Weird Darkness: Paranormal & True Crime Stories
Darren Marlar | Weird Darkness
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Darren Marlar | Weird Darkness
▶ WebplayerAward-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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Nov 14, 2026 · 5:07:14
“The Glass Bubble”: Doris has lived since she was a baby in a room eight feet square and white from floor to ceiling, and from her bed there she knew the family cat lay dead on…
Nov 14, 2026 · 1:11:15
Japanese urban legend says a woman cut in half by a train drags herself through the stations on her hands at up to 93 miles an hour, and the first sign she's close is the…
Nov 13, 2026 · 5:51
In the American Midwest around 1700, a tribe with no name hides in the snow-covered wilderness, though its rituals carry for miles. One night a girl who's just old enough to…
Nov 13, 2026 · 5:02:12
A tall young woman who seems to be made of gold, whose written plea says she's never been able to speak, steps up for the Messenger Lawrence's healing touch in front of thousands…
Nov 13, 2026 · 44:00
On a brightly lit stage in a London public hall in 1934, a young scientist wearing a device he called the Electro-Helmet stepped into an open-front cabinet, reached up to press…
Nov 12, 2026 · 17:43
Ryan Corbus goes to sleep in his own bed and wakes up in a blue jumpsuit behind a wall of frosted glass, where an old man in red tells him the ship has been orbiting Earth since…
Nov 12, 2026 · 11:29
On August 14th, 2005, the Davidson family found two circles of flattened pea plants in their field near Aneroid, Saskatchewan, and four days later, eighteen miles away, one of…
Nov 12, 2026 · 27:08
A search party in South Carolina comes across a patch of freshly disturbed ground in the woods and starts to dig. Police officers in Wales ask a man where his mother is, and he…
Nov 12, 2026 · 51:17
Strangers in dozens of countries now meet over tea and cake to talk openly about dying, and in New Zealand, retirees gather every week to build and paint the coffins they'll one…
Nov 12, 2026 · 5:00:12
On vacation in Taxco, Mexico, an 18-year-old American watches a woman stabbed in an upstairs window by a hand wearing a blood-red ring, and a few days later her father's old…
Nov 11, 2026 · 5:03:57
Jane Pryor comes home from Vienna to visit her father at a famous seaside clinic, is told at the door that he died two weeks ago, and is talked into staying on at a place where…
Nov 11, 2026 · 10:50
In September 1988, a boy with a slingshot found Joaquim Sebastião Gonçalves in the marsh grass at São Paulo's Billings Reservoir, three days after he'd swum across the water to…
Nov 11, 2026 · 30:39
A space zoologist sends his mind into the creatures of a jungle planet to judge whether it's safe for colonists, and finds thousands of insects in the treetops sitting perfectly…
Nov 11, 2026 · 43:31
An inmate at a federal prison in New Jersey told the FBI that a "thing" crawled into his throat and that his cellmate was helping the demon inside him grow, according to the…
Nov 11, 2026 · 1:12:30
It’s two sentences. The first is Bloody Mary as kids still play it. The second is the 1700s mirror ritual: girls ate an apple at a candlelit mirror and watched for a face over…
Nov 10, 2026 · 23:27
A mail carrier finds a mailbox taped shut and a note on the front door that says "9-1-1 Inside". In Spain, a woman lifts the lid of her late mother's chest freezer and finds a…
Nov 10, 2026 · 40:30
In the sleet of a Cincinnati November in 1880, a grave robber collapses in the grave he’s digging, wide awake and unable to move, and his partner can’t find a pulse. SOURCES and…
Nov 10, 2026 · 12:10
In May 1973, Judy Doraty pulled over outside Houston to watch a strange light in the sky, and years later, under hypnosis, she described a cow lifted into a chamber aboard a…
Nov 10, 2026 · 41:23
Li Shizhen, a 16th-century Chinese apothecary, wrote of aged holy men in Arabia who ate nothing but honey until they died, then lay sealed in honey for a century to become a…
Nov 9, 2026 · 5:09:11
On a domed colony on Neptune in the year 2120, a young man who wants to stop thinking, hands his living body over to a doctor, and the doctor's wife can't understand why she's…
Nov 9, 2026 · 1:10:22
Legend says a mermaid driven out of a village cursed the shores of Nevada's Pyramid Lake, where locals say someone vanishes at least once a year during fishing season; on Italy's…
Nov 9, 2026 · 14:41
In the Algonquian stories of the Great Lakes winter woods, a man who eats human flesh to survive comes back as the Wendigo, a giant of skin and bone that grows hungrier with…
Nov 9, 2026 · 16:57
In the year 2200, the man who tried to conquer the solar system is dropped onto the frozen surface of Pluto and left there to die, and as he stands alone on the ice cursing…
Nov 9, 2026 · 1:39:55
Michigan's Old Presque Isle Lighthouse had been out of service for more than a century when the Coast Guard pulled out its wiring in 1979 to stop an amber light that kept glowing…
Nov 9, 2026 · 13:35
In September 1967, Harry King found his sister's Appaloosa, Lady, on her side near Alamosa, Colorado, with the flesh stripped from her head and neck, no blood on the ground, and…
Nov 8, 2026 · 12:31
Every shift, night nurse Dana talks to Thomas Bellamy, the coma patient in Room 4A who hasn't stirred in five years, and one rainy night at Pinehurst Memorial he sits bolt…
Nov 8, 2026 · 52:41
A boy rides for days in his uncle's cab beside bags he's told are garbage, and police say the bags held his parents. In England, a man confesses to a killing nearly twenty-eight…
Nov 8, 2026 · 1:03:20
The press called Aileen Wuornos America's first female serial killer, and in 1998 an FBI profiler went further, saying there were no female serial killers at all. Jack the…
Nov 7, 2026 · 4:58:05
The people who visit Evan Bolivar never seem to leave, and when one of their cars finally pulls out of his driveway at dawn, Bolivar is behind the wheel alone, so Alan Pearson's…
Nov 7, 2026 · 24:59
Police in England ask a man where his friend has been, and as they walk him out of his flat, he tells them she's in the freezer. In a village in western India, a mother comes…
Nov 7, 2026 · 31:36
For years, a man in eastern Baltimore County would walk to the edge of the deep woods behind his neighborhood, and stare into the trees until he could feel something in there…
Nov 7, 2026 · 10:20
Three young listeners wrote this week's stories. Ben starts hearing scratching at his bedroom door, just like the boy in the scary movie he can't stop thinking about; Annie…
Nov 7, 2026 · 56:43
A mummified three-fingered hand with eight-inch fingers came out of a tunnel behind a stone door in the Peruvian desert, and the doctors in Cusco who X-rayed it found real bone…
Nov 7, 2026 · 5:00:33
At three in the morning, a spacecraft lands on the White House lawn and carries the president away, and when it brings him home 24 hours later just as promised, his daughter is…
Nov 6, 2026 · 11:46
Terry Sherman fired four revolver rounds and two rifle shots at a wolf three times the size of anything he expected on his Utah land, and it walked into the trees, its tracks…
Nov 6, 2026 · 5:08:55
All The Time In The World: Small-time con man Harry picks up his old cellmate at the gates of the state pen on the day the man finishes a 99-year sentence, and since his friend…
Nov 6, 2026 · 22:43
On Waterfield's planet, the mining ship's psychologist dresses up as a jeweled king to impress the local chieftain, and the chief sends back a gift: a seven-foot,…
Nov 6, 2026 · 42:08
The Massachusetts hospital that Arkham Asylum is based on was built for 450 patients and crowded with more than 2,000, and today people live in apartments built into what's left…
Nov 5, 2026 · 41:46
A Georgia man calls 911 to report that his mother has been abducted by aliens. On a canal bank in eastern India, a few dogs are tearing at something wrapped in plastic. On…
Nov 5, 2026 · 21:04
Seventeen-year-old Billy Weaver steps off the train in Bath on a freezing night looking for a cheap room, and a BED AND BREAKFAST notice in a window holds his eye so hard that he…
Nov 5, 2026 · 5:06:56
Watchers Of The Light: A small-town teacher goes for a lifeguard physical, and the doctor's X-rays show his heart beating on the right side of his chest and his liver turned…
Nov 5, 2026 · 5:08:35
The Fall of Gentryville: Overnight, the mountain village of Gentryville and all six hundred of its people vanish, and full-grown elm trees stand where the general store was the…
Nov 5, 2026 · 39:11
In June 1999 a passing motorist spotted Ricky McCormick's badly decomposed body in a cornfield in West Alton, Missouri, and in the pocket of his jeans were two handwritten pages…
Nov 4, 2026 · 1:02:11
For thousands of years people have wondered why some dreams keep returning to a place they've never been, or show events that haven't happened yet. One theory links those dreams…
Nov 4, 2026 · 24:11
A news blogger tracks down the people who worked at an abandoned country daycare, and the kids who went there, to learn what was in the room behind the gray door, where the…
Nov 4, 2026 · 1:38:05
A man in zombie makeup walks out onto the back patio during comedy night at an Austin coffee bar and picks up a knife. A mother and daughter go missing from a village in eastern…
Nov 3, 2026 · 32:31
The No End House pays $500 to anyone who reaches the last of its nine rooms, and nobody ever has. David's friend Peter Terry goes silent online for five weeks after his own try,…
Nov 3, 2026 · 1:09:16
Maryland families once painted seven-pointed stars on their barns to keep away the Snallygaster, a dragon-like bird said to drink its victims' blood, and when sightings near…
Nov 3, 2026 · 5:10:17
An uncle in Fresno tells his nephew, a Hollywood photographer, that he'll be dead within a week, then leaves him everything on one condition: he has to check the locks on the…
Nov 2, 2026 · 59:38
In a jungle prison colony where the only way out is a river full of caimans and ratfish, a lifer who weaves hats for the commandant keeps a carved knuckle bone and a bag of…
Nov 2, 2026 · 4:49:04
Charlie and Charlotte Tucker pay two hundred dollars for a dead minister's grandfather clock at a garage sale, and the seller swears it doesn't chime, though it struck one as…
Nov 2, 2026 · 1:39:30
On Easter Sunday, 1975, eight children hunted for eggs in the front yard of their grandmother's house in Hamilton, Ohio, while their uncle, James Ruppert, slept off a night of…
Nov 1, 2026 · 48:43
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow has a pumpkin, a headless Hessian, and a schoolmaster everybody feels sorry for. Disney gave us a lovable Ichabod Crane and Tim Burton gave us a hero.…
Nov 1, 2026 · 25:14
Two days after alien visitors wiped out the human race in a single hour, a widowed anthropology professor sits alone in a room with his books and one blank wall that annoys him,…
Oct 31, 2026 · 9:59:10
Halloween horror the way radio told it, with an organ sting, a host’s voice coming out of the dark, and a story nobody wanted to switch off before the end. CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS…
Oct 31, 2026 · 9:59:13
Ghosts, killers, and things that knock on the door after dark, played by the actors and sound-effects crews of radio's golden age for audiences who had nothing to look at but the…
Oct 31, 2026 · 9:57:08
Old radio horror for Halloween, from the years when the monsters came out of a wooden cabinet in the living room and every listener had to picture them on their own. CHAPTERS &…
Oct 31, 2026 · 24:44
It's still Halloween night in Grove City, Ohio, when Shawn Dyer wakes up on the damp grass of Marsh Cemetery, across Home Road from Gantz Park, and watches a jack-o'-lantern…
Oct 31, 2026 · 1:21:59
The Headless Horseman rides through Sleepy Hollow, a phantom ship sails out of a storm, and Bess Houdini holds a séance every Halloween hoping to hear from her husband, in…
Oct 31, 2026 · 5:55:06
No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that intelligent life beyond Earth was watching us. Studying us. Envying us. When massive cylinders fell…
Oct 31, 2026 · 1:18:02
A nervous teenager at a Finley garage sale warns a new kid not to buy the five-dollar scarecrow sitting in a chair by the house, then tells the story of the Murphy family's…
Oct 31, 2026 · 1:05:27
The 1938 radio drama of “War of the Worlds” by H.G. Wells, as performed by Mercury Radio Theater and Orson Welles. SOURCES… “War of the Worlds” by H.G. Wells. Radio script by…
Oct 30, 2026 · 24:57
In the glass-roofed New York of 2432, a bestselling author of caveman and cowboy adventures and his bride, a poet of birdsong and sunsets, bribe the operator of the Cosmic…
Oct 30, 2026 · 5:13:31
Stranded on the Saskatchewan prairie with his world-famous wife, a five-time Nobel Prize winner refuses to fix their stalled car, certain that tonight he'll finally meet his…
Oct 30, 2026 · 31:33
A terrifying urban legend meant to scare children became all too real when a former janitor turned the shadows of Staten Island into his hunting ground. READ or DOWNLOAD the full…
Oct 29, 2026 · 33:08
In a California gold camp abandoned by everyone but the dead, a prospector follows an old letter from his late friend, the camp's grave digger, to a vein of gold hidden beneath a…
Oct 29, 2026 · 1:01:14
Twenty-two stories, starting with a tourism official's glowing photo on a Gettysburg ghost tour and running through a Ugandan general's cannibal claim, white-powder letters to…
Oct 29, 2026 · 1:15:06
In January 1948, Captain Thomas Mantell chased a huge metallic object across the Kentucky sky in his P-51 Mustang and kept climbing after both of his wingmen turned back, and…
Oct 28, 2026 · 5:02:44
A Queens bar owner takes a jolt from his TV set that stops his heart, then wakes up able to read tomorrow's front page in his head, and the first thing he does is call his…
Oct 28, 2026 · 40:12
Lost in a Colorado snowstorm, a man who's fallen behind on his child support pulls into a roadside diner called The Silver Line just as it's closing, and the huge, cheerful man…
Oct 28, 2026 · 5:01:00
A man who runs a plant that builds nuclear reactors calls his wife to say he'll be home in twenty minutes for their anniversary dinner, walks in a full day later with wilted…
Oct 28, 2026 · 1:07:40
Grieving families in the Victorian era paid good money for a few minutes with their dead, and the mediums who took that money had help, from props hidden up their sleeves to…
Oct 27, 2026 · 30:21
In 2025, Louisiana’s corrections secretary said Jessie Hoffman’s nitrogen execution “went flawless”, and a journalist counted more than 225 heaving breaths from Anthony Boyd…
Oct 27, 2026 · 47:38
Twelve stories, starting with a Roswell officer's sealed statement about bodies under a tarp, now sitting in the Pentagon's newest UFO files, and running through a voice on a…
Oct 27, 2026 · 31:56
Twenty years after his father walked out, Josh gets a letter saying the man's dead and has left him a cabin in the Montana woods. Inside, there's a shelf full of matches and not…
Oct 27, 2026 · 5:06:26
On her walk home from the bank, Dory hears her mother's voice in her head, throws her shoulders back, and holds her head high, then looks down to find her shadow still hunched…
Oct 27, 2026 · 1:36:05
On the night of November 2nd, 1966, a sewing machine salesman named Woodrow Derenberger was driving home on Interstate 77 outside Parkersburg, West Virginia, when a craft shaped…
Oct 26, 2026 · 5:15:24
Lost in the Newfoundland fog on the way to see their daughter and baby grandson, a couple from Brampton, Ontario, picks up a hitchhiker who sends them to the Eternity Cove Hotel…
Oct 26, 2026 · 33:30
Dex and Trey talk a friend into a few days of camping at a spot Dex's cousin swears by, four miles uphill from the car, and the girl he's been crushing on for almost a year is…
Oct 26, 2026 · 1:28:21
The night is coming. Porch lights and decorations won't change what moves through the darkness on October 31st. Every plastic skeleton dangling from a suburban tree, every…
Oct 26, 2026 · 56:21
Fifteen stories, starting with the therapist who told a Boston jury about Sandra Birchmore's dead mother at the foot of the bed, holding Sandra's unborn baby, and running through…
Oct 26, 2026 · 59:48
Mary Collins was a 20-year-old Charlotte woman with a genetic disorder her family says left her with roughly the mental capacity of a 15-year-old, and on March 28th, 2020, as…
Oct 25, 2026 · 36:02
Ohio, Alabama and Idaho searched five men for veins in seven years, starting in 2017, and then sent them back to their cells alive. Alabama came back for two of them, Alan Miller…
Oct 25, 2026 · 17:15
Soon after 1870, at a boarding school near London, the Latin master makes a noise in his throat and rushes out of the room partway through marking an exercise, and when the boys…
Oct 25, 2026 · 5:08:56
A broke freelance journalist talks his way into a night alone in the cellar of Marriner's Waxworks, sitting with his back to the wax figure of a Paris throat-cutter the police…
Oct 25, 2026 · 1:44:13
Nine-year-old Walter Collins headed out to the movies in Los Angeles on March 10th, 1928, and didn't come home. Five months later the LAPD handed his mother a boy who'd turned up…
Oct 24, 2026 · 29:23
Just over a week ago, Terry McKinnon caught up with Harriet Hartman in a motel room and put bullets into her chest, and she barely flinched; she had him by the throat before she…
Oct 24, 2026 · 24:20
On Halloween night in Grove City, Ohio, Lucy Buxton's dad drives her and Shawn Dyer to Gantz Park with two flashlights and a thirty-minute limit, so they can look for the Blood…
Oct 24, 2026 · 26:58
Eric Sherman finally has a farmhouse with no HOA, no neighbors complaining about his Halloween displays, and plenty of room for his props, until a loose floorboard at the foot of…
Oct 24, 2026 · 31:07
In 2014, Ohio killed Dennis McGuire with a drug pair no one in the country had used in an execution, Oklahoma laid a sheet over Clayton Lockett's needle while the drugs went into…
Oct 24, 2026 · 1:20:13
Mary Mallon insisted she had never had typhoid in her life, and in March 1907, when a health department doctor brought police and an ambulance to the Park Avenue house where she…
Oct 23, 2026 · 5:01:24
On a stormy night with the phone lines down and her baby barely breathing, Madeline Hunter drags a blazing log out of the fireplace without knowing why, and only afterward…
Oct 23, 2026 · 40:02
A silent-film director is found shot in his bungalow with every lamp in the house still burning, and a private eye from the east is paid to find the letters before the police do.…
Oct 23, 2026 · 29:40
The drug turned to gel in John Wayne Gacy's IV tube, Christina Riggs took the needles in her wrists, and Florida pushed them through both of Angel Diaz's veins. In Ohio, Joseph…
Oct 23, 2026 · 4:58:06
A woman rents a cheap, secluded house in Cornwall that comes with a housekeeper she isn't allowed to turn away, and she can't work out how a kitchen she left a wreck late at…
Oct 23, 2026 · 40:05
Eleven stories, starting with an 18-month-old found breathing in a Gilbert, Arizona, hospital morgue hours after he was pronounced dead, and running through a beheading in West…
Oct 23, 2026 · 1:29:54
Early on November 30th, 1989, Linda Cortile says gray beings floated her out of her 12th-floor window in lower Manhattan and into a hovering craft, and two security men later…
Oct 22, 2026 · 13:32
Charles "Snake" Stuart says he found an eight-foot Bigfoot dead in New York's Adirondacks, that a Cornell University DNA report shows what it is, and that Cornell has until 5:00…
Oct 22, 2026 · 11:47
On the night the beings from Alpha Centauri were due to land in 1949, every star in the sky over Mount Wilson blinked out for a full minute, and nobody seemed to notice except…
Oct 22, 2026 · 21:46
In Florida’s electric chair, a flame rose from under Pedro Medina’s headpiece and Allen Lee Davis bled through his white shirt. On the needle side, Raymond Landry’s IV line blew…
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