On this season, we'll be exploring the moral panics, urban legends, and conspiracy theories that shape our psychology and culture, and why we end up believing them.

I'm your host, Chelsea Lover-Smith, and this is American Hysteria.

For people to hear 2000 is not a milestone as much as it is a sign of some sort of

ending chaos. The atomic bomb flash could burn you worse than a terrible sunburn. But if you

duck and cover, it will be much safer. Space agency has received panicked calls about the Mayan apocalypse.

The sky vanished, and every mountain of island was removed from its place.

The day of the 21st, 2012, my father and stepmom loaded their car and drove toward a cabin on Mount Rainier,

a place prophesized by some to be safe from the coming Mayan apocalypse.

This was not a split-second decision, but one years in the making, a room full of canned food, a handwritten survival guide, and predictions

both beautiful and terrifying that marked my teenage years. My dad created his own patchwork

spirituality that had end times both blooming and vibrant, hopeful bursts of true peace and a soft, gentle justice, as well as disintegrating and horrific, holes in the ground loaded with rifles, purifying water with the fibers in your clothes.

As an idealistic teenager, I could imagine along with my dad a vast wonderland of

post-apocalyptic fun, and I saw a world where all the cruel, greedy people were finally gone,

where all my best friends and I were free to exist in our truest forms without judgment,

roaming the broken cities, unafraid, skateboarding through the mall, ransacking the

grocery stores, growing food in long rows for all the people we loved. I could find the deluded

giddiness of starting over that so many people who believed in the rapture could. It's been said

that the apocalypse is as American as apple pie, and for this episode, we'll

explore different versions of the end of the world, the hyper-religious, the new age, and

the scientific. Our stories about the end tend to involve not only a series of cataclysmic,

devastating events, but also the saving of an elect few and the punishing and death of the rest.

Each major end times prediction date has come to pass without any mark of trouble,

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