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That Time a Grandma was Arrested After Killing and Eating 14 People

Published

5 months ago

November 26, 2025

It’s been years since we first reported on the strange and unsettling case of Tamara Samsonova, the so-called “Granny Ripper” whose unusual story of serial murder and possible cannibalism shocked the world.

The case shot to international infamy after it was reported that the then 68-year-old Samsonova was caught on CCTV camera footage carrying the pieces of a corpse in plastic bags around a pond where she attempted to dispose of the remains. It would later be revealed that the body was that of Valentina Nikolaevna Ulanova, a friend for whom she also acted as caretaker.

She would later say of Ulanova’s murder:

“I came home and put the whole pack of Phenazepam – 50 pills – into her Olivier salad. I woke up at 2AM and she was lying on the floor. So I started cutting her into pieces.”

Samsonova was captured on CCTV carrying out plastic bags later identified as those holding the dismembered body parts of Ulanova.

During the investigation into Samsonova’s activities, the police would further find evidence that would reportedly connect her to a total of 14 murders including that of a former tenant named Volodya. Samsonova reportedly wrote in her diary that she killed the man after an argument. She dismembered him as well, and disposed of his body in the same location she would later use for Ulanova’s remains.

The woman’s trial was quite sensational. It was revealed that she had a history of mental illness, and her behavior during seemed to underline this as she was observed blowing kisses to the judge and reporters during the trial while giggling.

CNN reported her saying:

“I’m haunted by a maniac upstairs who forced me to kill,” and later on, “I have nowhere else to live. I am a very old person, and I put the whole matter to rest deliberately. I have thought 77 times about it and then decided that I must be in prison. I will die there and the state will probably bury me.’

At another point in the trial, she admitted that she had been waiting ten years for the police to arrive on her doorstep to arrest her.

She was eventually given a battery of psychological tests when it was determined that she was a danger to others and herself. Samsonova was remanded to a state-run mental health facility where she still resides to this day.

On the surface, it was an open and shut case, but there were elements to Samsonova’s story that remain puzzles even now.

For starters, her diary not only recounted her crimes but also seemed to hint that she used specific murders for what she believed were dark magic rituals. Moreover, it was discovered that pages were missing from the diary and some of them, at least, were found with the body parts of Volodya, one of her earliest-known victims. These seemingly occult connections found her branded “Baba Yaga” in the Russian media, a reference to the powerful sometimes dark figure from Slavic folklore.

Then, there was the matter of her missing husband. Tamara married Alexi Samsonova in 1971. In 2005, she reported him missing. His body has never been found and he has been declared dead. He is not mentioned by name in her diary so it’s difficult to know if Alexi was one of her victims, but it seems likely given everything else that was discovered.

No matter the cause and the details, something about Tamara Samsonova captured the attention and imagination of the world. She has been the subject of numerous podcasts including episodes of Luminary, We Saw the Devil, and Killer Personality to name just a few. She’s also found herself the subject of a few intrepid true-crime YouTubers, some of which I’ll link below.

For me personally, I think there is a part of all of us that deems the elderly harmless. We expect that they cannot or will not do anything to hurt us. They are our grandparents or the kindly people down the street who always smile and wave as you go by. Outwardly, that’s who Samsonova was, and it shook the world audience when they realized that she was not only a brutal killer but that she seemingly did not begin killing until she was in her late 50s.

And that disturbs us most of all. Take a look at those videos below and let us know what you think of the case of Tamara Samsonova in the comments.

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The History of Deals with the Devil: From Faust to The Witch

Published

44 minutes ago

April 29, 2026

Luna Gray

Every culture on earth has invented a version of the same story. Someone makes a deal with darkness, gets exactly what they asked for, and loses everything that made them want it in the first place. This is either the oldest cautionary tale in human history or the universe’s way of saying that wanting things too much is the problem. Possibly both.

The template is so reliable it has survived more reinventions than most genres, showing up in ancient folklore, theater from the sixteenth century, Mississippi Delta blues, and a 1997 Al Pacino film where the devil runs a Manhattan law firm, which is honestly the most plausible setting the story has ever found.

Doctor Faustus and the Original Paperwork

The deal with the devil as Western storytelling knows it starts with the German legend of Johann Georg Faust, a real historical figure from the early 1500s whose reputation for dark arts grew considerably after his death. By the time Christopher Marlowe adapted him into Doctor Faustus around 1592, Faust had already become shorthand for a man who traded his eternal soul for power and forbidden knowledge.

Marlowe’s Faustus gets twenty-four years of demonic assistance, summons Helen of Troy, and spends the entire back half of the play desperately not thinking about what comes next. He traded his immortal soul for the intellectual equivalent of a Wikipedia subscription.

Goethe’s Faust, published in two parts in 1808 and 1832, complicated the template. Goethe’s version ends with Faust being saved, which is either deeply reassuring or a massive loop in the contract depending on how you read it. The devil, Mephistopheles, loses on a technicality. Lawyers have been insufferable about this ever since.

The word “Faustian” entered the language as shorthand for any bargain where you get what you want at a cost that turns out to be everything. It is used now to describe political compromises, corporate mergers, and at least three separate think pieces per year about social media.

The Crossroads

On the other side of the Atlantic, the deal with the devil found a different address. American blues mythology, particularly the tradition of the Mississippi Delta, attached the story to a specific location. The crossroads, where two roads meet at midnight, and where a man could wait for the devil to appear and tune his guitar.

The musician most associated with this mythology is Robert Johnson, who recorded twenty-nine songs in 1936 and 1937, including “Cross Road Blues” and “Me and the Devil Blues,” and died in 1938 at twenty-seven under circumstances that remain unclear. He was a remarkable guitarist who appeared to have improved dramatically in a very short period of time. The crossroads story about him developed and calcified after his death, told and retold until it became inseparable from his music. Robert Johnson himself never claimed any of it.

The person who actually did claim it was a different man entirely. Tommy Johnson, a Delta blues musician with no relation to Robert, reportedly told people on multiple occasions that he had met the devil at a crossroads at midnight, handed over his guitar, and gotten his talent in return. Tommy Johnson is considerably less famous than Robert Johnson, which is maybe the devil’s way of making a point about contract terms.

The crossroads mythology fed directly into O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), where the Coen Brothers dropped it into the middle of a Depression-era Odyssey adaptation because if you are already rewriting Homer you might as well rewrite American folklore while you are in there. It lives in every story about fame that arrives too fast, talent that appears from nowhere, and deaths at twenty-seven. The 27 Club has been run through the Robert Johnson mythology so many times that the connection has become its own piece of pop culture, self-sustaining and impossible to dislodge.

The Devil Grows Up

The devil of medieval Christianity and the devil of the crossroads deal mythology are related but not identical. The biblical Satan is primarily an adversary, an accuser, a figure whose role in early scripture is closer to a prosecuting attorney than a red-skinned tempter in a top hat.

The smooth-talking deal maker who shows up at crossroads and in horror films is a mash up of all of this. The biblical adversary, the folk devil, and a few centuries of storytelling that collectively decided the most interesting version of evil was one that made you an offer. The modern devil does not attack. He negotiates. And he always has better real estate.

Hollywood Signs the Contract

Hollywood has been making devil movies for as long as Hollywood has existed, and the quality varies in ways that suggest not all of those productions made favorable deals.

Angel Heart (1987) is the best film about a deal with the devil that never once uses the phrase. Mickey Rourke plays a private detective hired by a man named Louis Cyphre (Robert De Niro) to find a missing person, and the movie spends ninety minutes letting you work out what Louis Cyphre is an anagram of while everything gets worse. De Niro arrives in a cream suit eating hard-boiled eggs and the film is essentially already over.

The Devil’s Advocate (1997) casts Al Pacino as the literal devil running a Manhattan law firm and hiring Keanu Reeves as his star attorney. This works completely. New York in the nineties, of course the devil ran a law firm. The casting of Pacino is either inspired or the only possible answer to the question of which living actor could play Satan and make it seem like he was doing you a favor.

Crossroads (1986) sends Ralph Macchio into the Mississippi Delta to hunt down a lost Robert Johnson song and ends with a guitar duel between Macchio and Steve Vai, who plays the devil’s champion. The film climaxes with a Juilliard-trained classical guitarist defeating a blues devil deal using a Bach-influenced technique, in the Mississippi Delta, in front of a crowd that does not find this strange. Nobody in the film finds this strange.

Drag Me to Hell (2009) is Sam Raimi’s argument that you do not need to want power or knowledge or fame to end up on the wrong side of a supernatural contract. Christine Brown wanted a promotion. She denied a mortgage extension to an elderly woman. The punishment is an eternity of damnation. The moral is that the universe does not proportion its consequences to the scale of the ambition, which is either a theological horror show or a description of most Tuesdays.

And then there is The Witch (2015), where Robert Eggers quietly made the deal the ending rather than the premise. Thomasin does not go looking for the devil. The devil comes to her farm in 1630s New England, destroys her family, and waits. The offer, when it comes, is delivered by a goat named Black Phillip. “Wouldst thou like to live deliciously.” The audience agreed that yes, they probably would.

The Terms

What the deal with the devil has always been about, underneath the sulfur and the crossroads and the cream suits, is the terror of wanting something badly enough to pay any price for it. Faust wanted knowledge. Tommy Johnson wanted to play guitar better than anyone alive. Thomasin wanted to be free. The horror is not the devil. The horror is that the offer sounds reasonable and the terms are always printed small.

Every generation rewrites the story because every generation needs to. The template survives because the wanting does not stop.

News

Shudder’s May Is the Best Month They’ve Had in a While.

Published

2 days ago

April 27, 2026

Luna Gray

Shudder dropped their May 2026 programming slate and it is heavier than most months. The lead is The Terror: Devil in Silver, the long-awaited third installment of AMC’s horror anthology, premiering May 7 with new episodes weekly through June 11. Next up, Tales from the Crypt, all seven seasons, begins streaming May 1 after years off the market. Four new exclusive films fill out the rest of the month.

The Terror: Devil in Silver

The first two seasons of The Terror stand as some of the best horror television of the past decade. Season one sent the crew of HMS Terror on a doomed Arctic voyage in 1845. Season two, Infamy, placed its story inside a Japanese American internment camp during World War II. Neither shared a cast nor a plot with the other. Both were exceptional. Season three takes Victor LaValle’s novel and builds it into a six-episode limited series. Dan Stevens plays Pepper, a working-class moving man who lands in a psychiatric hospital through bad luck and a worse temper. What he finds inside is not treatment.

Karyn Kusama, who directed the Yellowjackets pilot and earned an Emmy nomination for it, directs the opening two episodes and serves as co-executive producer. LaValle and Chris Cantwell co-wrote the scripts. Ridley Scott executive produces. The ensemble behind Stevens includes Judith Light, CCH Pounder, Aasif Mandvi, Stephen Root, and Marin Ireland. This is the kind of combination that earns attention before a single frame has aired.

New episodes premiere weekly after May 7.

Tales from the Crypt

Tales from the Crypt ran on HBO from 1989 to 1996. Seven seasons. Ninety-three episodes. Each one a self-contained story hosted by the Crypt Keeper, a wisecracking animated corpse voiced by John Kassir, who closes every episode with a pun only he finds funny.

The show pulled from EC Comics and assembled talent at a level that looks almost unreasonable in retrospect: Brad Pitt, Demi Moore, Christopher Reeve, Catherine O’Hara, and Steve Buscemi in front of the camera. Robert Zemeckis, Tobe Hooper, and William Friedkin behind it. Tom Hanks, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Michael J. Fox also directed episodes.

The series has been effectively unavailable to stream for years, tied up in rights complications. It is now on Shudder. Season one drops May 1. Subsequent seasons premiere weekly on Fridays, with the final season 7 arriving June 12. Watch parties run every Friday at 9pm ET. There is no good reason to wait on this one.

The Exclusives

Whistle arrives May 8 and is the exclusive to prioritize. Directed by Corin Hardy, who made The Nun, and starring Dafne Keen, Sophie Nélisse, Percy Hynes White, and Nick Frost, it follows high school students who find an ancient Aztec Death Whistle and discover that blowing it summons their future deaths to hunt them down. Totally normal thing to happen.

Heresy lands May 1 and is worth knowing about before it arrives. Director Didier Konings is making his feature debut after years as a concept artist on Stranger Things, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.

Smothered arrives May 29 as a Shudder Original. It is Indonesian, and it is produced by Joko Anwar, the director behind Satan’s Slaves and Impetigore. That name means something to anyone who has been paying attention to international horror over the past decade. The film follows a micro-painting artist who loses part of his memory in an accident and returns home to find a woman claiming to be his mother.

This Is Not a Test streams May 22. Directed by Adam MacDonald and adapted from Courtney Summers’ 2012 novel, it stars Olivia Holt as a student sheltering in a high school during a zombie outbreak.

News

[Exclusive Clip] ‘From the Beyond: High Strangeness in the Bennington Triangle’

Published

3 days ago

April 26, 2026

Ryan T. Cusick

Audiences are invited to explore one of Vermont’s most mysterious regions in From the Beyond: High Strangeness in the Bennington Triangle, arriving later this month on streaming platforms and DVD.

The documentary will debut on April 28, 2026, on platforms including Apple TV, Prime Video, and Google Play. DVD editions will be available exclusively through the Small Town Monsters online shop.

Directed by Seth Breedlove, the film continues the company’s exploration of folklore, cryptids, and unexplained phenomena. Breedlove’s previous work includes The Mothman of Point Pleasant, On the Trail of Bigfoot, American Werewolves, and more than two dozen feature-length productions. In total, Small Town Monsters has released more than thirty films, along with investigative programs, web series, books, podcasts, and exclusive membership content.

From the Beyond: High Strangeness in the Bennington Triangle was made possible through the support of backers from the company’s 2025 Kickstarter campaign.

Set in rural Vermont, the documentary examines the legend of the Bennington Triangle, an area associated with reports of UFOs, ghosts, phantom lights, mysterious creatures, and a series of unexplained disappearances. At the center of the mystery is Glastenbury Mountain, where decades of unanswered questions continue to inspire speculation.

Going beyond folklore and campfire tales, the film asks a chilling question: Why is Glastenbury Mountain so inexplicable, and what happened to those who went missing?