American Hysteria
American Hysteria explores how fantastical thinking has shaped our culture – moral panics, urban legends, hoaxes, crazes, fringe beliefs, and national misunderstandings. Poet-turned-podcaster Chelsey Weber-Smith tells the strangest stories from American history and examines the forces that create the reality we share, and sometimes, the reality we don't.
Episodes
December 29, 2025 • 68 mins
Ross Benes is the author of the book 1999: The Year Low Culture Conquered America and Kickstarted Our Bizarre Times. Together we revisit what popular culture was like at the turn of the millennium and how things like Juggalos, professional wrestling, boy band rivalries, nü-metal, Jerry Springer, teen movies, the tech bubble, and the fear of the end of the world predicted the uncanny hyperreality we find ourselves in today.
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December 22, 2025 • 98 mins
In part two of our two-part series, I show Sarah a more radical side of the American Mall Santa. I tell her stories of how, in some cases, the character transformed into a symbol of societal change and guerrilla protest, from the ladies who had to take his bearded place during WWII, to the Black Santa revolutionaries of the Civil Rights Movement, to the activist Gay Santas who fought, quite creatively, against the stigma of HIV.
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December 15, 2025 • 85 mins
For this two-part holiday special, I tell Sarah Marshall all about the history of the American mall Santa Claus from the 1800s into the present day. For part one, we will learn about the eccentric men who created the look and vibe of the department store Kris Kringle, mass producing a jolly army of Santa proxies to whom kids could disclose their heart’s holiday desire. For part two, I will explain how the Mall Santa became a surpri...
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December 8, 2025 • 35 mins
Jelani Cobb is the Dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism and the author of the new book Three or More Is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here: 2012-2025 which he is here to talk with me about today. Since the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement over a decade ago, Jelani has been reporting on the most consequential events from the front lines, and this book acts as a kind of retrospective on both his own experiences ...
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December 1, 2025 • 88 mins
In honor of my favorite movie's 50th anniversary, I wanted to share an episode about The Rocky Horror Picture Show with all of you unconventional conventionalists, one that I recently recorded with my friends BJ and Harmony Colangelo for their fantastic coming-of-age film podcast, This Ends at Prom.
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November 26, 2025 • 8 mins
On May 5, 1993, three 8-year-old boys were brutally murdered in West Memphis, Arkansas. The tiny local police department launches an investigation but finds little physical evidence to lead them to a suspect. Eventually, outside pressure pushes them to charge someone with the killings, whether or not the evidence supports their conclusions.
American Scandal takes you deep into the heart of America’s dark side to look at what driv...
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November 24, 2025 • 53 mins
Brace yourselves, we are marching along with the Macy's Parade to learn about the chaos energy that has always animated this cultural institution, from its explosive balloon disasters to its surprisingly unruly origins.
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November 17, 2025 • 88 mins
Sarah Marshall of You're Wrong About joins me to wade back into the tall tales that devil-spawned the friendship we have today. In honor of her brand new podcast miniseries from the CBC called The Devil You Know about the past, present and future of the Satanic Panic, we 'll check out some never-before-heard satanic cult source material from newspapers.com and try to suss out the meaning of the many moral panics around the dark l...
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November 10, 2025 • 77 mins
Our associate producer (and my brother) Riley Swedelius-Smith is here to tell our producer Miranda Zickler and me about the chaotic opening day of The Happiest Place on Earth way back in 1955. We’ll learn about the many quirks of Walt Disney, the events that unfolded as he tried to build his ludicrous dream, and how everything went down when it was finally time to present the park to the American public–live on television.
Sou...
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November 3, 2025 • 74 mins
Have you ever wondered if the person you are arguing with in a social media comment section is really a person at all? Perry Carpenter is a cybersecurity expert, author of FAIK: A Practical Guide to Living in a World of Deepfakes, Disinformation, and AI-Generated Deceptions, and host of The Faik Files podcast. I asked Perry to explain the phenomenon of social media bots and troll farms; who might be commanding these faceless humans...
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October 27, 2025 • 63 mins
Bloody Mary...Bloody Mary...Bloody Mary...For our Halloween special, we are going to trace the history of the slumber party ritual known as Bloody Mary in which a young summoner stands in the dark in front of a mirror to call up a dangerous, blood-soaked witch-woman. By looking at the Victorian era occult divination games of girls, the many cemetery ghosts known as Mary, as well as humanity's supernatural history with the mirror it...
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October 20, 2025 • 102 mins
Sarah Marshall is here to teach me about the confounding phenomenon of Spontaneous Human Combustion in which a person is found almost totally incinerated with no explanation, seeming to have burst into flames from within. From the Victorian era to the modern day, we will look at historical cases and modern explanations to try to separate fact from fiction.
Subscribe to The Devil You Know, Sarah's new podcast on the Satanic Pani...
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October 13, 2025 • 63 mins
This is a rerelease of our 2023 Halloween special about the 12 Ft Skeleton Halloween craze and the strange history of our relationship to skeletons, both real and fake, stretching back hundreds of years. On 10/14 you can hear me on You're Wrong About covering Midnight Ghost Shows! I am doing a new series over on Patreon and Apple+ called Dispatches from the Field where I talk at you about whatever I want for however long tI want in...
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October 5, 2025 • 92 mins
What Went Wrong hosts Chris Winterbauer and Lizzie Bassett join me to tell the stories of three allegedly cursed horror movies and the unexplained events that befell the cast, crew, and sometimes even audiences. Were these films really possessed by dangerous, otherworldly energy? Or are we dealing with social conditions, marketing gimmicks, and safety violations that are all too human? What Went Wrong is a podcast that takes a lovi...
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September 29, 2025 • 66 mins
For this episode, I get schooled on the history of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, the children's horror book series that terrified 80s and 90s kids with its repurposed urban legends and folklore as well as genuinely terrifying illustrations. Liz Gotauco (AKA Cosbrarian), the creator of the F*cked Up Fairytales series, talks with me about how the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark became a right of passage for kids all over the ...
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September 22, 2025 • 77 mins
George Civeris is the host of the comedy podcast Straightiolab as well as a new podcast called United States of Kennedy that explores our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty and the ways that this family has continued to shape American life for decades. For this episode, George lays out the tale of the Kennedy Curse through a handful of tragic stories that have given America the impression that this political powerhouse f...
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September 15, 2025 • 66 mins
Tim Harford is the host of the podcast Cautionary Tales which recently put out a series on the most famous magician of all time, Harry Houdini. For this episode, Sarah Marshall of You’re Wrong About joins me as co-host to discuss with Tim the Victorian religion-turned-public spectacle known as Spiritualism, the wonderfully gullible Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creative and comical exposing of fraud mediums, the unknowable mysteries ...
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September 8, 2025 • 48 mins
This is a rerelease of our 2021 episode. In 2017, YouTube Kids was embroiled in a major scandal when it was discovered that a dark underbelly of inappropriate cartoons, computer animations, and live action videos were lurking just under the surface of the supposedly safeguarded app. With themes of injections, sexuality, violence, scatology, and much more, we will explore these bizarre, uncanny valley videos made by mysterious conte...
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September 4, 2025 • 8 mins
From Jonestown to Heaven’s Gate, to the Octopus Murders and the Waco Siege, the world is full of deception, manipulation, and destruction. Listen to Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes every Wednesday as we explore the real people at the center of the world’s most shocking secrets and nefarious organizations. Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes is a Crime House Original. Follow the show now so you don’t miss a single story.
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September 1, 2025 • 77 mins
Warning: REALLY WEIRD EPISODE. On social media and YouTube, bizarre, shocking, disgusting, creepy, and confusing animated ads for simple mobile games have popped up over the last few years. In collaboration with the guys from the Panic World podcast, we watch (and describe) some of the freakiest ads I have found over time, analyze the advertising psychology behind these “productions,” and look at the history of these kinds of click...
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