True Crimes Behind The Costumes: Murders, Myth, And The Dark Side Of October 31

Fear feels different when the mask is human. We open the door on Halloween’s darkest corridors: the father who poisoned his son with a cyanide Pixy Stix, the Toolbox Killers’ taped cruelty on a night meant for candy, and the times real corpses were dismissed as decorations under porch lights. From Detroit’s Devil’s Night arsons to a wolf mask at a front door and the Napa murders linked to a friend, the stories unfold like a horror anthology with one recurring villain: us.

We also trace how panic distorts truth. The Angela Palmer case sits inside the fog of the 1980s Satanic Panic—one crime rooted in delusion, many others wrongly imagined. Then the chill shifts from blood to signal: a radio call from a woman describing her own fatal crash, and the 35 phone calls family received after Charles Peck died in a train collision. Static, grief, and meaning collide, raising the question of what lingers after the body stops.

Amid the dread, we reconnect with older roots. Samhain reminds us that masks were once protection, not performance. Some listeners feel a 2012–2025 cycle closing, a collective pressure building toward change rather than doom. We end on home ground, wandering Michigan’s haunted lighthouses, silent roads, and deep lakes where legends wait just beyond the tree line. Come for the true crime, stay for the folklore, and leave with sharper eyes for the night. If the veil is thin, let’s walk it together. Subscribe, share with a friend who loves dark history, and leave a review telling us which story will haunt you tonight.

Chapters

• 0:00 Darkness Feels Safe
• 0:49 Welcome And Halloween Focus
• 1:18 The Pixie Sticks Murder
• 2:32 The Toolbox Killers’ Final Halloween
• 4:23 Real Bodies Mistaken As Props
• 5:27 Devil’s Night To Angel’s Night
• 6:35 Wolf-Masked Home Invasion
• 7:28 Napa Halloween Massacre
• 8:52 Occult Panic And Angela Palmer
• 10:45 Tyler Hadley’s Party After Murder
• 15:19 Calls From The Dead Legends
• 17:30 The 2025 Shift And Samhain Roots
• 20:12 Michigan’s Haunted Landscape And Farewell

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Halloween is supposed to be the one night the darkness feels safe. The one night we welcome the shadows, laugh at fear, and pretend death is only a decoration. Behind glowing pumpkins and flickering porch lights, real nightmares unfold. And it doesn't just stop there. Because Halloween is more than murders, it's disappearances that never had answers, it's pranks that turned fatal, haunted houses hiding real bodies, urban legends that turned out not to be legends at all. And the people who walk among us smiling with something far darker living just beneath their skin. These aren't just ghost stories, these are human ones. And humans remain the most terrifying thing in the dark. Welcome to Strange Strange Beyond Insane, and I am your host, Melissa. This is a deadly Halloween episode where the scariest part isn't what's lurking in the shadows, it's who. So I think that this is going to be a very fun episode. I know a lot of people would find these things morbid, but you've come to the right place where we think strange is fun, and we're always taking it to the next level, right? So let's start off with the Pixie Sticks murderer. Um, this was a true story of a notorious trick-or-treat murderer. So on a rainy Halloween night in 1974, the children of Deer Park, Texas, were out knocking on doors. Unfortunately, one of those kids, well, I shouldn't say victim, um, was eight-year-old Timothy O'Brien. And that was Ronald Clark O'Brien's own son. And this was a very shocking crime. Um, and that's what led to the name the man who killed Halloween, the pixie stick killer. So he gave this lace pixie stick to his own son, um, trying to collect, he figured his goal was to collect life insurance policy because he was over a hundred thousand dollars in debt. And the pixie stick was laced with potassium cyanide, and his son unfortunately died. Fortunately, the other kids did not get to those pixie sticks in time to all be poisoned. So only one of the kids died, but that was his own son. And again, this was October 31st, 1974, so very tragic. The next Halloween tragedy that we are going to talk about is the infamous toolbox killers, Lawrence Bittaker, I think, and Roy Norris. So they committed their final murder on Halloween on the night of 1979. They abducted their 16-year-old victim, Shirley Ledford, as she was hitchhiking home from a party. So there was an audio recording. The two men recorded Ledford's final brutal hours on an audio cassette. The tape played during Bit Taker's trial, and it was so disturbing that some jurors and spectators left the courtroom. The cause of death, Ledford was tortured and then strangled with a wire coat hanger, which was tightened with pliers. And um, so the killers discarded her body on a stranger's front lawn where it was found by a jogger the next morning. Yeah, that's uh that's pretty uh fucked up on Halloween. Again, this is a very fucked up episode, of course, and I had to do it a Halloween special. Um, so Bit Taker was sentenced to death in 1981, but he died of natural causes on death row in 2019. And then Norris also died in prison in 2020, and it says also of natural causes. So uh they definitely got their karma. So these two things that really happen in real life is seriously something from a fucking horror movie, right? And this is about times that people mistook actual dead human bodies for realistic Halloween decorations. In 2005, a woman's body hanging from a tree that was caused by suicide was ignored for hours by people passing by who just assumed that it was a Halloween decoration. And that's according to NBC. So that is real life. She committed suicide on a tree and literally was hanging there. Everybody just thought it was a Halloween prop, right? Um, in 2015, there was a body hanging from a fence that was mistaken for a Halloween prop, also, um, before the workers discovered that it was an actual murdered victim. So I guess is this morbid to say to maybe touch, feel the props? If it looks too good to be true, like in other words, if it looks super real, maybe you should like touch it, feel it. Okay, and this is a very infamous story. So this is the Devil's Night in Detroit. Um, and this was a widespread arson and vandalism that occurred on the night before Halloween, peaking in the 1980s, with over 800 fires in 1984. The arsons were a combination of insurance fraud, neighborhood efforts to burn down abandoned buildings, and a general rise in destructive behavior. Um, so to come to combat this, the city launched the No More Devil's Night campaign, later renamed Angel's Night, which involved tens of thousands of volunteers patrolling the streets and is credited with drastically reducing the number of fires to near historic lows by the late 2010s. So I know some people have called it Angel's Night. Um, I will I will always call it Devil's Night. That's just me. But I can see why it turned into that name instead. It definitely sounds a lot better and has a much more positive vibe about it, right? On Halloween night in 1984, William Michael Dennis murdered his eight-month pregnant ex-wife, Doreen Herbert, in her San Jose home. Dennis was wearing a wolf mask, posed as a trick-or-treater to get Herbert to open the door. He then attacked her with a machete. Her eight-year-old daughter, who had hid behind a couch, heard her mother plead, I'm going to kill you before Dennis hacked her to death. The motive was that Dennis had reportedly blamed Herbert for the accidental drowning of their three-year-old son several years earlier. Dennis was found guilty of murder, and his crime was featured on the Oxygen True Crime series Snapped. Okay, then in 2004, they call it the Napa Halloween Massacre. On Halloween night in 2004, roommates Adrian Insongna, I think, and Leslie Ann Mazzara were attacked and killed in their Napa home by the intruder wearing a mask. So the attacker was wearing a ghost face mask. And this is a mask that's popular li popularized by the movie Scream. Um he also had a dark-hooded sweatshirt on. So he broke into their house and stabbed them to death. And a third roommate survived by hiding and then finally escaping. So it was seen as like a random attack at first, but then it was later discovered that the killer was Eric Koppel, the husband of one of the insignia's best friends. Koppel later confessed to the murders and to having a sexual fantasy about his wife's friend, Adrian Insogna. Koppel was sentenced to life in prison. The case was also covered on the oxygens snapped and is known as the Halloween Massacre. Well, that's really fucked up. In 1984, a couple in Auburn, Maine burned a four-year-old girl, Angela Palmer, to death in an oven during a ritualistic killing. While not technically a witch burning, the couple's disturbing behavior and claim of cooking Lucifer made it a high-profile case involving occult beliefs and murder. This poor little girl. Oh my goodness. So Angela Palmer was stuffed into an electric oven and burned to death. Neighbors reported smelling burning hair and hearing the girl yelling, Let me out, Daddy, let me out. Before police arrived to find the oven door jammed, shut with a chair. Jesus. Okay, so the child's mother, Cynthia Palmer, 29, and her boyfriend John Lane, 36, were arrested. They were reportedly sitting in the living room holding Bibles and chanting as authorities entered the apartment. So the motive behind this is the couple told neighbors that they were cooking Lucifer. During their arraignment, they chanted and carried open Bibles. A judge ordered Cynthia Palmer and John Lane to undergo psychiatric testing. Both were held without bail. This highly publicized case occurred during the Satanic Panic, a period from the 1980s to the 1990s, when widespread fears of ritual abuse and cold activity gripped the United States. While the occult motive of the Angela Palmer murder was genuine, the broader nationwide panic often involved baseless accusations and exaggerated claims of ritual abuse. That is definitely a story from a fucking horror movie. I mean, I cannot believe people really do this in real life. I mean, this is real life shit, right? Very disturbing. Okay, so this may not have happened on Halloween, but this is a chilling story. In fact, I remember seeing the headlines on new on the news. Um, my husband and I were out to dinner at Hardy's, actually, a fast food restaurant. And I'm sitting there eating a cheeseburger watching this, and I was like, holy fucking shit, this is real life. Like this teenager for real did this, okay? So basically, the story goes that this teen boy's parents said no to a party. So he killed them and invited 60 people over with their bodies in the closet. Okay, so fucked up. Um, Tyler Hadley killed his parents with a hammer on July 16th, 2011, then posted, party at my crib tonight, maybe on Facebook. He spent hours cleaning up blood before inviting 60 teens to the house while the bodies were hidden in the bedroom. So in a courtroom TV interview, um, Tyler Hadley said that the idea started started as a joke. And then he even admitted later that he still doesn't fully understand why he even did this. So the then 17-year-old beat Blake and Mary Joe Hadley to death with a claw hammer inside their Florida home. Then, after dragging their bodies into the bedroom and covering them with household items, linens, books, picture frames, and towels, he spent nearly three hours cleaning the blood, according to his 2024 televised interview. That night, Hadley posted on Facebook, and these teenagers showed up. So some guests later told police that the house smelled strange. Others noticed blood in different parts of the home. I went into my bathroom and I was covered in blood everywhere, he said. There was blood all over the place. And I laughed at myself in the mirror and then went about my business of having my party. Hadily told investigators he struck his mother from behind as she sat at a computer. His father ran in horrified and asked, why? And he said, Why the fuck not? He described entering a dissociative state, this sort of psychotic state or trance, and said he remembered hearing his parents screaming and pleading for their lives, but he just kept swinging. After the murders, Hadley locked a family dog in a closet, hid his parents, their cell phones, and attempted to erase evidence of what he had done. He later had admitted to taking ecstasy beforehand and said that he felt very detached during the attack. According to the police and the court testimony, Hadley told friends in the weeks leading up to the killings that he had planned to kill his parents. One even recalled him saying that he wanted to host a party afterward because it had never been done before. In the 2024 interview, Hadley told David Scott that the idea of killing his parents started as a dark humor. He and his friends had been sitting around one night drinking beer and smoking weed, and he said, when the third when the thought first surfaced. I would sit there and think about it, he said, and then I think I latched onto it and didn't let go of it. The thoughts never went away. If I could just relieve myself of the thoughts, then it would be done. Eventually, he said the plan was no longer a joke. At some point during this party, Hadley pulled aside his best friend, Michael Mandel. He told him what he had done. Mandel didn't believe it until Tyler unlocked the master bedroom door and showed him the bodies. I come up to the master bedroom door. The party's going on over here, and I turned the doorknob, Mandel told ABC News. I looked down and I saw his father's leg against the door. My eyes popped up, and I said, Oh my, he's telling the truth. He did it, and this is real. Mandel called the police, and Port St. Lucie officers arrived early the next morning. There they found the Hadley's bodies in the bedroom and arrested Tyler on the spot. A blood-covered hammer lay between the victims' bodies. That's just Yeah, so, anyways, I really, really remember the story, and I wanted to talk about it here on the podcast because I don't think we've ever talked about these murders. Um, I know we've we've gone through a lot of murders on this show, but I I definitely the real life ones, especially the ones that like you remember seeing on TV that haunt you, those are the ones that just sit rent-free in your brain. And this is definitely one that is rent-free in my brain forever. Okay, so this is actually funny. I came across this story, and um, I was just chatting with someone earlier last week about the old radio show Coast to Coast. Um, so the title reads, These people of a radio station got a call from a dead woman live on air. In the early 2000s, a late-night radio show known for the paranormal Coast to Coast AM received a call that stunned even its seasoned host. A woman called in and was panicked. She described a terrible accident. She said she just died in a car crash, but didn't know where her body was. Then the line went dead. The host traced the caller's number. The phone. I mean, it basically belonged to a woman who had died hours earlier in the exact way she had described. No explanation, no prank, just silence and static. So there's still no explanation, and to this day the recording exists, and no one has ever explained how this call even happened. So, following this, this also brings me to a very interesting story. So, this is about a man named Charles Peck. He died on an impact of a train collision in 2008. Mysteriously, his loved ones received 35 calls from his phone after the crash, only to hear static on the other end. This man kept calling his loved ones, even though he'd been dead for some time. I find that very interesting. I think we've all had experiences after our loved ones have passed, even animals' pets. Um, I know I've had experiences. I know I'm not the only one. I do believe in these phenomena. I do believe that they happen, and like I said, I've had my own experience. So being on this topic, I would love to hear from our listeners the experiences that they've gotten, either, you know, it could be like a text message, a phone call. Um, we can't really count like Snapchat and stuff like that. Because it that has happened, but you gotta remember when the number is already in your phone, like things with Snapchat, especially, when somebody takes over that number, that can be why that, oh, you know, so and so snapped you or wants to be your friend. That's just because someone else has that number and that contact is still in your phone log. But I'm talking about like real life straight up phone calls saying this is your dad or this is your mom, and then static and the line goes dead. I definitely want to hear about some more experiences that I can talk about on here. Okay, so while we are in this Halloween vibe, I do want to bring this up. So a lot of people are feeling that heavy in the air energy right now, and you guys are not the only ones thinking this. There is a reason Halloween 2025 is being talked about as a pressure point date, but not in the dramatic Hollywood meteor hits the earth kind of way, you know, and the earth is gonna end, and you know, dog days are here, and the apocalypse and everything that they say every couple years, right? This is more in a collective shift, psychological break, revealing type energy. So, why this Halloween feels different? It's definitely the end of an energetic cycle. There's a 13-year cycle that started in 2012 and it ends late 2025. Halloween falls right at the doorway of the closeout. Big shifts always happen near endings. So that is what we're feeling, and that's a good thing because again, one shift is ending and a new beginning is coming, and I hope to God that it's a better one and we stop as a human civilization. I hope that we all can work together and leave politics out of this shit for once because we all see how distracted we have been. You know, wink wink, distractions, distracted. Yeah, that's really where the division hit hard this year, and I've seen it with my own eyes. So I think this new shift will be really good for everyone. So for everyone, this Halloween 2025 that wants to look cute, scary, slutty, whatever. Just remember the origin, right? And Halloween originally comes from the Celtic Festival of Sawin, a time when people wore disguises to confuse wandering spirits of the dead. And for all of my fellow Michiganders out there, and everyone else in the other states that listen to this podcast, Michigan is very magical. It's a very magical place for Halloween. Michigan is a land shaped by shadows, dense forests where the trees seem to breathe, abandoned towns swallowed by silence, and lakes so deep that not even the shoreline remembers what's buried beneath them. From the haunted lighthouses that still guide phantom ships to roads where something not quite human watches from the tree line. Our state's legends don't just live in the past, they wait. Some say they're stories, others swear that the spirits of Michigan never rest, and neither should your curiosity for tuning in to some more strange strange beyond insane. Happy Halloween, my twisted freak friends. Again, be good, and if you can't be good, be safe.