Astonishing Legends

In September of 2000, history professor Dr. William "Bill" Watson of Immaculata University stopped by the campus for a break with friend and fellow bagpipe musician Tom Connor during a long drive back from a performance.  While there, around 10:00 p.m. near the typically deserted faculty center lawn, both men witnessed a strange apparition that would later lead to a remarkable and meaningful coincidence.  Two years after this experience, Bill's twin brother, Reverend Dr. Frank Watson, by chance, came across a file once kept by their grandfather Joseph Tripician, a former secretary to the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad in the 1970s.  One official record in this file documented a tragedy connected to a ghost story their grandfather told annually at Thanksgiving dinner.  The report outlined a mass death of workers on an arduous stretch of the then Philadelphia and Columbia Railroad in the summer and fall of 1832.  Contractor Phillip Duffy had hired 57 Irish immigrants to lay the tracks for roughly a mile

On Friday, September 4, 1964, Donald Shrum and two friends from his job at Aerojet made camp in a remote section of wilderness near the Loch Leven Lakes in an area called Cisco Grove, roughly 60 miles northeast of Sacramento, CA. The three men had planned a relaxing weekend of bow hunting for deer, but those plans would change later that evening as Shrum experienced an exhausting and terrifying UFO close encounter of the worst kind. As night approached, Shrum got lost and separated from his hunting buddies and found himself isolated on a bluff almost a mile from camp. An experienced woodsman, Shrum decided it would be wiser to spend the night in a tree safe from predators rather than trying to find his way back over rough terrain in the dark. Seeing an unusual moving light on the horizon, Shrum built three signal fires to attract what he thought were his rescuers. The fires did seem to attract this object’s attention, but not the kind anyone wants. Beyond his wildest imagination and expectations, he would soo

Tonight's episode concludes this series of our listeners' most terrifying true tales for Halloween.  In the final Part Three of this anthology, we're proud to present five stories we believe were some of the most horrifying we've ever heard.  The collection covers a curated compilation of creepy creatures.  You may be tempted to classify them under the categories of a goblin, doppelgänger, genie, demon, and something that defies easy classification, but what are these things that people have encountered?  Do these beings even know what they are, or does it matter?  In our human desire to measure and rationalize, ask yourself: Does your "rational" explanation account for every detail offered in these reports?  Do you want to explain away these testimonies because of your confidence in a complete understanding of the natural or unnatural world?  Or could it be your fear of the unknown?   How do we know what's possible or impossible when we have such a limited and naive grasp of the true nature of our reality? 

As we continue with Part Two of our Halloween series featuring our listeners' true accounts, tonight's episode presents another three eerie tales of the supernatural.  The first story tells of a haunted college rooming house with a spirit fond of movie catchphrases.  And it may have the power to compel humans to deliver poignant messages.  Our second interview details a forceful presence with the ability to invade your dreams and physically send you to a dark portal of a waking nightmare.  Our final story is about a random encounter with... well, let's just say, one of the most terrifying entities the audience hopes they never meet.  The twist here is that whatever this thing is, it wasn't content to let you merely run away. Visit our website for a lot more information on this episode.

Astonishing Legends is all about fascinating and mysterious topics. And within that category, the details we cover can be unsettling or downright terrifying. But you may not realize that some of the most chilling and creepy accounts we've ever encountered have come from our listeners! We've received thousands of emails over our eight years of podcasting, and we appreciate and value every one of them. We realize that it takes no small amount of courage to send such personal anecdotes to strangers out in the world, becoming vulnerable to ridicule or scorn. So to honor that conviction and trust and show our tremendous gratitude to our audience, we're proud to present your scariest true stories in three parts. Also, because the Spooky Season is upon us, and most of us enjoy a frightening Halloween tale, what better time to hear about the weirdness of our world? So we invite you to settle in, lock your doors and windows, suspend any disbelief you might have, and enjoy these narratives as entertainment, evidence, o

In Part Two of our series on the Missing 411 phenomenon, we'll first examine a study conducted to determine which National Parks are the most dangerous in the United States.  The numbers and causes may surprise you.  We then take a closer look at a few more puzzling cases and, with a critical eye, examine the data presented by David Paulides and the CanAm Project vs. what's been reported by the news media.  Discrepancies raise questions when ascertaining the objective facts and judging if the evidence is remarkable.  There are plenty of errors and omissions from all parties, but what are the causes and intentions behind them?  With hundreds, perhaps thousands of incidents, it's understandable when a news outlet rushing to report under a deadline makes mistakes, but can the same leeway be given to Paulides?  Are they honest mistakes or the handy claim that details are "cherry-picked," overlooked, or embellished to prop up a narrative and sell content?  Will later discoveries change the investigations, are we b

A former police officer turned writer David Paulides was taken aside by a National Park Ranger and told about a disturbing trend he'd realized. This Ranger asserted that some people were going missing in the woods under mysterious circumstances leaving only puzzling evidence of their fate. Of course, people often go missing in the wilderness in tragic yet explainable events but what was troubling to these Rangers in the field was the apparent pattern of the occurrences and the subsequent investigation efforts. This Ranger stated that during the first seven to ten days of a disappearance, an all-out Search and Rescue effort ensued with plenty of press coverage. However, after the first week of a rescue mission, it seemed to them that the media stopped reporting, the search for the missing was called off, and no further explanation from the authorities was provided. An additionally alarming trend was that there seemed to be a reluctance or inability on behalf of the National Park Service administration to colle

Since antiquity, espionage and deceit have always been crucial weapons of warfare.  As technology and strategy have advanced over the centuries, methods for governments to deliver information and orders to their secret agents in the field have become more sophisticated.  Yet, one form of cryptic communication implemented in the early 20th century has proven ever effective and relatively simple.  With the advent of wireless telegraphy combined with a cipher technique called a "One-time Pad," militaries have been sending coded messages to their undercover operatives abroad since World War I.  It wasn't until shortwave and HAM radio enthusiasts started noticing eerie and enigmatic broadcasts of spoken series of numbers or strange electronic sounds that these coded communiqués aroused widespread curiosity during the height of the Cold War.  Although the use of public airwaves for clandestine messaging seems to have declined in recent years, listeners can still hear these top-secret instructions delivered to unkno

On December 1, 1948, an unknown man was found lying dead on the sand on Somerton Beach next to the neighborhood of Glenelg, about 7 miles (11 km) southwest of Adelaide, South Australia. He had no money or identification on him, the labels in his clothing were cut off, and his minimal possessions yielded no clues. Further adding to the mystery, a rolled-up scrap of paper with the Persian phrase "tamám shud," translating to "is over" or "is finished," was found in the man's watch pocket around the time of his autopsy. The scrap was later discovered torn from a copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, a circa 11th-century collection of poems by Khayyam, known as "the Astronomer-Poet of Persia." The book found tossed into a car after a public appeal by the police appeared to have previous writing indentations on a page adjacent to the torn-out one, revealing a local phone number and text speculated to be a coded message. With no further clues as to the Somerton Man's identity other than an abandoned suitcase left at

Did we hear about the Somerton Man case being solved? Yes. And now you will, too, on August 13th, 2022.

As we continue our discussion based on Blake Lemoine’s assertion that the Large Language Model chatbot LaMDA had become sentient, we relay the rest of his conversation with the program and then some questions and answers with Lemoine himself. But as Lemoine has said, machine sentience and personhood are just some of many questions to be considered. His greater issue is how an omnipresent AI, trained on an insufficient data set, will affect how different people and cultures interact and who will be dominated or excluded. The fear is that the ultimate result of protecting corporate profits will outweigh global human interests. In light of these questions about AI’s ethical and efficient development, we highlight the positions and insights of experts on the state and future of AI, such as Blaise Agüera y Arcas and Gary Marcus. The directives of responsible technology development and the right track to Deep Learning are more grounded than the fantastical thoughts of killer robots. Yet hovering over all of the mec

On June 11, 2022, The Washington Post published an article by their San Francisco-based tech culture reporter Nitasha Tiku titled, "The Google engineer who thinks the company's AI has come to life." The piece focused on the claims of a Google software engineer named Blake Lemoine, who said he believed the company's artificially intelligent chatbot generator LaMDA had shown him signs that it had become sentient. In addition to identifying itself as an AI-powered dialogue agent, it also said it felt like a person. Last fall, Lemoine was working for Google's Responsible AI division and was tasked with talking to LaMDA, testing it to determine if the program was exhibiting bias or using discriminatory or hate speech. LaMDA stands for "Language Model for Dialogue Applications" and is designed to mimic speech by processing trillions of words sourced from the internet, a system known as a "large language model." Over a week, Lemoine had five conversations with LaMDA via a text interface, while his co-worker collabor

We're marvelously fortunate and extraordinarily grateful that so many listeners have sent us their personal stories of mysterious experiences over the years. While it's not possible to respond to all of them, we can and should present some for the entertainment and edification of all. So as thanks to those who've shared, and a treat for us that love to hear them, we're featuring three stories from a recent call for submissions. Our first account comes from Terra Greenleaf, who managed to capture audio of strange animal sounds while at a facility in a deeply wooded area. Those familiar with Bigfoot research might classify them as typical "calls." However, this encounter is incredibly eerie because there appears to be a large semi-circle of the creatures and they might be hunting prey. Our next anecdote comes from Dr. Dominic Boyer, whose family occupied a house in Chicago once lived in by eminent physicist Enrico Fermi, known as the "architect of the nuclear age."  Having died in the home, the Boyers believe h

As we dive further into the epic of Mel's Hole, we learn that in the third phone call to Art Bell on the Coast to Coast AM radio show on April 24, 2000, Mel reveals what had happened to him since his initial calls in 1997. After supposedly taking the deal from the US government to relocate to Australia and receive a compensation of $250,000 per month for the lease of the land he received in a divorce settlement from his wife, Mel was happy to continue his research with medicinal plants and efforts with wombat rescue near Perth. However, upon Mel's return to the US and helping his nephew move from Tacoma to Olympia on the day he was scheduled to return to the program for a follow-up interview, there was an altercation on the bus he was riding. Mel was detained for questioning and told he would be transported back to Tacoma once authorities concluded their investigation. The next thing Mel remembered is waking up in an alley in San Francisco, missing his wallet, keys, belt buckle, and all of his back molar teet

One of the most enduring and pervasive tropes to ever capture the human imagination is the concept of a "bottomless pit." On Friday, February 22, 1997, a man calling himself "Mel Waters" had faxed Art Bell, the much-beloved and sadly now-passed host of the highly-rated, paranormal-themed radio talk show, Coast to Coast AM, claiming to have one on his property. Mel said his property is about nine miles west of Ellensburg, Washington, adjacent to Manastash Ridge. He and his neighbors and the property's previous owners had thrown their trash into the hole for decades. The 9' 9" in diameter hole had received everything from household waste and furniture to building debris to dead cows for as long as anyone could remember, yet it never seemed to fill up. Mel became self-admittedly obsessed with determining the depth of this curiosity. Being a former semi-pro shark fisherman, Mel had lowered three reels of 20 lb. fishing line with a one-pound weight at the end. After 1500 yards of monofilament and not hitting botto

Often when one hears about some group of people claiming to experience a highly strange event or similarly acting out in bizarre and irrational manners, it's easy and common to dismiss the episode as a case of "mass hysteria." Phenomena like the audience reaction to Orson Welles' War of the Worlds radio broadcast, "The Dancing Plague of 1518," the "Windshield-Pitting Mystery of 1954," and "The Mad Gasser of Mattoon" are considered by much of the public to be examples of mass hysteria. In the late 1930s and decades after, some sociologists used occurrences like those to help model their theory of "Social Contagion." Like the idea that one or several people claim to experience something unusual, others hear about it and start to see the same thing. Soon it all spirals into an epidemic of vast numbers of people all testifying to the same weirdness with no real, mystical cause. But is the potentially antiquated term of mass hysteria or even its modern descendant "mass psychogenic illness" accurate or helpful? Whe

On the evening of April 15, 1973, Enfield, Illinois, resident Henry McDaniel heard a scratching noise outside his door he thought might be a bear. He opened it to find a hideous creature he described as having "... three legs on it, a short body, two little, short arms coming out of its breast area, and two pink eyes as big as flashlights. It stood four and a half feet tall and was grayish colored. It was trying to get into the house." McDaniel grabbed his pistol and a flashlight and fired four shots at the beast, which was only 12 feet away, sure that he had hit it with the first shot. The bullets had no effect on the beast, as it made a hissing sound at McDaniel "much like a wildcat's" before bounding 50 to 75 feet towards a brush-lined railroad embankment in just three leaps. A neighbor of McDaniel's, ten-year-old Greg Garrett, claimed that 30 minutes before this encounter, the same creature had accosted him in his backyard, stepping on his sneakers and ripping them to shreds before the boy ran inside terr

In the second part of our series on Charles Hoy Fort, we first return to the formative events of his adolescence that shaped his personality, career, and personal philosophies. Fort chronicled anecdotes from his youth in an unpublished manuscript titled Many Parts, written while in his 20s and of which only fragments remain. What can be gleaned from tales of his boisterous boyhood adventures, punctuated by harsh punishments from a strict father, is that it all instilled in Fort defiance of rules, dogma, and the expectations of hallowed establishments. He struggled to make sense of a childhood world that seemed rife with capricious events and outcomes, much as he later struggled to make sense of an adult world peppered with anomalous occurrences and their close-minded dismissal. We then examine Fort's journey from middle age to the end and his mindset towards and relationship with strange evidence. Just as he had been since he was a kid, Fort remained a collector. First of birds and rocks, then later stories o

Perhaps most everyone listening to this show is familiar with the term "Fortean," meaning something related to the paranormal, the supernatural, or just generally strange phenomena. But where did that term come from? How did "Forteana" come to describe many of the topics we cover on the podcast? We owe that cognomen and a good deal of our inspiration for our reportage to the work of one man, Charles Hoy Fort. Fort (b. August 6, 1874 - d. May 3, 1932) was a journalist, author, and researcher best known for his collection of accounts of extraordinary incidents and bizarre phenomena. These reports and Fort's commentaries and speculations on them mostly ended up in four books: The Book of the Damned (1919), New Lands (1923), Lo!  (1931), and Wild Talents (1932). Within these volumes of nonfiction are found testimonies of rains of meat, frogs, blood, manna, black rain, and unbelievably large stones, poltergeists and spontaneous human combustion, vampires, animal mutilations, UFOs, and alien abductions – anomalies

In tonight's Part Two of our series, we continue with the "Why?" of Tiwanaku and Pumapunku. As in, why was it all built? Why did Tiwanaku society spend so much effort and resources on it, and what did it mean to them? We then transition to the "How?" such a monumental architectural and cultural feat could be accomplished. What craftsmanship skills and construction technology did they possess to erect structures that continue to baffle present-day archaeologists and engineers? Could an organic technique of creating geopolymers, or essentially a type of concrete, explain the precise geometric shapes attained? Or was it a combination with a lost art of stone softening and shaping to achieve such exact tolerances? Perhaps they were just some of the best stonemasons in the world, with modern-quality chisels, drills, saws, and generations of labor at their disposal? And how did they come by their craft, through observation of nature and technical evolution, or some otherworldly source? We'll ask our good friend, Ch