The popular image of New Orleans as a spooky, mysterious city full of witchcraft and voodoo needs no introduction. But few know that the city owes this image largely to the work of an Irishman named Lafcadio Hearn – a Victorian-era writer and traveller who sought out magic and mystery wherever he went, a collector…

Get ready for a look back at a strange world: 2001 was a different time. A time of baggy jeans, wallets on chains, and a strangely heavy, angry, and proudly stupid style of music that inexplicably became mainstream. It was the era of Nu-Metal: a subgenre now so hated and disgraced that even those of…

Video games have played a key role in the evolution of horror storytelling over the last couple of decades. And if you have fond memories of pre-rendered backgrounds, polygonal zombies, bad controls and even worse voice acting, then this episode RESTLESS DREAMS: 90S SURVIVAL HORROR NOSTALGIA is for you! Cian and Aodh get misty-eyed recalling…

Join Cian for a quarantine session of brandy and nostalgia at the cabin in this much-delayed episode. If you fondly remember reading (and cheating) through Fighting Fantasy gamebooks in the 80s, this installment has you covered, as Cian talks us through House Of Hell, his favourite FF adventure. It’s a haunted house game that really…

With the world in the midst of difficulties and upheaval, we bring you a brief update on the Wide Atlantic Weird status, as well as a short episode about a woman from County Cork who was famous in the 1920s for her mediumship, automatic writing, her follow-up books to the Bible (!) and for telling…

Reading Lovecraft is a great way to discover new writers and strange old pseudoscientific theories. In this episode I discuss how through Lovecraft I first learned of Margaret Murray and the infamous Witch-Cult Hypothesis – the idea that the ‘witches’ persecuted in early-modern witch trials were in fact the survivors of an ancient pagan cult….

In the second of our American Militia episodes, we examine the horror that was the 1993 Waco Siege. In February of that year, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms bungled a raid on a religious cult, the Branch Davidians, and their leader David Koresh, who were living in a compound in Texas. What resulted…

In 1999, a supposedly-real ‘horror film’ was released that showed us virtually nothing while filling us with a terror of virtually everything. Those of us who were young and impressionable at the time still owe our fear of camping to THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, an upstart indie film that expertly utilised internet marketing, folklore and…

Sitting by a roaring fire in the Wide Atlantic Weird cabin, Cian delves into a potted history of the Ancient Aliens theory – once a fringe, almost-dead belief, it’s come back with a vengeance, now being one of the most popular paranormal worldviews out there. Statistically, you probably know someone yourself who believes that ancient…

Cian and Ali begin their deep dive into the American militia (or Patriot) movement. There are some odd beliefs very particular to America at play here, so we crack a couple of cans and get stuck into the founding of the country and the constitution to find out exactly why grown men like to LARP…