Gauge Illumination - Horror, folklore, and strange signals from the road.

Here's something you shouldn't do: go looking for the 13 Steps to Hell.

Naturally, that's exactly where Gauge Illuminations is going.

Maltby's 13 Steps to Hell is one of those roadside folklore tales that begins with a real place and ends with it becoming something more than the sum of its parts. Just outside Snohomish in Washington State, according to the legend, there's a staircase beneath an old cemetery. If you find it after midn...

Episode 7: The Shaman’s Portal of Oklahoma (Some Places Demand a Legend): What this place needs is an urban legend.

Beaver Dunes Park near Beaver, Oklahoma, really contains roughly 300 acres of sand hills inside a 520-acre park. The green lightning, vanished conquistadors, missing homesteader, Colorado tourists, and Professor Mark Thatcher are the legend-making layer. Jimmy Mac separates place from story and explains landscape...

Here's something you shouldn't do: go looking for the 13 Steps to Hell.

Naturally, that's exactly where Gauge Illuminations is going.

Maltby's 13 Steps to Hell is one of those roadside folklore tales that begins with a real place and ends with it becoming something more than the sum of its parts. Just outside Snohomish in Washington State, according to the legend, there's a staircase beneath an old cemetery. If you find it after midn...

Thom Bray has spent most of his life around trucks, highways, emergencies, and the assorted poor decisions people make while traveling between one place and another.

Before retiring from J. J. Keller & Associates in 2025, Thom spent more than 20 years there as a transportation safety and regulatory expert. Before that came another couple of decades in trucking as a driver, driver trainer, safety supervisor, instructor, claims ma...

Lyle Blackburn is an author, musician, podcaster, and cryptid researcher whose lifelong fascination with strange creatures has made him one of the essential chroniclers of the Fouke Monster. His books include The Beast of Boggy Creek, Boggy Creek Casebook, Beyond Boggy Creek, Texas Bigfoot, Sinister Swamps, and enough other monsters to make walking home after dark considerably less appealing. His research has also contributed to do...

Lisa Morton is a screenwriter, author, editor, and paranormal historian. She is a six-time Bram Stoker Award winner, a recipient of the Horror Writers Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and the author of four novels and more than 200 short stories. Her nonfiction explores Halloween, ghosts, spiritualism, horror cinema, and the history of the supernatural.

Official website: https://lisamorton.com/

Substack — The Who...

Scott G. Shea is the author of All the Leaves Are Brown: How the Mamas & the Papas Came Together and Broke Apart. He is a longtime radio producer who has produced Seize the Day with Gus Lloyd on SiriusXM’s Catholic Channel since 2012, as well as five nationally aired audio documentaries. A lifelong student and collector of popular music, Shea writes about rock history and has completed a biography focused on the first fif...

Chad Fifer is a writer, actor, and musician who co-hosts Strange Studies of Strange Stories with Chris Lackey. The pair began podcasting in 2009 with The H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast and later expanded the show to classic science fiction, fantasy, horror, and weird fiction. Fifer has written short fiction, adapted H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Hound” for The Lovecraft Anthology: Volume II, composed music for audio prod...

Episode 6 explores Skinned Tom, the gruesome lovers’ lane ghost said to haunt the Tennessee–Kentucky border. Jimmy Mac traces the legend through the upheavals of the Roaring Twenties—the aftermath of war and pandemic, Prohibition, the rise of the automobile, changing courtship, and the moral panic that followed. Chad Fifer joins the show to talk horror tropes, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, isolation, hospitality...

We begin in Point Pleasant, West Virginia. It is November of 1966. Two couples driving through the McClintic Wildlife Sanctuary spotted a pair of glowing red eyes in the darkness and accidentally gave America one of its most enduring legends. Known locally as the “TNT Area,” the sanctuary is an eerie combination of open West Virginia countryside, abandoned man-made lakes, and camouflaged ammunition-storage igloos—...

Jimmy grew up south of Boggy Creek, which means he was closer to Louisiana's Honey Island Swamp Monster. But he couldn’t escape the commercials for Charles Pierce’s archetypal horror documentary The Legend of Boggy Creek, which used actual citizens to tell the tale of the upright entity terrorizing Fouke, Arkansas. Everybody’s got a Fouke monster: Bigfoot wanders the Pacific Northwest, The Yucca Man haunts The Moj...

Jimmy begins with the strangely enduring story of David Lang, the Tennessee farmer who supposedly disappeared in front of his family and witnesses in 1880—and the even stranger fact that the story was repeated by reputable outlets, including the Cincinnati Enquirer.

From there, Gauge Illuminations leaves the world of urban legends behind and goes looking for people who really did vanish: D. B. Cooper, who stepped out of an ai...

The Bunnyman of Colchester Bridge—There’s a Killer on the Highway: Welcoming celebrated author Jeremy Dauber and Wisconsin trucking legend/deputy fire chief Thom Bray, Jimmy uses Virginia’s Bunnyman of Colchester Bridge to examine our fascination with haunted bridges, killers in costume, and local legends built around the dare. Not a hitchhiker among them, these monstrous trolls-under-the-bridge wait for unsuspect...

The thumb goes up; the car goes by.

Forget about UFOs and Bigfoot, there might not be a more American urban legend than that of the mysterious hitchhiker. His (or in this case her) presence has haunted roadsides across America, and perhaps, most famously, in the form of Chicago’s Resurrection Mary. Jimmy Mac manages to tie the spectral vision from Illinois to the adventures of John Waters, the writings of Jack Kerouac, and an ...

John Lacarbiere III joins us in the first episode of Gauge Illuminations.

In this clip, John talks about watching the way his father loved his mother, how difficult it could be to recognize that love when he was younger, and how those observations helped shape the kind of man—and partner—he wanted to become.

Then the conversation takes a very John turn: books, Lego blocks, girls, nature, and eventually “the books, t...

Can a person be possessed without knowing it?

Award-winning horror writer, paranormal historian, and Halloween authority Lisa Morton joins Gauge Illuminations for a discussion of demonic possession, mass exorcisms, ancient accounts of spirits taking control of the body, and the details that make supernatural stories feel authentic.

Lisa explains the traditional definition of possession as the surrender—or disappearance—of...