Strange and Unexplained with Daisy Eagan

At nine years old, Asha Degree packed her bookbag, left her family home in Shelby, North Carolina and set about walking along a nearby highway. The search for Asha would unfold over 20 years, testing family, law enforcement and a confused community all up to today. No one has seen her since, but many wonder what errant clues haven’t been revealed in this haunting case of a child gone missing. This...

We pull a lot of accounts with strange & unexplained phenomena from the anonymous posting site Reddit on this podcast. After all, its creators endeavored for it to be the “front page of the internet.” However, when a frequent poster –claiming to be a World War II veteran– advertised his own image-hosting site on Reddit back in 2009, a mystery would unfold across the internet tying in a mysteri...

For all intents and purposes, German brewer Johann Adam Lemp achieved the so-called American Dream for generations of his descendants when he arrived in St. Louis, Missouri in 1838. His humble lager recipe ballooned into a huge brewery with a family mansion to match. However, as the business got passed down the line, dark history unfurled –haunting the business and house where it all happened. Thi...

The New York Lunatic Asylum opened its doors in 1839 with a mission to humanely treat the mentally ill of NYC from the tranquil isolation of an island on the East River. However, as the years unfolded, cracks showed, trouble ensued and an intrepid reporter found herself within the institution’s walls, reporting its downfall for the world to see. Here’s the story of Roosevelt Island. OBSESSED FEST...

Tara Calico was a smart, accomplished and athletic college freshman who biked into the New Mexico desert one morning in 1988 and never came back. A year later, a peculiar photograph appeared in a parking lot over a thousand miles away in Florida. The search for Tara would enlist the help of investigators across an ocean only to eventually reveal corruption back home. Whatever happened to her resul...

Feeling dead inside is one thing, but truly believing it is a mysterious, medical reality. With only about 200 known cases worldwide, Cotard’s Syndrome is a rare condition characterized by delusions of missing body parts, lost organs or being dead altogether –even while technically living to tell the tale. In this episode, we’ll go over the history of Cotard’s Syndrome, the stories of people who’v...

One wintry day in 1922, six bodies were discovered on a remote farm in Bavaria. The scene was ominous, scattered with clues indicating an unclear couple of days leading up to the sextuple murder of the family and its maid. Decades later, investigators landed on a culprit whose name still hasn’t been revealed. The tragedy at Hinterkaifeck was a mystery complete with complicated relationships, missi...

In 2006, a man was found on the ballroom floor of a hotel in Baltimore, with a hole in the ceiling overhead and a mystery surrounding the occurrence. Rey Rivera was –for all intents and purposes– an average guy, who lived, worked and loved in search of greater purpose. But upon going missing, he left clues along the way leading straight back to that hole in the roof of the infamous Belvedere Hotel...

In the wake of Pearl Harbor, the United States employed an old method of surveillance along its west coast: blimps. And when two pilots took off in one high above San Francisco Bay one summer morning in 1942, no one could have predicted its wild and wacky ride. A crash landing followed by the discovery of an empty cabin confused onlookers and navy personnel alike. What happened? This week's sponso...

One December morning in turn-of-the-20th-century New York City, a young society woman went out to run errands and never returned home. Dorothy Arnold’s forbidden love affair, writerly aspirations and wealth combined to stir up intrigue over what happened to her at the time. Today –over a hundred years on– her disappearance is still a mystery. This week's sponsors: Lumi Labs - To learn more about m...

We're taking a break this week so here's a listen back to our very first episode, based on the same story as the new series "The Watcher" out today on Netflix. In June 2014, Derek and Maria Broaddus bought their dream home in Westfield, New Jersey - a 6-bedroom, 3.5-bath mansion at 657 Boulevard. Just days later, before the family even moved in, they received their first letter from "The Watcher."...

In the early 1800s, a Tennessee farm-dwelling family began hearing suspicious noises around their home, seeing strange apparitions along their property and believing a wicked force had befallen them. The Bell Witch would go on to become a legendary haunting, complete with ghostly dialogue, violent scares in the night and even a cowardly visit from Andrew Jackson himself. And when the spirit finall...

In the late 1960s, the Zodiac Killer terrorized Northern California not necessarily via his body count –only five confirmed victims over the course of a year– but through his ability to manipulate fear into notoriety. Letters to newspapers, codes to crack and mysterious phone calls to police baited many into tormenting themselves with the question: who is the Zodiac? In this episode, we’ll go over...

An estimated one million people flock to the enigma that is Stonehenge every year, yet the origin of this circle of stones remains unknown. Who built it? How? And, of course, why? In this episode, we’ll cover the facts, debates and theories concerning this mysterious landmark and its five thousand-year history on Salisbury Plain.

Have you ever left your body, willingly or not? Astral projection has a long history, stretching from ancient religious texts and up through our current, quarantined imaginations. We humans desire to get out of ourselves from time to time, but when we do…where do we go? In this episode, we’ll head into the astral realm with the fascinating practice of accessing it.

Mind control –as a conspiracy and fear– has its long, questionable history in the United States. Starting in the 1950s in response to the Korean War and up through the LSD tests of the 1960s, the American government cooked up some experiments for the purpose of psychological manipulation. The top-secret CIA program MK Ultra spawned suspicion… as well as ideas that twisted themselves into a new con...

We're taking a break this week so here's an episode from our first season you may not have heard yet. There she lay face down on a beach towel, naked in the sand: handless, dead and with a mouth full of expensive dental work. In 1974, when a kid and her dog discovered the body of a young woman in Provincetown, Massachusetts, a mystery took off. Who was she? Well, she’s the Lady of the Dunes. 

In the early hours of a June morning in 1997, 26-year-old Lori Ceci Bova stepped outside for a smoke break and never came back. She forgot her cigarettes, for one, and as the search for Lori unfolded more questions than answers emerged. Loved ones, police and bystanders took turns being cagey, and the abundance of psychic input on the case led everyone astray. When someone disappears truly without...

Welcome to the magical world of Disney theme parks, where the huggable characters, glistening turkey legs and all around sparkle are a sheen over some dark secrets –which makes sense. Any place touting a policy of zero death on its grounds has to have some skeletons hidden away. 

We're taking a break this week so here's an episode from our first season you may not have heard yet. We'll be back with a new episode next week! This is the story of a cook who refused to wash her hands and the health department that chased her around New York City in search of a stool sample. She’d end up alone on an island, but everyone knew her name. Here’s how Mary Mallon became Typhoid Mary.

Imagine surviving a freak accident and coming out the other side unrecognizable – not on the exterior, but inside. Where do our personalities live, and how can they shift drastically? In season one, we covered miraculous talents resulting from traumatic brain injury. On this episode, we’ll head to the dark side of personality change with the stories of Phineas Gage, Eadweard Muybridge and someone...

Can you hear that? It’s like a car –idling in the distance– or a plane on a tarmac, with a tinge of oil crackling in a pan. Since the 1970s a mysterious sound has tormented communities across the globe and confounded those curious to find its source. With no recording of it in existence, and only 2 to 10 percent of affected area populations able to hear it, this hum is a sonic mystery for the ages...

In 1974, an article in a local paper turned the sleepy town of Stull, Kansas upside down. It was about an abandoned church and its surrounding cemetery. Accounts of cold brushes with spirits and theories on a stairway to hell drew the likes of rowdy college students and celebrities alike, including Kurt Cobain and Ariana Grande. But what’s more haunted: the places that fascinate us or the stories...

The possibility of parallel universes has long been considered in science fiction, pop culture and even plain, old physics. Accounts of interdimensional travel stretch back to the 12th century and forward to the annals of reddit today. On this episode, we’ll parse through some of these stories about slipping out the other side.

Jack and Janet Smurl were your typical, civically engaged, small-town couple. That is, until they –and their four kids– moved into a haunted house in West Pittston, Pennsylvania. Exploding appliances, strange sounds, violent events and a foul odor tortured the family inside while drawing onlookers and media outside. But was this craze the work of a demon or something more morally sinister?