Unfinished Business | Season 4: Listener Suggestions, Ep 7

Appalachian Mysteria

Kromatic Media

True Crime, Journalism, Paranormal, Appalachia, Murder, Society & Culture, Documentary

4.8 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 28 October 2025

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Joan Ann Charlton was the first of her family to attend college. Three weeks into her freshman year at Frostburg State University, she was brutally murdered in the campus arboretum. This episode tracks three generations of college students, from 1980s Frostburg to current-day Morgantown, each story centering around the memory of one 19-year-old woman who seems perpetually on the cusp of being forgotten. But it’s also about how Appalachian college students are laying entirely new ...

Transcript

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0:00.0	Frostburg, Maryland sits atop the eastern continental divide only eight miles west of Cumberland.
0:15.0	Some people consider it part of the Cumberland metro area, though the word metro may seem strange to use for communities this small.
0:23.2	Frostburg occupies less than three and a half square miles, with a population of well under
0:28.0	10,000, and more than half of those people are college students at Frostburg State University.
0:34.7	The campus lies along the eastern slope of Big Savage Mountain, which is why it also
0:39.1	appears in season two, Big Savage. It's the university Megan Schaefer was attending and where
0:44.3	Alex Stevens' best friend was instructing when the strange events took place at High Rock. In the opening
0:50.1	of that season, I said that Western Maryland is a different universe than the eastern part of the state,
0:54.7	and in that sense, Frostburg State is definitively Appalachian. It is still the only four-year
1:00.0	institution of the University System of Maryland, outside of that eastern Baltimore-Washington passageway.
1:06.8	Our story begins here. This episode tracks three generations of college students from 1980s Frostburg to current
1:14.2	day Morgantown, each story centering around the memory of one 19-year-old woman who seems
1:19.6	perpetually on the cusp of being forgotten.
1:22.6	This is the story of Joan Ann Charlton, but it's also about how Appalachian college students
1:27.1	are not only preserving her legacy, but it's also about how Appalachian college students are not only
1:28.0	preserving her legacy, but laying entirely new groundwork for all cold case law enforcement
1:33.2	around the country. From Chromatic Media, this is Appalachian Mysteria. The most authoritative article on the life and death of Joan Ann Charlton begins in part,
1:59.1	quote,
1:59.9	A young, energetic woman with an infectious
2:01.9	smile, Joan Charlton was the youngest of five siblings who moved to Baltimore, Maryland,
2:06.4	from Jamaica in the early 1970s. Joan was the first to go away to pursue an undergraduate degree,
2:13.4	and in August of 1983, she attended what was then Frostburg State College in the rural mountains of Western Maryland.
	...

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