Camping is Canceled.

In August 1949, The Washington Post ran a headline about a Maryland boy freed from the devil's grip. That story became a book that sold 13 million copies, then one of the scariest movies ever made. Before the 360-degree head turn, there was a real 14-year-old named Ronald Hunkeler, a house in Cottage City, and a family willing to try just about anyone who would pick up the phone. We start at the v...

It's spooky season, and we're starting with the board itself. The Ouija has a Baltimore origin story involving a fertilizer salesman, a coffin maker, a patent office that needed some convincing, and a family grudge that lasted 96 years. There's a university study that says the thing works, but just not the way you'd hope. Reddit has the scariest Ouija stories people were willing to type out: a ban...

We're wrapping up the Rose Petal Murder, and we're doing it with more questions than we started with. Part III picks up at Zachary Hughes's February 2023 murder trial. The jury wasn't allowed to hear some pretty major things. Then the same state that fought to keep those things out changed its tune the second it was convenient. We walk through the civil lawsuits, a long-overdue arrest, and two cou...

This week, we are diving deep into the primal instincts and eerie "gut feelings" that tell us to pack up and get out of the woods. We scoured the backpacking subreddit to bring you a spine-chilling collection of stories where trusting that inner voice meant the difference between a close call and absolute disaster. We also explore real-life mysteries, like the tragic 1995 disappearance of a hiker...

This week, we're breaking from our usual deep dives for one of our favorite recurring bits: a big pile of user-submitted horror stories about why, exactly, camping is canceled. Genevieve just got back from a week backpacking in Wyoming and lived to tell about it, so naturally the timing felt right to remind everyone why sleeping outside is a terrible idea. We dig through some of Reddit's darkest c...

This week, we bring our blind read of "The White Darkness" to a close, and it's the ending we were both dreading to find. We follow Henry Worsley as he retraces the exact steps of his hero, Ernest Shackleton, sled harness and all, first as part of a three-man team chasing the pole Shackleton never reached, and later, alone, attempting something no one had ever survived: an unsupported solo crossin...

When we last left you, police had two men in handcuffs, Christina Parcel's fiancé and her ex, and neither one turned out to be her killer. This week, that person finally speaks, and it's someone none of us saw coming: 31-year-old Zachary Hughes, a Juilliard-trained concert pianist who had never so much as met Christina Parcel before the day he killed her. We spend most of this episode inside Zach'...

A doorbell camera caught him walking up to the house with a bouquet of roses. Twelve minutes later, another camera caught him riding away in a mask and gloves. Inside, 43-year-old Christina Parcell had been stabbed 35 times, her body found surrounded by scattered rose petals. This week, we're pulling apart one of the most tangled cases we've ever covered. Christina left behind a sister who never d...

We're back for Part II of our blind read of David Grann's The White Darkness, and we already have several new fears we didn't have going into this one. Turns out surviving elite military training is somehow not even the most intense thing that happens in this episode. We are already emotionally invested and a little worried about what happens next. Join us next time for part 3 of this blind read....

This week's blind read started with a black and white photo: a man grinning around a fat cigar, ice crusted thick in his beard, missing front tooth and all. That's Henry Worsley, and by the time this photo was taken he was deep into a solo, unsupported crossing of Antarctica ... over a thousand miles of ice, no dog team, no support crew, nobody coming to check on him if something went wrong. We we...

We're picking up where we left off... Tami Oldham Ashcraft, alone on a gutted yacht in the middle of the Pacific. She’s grieving the fiancé the ocean took from her with nothing but raw grit, a broken sextant, and a voice in her head that will not shut up. Over the next 41 days, she rigs a mast out of pillows and a broken pole, argues with something she still can't fully explain, and has to decide,...

This time we skipped the murders for something almost as unsettling: real sleepaway counselors telling on their own campers. Today we dive deep into the weeds of Reddit for the weirdest, wildest, most deranged sleepaway camp memories. From unsolicited upskirts😱 to a kid who tried to take a counselor's face off with a desk chair, this episode has it all. Some stories had us laughing until we could...

⚠️ This one covers drug trafficking and substance abuse, plus the toll a life on the run took on two kids who never asked for any of it. Nothing violent, but still heavy in its own way. We're back for the second half of You Can Run, and honestly the first half didn't even scratch the surface. Fake passports, a boarding school in England, a nightclub called Ammmnesia (yes, with three M's for style)...

**WHAT HOOKED US: “When their parents ripped two young sisters from their privileged lives, gave them fake names, and took them on the lam, they thought it was because their father was in trouble with the IRS. It would be years before they learned the truth about his life of crime.”-The Atavist Magazine; No. 176 These two little girls had no idea their entire lives were about to turn into a game o...

It started as a single encounter in a Texas parking lot in 1996 — a journalist sitting in his car, a check in hand, when two teenagers approached and asked for a ride. Nothing unusual, until he looked at their eyes. Completely black. No whites, no pupils, no iris. Just void. He threw the car in reverse and didn't look back, and when he did, they were gone. That was Brian Bethel's account, and it b...

In 1983, Tami Oldham Ashcraft was only 23 years old when she and her fiancé set out to sail the Pacific Ocean. She and her fiancé, Richard Sharp, set off to sail from Tahiti to San Diego aboard Hazana . Back in 1983, weather reports only came through every 3 hours. By the time Tami and Richard knew what Hurricane Raymond was, the storm was already on top of them. Richard was swept overboard and ne...

These dogs — and one very deserving cat — went full hero mode when it mattered most. This week, we dove deep into the Reddit thread "Redditors Whose Lives Were Saved By An Animal" and pulled the best of the best. We were not prepared for how much we'd cry. "That's Genevieve. And that's Kaitlyn." Sisters-in-law, best friends, former CNAs, and the sharp-witted duo behind Camping Is Canceled . Known...

Survival Summer is officially in session, campers. This week, we’re going straight to the internet — specifically, the Reddit thread that asked people to share the worst situation they'd ever survived. The responses did not disappoint. From a college weed run that ended at the barrel of an AK-4, to a retired escort who slowly, horrifyingly pieced together what her "regular client" was actually aft...

She was supposed to be his eighth victim. On November 19th, 1988, 27-year-old Enietra Washington — a mother of two and lifelong South Los Angeles resident — accepted a ride from a stranger named Lonnie Franklin Jr. and barely lived to tell about it. Shot point-blank in the chest, sexually assaulted, photographed unconscious, and pushed from a moving car, Enietra did something Lonnie Franklin never...

Forty-six years later, and we still don't have an answer to that question. In this final installment of the Mainline Murders, we walk through the trials of both Bill Bradfield and Dr. Jay Smith — the theft conviction that cracked the case open, the jailhouse confessions that made stomachs drop, the physical evidence that pointed directly to Karen and Michael, and the appeal that let a convicted tr...

What started as a Victorian-era literary euphemism for murder on a mountain has become a hashtag, a warning, and for too many women — a lived experience. The term "alpine divorce" traces back to 1893 and Scottish author Robert Barr's fiction, where a husband plots to push his unhappy wife off a cliff in the Swiss Alps. The wife outsmarts him. Not everyone gets that ending. In this episode, we dig...

In December 1995, a farmer driving along a desolate country road outside Mansfield, Texas, found the body of 16-year-old Adrienne Jones — shot twice, her skull caved in, left behind a barbed wire fence in the dark. She had been lured out of her house in the middle of the night by the boy she had a crush on. What investigators would eventually uncover was a murder plot born out of jealousy, obsessi...

Nine months of manipulation, a car trunk full of cash, a bottle of acid, and a Cape May alibi — Bill Bradfield really thought he had this one locked up. Part III of the Mainline Murders picks up on June 22nd, 1979, the most critical 72 hours of the entire case. We follow the final movements of Susan Reinert and her kids, walk through Bill's meticulously constructed alibi weekend, and watch the inv...

In 2009, journalist Charles Bowden sat down in a motel room with a man who had personally buried 250 bodies in Juárez, Mexico. He was a former state police officer turned cartel sicario who spent nearly two decades kidnapping, torturing, and killing for an organization he could never fully see or name. Bowden had spent years trying to get to this story. What he walked away with was one of the most...

Part two of the Mainline Murders picks up right where we left off: with the deeply unsettling inventory found in Susan Reinert's car, including a blue comb engraved with the 79th Reserve Command, the very same unit served by her own principal. Who was Dr. Jay Smith, really? On paper, Principal Jay Smith was a decorated Army colonel, a man who'd carpooled with John Eisenhower and earned a doctorate...