Camping is Canceled.

⚠️ 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...

This week, we’re back with a blind read. We don’t do any research beforehand and refuse to peek at spoilers, so we have no idea how this ends! This is a CalMatters investigative piece called “The Man Who Unsolved a Murder” by Anat Rubin. It covers a six-year-old boy named Willie Cook who vanished from a small Northern California logging town in 1976. What starts as a cold case kidnapping quickly u...

We’re sharing Reddit's creepiest "Not a Ranger, But..." forest encounters. These search-and-rescue stories prove that humans—not monsters—are the woods' true terror. Anyone surprised? (Not us.) We cover bowhunters stumbling on meth labs disguised as campsites, kids vanishing mid-hunt only to reappear mud-soaked with zero memory, and rangers chasing "wolves" that lead to hidden bodies.​ We laugh-cr...

In 1979, a devoted mom, Susan Reinert, and her kids, Karen (12) and Michael (10), vanished after a routine Cub Scout pickup—only for Sue’s brutalized body to turn up crammed in her car’s wheel well days later. By all accounts, Sue seemed to be living the all-American life. In this episode, we dive into her relationship with her college-sweetheart-turned-ex-husband, Ken, and the events leading up t...

EP 118 wraps up our three-part Silk Road Blind Read. Silk Road was a secret, dark website that sold drugs like an online eBay, run by a mystery boss called DPR (Dread Pirate Roberts). In this finale, FBI agent Tarbell travels to Iceland to raid a data center and grab Silk Road's hidden server after spotting a leaked IP address.​ We yell through DPR's growing fear from his diary, his sloppy securit...

Silk Road's paranoia escalates as the feds close in. DPR casually prices out a hit on a flipped insider while his undercover handler Force stages a brutal (fake) bathtub torture for the sting. What was once a libertarian dream has morphed into a dark web nightmare. As far as blind reads go, this one truly had us on the edge of our seats. We couldn’t look away as Silk Road’s empire crumbled from th...

We're kicking off the Silk Road series—a massive dark web drug market run by a mysterious boss called DPR. We start with Curtis Green, a Utah grandpa and pain pill user who worked customer service for the site, getting raided by SWAT while covered in cocaine powder from a fake package (his tiny chihuahuas go wild).​ Then we flashback to Ross Ulbricht: a smart former Eagle Scout and physics student...

We’re exploring parallel lives. Like, souls splitting across timelines, Horcrux-style oversouls living multiple earthly lives at once. We break down four wild theories from Reddit deep dives, from quantum jumping to realms where your higher self lives an entire life while your body lies stationary on Earth.​ If you’ve ever felt déjà vu hit different or met a “soul family” stranger, these tales wil...

This episode drops the hammer on David Grann’s “True Crime” Blind Read, picking up mid-book with Bala’s sadistic, philosophy-fueled torture porn that’s less “literature” and more “confession disguised as art.” We unpack Amok ’s noose-tightened murders, “white gloves of silence,” and Bala’s smug insistence that it’s all just postmodern wordplay—while detective Wroblewski turns his squad into litera...

David Grann’s 2008 New Yorker masterpiece “True Crime” is a Polish whodunit that starts with a strangled woman and ends in a courtroom where fiction and murder collide. We dive into the case of Jacek Wroblewski, a cop turned amateur detective who becomes obsessed with a violent novel by a smug philosophy bro named Krystian Bala, convinced its twisted details mirror an unsolved killing.​ What unfol...

In this final part, we revisit the Lutz family’s own words through their 1979 Good Morning America interview, then pull back the curtain to examine the contradictions, missing details, and the carefully crafted public image that made Amityville a media monster.​ From there, we dig into what investigators, psychics, and skeptics uncovered behind the scenes: parapsychic Ron Mangravite’s claim that t...

This week’s episode is pure Merry Crisis energy in the best way: cozy chaos, seasonal depression, and holiday horror stories all rolled into one. We pull together Reddit confessions, off-the-rails family traditions, and a couple of bite-sized true crime tales that prove the holidays are less “Hallmark movie” and more “why is Santa staring at me like that?” If you need an excuse to put on noise-can...

This Blind Read had us absolutely feral (in the best way). We thought we were dealing with a classic “mysterious tormentor” case and instead got hit with psych letters, birdhouse cameras, BTK-adjacent clues, and some of the wildest investigative whiplash we’ve had in a while. Every time we thought we knew who “The Poet” was, the story yanked the floor out from under us again. We pick the case back...