The Fear Archive

A note arrives at the San Francisco Chronicle in August 1969. It begins: This is the Zodiac speaking. He did not wait for the press to invent a nickname. He named himself. He branded himself. He was doing personal marketing before personal marketing was a concept — and he did it while murdering people and daring the public to catch him. The Zodiac killed five confirmed victims, possibly seven. He...

Dead Air is what happens between Fear Archive episodes — no research, no structure, no plan. Just Amanda and Mike talking until something disturbing comes up. It always does. This week opens with Amanda getting an extremely convincing bank scam call while driving — a caller who knew her address, told her a fraudulent Wells Fargo account had been opened in her name in Colorado and was being used to...

There is a body lying on a riverbank. She has been there for two days. Somewhere between eight and thirteen teenagers have seen her. Some came back multiple times. Not one of them called the police. Her name was Marcy Renee Conrad. She was fourteen years old. Her boyfriend strangled her and then brought his friends to look. What those teenagers chose to do next — or rather, what they chose not to...

Dead Air is what happens between Fear Archive episodes — no research, no structure, no plan. Just Amanda and Mike talking until something disturbing comes up. It always does. This week: Amanda crashed an AMC app at 7AM to secure 70mm IMAX tickets to Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey on opening day. Peter put her in charge. She delivered. Mike still does not know what Tenet is about. They also cover:...

Monster vs. Aileen Wuornos is the Fear Archive episode that asks the question true crime almost never asks: when society creates someone like this, does it have the right to destroy her? One day before her execution, Aileen Wuornos looked directly into a camera and said: we have evil in us. All of us do. And my evil just happened to come out because of the circumstances. She was not wrong. She was...

Dead Air is what happens between Fear Archive episodes — no research, no structure, no plan. Just Amanda and Mike talking until something disturbing comes up. It always does. This week: Mike took magnesium because he read on Reddit that writers use it to have vivid dreams. It worked. He dreamed he was urinating. He was not dreaming. He woke up, slipped on dog vomit on the way to the bathroom, and...

Six men walked into the Colorado mountains in February 1874. One walked out. He was not starving. He had more money than he left with. And when they found the bodies, they had been butchered and consumed. The judge at Alfred Packer's sentencing delivered one of the most extraordinary lines in American courtroom history: there were seven Democrats in Hinsdale County, sir, and you ate five of them....

Dead Air is what happens between Fear Archive episodes — no research, no structure, no plan. Just Amanda and Mike talking until something disturbing comes up. It always does. This week: Amanda's old 1988 Nissan 240SX — yeast infection colored, beloved, sold to a stranger in Florida — turned up in the news when a dead body was found inside it. She tried to look it up and found nothing, because appa...

It is a normal day. A manager is checking receipts. Teenagers are laughing in the back. Grease pops, ice melts, orders come in. Then the phone rings. A man says he is a police officer. He sounds calm, professional, certain. He says an employee has stolen money. And over the next few hours, people will strip someone, search someone, and humiliate someone — not because they want to, but because they...

There is a registered Omaha sex offender named Cookie Monster who allegedly walked into a stranger's home through an unlocked door, removed his clothes, got into a sleeping child's bed, and brought a bottle of water and a bottle of lotion. Mike read about it. Mike has thoughts. This is Dead Air — the Fear Archive companion show where nothing stays on topic and everything is somehow worse than you...

The Fear Archive investigates the Hmong sleep deaths — a series of unexplained nocturnal deaths among Southeast Asian refugees in the early 1980s that Wes Craven has cited as direct source material for A Nightmare on Elm Street. Between 1981 and 1983, healthy young Hmong men living in the United States began dying in their sleep. No warning. No medical explanation. The Los Angeles Times covered th...

Amanda has a dead rat in her wall and has been marinating in the smell for weeks. Mike has a baby garter snake in his foundation and is convinced mama snake is behind him right now. This is Dead Air — the Fear Archive companion show where nothing stays on topic and everything connects back to true crime anyway. This episode: the rat in the wall becomes a conversation about frogging and things hidi...

The Fear Archive investigates Faces of Death — the 1978 shock documentary that was not quite a documentary, not quite fiction, and was deliberately designed to keep you from knowing the difference — and the 2026 remake that asks the harder question: why are you still watching? Faces of Death was released in 1978, directed by John Alan Schwartz under the pseudonym Conan LeCilaire. It presented itse...

What if the CIA didn't just experiment on human minds — what if they also shaped the movies inside them? In this episode, Amanda and Mike break down the real history of Project MK-Ultra — the CIA's declassified program of forced LSD experiments, psychological torture, and memory erasure — and trace its fingerprints across some of Hollywood's most iconic films. From The Manchurian Candidate to Stra...

Dead Air is the show between the shows. No scripts. No research. Just Amanda Kagiwada and Mike Assip talking about whatever broke their brains this week — and somehow ending up in weirder places than the Fear Archive ever goes. Episode 1: A potentially cursed Pakistani coin appears on Mike's dresser and nearly ends his marriage. Amanda joins the moon community and cannot explain what she saw. A do...

The Fear Archive investigates the Bell Witch — the oldest and most entrenched paranormal legend in American history — and the 2005 film that claimed this was the only haunting in the United States ever documented to result in a death. Between 1817 and 1821, the Bell family of Robertson County, Tennessee, reported escalating paranormal disturbances. The entity pulled hair from sleeping family membe...

The Fear Archive investigates the Travis Walton abduction — one of the most famous and most contested UFO encounters in American history — and the 1993 film that tried to put the experience on screen. On November 5, 1975, Travis Walton disappeared into the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest near Snowflake, Arizona, in front of six witnesses. He was gone for five days. When he returned — confused, d...

Black Christmas vs. Danny LaPlante is the episode that asks the question horror fans have never dared to ask out loud: did the film create the killer? In 1974, Black Christmas changed horror forever — not with gore or monsters, but with a single chilling idea: the killer is already inside the house. Watching. Listening. Waiting. In this episode of The Fear Archive, Amanda and Mike examine the real...

The Fear Archive investigates the Kelly-Hopkinsville encounter — the most detailed and extensively documented alien creature sighting in American history — and the unlikely film it helped inspire. On the night of August 21, 1955, the Sutton family and their friends at a farmhouse outside Hopkinsville, Kentucky, reported a siege by small, silver, glowing beings that appeared from the tree line and...

The Fear Archive examines the DeFeo murders — one of the most disturbing family annihilations in American true crime history — and the exploitation film that tried to explain them with demons and incest. On November 13, 1974, six members of the DeFeo family were found shot dead in their beds at 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville, New York. The only survivor was Ronald 'Butch' DeFeo Jr., who would late...

The Fear Archive investigates Joseph Kallinger — a Philadelphia shoemaker, father of seven, and serial killer who claimed God ordered him to murder every human being on earth — and the Bill Paxton film that channeled his darkness. Kallinger did not fit the profile. He was quiet, unremarkable, a craftsman who fixed shoes and raised children. And then he began recruiting his own son into a campaign...

The Fear Archive examines the Keddie Cabin murders — one of the most disturbing unsolved cases in California history — and how that atmosphere of random, senseless violence found its way into The Strangers. On the night of April 11, 1981, three people were murdered inside Cabin 28 in the small Sierra Nevada community of Keddie, California. Sue Sharp, her teenage son John, and his friend Dana Winga...

The Fear Archive investigates the haunting of Doris Bither — the real paranormal case that UCLA researchers took seriously enough to document — and the 1982 film The Entity that dramatized it. Doris Bither was a single mother living in Culver City, California, who reported being physically attacked by an unseen entity. She was bruised. Her children witnessed the disturbances. And when parapsycholo...

Ed Gein is the most influential killer in horror film history — and most people do not know the half of it. The Fear Archive examines the Butcher of Plainfield and the full scope of his cinematic legacy. In 1957, police entered Ed Gein's farmhouse in Plainfield, Wisconsin, and found something that defied description. Masks made of human skin. Bowls carved from skulls. Furniture upholstered in fles...

The Fear Archive investigates Ray and Faye Copeland — a Missouri farming couple convicted of serial murder in their seventies — and the Ti West horror film X, which excavates the darkness lurking beneath rural American surfaces. We interview Peter Phok, executive producer on X. Ray and Faye Copeland looked exactly like what they were: an aging farm couple in Ozark County, Missouri. They were not....