Weird Darkness: Paranormal & True Crime Stories
Darren Marlar | Weird Darkness
Podcast
Episodes
Listen, download, subscribe
DEATH CAFES AND COFFIN CLUBS: Inside The Death Positive Movement
Strangers in dozens of countries now meet over tea and cake to talk openly about dying, and in New Zealand, retirees gather every week to build and paint the coffins they'll one day be buried in. READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8tmdrd FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Have you heard of the “Death Positive” movement? Would you visit a Death Cafe? Would you join a Coffin Club? Why the sudden positive twist on what is typically so morbid? What’s so great about death? (Discourse At The Death Diner) *** When it comes to homes, the ghosts go bump in the night. When it comes to automobiles, do they go honk in the night? (Cursed Cars and Haunted Hoopties) *** Airline pilots in the UK are reporting strange objects in the sky. Not just one pilot, but several. And not just one UFO, but many. And the sightings were close. Very close. So close that they are being described as “near misses”. (Airliners Almost Crash Into UFOs) *** In today’s world, parents often worry about whether their kids are eating healthy and getting a good education, and in the case of long car trips, whether the children have their phones fully charged. It’s tough being a modern parent, but at least you don’t have to worry like Europeans did about your spawn being snatched by fairies. (Child Snatching Fairies) *** Two men go out for a weekend of elk hunting – and come back with the story of a creature so strange they don’t know what to call it. (Close Encounter at Pot Mountain) *** At a downtown Chicago church, people are turning up in droves – not for the preaching or the powerful worship band – but to see a painting of the Virgin Mary, crying real tears. (The Crying Madonna) CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)… 00:00:00.000 = Show Open 00:02:23.730 = Discourse At The Death Diner 00:08:43.721 = Cursed Cars And Haunted Hoopies 00:19:56.590 = Airliners Almost Crash Into UFOs *** 00:32:23.263 = Child-Snatching Fairies 00:39:18.693 = Close Encounters on Pot Mountain *** 00:45:36.275 = The Crying Madonna 00:48:48.583 = Show Close *** = Begins immediately after inserted ad break SOURCES and RESOURCES: “Discourse At The Death Diner” by Marilyn A. Mendoza Ph.D. for Psychology Today: https://tinyurl.com/vd6ober “Cursed Cars and Haunted Hoopties” by Erin Marquis for AutoBlog: https://tinyurl.com/r35gcjc “Airliners Almost Crash Into UFOs” from The Bolton News: https://tinyurl.com/vsn8rer “Child Snatching Fairies” by Tristan Shaw from Bizarre And Grotesque: https://tinyurl.com/u84989q “Close Encounter at Pot Mountain” by Staci Matlock for the Santa Fe New Mexican: https://tinyurl.com/soo5l6z “The Crying Madonna” by Cate Cauguiran for ABC7 Chicago: https://tinyurl.com/v4cv4sg (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. *No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast* EPISODE SYNOPSIS: This episode of Weird Darkness moves from Death Cafes and Coffin Clubs to cursed cars, near misses between airliners and unknown objects over Britain, changelings left by fairies, a vanishing structure on a New Mexico mountain, and a weeping icon of the Virgin Mary in Chicago.It opens with the Death Positive Movement, from the first Death Cafe, started in London in 2011 by Jon Underwood so strangers could talk about dying over tea and cake, to the Coffin Clubs of New Zealand, where older adults meet each week to build and decorate their own coffins, along with green burials, end-of-life doulas, and the WeCroak app that sends five reminders of death a day. From there, the episode turns to cars said to be cursed or haunted: the Graf & Stift limousine in which Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot in 1914, a wrecked Vauxhall Astra found in 2002 off Surrey's A3 after callers reported headlights veering off the road, a Renault Megane in Cape Town that witnesses say started itself in 2004, John F. Kennedy's limousine SS-100-X at the Henry Ford Museum, and James Dean's Porsche 550 Spyder, Little Bastard. Next come reports to the UK Airprox Board of aircraft nearly colliding with unidentified objects, including a lit object that passed between three and ten feet from an Embraer 175 approaching Glasgow Airport on December 30th, 2018, with former Ministry of Defence UFO investigator Nick Pope arguing that many cases blamed on drones should be logged as unknown. As late as the second half of the 1800s, European courts were still hearing cases of children abused or killed as changelings, the sickly stand-ins parents believed fairies had left in place of their own babies, and the episode traces that belief through the accounts George Waldron collected on the Isle of Man for his 1726 book A Description of the Isle of Man. After that, Santa Fe County bow hunters Josh Brinkley and Daniel Lucero describe what they saw while hunting elk on Cerro de la Olla, or Pot Mountain, northwest of Taos, New Mexico: two tall hooded figures at the rim of a caldera, and the next day a white tent-like structure 50 to 60 feet tall that vanished in the five seconds they lost sight of it. The episode closes in Chicago in 2019 at Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church, the oldest Greek Orthodox church in the Midwest, where worshippers saw an oil-like substance streaming from the eyes of an icon of the Virgin Mary as a bankruptcy court approved the sale of the church for $2.5 million. More episodes, additional podcasts, books, original music, in-depth paranormal and true-crime articles, and much more at https://weirddarkness.com.
Weird Darkness: Paranormal & True Crime Stories RSS Feed
