Astonishing Legends

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S2 Ep39: Above the Top Floor Oct 20, 2026

Show notes

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
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Ep 116: Small Town Monsters
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Ep 183: Sam the Sandown Clown
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Ep 203: The Beast of Gévaudan
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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!

Your True Halloween Stories IV Part 2 Oct 18, 2026

Show notes

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.

S2 Ep38: Hello, James. Oct 13, 2026

Show notes

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
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Ep 317: The Screaming Skulls
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Ep 85: The Bell Witch Part 1
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Ep 123: The Sallie House: Ghost in the Machine Part 1
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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!

Your True Halloween Stories IV Part 1 Oct 11, 2026

Show notes

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.

S2 Ep37: The Old Man on the Gravestone Oct 06, 2026

Show notes

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!

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

A Tale of Ghost Ships Three! Sep 27, 2026

Show notes

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

S2 Ep36: The Mimic Sep 22, 2026

Show notes

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
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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!

S2 Ep35: The Benevolent Warning Sep 15, 2026

Show notes

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!

S2 Ep34: The Lady in the Rocking Chair Sep 08, 2026

Show notes

In tonight's dead letter, listener Mothmaiden remembers a time when she was four years old and an only child in a neighborhood with no other kids, and she had an imaginary friend named Cindy Cora who looked exactly like Betty Rubble from The Flintstones. Then on a sunny afternoon, in her own bedroom with the light coming through the window, she saw an elderly woman with white and gray hair piled high on her head, sitting in a rocking chair, calm and gentle and completely solid. Were these things connected?
Relevant Prior Episodes
Abduction at Devil's Den
Devil's Den: The Reckoning Part 1
Chris McKinnell and the Warren Legacy
Dan, Susan, Micah Hanks and Missing Time
Links and Further Reading
Two-thirds of school-age children have an imaginary companion by age 7, University of Washington
Note: We say about one in three for the invisible-only friends. In the study, about two thirds of kids have had an imaginary companion by age seven, and about one in three have one at the time they are asked.
The psychological significance of play with imaginary companions in early childhood, Learning & Behavior
Childhood amnesia, Wikipedia
Ghosts and Apparitions in Psi Research, the Society for Psychical Research's Psi Encyclopedia
Phantasms of the Living (1886) by Gurney, Myers and Podmore, Internet Archive
Strange Intruders by David Weatherly
Devils Den: The Reckoning by Terry Lovelace
Contact (1997), Wikipedia
Note: We say David Morse was one of the doctors on ER. He played Dr. Jack Morrison on St. Elsewhere.
Sesame Street debuts, November 10, 1969, HISTORY
Wall Street crash of 1929, Wikipedia
The History of Bettys in Pop Culture, Refinery29
Natalie and Tara on YouTube

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

Special: Richard Hatem's Light in the Dark Tour 2026 Sep 04, 2026

Show notes

Hey folks! We're gearing up to go to the Wet Hot Bad Magic Summercamp next week but after that we're back on our regular schedule! In the meanwhile here's a chat Scott and Richard had just a week ago about his new tour which is also CLOSE ABOARD!

>>>>>>>>>>

A special episode from our friend Richard Hatem. Richard is the screenwriter behind The Mothman Prophecies and a longtime friend of the show, and he hosts Richard Hatem's Paranormal Bookshelf. He invited Scott onto his podcast to talk about his upcoming Light in the Dark Tour 2026, a 10-day, six-city run of live shows in September that wraps up at the Mothman Festival in Point Pleasant, West Virginia. We liked the conversation enough that we're sharing it here on the main feed.

Along the way, Scott and Richard get to such never-before-asked questions as: What scares our dogs? Where will Scott and Forrest be appearing live in September? Did Abbott and Costello get along? Can anyone find Scott's legendary "lost" appearance on Portlandia? Did Richard schedule too many shows on this tour, and will Susan ever forgive him? Find out the answers to these and many more questions on this episode.

If you can make it to one of the tour stops, go. Tickets and dates are at the link below.

Links

Get tickets to Richard Hatem's Light in the Dark Tour 2026 LIVE: https://www.richardhatemsparanormalbookshelf.com/events
Listen to Richard Hatem's Paranormal Bookshelf: https://www.richardhatemsparanormalbookshelf.com/
Support RHPB on Patreon: https://patreon.com/RichardHatem
Celebrate 2026 with 26% off all RHPB merch with offer code RHPB26. The discount is pre-applied at this link: https://richardhatem-shop.fourthwall.com/promo/RHPB26
Need help with your personal writing projects? Richard is here to help. Get 20% off when you mention RHPB: https://www.richardhatem.com/

Notes

Get the answer to ALL of your Abbott and Costello questions here: Abbott and Costello Meet the Podcast
Is your dog afraid of hiccups, just like Luna? Learn about your dog's weird fears here: Understanding Your Dog's Fear

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