flint sacrifice knife hewn from Kentish stone. The stories describe animals slaughtered on a sarsen stone and, in the darkest tellings, a golden-haired virgin tied to a stake, dismembered with the flint blade, her blood collected in a golden vessel and her ashes mixed with seed and scattered into the corners of the fields — corners locals still avoid after dark, marked by their overgrowth.The episode closes with Krishna Venta, born Francis Herman Pencovic in San Francisco in 1911, a barefoot self-styled prophet who claimed to have been born half a million years earlier on a planet called Neophrates and founded the WKFL Foundation on a 23-acre glen in Box Canyon. Two disaffected monks, Ralph Muller and Peter Kamenoff — who had taken the names Elzibah and Jeroham and accused Venta of sleeping with their wives — recorded martyr statements at a Tarzana motel and drove to the commune on December 10, 1958 with twenty sticks of dynamite in a musette bag. The blast lifted the top off the stone monastery, was heard more than 20 miles away, and killed ten people, including Venta, Cardinal Gene, and two children from the dormitories, seven-year-old Keela Baker and eleven-year-old Elwyn; survivors later scattered into other movements, among them members who died in Jonestown alongside Jim Jones' Peoples Temple in 1978.