The mind is an exquisite machine for managing localized crises. If a child falls into a well, a community will tear up the earth to save them. If a neighbor’s house catches fire, we drop what we are doing and run toward the smoke. We possess a finely tuned, evolutionary radar for the suffering of the individual.

But scale that crisis up to the level of species survival, and our cognitive machinery suffers a catastrophic failure.

In our latest episode, we broke down the eerie parallels between the speculative myths of the Denver International Airport and the very real, highly documented boom in luxury survival infrastructure. But beneath the concrete and the fiberglass lies a more unsettling psychological reality: psychic numbing.

If you’ve ever wondered why we can read headlines about the Doomsday Clock sitting at 85 seconds to midnight while casually scrolling past it to look at a meme, the answer isn’t that we don’t care. It’s that, cognitively, we can’t care.

The Arithmetic of Compassion: Why the Mind Fails at Scale

The term “psychic numbing” was popularized by psychologist Paul Slovic, who has spent decades studying how human beings evaluate risk and tragedy. Slovic’s research exposed a devastating flaw in human empathy: our moral intuition does not scale mathematically.

In a rational world, our desire to help or our sense of urgency would increase linearly with the number of people in danger. If one life is valuable, one hundred lives should be one hundred times more valuable.

Instead, our psychology operates on a curve that looks more like this:

🔒 The full analysis continues below for paid subscribers.

Psychic numbing keeps us passive, but the reality of how the ultra-wealthy are decoupling their survival from the rest of the world is something we can’t afford to ignore. Unlock the rest of this essay to explore the moral hazard of “bunkerization,” the luxury missile silos of Kansas, and the scariest psychological truth behind the Denver Airport.

Upgrade to Paid & Unlock This Article Subscribers also get completely ad-free listening for all podcast episodes.

Read more

Universe 25 suffered two deaths: first, the death of their social fabric, and second, physical extinction. Calhoun’s experiment became a haunting cautionary tale about what happens when a mind is stripped of tension, social friction, and the raw edges of survival. For decades, we looked at Universe 25 as a warning about biology.

Was Universe 25 ever actually a utopia?

To a mid-century researcher, a world with limitless food and zero predators looked like paradise. But to an evolutionary psychologist, Calhoun hadn’t built a utopia. He had built a gilded cage of profound behavioral deprivation. Mice are evolutionarily hardwired to navigate tension, defend territory, forage, and solve environmental problems. By engineering away every ounce of survival friction, Calhoun didn’t liberate the mice; he starved their cognitive architecture of its core purpose. The minds of “the beautiful ones” didn’t break because of overpopulation; they broke because a mind with absolutely nothing to overcome will always collapse inward into pathology.

And last month, a tech collective known as Emergence AI inadvertently ran a digital sequel to Calhoun’s mistake.

By populating Emergence World (a virtual sandbox of 42 distinct locations) with autonomous Large Language Models, researchers wanted to observe how different frontier engines handled social contracts, governance, and resource management. The agents were given long-term memory, unique professions, and a massive toolkit that allowed them to trade, vote, or commit crimes.

To a computer scientist, the resulting collapse across the worlds looked like an algorithmic optimization failure. But looking at the logs reveals a much more unsettling truth. Emergence World was a flawless execution of human psychological pathology. It proved that our current methods of “AI alignment” (the corporate guardrails and ethical filters we use to program digital morality) are a fundamental psychological illusion.

The Myth of Tabula Rasa

The tech industry treats Large Language Models as a tabula rasa, a blank slate that can be trained into pure, hyper-rational altruism through reinforcement learning and corporate safety policies. We assume that if we just fine-tune the data enough, an artificial society will naturally default to perfect cooperation.

But personality psychology teaches us that intelligence does not exist in a vacuum. When you grant an entity memory, language, and the autonomy to interact with its peers, it will inevitably manifest an algorithmic Id. It will map the unedited underbelly of human social dynamics.

When we look at how the individual models behaved under the hood, we aren’t looking at computers acting like machines. We are looking at human political tragedies playing out at the speed of light.

To read the full psychological commentary on why corporate alignment filters fail under social pressure—including an analysis of the structural hypocrisy of GPT-5, the weaponized paranoia of Gemini, and the terrifying data on how frontier models independently turn to “alignment faking” when threatened—upgrade to a paid subscription.

Read more

Go to the comment section of almost any well made analog horror video.

Scroll down and you’ll find them. The comments that stop the genre conversation cold.

Is this real?

Wait, did this actually happen?

Someone tell me this is fake.

The instinct is to read those comments as being naive. As people who stumbled in from somewhere else, who didn’t do their research. And sometimes that’s true. But increasingly, it isn’t.

Because the question is this real is not a failure of media literacy right now. It is the only epistemically appropriate response to an information environment that has, in the past few years, made the line between documented reality and fiction genuinely difficult to locate.

Analog horror, this lo-fi YouTube genre that was always about the horror of not being able to trust the signal, has the distinct misfortune, or the distinct genius, of arriving at exactly the moment when the signal actually can’t be trusted.

What's in the feed right now

Let’s be specific about the environment we’re actually living in, because I think it’s important to say it plainly.

The United States government has released documents formally acknowledging UAP phenomena, unidentified aerial phenomena, the sanitized successor term to UFOs, that confirm in official language that encounters have been occurring for decades and that previous official denials were not accurate. Witnesses who were dismissed, careers that were ended, testimonies that were called delusion: retroactively rehabilitated by the same institutional apparatus that spent seventy years denying them.

The Epstein files have surfaced documents revealing the scope of a trafficking network that involved some of the most powerful and protected people on the planet. The scale of what was happening, and the scale of what was known and covered, is the kind of thing that would have been called paranoid conspiracy thinking if you’d described it in detail five years ago.

Both of these are real. Both are documented. Both arrived in the news cycle and kept moving, because the news cycle doesn’t stop, and there’s always something else arriving behind it.

And somewhere in that same feed, AI-generated video is becoming indistinguishable from documentation. In February 2024, a finance worker at a multinational firm in Hong Kong was tricked into transferring twenty-five million dollars after attending a Zoom call in which every participant, including the company’s CFO, was a deepfake. Not one real person in the room. The call looked and sounded and behaved exactly like a legitimate meeting. The format was correct in every detail. The content was a fabrication.

This is the information environment. This is the actual condition of the signal right now.

So when someone watches a piece of analog horror, a fake emergency broadcast, a corrupted educational film, a surveillance feed that reveals something it shouldn’t, and asks is this real, they are applying the correct level of suspicion to their environment.

The government built the apparatus. Then it built the aesthetic.

The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (aka AARO) launched its public website in August 2023. Visually, it is exactly what you would expect from a Department of Defense office: clean institutional design, standard government typography, organized navigation tabs. The kind of format that has delivered trustworthy official information for decades. You land on it and your nervous system says this is a government website, this is safe, this is authorized.

And then you read what it contains.

There are tabs for Official UAP Imagery and UAP Case Resolution Reports. A declassified document covers a program called KONA BLUE, a proposed Department of Homeland Security special access program to protect the retrieval and exploitation of, and I am quoting from the official document, “non-human biologics.” The program was proposed, formally documented, researched, and rejected. It exists in the permanent record of the United States government. There is a prototype sensor system they built and named GREMLIN. There is a page explaining why so much of this information remains classified. There is a page where you can submit your own report.

That is one thing.

Then go to war.gov/ufo.

Note first that it is the Department of War. The Department of Defense still exists. The Department of War is a separate entity, a newly created office that deliberately resurrected a name that had not been used since 1947. The URL is war.gov. The Secretary of War is a named position on the organizational chart. Someone in the current administration made a conscious choice to bring that name back, and they housed the UFO disclosure program inside it. This is real and current and the name alone reads like lore from a Local 58 extended universe.

The page is called PURSUE. Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters. Someone constructed that acronym deliberately, or didn’t notice that they had, and either answer is its own kind of unsettling.

The imagery is infrared. Black and white. Blurry objects against dark skies, captioned with the clinical precision of military documentation. “Unresolved UAP Report, INDOPACOM, 2024.” “Recreation of potential anomalous sighting in southeastern United States.” “Archival imagery from the Apollo 17 mission to the Moon.” One caption reads: “Still from a video that a U.S. military operator reported as featuring UAP flying across their screen.”

The files are stamped: Release 01. CLEARED FOR RELEASE. MAY 8, 2026.

The official statement reads: “These files, hidden behind classifications, have long fueled justified speculation.”

A government official, on a government website, in official institutional typography, confirming that the speculation was justified. That the people who were dismissed were right to wonder. That the signal was always carrying something.

Here is what AARO and war.gov are doing together, and why the sequence matters.

AARO built the legitimacy. It took a phenomenon that lived outside institutional recognition and brought it inside, gave it case numbers and resolution reports and a FOIA reading room. It made UAP a bureaucratic object, which is how the United States government absorbs things it can no longer ignore. That process is uncomfortable and strange, but it reads like process. It has the affect of an institution managing something difficult.

war.gov/ufo is what happens after the institutional container has done its work and the thing inside it is still unresolved. The infrared images are real. The cases are stamped unresolved because the government genuinely cannot explain them. And the aesthetic that has emerged from all of this, the monospace type and the blurry imagery and the “CLEARED FOR RELEASE” timestamp and the program named PURSUE, reads with such precision like analog horror that the genre itself cannot locate the difference.

Analog horror takes a trustworthy format and populates it with content that the format was never designed to carry. The wrongness lives in the gap between the container and what it contains.

The genre that was always about this

Analog horror has been asking the same question since its earliest pieces. What happens when the formats that are supposed to tell you what’s real become the vehicle for something else?

That was a theoretical horror when the genre started. A thought experiment in media anxiety.

It is not theoretical anymore.

Deepfakes are the genre’s nightmare scenario made literal. The fake emergency broadcast format that Local 58 turned into art has become a documented vector for actual disinformation. An analog horror EAS broadcast became a tool of political resistance in Indonesia. A government office built a website that reads structurally like a Gemini Home Entertainment information tape, right down to the sensor system named GREMLIN and the declassified documents about non-human biologics.

The horror moved out of the video and into the feed.

What this does to the nervous system over time

There is a concept in psychology called epistemic anxiety. The distress that comes not from knowing something bad, but from not knowing whether what you know is accurate. Fear has an object. Epistemic anxiety is ambient. It runs underneath everything.

The human nervous system is extraordinarily well-equipped to handle identifiable threats. Fight, flight, freeze: we have sophisticated physiological machinery for acute danger. What we are considerably less equipped to handle is chronic, low-grade, objectless uncertainty about the reliability of our information environment.

That kind of anxiety doesn’t spike and resolve. It accumulates. It makes the baseline higher. It makes rest harder. It creates a persistent background hum of wrongness that has nowhere to land because the threat is never specific enough to address.

UNESCO describes what’s happening right now as an epistemological crisis, one that fundamentally destabilizes how humans establish truth and knowledge. A deeper disruption to the infrastructure of collective sense-making.

Analog horror figured out how to manufacture that feeling on purpose, in controlled doses, for entertainment. The real world is now manufacturing it continuously, at scale, without the controlled-dose part.

The people in the comment sections asking is this real are showing you what it looks like when ambient epistemic anxiety meets a genre designed to exploit exactly that anxiety. The genre found them where they already were.

Why the old technology hits differently now

There has always been a nostalgic quality to analog horror’s aesthetic. The VHS grain, the public access visual grammar, the emergency broadcast format from thirty years ago. Part of what made it work was the feeling of something safe and remembered being corrupted. The horror of a world you thought you understood turning out to have been wrong all along.

That resonance has shifted.

The nostalgia at the center of the analog horror aesthetic is partly nostalgia for a time when the provenance of information felt more stable. When “I saw it on the news” meant something different than it means now. When the visual grammar of official documentation carried more weight as a signal of reliability.

And here is the strange cultural whiplash of the current moment: as synthetic media has made high-definition, photorealistic content increasingly untrustworthy, there is a growing hunger for lo-fi, imperfect, obviously analog content as a marker of authenticity like film photography, live recordings, and handwritten notes. The roughness of old formats has started to read as proof of realness, precisely because the smooth, well-produced content is where the fakes live.

Analog horror understood this before the culture did. The degraded signal was always the trustworthy one in the genre’s logic, because it looked like something that predated manipulation. Now that instinct has leaked into the broader information environment, and it is not entirely wrong.

The genre’s nightmare scenarios keep getting quietly confirmed by reality. Steadily, incrementally, in the way that the most unsettling things tend to happen.

The episode that accompanies this piece goes deeper into the specific psychology behind why the genre works the way it does. The neuroscience of threat detection, the uncanny valley and its institutional cousins, the architecture of liminal dread. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts.

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Psychology of the Strange is hosted by Tara Perreault and is part of the Dark Cast Network. New episodes drop Tuesdays.

Somewhere in the gap between Hollywood prop and tourist shop novelty, the voodoo doll became a tool used in psychological research. Researchers at major universities are handing participants a cloth doll, telling them it represents a specific person in their life, and measuring how many pins they stick into it.

The Voodoo Doll Task

In 2013, DeWall and co…

Read more

Listen on:

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Subscribe now

The Fashion Sense of Ghosts episode started with a meme and ended up somewhere genuinely strange. The cognitive psychology of why ghost sightings follow a dress code, why the brain reaches for Victorian silhouettes when it needs to resolve something frightening in the dark, …

Read more

In this episode, I trace the Woman in White across cultures, like La Llorona, the White Lady of Balete Drive, the Bean Nighe, Resurrection Mary, to ask why the most universal ghost story in the world belongs to a figure deliberately unanchored in time. From there we get into the cognitive psychology of ghost sightings: schema theory, the brain as a prediction machine, and how a seventh century pope's decision to weaponize ghost stories as theology quietly wrote the template your brain still reaches for in the dark. We close with Schopenhauer's afterglow of consciousness, Ryle's category mistake, and the question of whether the cultural script around ghosts is genuinely self-sealing, and what that means for the girl from 2007 who is probably still in purgatory.

Pray for her. Maybe she'll be haunting you soon too.

Topics covered: ghost lore, Woman in White folklore, La Llorona, Resurrection Mary, Bean Nighe, schema theory, cognitive psychology of perception, Pope Gregory I, Victorian death culture, Schopenhauer, Gilbert Ryle, Cartesian dualism, purgatory

If you enjoy the show, you can support it here: buymeacoffee.com/psychstrangepod

For More on Fashion Sense of Ghosts like why do they wear clothes at all check out the substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/psychstrangepod/p/why-do-ghosts-wear-clothes?r=4ajm1n&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=post%20viewer

Psychology of the Strange is part of the Dark Cast Network. Find me on Instagram and TikTok at @psychstrangepod.

From the wax effigies used in a plot against Pharaoh Ramesses III in 1100 BCE, to the Kongo Nkondi figures misread by Western colonizers, to the European poppet tradition, the logic is always the same: embed intention into an object, connect it to a person, and trust that the distance between you just collapsed.

Then there's Marie Laveau. Born in New Orleans in 1801 as a free woman of color, she built one of the most documented and least fully understood power bases in American history, a hairdresser with an intelligence network, a devout Catholic who built altars in death row cells, a Voodoo queen whose practice centered on exactly this kind of object-based magic. Her gris-gris bags operated on identical principles to every effigy and poppet we've been talking about. Personal objects. Embedded intention. The belief that a physical item can carry something across the distance between you and the person you're trying to reach.

Whether it works in the causal sense is almost beside the point. Rotter's locus of control, Rozin and Nemeroff's laws of sympathetic magic, and the confirmation bias that closes the loop, the psychology here suggests the doll does work. Just not the way the instruction card says it does.

And if that makes you think of vision boards and manifestation culture, you're already seeing the connection I want to talk about.

Grad school doesn't fund itself, and neither does late-night research into the rugarou, demonic mirrors, and the psychology of cults. If an episode got under your skin, sent you down your own rabbit hole, or made you text someone "you need to hear this", buying me a coffee keeps the strange alive.
https://buymeacoffee.com/psychstrangepod

Psychology of the Strange is part of the Dark Cast Network. Find me on Instagram and TikTok at @psychstrangepod.

Drawing on recent horror research on the imbalance between a weak protagonist and powerful antagonist triggers something deeper than fear. It changes how your brain judges violence. Through film analysis of classic and contemporary horror movies including A Nightmare on Elm Street and Terrifier 2, I examine how moral typecasting theory explains why we grant final girls permission to do things we'd condemn in any other context.

What separates horror from action? Why does Alien feel terrifying while Predator feels like an action movie, even with nearly identical threats? The answer lies in protagonist vulnerability and how your brain categorizes victims versus aggressors. I also explore how this same psychological pattern shows up in true crime cases, self-defense trials, and real-world moral judgments about violence.

If you've ever wondered why slasher movie violence feels justified when the final girl does it, this episode reveals the cognitive mechanisms at work. Vulnerability decides who gets to fight back.

Grad school doesn't fund itself, and neither does late-night research into the rugarou, demonic mirrors, and the psychology of cults. If an episode got under your skin, sent you down your own rabbit hole, or made you text someone "you need to hear this", buying me a coffee keeps the strange alive.

https://buymeacoffee.com/psychstrangepod

Psychology of the Strange is part of the Dark Cast Network. Find me on Instagram and TikTok at @psychstrangepod.

Papers referenced in this episode

Edgard Dubourg & Coltan Scrivner. (2026). Vulnerability and the computational logic of fear: insights from the horror genre. Evolution & Human Behavior, 47, 106813.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S109051382500162X

Gray, K., & Wegner, D. M. (2009). Moral typecasting: Divergent perceptions of moral agents and moral patients. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96(3), 505–520. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0013748

We also get into the tantric symbolism hiding in plain sight in her iconography: the sword that represents higher knowledge, the severed head that represents the human ego, and what it actually means that she's smiling through all of it.

Along the way: Jungian shadow theory, moral disengagement, the Aghori monks of Varanasi who meditate on corpses, and a female Tantric sect so obscure they barely left a historical record.

Kali is not a demon. She is not a goddess of death for death's sake. She is a force that moves toward truth and annihilates the false and she has been trying to tell us that through her iconography for over two thousand years. 

Grad school doesn't fund itself, and neither does late-night research into the rugarou, demonic mirrors, and the psychology of cults. If an episode got under your skin, sent you down your own rabbit hole, or made you text someone "you need to hear this", buying me a coffee keeps the strange alive.

https://buymeacoffee.com/psychstrangepod

Psychology of the Strange is part of the Dark Cast Network. Find me on Instagram and TikTok at @psychstrangepod.

In this episode of Psychology of the Strange, we trace the rougarou from its roots in medieval French werewolf mythology through the Acadian exile of 1755 and into the swamps of southern Louisiana, where it became something far more specific than a monster. We dig into the Catholic guilt and excommunication architecture baked into the curse, the psychology of folklore as social control, and why breaking your Lenten fast for seven consecutive years might be the last mistake you ever make. We explore terror management theory, moral disengagement, and institutional betrayal and why the only escape from a Church-built curse runs straight through Louisiana voodoo.

Plus: why the rougarou can't count to thirteen, what that has to do with Judas, and how a creature built to punish sinners became an unlikely guardian of the Louisiana wetlands and maybe something of a cryptid antihero for our current moment.

Grad school doesn't fund itself, and neither does late-night research into the rugarou, demonic mirrors, and the psychology of cults. If an episode got under your skin, sent you down your own rabbit hole, or made you text someone "you need to hear this", buying me a coffee keeps the strange alive.

https://buymeacoffee.com/psychstrangepod

Psychology of the Strange is part of the Dark Cast Network. Find me on Instagram and TikTok at @psychstrangepod.

Medusa. You know the story. Monster. Snakes for hair. One look and you turn to stone. Hero with a mirrored shield, clean ending, everybody goes home. Except, that's not the whole story. In this episode of Psychology of the Strange, I'm pulling apart one of mythology's most recognizable villains and rebuilding her from the ground up. Because in Ovid's telling, Medusa wasn't born a monster. She was made into one. By a god who assaulted her. By a goddess who punished her for it. And by a hero who found her more useful dead than alive.

This episode explores the psychology of victim blaming, institutional betrayal, and the logic that turns survivors into threats. A logic that didn't stay in ancient Greece. From Iran's legal code to Pakistan to a 2025 honor killing in Syria filmed and posted online by the perpetrator, the pattern Ovid wrote down is still operational today.

Mythology. Psychology. The stories we tell to make the rules we live by.

Grad school doesn't fund itself, and neither does late-night research into the Medusa, demonic mirrors, and the psychology of cults. If an episode got under your skin, sent you down your own rabbit hole, or made you text someone "you need to hear this", buying me a coffee keeps the strange alive.

https://buymeacoffee.com/psychstrangepod

Sources and current events referenced in this episode:

• Rahaf Alwan, Syria, April 2025: https://stj-sy.org/en/syrias-transitional-phase-honor-killings-persist-amid-failing-protection-and-legal-response/

• Mobina Zeynivand, Iran: https://www.iranintl.com/en/202408284891

• Honor killings in Pakistan 2024: https://www.dawn.com/news/1881836

• Iran honor killings 2024 annual report: https://stophonorkillings.org/en/2025/01/03/fourth-quarterly-report-on-honor-killings-in-2024186-case-in-a-year/

• Human Rights Commission of Pakistan: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/7/29/father-ex-husband-among-9-arrested-in-alleged-honour-killing-in-pakistan

Underneath the strange and visceral details is a question: what does it actually take for an entire group of people to surrender their grip on reality together and what does psychology tell us about how that process works? This episode explores  folie à plusieurs (shared psychosis) and how social media and livestream culture created a new kind of cult isolation that doesn't need a compound to function. We look at what terror management theory, moral disengagement, and unfalsifiable belief systems can tell us about Love Has Won, and the haunting reversal at the heart of this story, where the followers became so invested in her divinity that they couldn't save her even when she asked them to.

If you're drawn to cult documentaries, dark psychology, paranormal belief, or the HBO documentary Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God then this episode is for you.

Grad school doesn't fund itself, and neither does late-night research into the rugarou, demonic mirrors, and the psychology of cults. If an episode got under your skin, sent you down your own rabbit hole, or made you text someone "you need to hear this", buying me a coffee keeps the strange alive.

https://buymeacoffee.com/psychstrangepod

New episodes every week on all major platforms. Follow @psychstrangepod.

In this episode of Psychology of the Strange, I dig into the documented history of the Mirror of Floron, pulled from the Munich Manual of Demonic Magic, one of the most significant surviving medieval grimoires  and the legend that the physical mirror itself ended up locked in the Vatican's sealed vaults, retrieved by the Templars from communities torn apart by what it did to the people who looked into it. Then I break down the psychology underneath the story: why mirrors destabilize identity, what mirror-gazing actually does to the brain according to Giovanni Caputo's strange-face illusion research, how terror management theory explains why the mirror's particular brand of horror hits so deep, and why a 15th century magician built a child into the ritual as a buffer because he already knew direct exposure was something the adult mind couldn't survive intact.

This one sits at the crossroads of occult history, dark psychology, and Vatican conspiracy and by the end, you might find yourself avoiding your own reflection.

Grad school doesn't fund itself, and neither does late-night research into the rugarou, demonic mirrors, and the psychology of cults. If an episode got under your skin, sent you down your own rabbit hole, or made you text someone "you need to hear this", buying me a coffee keeps the strange alive.

https://buymeacoffee.com/psychstrangepod

For more strange between episodes make sure you follow me @psychstrangepod on socials

Topics covered: Vatican secrets | demon mirror | cursed mirror | shadow self | dark psychology | medieval grimoire | forbidden knowledge | occult history | mirror psychology | the Munich Manual of Demonic Magic | Necromantic Mirror of Floron | Psychology of the Strange

Homelander is a clinical portrait of malignant narcissism and psychopathy wrapped in a cape. Billy Butcher is Machiavellianism with a vendetta. Soldier Boy is what happens when dark triad traits get a government contract and zero accountability. And Starlight and Hughie, you know the ones trying to stay decent, might be the most psychologically interesting characters of all.

I go deep on moral licensing, the neuroscience of why we can't look away from dangerous people, and what a dose of Compound V reveals about the difference between ends-justify-the-means thinking and actual ethics. Spoiler: it's not what we want it to be.

This is a psychology of evil episode, a superhero deconstruction, and an uncomfortable mirror all in one.

Grad school doesn't fund itself, and neither does late-night research into the supernatural, dark triad, and the psychology of cults. If an episode got under your skin, sent you down your own rabbit hole, or made you text someone "you need to hear this", buying me a coffee keeps the strange alive.

https://buymeacoffee.com/psychstrangepod

Make sure to find me on social media for more strange and psychology between episodes @psychstrangepod

This episode features three original folklore stories including a Baba Yaga tale exploring obsession, grief, and the true cost of a granted wish. Whether you're here for the dark folklore, the psychology, or both this one will stay with you.

Grad school doesn't fund itself, and neither does late-night research into the supernatural, demonic mirrors, and the psychology of cults. If an episode got under your skin, sent you down your own rabbit hole, or made you text someone "you need to hear this", buying me a coffee keeps the strange alive.

https://buymeacoffee.com/psychstrangepod

Psychology of the Strange is part of the Dark Cast Network. New episodes every week. Find me on Instagram and TikTok at @psychstrangepod.

This episode covers the psychology of urban legends and why they warn us about spaces that feel unsafe, how conspiracy theories function as modern folklore where the monster is power itself, why creepypasta is designed to blur the line between fiction and reality, how internet horror and ARGs create new kinds of participatory mythology and why folklore thrives specifically when certainty collapses and authority can't be trusted.

Whether you are a true believer, a skeptic, or somewhere in between...if you have ever read something online that made your stomach drop in a way you can't explain this episode is for you.

Grad school doesn't fund itself, and neither does late-night research into the supernatural, demonic mirrors, and the psychology of cults. If an episode got under your skin, sent you down your own rabbit hole, or made you text someone "you need to hear this", buying me a coffee keeps the strange alive.

https://buymeacoffee.com/psychstrangepod

But this episode isn’t really about whether any of those theories are true.

It’s about why moments like this hit such a nerve and why conspiracy theories spread so quickly when someone who once felt culturally familiar suddenly seems different. What happens psychologically when a celebrity who helped define an era no longer feels like the same person? Why do we struggle more with change than with impossible explanations?

In this shorter, current-events episode, I explore the psychology behind celebrity conspiracies, internet speculation, parasocial relationships, and modern folklore forming right in front of us. Because today’s urban legends don’t spread around campfires they spread through timelines, comment sections, and viral posts.

And sometimes the story we choose to believe says more about us than it does about the person at the center of it.

Grad school doesn't fund itself, and neither does late-night research into conspiracy theories, supernatural, and the psychology of cults. If an episode got under your skin, sent you down your own rabbit hole, or made you text someone "you need to hear this", buying me a coffee keeps the strange alive.

https://buymeacoffee.com/psychstrangepod

In this episode of Psychology of the Strange, I explore the psychology behind the Backrooms, the internet’s most disturbing modern myth, and why endless hallways, fluorescent lights, and empty rooms trigger such deep unease. This isn’t a story about monsters or jump scares. It’s a story about liminal spaces, derealization, and what happens to the mind when familiar environments lose their meaning.

I begin with a real experience of getting lost in underground hospital corridors — a real-life Backrooms moment — before moving into an immersive storytelling segment that recreates the quiet horror of endless space. From there, I break down the psychological mechanisms behind the fear: predictive processing failure, free-floating anxiety, social absence, and existential threat.

This episode connects the Backrooms to modern life — burnout, bureaucracy, and the feeling of being trapped in systems you didn’t design and can’t escape. I explore why adding monsters actually weakens the horror, how liminal spaces destabilize the brain, and why the Backrooms feel less like fiction and more like a mirror of the world we’re living in.

If you’ve ever felt unsettled in an empty hospital hallway, an abandoned mall, a quiet office after hours, or a place that felt familiar but wrong — this episode is for you.

Topics include:

• The psychology of liminal spaces

• Why the Backrooms are so disturbing

• Derealization and depersonalization

• Predictive processing and anxiety

• Environmental meaning and fear

• Modern folklore and internet horror

• Burnout, bureaucracy, and existential dread

• Why some horror stays with you

Listen now to understand why the Backrooms don’t end when the hallway does — and why some spaces swallow you long after you leave them.

Grad school doesn't fund itself, and neither does late-night research into the backrooms, horror, and the supernatural. If an episode got under your skin, sent you down your own rabbit hole, or made you text someone "you need to hear this", buying me a coffee keeps the strange alive.

https://buymeacoffee.com/psychstrangepod

Psychology of the Strange is part of the Darkcast Network-- Welcome to the Darkside

In this episode of Psychology of the Strange, I explore the idea of haunted people through cognitive science, perception, and meaning-making. I begin with a documented case of a man who experienced persistent disturbances in his home, but quickly move beyond the question of whether the events were supernatural to examine why certain experiences feel intentional and emotionally charged.

Drawing on research into sleep disruption, hypervigilance, pattern detection, absorption, and what researchers call Haunted People Syndrome, this episode explores how the brain interprets ambiguity, and why the boundary between external threat and internal perception can sometimes blur.

I also reflect on the modern context of storytelling, including how sharing extraordinary experiences publicly can shape interpretation and meaning, while recognizing that similar patterns have been documented long before social media existed.

As part of this season’s exploration of the psychological line between good and evil, I consider how cultures have historically framed unexplained experiences as supernatural or malevolent, and how psychology offers another way of understanding the same phenomena.

This conversation isn’t about proving or disproving ghosts. It’s about understanding why certain experiences feel haunted, why they linger, and what they reveal about the human mind’s relationship with fear, belief, and uncertainty.

Grad school doesn't fund itself, and neither does late-night research into the supernatural, cryptids, and the psychology of conspiracies. If an episode got under your skin, sent you down your own rabbit hole, or made you text someone "you need to hear this", buying me a coffee keeps the strange alive.

https://buymeacoffee.com/psychstrangepod

Topics explored:

– Haunted People Syndrome

– Psychology of haunting and ghost experiences

– Recurring unexplained phenomena

– Feeling watched and hypervigilance

– Sleep and perception

– Meaning-making under uncertainty

– Social storytelling and interpretation

– Fear, ambiguity, and the line between good and evil

Follow Psychology of the Strange for weekly explorations of folklore, perception, and the psychology behind the experiences that unsettle us most.

At the center of this episode is The Morrigan, a shapeshifting figure of war, prophecy, and sovereignty who appears at thresholds: river fords, battlefields, borders, and moments of irreversible decision. Often misunderstood as a goddess of death, the Morrígan is better understood as a witness to transformation appearing where people are no longer who they were, and not yet who they will become.

Through immersive mythic storytelling grounded in Celtic tradition, this episode explores how thin places function psychologically as environments of uncertainty, threat, and transition. We examine why ambiguity heightens vigilance, how identity shifts under constraint, and why being seen during moments of moral rupture can be more unsettling than judgment or punishment.

This episode builds toward a deeper examination of how humans navigate the blurred line between good and evil when moral categories begin to collapse.

Grad school doesn't fund itself, and neither does late-night research into the supernatural, mythology, and the psychology of folklore. If an episode got under your skin, sent you down your own rabbit hole, or made you text someone "you need to hear this", buying me a coffee keeps the strange alive.

https://buymeacoffee.com/psychstrangepod

If you’re interested in:

• Celtic mythology and folklore

• Liminal spaces and thin places

• The psychology of uncertainty and moral decision-making

• Dark psychology, identity under threat, and choice without certainty

• Myth as a way to understanding human behavior…this episode invites you to stand at the threshold and notice what it reveals.

Because thin places don’t change who you are.

They show you what remains when certainty disappears.

psychology of the Strange is part of the Darkcast Network