Show notes
Santa Cruz students were told to accept rides only from cars with a university parking sticker, and Edmund Kemper, a six-foot-nine man who'd killed his grandparents at fifteen, had one because his mother worked on campus.
EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/EdmundKemper
READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/59bkpj6y
FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: “I just wanted to see what it felt like to kill Grandma.” “When I see a pretty girl walking down the street, I think two things. One part wants to be real nice and sweet, and the other part wonders what her head would look like on a stick.” “If I killed them, you know, they couldn’t reject me as a man. It was more or less making a doll out of a human being… and carrying out my fantasies with a doll, a living human doll.” “With a girl, there’s a lot left in the girls body without a head. Of course, the personality is gone.” These are just some of the actual phrases serial killer Edmund Kemper III used to describe his joy in mutilating women. (Kemper) *** Was Zigmund Adamski really the victim of murderous extraterrestrial visitors? If so, why would they choose to kill a human and leave his body for all the world to see? (The Zigmund Adamski Extraterrestrial Incident) *** A Weirdo family member shares her hair-raising incident with an invisible phantom’s hand. (Hair Raising Experience)
CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding
00:00:44.116 = Show Open
00:02:38.445 = Serial Killer Edmund Kemper, The Co-Ed Killer
00:30:00.187 = The Zigmund Adamski Extraterrestrial Incident ***
00:34:13.211 = Hair Raising Experience
00:38:22.618 = Show Close
*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad break
LISTEN ON PODCAST APPS:
Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.com/wdapps
*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*
SOURCES and RESOURCES:
“Kemper” from The Scare Chamber: http://bit.ly/2qfY9ht
“The Zigmund Adamski Extraterrestrial Incident” from Real Paranormal Experiences: http://bit.ly/31gwgCL
“Hair Raising Experience” submitted anonymously by a Weirdo family member
(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.)
WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.
LIKE WHAT YOU’RE HEARING? WEIRD DARKNESS posts episodes 7 DAYS A WEEK! Listen FREE wherever you get podcasts or visit https://weirddarkness.com/listen. • Paranormal • True Crime • Ghosts • UFOs • Cryptids • Unexplained • Want even more? Become an OFFICIAL WEIRDO for commercial-free episodes, bonus episodes, weeknight live chats, audiobooks & more at https://WeirdDarkness.com/OFFICIAL
This episode of Weird Darkness runs from the Santa Cruz murders of Edmund Kemper, the Co-Ed Killer, to a coal miner found dead on a coal pile in Todmorden, England, and an invisible hand in a listener's hair in Oceanside, California.
It opens with Edmund Kemper, who shot his grandparents to death on their North Fork, California ranch at fifteen, spent five years at Atascadero State Hospital, and by 1972 was driving the roads around Santa Cruz with a University of California parking sticker on his car, courtesy of his mother's job on campus. Over the next year he killed six young hitchhikers, among them Fresno State students Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa, fifteen-year-old Aiko Koo, Cindy Schall, and UC Santa Cruz students Rosalind Thorpe and Allison Liu. In April 1973 he killed his mother, Clarnell, and her friend Sally Hallett, then drove to Pueblo, Colorado, and called the police from a phone booth to confess. A jury found him sane and guilty on eight counts of first-degree murder that November, and he's been turned down for parole again and again ever since.
From there, the episode crosses to West Yorkshire, where coal miner Zigmund Adamski walked out of his home in Tingley in June 1980 to buy potatoes and turned up dead days later on top of a pile of coal in Todmorden, about twenty miles away, with burns on his head, neck, and shoulders covered in an ointment nobody could identify. That November, PC Alan Godfrey, one of the officers on the case, reported an object he first took for a bus hovering just off the ground near a Todmorden housing estate, and under hypnosis he described a tall man called Joseph, eight small robots, and a dog the size of an Alsatian.
The episode closes with a listener's account from 2009, when she was packing her car after dark outside her aunt's house in Oceanside, a house that had felt wrong to the family since her aunt moved in back in 1996. Alone in the dim driveway, she felt what seemed like a moth the size of a bat thrashing in her short hair, swatted at empty air, and then felt something tug her bangs at the trunk of the car, and she ran back into the house calling for her family.
Our TOPPODCAST Picks 
Stay Connected
