Weird Darkness: Paranormal & True Crime Stories

New Orleans high society adored the charming Jacques St. Germain, right up until they started asking why a man who claimed to be forty could describe the 1700s like he'd lived them. Now more than a century later people are still arguing over whether Jacques St. Germain was a con man, an immortal, or a true-life vampire.

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

READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p9xjvjy

FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Was a New Orleans neighborhood home to an immortal vampire in the early 1900s? (Vampire in New Orleans) *** A young girl disappeared in Yosemite National Park back in 1981. To this day no one knows where she is, and some say a paranormal cause is to blame. (A Supernatural Disappearance in Yosemite) *** After Lori Erica Ruff's death, her husband discovered he had been married to a complete stranger. Because Lori Erica Ruff never existed. (The Woman Without an Identity) *** Was there a plot to murder Marconi scientists in the 1980s? (The Marconi Murders)

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00.00.000 = The Foreboding
00:00:41.374 = Show Open
00:02:10.004 = The Immortal Vampire of New Orleans
00:18:58.982 = A Supernatural Disappearance In Yosemite ***
00:29:58.328 = The Woman Without An Identity
00:36:55.918 = The Marconi Murders ***
00:51:45.221 = Show Close
*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad break

LISTEN 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:
“Vampire In New Orleans” by Brent Swancer: http://bit.ly/2IrlOTU
“A Supernatural Disappearance in Yosemite” by Beth Elias: http://bit.ly/2v94zOB
“The Woman Without an Identity” by Stephanie Webber: http://bit.ly/2UBMIyO
‘The Marconi Murders” posted at The Unredacted: http://bit.ly/2VR1PRC
(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: June 16, 2020

LIKE WHAT YOU’RE HEARING? WEIRD DARKNESS posts episodes 7 DAYS A WEEK! Listen FREE wherever you get podcasts or visit https://weirddarkness.com/listen. • Paranormal • True Crime • Ghosts • UFOs • Cryptids • Unexplained • Want even more? Become an OFFICIAL WEIRDO for commercial-free episodes, bonus episodes, weeknight live chats, audiobooks & more at https://WeirdDarkness.com/OFFICIAL

This episode of Weird Darkness moves from a suspected vampire in early-1900s New Orleans to a teenager who vanished in Yosemite National Park, a Texas wife who'd stolen a dead child's identity, and a string of bizarre deaths among British defense scientists during the Cold War.It opens with Jacques St. Germain, a wealthy stranger who arrived in New Orleans in the early 1900s, settled into a mansion at 1039 Royal Street, and began hosting lavish parties for the city's elite. He spoke French, English, and Spanish, described centuries-old events as if he'd witnessed them, was almost never seen in daylight, and never ate at his own feasts. He also claimed descent from the Comte de St. Germain, the 18th-century adventurer and alchemist who told Casanova he was three hundred years old, and the resemblance between the two men was close enough that people began to wonder if they were the same person. A prostitute's leap from his upper-floor window, her story of an attempted bite to the neck, and what police allegedly found in his darkened second floor after he skipped town turned a rich man's eccentricities into one of the city's most enduring vampire legends.From there the episode heads to California and the disappearance of fourteen-year-old Stacy Ann Arras, who walked away from a horseback tour group at Sunrise High Sierra Camp in Yosemite on July 17, 1981, intending to photograph a nearby lake, and was never seen again. As many as 150 searchers, tracking dogs, divers, and helicopters combed the area and recovered only a single camera lens. The segment weighs the theories still attached to her case, from a runaway teen in flip-flops to David Paulides and his Missing 411 research, along with search-and-rescue volunteers who explain how wind, ridgelines, and dry ground can swallow a person's voice and scent within fifty feet.Next comes the woman who called herself Lori Erica Ruff, found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot outside her in-laws' home in Longview, Texas, on Christmas Eve 2010. Her husband, Blake Ruff, then opened a lockbox she'd forbidden him to touch and found the birth certificate of Becky Sue Turner, a two-year-old who died in a Washington house fire in 1971, along with the paper trail of a name change in Idaho in 1988. Investigators listed her as a Jane Doe for six years until DNA from her young daughter traced her to a Pennsylvania family whose seventeen-year-old, Kimberly McLean, had walked away from home in 1986.The episode closes in Britain, where at least twenty-five scientists and engineers connected to Marconi Electronic Systems and related defense contractors died between 1982 and 1990, many of them working on projects tied to America's Strategic Defense Initiative. Dr. Keith Bowden's car went off a bridge on tires someone had swapped for worn ones, Vimal Dajibhai went off the Clifton Suspension Bridge with a puncture wound on his buttock, Arshad Sharif tied a ligature to a tree and hit the accelerator, and Alistair Beckham wired himself to a power socket in his garden shed hours before Ministry of Defence men arrived to collect his files. Coroners returned open verdicts, Computer Weekly journalist Tony Collins wrote a book arguing the pattern pointed to a plot, and Margaret Thatcher's government called the whole cluster a coincidence brought on by workplace stress.

A movie actress worn down by a lifetime of asthma puts her hand in a bald doctor's and agrees to let him remove her head, on his promise that a prettier one is on the way.

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/OTR

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = Show Open
00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “The Beheading” (September 20, 1978) ***WD
00:46:46.654 = CBC Nightfall, “Willoughby Obsession” (September 05, 1980)
01:14:40.820 = Nightmare, “The Leech” (April 07, 1954)
01:37:20.592 = Song, “The Leech” (based on the Nightmare episode) by Static Wax
01:40:07.933 = Obsession, “Cry Vengeance” (May 05, 1952) ***WD
02:10:24.576 = Origin of Superstition, “Two Walker” (1935) ***WD
02:23:04.029 = Pat Novak For Hire, “Rita Malloy” (April 23, 1949)
02:52:43.186 = Peril, “Squeeze Play” (1953) ***WD
03:16:26.722 = Mystery Playhouse, “Lady In Morgue” (May 15, 1945) ***WD
03:40:09.104 = Philip Morris Playhouse, “Night Has A Thousand Eyes” (August 19, 1953) ***WD
04:04:47.576 = Price of Fear, “William And Mary” (September 08, 1973) ***WD
04:32:19.384 = Quiet Please, “The Other Side Of The Stars” (May 08, 1949)
05:01:42.559 = 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/WDRR0773

In 1896 the visitors pedaled airships. In 1952 they were blond and worried about the bomb. Today they're gray, from forty light-years away, and worried about the climate. Somebody keeps updating the aliens, and it might be us.

Look for this podcast on YouTube Music, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and numerous other podcast apps. Get the full list of options here: https://pod.link/1651062114

EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources and print version): https://weirddarkness.com/cotu-wemadethemup

Weird Darkness® and Church Of The Undead™ are trademarked. Copyright © 2026.

Four thousand light-years from Earth, a survey ship deep inside the Crab Nebula picks up something on its locator that no human built, and within the hour both crews understand the same thing: whichever ship leaves first can be followed home, so neither one can be allowed to leave.

A NOTE FROM YOUR NARRATOR: I’ve been on an old-time radio kick recently, listening to shows like “The Whistler”, “Dimension X”, and “Strange Tales”. One of my favorite shows is called “X-Minus One”.  It was a half-hour science fiction radio drama series that was broadcast from April 24, 1955 to January 9, 1958 in various timeslots on NBC radio. At the end of each episode they tell you where the stories they used came from before they adapted them for radio – and one of those sources was the publication “Astounding Science Fiction Magazine”. I jumped online to see if there were old copies I could look at, and I found a book – an anthology of many of the stories from that magazine. The book was published in 1954. The story was entitled “First Contact”, written by Murray Leinster in 1945. The story is credited as one of the first instances of a universal translator in science fiction. So influential is the story that it won a retro Hugo Award for Best Novelette in 1996.

EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/mitm-firstcontact

SOURCES and RESOURCES: 
“First Contact” by Murray Leister from “Astounding S-F Anthology”: https://amzn.to/3zhbBWi

WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.

Midnight In The Macabre (MITM), originally aired: September 13, 2026

LIKE WHAT YOU’RE HEARING? WEIRD DARKNESS posts episodes 7 DAYS A WEEK! Listen FREE wherever you get podcasts or visit https://weirddarkness.com/listen. • Paranormal • True Crime • Ghosts • UFOs • Cryptids • Unexplained • Want even more? Become an OFFICIAL WEIRDO for commercial-free episodes, bonus episodes, weeknight live chats, audiobooks & more at https://WeirdDarkness.com/OFFICIAL

An actress found with her throat cut on Christmas morning, a socialite on trial for arsenic, a child butchered in Bradford, and not one of the cases found the end of the rope.

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

READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/489cffte

FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE:Nine murders from the reign of Queen Victoria, and the hangman went home after every one of them. In April 1891, a janitor at a Manhattan waterfront hotel opened the door to room 31 and found a woman the neighborhood called "Old Shakespeare" strangled and cut open, and within a day the New York papers were asking whether Jack the Ripper had crossed the Atlantic. In London, while the Ripper hunt filled the front pages, someone else was dropping the dismembered pieces of women into the Thames, one of them on the construction site of Scotland Yard itself. A Glasgow socialite stood trial for lacing her lover's cocoa with arsenic, barrister Charles Bravo lingered for days in his Balham mansion with antimony in his body and a household full of suspects, and Adelaide Bartlett walked out of court with liquid chloroform in her dead husband's stomach and no explanation of how it got there. Add a young Bradford boy whose mutilated body drew the Ripper's name north, a murdered London prostitute whose death gave Charles Dickens the killing of Nancy in "Oliver Twist", an actress found on Christmas morning with her throat cut and her door locked from the outside, and three siblings laid out in a Queensland paddock with their feet pointed west, and you have nine cases closed by verdict, by acquittal, or by nobody at all, with the questions still sitting open more than a century later.

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = East River Shadows
00:07:15.256 = Show Open
00:10:36.687 = The Gruesome Murder Of Shakespeare: Jack The Ripper In America?, Part 1
00:25:21.616 = The Gruesome Murder Of Shakespeare: Jack The Ripper In America?, Part 2 ***
00:38:58.221 = The Gruesome Murder Of Shakespeare: Jack The Ripper In America?, Part 3 ***
00:50:06.531 = The Thames Torso Murders: Victorian London's Forgotten Serial Killer ***
01:13:04.687 = The Balham Mystery: The Inexplicable Poisoning of Charles Bravo ***
01:35:52.584 = Blood On Boxing Day: The Gatton Murders ***
01:48:01.563 = The Strange Affair of Madeleine Smith: Love, Poison, and Mystery
02:02:16.844 = Bradford Butchery: The Tragic Case of John Gill ***
02:19:36.644 = The Grimwood Murder: The Real-Life Crime Behind Oliver Twist's Darkest Scene
02:34:13.930 = Christmas Murder Of A Forgotten Actress: The Case of Harriet Busman ***
02:49:05.581 = The Pimilco Poisonings: Marriage, Minister, Murder, and Mystery ***
02:59:24.285 = Show Close
*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad break

LISTEN 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*