Ain't It Scary? with Sean & Carrie

We're more than halfway through September, and in this house that means it's basically Halloween! Sean kicks off our spooky series on vampires with a look at the man who gave his name to the most famous vampire of all: Vlad Tepes Dracula, AKA Vlad the Impaler. While the 15th century Wallachian noble wasn't an undead monster, he was certainly...bloodthirsty, to say the least...

Here we are: the end of the line for the Manson Family. This week, we bring our epic series on the Manson Family Murders to an explosive conclusion with the August 9th killings of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, the retaliation murder of Shorty Shea (and possibly lawyer Ronald Hughes), the capture of the Family during a ranch raid, and the final sensational trial that made Charlie Manson, the Manson girls and "Helter Skelter" household names...

And here we are. The infamous murders of August 8th, 1969, where 5 people - some famous - would meet horrific ends at the hands of the Manson Family, directed by Charlie to create "copycat murders" to lessen the heat on the real killer, Bobby Beausoleil, and hopefully spring him from jail before he could rat on Charlie to the cops. But it's not just about the deaths...

This week, the horror of Helter Skelter begins on part 4 of our Manson Family deep-dive with the lesser-known murder of the Family's first official victim, former friend Gary Hinman. We explore the circumstances leading to the powder keg-like situation the family was in, and how it all exploded into violence when Charlie decided that the money required to fund the Family's flight to Death Valley was basis enough for murder...

In week 3 of our Manson saga we travel with the Family to the worn-down Western movie set of Spahn Ranch, where Charlie and co set up shop and begin their descent further into shared cult madness - separated from their loved ones, fully dependent on Charlie, hungry, overworked, and addled out of their minds on constant LSD consumption. It's a potent cocktail, ready to explode in the California heat...and boy, will it ever...

"Cease to exist, just come and say you love me Give up your world, come on you can be, I'm your kind, I'm your kind, and I see..." This week, we take a tour through the epicenter of the hippie movement right at the peak of the Summer of Love, when Charlie Manson finally leaves prison and makes his way to the Haight-Asbury neighborhood of San Francisco...

The innocence of the Summer of Love and the hippie counterculture movement came to an abrupt end in August 1969, when a string of brutal murders in the Los Angeles area rocked Hollywood, the country, and the world. The perpetrators? A strange hippie cult called "The Family", headed by a creepy, scrawny guy with an odd charisma by the name of Charles Manson...

In the summer of 1974, a body was discovered among the dunes of Cape Cod by a young girl chasing her dog. Despite the efforts of local and state police, the so-named "Lady of the Dunes" would go unidentified for nearly 50 years - as would her killer. Join us as Sean lays out the facts of the discovery, the investigation, and decades worth of theories - along with stunning developments from just the past year...

We kept it fairly loose this week with a midsummer (midsommar??) catch-up featuring Sean & Carrie gathering round the spooky campfire and talking their recently-consumed horror content (Bones and All, Diablo 4, True Blood, and more), favorite vampire lore, how Edward got Bella pregnant in the Twilight series (spoiler: you would never have guessed it), who in the Ain't it Scary? archives they would FMK (F*ck, Marry, Kill), and a semi-deep-dive news segment covering the recent arrest made in the...

In late July 1945, the heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis had just conducted a top-secret mission, delivering a sealed metal box to a small island in the Pacific. Unbeknownst to the crew aboard, that box held the final pieces of the atomic bomb that would be detonated over Hiroshima in the coming weeks - but that's not the story we're telling today...