Just Plain Weird Episodes

This week it's a summertime holiday story for the summertime holiday season as Sean introduces us to the creature fondly remembered as the Sandown Clown. This C-team cryptid (maybe) is reported to have chatted with two vacationing children on the Isle of Wight one warm day in 1973, introducing itself, "Hello and I am all colors, Sam." The "clown's" eye-catching appearance and inescapable high strangeness have made it a favorite of ghost, cryptid and alien hunters despite the single alleged si...

[Obvious TW this week for discussion of suicide.] Over the years, certain songs have attracted dark reputations. Reputations like that the songs might drive you made enough to end your own life... or make others made enough to end another's. This week, we discuss 3 famous examples of these "suicide songs": the morosely melancholic "Gloomy Sunday", the sinister legend of the Lavender Town Syndrome, and the very real rash of "My Way" murders, centered within Philippines karaoke culture. Can a son...

This week, Carrie takes us on a trip back to the 1930s Mississippi Delta with the mysterious story of Robert Johnson, American blues icon and “first ever rock star.” Johnson has long been identified with the legend that he, desperate to become an incredible guitarist, went down to the crossroads one dark night and sold his soul to the Devil for musical glory. Did Johnson really make some kind of Faustian bargain with Satan himself? If not, how did he go from no-talent blues wannabe to musical v...

This week we tiptoe around the border between worlds, in an episode dedicated to fairy photography! Taken between 1917 and 1920 by two young girls, the Cottingley Fairy photographs seem to depict tiny, dance-happy fairies (and, in one weird case, a sneaky gnome) playing with the human children. Over the decades the Cottingley Fairy pictures have fascinated many fans of the occult - most famously Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who would dedicate a surprising portion of the 1920s...

More than 10,000 people (and, honorarily, one dog) have been made Catholic saints in the more than 2,000 years that the religion has existed - and in all that time, there are bound to be some crazy stories along the way. Inspired by the holiday season, reformed Catholics Carrie & Sean go through some of the wildest backstories of the saints this week, including tales of stigmata, possible fraud, religious ecstasy, incorruptible remains, holy relics, and a wide variety of absolutely brutal deaths...

1984's A Nightmare on Elm Street introduced the world to Freddy Krueger, the besweatered slasher who kills teenagers in their dreams. But Wes Craven says he based his most iconic creation on a real-life horror: a plague of young men dying in their sleep, seemingly during nightmares, that hit the U.S. in the late '70s and early '80s. Where did these victims come from? How did they die? What exactly gave Craven the inspiration to create one of the most recognizable horror characters of all time? ...

Have you ever heard anything that you couldn't explain? The most mysterious sounds in the world vary from impossibly loud deep sea groans to possibly Biblical trumpets calling in the sky. And many, chillingly enough, still have no real scientific explanations. The stories of mysterious sounds we're exploring today include: ...The Bloop, the loudest undersea noise ever recorded, ...The Sky Trumpets and Well to Hell, two completely opposite sides of the maybe-Biblical coin, ...And assorted soun...

On February 19th, 1994, 31-year-old Gloria Ramirez was rushed to Riverside General Hospital after suffering severe heart palpitations, possibly caused by her advanced cervical cancer. In the ER, hospital staff began to work to try and save Gloria's life - and that's where the strangeness started. Nurses, residents, and technicians alike began to complain of severe symptoms after Gloria's blood was taken, noting a strange chemical-like smell coming from her body. Then, these very same seasoned...

After a few weeks of brutality, Carrie returns with a slightly silly tale from pre-WW2 Britain: the story of Gef, a trickster entity (or spirit? or poltergeist? or cryptid? or...) who presented himself as a talking mongoose to the Irving family, and both harassed and cozied up with the Irvings until the end of World War II. Gef, as he preferred to be called, allegedly told the Irvings - father James, mother Margaret, and 13-year-old daughter Voirrey - that he was the spirit of an Indian mongo...

Can you imagine a hunger so deep it can never be filled, no matter how you try or what you eat? Cravings wracking your whole existence, pushing you past the limits of biology, decency and morality? That was the constant condition of Tarrare, the hungriest man who ever lived. This week, Sean tells the fascinating, morbid and entirely disgusting story of the eighteenth century French peasant, street performer, polyphage and unlikely spy who really would do anything for a meal...and we mean anyt...

What would your last words be, if you knew you were about to die? Would you go out with a joke, a last "I love you"...or an expression of regret? This week, Sean takes us on a tour of his favorite last words throughout the ages, from Pythagoras to Groucho Marx. Assassins, revolutionaries, kings and criminals - everyone has to reach the finish line sometime, and some do with such grace, dignity and courage that their words bring comfort and inspiration down through the ages. Others... don't...

From 1962 to 1972, the U.S. government ran a top-secret program that teleported child spies through space and time. At least, that's the claim of Andrew Basiago, former time traveler and holder of the hotly contested title of "Strangest 2016 Presidential Candidate." Join us for a tour through Basiago's meeting with George Washington, his failed presidential bid, his childhood teleportation experiments, and his jaunts on Mars with a teenaged Barack Obama. ___________________________________...

In November 1987, one of the weirdest moments of TV history happened right underneath the noses of the Chicago viewing public. That night a mysterious figure wearing a full-head "Max Headroom" mask invaded the broadcasts of local Chicago TV stations WGN and WTTW. Initially, on WGN, the masked marauder was only able to cut in for about 30 seconds before the transmission was re-seized by network engineers...but on WTTW, which was airing an innocuous Doctor Who rerun, the signal hijacking would ...

If you're looking for a well-researched, yet grisly story told with a wink and a laugh...well, we have 49 other episodes we can recommend. To celebrate our big 50th episode, we wanted to do something a little different.  Coast to Coast AM, the cream...

Walt Disney built an empire on family-friendly entertainment that’s grown into a modern titan of the industry - and today we’re climbing all over its seamy underbelly. Gross! Sean zig-zags us through rumors about Walt Disney’s involvement with Nazis,...

In 1985, U.K. tabloid The Sun started a frenzy of fear when they published a series of articles about a cursed mass-produced painting - dubbed "The Crying Boy" - that had been found at the sites of dozens of house fires. In each of these instances,...

Is it possible for a whole family to be cursed? Some people think so. In fact, there's one particular family in United States history many have asserted IS the victim of a curse - the Kennedys. From political assassinations to plane crashes to tragic...

In this episode we’re taking a trip to pre-WWII Key West, Florida - a place beyond laws, full of unbelievable characters. One of these characters is Count Carl von Cosel (born Karl Tanzler), an eccentric x-ray technician that falls head-over-heels in...

On part 2 of our series, we chat about 4 more legendary locations and people in the CT area worth discussing—the spooky Dudleytown, the unsettling Fairfield Hills State Hospital, the tragic Leatherman, and the just plain weird Headless Horseman of...

On our very first episode and part 1 of our series, we dive into two of the most intriguing legends from the state of Connecticut—the legendary “mutants” The Melonheads, and the notoriously haunted Remington Arms Factory in Bridgeport. Carrie finds...