The Devil Within

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  The New Monsters: The Bunny Man - Part Three 18.09.2026 23dk

  THE DEVIL WITHIN THE NEW MONSTERS: THE BUNNY MAN Episode Three: Midnight at the Overpass By the 1990s, everybody in Northern Virginia seemed to know the rules. Drive out to Bunny Man Bridge after dark. Wait until midnight. Turn off the headlights. Say his name three times. Maybe get out of the car. Maybe come on Halloween. Nobody could agree on exactly how you summoned the Bunny Man, but that hardly mattered. Because everybody agreed that if you stayed beneath that railroad bridge long enough, something would happen. In the final chapter of our three-part investigation into The Bunny Man, we follow one of America's strangest urban legends through its most important transformation. What began with two reported encounters with a rabbit-costumed stranger in Fairfax County in October 1970 eventually became something teenagers could actually participate in. This week, we head back beneath the railroad tracks outside Clifton, Virginia, during an era when American suburbia was developing some very particular nightmares of its own. Stranger danger was reshaping childhood. Parents inspected Halloween candy for razor blades and poison. The Satanic Panic warned that secret cults might be hiding behind otherwise ordinary American life, while a new generation of slasher movies discovered that the safest-looking suburbs made particularly effective places for monsters. The Bunny Man fit right in. His rabbit costume corrupted something associated with childhood innocence. His axe gave him the silhouette of a horror villain. Better still, you didn't need to travel into some remote wilderness to find him. You needed a car, a few friends and enough nerve to drive into the woods. Folklorists call it legend tripping: traveling to a supposedly haunted place specifically to test the story. Haunted railroad crossings, Crybaby Bridges, cemeteries, abandoned houses and mirrors capable of summoning Bloody Mary all operate on variations of the same brilliant idea. They don't merely give you a monster to believe in. They give you something to do. Bunny Man Bridge became one of those places. Every group of teenagers who drove beneath the tracks created another opportunity for reality to misbehave. A deer moving through the woods became a person. A branch became a weapon. A reflection became a pair of eyes. Then a freight train thundered overhead, somebody screamed, and by Monday morning four people remembered the same ten seconds four different ways. Then the internet arrived. The Bunny Man had spent decades traveling through newspapers, playgrounds, school buses, parties and word of mouth. Home computers and dial-up connections suddenly removed geography from the equation. The abandoned asylum could be repeated from website to website. An escaped inmate could acquire a name, a biography and a body count. Eventually, repetition itself began impersonating evidence. That makes the Bunny Man an important creature in the evolution of The New Monsters. He wasn't born online like Slender Man, and he wasn't collaboratively constructed on the internet like the Backrooms. The internet didn't create the Bunny Man. It inherited him. But before we leave Fairfax County, we return to the question buried beneath more than half a century of mythology: Who was actually inside the bunny suit? Strip away the asylum. Strip away the escaped inmates, mutilated rabbits, murders and supernatural bridge rituals, and two reported incidents remain. In October 1970, witnesses described a rabbit-costumed figure carrying weapons and angrily complaining about trespassing. During the first encounter, a hatchet reportedly came through the window of a car. Ten days later, a similarly dressed person was reportedly encountered near an unfinished house, again armed and again furious about trespassers. Was it an elaborate Halloween prank that escalated? An attempt to frighten people away from private property? Someone angry about the relentless development transforming Fairfax County around him? All are possibilities. None is an answer. More than half a century later, the person beneath those rabbit ears remains unidentified. And perhaps that's why the Bunny Man survives so well. Remove the supernatural mythology and the story doesn't become ordinary. The strange part was there from the beginning. A newspaper story became a playground story. The playground story acquired a bridge. The bridge acquired an asylum. The asylum acquired escaped inmates and murders. Teenagers turned the bridge into a pilgrimage site, and eventually the internet gathered every version into a sprawling digital mythology. No single person created the Bunny Man we know today. Thousands of people did. NEXT TIME ON THE NEW MONSTERS THE LOVELAND FROGMAN Next time, we're heading west to Loveland, Ohio, where another distinctly American monster emerged along the Little Miami River. The story begins with a murky 1955 account involving several short, upright creatures reportedly encountered near the river—one of them, wonderfully, supposedly holding something resembling a wand or metal rod that produced sparks. Then, in March 1972, a Loveland police officer reported encountering a strange leathery animal near the roadway. Another officer would soon encounter something as well. And this time, he shot it. Decades later, that officer would insist the famous Frogman wasn't a monster at all. According to him, he'd encountered a large, tailless iguana, probably someone's escaped exotic pet. That should have killed the legend. It didn't. Next time on The New Monsters: The Loveland Frogman. LISTEN • FOLLOW • WATCH Follow The Devil Within wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a 5-star rating and review. It remains one of the best ways to help new listeners discover the show. Watch The Devil Within on the Evio Creative YouTube channel, subscribe, and turn on notifications for new episodes and videos. And join us on Instagram at @thedevilwithinpod. The Bunny Man: Episode Three — Midnight at the Overpass. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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  The New Monsters: The Bunny Man - Part Two 16.09.2026 25dk

  THE DEVIL WITHIN THE NEW MONSTERS: THE BUNNY MAN Episode Two: The Bridge There is a railroad bridge outside Clifton, Virginia, where Colchester Road narrows into a single lane and disappears beneath the tracks. For generations of Northern Virginia teenagers, it has been known by another name: Bunny Man Bridge. According to the legend, this is where the Bunny Man lived, killed and perhaps died. Some versions claim he was an escaped asylum patient who vanished into the surrounding woods after a transport bus crashed. Others add mutilated rabbits hanging from trees, murdered children, bodies suspended from the railroad tracks and a killer who eventually returned from the dead. It's a spectacular horror story. There's just one problem: almost none of it appears to have happened. In Episode Two of our three-part investigation, we follow the Bunny Man away from the documented encounters on Guinea Road and into the place that transformed him from a bizarre local mystery into a full-fledged American monster. Research by Fairfax County historian and archivist Brian Conley found no evidence of the asylum, the escaped inmates or the Bunny Man massacre supposedly connected to the bridge. The two documented incidents from October 1970 happened miles away. So how did the Bunny Man get to Clifton? We travel back through the history of the village itself, from the arrival of the Orange and Alexandria Railroad in 1858 to its importance during the Civil War, when the tracks became part of the military infrastructure connecting a country tearing itself apart. After the war, a railroad village grew here, preserving a pocket of older Northern Virginia even as suburban Washington expanded around it. That landscape gave the legend something Guinea Road eventually couldn't: permanence. Construction sites become houses. Woods are cleared. Empty lots acquire addresses. But a secluded railroad overpass surrounded by trees can remain unsettling for generations. Better still, it gave teenagers somewhere they could actually visit. The Bunny Man stopped being merely something people heard about and became something they could go looking for. From there, the mythology began building backward. An asylum appeared where historical research has found none. A bus crashed. Patients escaped. Rabbits were slaughtered. One fugitive supposedly died while another became the Bunny Man. Eventually murders, Halloween rituals and supernatural encounters were attached to the bridge, creating an elaborate origin story for a monster whose real identity had never been established. We'll explore why those additions were so effective, how the abandoned asylum became one of American horror's favorite shortcuts for hidden evil, and why the Bunny Man's axe survived the transformation from reported weapon to unmistakable horror icon. Most importantly, we'll see the moment when folklore becomes interactive. Teenagers began driving beneath the bridge after dark, turning off their engines and waiting for something to happen. Every movement in the woods, unexpected car or freight train thundering overhead offered another opportunity for the story to reproduce itself. Because the Bunny Man didn't become immortal when somebody died beneath those railroad tracks. He became immortal when people started going there to find him. NEXT TIME In the final chapter of our Bunny Man story, Midnight at the Overpass, we follow the legend through the 1980s and 1990s and into the early internet, when a regional Virginia ghost story suddenly gained access to a global audience. We'll explore Halloween pilgrimages, stranger danger, Satanic Panic and the peculiar rituals that taught generations of teenagers how to summon a monster. Then we'll return to October 1970 and the question that none of the mythology has ever answered: Who was actually inside the rabbit suit? LISTEN • WATCH • FOLLOW Listen & Follow: Follow The Devil Within wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss the final chapter of The Bunny Man. Rate & Review: Leave us a 5-star rating and review. It remains one of the best ways to help new listeners discover the show. Watch & Subscribe: Watch The Devil Within on the Evio Creative YouTube channel, subscribe, and turn on notifications for new episodes and videos. Join the Conversation: Follow @thedevilwithinpod and tell us: Would you spend midnight beneath Bunny Man Bridge? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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  The New Monsters: The Bunny Man - Part One 14.09.2026 22dk

  THE DEVIL WITHIN THE NEW MONSTERS: THE BUNNY MAN Episode One: The Man on Guinea Road In October 1970, along a dark stretch of Guinea Road in Fairfax County, Virginia, a young couple sitting inside their car saw someone emerge from the woods. The stranger appeared to be wearing a white suit with long rabbit ears. He began shouting about private property, claimed to have their license plate number—and then hurled a hatchet through the passenger window. The couple escaped. Police recovered the weapon. The man in the rabbit costume vanished. If that were the end of the story, the Bunny Man might have survived as little more than a spectacularly bizarre newspaper clipping. But ten days later, another encounter was reported nearby. This time, security guard Paul Phillips discovered a rabbit-costumed figure at an unfinished house, carrying a long-handled axe and reportedly chopping at the structure while complaining about trespassers. Two incidents had given Northern Virginia something much harder to dismiss: a pattern. In Episode One of our three-part journey into The Bunny Man, we go beneath the legend to the landscape that created it. Long before suburban Washington pushed into Fairfax County, this was a place shaped by Indigenous history, colonial Virginia, George Washington and George Mason, the American Revolution and the Civil War. By 1970, another invasion was underway as farms and forests disappeared beneath subdivisions, highways and construction sites. That transformation provides an irresistible backdrop for what happened on Guinea Road. The original Bunny Man emerged from woods being consumed by development, repeatedly complained about trespassing and carried the very tools traditionally used to clear the landscape around him. Whether any of that symbolism was intentional is impossible to know, but the timing helped create an almost perfect American monster: something lurking along the uneasy boundary where countryside was becoming suburbia. We'll also trace how two documented encounters began mutating almost immediately through newspapers, telephones, school buses and playgrounds. Before the internet could make legends viral, children and teenagers were already remarkably efficient distribution networks, repeating stories, changing details and filling unanswered questions with increasingly elaborate explanations. And somewhere along the way, the Bunny Man moved. The famous Bunny Man Bridge near Clifton was not the location of either documented 1970 encounter. Yet as the original construction sites disappeared and unfinished houses became ordinary homes, the secluded railroad overpass remained beneath the trees. Eventually the legend acquired the bridge, an asylum, escaped killers, mutilated rabbits and murder—transforming an unidentified man in a bizarre costume into something supernatural. But before we get to the ghost stories, we begin with the part that remains considerably stranger because it appears to have actually happened. Someone wore the rabbit costume. Someone carried the weapons. And more than half a century later, nobody has conclusively established who was inside it. Listen & Follow: Follow The Devil Within wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss Episode Two: The Bridge. Rate & Review: If you're enjoying The New Monsters, leave us a 5-star rating and review. It helps new listeners discover the show. Watch & Subscribe: Watch The Devil Within on the Evio Creative YouTube channel, subscribe, and turn on notifications for new episodes and videos. Join the Conversation: Follow @thedevilwithinpod and tell us: What do you think was really happening on Guinea Road in October 1970? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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  The Devil's Ledger - Week of September 14th, 2026 14.09.2026 19dk

  THE DEVIL’S LEDGER Week of September 14, 2026 — Twenty-Five Years Later This week on The Devil’s Ledger, we mark the 25th anniversary of September 11, 2001 and remember the 2,977 people whose lives were taken that day, along with the first responders and rescue workers who ran toward unimaginable danger while thousands were desperately trying to escape. We also honor those who have died in the years since from illnesses connected to their work at Ground Zero. Twenty-five years later, “Never Forget” remains more than a phrase; it is an obligation to remember the victims, teach the history and honor the extraordinary courage witnessed that morning. THE CREEPIEST THING I HEARD THIS WEEK: THE CURSE OF DUDLEYTOWN Deep in the forests of northwestern Connecticut lie the remains of Dudleytown, an eighteenth-century settlement that eventually became one of New England’s most enduring haunted legends. Stories of a centuries-old family curse, insanity, mysterious deaths and strange creatures transformed an abandoned settlement into the so-called “Village of the Damned.” Historians have challenged much of the mythology, offering far more ordinary explanations for Dudleytown’s disappearance, but the legend proved harder to kill. Ghost hunters still seek it out despite the former settlement being privately owned and closed to the public. THIS WEEK ON THE DEVIL WITHIN: THE BUNNY MAN The New Monsters heads to Northern Virginia for the story of The Bunny Man, a legend that began with genuine 1970 reports involving a mysterious man in a rabbit costume carrying a hatchet or axe. From those strange encounters grew Bunny Man Bridge, tales of escaped lunatics and an abandoned asylum, alleged murders and a midnight summoning ritual. Across three episodes, we separate the documented incidents from the mythology and follow the Bunny Man from newspaper reports and playground whispers into teenage legend-tripping and eventually the internet. THIS WEEK ON CRIMINAL MISCHIEF: JAYCEE DUGARD Carolyn Ossorio examines the devastating 1991 kidnapping of Jaycee Dugard, who was just eleven years old when she was abducted near her South Lake Tahoe home and held captive for more than eighteen years. Joining Carolyn is legendary investigator Paul Holes for a conversation about the investigation, the evidence, the opportunities authorities missed and, most importantly, Jaycee’s extraordinary survival and reclamation of the life that was stolen from her. THIS WEEK ON THE SLIPPERY: THE DEADLY SECRET BEHIND WELCOME TO SWEETIE PIE’S Behind the family drama of the hit OWN reality series Welcome to Sweetie Pie’s was a crime more shocking than anything television producers could have manufactured. The Slippery examines how Tim Norman became the architect of a murder-for-hire plot targeting his own 21-year-old nephew, Andre Montgomery. Investigators from the FBI, ATF and local law enforcement eventually unraveled a trail of life-insurance policies, burner phones, cell-tower records, financial transactions and accomplices that exposed the machinery behind Andre’s murder. THIS WEEK IN HORROR: BLACK ZOMBIE Director Maya Annik Bedward’s documentary BLACK ZOMBIE travels beyond Hollywood’s flesh-eating undead to explore the zombie’s origins in Haitian history and spiritual tradition. Moving through films including White Zombie, Night of the Living Dead and The Serpent and the Rainbow, the documentary examines how a figure rooted in enslavement, stolen agency, resistance and survival was transformed into one of modern horror’s most recognizable monsters. Featuring historians, artists and horror figures including Tananarive Due and Tom Savini, BLACK ZOMBIE asks what was lost when Hollywood took the zombie out of Haiti—and what can be reclaimed by putting that history back. We close this week where we began: September 11, 2001. Remember the people who went to work and never came home, the passengers and flight crews, the firefighters climbing the stairs, the police officers and paramedics running toward danger, the passengers who fought back aboard Flight 93, and the families whose lives were forever divided into before and after. Life is short. Call somebody you love, take the trip, have the dinner, laugh too loudly, make something, and tell people what they mean to you while they are still here to hear it. Listen & Follow: Follow The Devil’s Ledger and the entire Evio Creative lineup wherever you get your podcasts. Rate & Review: If you enjoy the show, please leave us a 5-star rating and review. It remains one of the best ways to help new listeners discover us. Watch & Subscribe: Watch The Devil Within, Criminal Mischief and more on the Evio Creative YouTube channel. Subscribe and turn on notifications so you never miss a new episode. Join the Conversation: Follow @thedevilwithinpod on Instagram, and send stories, tips and feedback to [email protected]. Never forget. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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  The New Monsters: Alligators in the Sewers — Part Three 11.09.2026 23dk

  THE DEVIL WITHIN The New Monsters: Alligators in the Sewers — Episode Three: The Monster Under Manhattan By 1980, the alligator had escaped. The legend that began with misplaced reptiles, a very real 1935 newspaper story and Teddy May’s extraordinary tales of an underground colony had finally crawled out of the sewers and into American popular culture. Hollywood was waiting. In the wonderfully excessive 1980 creature feature Alligator, a little girl brings home a baby alligator named Ramon. Her father eventually decides reptile ownership has run its course and flushes the animal down the toilet. Twelve years later, Ramon has survived beneath the city by eating discarded laboratory animals pumped full of experimental growth hormones. The adorable souvenir has become an enormous, man-eating monster. And the remarkable thing is that audiences barely needed the premise explained. By then, everybody knew the story. Baby alligator. Toilet. Sewer. Darkness. Monster. In the final episode of Alligators in the Sewers, we explore how one of America’s greatest urban legends escaped New York and became part of our shared cultural imagination. Robert Daley’s 1959 book The World Beneath the City gave Teddy May’s stories a permanent home. Thomas Pynchon’s 1963 novel V. populated Manhattan’s sewers with albino alligators. Books, newspapers and word of mouth continued adding details until ordinary abandoned pets had evolved into enormous, pale, blind creatures supposedly feeding on New York’s endless population of rats. By the 1970s, the city itself had become the perfect setting. Aging infrastructure, graffiti-covered subway cars, crime, disinvestment and the fiscal crisis transformed New York’s underground from a symbol of nineteenth-century engineering triumph into something darker. The tunnels beneath Manhattan became a place where anything might be hiding. Then Alligator gave the legend its monster movie. But reality has an irritating habit of occasionally helping folklore along. In 2001, a caiman appeared in Central Park’s Harlem Meer. In 2010, police found a young alligator beneath a parked car near a storm drain in Queens. And in 2023, workers discovered an emaciated four-foot alligator in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. None were evidence of some secret breeding colony beneath New York. They were almost certainly abandoned or escaped exotic pets. Which, of course, was exactly how the legend supposedly began. Nearly ninety years after East 123rd Street, New Yorkers were still finding alligators where alligators had absolutely no business being. And perhaps that is why this particular monster refuses to die. The sewer alligator was assembled from pieces of reality. Americans really did buy baby alligators. People really did abandon exotic pets. Crocodilians really have appeared in New York. Beneath the streets really does exist an enormous hidden geography of sewers, subway tunnels, utility corridors, buried waterways and infrastructure most of us will never see. Folklore simply connected those facts and populated the darkness between them. Today, New York has gone one step further and embraced the creature. In 2023, artist Alexander Klingspor’s NYC Legend placed an enormous bronze alligator atop a manhole cover in Union Square. The monster supposedly hunted beneath the city had finally returned to the surface as public art. First New York feared the alligator. Then it laughed at it. Eventually, it made the thing a mascot. And that may make the sewer alligator one of the prototypes for everything we’ve been exploring in The New Monsters. Long before Slender Man spread through internet forums, before the Backrooms became a collaboratively constructed online universe, and before millions of people analyzed pixels searching for the Fresno Nightcrawler, New Yorkers were already creating folklore in real time. They simply did it with newspapers, books, schoolyards and stories passed from one person to another. New York built an extraordinary artificial wilderness beneath itself. And every wilderness eventually gets a monster. NEXT TIME ON THE NEW MONSTERS: THE BUNNY MAN Next time, we leave Manhattan behind and head for the rapidly expanding suburbs of Northern Virginia, where another distinctly American monster emerged from an entirely different landscape. Our backdrop this time isn't the sewer. It's the suburb. In October 1970, police began receiving reports of a strange man wearing a rabbit costume who allegedly threatened people with an axe. Newspapers picked up the story. Then came another encounter. Over the decades, those incidents accumulated escaped mental patients, mutilated animals, murdered children and a lonely railroad overpass that generations of teenagers would eventually visit after dark. The strangest part of the Bunny Man legend isn't that much of what people believe about him never happened. It's that something really did happen first. Next time on The New Monsters: The Bunny Man. LISTEN • WATCH • FOLLOW Listen & Follow: Follow The Devil Within wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss an episode of The New Monsters. Rate & Review: Leave a five-star rating and review. It remains one of the most effective ways to help new listeners discover the show. Watch & Subscribe: Watch The Devil Within on the Evio Creative YouTube channel. Subscribe and turn on notifications for full episodes, videos and exclusive content. Join the Conversation: Follow @thedevilwithinpod and tell us which modern monster you want us to investigate next. Stories, tips and strange encounters: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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  The New Monsters: Alligators In The Sewers - part Two 09.09.2026 24dk

  THE DEVIL WITHIN The New Monsters: Alligators in the Sewers — Episode Two: The Man Who Saw Them They kept seeing alligators. Sometime in the 1930s, New York sewer inspectors began returning from beneath the city with an increasingly ridiculous claim: there were alligators living beneath Manhattan. Their boss, Theodore “Teddy” May, had a more reasonable explanation. Whiskey. According to Robert Daley's 1959 book The World Beneath the City, May became convinced his workers had discovered somewhere underground to hide booze. He sent men to investigate. Nobody found the whiskey. But the alligator sightings continued. Eventually, Teddy May decided to descend into the sewers himself—and according to the story he later told, his flashlight swept across the water and revealed something he hadn't expected to see. Several alligators. In Episode Two of Alligators in the Sewers, The Devil Within heads back beneath 1930s New York to meet the men whose jobs took them into a hidden world most New Yorkers would never see. We explore what it was actually like to work inside Manhattan's enormous underground infrastructure, where sewer inspectors navigated brick tunnels by flashlight during the lowest-flow hours of the night. The dangers were very real: rapidly rising wastewater, powerful currents, blockages and deadly gases. And the things moving through those tunnels could be bizarre—barrels, Christmas trees, jewelry, false teeth, weapons and practically anything else New York managed to lose down a drain. Then we meet Teddy May. Part sewer worker, part foreman and apparently one hell of a storyteller, May would become the central figure in the sewer-alligator legend. His claims transformed the documented discovery of a single reptile beneath East Harlem into something much larger: an entire population living beneath Manhattan. And then, according to the legend, New York fought back. Daley's account describes an extraordinary extermination campaign in which sewer crews supposedly used poisoned food, powerful trunk-sewer currents and, in some versions, .22-caliber rifles to eliminate the animals. It's an irresistible image: Depression-era municipal workers disappearing through Manhattan manholes carrying flashlights and guns to hunt alligators beneath New York City. There's just one problem. The evidence for a citywide infestation—and the war supposedly waged against it—is considerably thinner than the story. No substantial contemporary municipal paper trail has emerged documenting an organized extermination campaign. What survives largely depends upon testimony recorded more than twenty years later. But folklore was already taking over. The ordinary reptiles of the earliest stories became pale, blind subterranean monsters, supposedly transformed by generations without sunlight and sustained by Manhattan's endless supply of rats. The biology doesn't work, but the mythology is perfect. An ordinary alligator beneath New York could simply be lost. A pale, blind alligator belonged there. This is the story of the men beneath the manholes, the raconteur who gave their stories life, and the moment an escaped exotic pet became something uniquely New York. This is The Man Who Saw Them. LISTEN • WATCH • FOLLOW Listen & Follow: Follow The Devil Within wherever you get your podcasts. Rate & Review: Leave a five-star rating and review to help new listeners discover the show. Watch & Subscribe: Watch The Devil Within on the Evio Creative YouTube channel. Subscribe and turn on notifications for full episodes and exclusive video content. Join the Conversation: Follow @thedevilwithinpod and tell us what you think Teddy May really saw beneath Manhattan. Stories, tips and strange encounters: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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  The Devil's Ledger: Week of Sept. 7th 08.09.2026 15dk

  THE DEVIL’S LEDGER Week of September 8, 2026 MISTRIAL. After seven weeks of testimony and roughly 36 hours of deliberations, the Lindsay Clancy murder trial has ended with a hung jury in Plymouth County, Massachusetts. Eleven jurors reportedly favored finding Clancy not criminally responsible for the deaths of her three children. One juror disagreed, and Judge William Sullivan ultimately declared a mistrial. So what happens now? Potentially, we do the whole thing again. A deadlocked jury generally does not trigger the double-jeopardy protection that would prevent prosecutors from retrying the case, leaving open the possibility of another trial, a negotiated resolution, or whatever comes next in a case that has already generated an extraordinary amount of public attention. We'll keep following it. In the meantime, I suppose we'll have to wait for whichever juror signs the first book deal. THE CREEPIEST THING I HEARD THIS WEEK THE MASKED MENACE — CAUGHT Remember our masked friend from Philadelphia? A few weeks ago, we told you about a man roaming Center City Philadelphia in a disturbing white doll mask, approaching and chasing strangers and generally turning the morning commute into the opening ten minutes of a slasher movie. Now we have an ending. Authorities identified the suspect as 22-year-old Zymire Hughes, who police say harassed or terrorized more than fifteen people on August 12. In one particularly disturbing encounter, he allegedly approached a woman near JFK Boulevard and repeatedly asked her, “Are you ready to die?” Hughes subsequently traveled from the Philadelphia area to Orlando and then Las Vegas. Newly released body-camera footage shows Las Vegas police and U.S. Marshals closing in on an apartment where authorities believed he was hiding. On August 25, the Nevada Violent Offender Task Force surrounded the complex. Hughes came out. The mask did not. And perhaps the strangest detail of all is that investigators have suggested at least some of this behavior may have been intended for social-media content. Which raises the possibility that the mask wasn't worn because someone didn't want to be recognized. Maybe it was worn because he wanted to be watched. A generation ago, if somebody put on a horrifying mask and started chasing strangers through downtown Philadelphia, we'd ask: What the hell is wrong with this guy? In 2026, apparently we have to ask another question: Was he doing it for the algorithm? That's the Creepiest Thing I Heard This Week. THIS WEEK ON THE DEVIL WITHIN THE NEW MONSTERS: ALLIGATORS IN THE SEWERS This week's installment of The New Monsters deals with one of my favorite urban myths of all time. Growing up in Northern New Jersey, Manhattan was right across the river, and for a kid in the 1980s it represented both sides of the cultural coin. It was the stuff of dreams—hip-hop, graffiti, Basquiat, clubs and the feeling that practically everything interesting in America was happening over there. It was also the stuff of nightmares. This was the New York of Son of Sam, abandoned buildings, graffiti-covered subway cars and an underground world that seemed to begin at the bottom of every subway staircase and continue forever beneath Manhattan. And somewhere down there were the alligators. At least where I grew up, nobody presented this as folklore. Somebody bought a baby alligator in Florida, brought it back to New York, discovered that baby alligators have the annoying habit of becoming adult alligators, and flushed it down the toilet. Then it grew to twelve feet long beneath Manhattan and lived on rats. Obviously. The adults told us this stuff. We didn't invent it. This week on The New Monsters, we're breaking down where the legend came from, the real alligators discovered in New York, the bizarre trade in baby alligators as Florida souvenirs and the stories of legendary sewer superintendent Teddy May that helped turn an isolated reptile into an entire subterranean population. And here's the surprising part: It's not as crazy as you might think. The giant albino colonies are another matter. THIS WEEK ON CRIMINAL MISCHIEF BAD BLOOD: THE HATFIELDS AND THE McCOYS Over on Criminal Mischief, Carolyn Ossorio rolls up her sleeves and heads into one of the most famous family feuds in American history: the Hatfields and the McCoys. Long before reality television discovered that Americans would happily spend an hour watching two families scream at one another, the Hatfields and McCoys were doing it with considerably higher stakes. The feud unfolded along the Kentucky–West Virginia border in the decades following the Civil War and became so deeply embedded in American folklore that the family names themselves became shorthand for any argument that has gone on so long nobody can quite remember why everyone is still angry. But beneath the mythology were real people, real politics, property disputes, murder and revenge. Carolyn separates the history from the caricature this week in Bad Blood, on Criminal Mischief. THIS WEEK ON THE SLIPPERY Scott and Nancy are taking the Labor Day holiday off this week, no doubt researching another scammer, fraudster or human-shaped warning label whose story will eventually have you stopping halfway through the episode to Google: “Wait... is this actually real?” They'll be back next week. Hang in there. THIS WEEK IN HORROR ONSLAUGHT This week in horror, ONSLAUGHT, the new R-rated action-horror movie from director Adam Wingard, gives us an Army sniper veteran forced to unleash everything she knows when a rogue squad of genetically engineered super-soldiers threatens her young daughter. And if that sounds gloriously like somebody discovered an unproduced screenplay behind a Blockbuster Video in 1989 and decided to spend actual money making it nearly four decades later, you understand why it made this week's Ledger. Genetically engineered super-soldiers. Army sniper mom. Dan Stevens. Michael freaking Biehn. I'm not sure what else you people want from me. Onslaught is in theaters now. ACROSS THE EVIO UNIVERSE That's it for this week's Devil's Ledger. Happy September, everybody. We survived August, Labor Day is behind us, football is back, playoff baseball is approaching, and somewhere out there somebody has already ordered a pumpkin-spice latte while it's still ninety-four degrees outside. Hang in there. Fall is coming. Follow your favorite Evio shows wherever you get your podcasts, leave us a 5-star rating and review, and subscribe to the Evio Creative YouTube channel and turn on notifications so you don't miss what's coming next. We'll see you on The Devil Within, Criminal Mischief, The Slippery and everywhere else we're telling stories this week. We'll see you across the Evio Universe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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  The New Monsters: Alligators in the Sewers - Part One 07.09.2026 23dk

  THE DEVIL WITHIN The New Monsters: Alligators in the Sewers — Episode One: Beneath the City On February 9, 1935, three teenagers shoveling snow into an open manhole on East 123rd Street reportedly discovered something moving beneath the ice. An alligator. The following morning, The New York Times carried the headline “ALLIGATOR FOUND IN UPTOWN SEWER.” The animal was reportedly seven to eight feet long, weighed roughly 125 pounds and had been dragged from beneath East Harlem using a makeshift noose fashioned from clothesline. Whatever happened on that winter afternoon, the story gave one of America's greatest urban legends something most legends can only dream of: a date, an address and witnesses. But before we can hunt alligators beneath Manhattan, we have to understand how an entire hidden world came to exist beneath New York in the first place. In Episode One of our latest New Monsters investigation, we descend into the history of the city beneath the city—from Manhattan's vanished streams and polluted Collect Pond to overflowing cesspools, cholera epidemics and the massive nineteenth-century engineering projects that transformed New York. The arrival of Croton water in 1842 helped create a new problem on an enormous scale: all that water eventually had to go somewhere. The solution was a vast network of brick-lined sewers constructed beneath a rapidly expanding metropolis. Then we head south to the Sunshine State, where Florida's booming tourist industry once offered visitors a souvenir that would be almost unimaginable today: living baby alligators. They were cute, exotic and small enough to bring home. Unfortunately, alligators possess the irritating habit of becoming considerably larger alligators. And that's where the legend gives us the image that has survived for generations: the unwanted pet disappearing down the toilet and into the sewers below. The plumbing makes that particular scenario considerably more complicated than folklore suggests. The biology is even less cooperative; New York's cold underground environment is a miserable place for an alligator to establish a permanent home. Yet the reptile reportedly discovered in 1935 was real enough to make headlines—and that was all the story needed. Finally, we meet Teddy May, the New York sewer worker whose stories would transform one misplaced reptile into something much larger. More than twenty years later, writer Robert Daley recorded May's extraordinary claims in The World Beneath the City: according to May, there hadn't been just one alligator beneath Manhattan. There were dozens. Was there really a colony living beneath New York? Were unwanted Florida souvenirs somehow surviving underground? And how did ordinary reptiles eventually become the enormous, pale, blind sewer monsters generations of Americans grew up hearing about? Welcome to Alligators in the Sewers. Welcome back to The New Monsters. LISTEN • WATCH • FOLLOW Listen & Follow: Follow The Devil Within wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss an episode of The New Monsters. Rate & Review: Leave us a five-star rating and review. It remains one of the most important ways you can help new listeners discover the show. Watch & Subscribe: Watch The Devil Within on the Evio Creative YouTube channel. Subscribe and turn on notifications for full episodes, videos and exclusive content. Join the Conversation: Follow @thedevilwithinpod and tell us which modern monster we should investigate next. Stories, tips and strange encounters: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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  The New Monsters: The Fresno Nightcrawler - Part Three 04.09.2026 22dk

  The Fresno Nightcrawler: Proof of Something There was a brief period when we thought cameras were going to solve everything. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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  The New Monsters: The Fresno Nightcrawler - Part Two 02.09.2026 25dk

  The Fresno Nightcrawler: The Internet Gives It Legs One unexplained video can be dismissed as an anomaly. A second changes the equation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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  The New Monsters: The Fresno Nightcrawler - Part One 01.09.2026 27dk

  The Fresno Nightcrawler: Something Walked Across the Lawn Something strange crossed a Fresno lawn after dark, and a security camera was there to see it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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  The Devil's Ledger - Week of August 31st. 31.08.2026 14dk

  THE DEVIL’S LEDGER Week of August 30, 2026 Mother Nature reminds us who's in charge, a Colombian “sorcerer” faces the horrifying consequences of a healing ritual, The Fresno Nightcrawler walks into The New Monsters, Carolyn Ossorio investigates the murder of Dee Warner, and The Slippery opens the mailbag and reveals what they're working on next. Then, in This Week in Horror, we enter the deeply deranged children's television nightmare of Buddy. THE CREEPIEST THING I HEARD THIS WEEK: THE SORCERER OF LIBORINA This week's story takes us back to 2021 and rural Antioquia, Colombia, where a 31-year-old mother of four sought spiritual healing from a man known as the Sorcerer of Liborina. According to prosecutors, Martín Rangel Londoño Jaramillo covered the woman with a homemade mixture containing alcohol, sulfur and camphor before setting fire to the substance as part of the ritual. The woman suffered burns across approximately 70 percent of her body. Investigators allege that instead of immediately seeking emergency treatment, the Sorcerer sent her home with an herbal remedy. She eventually reached a hospital in Medellín but died about a week later. Authorities subsequently arrested Londoño Jaramillo on a murder charge; he denied the accusations. It's a disturbing reminder of an ancient human vulnerability: when we're suffering, we'll sometimes place extraordinary trust in anyone who promises they can make the suffering stop. THIS WEEK ON THE DEVIL WITHIN Our journey through The New Monsters continues with one of the internet age's strangest cryptids: The Fresno Nightcrawler. It begins with grainy security footage from Fresno, California, showing a pale, impossibly thin figure seemingly composed almost entirely of legs walking across a lawn in the middle of the night. The footage raised far more questions than it answered—and then the Nightcrawler received the one thing every aspiring cryptid needs if it hopes to become genuine folklore: A second sighting. Hear the incredible story of the Fresno Nightcrawler this week on The Devil Within. CRIMINAL MISCHIEF Carolyn Ossorio investigates the disappearance and murder of Dee Warner, a Michigan mother of five who vanished from her property in 2021 following an argument with her husband, Dale. Years of searching ultimately led investigators back to the property, where Dee's remains were discovered concealed inside a fertilizer tank. Dale Warner was subsequently convicted of second-degree murder and tampering with evidence. Carolyn takes us through the disappearance, the investigation and the breakthrough that finally revealed what happened to Dee. THE SLIPPERY Scott and Nancy revisit several stories they've covered so far, bringing us new developments, unanswered questions and cases that weren't nearly as finished as they appeared. They'll also take us behind the scenes to reveal what's currently being investigated—including a new cancer scammer series coming this fall—before opening the mailbag to respond to your comments, questions and observations about the show. THIS WEEK IN HORROR: BUDDY Director Casper Kelly, the wonderfully warped mind behind Too Many Cooks, brings us Buddy, a supernatural black comedy starring Cristin Milioti, Delaney Quinn, Topher Grace and Michael Shannon, with Patton Oswalt and Keegan-Michael Key joining the madness. The premise? A group of children become trapped inside an aggressively cheerful 1990s-style television show hosted by a giant bright-orange unicorn named Buddy. The songs are catchy, the colors are bright, the life lessons are plentiful—and then Buddy decides his young friends aren't leaving. It's childhood nostalgia fed through a wood chipper, and frankly, we're in. Listen & Follow: Follow all of the shows in the Evio Creative universe wherever you get your podcasts. Rate & Review: If you love what you're hearing, leave a five-star rating and review. It makes a real difference in helping new listeners discover the shows. Watch & Subscribe: Watch episodes and clips on the Evio Creative YouTube channel, subscribe and turn on notifications so you never miss what's coming next. Goodbye, August. September, please behave yourself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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  The New Monsters: The Black-Eyed Children - Part Three 28.08.2026 23dk

  The Eyes of Fear The New Monsters – Story Five, Episode Three Why do monsters survive in an age of science? Why do ancient fears continue to evolve in a world filled with smartphones, surveillance cameras, artificial intelligence, and instant access to information? And why, after nearly thirty years, do people still report encounters with the Black-Eyed Children? In the concluding chapter of this three-part investigation, The Devil Within moves beyond eyewitness accounts and paranormal speculation to explore a more fascinating question: why do stories like this refuse to die? This week, Branden Morgan examines the remarkable science behind memory, intuition, and eyewitness testimony, revealing why the human brain is far more sophisticated—and far less reliable—than most of us realize. Are the Black-Eyed Children evidence of something supernatural? Could they be the product of suggestion, folklore, and the extraordinary way our minds reconstruct emotionally charged experiences? Or does the truth lie somewhere between those two possibilities? As the investigation unfolds, we discover that the legend's greatest strength may have nothing to do with black eyes at all. Instead, it lies in a deeply familiar human experience: the unsettling feeling that something is wrong long before we can explain why. It is a sensation nearly everyone has experienced at some point in life—a warning whispered by instinct before conscious thought has assembled the evidence. The episode then widens its lens to examine the evolution of modern mythology itself. From the changelings of Celtic folklore to vampires, fairies, ghost children, and finally the Black-Eyed Children, every civilization has created stories about strangers who appear almost human while violating some deeply rooted expectation of what it means to be safe. These legends are less about proving the supernatural than preserving emotional truths that transcend generations. As The Black-Eyed Children comes to its haunting conclusion, the series also completes the first chapter of The New Monsters. Together, these stories have explored the fears that define our age. The Frogman reflected our growing anxiety over environmental collapse. The Montauk Monster embodied our suspicion of powerful institutions. Slender Man demonstrated that mythology can now be created collaboratively by millions of strangers. The Backrooms transformed the architecture of modern life into the haunted houses of the twenty-first century. And now, The Black-Eyed Children ask perhaps the oldest question of all: Can we still trust what appears familiar? Because every generation creates its own monsters. But the greatest monsters have never been the creatures lurking in the darkness. They've always been the ones standing in the light. Next time on The New Monsters, we investigate one of the strangest pieces of modern cryptid folklore ever captured on camera. A grainy security video from Fresno, California appears to show an impossible figure walking calmly across a suburban lawn. No arms. No visible torso. Just two impossibly long white legs gliding effortlessly through the darkness. Could it be a camera hoax? An elaborate costume? Or the birth of another modern monster? Join us as we investigate The Fresno Nightcrawler. 🎧 Listen & Follow
Listen to The Devil Within wherever you get your podcasts, and be sure to follow so you never miss an episode. ⭐ Rate & Review
If you're enjoying The New Monsters, please leave a 5-star rating and review. It helps more listeners discover the show and supports independent storytelling. 📺 Watch on YouTube
Watch full episodes, companion visuals, exclusive documentaries, and behind-the-scenes content on the Evio Creative YouTube Channel. 📱 Join the Conversation
Follow @thedevilwithinpod on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube, and tell us what you think. Have you experienced something strange? Is there a modern monster or urban legend you'd like us to investigate? We'd love to hear from you. 📧 Share Your Story
Have an unexplained encounter, local legend, or mysterious experience? Email us anytime at [email protected]. Your story could inspire a future episode of The Devil Within. 👹 New Episodes Every Week
Because folklore never dies... it simply finds a new generation to believe in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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  The New Monsters: The Black-Eyed Children - Part Two 26.08.2026 23dk

  The New Monsters: The Black-Eyed Children - Part Two The Children at the Door They never break in. They never force the door. They simply ask. In the second chapter of The Black-Eyed Children, Branden Morgan investigates one of the most unsettling patterns in modern paranormal folklore. Following journalist Brian Bethel's now- famous encounter in Texas, reports of eerily similar experiences began surfacing across NorthAmerica. Different witnesses. Different cities. Different decades. Yet the stories shared an astonishing number of details. Two children. Late at night. Perfectly polite. An overwhelming sense that something is terribly wrong. And one simple request. "May we come inside?" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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  The New Monsters: The Black-Eyed Children - Part One 24.08.2026 25dk

  The New Monsters: The Black-Eyed Children - Part One Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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  The Devil's Ledger - Week of August 24th, 2026 24.08.2026 14dk

  THE DEVIL’S LEDGER Week of August 24, 2026 It is still freakin’ August. This week on The Devil’s Ledger, we surrender to the heat and turn our attention toward masked lunatics, black-eyed children, Victorian blackmail, spectacular fraud, and another trip into a supernatural dimension that desperately needs better lighting. We begin with The Creepiest Thing I Heard This Week: The Chucky Mask Spree. Philadelphia police say a masked man targeted at least half a dozen people during a bizarre early-morning spree, including a 40-year-old jogger whom he allegedly chased after asking whether she was ready to die. Surveillance cameras captured the suspect wearing a Chucky-style doll mask—and investigators noticed that beneath it he appeared to be wearing another black face covering. Fictional monsters are considerably less entertaining when someone decides to wear their face in the real world. 👹 THIS WEEK ON THE DEVIL WITHIN The New Monsters continues with The Black-Eyed Children, one of the internet age’s most unsettling urban legends. They appear outside homes, beside cars and on lonely streets asking for help—and eventually asking to be allowed inside. Then their victims notice the eyes: completely black. We trace the origins of the legend, how the stories spread across the internet, and the much older piece of folklore hiding beneath them: the idea that evil sometimes requires an invitation. This week on The Devil Within: The New Monsters — The Black-Eyed Children. 🔎 THIS WEEK ON CRIMINAL MISCHIEF Carolyn Ossorio trades true crime for the original master detective with a special reading of Arthur Conan Doyle’s “A Scandal in Bohemia.” First published in 1891, the story introduces Irene Adler, the extraordinary woman who manages to do what remarkably few characters in the Sherlock Holmes canon ever accomplish: outmaneuver Holmes himself. Royalty, romance, blackmail, disguises and one dangerously important photograph send Holmes and Watson into one of Doyle’s cleverest adventures. Pour yourself something appropriate, settle in and prepare for a trip to 221B Baker Street. And yes, we’re allowing Carolyn to attempt the accents. We may regret this. 💰 THIS WEEK ON THE SLIPPERY Meet Lacy Johnson, a woman accused of approaching fraud less like a specialty and more like an all-you-can-eat buffet. Her alleged schemes ranged from faking a life-threatening cancer diagnosis and operating a bogus charity purportedly supporting American troops to identity theft, financial manipulation and even burglarizing and vandalizing the home of a former employer. Her most devastating alleged cons, however, were reserved for the people who believed they were closest to her: romantic partners who discovered that intimacy itself could become another tool for extracting money. It’s The Relentless Hustle of Lyin’ Lacy Johnson, this week on The Slippery. 🎬 THIS WEEK IN HORROR We’re heading back into The Further with Insidious: Out of the Further, the sixth installment in the Insidious franchise. This time, Gemma discovers she possesses the ability to enter The Further—and, considerably less conveniently, bring things back with her. Naturally, the inhabitants of that purgatorial nightmare eventually realize what she can do. Lin Shaye also returns as Elise Rainier, continuing her admirable refusal to allow something as trivial as death to interfere with steady employment. Sometimes you want elevated horror examining grief, trauma and the existential uncertainty of human existence. Sometimes you want demons. This week, we’re going with demons. 🎧 LISTEN & FOLLOW Listen to The Devil’s Ledger and your favorite shows from Evio Creative wherever you get your podcasts. Hit Follow so every new episode lands automatically in your feed—and you never miss what’s happening across the Evio Universe. ⭐ RATE & REVIEW If you’re enjoying the shows, leave us a 5-star rating and review. It takes less than a minute, costs absolutely nothing, and remains one of the best ways to help new listeners discover Evio Creative. 📺 WATCH & SUBSCRIBE ON YOUTUBE Watch full episodes, original video, clips, visual evidence and more from across the network on the Evio Creative YouTube Channel. Subscribe and turn on notifications so you know the moment something new drops. 👹 JOIN THE EVIO UNIVERSE Follow @eviocreative and @thedevilwithinpod on Instagram for new episodes, clips, behind-the-scenes material and everything happening across the Evio Universe. 📧 STORIES, TIPS & FEEDBACK Have a creepy story? A criminal case we should investigate? A con artist we somehow missed? Send your stories, tips, case suggestions and feedback to [email protected]. August continues. Apparently forever. Stay cool, drink some water, don’t invite any black-eyed children into your house, and we’ll see you somewhere this week across the Evio Universe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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  The New Monsters: The Backrooms - Part Three 21.08.2026 27dk

  The Haunted Houses We Built The New Monsters – Story Four, Episode Three Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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  The New Monsters: The Backrooms - Part Two 19.08.2026 23dk

  The Things That Wait Between the Walls The New Monsters – Backrooms, Part Two Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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  The New Monsters: The Backrooms - Part One 17.08.2026 23dk

  You Have Been Here Before The New Monsters – Story Four, Episode One What if the most terrifying place you've ever imagined isn't a haunted mansion, an abandoned asylum, or a forgotten cemetery? What if it's an office building? This week on The Devil Within, Branden Morgan begins a new three-part investigation into one of the internet's most extraordinary pieces of modern folklore: The Backrooms. What started as a single anonymous photograph posted online in 2019 quickly became a global phenomenon, inspiring millions of people to ask an unsettling question: "Why does this place feel so familiar?" Unlike the monsters we've explored throughout The New Monsters, the Backrooms have no ancient legend, no centuries of oral tradition, and no historical eyewitness accounts stretching back through time. Instead, they represent something entirely new—a mythology born from architecture itself. In this first chapter, we trace the mysterious origins of the now-famous photograph and examine the surprising psychology behind liminal spaces. Why do empty airports after midnight, deserted shopping malls, abandoned school hallways, and silent office buildings evoke such powerful feelings of unease? Why do so many people insist they've experienced the Backrooms long before they ever heard the name? Along the way, we explore the concept of "no-clipping," the language of modern video games that gave birth to one of the internet's most enduring horror concepts, and discover why the Backrooms resonate so deeply with a generation raised in a world of fluorescent lights, endless hallways, and anonymous commercial spaces. This isn't merely the story of an internet meme. It's the story of how an ordinary photograph revealed something extraordinary about the human mind—and how the buildings we constructed for efficiency may have accidentally become the haunted houses of the twenty-first century. Next week, the empty hallways won't remain empty for long. Thousands of strangers begin expanding the mythology, creating new levels, impossible creatures, explorer journals, survival guides, and one of the richest collaborative horror universes ever assembled online. We'll explore how the internet transformed a single unsettling image into an entire ecosystem of modern folklore, and why every civilization eventually feels compelled to populate its nightmares. 🎧 Listen & Follow Listen to The Devil Within wherever you get your podcasts, and be sure to follow so you never miss an episode. ⭐ Rate & Review If you're enjoying The New Monsters, please leave a 5-star rating and review. It helps more listeners discover the show and supports independent storytelling. 📺 Watch on YouTube Watch full episodes, companion visuals, and exclusive content on the Evio Creative YouTube Channel. 📱 Join the Conversation Follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube @thedevilwithinpod, and tell us what you think. Have you experienced something strange? Have a local legend you'd like us to investigate? We'd love to hear from you. 📧 Share Your Story Email us anytime at [email protected]. Your story could inspire a future episode of The Devil Within. 👹 New Episodes Every Week Because every civilization invents monsters... and we're still creating ours. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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  The Devil's Ledger - Week of August 17th 17.08.2026 17dk

  The Devil's Ledger — Week of August 17, 2026 The universe put on one hell of a show this week. We begin with Spain's spectacular August 12 solar eclipse and humanity's long, occasionally unhinged relationship with watching the sun disappear. For The Creepiest Thing I Heard This Week, we travel from ancient Greece—where an eclipse could signal that the gods had essentially abandoned humanity—to Choctaw stories of a giant black squirrel attempting to devour the sun and Vietnamese legends of a celestial frog swallowing it whole. And apparently scientific literacy hasn't completely saved us. Modern eclipse superstitions warn of poisoned food, birthday curses and even the possibility that washing your hair during an eclipse could somehow affect your sanity. Three thousand years ago we feared an angry god had extinguished the sun. Today we're worried about the potato salad. Progress remains uneven. Then, across the Evio Universe this week: On The Devil Within, The New Monsters continues with The Backrooms, the internet-born nightmare built around the idea that reality itself has seams. Slip through the wrong one and you could find yourself trapped inside an apparently endless maze of yellow wallpaper, stained carpeting, fluorescent lights and empty rooms. What began as an unsettling image evolved into an enormous collaborative mythology of levels, entities, rules and stories—and ultimately escaped the internet into games, movies and mainstream popular culture. On Criminal Mischief, Carolyn Ossorio breaks down the extraordinary new developments surrounding Luigi Mangione. Following his federal guilty plea in connection with the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, attention now turns toward New York's pending murder case and an increasingly important question: double jeopardy. Federal and state governments are generally treated as separate sovereigns under federal constitutional law, while New York provides additional statutory protections against successive prosecutions. Carolyn examines what Mangione's plea means, what it doesn't mean, and why the next major battle may happen before another jury ever hears the case. On The Slippery, we meet Olga Rutterschmidt and Helen Golay, the elderly Los Angeles women whose apparent efforts to help unhoused men concealed an astonishing insurance scheme. Prosecutors established that the pair befriended vulnerable men, obtained numerous life-insurance policies on them and eventually murdered Paul Vados and Kenneth McDavid in staged hit-and-run incidents before collecting millions in insurance proceeds. The scheme began unraveling when one detective overheard another discussing a suspicious death and remembered an eerily similar case. The same two women appeared in both files. From there came insurance investigators, undercover operations and the slow dismantling of an extraordinary criminal enterprise. And This Week in Horror, we're talking Ice Cream Man, Eli Roth's gleefully deranged throwback to the excesses of 1980s horror: an idyllic summer town, a mysterious ice cream man and frozen treats capable of turning children into homicidal killers. It's bloody, ridiculous and precisely the sort of movie that understands sometimes the best horror premise begins by taking something completely innocent and ruining it forever. So keep looking toward the stars, enjoy these final weeks of summer, and we'll see you somewhere this week across the Evio Universe. 🎧 LISTEN & FOLLOW Follow The Devil's Ledger and the entire Evio Creative lineup wherever you get your podcasts. Hit Follow on the shows you love so new episodes land automatically in your feed. ⭐ RATE & REVIEW Enjoying what we're doing? Leave your favorite Evio shows a 5-star rating and review. Ratings and reviews remain one of the most powerful ways to help independent podcasts reach new listeners—and they take less than a minute. 📺 WATCH & SUBSCRIBE ON YOUTUBE Go deeper into the stories with full episodes, video podcasts, clips, original imagery and more on the Evio Creative YouTube Channel. Subscribe and turn on notifications so you don't miss what's coming next across the network. 👹 JOIN THE EVIO UNIVERSE Follow @eviocreative and @thedevilwithinpod on Instagram for new episodes, clips, behind-the-scenes material, upcoming stories and everything happening across the network. 📧 STORIES, TIPS & FEEDBACK Have a story we should investigate? A case we somehow missed? Something creepy, criminal, inexplicable or simply too strange to ignore? Send your stories, tips and suggestions to [email protected]. Until next week, stay curious, keep looking toward the stars, and we'll see you somewhere across the Evio Universe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices