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Mark McNease’s Fearsome Fiction Podcast: The Southwest Chamber, by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (includes YouTube)
There’s a particular kind of horror that doesn’t announce itself with screams or spectacle. It arrives slowly—a thought that isn’t yours, a memory you couldn’t possibly have, a garment that reappears where it shouldn’t be. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman knew this kind of horror intimately, and in “The Southwest Chamber,” first published in 1903, she deployed it to devastating effect.
The story follows the Gill sisters, who inherit a New England boarding house along with one deeply problematic room—the southwest chamber, formerly occupied by a recently deceased and apparently still-present aunt. One by one, guests are installed in the room, and one by one they flee it, shaken by experiences they can barely articulate. Freeman, one of the finest American ghost story writers of her era, understood that the most frightening hauntings aren’t about what a ghost does to you—they’re about what it makes you feel.
This episode of Fearsome Fiction brings you Freeman’s full story, read aloud and ready to unsettle your afternoon.
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Mark McNease’s Fearsome Fiction Podcast: Night Flight to Murder Town – A Marshall James Thriller (Chapters 37 – 53 / The End)
You’ve been with Marshall James through all of it.
The suspicion. The fear. The slow unraveling of everything he thought he knew about the people around him — and about himself. You followed him into the dark and waited with him there while the truth fought its way to the surface.
Now we’re here. The final chapters of Night Flight to Murder Town.
Marshall gets his life back. The cloud that’s followed him, the whispers and the doubt and the weight of being the man everyone suspected — it lifts. He is vindicated. And standing on the other side of all of it, he gets to ask the question we all ask when the worst is finally over: now what?
The answer, it turns out, is New York City. A new beginning. A life rebuilt from the wreckage of the old one. And beside him through all of it — Boo. His husband. His anchor. The reason the new life is worth building at all.
But New York, as it happens, is not the last chapter. It’s just the one before the last chapter. Because Marshall and Boo are leaving the city now, trading its noise and its energy and its beautiful relentlessness for something quieter. Something on the water. A town called Lambertville, on the banks of the Delaware, where a different kind of life is waiting.
Some of you may know that town. Some of you may even know that stretch of river.
This is where Marshall James lands. This is where his story, for now, comes to rest.
These are the final episodes of Night Flight to Murder Town: A Marshall James Thriller.
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True Crime Tuesdays – A Fearsome Fiction Feature: The Many Victims of Randy Steven Kraft, the Scorecard Killer
He looked like your neighbor. He worked as a computer programmer. He threw dinner parties for friends. But from 1971 to 1983, Randy Steven Kraft prowled the freeways of Southern California — and beyond — leaving a trail of young men’s bodies in his wake. When police finally caught him, they found something almost no one expected: a coded list. Sixty-one cryptic entries, each one believed to represent a life he had taken. Investigators called it the Scorecard.
More than fifty years later, victims are still being identified — and the case is still growing. This week on True Crime Tuesdays, we go deep into one of America’s most prolific and least-known serial killers: the man police called the Scorecard Killer, the Freeway Killer, and the Southern California Strangler. And we ask the question that haunts investigators to this day: how many names are still on that list?
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Mark McNease’s Fearsome Fiction Podcast: Night Flight to Murder Town – A Marshall James Thriller (Chapters 34 – 36)
Fasten your headphones for another three chapters of Night Flight to Murder Town: A Marshall James Thriller by Mark McNease. Narration provided by Wondervox.
When we left Marshall James, he was in the middle of a very bad few days in New York City. His friend Trent is dead, the murder scene has been suspiciously cleaned up, and someone has apparently lifted Marshall’s driver’s license — which has now turned up in a dead senator’s apartment.
In Chapter Thirty-Four, Marshall and Colin pay a visit to Rhonda — Colin’s neighbor two floors down — to use her computer and finally open the disk that Trent died for. What they find on it is a spreadsheet of cities, money, and names that make everything a great deal more dangerous.
Chapter Thirty-Five takes us back to the present in Lambertville, New Jersey, where his husband Boo has been gently lobbying for a change of scenery. He wakes up in a bed and breakfast, comes downstairs to coffee and conversation, and meets Kyle Callahan and his husband Danny Durban — hosts, innkeepers, and, as we’ll come to see, people who know something about starting over in a new town.
Chapter Thirty-Six continues that morning, as Marshall begins to take the measure of this quieter life and wonder whether he might actually belong in it.
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True Crime Tuesdays – A Fearsome Fiction Podcast Feature: The Strange Death of Rey Rivera
On the evening of May 16, 2006, aspiring screenwriter Rey Rivera received a brief phone call, said “oh,” and ran out of his Baltimore home. He was 32 years old, newly married, and by every account a happy man on the verge of the life he’d always wanted. Eight days later, his body was found inside a locked, abandoned conference room at the historic Belvedere Hotel — beneath a hole in the ceiling that should have been impossible to make from above.
The physics didn’t add up. The injuries didn’t match. The detective assigned to the case said the scene looked staged and was pulled off it three weeks later. And taped to the back of Rey’s computer at home was a note — typed in tiny font, folded into a strange shape, addressed to “brothers and sisters” — that opened with a Masonic phrase, referenced volcanoes and secret societies and Stanley Kubrick, and was never satisfactorily explained by anyone.
This week on True Crime Tuesdays, we go to Baltimore, to a fourteen-story hotel, and to one of the genuinely strangest unsolved deaths of the past twenty years. No resolution. No clean answers. Just a hole in a roof, a note that reads like a riddle, and a case the medical examiner still considers open.
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Mark McNease’s Fearsome Fiction Podcast: Night Flight to Murder Town – A Marshall James Thriller (Chapters 31 – 33)
Night Flight to Murder Town — Chapters 31, 32 & 33
Marshall is in full survival mode. With a murdered man and a ransacked apartment behind him, he recruits his unlikely new ally Colin for a reconnaissance mission to Trent Stoffer’s Upper East Side building. What they find — or rather, don’t find — turns everything upside down. The apartment is spotless, the bedroom pristine, and Trent, according to a very helpful man named Dennis, is alive and well in Hong Kong. The body is gone, the evidence is gone, and Marshall is left looking like a man who has lost his grip on reality.
Meanwhile, in a complete change of pace, Marshall and Boo enjoy a sun-drenched afternoon in New Hope, Pennsylvania — ice cream, Main Street, and the Bucks County Playhouse — before Boo reveals the dark history of Passion House, the B&B where they’re staying. A housekeeper. A famous writer. A canal. And a locked storage room upstairs that no one talks about.
Back in 1992 New York, the mystery deepens. Dennis’s too-smooth performance and the suspiciously immaculate crime scene tell Marshall exactly one thing: everyone is in on it. The doorman, the super, and whoever cleaned up that bedroom with professional efficiency. The only lead left is a computer disk Trent slipped him — and finding a computer to read it on.
