A regular nineteen-year-old with no criminal record stabbed his landlord to death with a pocketknife, then later claimed the demon he'd taunted into possessing him — instead of his fiancée's eleven-year-old brother — had crawled out of a well and into his body to commit the murder.
EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources and full transcript): https://weirddarkness.com/arnejohnson
READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode:
https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8n97s9
FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: The third Conjuring film is based on the true story of Arne Cheyenne Johnson who claimed he committed murder because a demon made him do it. But how much truth is there to that story? (The Devil Made Him Do It) *** A tribe living in the Amazon Jungle tells about a strange encounter they had with an extraterrestrial and a strange beam of light. (That Time An Alien Visited the Kayapo People) *** An elderly man decides he needs to hire someone to help him care for his property… but who he chose would bring only death and a mystery that still goes unsolved. (The Wonnangatta Station Murders) *** Lizard people. Reptilians. It’s one of the strangest and most controversial conspiracy theories in existence – and we’ll look at some of the history behind the idea, as well as what science says about the possibility of it being a reality. (The Myths and Modern Science of Reptilians) *** A nun who wasn’t very good at being a nun ended up being a nun without a head. (The Headless Nun of Watton Priory) *** We’ve all been asked the question, “How do you want to die when it comes your time?” Aside from the boring but realistic answer of “quietly in my sleep” some would prefer to go out in a blaze of glory, doing something heroic to save a person or persons from imminent doom. But of course that does not happen for most of us. In fact, there are probably more people going out in a blaze of stupidity! (Dumbest Deaths) *** In 1995 Mike Marcum got it in his head to build a time machine. Did he succeed? We may never know – because he disappeared without a trace. (The Mike Marcum Time Machine)
CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding00:00:16.342 = Show Open
00:02:43.182 = The Devil Made Him Do It
00:13:06.595 = The Wonnangatta Station Murders ***
00:21:13.768 = That Time An Alien Visited The Kayapo People
00:31:32.636 = Myths and Modern Science of Reptilians ***
00:36:18.232 = Headless Nun of Watton Priory
00:50:09.790 = Dumbest Deaths ***
01:02:12.268 = The Mike Marcum Time Machine ***
01:06:33.695 = Show Close & Bloopers
*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad break
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*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*
SOURCES and RESOURCES:
“The Myths and Modern Science of Reptilians” from Anomalien: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/b7m27fbr
“The Devil Made Him Do It” by Marco Margaritoff for All That’s Interesting: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/pxfxa423
“That Time An Alien Visited The Kayapo People” by Ellen Lloyd for Ancient Pages: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/sauzjxp2
“The Wonnangatta Station Murders” by Brent Swancer for Mysterious Universe: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/ceycy3k
“The Headless Nun of Watton Priory” from Esoterx: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/x4sknt6r
“Dumbest Deaths” by Katie Chilton for ListVerse: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/sm6mwmj7
“The Mike Marcum Time Machine” from Earth Chronicles: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/hytc7552
(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: November 17, 2021
Weird Darkness host Darren Marlar leads listeners through seven dark tales spanning a courtroom plea of demonic possession, an unsolved double murder on a remote Australian cattle station, an Amazon tribe's memory of a sky visitor, the serpent-race conspiracy of reptilians, a centuries-old English haunting, history's most absurd deaths, and a Missouri man who vanished after trying to build a time machine.It opens with the 1981 killing of forty-year-old landlord Alan Bono in Brookfield, Connecticut, the first murder in the town's 193-year history, committed by his nineteen-year-old tenant Arne Cheyenne Johnson with a five-inch pocket knife. Johnson's attorney Martin Minnella attempted a plea of not guilty by reason of demonic possession, tracing the violence to months of torment suffered by eleven-year-old David Glatzel, the brother of Johnson's fiancée Debbie, who described a tormentor with black eyes, animal features, and hooves. Paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren declared it a genuine possession and claimed David levitated and stopped breathing across three exorcisms overseen by priests, while psychiatrists countered that the boy had a learning disability. Judge Robert Callahan rejected the supernatural defense as unprovable, Johnson was convicted of first-degree manslaughter on November 24, 1981, and the case later inspired the film The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It.From there the episode travels to the remote Wonnangatta Station in Australia's Victorian Alps, where caretaker James Barclay hired English handyman John Bamford in 1917, a man rumored to have killed his own wife. After the two rode to Talbotville to vote on the Reinforcement Referendum in December 1917, mailman Harry Smith found the homestead empty but for the words "Home Tonight" chalked on the kitchen door, and weeks later he and Jack Jebb uncovered Barclay's decomposed body in a shallow creekside grave, dead from a shotgun blast to the back. The following November, Bamford's body surfaced in a log pile on the Howitt Plains with a bullet in the head, leaving investigators with a recently fired shotgun, traces of strychnine in the kitchen pepper, and no answer as to who killed the second man.Next comes the legend of the Kayapo people of the Brazilian Amazon, who tell of a sky visitor named Bep Kororoti who descended from the mountains of Pukato-Ti amid thunder, wielding a weapon that reduced trees and stones to dust and a beam of light that paralyzed anyone who fled his lessons. The being neither ate nor drank, taught the villagers practical skills, and eventually ascended back into the sky, and the account drew international attention when young Kayapo men touring Rio de Janeiro reportedly pointed at an Apollo 11 astronaut display and shouted that he had returned. Erich von Däniken cited photographs of Kayapo men in straw ritual costumes resembling spacesuits, taken by Joao Americo Peret in 1952, nearly a decade before Yuri Gagarin's 1961 spaceflight, as supposed support for the ancient astronaut theory.The discussion then turns to reptilians, tracing serpent-race myths found across Sumeria, Babylonia, India, China, and Mesoamerica, alongside the modern claims of David Icke that some humans are disguised lizard people. Set against the folklore, researcher Bjarke Jensen of Aarhus University lays out the actual biology: the human reptilian brain that governs heart rate and breathing, eyes structured much like a reptile's, and conductive heart tissue whose molecular building blocks Jensen's team located hidden in the spongy hearts of lizards, frogs, and zebrafish.The episode then visits Watton Priory in East Riding of Yorkshire, a Gilbertine community where, according to the twelfth-century account of Saint Aelred of Rievaulx, an orphaned girl named Elfleda fell in love with a young lay brother, was beaten and chained in a dungeon by the nuns, and was forced to watch as the man was mutilated. A second tragedy fastened itself to the same site after the 1644 Battle of Marston Moor, when Parliamentarian soldiers beheaded the Catholic Lady of Watton and killed her child, and over the centuries the two women blurred into a single spectral figure remembered as the Headless Nun, said to stand at the foot of the bed in blood-stained garments before vanishing.From there the show catalogs history's most absurd deaths, beginning with English Channel swimmer Matthew Webb, who drowned in the Niagara rapids in 1883, and the Spartan general Pausanias, sealed inside a temple of Athena and starved until he died moments after his release. The roll continues with Draco of Athens, smothered around 600 BC beneath cloaks and hats thrown in tribute; Sir Arthur Aston, beaten to death with his own wooden leg; the philosopher Heraclitus, who buried himself in cow dung hoping to cure his dropsy; lawyer Clement Vallandigham, who fatally shot himself in 1871 while demonstrating how a victim might have shot himself by accident; the Viking Sigurd the Mighty, killed by an infection from the sev
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