The Devil Within

EVIO Creative

The Devil Within is a cinematic podcast about the stories that refuse to die — the legends, disappearances, curses, and supernatural encounters that linger long after the world moves on.

Each episode blends history, folklore, and investigation to explore what really happened… and why these stories still haunt us.

From mythical creatures and haunted places, to strange crimes and unexplained phenomena, The Devil Within starts where the facts end — and the unanswered questions begin.

New episodes weekly. Bring a light. You may need it.

BINGE THE FIRST FOUR SEASONS NOW!

Season 1: The Jersey Devil - The brutal slaying of BETTY ANN SULLIVAN shocked the small town of Jefferson Township, New Jersey. The violence of that evening shocked the nation for the perpetrator... was her own son, a boy of fourteen who would take his own life only hours later. What the investigation revealed left a community in tatters, unwilling to believe the evil that had befallen them.

Season 2: The Demons of Yorkshire - In 1974 after experiencing financial hardship, Michael Taylor joined a local church in the rolling hills of Northern England. After falling in love with a young, beautiful preacher, Michael’s personality began to change. The mild-mannered family man became abusive and unhinged. His new church believed he was possessed by no fewer than 48 demons and would require an exorcism to save his soul and protect his family from evil. But the supposed remedy would come at a very steep price...

Season 3: A Season in Hell - In the late 1970's New York City had it all: Hip Hop, Punk Rock... and the Son of Sam. The third season of The Devil Within takes listeners into the belly of the beast and explores the wicked origins, reign of terror and ultimate capture of one of the most feared serial killers in history. With exclusive interviews from journalists, FBI agents, historians and mental health experts this season promises to be the most comprehensive - and most terrifying - account of how one man brought New York City to a standstill.

Season 4: Satan's Shadow - In the 1980s, California learned that fear doesn’t always lurk in the dark.

Sometimes, it walks right through the door.

SATAN’S SHADOW follows the terrifying rise of Richard Ramirez — the Night Stalker — while tracing his crimes alongside Dante Alighieri’s Inferno. As Ramirez descends deeper into violence, we descend with him through Dante’s circles of hell, asking what happens to a city — and a soul — when darkness becomes a spectacle.

Across nine episodes, each chapter pairs the facts of the case with a brief lesson from Dante: desire twisted into obsession, cruelty masquerading as power, betrayal, violence, and the chilling fascination that draws us closer instead of pushing us away.

Because Ramirez didn’t just kill.

He captivated.

He made the world watch — and forced us to confront the part of ourselves that can’t look away.

Bonus episodes explore the trial, aftermath, and the myths that followed — along with glimpses into Purgatorio and Paradiso, and whether redemption or meaning is possible after horror.

SATAN’S SHADOW isn’t only about a murderer.

It’s about a culture slowly walking toward darkness…

and what it costs to climb back out.

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Today · 22 min
The Devil's Audition - Part Two
THE DEVIL’S AUDITION Episode Two: The Demons in North Beach Seventeen days after Valerie McDonald disappeared from San Francisco, Michael Hennessey—the man who had lured her away with the promise of a role in a Dustin Hoffman movie—was dead. Hennessey and fellow ex-convict John Gordon Abbott had fled north to British Columbia, where a confrontation with the RCMP ended in gunfire. Abbott was captured, Hennessey was killed, and investigators reportedly found Valerie’s voter-registration and unemployment-benefit cards among their belongings. TDW_Devil Audition_2 This week on The Devil Within, we return to the Tower Apartments and the dangerous world Valerie had been trying to escape. Before she vanished, Valerie told friends about large quantities of cocaine and what contemporary reports called “Satanistic” activities inside her building. In San Francisco—the birthplace of Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan—the allegation carried particular weight. But there is no reliable evidence establishing that an organized Satanic cult operated from the Tower Apartments. What is documented is arguably more disturbing: Valerie was surrounded by men with serious criminal histories, including Phillip Arthur Thompson, who decades later would be convicted of the 1971 murder of Betty Cloer. TDW_Devil Audition_2 TDW_Devil Audition_2 Investigators also suspected Abbott, Hennessey and Thompson of participating in an ambitious criminal enterprise involving robbery, automatic weapons and cocaine trafficking. Valerie’s parents came to believe their daughter may have disappeared because she learned something about that operation, although that theory has never been proven. TDW_Devil Audition_2 Valerie had reportedly been threatened. She was frightened enough to move out. Then Hennessey arrived with the irresistible promise of a movie audition, and Valerie disappeared. For eleven years, her family waited. Then, on October 3, 1991, hunters discovered partial human remains near the Kettle River in Ferry County, Washington, hundreds of miles north of San Francisco and near the Canadian border. Nobody knew who she was. It would take another ten years before anyone realized whom they had found. TDW_Devil Audition_2 LISTEN • WATCH • FOLLOW Follow The Devil Within wherever you get your podcasts and leave a five-star rating and review. Watch and subscribe on the Evio Creative YouTube channel, with notifications turned on, and follow @thedevilwithinpod for more from the Evio Universe. The Devil’s Audition: The Devils in North Beach, on The Devil Within. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Monday · 15 min
The Devil's Ledger - Week of October 12th, 2026
The Devil's Ledger | October 12, 2026 A Human-Skin Teddy Bear, a Hollywood Disappearance, a Surgeon on Trial, and a Reality TV Fraudster Welcome back to The Devil's Ledger, your weekly journey through the darker corners of the Evio Universe. As wild weather continues to make headlines, we're hoping everyone is staying safe, staying dry, and finding a little time to escape into a good book, a great movie, or one of our latest podcasts. This week, we're serving up a particularly unsettling collection of stories involving a grotesque discovery in the California desert, an aspiring actress who vanished in San Francisco, a plastic surgeon facing murder charges, a reality television star's multimillion-dollar fraud scheme, and a Nevada motel where the hospitality is positively murderous. THE CREEPIEST THING: The Human-Skin Teddy Bear In Victorville, California, a horrifying discovery outside a convenience store sent investigators scrambling: a teddy bear that appeared to be stitched together from human skin. The county coroner was called, police launched an investigation, and the truth turned out to be almost as bizarre as the original discovery. Was it evidence of something monstrous, or simply the world's most ill-advised practical joke? THE DEVIL WITHIN: The Devil's Audition San Francisco, 1980. Aspiring actress Valerie McDonald disappears after being lured by the promise of an audition for a nonexistent Dustin Hoffman film. What follows is an investigation involving dangerous criminals, alleged international drug trafficking, and disturbing reports of Satanic activity. In this three-part investigation, The Devil Within explores the circumstances surrounding Valerie's disappearance and the troubling intersection of ambition, deception, and the occult. CRIMINAL MISCHIEF: Tomasz Kosowski, Part Two After last week's special conversation with COLD creator Dave Cawley, Carolyn Ossorio returns to the disappearance and alleged murder of Florida attorney Steven Cozzi. This week, the investigation moves into the courtroom, where accused murderer and plastic surgeon Tomasz Kosowski makes the extraordinary decision to represent himself. Carolyn examines the evidence, the legal proceedings, and the unanswered questions surrounding a case in which the victim's body has never been recovered. THE SLIPPERY: Jen Shah She was a reality television celebrity, a self-proclaimed business mogul, and the face of a lavish lifestyle. Behind the designer clothes and extravagant parties, however, Jen Shah was helping operate a nationwide telemarketing fraud scheme that devastated financially vulnerable Americans. Scott and Nancy investigate the mechanics of the operation, the victims who lost their savings, and the federal investigation that ultimately brought Shah down. She's already out of prison, but has justice really been served? THIS WEEK IN HORROR: Last Chance Motel A newlywed couple's dream wedding becomes a nightmare when they encounter a remote Nevada motel operated by a bloodthirsty family. Starring Heather Langenkamp and Sierra McCormick, Last Chance Motel offers a gruesome reminder that sometimes the best travel advice is simply to keep driving. JOIN US ACROSS THE EVIO UNIVERSE There's always another mystery to investigate, another criminal to expose, and another nightmare waiting just around the corner. Listen & Follow: Subscribe to The Devil Within, Criminal Mischief, The Slippery, and The Devil's Ledger wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss a new episode. Rate & Review: If you enjoy our shows, please leave a five-star rating and a written review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Your support helps introduce the Evio Universe to new listeners. Watch & Subscribe: Visit the Evio Creative YouTube channel, subscribe, and turn on notifications for new videos, original content, and updates from across our network. Stay Connected: Follow @thedevilwithinpod on Instagram, and send your stories, tips, and suggestions to mailto:info@eviocreative.com. Until next time, stay safe, have a calm and productive week, and we'll catch up again across the Evio Universe. An Evio Creative Production. Suggested episode keywords: The Devil's Ledger, Evio Creative, The Devil Within, Valerie McDonald, The Devil's Audition, Satanism, occult mysteries, Criminal Mischief, Tomasz Kosowski, Steven Cozzi, Carolyn Ossorio, Dave Cawley, COLD podcast, The Slippery, Jen Shah, Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, true crime, fraud, human skin teddy bear, Victorville, Last Chance Motel, Heather Langenkamp, horror movies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Monday · 24 min
The Devil's Audition - Part One
THE DEVIL’S AUDITION Episode One: Temptation On November 9, 1980, twenty-six-year-old Valerie McDonald was doing something remarkably sensible: she was getting out. The aspiring filmmaker, actress, model and cocktail waitress had become frightened by the men managing her apartment building in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood. She reportedly told friends and family about drugs, threatening behavior and activity she considered Satanic. With friends helping her move, Valerie appeared ready to put the Tower Apartments—and the people surrounding it—behind her. TDW_Devil Audition_1 Then Michael Hennessey arrived with an offer almost perfectly designed for an ambitious young actress. There was a movie shooting in town, he said, starring Dustin Hoffman, who was then at the absolute height of his career after winning the Academy Award for Kramer vs. Kramer. The production supposedly needed an attractive blonde woman for a small role playing the victim of a serial killer. The job paid $200 and, more importantly, offered Valerie the possibility of appearing opposite one of the biggest movie stars in America. TDW_Devil Audition_1 Valerie agreed to go. Her family would never see her alive again. The movie did not exist. A private investigator hired by Valerie’s parents later contacted the production company and Hoffman’s representatives and found no evidence of the film or the role Valerie had been promised. Someone appears to have constructed an elaborate fiction around Valerie’s ambitions and used it to lure her away. TDW_Devil Audition_1 Then the story became considerably stranger. Within days, Hennessey and convicted criminal John Gordon Abbott were fleeing north. On November 26, Canadian authorities caught up with them in British Columbia. A confrontation with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police erupted into gunfire. Abbott was captured. Hennessey was killed. TDW_Devil Audition_1 Among the fugitives’ belongings, authorities reportedly discovered Valerie’s voter-registration and unemployment-benefit cards. The missing woman in San Francisco was now physically connected to the men who had fled hundreds of miles toward Canada. TDW_Devil Audition_1 But Valerie herself was nowhere to be found. In Episode One of The Devil’s Audition, we return to San Francisco at the dawn of the 1980s—a city emerging from Jonestown, the assassinations of George Moscone and Harvey Milk, and the fading glow of the counterculture—to reconstruct Valerie’s final days. We enter the Tower Apartments, meet the dangerous men who surrounded her and follow the irresistible promise of a Hollywood audition that appears to have been created specifically for her. TDW_Devil Audition_1 Because Valerie recognized that she was in danger. She was already leaving. Then somebody offered her exactly what she wanted. Listen & Follow: Follow The Devil Within wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss an episode. Rate & Review: Leave us a five-star rating and review—it remains one of the best ways to help new listeners discover the show. Watch & Subscribe: Watch The Devil Within on the Evio Creative YouTube channel, subscribe, and turn on notifications for every new episode. TDW_Devil Audition_1 Join the Conversation: Follow @thedevilwithinpod for episode clips, imagery, updates and more from the Evio Universe. Stories & Tips: Have a story you think belongs on The Devil Within? Send it to info@eviocreative.com. The Devil’s Audition — Episode One: Temptation, on The Devil Within. LISTEN • WATCH • FOLLOW Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Friday · 22 min
Christa Pike: The Devil On Death Row - Part Three
THE DEVIL ON DEATH ROW Episode Three: Twice Condemned For nearly thirty years, Christa Pike waited to die. She entered Tennessee’s death row at nineteen under a sentence of electrocution, but remained there long enough to watch the machinery of capital punishment change around her. The electric chair gave way to lethal injection, the teenager associated with pentagrams became a fifty-year-old practicing Buddhist, and Tennessee eventually set September 30, 2026, as the day her sentence would finally be carried out. TDW_Pike_3 In the final episode of The Devil on Death Row, we follow Pike through decades of appeals, challenges to her original sentencing, arguments over childhood trauma and adolescent brain development, and her attorneys’ final attempts to obtain clemency. Then September 30 arrives. A federal appeals court temporarily stops the execution, Tennessee appeals, and the United States Supreme Court clears the way for the state to proceed. TDW_Pike_3 At 7:27 p.m., the curtains open at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution and Pike is strapped to a gurney. Pentobarbital is administered—but Pike remains alive and complains that her arm is burning. Tennessee tries again. After a second administration of the execution drug, witnesses can still hear her breathing. Eventually the witnesses are removed, Pike is transported to a hospital, and the state acknowledges an extraordinary fact: Christa Pike survived her execution. TDW_Pike_3 Governor Bill Lee subsequently halts Tennessee’s remaining 2026 execution and orders an independent review. Thirty-one years after Colleen Slemmer was murdered, the story that began with pentagrams, Satanic imagery and the fading embers of the Satanic Panic is suddenly unfinished again. TDW_Pike_3 The Devil may have been everywhere in this story, but perhaps he was never required. Human beings did all of it themselves. Listen & Follow: Follow The Devil Within wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a 5-star rating and review. Watch and subscribe on the Evio Creative YouTube channel, turn on notifications, and join the conversation at @thedevilwithinpod. Stories and tips: mailto:info@eviocreative.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
October 7 · 22 min
Christa Pike: The Devil On Death Row - Part Two
THE DEVIL ON DEATH ROW Episode Two: The Devil in the Woods Hours after nineteen-year-old Colleen Slemmer was tortured and murdered in the woods outside Knoxville, Christa Pike went to breakfast. According to trial testimony, she was carrying something almost impossible to comprehend: a fragment of Colleen’s skull, taken from the murder scene as a souvenir. Pike reportedly showed the bone to other students, pointed to blood on her shoes and openly described what had happened the night before. TDW_Pike_2 In Episode Two of The Devil on Death Row, we return to the woods to reconstruct Colleen’s final hour and examine the Satanic imagery that became inseparable from the crime. The attack lasted somewhere between thirty minutes and an hour, and when Colleen’s body was examined, investigators found a pentagram carved into her chest. But the occult connection went deeper: at Tadaryl Shipp’s later trial, another student testified that days before the murder Shipp had spoken about the need for a human sacrifice because the celestial bodies were in alignment. TDW_Pike_2 As Christa goes on trial, psychiatrists attempt to answer the question that had haunted the case from the beginning. Was this a Satanic murder, or were troubled teenagers borrowing the imagery of Satanism to give jealousy, rage and violence a darker mythology? The jury ultimately finds Pike guilty of premeditated first-degree murder and conspiracy, and Tennessee chooses the ultimate punishment: death by electrocution. TDW_Pike_2 The Satanic Panic taught America to believe extraordinary evil required an extraordinary explanation. Christa Pike offered something considerably more disturbing: perhaps people don't need the Devil to commit monstrous acts. Sometimes they simply borrow his language. Listen & Follow: Follow The Devil Within wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a 5-star rating and review. Watch and subscribe on the Evio Creative YouTube channel, turn on notifications, and join the conversation at @thedevilwithinpod. Stories and tips: mailto:info@eviocreative.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
October 5 · 22 min
Christa Pike: The Devil On Death Row - Part One
THE DEVIL ON DEATH ROW Episode One: The Pentagram In January 1995, nineteen-year-old Colleen Slemmer walked away from the Knoxville Job Corps Center with three other students. The following morning, her body was discovered on the University of Tennessee agricultural campus. She had been subjected to a prolonged attack, and carved into her chest was a symbol America had spent more than a decade learning to fear: a pentagram. TDW_Pike_1 In Episode One of The Devil on Death Row, we return to the fading years of the Satanic Panic, when allegations of secret cults, ritual abuse and devil worship had moved from horror movies into police departments, courtrooms and American living rooms. By 1995, much of that panic was beginning to collapse beneath the weight of its own extraordinary claims. Then Colleen Slemmer was murdered, and the crime contained genuinely documented Satanic imagery: Christa Pike and her boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp were observed wearing pentagram necklaces, Pike had experimented with occult imagery before the murder, and a forensic psychiatrist would later testify that the crime contained “satanic elements,” while characterizing what he saw as adolescent dabbling rather than evidence of an organized cult. TDW_Pike_1 But behind the pentagrams was something considerably more human. Eighteen-year-old Christa Gail Pike had endured an unstable adolescence before arriving at Job Corps, where she became intensely attached to Shipp and convinced herself that Colleen wanted to take him away from her. The day before the murder, Pike reportedly told another student that she intended to kill Colleen. On January 12, four young people walked into the woods together, with Colleen believing they were going to smoke marijuana and settle their differences. TDW_Pike_1 The Satanic Panic taught America to search for elaborate explanations for evil. The Christa Pike story asks a more unsettling question: what happens when the symbols a culture creates to represent evil become part of the language young people use to commit it? Listen & Follow: Follow The Devil Within wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a 5-star rating and review. Watch and subscribe on the Evio Creative YouTube channel, turn on notifications, and join the conversation at @thedevilwithinpod. Have a story or tip for the show? Email mailto:info@eviocreative.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
October 5 · 14 min
The Devil's Ledger - Week of Oct. 5th, 2026
THE DEVIL’S LEDGER Week of October 5, 2026 October has arrived across the Evio Universe, and before we get to the murder, monsters, fraud and assorted demonic activity, we have one request: vote. The midterms are approaching, and regardless of party, voting is how we hold elected officials accountable—or throw them out. Our longstanding policy remains simple: if you don’t vote, you don’t get to complain about shit. Ledger Oct 5 This week’s Creepiest Thing I Heard This Week investigates the strange online mythology forming around the upcoming supernatural horror film You Can’t Leave. Social media claims insist the filmmakers employed real occult experts to create authentic demonic rituals capable of exposing audiences to something genuinely dangerous. There’s just one problem: we couldn’t find credible evidence that any of it is true. Which raises an even better question—are we watching a modern urban legend being created in real time? Ledger Oct 5 On The Devil Within, our new three-part series The Devil on Death Row examines Christa Pike, the brutal 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer, its documented Satanic imagery and its place at the dying edge of the Satanic Panic. Then we follow Pike through thirty years on death row to the extraordinary events of September 30, when Tennessee attempted to execute her with pentobarbital—and she survived. Twice. Ledger Oct 5 On Criminal Mischief, Part Two of the Tomasz Kosowski case enters the courtroom, where the plastic surgeon accused of murdering attorney Steven Cozzi makes the extraordinary decision to represent himself in a capital murder trial. Over on The Slippery, we meet former Bellum Entertainment CEO Mary Carole McDonnell and the alleged $30 million fraud built around a decidedly inconvenient detail: the enormous aerospace-family fortune she claimed to possess apparently didn't exist. Ledger Oct 5 Ledger Oct 5 Finally, This Week in Horror heads deep into the Amazon for Beware Boiuna, a good old-fashioned monster movie about a humanitarian mission that awakens a colossal serpent from Amazonian folklore—and one that has a special connection to the Evio family. Ledger Oct 5 Halloween is getting closer. The monsters are stirring. Let’s open the books. Listen & Follow: Follow the Evio shows wherever you get your podcasts, leave a 5-star rating and review, and watch and subscribe on the Evio Creative YouTube channel with notifications turned on. Join us at @thedevilwithinpod, and we’ll see you this week across the Evio Universe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
October 2 · 21 min
The Killer of Lake Tangyanika - Part Three
THE DEVIL WITHIN GUSTAVE — Episode Three: The Hunt For years, Patrice Faye had followed the evidence left behind by one of Africa's most notorious predators. He interviewed witnesses, mapped attacks around Lake Tanganyika, studied movements along the Rusizi River and learned the scars that distinguished one enormous Nile crocodile from every other animal in the water. By 2002, studying Gustave was no longer enough. Faye wanted to capture him alive. In the final installment of our three-part investigation, The Hunt, the naturalist's obsession becomes an extraordinary field expedition. Gustave's legend has now escaped Burundi and entered the international press, bringing increasingly spectacular claims with it: hundreds of victims, gunshot wounds, attacks on massive animals and a crocodile that supposedly killed without eating. Faye himself offered a considerably more cautious estimate, saying he had documented roughly sixty deaths attributable to Gustave, perhaps fewer—a number that still could never be scientifically confirmed. But Gustave himself was real. His extraordinary size and distinctive scars allowed Faye to identify an individual animal moving through the enormous interconnected ecosystem of Lake Tanganyika and the Rusizi River. Capturing him alive could finally replace estimates with measurements: his true length, weight, age, physical condition and injuries could all be studied for the first time. So Faye built a jail. Nearly thirty feet long and weighing roughly a ton, the enormous steel cage looked more like industrial machinery than an animal trap. Cameras monitored it. Bait was placed inside. Crocodile specialist Alison Leslie joined the expedition, while filmmaker Jean-Michel Corillion documented the hunt for what would become Capturing the Killer Croc. Eventually, something enormous approached the cage. Then everything went wrong. A violent storm struck. The infrared camera failed. By morning, the trap had been damaged and partially submerged—and the live goat being used as bait had vanished. Whatever happened during those missing hours was never captured on film. The cage intended to settle the mystery of Gustave had somehow produced another one. Faye's expedition ended without its prisoner. But Gustave didn't disappear from the story. Reports continued for years, including another reported sighting in 2009. What remained were ultimately two Gustaves: the documented animal—an exceptionally large, heavily scarred Nile crocodile photographed and filmed in the Lake Tanganyika region—and the nearly supernatural creature built around him by decades of rumor and repetition. And then there is the final mystery. Did Gustave ever die? Rumors say yes. Evidence says we don't know. No verified carcass was recovered. No skull was conclusively identified. No scientific examination established when or where Gustave's life ended. That doesn't make him immortal. It simply means that the final chapter of his biological life was never documented. Perhaps that's appropriate. Because after three episodes spent asking what transformed Gustave into a monster, we arrive at a more uncomfortable possibility: Maybe nothing did. Maybe Gustave remained exactly what millions of years of evolution had designed him to be—patient, opportunistic, adaptable and capable of learning from the world around him. Perhaps it was the world around him that changed. LISTEN, WATCH & FOLLOW Follow The Devil Within wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a five-star rating and review. It remains one of the simplest and most effective ways to help new listeners discover the show. Watch The Devil Within on the Evio Creative YouTube channel. Subscribe and turn on notifications so you never miss a new episode. Follow @thedevilwithinpod for clips, archival material, episode imagery and more from the stories we investigate. Have a story, mystery or case you think belongs on The Devil Within? Send it to info@eviocreative.com. The Devil Within is written and hosted by Branden Morgan and produced by Evio Creative. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
September 30 · 23 min
The Killer of Lake Tangyanika - Part Two
THE DEVIL WITHIN GUSTAVE — Episode Two: Built to Kill What makes a predator perfect? In Episode Two of our three-part investigation into Gustave, we leave Lake Tanganyika behind for a moment and travel to Tsavo, Kenya, in 1898, where two maneless male lions began pulling railway workers from their camps. The animals that became known as the Ghost and the Darkness terrorized the Uganda Railway project for months before Lieutenant Colonel John Henry Patterson finally killed them. More than a century later, their preserved remains would give scientists something Patrice Faye never had with Gustave: a killer they could actually examine. Then we go inside the Nile crocodile. Calling Gustave a dinosaur isn't scientifically accurate, but crocodilians belong to an evolutionary lineage whose basic predatory strategy has survived for an extraordinary span of time. Eyes and nostrils positioned above the water allow the animal to disappear almost completely beneath the surface. A muscular tail provides explosive acceleration. Armored osteoderms protect the body. Conical teeth seize rather than chew. And when prey is too large to swallow, the infamous death roll can tear it into manageable pieces. Everything about the design is built around one principle: Don't waste energy. That principle makes Gustave's story considerably stranger. Crocodiles are ectothermic ambush predators capable of waiting extraordinary periods between meals. They don't need prolonged pursuit. They wait until an animal enters the narrow strip of geography where water meets land—and then patience becomes explosive violence. For people who depend upon Lake Tanganyika for fishing, bathing, washing and drinking water, that kill zone is also an unavoidable part of everyday life. But Patrice Faye encountered reports of victims attributed to Gustave whose bodies were recovered or only partially consumed. That helped create the sensational legend that Gustave killed for pleasure. The biology tells a more complicated story. Crocodile ecologist Alison Leslie rejected the idea of a crocodilian psychopath. Attacks can be interrupted. Crocodiles can behave territorially. Large prey may be consumed over several days. And some of the deaths attributed to one famous crocodile may have belonged to entirely different animals. Faye nevertheless wondered whether decades of conflict in Burundi and neighboring Congo had provided Gustave with opportunities to scavenge human remains—and thereby learn that humans were simply another available food source. It remains a hypothesis, not an established scientific explanation. Finally, we meet the Old Man of the Lake. Faye estimated Gustave at approaching twenty feet long and perhaps a ton in weight. His enormous body carried distinctive scars, including wounds Faye believed came from gunfire, allowing him to distinguish Gustave from other crocodiles. After decades of survival, this wasn't simply a giant animal. It was an experienced predator capable of learning the repetitive patterns of the people living along its territory. Perhaps Gustave wasn't terrifying because he broke the rules of nature. Perhaps he was terrifying because he followed them perfectly. And Patrice Faye had finally decided that understanding Gustave wasn't enough. He was going to catch him. LISTEN, WATCH & FOLLOW Follow The Devil Within wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a five-star rating and review to help new listeners discover the show. Watch The Devil Within on the Evio Creative YouTube channel. Subscribe and turn on notifications so you never miss a new episode. Follow @thedevilwithinpod for episode clips, archival material and more from the stories we investigate. Have a story or case you think belongs on the show? Send it to info@eviocreative.com. The Devil Within is written and hosted by Branden Morgan and produced by Evio Creative. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
September 28 · 12 min
The Devil's Ledger - Week of September 28th, 2026
THE DEVIL'S LEDGER Week of September 28, 2026 Fall has officially arrived, playoff baseball is back, and apparently Mother Nature decided the Northeast needed to celebrate with a violent nor'easter. This week on The Devil's Ledger, Branden sends some love to everyone currently getting battered by wind, rain and coastal flooding—and finally answers a question some of us have somehow avoided asking our entire lives: What the hell actually is a nor'easter? Then we head into considerably darker territory. THE CREEPIEST THING I HEARD THIS WEEK: THE MOSQUITO Brazilian authorities say they've captured Jorlan Lopes da Silva, a suspected serial killer nicknamed “Mosquito” because of his thin, frail build. Police accuse da Silva of involvement in sixteen murders around Mulungu in northeastern Brazil. Investigators say he evaded capture by disappearing into dense vegetation and living in makeshift camps hidden in the wilderness. But it's the bizarre circumstances of his arrest that elevate this one into Creepiest Thing territory: when police finally cornered him after a two-day pursuit, da Silva was reportedly wearing a dress, wig and painted fingernails—and carrying an unrelated baby in his arms. THIS WEEK ON THE DEVIL WITHIN: GUSTAVE The New Monsters has come to an end, which means we're returning to something considerably more familiar: Serial killers. Sort of. Our new three-part series travels to Burundi and the shores of Lake Tanganyika for the extraordinary story of Gustave, the enormous, heavily scarred Nile crocodile blamed in legend for more than 300 human deaths. That number has never been verified—and naturalist Patrice Faye offered far more conservative estimates—but behind the mythology was a very real, exceptionally large crocodile that Faye spent years tracking. How do you hunt a serial killer with no motive, fingerprints or confession—one who can simply disappear beneath the surface of one of Africa's great lakes? Meet Gustave: The Killer of Lake Tanganyika. CRIMINAL MISCHIEF: TOMASZ KOSOWSKI Over on Criminal Mischief, Carolyn investigates the extraordinary case of plastic surgeon Tomasz Kosowski, recently found guilty of murdering attorney Steven Cozzi. Cozzi vanished from his Largo, Florida, law office in March 2023. His wallet, phone and keys were left behind, while investigators discovered blood inside the men's restroom. His body has never been recovered. Then Kosowski made the already extraordinary case even stranger: facing first-degree murder and the possibility of a death sentence, he represented himself. Carolyn breaks down the evidence, the disappearance and one of the stranger murder trials we've encountered in quite some time. THE SLIPPERY: THE PONZI KILLER MOM Scott and Nancy bring us the rise and spectacular collapse of Natalie Cochran. Natalie and Michael Cochran appeared to have everything: high-school sweethearts turned successful suburban family, with Natalie working as a pharmacist and Michael as a popular baseball coach and businessman. Behind that success was a multimillion-dollar fraud scheme involving supposedly lucrative government and defense contracts. As the money poured in, so did the lies—and when Michael began asking questions, prosecutors said Natalie chose murder over exposure. A jury ultimately convicted her of killing her husband with insulin. Money. Marriage. Fraud. Defense contracts. Murder. This week, The Slippery takes on The Ponzi Killer Mom. THIS WEEK IN HORROR: VICTORIAN PSYCHO Finally, we're going Gothic. Maika Monroe stars as Winifred Notty, an eccentric young governess who arrives at a remote English manor in 1858 to educate the children of a wealthy family. Then people begin disappearing. Also starring Jason Isaacs, Thomasin McKenzie and Ruth Wilson, Victorian Psycho gives us a remote manor, Victorian repression, disappearing servants and a governess who may have considerably more on her mind than afternoon lessons. LISTEN • WATCH • FOLLOW Follow The Devil Within, Criminal Mischief, The Slippery and The Devil's Ledger wherever you get your podcasts. Leave us a five-star rating and review to help more listeners discover the Evio Universe. Watch and subscribe on the Evio Creative YouTube channel, and turn on notifications so you never miss a new episode. Follow @thedevilwithinpod for clips, episode imagery, stories and updates. Have a story or tip for us? mailto:info@eviocreative.com Fall is here. The sweaters are coming out. The leaves are changing. Playoff baseball has arrived. Nature is healing. We'll see you this week across the Evio Universe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
September 28 · 22 min
The Killer of Lake Tangyanika - Part One
THE DEVIL WITHIN GUSTAVE: THE KILLER OF LAKE TANGANYIKA Episode One — Pattern For years, people living along the shores of Lake Tanganyika told stories about something enormous moving beneath the water. Fishermen disappeared. Bodies were recovered bearing catastrophic injuries. Survivors described attacks that happened with terrifying speed, often in places where generations of Burundians had fished, washed clothes and collected water. Then French naturalist Patrice Faye began looking for a pattern. Faye was an unlikely investigator: a self-taught naturalist and herpetologist from Lyon who had worked as a plumber and lumberjack, traveled through Africa and eventually made Burundi his home. During some of the country's darkest years, he developed an extraordinary knowledge of its wildlife—and became increasingly troubled by the stories emerging from Lake Tanganyika. In Episode One of our three-part investigation into Gustave, we travel deep into the history of Burundi, a breathtaking country scarred by colonialism, political assassination and a civil war that killed an estimated 300,000 people between 1993 and 2005. Against that backdrop, Faye developed a disturbing theory: could years of human bodies entering the region's waterways during the violence have taught an opportunistic predator that human beings were food? It was a theory he could never prove, but one that connected Burundi's human tragedy to the mystery developing along its shoreline. Faye collected eyewitness accounts, compared locations and studied descriptions until he became convinced that many of the attacks were connected. Witnesses repeatedly described extraordinary size and distinctive scars, including an injury on the animal's head. Eventually, Faye saw his suspect himself and gave him a name: Gustave. Gustave wasn't a man. He was an enormous Nile crocodile—estimated by Faye at roughly twenty feet long, perhaps a ton in weight and around sixty years old, although the animal was never captured and scientifically measured. And while the sensational claims that Gustave killed two or three hundred people belong more comfortably to legend than established fact, something very real remained beneath the mythology: an exceptionally large, scarred crocodile that Faye would spend years trying to understand. This is the story of a naturalist, a country haunted by war, and a predator that became a legend. This is Gustave: The Killer of Lake Tanganyika. Listen & Follow: Follow The Devil Within wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss an episode, and leave us a five-star rating and review to help more listeners discover the show. Watch & Subscribe: Watch The Devil Within on the Evio Creative YouTube channel. Subscribe and turn on notifications for new episodes and original video content. Join the Conversation: Follow @thedevilwithinpod for clips, images, archival material and more from the stories we investigate. The Devil Within is written and hosted by Branden Morgan and produced by Evio Creative. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
September 25 · 23 min
The New Monsters: The Loveland Frogman - Part Three
THE NEW MONSTERS: THE LOVELAND FROGMAN Episode Three: The Monster Loveland Kept By the summer of 2016, hunting monsters had changed. Armed with smartphones and Pokémon Go, two teenagers wandered near Ohio's Little Miami River and reportedly encountered something that wasn't supposed to be part of the game. Their footage was ambiguous, but the name attached to it was unmistakable: the Loveland Frogman. The alleged sighting resurrected a legend stretching back decades—mysterious humanoid figures beside an Ohio road in 1955, police encounters in 1972, and the wonderfully bizarre story of a frog-like creature carrying a wand that produced sparks. But the renewed attention also brought former Loveland police officer Mark Mathews back into the story. Mathews had encountered and shot the animal associated with the legend in 1972, and his explanation was considerably less supernatural: according to him, it was a large, tailless iguana, probably an escaped or abandoned exotic pet. That should have killed the legend. Instead, Loveland kept the Frogman. In the conclusion of our three-part investigation, we explore what happens when a monster outlives the eyewitnesses who created it. From the arrival of the internet and the 2016 Pokémon Go encounter to the transformation of regional cryptids into hometown mascots, merchandise and cultural identities, the Frogman reveals something important about the way modern folklore survives. Evidence may weaken a legend, but once enough people inherit the story, evidence isn't the only thing keeping it alive. We also bring The New Monsters full circle, from alligators beneath Manhattan and the Bunny Man of Northern Virginia to the strange amphibious resident of the Little Miami River. Cameras, smartphones and instant communication were supposed to make monsters obsolete. Instead, technology gave folklore a distribution system. Maybe the Loveland Frogman really was an iguana. If so, the iguana lost. The monster survived. LISTEN, FOLLOW & REVIEW Listen to The Devil Within wherever you get your podcasts, and make sure you're following the show so you never miss a new episode. If you enjoy the series, please leave us a five-star rating and review—it remains one of the best ways to help new listeners discover the show. WATCH & SUBSCRIBE Watch The Devil Within and more from the Evio Creative network on the Evio Creative YouTube channel. Subscribe and turn on notifications so you know whenever a new episode drops. JOIN THE CONVERSATION Follow @thedevilwithinpod for clips, stories, archival material and more from The Devil Within. Have a strange story, unexplained encounter, case or legend you think we should investigate? Send it to info@eviocreative.com. The Devil Within is written and hosted by Branden Morgan and produced by Evio Creative. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
September 23 · 24 min
The New Monsters: The Loveland Frogman - Part Two
THE DEVIL WITHIN THE NEW MONSTERS: THE LOVELAND FROGMAN Episode Two — The Creature Gets a Name Before the Loveland Frogman became one of America's strangest regional cryptids, it may have been something else entirely. The story takes us back to Loveland, Ohio, in 1955, where a businessman or traveling salesman supposedly encountered three small humanoid figures beside a country road near the Little Miami River. Later versions describe creatures standing three or four feet tall, with leathery skin, deeply wrinkled heads and vaguely frog-like faces. Then one of them reportedly raised a strange metal rod above its head—and sparks began shooting from it. A Frogman is strange enough. A Frogman with a magic wand requires considerably more explanation. In Episode Two of The New Monsters, we investigate how a handful of separate encounters gradually became the mythology of the Loveland Frogman—and why the creature's bizarre origins may have more in common with America's flying-saucer obsession than traditional cryptozoology. The problem begins with the 1955 encounter itself. Unlike the better-documented police sightings that followed seventeen years later, there is no readily available contemporary police report establishing the version of the story we know today. Its famous details reach us largely through later researchers, paranormal literature and decades of retelling, meaning the Frogman's origin story belongs much more securely to folklore than verified history. And then there's that wand. America in 1955 was deep in the first great age of flying-saucer fascination. UFO reports were multiplying, science-fiction theaters were filled with extraterrestrial visitors, and stories of strange humanoids carrying mysterious technology occupied a very different corner of the American imagination. Three small beings beside a road carrying a sparking device don't necessarily sound like unknown amphibians at all. They sound suspiciously like visitors. The documentary trail is too weak to conclude that the Frogman began as a UFO story, but the possibility reveals just how dramatically a story can change depending upon the name we eventually give its creature. Then came 1972. Loveland police officers Ray Shockey and Mark Mathews encountered unusual animals near the Little Miami River seventeen years after the alleged 1955 incident. Suddenly, the older story had something it had previously lacked: recognizable witnesses and the authority of a police uniform. Three mysterious humanoids from 1955 could become earlier examples of the same creature encountered by police in 1972, while those later encounters appeared to prove that something had been returning to the river for decades. Separate stories became sightings. Sightings became a pattern. And eventually, the pattern became a monster. Once the name Loveland Frogman took hold, the transformation accelerated. Paranormal books, cryptozoology collections and eventually the internet standardized a creature that eyewitness testimony had left frustratingly incomplete. Artists supplied enormous eyes, long limbs, webbed hands and unmistakably amphibian features until generations of people who had never seen the creature nevertheless knew exactly what a Loveland Frogman was supposed to look like. And somehow, through every transformation, the sparking wand survived. This week on The Devil Within, we follow one of America's strangest cryptids from an uncertain roadside encounter through police reports, paranormal publishing and the internet, examining how folklore can create a coherent history from stories that may never have belonged together in the first place. Because the Loveland Frogman wasn't simply discovered. It was assembled. Next time, the Frogman enters the smartphone age when teenagers playing Pokémon Go near Loveland encounter something strange beside the water. We'll also meet the police officer who publicly tried to kill his own legend by insisting that the Frogman he encountered in 1972 was actually a tailless iguana—and discover why Loveland kept its monster anyway. Listen & Follow: Follow The Devil Within wherever you get your podcasts. Rate & Review: Leave us a 5-star rating and review to help new listeners discover the show. Watch & Subscribe: Watch The Devil Within on the Evio Creative YouTube channel. Subscribe and turn on notifications so you never miss a new episode. Join the Conversation: Follow @thedevilwithinpod and send your stories, sightings and tips to info@eviocreative.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
September 21 · 22 min
The New Monsters: The Loveland Frogman - Part One
THE DEVIL WITHIN THE NEW MONSTERS: THE LOVELAND FROGMAN Episode One — Encounter There are places where the modern world seems to thin after dark. Outside Loveland, Ohio, the Little Miami River winds through wooded banks, bridges and stretches of road where everything beyond the headlights can disappear into darkness. It was along this landscape in March 1972 that Loveland police officer Ray Shockey reportedly encountered something strange near the roadway—an unusual creature that moved toward the guardrail and vanished in the direction of the river. Then another Loveland police officer encountered something in roughly the same area. This week, The New Monsters investigates the legend of the Loveland Frogman, one of Ohio's strangest and most beloved cryptids. But beneath the stories of upright amphibious creatures and mysterious encounters is something even more interesting: a collection of separate incidents that gradually became the history of a single monster. We begin with the landscape itself and the Little Miami River, the waterway that helped shape Loveland long before anyone imagined a Frogman living beside it. From Indigenous history and early settlement to farms, mills, railroads and the growth of Cincinnati, the river became both an economic corridor and a natural boundary between civilization and the remaining woods. Even as modern development spread outward, the river preserved precisely the sort of places where folklore thrives: dark water, wooded banks, blind curves and roads that surrender to the landscape after sunset. Then we travel back to 1955, when the earliest and most mysterious chapter of the Frogman legend supposedly occurred. Later versions describe a motorist encountering several short, upright creatures with leathery, frog-like bodies—and even claim that one carried a bizarre rod or wand capable of producing sparks. The problem is that the original encounter is difficult to document cleanly, and many of its most famous details reach us through later retellings. Seventeen years later, the story becomes considerably harder to ignore. In March 1972, Officer Shockey reported encountering an unusual animal while driving near the Little Miami. Fellow officer Mark Mathews subsequently encountered something in the same area and fired at it. Years later, Mathews would insist there was nothing supernatural about what he saw: according to him, the creature was a large iguana missing its tail, probably an escaped or abandoned exotic pet. That should have killed the legend. Instead, it helped create one. Because once the name Frogman entered the story, separate encounters began fitting together. The mysterious creatures of 1955 became earlier sightings of the animal encountered by police in 1972, while the credibility of the later police encounters reached backward and gave the older story an authority it had never possessed on its own. Loveland no longer had an unexplained animal sighting; it had a history. And that's where our investigation begins. IN THIS EPISODE The Little Miami River and the history that shaped Loveland; the mysterious and difficult-to-document 1955 encounter; Ray Shockey's 1972 roadside sighting; Mark Mathews and the alleged tailless iguana; the exotic-pet explanation; and the strange process by which separate stories became the mythology of the Loveland Frogman. Next time on The New Monsters, we'll go deeper into the bizarre 1955 encounter, investigate the Frogman's infamous sparking wand, and discover how paranormal books, local storytelling and eventually the internet transformed a handful of uncertain encounters into one of America's most recognizable regional cryptids. Listen & Follow: Follow The Devil Within wherever you get your podcasts. Rate & Review: Leave us a 5-star rating and review to help more listeners discover the show. Watch & Subscribe: Watch The Devil Within on the Evio Creative YouTube channel. Subscribe and turn on notifications for every new episode. Join the Conversation: Follow @thedevilwithinpod and send your stories, sightings and tips to info@eviocreative.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
September 21 · 15 min
The Devil's Ledger - Week of September 21st, 2026
THE DEVIL’S LEDGER Week of September 21, 2026 Football is back, fall is finally arriving, and the Evio Universe has assembled a particularly strange collection of stories this week. We begin with The Creepiest Thing I Heard This Week, where an unsettling internet trend has transformed one of Dr. Seuss’s most beloved characters into nightmare fuel. AI-generated images of a sinister Cat in the Hat lurking outside homes and schools have prompted police investigations across the country, juvenile arrests—and, in Canada, a bizarre real-world incident involving someone in costume allegedly chasing a teenage girl through a neighborhood. Then, on The Devil Within, we head to Ohio for the conclusion of our investigation into the Loveland Frogman. From a murky 1955 encounter involving strange humanoid figures and a supposedly sparking wand to two police encounters in 1972 and a wonderfully appropriate Pokémon Go sighting decades later, we examine how separate stories became the biography of a single monster—and why even a police officer’s decidedly unromantic explanation involving a tailless iguana couldn’t kill the legend. On Criminal Mischief, Carolyn Ossorio investigates the developing case surrounding Philadelphia’s so-called “House of Horrors.” Authorities are investigating an Olney home in connection with at least seven missing women, as police and the FBI work through disturbing physical and digital evidence recovered during the investigation. With no remains yet confirmed at the property, Carolyn separates what investigators actually know from the speculation surrounding a case that is still unfolding. Over on The Slippery, Scott and Nancy enter the heavily filtered world of Adva Lavie, the Israeli-born former flight attendant and social-media personality accused of using dating apps and aliases to enter the lives of wealthy older men and steal luxury property. Then the story acquires a billionaire, an engagement and an even stranger investigation. Lavie has pleaded not guilty to the criminal charges against her, and the latest allegations remain under investigation. Finally, This Week in Horror takes us onto the highway with Passenger, the new supernatural road-trip nightmare from director André Øvredal. A young couple leaves New York for life on the road, only to discover that something demonic may have joined them for the ride. And with that, we say farewell to summer and welcome back pumpkin spice, football weekends, open sweater cabinets, earlier sunsets, changing leaves and—hopefully—a slight slowing of the relentless pace of life. Listen and follow the shows of the Evio Creative network wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoy what we’re doing, leave us a five-star rating and review and help other listeners discover the Evio Universe. Watch and subscribe on the Evio Creative YouTube channel, and turn on notifications so you never miss a new episode. Until next week, we’ll see you across the Evio Universe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
September 18 · 23 min
The New Monsters: The Bunny Man - Part Three
THE DEVIL WITHIN THE NEW MONSTERS: THE BUNNY MAN Episode Three: Midnight at the Overpass By the 1990s, everybody in Northern Virginia seemed to know the rules. Drive out to Bunny Man Bridge after dark. Wait until midnight. Turn off the headlights. Say his name three times. Maybe get out of the car. Maybe come on Halloween. Nobody could agree on exactly how you summoned the Bunny Man, but that hardly mattered. Because everybody agreed that if you stayed beneath that railroad bridge long enough, something would happen. In the final chapter of our three-part investigation into The Bunny Man, we follow one of America's strangest urban legends through its most important transformation. What began with two reported encounters with a rabbit-costumed stranger in Fairfax County in October 1970 eventually became something teenagers could actually participate in. This week, we head back beneath the railroad tracks outside Clifton, Virginia, during an era when American suburbia was developing some very particular nightmares of its own. Stranger danger was reshaping childhood. Parents inspected Halloween candy for razor blades and poison. The Satanic Panic warned that secret cults might be hiding behind otherwise ordinary American life, while a new generation of slasher movies discovered that the safest-looking suburbs made particularly effective places for monsters. The Bunny Man fit right in. His rabbit costume corrupted something associated with childhood innocence. His axe gave him the silhouette of a horror villain. Better still, you didn't need to travel into some remote wilderness to find him. You needed a car, a few friends and enough nerve to drive into the woods. Folklorists call it legend tripping: traveling to a supposedly haunted place specifically to test the story. Haunted railroad crossings, Crybaby Bridges, cemeteries, abandoned houses and mirrors capable of summoning Bloody Mary all operate on variations of the same brilliant idea. They don't merely give you a monster to believe in. They give you something to do. Bunny Man Bridge became one of those places. Every group of teenagers who drove beneath the tracks created another opportunity for reality to misbehave. A deer moving through the woods became a person. A branch became a weapon. A reflection became a pair of eyes. Then a freight train thundered overhead, somebody screamed, and by Monday morning four people remembered the same ten seconds four different ways. Then the internet arrived. The Bunny Man had spent decades traveling through newspapers, playgrounds, school buses, parties and word of mouth. Home computers and dial-up connections suddenly removed geography from the equation. The abandoned asylum could be repeated from website to website. An escaped inmate could acquire a name, a biography and a body count. Eventually, repetition itself began impersonating evidence. That makes the Bunny Man an important creature in the evolution of The New Monsters. He wasn't born online like Slender Man, and he wasn't collaboratively constructed on the internet like the Backrooms. The internet didn't create the Bunny Man. It inherited him. But before we leave Fairfax County, we return to the question buried beneath more than half a century of mythology: Who was actually inside the bunny suit? Strip away the asylum. Strip away the escaped inmates, mutilated rabbits, murders and supernatural bridge rituals, and two reported incidents remain. In October 1970, witnesses described a rabbit-costumed figure carrying weapons and angrily complaining about trespassing. During the first encounter, a hatchet reportedly came through the window of a car. Ten days later, a similarly dressed person was reportedly encountered near an unfinished house, again armed and again furious about trespassers. Was it an elaborate Halloween prank that escalated? An attempt to frighten people away from private property? Someone angry about the relentless development transforming Fairfax County around him? All are possibilities. None is an answer. More than half a century later, the person beneath those rabbit ears remains unidentified. And perhaps that's why the Bunny Man survives so well. Remove the supernatural mythology and the story doesn't become ordinary. The strange part was there from the beginning. A newspaper story became a playground story. The playground story acquired a bridge. The bridge acquired an asylum. The asylum acquired escaped inmates and murders. Teenagers turned the bridge into a pilgrimage site, and eventually the internet gathered every version into a sprawling digital mythology. No single person created the Bunny Man we know today. Thousands of people did. NEXT TIME ON THE NEW MONSTERS THE LOVELAND FROGMAN Next time, we're heading west to Loveland, Ohio, where another distinctly American monster emerged along the Little Miami River. The story begins with a murky 1955 account involving several short, upright creatures reportedly encountered near the river—one of them, wonderfully, supposedly holding something resembling a wand or metal rod that produced sparks. Then, in March 1972, a Loveland police officer reported encountering a strange leathery animal near the roadway. Another officer would soon encounter something as well. And this time, he shot it. Decades later, that officer would insist the famous Frogman wasn't a monster at all. According to him, he'd encountered a large, tailless iguana, probably someone's escaped exotic pet. That should have killed the legend. It didn't. Next time on The New Monsters: The Loveland Frogman. LISTEN • FOLLOW • WATCH Follow The Devil Within wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a 5-star rating and review. It remains one of the best ways to help new listeners discover the show. Watch The Devil Within on the Evio Creative YouTube channel, subscribe, and turn on notifications for new episodes and videos. And join us on Instagram at @thedevilwithinpod. The Bunny Man: Episode Three — Midnight at the Overpass. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
September 16 · 25 min
The New Monsters: The Bunny Man - Part Two
THE DEVIL WITHIN THE NEW MONSTERS: THE BUNNY MAN Episode Two: The Bridge There is a railroad bridge outside Clifton, Virginia, where Colchester Road narrows into a single lane and disappears beneath the tracks. For generations of Northern Virginia teenagers, it has been known by another name: Bunny Man Bridge. According to the legend, this is where the Bunny Man lived, killed and perhaps died. Some versions claim he was an escaped asylum patient who vanished into the surrounding woods after a transport bus crashed. Others add mutilated rabbits hanging from trees, murdered children, bodies suspended from the railroad tracks and a killer who eventually returned from the dead. It's a spectacular horror story. There's just one problem: almost none of it appears to have happened. In Episode Two of our three-part investigation, we follow the Bunny Man away from the documented encounters on Guinea Road and into the place that transformed him from a bizarre local mystery into a full-fledged American monster. Research by Fairfax County historian and archivist Brian Conley found no evidence of the asylum, the escaped inmates or the Bunny Man massacre supposedly connected to the bridge. The two documented incidents from October 1970 happened miles away. So how did the Bunny Man get to Clifton? We travel back through the history of the village itself, from the arrival of the Orange and Alexandria Railroad in 1858 to its importance during the Civil War, when the tracks became part of the military infrastructure connecting a country tearing itself apart. After the war, a railroad village grew here, preserving a pocket of older Northern Virginia even as suburban Washington expanded around it. That landscape gave the legend something Guinea Road eventually couldn't: permanence. Construction sites become houses. Woods are cleared. Empty lots acquire addresses. But a secluded railroad overpass surrounded by trees can remain unsettling for generations. Better still, it gave teenagers somewhere they could actually visit. The Bunny Man stopped being merely something people heard about and became something they could go looking for. From there, the mythology began building backward. An asylum appeared where historical research has found none. A bus crashed. Patients escaped. Rabbits were slaughtered. One fugitive supposedly died while another became the Bunny Man. Eventually murders, Halloween rituals and supernatural encounters were attached to the bridge, creating an elaborate origin story for a monster whose real identity had never been established. We'll explore why those additions were so effective, how the abandoned asylum became one of American horror's favorite shortcuts for hidden evil, and why the Bunny Man's axe survived the transformation from reported weapon to unmistakable horror icon. Most importantly, we'll see the moment when folklore becomes interactive. Teenagers began driving beneath the bridge after dark, turning off their engines and waiting for something to happen. Every movement in the woods, unexpected car or freight train thundering overhead offered another opportunity for the story to reproduce itself. Because the Bunny Man didn't become immortal when somebody died beneath those railroad tracks. He became immortal when people started going there to find him. NEXT TIME In the final chapter of our Bunny Man story, Midnight at the Overpass, we follow the legend through the 1980s and 1990s and into the early internet, when a regional Virginia ghost story suddenly gained access to a global audience. We'll explore Halloween pilgrimages, stranger danger, Satanic Panic and the peculiar rituals that taught generations of teenagers how to summon a monster. Then we'll return to October 1970 and the question that none of the mythology has ever answered: Who was actually inside the rabbit suit? LISTEN • WATCH • FOLLOW Listen & Follow: Follow The Devil Within wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss the final chapter of The Bunny Man. Rate & Review: Leave us a 5-star rating and review. It remains one of the best ways to help new listeners discover the show. Watch & Subscribe: Watch The Devil Within on the Evio Creative YouTube channel, subscribe, and turn on notifications for new episodes and videos. Join the Conversation: Follow @thedevilwithinpod and tell us: Would you spend midnight beneath Bunny Man Bridge? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
September 14 · 22 min
The New Monsters: The Bunny Man - Part One
THE DEVIL WITHIN THE NEW MONSTERS: THE BUNNY MAN Episode One: The Man on Guinea Road In October 1970, along a dark stretch of Guinea Road in Fairfax County, Virginia, a young couple sitting inside their car saw someone emerge from the woods. The stranger appeared to be wearing a white suit with long rabbit ears. He began shouting about private property, claimed to have their license plate number—and then hurled a hatchet through the passenger window. The couple escaped. Police recovered the weapon. The man in the rabbit costume vanished. If that were the end of the story, the Bunny Man might have survived as little more than a spectacularly bizarre newspaper clipping. But ten days later, another encounter was reported nearby. This time, security guard Paul Phillips discovered a rabbit-costumed figure at an unfinished house, carrying a long-handled axe and reportedly chopping at the structure while complaining about trespassers. Two incidents had given Northern Virginia something much harder to dismiss: a pattern. In Episode One of our three-part journey into The Bunny Man, we go beneath the legend to the landscape that created it. Long before suburban Washington pushed into Fairfax County, this was a place shaped by Indigenous history, colonial Virginia, George Washington and George Mason, the American Revolution and the Civil War. By 1970, another invasion was underway as farms and forests disappeared beneath subdivisions, highways and construction sites. That transformation provides an irresistible backdrop for what happened on Guinea Road. The original Bunny Man emerged from woods being consumed by development, repeatedly complained about trespassing and carried the very tools traditionally used to clear the landscape around him. Whether any of that symbolism was intentional is impossible to know, but the timing helped create an almost perfect American monster: something lurking along the uneasy boundary where countryside was becoming suburbia. We'll also trace how two documented encounters began mutating almost immediately through newspapers, telephones, school buses and playgrounds. Before the internet could make legends viral, children and teenagers were already remarkably efficient distribution networks, repeating stories, changing details and filling unanswered questions with increasingly elaborate explanations. And somewhere along the way, the Bunny Man moved. The famous Bunny Man Bridge near Clifton was not the location of either documented 1970 encounter. Yet as the original construction sites disappeared and unfinished houses became ordinary homes, the secluded railroad overpass remained beneath the trees. Eventually the legend acquired the bridge, an asylum, escaped killers, mutilated rabbits and murder—transforming an unidentified man in a bizarre costume into something supernatural. But before we get to the ghost stories, we begin with the part that remains considerably stranger because it appears to have actually happened. Someone wore the rabbit costume. Someone carried the weapons. And more than half a century later, nobody has conclusively established who was inside it. Listen & Follow: Follow The Devil Within wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss Episode Two: The Bridge. Rate & Review: If you're enjoying The New Monsters, leave us a 5-star rating and review. It helps new listeners discover the show. Watch & Subscribe: Watch The Devil Within on the Evio Creative YouTube channel, subscribe, and turn on notifications for new episodes and videos. Join the Conversation: Follow @thedevilwithinpod and tell us: What do you think was really happening on Guinea Road in October 1970? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
September 14 · 19 min
The Devil's Ledger - Week of September 14th, 2026
THE DEVIL’S LEDGER Week of September 14, 2026 — Twenty-Five Years Later This week on The Devil’s Ledger, we mark the 25th anniversary of September 11, 2001 and remember the 2,977 people whose lives were taken that day, along with the first responders and rescue workers who ran toward unimaginable danger while thousands were desperately trying to escape. We also honor those who have died in the years since from illnesses connected to their work at Ground Zero. Twenty-five years later, “Never Forget” remains more than a phrase; it is an obligation to remember the victims, teach the history and honor the extraordinary courage witnessed that morning. THE CREEPIEST THING I HEARD THIS WEEK: THE CURSE OF DUDLEYTOWN Deep in the forests of northwestern Connecticut lie the remains of Dudleytown, an eighteenth-century settlement that eventually became one of New England’s most enduring haunted legends. Stories of a centuries-old family curse, insanity, mysterious deaths and strange creatures transformed an abandoned settlement into the so-called “Village of the Damned.” Historians have challenged much of the mythology, offering far more ordinary explanations for Dudleytown’s disappearance, but the legend proved harder to kill. Ghost hunters still seek it out despite the former settlement being privately owned and closed to the public. THIS WEEK ON THE DEVIL WITHIN: THE BUNNY MAN The New Monsters heads to Northern Virginia for the story of The Bunny Man, a legend that began with genuine 1970 reports involving a mysterious man in a rabbit costume carrying a hatchet or axe. From those strange encounters grew Bunny Man Bridge, tales of escaped lunatics and an abandoned asylum, alleged murders and a midnight summoning ritual. Across three episodes, we separate the documented incidents from the mythology and follow the Bunny Man from newspaper reports and playground whispers into teenage legend-tripping and eventually the internet. THIS WEEK ON CRIMINAL MISCHIEF: JAYCEE DUGARD Carolyn Ossorio examines the devastating 1991 kidnapping of Jaycee Dugard, who was just eleven years old when she was abducted near her South Lake Tahoe home and held captive for more than eighteen years. Joining Carolyn is legendary investigator Paul Holes for a conversation about the investigation, the evidence, the opportunities authorities missed and, most importantly, Jaycee’s extraordinary survival and reclamation of the life that was stolen from her. THIS WEEK ON THE SLIPPERY: THE DEADLY SECRET BEHIND WELCOME TO SWEETIE PIE’S Behind the family drama of the hit OWN reality series Welcome to Sweetie Pie’s was a crime more shocking than anything television producers could have manufactured. The Slippery examines how Tim Norman became the architect of a murder-for-hire plot targeting his own 21-year-old nephew, Andre Montgomery. Investigators from the FBI, ATF and local law enforcement eventually unraveled a trail of life-insurance policies, burner phones, cell-tower records, financial transactions and accomplices that exposed the machinery behind Andre’s murder. THIS WEEK IN HORROR: BLACK ZOMBIE Director Maya Annik Bedward’s documentary BLACK ZOMBIE travels beyond Hollywood’s flesh-eating undead to explore the zombie’s origins in Haitian history and spiritual tradition. Moving through films including White Zombie, Night of the Living Dead and The Serpent and the Rainbow, the documentary examines how a figure rooted in enslavement, stolen agency, resistance and survival was transformed into one of modern horror’s most recognizable monsters. Featuring historians, artists and horror figures including Tananarive Due and Tom Savini, BLACK ZOMBIE asks what was lost when Hollywood took the zombie out of Haiti—and what can be reclaimed by putting that history back. We close this week where we began: September 11, 2001. Remember the people who went to work and never came home, the passengers and flight crews, the firefighters climbing the stairs, the police officers and paramedics running toward danger, the passengers who fought back aboard Flight 93, and the families whose lives were forever divided into before and after. Life is short. Call somebody you love, take the trip, have the dinner, laugh too loudly, make something, and tell people what they mean to you while they are still here to hear it. Listen & Follow: Follow The Devil’s Ledger and the entire Evio Creative lineup wherever you get your podcasts. Rate & Review: If you enjoy the show, please leave us a 5-star rating and review. It remains one of the best ways to help new listeners discover us. Watch & Subscribe: Watch The Devil Within, Criminal Mischief and more on the Evio Creative YouTube channel. Subscribe and turn on notifications so you never miss a new episode. Join the Conversation: Follow @thedevilwithinpod on Instagram, and send stories, tips and feedback to info@eviocreative.com. Never forget. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
September 11 · 23 min
The New Monsters: Alligators in the Sewers — Part Three
THE DEVIL WITHIN The New Monsters: Alligators in the Sewers — Episode Three: The Monster Under Manhattan By 1980, the alligator had escaped. The legend that began with misplaced reptiles, a very real 1935 newspaper story and Teddy May’s extraordinary tales of an underground colony had finally crawled out of the sewers and into American popular culture. Hollywood was waiting. In the wonderfully excessive 1980 creature feature Alligator, a little girl brings home a baby alligator named Ramon. Her father eventually decides reptile ownership has run its course and flushes the animal down the toilet. Twelve years later, Ramon has survived beneath the city by eating discarded laboratory animals pumped full of experimental growth hormones. The adorable souvenir has become an enormous, man-eating monster. And the remarkable thing is that audiences barely needed the premise explained. By then, everybody knew the story. Baby alligator. Toilet. Sewer. Darkness. Monster. In the final episode of Alligators in the Sewers, we explore how one of America’s greatest urban legends escaped New York and became part of our shared cultural imagination. Robert Daley’s 1959 book The World Beneath the City gave Teddy May’s stories a permanent home. Thomas Pynchon’s 1963 novel V. populated Manhattan’s sewers with albino alligators. Books, newspapers and word of mouth continued adding details until ordinary abandoned pets had evolved into enormous, pale, blind creatures supposedly feeding on New York’s endless population of rats. By the 1970s, the city itself had become the perfect setting. Aging infrastructure, graffiti-covered subway cars, crime, disinvestment and the fiscal crisis transformed New York’s underground from a symbol of nineteenth-century engineering triumph into something darker. The tunnels beneath Manhattan became a place where anything might be hiding. Then Alligator gave the legend its monster movie. But reality has an irritating habit of occasionally helping folklore along. In 2001, a caiman appeared in Central Park’s Harlem Meer. In 2010, police found a young alligator beneath a parked car near a storm drain in Queens. And in 2023, workers discovered an emaciated four-foot alligator in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. None were evidence of some secret breeding colony beneath New York. They were almost certainly abandoned or escaped exotic pets. Which, of course, was exactly how the legend supposedly began. Nearly ninety years after East 123rd Street, New Yorkers were still finding alligators where alligators had absolutely no business being. And perhaps that is why this particular monster refuses to die. The sewer alligator was assembled from pieces of reality. Americans really did buy baby alligators. People really did abandon exotic pets. Crocodilians really have appeared in New York. Beneath the streets really does exist an enormous hidden geography of sewers, subway tunnels, utility corridors, buried waterways and infrastructure most of us will never see. Folklore simply connected those facts and populated the darkness between them. Today, New York has gone one step further and embraced the creature. In 2023, artist Alexander Klingspor’s NYC Legend placed an enormous bronze alligator atop a manhole cover in Union Square. The monster supposedly hunted beneath the city had finally returned to the surface as public art. First New York feared the alligator. Then it laughed at it. Eventually, it made the thing a mascot. And that may make the sewer alligator one of the prototypes for everything we’ve been exploring in The New Monsters. Long before Slender Man spread through internet forums, before the Backrooms became a collaboratively constructed online universe, and before millions of people analyzed pixels searching for the Fresno Nightcrawler, New Yorkers were already creating folklore in real time. They simply did it with newspapers, books, schoolyards and stories passed from one person to another. New York built an extraordinary artificial wilderness beneath itself. And every wilderness eventually gets a monster. NEXT TIME ON THE NEW MONSTERS: THE BUNNY MAN Next time, we leave Manhattan behind and head for the rapidly expanding suburbs of Northern Virginia, where another distinctly American monster emerged from an entirely different landscape. Our backdrop this time isn't the sewer. It's the suburb. In October 1970, police began receiving reports of a strange man wearing a rabbit costume who allegedly threatened people with an axe. Newspapers picked up the story. Then came another encounter. Over the decades, those incidents accumulated escaped mental patients, mutilated animals, murdered children and a lonely railroad overpass that generations of teenagers would eventually visit after dark. The strangest part of the Bunny Man legend isn't that much of what people believe about him never happened. It's that something really did happen first. Next time on The New Monsters: The Bunny Man. LISTEN • WATCH • FOLLOW Listen & Follow: Follow The Devil Within wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss an episode of The New Monsters. Rate & Review: Leave a five-star rating and review. It remains one of the most effective ways to help new listeners discover the show. Watch & Subscribe: Watch The Devil Within on the Evio Creative YouTube channel. Subscribe and turn on notifications for full episodes, videos and exclusive content. Join the Conversation: Follow @thedevilwithinpod and tell us which modern monster you want us to investigate next. 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