Camping is Canceled.

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...

We’re blind-reading Corey Mead’s article, "The Poet," set in late 1970s Wichita, Kansas. The city is already on edge due to the active BTK Strangler when Ruth Finley, a quiet telephone company employee, begins receiving menacing phone calls from a stranger who knows a traumatic secret from her past: she was branded by a "sex maniac" as a teenager in 1946. As the harassment escalates from letters t...

We’re trading historical gratitude for the absolute dumpster fire of modern family gatherings. In Episode 108, we serve up a chaotic platter of listener-submitted nightmares that prove blood isn't always thicker than gravy. We’re exploring everything from a violent brawl between aunts nicknamed "Jailbird" and "Moonpie" involving a carving fork to a sentimental wedding video that abruptly cuts to N...

Buckle up, because today we’re wading into one of the internet’s strangest rabbit holes: feral people . What does that term really mean? We explore everything from Appalachian legends — backwoods creatures, cave-dwelling clans, and “wrong turn” horror stories — to folklore and psychology. In this episode, we’ll balance spooky Reddit tales with sobering real-life cases: children raised in isolation...

Bless Kait for showing up on antibiotics and a prayer. After two weeks of chaos (and a possible case of strep), we are diving back into the most cursed address in American true crime: 112 Ocean Avenue, Amityville, New York. Last time, we left off with the DeFeo family found murdered in their beds. With Butch DeFeo’s confession echoing through Suffolk County, a new family moves into the now-infamou...

You’ve heard the phrase “the devil made me do it.” But what happens when someone uses it to explain one of the most infamous family murders in American history? We dig into the real events behind The Amityville Horror — the gruesome 1974 murders that inspired a best-selling book, a Hollywood franchise, and decades of ghost stories. But before the hauntings and horror-movie jump scares, there was a...

Welcome back, campers! (And happy spooky season.) This week, we’re tossing the script out the window and diving into real-life horror stories that sound straight out of a movie. From near-death escapes to paranormal close calls, these are the true tales that make you turn the radio down, lock the doors, and whisper, “Did that really just happen?” In this chaotic, wing-it episode, our counselors re...

Spooky season is here, campers. This week, we’re heading straight into local legend territory. Nestled in the backroads of Collinsville, Illinois, just past the world’s largest ketchup bottle, lies a string of graffiti-covered railroad underpasses known as the Seven Gates of Hell. For decades, bored teens, paranormal investigators, and the morbidly curious have driven these roads at night, hoping...

In Part II of our coverage of SC's Rose Petal Murder.....the investigation into the fatal stabbing of 41 year old Vet Tech Christina Parcell gets far more complicated than anyone expected. In Part I, we unpacked the tangled relationships, custody battles, and harassment campaign that painted a disturbing picture of Christina's ex-bf and the father of her daughter in the months leading up to her mu...

We're sure y'all already know what horrible things have been happening these last couple of weeks... including but not limited to: yet another school shooting & the cold-blooded murder of a peaceful political activist. But there's always Jake Gyllenhaal being Jake Gyllenhaal; so there's still some love and light in the world. We talk about it all today. In this episode, we cover: Multiple scho...

100 episodes , campers. We can hardly believe it. To mark the milestone, we’re taking you deep into one of the most shocking and twisted cases we’ve ever covered: The “Rose Petal” Murder of Christina Parcell in Greenville, South Carolina….which actually had VERY little to do with roses. On October 13th, 2021, 41-year-old veterinary tech and mother to a 9 year old daughter Christina Parcell was fou...

The Villisca Axe Murders didn’t just end with the brutal crime of 1912; the house itself has lived on with a legacy of hauntings, morbid tourism, and unanswered questions. In this final part of our deep dive, we trace how the infamous little white farmhouse became a historic landmark, a paranormal hotspot, and a site of both fascination and fear. ⚠️ Content Warning: This episode covers graphic vio...

June 10th, 1912. A quiet Iowa town woke to the discovery of one of the most gruesome crimes in American history. Eight people — including six children — were found brutally murdered in their beds. Over a century later, the case remains unsolved, clouded in speculation, small-town gossip, and a legacy of hauntings that still terrifies visitors today. ⚠️ Content Warning: This episode covers graphic...

Have you ever locked eyes with someone who looked exactly like you? Or heard the old superstition that seeing your double means death is near? This week, we’re pulling back the veil on one of folklore’s creepiest figures: the doppelgänger . ⚠️ Content Warning : This episode includes themes of death, folklore, paranormal encounters, and unsettling psychological experiences. Listener discretion advi...