AFTER SHOCK: This 1970s rockstar biopic of a man whom we can all agree should be deeply reviled isn’t a new or shocking concept in America, the country with the world record for serial killers in the last 100 years. Zac Efron's sculpted and lovable Ted Bundy personifies an ongoing American obsession with this allegedly handsome killer turned celebrity, a man who confessed to 30 murders and brutal sexual assaults. What does it mean that these boogeymen for which we carry pepper spray, check our b...
Jul 22, 2019•12 min•Ep 8•Transcript available on Metacast Whether we like to admit it or not, we have celebrities that we follow, and we can watch their dramatics play out on a public stage, their dramatics that remind us of our own. On this episode, we will trace the major events that shaped American fame as we know it, forming our fantastical ideas about celebrities and their personas on and off screen. We’ll explore the anthropology and psychology behind our celebrity celebrity obsession, a process that is actually embedded in our very DNA. We’ll al...
Jul 15, 2019•36 min•Ep 7•Transcript available on Metacast AFTER SHOCK: On this week's show we talk about a disease known as Parrot Fever that frightened the nation in 1929, leading to parrots being abandoned in the streets and thrown overboard from ships. But just as quickly, the hysteria gave way to ridicule as America and the media made Parrot Fever into a joke, a made-up illness, a silly panic. But in reality, sickness and death struck 20% of those who contracted Parrot Fever, and though the concern was overblown, the denial of its existence was too...
Jul 08, 2019•12 min•Ep 6•Transcript available on Metacast Gwyneth Paltrow’s Lifestyle-brand ‘Goop’ and the expensive products it peddles are just the newest in a long line of medical quackery leading back to the 1800s. America has a long history with selling and buying Snake Oil, bogus cures to any ailment you can imagine, starting with the cowboy showman of the wild west, who sold to the masses through traveling vaudevillian performances. In addition to fake cures, historical American doctors and scientists also have a dark history of identifying and ...
Jul 01, 2019•39 min•Ep 5•Transcript available on Metacast We all remember the very real threat of cooties, a contractable playground malady that developed out of the adult fear of germs. Cooties have long acted as a tool of kiddy quarantine as well as a tool to define who are the social others of the school hierarchy. Today we will dive into the long history of cooties, from wartime trenches to the jungle gym. American Hysteria is written, produced, and hosted by Chelsey Weber-Smith Produced and edited by Clear Commo Studios Research and cowritten by R...
Jun 24, 2019•13 min•Ep 4•Transcript available on Metacast In a real sense, germs are our only modern predator and they are invisible and impossible to detect; what could be scarier? America has adjusted to the threat of germs by not only working toward cures and vaccinations, but by making uncleanliness in general a cultural symbol meant to separate social others from the affluent. Anxieties about race and immigration, about gender and sexuality and class, played out in the way products were marketed, as well as in how public policy and public opinion ...
Jun 17, 2019•34 min•Ep 3•Transcript available on Metacast American Hysteria presents the AFTER SHOCK, a follow-up minisode to the main episode before it, basically The Shit They Didn't Show or From The Cutting Room Floor. We'll cover one interesting story every other week. This episode is about 'griefbots,' a new form of AI that app developers are creating. By scouring social media posts and text messages of deceased persons, they work to design chat bots that loved ones and future generations can actually interact with. One developer is even offering ...
Jun 10, 2019•16 min•Ep 2•Transcript available on Metacast For the season two premiere, we are exploring the rich American history of Spiritualism, a massive 80-year trend of popular culture lasting from the Civil War to the Jazz age in which mediums began speaking to, and then speaking for, the spirits of the dead. A sudden craze of magical, fun, gross, and sexy parlor room séances swept the nation, materializing during the awe-inspiring age of invention and scientific inquiry. But the movement also had a political side; for the first time women were g...
Jun 03, 2019•34 min•Ep 1•Transcript available on Metacast Join us next week, Monday, June 3rd, for the premiere of season two where we cover the creepy, sexy, gross, and surprisingly political American movement of Talking to the Dead. Find out what more you can expect from our coming season, from terrorism to dangerous teens, from medical quackery to the dangers of the crossword puzzle. In the meantime, if you love the show, please leave us a five star review, it really helps the show out. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
May 27, 2019•2 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is the 20 year anniversary of one of my favorite movies of all time, The Blair Witch Project, a movie that masqueraded as real found footage of three college students who went missing in the woods while recording a documentary on the local legend. The story of the missing students and the lore of the Blair Witch were both widely believed during its monumental release, and we are covering just how the directors and marketing team were able to pull off one of the greatest hoaxes in American h...
May 06, 2019•16 min•Ep 21•Transcript available on Metacast Our culture, our society, our very sense of self, relies heavily on a faith in our memories as perfectly accurate. But what if our memories aren’t as reliable as we think? What if we can recall vividly, things that never actually happened? And what if that can extend out to an entire culture, a whole group collectively remembering something wrong? The Mandela Effect, however, says that parallel dimensions are to blame for discrepancies of mass childhood memories, such as the spelling of Berensta...
Apr 22, 2019•13 min•Ep 20•Transcript available on Metacast The newest viral internet urban legend focuses on an entity named Momo, a creepy humanoid figure with giant eyes, a strange too-wide smile, and grotesque chicken legs, said to message teens and kids on messaging apps with escalating dangerous challenges ending in self-harm and suicide. On this mini episode, we'll explore this and other panics that look for something to blame for the issue of adolescent mental health. These mini episodes will cover the strangest viral phenomena of the world wide ...
Apr 08, 2019•14 min•Ep 19•Transcript available on Metacast It has been said that the apocalypse is as American as apple pie, and for our season finale we are exploring different versions of the end of the world, the hyper-religious, the new age, and the scientific, as well as Chelsey’s personal experience with the 2012 Mayan Apocalypse. The stories we tell about the end of time tend to involve not only a series of cataclysmic, devastating events, but also the saving of an elect few, and the punishing and death of the rest. While none of the end times pr...
Mar 25, 2019•44 min•Ep 18•Transcript available on Metacast This week we will be discussing the history of drug panic in the United States and its effects in the present day. My guest is Sarah Deutsch, a friend of mine from high school who received her masters in Public health from the City University of New York. Sarah went on to become the Director of Outreach and Prevention for a syringe exchange in Washington Heights, where she worked for many years. Currently, Sarah is working in Washington State to scale up programs that serve people who use drugs....
Mar 18, 2019•25 min•Ep 17•Transcript available on Metacast When a security camera caught footage of a 31-year-old Florida resident eating the face of a homeless man, the news and social media dubbed him the Miami Zombie, and it was widely speculated that he was under the influence of a new synthetic drug called Bath Salts, a claim that was later found to be false. Hysterical drug rhetoric has long talked of zombies and monsters and aggressors with superhuman strength and an imperviousness to police bullets, and panic around drug use has long been manufa...
Mar 11, 2019•35 min•Ep 16•Transcript available on Metacast For this week's episode of the Calm Down, my guests are the women of Feminist Folklore. Each week Carela Holl-Jensen and Rachael Marr consider what fairytales, folk stories, and urban legends can tell us about culture at large, about beliefs surrounding gender and sexuality and the prescribed roles of women. Today we’ll be discussing different interpretations of the Hook man urban legend as well as the true crime stories of Lover’s Lane, while we dissect the phenomenon of the teenage urban legen...
Feb 25, 2019•24 min•Ep 15•Transcript available on Metacast In 1996, Scream taught American teenagers the first rule to surviving a horror movie. Never, ever have sex. Classic slasher movies have their roots in an urban legend we all heard growing up: a guy and a girl are parked on a deserted lover’s lane making out while a hook-handed killer is on the loose. The 2000s gave us urban legends about dangerous teen sex games, Rainbow parties and sex bracelets, as well as bans on high school dances over grinding and twerking, and with the recent outrage over ...
Feb 18, 2019•36 min•Ep 14•Transcript available on Metacast For the Calm Down this week my guests are my two Christian friends who wish to remain anonymous, as they are sharing some anti-establishment opinions. Brianna is a poet who got her masters with me at the University of Virginia, and her husband Patrick has a master’s degree in biblical and theological studies and teaches the bible at a private high school. Brianna and Patrick are dedicated to questioning and exploring their faith in big ways, and today we’ll talk about their changes of heart as y...
Feb 11, 2019•27 min•Ep 13•Transcript available on Metacast The purse-carrying, tutu-wearing purple Teletubby Tinky Winky was outed as a homosexual in 1999, capping off a decade of conspiratorial anti-gay writings and videos that influenced politics straight up to supreme court. Accused of using kids shows and public schools to influence impressionable minds and recruit new young homosexuals, the gay militants were secretly powerful agents of a massive conspiracy to bring down traditional American values and take over the country. The creation of the Gay...
Feb 04, 2019•36 min•Ep 12•Transcript available on Metacast For most of us living in the US, clowns have become much more associated with horror than the laughter of kids. The “killer clown” epidemic went viral in 2016, with reports across the nation of evil clowns trying to lure children into the woods, attacking adults, and threating harm to local schools, but as you might guess, they were all hoaxes or hysteria. However, it wasn’t the first time that America was invaded by Phantom Clowns. For this episode, I will trace the history of our relationship ...
Jan 21, 2019•38 min•Ep 10•Transcript available on Metacast *Please be aware that this episode talks about child sexual abuse* We recommend listening to part one of Satanic Panic first. In 1980s America, when 60% of people believed that devil worship was a serious problem, two new characters, Stranger Danger’s murderous pedophile and the Satanist, blurred into a new villain and psychological archetype: The Satanic pedophile. In part one, we saw how Satanic hysteria was sown through pop culture, sensational media, and religious hucksters, causing the wide...
Jan 07, 2019•38 min•Ep 8•Transcript available on Metacast This episode is part one of our two-part series on perhaps the most mystifying moral panic in US history, the 1980s and early 90s 'Satanic Panic.' For this episode, Chelsey covers the rise of organized Satanism beginning in the late 60s, as well as the adversarial countercultures of the hippies and the metalheads, and their apparent Satanic crimes that would be hailed as proof of their evil, as well as proof that teens, as well as children, were in serious moral peril. Satan was allegedly hypnot...
Dec 10, 2018•35 min•Ep 6•Transcript available on Metacast For this episode, we'll explore the mother-of-all conspiracy theories, the Illuminati, an alleged secret society and their evil world domination plan known as the New World Order. Chelsey takes a stroll down memory lane with friend Austin Smith, to a time when they believed in the Illuminati and found what seemed like proof. We’ll explore the history of the theory itself, why some people are more prone to believing than others, and how at the heart of the theory lies a dark ideology that has aff...
Nov 26, 2018•37 min•Ep 4•Transcript available on Metacast This episode takes a look at our history with candy, the desire and the panic, and explains why sweets have always been a source of fear for parents. Starting with the strange 1800s religious beliefs of Dr. Harvey Kellogg, about candy leading to sexual deviancy, we'll move through the goofy urban legends of the 1970s, to the 80s and 90s when people allegedly began finding dangerous objects in their foods, like syringes in Pepsi cans and poison in Halloween candy. American Hysteria is written and...
Nov 12, 2018•33 min•Ep 2•Transcript available on Metacast This episode explores the evolution of American's bogeyman, the Stranger, and reveals how rare these types of kidnappings really are. Through looking at the sensational child snatching crimes that have shaped our culture from the 1800s to the 1980s, and how we have responded to them in the media, in books, with PSAs and made-for-TV movies, host Chelsey Weber-Smith explains the problem with Stranger Danger and what this moral panic might be covering up. American Hysteria is written and produced b...
Nov 12, 2018•33 min•Ep 1•Transcript available on Metacast American Hysteria is a brand new podcast exploring our moral panics, urban legends, and conspiracy theories, how they shape our psychology and culture, and why we end up believing them. Host Chelsey Weber-Smith will attempt to understand why we fear the wrong things, explore how these fears shape our past, present, and future in sometimes hilarious and sometimes devastating ways, and also what these bizarre panics might be covering up. Topics range from Stranger Danger to Poisoned Halloween Cand...
Nov 05, 2018•2 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
