Psychology of the Strange

Voodoo Death And The Question Of Whether Belief Can Kill You

Sometime in the late 1930s, a man in rural Alabama met another man in a cemetery at night. The second man waved a bottle in his face, told him he had been hexed, and told

Olga of Kyiv, The Saint Who Buried 20 Men Alive

In roughly 945, Prince Igor of Kyiv went back for a second round of tribute from the Drevlians and paid for it with his life. What his widow did next has been retold for

The Haunted Room Experiment: Infrasound, Ghosts, and the Power of Suggestion

In 2009, a team of psychologists published the results of a haunted house they built on purpose. Ghost sightings, sensed presences, cold spots, and unexplained dread had

Machine Elves- DMT, Hyperspace, and the People Who Get Locked Out

DMT entities, machine elves, and the hyperspace breakthrough: what people report meeting under N,N-dimethyltryptamine, and why the reports match. A Johns Hopkins survey o

Psychic Bonds

Witch's familiars, psychic pets, and telepathic cats: this episode digs into the centuries-old belief that animals can sense things they have no ordinary way of knowing.

Glitched

Have you ever stepped into an unfamiliar room, only to be struck by the chilling, unshakable certainty that you have stood in that exact spot before? For generations, hu

The Blood Goddess of Yerba Buena

In 1963, deep in the isolated mountains of Tamaulipas, Mexico, a routine police investigation uncovered a nightmare: a remote mining village transformed into an apocalypt

Akashic Library and Near Death Experiences

Have you ever wondered what happens in those final milliseconds when the lights go out? Pop culture loves to promise that clinical death is a peaceful journey toward a wa

The Old Ursuline Convent & the Casket Girls

If you walk down Chartres Street in the French Quarter of New Orleans late at night, your eyes will naturally drift upward to the third floor of the Old Ursuline Convent.

The Inverse Curse of the Modern Potion

What happens when a medication designed to heal the physical body accidentally alters more than was prescribed? On June 17, 2026, researchers at Rutgers University dropp

Apocalypse Airlines and Elite Doomsday Bunkers

The Doomsday Clock is sitting at 85 seconds to midnight... the closest it has ever been to global catastrophe. Yet, the dominant cultural response isn’t panic; it’s a mem

Ghosts in the Machine and The Dark Psychology of AI Simulated Societies

In 1968, researcher John B. Calhoun built "Universe 25", it was a utopian habitat for mice that eventually collapsed into behavioral rot and extinction due to a lack of s

Lucid Journeys, Epic Realities, and the New Science of the Dreaming Mind

What happens to your brain when the lights go out? Every night, our minds spin up a hyper-realistic, 100% immersive reality simulator. For decades, science viewed dreamin

Of Mushrooms and Little People

In this episode, I enter one of the strangest corners of mycology, folklore, and consciousness research I've encountered: Lanmaoa asiatica, a mushroom with no identified

Analog Horror Manufacturing Dread

Analog horror, psychology of fear, and the neuroscience of dread. In this episode of Psychology of the Strange, I'm breaking down what the analog horror genre is actually

The Fashion Sense of Ghosts & Woman in White Lore

Every ghost sighting follows the same dress code, the long dress, pale, timeless, and tragic. Almost nobody is reporting the apparition in low rise flare jeans and butter

Voodoo Dolls, Marie Laveau, and the Psychology of Magical Thinking

The voodoo doll you picture (small cloth figure, colorful pins) has almost nothing to do with Voodoo. That image is a Western invention, laundered through Hollywood until

The Psychology of the Final Girl in Horror Movies

Why do we cheer when the final girl fights back in horror movies? From Laurie Strode in Halloween to Sidney Prescott in Scream to Sienna Shaw in Terrifier 2, slasher film

Kali, Enlightenment through Destruction

Kali. Hindu goddess, destroyer, mother, liberator. She is one of the most misunderstood figures in Hindu mythology, and today we're pulling back the curtain on who she ac

Rugaru Legend in the Bayou

Deep in the Louisiana bayou, something moves through the cypress trees after dark. The rougarou (aka rugaru or rougaroux) is Louisiana's legendary swamp werewolf. It has