Hello, ghost family. Sam here, I apologize for being away from your headphones for such a long time

and if you are still hanging around the feed here, it is good to be back with you.

I'm coming into the feed today for sort of bitter sweet reasons. The bitter reason is that as some of you may have guessed,

it is definitely going to be a pretty long time, I think, before there's another new episode of family ghosts here in the feed.

I'm not ruling it out permanently, but I do want to be honest with all of you who have been so wonderful and supportive of the show

and say that family ghosts as a project reached a point for me where it was a little bit too heavy on my heart to spend as much time as I was spending in such difficult territory

and to feel like I was still able to do right by the subjects who did me the honor of coming to me with stories of theirs that they wanted me to share

with the proper care and sensitivity and emotional bandwidth to do so.

I just got to a place where I did not have that bandwidth anymore. For the moment, it's a little bit tapped out and it just doesn't feel right to tell more stories

from a place where I know I don't have the necessary commitment to meet those stories where they are and then travel with them to the places that they need to go.

So I want to thank all of you for listening to family ghosts. It was one of the most fulfilling artistic experiences of my entire life.

It fundamentally changed me and the fact that I got to share it all with you is one of the most special experiences that I have ever had.

But I also want to tell you that the project that I'm here today to introduce you to is lighting me up creatively like nothing since family ghosts.

It's a project called the Midnight Disease and I'm not going to say too much about it in this intro because as you're about to hear the intro of the Midnight Disease itself explains what the Midnight Disease is.

But I do want you to know that if you love family ghosts, I humbly think that you will find that the Midnight Disease is fueled by the same spirit of empathy and care and curiosity and an attempt to get beyond the surface of things.

And so even though the format of the show is going to be very different than a family ghosts episode, the Midnight Disease is mostly a conversational show.

I hope and think that you will be able to hear those same family ghosts creative values resonating in the Midnight Disease.

And I want to let you know that if you do like what you hear, this is just the first half of the first episode of the Midnight Disease.

There's a whole second half of the interview that gets into some really fascinating territory for family ghosts fans in particular if you enjoyed our episode still close about my own adventures with spiritualism.

My guest on the first episode of the Midnight Disease is a real life psychic medium.

And among other things she tells me all about how that element of her life informs her songwriting.

But if you want to hear that part of the conversation, you've got to go over to the Midnight Disease feed, just search for the Midnight Disease in Apple Podcasts or Spotify and subscribe.

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