Some dreams are only dreams. Some are the only true life we have, and we forget them before breakfast.In the winter of 1901, a young intern at a New York state asylum takes an interest in Joe Slater, a Catskill mountain man committed for a murder he cannot remember. In his sleep, Slater raves of halls of living light, and of a shining thing he has sworn to hunt across the stars. Hoping to hear what the dying man sees, the intern builds a machine to listen in, and on Slater's last night, something answers. H.P. Lovecraft's 1919 tale of dreams, cosmic vengeance, and a real star that appeared in the sky in February 1901.What caught me about this one is where it happens. Joe Slater lives in the Catskills, the same mountains where Rip Van Winkle drank from a stranger's flagon and slept away twenty years. Both men drift at the edge of their communities, and both fall into a sleep that follows the drink and carries them outside ordinary time. Rip wakes to find the world has moved on without him. Slater wakes to find that the world he knows was never the real one. It reads almost like Lovecraft picked up Irving's idea and followed it further into the dark: not how much time a sleeping man can lose, but where he actually goes.Listen everywhere: http://midnightinthedarkforest.com

For three thousand years, people have told the same story: a person goes out into the dark, something else comes back, and in the morning, has to live with what it did.From the altar of Zeus on Mount Lykaion to the werewolf trials of sixteenth century France, from the Beast of Gévaudan to Freud's Wolf Man, this is the history of the werewolf and what it has always been underneath. Peter Stumpp, Gilles Garnier, a starving boy named Jean Grenier, and an old Livonian peasant who swore the werewolves were the hounds of God. The courts saw the devil. The doctors saw a patient. The families saw someone they loved turn into something else.Listen everywhere: http://midnightinthedarkforest.com

A gothic schoolmaster. A headless horseman. A dark road through the Hudson Valley on a cold October night.This episode brings Washington Irving's 1820 classic to life: the story of Ichabod Crane, the wealthy Katrina Van Tassel, and the specter said to ride through Sleepy Hollow in search of its lost head. One of the first great American ghost stories, still riding two centuries later.

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Four true accounts of the Amur tiger.A first-hand encounter. A man alone in the taiga who made a mistake, and an animal that did not forget it. A city that woke to tracks in the snow. A door that would not open, and what was leaning against it.Listen everywhere: http://midnightinthedarkforest.comSupport the show: http://patreon.com/aaronmarshall

"I think they're scarier if they're real." My mother told me ghost stories, knockings and spirits and things in the dark. My father had no patience for any of it. When I asked him for scary stories, he told me true ones instead, and he was right. They were scarier.

These are nine of my father's stories, told the best I can tell them...

He never believed in monsters. He didn't need to. He'd already met the real kind, and outlasted them.

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Six stories, one Kentucky family, one woman who kept them all. A house near Horse Cave with something laid into the outhouse footing. Floyd Collins, trapped in Sand Cave in 1925, as the story came down through a grandfather who was a boy in those hills. A family legend about a knock that arrives before the news does.

There is a door in the primordial mind that fear opens. Grief and melancholy have their own key. On the other side: true accounts, testimony, legends, and fiction, from just down the road to the reaches beyond our galaxy.

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