Astonishing Legends

In tonight's dead letter, Daniel, a self-described skeptic writes in about the one thing he's never been able to explain away. He was a third-grader in northeast Washington in 1985, riding home one evening, when an intense green light blinded him and his mom in their car. For years he figured he'd made it up, or pulled it from some movie. Then it came up years later over lunch with his sister, and he found out he wasn't the only one in the car who never forgot it.
REFERENCE LINKS

When Mysterious Green Fireballs Worried the U.S. Government — HISTORY

Project Twinkle and the Green Fireball Investigation

The Green Flash: What Causes the Rare Sunset Phenomenon — EarthSky

Fairchild Air Force Base History — HistoryLink.org

Faded Giant by Robert Salas and James Klotz

The 1967 Malmstrom Missile Shutdown — CUFON Archive

Robert Hastings — UFOs and Nukes

Astonishing Legends Ep. 155: Abduction at Devil's Den (Terry Lovelace)
We're looking for more stories! Send your Dead Letter to deadletteroffice@astonishinglegends.com!

In tonight's dead letter, our listener’s family trades a rented place for an old Victorian villa tucked into the quiet border country between England and Wales. The previous owner had loved the house for more than half a century, and the neighbors were quick to say she'd have approved of the new arrivals. But the littlest member of the family keeps mentioning an old woman with white hair. We’ll get into faceless figures, formidable women who hold a home together, and an old plaque that quietly says exactly what this whole story is about.

REFERENCE LINKS

William Morris's Bed and the Kelmscott Manor Poem — Society of Antiquaries of London

Lucy M. Boston, the Green Knowe Books, and Memory in a House — Britannica

The Manor at Hemingford Grey (the real Green Knowe)

Folklore of the Stiperstones and the Devil's Chair

The Devil's Chair: The Story Behind the Shropshire Landmark — Shropshire Star

The White Lady of Ludlow Castle (Marion de la Bruyère) — Shropshire Star

The Phantom Funeral of Ratlinghope and Shropshire Ghost Stories — The History Press

Shropshire Folklore, Wild Edric, and the Long Mynd Black Dog — Shropshire Star

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

In tonight's dead letter, we head into Grafton, West Virginia — a small railroad town built on a B&O junction, Civil War supply lines, and two national cemeteries. The house at the center of this story sat right in the middle of all that history. When a listener named Jonathan moved in with his family as a kid, it was, as he puts it, just off — and the footsteps upstairs were the easy part. Small things kept stacking up, the kind you could maybe almost explain away one at a time but never all together. Decades later he's still working through what happened in that house, and what stayed there.
REFERENCE LINKS

Grafton, West Virginia — e-WV Encyclopedia

B&O Railroad Historical Marker in Grafton

Grafton Civil War Supply Depot Historical Marker

Grafton National Cemetery — National Cemetery Administration

Thornsbury Bailey Brown — First Union Soldier Killed in the Civil War

International Mother's Day Shrine

Anna Jarvis, Founder of Mother's Day

The Grafton Monster — e-WV Encyclopedia

The Grafton Monster Festival

The Grafton Monster in Fallout 76

George Washington's Surveying of Grafton — City of Grafton

Ruth Ann Musick, West Virginia Folklorist

The Telltale Lilac Bush and Other West Virginia Ghost Tales

Astonishing Legends Ep 85: The Bell Witch Part 1

Astonishing Legends Archived Episodes — The Bell Witch Series

The Enfield Poltergeist (1977)

The Smurl Haunting (West Pittston, PA)

Skinwalkers at the Pentagon — Lacatski, Kelleher, Knapp

Hypnopompic Hallucinations — Sleep Foundation

The Old Hag Phenomenon and Sleep Paralysis

The Blemmyes — Headless Men with Faces in Their Chests

West Virginia Paranormal Investigations

Paper Moon (1973)

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

In January 1956, rush-hour drivers crossing Pittsburgh’s icy Homestead High Level Bridge watched a nightmare descend from the sky: a silent B-25 bomber gliding just feet above the roadway with both engines dead. Veteran Air Force pilot Major William Dotson pulled off a flawless emergency landing on the freezing Monongahela River, saving all six men from the crash itself. But within minutes, two crew members vanished into the current, and the bomber sank beneath only 25 feet of water… never to be seen again. How does an entire military aircraft disappear in shallow water, in front of hundreds of witnesses, and stay missing for nearly seventy years?
Visit our website for a lot more information on this episode.

Scott and Forrest present a preview of a new podcast called Hidden History with Dr. Harini Bhat!
Dr. Harini Bhat is a clinical pharmacist and storyteller obsessed with the moments in history that still can't be fully explained. Every week she investigates real events that defy easy explanation. Mass hysterias. Vanished civilizations. Medical oddities. Strange signals. Unexplained phenomena that keep repeating across centuries, as if history is trying to tell us something.

Hidden History doesn't dismiss ancient events as myth or superstition. It treats them as open case files, shaped by the limits of knowledge, technology, and record-keeping. Because the unknown isn't a failure of explanation. It's a constant in human experience, one that evolves, repeats, and sometimes deepens the more we learn.

New episodes drop every Monday. Follow now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or watch on YouTube @hiddenhistorypod. Listen here: https://play.megaphone.fm/65qgwrg-sq-mmvg7tpqgfa