Today's True Weird Stuff - Bright Lights, Big Sleepy Revisited
This was one of the first True Weird Stuff episodes we did...it's a deeply personal story for Sheri, who shared the time she and her family experienced a "lost time" phenomenon. This episode has been updated to include a newly recorded Post-Mortem, in which Sheri reveals new information she recently learned while visiting her mom.
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1:18:36
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1:18:36
Flat Earth City
Today's True Weird Stuff - Flat Earth City
Wilbur Glenn Voliva was a self-proclaimed prophet, flat-earth crusader, and autocratic ruler of Zion, Illinois. This fiery preacher took over John Alexander Dowie’s religious utopia in the early 1900s, ruling with an iron fist, Volivabanning everything from whistling to reading newspapers on Sundays. But his most infamous crusade was against science itself: Voliva loudly declared that the Earth was flat, even offering thousands of dollars to anyone who could prove it was round.
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1:09:36
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1:09:36
The Littlest Survivor
Today's True Weird Stuff - The Littlest Survivor
In 1846, the Donner Party set out westward seeking new land and opportunity, but their journey turned into a nightmare when they became trapped by snow in the unforgiving Sierra Nevada. Starvation, freezing temperatures, and impossible choices claimed the lives of many members of the Donner Party. Eliza Donner Houghton, the youngest survivor and among the last to be rescued, witnessed the loss of both parents and bore witness to fear, desperation, and horrors no child should endure.
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1:36:52
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1:36:52
A Demon Named Bob
Today's True Weird Stuff - A Demon Named Bob
In 1878, a quiet town in Nova Scotia became the stage for one of the most chilling hauntings in North American history. After a near-death experience, a young woman named Esther Cox began to suffer strange attacks — unseen forces that scratched messages into walls, set fires, and hurled objects through the air. Was she the victim of a violent haunting, or the center of a psychological storm misunderstood by her time?
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1:35:08
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1:35:08
Liar, Liar, Plants on Fire
Today's True Weird Stuff - Liar, Liar, Plants on Fire
In 1966, Cleve Backster, an interrogation specialist for the CIA, claimed to have discovered something shocking: plants seemed to respond to human thoughts and emotions. He came to this conclusion by hooking up plants to a polygraph machine to measure their response. His controversial experiments with polygraphs suggested that living things might share a hidden form of communication, and sparked a wave of fascination and skepticism that still lingers today.
True Weird Stuff is the award-winning podcast hosted by Sheri Lynch. Surprising, odd, bizarre - and sometimes insane. Always true. Let us tell you a story…
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