The Cottingley Fairies might not seem like the kind of story you’d expect on Paranormia. There’s no crime scene and no shadowy figure in the woods. Instead, it begins with two cousins in a small Yorkshire village, a stream behind their house, and a borrowed camera meant to prove a simple claim… that they had been visiting fairies.

In 1917, Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright produced photographs that appeared to show tiny winged figures dancing beside Cottingley Beck. What could have stayed a family joke quickly spread far beyond the village. The images reached Theosophists who believed they were proof of hidden worlds, and eventually Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, who published them in The Strand magazine and argued they might change how people think about reality.

This episode explores how a childhood hoax became an international story, and why so many people, in a world still recovering from war and loss, wanted to believe it.

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If you have a story where crime and the otherworldly intertwine, something strange, unexplained or just plain haunted, get in touch at paranormia@alwaystruecrime.com.

Paranormia is an Audio Always production.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the early 2000s, a small group of teens and young adults found each other online through Final Fantasy VII fandom. It started the way so many internet friendships start with late-night chats, shared obsessions, and the relief of being understood by strangers who felt like home. Then a charismatic leader began offering something bigger than community. She claimed certain members weren’t just fans, but that their souls were “bonded” to the characters. Their real lives, she said, existed in another world, and she could help them remember.

What followed wasn’t just roleplay. Survivor accounts describe a household in State College, Pennsylvania, where the fantasy became a framework for control. Relationships were treated as “destiny,” boundaries reframed as betrayal, and “past-life” rituals that slid into coercion and confinement.

This episode traces how a fandom became a contained world, and why its aftermath became an internet legend. Some names are pseudonyms from published reporting in Vice; others are composite characters created to reflect roles described across survivor accounts. This is not a story about the supernatural. It’s a story about vulnerability, identity, and what happens when belief stops being private, and becomes the price of belonging.

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If you have a story where crime and the otherworldly intertwine, something strange, unexplained or just plain haunted, get in touch at paranormia@alwaystruecrime.com.

Paranormia is an Audio Always production.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In May 1828, a teenage boy appeared at the gates of Nuremberg carrying letters and a name… Kaspar Hauser. He could barely explain where he’d come from, but the letters claimed something extraordinary, that he had been raised in isolation, kept in a dark room since infancy by a man he rarely saw, then delivered to the city like a sealed message finally opened.

Nuremberg didn’t know whether it had found a victim, a miracle, or a fraud. Officials contained him, teachers tried to educate him, doctors examined him, and crowds came to stare. Rumour quickly outgrew the boy at the centre of it; a feral child, psychological experiment, political secret, even a stolen heir. As the attention intensified, so did the violence, injuries, alleged attacks, and a public argument that hardened into two competing truths. Someone was hunting Kaspar, or Kaspar had learned that mystery was the only way to stay protected.

The story ends in December 1833, in a winter garden in Ansbach. Kaspar staggers back with a stab wound and a small purse containing a note written in mirror writing, backwards like a riddle. He dies days later, and the question survives him. Was he murdered, or did he write his own ending? This is not a story about the supernatural. It is a story about identity, public obsession, and what happens when belief becomes the price of compassion.

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If you have a story where crime and the otherworldly intertwine, something strange, unexplained or just plain haunted, get in touch at paranormia@alwaystruecrime.com.

Paranormia is an Audio Always production.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.