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This story originally aired on November 18, 2017. "You Can do anything in the Barbie Dream Hearse, except smoke” laughs Kat Taylor as we enter the world of white leather with pink accents. Perhaps you’ve seen it, The Barbie Dream Hearse, driving around Seattle, shuttling people around who might be watching a movie in the back, or pouring another glass of champagne from the ice bucket. The white hearse turned party limo is hard to miss. It all started with a play on words. “The words Barbie Dream

In the Fall of 2016, Greg Beckelhymer died after a year-long struggle with metastatic kidney cancer. He was 47 years old. In this story, his widow, Seattle-based writer Michelle Goodman and her sister, Naomi Goodman, talk about how acute grief is often accompanied by strong denial. “I had to remind myself that he wouldn’t be walking through the front door to make dinner with me and to take the dog to the nearby park afterward. I had to remind myself because grief is sneaky. It fools you into

This show originally aired on October 28, 2017. This week on Sound Effect, our theme is "ghosts." We open with host Gabriel Spitzer having his son taste-test a ghost pepper. Next, Gabriel meets up with a Seattle writer who discovered a ghost from her family in her own neighborhood. Sound Effect’s Jennifer Wing heads to Eastern Washington to meet a man who is on the search for apple varieties thought to be lost. And finally, Sound Effect’s Kevin Kniestedt talks to singer Lydia Ramsey about how

This story originally aired on October 28, 2017. Near the coast of Washington state, on the banks of the Copalis River, lies a ghost forest -- a stand of gray, dead trees in the middle of a healthy forest. How did it get there? Could the key lie in another mystery, a mysterious tsunami recorded by samurai in 18th-century Japan? Linking these seemingly unconnected phenomena became a goal for ambitious scientists using everything at their disposal, from computer models to chainsaws. But, most

This story originally aired on October 28, 2017. In the Fall of 2016, Greg Beckelhymer died after a year-long struggle with metastatic kidney cancer. He was 47 years old. In this story, his widow, Seattle-based writer Michelle Goodman and her sister, Naomi Goodman, talk about how acute grief is often accompanied by strong denial. “I had to remind myself that he wouldn’t be walking through the front door to make dinner with me and to take the dog to the nearby park afterward. I had to remind

This story originally aired on October 28, 2017. What if something was thought to be gone forever? Would you still go looking for it? There is a man named David Benscoter , who does just this. Benscoter spends a lot if his time exploring an area of Eastern Washington known as the Palouse. He searches abandoned homesteads, looking for varieties of apples that are believed to be extinct. “These trees, they’re just going to go away someday. And if I don’t do it there’s no one who’s going to search

This story originally aired on October 28, 2017. To say that Seattle musician Lydia Ramsey was raised in a musical family would be kind of an understatement. “Me and my brothers joke that, like, in order to sit down in our living room, you had to pick up an instrument because it was taking up the chair. And then you’d be like oh, well I’m holding this so I might as well play something on it,” said Ramsey. Eventually, Lydia would decide to dig a little deeper into her family history. What she

This story originally aired on October 28, 2017. Seattle Writer Rachel Kessler started this discussion by reading a passage from an essay she wrote that was recently anthologized in a book Ghosts of Seattle Past. “I ride down Yesler every day to get to the library where I research and write. At this point I decided to investigate my own family's history which it turns out is connected to Yesler way and 17th. ‘How far back do you know your family?’ The genealogy librarian opened up the ancestry

Washington State is, of course, named after founding father George Washington. But there’s another George Washington, also a founding father, who settled in a little corner of the territory with his wife Mary Jane nearly 150 years ago. There he founded a town called Centerville, later changed to Centralia. What makes Washington an unusual pioneer-type is that he was African-American, born in Virginia to a white woman and a black slave. Now, some 200 years later, George Washington has become a

This story originally aired on October 7, 2017. So, there’s this online test. The faces of people of different races flash up on your screen along with words, like good, bad, sweet and bitter. And you have to immediately click on one of the words when you see the face. It tests our implicit racial biases in a way that’s really hard to fool. The results can be enlightening. Or horrifying, because it turns out almost all of us have implicit bias. Dr. Caprice Hollins teaches workshops that help