Stella Nickells: Excedrin, Cyanide, and Murder
Stella Nickells: Excedrin, Cyanide, and Murder
A sealed bottle of headache medicine is supposed to mean safety, not a death sentence. When Susan Snow takes two Excedrin capsules for a brutal headache and dies within minutes, investigators find cyanide at the center of the case. Panic spreads fast because America has already lived through the Tylenol tampering nightmare, and no one knows if more poisoned bottles are sitting on store shelves waiting for the next victim.
We follow the investigation as it swerves toward Stella Nickell who calls police to say her husband Bruce died the same way after taking Excedrin. That single phone call becomes a turning point, pulling Bruce’s “natural causes” death back into the spotlight and raising questions about motive, life insurance policies, and whether this was a calculated attempt to make one murder look like a larger product-tampering spree.
We also share a wild personal twist: Zach meets someone connected to Bruce’s family who may help us add new context in a future follow-up.
Listen now, then subscribe, share the show with a friend, and leave a review. Where do you land on this one: airtight guilt or too many gaps?
Psychotic Breaks: Delusions, Psychosis, or Something Else?
Psychotic Breaks: Delusions, Psychosis, or Something Else?
Welcome To The Oddity Shop, Where The Bizarre is Always on Sale. This Week, Your Curator Kara showing us what happens when the brain misfires.
Something about “signs” can feel irresistible: the repeating numbers, the lyric that hits too hard, the stranger’s smile that lands like a message. But what happens when that certainty escalates into a full-blown alternate reality? We’re back from our break with a topic that sits right at the crossroads of faith, paranormal curiosity, and mental health: how do we tell the difference between a genuine spiritual experience and psychosis?
The Phoenix Lights: Arizona's Biggest UFO Sighting
The Phoenix Lights: Arizona's Biggest UFO Sighting
A clear March night over Arizona turns strange fast: thousands of people report a huge, silent V-shaped object drifting across the sky, big enough to swallow sections of starlight. We’re breaking down the Phoenix Lights, the 1997 UFO sighting that refuses to stay neatly filed under “misidentification,” especially when the earliest reports start far north and then track steadily toward the Phoenix metro area with eerily consistent details.
Then it gets political. Former Governor Fife Symington publicly jokes about the sightings, only to later admit he personally saw something he couldn’t explain, reigniting debate about credibility, memory, and public messaging.
Haunted Spaghetti: When The Breadsticks Come With Footsteps
Haunted Spaghetti: When The Breadsticks Come With Footsteps
Spaghetti is supposed to be comfort food. So why do multiple spaghetti restaurants have decades of ghost stories, full-body apparitions, and the kind of after-hours noises that would make any sane person quit mid-shift?
Tracking three locations tied to the Old Spaghetti Factory and the Spaghetti Warehouse. In Gastown, Vancouver, staff and visitors describe a uniformed tram conductor appearing inside a trolley car you can actually dine in, plus a prankster “little red man” and sightings of a child spirit. In Houston, we unpack the tragic elevator-shaft legend, reports of footsteps and moving objects, and the creepy shoulder-tap stories. In Duarte, California, the building’s past as a 1909 schoolhouse drives the haunting, including lights switching, hallway voices, and an intercom laugh that is nightmare fuel.
MH flight 370: The Disappearance of a Malaysian Airlines Flight
MH flight 370: The Disappearance of a Malaysian Airlines Flight
A passenger jet doesn’t vanish like a magic trick, yet Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 does exactly that. We follow the night MH370 leaves Kuala Lumpur for Beijing like any routine long-haul flight, then slips out of the world’s grasp after one calm sign-off: “Good night, Malaysian 370.”
We break down what’s known versus what’s assumed: how air traffic control handoffs work, why transponders matter, and what it means when military radar later suggests a dramatic U-turn and a route that still follows navigational waypoints. We also dig into the satellite “handshake” pings that push the search into the Indian Ocean, one of the most unforgiving places on Earth to find wreckage, evidence, or answers.
The Three Kings Ritual: Summoning Spirits From Reddit!
The Three Kings Ritual: Summoning Spirits From Reddit!
“Please don’t actually try this.” That’s the line that launches one of the strangest artifacts of internet horror culture: the Three Kings ritual. What starts as a 2012 r/nosleep post quickly turns into a step-by-step blueprint loaded with specificity: three chairs, two mirrors angled just right, a candle, water, a fan, an alarm set for 3:30 a.m.
Fear Caught On Tape: The Pascagoula Alien Abduction
Fear Caught On Tape: The Pascagoula Alien Abduction
A secret tape recorder in a sheriff’s department. Two exhausted, terrified men left alone in a cold room. And a few minutes of audio that still makes UFO researchers stop and listen 50 years later. We’re digging into the Pascagoula, Mississippi alien abduction, a 1973 Gulf Coast story that starts with a normal after-work fishing trip and ends with a hovering craft, paralyzing force, and a clinical “scan” that feels more like procedure than science fiction.
We walk through who Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker were before that night and why their backgrounds matter when people debate witness credibility. What keeps pulling us back is the aftermath. Instead of waiting days, they report immediately, and the police try to catch them in a lie by recording them in private. The result is a raw snapshot of panic and disbelief that’s hard to wave away, even if you lean skeptical.
Lurking in the Trees: The New Hampshire Woods Devil
Lurking in the Trees: The New Hampshire Woods Devil
What’s worse, seeing the thing or feeling it? We head deep into Northern New Hampshire folklore and cryptid history with the New Hampshire Woods Devil, a legend tied to campers, hunters, hikers, and truck drivers who report glowing eyes, impossible movement, and the heavy feeling of being watched.
We break down the reported description, the sensory clues, and the behavior that makes it feel intelligent rather than animal. We also dig into the leading explanations: a regional Bigfoot variant, a paranormal shadow entity, a forest elemental, or just darkness and isolation playing tricks on the brain. If you’ve ever been deep in the woods at night, you already know why this story sticks.
The Rosenheim Poltergeist: Spirit? Psychic Energy? SLIding?
The Rosenheim Poltergeist: Spirit? Psychic Energy? SLIding?
Your phone rings at work. You pick up. Static. It rings again. Static. Then it starts happening hundreds of times a day and the line begins dialing out by itself. That’s where we start before the story gets even stranger: lights flicker, fluorescent fixtures sway like someone shoved them, and the office goes from “annoying electrical problem” to “why are papers sliding off desks when nobody is near them?”
We head to 1967 Bavaria for the Rosenheim Poltergeist, one of the most infamous haunted office cases on record. A law office full of practical, detail-obsessed people tries everything you’d expect: phone technicians, electricians, repairs, replacements, and engineering checks. Nothing stops the ringing, the outages, the surges, or the physical disturbances.
The Villisca Axe Murder House: Unsolved Mystery, Still Haunting Today.
The Villisca Axe Murder House: Unsolved Mystery, Still Haunting Today.
Eight people are alive after a small town church program in Villisca, Iowa. By morning, the Moore family and two visiting children are gone, the house is staged in ways that make your skin crawl, and the investigation is already falling apart. The Villisca Axe Murders are infamous for the brutality, but what keeps pulling us back is the weirdness: covered mirrors, covered faces, a killer calm enough to move through the home and even cook food, then vanish with no conviction ever coming.