Scams, Money, & Murder

On the night of September 19th, 1961, Betty and Barney Hill were driving home through the White Mountains of New Hampshire when a light in the sky started following their car. Barney pulled over, looked through binoculars, and said figures were looking back. They got home two hours later than they should have, with no memory of where the time went. Betty started having nightmares. Two years later...

If you're like us, you're counting down the days until Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz return to the big screen to fight mummies. But did you know the real stories behind everyone's favorite horror adventure? A cursed tomb, the real Imhotep, the truth about the nightmare-inducing scarabs and more. For more, follow Twisted Tales wherever you listen to podcasts: https://pod.link/1839058226 If you’re...

On a Friday morning in September 2006, sixteen-year-old Cassie Jo Stoddart looked up from her locker and smiled at a camera. The two boys holding it were her friends. That night, they planned to kill her. In the first part of our series on the "Scream" inspired murder, Katie Ring goes back to the beginning: a house-sitting job out past the edge of town, two classmates obsessed with Scream and Colu...

On August 4, 1892, Andrew and Abby Borden were found hacked to death in their Fall River, Massachusetts home...and suspicion fell almost immediately on Andrew's younger daughter, Lizzie. The household behind those locked doors tells a story of financial anxiety, stepfamily resentment, and a woman whose answers never quite added up. Lizzie was acquitted, but the question of what happened that morni...

In 1982, Cindy James was running a Vancouver treatment center for preschoolers with serious emotional and behavioral problems, and the two psychiatrists on staff reported to her. That October, months after leaving her sixteen-year marriage, the 38-year-old nurse called police to report obscene phone calls from a man who knew her name. She would call them close to a hundred more times over the next...

Most people will never knowingly meet a serial killer. The people in these Reddit stories did, and only realized how close they came when a familiar face showed up on the evening news… Alexis Linkletter and Sabrina Deana-Roga swap four real-life brushes with serial killers from Reddit, hearing each story for the first time, and they're joined by a special guest, SNOOK, for one of them. A charming...

On the evening of September 26, 2016, 21-year-old Keeshae Jacobs left her mother's house in Richmond, Virginia in black basketball shorts, pink Nikes and a pink headscarf. She told her mother and brother she'd be back in the morning to make pancakes. A friend drove her to a red brick row house in Church Hill. Just after 11 p.m. she texted her mother that she'd made it there safely, and that she lo...

In November 1957, police in Plainfield, Wisconsin went looking for a missing hardware store owner, Bernice Worden, and found her body in a shed behind Ed Gein's farmhouse. Inside the house, they found furniture, clothing and keepsakes made from human remains. Gein admitted killing Worden and a tavern owner named Mary Hogan, and to robbing more than 40 graves. He was found unfit to stand trial; whe...

In 2018, an anonymous user posted a photograph of an empty yellow room on 4chan — no caption, no story, no name. A year later, two paragraphs turned that image into one of the most elaborate horror mythologies the internet has ever produced. What followed was a global phenomenon: hundreds of levels, thousands of contributors, and a teenage filmmaker handed a feature film deal by A24. For more, fol...

Before she was “the Black Dahlia,” Elizabeth Short was a movie-struck kid from Massachusetts whose father vanished off a Boston bridge, then turned up alive twelve years later. In the first part of our 3-part series on the Black Dahlia, Katie Ring traces who Elizabeth really was: the fiancé she lost days before the war ended, the stories she told strangers to get by, and the last place anyone can...

Carl Panzram wrote his autobiography in prison — a document so violent and psychologically raw that the guard who helped him smuggle it out spent decades trying to publish it. He claimed murders on three continents and crimes across America, Africa, and Central America. In Part 1, Vanessa and Dr. Engels trace Panzram's catastrophic childhood in Minnesota reform schools where every attempt at rehab...

On the evening of June 9th, 1912, Josiah and Sarah Moore walked their four children home from a Children's Day program at the Presbyterian church in Villisca, Iowa. Two young sisters, Lena and Ina Stillinger, had been invited to stay the night. By the next morning all eight of them had been murdered with an axe in their beds while the small southwestern Iowa town slept, in what became known as the...

On the one night a year everyone wears a mask, how do you know who's really dangerous? Alexis Linkletter and Sabrina Deana-Roga trade four chilling Halloween stories from Reddit, hearing each one for the first time. A masked intruder hides in the dark watching a shop owner, then vanishes without a trace. A stranger in a truck turns a walk home into a nightmare. Michael Myers follows two girls all...

On Halloween night 2001, 21-year-old Penn State senior Cindy Song went out dancing with two friends in State College, Pennsylvania. Just before 4 a.m., one of them dropped her off and watched her climb the stairs to her apartment. After that, she vanished. Inside, police found a pair of false eyelashes set down on the counter and her backpack with her cell phone still zipped inside — the only sign...

In November 1974, Ronald DeFeo Jr. shot and killed six members of his family in their house on Ocean Avenue in Amityville, New York. Thirteen months later, George and Kathy Lutz moved in with their three children and left after 28 days, describing green slime, swarms of flies, a demonic pig and voices in the walls. The book that followed sold in the millions and launched one of the most profitable...

A killer who watched from the windows. A town students were too afraid to walk through. And a franchise born from real terror. Heidi Wong tells the true origin of Scream’s Ghostface: from Danny Rolling’s brutal attacks to the confession that later ignited Kevin Williamson’s iconic screenplay. For more, follow Twisted Tales wherever you listen to podcasts: https://pod.link/1839058226 If you’re new...

On September 30th, 2026, the state of Tennessee attempted to execute Christa Pike, the only woman on its death row. Two doses of a lethal drug later, she was still breathing. Now, she’s walking and talking. In the first part of our series on Christa Pike, Katie Ring goes back to the beginning: Two teenage girls, two very different childhoods, and the one place they were both sent to get their live...

In August 2018, Shanann Watts, 15 weeks pregnant, vanished from her home in Frederick, Colorado, along with her two young daughters, Bella and CeCe. Her husband Chris had been living a secret life: conducting an affair, hunting for apartments, and building a future that had no room for his family. As investigators closed in, the gap between his public image and private reality became impossible to...

Through the 1980s, a landlady named Dorothea Puente ran a boarding house at 1426 F Street in Sacramento, California. Her tenants were the people nobody else would take: the elderly, the disabled, the mentally ill, and the newly homeless. Social workers who visited described her as warm and unusually attentive, the rare operator who cooked real meals. Puente also collected their mail and cashed the...

A radio turns on by itself. A voice screams a warning. A shadow crawls toward your bed. Coincidence, or something more? Alexis Linkletter and Sabrina Deana-Roga celebrate Halloween with four of Reddit's spookiest paranormal crime stories. A young man wakes at 3 A.M. to a shadowy figure crawling toward his bed, then learns the next morning that gas had been leaking through the house all night. A wo...

When Nancy Moyer's estranged husband brought their daughters to her house on the evening of Sunday, March 8th, 2009, the front door was resting open against the frame. The television was on, her car sat out front, and a half-finished glass of wine stood on the coffee table beside a second. Detectives found no forced entry, no sign of a struggle, and both glasses had only Nancy's prints on them. Th...

In 1970, a nursing student in Connecticut was given a Raggedy Ann doll for her birthday. Within weeks she and her roommate believed it was moving around their apartment on its own, leaving handwritten notes, and attacking a friend. They called Ed and Lorraine Warren, the self-described demonologists who would later become the most famous paranormal investigators in America. The Warrens declared th...

An A&E original podcast presented by Rewind Studios, Celebrity Ghost Stories is adapted from the first and only series where celebrities share their real-life personal encounters with the paranormal, told completely through first-person narratives by the respected actors, musicians, and athletes who experienced these phenomena themselves. From ghosts and angry spirits to real-life haunted home...

On Christmas Eve, 1945, the Sodder family went to bed with nine children under one roof. By sunrise, the house was ash and five children were gone, without a single bone left behind. In the first part of our 3-part series on the Sodder children, Katie Ring covers the warnings nobody took seriously, a night where everything that could go wrong did, and a father who knew it was no accident. Follow A...

In 1920s Germany, Peter Kürten terrorized Düsseldorf in a killing spree that would earn him the name the Vampire of Düsseldorf. But his path to murder began decades earlier, rooted in a childhood of relentless abuse and cruelty. From his first alleged killings at age nine to a string of escalating attacks on women and children, this episode traces how Kürten's compulsion evolved into something uns...