URBAN LEGENDS

American Hysteria

W!ZARD Studios

Society & Culture, History

4.4 • 3.5K Ratings

🗓️ 3 May 2021

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The kids' book series Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark was based largely on urban legends, and when I read them for the first time I realized that I had heard them before, but as something true that happened to a friend of a friend. For our season four finale, I will be sharing my own journey with contemporary myths, from that first book series through the 1998 teen slasher Urban Legend, the landmark work of Mr. Urban Legend, and the man who finally got to the bottom of the most memorable story from my mom’s own childhood: The Bunny Man (I’ll let her tell you about it). So come sit around the midnight campfire, listen to some of the greatest hits, and see what they have to tell us about ourselves and our society, and what they have to do with the tangled mess of conspiracy theories we find ourselves in today. Become a Patron to get access to Chelsey's other podcast Walk with Me Head to tryfirstleaf.com/hysteria to get 6 bottles of wine for $29.95 Finding You is out May 14th American Hysteria is written, produced, and hosted by Chelsey Weber-Smith Sound design by Clear Commo Studios Research and co-writing by Riley Smith Co-produced and edited by Miranda Zickler (listen to Shiny Little Corners now!) Voice acting by Will Rogers Follow American Hysteria on social media: Twitter: @AmerHysteria Instagram: @AmericanHysteriaPodcast Find our merch at americanhysteria.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	On this season, we'll be covering our vehicles of hysteria, how pop culture and the media shape our psychology and society,
0:17.0	and how our national mythologies manipulate the realities we share, and sometimes
0:24.0	the realities we don't.
0:26.6	I'm your host, Chelsea Weber Smith, and this is American hysteria.
0:32.6	They are the legends we've all heard, the stories we've all told.
0:37.5	Don't alert the driver with a courtesy flash, because it could be a new gang member playing
0:42.4	a deadly initiation game.
0:44.3	Sure, they're going to be afraid of fires and drowning and strangers, but why do they have
0:48.5	to live with this fear that somebody's going to chop them up and eat them?
0:51.4	The caller is in the house.
0:53.6	The calls are coming from the house.
1:01.0	Scary stories to tell in the dark was far more than a horror book series made for eight to 12 year olds.
1:13.8	Scary stories to tell in the dark was a pilgrimage site of old and holy scrolls,
1:21.7	something that scared and fascinated us kids in an almost ancient way.
1:29.2	In the elementary school libraries of the mid-2000s,
1:33.5	the wait time to check out a copy could be weeks, months,
1:37.9	and anyone in possession of a copy became a darkly enchanting sage, a little bit divine, and of course your new best friend.
1:50.0	The uncanny art of Stephen Gamble was like nothing we had ever seen, the wispy, otherworldly,
1:58.5	nightmarish ink drawings that are probably still seared into some of your
2:03.7	memories today. But beyond the eerie invitation of this chilling cover art, the horror
2:13.0	stories themselves waited matter-of-factly, told to us straight up by a folklorist named
2:20.7	Alvin Schwartz. And many of those stories were drawn from popular American urban legends that had
	...

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