Today I want to tell you about the dark origins of Christmas, before Santa Claus ever existed. We're diving into Frau Perchta, a Christmas witch who visited homes with iron scissors and a taste for porridge...whether she had to cut it out of you or not. We'll also cover the real Saint Nicholas and his disturbing miracles, and the demonic Krampuses who worked alongside him to drag sinners straight to hell. This beloved holiday is actually as dark as a Brother Grimms fairytale….

Cold cases can sit on shelves for years without answers, but this year we’ve seen some amazing advancements in cases that police thought would never get solved. I want to tell you about three of them today, with twists that no one saw coming. We'll cover the Yogurt Shop Murders, and the shocking discoveries that led to arrests in the murders of Aliza Sherman and Doris Worrell.

Last year, a group of adventurers with National Geographic were hiking Mount Everest when they saw a human foot sticking out of the ice. Now, it is not rare to see dead bodies on the mountain, there are at least 200 of them scattered around Everest, and many of them act as markers for trails, frozen forever in time where they fell

But this human foot in particular, had been on the mountain for 100 years and solved a century old mystery…

Today, I want to tell you about a horrifying urban legend that haunted a community nearby the ruins of the abandoned Willowbrook State School in Staten Island for decades. Eventually, children started really disappearing from this community, so let's explore the real story behind the urban legend....

TW: Child Abuse, Child Death

Step inside the legend of H.H. Holmes and the chilling labyrinth he built during the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. We'll follow a string of disappearances through the “Murder Castle” he built: a three story building with the sole purpose of killing as many people as discreetly as possible. Was Holmes a criminal mastermind, or has time twisted the tale?

Imagine you hear a strange sound coming from your attic one evening. What is scarier? That it’s paranormal? Maybe a ghost haunting your space? Or that it’s a person, an unknown intruder watching you from inside your own home? That is a question that a family in the German countryside had to ask themselves a hundred years ago. But we would never know their answer, because after hearing strange sounds coming from their attic, the entire family and their chambermaid were found brutally slain inside of their barn. What was tormenting the Gruber family?

TW: Child Death, Incest

What would happen if you read an ad in a newspaper for your dream partner. They’re rich, they’re beautiful and they are looking for someone to share their life with. Would you answer, or is that too good to be true? Well, in 1906, dozens of men around the country had that exact problem, except when they answered these ads and went to go meet their future wife, they vanished without a trace.

TW: Child Death

In 1929, bodies were turning up all over Dusseldorf, Germany with one horrifying thing in common. It looked like someone had bitten their necks, and in some cases, tried to drain them of blood. 

Immediately word of a vampire spread throughout the city, but that did little to stop the attacks, which would eventually point back to one of the most depraved human beings that we’ve covered on this show…

TW: Reference to child harm, sexual assault, incest, and animal cruelty.

Lost media, TV urban legends, and the moments kids’ networks never wanted you to see. This episode investigates the rumored Nickelodeon “destroyed tape” from Legends of the Hidden Temple, real broadcast signal hijackings (including the infamous Handy Manny incident), and a haunting stop-motion short known only as “The Butcher.” From grueling game-show sets to vanished DVR recordings, we dig into how media disappears and why people won’t stop looking for it.

This story starts with a police officer who was investigating a suspect in a missing woman's case. When the officer went down into the man’s basement, he found a secret, locked leather door in the far back corner of the room. 

Now, to understand what was in that room, and who that man was, we need to start all the way at the beginning, and go deep into the Göhrde Forest where in 1989, multiple bodies were discovered deep within the woods.

In 1966, three children vanished without a trace in Australia, and no one knows what happened. It’s a mystery that still plagues the country to this day, and may credit it as the reason people started locking their doors there. 

But today, we have a much clearer picture of the crime, who might have been responsible, and there’s even been updates on the case as of this year.

Summer is the perfect time to visit an amusement park, but for every park that’s open and bustling during the warmer months, there’s one that’s fallen into disrepair and sits there abandoned. 

But what causes this to happen? Well, sometimes a series of horrible accidents cause the public to lose faith in a park, and ticket sales plummet. Sometimes, a once in a generation disaster occurs and an entire city must evacuate, leaving the park inside empty. And other times, a park somehow winds up built on an ancient graveyard, and unexplained, supernatural events scare the public away. 

Today, we’re talking about River Country, Pripyat Amusement Park, and Lake Shawnee Abandoned Amusement Park 

TW: Child death

In 2014, while looking for two missing hikers, Lisanne Froon and Kris Kremers, in Panama, officials came across a digital camera in the forest that they believed belonged to one of them. 

The photos they found on that camera were disturbing, to say the least. And they held terrifying clues as to what happened to the missing girls. 

Mysterious disappearances, lost shipwrecks, the Lake Michigan “Stonehenge”, strange lights above Lake Erie and more. 

There’s something strange happening in the great lakes. These lakes in North America are much bigger than you would ever imagine, they hold about a fifth of the entire world’s freshwater. But they also hold some of the greatest unsolved mysteries. They are quite literally full of secrets.

In 2011, a 24 year old woman vanished from a Disney Cruise that was heading back to LA. And what at first seemed like an open and shut “man overboard” case quickly started to seem like something much darker. Leaving us with the question, does Disney know more than they’re saying??

TW: Reference to Sexual Assault

The internet freaked out last month when the haunted doll Annabelle was taken on tour around the country. Stories started circulating of buildings burning down in her wake, prisoners escaping, and even that she went missing at one point. 

But what was really going on, and why was the Annabelle tour such a spiritually chaotic event?

What kind of illness turns deer into stumbling, soulless shells of themselves—bodies wasting away, but never truly dying? Or drives healthy young men into violent frenzies that leave them strapped to hospital beds, terrified of water? This week, we’re diving into the terrifying world of zombie illnesses—real diseases that hijack the brain and erase what makes us human.

In 1989, the body of a woman was found hog tied off the side of a road in Richmond British Columbia. 

What followed was one of the longest coroners inquest in Canadian history. An inquest that would say the woman had died by an unknown event.

Although she was found with her hands and feet tied with nylon behind her back, although she had told police that for 7 years she was being harassed by an unknown person, a jury of her peers wasn’t convinced that any crime had taken place…

But how could that be? Well, today we are going to get into the very, very complicated death of Cindy James. 

TW: Animal abuse, suicide

A strange man stalks two women on their camping trip. A strange dog has been caught on a loop for hundreds of years at the foot of a mountain. And lights that have no source, and no explanation. Today we're taking a trip through the Appalachian trail. Bring your flashlight.

Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan, isn't just the largest U.S. military installation in the Pacific—it's also one of the most haunted. From shadowy figures trying to enter through the gates to abandoned buildings that drive occupants to the edge, and the chilling laughter of ghostly children, Kadena’s legends are as eerie as they are enduring. But are the hauntings rooted in the base itself… or in the haunted history of Okinawa Island beneath it?