Heart Starts Pounding: Horrors, Hauntings and Mysteries

Go to https://kachava.com and use code HSP for 15% off your first order! A newlywed couple boarded a Mediterranean cruise for their honeymoon. Five days later, a teenager photographed blood splattered across a lifeboat canopy, and the groom was gone. His bride says she blacked out. Four men were the last to see him alive. What happened to George Smith puzzled his family for years until they finall...

Across Appalachia, thousands of people keep reporting the same thing: a massive black cat in the woods that screams like a woman being murdered. The government says it doesn't exist, there are NO official reports of big black cats in the area. But the Cherokee had a name for what lives in those mountains, and its story is far older, and far more wicked, than a misidentified panther.  Today, we’re...

On April 18th, 2014, a 14,000-tonne block of ice broke free above the Khumbu Icefall and killed sixteen Sherpa guides. It was the deadliest single disaster in Mount Everest's history. What followed wasn't just a rescue. It was a reckoning: a fight over $400 funeral payments, a historic strike, and the first time in ninety years that the world's most famous mountain went silent. TW: Mass death, des...

Go to https://kachava.com and use code HSP for 15% off your first order. They call it the golden age of DNA testing, and this year, two cases that police thought would never be solved finally cracked open. But the answers were nothing anyone expected. August 1990, Houston. A white Honda Civic sits abandoned at the end of a cul-de-sac on the city's edge. The keys are in the ignition, a woman's purs...

Go to https://kachava.com and use code HSP for 15% off your first order. In 1970, a man with no clinical training opened a "therapeutic boarding school" in the Maine woods. For forty-one years, students inside were subjected to organized beatings, forced fight rings, and psychological torture while journalists, state investigators, and even Congress failed to shut it down.  Then, in 2010, one anon...

Family Lore is a weekly narrative podcast that celebrates and investigates ancestral mystique. Each episode begins with a guest sharing a fascinating family legend, followed by a historical deep-dive to uncover the truth and meaning behind the tale. Available now. https://link.pscrb.fm/f0281/FLFD To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-p...

In July 2022, 18-year-old Mackenzie Shirilla drove her car into a brick wall at nearly 100 miles per hour, killing her boyfriend Dominic Russo and his best friend Davion Flanagan. What looked like a drug-fueled accident unraveled fast, and the Netflix documentary only tells part of the story. This week, we go deeper: the details left on the cutting room floor, the recorded prison call that changed...

In 2019, an anonymous photo of a yellow hallway turned into one of the biggest creepypastas of a generation. Millions of people have since built out the Backrooms. Hundreds of levels, from an infinite black ocean hiding a planet-sized creature to a children's birthday party run by entities that wear your skin. With a new A24 film bringing the Backrooms to the big screen, we're going no-clipping in...

Go to https://kachava.com and use code HSP for 15% off your first order. To find out how you can get involved and provide advocacy and support, visit the website for the Data for Indigenous Justice organization at www.dataforindigenousjustice.org and click on “Resources” in the top left menu. In 2003, 19-year-old Sonya Ivanoff was walking home from a friend's house in Nome, Alaska when a witness s...

Go to https://kachava.com and use code HSP for 15% off your first order. Today, we're covering three terrifying true urban legends: a South African schoolyard legend called Pinky Pinky with an unnerving connection to a real case in Japan, the history of Summerwind Mansion, which reveals more about its owners than the house itself…and the true origins behind the Red Ghost.  TW: Stalking, mention of...

Today. Slater and I are reading Reddit scary stories about close encounters with people who were not who they said they were. A man offers a woman her dream job, but the company doesn't exist!? A friendly neighbor starts knowing things he was never told. A first date takes a deliberate detour. And a hitchhiker carrying a small child through a Montana blizzard may have been one of the most dangerou...

In September 1991, a young mother in Arlington, Texas, Cynthia Gonzalez, left for a late-night appointment and never came home. Her car was found 40 miles away, and the investigation that followed would consume a legendary detective's entire career through serial killer suspects, failed polygraphs, and confessions that went nowhere. Thirty-four years later, a college classroom full of students at...

In the summer of 1975, the bodies of young women began surfacing in canals along the edge of the Florida Everglades. To make matters worse, investigators blamed the victims for their own deaths. Today, we will cover many things the Everglades have swallowed. From serial killers to a doomed jetliner pulled from the sky, to a creature with over 600 documented sightings. The deeper you go, the strang...

Go to https://kachava.com and use code HSP for 15% off your first order. A college student gets into what she thinks is her rideshare. A speech therapist spends years pretending to be someone's mother. And a backpacker in Singapore accepts a stranger's offer to split a hotel room…then never calls home. Three stories about the people who slipped through the cracks. By the time anyone realized somet...

Go to https://kachava.com and use code HSP for 15% off your first order. In March 2000, 23-year-old Leah Roberts left a note for her roommate and took off on a solo cross-country trip. Nine days later, her wrecked Jeep was found by hikers at the bottom of a ravine in upstate Washington and Leah was not inside. What initially looked like a crash started to feel more sinister as the investigation co...

True Crime News: The Podcast is your weekly dose of real-time updates on the most gripping true crime stories, current cases, investigations, scams, and schemes. Host Ana Garcia is joined by crime experts, police officers, defense attorneys, and other leading authorities in their fields as they cover murders, scams, investigations, and unsolved crimes from across the country. Join us each week as...

Your terrifying stories are back, and they did not disappoint! From deep inside the Michigan woods, to a haunted church camp, to the backroads of Argentina, and a 2am parking lot encounter. Morgan from Two Hot Takes is joining us to read through tales that range from something inhuman in the trees to a dream that may have saved someone's life, as we try to figure out what is going on with you guys...

Today, we’re reading Reddit's scariest stories with KallMeKris and CelinaSpookyBoo. From glitches in the Matrix that defy all sense of logic, haunted houses full of vengeful ghosts, and a man showing up at someone’s door at 2am knowing way too many intimate details about them. Some of these have explanations. Some of them don't. And honestly? The ones with answers are scarier. Find Kris and Celina...

Why have so many people described seeing the same scary entity in the backwoods of Appalachia? Something that looks human, but not quite? Today, we’re talking about the terrifying entity people have been seeing in the woods for generations.  “Crawlers”Our Small Business Spotlight this week is Coco and Duckie! Shop their store here: https://cocoandduckie.com/ Show Notes: https://www.heartstartspoun...

Go to https://kachava.com and use code HSP for 15% off your first order. Feral Children used to be the stuff of legends, but their stories are shocking, devastating, and real. Today, we're diving into multiple stories of feral children: the girl who was raised by her dog when her parents forgot about her, the legend of the wolf girl of Devils River, and the human experiment where a scientist tried...

When villagers in a remote Thai forest heard screams echoing from the woods every hour for three straight days, they were convinced the legends of ancient spirits haunting those trees had come to life. In Taiwan, a woman and her young daughter walked into an elevator, rode to the top floor of an 11-story building, and seemingly vanished, feeding into the internet's most haunting urban legends, “Th...

Go to https://kachava.com and use code HSP for 15% off your first order. One summer, a 24-year-old runner parked her car on a remote Wyoming road, left behind a to-do list with one uncrossed item "run" and was never seen again. Across the country, another woman was walking with friends on a well-traveled trail in the Great Smoky Mountains, went off ahead of her friends, and vanished without a trac...

Our listeners get 15% off plus free shipping when they buy two or more pairs of prescription glasses at WarbyParker.com/HSP — Using our link helps support the show. #WarbyParker #ad A face drawn in the fog of a bathroom mirror that looks exactly like you. A husband standing in the doorway who doesn't speak, doesn't move — and swears he was never there. From djinn that fall in love through reflecti...

Go to https://kachava.com and use code HSP for 15% off your first order. In September 2001, a housekeeper discovered an unidentified man's body in a remote Washington motel room, no ID, no belongings, and a fake name scrawled in the guest book. For 17 years, detectives hit dead ends while an obsessive online community became consumed by one haunting question: who was the man in room five? This is...

Go to https://kachava.com and use code HSP. New customers get twenty dollars off an order of two bags or more, January 1st through 31st! In February 2014, Aspen socialite Nancy Pfister was discovered murdered in the closet of her mountainside home, sending shockwaves through one of America's most exclusive communities. This is a case of wealth, betrayal, a shocking confession, and lingering questi...