Astonishing Legends

In tonight's dead letter, we're back in Athens, Ohio, with our listener Evan, who was a sophomore engineering student at Ohio University around 2015. He was thrilled to get room 328 in Wilson Hall, directly below room 428, the "haunted room" we asked about at the end of Dead Letter Office episode 52. He thought bunking below that haunted room would be fun. Maybe it was, but there was a price to pay.

Relevant Prior Episodes
Ep 338: Your True Halloween Stories IV, Part 3
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Ep 50: Mothman Part 1
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Ep 3: Greyfriars Kirkyard Halloween Special
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Ep 117: The Black Monk of Pontefract Part 1
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Ep 123: The Sallie House: Ghost in the Machine Part 1
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Ep 2: Queen Mary & The Haunted Valentine
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Ep 85: The Bell Witch Part 1
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Links and Further Reading
Dead Letter Office S1 Ep 52: The Little Old Man (Audioboom)

Histories of hOUme: A skeptical vacancy in Wilson Hall room 428, by Bri Shaniuk (The Post, October 2015)
Note: We call the paper the Athens Post in the episode. It's The Post, in Athens, Ohio.

Ghost stories, urban legends haunt college campuses (The Columbus Dispatch, via PressReader)

Five Athens cemeteries form lopsided square (The Post)

History of The Ridges (Ohio University)

Kennedy Museum of Art, 100 Ridges Circle (Ohio University)

More than 1,900 unidentified people are buried in Athens, Ohio (WOUB Public Media, October 2025)

Jim Harold's Campfire

Hotel Monte Vista, Flagstaff, Arizona

Tesseract (Wikipedia)

Sleep Paralysis and Anomalous Experience (Psi Encyclopedia)

Night hag (Wikipedia)

Benedictine College

The Shining, the 1980 film (Wikipedia)

Ring, the 1998 film released in North America as Ringu (Wikipedia)

New Orleans murder-suicide rivets city; couple had met amid Katrina (Associated Press, via The Seattle Times, October 2006)

Bloody Mary's Tours and Haunted Museum, New Orleans

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

In tonight's dead letter, Patrick writes to us from Northcote, a suburb on the north side of Melbourne, Australia, where his son James, thirteen at the time, took Cookie, the family's Boston terrier, out before dawn one morning in the autumn of 2024, through a reserve that used to be part of a golf course. Cookie never barks at anyone, but at the top of the hill, beside a stand of gum trees, he stopped, stared, and started to growl at something James couldn't see. Forrest is away this week, so Richard Hatem, screenwriter of The Mothman Prophecies, sits in and reads the letter.

Relevant Prior Episodes
Ep 72: Richard Hatem - Screenwriter of The Mothman Prophecies
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts

Ep 50: Mothman Part 1
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Ep 37: The Delphos Ring Part 1
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Ep 45: Skinwalker Ranch Part 1
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Links and Further Reading
Last week's Dead Letter Office, DLO-240: The Visitor in Clothier Hall (Apple Podcasts)

Richard Hatem's Paranormal Bookshelf (Apple Podcasts)

The Mothman Prophecies, by John A. Keel (Bookshop.org)

Hunt for the Skinwalker, by Colm A. Kelleher and George Knapp (Bookshop.org)

Leaked "jellyfish" UFO video leaves the internet enthralled and baffled (Global News, January 2024)

Slender Man (Wikipedia)

Northcote, Victoria (Wikipedia)

Merri Creek (Wikipedia)

Whatever Remains Podcast, with Marie Mayhew (Apple Podcasts)

Loud pack of coyotes takes over abandoned West Hollywood construction site (ABC7 Los Angeles, July 2026)

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

In tonight's dead letter, Keith takes us back to the spring of 1997, when he was a freshman at Rutgers living on the third floor of Clothier Hall, a brick dorm in downtown New Brunswick, New Jersey. Early one Saturday morning, with the first light coming in around the curtain, he opened his eyes and someone was sitting on the floor against his roommate's bed, six feet away, in a room he had locked the night before. Someone, or some…thing…that shouldn’t have been there.

Relevant Prior Episodes
Ep 26: Shadow People
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts

Ep 338: Your True Halloween Stories IV, Part 3
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts

Ep 87: Black Eyed Kids Part 1
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts

Links and Further Reading
Clothier Hall (Rutgers Residence Life)

Weird NJ

Shadow person (Wikipedia)
Note: We call Benadryl's active ingredient pseudoephedrine in the episode. It's diphenhydramine.

Hypnagogia and the hypnopompic state (Wikipedia)

Hypnic jerk (Wikipedia)

Jim Harold's Campfire

Miyamoto Musashi (Wikipedia)

Wild Talents, by Charles Fort (1932), free to read at sacred-texts.com

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

We're back, and this time we’re lucky enough to have paranormal investigator, researcher and author Michelle Belanger join us to help answer the question connecting this week's stories: does this phenomenon have a name?
At a Southern California shopping mall, Amy gets in line for food when two young women behind her suddenly fill her with an intense feeling of dread.
In Los Angeles, Zee picks up two young women from an unlikely spot near a freeway overpass, and before long, an ordinary ride begins to feel anything but.
Lastly, Mike takes us back to a Chicago suburb in 1988, where a routine walk near a cemetery leads to a passing encounter with two women he has never forgotten.
Turn down the lights and join us for the final set of this year’s true Halloween mysteries.
Visit our website for a lot more information on this episode.

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
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts

Ep 183: Sam the Sandown Clown
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts

Ep 203: The Beast of Gévaudan
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts

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!