{"podcast":{"title":"Weird Darkness: Paranormal & True Crime Stories","slug":"weird-darkness-paranormal-true-crime-stories-475827","podcast_index_feed_id":475827,"rss_url":"https://www.spreaker.com/show/3655291/episodes/feed","website_url":"https://weirddarkness.com","image_url":"https://d3wo5wojvuv7l.cloudfront.net/t_rss_itunes_square_1400/images.spreaker.com/original/a1570d70b941e8f0e16b68380622d72f.jpg","author":"Darren Marlar","episode_count":1000,"summary":"Award-winning podcast of true stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, the strange and bizarre, true crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and unexplained -- seven days a week! Hosted by professional voice actor Darren Marlar, named one of the “Best Storytellers in Podcasting” by Podcast Business Journal.","last_synced_at":"2026-07-28T14:17:16.106491+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/weird-darkness-paranormal-true-crime-stories-475827"},"episode":{"title":"Spontaneous Human Combustion | They Found Only Her Skull and Foot; Her Room Left Unscorched","slug":"spontaneous-human-combustion-they-found-only-her-skull-and-foot-her-room-left-unscorched","published_at":"2026-06-17T00:00:04+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/weird-darkness-paranormal-true-crime-stories-475827/spontaneous-human-combustion-they-found-only-her-skull-and-foot-her-room-left-unscorched","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/weird-darkness-paranormal-true-crime-stories-475827","url":"https://weirddarkness.com/MaryHardyReeser","audio_url":"https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/api.spreaker.com/download/episode/72555535/wd20260616a_maryhardyreeder.mp3","summary":"Sometime before dawn on July 2, 1951, a 67-year-old St. Petersburg widow was reduced to ash in her own armchair while the room around her sat almost untouched, leaving behind little more than a shrunken skull, a piece of spine, and a single foot still resting in its slipper. EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/MaryHardyReeser READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p88de8v FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: When police found her in 1951, she was almost entirely ash. But mysteriously, the rest of her apartment remained almost perfectly intact. We’ll look at the death of Mary Reeser – which became known as “The Cinder Woman Case”. (Did Mary Hardy Reeser Spontaneously Combust?) *** Most crimes are pretty ordinary – assault, robbery, the occasional murder, but once in a while a crime is committed in a strange, shocking way – to the point it’s almost hard to believe what you are hearing is a true story. I’ll share a few of those strange crimes. (Creepy Crimes and Crazy Criminals) *** One of the reasons we find chimpanzees so interesting is because they are so much like humans – in body shape, the way they express themselves, it’s eerie sometimes. But still, we know they are just apes. Then there is the strange case of Oliver – a chimpanzee that also appeared to be human. Or was he a human that appeared to be a chimpanzee? Or, is it possible, that Oliver was a genuine genetic hybrid of the two? We’ll look at his incredibly strange story. (Oliver, The Humanzee) *** Some hauntings are more terrifying than others – and some are stranger than others. What happened to the Palzon family in Zaragoza, Spain possibly qualifies for both. They didn’t have a typical haunting – this was no poltergeist or spirit of a…","meta_description":"Sometime before dawn on July 2, 1951, a 67-year-old St. Petersburg widow was reduced to ash in her own armchair while the room around her sat almost untou…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":4228,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/weird-darkness-paranormal-true-crime-stories-475827/episodes/spontaneous-human-combustion-they-found-only-her-skull-and-foot-her-room-left-unscorched/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/weird-darkness-paranormal-true-crime-stories-475827/spontaneous-human-combustion-they-found-only-her-skull-and-foot-her-room-left-unscorched.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}