Episode 650: Plagues of Hysteria with Andrew McMahon

In the early morning hours of July 9, 1993, police in Sedona, Arizona received a dispatch call from 911 regarding a domestic violence related shooting at a home on Coffee Pot Drive. When they arrived at the home, officers found thirty-one-year-old Russell Peterson performing CPR on his longtime girlfriend, Stephanie Wasilishin, who was lying on the floor of the couple’s bedroom with a large hole in her neck from a .44 caliber bullet. Also present in the bedroom was the couple’s four-year-old daughter.

In the summer of 1977, single mother Margaret Hodgson called the police to her council estate apartment in Enfield, London to report that she and her two daughters, Janet and Peggy, had seen furniture move in the apartment and were hearing strange noises coming from within the walls. That simple albeit unusual call set in motion a chain of events that would thrust the unassuming Hodgson family into the center of a debate about the existence of the supernatural and forever associate them with one of England’s most notorious paranormal cases, the Enfield poltergeist.

Happy Friday, weirdos! We are SO EXCITED to spend our FIRST MONTHLY BONUS EPISODE digging into the shocking Netflix Documentary Unknown Number: The High School Catfish! MAJOR spoilers ahead, so if you haven't watched it yet, press 'pause' and get thee to Netflix IMMEDIATELY!

Just after 8:00 pm on the evening of February 19, 1994, thirty-one-year-old Gloria Ramirez was admitted to Riverside General Hospital with what Emergency Room staff believed were symptoms of a heart attack.

When nineteen-year-old Patty Hearst was kidnapped from her apartment in February 1974, everyone assumed the heiress had been abducted for the purposes of ransom. However, in the days that followed, Hearst’s kidnappers, the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), made themselves known when they sent a letter demanding the Hearst family provide food to every needy family in California.