We're swinging into December with a cavalcade of criminal Clauses this week, as Sean ticks off some notable examples of men who made the Naughty List while dress as Kris Kringle. Discussion of Santa-themed bank robbers brings us to the aptly-named Santa Claus Bank Robbery of 1927, which was a comedy of errors from the time Marshall Ratliff put on the big guy's suit right up until he was being tied up by a lynch mob. Then, we cap things off with the truly horrific Covina Massacre of 2008, when a ...
Dec 05, 2024•53 min•Ep. 195
We return to the autumn of 1885 this week where, in Austin, Texas, six victims - most of them Black domestic servants - have already been claimed by a killer who has successfully eluded police for nearly a year. On Christmas Eve, the midnight murderer's fury reaches its deadly peak. In the shocking conclusion to our two-parter on this case, Sean details the brutal "double event" that makes the end of the killing spree before delving into the details of the investigation...such as it was. With hu...
Nov 21, 2024•58 min•Ep. 194
Beginning in late 1884 and throughout 1885, Austin, the boomtown capitol of Texas, was terrorized and sensationalized by a series of horrific murders. One man, six women and a young girl would be claimed by the spree before the year was out. Most of the victims were Black, and many of them worked as domestic servants. Despite over 400 arrests, the crimes remain unsolved to this day... Officially, that is. In the first of a two-parter, Sean introduces the growing city of Austin in the late 19th c...
Nov 14, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 193
To wrap up the spooky season here on the show (though, let's be honest, that never really ends around these parts) we're taking a trip to beautiful Vermont, where the skiing is top-notch, the leaf-peeping is absolutely beautiful, and the ghosts...well, the ghosts seem to be all around, too. On our journey through the Green Mountain State we'll meet the son of a former president who can't let go of the place he once called home...visit a small-town in and its tap-dancing ghost...try to escape the...
Oct 31, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 192
A topical storm washes over the podcast this week as we wade into the controversy and conspiracy around weather modification. As conversation online takes a turn for the unhinged in the wake of Hurricanes Helene and Milton, we take a quick look at the reality of changing the weather, Ain't It Scary style. Sean does his best with the science (and pseudoscience) as he takes us through attempts at weather control including Wilhelm Reich's orgone cannons and government cloud seeding programs like Sk...
Oct 24, 2024•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 191
In this pre-Halloween special edition of "Spooky Chat," Sean and Carrie run down announcements ranging from the mundane to the life-changing before discussing the flicks we've been watching this Halloween, and the best and worst possible Ain't It Scary party guests. 7:11 - Urban Legend 11:11 - Halloween (1978) 18:55 - The Addams Family 21:20 - Casper 23:41 - IT Chapters 1 & 2 33:24 - Final Destination 38:30 - Hocus Pocus & Under Wraps 43:25 - Best/Worst Halloween Party Guests (from the A...
Oct 17, 2024•1 hr 9 min
Here on the show we love to get in the spooky season spirit by gathering around the virtual bonfire, throwing some sand into the flames, and getting into some famous urban legends. This year is no different - and now, along with our past explorations into the folklore surrounding tainted Halloween candy and the Bloody Mary ritual, we're adding three more legendary deep dives into the mix, all around the theme of "Teens in Trouble." First, we take a drive down Lovers Lane and try to avoid the Hoo...
Oct 10, 2024•53 min•Ep. 170
The New Jersey Pine Barrens: Over one million acres of sparsely populated, occasionally-on-fire wilderness, where the soil isn't good for growing anything but legends. Join us on a tour of Jersey's Pinelands and all the creepies and cryptids that supposedly make them their home, from pirate ghosts to the famed Jersey Devil. Go easy on Sean, Jersey-ites! He meant to say "pork roll." ________________________________________ Connect with us on social media: Facebook: www.facebook.com/aintitscary Tw...
Oct 03, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 189
On June 18th, 2023, the underwater tourism company OceanGate launched its Titan submersible, which was heading down with five passengers - billionaire adventurer Hamish Harding, deep-sea explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet, businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman, and the CEO of OceanGate itself, Stockton Rush - to nearly 2.5 miles beneath the ocean's surface to visit the wreck of the legendary doomed ocean liner, Titanic . None of them would make it back alive. What has unfolded in the last y...
Sep 26, 2024•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 188
Satanic Panic is back, baby, in the second of two parts on the Son of Sam murders! Sean takes us to the scenes of the last few shootings David Berkowitz committed in the summer of 1977, before covering Berkowitz's tumultuous transition to incarceration and eventual (inevitable?) cellblock conversion to evangelical Christianity. Oh, yes, and a talking dog. Looming like a conspiratorial shadow is the question: Did Berkowitz act alone? Or was the "Son of Sam" actually an interstate Satanic cabal be...
Sep 19, 2024•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 184
Trigger warnings for death and disco this week as we had back to mid-1970s New York to explore the "Son of Sam" murders that left the city in panic for one frantic year. From July 1976 to July 1977, David Berkowitz embarked on a string of cold-blooded murders with a .44 caliber pistol, killing six innocent people and wounding another seven more. This week, Sean gives us a quick tour of the life and times of the sad-sack slayer before sketching out his crimes of '76 and '77, along with his pretty...
Sep 12, 2024•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 186
In late September 1982, seven residents of the Chicago metropolitan area collapsed mysteriously, dying mere hours or days later. It didn't take investigators long to realize all seven victims had taken Extra-Strength Tylenol just prior to their deaths. All of them had been murdered, by a stranger, with cyanide, which had tainted the Tylenol capsules as they sat on store shelves. Join us this week as Sean runs down the facts and the suspects in this technically-unsolved poisoning spree - and the ...
Sep 06, 2024•53 min•Ep. 185
#HotMothSummer comes to a climactic end this week with the end of the first Mothman flap of Point Pleasant, West Virginia in 1966-1967 and the catastrophic collapse of the Silver Bridge, a tragedy in which 46 people lost their lives. Was the Mothman trying to warn those of the calamity to come...or merely a harbinger of their doom? And what was with all those UFOs, Men in Black, and of course, Indrid Cold? We try to get to the bottom of a "Unifying Theory of Mothman", and along the way also expl...
Aug 29, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 184
Thanks for your patience as we push through some tiring personal stuff to get to a great end to our Mothman series, and capping off #HotMothSummer just ahead of Labor Day! In the interest of our sanity, we kept it fairly loose this week with a late catch-up featuring Sean & Carrie gathering round the spooky campfire and talking their recently-consumed horror content ( Fallout the TV show, a cameo by our love of The Traitors , Immaculate and 'Salem's Lot ), discussed some ways we're already g...
Aug 22, 2024•1 hr 12 min
This week, we return to Point Pleasant for even more high strangeness as the Men in Black, a fleet of UFOs, and author John Keel descend on the town and get mixed up in a series of bizarre encounters including a little man with a ballpoint pen obsession, Indrid Cold and his posse of Lanulans (including our fave, Kletaw) and one very (and rightfully) pissed-off Native American Chief by the name of Cornstalk. Next time, we'll attempt to wrap up this crazy tale with the rest of the unbelievable eve...
Aug 15, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 180
This week, #HotMothSummer continues as we finally reach the story we've been building up to: the strange tale of the Mothman, a maybe-cryptid maybe-alien that descended upon the small town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia in 1966 to freak out the locals and eventually nab himself his own festival, museum, and of course, a particularly bootylicious statue. We begin this bizarre story with sightings of odd man-bird-creatures across the centuries in America, leading up to the major late-60s flying-...
Aug 08, 2024•56 min•Ep. 182
#HotMothSummer presses on this week with part 2 of our primer on the Men in Black! Sean takes us back to 1953 Bridgeport, Connecticut, as we hear in Albert Bender's own words what he says he experienced that fateful summer. What sounded from the outside like an intimidating visit from government officials quickly spins into a sci-fi thriller full of telepathic messages, astral projection, and the occasional sexy alien rubdown. Grab your magic coin and breathe in that sweet, sweet sulphur air, be...
Jul 18, 2024•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 181
Best known today for diminishing cinematic returns, the Men In Black have been one of the creepiest boogymen of the UFO community for nearly 80 years. This week, Sean takes us all the way back to 1947 and the first reported incident of someone being approached by a black-suited government agent after a UFO sighting and told to keep quiet. Next we jump ahead to the early '50s to meet Albert Bender, whose own encounters with so-called Men in Black were decidedly more sinister. What did Bender see ...
Jul 11, 2024•1 hr•Ep. 180
As an Independence Day treat, we hop into the time machine for a little "Ain't it Sneaky" here on the show with the twisting tale of the Culper Spy Ring, America's first foray into espionage during the Revolutionary War. Formed after the tragic execution of newbie colonial spy and forever Connecticut hero Nathan Hale, the Culper Spy Ring was the brainchild of none other than George Washington, who realized a more sophisticated system of spycraft was necessary if the fledgling Patriot cause was e...
Jun 27, 2024•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 179
This week it's a summertime holiday story for the summertime holiday season as Sean introduces us to the creature fondly remembered as the Sandown Clown. This C-team cryptid (maybe) is reported to have chatted with two vacationing children on the Isle of Wight one warm day in 1973, introducing itself, "Hello and I am all colors, Sam." The "clown's" eye-catching appearance and inescapable high strangeness have made it a favorite of ghost, cryptid and alien hunters despite the single alleged sight...
Jun 20, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 178
Lighthouses have stood on the Northeastern coast of America for centuries, beacons of hope in dark night or a desperate storm...and, sometimes, silent witnesses to the many tragedies that can befall seafarers and their loved ones in the course of their sometimes dangerous work. This week, we take a trip through the past 300 years of American history to visit some of the most haunted lighthouses in New England (and, uh, one in New Jersey) and see how their morbid tales tie in to the most importan...
Jun 13, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 172
We take a trip back to '40s and '50s London this week to cover the grimy and gruesome story of serial killer John Reginald Christie, who gassed and strangled 8 women to death and stowed their bodies in and around his London flat. Sean takes us through the case that helped get the death penalty abolished in the UK, and we tackle all the most important unanswered questions - like how this guy stayed married as long as he did. ________________________________________ Connect with us on social media...
Jun 06, 2024•1 hr 28 min•Ep. 178
For our 175th episode, we're going back to our spooky roots to investigate another internet-popularized urban legend: Black Eyed Kids. In 1998, journalist Brian Bethel took to the fledgling interwebs to share a strange tale. Sitting in his car alone one night in 1996, he'd been approached by two strange children - children who insisted he let them in the car and acquiesce to their demands. The encounter made Brian uneasy...especially so when he realized that both of the kids had entirely black e...
May 31, 2024•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 175
This week we tackle the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum theft, one of the most notorious and high-value art heists of all time. One March night in Boston, 1990, two men donned police disguises to enter the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Once inside, they subdued security and walked off with a collection of art potentially valued at over $1 billion in 2024. Vermeers, Rembrandts and more were lost to the world that night, never to be seen again. To this day, no one has ever been charge...
May 23, 2024•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 174
This week, we're celebrating all kinds of mums - but no, that isn't in observance of America's Mother's Day holiday this upcoming Sunday! No, the collection of mums we're discussing are of a decidedly drier type: mummified human remains. And these aren't the millennia-old corpses of ancient Egyptian Pharoahs; no, all the mummies we're discussing come from the last century (and change) and all across the world. From a drag queen's closet in New York City to a musty Sicilian catacomb to Moscow's R...
May 09, 2024•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 173
This week we're tackling the "ancient astronaut" hypothesis: the idea that ancient humans had repeated contact with extraterrestrials that is borne out in their myths, art, and monumental achievements. How were the Great Pyramid of Giza and the Moai of Easter Island erected without modern technology? Could the Bible, the myths of the Babylonians and Mayan religion all be cultural memories of heavenly beings from another planet? Are the Annunaki and Planet X on their way back to the inner solar s...
May 02, 2024•1 hr 22 min•Ep. 172
Last week we shared the first half of the dramatic tale of one of America's so-called "Crimes of the Century" - the kidnapping, and tragic murder, of Charles Lindbergh Jr., toddler son to one of the most famous men in the world: aviator Charles Lindbergh. In this, our 2nd and final part, we detail the painstaking investigation that eventually led to the arrest of German immigrant Richard "Bruno" Hauptmann for the murder of little Charles. The years-long search for the kidnapper and killer involv...
Apr 25, 2024•1 hr 22 min•Ep. 171
On the night of March 1st, 1932, little Charles Lindbergh Jr. was tucked into his crib for a good night's sleep. Mere hours later, the family nurse discovered that Charles Jr. was no longer in his bed...nor was he anywhere else to be found. The disappearance kicked off the beginning of one of America's so-called "crimes of the century", and one of the world's earliest international true crime sensations. Because Charles Jr. wasn't just any toddler - he was the son of megastar aviator Charles Lin...
Apr 19, 2024•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 170
It's an old school ghost story this week - and we mean *way* old school, as we jump back to the early 19th century to explore the Bell Witch Haunting. From 1817 to 1821 John Bell Sr. and his family were harassed by an invisible presence with a clear, distinct voice and a penchant for slapping people around. This week Sean introduces us to the Bell family, the mischievous spectral gossip known as Kate, and the series of events on this Tennessee farm that would eventually turn deadly. (I mean, may...
Apr 11, 2024•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 169
[Obvious TW this week for discussion of suicide.] Over the years, certain songs have attracted dark reputations. Reputations like that the songs might drive you mad enough to end your own life... or make others mad enough to end another's. This week, we discuss 3 famous examples of these "suicide songs": the morosely melancholic "Gloomy Sunday", the sinister legend of the Lavender Town Syndrome, and the very real rash of "My Way" murders, centered within Philippines karaoke culture. Can a song r...
Apr 04, 2024•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 168
