Dialing the Urban Legends Hotline with American Hysteria's Chelsey Weber-Smith

Welcome back to Scare Me! a weekly horror newsletter. Today, we’re speaking with Chelsey Weber-Smith, the intrepid host of one of my favorite podcasts, American Hysteria.

Where can you find a podcast that covers the cultural history of Goth fashion, the panic over gang initiations, and whatever the fuck was going on with those clowns that were lurking around in 2016?

The answer: American Hysteria. Since 2018, Chelsey Weber-Smith has delved into the archives to bring us the confounding truths between moral panics and urban legends that whipped up mass media frenzies and gripped the American public.

The stories alone would be worth hearing, but Chelsey tells these tales with true style. They hold an MFA in poetry from the University of Virginia (my alma mater!) and it really shows in the immersive, mesmerizing storytelling that bring these buried stories to life. There’s a certain noticing that is present in poetry—an attunement to detail that unlocks a larger truth—and that’s what I feel when I listen to Chelsey unravel these unbelievable yarns.

Chelsey was kind enough to correspond with me over email, providing a peek behind the scenes and reflecting on what makes this show and its audience so special.

This conversation has been lightly edited with permission. All links, emphasis, and unintentional errors added by your devoted editor.

Welcome, new subscribers! It seems like most of you found Scare Me! from my recent interview with Neil McRobert, the host of Talking Scared and author of the forthcoming novella Good Boy. I’m so glad you’re here!

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Michelle Delgado: As of today, you've got a deep back catalogue of 255+ episodes covering an eclectic range of topics—but they all somehow make complete sense as a body of work, thanks to your sensibility as a researcher and storyteller. I could guess, but I'd love to know your perspective: What are the hallmarks of an American Hysteria story? What are the elements that jump out at you when you're sifting through the dregs of American history? 

Chelsey Weber-Smith: This is a great question. I like to think of what we call “history” as a kind of poem that speaks about abstract human experiences in sensational stories that we attach deeper meanings to.

When I look at a topic, say an urban legend, I will find true stories in newspaper archives that could be the grains of truth that helped form the legend, and then try to understand what was happening in culture and politics at the time when the tale was solidifying. It then becomes possible to see why that particular urban legend spread as far as it did, what it says about the concerns and fears of that cultural moment, and what psychological purpose the story might fulfill.

This can certainly be the case with moral panics as well. We have some kind of cultural or political change that causes anxiety in the mainstream—say, the push for gay rights—and then we have the moral panic that tries to express that anxiety with a single encapsulating story.

Like in 1999, for a goofy example, when Tinky Winky of the Teletubbies was accused of being gay and indoctrinating children. (Thanks Jerry Falwell!) That example is a bit more ridiculous, but we can also look at recent stories told by politicians about immigrants eating cats and dogs or queer kids using litter boxes in school.

These urban legends and moral panics serve as a way to demonize a folk devil (in this case immigrants or queer people). Then, they can be used as a justification for whatever oppressive laws or actions a particular religious or political group wants to enact because they have made their “enemy” into something dangerous or dangerously strange.

Plus, these sensational stories grab our attention like nothing else. It all feeds into the attention economy where the media and influencers can make tons of money off our outrage and fear. 

American Hysteria has a very substantial and dedicated listenership. Was there a moment or a specific episode when you noticed the show striking a particularly powerful chord or attracting a wave of new listeners?

Funny enough, our Skibidi Toilet episode did extremely well and brought in a lot of new people, I think because we did such a deep dive into the early 2000s viral video culture and compared it to more high art concepts like surrealism.

Our episode about the 12 Foot Skeleton craze did great, as did the one about the history and cultural impact of Jackass. I think that has to do with their timeliness as well as nostalgia. People like to revisit history that they actually remember. Oh, and of course our recent episode on the history of thongs from the 1930s to the 2000s was pretty beloved.

How does it feel to connect with the community that's grown around your work? 

We have the best community possible in my opinion, a group of people who are so kind and generous and really believe in promoting political solidarity rather than leaning back on divisiveness.

I get held to account now and then by people who have feelings about something I said on the show. Though it’s hard, I also like it, because almost always the person gives me the benefit of the doubt and we move from that place. That’s a really special thing to me.

I just adore our listeners, I really do.

This is the first time Scare Me! is covering nonfiction—but urban legends seem to have a very particular, reciprocal relationship to the horror genre. I'd be really curious to know your take on the nature of that relationship.

What's distinctive about urban legends compared to fictional horror stories? What happens when urban legends are reinforced by or absorbed into something like a Hollywood movie?  

We actually just did an episode with Sarah Marshall of the You’re Wrong About podcast on the urban legend called “The Babysitter and the Man Upstairs,” which is the one where the babysitter keeps getting creepy calls asking if she has checked the children. The operator traces the call and it turns out that “the call is coming from inside the house.”

If we look back before the slasher craze exploded with 1978’s Halloween, we can find 1974’s Black Christmas as one of the very first in the slasher genre. It clearly uses the heart of the Babysitter and the Man Upstairs, with the killer calling and making obscene calls from the attic of their sorority house. Following that in 1979 was the very literal version of the urban legend shown in When A Stranger Calls.

Then in the 90s, which is the horror era that I love the most, we see Scream actually paying homage to When A Stranger Calls in its opening scene when we find out that the killer is calling from her house. I think the DNA of the whole slasher genre comes from this urban legend.

We can see other urban legends in the horror genre, too, like the myth of the Halloween candy poisoner or killer clowns lurking around town, both of which we have done episodes on. Even something like The Blair Witch Project owes everything to urban legends—they just happened to create their own incredible lore from scratch. That’s why it’s my favorite, along with their unprecedented marketing campaign.

My favorite horror trope is the "let's go to the library" moment, when the characters delve into archives and microfiche. It can be tricky for movies to convey just how thrilling research can be—but in my experience, it really can feel exhilarating to finally track down an elusive primary source, contact information for an important source, or to finally find the origin of a series of articles that reference each other.

Is there an episode or series that was particularly challenging to research? Have you had any memorable moments when you finally found the exact detail you'd been hunting for?

Oh, this is one of my favorite motifs too. It makes me think of the 90s coming-of-age movie Now and Then (which I believe has some light horror elements) where a group of girls perform a seance in a local graveyard and believe they have brought back the ghost of a dead boy. They ride their bikes to the library to go through the archives of the town’s newspaper to try to learn what happened to the boy, which was, of course, that he was murdered.

I think about those scenes a lot when I am on newspapers.com. I’m so lucky to have three hundred years of newspapers right there on my screen whenever I want them.

The time I became most obsessed with the newspapers.com archives was when I was researching for our episode about the urban legend called Gang Initiations. It was predicated on the tale most of us heard in the ‘90s, that if you saw a car driving at night with its headlights off and you flashed yours as a courtesy, they would turn around and run you off the road or murder you because the whole thing was part of a ritual gang initiation targeting innocent (usually white, middle class) people.

I started to look into more stories that were presented by police and politicians as these kinds of ritual gang initiations, and I found that in almost all of these crimes, they eventually dropped the gang initiation angle, and often the gang connection altogether.

But the debunking never gets the same airtime as the original, more sensational story, so the tale cements itself in the public consciousness. I followed so many of these reports from start to finish, and I couldn’t stop. It was shocking to see how these stories of gang initiates slashing women’s ankles from under their cars at the mall to Halloween gang initiation massacres of kids at Halloween were nothing more than viral rumors.

Finally: You've spoken on other podcasts like The Bechdel Cast and You Are Good about your love for horror masterpieces like The Blair Witch Project and Mulholland Drive. What draws you to horror, and what do you enjoy most about the genre?  

When my mom was pregnant with me, she had a craving to watch horror movies, and got freaked out after watching The Seventh Sign where heaven runs out of souls to give new babies. I like to think that because of that I came out of the womb as a horror fanatic (hopefully with a soul), and that horror itself built into my very DNA.

As far back as I can remember, I would break away from my family at Blockbuster just to walk back and forth through the horror section and look at all the covers, especially Tim Curry as Pennywise on the 1990 IT double VHS. Since I didn’t have access to adult horror content, I gravitated to things like Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and Are You Afraid of the Dark?, both of which were made for kids but were also truly scary and in my opinion, true works of art.

I have always been drawn to what other people consider dangerous situations; I grew up exploring abandoned buildings, camping with my dad on random forest service roads, and graduated into hitchhiking and months-long solo road trips in my truck camper. I still do most of those things now and then.

Horror movies have always been these bite-sized (fake) dangerous adventures where you get to experience that adrenaline in a safe place, sometimes in theaters with a bunch of other people who, if you’re lucky, are there to have fun with a bunch of joyful weird strangers.

The other great thing about horror movies is that even the bad ones can be good, sometimes better than the good ones. Plus, I think that horror movies can more easily and bluntly tell us the truth about a cultural moment, whether we like it or not.

Up Next: Artist Lauren P. Dodge on Making Macabre Miniatures in the Southern Gothic Tradition

For the past four or five years, I’ve been avidly following artist Lauren P. Dodge’s various social media accounts, where she meticulously documents the construction of an elaborate Southern Gothic dollhouse. From tiny jars to moss-choked church signs to drowned bathtubs, every corner of the house is packed with the elaborate lore of its inhabitants (some living…some deceased).

On a recent phone interview, Lauren revealed that the Honey House is just one corner of the expansive world she’s building. I loved learning about the novel she’s writing, her own ties to the Southern Gothic tradition, and much more.

After that: A conversation with Chris Panatier! His new book, Shitshow, is both a maximalist romp perfect for fans of House of Wax or Beetlejuice and a surprisingly moving, bittersweet story about the existential horrors of aging. It’s set in a haunted portable toilet.

Scare Me! is a free weekly horror newsletter published every Thursday morning. It’s written by Michelle Delgado, featuring original illustrations by Sam Pugh. You can find the archive of past issues here. If you were sent this by a friend, subscribe to receive more interviews, essays—and maybe even a ghost story or two.