Astonishing Legends

Astonishing Legends

The world is more mysterious than most people are comfortable imagining. We cross paths with the mystical from time to time and may not even notice it. If we do, we quickly return to our usually mundane daily existence. But what if we not only acknowledged the unknown, we investigated it and spoke with those in the know? That's what co-hosts Scott Philbrook & Forrest Burgess, and co-executive producer Tess Pfeifle do at Astonishing Legends. Over 100 million downloads and hundreds of thousands of listeners have discovered the thrill of exploring the mysteries of our world, showing that the unknown can be both captivating and intriguing. Welcome to Astonishing Legends!

Episodes

October 27, 2026 • 34 mins
In tonight's dead letter, Keith takes us back to the spring of 1997, when he was a freshman at Rutgers living on the third floor of Clothier Hall, a brick dorm in downtown New Brunswick, New Jersey. Early one Saturday morning, with the first light coming in around the curtain, he opened his eyes and someone was sitting on the floor against his roommate's bed, six feet away, in a room he had locked the night before. Someone, or...
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We're back, and this time we’re lucky enough to have paranormal investigator, researcher and author Michelle Belanger join us to help answer the question connecting this week's stories: does this phenomenon have a name?

At a Southern California shopping mall, Amy gets in line for food when two young women behind her suddenly fill her with an intense feeling of dread.

In Los Angeles, Zee picks up two young women from an un...

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October 20, 2026 • 42 mins
In tonight's dead letter, we're in Cluj-Napoca, Transylvania in the 1990s, a few years after the revolution, where our listener Nadina, six at the time, had the run of a Soviet-era apartment block with her older sister and their best friend while their nanny visited a friend upstairs. They climbed past the last floor of apartments to the metal door at the top, and before anyone could touch it, something huge, aggressive and fe...
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October 17, 2026 • 129 mins

Our Halloween tradition continues with three more listeners sharing encounters they still can’t explain.

At a church summer camp in the mountains above Southern California, Ray and two fellow counselors spot a girl standing alone in the parking lot after lights-out. She silently returns to the bunkhouse when they call to her… but that won’t be the last time they see her.

In San Luis Obispo, Brian and his wife...

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October 13, 2026 • 50 mins
In tonight's dead letter, our listener TM was the office manager at a Catholic parish in the upper Mississippi river area, and part of her job was digitizing the cemetery's paper records, so she'd walk the rows with a camera, say hello to everyone, and tell them what she was there to do. One marker sat outside the cemetery’s plot map entirely: a boy who drowned in the river in 1936, with fresh flowers by his stone and no...
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October 10, 2026 • 184 mins

Once more, our favorite Halloween tradition rises from the grave, as three listeners join us to personally share encounters they still can’t explain.

In the North of England, district nurse Luke and a trainee see someone inside the home of a patient who lives alone. In Idaho Falls, Krystina tells us about small dark figures lurking at the edge of a woman’s vision and their attempt to get answers. Then, Jennifer tak...

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October 6, 2026 • 51 mins

In tonight's dead letter, Corey takes us back to Omaha, Nebraska in the year 2000, when he was the overnight host on a Top 40 station and a call-in topic about haunted places kept circling back to one private family cemetery. He sent a carload of listeners out there on a Friday night to report back live on the air. A few days later his boss got a phone call from the cemetery's caretakers. And, to paraphrase a Dateline episode...

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September 26, 2026 • 136 mins

In 1933, a Scottish botanist watched a seemingly abandoned steamship drift past the Alaskan coast on an ice floe. It appeared upside down in a strange mirage, with no crew and no one at the wheel. This ship was the Baychimo, which was abandoned two years earlier, but refused to disappear. Having repeatedly resurfaced across the Arctic, it earning a reputation as one of history’s great ghost ships.

In this episode, we exp...

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September 22, 2026 • 32 mins
In tonight's dead letter, our listener Ed and his wife are newlyweds, sharing the apartment he's lived in for about two years in Clay Center, Nebraska. One morning in early 2020, he hits snooze on his alarm and sees a figure walking out of their bedroom, silhouetted by the living room lights he'd set on a timer, and it looks just like his wife, but it’s not.

Relevant Prior Episodes

Ep 26: Shad...
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September 15, 2026 • 40 mins
In tonight's dead letter, our listener named Mark is driving through western Michigan at two in the morning in 1978, working off a paper map and handwritten directions to a house he's never been to. He comes up a hill and into a curve on US 131, and there are four people standing in his lane. Two of them are waving him over to the right, and the other two have their arms raised above their heads in an X. Had they not been ther...
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September 8, 2026 • 46 mins
In tonight's dead letter, listener Mothmaiden remembers a time when she was four years old and an only child in a neighborhood with no other kids, and she had an imaginary friend named Cindy Cora who looked exactly like Betty Rubble from The Flintstones. Then on a sunny afternoon, in her own bedroom with the light coming through the window, she saw an elderly woman with white and gray hair piled high on her head, sitting in a ...
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Hey folks! We're gearing up to go to the Wet Hot Bad Magic Summercamp next week but after that we're back on our regular schedule! In the meanwhile here's a chat Scott and Richard had just a week ago about his new tour which is also CLOSE ABOARD!

>>>>>>>>>>

A special episode from our friend Richard Hatem. Richard is the screenwriter behind The Mothman Prophecies and a longtime friend of the show, a...

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September 1, 2026 • 53 mins
In tonight's dead letter, listener Chris takes us back to the early 2000s, when he was the head brewer at a restaurant on the east side of Cumberland, Maryland, in a building so old it served as a Civil War field hospital. One night after close, he and three coworkers were having a beer in the basement bar when the loudest sound he'd ever heard slammed into the floorboards right above their heads, shaking dust from the ceiling...
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Our friend Richard Hatem is taking his Paranormal Bookshelf on the road! The Light in the Dark Tour 2026 is an all new live show playing six cities in seven days, September 13th through 19th, and it winds up at the Mothman Festival in Point Pleasant, West Virginia. Richard and Susan Lambert will be at the festival both days selling Mothman and podcast merch, and on Saturday night, September 19th, he's performing an episode of...

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August 25, 2026 • 52 mins
In tonight's dead letter, a teenager in rural Arkansas in the late 2000s goes poking around an abandoned schoolhouse and comes home with a mirror she likes the look of. Years later it's hanging in her first Los Angeles apartment, and one evening while she's in the bath she catches the towel on the back of the door swinging wildly but the moment she turns to look, it stops dead. But that’s only part of the story.
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In tonight's dead letter, in the summer of 1996, two college kids from New Jersey were road-tripping to Gen Con when they got off I-80 near Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, looking for food and a place to stay. Around 11:30 PM, at a gas station that turned out to be closed for the night, three blonde kids in bathing suits were standing under a light, saying something to them that neither of them could make out.

Relevan...
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In tonight's dead letter, listener John is nineteen, home from his freshman year and a few shifts into a summer dishwashing job at a grand old house on Michigan's Old Mission Peninsula that has been a restaurant since the 1950s. The staff there blame anything strange in the building on a ghost they call Genevieve, and John doesn't believe in any of that. One warm night he goes upstairs to change out of his kitchen clothes, an...

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August 8, 2026 • 87 mins

In 1673, Rebecca Cornell was found dead beside the hearth in her Rhode Island home. Afterward, her ghost allegedly appeared to accuse someone of murder and her son was tried and hanged. Her story is just one of nearly sixty strange intersections of true crime, hauntings, history, and food collected in Cuisine to Kill For, the new cookbook from veteran paranormal investigator and television personality Amy Bruni. This week, Am...

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August 4, 2026 • 48 mins

In tonight's dead letter, listener Mary is on a ghost tour in Key West when the guide stands her group under an old, unmarked movie marquee and asks them what happened there. Before he says another word, Mary smells smoke. The story he tells the group involves a church fire, and more strange events unfold from there.

Relevant Prior Episodes

Conjuring Philip Part 1

The True Story behind the Conjuring Part 1

Resurre...

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July 28, 2026 • 43 mins

In tonight's dead letter, a truck-riding barn cat named Milo becomes the witness our listener Amy needs to affirm that she’s not seeing and hearing things. The old stone house they occupy seems to have some very strange and unusual visitors. One defying any conventional explanation or even paranormal categorization. 

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Dyatlov Pass Part 1

Monsters Among Us 

Background & Furth...

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