MavRadio.FM Podcast

Seventeen student journalists spent a semester reporting one story each, and on Thursday, Oct. 29, 2026, they put all of it on the air at once. This is the fifteenth annual Haunted Heartland, broadcast live from MavRadio.FM and KVNO 90.7 HD-2 in Omaha, hosted by Juliette Eckler and Katie Klemmensen.

Not all of it is a ghost story. The hour holds a bronze angel in Council Bluffs and the woman who modeled for it, a jail where the cells revolved, a human scalp kept in a library archive since 1900, a cold case, a sandwich invented over a poker game, a town that cannot agree on what is under its park, and a family that sets a table for its dead. The rule the students work under is simple. Attribute the legend, name your sources, and nothing is off limits as long as it can be verified.

In this episode:

· Cole Avey on the Black Angel of Council Bluffs, and what folklore is for

· Oliver Begeman on the Thompson scalp, and the first derailment on the transcontinental railroad

· Gisela Kwihangana on the Woman in White of Prospect Hill, and a newspaper story that cannot be confirmed

· Sienna McEneaney on the Reuben, and the poker game at the Blackstone Hotel

· Jackson Diebold on the John Joubert case, with investigative reporter Mark Pettit

· Dylan Casart on the Oma Dome, and what the National Weather Service makes of it

· Ivania Quijano on Brother Sebastian's, and the patron at table 35

· Ross Pizinger on the fifteen year history of this broadcast, told on archive tape

· MarinKrause on Anna Wilson, the madam who left Omaha a fortune, from the 2014 archive

· Chase Sherwood on the Squirrel Cage Jail flashlight tours

· Vince Arculeo on Audrey Munson, the most photographed model in America

· Christopher Graf on Seven Sisters Road, and what the record says about it

· Malia Oltmer on Fremont, a park that was a cemetery and a rental house in her own family

· Grace Walter on pumpkin spice, and the ritual underneath it

· Kevin Santos on the Squirrel Cage Jail, and the people who keep it

· Gabe Miller on clowns, and when they stopped being funny

· Sophia Gueret on the fourth floor of Arts and Sciences Hall, and an unsolved mystery

· Juliet Mendoza on Día de los Muertos, with her mother

Haunted Heartland is produced by students in JMC 2370 All About Audio at the University of Nebraska at Omaha School of Communication. Executive producer Jodeane Brownlee. Producers Samira Zarazua and Ivan Tovar. Supervising producer Cole Avey. Producer Sean Keating. Digital media director Bella McAtee. Show open and close by Denise Valdez-Alvarez. Production assistant Jamie Bush.

MavRadio.FM is the student run, national award winning college radio station of the University of Nebraska at Omaha, heard on KVNO 90.7 HD-2 and at mavradio.fm. Follow UNOMavRadio on Facebook and Instagram.

Season TWO!

Every relationship ends. Dr. Paige Toller says that to her students, and it stops them for a second. Paige is a professor in the UNO School of Communication who studies interpersonal communication, which looks at how our closest relationships form, hold together, and end. In this episode she talks about the part we usually avoid, grief and loss, and why she treats it as a real part of how relationships work, not a footnote.

Paige explains that grief is both internal and external, the private emotion and the way we reach for other people. She talks about the little deaths we rarely name, a lost job, a breakup, the loss of your health, a kid leaving for college, and how each one asks us to build a new normal. She shares research she did on how people talked about suicide online, and what it revealed about how poorly we support the people left behind. And she talks about her dissertation work with parents who lost a child, and the resilience she did not expect to find. She has one thing she wishes faculty and students understood: grief is all-consuming, especially right after a loss, and a grieving student cannot just set it aside for class. Building a new normal takes time, sometimes years. Her point is simple and hard. There is no love without loss.

If you are dealing with grief or loss, UNO counseling services are there for students, faculty, and staff, and community counseling is an option too. Watch on YouTube, listen wherever you get your podcasts, and subscribe to Comm in Ten. Once a Maverick, always a Maverick.

Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@UNOSchoolofComm Listen anywhere: https://mavradio.fm/podcasts Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/search?term=mavradio Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1XfRvLxttVvUFvvPEIyOSP UNO School of Communication: https://www.unomaha.edu/college-of-communication-fine-arts-and-media/communication/index.php Follow us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CommUNO/ Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/uno_schoolofcomm/

#CommInTen #Grief #InterpersonalCommunication #UNOCommunication

Most students don't graduate because of one big moment. They graduate because of dozens of small ones, many of them happening in an advisor's office. Megan Lee has had thousands of those conversations. In this episode, the Season 1 finale, she walks us through how academic advising actually shapes student success. It's a side of higher education that doesn't get headlines, and it should.

Megan talks about the pattern she sees again and again with students who get stuck, and the kind of communication that gets them moving again. We close out the season with a conversation about listening, persistence, and the quiet, structural work of helping someone become who they're trying to become.

Watch on YouTube, listen on your favorite podcast platform, and subscribe to Comm in Ten.

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@UNOSchoolofComm Listen anywhere: https://mavradio.fm/podcasts Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/search?term=mavradio Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1XfRvLxttVvUFvvPEIyOSP From the UNO School of Communication: https://www.unomaha.edu/college-of-communication-fine-arts-and-media/communication/index.php

Competitive speaking sounds, from the outside, like a stage event. From the inside, it's a craft, closer to coaching than performing. The people who do it well end up communicating at a level that shows up everywhere else in their lives. Amanda VonGoodrich coaches UNO Forensics. In this episode she shares what the work is really about, what students gain from it, and why the discipline matters more than the trophies.

Amanda reflects on her own path through forensics and what builds confidence in young speakers. Not the surface-level kind. The steadier kind that comes from knowing you've prepared. We talk about argument as a form of respect, the difference between speaking at people and to them, and why forensics graduates tend to do well in rooms that have nothing to do with competition.

Watch on YouTube, listen wherever you get your podcasts, and subscribe to Comm in Ten. Once a Maverick, always a Maverick.

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@UNOSchoolofComm Listen anywhere: https://mavradio.fm/podcasts Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/search?term=mavradio Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1XfRvLxttVvUFvvPEIyOSP From the UNO School of Communication: https://www.unomaha.edu/college-of-communication-fine-arts-and-media/communication/index.php

Pop culture is never just pop culture. The stories we tell about who's strong, who's worth saving, and what counts as power say a lot about us. You just have to know where to look. Superhero research is one of those places. In this episode, Dr. Adam Tyma flips the script and lets us study him for a change. He takes comics and capes seriously, and he'll tell you exactly why that's real work.

Dr. Tyma works in critical media studies. That means he digs into film, TV, and video games to figure out what they're quietly teaching us. And his range is wild. He's written on Alien, Blade Runner, and Buffy. He's co-editing a Marvel book for Bloomsbury that covers everything from a postcolonial take on Black Panther to Logan as a story about getting older and facing the end. He also runs a TikTok series, the Media Literacy Survival Guide, with short weekly takes on who owns the media, the First Amendment, and whatever's blowing up in the news. His whole thing is that good media users are smart consumers and smart creators, both at once. We get into the heroes he loves, Thor and Daredevil, how a kid's obsession turned into a career, and what superheroes can teach us about communication once you really pay attention.

Watch on YouTube, listen on major podcast platforms, and subscribe to Comm in Ten. Once a Maverick, always a Maverick.

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@UNOSchoolofComm Listen anywhere: https://mavradio.fm/podcasts From the UNO School of Communication: https://www.unomaha.edu/college-of-communication-fine-arts-and-media/communication/index.php

Most students don't really know what a graduate teaching assistant is until they have one. Aly Holmberg has been on both sides of that desk. In this episode she walks us through what it means to be a GTA: the prep, the mentorship, the small daily acts of communication that turn a syllabus into a real class. We talk about teaching as a discipline you learn the same way you learn anything else. By paying attention. By being honest about what isn't working. By getting better, semester by semester.

Aly came to UNO from Long Beach State in California, with a speech and platform background and a coach who nudged her toward the Midwest. She's candid about the imposter syndrome that hits every time you face a new class, and how teaching went from terrifying to second nature by getting the reps in, until she knew how to bring her own persona into the room. She teaches public speaking and now intro to journalism and media, and she breaks down why knowing your why matters before you commit. We also talk about the support graduate students need to do this work well, and why investing in GTAs is investing in undergraduate education itself.

Watch on YouTube, listen wherever you get your podcasts, and subscribe to Comm in Ten. Once a Maverick, always a Maverick.

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@UNOSchoolofComm Listen anywhere: https://mavradio.fm/podcasts From the UNO School of Communication: https://www.unomaha.edu/college-of-communication-fine-arts-and-media/communication/index.php

Health communication only works when it actually communicates. Too often, the messages people most need to act on are buried under jargon, packaging, or assumptions about who's reading them. Allison Wakin works at the intersection of clarity and care. In this episode she breaks down why accessible health messaging matters more than persuasion, and what gets lost when public health forgets its audience.

Allison reflects on her work [add specifics: her role, her area of focus, a moment where clear communication made a measurable difference] and what she'd want every student of communication to understand about audiences who are stressed, sick, or simply tired. We talk about the difference between informing and connecting, why empathy is a research method, and what it takes to write something that reads like it was meant for one specific reader.

Watch on YouTube, listen on your favorite podcast app, and subscribe to Comm in Ten. Once a Maverick, always a Maverick.

Subscribe:

https://www.youtube.com/@UNOSchoolofComm

Listen anywhere: https://mavradio.fm/podcasts

UNO School of Communication:

https://www.unomaha.edu/college-of-communication-fine-arts-and-media/communication/index.php

Follow us:

https://www.facebook.com/CommUNO/

https://www.instagram.com/uno_schoolofcomm/

#CommInTen #HealthCommunication #UNOCommunication #Mavericks

The skills you bring from the court to the classroom. Morgann Gardner played basketball for thirteen years. Thirteen years of 5 a.m. workouts, 6 a.m. lifts, two-a-day practices, and the kind of discipline that follows you out of the gym. Now she's a graduate teaching assistant at UNO, teaching Public Speaking Fundamentals to a room full of nervous first-year speakers.

Morgann came to UNO from Racine, Wisconsin, on a recruiting visit her mom drove her out for from a tournament in Iowa. She committed after one mini campus tour, and stayed for an undergrad degree in JMC Emerging Media, an Outstanding Student of the Year award for 2024-2025, and a last-minute leap into the master's program she wasn't sure she'd get into. Her advice for current and future student athletes: stick with it, talk to your professors, and remember that the hard part is mental, not physical.

Watch on YouTube, listen on your favorite podcast app, and subscribe to Comm in Ten.

#StudentAthlete #StudentSuccess#CommInTen #OnceAMaverick #UNOmaha #StudentAthlete #PublicSpeaking

Welcome back to Lost In Your 20s with Karima Zhauatar, the podcast for everyone trying to make sense of an in-between decade and the version of themselves they're becoming.

In this episode, we dive into the quiet reality of forced maturity. Being "mature" or "responsible" is often seen as a badge of honor, but we rarely talk about what that costs a person on the inside. We explore the gap between the life we imagined, filled with time to explore, make mistakes, and find ourselves, and the reality of being pushed into adult roles before we were ready.

Featuring a deeply personal story from a guest who faced early marriage and parenthood due to cultural and family expectations, we examine the "quiet loss of choice." The episode touches on the difficulty of saying "no" when it feels like losing everything, and the lingering "what ifs" that haunt those who skipped the traditional chapters of youth, like university or independent discovery.

Ultimately, this conversation is about validation. It's an acknowledgment that you can love your life and your family while still grieving the version of yourself that never got to happen. We discuss the invisibility of internal struggles behind a "mature" exterior, the importance of independence, and the freedom to change.

We close with a reminder that there is no single "correct" timeline for life. You didn't miss your life. You are still in it. And it is never too late to start choosing yourself.

Featuring: Guest

Music: Universal Production Music

#LostInYour20s #GrowingUpTooFast #LifeTimelines #CrisisOf20 #MentalHealthAwareness #EmotionalWellbeing #MavRadio

Welcome back to The Fangirl Archives with Jelly, the podcast where we go deeper into the stories, music, and cinematic universes that fandoms love.

In this episode, Jelly dissects the extensive storyline of the BTS Universe, the cinematic world built across BTS's music videos, short films, webtoon comics, mobile games, and "The Notes" book series.

With a storyline that goes far beyond pretty pictures and happy smiles, the BTS Universe (the BU) tells an extensive backstory for fictional characters that were originally introduced to promote new music. As the BU grew more complex, exploring themes of murder, death, suicide, friendship, and the anxiety of youth, BTS were able to express "the most beautiful moment in life" with more than just music. By using the concept of an alternate universe to expand on songs about pain, longing, and the idea that "youth is never coming back," the BU may have been the greatest creative choice for the heart of ARMY.

Because of the sheer volume of content to explore, Jelly delivers a crash course on what the key details of the BU are about. As seven characters, Seokjin, Namjoon, Yoongi, Hoseok, Jimin, Taehyung, and Jungkook, move through the struggles of youth, how do time travel and time loops fit into their fictional story? And does a story really matter when the music is what you came for?

Listen as Jelly explains the baseline of the BU and what the music means for the storyline BTS has created.

Rating note: PG-13.

Disclaimer: Any themes or storylines discussed are fictional, even if they resemble events in real life. Any BTS music referenced does not belong to liljellyproductions or Jelly. All music rights belong to BTS and BIGHIT MUSIC under HYBE Corporation.

#BTS #HYYH #BTSUniverse #BTSArmy #TimeLoop #TimeTravel #TheMostBeautifulMomentInLife #MavRadio