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PODCAST

Gauge Illumination - Horror, folklore, and strange signals from the road.

Gauge Illuminations is a map of strange territory—a late-night, listener-guided campfire built for night riders, overnight drivers, and anyone chasing the signal beyond the familiar. Part performance, part investigation, and part roadside séance, we explore horror, folklore, weird fiction, and the people who create them, stitching together fringe reportage, road legends, interviews, and tightly crafted storytelling to uncover the landmarks where great stories are born. Along the way you’ll hear

fiction science fiction

All Episodes

00:36:34

Episode 8: Maltby's 13 Steps to Hell

Gauge Illumination - Horror, folklore, and strange... ·

2026/10/05

Here's something you shouldn't do: go looking for the 13 Steps to Hell.Naturally, that's exactly where Gauge Illuminations is going.Maltby's 13 Steps to Hell is one of those roadside folklore tales that begins with a real place and ends with it becoming something more than the sum of its parts. Just outside Snohomish in Washington State, according to the legend, there's a staircase beneath an old cemetery. If you find it after midnight, you're supposed to walk down the

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00:18:32

Thom Bray interview from episode 2

Gauge Illumination - Horror, folklore, and strange... ·

2026/10/02

Thom Bray has spent most of his life around trucks, highways, emergencies, and the assorted poor decisions people make while traveling between one place and another.Before retiring from J. J. Keller & Associates in 2025, Thom spent more than 20 years there as a transportation safety and regulatory expert. Before that came another couple of decades in trucking as a driver, driver trainer, safety supervisor, instructor, claims manager, training director, and safety director.He has driven

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00:27:31

Megan Kate Nelson Interview from episode 3

Gauge Illumination - Horror, folklore, and strange... ·

2026/10/01

Megan Kate Nelson is a historian, writer, and Pulitzer Prize finalist whose work examines the American West, the Civil War, environmental history, and national mythology. Her books include The Three-Cornered War, Saving Yellowstone, Ruin Nation, Trembling Earth, and The Westerners.Official website: https://megankatenelson.com/About: https://megankatenelson.com/about/

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00:28:16

Lyle Blackburn Interview from episode 4

Gauge Illumination - Horror, folklore, and strange... ·

2026/10/01

Lyle Blackburn is an author, musician, podcaster, and cryptid researcher whose lifelong fascination with strange creatures has made him one of the essential chroniclers of the Fouke Monster. His books include The Beast of Boggy Creek, Boggy Creek Casebook, Beyond Boggy Creek, Texas Bigfoot, Sinister Swamps, and enough other monsters to make walking home after dark considerably less appealing. His research has also contributed to documentaries by Small Town Monsters, and he has appeared on Expedition

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00:21:16

Steve Ward interview from episode 5

Gauge Illumination - Horror, folklore, and strange... ·

2026/09/30

Mothman expert Steve Ward provides deep historical lore and investigation into the sightings around the TNT area.Website: https://www.mothmanmuseum.com/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/steve.ward.5/?hl=enFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/mothmanfestival/

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00:29:46

Lisa Morton interview from episode 1

Gauge Illumination - Horror, folklore, and strange... ·

2026/09/30

Lisa Morton is a screenwriter, author, editor, and paranormal historian. She is a six-time Bram Stoker Award winner, a recipient of the Horror Writers Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and the author of four novels and more than 200 short stories. Her nonfiction explores Halloween, ghosts, spiritualism, horror cinema, and the history of the supernatural.Official website: https://lisamorton.com/Substack — The Whole Haunted World: https://lisamorton.substack.com/Instagram:

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00:20:23

Scott G. Shea interview from episode 7

Gauge Illumination - Horror, folklore, and strange... ·

2026/09/30

Scott G. Shea is the author of All the Leaves Are Brown: How the Mamas & the Papas Came Together and Broke Apart. He is a longtime radio producer who has produced Seize the Day with Gus Lloyd on SiriusXM’s Catholic Channel since 2012, as well as five nationally aired audio documentaries. A lifelong student and collector of popular music, Shea writes about rock history and has completed a biography focused on the first fifteen years of Waylon Jennings’s career.Official website:

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00:17:04

Chad Fifer interview from episode 6

Gauge Illumination - Horror, folklore, and strange... ·

2026/09/30

Chad Fifer is a writer, actor, and musician who co-hosts Strange Studies of Strange Stories with Chris Lackey. The pair began podcasting in 2009 with The H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast and later expanded the show to classic science fiction, fantasy, horror, and weird fiction. Fifer has written short fiction, adapted H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Hound” for The Lovecraft Anthology: Volume II, composed music for audio productions and bands including Pitch Black Manor and Draculater, and co-designed Strange

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00:36:48

Episode 8: The Werewolf of Defiance Ohio Everybody's...

Gauge Illumination - Horror, folklore, and strange... ·

2026/09/26

In July of 1973 in Defiance, Ohio, railyard worker Ted Davis came face to face with a giant entity, over seven feet tall, covered in hair with sharp fangs and claws. Man, everybody's got a werewolf.

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00:38:12

Ep6: Skinned Tom: The Ghost of Lovers’ Lane

Gauge Illumination - Horror, folklore, and strange... ·

2026/09/13

Episode 6 explores Skinned Tom, the gruesome lovers’ lane ghost said to haunt the Tennessee–Kentucky border. Jimmy Mac traces the legend through the upheavals of the Roaring Twenties—the aftermath of war and pandemic, Prohibition, the rise of the automobile, changing courtship, and the moral panic that followed. Chad Fifer joins the show to talk horror tropes, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, isolation, hospitality, and Strange Stories: The Roleplaying Game. Also: the Uncanny Lull, Collect Rocks Day,

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01:47:46

Episode 5: Mothman (Warnings from Beyond)

Gauge Illumination - Horror, folklore, and strange... ·

2026/09/05

We begin in Point Pleasant, West Virginia. It is November of 1966. Two couples driving through the McClintic Wildlife Sanctuary spotted a pair of glowing red eyes in the darkness and accidentally gave America one of its most enduring legends. Known locally as the “TNT Area,” the sanctuary is an eerie combination of open West Virginia countryside, abandoned man-made lakes, and camouflaged ammunition-storage igloos—a strange landscape that provided just enough mystery to turn a frightening encounter

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01:49:25

Episode 4: The Legend of Boggy Creek (The Country’s...

Gauge Illumination - Horror, folklore, and strange... ·

2026/08/29

Jimmy grew up south of Boggy Creek, which means he was closer to Louisiana's Honey Island Swamp Monster. But he couldn’t escape the commercials for Charles Pierce’s archetypal horror documentary The Legend of Boggy Creek, which used actual citizens to tell the tale of the upright entity terrorizing Fouke, Arkansas. Everybody’s got a Fouke monster: Bigfoot wanders the Pacific Northwest, The Yucca Man haunts The Mojave, and New Hampshire’s got The Woods Devil. It seems almost every region or state

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02:08:07

Episode 3: The Vanishing: Getting Lost in the Great...

Gauge Illumination - Horror, folklore, and strange... ·

2026/08/22

Jimmy begins with the strangely enduring story of David Lang, the Tennessee farmer who supposedly disappeared in front of his family and witnesses in 1880—and the even stranger fact that the story was repeated by reputable outlets, including the Cincinnati Enquirer. From there, Gauge Illuminations leaves the world of urban legends behind and goes looking for people who really did vanish: D. B. Cooper, who stepped out of an airplane with a parachute and a fortune and was never seen again, and Polly

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01:56:07

EP 2. The Bunnyman of Colchester Bridge—There’s a...

Gauge Illumination - Horror, folklore, and strange... ·

2026/08/16

The Bunnyman of Colchester Bridge—There’s a Killer on the Highway: Welcoming celebrated author Jeremy Dauber and Wisconsin trucking legend/deputy fire chief Thom Bray, Jimmy uses Virginia’s Bunnyman of Colchester Bridge to examine our fascination with haunted bridges, killers in costume, and local legends built around the dare. Not a hitchhiker among them, these monstrous trolls-under-the-bridge wait for unsuspecting drivers on slow roads, breakdowns, and lovers’ lanes.But more than just a road

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02:05:51

EP 1. Resurrection Mary (The Myth of The American...

Gauge Illumination - Horror, folklore, and strange... ·

2026/08/10

The thumb goes up; the car goes by.Forget about UFOs and Bigfoot, there might not be a more American urban legend than that of the mysterious hitchhiker. His (or in this case her) presence has haunted roadsides across America, and perhaps, most famously, in the form of Chicago’s Resurrection Mary. Jimmy Mac manages to tie the spectral vision from Illinois to the adventures of John Waters, the writings of Jack Kerouac, and an awful favorite of Christopher Nolan: The Hitcher. Along the way, 6 time

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00:00:52

John Lacarbiere III joins us in the first episode of...

Gauge Illumination - Horror, folklore, and strange... ·

2026/08/07

John Lacarbiere III joins us in the first episode of Gauge Illuminations.In this clip, John talks about watching the way his father loved his mother, how difficult it could be to recognize that love when he was younger, and how those observations helped shape the kind of man—and partner—he wanted to become.Then the conversation takes a very John turn: books, Lego blocks, girls, nature, and eventually “the books, the Legos, and the legs.”John Lacarbiere III is a New Orleans poet, spoken-word artist,

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00:01:14

Can You Be Possessed and Not Know It? Lisa Morton on...

Gauge Illumination - Horror, folklore, and strange... ·

2026/08/04

Can a person be possessed without knowing it?Award-winning horror writer, paranormal historian, and Halloween authority Lisa Morton joins Gauge Illuminations for a discussion of demonic possession, mass exorcisms, ancient accounts of spirits taking control of the body, and the details that make supernatural stories feel authentic.Lisa explains the traditional definition of possession as the surrender—or disappearance—of a person’s will beneath another personality. The conversation moves from

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00:01:07

Gauge Illuminations, coming soon to a highway near you.

Gauge Illumination - Horror, folklore, and strange... ·

2026/08/01

Or is it all just a mythhttps://gaugeilluminations.substack.com/

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1:56

Urban Myth: Hitchhiker Mary

Gauge Illumination - Horror, folklore, and strange... ·

2026/07/31

The hitchhiker myth lives at the center of the American imagination of the road. It is ground zero for our tradition of urban legends.

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1:53

The Rules of The Road Movie

Gauge Illumination - Horror, folklore, and strange... ·

2026/07/30

Not everything that claims to be road movies is in fact a road movie.Fury Road! Not a road movie. Take a deep dive into the subject on our substack page. https://gaugeilluminations.substack.com/p/the-rules-of-the-road-movie

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