Travelers on the Kansas trail stopped at a lonely inn run by a family of Spiritualists — and the ones who sat in the seat nearest the curtain were never seen leaving it.
🎵 Stick around to the end of the episode for a CROSSROADS HAINT song about the Benders!
READ A DEEP-DIVE ARTICLE ABOUT THE BENDERS: https://weirddarkness.com/bloody-benders
EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/bloodybenders
READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yckuftrv
FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: When you think of monsters in America, you probably think of Bigfoot in the American Northwest – or perhaps the Chupacabra in the South. Maybe you think of Dogman in the upper Midwest. But people don’t typically think of the American lakes and shores, where we have our own collection of monsters and sea serpents. (American Sea Monsters) *** As the saying goes – don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time. But once in a while the punishment goes far beyond what the crime calls for. (Cruel and Unusual Punishments) *** Marilyn Monroe was found dead of a drug overdose on August 5, 1962. And while the facts of her death are shocking, her troubling childhood wasn’t pretty either. We’ll look at the life and death of this Hollywood bombshell. (The Troubled Life And Shocking Death of Marilyn Monroe) *** We’ll take a look at, not the very first serial killer - but the first serial killer FAMILY in America! The bloody Benders! (America’s First Serial Killer Family)
CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = Show Open
00:01:45.702 = American Sea Monsters
00:15:00.217 = The Troubled Life and Shocking Death of Marilyn Monroe ***
00:36:04.254 = Cruel and Unusual Punishments ***
00:46:15.542 = America’s First Serial Killer Family
00:54:12.123 = Show Close
= Song: “Don’t Stay at the Benders” by Crossroads Haint (https://weirddarkness.com/music)
*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad break
LISTEN ON PODCAST APPS:
Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.com/wdapps
*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*
SOURCES and RESOURCES:
“American Sea Monsters” by Charles M. Skinner, posted at LegendsOfAmerica.com:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/ycy9tdes
“Cruel and Unusual Punishments” by Jonathan Hastad for ListVerse.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/y994jmsf
“The Troubled Life And Shocking Death of Marilyn Monroe” by Margarita Hirapetian: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/55bv7naw, and Kelly Kreiss: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/432bykfc for Ranker.com
“America’s First Serial Killer Family” by Miss Celania for MentalFloss.com: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yz7mbn7v
(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)
WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.
Originally aired: January, 2021
This episode of Weird Darkness travels from the sea serpents and lake monsters lurking in American waters to the drug overdose that killed Marilyn Monroe, through history's most gruesome execution methods, and out to a lonely Kansas inn run by the country's first family of serial killers.It opens with a survey of American sea monsters drawn from Charles Skinner's 1896 writings, cataloguing the hundred-foot serpent sighted off Cape Ann and Nahant, Massachusetts as far back as 1638, the fifty-foot finned snakes two men reported battling in Devil's Lake, Wisconsin in 1892, the leonine-skulled creature three women watched churn the Wabash River at Huntington, Indiana, and the Native legends behind them — the Huron horned serpent Okniont, the child-drowning Amhuluk of Oregon, and the water-devils of Crater Lake who hurled a Klamath man from a two-thousand-foot cliff.From there it turns to the troubled life and death of Marilyn Monroe, found dead of a barbiturate overdose on August 5th, 1962 at her home on Fifth Helena Drive in Brentwood — a death coroner Thomas Noguchi complicated when he found no pills in her stomach and learned her organ samples had been destroyed before toxicology testing. The episode traces the conspiracy theories that grew from her final phone calls to Peter Lawford and Joe DiMaggio Jr., the strange gap between when housekeeper Eunice Murray found her and when police were called at 4:25 am, and the 1982 review by District Attorney John Van de Kamp that ruled out foul play, before reaching back into the childhood of Norma Jeane Baker — the schizophrenic mother, the orphanage, the string of foster homes, and the marriage at sixteen that pulled her out of the system.Next comes a tour of cruel and unusual punishments across history, from the Norse Blood Eagle carved into a father's murderer to the Chinese lingchi or death by a thousand cuts, execution by elephant in India and Thailand, being blown from the mouth of a cannon in British-controlled Punjab, boiling alive under Henry VIII, the Roman poena cullei that sewed a parricide into a sack with a rooster, snake, monkey, and dog, and scaphism — the horror of being force-fed milk and honey, smeared with the rest, and left between two boats to be eaten alive.The episode closes with the Bloody Benders, the Spiritualist family who settled near the Osage Trail outside Cherryvale, Kansas in 1870 and turned their one-room inn into a slaughterhouse, seating travelers against a canvas curtain and crushing their skulls with a hammer from behind it before dropping the bodies through a trap door to a blood-soaked cellar. When the prominent Dr. William York vanished off the trail in March 1873 and his brothers — a colonel and a Kansas senator — came looking, the Benders fled, leaving behind a garden of buried corpses that may have numbered as many as twenty-one, and though real names later surfaced (Pa was John Flickinger, Kate was Eliza Griffith), no one ever learned where the family went or brought back proof of their fate.
