Camping is Canceled.

Spooky season waits for no one, and the internet's creepiest paranormal stories certainly have us terrified. We're reading vintage Reddit threads from 10 years ago, back before AI could muddy the water, and the comments are somehow as unsettling as the posts.

Expect haunted apartments, bedtime visitors nobody invited, dreams that landed a little too close to real life, and one overnight shift at a remote port facility where we would have refused to leave the room until daylight. You decide what you believe, and we'll be over here with every light in the house on...

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In August 1949, The Washington Post ran a headline about a Maryland boy freed from the devil's grip. That story became a book that sold 13 million copies, then one of the scariest movies ever made. Before the 360-degree head turn, there was a real 14-year-old named Ronald Hunkeler, a house in Cottage City, and a family willing to try just about anyone who would pick up the phone.

We start at the very beginning: scratching under the floorboards, a household whose beliefs about ghosts and demons didn't quite line up, and a reverend, a psychiatrist, and a parapsychologist...

It's spooky season, and we're starting with the board itself. The Ouija has a Baltimore origin story involving a fertilizer salesman, a coffin maker, a patent office that needed some convincing, and a family grudge that lasted 96 years. There's a university study that says the thing works, but just not the way you'd hope.

Reddit has the scariest Ouija stories people were willing to type out: a bank account number nobody should have known, a name that meant nothing until Mom's face changed, and one very specific green van. Consider this your PSA: we don't recommend trying...

We're wrapping up the Rose Petal Murder, and we're doing it with more questions than we started with. Part III picks up at Zachary Hughes's February 2023 murder trial. The jury wasn't allowed to hear some pretty major things. Then the same state that fought to keep those things out changed its tune the second it was convenient.

We walk through the civil lawsuits, a long-overdue arrest, and two courtroom statements that made us react in very different ways. Through all of it, we keep coming back to Christina Parcell and to the kids at the center of...

This week, we are diving deep into the primal instincts and eerie "gut feelings" that tell us to pack up and get out of the woods. We scoured the backpacking subreddit to bring you a spine-chilling collection of stories where trusting that inner voice meant the difference between a close call and absolute disaster.

We also explore real-life mysteries, like the tragic 1995 disappearance of a hiker in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness, and delve into the fascinating Shoshone legend of the Nimerigar "little people." Plus, we share incredible tales of hikers who listened to their intuition and ended up...

This week, we're breaking from our usual deep dives for one of our favorite recurring bits: a big pile of user-submitted horror stories about why, exactly, camping is canceled. Genevieve just got back from a week backpacking in Wyoming and lived to tell about it, so naturally the timing felt right to remind everyone why sleeping outside is a terrible idea.

We dig through some of Reddit's darkest camping and hiking threads for tales of vanishing children, humanoid figures crawling around tents during thunderstorms, ghost Marines pointing lost soldiers back to safety, and a Wicker Man sighting...

This week, we bring our blind read of "The White Darkness" to a close, and it's the ending we were both dreading to find. We follow Henry Worsley as he retraces the exact steps of his hero, Ernest Shackleton, sled harness and all, first as part of a three-man team chasing the pole Shackleton never reached, and later, alone, attempting something no one had ever survived: an unsupported solo crossing of Antarctica.

What follows is one man's final chapter, and it left both of us completely wrecked. In this episode, Gen talks about what Worsley left behind...

When we last left you, police had two men in handcuffs, Christina Parcel's fiancé and her ex, and neither one turned out to be her killer. This week, that person finally speaks, and it's someone none of us saw coming: 31-year-old Zachary Hughes, a Juilliard-trained concert pianist who had never so much as met Christina Parcel before the day he killed her.

We spend most of this episode inside Zach's own words, pulled straight from two and a half hours of trial testimony, tracing how a chance meeting outside a Greenville coffee shop turned into a friendship w...

A doorbell camera caught him walking up to the house with a bouquet of roses. Twelve minutes later, another camera caught him riding away in a mask and gloves. Inside, 43-year-old Christina Parcell had been stabbed 35 times, her body found surrounded by scattered rose petals. This week, we're pulling apart one of the most tangled cases we've ever covered.

Christina left behind a sister who never doubted her, a fiancé who found her body and immediately asked for gloves before touching anything, and an ex-partner whose obsession with her stretched across a continent. We dig into the c...

We're back for Part II of our blind read of David Grann's The White Darkness, and we already have several new fears we didn't have going into this one. Turns out surviving elite military training is somehow not even the most intense thing that happens in this episode.

We are already emotionally invested and a little worried about what happens next. Join us next time for part 3 of this blind read.

"That's Genevieve. And that's Kaitlyn."

Sisters-in-law, best friends, former CNAs, and the sharp-witted duo behind Camping Is Canceled. Known for their mix...

This week's blind read started with a black and white photo: a man grinning around a fat cigar, ice crusted thick in his beard, missing front tooth and all. That's Henry Worsley, and by the time this photo was taken he was deep into a solo, unsupported crossing of Antarctica ... over a thousand miles of ice, no dog team, no support crew, nobody coming to check on him if something went wrong.

We went in knowing nothing except the title and the author (per usual for us) and came out somewhere we didn't expect: deep in the...

We're picking up where we left off... Tami Oldham Ashcraft, alone on a gutted yacht in the middle of the Pacific. She’s grieving the fiancé the ocean took from her with nothing but raw grit, a broken sextant, and a voice in her head that will not shut up. Over the next 41 days, she rigs a mast out of pillows and a broken pole, argues with something she still can't fully explain, and has to decide, more than once, whether she even wants to make it home.

This is the ending of one of the most inc...

This time we skipped the murders for something almost as unsettling: real sleepaway counselors telling on their own campers. Today we dive deep into the weeds of Reddit for the weirdest, wildest, most deranged sleepaway camp memories.

From unsolicited upskirts😱 to a kid who tried to take a counselor's face off with a desk chair, this episode has it all. Some stories had us laughing until we couldn't breathe. Others had us seriously worried about how these kids turned out… and whether their parents ever found out what really happened at camp. Either way, we regret nothing about...

⚠️ This one covers drug trafficking and substance abuse, plus the toll a life on the run took on two kids who never asked for any of it. Nothing violent, but still heavy in its own way.

We're back for the second half of You Can Run, and honestly the first half didn't even scratch the surface. Fake passports, a boarding school in England, a nightclub called Ammmnesia (yes, with three M's for style), and a prison escape involving a man drinking his own blood... this family's fugitive years get weirder by the page.

But underneath all...

**WHAT HOOKED US: “When their parents ripped two young sisters from their privileged lives, gave them fake names, and took them on the lam, they thought it was because their father was in trouble with the IRS. It would be years before they learned the truth about his life of crime.”-The Atavist Magazine; No. 176

These two little girls had no idea their entire lives were about to turn into a game of hide and seek under fake names. We're only halfway through, and we already need a minute.

⚠️ Heads up, this one includes emotional abuse an...

It started as a single encounter in a Texas parking lot in 1996 — a journalist sitting in his car, a check in hand, when two teenagers approached and asked for a ride. Nothing unusual, until he looked at their eyes. Completely black. No whites, no pupils, no iris. Just void. He threw the car in reverse and didn't look back, and when he did, they were gone. That was Brian Bethel's account, and it became the origin story of one of the internet's most unsettling modern legends: the Black-Eyed Children, or BEKs.

The encounters we read through this ep...

In 1983, Tami Oldham Ashcraft was only 23 years old when she and her fiancé set out to sail the Pacific Ocean. She and her fiancé, Richard Sharp, set off to sail from Tahiti to San Diego aboard Hazana. Back in 1983, weather reports only came through every 3 hours. By the time Tami and Richard knew what Hurricane Raymond was, the storm was already on top of them.

Richard was swept overboard and never found. Tami was knocked unconscious for 27 hours. When she woke up, she was alone on a dismasted, half-destroyed boat 1,500+ miles from the nearest land — without a work...

These dogs — and one very deserving cat — went full hero mode when it mattered most. This week, we dove deep into the Reddit thread "Redditors Whose Lives Were Saved By An Animal" and pulled the best of the best. We were not prepared for how much we'd cry.

"That's Genevieve. And that's Kaitlyn."

Sisters-in-law, best friends, former CNAs, and the sharp-witted duo behind Camping Is Canceled. Known for their mix of research-driven storytelling and unfiltered commentary, Gen and Kait tackle true crime cases (and paranormal rabbit holes) with empathy, curiosity, and a healthy dose of dark...

Survival Summer is officially in session, campers. This week, we’re going straight to the internet — specifically, the Reddit thread that asked people to share the worst situation they'd ever survived. The responses did not disappoint.

From a college weed run that ended at the barrel of an AK-4, to a retired escort who slowly, horrifyingly pieced together what her "regular client" was actually after... we might be a little scarred from these survival tales.

Next week, we are back with a full deep dive into the survival story of Tami Oldham Ashcraft, a woman who...

She was supposed to be his eighth victim. On November 19th, 1988, 27-year-old Enietra Washington — a mother of two and lifelong South Los Angeles resident — accepted a ride from a stranger named Lonnie Franklin Jr. and barely lived to tell about it. Shot point-blank in the chest, sexually assaulted, photographed unconscious, and pushed from a moving car, Enietra did something Lonnie Franklin never counted on: she survived. And decades later, she took the stand and looked him in the eye.

Lonnie Franklin Jr., known as the Grim Sleeper, was convicted of 10 murders in 2016 and sentenced to death. He died...

Forty-six years later, and we still don't have an answer to that question. In this final installment of the Mainline Murders, we walk through the trials of both Bill Bradfield and Dr. Jay Smith — the theft conviction that cracked the case open, the jailhouse confessions that made stomachs drop, the physical evidence that pointed directly to Karen and Michael, and the appeal that let a convicted triple murderer walk free. All of it builds to the two loose threads that refuse to tie: where are those children, and who is truly responsible?

This one stings. Because the ju...

What started as a Victorian-era literary euphemism for murder on a mountain has become a hashtag, a warning, and for too many women — a lived experience. The term "alpine divorce" traces back to 1893 and Scottish author Robert Barr's fiction, where a husband plots to push his unhappy wife off a cliff in the Swiss Alps. The wife outsmarts him. Not everyone gets that ending.

In this episode, we dig into the deeply unsettling trend of partners — overwhelmingly men — abandoning, endangering, or outright attempting to kill their significant others in remote wilderness settings. From cases that made the headli...

In December 1995, a farmer driving along a desolate country road outside Mansfield, Texas, found the body of 16-year-old Adrienne Jones — shot twice, her skull caved in, left behind a barbed wire fence in the dark. She had been lured out of her house in the middle of the night by the boy she had a crush on. What investigators would eventually uncover was a murder plot born out of jealousy, obsession, and two teenagers who had convinced themselves that eliminating a girl was the only way to preserve what they had.

⚠️ Content warning: This episode contains descriptions of mur...

Nine months of manipulation, a car trunk full of cash, a bottle of acid, and a Cape May alibi — Bill Bradfield really thought he had this one locked up. Part III of the Mainline Murders picks up on June 22nd, 1979, the most critical 72 hours of the entire case.

We follow the final movements of Susan Reinert and her kids, walk through Bill's meticulously constructed alibi weekend, and watch the investigation slowly close in — not through a dramatic confession, but through a $25,000 paper trail Bill assumed nobody would ever find.

New here? Don't start here. Go back...

In 2009, journalist Charles Bowden sat down in a motel room with a man who had personally buried 250 bodies in Juárez, Mexico. He was a former state police officer turned cartel sicario who spent nearly two decades kidnapping, torturing, and killing for an organization he could never fully see or name. Bowden had spent years trying to get to this story. What he walked away with was one of the most chilling first-person accounts of cartel life ever put on paper.

Bowden's writing pulls no punches: the sicario speaks plainly about his craft, his conscience, and the s...

Part two of the Mainline Murders picks up right where we left off: with the deeply unsettling inventory found in Susan Reinert's car, including a blue comb engraved with the 79th Reserve Command, the very same unit served by her own principal. Who was Dr. Jay Smith, really?

On paper, Principal Jay Smith was a decorated Army colonel, a man who'd carpooled with John Eisenhower and earned a doctorate. Behind that carefully curated image was a much darker story: a daughter lost to heroin addiction who vanished without a trace, a basement that read like a fever...

This week, we’re back with a blind read. We don’t do any research beforehand and refuse to peek at spoilers, so we have no idea how this ends! This is a CalMatters investigative piece called “The Man Who Unsolved a Murder” by Anat Rubin. It covers a six-year-old boy named Willie Cook who vanished from a small Northern California logging town in 1976.

What starts as a cold case kidnapping quickly unravels into something messier: a witness whose story keeps shifting, a confession that a leading expert calls psychological torture, a defense investigator who starts pulling one thre...

We’re sharing Reddit's creepiest "Not a Ranger, But..." forest encounters. These search-and-rescue stories prove that humans—not monsters—are the woods' true terror. Anyone surprised? (Not us.) We cover bowhunters stumbling on meth labs disguised as campsites, kids vanishing mid-hunt only to reappear mud-soaked with zero memory, and rangers chasing "wolves" that lead to hidden bodies.​

We laugh-cry through trail cam blunders, time-loss blackouts, and "fuzzy figures" haunting family hikes. This episode hammers home why we never stray off-trail without backup.​

“That’s Genevieve. And that’s Kaitlyn.”

Sisters-in-law, best friends, former CNAs, and the shar...

In 1979, a devoted mom, Susan Reinert, and her kids, Karen (12) and Michael (10), vanished after a routine Cub Scout pickup—only for Sue’s brutalized body to turn up crammed in her car’s wheel well days later. By all accounts, Sue seemed to be living the all-American life. In this episode, we dive into her relationship with her college-sweetheart-turned-ex-husband, Ken, and the events leading up to her disappearance and murder.

We truly can’t get over how badly this investigation was fumbled. This Pennsylvania nightmare—inspired a book and TV movie—stays unsolved 46 years later.

“That’s...

EP 118 wraps up our three-part Silk Road Blind Read. Silk Road was a secret, dark website that sold drugs like an online eBay, run by a mystery boss called DPR (Dread Pirate Roberts). In this finale, FBI agent Tarbell travels to Iceland to raid a data center and grab Silk Road's hidden server after spotting a leaked IP address.​

We yell through DPR's growing fear from his diary, his sloppy security mistakes (like ignoring server alerts), and agent Force's dangerous undercover work as "Nob," whom DPR has grown to trust a bit too much: he starts chatting ab...

Silk Road's paranoia escalates as the feds close in. DPR casually prices out a hit on a flipped insider while his undercover handler Force stages a brutal (fake) bathtub torture for the sting. What was once a libertarian dream has morphed into a dark web nightmare.

As far as blind reads go, this one truly had us on the edge of our seats. We couldn’t look away as Silk Road’s empire crumbled from the inside.

“That’s Genevieve. And that’s Kaitlyn.”

Sisters-in-law, best friends, former CNAs, and the sharp-witted duo behind Campi...

We're kicking off the Silk Road series—a massive dark web drug market run by a mysterious boss called DPR. We start with Curtis Green, a Utah grandpa and pain pill user who worked customer service for the site, getting raided by SWAT while covered in cocaine powder from a fake package (his tiny chihuahuas go wild).​

Then we flashback to Ross Ulbricht: a smart former Eagle Scout and physics student who drops out, experiments with psychedelics, discovers Bitcoin, and secretly builds Silk Road from his laptop—a hidden online "eBay" for drugs using anonymous Tor tech. We rev...

We’re exploring parallel lives. Like, souls splitting across timelines, Horcrux-style oversouls living multiple earthly lives at once. We break down four wild theories from Reddit deep dives, from quantum jumping to realms where your higher self lives an entire life while your body lies stationary on Earth.​

If you’ve ever felt déjà vu hit different or met a “soul family” stranger, these tales will have you side-eyeing your furniture. We debate carbon monoxide vs. cosmic weirdness, because sometimes the scariest parallel is the one staring back from your own life.

“That’s Genevieve. And t...

This episode drops the hammer on David Grann’s “True Crime” Blind Read, picking up mid-book with Bala’s sadistic, philosophy-fueled torture porn that’s less “literature” and more “confession disguised as art.” We unpack Amok’s noose-tightened murders, “white gloves of silence,” and Bala’s smug insistence that it’s all just postmodern wordplay—while detective Wroblewski turns his squad into literary sleuths, assigning chapters like it’s homework from hell.​

This finale is a masterclass in how a “perfect crime” meets its match in dogged facts over slippery philosophy. If you love seeing pretentious creeps get cornered by their own words, don’t...

David Grann’s 2008 New Yorker masterpiece “True Crime” is a Polish whodunit that starts with a strangled woman and ends in a courtroom where fiction and murder collide. We dive into the case of Jacek Wroblewski, a cop turned amateur detective who becomes obsessed with a violent novel by a smug philosophy bro named Krystian Bala, convinced its twisted details mirror an unsolved killing.​

What unfolds is pure mind-melt: Bala’s pretentious Nietzsche obsession, his internet auction site bragging, and a story so meta it blurs the line between art and confession—leaving us gasping, theorizing, and questioning...

In this final part, we revisit the Lutz family’s own words through their 1979 Good Morning America interview, then pull back the curtain to examine the contradictions, missing details, and the carefully crafted public image that made Amityville a media monster.​

From there, we dig into what investigators, psychics, and skeptics uncovered behind the scenes: parapsychic Ron Mangravite’s claim that the house was soaked in ritual magic, Lorraine Warren’s belief that someone inside the home was acting like a magnet for dark energy, and the way George Lutz’s “regular guy” persona starts to crumble under closer s...

This week’s episode is pure Merry Crisis energy in the best way: cozy chaos, seasonal depression, and holiday horror stories all rolled into one. We pull together Reddit confessions, off-the-rails family traditions, and a couple of bite-sized true crime tales that prove the holidays are less “Hallmark movie” and more “why is Santa staring at me like that?”

If you need an excuse to put on noise-canceling headphones and hide from your kids, in-laws, or capitalism in general, this one’s your festive escape hatch.​

“That’s Genevieve. And that’s Kaitlyn.”

Sisters-in-law, best f...

This Blind Read had us absolutely feral (in the best way). We thought we were dealing with a classic “mysterious tormentor” case and instead got hit with psych letters, birdhouse cameras, BTK-adjacent clues, and some of the wildest investigative whiplash we’ve had in a while. Every time we thought we knew who “The Poet” was, the story yanked the floor out from under us again.

We pick the case back up with Ruth Finley being harassed. It’s ramping up, and the threats feel way too close to home. The question stops being “Who’s doing this?” and turns...

We’re blind-reading Corey Mead’s article, "The Poet," set in late 1970s Wichita, Kansas. The city is already on edge due to the active BTK Strangler when Ruth Finley, a quiet telephone company employee, begins receiving menacing phone calls from a stranger who knows a traumatic secret from her past: she was branded by a "sex maniac" as a teenager in 1946.

As the harassment escalates from letters to physical confrontations, the stalker—who eventually dubs himself "The Poet"—taunts Ruth and her husband Ed with crude, rhyming letters and public messages in the newspaper classifieds. Police, includin...

We’re trading historical gratitude for the absolute dumpster fire of modern family gatherings. In Episode 108, we serve up a chaotic platter of listener-submitted nightmares that prove blood isn't always thicker than gravy.

We’re exploring everything from a violent brawl between aunts nicknamed "Jailbird" and "Moonpie" involving a carving fork to a sentimental wedding video that abruptly cuts to NASCAR legend Dale Earnhardt’s funeral. It’s a crash course in how quickly a holiday feast can turn into a crime scene.

So, before you stress about your bad turkey leftovers or political arguments at the d...