Grinning Stranger Halts Salesman on Interstate 77, Gives Name Without Speaking

PARKERSBURG, W.VA. — According to the podcast Weird Darkness, a sewing machine salesman named Woodrow Derenberger was driving home on Interstate 77 outside Parkersburg on the night of November 2nd, 1966, when a craft shaped like an old kerosene lamp passed his van and came to a stop in front of it.

The episode relates that the man who stepped out wore a dark overcoat over a glistening green uniform, and bore an extraordinarily broad grin. He is said to have given his name as Indrid Cold, though without ever saying a word aloud.

The show notes add further claims. Derenberger said the visits continued, and that he was taken to a planet called Lanulos. UFO investigator John Keel, the notes say, received telephone calls from someone using the same name. Weeks before the highway encounter, two boys in Elizabeth, New Jersey, are reported to have seen a grinning man standing behind a fence above the Turnpike.

The Grinning Man is only one item on a crowded program. The same episode takes in the reported ghosts of the Irish Brigade at Antietam, the history of safety coffins, the Devil's Footprints in the Devon snow of 1855, and the murders committed by John List in New Jersey. It also covers the Kansas City Massacre and several first-person ghost stories, among them a haunted hospital room, a Cornish apparition and a ghost said to have used a household bathroom.

The notes state that no AI voices are used in the narration. As with the other accounts in the program, the Indrid Cold story is presented as the recollection of the witness and not as established fact.