Strange stories, checked for loose threads.
Weird Distractions follows Alex through strange corners of crime, legend, and paranormal lore, from Moon Point Cemetery to Connie Converse. The tone is casual and self-aware, but the episodes still keep one eye on sources, uncertainty, and competing versions of a story.
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Weird Distractions is an archived weekly show about stories that sit between crime, folklore, paranormal history, conspiracy theories, and unresolved rumor. Alex frames each episode as a temporary escape, but the material often carries real weight. The archive moves from haunted cemeteries and haunted locations to missing children, vanished artists, historical oddities, and strange public threats. It is not a sleek true-crime machine. It feels more like a researched conversation with the notes still on the table. That looseness is part of the appeal. In the Moon Point Cemetery episode, local lore about Mary Rutherford and the Hatchet Lady is weighed against gaps in the record. In the Rose Hall episode, competing versions of Annie's story sit beside questions about what can actually be verified. The Connie Converse episode shifts into a more reflective mode, connecting disappearance, depression, family pressure, and artistic disappointment without pretending there is a clean answer. Episodes such as Hazel the Mummy and Hales Bar Dam show the show's taste for lore where history and rumor have fused together. The Adele Marie Wells episode brings the tone back to true crime, with attention to uncertainty, witness reports, and the pain of an unresolved disappearance. Crossovers with Ye Olde Crime bring a looser, joke-heavy energy, especially around obscure language and old crime stories. Still, the show usually returns to the same editorial habit: tell the strange version, then check where it wobbles. Alex often flags when a source conflicts, when a pronunciation may be wrong, or when lore fills in gaps that records do not. That makes the show especially useful for listeners who enjoy eerie stories but dislike total certainty where none exists. The pacing is chatty and personal. The subject matter is dark enough to require care. The voice is empathetic without becoming solemn all the time. Weird Distractions works best as a back-catalogue listen for people who want folklore, mystery, and true crime in the same feed. Its oddness is the point, but its curiosity is what holds it together.
Made for: Best for listeners who like true crime, haunted history, folklore, urban legends, conspiracy theories, and unresolved mysteries presented in a conversational style. It especially suits people who enjoy eerie subjects with visible skepticism and personal asides.
What sets it apart: The show keeps the uncertainty in frame, comparing lore, reports, and source conflicts instead of flattening every story into one neat version. Its mix of solo research, listener weirdness, and Ye Olde Crime crossovers gives the archive a handmade, community-adjacent feel.
Weird Distractions was a weekly show where host Alex rotated discussing topics such as true crime cases, conspiracy theories, paranormal stories and more to provide what most would consider a 'weird' distraction from everyday life. Ending in February of 2024, please enjoy the back log of this show or check out the other amazing shows through the Cultiv8 Podcast Network.
Poisoned candy, haunted hospitals and vanished songwriters become your strangely companionable escape with Alex.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A Jamaican haunting shaped by jealousy, curses, revenge, disputed death stories, and an uncertain tomb.
Rose Hall works best as a haunted-place story with a clean, troubling spine: Annie, feared and powerful, is said to have cursed Melisand after the young English bookkeeper Annie desired loved someone else.
A mysterious disappearance becomes a careful portrait of Connie Converse and the people trying to reach her.
Connie Converse's mysterious disappearance gives this episode its quiet pull, but the story wisely keeps circling back to the life before it: the lost job, the abandoned musical dream, depression, and the possibility of alcohol dependency raised by her nephew, Tim Converse.
A Tennessee dam story turns grim as unstable ground, hard labor, and uncertain death tolls shape the episode.
Hales Bar Dam returns to a Tennessee story PlayNext has touched before, following host Alex as he tracks the project from the campaign to build the dam through Congress's 1904 approval and the creation of the Chattanooga and Tennessee River Power Company the next year.
A Canadian paranormal hotspot story grounded in Riverview's troubled psychiatric history and the accounts left behind.
Riverview Hospital comes through as a Canadian paranormal hotspot with a history that does much of the unsettling work. Alex traces the facility's move away from large-scale psychiatric care as patient numbers declined, placing psychiatric medications, hospital psychiatric…
True crime with haunted-house energy.
True crime with yarn in hand.
Dark cases told between friends, clip by clip.
Killers, ghosts, conspiracies and murderless capers, all tagged.
Host Alex, in the second-to-last episode of Weird Distractions, covers Rose Hall in Montego Bay, Jamaica, tracing its ownership from Henry Fanning's 1742 purchase through Annie Palmer, the plantation's fourth mistress, allegedly nicknamed the White Witch of Rose Hall for abusing enslaved people and using voodoo-linked magic.
Weird Distractions examines the disappearance of Elizabeth Eaton Converse, known professionally as Connie Converse, an American singer-songwriter born in Lacona, New Hampshire, in 1924.
Host Alex re-covers the Hales Bar Dam in Marion County, Tennessee, a location first covered years earlier by former co-host Christy, tracing its origins from an 1775 Treaty of Sycamore Shoals land deal and a curse allegedly placed by Cherokee War Chief Dragging Canoe through its troubled 1905-1913 construction, during which one estimate cites up to 700 worker deaths.
Weird Distractions and Ye Olde Crime split this crossover between Japan's Monster with 21 Faces and Greece's Antonis Daglis.
Alex tests three old slang terms—“hook it,” “bang up,” and “dump fencer”—with Lindsay on Ye Olde Crime.
Weird Distractions host Alex recounts the lore of Hazel Ferris, a supposed 1905 Kentucky fugitive later called “Hazel the Mummy.” Retellings say a hat argument led to multiple deaths, then place Hazel in Bessemer, Alabama, where she died in 1906.
Weird Distractions' “The Mischievous Kallikantzaros” covers Greek goblin-like creatures said to appear for 12 days around the winter solstice.
Host Alex covers Riverview Hospital in Coquitlam, British Columbia, a psychiatric facility opened in 1913 (originally named Hospital for the Mind of Mount Coquitlam, later Essendale) that housed up to 4,300 patients by 1956 before closing in 2012.
This episode explores the New England Vampire Project, discussing historical vampire panic cases from the 19th century.
Host Alex discusses an unsolved true crime case, with housekeeping about Patreon and new merch.
Host Alex introduces a true crime/dark history case from the US, with housekeeping and personal reflections before diving into the main story.