Ain't It Scary? with Sean & Carrie

1984's A Nightmare on Elm Street introduced the world to Freddy Krueger, the besweatered slasher who kills teenagers in their dreams. But Wes Craven says he based his most iconic creation on a real-life horror: a plague of young men dying in their sleep, seemingly during nightmares, that hit the U.S. in the late '70s and early '80s. Where did these victims come from? How did they die? What exactly...

As Ain't It Scary's spooky season tour comes to a close, we're giving you a sneak peek of what we've been talking about all October with this episode chock full of colonial-era ghost stories! Join us for an hour of ghost ships, George Washington's sexy (?) phantom-about-town, and a big oopsie regarding some lost bones. Trick or treat, everyone! ________________________________________ Connect with...

To mark the 150th episode of the podcast (OMG), we're going back to one of our earliest subjects! At the very start of the pod we investigated the Halloween urban legend of the stranger poisoning trick or treat candy, and how the tale actually originated in the true-life crime of Ronald Clark O'Bryan, the "Real Candy Man" who killed his son with a poisoned Pixy Stick for insurance money. This time...

First published in 1897, Bram Stoker's Dracula laid the foundations for what would become horror fiction, and set up most of the vampire tropes you know on one fell swoop. Crosses and sunlight? That's a Stoker. Bat transformation? That's a Stoker. Sleeping in dirt from your homeland? You know that's our guy Bram. So what better way to cap off our bloodthirsty trilogy of vampire episodes than with...

The second week of this spooky season's vampire series stars Erzsebet AKA Elizabeth Bathory, the famed Blood Countess of Hungary! Born in 1560 to one of Hungary's wealthiest families, Elizabeth made herself even more powerful through marriage and soon was soon owner of a personal estate the size of a small country. But rumors of the Baroness's cruel tendencies and baroque tastes spread through the...

We're more than halfway through September, and in this house that means it's basically Halloween! Sean kicks off our spooky series on vampires with a look at the man who gave his name to the most famous vampire of all: Vlad Tepes Dracula, AKA Vlad the Impaler. While the 15th century Wallachian noble wasn't an undead monster, he was certainly...bloodthirsty, to say the least. Join us this week for...

Here we are: the end of the line for the Manson Family. This week, we bring our epic series on the Manson Family Murders to an explosive conclusion with the August 9th killings of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, the retaliation murder of Shorty Shea (and possibly lawyer Ronald Hughes), the capture of the Family during a ranch raid, and the final sensational trial that made Charlie Manson, the Manson g...

And here we are. The infamous murders of August 8th, 1969, where 5 people - some famous - would meet horrific ends at the hands of the Manson Family, directed by Charlie to create "copycat murders" to lessen the heat on the real killer, Bobby Beausoleil, and hopefully spring him from jail before he could rat on Charlie to the cops. But it's not just about the deaths. It's about the lives - and thi...

This week, the horror of Helter Skelter begins on part 4 of our Manson Family deep-dive with the lesser-known murder of the Family's first official victim, former friend Gary Hinman. We explore the circumstances leading to the powder keg-like situation the family was in, and how it all exploded into violence when Charlie decided that the money required to fund the Family's flight to Death Valley w...

In week 3 of our Manson saga we travel with the Family to the worn-down Western movie set of Spahn Ranch, where Charlie and co set up shop and begin their descent further into shared cult madness - separated from their loved ones, fully dependent on Charlie, hungry, overworked, and addled out of their minds on constant LSD consumption. It's a potent cocktail, ready to explode in the California hea...

"Cease to exist, just come and say you love me Give up your world, come on you can be, I'm your kind, I'm your kind, and I see..." This week, we take a tour through the epicenter of the hippie movement right at the peak of the Summer of Love, when Charlie Manson finally leaves prison and makes his way to the Haight-Asbury neighborhood of San Francisco. There, he sows the first seeds of what would...

The innocence of the Summer of Love and the hippie counterculture movement came to an abrupt end in August 1969, when a string of brutal murders in the Los Angeles area rocked Hollywood, the country, and the world. The perpetrators? A strange hippie cult called "The Family", headed by a creepy, scrawny guy with an odd charisma by the name of Charles Manson. This August, we're diving in to the expl...

In the summer of 1974, a body was discovered among the dunes of Cape Cod by a young girl chasing her dog. Despite the efforts of local and state police, the so-named "Lady of the Dunes" would go unidentified for nearly 50 years - as would her killer. Join us as Sean lays out the facts of the discovery, the investigation, and decades worth of theories - along with stunning developments from just th...

We kept it fairly loose this week with a midsummer (midsommar??) catch-up featuring Sean & Carrie gathering round the spooky campfire and talking their recently-consumed horror content (Bones and All, Diablo 4, True Blood, and more), favorite vampire lore, how Edward got Bella pregnant in the Twilight series (spoiler: you would never have guessed it), who in the Ain't it Scary? archives they would...

In late July 1945, the heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis had just conducted a top-secret mission, delivering a sealed metal box to a small island in the Pacific. Unbeknownst to the crew aboard, that box held the final pieces of the atomic bomb that would be detonated over Hiroshima in the coming weeks - but that's not the story we're telling today. On the way back to base in the Philippines from that...

The American Revolutionary War spanned 8 bloody years of war, brutality, and conflict. When the America of today looks back on it now, we tend to look back with reverence and even idolization - but we don't think about the foul hygiene, wretched conditions, and ethical atrocities that occurred for even longer than the 8 years of war leading up to America's hard-fought freedom. This week, in honor...

In the 1920s and 30s, colonial Kenya was playground to a social clique of wealthy British expats called the "Happy Valley Set," famed for their excessive tastes and drug-fueled sex parties. One of the foremost members of the set, Josslyn Hay, Earl of Erroll, caused an international stir when he was found behind the wheel of his car with a bullet in his head. This week, it's hot summer nights and h...

In this episode, Carrie leads a deep dive into the secretive world of Bohemian Grove. Join us as we explore the enigmatic rituals and hidden history surrounding the elusive private Bohemian Club, whose encampment sits nestled deep within the towering redwoods of Northern California. From its origins as a haven for artists and intellectuals to its contemporary reputation as a meeting ground for the...

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had a penchant for achieving milestones early: he composed his first pieces by age 5, his first symphony by age 8, and tragically, even died young at the age of 35. Since immediately after the seminal musical genius's sharp health decline and painful demise, rumors have swirled about the medical - or murderous - culprit. After an overview of Mozart's life and times, we run...

This week, we're teaming up with the New York Mystery Machine podcast to bring you the best Bigfoots the Northeast has to offer! After Adam and Christina gave us the lowdown on the Sasquatches of New York over at their feed, we bring the NYMM crew into OUR house as Sean shares the best of New England's Bigfoot history, new and old. From the V-sculpted wildmen of Connecticut to the pizza-loving hai...

We're back at it after a 2-week break to travel abroad and move house! And we're chatting another house...of worship, that is. Catholicism is a mysterious religion based in millennia of faith and worship, and of course in those hundred years, conspiracies have developed around the seat of Roman Catholic power: The Vatican. Inspired by our Patron Kate's request and a trip to Vatican City itself, Ca...

This week we finish our quick tour through the purported adventures of the UFO prophet Raël, whose Raëlian Movement once claimed nearly a hundred thousand followers worldwide. While Raël was spreading his message here on Earth, his alien benefactors returned in 1975 to take him on a trip through the stars - and a tour of their paradise planet, where Raël and his followers hope to be cloned someday...

ETs are back on Ain't It Scary in a two-part primer on one of the most prominent UFO religions on Earth - the Raëlian Movement! In this first installment, Sean introduces Claude Vorilhon - the man who would be renamed Raël - as the erstwhile pop singer-turned-racing journalist meets an ancient alien master and learns the secret origins in the human race. Raël's received wisdom would be recorded in...

This week, we explore how a crime story can inform pop culture with the true tale of Grace Brown's murder at the hands of Chester Gillette in 1906. In a collaboration with the You're Missing Out podcast, we took a (virtual) trip to Upstate New York to investigate the famous "Murder in the Adirondacks": the likely drowning death of Grace Brown caused by her sometime-boyfriend and factory superior,...

In the second of a two-parter on the Roman Empire's most hated rulers, Sean illustrates the *colorful* life and times of Nero, Rome's fifth emperor, who got up to a lot more than just fireside fiddling. Join us for a twisted tale of matricide, fratricide, parricide, arson, plain ol' torture murders and more forced suicides than you can shake a centurion at. But above all the violence, Nero conside...