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 ghost, Chelsea Weber Smith, and this is American hysteria.

I put my eyes on it. Something changed inside me.

Standing at 12 feet tall, these skeletons are everything this Halloween.

But when I first met the 12-foot skeleton from Home Depot, it was like, wow, this might actually be the one.

Go big this year with the 12-foot giant skeleton with life eyes technology.

Happy Halloween and thanks for shopping at the Home Depot.

During the fall of 2020, the first 12-foot skeletons were seen towering over the unhinged humor of our pandemic-era social media,

appearing as if from nowhere, like the mythic undead rising enormous from their green suburban graves.

Our decades-long national obsession with Halloween skeleton decorations was already very apparent,

with various sizes, colors, and accoutrements found at most every department

store, grocery store, drug store, hardware store, and gift shop, making their seasonal aisles

into our very own American catacombs. For the last few years, we've scoffed at the anatomically incorrect

skeletons of various animals and even insects that make absolutely no biological sense.

And yet, in my home, a bones-only dog sits beside a half-sized plastic skeleton all year

long, Dr. Skull's jaw wide open as if in gleeful, unnerving awe. But the 12-foot skeleton was something else altogether, and he hit us like a first crush.

The obsession with Skelly, as he came to be known, started with the help of influencers, like Karen and Georgia,

of the massively popular podcast, My Favorite Murder,

who mused about their overwhelming desire to own one themselves.

I put my eyes on it. Something changed inside me. You could liken it to a religious experience.

You could liken it to love at first sight.

Yeah. But I was...

...