On this season, we'll be exploring our bizarre beliefs,

unfounded fears, and fantastical thinking, how they shape our psychology and culture,

and how much of our past we can find in the present.

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

I mean, you can take these in the Chicago area right now and ask about anything you want.

You can't find it.

Somebody in the crowd yelled, there's the Elmo's, and they rushed us.

I don't like them. I don't rushed us. I don't like them.

I don't like their faces, but I want one.

I remember my first Beanie Baby vividly, Bones the Dog, a simple light brown stuffed animal filled with beans instead of fluff.

After a quick scan of the tag, I tore it off immediately, the heart-shaped tag that contained a unique birth date and a poem for each animal,

the hearts that would eventually fill the hopeful eyes of American kids and adults alike.

There was a kind of love in ripping off a tag, an initiation into a time-honored, plush intimacy.

Cue the madness of the lights and sounds of Chucky Cheese on a weekend afternoon, a single

child, me swimming through the pond of plastic balls, some perfectly round, others crushed

under the weight of a foot, sadly oblong among the primary colors that called so many of

us to them with a silent incantation.

Bones and I were kicking it tough, diving down, and almost swimming through the pizza-greased pit,

until suddenly it happened. He was in my hand, and then he wasn't.

Bones was lost in the vastness, in the void, alone, afraid I imagined, because I knew

somehow he could feel just like I could. Desperately, I clawed through the balls for upwards of an

hour, my dad even climbing in, tears rolling down my face. And then, eventually, we left. Then we came back because I was so

...