Episodes

  • S2 Ep39: Above the Top Floor
    Oct 20 2026
    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 deadletteroffice@astonishinglegends.com!
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    43 mins
  • Your True Halloween Stories IV Part 2
    Oct 18 2026

    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.

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    2 hrs and 9 mins
  • S2 Ep38: Hello, James.
    Oct 13 2026
    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 deadletteroffice@astonishinglegends.com!

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    51 mins
  • Your True Halloween Stories IV Part 1
    Oct 11 2026

    In 1933, a Scottish botanist watched a seemingly abandoned steamship drift past the Alaskan coast on an ice floe. It appeared upside down in a strange mirage, with no crew and no one at the wheel. This ship was the Baychimo, which was abandoned two years earlier, but refused to disappear. Having repeatedly resurfaced across the Arctic, it earning a reputation as one of history’s great ghost ships.

    In this episode, we explore the strange history of ghost ships from the the Baychimo, to the frozen Octavius, and the Ourang Medan, whose crew was reportedly found mysteriously dead shortly before the ship itself exploded and sank. Three ships, three enduring legends, and at least one vessel whose final resting place remains unknown.

    Visit our website for a lot more information on this episode.

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    3 hrs and 5 mins
  • S2 Ep37: The Old Man on the Gravestone
    Oct 6 2026
    In tonight's dead letter, Corey takes us back to Omaha, Nebraska in the year 2000, when he was the overnight host on a Top 40 station and a call-in topic about haunted places kept circling back to one private family cemetery. He sent a carload of listeners out there on a Friday night to report back live on the air. A few days later his boss got a phone call from the cemetery's caretakers. And, to paraphrase a Dateline episode…things got weirder from there.We mentioned a TON of old eps in this one! Relevant Prior EpisodesEp 48: Choose Your Own AdventureAstonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts Ep 71: Pere Cheney: The Town that DisappearedAstonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts Ep 87: Black Eyed Kids Part 1Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts Ep 50: Mothman Part 1Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts Ep 14: What's Gotten Into You?Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts Ep 209: The Phantom Horse of GreensboroAstonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts Ep 120: The Grim ReaperAstonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts Ep 154: Lockdown at the Waverly Hills SanatoriumAstonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts Ep 156: The Ax Murder House in Villisca Part 1Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts Ep 49: Monsters Among UsAstonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts Ep 310: The Rhine Research Center: Extraordinary EvidenceAstonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts Links and Further ReadingChurch Grims, by Tess Pfeifle (Astonishing Legends blog) Strange Intruders, by David WeatherlyG.N.M. Tyrrell (Psi Encyclopedia, Society for Psychical Research)Ghosts and Apparitions in Psi Research (Psi Encyclopedia)Phantasms of the Living, Volume 1 (1886), free at the Internet ArchivePhantasms of the Living, Volume 2 (1886), free at the Internet ArchiveJim Harold's CampfireThe Mothman of Point Pleasant (Small Town Monsters, 2017)The AnkouThe Case Against Reality, by Donald HoffmanA Game of Pool, The Twilight Zone (1961)On a Pale Horse, by Piers AnthonyThe Villisca Axe Murder HouseLive and Let Die (1973)Twin Peaks: The Return (2017)We're looking for more stories! Send your Dead Letter to deadletteroffice@astonishinglegends.com!
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    52 mins
  • A Tale of Ghost Ships Three!
    Sep 27 2026

    In 1933, a Scottish botanist watched a seemingly abandoned steamship drift past the Alaskan coast on an ice floe. It appeared upside down in a strange mirage, with no crew and no one at the wheel. This ship was the Baychimo, which was abandoned two years earlier, but refused to disappear. Having repeatedly resurfaced across the Arctic, it earning a reputation as one of history’s great ghost ships.

    In this episode, we explore the strange history of ghost ships from the the Baychimo, to the frozen Octavius, and the Ourang Medan, whose crew was reportedly found mysteriously dead shortly before the ship itself exploded and sank. Three ships, three enduring legends, and at least one vessel whose final resting place remains unknown.

    Visit our website for a lot more information on this episode.

    Show More Show Less
    2 hrs and 17 mins
  • S2 Ep36: The Mimic
    Sep 22 2026
    In tonight's dead letter, our listener Ed and his wife are newlyweds, sharing the apartment he's lived in for about two years in Clay Center, Nebraska. One morning in early 2020, he hits snooze on his alarm and sees a figure walking out of their bedroom, silhouetted by the living room lights he'd set on a timer, and it looks just like his wife, but it’s not.
    Relevant Prior Episodes
    Ep 26: Shadow People
    Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts
    Ep 64: Electronic Fog
    Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts
    Ep 226: Boundless Remote Viewing with Lori Williams Part 1
    Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts
    Links and Further Reading
    Ed's Floor Plan of the Apartment
    Clay Center, Nebraska, Wikipedia
    World's Largest Ball of Twine, Kansas Tourism
    Note: We call it the world's biggest ball of yarn in the episode. It's actually a ball of sisal twine. I always mess that up! (Scott)
    Doppelganger, Britannica
    Hypnagogic Hallucinations, Cleveland Clinic
    A-Yokai-A-Day: Ikiryo, Matthew Meyer
    Alexander Cannon (psychiatrist), Wikipedia
    STAR GATE [Controlled Remote Viewing], Federation of American Scientists
    Astral Projection Hypnosis by Dr. Steve G. Jones
    Journeys Out of the Body by Robert A. Monroe
    Richard Hatem's Paranormal Bookshelf
    Beyond the Bermuda Triangle by Bruce Gernon and Rob MacGregor
    We're looking for more stories! Send your Dead Letter to deadletteroffice@astonishinglegends.com!
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    32 mins
  • S2 Ep35: The Benevolent Warning
    Sep 15 2026
    In tonight's dead letter, our listener named Mark is driving through western Michigan at two in the morning in 1978, working off a paper map and handwritten directions to a house he's never been to. He comes up a hill and into a curve on US 131, and there are four people standing in his lane. Two of them are waving him over to the right, and the other two have their arms raised above their heads in an X. Had they not been there he may have had a fatal collision, and when he went to find them shortly after, they had vanished.
    Relevant Prior Episodes
    Ep 102: Resurrection Mary Part 1
    Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts
    Ep 116: Small Town Monsters
    Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts
    Links and Further Reading
    Lydia: The Ghost of Jamestown Bridge, NCpedia
    A History of the Vanishing Hitchhiker, Beardsley and Hankey, 1943
    The Bray Road Beast, Small Town Monsters
    Jim Harold's Campfire: True Ghost Stories, Books 1 through 6
    Note: We call it the National Highway Transportation Safety Association in the episode. The ‘A’ is actually for Administration.

    We're looking for more stories! Send your Dead Letter to deadletteroffice@astonishinglegends.com!
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    41 mins