Five prisoners are kept awake for fifteen days in a sealed chamber — and what the researchers find when they open the door no longer wants to be set free. A blockbuster film series trails a string of real-life deaths its cast can't explain. On the back roads of Maryland, a half-goat figure waits for teenagers who wander too far. And one ordinary night in El Paso, a couple walks out of their home — dishes still in the sink, cat unfed — and is never seen again.

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

READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/3rr9mhjx

FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: The Russian Sleep Experiment *** The Poltergeist Film Curse *** The Goat-Man of Maryland *** The Patterson Family Disappearance *** The Legend of the Leprechaun

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding
00:01:06.939 = Show Open
00:01:55.409 = The Poltergeist Curse
00:06:21.074 = The Goatman of Prince George’s County
00:14:07.417 = The Lore of the Leprechaun ***
00:16:55.345 = Vanishing of the Pattersons
00:27:39.437 = The Russian Sleep Experiment ***
00:43:05.653 = Show Close
*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad break

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SOURCES and RESOURCES:
“The Russian Sleep Experiment”: http://bit.ly/36mHCc9
"Leprechaun: One Of The Most Famous And Powerful Creatures Of The Irish Faerie Folk" (link no longer available)
“The El Paso Vanishing (What Happened To The Pattersons?)”: http://bit.ly/2JHq3cW
“Maryland’s Goat-Man Is Half Man, Half Goat, and Out For Blood”: http://bit.ly/2pEciVw
“The Poltergeist Curse?”: http://bit.ly/36oH857
(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 22, 2018
Weird Darkness travels from a cursed Hollywood film set to a Maryland goat-monster, the cobbler-fairies of Irish legend, a vanished El Paso couple, and a blood-soaked Soviet sleep laboratory where the test subjects no longer wanted to be set free.It opens with the deaths that shadow the Poltergeist films, beginning with Heather O'Rourke, who played Carol Anne Freeling from the original 1982 release through both sequels and died at twelve in San Diego in February 1986 during surgery for a bowel obstruction later traced to a congenital intestinal flaw. Dominique Dunne, who played older sister Dana Freeling, was strangled in 1982 by John Sweeney outside her Hollywood home, and Sweeney served just three years and seven months. Julian Beck, the gaunt preacher Kane of Poltergeist II, died of stomach cancer in 1983, and Will Sampson, who played the shaman Taylor, died after a heart-lung transplant — four deaths that fed a curse legend later thickened by JoBeth Williams' claim that Steven Spielberg used real human skeletons as cheaper props and by Sampson's own ritual cleansing of the set.From there the episode crosses into Prince George's County, Maryland, where the Goatman has stalked local legend for decades. One origin story sets him at the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, a half-man, half-goat creature born from a USDA experiment gone wrong; another makes him a herdsman driven mad after teenagers slaughtered his flock. University of Maryland folklorist Barry Pearson traces his heyday to the 1970s and the 1971 decapitation of a puppy named Ginger in Bowie, an incident the Washington Post covered and locals pinned on the creature haunting Fletchertown and Lottsford roads, while Beltsville spokesperson Kim Kaplan dryly wonders whether a goatman that old would be collecting Social Security by now.Next the show turns to Irish folklore and the leprechaun, the solitary fairy whose name traces to a Gaelic root for a small body or a shoemaker. Standing two to three feet tall in a green or red coat and buckled shoes, he works as a fairy cobbler who stitches only a single shoe and never a pair, guards a hidden pot of gold, and trades three wishes for his freedom when a human manages to catch him. He lives in cave networks reached through rabbit holes and the hollow trunks of fairy trees, and damaging one of those trees is said to draw a lifetime of bad luck.From the green hills of Ireland the episode moves to El Paso, Texas, where William and Margaret Patterson left their home at 3000 Piedmont Drive on March 5, 1957 and were never seen again, dinner dishes still in the sink and their cat Tommy left without food. The owners of Patterson Photo Supply vanished without packing a suitcase, their associate Doyle Kirkland turned up driving William's Cadillac with a thin story about a vacation, and a telegram from Dallas signed with the wrong middle initial named Kirkland as William's replacement at the store. Decades on, caretaker Reinaldo Nangre claimed he had cleaned blood from the garage and found a piece of scalp on the boat propeller before dying in a car crash, and Sheriff Leo Samaniego floated the theory that the couple were Soviet spies photographing Fort Bliss, leaving a disappearance that was declared a death in 1964 and has never been solved.The episode closes in the late 1940s, when Soviet researchers sealed five political prisoners in a chamber and kept them awake for fifteen days with an experimental gas-based stimulant, promising freedom in exchange for thirty sleepless days. Paranoia set in after five days, screaming after nine, and when the chamber was opened on the fifteenth the soldiers found four men still alive amid their own torn-out organs, having eaten their own flesh and blocked the floor drain with it, fighting any attempt to remove them and begging for the gas rather than sleep. One subject, pinned for surgery without anesthetic, wrote only the words "keep cutting," and as the last of them was shot through the heart he claimed to be the madness that lurks in every sleeping mind, choking out that he was so nearly free.