Odd Things I've Seen: The Podcast

I discuss the 2024 OTIS Halloween Season that I do every year on oddthingsiveseen.com and how it kinda went awry from my original intention, and I go deeper into this year's theme of "Is Halloween Getting Annoying?"

• Support this podcast and other of my oddity initiatives on my Patreon.
• Follow me on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
• Buy my latest book, Cult Following: The Extreme Sects that Capture Our Imaginations and Take Over ...

In this episode, we travel to Pittsburgh to see horror movie sites connected to George Romero and Tom Savini, while waxing (and waning) nostalgic on how much has changed at both the sites and in my own life since my original 2006 visit to the place back in the first days of OTIS.

• See photos from my trip here.
• See photos from the Living Dead Museum here.
• Read my original OTIS piece on my first visit to the Dawn of the Dead Mall.
...

In this episode, I read the introduction to my book, "The United States of Cryptids," as well as an entry on one of the weirdest cryptids in its pages: The giant sky clams of Nevada. Come for the bigfoot parties. Stay for the flying mollusks. 

• Buy The United States of Cryptids here.
• Support this podcast and other of my oddity initiatives on my Patreon.
• Follow me on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
• Preorder my next book, Cult Fo...

I have visited probably a dozen movie monster museums across this country in my time searching out oddity. Three of these museums stand out as my favorites--one in Nevada, one in Connecticut, and one in Massachusetts. Come with me and let's be old-fashioned Monster Kids for a while.

• See photos from my visit to Tom Devlin's Monster Museum here.
• See photos from my visit to Cortlandt Hull's Witch's Dungeon here.
• See super-out-of-d...

The X-Files is my favorite show of all time. I was on the couch for its debut on September 10, 1993. So when I found out a museum of original props had opened a mere three hours from me, I wasted only two years to get there.

• See photos from my visit here.
• Visit the museum website here.
• Read about my top eight favorite episodes here.
• Support this podcast and other of my oddity initiatives on my Patreon.
• Want to learn about the o...

My fascination with serial killers comes with a heaping load of shame, except for in one instance: Ed Gein. That's because without Gein, we might not have Norman Bates. Or Leatherface. Or Buffalo Bill. Or the Firefly family. So my shame load was only a mild one as I visited sites related to him in his hometown of Plainfield, Wisconsin. With my wife and two kids.

• See photos from our visit to Plainfield here.
• Hardware Store Addre...

On February 3, 1959, a small plane carrying pop stars Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper crashed into an Iowa cornfield, killing all three instantly and inspiring Don McLean to write American Pie. We trudge into that cornfield, to see the place where the music died.

• See images from our jaunt to the death site here.
• Death site address: 315 St. and Gull Ave., Clear Lake, Iowa.
• More information on The Smashed Man of D...

In this special on-location episode, I head to North and South Dakota to see a couple of gigantic cryptid statues. In Bismarck, North Dakota, a quartet of Thunderbirds glower above a lightning storm on the banks of the Missouri. Then I drive five hours southwest through snow and rain and flocks of pheasants to Keystone, South Dakota, to see the world's largest Bigfoot statue, right in the shadow of Mount Rushmore. Come with me.

In this episode, I read from my latest nonfiction book, Cursed Objects, to talk about what exactly is a cursed object, as well as to tell the story of the time I bought one to see what would happen.

• Buy Cursed Objects: Strange but True Stories of the World's Most Infamous Items.
• See bonus Cursed Objects materials that didn't make it into the book.
• Want to learn about the oddities I visit in real time? Follow me on Twitter, Face...

We visit High Rock Tower Park, where nineteenth century spiritualist John Murray Spear built his New Motive Power, aka, the God Machine, aka, the Infant Motor, aka, the Mechanical Messiah, all based on plans that the ghosts of Benjamin Franklin and Socrates gave him. Then the story gets weird.

• Photos from my visit to High Rock Tower Park
• Address of High Rock Tower Park: 30 Circuit Ave, Lynn, MA.
• A book about John Murray Spear.
• ...

I’m a guy who digs the ghostly. I love the macabre. I obsessively search out spooky sites and objects like my afterlife depends on it. That means I always find myself in paranormal circles, be they crop, spellcasting, or fairy. I’m constantly absorbing other people’s takes on the paranormal. And I have a take on it, too. Actually, let’s get specific. Ghosts. I have a take on ghosts.

• Here's the essay version of this topic.
• My Cu...

We head to Cape Cod in Massachusetts to find neighboring, but very different oddities: A nineteenth century tower in a forest that is haunted by a famous opera singer who fights the local witch and an abandoned air force base with connections to a UFO abduction. Yeah, this one has it all. Even pirates.

• Photos from my visit to the Jenny Lind Tower.
• Photos from my visit to the abandoned North Truro Air Force Station.
• Address of N...

A Season with the Witch: The Magic and Mayhem of Halloween in Salem, Massachusetts is my account of living in the city of Salem, Massachusetts, during the entire month of October, getting to the heart of this weird city during its weirdest season. In this episode, I read from that book. I'm also releasing this episode through my YouTube channel, so you can either watch me read or listen to me read. Unfortunately, I come with both v...

For this episode, we're going on location to an abandoned Bible theme park (and murder scene) looming over the town of Waterbury, Connecticut. It's oddities like these that this site and that podcast and, well, I (me?) are made for.

• Photos from my visit to Holy Land USA.
• Address of Holy Land USA: 60 Slocum Street, Waterbury CT.
• Website for Holy Land USA.
• My Cursed Objects book is out now!
• Want to learn about the oddities I visi...

My obsession with Danvers State Hospital (aka Danvers Insane Asylum) started with the horror movie Session 9 back in 2001, which was filmed inside the then 120-year-old abandoned asylum. Over the next two decades, I visited the site, found the asylum cemetery, watched Session 9 on the site where it was filmed, and, just a few months ago, returned to find the second asylum cemetery. This is the whole story.

• Photos from my first ...

I take you back to where my love for cemeteries first started...Highgate Cemetery in London. I met her in 1999, returned to her in 2017. We go to both West and East Cemeteries, finding the graves of Douglas Adams and Karl Marx and the guy who wrote The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, to the parts that inspired Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book and The Abominable Dr. Phibes with Vincent Price, into crypts and through plots of stones invisib...

Lily Dale is an quaint little town in western New York that you'd probably like a lot…if you can stomach all the ghosts. But the residents like it that way. After all, they’re all mediums. In this episode, I tell you about my visit to this strange place and about my own personal session (my very first!) with a medium.

• Photos from my trip to Lily Dale.
• The transcript of my session with a medium and some dead people.
• Photos from ...

Torture museums: Are they ghastly tourist traps with acute deficiencies of taste or family-friendly opportunities for history lessons? I have no clue! But I've been to two of them, one in Wisconsin and one in Florida, and they couldn't have been more different experiences from each other. Let's visit them together now, and learn the shameful secret of all medieval torture museums. With bonus serial killer severed head and alien imp...

I don't use the term bonkers lightly, but in this episode, I'm going to tell you about two of the most bonkers museums I've ever been to. And that image you have in your head when I say "museum"? Throw it out. Doesn't apply. Oddly enough, both of these museums have very boring names, despite being places of breathless bizarrerie and overwhelming wonderment: The City Museum in Missouri and the House on the Rock in Wisconsin.

• Pho...