In 1930s Cleveland, bodies started turning up in Kingsbury Run. No heads. No hands. No names. The Cleveland Torso Murders weren’t just violent, they were methodical, designed to erase people the city barely saw in the first place. Tonight’s Phreak File digs into what’s known, what’s documented, and why the most terrifying part of this case isn’t the butcher. It’s how easy it was to make victims disappear twice.

Cotard’s Syndrome is the nightmare delusion where someone becomes convinced they’re already dead, missing organs, or fading out of reality while still walking around like everything’s fine. Then we pivot to the modern problem: AI convenience training people to outsource intuition and critical thinking until “the screen said so” starts replacing judgment. Clinical, eerie, and uncomfortably familiar.

Do you like true, personal ghost stories? Check out our friends over at Homespun Haints!

Deep in the Amazon, there are places the map doesn’t explain and trails that feel like they’re being watched. In this episode of Cryptid Captures, Phreak opens the file on the Mapinguari, a shaggy, foul-stinking forest legend whispered about like a warning instead of a bedtime story. From accounts of crushing footsteps and rotten-metal air to the unnerving idea of a “guardian” that shows up when humans take too much, we dig into what makes the Mapinguari feel real: not proof, but pattern. Because in a rainforest big enough to swallow towns, the scariest part isn’t that something could be out there.

It’s that the jungle might already know you’re there.

In March 1989, UT student Mark Kilroy vanished after crossing into Matamoros during Spring Break. What followed wasn’t a mystery that “might” be true. It was a documented nightmare: Rancho Santa Elena, Adolfo Constanzo’s inner circle, and a belief system twisted into a machine that treated human lives like fuel.

This Phreak File isn’t a whodunit. It’s a dossier on how fear gets organized, how violence gets dressed up as “protection,” and what happens when belief becomes a weapon.

In this episode, we dig into prions: misfolded proteins that don’t just make you sick, they rewrite your brain slowly and irreversibly. No bacteria. No virus. No real cure. Just a biological glitch that spreads by forcing healthy proteins to fold wrong, leaving the mind to unravel piece by piece.

Then we layer in Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, where perception itself can warp, rooms shrink, distances stretch, time stutters, and your own body stops feeling correctly sized while you’re fully awake. Together, it paints a brutal picture: sometimes the scariest “veil” isn’t supernatural at all, it’s the moment your brain stops being a reliable witness and starts turning reality into a funhouse with teeth.

The Aswang isn’t one monster. It’s an umbrella for an entire ecosystem of Filipino night predators: shapeshifters, witches, ghouls, vampires, and the infamous manananggal. In this episode of Cryptid Captures, Phreak digs into why the Aswang feels so real, how old the stories run, why certain regions carry the reputation, and the most unsettling part of all: a legend that doesn’t need proof to change how people behave after dark.

Graduation night in Springfield, Missouri should’ve ended with hangovers and blurry photos. Instead, three women vanished from a quiet house without the kind of chaos people expect. Cars in the driveway. Purses and keys left behind. A scene compromised too early. And decades later, no ending.

In this Phreak File, Phreak walks the verified timeline, separates rumor from record, and stares down the detail that makes this case unbearable: whatever happened didn’t need to get loud. Somebody knew how to keep it quiet.

In this episode, we dig into Lanmaoa asiatica and reports of “lilliputian” hallucinations, where people claim to see tiny, realistic figures moving with purpose like a hidden layer of reality slipped into view. Then we shift into Capgras syndrome, the chilling delusion where someone you love looks identical… but your brain insists they’re an impostor.

Two different perception glitches, one ugly question: when reality feels wrong, are you catching a glimpse beyond the veil… or watching your own mind rewrite the world?