On this podcast, we explore fantastical thinking, moral panics, urban legends, conspiracy theories, hoaxes, and crazes, examine the forces that shape our culture and tell the stories that create the realities we share, and sometimes the realities we don't.

I'm your host, Chelsea Weber Smith, and this is American hysteria.

You're a professional writer, aren't you? I said, no, I'm not. I'm a Hillsboro halfway.

Every conceivable segment of society reached this column.

The business of living from one day to the next is just one problem after another.

Some people who write are extremely intelligent, others are fantastically ignorant, but most of them are very serious.

My name is Ned. Hello, Ned.

It's been 4,000 days since my last drink.

It was my first and last Blackberry Schnapps.

Ned, did you clip Anne Landers today?

Anne Landers is a boring old biddy. Ned!

I was more animal than man.

Before making this episode, I agreed with the assessment of once drunk Simpsons character Ned Flanders

about retro American newspaper advice columnist Anne Landers,

and felt the same way about her seemingly stuffy arch-rival, Dear Abby, both of whom wrote

responses to tens of thousands of questions from their 100 million readers from the 1950s to the early 2000s.

But as I began my research in earnest, I quickly found out that these old bitties were many things,

but boring was not one of them. Because of my young age and my chosen profession, my original

thoughts about Anne Landers and Dear Abby had to do with their peddlings of many classic urban

legends. For example, starting as early as the late 1970s, Abby and Anne kept the Halloween sadist tale alive for decades, issuing annual warnings about the dangers of candy received while trick-or-treating.

Anne wrote this year after year.

Dear readers, in recent years, people with twisted minds have been

...