Weird Darkness Records

What if a classic radio story became a song — in the time it takes place? Static Wax reimagines featured RetroRadio stories as songs from their era.

"The Sound of the Old Man's Cane" is a 1930s-style big band number inspired by Dead Walk at Night, an episode of Inner Sanctum Mysteries originally broadcast on September 20, 1942. The story follows a man who murders his blind uncle to claim his inheritance and escape a life of servitude — only to find that the dead don't stay silent, and the sound of a tapping cane follows him long after the old man is g...

The song is about Flying Tiger Line Flight 739, a chartered Lockheed Super Constellation that went missing over the western Pacific on March 16th, 1962, with 107 people aboard. It had lifted off from Travis Air Force Base in California two days earlier and was working toward Saigon by way of Honolulu, Wake Island, Guam, and Clark Air Base in the Philippines. Ninety-three of the passengers were Ranger-trained Army communications specialists flying in civilian clothes with their uniforms and identification packed away, three were South Vietnamese servicemen, and the remaining eleven were the civilian crew. The soldiers were going over to relieve men...

[Verse 1]
Day after day they seek me out
Eager to know my holy ways
As if they do only what is right not wrong
As if they do only what I say
They ask me for my just decisions
They pray that I will always be near
Why have we fasted, have you not seen it
We are so humble is your vision clear
[Chorus]
Is this the kind of fast I've chosen
Because you learn it awful slow
When you fast for the Lord
Don't be...

The song is about the four people who ran a roadside inn and general store on the Great Osage Trail in Labette County, Kansas, roughly seven miles northeast of Cherryvale, from the fall of 1871 until May of 1873. John Bender Sr., his wife Elvira, and the pair who passed as their grown son and daughter, John Jr. and Kate, took in travelers crossing the plains. Kate handed out flyers advertising herself as a healer and spiritualist who could cure disease and speak with the dead, and she held séances for anyone who asked. A canvas curtain divided the single room. A...

Loosely based on the story, “The Impossible Is True” by CBS Radio Mystery Theater (March 14, 1978), as heard in the Weird Darkness #RetroRadio episode, “Three Witnesses, a Locked-Room Murder, And a Ghost On The Marble Stairs”: https://weirddarkness.com/wdrr0707/

An old mansion narrates the history of the wealthy family that has lived and died inside it across generations — a locked-room death, a woman drawn down the marble stairs by a beckoning figure, one heir after another falling to the same slow doom. But the house has watched it all too many times to grieve or even care, and its weary i...

The song is about the voice Harriet Tubman said guided her, and it runs from the blow that opened her up to it to the last years of her life. In 1835, when she was about thirteen, she was inside a dry-goods store in Bucktown, Maryland, when an overseer threw a two-pound iron weight at another enslaved person who had left without permission; it hit Harriet in the head instead and fractured her skull. She was carried back to the quarters and left there for days. For the rest of her life she had what she called sleeping spells, sudden blackouts...

Based on the story, "The Strange Burial of Alexander Jordan" from the #RetroRadio episode, "The Burial of Alexander Jordan: The Coffin Bell That Rang Six Nights After the Funeral."  

Old Alexander Jordan, terrified of being buried alive during one of his cataleptic fits, rigs a bell from his crypt to his nephew's bedroom — so that if he wakes inside the coffin, he can ring for help. But his nephew Ramsey has been waiting a long time to inherit the Jordan place, and a bell that rings in the dead of night can be silenced more than one way.

In October 1919, silent film actress Marie Empress boarded a steamship bound for New York — and was never seen again. Her bed unslept in. Her sandwiches untouched. No one saw her leave. A pop-punk ballad telling the story of one of cinema's most baffling, and mostly forgotten, unsolved disappearances.

THE VANISHING OF MARIE EMPRESS
Marie Ann Louisa Taylor — known to audiences as Marie Empress — was a rising star of the silent film era. Born in England, she built a successful career in music halls before crossing to American vaudeville and eventually the screen, where her dark beauty and natura...

Static Wax takes the stories told on vintage radio broadcasts and reimagines them as era-appropriate songs — the way they might have sounded if they'd been written for the jukebox instead of the airwaves. "Nine Score Years a-Waiting" is an Appalachian mountain ballad in the high lonesome tradition, drawn from the Dark Fantasyepisode "Pennsylvania Turnpike," originally broadcast March 20, 1942 over NBC from station WKY in Oklahoma City. The song carries the weight of an older form — clawhammer banjo, mournful fiddle, close harmony, the modal minor tonality of British Isles ballads transplanted to the Allegheny hills — to tell a story of a wronged man wh...

[Verse]
I woke up this morning, put Psycho on again
Watched it seventeen times, I'll watch it to the end
My shower's got a curtain, I check it every day
Janet Lee didn't make it, but hey, what can I say
[Pre-Chorus]
My friends think I'm crazy, my mom thinks I'm unfeeling
I've got Hitchcock stuff from my floor to my ceiling
[Chorus]
Good eve-en-ing, Good eve-en-ing
The man in the silhouette owns my soul
Good eve-en-ing, Good eve-en-ing
I watched The Birds and I lost all control<...

Hear more original music from Weird Darkness Records at https://WeirdDarkness.com/music. Explore hundreds of original songs by Dark Weirdness, Static Wax, Incorruption, Monster Flakes, Maggie Cross, Alena Ingram, and more!

Weird Darkness Records is the music division of the Weird Darkness brand, transforming the show’s strange, dark, true-crime, paranormal, supernatural, and macabre stories into original songs spanning multiple artists and musical styles.

All songs are also available on major streaming services including Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Pandora, iHeartRadio, and most other music platforms worldwide.

Anneliese Michel was born September 21st, 1952, in Leiblfing, Bavaria, and raised in a strictly observant Catholic household in Klingenberg am Main. At sixteen she suffered a severe convulsion and was diagnosed with temporal lobe epilepsy; doctors put her on Dilantin, added Aolept for psychotic symptoms in the summer of 1970, and switched her to Tegretol in November of 1973, by which point she was reporting voices, seeing faces during prayer, and being treated for depression. Her family concluded the problem was spiritual rather than medical, and in September of 1975 Bishop Josef Stangl authorized a private exorcism under the Rituale Romanum, carried out...

"The Together Place" is a 1940s-style torch ballad inspired by The Together Place, an episode of the CBS Radio Mystery Theater originally broadcast on August 15, 1977. The story follows a small-town doctor and his retired nurse as they are drawn into the haunting mystery of a young woman who speaks with absolute certainty of a twin sister no one else can see — and a realm she calls Kamaloka, the Together Place, where the dead are never truly alone.

Static Wax from Weird Darkness Retro Radio brings old radio drama back to life through original songs written in the musical st...

I wake up in the morning and it's hard for me to get out of bed
(The dreams are over)
I just look to my side and think of her instead
(My wife and my lover)
Gray skies turned to blue when she said I do
And the sun shone down on her face
She's the other part of me
The happiness that set me free
She's the other part of who I am
She has made my life complete
Her love for me cannot be beat
I’m go...

In the early 1970s, a mother walked into an antique shop and bought her daughter a Raggedy Ann doll for her birthday. Stitched cloth, button eyes, painted smile. The kind of thing you'd hand a child without a second thought.

The daughter's name was Donna. She was twenty-eight, in nursing school, sharing an apartment with her roommate Angie. And the doll — the doll was just a doll. At first.

Until Donna and Angie started coming home to find it… moved.

Sat up where it had been laid down. Standing where it had been sitting. Arms...

ABOUT DARK WEIRDNESS
Dark Weirdness is the pop-punk wing of Weird Darkness Records — turning true crime cases, paranormal encounters, and historical horrors from the Weird Darkness podcast into hook-driven anthems. Expect power chords, sing-along choruses, and the occasional song that has no business being as catchy as it is, given the subject matter.

VERSE 1
Candy in the van on a summer street
Painted boots and oversized feet
"Come a little closer, kid, I got a treat"
Wheels start spinning down a one-way street
Pogo at the party, bouncing on his knee
Pi...

Killed for the money she wouldn't hand over, a woman returns from the closet where her killer left her to make sure he never escapes what he's done.

Synopsis
A man refuses to leave a hotel room empty-handed. He asks the woman inside for money; she refuses; he shoots her and hides her body in the closet before slipping past the front desk unseen. Room four-eighteen becomes both his alibi and her grave, marked only by a neon sign glowing outside in the snow. Downstairs, he charms another woman with the same words he once whispered to...

THE HEARSE SONG
[Verse 1]
Don't ever laugh as a hearse goes by
For you may be the next to die
They wrap you up in a big white sheet
From your head down to your feet
They put you in a big black box
And cover you up with dirt and rocks
And all goes well for about a week
And then your coffin begins to leak
[Chorus]
The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out
The worms play pee-knuckle on your snout
They eat your eyes...

Originally written decades ago during Darren's years as a Christian singer-songwriter, now rebuilt with a harder edge — a blunt indictment of moral compromise dressed up as freedom.

ABOUT THE SONG:
"Satan Rules (Under Satan's Rules)" was first written nearly thirty years ago, back when Darren was pursuing a career as a Christian singer and songwriter. The lyric names — without softening — the self-serving bargains people make while still claiming the name of God: abortion reframed as nothing more than personal choice, ambition that steps on friends on the way up, wealth hoarded while charity sits untouched, morality reshaped to fit...

"Exactly Nothing Like You" — upbeat 90s-style melodic punk-pop rock with distorted guitars and three-part harmonies, about the kind of breakup that ends with a thank-you note instead of a grudge.

A one-off detour from the usual Dark Weirdness fare — written in the passenger seat during a day-long road trip between Illinois and Kansas City, with nothing paranormal, criminal, or unsettling in sight. Just a fun, sunny pop song that happened to show up and ask to be written.

All Dark Weirdness releases eventually reach streaming platforms including Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, and most othe...

"The Name On The Door (Means Nothing At All)" is a 1970s-style pop ballad inspired by For Want of a Nail, an episode of the CBS Radio Mystery Theater originally broadcast on August 12, 1977. The story follows a cheerful, unsuspecting housewife whose plane makes an emergency landing in a strange city — and a chance visit to her husband's biggest customer sets off a chain of events that will shatter everything she thought she knew about her life, her marriage, and the man she loved.

Static Wax from Weird Darkness Retro Radio brings old radio drama back to life through or...

ABOUT MONSTER FLAKES
Monster Flakes is a band of cryptids and creatures playing bubblegum monster-surf — the things that usually do the haunting, plugged in and playing the chase music instead.Monster Flakes are a six-piece bubblegum monster-surf band made up of the creatures usually doing the haunting. Hat Man fronts the group — the one creature with absolutely no facial features somehow still has all the stage presence — backed by Bigfoot on bass, Mothman on guitar, Chupacabra on drums, and the Flatwoods Monster on Farfisa, with the Fresno Nightcrawlers swaying in a line as the wordless “ba-ba-ba” backup trio. They set up whe...

Eight flawless pearls, six native divers, and a captain willing to do the math — the sea keeps better books than he does.

ABOUT THE SONG: "Ghosts of the Nancy Hale" — Southern Gothic blues with Chicago and Bayou influence. Inspired by the Weird Darkness Retro Radio presentation of Creeps by Night — "The Six Who Did Not Die," originally broadcast July 11, 1944. Eight flawless pearls, six native divers, and a captain willing to do the math — the sea keeps better books than he does.Every track is inspired by the strange, the haunted, the historical, and the occasionally unspeakable stories covered on the W...

"Let Me See Your Face" is a 1920s Delta blues song inspired by ‘Let Me See Your Face’, an episode of Beyond Midnight — the South African horror anthology that aired on Springbok Radio from 1968 to 1970 — originally broadcast on April 14, 1969. Though the episode aired in the late 1960s, the story itself is set in 1920s, making Delta blues the natural musical language for this tale. When a writer takes a room at a quiet Rouen hotel, a mysterious woman glimpsed alone in the moonlit garden at midnight awakens in him a fascination so powerful, no warning — and no fear — can stop him from see...

"I Don't Know" is a post-grunge hard rock anthem about the honest refusal to name what you can't identify. Built around a real UFO sighting over Iowa, the song argues that the three most faithful words a Christian — or anyone — can say about an unexplained experience are the three words they least want to say. Gritty vocals, arena-sized choruses, and a Bereans-anchored bridge that calls the listener to test everything rather than dismiss or invent. Heavy distorted guitar, walking bass, punchy drums, and orchestral swells carry a message most rock songs wouldn't dare touch.

ABOUT THE SOURCE MESSAGE…This s...

"The Leech!" is a novelty doo-wop song inspired by "The Leech," a 1954 episode of the classic radio horror anthology Nightmare(April 7, 1954). When a desperate man kills his lover's husband to finally set them free, he discovers that getting rid of a body is far easier said than done — and the dead have a terrifying way of refusing to stay gone.

Static Wax from Weird Darkness Retro Radio brings old radio drama back to life through original songs written in the musical style of the era each story takes place in. Every song is a standalone journey into a di...

Based on the classic story “The Wendigo” by Algernon Blackwood

ABOUT CROSSROADS HAINT
Crossroads Haint is the blues project from Weird Darkness Records — Chicago Blues fused with Delta Blues, told through a Southern Gothic lens. Slide guitar, harmonica, and the kind of vocal that carries the weight of what it is telling. Blues From The Other Side.


VERSE
Five men rode into the northern trees,
Rifles slung and rations stored beneath the pines
Cathcart read the woods like books on shelves
But the forest wrote its own between the lines
V...

[Verse 1]
Book of Job, if you probe, you'll find a mighty beast
No one can catch him, no one can snatch him
He has a tail as big as a tree
Could it be what it seems to be?
Oh, what a surprise, it was right there in front of my eyes
[Chorus]
It sounds like a dinosaur
What are they waiting for?
Well, it sounds like a dino, but what do I know?
It sounds like a dino-saur to me
[Verse 2]
The giant one, Leviathan, he'll make...

A woman designs every room of a railroad millionaire's mansion, gets handed an envelope of cash and a goodbye on the night the work is finished, and makes him one promise about that house before she goes up to the library alone.

SONG SYNOPSIS: He builds the house and she designs it. She sets the library windows high so the light comes in without the damp, picks the oak for the ceiling beams, and gives every room the grace his money couldn't buy on its own, and the whole time she is building it for herself. On the...

SONG SYNOPSIS: She finishes her shift at the switchboard at ten and doesn't call home afterward, which is the first thing anybody notices. It's a Thursday in June of 1948, it's her first date with a lineman from the telephone company, and they spend it working through the taverns on the east side and the south side of a small Illinois river town. He's twenty-eight and she's seventeen, and by every account that ever surfaced, the eleven years between them didn't trouble her. Around eleven-thirty they leave the roadhouse on the south edge of town, the last stop anybody could name...

Instrumental horror music from Weird Darkness, with no voices and nothing to follow. Music for sleeping with the lights on.
HORRORCHESTRA is a series of long-form instrumental beds written in the style of the old black-and-white horror movie scores: muted strings, a lone oboe, a piano decaying somewhere down a hallway, a church bell a long way off. It was built for the hours when the house has gone quiet and silence is the last thing you want.
Some people sleep to it. Others write to it, work late to it, run tabletop games under it, or leave...

SONG SYNOPSIS:
For twenty years, Ken McElroy took whatever he wanted from Skidmore, Missouri, and walked free from all but one of twenty-one indictments, parking outside the homes of anyone who dared testify and staring at their windows for hours. When the single conviction that finally stuck put him back on Main Street on an appeal bond, the town gathered on a July morning in 1981 and watched him die behind the wheel of his pickup, the engine screaming under a dead man's boot. More than thirty neighbors stood close enough to name the shooters. Told from inside that crowd – an...

Get all of the music at https://weirddarkness.com/music
SONG SYNOPSIS: Nine o'clock on a summer night, a boy and his mother are alone in the house when the doorbell rings — once, then again. Behind the curtain stands a man in dirty coveralls and yellow-stained gloves, a painted grin fixed on a hollow face, and he won't move, blink, or say a word. The boy turns and finds a second clown already inside, standing on the kitchen tile, holding old photographs of his father and wearing the same silent smile. His mother screams for them to leave, and the...

Get all of the music at https://weirddarkness.com/music

SONG SYNOPSIS: Twenty years back, a boy stood on a weathered dock at Lake Weeping Tree while his uncle pointed at the water, and something rose from it and slipped under before anyone else turned to look. The uncle spent the rest of his life as the family punchline — the man who swore a monster lived in the lake — and took the ridicule to his grave. Now the boy is grown, tongs in hand at the family cookout, grilling burgers and franks at that same water's edge and watc...

Inspired by the Weird Darkness podcast of the same name, "Church of the Undead"

[VERSE 1]
Ezekiel stood in a valley of bones
Dry, dusty, scattered, forgotten, alone
God said, "Can they live?" and the prophet replied
"Lord, only You know" — let me testify
[BRIDGE 1]
The Spirit blew in and those bones rattled loud
Sinew wrapped tight on that skeleton crowd
They stood to their feet, a whole undead army
Not zombies from hell, no — RAISED BY THE ALMIGHTY
[PRE-CHORUS]
Ephesians 2 says, “we were DEAD in our sin
B...

SONG SYNOPSIS:
A woman's gift for reading minds pulls her out of an ordinary life and into a classified government program, hidden away to turn her sight on the world's secrets. The child who learned to bury what she knew becomes the grown woman who feels unseen eyes watching, becomes the captive who longs for a wedding day that never came. At the end she discovers that the power which stole everything from her has quietly saved the one man she loved — and she chooses to keep the cage that lets her keep watch over him.

SONG IN...

SONG SYNOPSIS:
A kid's homemade radio rig finally gets an answer from the Kuiper Belt — a green light screaming over the hill, car alarms cutting out, then silence. What answers isn't friendly: a car-sized, bug-eyed horror with clicking blade-legs that tracks the signal home, crashes through the front door, and skewers his sister on its way in. Smashing the radio doesn't end it. His sister's eyes go black, her voice changes, and the thing delivers its warning through her mouth — it hasn't slept in weeks, and it's coming back hungry if the noise doesn't stop.

SONG INSPIRATION:

SONG SYNOPSIS:
A man cycles through every self-help book, every method, every attempt to fix himself by sheer will, and comes up empty every time. The striving fails again and again — no matter how hard he tries, he cannot prevail — until he stops reaching for the shelf and reaches higher instead. What starts as a confession of failure becomes a hand-off: he can't help himself, so he stops trying to and gives his life over instead.

SONG INSPIRATION:
A personal song, not tied to any Weird Darkness episode — written by Darren Marlar close to thirty years ago an...

SONG SYNOPSIS:
A Fresno, California family installs a security camera by the garage after their dogs won't stop barking into the dark. The next morning's footage shows two pale, waist-high figures gliding across the front lawn — no arms, no visible torso, just a pair of long, backward-bending legs wrapped in something that flaps like loose fabric, more disembodied walking pants than any known animal. The clip goes public, gets picked apart on cable TV as neither obvious hoax nor solved mystery, and nearly two decades later the same unplaceable shapes turn up again — caught by Yosemite park cameras meant for...

SONG SYNOPSIS:
A five-inch copper idol has outlived every thief who ever believed he'd stolen her. Lifted from a wealthy widow's dinner table by a smooth investment counselor, she settles into his pocket and begins collecting on the debt — luck for worship, fortune for obedience. He believes the theft was his idea; she has been choosing men like him for centuries, letting each one believe he's the thief right up until he understands he was only ever the prize. She doesn't hide what she is. She simply waits for him to stop asking.

SONG INSPIRATION:
Inspired by...