Weird Darkness: Paranormal & True Crime Stories

For over a century, witnesses across Michigan and Wisconsin have described the same impossible figure – upright, wolf-headed, and aware of being watched. Some walked away with scars, others with a story they were afraid to tell for decades.

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

READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yckpcp8s

FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Across Michigan and Wisconsin, encounters with an upright, wolf-headed figure span more than a century – from nineteenth-century logging camps to farm roads, deer stands, and suburban backyards. Witnesses describe a creature with human-like hands, glowing eyes, and an unsettling awareness of being watched, several of them staying silent about what they saw for years rather than risk being disbelieved. Hunters, drivers, and at least one retired sheriff's deputy all report the same detail – something that watches back, and in more than one account, something that speaks.

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding
00:06:13.435 = Show Open
00:08:57.805 = Part One
00:18:33.555 = Part Two ***
00:46:24.349 = Part Three ***
01:00:02.576 = Part Four ***
01:14:17.255 = Part Five ***
01:27:28.423 = Part Six ***
01:34:00.844 = Part Seven ***
01:46:18.276 = Show Close
01:47:34.794 = SONG: “Dogman of Silver Creek” by Dark Weirdness
*** = 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:
PHOTO: 1961 photo of Dogman (at Strangeology.com): https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/muajp2my
BOOK: “The Beast of Bray Road: Tailing Wisconsin’s Werewolf” by Linda Godfrey: https://amzn.to/43xNkro
The InBetween with Carol Ann (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/@TheInBetweenTales
MichigansThumb.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p98vf2c
TetZoo.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4maj49wk
Hangar1Publishing.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yc29e65a
MythFolks.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8wdd24
DiscoveryUK.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p88uxkj
CreepyEncounters.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yckncywh
ListVerse.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/mtybyttw
(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: March 22, 2025
Weird Darkness devotes a full episode to the Dogman, the upright, wolf-headed cryptid reported across Michigan and Wisconsin for more than a century, moving through firsthand encounters, a claimed government cover-up, a witnessed fight between a Dogman and two Sasquatch, and a side-by-side comparison of Dogman folklore against traditional werewolf mythology.It opens with the creature's documented history, tracing the first alleged sighting to 1887, when a group of lumberjacks in Wexford County, Michigan described a being with the body of a man and the head of a dog during the state's great logging era. Similar reports followed in Allegan County in the 1950s and in Cross Village, Big Rapids, and Manistee County during the 1960s, while Elkhorn, Wisconsin became the center of activity in the early 1990s. The segment also catalogs standalone incidents tied to the legend: four horses found dead with their eyes open in 1917, seven-foot-four claw marks reported on a church door in 1957, a farmer found dead at his plow surrounded by oversized canine tracks in 1997, a 2006 backyard sighting in Shelby Township, Michigan, and an army veteran's account of a wolf-headed creature pacing his truck through Manistee National Forest. Odawa oral tradition describing a two-legged, wolf-like being near Lake Michigan predates all of it, and the episode raises the theory that Dogman sightings cluster in years ending in seven.From there, the episode turns to the case that gave the cryptid one of its best-known names: the Beast of Bray Road. Lori Endrizzi's fall 1989 sighting on Bray Road outside Elkhorn, Wisconsin, first documented by researcher Linda Godfrey in the 2003 book "The Beast of Bray Road," describes a kneeling, brownish-gray figure with long claws that turned to meet her headlights. Two years later, on Halloween night 1991, Doris Gipson struck the same stretch of road and was chased by a clawed, upright creature that clung to her car's rear bumper as she fled. Walworth County Animal Control officer Jon Fredrikson began compiling reports in a manila folder marked "Werewolf," which grew to include a December 1990 sighting by a child witness, clawed tracks near Potter's Road that led locals to nickname the creature "Pottsy," a 1990 roadside sighting by Mike Etten, and two separate encounters reported by high school student Tom Brichta. The same story traces the legend back further still, to 1936, when night watchman Mark Shackleman encountered a six-foot, black-furred creature scratching at an Indigenous burial ground outside Racine, Wisconsin's St. Coletta Convent, a creature that reportedly spoke a single word, "Gadarah," a name tied to the biblical account of Jesus casting out demons at Gadara.Next, the episode moves to a February 2012 case from rural Chenango, New York, where Brandon Close and his neighbor Gene pursued the source of a scream that had left Close's cattle huddled against an electric fence, only to be chased through the woods by an eight-foot creature that kept pace with their all-terrain vehicle at highway speed. The account continues with an unmarked black van and armed personnel arriving at Close's property the following day, ultimately removing the memory cards from his trail cameras.A separate account follows a Big Rapids, Michigan night watchman's 1961 encounter with a six-foot, grayish-brown creature outside his home near the Haymarsh State Game Area, an incident the witness says he photographed under a streetlight.The episode then recounts an anonymous 1992 camping trip in which the witness watched a black, long-armed creature stalk him along a dry creek bed before a Sasquatch intervened, leading to a violent fight that ended when a second, larger Sasquatch killed the Dogman and dragged its body into the woods.Hunting-season encounters follow, beginning with Peter's October 16, 2012 experience in Pontiac, Illinois, where a wolf-sized creature bit his arm during a chase near his family's deer stand before inexplicably retreating. A separate witness describes two Dogman sightings twenty years apart, the first in Alto, Michigan in 1988 and the second in nearby Lowell, Michigan in 2008, when a blue-eyed creature that had followed him since childhood appeared on his roof and spoke a single word, "Don't."Another segment follows Derek, an Ohio mycology enthusiast, to a 2016 night-fishing trip along the Mahoning River in Niles, Trumbull County, Ohio, where he encountered a crouching creature near an old train trestle that stood to meet his gaze before retreating into the brush.A Fitchburg, Wisconsin case follows college student Matt, who in 2006 heard a scream during a minor earthquake and glimpsed a wolf-headed, humanoid figure in a passing car's headlights. A separate story follows a man identified as Mark to his late grandfather's cabin in Sierra County, Ohio, where he discovered why his grandfather had banned the family from the property for years, after an unseen creature chased him back to the cabin and reappeared at the tree line with two others.A Reed City, Michigan hunting party's four-day encounter in November 2007 follows, in which Sam and his companions repeatedly crossed paths with a yellow-eyed, hunchbacked creature that left claw marks on a rifle stock and a cabin door. The episode then follows Gabe to a rural Montana property, where lightning revealed a broad-shouldered, upright creature in his yard, followed weeks later by a closer encounter near his satellite dish that prompted him to move.Retired law enforcement officer Laura Love's account follows, describing a nearly seven-and-a-half-foot, dark-furred creature that struck a truck near the West Weber Road overpass on U.S. Highway 31 before vanishing into roadside brush. A separate story follows Janet, who for years believed she had seen a deformed bear near Danbury, Wisconsin's Long Lake before her son's own Dogman sighting prompted her to reconsider what she and her sister-in-law Amy witnessed on Rustic Road.A November 7, 2016 account from Duluth, Minnesota follows, describing an anonymous graphic designer's sighting of a hunched, wolf-faced cr

A man wakes up convinced he murdered someone in his sleep, and the marks on his own body say the dream might not have been a dream at all.

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, “Cool Killer Carl” (May 05, 1978) ***WD
00:46:18.874 = Mystery Playhouse, “Nightmare” (November 28, 1944)
01:15:15.928 = Price of Fear, “Remains To Be Seen” (September 01, 1973) ***WD
01:42:19.483 = Adventures of Ellery Queen, “Terrified Man” (January 15, 1948) ***WD (LQ)a
02:06:01.040 = Quiet Please, “The Smell of High Wines” (March 20, 1949) ***WD
02:35:22.653 = Radio City Playhouse, “Interval” (November 27, 1949) ***WD
03:03:46.860 = Half Hour To Kill, “Blackout Never Aired” (October 29, 1946) ***WD
03:32:04.765 = Sam Spade, “Adam Figg Caper” (October 05, 1947) ***WD
03:55:50.400 = The Sealed Book, “Stranger In The House” (May 06, 1945) ***WD
04:25:19.830 = The Shadow, “Bubbling Death” (December 05, 1943) ***WD
04:50:39.793 = Strange Adventure, “Title Unknown – Episode 69” (1945) ***WD
04:53:57.077 = Calling All Detectives, “Jerry Investigates a Mysterious Increase in Hospital Deaths” (July 06, 1948) ***WD (LQ)
05:01:43.438 = 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/WDRR0728

Six strangers board a night train crawling through the worst winter in years — a divorced businessman, a runaway couple, a wealthy man running out of time, and an elderly woman being shipped off by her own family — each quietly hoping this trip might be the one that changes everything, for better or worse.

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, “Journey To Somewhere” (May 04, 1978) ***WD
00:44:26.457 = Molle Mystery Theater, “Killer Come Back To Me” (May 17, 1946)
01:13:35.047 = Mr. Keen, “The Leaping Dog” (April 13, 1944) ***WD
01:42:41.788 = Murder at Midnight, “The Man With The Black Beard” (May 08, 1950) ***WD
02:08:37.327 = The Black Museum, “The Tan Shoe” (January 15, 1952)
02:33:18.183 = Mysterious Traveler, “The Green Plague” (June 17, 1952)
03:00:29.228 = CBC Nightfall, “Hands Off” (July 25, 1980)
03:27:14.184 = Obsession, “Clinging Hate” (May 14, 1951) ***WD
03:49:55.235 = Origin of Superstition, “Kissing Under Mistletoe” (1935) ***WD
04:04:07.297 = Pat Novak For Hire, “Rory Malone” (March 20, 1949)
04:33:03.187 = Peril, “Lucky Lady” (1953) ***WD
04:58:54.597 = 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/WDRR0727

Four friends went into the Massachusetts woods looking for a paved road that starts in the middle of nowhere, and they found what was waiting at the end of it.

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

SOURCES and RESOURCES:
“The Asylum In The Woods” by Redditor R.L. Rogers: https://www.creepypasta.com/the-asylum-in-the-woods/

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

Midnight In The Macabre (MITM), originally aired: July 28, 2026

In 1947, the Army announced it had recovered a crashed "flying disc" near Roswell, then reversed itself within a day — a contradiction the Air Force didn't explain until 1994, when it revealed a classified spy program called Project Mogul. Roswell wasn't even the first: unidentified wreckage and bodies had been turning up for decades before it.

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

FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: When you hear the words “UFO crash” you likely think of Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. And while that is the most famous of supposed extraterrestrial spaceship crashes, it is by no means the first. In fact, there were several taking place before Roswell became a household name. (UFO Crashes Before Roswell) *** But first – we’ll take a look at Roswell itself… and what might have been behind the crash, the UFOs, and the aliens! (Behind Roswell’s Aliens) *** Numerous travelers have gone missing in Nahanni Valley… and many whose bodies have been found, have been decapitated. It’s no wonder it has been nicknamed “The Valley of Headless Men”. (The Valley of Headless Men) *** In 2016, construction in a San Francisco family’s backyard unearthed a terrifying find… a glass coffin. And the history behind it tells a morbid history of the city. (The Karner’s Backyard Glass Coffin) *** Former Green Beret Jeffrey MacDonald claimed that a gang of acid-crazed Manson Family copycats brutally murdered his pregnant wife and two daughters in 1970, but then he was found guilty. Did he commit the crime, or did the law convict the wrong man? (The Evil Deeds of Jeffrey MacDonald) *** It’s understood that scientifically, alchemy – attempting to turn a substance or element into gold – is impossible. But then, there is that one incident that took place in the early seventeenth century that has some people wondering if that’s wrong. (The Alchemy Master)

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding
00:01:27.594 = Show Open
00:03:47.621 = Behind Roswell’s Aliens / UFO Crashes Before Roswell
00:19:45.640 = The Valley of Headless Men ***
00:33:18.357 = The Karner’s Backyard Glass Coffin
00:44:54.640 = The Evil Deeds of Jeffrey MacDonald ***
00:55:31.498 = The Alchemy Master
01:02:26.698 = 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:
“Behind Roswell’s Aliens” by Adam Janos for History.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yd5fhudu
“UFO Crashes Before Roswell” from Anomalien.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2w6d76yh
“The Valley of Headless Men” by Aleksa Vuckovic for Ancient-Origins.net: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p9c6zf4
“The Evil Deeds of Jeffrey MacDonald” by Marco Margaritoff for AllThatsInteresting.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8eant7
“The Alchemy Master” by Ellen Lloyd for AncientPages.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4xzysbwc
“The Karner’s Backyard Glass Coffin” by Trilby Beresford for Ranker.com’s Graveyard Shift:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/3mpvk9jh
(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: January 2021
This episode of Weird Darkness moves from a classified Cold War balloon program in the New Mexico desert to a Canadian valley littered with decapitated bodies, a Victorian child's glass coffin dug up in a San Francisco backyard, a Green Beret convicted of butchering his own family, and a seventeenth-century alchemist tortured for the secret of turning lead into gold.It opens with the 1947 Roswell crash, tracing how rancher W.W. "Mac" Brazel's discovery of wreckage on his Lincoln County property led Colonel William Blanchard's Roswell Army Air Field to announce the capture of a "flying disc," only for the Army to reverse itself within days and blame a weather balloon, complete with staged photos of Major Jesse Marcel posing with the debris. The story follows the account through the U.S. Air Force's 1994 admission that the wreckage actually came from Project Mogul, a secret high-altitude balloon array built to detect Soviet atomic tests, and its 1997 explanation that reported alien bodies were fallen parachute test dummies, then weighs those official conclusions against UFO researcher Donald Schmitt's objections and journalist Annie Jacobsen's competing claim that the crash involved deformed children deployed by Joseph Stalin and designed by Nazi doctor Josef Mengele.From there, the episode moves through six UFO crash reports that predate Roswell by decades, including an 1897 cigar-shaped craft said to have destroyed Judge Proctor's windmill in Aurora, Texas, and left a small humanoid body buried in the local cemetery; an 1862 wreck witnessed by shipwrecked sailors from the vessel Christine on a deserted Indian Ocean island, where they found twelve-foot-tall bodies with bronze beards; a UFO crash near Stavropol, Russia, whose three survivors reportedly died from being unable to breathe Earth's atmosphere; a 1941 crash in the Carolinas recovered by the U.S. Army during a military exercise involving soldier Guy Simeone; an 1884 debris field of gear-like metal fragments found by rancher John Ellis in Dundy County, Nebraska; and a wartime British crash investigated by journalist Dorothy Kilgallen, who died shortly after publishing claims that the recovered craft's crew stood under four feet tall.Next, the story shifts to Canada's Nahanni Valley, where at least 44 people have died or vanished since 1908, beginning with prospector brothers Willie and Frank McLeod, whose headless skeletons were found at their camp two years after they disappeared, and continuing through the decapitations of Swiss prospector Martin Jorgenson and outlaw "Yukon" Fisher, the mysterious cabin fire that killed Phil Powers, and the vanishing of Annie Laferte, who was later spotted wandering naked and disoriented near the Flat River — deaths locals attribute variously to the legendary Naha tribe, the valley's hot sulphur springs, or predators, while Dene oral history holds that the warlike Naha people simply disappeared without explanation.The episode then turns to 2016, when a construction crew remodeling John and Ericka Karner's San Francisco home unearthed a 19th-century glass-and-cast-iron coffin containing the preserved body of a toddler, later identified through DNA testing led by genealogist Elissa Davey as Edith Howard Cook, who died of malnutrition in 1876 and was accidentally left behind when San Francisco's Odd Fellows Cemetery was relocated to Colma in the 1930s — a discovery the Karner family says ended years of unexplained footsteps they'd heard from a toddler no longer in the house.From there, the story follows former Green Beret Jeffrey MacDonald, convicted of stabbing his pregnant wife Colette and daughters Kimberly and Kristen to death at Fort Bragg in 1970 after claiming a blonde intruder chanting about acid and "pigs" oversaw the killings, an account investigators concluded was staged using details from the recent Manson Family murders; the case follows his decades of appeals, including the 1983 bestseller "A Fatal Vision" that branded him a psychopath and filmmaker Errol Morris's later book arguing the evidence against him was mishandled.The episode closes with the story of Alexander Seton, a secretive Scottish alchemist known as the Cosmopolitan, who in 1602 convinced skeptical Swiss professor Wolfgang Drenheim that he had transmuted lead into gold using nothing but a wrapped powder and a goldsmith's crucible in Fribourg. Seton's success drew the attention of Emperor Rudolf II and later trapped him in the custody of Christian II, Elector of Saxony, who had him pierced with iron spikes and burned with molten lead in an attempt to force him to reveal his formula; Seton escaped in 1603 with the help of his friend Michael Sendivogius but died a broken man soon after, and the alchemical text he was said to have written, the Book of Twelve Chapters, was destroyed, leaving his method lost.