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PODCAST

Monsters Myths and Manias

weirdcalderdale

Monsters, Myths and Manias explores strange and forgotten corners of history. Join Professor Weird (Paul Weatherhead) as he explores bizarre but true stories of mass hysteria, ghost panics, scary folklore and strange creatures...

history

All Episodes

9:22

Yorkshire Zombies - The Medieval Dead

Monsters Myths and Manias ·

2025/10/26

Yorkshire in the 1300s was a strange and frightening place. The living dead crawled from their graves, wandered round the lanes and accosted the villagers, at least according to accounts written by an anonymous monk. But these zombies were very different from the gut munchers of modern popular culture, and it wasn’t your brain they were after. So why were the dead shuffling round Yorkshire six centuries ago? What did they want? And how could they be stopped?In this episode of Monsters, Myths and

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12:07

Top 5 Cannibal Zombie Movies from the Golden Age of...

Monsters Myths and Manias ·

2025/10/19

In recent decades there have been some fine zombie films, but these mainstream offerings tend to suffer from one fatal flaw: respectability. The zombie films from the golden age (which I’ve taken as being from the late 60s to the early 90s) are different. They are gloriously disreputable, so much so that many were banned in Britain or were only available in editions butchered by the censors. In this Halloween special, Professor Weird aka Paul Weatherhead guides you through his Top 5 cannibal zombie

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9:21

Scared to Death!

Monsters Myths and Manias ·

2025/10/12

In this episode, bizarre and spooky urban legends about ghost hoaxes going wrong and scarring the hapless victim to death!

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11:03

What did the atheist philosopher see when he died and...

Monsters Myths and Manias ·

2025/10/05

Atheist philosopher A.J. Ayer choked to death on a piece of smoked salmon and had a bizarre vision of the afterlife before being revived... What did he see and did it change his mind?

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10:21

Ghost Streakers!

Monsters Myths and Manias ·

2025/09/28

Naked ghosts – people who wandered the streets at night starkers frightening any unlucky victim they happened to meet - were surprisingly frequent, especially in the early nineteenth century. They were a combination of ghost hoaxer, streaker and flasher. The sight of someone stalking a secluded location with his wan naked body eerily reflecting the gas lamps or moon light would have been a very disconcerting, threatening and scary experience. It has an element of the bizarre and surreal about it,

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9:51

The Skoptsy: Russia's Weird Castration Cult

Monsters Myths and Manias ·

2025/09/21

Professor Weird explores the castration cult that swept Russia and Eastern Europe in the late seventeenth century. They were known as the Skoptsy, and the operation (which they called the Fiery Baptism) involved a red hot poker and no anesthetic... But we would never do anything like that in the modern day and age... would we?

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14:46

The Calverley Ghost: A Yorkshire Tragedy

Monsters Myths and Manias ·

2025/09/14

The West Yorkshire village of Calverley became the centre of public attention over Christmas 1904 after reports of a mysterious phantom were widely published. However, the Christmas ghost of Calverley has a long history, involving tales of schoolboys raising the dead, headless horses, exorcism and haunted preachers. The story begins, though, with a horrifying Jacobean murder spree that spawned a grim piece of gory theatre that William Shakespeare may have had a hand in…This episode is based on a

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10:47

Playing the Ghost: A Brief History of Ghost Hoaxes

Monsters Myths and Manias ·

2025/09/07

To mark the release of his new book, Phantoms of Christmas Past: Festive Ghost Hunts, Ghost Hoaxes and Ghost Panics, author Paul Weatherhead examine the weird history of ghost hoaxing, a bizarre activity that was surprisingly widespread in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These hoaxes often led to mayhem, drunken rioting, ghost hunters dressing in drag, and even death.... Phantoms of Christmas Past is available wherever you get your books from or direct from the publisher: Phantoms of

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12:31

The Demon Haunted Castaway

Monsters Myths and Manias ·

2025/08/31

In January 1726 the British ships the Compton and the James and Mary anchored off a desolate uninhabited island in the South Atlantic for repairs. Men were sent ashore to find provisions, but instead came across a tent with a man’s skeleton lying near it. Next to the skeleton was a manuscript – a diary of the dead man’s last days as a castaway on this remote island. The diary was written in Dutch and told a horrifying tale of a man haunted by madness and despair and plagued by monstrous demons…

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09:37

The North Sea Monster

Monsters Myths and Manias ·

2025/08/24

Fishermen are known for their tall tales, but few are as tall as the tale told of the gigantic fire breathing sea serpent that attacked a Scottish trawler in 1903. Reports of sea monsters were fairly common in the newspapers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but the desperate battle between the crew of the Glen Grant and the fire-breathing North Sea Monster is one of the most exciting...

en

08:12

The UFO Cult that Saved the World

Monsters Myths and Manias ·

2025/08/17

In 1954 a group of undercover psychologists joined a doomsday UFO cult who believed the world was about to be destroyed and the true believers whisked away in a flying saucer. What would happen to the believers' faiths when the prophesised apocalypse didn't happen, the psychologists wondered? The results reveal an important truth about human nature...

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14:08

The Gorefield Ghost

Monsters Myths and Manias ·

2025/08/10

In early 1923 a Fenland farm was visited by strange destructive phenomena – household objects mysteriously flying across the room and smashing. Some said the house was haunted by a poltergeist, others blamed witchcraft or even demons. The haunted house became a national sensation, leading to psychic investigators, spiritualists, an exorcist, a witch and Arthur Conan Doyle all trying to solve the mystery. But perhaps the answer was right under their nose all along… Paul Weatherhead alias Professor

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08:43

Doomsday Herring and Fishy Farts

Monsters Myths and Manias ·

2025/08/03

The strange history of prophetic herring and how they spelled doom for mighty men. Plus, how herring farts nearly brought about the apocalypse...

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04:34

Monster Fly Attacks Yorkshire

Monsters Myths and Manias ·

2025/07/27

A monster fly three feet in length and with an 18 inch dagger like tongue caused mayhem when it escaped from a laboratory and went on the rampage in Yorkshire in February, 1932. This is according to a contemporary Bulgarian newspaper and reported by Reuters in several British papers a few months later when it created quite a buzz...Sources Sheffield Daily Telegraph 12 December 1932; Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, 12 December 1932

en

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