Christmas is over, the tree is on the curb, and you think the house is finally yours again. That’s when she comes. This is the Italian legend of La Befana, the soot-streaked crone who slips down chimneys on January 6th, leaves gifts for good children, coal for the bad, and quietly rearranges your home in the middle of the night. She isn’t a punisher like Krampus, but something worse: a creature of endless grief and obsessive routine, cursed to sweep through millions of houses searching for a child she’ll never find, leaving behind candy, ash, and the feeling that someone else’s ancient sorrow has moved in with you.

On New Year’s Eve 2022, Ana Walshe rang in the year with friends at her home in Cohasset, Massachusetts. By sunrise, the successful real-estate executive had supposedly left for the airport and was never seen again.

In this episode, Phreak follows the digital breadcrumbs, Home Depot runs, and chilling search history surrounding her disappearance, and look at how the first mystery of the year ended with a missing mother, a husband on trial, and a story still being written in court.

Some years don’t end cleanly. Some people aren’t supposed to make it through at all.

In this episode, we open the ledger on The Black Registrar, a New Year ritual said to correct lives that slipped past their expiration date. Then we turn to one of the most baffling real-world mysteries in American history: The Yuba County Five — five men who drove the wrong way into the mountains, abandoned a working car, and vanished into the snow, leaving behind more questions than answers.
When the numbers don’t add up, something always comes to collect.

(We had a guest pop in, but their audio didn't seem to record, just ignore that snafu)

(And we forgot to say the mystery word again...ugh. Let's say it's "wolfout")

Krampus might rattle chains and drag the wicked into the snow, but Perchta waits until you think the danger’s over. In this episode of Cryptid Captures, Phreak dives into the Bavarian and Austrian legend of Perchta, the Shining One who stalks the Twelve Rough Nights between Christmas and Epiphany, checking spinning wheels, kitchens, and half finished chores. Pass inspection and you might get a coin.

Fail, and the stories say she opens your belly with a knife, removes your organs, and stuffs you full of trash, wool, and household waste before sewing you back up. This is the monster that doesn’t want your soul, just your effort – and she’ll happily turn your body into a garbage bag if you disappoint her.

A man in Brazil is found stumbling through the streets, covered in bite marks from other people and infected with something that turns him violent. That’s not a horror script; that’s the starting point. In this Kamen’s Konspiracies, Kamen tracks the science behind “real” zombies: ant-controlling fungi, brain-altering parasites, rabies, and engineered pathogens that can strip away inhibition and ramp up aggression. Is the zombie apocalypse just fiction, or are we already experimenting with its building blocks?

On Christmas Day 1929, tobacco farmer Charlie Lawson took his wife and seven children into town for new clothes and a rare family portrait. Hours later, six of those kids and their mother were dead on the farm, posed like they were already in coffins, and Charlie’s body was found in the woods with a shotgun and a half-written note.

This is the story of a holiday that curdled into a massacre, and a family portrait that feels more like a premonition than a memory.

While most people wrap themselves in cozy Hallmark fantasies and Santa stories, the Alps kept another name on the calendar: Krampus, the horned enforcer who shows up with chains, switches, and a sack big enough for the worst of the year’s sinners. In this episode of Cryptid Captures, Phreak digs into the old-world terror behind Krampusnacht, modern encounters with something dragging chains through attics and over frozen roads, and the psychological horror of a monster that doesn’t hunt at random, but only comes for the people who know they deserve it.

Governments, militaries, corporations, and fringe groups have all learned the same trick: you don’t need bullets if you can rewrite what people believe is true. In this episode of Kamen’s Konspiracies, Kamen breaks down the history and mechanics of PSYOPS – from leaflet drops and staged radio broadcasts to modern “info ops,” meme warfare, and algorithmic manipulation. Where’s the line between propaganda, marketing, and psychological operations, and how do you know when you’re the target instead of the audience?

A woman dies by suicide in a red Cadillac on Christmas Eve, in the driveway of the only family that still speaks to her. That’s tragic enough, until they open a metal lockbox in her closet and find out “Lori Erica Ruff” was never real: she once stole the identity of a dead child, changed her name in a Texas courtroom, and spent decades hiding her past behind church events, a marriage, and a baby she guarded like a secret.

This week, Phreak unwraps the mystery of a woman who chose to die beside a children’s section in a Virginia cemetery with a tiny Christmas tree, a Walkman, and a typed note signing herself “Jane Doe” – a Jane Doe the world would know for 25 years only as the “Christmas Tree Lady,” until forensic genealogy dragged her real identity back into the light. Kamen follows with a tour of winter oddities that look like they belong in a glitching snow globe: towering ice spikes, rolling snow wheels, and other cold-weather phenomena that feel more supernatural than scientific.