The Cult of Weird Twitter account has nearly 11k followers and has been sharing creepy and gruesome stories since 2011, but where you can find an even larger treasure trove of oddities is the Cult of Weird website. This site focuses on all things bizarre, spooky and strange, sharing stories that fall into various categories such as Aliens and UFOs, Weird Art, Cabinet of Curiosities, True Crime, Cryptozoology, From the Grave, Occult, Paranormal, Freak Show, Travel and Weird Book Club.
Visitors to the site can even purchase items to help give their homes the spooky and strange vibe they’re looking for. The site notes that it’s updated frequently with fascinating items of vintage weirdness like medical oddities, skulls, taxidermy, preserved insects, wet specimens, vintage funeral ephemera, Ouija boards and other occult objects. The first item that’s currently on sale at the shop is a “Victorian Child’s Viewing Coffin”. If I didn’t know what it was, I would think it’s just a beautiful piece of woodwork!
To learn more about how Cult of Weird began in the first place, we reached out to the site's creator, Charlie Hintz. We wanted to know where Charlie's fascination for these bizarre topics came from and what inspired him to turn that into Cult of Weird. "I live in Wisconsin, where there is one legend or another around every corner," he shared. "Ghosts, monsters, UFOs. I was raised on these stories. As a child, I lived on a lake in the Kettle Moraine State Forest area near a grouping of Native American burial mounds. My neighbors were divers, and one day they found a skeleton in the lake. Another neighbor would apparently hear phantom drum sounds in the night."
"In the 80s, hikers and horseback riders encountered naked people and the remains of animal sacrifices in the Kettle Moraine," Charlie told Bored Panda. "Apparently, there was a known cult conducting rituals in the woods. In 1988, the first season of Unsolved Mysteries featured the story of a haunted house I drove past frequently (and still do) because I have family in the area. My aunt knows that family."
Charlie went on to share even more examples of the strange occurrences that have happened in Wisconsin. "There’s Goatman and the Beast of Bray Road. Three Wisconsin towns claim to be the 'UFO Capital of the World', and each one has had their share of unexplained occurrences," he noted. "In one town, a retired police officer allegedly died of a mysterious illness just months after being struck by a blast of light from a UFO. In another, a local tavern owner kept a binder full of photos of UFOs photographed from the top of a nearby hill he believed concealed a pyramid."
"Wisconsin resident August Derleth, who published the first collections of H.P. Lovecraft’s work, believed there were 'Cthulhu power zones' of ancient cosmic energy in Wisconsin," Charlie explained. "It’s been written that occultists conducted rituals on the shores of certain Wisconsin lakes in an attempt to awaken the eldritch 'Deep Ones' from their depths."
"So many roads of the strange and unusual lead to Wisconsin," Charlie told Bored Panda. "I eventually became interested in why that was. I launched Cult of Weird in 2010 because it seemed like a good excuse to research the history, legends and folklore that spawned them."
We then asked Charlie what he likes to feature on Cult of Weird and how he decides what to share. "I try to cover the whole range of Fortean subject matter - anything mysterious or difficult to explain, especially if it has cultural or historical connotations," he shared. "I love history, particularly when you can find modern connections to disturbing things that really happened in the past, and I’m a sucker for a good story."
"I like to explore legends that have grown around certain places, objects, or ideas, and what the historical basis for them might be," Charlie says. "Those stories are even more compelling when there are multiple witnesses or experiences, especially over long periods of time. Even better is when you hear from a skeptic, and they say, 'I didn’t want to be one of those people, but...'"
"A lot of 'high strangeness' type of phenomena, however, like synchronicity, portals, stories of Indrid Cold or extraterrestrial ghost sasquatch…those often seem to me to be pareidolia at best and I tend to avoid them unless it relates to something more tangible."
"I definitely get some unusual experiences submitted by readers, and really they’re some of my favorites," Charlie noted. "But a lot of what I feature on Cult of Weird comes from random conversations I’ve had where someone mentions something strange, and I have to backtrack and say, 'Wait, what did you just say?' Or I find obscure details in old books that demand more attention, and ultimately lead to strange stories I hadn’t previously heard of."
"I was wandering around a cemetery a few years back, photographing graves associated with various legends there, when someone approached me and said, 'You want to see the oldest grave here?' Naturally, I said yes, and followed them up a hill to a family plot from the 1850s," Charlie shared. "The engraved words on the stones (Born into Spirit-Life) lead to me uncovering the story of Nathaniel Tallmadge, third governor of the Wisconsin Territory, who once lived on that land and believed spirits taught his daughter how to play the piano."
We were also curious what Charlie's favorite topics to cover are. "Modern civilization has a lot of skeletons in its closet, both literally and figuratively. I love the dark corners of history and archeology the most," he shared. "Also, I have a soft spot for ridiculous offbeat news stories. I still share them frequently on Cult of Weird. I read an article in the early 2000s about a fisherman who caught a talking fish. After he pulled it from the water, it issued a dire warning that the end of the world was near, and then he ate it. I don’t care what the reality of that story was - that article changed my life."
