The UnBelievable: Encounters with Dan Aykroyd

Some evils don't just surround a person, they burrow in deep and refuse to let go. Adolfo Constanzo builds a cartel empire along the U.S.-Mexico border that runs not just on violence and cocaine, but on dark ritual and genuine belief in demonic protection, making him one of the most terrifying and unbelievable criminal figures of the twentieth century. In a convent in Loudun, France, in the 1630s, an entire community of nuns falls into what is documented at the time as mass demonic possession; screaming, convulsing, and making accusations that send a priest to the stake in one of history's most disturbing and theatrical encounters with perceived evil. The Hope Diamond passes through the hands of kings, collectors, and socialites for centuries, leaving behind a trail of madness, ruin, and death so consistent and so well documented that even the most skeptical gemologists tend to handle its history with care. And then there is the boy, the real one, the quiet suburban child whose terrifying ordeal in the late 1940s is so extreme and so meticulously recorded by those who witness it that it becomes the blueprint for the most frightening film ever made. A cartel leader wrapped in demonic protection. A convent consumed by darkness. A diamond that destroys everyone it touches. These are the Evil Entanglements and they are as unbelievable as they are inescapable.

There's bad luck, and then there's something older and darker that no amount of good fortune can touch. James Dean is one of Hollywood's brightest stars when his Porsche Spyder carries him into a fatal collision on a California highway but the car's appetite for destruction doesn't die with him, continuing to wound and kill in a documented chain of events that leaves even the most rational observers deeply unsettled. Bela Lugosi makes a career out of playing monsters, but the yellow-eyed woman who follows him through his real life is no performance, she appears consistently enough, and is witnessed clearly enough, that those around him can't dismiss what they're seeing. In a North Yorkshire pub, the Busby Stoop Chair quietly accumulates a body count so undeniable that the only solution anyone can agree on is to take it out of reach entirely, suspending it from a museum ceiling where no unsuspecting visitor can make the last mistake of their life. Somewhere in early American history, a man who goes on to shape a nation finds himself locked in a grinding battle with an unseen force that embeds itself into his land like a splinter. And then there is the place, the location so thoroughly and irreversibly cursed that humanity's only answer is to build a fortress around it and never look back. These are the Hopelessly Hexed, unbelievable stories of curses with no exit and no end.

Some forces arrive uninvited and simply refuse to leave. In a quiet council house in Enfield, England, a single mother and her children become the center of one of the most documented and disturbing poltergeist cases in history: furniture moves on its own, voices come from nowhere, and investigators who arrive as skeptics leave as something else entirely. In the summer of 1955, a rural Kentucky family barricades themselves inside their farmhouse as small, luminous creatures besiege them through the night in what becomes known as the Kelly-Hopkinsville encounter, one of the most credible and unbelievable alien siege cases ever recorded. In the early 2000s, a man finds himself in a battle with something deeply malevolent that attaches itself to him and refuses every attempt to shake it loose. England's oldest prison has long been home to something that goes far beyond its living inmates, a ghost bear whose presence terrifies guards and prisoners alike for centuries. And somewhere in the corridors of Cold War military command, an alien visitor comes close enough to triggering a third world war to make everyone involved wish they could forget it ever happened. These are Hostile Takeovers…unbelievable stories of forces that grab hold, dig in, and on their own terms, never truly let go.

Some roads lead somewhere no map can prepare you for. In 1593, a Spanish soldier closes his eyes in Manila and opened them thousands of miles away with no explanation that satisfied anyone then or since. A woman pulling off the highway for a rest near the Sierra Nevada mountains finds herself face to face with something at the roadside that connects directly to one of the most tragic and disturbing stories in American history…the doomed Donner Party. On the fog-covered moors of England, a former police officer encounters a small grey creature that flees into the wilderness and left behind evidence that still hasn't been explained away. At a lonely Mississippi crossroads sometime in the 1930s, a young Blues musician named Robert Johnson allegedly made a deal that transformed him overnight into one of the most gifted guitarists who ever lived and cost him everything not long after. A nap at work teleports a man nine thousand miles. A pilot punches through a cloud bank and emerges decades in the past. A toddler carries the detailed memories of a World War II pilot he never could have known. Going off the beaten path has consequences and these unbelievable strange detours prove that some wrong turns change everything.