In the summer of 2017, I took many walks in the heavy fog and foliage along Oregon's moody coast while listening to the Lore podcast. The atmosphere paired with Aaron Mahnke's speculative storytelling will always be strongly associated in my memory.

Lore is a bi-weekly podcast that covers dark historical stories bound together with common themes such as trust, fears, beasts, witches, vampires, changelings, and various towns' dark pasts, such as New Orleans and Savannah, Georgia.

A more recent episode called "Locked Away" tells the story of the Winchester Mystery House and the famous family behind it. Sarah Winchester, the heir to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, suffered the loss of her nine-day-old daughter and her husband in 1881. She sought answers from spiritualist Adam Coons, who told her that she was cursed by the ghosts of everyone killed by a Winchester rifle, also known as "The Gun that Won the West."

To escape it, Coons told her, she needed to head West and to build a home to house all those spirits. When Sarah arrived in California, she bought a farmhouse on a 162-acre piece of land far-removed from civilization. From 1884 to 1922, Sarah Winchester oversaw the building of the current Winchester Mystery House, a mansion with about 160 rooms, ten-thousand windows, 17 chimneys, and seven stories. It's an extraordinary story of someone running, as Mahnke reflects:

Sarah Winchester spent her life running from pain...Each and every one of us keeps a bag that's overflowing with regret or guilt or suffering. We're all just too busy managing our own to notice that everyone else is doing the same thing...Perhaps her story is attractive because she built a crazy house, or maybe it's because it feels familiar. She did what many of us wish we could. What she left with us is a monument to forgetting.

Since its beginning in 2015, it has accumulated 85 episodes, 3 books, and a series on Amazon Prime. This podcast has captured my imagination and challenged me to think differently about the past and as a writer, about storytelling and its power.
This podcast gives what I have always wanted from horror - history without the genre's typical gimmicks. The podcast is a thoughtful take on our world's lore and what it means for humanity as a whole. I

t takes a look at our fears and motivations and where this shows in the stories that have lasted through history, relying on factual information and accounts. It discusses our human capacity for ugliness but also for immense compassion and beauty. Mahnke's sympathetic and thoughtful take on even the most horrific stories provides light even in history's darkest hours, as well as my favorite podcast to date.

If you've looked at the 85+ episodes and wonder where to start, I would suggest starting from the very beginning.