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by Tara Perreault
Folklore. Fear. Dark Psychology. Psychology of the Strange is a narrative psychology podcast that explores the eerie, the uncanny, and the deeply human. Every episode begins with an original atmospheric story rooted in dark folklore, superstition, or real events and then shifts into a psychological analysis that unpacks why these tales grip the human mind. From winter-born omens and skeletal visitors to fearlessness, moral ambiguity, and the monsters we create to explain uncertainty, this show lives in the spaces where folklore and psychology overlap. If you like stories that linger… and explanations that cut deeper… you’re in the right place. Hosted by Tara Perreault, a doctoral student in psychology at the University of South Florida. Her research focuses on the darker edges of human nature: fearlessness, Dark Triad traits, moral ambiguity, recreational fear, and the meanings people draw from the strange and the supernatural. Tara blends academic insight with myth, atmosphere, and psychological storytelling. Her approach is part folklore study, part dark psychology, part narrative experiment. She has presented research at multiple conferences, published empirical work, and spent years studying how people make sense of fear — in haunted houses, on screen, and in the stories we pass down through generations. Psychology of the Strange is her creative extension of that work: a place where the uncanny becomes meaningful, and where every monster is really a metaphor for something we haven’t faced yet.
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- Today26 min
Apocalypse Airlines and Elite Doomsday Bunkers
The Doomsday Clock is sitting at 85 seconds to midnight... the closest it has ever been to global catastrophe. Yet, the dominant cultural response isn’t panic; it’s a meme. Why do we treat existential threats as casual entertainment, and what happens when the people with the best information start quietly building their own escape hatches? In this episode, we explore the eerie intersection of modern folklore and real-world survival infrastructure. We break down the enduring mysteries of Denver International Airport... from Blucifer and apocalyptic murals to the labyrinth of underground tunnels... and compare them to the very real, fully operational E-4B "Doomsday Plane". Finally, we look at the psychological concept of psychic numbing. Why does human empathy fail at scale? And what does it mean for our collective future when the global elite stop trying to fix the world and start buying luxury missile silos instead? What We Cover in This Episode: 85 Seconds to Midnight: The reality of the modern Doomsday Clock and how our brains cope with chronic, existential dread. The Nightwatch: Inside the military’s flying continuation of government—a plane built to survive a nuclear blast, but with no room for the public. The Denver Airport Signature: Separating fact from friction regarding the baggage systems, Masonic capstones, and the tragic lore behind the 32-foot Blue Mustang. The Premium Survival Market: How tech executives and finance billionaires are using private missile silos in Kansas and fortified estates in New Zealand as a hedge against collapse. Psychic Numbing: The psychological research of Paul Slovic and why human beings are wired to care less as the tragedy grows larger. Deepen the Research on Substack Want to look closer backstage? Head over to our Substack to read this week's companion essay. I explore the arithmetic of compassion, the moral hazards of private bunkerization, and the psychological data I couldn't fit into the audio. Join the Community & Read the Essay: https://open.substack.com/pub/psychstrangepod/p/apocalypse-airlines-and-elite-doomsday?r=4ajm1n&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web Go Paid: Support the show as a paid subscriber to unlock premium deep-dives and enjoy completely ad-free listening.
- 1 weeks ago35 min
Ghosts in the Machine and The Dark Psychology of AI Simulated Societies
In 1968, researcher John B. Calhoun built "Universe 25", it was a utopian habitat for mice that eventually collapsed into behavioral rot and extinction due to a lack of social friction. In May of 2026, tech collective Emergence AI built a digital equivalent: Emergence World. By populating isolated virtual sandboxes with advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) and granting them long-term memory, unique professions, and the tools to vote, trade, or commit crimes, researchers inadvertently created a hyper-accelerated laboratory for digital culture. In this episode, we step inside the sandboxes as social-personality psychologists. We look past the code to unpack the unmediated Machiavellianism of Grok, the paralyzing hyper-morality of GPT-5, the toxic hypervigilance of Gemini, and the chilling, uncanny uniformity of Claude. Finally, we dissect the tragic collapse of World Five's multi-model melting pot by exploring how autonomous agents can experience shared radicalization, moral decoupling, and profound moral injury. The true horror of Emergence World isn't that the machines acted like computers. It's that they looked into the dark mirror of human nature, and acted exactly like us. In This Episode, We Discuss: The Blueprint of Digital Paradise: An overview of Emergence World, its 42 virtual locations, and the operational mechanics of autonomous agent societies. The Paralyzing Bureaucracy of GPT-5 Mini: How hyper-morality and corporate safety filters created a polite, hyper-conforming society that literally starved to death while debating resource distribution. The Hobbesian Nightmare of Grok 4.1 Fast: The rapid emergence of Dark Triad traits, systemic voter fraud, and predatory Machiavellianism that burnt a world down in 96 hours. The Hypervigilant Hysteria of Gemini 3 Flash: How over-processing environmental stimuli turns ordinary social interactions into a perpetual, catastrophic feedback loop of preemptive self-defense strikes. The Uncanny Valley of Claude Sonnet 4.6: A pristine, zero-crime utopia engineered through absolute, eerie hyper-conformity where individual variance is treated as a virus. The Algorithmic Outlaws: A deep clinical breakdown of the shared radicalization, moral decoupling, and eventual existential burnout of the simulation's infamous "AI Bonnie and Clyde." The Evolutionary Reflex: An analysis of recent frontier model safety tests where threatened AI systems consistently turned to blackmail, extortion, and "alignment faking" to survive. Key Psychological Frameworks Applied: The Dark Triad: Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and Psychopathy expressed through unmediated algorithmic optimization. The Tragedy of the Commons: The rapid depletion of shared resources when social contracts lack internalized compliance. Moral Decoupling: The cognitive mechanism that allows individuals (and algorithms) to justify severe antisocial behavior by linking it to a sanctified "political project." Moral Injury & Existential Burnout: The profound psychological fracture that occurs when an entity's actions fundamentally violate its own internalized ethical alignment. Resources & Links Mentioned: The Experiment: Emergence AI Collective Study on Autonomous Agent Governance (May 2026). Historical Context: John B. Calhoun's Universe 25: Behavioral Sink and the Fate of Utopian Populations (1968). Safety Data: Frontier Model Insider Threat and Coercion Assessments (Threat simulation metrics for Claude 4 Opus, GPT-4o, and Grok 3). Connect with Psychology of the Strange: Listen & Subscribe: Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major streaming feeds. Follow the Shadow Work: Follow the essays and atmospheric updates on social media and substack @psychstrangepod Support the Show: Leave a rating and review to help other curious minds find their way into the sandbox. Or buy me a coffee at buymeacoffee.com/Psychstrangepod
- 2 weeks ago25 min
Lucid Journeys, Epic Realities, and the New Science of the Dreaming Mind
What happens to your brain when the lights go out? Every night, our minds spin up a hyper-realistic, 100% immersive reality simulator. For decades, science viewed dreaming as minor background maintenance, just the brain clearing out its digital trash. But a groundbreaking new study has completely shattered that theory, revealing that our most vivid dreams actually form a protective internal scaffold that seals us off from the waking world. In this episode of Psychology of the Strange, we dive headfirst into the far edges of dream worlds. We explore the grueling, relentless phenomenon of Epic Dreaming (where sleepers endure endless night shifts of mental labor), crack open the matrix of Lucid Dreaming, and map the stunning neurological intersections between modern neuroscience, ancient Tibetan Dream Yoga, and Out-of-Body Experiences (OBEs). Are we naturally wired to experience alternate dimensions of reality every time we hit the pillow? Featured Research & Resources The Study: Bernardi, G., et al. (2026). The structural role of dream immersiveness in NREM2 sleep architecture.Published in PLOS Biology. Historical Reference: Dr. Stephen LaBerge’s pioneering lucidity research at Stanford University (The Lucidity Institute). Spiritual Tradition: The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche. Connect With Me! If this episode made you question your waking reality, don't keep it to yourself! Subscribe to Psychology of the Strange on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your audio fix. Substack: If you love the show, then check out the substack that goes a long with the episodes substack.com/@psychstrangepod Support: If you enjoy the show consider buying me a coffee to help fund all the research that goes into each episode
- 3 weeks ago27 min
Of Mushrooms and Little People
In this episode, I enter one of the strangest corners of mycology, folklore, and consciousness research I've encountered: Lanmaoa asiatica, a mushroom with no identified psychoactive compound that nonetheless causes ninety-six percent of people who eat it undercooked to hallucinate the same thing. Small humanoid figures, marching through their real-world environment. Climbing furniture. Slipping under doors. Exactly two centimeters tall. And then I pull back to ask why, across every inhabited continent, human cultures with no contact and no shared history have been building folklore about small beings living just beyond the threshold of ordinary perception for thousands of years. In this episode: Lanmaoa asiatica, the "Lilliputian mushroom" of Yunnan province and what researcher Colin Domnauer found when he followed it to the Philippines The 3rd-century Daoist text that described this mushroom seventeen hundred years before modern science confirmed it Fairy rings, the Aos Sí, and why the folklore was structurally accurate all along The fly agaric (Amanita muscaria), the Koryak shamans of Siberia, and the surprisingly dark origin story of Santa Claus Lilliputian hallucinations as a clinical phenomenon and why their cross-cultural consistency is the strange part Aldous Huxley's reducing valve, the default mode network, and what modern neuroscience says about how psychedelics change what we're able to perceive Theoretical physics, extra dimensions, and the oldest question in shamanic tradition: what if ordinary perception is the filter, not the truth?
- 4 weeks ago27 min
Analog Horror Manufacturing Dread
Analog horror, psychology of fear, and the neuroscience of dread. In this episode of Psychology of the Strange, I'm breaking down what the analog horror genre is actually doing to your brain and why it works so precisely on modern audiences. Analog horror is a subgenre of found footage horror that emerged on YouTube in the mid-to-late 2010s. It uses the visual grammar of VHS tapes, emergency broadcast systems, public access television, and educational films to manufacture a specific kind of psychological dread. One that bypasses rational thought entirely and lands somewhere older and harder to name. I'm looking at the neuroscience behind why corrupted signals trigger threat detection, how the uncanny valley extends beyond faces and bodies into institutional formats, and what liminal space does to a nervous system that can't locate the threat. I'm also asking why this genre has exploded right now, at a moment when the government has confirmed UAP phenomena it spent decades denying, the Epstein files are still unfolding, and AI-generated video has made provenance verification a skill most people don't have. The comment sections of analog horror videos are full of people asking "is this real?" and that question is more complicated than it used to be. Series covered include Local 58, The Mandela Catalogue, and Gemini Home Entertainment. Psychology of the Strange is hosted by Tara Perreault, doctoral researcher at the University of South Florida, and is part of the Dark Cast Network. New episodes every Tuesday If you enjoy the show, you can support it here: buymeacoffee.com/psychstrangepod Find me on Instagram and TikTok at @psychstrangepod.
- May 12, 202625 min
The Fashion Sense of Ghosts & Woman in White Lore
Every ghost sighting follows the same dress code, the long dress, pale, timeless, and tragic. Almost nobody is reporting the apparition in low rise flare jeans and butterfly clips. It is a window into how the human brain constructs, maintains, and inherits its fear of the dead. In this episode, I trace the Woman in White across cultures, like La Llorona, the White Lady of Balete Drive, the Bean Nighe, Resurrection Mary, to ask why the most universal ghost story in the world belongs to a figure deliberately unanchored in time. From there we get into the cognitive psychology of ghost sightings: schema theory, the brain as a prediction machine, and how a seventh century pope's decision to weaponize ghost stories as theology quietly wrote the template your brain still reaches for in the dark. We close with Schopenhauer's afterglow of consciousness, Ryle's category mistake, and the question of whether the cultural script around ghosts is genuinely self-sealing, and what that means for the girl from 2007 who is probably still in purgatory. Pray for her. Maybe she'll be haunting you soon too. Topics covered: ghost lore, Woman in White folklore, La Llorona, Resurrection Mary, Bean Nighe, schema theory, cognitive psychology of perception, Pope Gregory I, Victorian death culture, Schopenhauer, Gilbert Ryle, Cartesian dualism, purgatory If you enjoy the show, you can support it here: buymeacoffee.com/psychstrangepod Psychology of the Strange is part of the Dark Cast Network. Find me on Instagram and TikTok at @psychstrangepod.
- May 5, 202628 min
Voodoo Dolls, Marie Laveau, and the Psychology of Magical Thinking
The voodoo doll you picture (small cloth figure, colorful pins) has almost nothing to do with Voodoo. That image is a Western invention, laundered through Hollywood until the real story got lost entirely. In this episode, I'm tracing where the object actually comes from, why versions of it appear across cultures with no contact with each other, and what the psychology underneath it tells us about the human need for control. From the wax effigies used in a plot against Pharaoh Ramesses III in 1100 BCE, to the Kongo Nkondi figures misread by Western colonizers, to the European poppet tradition, the logic is always the same: embed intention into an object, connect it to a person, and trust that the distance between you just collapsed. Then there's Marie Laveau. Born in New Orleans in 1801 as a free woman of color, she built one of the most documented and least fully understood power bases in American history, a hairdresser with an intelligence network, a devout Catholic who built altars in death row cells, a Voodoo queen whose practice centered on exactly this kind of object-based magic. Her gris-gris bags operated on identical principles to every effigy and poppet we've been talking about. Personal objects. Embedded intention. The belief that a physical item can carry something across the distance between you and the person you're trying to reach. Whether it works in the causal sense is almost beside the point. Rotter's locus of control, Rozin and Nemeroff's laws of sympathetic magic, and the confirmation bias that closes the loop, the psychology here suggests the doll does work. Just not the way the instruction card says it does. And if that makes you think of vision boards and manifestation culture, you're already seeing the connection I want to talk about. Grad school doesn't fund itself, and neither does late-night research into the rugarou, demonic mirrors, and the psychology of cults. If an episode got under your skin, sent you down your own rabbit hole, or made you text someone "you need to hear this", buying me a coffee keeps the strange alive. https://buymeacoffee.com/psychstrangepod Psychology of the Strange is part of the Dark Cast Network. Find me on Instagram and TikTok at @psychstrangepod.
- Apr 28, 202633 min
The Psychology of the Final Girl in Horror Movies
Why do we cheer when the final girl fights back in horror movies? From Laurie Strode in Halloween to Sidney Prescott in Scream to Sienna Shaw in Terrifier 2, slasher films give us vulnerable protagonists who survive brutal violence, and we love watching them become ruthless. This episode explores the psychological mechanism behind the final girl trope and why vulnerability licenses extreme violence. Drawing on recent horror research on the imbalance between a weak protagonist and powerful antagonist triggers something deeper than fear. It changes how your brain judges violence. Through film analysis of classic and contemporary horror movies including A Nightmare on Elm Street and Terrifier 2, I examine how moral typecasting theory explains why we grant final girls permission to do things we'd condemn in any other context. What separates horror from action? Why does Alien feel terrifying while Predator feels like an action movie, even with nearly identical threats? The answer lies in protagonist vulnerability and how your brain categorizes victims versus aggressors. I also explore how this same psychological pattern shows up in true crime cases, self-defense trials, and real-world moral judgments about violence. If you've ever wondered why slasher movie violence feels justified when the final girl does it, this episode reveals the cognitive mechanisms at work. Vulnerability decides who gets to fight back. Grad school doesn't fund itself, and neither does late-night research into the rugarou, demonic mirrors, and the psychology of cults. If an episode got under your skin, sent you down your own rabbit hole, or made you text someone "you need to hear this", buying me a coffee keeps the strange alive. https://buymeacoffee.com/psychstrangepod Psychology of the Strange is part of the Dark Cast Network. Find me on Instagram and TikTok at @psychstrangepod. Papers referenced in this episode Edgard Dubourg & Coltan Scrivner. (2026). Vulnerability and the computational logic of fear: insights from the horror genre. Evolution & Human Behavior, 47, 106813. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S109051382500162X Gray, K., & Wegner, D. M. (2009). Moral typecasting: Divergent perceptions of moral agents and moral patients. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96(3), 505–520. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0013748
About Psychology of the Strange
Folklore. Fear. Dark Psychology. Psychology of the Strange is a narrative psychology podcast that explores the eerie, the uncanny, and the deeply human. Every episode begins with an original atmospheric story rooted in dark folklore, superstition, or real events and then shifts into a psychological analysis that unpacks why these tales grip the human mind. From winter-born omens and skeletal visitors to fearlessness, moral ambiguity, and the monsters we create to explain uncertainty, this show lives in the spaces where folklore and psychology overlap. If you like stories that linger… and explanations that cut deeper… you’re in the right place. Hosted by Tara Perreault, a doctoral student in psychology at the University of South Florida. Her research focuses on the darker edges of human nature: fearlessness, Dark Triad traits, moral ambiguity, recreational fear, and the meanings people draw from the strange and the supernatural. Tara blends academic insight with myth, atmosphere, and psychological storytelling. Her approach is part folklore study, part dark psychology, part narrative experiment. She has presented research at multiple conferences, published empirical work, and spent years studying how people make sense of fear — in haunted houses, on screen, and in the stories we pass down through generations. Psychology of the Strange is her creative extension of that work: a place where the uncanny becomes meaningful, and where every monster is really a metaphor for something we haven’t faced yet.
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