Terrifying & True Episodes

A man dressed as Santa Claus opened fire at an Ortega family Christmas Eve gathering in Covina, California, then burned the home with a homemade fuel sprayer. On December 24, 2008, Bruce Pardo arrived carrying wrapped equipment and multiple weapons. Eight-year-old Katrina Yuzefpolsky survived the first shot, while relatives fled through windows and across neighboring yards. Gunfire and the rapidly spreading blaze killed nine members of the Ortega family, including Pardo’s former wife, Sylvia Or...

Five Sodder children vanished during a Christmas Eve house fire in 1945, leaving their family to question whether the blaze concealed an abduction. George and Jennie Sodder were asleep in their Fayetteville, West Virginia, home when fire broke out shortly after midnight. They escaped with four of their children, but Maurice, Martha, Louis, Jennie, and Betty were believed to be trapped upstairs. Rescue attempts failed: the family’s ladder was missing, two coal trucks would not start, and the fir...

Santa Claus comes to your home ready to reward you for being good all year... But the creature that comes to punish those who have been bad isn't fat and jolly... He's not even a man! Krampus, the Christmas Demon, is coming! We are telling that...

Chalino Sanchez lived a wild life full of fast women and dangerous men. He wrote songs about those exploits and made many legends along the way. The way he died, however, has become the stuff of legend in its own right. We are telling that story...

Beyond Venezuela's beautiful scenery lurks something mysterious... A black goo capable of causing catastrophic and deadly car accidents but worse yet, NO ONE KNOWS what it is or where it comes from! We are telling that story today, on Terrifying &...

Deep in the Alaskan wilderness, thousands of people have vanished. Hikers, tourists, pilots, and even entire aircraft have disappeared without wreckage, bodies, footprints, or answers. This deadly region has become known as the Alaska Triangle. In this episode of Terrifying & True, we investigate the chilling mystery of the Alaska Triangle, a vast stretch of wilderness connecting Anchorage, Juneau, and Utqiagvik. Since 1988, more than 16,000 people have reportedly vanished in this region, where...

Poisoned Halloween candy became an American urban legend despite a troubling gap between the familiar warning and documented crimes. Terrifying & True examines the deaths of Kevin Toston and Timothy O’Bryan, sociologist Joel Best’s research, and the media scares and hoaxes that helped keep parents checking wrappers. Real tragedies sit beside exaggerated claims, often pointing toward dangers closer to home than an unknown trick-or-treater’s neighbor. Why does the image of a stranger handing out p...

Chain letters are a documented social phenomenon that moved from copied religious warnings and charitable appeals to pyramid schemes, email spam, and viral social media posts. Their history reaches far beyond the internet, using promised blessings, threatened curses, and the pressure to keep a message moving. This episode follows Lucy Meyer’s successful 1888 dime appeal for a Methodist missionary school, the snowball collection that overwhelmed Mrs. Campbell with thousands of letters, and fundr...

The 1982 Corpsewood Manor murders took place at the handmade brick retreat Charles Scudder and Joseph Odom built in the north Georgia woods near Summerville. The couple left Chicago for forty isolated acres, creating an off-grid home filled with art, music, gardens, stained glass, and the symbols of Scudder’s unconventional beliefs. Their hospitality and eccentricity also inspired rumors that exaggerated their wealth and cast them as dangerous outsiders. This episode follows the planned robbery...

The Texarkana Moonlight Murders were a series of attacks in Texas and Arkansas during 1946, attributed to an unidentified assailant remembered as the Phantom Killer. Over less than three months, familiar lovers’ lanes and a rural farmhouse became crime scenes, leaving five people dead and three survivors carrying the only direct memories of the attacker. This episode follows the assaults on Jimmy Hollis and Mary Jeanne Larey, the murders of Richard Griffin, Polly Moore, Paul Martin, Betty Jo Bo...

The 1965 murder of 16-year-old Sylvia Likens in Indianapolis remains one of Indiana’s most disturbing true crime cases. Left in the care of Gertrude Baniszewski while her parents worked, Sylvia was isolated and abused over months as Baniszewski’s children and neighborhood youths were drawn into the cruelty. This episode examines the adults who saw warning signs, the police response after Sylvia’s death, and the 1966 trial involving Gertrude, Paula, John Jr., Richard Hobbs, and Coy Hubbard. It a...

At nineteen, a young woman in a large Canadian city accepts an after-hours cleaning job at a neighborhood pharmacy. The work is quiet, close to home, and normally solitary—until one of her father’s much older friends begins waiting outside the locked doors and asking when her shift ends. His behavior escalates from lingering outside both buildings to following her after work, pressuring her to attend a late-night movie, asking for her phone number, and offering to buy her shoes. Even after her ...

In the early 1980s, two young paperboys vanished from Des Moines, Iowa under hauntingly similar circumstances. Twelve-year-old Johnny Gosch disappeared in 1982 while delivering newspapers before sunrise, leaving behind his wagon, undelivered papers, and a family forced to fight for answers. Two years later, thirteen-year-old Eugene Martin vanished from his own paper route, leaving behind a delivery bag full of newspapers and another devastated family. The cases were never officially connected, ...

The Mary Celeste is the Atlantic ghost ship found deserted in December 1872 with ten people missing and no certain explanation for why they left. Sailors from the Dei Gratia discovered the cargo vessel still seaworthy, its industrial alcohol largely intact, its provisions and personal belongings in place, and its lifeboat gone. Captain Benjamin Briggs, his wife Sarah, their young daughter Sophia, and seven crewmen had vanished. This episode separates the documented evidence from inventions that...