True Weird Stuff
True Weird Stuff is the award-winning podcast hosted by Sheri Lynch. Surprising, odd, bizarre - and sometimes insane. Always true. Let us tell you a story…
The Hermit of Gully Lake
Today's True Weird Stuff - The Hermit of Gully Lake
In 1944, Willard MacDonald jumped from a moving military train to escape fighting in World War II and vanished into the wilderness of Nova Scotia, Canada. What began as an act of desperation became a remarkable life of solitude that lasted nearly 60 years. Known as the Hermit of Gully Lake, MacDonald survived brutal Canadian winters, lived in a tiny makeshift cabin, and refused to return to civilization even after he was no longer a wanted deserter.
The Ogress of Reading - The Serial Killer Who Murdered Babies for Money
Today's True Weird Stuff - The Ogress of Reading: The Serial Killer Who Murdered Babies for Money
In Victorian England, desperate mothers entrusted their babies to a seemingly compassionate nurse named Amelia Dyer. But behind her promises of loving homes lay a horrifying secret. Known as the Ogress of Reading, Dyer exploited the unregulated practice of “baby farming,” taking money to care for unwanted infants before murdering them and disposing of their bodies in the River Thames. When a gruesome discovery in 1896 exposed her crimes, investigators uncovered one of Britain's most shocking serial murder cases, with...
Your Beautiful Ankle - The Bizarre History of Ankle Beauty Contests
Today's True Weird Stuff - Your Beautiful Ankle - The Bizarre History of Ankle Beauty Contests
Once upon a time, a woman's ankle was considered so alluring that entire beauty contests were devoted to finding the prettiest pair. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, ankle beauty contests became a bizarre sensation, with women hiding behind curtains while judges inspected, measured, and sometimes even caressed their feet and ankles. It's a forgotten chapter of history that's equal parts hilarious, creepy, and utterly unbelievable.
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For the Lady, a Lysol Douche
Today's True Weird Stuff - For the Lady, a Lysol Douche
Today, you use Lysol to clean the kitchen or disinfect the bathroom. But for decades, it was marketed to American women for something far more intimate. Behind vintage ads promising “feminine hygiene” and marital happiness was a coded message about birth control at a time when contraception was restricted or illegal. Women were encouraged to douche with Lysol, even as its caustic ingredients caused burns, serious injuries, and death.
Deadly Belle - The Serial Killer Who Lured Men to Her Murder Farm
Today's True Weird Stuff - Deadly Belle - The Serial Killer Who Lured Men to Her Murder Farm
Known as one of America’s most notorious female serial killers, Belle Gunness lured wealthy bachelors to her farm in Indiana, took their money, and buried their dismembered bodies. But when her farmhouse burned to the ground in 1908, investigators were left with one chilling question: Did Belle Gunness die in that fire, or did she pull off yet another deadly deception?
Tilt-A-Whirl: From a Kitchen Table to the American Midway
Today's True Weird Stuff - Tilt-A-Whirl: From a Kitchen Table to the American Midway
Long before the Tilt-A-Whirl became a fixture of carnival midways across America, it began with a strange little experiment involving an inventor, his young son, a wooden chair, and a kitchen table. Discover the surprisingly weird history of the iconic carnival ride, from Herbert Sellner’s original 1920s invention to the family tragedies and lasting legacy that made the Tilt-A-Whirl an American amusement park classic.
Olney House of Horrors: The R.C. and Eugene Horsch Serial Killer Mystery
Today's True Weird Stuff - Olney House of Horrors: The R.C. and Eugene Horsch Serial Killer Mystery
A routine arrest near Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell lead police to a decaying house filled with hidden compartments, mysterious chemicals, fake IDs, and possible connections to multiple missing women. At the center of the investigation are Eugene Horsch and his late father, R.C. Horsch, a pornographer, counterfeiter, fugitive and author who once described himself as a serial killer. Did Philadelphia police stumble onto a house of horrors hiding decades of murder, or does the disturbing evidence point to something elsRevisiting Bloody Benders: America’s Killer Family (Airdate 9/4/2026)
Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting Bloody Benders: America’s Killer Family (Airdate 9/4/2026)
For pioneers traveling the lonely Kansas prairie, the Bender family's roadside inn seemed like a welcome refuge from the hardships of the frontier. Then, travelers started disappearing. As suspicion turned toward the seemingly ordinary family, one of America's most chilling frontier mysteries began to unfold. By the time authorities arrived, the Benders had already disappeared, leaving behind countless questions surrounding this serial killer family.
Revisiting Charlie No-Face - The Tragic Truth Behind the Green Man Legend
Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting Charlie No-Face - The Tragic Truth Behind the Green Man Legend
For decades, teenagers in western Pennsylvania whispered about a faceless figure walking the roads at night. They called him Charlie No-Face, or the Green Man. But behind the urban legend was Raymond Robinson, a real man horribly injured in a childhood electrical accident, who chose the cover of darkness because daylight brought cruelty, fear, and stares.
Revisiting Rest In Peace: The Church Built Over a Pit of Corpses
Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting Rest In Peace: The Church Built Over a Pit of Corpses
In the 1800s, London was running out of room for the dead. At Enon Chapel, bodies were crammed beneath the church floor while worshippers gathered above the stench of decay. As overcrowded graveyards became a public health nightmare, George “Graveyard” Walker exposed the horrors hiding beneath the city’s chapels and burial grounds.
Revisiting Hammer Time - The Hollywood Love Triangle That Ended in Murder
Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting Hammer Time - The Hollywood Love Triangle That Ended in Murder
In 1922, former showgirl Clara Phillips became convinced her husband was having an affair with 19-year-old Alberta Meadows. What followed was one of Los Angeles’ most sensational crimes: a jealous confrontation, a claw hammer, and a murder so brutal the press gave Phillips a chilling nickname: the “Tiger Woman.”
Revisiting Teenage Nazi Hunters - The Sisters Who Became Nazi Assassins
Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting Teenage Nazi Hunters: The Sisters Who Became Nazi Assassins
Freddie and Truus Oversteegen were teenage girls who exploited society's tendency to underestimate them, turning innocence into one of the most effective weapons against the Nazi occupation. Their courage, deception, and deadly missions remain among the most extraordinary stories of WWII.
Revisiting Ballsy: The Prison Doctor Who Experimented on Thousands of Inmates
Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting Ballsy: The Prison Doctor Who Experimented on Thousands of Inmates
At California's San Quentin Prison, Dr. Leo Stanley believed crime could be cured through surgery. Over the course of decades, inmates became subjects in a series of bizarre and disturbing experiments involving forced sterilizations, gland transplants, and testicles taken from executed prisoners. Stanley claimed he was advancing science. Others saw something far more sinister: a prison doctor using human beings as laboratory specimens.
Revisiting Human Product 12 - The Man Secretly Injected With Plutonium
Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting Human Product 12 - The Man Secretly Injected With Plutonium
In 1945, Ebb Cade survived a car accident near Oak Ridge, Tennessee, only to become part of a secret experiment. Without his consent, doctors injected him with plutonium to study how radiation moved through the human body. Also known as "Human Product 12,” Cade became the first of 18 victims of one of the most disturbing human radiation experiments in American history.
Revisiting The Enema King: Louis XIV's Strangest Obsession
Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting The Enema King: Louis XIV's Strangest Obsession
Louis XIV was known as the Sun King, but history gave him another, far less majestic nickname. At Versailles, doctors prescribed them for everything from headaches to digestive problems. Convinced that enemas were the key to good health, Louis XIV received them by the thousands, making enemas both a medical treatment and a status symbol.
Revisiting Shock Doc - Inside Bellevue’s Horrific Child Psychiatry Experiments
Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting Shock Doc - Inside Bellevue’s Horrific Child Psychiatry Experiments
Dr. Lauretta Bender became one of the most controversial child psychiatrists in America. At Bellevue Hospital, she used electroshock therapy on children diagnosed with childhood schizophrenia. Her work became tangled in the dark history of government-backed mind control research and society's terrifying faith in experimental psychiatry.
Revisiting Corpse Medicine - When Doctors Prescribed Human Remains
Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting Corpse Medicine - When Doctors Prescribed Human Remains
Before modern medicine, some cures came from the grave. For centuries, Europeans swallowed powdered skull, drank human blood, and consumed ground-up mummies in the belief that the dead could heal the living. It sounds like folklore, but corpse medicine was once accepted as a real treatment for everything from headaches to epilepsy.
Revisiting King of Quacks: The Greatest Medical Fraud in American History
Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting King of Quacks: The Greatest Medical Fraud in American History
Curtis Howe Springer claimed to be a doctor. He wasn't. He also claimed to be a minister. That was questionable, too. Yet somehow he convinced thousands of people to trust him with their health, their money, and their dreams. Selling miracle cures from his desert empire, Springer built a fortune on deception and became one of the most successful medical frauds in American history...the self-crowned King of Quacks.
Revisiting The Baroness: The Galápagos Murder Mystery Nobody Solved
Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting The Baroness: The Galápagos Murder Mystery Nobody Solved
The Galápagos Islands were supposed to be an escape from the world. But for a handful of European settlers, jealousy, betrayal, and suspicion turned their isolated paradise into the setting for one of history's strangest mysteries. When the self-proclaimed Baroness of this remote island suddenly vanished, everyone became a suspect.
Revisiting Unholy City: The Cult Leader Who Built His Own Town
Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting Unholy City: The Cult Leader Who Built His Own Town
His followers called him a prophet. Everyone else called him dangerous. In the hills of California, cult leader William E. Riker built a community known as Holy City...a town founded on racial segregation, strict control, and his own twisted interpretation of Christianity. What began as a religious movement grew into one of the strangest cult compounds in American history.
The Phantom Barber
Today's True Weird Stuff - The Phantom Barber
In the summer of 1942, paranoia gripped the town of Pascagoula, Mississippi. An unknown intruder began sneaking into homes at night, not to steal valuables, but to cut the hair of sleeping children. As the attacks escalated into violence, mass hysteria took hold. A shadowy figure called “The Phantom Barber” terrorized families, then suddenly vanished without a trace.
Bloody Bishop
Today's True Weird Stuff - Bloody Bishop
In 1976, a respected U.S. diplomat named William Bradford Bishop murdered his wife, mother, and three sons. He drove their bodies 275 miles to a swamp and set them on fire. Bishop vanished soon after, abandoning his car near the Great Smoky Mountains. He spent nearly 42 years on the FBI’s Most Wanted list and was never captured. No one knows if he died in those mountains…or if he simply became someone else.Revisiting The Living Corpse: The Man Who Made a Career Being Buried Alive
Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting The Living Corpse: The Man Who Made a Career Being Buried Alive
Before modern mortuary science, being buried alive was a real and terrifying possibility. But in mid-century America, one man turned that fear into a career. Meet “Country” Bill White, aka "The Living Corpse." Country Bill spent over two years of his life underground, chasing world records across drive-in theaters and car dealerships. This is the strange, wildly American story of a man who made a living cheating death.
The Morlok 4
Today's True Weird Stuff - The Morlok 4
In 1930, four identical baby girls were born against impossible odds. The medical marvel of the Morlok quadruplets brought hope to a society ravaged by the Great Depression. But what the world didn't see was the strict, authoritarian home life behind closed doors. As their fame grew, so did their father’s control, transforming their celebrity into captivity.
The Hello Girls: The Women Who Helped Win WWI...and Were Forgotten
Today's True Weird Stuff - The Hello Girls: The Women Who Helped Win WWI...and Were Forgotten
Before women could vote or officially serve in the Army, 223 American women were sent to the front lines of World War I to run battlefield communications. They worked under bombardment, wore gas masks at their desks, and connected 26 million calls that helped secure Allied victory. They were sworn in as soldiers...and then denied recognition for 60 years. This is the story of the Hello Girls.The Angel Makers: The Village That Poisoned Its Husbands
Today's True Weird Stuff - The Angel Makers
In a quiet Hungarian village with no doctor and no escape from abusive marriages, the women found salvation in a midwife called Auntie Suzy. She delivered babies by day and, by night, brewed arsenic from flypaper. Husbands, lovers, parents, even children began to die. For nearly twenty years, no one asked questions. Mysterious deaths in the community became the status quo, creating the murderous legacy of the Angel Makers.
Revisiting Beavers On The Moon
Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting Beavers On The Moon
Claims that the Apollo 11 moon landing was a hoax have existed for decades. Meet the grandaddy of moon landing conspiracy theories, Bill Kaysing. He believed the Apollo Moon landings between 1969 and 1972 were faked. However, this isn't the only lunar conspiracy...The Great Moon Hoax of 1835 went as far as to trick people into believing that animals lived on the moon.
Amelia's SOS
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Today's True Weird Stuff - Amelia's SOS
In 1937, the world was told that Amelia Earhart simply vanished — swallowed whole by the Pacific, leaving nothing behind but silence. But what if there wasn’t silence? What if, in the days after her disappearance, faint and frantic distress calls crackled through the static? Amateur radio operators claimed they heard her pleading for help. A warship reported similar transmissions. And yet, history brushed them aside as hoaxes.
Revisiting Tripping Johns
Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting Tripping Johns
One of our first episodes of True Weird Stuff was about the CIA dosing unsuspecting men with LSD and luring them to surveillance brothels. We're doing something a little different in this episode; we're providing live commentary as we listen back to "Tripping Johns."
Revisiting Talking To Heaven
Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting Talking To Heaven
What happens when we die? Are you a person who believes that we flicker into and out of existence like earthbound fireflies, here and then gone? Or maybe you believe in an eternal soul that recycles itself lifetime after lifetime? What if you could know, what if you did know what happens when we die? In this episode, you’ll hear from internationally acclaimed spiritual medium James Van Praagh.Killer Ouija Board
Today's True Weird Stuff - Killer Ouija Board
Some say the Ouija board is just a game. A toy. A harmless way to pass the time. But in 1933, Dorothea Turley—once celebrated as America’s ideal of beauty—found herself trapped in a life she no longer wanted. Isolated, restless, and searching for answers, she turned to a Ouija board. What she got back was a sinister command: kill your husband.
Cursed Bread
Today's True Weird Stuff - Cursed Bread
In 1951, a quiet French village descended into chaos after people began hallucinating, screaming about monsters, and even jumping from windows—all after eating bread. Officially blamed on contaminated grain, the case took a darker turn when connections to CIA LSD experiments and the mysterious death of a government scientist surfaced. Was this a tragic accident… or a secret test on an entire town?
The Jumper
Today's True Weird Stuff - The Jumper
On November 28, 1953, a man crashed through a tenth-floor window at New York City’s Hotel Statler. His name was Frank Olson — a scientist working on some of the most disturbing top-secret programs of the Cold War. Days earlier, the CIA had secretly dosed him with LSD. The official story? A troubled man had a breakdown and jumped. But decades later, new evidence raised a terrifying possibility: Frank Olson didn’t jump...he was thrown.
Open Wide
Today's True Weird Stuff - Open Wide
In the early 1900s, psychiatrist Dr. Henry Cotton claimed he could cure mental illness by removing hidden infections in the body. His theory led to a shocking medical practice at the New Jersey State Hospital for the Insane in Trenton—patients had all of their teeth pulled, tonsils removed, and even parts of their intestines surgically removed in an attempt to eliminate bacteria believed to cause insanity. What started as a revolutionary medical theory quickly spiraled into one of the most disturbing chapters in psychiatric history.
Scarlett Sisters
Today's True Weird Stuff - Scarlett Sisters
Born into Southern privilege, sisters Ada and Minna Simms escaped violent marriages, stumbled into show business, and eventually pivoted into running what became the most luxurious brothel in America. The Everleigh Club catered exclusively to millionaires, politicians, gangsters, and royalty. Ada and Minna transformed prostitution into an elite, curated luxury experience that also brought controversy to their front door.Jeffrey Epstein, Vampire
Today's True Weird Stuff - Jeffrey Epstein, Vampire
How do you build a conspiracy theory? Start with a villain. Add power. Stir in mystery. True Weird Stuff examines the internet's bizarre claim that Jeffrey Epstein is an immortal vampire who once lived as President Andrew Jackson. We trace the ingredients: the suspicious timing of press releases, strange digital footprints after Epstein’s death, the uncanny resemblance to the face on the $20 bill — and society's refusal to accept an unsatisfying ending.
Swing Your Partner
Today's True Weird Stuff - Swing Your Partner
From 17th-century folk traditions to 20th-century propaganda, the square dance traveled a long road before landing in your elementary school gym. What looks like homespun Americana hides a secret: a powerful man’s fear that jazz was a threat to white America. Sometimes the most wholesome traditions carry the darkest fingerprints.
Chronovision
Today's True Weird Stuff - Chronovision
In 1972, a Vatican priest claimed he built a machine that could watch past events like a television...everything from ancient Rome to the crucifixion of Christ. Father Pellegrino Ernetti called his invention the Chronovisor, and Ernetti claimed the Vatican saw the machine, feared it, and hid it away forever. The Chronovisor promised answers that no religion or government could survive. Was it the greatest secret ever buried, or a warning about wanting proof too badly?
Internal Sunshine
Today's True Weird Stuff - Internal Sunshine
William J.A. Bailey wasn’t a doctor, but he convinced the public to trust him anyway—selling radium-laced water as a cure for nearly everything. One of those believers was Eben Byers, a wealthy athlete who drank more than a thousand doses, slowly poisoning himself until his jaw disintegrated and his skull began to rot before his death. The death of Eben Byers forced the world to finally confront the cost of pseudoscience that goes unchecked.
The Perfect Baby
Today's True Weird Stuff - The Perfect Baby
In 1919, a toddler known as one of America’s “Perfect Babies” vanished from his New Jersey home. Searchers scoured the woods. Accusations spread. Theories multiplied. When his remains were found deep in the swamp, they answered nothing. The disappearance and death of 2-year-old Billy Dansey spun a web of fear, superstition, prejudice, and failed justice.
