Para-X Radio

Richard delves into Haunted Bridges

Henry and the gang speak with Paranormal Investigator Phil Summers from Charleston South Carolina

This week's show features curiosities and mysteries from the Boston Public Library and the Cocoanut Grove Fire location. The team also shares historic accounts and dramatic calamities from New England's 4th of July celebrations.   Plus, learn the bizarre (and often times dangerous) celebratory rituals from Portsmouth, New Hampshire's that were far more than the typical "Huzzahs" and firework displays.

The story of Candyman--the mythical villain who lived in Chicago's notorious and now-vanished Cabrini-Green housing project, has (as they say) taken on a life of its own since the Hollywood film of the same name debuted so many years ago now. After we started our Chicago Hauntings ghost tours in 2003, almost every night someone would ask, at the end, "What about Candyman?" After many such nights, we finally put the story on the tour. And that's all I thought it was at first.

A hidden undercroft. An ancient stone said to grant vision — or madness. A door that would not open… until it did. In the quiet village of Oxcroft, an antiquarian enquiry becomes a descent into something older than faith and more enduring than reason. But when the chamber vanishes, and only blood remains, the question is no longer what was found — but what was released.

This episode of Weird Darkness traces the Slender Man from an internet photo contest into real-world stabbings, arson, and a wave of suicides on a South Dakota reservation, then weighs whether an invented internet legend can, in some sense, become real. It opens with the character's exact origin: on June 10th, 2009, Eric Knudsen, posting under the name Victor Surge on the forum Something Awful, submitted two doctored photographs as part of a contest to create convincing paranormal images. Each carried a caption inventing a backstory, one referencing a photographer "presumed dead" in 1983 and another tying the figure to a fire at the Stirling City Library and the disappearance of a photographer named Mary Thomas in 1986. The figure in both images, faceless and unnaturally tall with elongated arms, spread across the internet within days and took on the name Slender Man, along with a folklore of his own: a preference for woods and abandoned buildings, the ability to travel at will, and warning signs that included nosebleeds, nightmares, and sudden paranoia. From there, the episode turns to the Waukesha stabbing of May 31st, 2014, in Wisconsin, when twelve-year-old Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser led their friend Payton Leutner into nearby woods and stabbed her nineteen times, telling investigators the attack was meant to prove Slender Man's existence and make them his "proxies." Leutner survived and crawled to a roadside where a cyclist found her. Geyser was sentenced to forty years to life and remains held in a psychiatric facility; Weier, sentenced to twenty-five years to life, was released from institutional care in the summer of 2021 and placed under supervision. Next, the episode covers the string of incidents that followed within months: a thirteen-year-old girl's knife attack on her mother in Hamilton County, Ohio, in June 2014; a Las Vegas shooting in which the gunman, who reportedly dressed as Slender Man, killed two police officers and a bystander before killing his wife and himself; and a house fire set by a fourteen-year-old girl in Port Richey, Florida, in September 2014, who told police she had "been reading a lot" about the character online. It also details a separate wave of youth suicides on South Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation between late 2014 and mid-2015, which the New York Times reported topped one hundred in six months, some tied by officials to the Slender Man and to a local legend of a "suicide spirit" known as Walking Sam or the Tall Man, and a mass hanging attempt in nearby woods that a local pastor, John Two Bulls, intervened to stop. The episode also relays an account researcher Nick Redfern collected from a Pennsylvania flight attendant trainee named Lacy, who said her laptop began displaying Slender Man's face and, on one occasion, a voice, after she read Robin Swope's book Slenderman: From Fiction to Fact in 2016.The episode closes by comparing Slender Man to Spring-Heeled Jack, a figure reported across Victorian England from the 1830s onward and long suspected of being one person's stunt copied by others in later decades, before turning to researcher Peter McCue's Psychic Internet Theory and the ancient Egyptian god Ptah, weighing whether shared belief circulated across the internet might account for why so many people came to treat a fictional character as something they could encounter.

Deep within the dark and ancient Appalachian forests, countless legends tell of strange encounters that defy explanation. Hikers, hunters, and locals have reported hearing ghostly voices echoing through the trees, seeing shadowy figures moving between the fog-covered paths, and feeling an unseen presence watching from the depths of the wilderness.

From haunted trails and abandoned settlements to tales of lost souls wandering the mountains, the Appalachian forest holds a history filled with mystery, folklore, and terrifying stories that have been passed down for generations. When the sun disappears behind the mountains, the silence of the woods can reveal secrets that many believe were never meant to be found.

Welcome back to another episode of Haunted America. On todays show we have another installment of Reddit Ghost Stories. Thank you for following along. Please leave a review of the podcast down below!!

 Emo-Von and Lashae Discuss Why is My House Haunted & Alien Abduction

There's a movie that's based on an urban legend that then became an urban legend which has since inspired other legends. Confused yet? So were the Trippers when a little movie called Cry Baby Lane came across their radar.

Rumor was so many parents complained upon seeing it, Nickelodeon was forced to pull it and vow never to air it again. So, of course, Christopher Balzano and Natalie Crist needed to watch it. Listen in as they explore the folklore that helped developed the plot of the story and the rumors that have swirled around it for almost two decades. They also use this chance to discuss the ideas behind Cry Baby legends across the country and introduce a new Legend Trip they'll be looking to get to; the infamous Cry Baby Ghost of Bellamy Bridge.

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