A Hearken Halloween: 6 spooky audience questions answered đ
Halloween weekend has officially begun. Grab a hot apple cider or some fun sized candies and get spooked with a Hearken Halloween special: six pieces inspired by audience questions and reported by our partner newsrooms around the world.
đ» VPRâs Brave Little State: Your Vermont Ghost Stories by Angela Evancie and Alex Keefe
Listener Allison Litten, of Wilder, Vermont tasked Brave Little State with uncovering âthe most interesting, intriguing, bizarre, mysterious ghost storiesâ from around the state. So the team put the call out to the rest of their audience to submit their local scary tales, and they delivered. In addition to those bone-chilling tales that had me feeling spooked in broad daylight, this episode also featured a Halloween version of the Brave Little State theme, and an original audience-submitted a capella song submission about vampires. â° This episode also has a bonus ghost story by listener Thea Lewis at the end.
đ KQEDâs Bay Curious: Why are there so many dead people in Colma and so few in SF? by Jon Brooks
âWhat Las Vegas is to gambling, Colma is to death.â
Listeners Matt Brown and Katherine Murphy both wondered why the tiny neighborhood of Colma, California in the Bay Area seems to have a disproportionately high amount of cemeteries âthree-fourths of the townâs overall square footage is zoned for them, in fact. Indeed, they have only 1,431 so-called âabove-ground residentsâ and âmaybe a million and a half underground,â so theyâre far outnumbered. Not very good odds for the zombie apocalypse, as Bay Curious points out.
đĄ Journal MĂ©troâs CurioCitĂ©: Is the ChĂąteau Ramezay haunted? (in French) by Jeff Yates
Spooky content en français from our partner Journal MĂ©tro in Montreal. An audience member wanted to get to the bottom of whether Chateau Ramezay, a historic site and museum in the city, is haunted or not. âSeeing ghosts dressed in period costumes who suddenly disappearâ is a pretty good argument that it is, if you ask me. Iâm jealous of those alleged ghosts â Iâm sure those costumes are better than my thrown-together Scary Spice getup is going to be this weekend.
đ» NJTV Newsâs Ask Away: Why does New Jersey have so many ghosts?
An NJTV audience member demanded to know why it is that he would have at least three ghosts in his house and his friend six, when meanwhile his friend Matt, who lives in the more population-dense California, âis essentially living ghost free.â While the Ask Away team donât style themselves as âexperts on the supernatural,â they concede that theyâve âseen ten and a half episodes of Ghost Hunters International collectivelyâ and thought they could give it their best shot.
đ WPLNâs Curious Nashville: âWater Witchingâ And The Search For Unmarked Graves by Mack Linebaugh
An audience member was curious about Nashvilleâs oldest structures. Sounds innocuous enough, until WPLN reporters visited old homes and stumbled upon family graves dating back 200 years. Turns out these graves were located with a generations-old power of water witching. Wading through Nashvilleâs supernatural past becomes a deep dive into spooky.
đ» WBEZâs Curious City: We Ainât Afraid Of No (Chicago) Ghosts!
âYouâre listening to Curious City, where we answer your questions about Chicago, the region, its peopleâŠand its ghosts.â
Curious Cityâs spooky special, featuring two different audience question, is perhaps the most meta-level of this bunch. Before telling any ghost stories, the reporters ask an expert what the value of ghost stories is in the first place. Question asker and âghost enthusiastâ Ben Albers wonders what the most âlegitimateâ ghost story in Chicago is, and he wants hard evidence to back it up. The teamâs tour guide for this investigation, Adam Selzer, had been giving ghost tours for ten years, and first got into ghosts by watching Scooby Doo as a kid â one of the best career paths Iâve ever heard.
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