American Hysteria
chelsey weber-smith
American Hysteria explores how fantastical thinking has shaped our culture – moral panics, urban legends, hoaxes, crazes, fringe beliefs, and national misunderstandings. Poet-turned-podcaster Chelsey Weber-Smith tells the strangest stories from American history and examines the forces that create the reality we share, and sometimes, the reality we don't.
- 1 hour 25 minutesThe Spooky Side of Pokémon with Guide to the Unknown
The extended media universe of Pokémon has been an obsession for young people since the late 1990s, and for this goofball episode my friends from the Guide to the Unknown podcast are here to dive into the creepier side of this unparalleled cultural phenomenon. Together with our voice actor Will Rogers and his sister, my pal Kristen Rogers-Anderson, we bring you the weirdest tales from Pokemon history, from the unnerving aspects of the video games, to the supposed mass medical events caused by the show, to the many ridiculous moral panics and sometimes gruesome urban legends it inspired. Will even brings us an original Pokemon gameshow that you’re not gonna wanna miss.
Subscribe to Guide to the Unknown on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts
Become a Patron to support our show and get early ad-free episodes and bonus content
Or subscribe to American Hysteria on Apple Podcasts
Get some of our new merch at americanhysteria.com, all profits go to The Sameer Project, a Palestinian-led mutual aid group who are on the ground in Gaza delivering food and supplies to displaced families.
Leave us a message on the Urban Legends Hotline
Producer and Editor: Miranda Zickler
Associate Producer: Riley Swedelius-Smith
Additional editing by Kaylee Jasperson
Hosted by Chelsey Weber-Smith
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
16 March 2026, 7:01 am - 1 hour 19 minutesThe Corporate Takeover of Caring with Dr. Mara Einstein
Have you ever been suspicious of a corporation showcasing their commitment to the environment, to marginalized groups of people, or to those suffering through a deadly disease? Dr. Mara Einstein is the author of Compassion, Inc.: How Corporate America Blurs the Line Between What We Buy, Who We Are, and Those We Help. For this episode, ahe explains the history and modern state of cause marketing to show how corporations use tricks like greenwashing and pinkwashing to improve their public profiles and their profits while shifting the responsibility of true change to their loyal customers.
Get a copy of Compassion, Inc
Become a Patron to support our show and get early ad-free episodes and bonus content
Or subscribe to American Hysteria on Apple Podcasts
Get some of our new merch at americanhysteria.com, all profits go to The Sameer Project, a Palestinian-led mutual aid group who are on the ground in Gaza delivering food and supplies to displaced families.
Leave us a message on the Urban Legends Hotline
Thank You To Our Sponsor: Go to https://surfshark.com/chelsey or use code CHELSEY at checkout to get 4 extra months of Surfshark VPN!
Producer and Editor: Miranda Zickler
Associate Producer: Riley Swedelius-Smith
Additional editing by Kaylee Jasperson
Hosted by Chelsey Weber-Smith
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
9 March 2026, 7:01 am - 1 hour 2 minutesBUGS!!!!!! with Akilah Hughes
We have had many media panics about swarms and hordes, about infestations and plagues of dangerous insects and arachnids that promise to rain destruction down on the defenseless American public. My guest today is comedian Akilah Hughes, host of the podcast How Is This Better? We are talking about our American fear around sensationalized bugs, from killer bees to infected mosquitos to floating spiders to the kissing bug. We’ll discuss what these panics can tell us about the language of our politics and the way mass hysteria can create monstrous problems from perceived threats, no matter how tiny.
Get more of Akilah's work:
Website / How Is This Better? / YouTube / Instagram
Become a Patron to support our show and get early ad-free episodes and bonus content
Or subscribe to American Hysteria on Apple Podcasts
Get some of our new merch at americanhysteria.com, all profits go to The Sameer Project, a Palestinian-led mutual aid group who are on the ground in Gaza delivering food and supplies to displaced families.
Leave us a message on the Urban Legends Hotline
Thank You To Our Sponsor: Go to https://surfshark.com/chelsey or use code CHELSEY at checkout to get 4 extra months of Surfshark VPN!
Producer and Editor: Miranda Zickler
Associate Producer: Riley Swedelius-Smith
Additional editing by Kaylee Jasperson
Hosted by Chelsey Weber-Smith
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
2 March 2026, 8:01 am - 1 hour 7 minutesTalking to the Future: Nuclear Semiotics (rerun)
[We are taking a break this week so please enjoy a re-release of one of our favorite episodes!] How do we warn people 10,000 years in the future about nuclear waste sites that will remain extremely dangerous for longer than human civilization has existed? When language, symbols, and technologies are lost to time, how can we get our message across? Atomic Priesthoods, Radiation Cats, Forests of Thorns, manufactured folklore, these are just a few of the unorthodox ideas of government-sponsored academics trying to answer this baffling puzzle.
Become a Patron to support our show and get early ad-free episodes and bonus content
Or subscribe to American Hysteria on Apple Podcasts
Leave us a message on our Urban Legends Hotline or get your mitts on some merch at americanhysteria.com
Thank You To Our Sponsor: Go to https://surfshark.com/chelsey or use code CHELSEY at checkout to get 4 extra months of Surfshark VPN!
Sound Designer and Associate Producer: Riley Swedelius-Smith
Producer and Editor: Miranda Zickler
Voice Actor: Will Rogers and his daughter Zoe
Written, Produced, and Hosted by Chelsey Weber-Smith
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
23 February 2026, 8:01 am - 1 hour 32 minutesJINGLES pt. 2 with Sarah Marshall of 'You're Wrong About'
If you thought the first part of our series was catchy, wait til we enter the modern era where all the jingles that played throughout our lifetimes will be activated like sleeper cells inside us. For part two of our series, we are starting our history in the middle of the century when television commercials began to rely heavily on jingles, leading to a decades-long reign of musical advertising that lasted well into the 1990s. In addition, I’ll tell Sarah the stories behind some of the most beloved jingles of all time for a trip down a hyper-consumerist memory lane.
Become a Patron to support our show and get early ad-free episodes and bonus content
Or subscribe to American Hysteria on Apple Podcasts
Get some of our new merch at americanhysteria.com, all profits go to The Sameer Project, a Palestinian-led mutual aid group who are on the ground in Gaza delivering food and supplies to displaced families.
Leave us a message on the Urban Legends Hotline
Producer and Editor: Miranda Zickler
Associate Producer: Riley Swedelius-Smith
Additional editing by Kaylee Jasperson
Hosted by Chelsey Weber-Smith
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
16 February 2026, 8:01 am - 1 minute 27 secondsIntroducing Mind Games
We’re excited to share a preview of a new podcast we think you’d enjoy: Mind Games.
What if you could hypnotize yourself into a better you? Or.... secretly hypnotize others into giving you anything you want? That’s the promise of NLP. Mind Games is an investigation into the world of Neuro-Linguistic Programming, or NLP, a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology that has quietly shaped industries, institutions, and belief systems around the world. Part science experiment, part investigation, part true crime thriller, Mind Games tells the story of NLP and its crazy cast of disciples, including the fake doctor who invented it at a New Age commune, took it to Fortune 500 boardrooms, and whose gruesome murder trial did little to stop its rise.
Find Mind Games on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. New episodes out Tuesdays.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
12 February 2026, 3:00 am - 1 hour 24 minutesJINGLES pt. 1 with Sarah Marshall of 'You're Wrong About'
We all contain within us the many cheesy tunes of catchy capitalism that marked our childhoods, those hyper-memorable earworms that, depending on your age, feel like an invention of the 90s, of the 80s, of the 70s, of the 60s. But these musical, lyrical advertisements have a much longer history than that. For part one of this two part series, I share with Sarah Marshall of You’re Wrong About the goofy evolution of the jingle from its distant origins into the age of American radio. For part two, we’ll explore the stories behind some of the most memorable TV jingles of all time, and I guarantee your psyche will force you to sing along.
Become a Patron to support our show and get early ad-free episodes and bonus content
Or subscribe to American Hysteria on Apple Podcasts
Get some of our new merch at americanhysteria.com, all profits go to The Sameer Project, a Palestinian-led mutual aid group who are on the ground in Gaza delivering food and supplies to displaced families.
Leave us a message on the Urban Legends Hotline
Producer and Editor: Miranda Zickler
Associate Producer: Riley Swedelius-Smith
Additional editing by Kaylee Jasperson
Hosted by Chelsey Weber-Smith
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
9 February 2026, 8:01 am - 1 hour 8 minutesA Cult by Any Other Name with Joseph Laycock
Joseph Laycock is the author ofThe Penguin Book of Cults, and for this episode we discuss how our culture thinks of and reacts to what we oftentimes incorrectly identify as cults. His book delves into many lesser known examples of new religious movements from the 18th century into the early 20th century, groups made up of vampires, hollow earthers, and dangerous yogis, all of which we will be discussing today. Joe will help us better understand what a cult is and what a cult isn’t, and whether this label is helpful in a modern political context.
Get a copy of Joe's book
Become a Patron to support our show and get early ad-free episodes and bonus content
Or subscribe to American Hysteria on Apple Podcasts
Get some of our new merch at americanhysteria.com, all profits go to The Sameer Project, a Palestinian-led mutual aid group who are on the ground in Gaza delivering food and supplies to displaced families.
Leave us a message on the Urban Legends Hotline
Producer and Editor: Miranda Zickler
Associate Producer: Riley Swedelius-Smith
Additional editing by Kaylee Jasperson
Hosted by Chelsey Weber-Smith
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
2 February 2026, 8:01 am - 1 hour 19 minutesThe Art of (Psychological) War with Annalee Newitz
Annalee Newitz is the author of Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind, which traces the way disinformation, propaganda, and violent threats have evolved from military weapons deployed against foreign adversaries into tools of domestic culture war. For this episode, Annalee gives us a primer on the ways psychological warfare has long propped up the American colonial project, including the many men who have been the masters of its weaponized storytelling. In addition to providing historical context, I hope this conversation can remind us that while fighting against the world we do not want, we can also hold inside ourselves the world we envision, the one we are fighting for.
Get a copy of Stories Are Weapons and Automatic Noodle
Become a Patron to support our show and get early ad-free episodes and bonus content
Or subscribe to American Hysteria on Apple Podcasts
Get some of our new merch at americanhysteria.com, all profits go to The Sameer Project, a Palestinian-led mutual aid group who are on the ground in Gaza delivering food and supplies to displaced families.
Leave us a message on the Urban Legends Hotline
Producer and Editor: Miranda Zickler
Associate Producer: Riley Swedelius-Smith
Additional editing by Kaylee Jasperson
Hosted by Chelsey Weber-Smith
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
26 January 2026, 8:01 am - 58 minutes 32 secondsCelebrity Clone Conspiracies with 'No Such Thing' Podcast
For this collaboration with the podcast No Such Thing, we covered the tales of nefarious forces secretly replacing famous people with clones. We’ll learn about different clone conspiracies and their origins, hear from an expert on the real science and ethical concerns behind cloning, and chat about where these outlandish tales fit into the larger infrastructure of American conspiracy theories.
No Such Thing is a show where three best friends and journalists settle their dumb arguments — and yours — by actually doing the research. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Become a Patron to support our show and get early ad-free episodes and bonus content
Or subscribe to American Hysteria on Apple Podcasts
Get some of our new merch at americanhysteria.com, all profits go to The Sameer Project, a Palestinian-led mutual aid group who are on the ground in Gaza delivering food and supplies to displaced families.
Leave us a message on the Urban Legends Hotline
Producer and Editor: Miranda Zickler
Associate Producer: Riley Swedelius-Smith
Additional editing by Kaylee Jasperson
Hosted by Chelsey Weber-Smith
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
19 January 2026, 8:01 am - 1 hour 7 minutesJESUS TOAST
A grilled cheese sandwich, a tortilla, an auto loan company building, a cinnamon roll, and a forkful of spaghetti are just a handful of the places that images of religious figures have miraculously appeared in the United States. For this episode, we'll tell stories about mass pilgrimages made to quirky apparitions of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and Mother Teresa, and show how some have embraced them as genuine spiritual manifestations while others have turned them into a kitschy, meme-worthy craze.
Become a Patron to support our show and get early ad-free episodes and bonus content
Or subscribe to American Hysteria on Apple Podcasts
Listen to Magpie Cinema Club
Get some of our new merch at americanhysteria.com, all profits this month go to The Sameer Project, a Palestinian-led mutual aid group who are on the ground in Gaza delivering food, supplies, and cash envelops to displaced families.
Leave us a message on our Urban Legends Hotline at americanhysteria.com
Producer and Editor: Miranda Zickler
Sound Designer and Associate Producer: Riley Swedelius-Smith
Voice Actor: Will Rogers
Written, Produced, and Hosted by Chelsey Weber-Smith
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
12 January 2026, 8:01 am - More Episodes? Get the App