Episode Details

A candlemaker guards one dying flame through the night while ravenous things in the dark demand the soul of a frozen stranger. An old woman stares through a second-floor window with no ledge to stand on, and the shadow man behind her inches closer with every passing night. And a small-town officer commits a man to a psychiatric hold for claiming a five-year-old suicide was really a murder — until the same vision starts playing out in front of his own eyes.

FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: I have three stories in this episode for you! Andrew Pendragon pens the tale, “Candles” to start things off. Weirdo Family member Randy Hogan shares a fictional tale called “Old Woman in the Window”. And then our final story is from S.F. Barkley called “I’m a Cop And I Institutionalized Someone I Knew Wasn’t Crazy”.

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = Show Open
00:01:10.223 = Chandler’s Candles
00:19:35.808 = The Old Woman in the Window
00:24:35.615 = I’m A Cop And I Institutionalized Someone I Knew Wasn’t Crazy, Part 1 ***
01:03:09.029 = I’m A Cop And I Institutionalized Someone I Knew Wasn’t Crazy, Part 2 ***
01:29:19.732 = Show Close
*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad break

LISTEN ON PODCAST APPS:
Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.com/wdapps
*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*

SOURCES and RESOURCES:
“I’m a Cop And I Institutionalized Someone I Knew Wasn’t Crazy” by S.F. Barkley: https://sfbarkley.com/,https://www.reddit.com/user/Barkles52/
“Candles” by Andrew Pendragon: https://www.creepypasta.com/candles/
“The Old Woman in the Window” by Weird family member, Randy Hogan
(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)

WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.
Originally aired: September 10, 2020
Weird Darkness gathers three works of horror fiction for Creepypasta Thursday, moving from a candlemaker's nightly bargain with the dark, to a watcher at an upstairs window, to a small-town murder reopened by a vision no evidence could explain.It opens with a candlemaker in the small town of Clovetown, the last practitioner of an inherited art he calls Chandler's candles, passed to him from his father and grandmother and kept alive mostly through monthly orders from the Catholic church down the road. His after-hours visitors come only once, telling him sad stories before they go, and on a freezing Tuesday a muddy, shivering man named Basim arrives — a wanderer whose family left Israel before settling in a Midwestern state he refuses to name. The candlemaker warms Basim with tea, tends a bruise left when local children pelted him with a rock, and sends him off with a vanilla-scented sculpted candle and a box of matches. That night the shop window shatters under another volley of stones, and Basim is found frozen to death on a bench outside. As the power fails and darkness floods the shop, ravenous shadow-creatures his family has sheltered against for centuries surround him and demand Basim's mark