Murder Coaster

New England in the 1800s was gripped with a vampire panic. Belief in the undead rising from their graves at night to feed off the living, spreading pestilence and disease, was rampant, and as families watched their children grow sickly and pale, struggling to breathe and withering away, they saw no choice but to seek out the offending creatures of the night, by digging up their corpses, hacking ou...

Lizzie Borden. The name has been etched into the American consciousness through countless books, movies, even a heavy metal band and a haunting and disturbing children’s rhyme which you can hear on playgrounds to this day. She was the first, modern American Psycho, a woman of class and privilege who caved her parent’s heads in with an axe. Theories over her innocence or guilt, as well as the vicio...

Learn the disturbing truth behind the Conjuring Haunting. There’s a legend of a murderous and devil-worshipping witch that once dwelled in Rhode Island in the early eighteen hundreds by the name of Bathsheba who sacrificed babies to Satan and whose ghost is said to haunt the land. The legend has become so pervasive that the Burrillville cemetery, where her grave is located, has become a tourist de...

Happy release day to THE DAUGHTERS OF BLOCK ISLAND and congratulations to cohost Christa Carmen!! Christa tells us all about her love of Gothic horror and her new book THE DAUGHTERS OF BLOCK ISLAND. It is a book filled with mystery, murder, intrigue, ghosts, red herrings, twists and turns, an underground labyrinth of dungeons and tunnels, and a haunted mansion, everything a Murder Coaster listener...

Welcome back to our second and final episode on Sid and Nancy, the Romeo and Juliette of punk rock. Today we will explore the tumultuous relationship of these two star-crossed lovers, the implosion of the Sex Pistols, and then get into the mysteries surrounding this infamous case. Who killed Nancy Spungen? And was the death of Sid Vicious an overdose or suicide? Ladies and Gentlemen, we present to...

Sid and Nancy. They were the Romeo and Juliette of punk rock, star-crossed lovers, each despised and hated by the other's friends and family, bound together by fate and passion into a forlorn and doomed romance that would see them both dead in the prime of their youth. Their relationship is the stuff of legend, of films, books, songs, and poems, a tumultuous and violent affair riddled with drugs a...

The story of professional skateboarder Gator is a distinctly American tale about a rocket to success and a tumble to disgrace. It is also a story about the history skateboarding and Southern California culture, a story of celebrity and fame, of bizarre religious mania, sexual sadism and murder. Mark Rogowski was just a child when his mother brought him from Brooklyn to San Diego, and beach culture...

New York Times bestselling, Edgar Award winning author Harry N MacLean joins us to discuss his new true crime book STARKWEATHER: The Untold Story of the Killing Spree That Changed America. In late 1957 and early 1958 nineteen-year-old Charles Starkweather went on a spree of crime and murder through the American heartland, much of it accompanied by his fourteen-year-old girl friend Caril Ann Fugate...

PUNK ROCK. It was a battle cry for alienated and disaffected youth around the world. Outsider kids who wanted to go wild in a cruel world where they saw no future. The rejected, the misfits, banding together and causing chaos. And in many ways, no band reflected the anarchistic spirit of the hardcore punk movement better than Fang, from Berkley California. Fang would become infamous for their hedo...

The Black Dahlia. Just the name itself evokes mystery and intrigue, conjuring images of a raven-haired and gothic beauty tragically slain at the zenith of her youth, of a gritty 1940s Los Angeles straight from a hard-boiled True Detective magazine, revealing the dark underbelly of old-school Hollywood. Indeed, the Black Dahlia murder is one of the most enduring murder mysteries in the history of t...

The Wendigo. Today we will examine the origins of the mythological beast, and explore three cases of supposed Wendigo possession that ended in madness, murder and cannibalism. Swift Runner was a Cree Native American in Saskatchewan who is said to have succumbed to the Wendigo spirit and butchered and ate his entire family during the harsh winter of 1878. He would become the first person legally ex...

What does Hitler, Russia’s most prolific serial killer, and a Florida frat-boy cannibal have in common? They’re all werewolves!!! Hitler was obsessed with wolves and werewolves. The name Adolf literally means “noble wolf” and Hitler often called himself Father Wolf. He also deployed not one, but two Werewolf Battalions during the nightmare of World War II. Mikhail Viktorovich Popkov is Russia’s mo...

Horror writers on werewolves! From huge, mainstream, bestselling authors, to underground indie writers of extreme horror and splatter punk, we have curated an amazing collection of horror authors to give us their take on what the werewolf means to them. The authors featured on today's episode are: Richard Chizmar, New York Times bestselling author of Chasing the Boogeyman and Gwendy’s Button Box,...

Albert Fish is one of the most terrifying and notorious figures in the history of true crime. A cannibal and child killer, he was both a sadist and a masochist whose sexual perversions knew no bounds. Albert Fish was the original Boogeyman. For decades he roamed the country, a shadowy figure, abducting children and eating them. Not unlike the Slenderman of internet lore, he would appear and then m...

World War I caused astounding economic and social ramifications in Germany. Severe reparations led to an extreme economic crisis marked by hyperinflation, unemployment, and widespread poverty. The social fabric of Germany was torn apart, allowing a vast criminal underground to flourish. And one of these criminals was a werewolf, prowling the city of Hanover at night, ripping the throats out of his...

Mark and Jim from the Horror Movies and Shit podcast join us today as we cover the long history of the werewolf in cinema! Unlike vampires, which entered the realm of cinema with an established mythology, the modern werewolf is a creature almost entirely created by Hollywood. Today we’ll explore how film shaped and influenced our notions of lycanthropy. Along the way, we’ll let you know which were...

In humanity's oldest surviving work of literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh, the goddess of sex and violence transforms her lover into a wolf. This ancient narrative suggests that the concept of the werewolf has been intertwined with human culture since time immemorial. Join us on a journey into the historical roots of the werewolf, which culminated in the infamous werewolf trials and executions duri...

On April 11, 1981, a chilling and unsolved multiple murder unfolded in Cabin 28 in the little town of Keddie, California, nestled in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Three victims were found: Sue Sharp, her son John Sharp, and John’s best friend Dana Wingate. They were brutally slain, having been bound, beaten with a hammer and stabbed. Sheila Sharp, Sue's 12-year-old daughter, was mi...

Richard Chizmar joins the show to discuss his new book Becoming the Boogeyman a blending of true crime and horror fiction.. Richard is not only a New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Amazon and Publishers weekly bestselling author, screenwriter and extremely prolific short story writer, he is also the founder of Cemetery Dance Magazine and the Cemetery Dance book imprin...

The Wineville Chicken Coop murders stand as some of the most horrifying and unsettling chapters in the annals of true crime, marked by a plot twist so bizarre it defies belief. Today, we delve into these gruesome crimes through a four-act narrative we've titled "A Tale of Two Mothers." Sarah Louise Northcott's love for her son, Gordon, knew no bounds. Gordon was a charismatic, intelligent, and gif...

The Leslie Van Houten Story Part 2: Marauders in the desert, the way of the coyote, arrest, trial, rehabilitation and release. Leslie has gone from flower-power, love-child hippie to marauding, violent outlaw running wild in the desert of Death Valley under the command of the Infinite Soul Charlie Manson. Then it all comes crashing down. The Family is busted and crazy Sexy Sadie is telling anyone...

From Homecoming Queen to Acid Orgies: The Leslie Van Houten Story Part 1 After 53 years in prison, former Manson Family member Leslie Van Houten is now a free woman. This is her story. Leslie sang in the choir as a little girl and lived to dance, sliding across the wooden floors of the Harmony Ballroom in Anaheim to the surf rock sounds of Dick Dale. As a teenager she heard the hippie call to turn...

The craziest suspected serial killer you probably never heard of! In 1982 Treasury Department agents were hot on the trail of a counterfeiter traveling across the country passing off fake twenties at shopping malls, earning him the monicker “The Mall Passer.” Authorities would eventually apprehend Mike DeBardeleben, and the horrors they would uncover when they searched his many storage compartment...

Get ready for a rootin-tootin, true-crime good time, as we get into the life of notorious Wild West outlaw, gunslinger, and old-time serial killer Levi Boone Helm: The Kentucky Cannibal. The American Frontier of the 1800s was a ruthless, brutal and lawless place where might made right and violence reigned, and no one epitomized this savagery better than Boone Helms. Boone Helms’s reign of terror a...

Every abandoned place is haunted, if not by the ghosts of the dead, then by the relics of the past. And no place appears more eerie and forlorn than the abandoned amusement park. Today we will be covering two abandoned and haunted amusement parks. First there's the Rocky Point Amusement Park in Rhode Island. Most locals scoff at the supposed Gypsy curse that's said to be upon Rocky Point Amusement...