A quick note to our loyal strangers.

This episode is a little scarier than our usual fare.

Nothing grotesque or salacious, of course.

We're clinging to that clean rating with all our might.

But overall, the story might be a bit too frightening for the little ones in the audience, who we know like to listen along.

Now, on with the creep show.

I'm Laura Norton, and this is one strange thing, the show where we search the nation's news archives for stories that can't

quite be explained.

It's finally here, Halloween.

Well, practically, as close as we're going to get anyway with this Tuesday release schedule.

So, welcome to our second, supersized October episode.

We've enjoyed digging into the legends that make us think of spooky season,

the phantoms and creepers and haunts

who crawl and slither along the corners of our cultural imagination.

You'll recognize them, the archetypes that exist both in our waking lives and in our

nightmares, the flapping bats and creeping spiders, the howling wolves, the dense forest,

and the lonely roads, the scarecrowes in the fields.

And then there are the clowns.

Clowns are spooky.

That's not news to anyone who has read Stephen King or heard of John Wayne Gacy or honestly

watched a single episode of Bozo from the 1970s.

Seriously, who greenlit that?

...