Scams, Money, & Murder

In 2018, an anonymous user posted a photograph of an empty yellow room on 4chan — no caption, no story, no name. A year later, two paragraphs turned that image into one of the most elaborate horror mythologies the internet has ever produced. What followed was a global phenomenon: hundreds of levels, thousands of contributors, and a teenage filmmaker handed a feature film deal by A24. For more, fol...

Before she was “the Black Dahlia,” Elizabeth Short was a movie-struck kid from Massachusetts whose father vanished off a Boston bridge, then turned up alive twelve years later. In the first part of our 3-part series on the Black Dahlia, Katie Ring traces who Elizabeth really was: the fiancé she lost days before the war ended, the stories she told strangers to get by, and the last place anyone can...

Carl Panzram wrote his autobiography in prison — a document so violent and psychologically raw that the guard who helped him smuggle it out spent decades trying to publish it. He claimed murders on three continents and crimes across America, Africa, and Central America. In Part 1, Vanessa and Dr. Engels trace Panzram's catastrophic childhood in Minnesota reform schools where every attempt at rehab...

On the evening of June 9th, 1912, Josiah and Sarah Moore walked their four children home from a Children's Day program at the Presbyterian church in Villisca, Iowa. Two young sisters, Lena and Ina Stillinger, had been invited to stay the night. By the next morning all eight of them had been murdered with an axe in their beds while the small southwestern Iowa town slept, in what became known as the...

On the one night a year everyone wears a mask, how do you know who's really dangerous? Alexis Linkletter and Sabrina Deana-Roga trade four chilling Halloween stories from Reddit, hearing each one for the first time. A masked intruder hides in the dark watching a shop owner, then vanishes without a trace. A stranger in a truck turns a walk home into a nightmare. Michael Myers follows two girls all...

On Halloween night 2001, 21-year-old Penn State senior Cindy Song went out dancing with two friends in State College, Pennsylvania. Just before 4 a.m., one of them dropped her off and watched her climb the stairs to her apartment. After that, she vanished. Inside, police found a pair of false eyelashes set down on the counter and her backpack with her cell phone still zipped inside — the only sign...

In November 1974, Ronald DeFeo Jr. shot and killed six members of his family in their house on Ocean Avenue in Amityville, New York. Thirteen months later, George and Kathy Lutz moved in with their three children and left after 28 days, describing green slime, swarms of flies, a demonic pig and voices in the walls. The book that followed sold in the millions and launched one of the most profitable...

A killer who watched from the windows. A town students were too afraid to walk through. And a franchise born from real terror. Heidi Wong tells the true origin of Scream’s Ghostface: from Danny Rolling’s brutal attacks to the confession that later ignited Kevin Williamson’s iconic screenplay. For more, follow Twisted Tales wherever you listen to podcasts: https://pod.link/1839058226 If you’re new...

On September 30th, 2026, the state of Tennessee attempted to execute Christa Pike, the only woman on its death row. Two doses of a lethal drug later, she was still breathing. Now, she’s walking and talking. In the first part of our series on Christa Pike, Katie Ring goes back to the beginning: Two teenage girls, two very different childhoods, and the one place they were both sent to get their live...

In August 2018, Shanann Watts, 15 weeks pregnant, vanished from her home in Frederick, Colorado, along with her two young daughters, Bella and CeCe. Her husband Chris had been living a secret life: conducting an affair, hunting for apartments, and building a future that had no room for his family. As investigators closed in, the gap between his public image and private reality became impossible to...

Through the 1980s, a landlady named Dorothea Puente ran a boarding house at 1426 F Street in Sacramento, California. Her tenants were the people nobody else would take: the elderly, the disabled, the mentally ill, and the newly homeless. Social workers who visited described her as warm and unusually attentive, the rare operator who cooked real meals. Puente also collected their mail and cashed the...

A radio turns on by itself. A voice screams a warning. A shadow crawls toward your bed. Coincidence, or something more? Alexis Linkletter and Sabrina Deana-Roga celebrate Halloween with four of Reddit's spookiest paranormal crime stories. A young man wakes at 3 A.M. to a shadowy figure crawling toward his bed, then learns the next morning that gas had been leaking through the house all night. A wo...

When Nancy Moyer's estranged husband brought their daughters to her house on the evening of Sunday, March 8th, 2009, the front door was resting open against the frame. The television was on, her car sat out front, and a half-finished glass of wine stood on the coffee table beside a second. Detectives found no forced entry, no sign of a struggle, and both glasses had only Nancy's prints on them. Th...

In 1970, a nursing student in Connecticut was given a Raggedy Ann doll for her birthday. Within weeks she and her roommate believed it was moving around their apartment on its own, leaving handwritten notes, and attacking a friend. They called Ed and Lorraine Warren, the self-described demonologists who would later become the most famous paranormal investigators in America. The Warrens declared th...

An A&E original podcast presented by Rewind Studios, Celebrity Ghost Stories is adapted from the first and only series where celebrities share their real-life personal encounters with the paranormal, told completely through first-person narratives by the respected actors, musicians, and athletes who experienced these phenomena themselves. From ghosts and angry spirits to real-life haunted home...

On Christmas Eve, 1945, the Sodder family went to bed with nine children under one roof. By sunrise, the house was ash and five children were gone, without a single bone left behind. In the first part of our 3-part series on the Sodder children, Katie Ring covers the warnings nobody took seriously, a night where everything that could go wrong did, and a father who knew it was no accident. Follow A...

In 1920s Germany, Peter Kürten terrorized Düsseldorf in a killing spree that would earn him the name the Vampire of Düsseldorf. But his path to murder began decades earlier, rooted in a childhood of relentless abuse and cruelty. From his first alleged killings at age nine to a string of escalating attacks on women and children, this episode traces how Kürten's compulsion evolved into something uns...

Ted Binion was 21 when he took over the casino floor at Binion's Horseshoe, the no-limits gambling hall his father Benny built in Las Vegas, and he ran it for 30 years. By March 1998, regulators had revoked his gaming license for good. That July, he had 24 tons of silver buried 12 feet underground on a lot in Pahrump. That September, he was found dead on a mattress in his den, an empty bottle of X...

What happens when the people closest to you have been lying from day one? Alexis Linkletter and Sabrina Deana-Roga react to four of Reddit's most disturbing deceptions. A woman discovers her boyfriend's online friend group may have been him the whole time. A boyfriend hides a device in his girlfriend's closet and plays dumb while it slowly drives her to paranoia. A woman realizes the new man she's...

In May 2008, 19-year-old Brandon Swanson called his parents to say his car had slid off the road and he needed a ride. He swore he knew exactly where he was. But when his parents' flashing headlights never found him, Brandon started walking toward town, his father still on the line, until he yelled two words and went silent. What began as a routine favor became one of Minnesota's most confounding...

In 2009, at a science fiction convention in Atlanta, a paranormal researcher named Fiona Broome discovered that strangers shared her vivid memory of Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s. Mandela walked free in 1990 and died in 2013. Broome named it the Mandela Effect, and the catalogue grew: a children's book spelled wrong, a logo with a horn that never existed, a Sinbad genie movie nobody...

A filmmaker haunted by his family’s past. A doll that mirrored a tragedy. And a story born from grief, faith, and fear. Heidi Wong explores the real inspirations behind Osgood Perkins’s Longlegs: from Anthony Perkins’s hidden legacy to the JonBenét Ramsey “My Twinn” doll and the dark folklore of sympathetic magic. For more, follow Twisted Tales wherever you listen to podcasts: https://pod.link/183...

In January 1974, a family of four was found bound and killed in their Wichita home. The killer left nothing behind. Four months later, a letter arrived at a local newspaper describing details only the murderer could know, signing off with a name he'd chosen for himself: BTK. In the first part of our 3-part series on BTK, Katie Ring traces the early murders, the taunting communications that made hi...

In 1918, a killer began slipping into New Orleans homes under cover of darkness, attacking sleeping victims with an axe and vanishing without a trace. The attacks targeted the city's Italian immigrant grocers, leaving a terrorized community wondering who would be next...and investigators scrambling to find a suspect they couldn't identify. As the body count rose, false arrests and coerced statemen...

In January 1982, 33-year-old Lynette Dawson vanished from Bayview, on Sydney's northern beaches, and it would take 40 years to prove she had been murdered. A nurse and the mother of two young daughters, she had spent years trying to hold together a marriage to Chris Dawson, a former rugby league player and PE teacher the community adored. Months earlier, Chris had moved a teenage student into the...