What does that mishmash of an episode title mean? Well, gentle listeners, this week in honor of the approaching All Hallow's Eve we are taking a short break to prepare our intense final episode of our "Salem Witch Trials" series and dropping in a preview of some content we have going on over at Patreon! We just launched a currently Patreon-exclusive new mini-series, "Ain't it Kitschy?", where we will be diving into everything, well, kitschy - kitschy being defined as things considered to be gaud...
Oct 28, 2021•57 min
In this 2nd part of what's become a 3-part series, we dive deeper into the tragic events of the 1692 Salem Witch Trials and how the hysteria began to rapidly spread across Salem and beyond - now in the guise of dozens of arrests and hearings with suspected witches fingered by a gaggle of mostly teenage girls. Carrie introduces us to the key players in the Salem Witch Trials and the context in which they existed...from afflicted girl Mercy Lewis' deep-rooted trauma from being orphaned by Maine's ...
Oct 21, 2021•1 hr 41 min
We've finally come to our long promised two-parter on one of Carrie's pet interests, the Salem Witch Trials! In 1692 Salem, Massachusetts, tensions were already high. The Puritan colonists were struggling through the "Little Ice Age" devastating their crops, paranoid about being attacked by neighboring Native American tribes, and quarreling with their minister and each other about who the most godly of the bunch really was. The atmosphere was rife for backstabbing and tragedy, and that tragedy w...
Oct 14, 2021•1 hr 19 min
Halloween is SPOOKY SEASON, and Sean is kicking us off with a howlin' all-werewolf episode! We take a whirlwind tour of the mythology and history of werewolves (including skinwalkers and the Rougarou) before tackling real life monsters like Gilles Garnier and modern manwolves like the Beast of Bray Road. What horrors lurk under the full moon? Where do these werewolf legends come from? And why are these badass beastie boys always playing second fiddle to uppity ol' vampires?? ____________________...
Oct 07, 2021•1 hr 38 min
Dr. John Dale Cavaness was a beloved small-town doctor and respected member of his community, so there was a public outcry when he was accused of murdering his own son, Sean, for insurance money in 1984. It didn’t come out until his trial that Cavaness had murdered ANOTHER of his sons seven years before. And that's not even including the double reckless homicide before that! Sean chips past the “respectable” doctor's exterior to the monster Cavaness’s family knew, and Carrie marvels at the slopp...
Sep 30, 2021•1 hr 18 min
Jamestown, Virginia was the first successful English settlement in North America (for the first UNsuccessful one, go check out our episode on Roanoke) - but it came close to failing completely many, many times. The worst of these failures being the tragic Starving Time. Plagued by a deadly combination of famine, disease, and an enemy Native tribe, the Starving Time in winter 1609-1610 almost wiped out the entire colony, leaving only 60 survivors from the original group of 500. And some of these ...
Sep 23, 2021•1 hr 15 min
In 1998 - then again, in 2000 - our world got a hero, born of another reality. A man who traveled through time to warn us of coming catastrophe. Or, maybe, just one more Internet meme spun out of control. A man calling himself John Titor first faxed Art Bell's Coast to Coast AM program, then later posted on several online message boards. Titor claimed to be a military time traveler from the year 2036, and he told a story of our near future full of war, disease, famine, and catastrophe. Of course...
Sep 16, 2021•1 hr 20 min
Natalie Wood was one of the biggest film stars of the late 50s and early 60s, starring in such classics as Miracle On 34th Street while still a child and continuing on to acclaimed roles in Rebel Without a Cause, Splendor in the Grass, West Side Story, and more. By 1981 her career had cooled, but she still had one thing from her early days of stardom - her marriage to fellow actor Robert Wagner. Well, remarriage, to be precise. There was uncertainty about whether the second Wood-Wagner marriage ...
Sep 09, 2021•1 hr 36 min
If you're looking for a well-researched, yet grisly story told with a wink and a laugh...well, we have 49 other episodes we can recommend. To celebrate our big 50th episode, we wanted to do something a little different. Coast to Coast AM, the cream of the crop of late-night call-in shows, has been delivering the finest in weird listening since 1988 - and we'd be remiss not to pay tribute to one of our biggest influences. Sean and Carrie dip a toe into the archives for some wild Area 51 calls and...
Sep 02, 2021•1 hr 22 min
King Henry VIII. Beheader of wives. Noted fat guy. Lover of turkey legs. Henry the 8th has become a punch line, known for his break with the Roman Catholic Church over his obsession with Anne Boleyn and gradual decay into a stinking, ulcerating laughingstock by the time of his death at 55 in 1547. But Henry VIII wasn't just a big goofus...he also exhibited classic signs of psychopathy, narcissism, and traits of being a serial killer. One that didn't get his own hands dirty, of course, but a kill...
Aug 26, 2021•1 hr 43 min
For almost as long as America's been a country, there have been stories of strange lights and objects zipping around the North American skies. This week, we've chosen some particularly intriguing tales from the New England states - Massachusetts, Maine, Rhode Island, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Connecticut - and try to figure out whether these unidentified flying objects are merely terrestrial, extraterrestrial, or something else altogether. From a mass abduction/sighting incident in the '60s Be...
Aug 19, 2021•1 hr 23 min
Theaters are places of intense emotion - the laughter of a hilarious comedy, the love of a romantic musical, the tears of an affecting tragedy. It's no wonder that these magnets for, well, drama, tend to be some of the most haunted places in the world. From the spectral figures of the Great White Way to the site of an American president's final moments, to the home of the Phantom himself in Paris and one of the oldest continuously operating theaters in the world in London, we take a field trip t...
Aug 12, 2021•1 hr 5 min
Satanic Panic is having something of a renaissance these past few years, and that's where we're ending our four-part series today! Once again, whispers are flying around of a vast underground conspiracy of child abusing Satanists. But this time, it's not preschool teachers, basement-dwelling nerds or Metallica-wearing teens who are to blame...it's Hollywood elites and top-ranking Democratic politicians! Sean takes us through Pizzagate's origins in Hillary Clinton emails (but her emails!) and Ter...
Aug 05, 2021•1 hr 35 min
For part 3 in our tour of Satanic hysteria, it's 1993 and the ritual abuse panic of the '80s is coughing its last gasp in Arkansas! Faced with the horrific murder of three young boys, West Memphis law enforcement, media and the community at large pointed the finger at three misfit, somewhat delinquent teenagers - Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jesse Misskelley. When one of the suspects confessed to the murders, it was only the beginning of the story. Sean takes us through the facts of the cas...
Jul 29, 2021•1 hr 59 min
In lieu of our normal episode this week, enjoy an interview with ParaConn co-founders Charles Rosenay & Nick Grossmann! ParaConn is Connecticut's FIRST paranormal convention! We'll be guests at the convention this weekend (July 24 and 25) in Ansonia, CT, so to prep for 2 days of meeting, greeting, and definitely buying a lot of spooky home decor, we sat down with Charles and Nick to talk the paranormal, Connecticut's legends, their scariest experiences during ghost investigations, and the co...
Jul 22, 2021•1 hr
Let the panic continue! Last week we showed you the origins of the 1980s Satanic Panic within a rash of alleged Satanic sex rituals at daycare centers. This week, Unloaded Questions co-host and our actual D&D Dungeon Master Nick Salese joins us in the role of resident D&D expert as we trace the Satanic Panic's spread to point fingers at all corners of popular culture - including the tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. Is TSR's 1974 hit roleplaying game a recruiting tool fo...
Jul 15, 2021•1 hr 41 min
July is the month for Satanic Panic, and Sean kicks off our four-part series with a look at the cases that set the tone for ritual abuse hysteria in the 1980s. From the 1980 bestseller Michelle Remembers to the more than four-year-long satanic sex abuse trial surrounding McMartin Preschool in California, we try and get at the roots of what some have claimed is a vast underground conspiracy of devil-worshipping child molesters. Warning: some of this content is especially icky. ___________________...
Jul 08, 2021•1 hr 36 min
Throughout the many years humans have been on this Earth, we've always been prone to one problem (among many): mass hysterias. Mass hysterias are sociological and psychological phenomena that transmit collective illusions of threats (whether real or imaginary) through a population and society as a result of rumors and fear. Basically--a shared bout of insanity, usually centered around one thing. In this episode Carrie takes us through 4 of the most confounding historical hysteria cases around th...
Jul 01, 2021•1 hr 16 min
It's our very first guest star episode! On this ep, Paul Ferrante - author of the "T.J. Jackson Mystery" paranormal YA series and dad/dad-in-law to our very own Carrie and Sean - stops by to talk ghosts. The ghosts of Gettysburg, PA, that is! The Battle of Gettysburg was not only the bloodiest battle of the entire American Civil War, but the bloodiest battle ever fought on U.S. soil. It seems the spirits of many of those lost between July 1st and 3rd, 1863 never left...and still haunt the street...
Jun 24, 2021•1 hr 18 min
If you're like us, you couldn't focus on the two leads duking it out in Godzilla vs. Kong... because you just kept thinking, "Wait, they said 'Hollow Earth' just now, right? Like, 'The Hollow Earth,' like it's a place?" This week, Sean takes us through the history of people thinking the Earth has a big ol' hole in the middle of it... and maybe several more Earths inside, too, while we're at it? From the pseudoscientific musings of a Royal Astronomer to a New York doctor turned messianic cult lea...
Jun 17, 2021•1 hr 10 min
While hiking the Pianista trail near Boquete, Panama in April 2014, Dutch tourists Lisanne Froon and Kris Kremers vanished, seemingly without a trace. Searches by local and Dutch authorities turned up nothing, and hope began to fade that the girls would ever be found. Until June, when Lisanne's backpack was uncovered, containing a working camera, the girls' cell phones...and a lot of questions. After this, some remains of Froon and Kremers were sadly discovered along the Culebra river, but to so...
Jun 10, 2021•1 hr 32 min
Trailer for the podcast Ain't it Scary? with Sean & Carrie With a shared passion for history and the truth, Sean & Carrie realized they could bring their different perspectives to the world of true crime, the paranormal, conspiracies, aliens, cryptids, historical weirdness, mysteries, and all things inexplicable. Sean’s sharp eye on the logical and Carrie’s open mind to the unexplainable combine in every episode for an informative hour with a lighter touch--like Scully and Mulder got the...
Jun 09, 2021•2 min
Walt Disney built an empire on family-friendly entertainment that’s grown into a modern titan of the industry - and today we’re climbing all over its seamy underbelly. Gross! Sean zig-zags us through rumors about Walt Disney’s involvement with Nazis, the FBI and cryogenic freezers, before tackling the most storied spirits of Disneyland in a whirlwind ghost tour around the original Magic Kingdom. He’s still Sean, so we also detour into tangents on the House Un-American Activities Committee and th...
Jun 03, 2021•1 hr 46 min
In 1985, U.K. tabloid The Sun started a frenzy of fear when they published a series of articles about a cursed mass-produced painting - dubbed "The Crying Boy" - that had been found at the sites of dozens of house fires. In each of these instances, the story was the same: families had purchased the painting, displayed it, their home had gone up in flames, and the painting itself mysteriously remained unscathed, even if the entire house around it was gutted. That was enough for The Sun...the "Cry...
May 27, 2021•1 hr 4 min
The Fermi Paradox is the apparent contradiction between the high probability of advanced alien life in the universe - and the total lack of evidence for it here on Earth. In the conclusion to our two-part series, Sean focuses on the Fermi Paradox answers that include civilizations beyond our planet. Are they locked away forever behind impossible distances of space? Are we just not listening hard enough or looking in the right places? Or maybe - just maybe - are extraterrestrials already right he...
May 20, 2021•1 hr 28 min
Are we all alone in the universe? There are hundreds of billions of galaxies - the largest hold trillions of stars, the smallest a few hundred million. It seems impossible that there wouldn't be civilizations out there, some of them far more advanced than ours. So...where are they? The Fermi Paradox is the apparent contradiction between the high probability there is advanced life out there, and the total lack of evidence for it. In this first of a two-part series, Sean takes us past "Scary" and ...
May 13, 2021•1 hr 25 min
Turin, Italy. 1960. Two enterprising young brothers have rigged up their own radio equipment to listen in on the Soviet Russian unmanned rocket launches during the Cold War Space Race. But they pick up something they never expected...something the Soviets never thought would be uncovered. A voice, in Russian, begging for help as their space craft goes up in flames. And the voice...is coming from space. Did the Soviet Union cover up the deaths of multiple cosmonauts during their race to beat Amer...
May 06, 2021•57 min
This week Sean gives us a closer look at famed heiress-turned-hostage-turned-bank-robber Patty Hearst, and the tragic hippie Communist morons in the radical left "Symbionese Liberation Army" who turned a 19-year-old art history major into a fanatical urban guerrilla...within just a couple of months. The horror in this story is a more personal one: How strong is your identity? If you were put in the right situation, would you bend and change? Would you break altogether? Is brainwashing even a thi...
Apr 29, 2021•1 hr 16 min
This week we complete our two part series on the most haunted cemeteries in the entire world! From the gateway to hell in Stull, Kansas, to the story of a vampire king in London, England, to crying statues in Savannah, moving coffins in Barbados, and a one-two punch of weirdness in Chicago including phantom women both on film and in legend, we discuss and rank some of the world's most haunted graveyards...and designate one the MOST HAUNTED winner! ________________________________________ Connect...
Apr 22, 2021•1 hr 11 min
This week on the podcast we begin a two part series on the most haunted cemeteries in the entire world! From the cursed grounds of an accused witch's murder in Salem, Massachusetts, to the site of possibly the most adorable ghost ever in Edinburgh, Scotland, to the final resting ground of New Orleans' voodoo queen, the spirit of the Lizard King in Paris, and a screaming skull in Baltimore, we tackle some of the world's most ghoulish graveyards - and the stories behind their specters. Don't forge...
Apr 15, 2021•1 hr 3 min
