On Halloween night in 1974, Ronald Clark O'Bryan handed his son a Pixy Stix filled with cyanide, unknowingly creating one of America’s darkest modern legends. Behind his mask as a churchgoing father and optician, O'Bryan was drowning in debt and had secretly taken out life insurance policies on his children. His desperate act of greed would not only claim his son’s life but forever change how parents viewed Halloween candy.

The Tranquille Sanatorium, located near Kamloops, British Columbia, opened in 1907 as a tuberculosis treatment center and later served as a psychiatric hospital before closing in 1983. At its peak, it functioned as a small self sustaining community with farms, tunnels, staff housing, and medical facilities. Since its abandonment however, the site has gained a reputation for being one of the most haunted locations ins Canada, drawing urban explorers and paranormal investigators intrigued by its eerie atmosphere and tragic past.

At 3:00 a.m. on November 30, 1989, a Manhattan woman named Linda Napolitano claimed she was lifted from her 12th floor apartment window by a beam of blue light and taken aboard a glowing craft hovering over the Brooklyn Bridge. Within months, two alleged government bodyguards and more than twenty witnesses surfaced, saying they’d seen the same impossible event unfold above the East River. What began as a bizarre UFO report soon spiralled into a global sensation of obsession, paranoia, and accusation. What some say is the most credible UFO abduction story in history has also divide believers and skeptics alike unlike any other case before it.

It's time for the 4th Annual Halloween Week: 3 Urban Legends! We have researched 3 urban legends and found the truth and fiction behind each. As we tell the stories, we want to know if you can figure out which ones are true and which ones are false. We will of course reveal the answers, but first we want to test your wicked knowledge!

Two hundred years ago, a quiet Tennessee farm became the center of one of America’s most terrifying hauntings. The Bell family was stalked, tormented, and ultimately broken by a voice in the dark that claimed to want one thing, the death of their patriarch. What followed remains the only time in U.S. history that a ghost was blamed for murder.

For centuries, nursery rhymes have been passed down as harmless children’s songs, but their true origins are anything but sweet. It seems as though the innocent words we all remember may have been hiding nightmares all along. In this episode we’re peeling back the cute surface and digging into the dark history that’s been whispered through generations. Trust us when we say, you’ll never hear your childhood favourites the same way again.

Edgar Allan Poe, the master of the macabre, spent his life crafting horrors that crawled under our skin. But in October of 1849, it was his own final days that became the most chilling mystery he ever inspired. Found delirious in a gutter, wearing clothes that weren’t his, Poe left behind one last unsolved riddle... his own death.

On Halloween night in 2004, Napa Valley, a town that hadn’t seen a homicide in years, awoke to horror when roommates Adriane Insogna and Leslie Mazzara were found brutally stabbed inside their Dorset Street home. The only survivor, Lauren Meanza, escaped through the back door as the killer fled through a shattered kitchen window. Nearly a year later, DNA from rare Camel Turkish Gold cigarettes exposed the murderer as Eric Copple the murderer. He also just so happened to be, the husband of one of Adriane’s best friends.

What began as a week of new classes at college in Gainesville, Florida, turned into one of the most terrifying crime sprees in American history. Within four days in August 1990, five students were brutally murdered in their own homes, their bodies arranged in scenes so disturbing they would later inspire the classic movie franchise "Scream". But behind that Hollywood legend was a real life nightmare, and the man who brought it to life was far darker than fiction ever dared to be.

On June 19, 2003, police in Cheshire, England, discovered a crime scene so brutal it would haunt investigators for years. Inside a secluded outbuilding at Burnt House Farm in Tabley, 44 year-old Brian Waters had been tortured to death over a £20,000 drug debt owed to gangster John Wilson. The assault, witnessed by his own children, exposed a web of criminal ties stretching from the Netherlands’ cannabis trade to a 16 year international manhunt that ended with the capture of Christopher Guest More Jr. in Malta.

For over a decade, Israel Keyes moved silently across America, flying into random cities, renting cars with cash, and driving thousands of miles just to kill. He buried “kill kits” years in advance packed with guns, rope, zip ties, and Drano, waiting for the perfect moment to dig them up. By the time he was caught in 2012, Keyes had murdered a young barista in Alaska, abducted and killed a couple in Vermont, robbed banks to fund his crimes, and hinted at at least eleven victims scattered across the country. He was meticulous, patient, and terrifyingly ordinary, an unassuming father and contractor who built his life around murder and believed no one would ever catch him.

For over a decade, Israel Keyes moved silently across America, flying into random cities, renting cars with cash, and driving thousands of miles just to kill. He buried “kill kits” years in advance packed with guns, rope, zip ties, and Drano, waiting for the perfect moment to dig them up. By the time he was caught in 2012, Keyes had murdered a young barista in Alaska, abducted and killed a couple in Vermont, robbed banks to fund his crimes, and hinted at at least eleven victims scattered across the country. He was meticulous, patient, and terrifyingly ordinary, an unassuming father and contractor who built his life around murder and believed no one would ever catch him.

On January 31, 2004, exactly three years after her divorce from David Larsen, 30-year-old Teri Jendusa-Nicolai arrived at her ex-husband’s Wind Lake, Wisconsin home to pick up their daughters. Minutes later, he ambushed her with a baseball bat, bound her with duct tape, and sealed her in a garbage can filled with snow before abandoning her in a storage unit across the state line in Illinois. For 26 agonizing hours, Teri clung to life in subzero cold while police raced against time to find her. 

On a dark September night, a mother and son slipped into the Atlantic on a fishing trip that should have lasted only hours. A week later, the son was found alive in a drifting raft,while his mother had vanished into the depths without a trace. What followed was not just a search for a missing woman, but an unraveling tale of family fortune, murder, and betrayal at sea.

On 31 January 2019, 21 year old University of Hull student Libby Squire was refused entry to a nightclub, put in a taxi by friends, and dropped outside her home, but she never went inside. Minutes later, she was seen wandering Beverley Road, intoxicated, distressed, and without her phone or keys, before CCTV caught her getting into a silver Vauxhall Astra just after midnight. By 2:45 am she was reported missing, launching the biggest search in Humberside Police history, a hunt that ended with her body in the Humber Estuary and the exposure of serial sexual predator named Pawel Relowicz.

1995, when daytime talk shows ruled the afternoon. On March 6 in Chicago, The Jenny Jones Show taped a “same-sex secret crush” reveal episode. 32-year-old Scott Amedure would be telling his 24-year-old Jonathan Schmitz friend he liked him. The lights blaze, the crowd leans in, and a private moment goes public. But no one in those studio seats imagined that, days after the cameras stopped rolling, the shockwaves from that reveal would end in cold blooded murder.

Between 1968 and 1969, three women left Glasgow’s famous Barrowland Ballroom and were later found murdered. Each one of them was strangled with their own stockings and left near their homes. Witnesses described their companion as a tall, red haired man who quoted scripture, a detail that earned him the name “Bible John.” Despite one of Scotland’s largest manhunts, endless speculation, and even modern DNA testing, the faceless killer has endured as one of the most infamous and haunting figures in British criminal history.

Between 1968 and 1969, three women left Glasgow’s famous Barrowland Ballroom and were later found murdered. Each one of them was strangled with their own stockings and left near their homes. Witnesses described their companion as a tall, red haired man who quoted scripture, a detail that earned him the name “Bible John.” Despite one of Scotland’s largest manhunts, endless speculation, and even modern DNA testing, the faceless killer has endured as one of the most infamous and haunting figures in British criminal history.

Ted Ammon was a self made Wall Street success, a man who built his fortune through savvy deals and a relentless drive. But his bitter divorce and his estranged wife’s new romance with a hot-tempered electrician set the stage for tragedy. When Ammon was found bludgeoned to death in his East Hampton home, investigators unraveled a story as tangled as it was deadly.

From the mid 1980s through the late 1990s, Futoshi Matsunaga lived by deception, posing as a businessman, scamming millions, and using electrocution, starvation, and fear to bend people to his will. At his side was Junko Ogata, once a gentle preschool teacher, gradually broken down into his accomplice and forced to take part in murders that claimed nearly her entire family. By the time police finally caught the pair in 2002, investigators had tied them to seven killings and years of abuse so horrific that prosecutors declared the case without precedent in Japan’s history.