Psychology of the Strange

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
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For More on Fashion Sense of Ghosts like why do they wear clothes at all check out the substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/psychstrangepod/p/why-do-ghosts-wear-clothes?r=4ajm1n&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=post%20viewer
Psychology of the Strange is part of the Dark Cast Network. Find me on Instagram and TikTok at @psychstrangepod.

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.
Want to go deeper? I wrote a companion piece for this episode exploring the peer-reviewed research behind the voodoo doll  including why the object has become a validated instrument in psychology labs, and why it might actually be a more effective way to process anger than hitting a pillow. Read it on Substack. The Scientific Use of Voodoo Dolls
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.

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/S109051382500162XGray, 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

Kali, Enlightenment through Destruction

Kali. Hindu goddess, destroyer, mother, liberator. She is one of the most misunderstood figures in Hindu mythology, and today we're pulling back the curtain on who she actually is. From the dark psychology of her origins to the real history of the Thuggee cult, the hereditary stranglers who killed up to two million people in her name. This episode explores what happens when people think they understand a force that cannot be controlled, negotiated with, or appealed to.
We also get into the tantric symbolism hiding in plain sight in her iconography: the sword that represents higher knowledge, the severed head that represents the human ego, and what it actually means that she's smiling through all of it.
Along the way: Jungian shadow theory, moral disengagement, the Aghori monks of Varanasi who meditate on corpses, and a female Tantric sect so obscure they barely left a historical record.
Kali is not a demon. She is not a goddess of death for death's sake. She is a force that moves toward truth and annihilates the false and she has been trying to tell us that through her iconography for over two thousand years. 
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.

Rugaru Legend in the Bayou

Deep in the Louisiana bayou, something moves through the cypress trees after dark. The rougarou (aka rugaru or rougaroux) is Louisiana's legendary swamp werewolf. It has haunted Cajun folklore for centuries, born from the French loup-garou legend and shaped by the fears of a displaced people trying to hold their world together in the dark.
In this episode of Psychology of the Strange, we trace the rougarou from its roots in medieval French werewolf mythology through the Acadian exile of 1755 and into the swamps of southern Louisiana, where it became something far more specific than a monster. We dig into the Catholic guilt and excommunication architecture baked into the curse, the psychology of folklore as social control, and why breaking your Lenten fast for seven consecutive years might be the last mistake you ever make. We explore terror management theory, moral disengagement, and institutional betrayal and why the only escape from a Church-built curse runs straight through Louisiana voodoo.
Plus: why the rougarou can't count to thirteen, what that has to do with Judas, and how a creature built to punish sinners became an unlikely guardian of the Louisiana wetlands and maybe something of a cryptid antihero for our current moment.
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.

Medusa, the other version

Trigger Warning: This episode contains detailed discussion of sexual assault, honor killings, and violence against women.
Medusa. You know the story. Monster. Snakes for hair. One look and you turn to stone. Hero with a mirrored shield, clean ending, everybody goes home. Except, that's not the whole story. In this episode of Psychology of the Strange, I'm pulling apart one of mythology's most recognizable villains and rebuilding her from the ground up. Because in Ovid's telling, Medusa wasn't born a monster. She was made into one. By a god who assaulted her. By a goddess who punished her for it. And by a hero who found her more useful dead than alive.
This episode explores the psychology of victim blaming, institutional betrayal, and the logic that turns survivors into threats. A logic that didn't stay in ancient Greece. From Iran's legal code to Pakistan to a 2025 honor killing in Syria filmed and posted online by the perpetrator, the pattern Ovid wrote down is still operational today.
Mythology. Psychology. The stories we tell to make the rules we live by.
Grad school doesn't fund itself, and neither does late-night research into the Medusa, 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
 
Sources and current events referenced in this episode:
Rahaf Alwan, Syria, April 2025: https://stj-sy.org/en/syrias-transitional-phase-honor-killings-persist-amid-failing-protection-and-legal-response/
Mobina Zeynivand, Iran: https://www.iranintl.com/en/202408284891
Honor killings in Pakistan 2024: https://www.dawn.com/news/1881836
Iran honor killings 2024 annual report: https://stophonorkillings.org/en/2025/01/03/fourth-quarterly-report-on-honor-killings-in-2024186-case-in-a-year/
Human Rights Commission of Pakistan: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/7/29/father-ex-husband-among-9-arrested-in-alleged-honour-killing-in-pakistan

The Galactic Goddess- Amy Carlson and the Love Has Won Cult

Love Has Won cult leader Amy Carlson, known as Mother God, was found mummified in a Colorado home in 2021, her body wrapped in Christmas lights, her skin turned permanently blue from years of colloidal silver ingestion, her followers still waiting for galactic beings led by Robin Williams to take them to another dimension. This true crime and cult psychology episode explores shared delusion, coercive control, and what happens when a group of people construct a reality so airtight that even death can't penetrate it.
Underneath the strange and visceral details is a question: what does it actually take for an entire group of people to surrender their grip on reality together and what does psychology tell us about how that process works? This episode explores  folie à plusieurs (shared psychosis) and how social media and livestream culture created a new kind of cult isolation that doesn't need a compound to function. We look at what terror management theory, moral disengagement, and unfalsifiable belief systems can tell us about Love Has Won, and the haunting reversal at the heart of this story, where the followers became so invested in her divinity that they couldn't save her even when she asked them to.
If you're drawn to cult documentaries, dark psychology, paranormal belief, or the HBO documentary Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God then this episode is for you.
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
 
New episodes every week on all major platforms. Follow @psychstrangepod.

The Necromantic Mirror of Floron: Vatican Secrets, Demonic Magic, and the Psychology of the Shadow Self

A demon mirror hidden beneath the Vatican. A cursed object so dangerous that even looking into it required a ritual: a celibate blacksmith, a waxing moon, and a virgin boy as the only one permitted to see what it showed. The Necromantic Mirror of Floron is not just a Vatican conspiracy theory. It's a real artifact documented in a 15th century grimoire, and what it allegedly reveals is darker than any demon: the version of yourself you've spent your entire life arranging not to see.
In this episode of Psychology of the Strange, I dig into the documented history of the Mirror of Floron, pulled from the Munich Manual of Demonic Magic, one of the most significant surviving medieval grimoires  and the legend that the physical mirror itself ended up locked in the Vatican's sealed vaults, retrieved by the Templars from communities torn apart by what it did to the people who looked into it. Then I break down the psychology underneath the story: why mirrors destabilize identity, what mirror-gazing actually does to the brain according to Giovanni Caputo's strange-face illusion research, how terror management theory explains why the mirror's particular brand of horror hits so deep, and why a 15th century magician built a child into the ritual as a buffer because he already knew direct exposure was something the adult mind couldn't survive intact.
This one sits at the crossroads of occult history, dark psychology, and Vatican conspiracy and by the end, you might find yourself avoiding your own reflection.
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
 
For more strange between episodes make sure you follow me @psychstrangepod on socials
Topics covered: Vatican secrets | demon mirror | cursed mirror | shadow self | dark psychology | medieval grimoire | forbidden knowledge | occult history | mirror psychology | the Munich Manual of Demonic Magic | Necromantic Mirror of Floron | Psychology of the Strange

Narcissists, Psychopaths, and Heroes, Oh My! The Boys

Dark triad personality traits, narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism, may be the hidden ingredient of every superhero story you've ever loved. In this psychology deep dive, I'm using Amazon Prime's The Boys to explore what separates a hero from a monster and whether the answer is psychology, circumstance, or just really good branding.
Homelander is a clinical portrait of malignant narcissism and psychopathy wrapped in a cape. Billy Butcher is Machiavellianism with a vendetta. Soldier Boy is what happens when dark triad traits get a government contract and zero accountability. And Starlight and Hughie, you know the ones trying to stay decent, might be the most psychologically interesting characters of all.
I go deep on moral licensing, the neuroscience of why we can't look away from dangerous people, and what a dose of Compound V reveals about the difference between ends-justify-the-means thinking and actual ethics. Spoiler: it's not what we want it to be.
This is a psychology of evil episode, a superhero deconstruction, and an uncomfortable mirror all in one.
Grad school doesn't fund itself, and neither does late-night research into the supernatural, dark triad, 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
 
Make sure to find me on social media for more strange and psychology between episodes @psychstrangepod

Baba Yaga- The witch in the forest

Baba Yaga is one of the most enduring figures in Slavic Folklore, but she was never just a monster. In this episode I explore three different tellings of her tale and uncover what she reveals about the darkest corners of psychology. I trace her origins from ancient Slavic tradition to modern psychological theory, examining her through Carl Jung's Crone archetype, Arnold van Gennep's concept of liminality, and Albert Bandura's research on moral disengagement. Why does she appear at moments of desperation? What does her ambiguous morality tell us about the line between good and evil and why that line moves? And what happens when you get exactly what you asked for?
This episode features three original folklore stories including a Baba Yaga tale exploring obsession, grief, and the true cost of a granted wish. Whether you're here for the dark folklore, the psychology, or both this one will stay with you.
Grad school doesn't fund itself, and neither does late-night research into the supernatural, 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. New episodes every week. Find me on Instagram and TikTok at @psychstrangepod.