Weird Darkness: Paranormal & True Crime Stories

They wore caps and gowns to celebrate the future — but before the night was over, some would lie dead in pools of blood, their dreams buried with them.

EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/capsgownscaskets

READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4d8r6tb9

FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Graduation is a special time in just about everyone’s life when they make their way from childhood, to adulthood. And while that step might be a bit scary for some, we all get past it – we have to. But what if there is something truly to be afraid of at your graduation? Like the possibility of being murdered? (Murdered During Graduation) *** Joseph McKinnon strangled his girlfriend Patricia Dent, then died while trying to bury her body in their garden. (Killed By Karma) *** When you die, do you know that you are dead? A new study says that maybe… yes. You might still be conscious enough to know you are dead even after your body ceases to live. But for how long? (When You Die, You Are Conscious Long Enough To Know It) *** The term Zodiac in true crime circles invokes images of serial murder, cryptograms and bragging letters in and around San Francisco. But the California Zodiac is not the only Zodiac out there. (A Tale of Two Zodiacs)

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00.00.000 = Show Open
00:01:54.162 = Murdered During Graduation
00:13:33.644 = A Tale Of Two Zodiacs ***
00:35:21.731 = When You Die You Are Conscious Long Enough To Know It ***
00:44:27.121 = Killed By Karma
00:48:08.338 = 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:
“A Tale of Two Zodiacs” by Paul Drexler for Crime Traveller: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/ycknuxfd
“Killed By Karma” by Kaleena Fraga for All That’s Interesting: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/pzrdsmsy
“When You Die, You Are Conscious Long Enough To Know It” by Matthew Lavelle for Ranker’s Graveyard Shift:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/4kkcc9m7
“Murdered During Graduation” by Mary Fetzer for ListVerse: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p92rn29
(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.
Originally aired: May, 2022
This episode of Weird Darkness, hosted by Darren Marlar, moves from a string of graduation celebrations that ended in murder to a comparison of the Korean and California Zodiac killers, a scientific claim that human consciousness lingers briefly after death, and the case of a South Carolina man who died burying the girlfriend he had just strangled.It opens with a survey of graduation celebrations turned deadly, beginning with the May 2020 party in southwest Indiana where 47-year-old William Baker carried a .30-06 rifle into a shed and shot 18-year-old South Dearborn High School graduate Paycin Kritlow in the back, claiming his daughter had been raped even though she and her friends denied any assault occurred, a killing that earned Baker a 55-year sentence in November 2021. The segment moves through Menhaz Zaman, a 24-year-old outside Toronto who murdered his father, mother, sister, and grandmother with a crowbar-like weapon and a knife the day before a York University graduation he had faked after failing out of Seneca College; the June 2020 shooting of 19-year-old Tyana Johnson in a Bronx park while her friend Ahamad Branch worked as the DJ; and the June 2017 ambush of Maryland teenagers Shadi Adi Najjar and Artem Ziberov, shot thirty times between them by a group who had searched online for a song called "I Kill for My Family" and killed over a stolen handful of marijuana. Other cases stretch across Pennsylvania, Mississippi, Ohio, South Carolina, and Louisiana, including 18-year-old Hailey Deickman, who died days before her high school graduation after Franklin Senfles sold her fentanyl she believed was oxycodone.From there, the show sets two very different Zodiac cases side by side. The first is the Korean "Zodiac Killer," the Hwaseong murders that began on September 15th, 1986 with the rape and strangling of 71-year-old Lee Wan-im and continued as women were strangled with their own clothing on dark rural roads, a case that drew a manhunt of more than 21,000 suspects and sent a disabled man named Yoon Sung-yeo to prison on a coerced confession, until DNA identified Lee Choon-jae in 2019, a man already jailed since 1995 who confessed to 14 murders and 30 rapes and had escaped suspicion because police wrongly believed the killer's blood was type B rather than his actual type O. Darren places that against the California Zodiac, who killed at least five people around San Francisco between 1968 and 1971, taunted newspapers with cryptograms and threats against schoolchildren, and drew suspicion onto former schoolteacher Arthur Leigh Allen without ever being caught. The segment weighs how each case reached the screen, contrasting Bong Joon-ho's 2003 film Memories of Murder, made while the Korean killer was still unknown, with David Fincher's 2007 Zodiac, built on Robert Graysmith's books, and argues that a competent investigation on either continent might have swapped the outcomes.Next, the episode turns to research suggesting that human consciousness may briefly outlast the body. Dr. Sam Parnia, director of critical care and resuscitation research at NYU Langone in New York City, describes cardiac-arrest patients who were revived and could recall specific conversations and the actions of the doctors and nurses working to save them, and his work points to conscious awareness continuing for as long as three minutes after the heart stops even though the brain's electrical activity typically flatlines within twenty to thirty seconds. The segment adds microbiologist Peter Noble of the University of Washington, whose studies on mice and zebrafish found certain genes increasing in activity in the hours after death, and it frames both findings as evidence that cells shut down gradually rather than switching instantly from living to dead.The episode closes with the death of Joseph McKinnon in Trenton, South Carolina, whom deputies first found lying unresponsive in his yard, dead of a heart attack he suffered while filling in a pit a neighbor believed was meant for a new water feature. When investigators could not locate McKinnon's girlfriend, 65-year-old Patricia Dent, and learned she had missed her shift at the Mount Vintage Golf Club, they dug into the pit and uncovered black garbage bags holding her bound, bruised, and strangled body. Edgefield County Sheriff Jody Rowland and Coroner David Burnett concluded that McKinnon had attacked and choked Dent inside their home, wrapped her, and collapsed from cardiac arrest as he covered her over, and her twin sister Pamela Briggs spoke of her grief while police noted the couple had no known history of domestic violence, meaning that had McKinnon lived, Dent might simply have vanished.

Orange County deputies have linked three people from the Indianapolis area to roughly twenty break-ins at Central Florida cemetery niches, where the jewelry families left beside their loved ones' ashes was taken, and all three are still at large.

BOOK: "They Told Me My Newborn Died - They Lied": https://amzn.to/4i0XVT1
SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/CemeteryNicheThefts

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://pod.link/1078714736

*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*

WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.

LIKE WHAT YOU’RE HEARING? WEIRD DARKNESS has new 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

A two-inch, eyeless fish with no color and a broken sight gene turned up in a single pool under the Army base locals call Alabama's Area 51 – inside a cave scientists had been watching for thirty years.

SOURCES, LINKS, AND PRINT VERSION: https://weirddarkness.com/demoncavefish

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://pod.link/1078714736

*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*

WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.

LIKE WHAT YOU’RE HEARING? WEIRD DARKNESS has new 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

“Sub-Basement”: Down in the black tunnels beneath the store, the doors have sealed shut, the watchman is lying with his throat torn open, and whatever did it is dragging itself toward them through the dark — blind, patient, and hungry after a wait of ten thousand years.

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.tiny.us/OTR

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = Show Open
00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “Alias Mr. Aladdin” (June 12, 1978) ***WD
00:45:00.815 = Jeff Regan, “The Man In The Door” (August 28, 1948)
01:15:53.217 = The Key, “One Hundreds Fifty Thousand Dollars Embezzled” (1956) ***WD
01:40:41.805 = Lights Out, “Sub-Basement” (August 24, 1943) ***WD
02:09:56.858 = Macabre, “Edge of Evil” (January 08, 1962) ***WD
02:39:56.460 = Philip Marlowe, “Sword of Cebu” (March 28, 1950)
03:09:26.831 = Blackstone The Magician, “Ghost That Wasn’t” (November 28, 1948) ***WD
03:22:07.674 = The Black Mass, “A Predicament” / “Tell-Tale Heart” (June 20, 1954) ***WD
03:51:06.861 = Michael Shayne, “Investment In An Invention” (June 18, 1945)
04:20:43.109 = Beyond Midnight, “The House, aka The Visits” (June 27, 1969) (LQ)
04:49:34.636 = Tales of the Frightened, “Story of Wood” (December 18, 1957)
04:53:54.293 = Tales From The Tomb, “Ghost of a Vampire” (1960s)
04:59:20.864 = Show Close

(ADU) = Air Date Unknown
(LQ) = Low Quality
***WD = Remastered, edited, or cleaned up by Weird Darkness to make the episode more listenable. Audio may not be pristine, but it will be better than the original file which may have been unusable or more difficult to hear without editing.
CUSTOM WEBPAGE: https://weirddarkness.com/WDRR0743

In 1957, three teenage naval cadets were sent to map a Suffolk village they had never seen, and came back describing a place that didn't belong to its own century. It's remembered now as the Kersey Time Slip – and decades on, no one can agree on what those three boys actually walked into.

EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/KerseyTimeslip

READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yeyty99k

FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Sandra Hughes was the kind of outdoorswoman who could disappear into the Sierra National Forest for weeks on purpose and walk back out just fine, so when she drove in to wait out the pandemic in the summer of 2020 and didn't come back at all, she left behind a case that still has no answer. (Disappearance of Sandra Hughes) *** Ken McElroy was shot to death on a small-town main street in front of dozens of neighbors, and more than forty years later, every one of them still says the same thing: they saw nothing. (The Town Bully of Skidmore) *** Three Royal Navy cadets walked into a Suffolk village in October 1957 and found a butcher’s shop full of rotting oxen, no wires, no people, and no church. (The Kersey Timeslip)

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding
00:01:41.359 = Show Open
00:03:11.460 = Kersey Timeslip, Part One
00:16:32.343 = Kersey Timeslip, Part Two ***
00:28:18.744 = Disappearance of Sandra Hughes ***
00:46:13.169 = Ken McElroy, The Town Bully of Skidmore ***
01:09:17.968 = SONG: “Nobody Saw A Thing” by Maggie Cross (based on the Ken McElroy story)
01:14:43.961 = 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:
The Disappearance and Ghost Sighting of Sandra Johnsen Hughes: https://weirddarkness.com/sandra-hughes/
The Kersey Timeslip: Three Cadets and a Village Out of Time: https://weirddarkness.com/kersey-timeslip/
Ken McElroy – The Town Bully of Skimore: https://weirddarkness.com/ken-mcelroy
SONG: “Nobody Saw A Thing” by Maggie Cross: https://weirddarkness.com/music
(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.
Originally aired: August 14, 2026