Astonishing Legends

Astonishing Legends Productions
  • 4.6 (9.5K)
  • Society & Culture
  • Updated Biweekly

The world is more mysterious than most people are comfortable imagining. We cross paths with the mystical from time to time and may not even notice it. If we do, we quickly return to our usually mundane daily existence. But what if we not only acknowledged the unknown, we investigated it and spoke with those in the know? That's what co-hosts Scott Philbrook & Forrest Burgess, and co-executive producer Tess Pfeifle do at Astonishing Legends. Over 100 million downloads and hundreds of thousands of listeners have discovered the thrill of exploring the mysteries of our world, showing that the unknown can be both captivating and intriguing. Welcome to Astonishing Legends!

  1. 2d ago

    Above the Top Floor

    In tonight's dead letter, we're in Cluj-Napoca, Transylvania in the 1990s, a few years after the revolution, where our listener Nadina, six at the time, had the run of a Soviet-era apartment block with her older sister and their best friend while their nanny visited a friend upstairs. They climbed past the last floor of apartments to the metal door at the top, and before anyone could touch it, something huge, aggressive and feral sounding on the other side began attacking it so hard they fled. Nadina still doesn't know what was up there. Relevant Prior Episodes Ep 49: Monsters Among UsAstonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts Ep 116: Small Town MonstersAstonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts Ep 183: Sam the Sandown ClownAstonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts Ep 203: The Beast of GévaudanAstonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts Links and Further Reading Hoia Baciu Forest (Astonishing Legends) History of Cluj-Napoca Systematization in Romania Transylvanian Superstitions, Emily Gerard, 1885 (Project Gutenberg) Pricolici Strigoi Tracing the Roots of Lycanthropy (Astonishing Legends) The Beast of Bray Road (Astonishing Legends) Blonde Venus (1932) Classic Sideshow Acts: The Girl into the Gorilla (Museum of the Weird) Pepper's Ghost We're looking for more stories! Send your Dead Letter to deadletteroffice@astonishinglegends.com!

    Above the Top Floor

  2. 5d ago

    Your True Halloween Stories IV Part 2

    Our Halloween tradition continues with three more listeners sharing encounters they still can’t explain. At a church summer camp in the mountains above Southern California, Ray and two fellow counselors spot a girl standing alone in the parking lot after lights-out. She silently returns to the bunkhouse when they call to her… but that won’t be the last time they see her. In San Luis Obispo, Brian and his wife move into a guest house with a long history and a curious warning from their elderly landlady: most tenants don’t stay very long. Soon they begin to understand why. And Terry takes us back to the night shift of a hospital coronary care unit, where a dying patient starts asking every nurse the same unsettling question: “Who’s that behind you?” Turn down the lights and settle in for Part Two of our Halloween listener stories. Visit our website for a lot more information on this episode.

  3. Oct 13

    Hello, James.

    In tonight's dead letter, our listener TM was the office manager at a Catholic parish in the upper Mississippi river area, and part of her job was digitizing the cemetery's paper records, so she'd walk the rows with a camera, say hello to everyone, and tell them what she was there to do. One marker sat outside the cemetery’s plot map entirely: a boy who drowned in the river in 1936, with fresh flowers by his stone and no file in the office. One July afternoon, someone or something unseen let her know it was there. Relevant Prior Episodes Ep 247: Massacre at Duffy's Cut Part 1Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts Ep 317: The Screaming SkullsAstonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts Ep 85: The Bell Witch Part 1Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts Ep 123: The Sallie House: Ghost in the Machine Part 1Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts Ep 4: Amelia Earhart Vanishes Part 1Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts Links and Further Reading Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 1032 (Vatican.va) St. John Chrysostom (Britannica) All Souls' Day (Catholic Encyclopedia, New Advent) Columbarium (Merriam-Webster) Duffy's Cut (Wikipedia) Historic Bell Witch Cave, Adams, Tennessee Electronic Voice Phenomena: An Overview (Astonishing Legends blog) Stahl House, Case Study House #22 (LA Conservancy) Scared All The Time (podcast) We're looking for more stories! Send your Dead Letter to deadletteroffice@astonishinglegends.com!

    Hello, James.

  4. Oct 11

    Your True Halloween Stories IV Part 1

    In 1933, a Scottish botanist watched a seemingly abandoned steamship drift past the Alaskan coast on an ice floe. It appeared upside down in a strange mirage, with no crew and no one at the wheel. This ship was the Baychimo, which was abandoned two years earlier, but refused to disappear. Having repeatedly resurfaced across the Arctic, it earning a reputation as one of history’s great ghost ships. In this episode, we explore the strange history of ghost ships from the the Baychimo, to the frozen Octavius, and the Ourang Medan, whose crew was reportedly found mysteriously dead shortly before the ship itself exploded and sank. Three ships, three enduring legends, and at least one vessel whose final resting place remains unknown. Visit our website for a lot more information on this episode.

  5. Oct 6

    The Old Man on the Gravestone

    In tonight's dead letter, Corey takes us back to Omaha, Nebraska in the year 2000, when he was the overnight host on a Top 40 station and a call-in topic about haunted places kept circling back to one private family cemetery. He sent a carload of listeners out there on a Friday night to report back live on the air. A few days later his boss got a phone call from the cemetery's caretakers. And, to paraphrase a Dateline episode…things got weirder from there. We mentioned a TON of old eps in this one! Relevant Prior EpisodesEp 48: Choose Your Own AdventureAstonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts Ep 71: Pere Cheney: The Town that DisappearedAstonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts Ep 87: Black Eyed Kids Part 1Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts Ep 50: Mothman Part 1Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts Ep 14: What's Gotten Into You?Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts Ep 209: The Phantom Horse of GreensboroAstonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts Ep 120: The Grim ReaperAstonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts Ep 154: Lockdown at the Waverly Hills SanatoriumAstonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts Ep 156: The Ax Murder House in Villisca Part 1Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts Ep 49: Monsters Among UsAstonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts Ep 310: The Rhine Research Center: Extraordinary EvidenceAstonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts Links and Further ReadingChurch Grims, by Tess Pfeifle (Astonishing Legends blog) Strange Intruders, by David Weatherly G.N.M. Tyrrell (Psi Encyclopedia, Society for Psychical Research) Ghosts and Apparitions in Psi Research (Psi Encyclopedia) Phantasms of the Living, Volume 1 (1886), free at the Internet Archive Phantasms of the Living, Volume 2 (1886), free at the Internet Archive Jim Harold's Campfire The Mothman of Point Pleasant (Small Town Monsters, 2017) The Ankou The Case Against Reality, by Donald Hoffman A Game of Pool, The Twilight Zone (1961) On a Pale Horse, by Piers Anthony The Villisca Axe Murder House Live and Let Die (1973) Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) We're looking for more stories! Send your Dead Letter to deadletteroffice@astonishinglegends.com!

    The Old Man on the Gravestone

  6. Sep 27

    A Tale of Ghost Ships Three!

    In 1933, a Scottish botanist watched a seemingly abandoned steamship drift past the Alaskan coast on an ice floe. It appeared upside down in a strange mirage, with no crew and no one at the wheel. This ship was the Baychimo, which was abandoned two years earlier, but refused to disappear. Having repeatedly resurfaced across the Arctic, it earning a reputation as one of history’s great ghost ships. In this episode, we explore the strange history of ghost ships from the the Baychimo, to the frozen Octavius, and the Ourang Medan, whose crew was reportedly found mysteriously dead shortly before the ship itself exploded and sank. Three ships, three enduring legends, and at least one vessel whose final resting place remains unknown. Visit our website for a lot more information on this episode.

  7. Sep 22

    The Mimic

    In tonight's dead letter, our listener Ed and his wife are newlyweds, sharing the apartment he's lived in for about two years in Clay Center, Nebraska. One morning in early 2020, he hits snooze on his alarm and sees a figure walking out of their bedroom, silhouetted by the living room lights he'd set on a timer, and it looks just like his wife, but it’s not. Relevant Prior Episodes Ep 26: Shadow PeopleAstonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts Ep 64: Electronic FogAstonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts Ep 226: Boundless Remote Viewing with Lori Williams Part 1Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts Links and Further Reading Ed's Floor Plan of the Apartment Clay Center, Nebraska, Wikipedia World's Largest Ball of Twine, Kansas TourismNote: We call it the world's biggest ball of yarn in the episode. It's actually a ball of sisal twine. I always mess that up! (Scott) Doppelganger, Britannica Hypnagogic Hallucinations, Cleveland Clinic A-Yokai-A-Day: Ikiryo, Matthew Meyer Alexander Cannon (psychiatrist), Wikipedia STAR GATE [Controlled Remote Viewing], Federation of American Scientists Astral Projection Hypnosis by Dr. Steve G. Jones Journeys Out of the Body by Robert A. Monroe Richard Hatem's Paranormal Bookshelf Beyond the Bermuda Triangle by Bruce Gernon and Rob MacGregor We're looking for more stories! Send your Dead Letter to deadletteroffice@astonishinglegends.com!

    The Mimic

  8. Sep 15

    The Benevolent Warning

    In tonight's dead letter, our listener named Mark is driving through western Michigan at two in the morning in 1978, working off a paper map and handwritten directions to a house he's never been to. He comes up a hill and into a curve on US 131, and there are four people standing in his lane. Two of them are waving him over to the right, and the other two have their arms raised above their heads in an X. Had they not been there he may have had a fatal collision, and when he went to find them shortly after, they had vanished. Relevant Prior Episodes Ep 102: Resurrection Mary Part 1Astonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts Ep 116: Small Town MonstersAstonishing Legends · Spotify · Apple Podcasts Links and Further Reading Lydia: The Ghost of Jamestown Bridge, NCpedia A History of the Vanishing Hitchhiker, Beardsley and Hankey, 1943 The Bray Road Beast, Small Town Monsters Jim Harold's Campfire: True Ghost Stories, Books 1 through 6 Note: We call it the National Highway Transportation Safety Association in the episode. The ‘A’ is actually for Administration.  We're looking for more stories! Send your Dead Letter to deadletteroffice@astonishinglegends.com!

    The Benevolent Warning
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About

The world is more mysterious than most people are comfortable imagining. We cross paths with the mystical from time to time and may not even notice it. If we do, we quickly return to our usually mundane daily existence. But what if we not only acknowledged the unknown, we investigated it and spoke with those in the know? That's what co-hosts Scott Philbrook & Forrest Burgess, and co-executive producer Tess Pfeifle do at Astonishing Legends. Over 100 million downloads and hundreds of thousands of listeners have discovered the thrill of exploring the mysteries of our world, showing that the unknown can be both captivating and intriguing. Welcome to Astonishing Legends!

Information

  • Creator
    Astonishing Legends Productions
  • Years Active
    2014 - 2026
  • Episodes
    475
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Astonishing Legends Productions, LLC
  • Show Website
    Astonishing Legends

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