Show notes
A terrifying vision, a terrifying UFO encounter, and evidence of the encounter buried in his arm – if true, Tim Cullen’s story could change everything we think we know about extraterrestrials.
EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/timcullen
READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/433fftc2
FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Tim Cullen’s life changed forever after a chilling dream in 1978. It wasn’t long after that he had bizarre encounters with UFOs, was abducted by aliens, and found a strange piece of metal embedded in his arm. Were these encounters real? If so, what secrets lie within the alien implant removed from his body? (The Alien Abduction of Tim Cullen) *** The life of Martha Place took a dark turn in 1899. Convicted of a brutal murder, Martha faced a horrifying punishment… she was about to become the first woman to be executed by the electric chair. (The First Woman in the Electric Chair) *** We’ll look at a double-murder case where real crime collides with reality TV, resulting in real-life horror. (The Wife-Swap Murders) *** Steve’s childhood was marked by inexplicable and spine-chilling encounters. Eerie breathing sounds, a manifestation at his bedside, being pushed down the stairs… all without a rational explanation. Even moving away wouldn’t bring his paranormal tormenting to an end. (The Entity That Follows) *** The urban legend of "The Licked Hand” is a chilling tale that has been whispered around campfires and shared at sleepovers for generations, tapping into our deepest fears of invasion and vulnerability. But this isn't just any ghost story; it's a timeless warning about the dangers lurking in the darkness, waiting to infiltrate our homes and lives… and it even has a bit of truth to it. (Licking The ‘Humans Can Lick Too’ Urban Legend)
CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding
00:01:22.108 = Show Open
00:03:49.182 = Alien Abduction of Tim Cullen
00:15:23.331 = The First Woman in the Electric Chair ***
00:20:45.119 = Licking The “Humans Can Lick Too’ Urban Legend
00:32:36.414 = Wife-Swap Murders
00:40:47.468 = The Entity That Follows ***
00:57:00.607 = Show Close
*** = 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 Alien Abduction of Tim Cullen” by Marcus Lowth for UFO Insight: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p9xv3u2
“The Wife-Swap Murders” by Rayven Crawford for Unspeakable Crimes: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/5n93fc8e
“Licking The ‘Humans Can Lick Too’ Urban Legend” by Jacob Shelton for Graveyard Shift:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8bbakk, and UrbanLegendsAndHorror.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/y39ytjpk
“The First Woman in the Electric Chair” by Troy Taylor: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/ydbd6ae8
“The Entity That Follows” by Marcus Lowth for UFO Insight: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/ykycurch
(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.)
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Originally aired: April 10, 2024
This episode of Weird Darkness moves from a recovered alien implant in a Colorado man's forearm to the first woman ever sent to the electric chair, through the campfire legend of the licked hand, a Wife Swap family destroyed by one son's gunfire, and a breathing entity that stalked a boy from one English city to another.It opens with Tim Cullen, who dreamed on April 2nd, 1978 that he would be in a violent traffic accident, then lived it a week later on April 9th when his friend Ken Ruberg's car rolled over multiple times and left Cullen with a broken neck. Recovering in the hospital, he had a second vivid dream, this one of a UFO, and on May 30th of that year, while driving Highway 59 home from a checkup with his pregnant wife Janet, the couple watched a silent, glowing craft roughly 100 feet long hover over a pasture with two diffused lights — one yellow, one red — glowing at its rear. Cullen reported two more sightings along the same Yuma, Colorado stretch of road, one in 1980 and another in 1994 witnessed by his wife and three daughters, but the encounters faded from his mind until 1998, when he hit his thumb with a hammer and Dr. Mark Hubner at the Yuma Clinic spotted a piece of metal lodged in his forearm on the X-ray. Convinced the object was an alien implant, Cullen contacted Roger K. Leir, who surgically removed it on February 5th, 2000 in Thousand Oaks, California — a melon-seed-shaped fragment about 7 centimeters long, wrapped in a reddish-brown membrane, with a magnetic core that leapt half an inch off the table toward a magnet.From there the episode turns to March 20th, 1899, when Martha Place became the first woman executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison in New York, a procedure so unfamiliar with a female prisoner that her executioners cut a slit in the black dress she had sewn herself to reach her ankles. Born Martha Garrettson in Millstone, New Jersey in 1849, she had been struck in the head by a sleigh at 23 and, her brother believed, never fully recovered. After marrying widower William Place and coming to hate her teenage stepdaughter Ida, she threw acid into the 17-year-old girl's face on February 7th, 1898, smothered her with bedding, and waited with an ax for William, whom she wounded as he stepped through the door. Governor Theodore Roosevelt refused to commute her sentence, and after the words "God help me," 1,760 volts ended her life at the age of 49.Next comes the urban legend of the licked hand, in which a girl left home alone with her German Shepherd reaches down through the night to feel a reassuring lick, only to wake and find her dog skinned in the shower and the words "Humans can lick too" scrawled on the mirror. The legend's roots reach back to an 1871 entry in The Diary of a Victorian Squire by Dearman Birchall, run through M.R. James's 1919 story "The Diary of Mr. Poynter," and surface in the film Urban Legend with its "aren't you glad you didn't turn on the lights" variant. Folklorists including Trevor Blank of SUNY Potsdam account for the tale's endurance, and its dread finds a real-world echo in Dennis Rader, the BTK strangler, who cut the phone lines at Marine Hedge's home on April 27th, 1985 and hid in her closet for hours before she returned.The episode then examines a double murder rooted in reality television, the case of the Stockdale family, who appeared on an April 23rd, 2008 episode of Wife Swap trading mothers with the easygoing Tonkovic household. Raised under a strict religious regime that banned video games, dating, and most contact with the outside world, Jacob Stockdale fatally shot his mother Kathy and his brother James in the head on June 15th, 2017 in Beach City, Ohio, then survived a self-inflicted gunshot. He pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity and tried more than once to flee the mental institution holding him, including a plan to hide behind stacks of books being carted out, but Dr. Arcangela Wood judged him sane at the time of the killings. Jacob ultimately pleaded guilty and received two consecutive 15-year terms, 30 years for the deaths of his mother and brother.The episode closes with an account written by UFO Insight's Marcus Lowth and told to him by a man he calls Steve, who first heard breathing beside his face at age three or four in 1970s Newcastle, England. The encounters escalated over the following years — an invisible finger shoving his cheek, the manifestation of a grey-haired man around 50 in an old-fashioned suit at his bedside, and a push that sent him tumbling down a full flight of stairs in daylight. When the family moved to a semi-detached house near Sheffield in Yorkshire, the presence followed, culminating one night around midnight when Steve, then eight or nine, felt invisible knees pin him to the mattress and unseen hands tighten around his throat until the grip suddenly released and the breathing drained away into the distance. It never returned, leaving unresolved whether the entity was a poltergeist drawn to a child, the lingering ghost of an old man, or something demonic that fixed on a person rather than a place.
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