Show notes
A three-year-old girl's imaginary friend turned out to be a real man – one who had been dead for fifteen years before she was born.
BOOK: “They Told Me My Newborn Died – They Lied: A Global History of Stolen Babies” by Darren Marlar: https://amzn.to/45fNXpt
EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/heidiwyrick
READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/5a4fwj7t
FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Deep in the Balsam Mountains of North Carolina, a shaggy eight-foot creature has been stealing gems and watching women bathe since the early 1900s — and the word used to name him came from a Lewis Carroll poem written the moment after a sleepless night at a dying man's bedside. (The Boojum) *** In 1980, a group of artists in Baltimore took out an ad in a major international magazine — not to sell anything, and not to promote a show. They were sending an invitation. The guests they were hoping to attract just hadn't been born yet. (Krononauts Party) *** A three-year-old girl in rural Georgia started playing with an imaginary friend — and then her family found out he was real, and had been dead for fifteen years. The question that nobody has been able to answer isn't whether she knew him. It's how. (The Heidi Wyrick Haunting)
CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding
00:01:23.333 = Show Open
00:03:14.569 = The Heidi Wyrick Haunting, Part 1
00:13:30.069 = The Heidi Wyrick Haunting, Part 2 ***
00:32:01.091 = The Boojum ***
00:53:27.330 = Krononauts Party ***
01:01:57.222 = SONG: “Krononauts Party” by Dark Weirdness (https://weirddarkness.com/music)
01:06:24.212 = Show Close
*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad break
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SOURCES and RESOURCES:The Heidi Wyrick Haunting: https://weirddarkness.com/heidi-wyrick/
The Boojum: https://weirddarkness.com/boojum/
Krononauts Party: https://weirddarkness.com/krononauts-party/
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Originally aired: August 11, 2026
Weird Darkness moves through three cases this episode: a decade-long haunting in rural Georgia that a university parapsychologist wired with scientific instruments, an eight-foot gem-hoarding creature that Appalachian locals have hunted for over a century, and a 1980 Baltimore art stunt that advertised a party for time travelers.It opens with the Wyrick haunting, which began in March of 1989 when three-year-old Heidi Wyrick walked in from the backyard of her family's new home on Swint Loop in Ellerslie, Georgia, and asked to keep swinging with an old man her mother couldn't see. The friend Heidi called Mr. Gordy matched James Gordy, a former caretaker of the property who had died in 1974, down to his silver hair, dark suit, and top hat; a second, wounded visitor she named Con matched Lon Batchelor, a man who lost his hand in a cotton gin accident and died in 1957. Before she could read, Heidi ran straight to Gordy's headstone in a cemetery of hundreds and later picked his face from a blind photo lineup. By 1993 the activity had turned violent, with a faceless dark figure, claw marks appearing on Heidi and her father Andy across consecutive nights, and a ribbon found wound around the throat of infant daughter Jordan, and the family brought in Dr. William Roll, a parapsychologist known from Unsolved Mysteries, who recorded an electromagnetic spike past 40 milligauss, elevated positive ions, and nearby seismic activity, then admitted he could not explain the scratches. Medium Amy Allan, later of The Dead Files, and a second psychic working separately placed the same entities in the same rooms, and the Wyricks finally left the house after Andy and Lisa found Heidi suspended upside down above her bed. The case appears in the Discovery Channel's 2002 film A Haunting in Georgia and the 2013 movie The Haunting in Connecticut 2: Ghosts of Georgia, and in The Veil: The Heidi Wyrick Story, the firsthand account written by Heidi's aunt Joyce.From there the episode climbs into the Balsam Mountains of western North Carolina for the legend of the Boojum, a creature said to stand six to eight feet tall, covered in shaggy gray hair, with a disturbingly human face. According to Haywood County lore, the Boojum hoards the region's real gemstones – North Carolina is the only state that holds all four major precious gems, and the 1,869-carat uncut emerald pulled from the North American Emerald Mine in Hiddenite in 2003 is a matter of record – stashing them in moonshine jugs buried in hidden caves. The first written accounts cluster around the Eagle Nest Hotel, a forty-room hay-fever resort that opened on Eagle Nest Mountain in 1900 and burned in 1918, where guests were warned that the Boojum hid in the mountain laurel to watch women bathing in the forest pools. At the center of the legend is a woman named Annie, who chose to live with him as his wife and whose calls across the ridges are said, in local folk etymology, to have given the word "hootenanny" its name. The segment traces the creature's name back to Lewis Carroll's 1876 nonsense poem The Hunting of the Snark, sets the story against the Cherokee removal along the Trail of Tears and the eviction of Appalachian families to create Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and lands in present-day Waynesville, where Boojum Brewing carries the legend's name.The episode closes with the Krononauts, a group from Baltimore's avant-garde art scene who, in January of 1980, ran an advertisement on page 90 of Artforum magazine inviting time travelers to a party in Baltimore on March 9th, 1982, a date chosen because all nine planets would line up more closely than they had in nearly two hundred years, an alignment popularized by the 1974 book The Jupiter Effect. Hundreds of people came, the New York Times covered it and described the scene as an epidemic of temporary lunacy, and no one produced any evidence of time travel, since the organizers' real aim was the permanent paper trail, built on the logic that a documented invitation could be found and answered from any point in the future. The segment follows the same experiment forward through MIT graduate student Amal Dorai's 2005 Time Traveler Convention and physicist Stephen Hawking's 2009 reception at Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge, where Hawking mailed the invitations only after the party had ended and took the empty room as evidence for his chronology protection conjecture, and it ends with an original song, "Krononauts Party," by Dark Weirdness.
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