Astonishing Legends

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
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts

Ep 116: Small Town Monsters
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts

Ep 183: Sam the Sandown Clown
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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!

Our Halloween tradition continues with three more listeners sharing encounters they still can’t explain.
At a church summer camp in the mountains above Southern California, Ray and two fellow counselors spot a girl standing alone in the parking lot after lights-out. She silently returns to the bunkhouse when they call to her… but that won’t be the last time they see her.
In San Luis Obispo, Brian and his wife move into a guest house with a long history and a curious warning from their elderly landlady: most tenants don’t stay very long. Soon they begin to understand why.
And Terry takes us back to the night shift of a hospital coronary care unit, where a dying patient starts asking every nurse the same unsettling question: “Who’s that behind you?”
Turn down the lights and settle in for Part Two of our Halloween listener stories.
Visit our website for a lot more information on this episode.

In tonight's dead letter, our listener TM was the office manager at a Catholic parish in the upper Mississippi river area, and part of her job was digitizing the cemetery's paper records, so she'd walk the rows with a camera, say hello to everyone, and tell them what she was there to do. One marker sat outside the cemetery’s plot map entirely: a boy who drowned in the river in 1936, with fresh flowers by his stone and no file in the office. One July afternoon, someone or something unseen let her know it was there.

Relevant Prior Episodes

Ep 247: Massacre at Duffy's Cut Part 1
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts

Ep 317: The Screaming Skulls
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts

Ep 85: The Bell Witch Part 1
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts

Ep 123: The Sallie House: Ghost in the Machine Part 1
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts

Ep 4: Amelia Earhart Vanishes Part 1
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts

Links and Further Reading

Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 1032 (Vatican.va)

St. John Chrysostom (Britannica)

All Souls' Day (Catholic Encyclopedia, New Advent)

Columbarium (Merriam-Webster)

Duffy's Cut (Wikipedia)

Historic Bell Witch Cave, Adams, Tennessee

Electronic Voice Phenomena: An Overview (Astonishing Legends blog)

Stahl House, Case Study House #22 (LA Conservancy)

Scared All The Time (podcast)

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

In 1933, a Scottish botanist watched a seemingly abandoned steamship drift past the Alaskan coast on an ice floe. It appeared upside down in a strange mirage, with no crew and no one at the wheel. This ship was the Baychimo, which was abandoned two years earlier, but refused to disappear. Having repeatedly resurfaced across the Arctic, it earning a reputation as one of history’s great ghost ships.
In this episode, we explore the strange history of ghost ships from the the Baychimo, to the frozen Octavius, and the Ourang Medan, whose crew was reportedly found mysteriously dead shortly before the ship itself exploded and sank. Three ships, three enduring legends, and at least one vessel whose final resting place remains unknown.
Visit our website for a lot more information on this episode.

In tonight's dead letter, Corey takes us back to Omaha, Nebraska in the year 2000, when he was the overnight host on a Top 40 station and a call-in topic about haunted places kept circling back to one private family cemetery. He sent a carload of listeners out there on a Friday night to report back live on the air. A few days later his boss got a phone call from the cemetery's caretakers. And, to paraphrase a Dateline episode…things got weirder from there.
We mentioned a TON of old eps in this one!

Relevant Prior Episodes
Ep 48: Choose Your Own Adventure
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts

Ep 71: Pere Cheney: The Town that Disappeared
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts

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

Ep 50: Mothman Part 1
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts

Ep 14: What's Gotten Into You?
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts

Ep 209: The Phantom Horse of Greensboro
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts

Ep 120: The Grim Reaper
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts

Ep 154: Lockdown at the Waverly Hills Sanatorium
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts

Ep 156: The Ax Murder House in Villisca Part 1
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts

Ep 49: Monsters Among Us
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts

Ep 310: The Rhine Research Center: Extraordinary Evidence
Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts

Links and Further Reading
Church Grims, by Tess Pfeifle (Astonishing Legends blog)

Strange Intruders, by David Weatherly

G.N.M. Tyrrell (Psi Encyclopedia, Society for Psychical Research)

Ghosts and Apparitions in Psi Research (Psi Encyclopedia)

Phantasms of the Living, Volume 1 (1886), free at the Internet Archive

Phantasms of the Living, Volume 2 (1886), free at the Internet Archive

Jim Harold's Campfire

The Mothman of Point Pleasant (Small Town Monsters, 2017)

The Ankou

The Case Against Reality, by Donald Hoffman

A Game of Pool, The Twilight Zone (1961)

On a Pale Horse, by Piers Anthony

The Villisca Axe Murder House

Live and Let Die (1973)

Twin Peaks: The Return (2017)

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