Astonishing Legends

In tonight's dead letter, Keith takes us back to the spring of 1997, when he was a freshman at Rutgers living on the third floor of Clothier Hall, a brick dorm in downtown New Brunswick, New Jersey. Early one Saturday morning, with the first light coming in around the curtain, he opened his eyes and someone was sitting on the floor against his roommate's bed, six feet away, in a room he had locked the night before. Someone, or some…thing…that shouldn’t have been there. Relevant Prior Episodes Ep 26: Shadow People Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts Ep 338: Your True Halloween Stories IV, Part 3 Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts Ep 87: Black Eyed Kids Part 1 Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts Links and Further Reading Clothier Hall (Rutgers Residence Life) Weird NJ Shadow person (Wikipedia) Note: We call Benadryl's active ingredient pseudoephedrine in the episode. It's diphenhydramine. Hypnagogia and the hypnopompic state (Wikipedia) Hypnic jerk (Wikipedia) Jim Harold's Campfire Miyamoto Musashi (Wikipedia) Wild Talents, by Charles Fort (1932), free to read at sacred-texts.com We're looking for more stories! Send your Dead Letter to [email protected]!

We're back, and this time we’re lucky enough to have paranormal investigator, researcher and author Michelle Belanger join us to help answer the question connecting this week's stories: does this phenomenon have a name? At a Southern California shopping mall, Amy gets in line for food when two young women behind her suddenly fill her with an intense feeling of dread. In Los Angeles, Zee picks up two young women from an unlikely spot near a freeway overpass, and before long, an ordinary ride begins to feel anything but. Lastly, Mike takes us back to a Chicago suburb in 1988, where a routine walk near a cemetery leads to a passing encounter with two women he has never forgotten. Turn down the lights and join us for the final set of this year’s true Halloween mysteries. Visit our website for a lot more information on this episode.

In tonight's dead letter, we're in Cluj-Napoca, Transylvania in the 1990s, a few years after the revolution, where our listener Nadina, six at the time, had the run of a Soviet-era apartment block with her older sister and their best friend while their nanny visited a friend upstairs. They climbed past the last floor of apartments to the metal door at the top, and before anyone could touch it, something huge, aggressive and feral sounding on the other side began attacking it so hard they fled. Nadina still doesn't know what was up there. Relevant Prior Episodes Ep 49: Monsters Among Us Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts Ep 116: Small Town Monsters Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts Ep 183: Sam the Sandown Clown Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts Ep 203: The Beast of Gévaudan Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts Links and Further Reading Hoia Baciu Forest (Astonishing Legends) History of Cluj-Napoca Systematization in Romania Transylvanian Superstitions, Emily Gerard, 1885 (Project Gutenberg) Pricolici Strigoi Tracing the Roots of Lycanthropy (Astonishing Legends) The Beast of Bray Road (Astonishing Legends) Blonde Venus (1932) Classic Sideshow Acts: The Girl into the Gorilla (Museum of the Weird) Pepper's Ghost We're looking for more stories! Send your Dead Letter to [email protected]!

Our Halloween tradition continues with three more listeners sharing encounters they still can’t explain. At a church summer camp in the mountains above Southern California, Ray and two fellow counselors spot a girl standing alone in the parking lot after lights-out. She silently returns to the bunkhouse when they call to her… but that won’t be the last time they see her. In San Luis Obispo, Brian and his wife move into a guest house with a long history and a curious warning from their elderly landlady: most tenants don’t stay very long. Soon they begin to understand why. And Terry takes us back to the night shift of a hospital coronary care unit, where a dying patient starts asking every nurse the same unsettling question: “Who’s that behind you?” Turn down the lights and settle in for Part Two of our Halloween listener stories. Visit our website for a lot more information on this episode.

In tonight's dead letter, our listener TM was the office manager at a Catholic parish in the upper Mississippi river area, and part of her job was digitizing the cemetery's paper records, so she'd walk the rows with a camera, say hello to everyone, and tell them what she was there to do. One marker sat outside the cemetery’s plot map entirely: a boy who drowned in the river in 1936, with fresh flowers by his stone and no file in the office. One July afternoon, someone or something unseen let her know it was there. Relevant Prior Episodes Ep 247: Massacre at Duffy's Cut Part 1 Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts Ep 317: The Screaming Skulls Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts Ep 85: The Bell Witch Part 1 Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts Ep 123: The Sallie House: Ghost in the Machine Part 1 Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts Ep 4: Amelia Earhart Vanishes Part 1 Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts Links and Further Reading Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 1032 (Vatican.va) St. John Chrysostom (Britannica) All Souls' Day (Catholic Encyclopedia, New Advent) Columbarium (Merriam-Webster) Duffy's Cut (Wikipedia) Historic Bell Witch Cave, Adams, Tennessee Electronic Voice Phenomena: An Overview (Astonishing Legends blog) Stahl House, Case Study House #22 (LA Conservancy) Scared All The Time (podcast) We're looking for more stories! Send your Dead Letter to [email protected]!