SPIRIT TALES AND MAGIC

Send us Fan Mail A Civil War soldier in California sounds like a glitch in the story we learned in school until you trace the footsteps back to Drum Barracks near the Port of Los Angeles. We take a listener’s sighting seriously and use it as a doorway into a forgotten piece of American history: California’s divided loyalties, the creation of Camp San Pedro (later Drum Barracks), and how thousands of troops moved through Southern California as the Union fought to hold the Southwest. If you’ve ...

Send us Fan Mail A haunted tour should leave you with photos and goosebumps, not a mystery object in your pocket. After a night on the Queen Mary in Southern California, Cassandra and I join the Haunted Shipwalk tour and something genuinely strange happens during a short break: I reach into my Spirit Tales and Magic hoodie for a Kleenex and pull out a large bobby pin I do not own. Not “maybe I forgot” strange, but “there’s no access and no reason” strange. We walk through what makes this kin...

Send us Fan Mail The quiet of a library can be louder than any scream. We open a door marked “preternatural” and step into reading rooms where stories don’t end at the last page: a coal-scented childhood library with a balcony watcher, a deserted building that typed without a working typewriter, and modern stacks where webcams tried to catch a Grey Lady in motion. What starts as one listener’s prompt becomes a map of haunted libraries—and what they teach us about place, memory, and the strang...

Send us Fan Mail The scariest thing about a haunting isn’t always the shadow in the doorway—it’s the tiny detail you almost ignored. We open with Halloween warmth and a quick safety check, then move straight into a challenge for every investigator and curious mind: the smallest note in your story might be the master key later. A bowler-hatted figure shows up near tragedies across decades, not to be folded lazily into Mothman lore, but to demonstrate how archetypes travel through memory, rumor...

Send us Fan Mail A lonely New Jersey road draped in a canopy of trees, a bridge where coins won’t stay thrown, and headlights that chase you until they disappear—Clinton Road is the rare place where folklore and firsthand accounts keep colliding. We take you mile by mile through its most enduring legends, weigh them against lived experiences from listeners, and follow the trail from Cross Castle’s crumbling stones to Dead Man’s Curve, where people swear they feel the weight of unseen eyes. W...

Send us Fan Mail A green pulse in the dunes, a ranger who shouldn’t exist, and a dog named Sam who breaks his own faithful routine—our journey begins at Beaver Dunes Park, the stretch of Oklahoma terrain many call the Bermuda Triangle of the Plains. A longtime listener from the Panhandle sends two stories from the same patch of sand: teenage misadventure rescued by a helpful ranger later revealed to be dead for 15 years, and a later trip where a quick turn toward a green light ends with a bel...

Send us Fan Mail A sleepy Phoenix parking lot turned into a tidal wave of costumes, laughter, and just enough mischief to tip the night into legend. We showed up with candy and flashlights; the crowd brought handmade characters, a silent trickster in royal purple, and a kid who stepped to the table and—without breaking character—whispered the line that launched a hundred sleepovers: say my name three times in a mirror. From there, we trace the Bloody Mary tale the way it lives in the wild: t...

Send us Fan Mail A masked figure in red slips into a dead‑end alley and vanishes, and that single mystery becomes our doorway into a world of letters under stair runners, midnight music from fireplaces, and furniture that won’t sit still. We trace the strange symmetry across famous homes and our own: Jenny Slate’s sea captain sealed by hidden correspondence; our Woodrow houses and the trunk that named Ruby; Jennifer Aniston’s frankincense cleansing where dishes crack and a medium draws a hard...

Send us Fan Mail What if the power of a Ouija board lives less in the wood and more in the wanting? We crack open the psychology, the history, and the folklore behind a game that became a ritual—and a ritual that became a thousand late-night stories. Starting with the ideomotor effect, we show how tiny, unconscious movements can feel like messages from beyond when a group is primed by silence, low light, and shared expectation. Then we track the board’s rise from 1890s patents and parlor room...

Send us Fan Mail A house with hidden passages, a polite request for anonymity, and a story we can’t tell—those boundaries set the stage for a conversation about celebrity hauntings that feel uncomfortably familiar. We walk through three public accounts that challenge skepticism in different ways: Courtney Cox hears a stranger at the door say there’s “someone behind you,” Octavia Spencer treats her resident spirit like a bouncer who keeps trouble out, and Britney Spears reportedly flees a home...

Send us Fan Mail The road has a way of sharpening the strange. While recording from Arizona, we open a listener’s account that runs from goosebumps at Gettysburg to a charged encounter at Little Bighorn—complete with a flash of a white handlebar mustache, a flurry of ghost-hunting gear, and a ranger’s timely invitation to leave. That single thread pulls us into the Stonehouse’s layered folklore, the early “ghost herders” who tended more than grounds, and the meticulous identification of Lieut...

Send us Fan Mail Ever watched a “ghost story” twist into a science problem right in front of you? We open a fresh door on the paranormal by asking a risky question: what if hauntings are just living people slipping between frequencies, slightly out of phase with our reality. Inspired by a listener email and a nod to Tesla’s notes on vibration, we sketch a city manor where time frays, “ghosts” wander confused and alive, and a mundane crime hides at the fracture point. It’s a story scaffold you...