Happy October, listeners.All this month, we're bringing you a special series we're calling True Urban Legends.Every week, we'll dissect one classic urban legend and the haunting true story that either inspired it or is eerily similar.
As an added surprise, each new episode will be presented by a different host, including one with yours truly.
All of us had a hand in choosing the urban legends we found the most compelling, but you'll have to tune in each week to find out which tales we chose and the true stories behind every legend.
Due to the nature of this case, listener discretion is advised.This episode includes discussions of violence and murder.Consider this when deciding how and when you'll listen.
On a lonely road in Pennsylvania, a car rolls to a stop in front of an old two-story clapboard home.Three teenage boys climb out.Breathless, they stare up at the dark, looming structure known as the Hex Hollow Murder House.
The home sits in a clearing of crooked trees, as if the forest itself is afraid to get too close.Its dark, wooden exterior is weathered from over a century of exposure to the elements, and the dusty windows seem less like openings to the outside,
and more like eyes, diligently watching those who dare get near.And this night, Halloween night, the house has a lot to watch out for.According to legend, it's the one day a year when the hollow becomes a portal to hell.
Hex Hollow may look a bit frail these days, but the legend says the house and the land are cursed by the horrors that happened inside all those years ago when a witch was tortured and murdered.
Now, coming here is almost a rite of passage, especially for local kids coming of age.Their town is so boring, the boys joke as they approach the home, maybe a demon or two would make things more interesting.
The three friends put on their bravest face and push each other along towards the deserted house and up onto the creaking porch.Peering through the windows, they can tell right away at least one of the stories is true.
Everything inside the house is just like it was nearly 100 years ago, the night they say this place became a portal to hell. Wooden chairs sit silently collecting dust, coated in spider webs.
A cupboard hangs slightly ajar, exposing old tonics and potions the owner kept on hand.If you look closely at the worn floorboards, you can even see a tinged spot where his body was burned.
As they lean their heads against the glass, cupping their faces to see, the floorboards behind them creak, but it's not the sound of someone taking measured steps.
The creaking is coming from all around them, the porch, the stairs, even from inside the house.Something's moving around them, but it's too fast to see clearly, almost like they're trapped in a deep ocean current.
Then the shadowy figures begin to take a more familiar form, growing more human.The three friends don't wait a moment longer.The portal to hell suddenly doesn't seem like just a legend.
They sprint for the car, never noticing the smoke rising from the chimney, a signal that the witch's spirit is present. Welcome to the Serial Killers October special, True Urban Legends.I'm your guest host, Kailin Moore.
Some of you may know me from my podcast, Heart Starts Pounding, where I cover all manner of horrors, hauntings, and mysteries to satisfy your dark curiosities.
All this month, we're talking about urban legends and the haunting true stories surrounding them.Today, we'll be covering the Hex Hollow Murder House.
Legend has it, the crime that occurred there was so dark that it forever cursed the home and the victim's spirit.You can check out my podcast, Heart Starts Pounding, on Spotify.
I upload every Wednesday night, and you can find serial killers here every Monday.Stay with us.
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Most urban legends act as warnings.They all basically come from the same place, common fears and social anxieties, like going off to college or walking alone through a parking garage at night.
Growing up, I always heard these kinds of urban legends from my grandfather, who was raised in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains.
At night, his mother would take him to the window and point out the thick, dark forest at the edge of their property.She'd tell him stories of things that whistle in the woods at night, and of a witch who supposedly lived deep inside.
You must never go into those woods, she told him.
Now, I don't know if there really was a witch in the woods, but what my grandfather eventually learned was the woods were full of men making illegal moonshine, and parents would tell their kids all sorts of things to make sure they didn't stumble upon the operation.
If a moonshiner thought you might snitch on them, there was no telling what they'd do to you.That's all to say, there's a reason we tell each other these legends. Sometimes there is danger lurking in the woods.
The real Hex Hollow House sits in a rural area known as Ramirez Hollow in York County, Pennsylvania.To get there, you have to follow several twisting country roads and trails, but be careful how you trace your path.
As the urban legend goes, the portal to hell will only open if you walk them in the wrong sequence.
And while I can't say for sure there's a portal to hell that opens up on Halloween night, the other part of the legend, that a witch was tortured and burned on the property, may hold some truth to it.
And it all starts with a man named Nelson Raymeier. Early, one November morning in 1928, a farmer named David Vanover heard an alarming sound.
He lived just down the road from the Hex Hollow house, and even from a distance, he could hear the animals on the property crying out in agony.
The home belonged to Nelson Rehmeyer, and it seems like it wasn't like him to not tend to his animals, because David was concerned enough by the noise to want to go and check out what was happening.
I can imagine him coming upon the unexpected scene, animals bellowing in hunger, not having been fed in over a day.No sign of Nelson anywhere.
David approached the house and pushed the kitchen door open only to be met with the horrible stench of burned flesh.Right there in front of him lay a figure covered by what looked to David to be straw and a blanket.
It was charred, but not burned entirely. Despite the dark scorch marks all over the body, David immediately recognized his neighbor.That's when the horror of the scene came into full view.Nelson was face down on the floor.
His knees were bent and his feet stretched up and towards his back.It seemed like his legs were bound together.Only David couldn't see any rope. Once he got over the shock, David noticed broken pieces of a chair scattered across the floor.
Some were bloody and there was blood spray on the wall.This was no accident.Someone had been here and killed Nelson, but who could have done this and why?Well, to understand that, we need to learn a little bit more about who Nelson really was.
In 1928, 60-year-old Nelson lived alone on his farm.People thought of him as kind and friendly, although he mostly kept to himself.Neighbors also considered him eccentric.
For starters, he kept socialist literature around his house and reportedly endorsed socialist politicians.
Since the Russian revolution had just ended a few years earlier, that kind of talk was seen as subversive at best, downright dangerous at worst.Then there was Nelson's living situation.
He was married and had two daughters, but he and his wife no longer lived together.A while back, Alice Raymeier moved out with their children to her own house just a mile down the road.
Yet, they never divorced and they still frequently kept in touch.Today, we'd probably consider them estranged and maybe co-parenting, but in 1928, this setup made zero sense to his neighbors.
It was just one more thing that made him seem nice, but weird. But then there was something else about Nelson that outsiders didn't understand.And that was the fact that Nelson was a busy folk magic practitioner known as a Hexdoctor or Hexenmeister.
He practiced Braucherei, or Brauche, a kind of Pennsylvania German religious folk healing.Using prayers, charms, amulets, and rituals, a Hexenmeister could heal, protect, and bless.
And some people in the Pennsylvania German community were likely to put just as much trust in their folk doctors as they did medical doctors.Sometimes they preferred to see a Hexenmeister to cure whatever ailed them.
And anybody could be a practitioner.Your gender, age, race, background, that didn't matter.So long as you had the gift. Believers often kept special books that detailed instructions and prayers.
These were meant to tackle just about any problem life might throw at them.Like, if you wanted to stop a wound from bleeding, you might repeat this incantation three times.This is the day on which the injury happened.
Blood, thou must stop until the Virgin Mary bring forth another son. For fevers, you might have to write down a series of letters and wear them around your neck.Some remedies were a little more involved and messy.
To heal a toothache, a practitioner might be called upon to prod the sore tooth with a needle until it bled, then soak some thread in the blood and use it to sew a rag around the base of an apple tree.
Look, even back then, outsiders, non-believers saw some of these remedies as superstitions, but harmless ones.Pennsylvania Germans were also Christians, and these folk magic beliefs worked in tandem with their trust in God.
But there's a darker side to all of this too.Remember how I said Hexenmeisters were called upon to help protect? That's because this ideology, which is still around today, very much includes the belief in evildoing witches.
In one popular bracha book titled Long Lost Friend, there are entries to quote, prevent witches from bewitching cattle and to prevent malicious persons from doing you injury.
To be clear, this group believed there was a huge difference between a Hexemeister and a witch.A Hexemeister protects and heals.A witch means to do harm.Nelson Rehmeier was, by most accounts, a friendly Bracha practitioner.
He helped people, and Hexemeisters at the time often earned a little extra money on the side. But not everyone in the community believed that Nelson was using his gift for good.
One evening, a man named John Blymeyer sat down with one of the most powerful Hexemeisters in the community, a woman named Emma Knott, also known as the River Witch of Marietta.
John told the River Witch that he believed he was being hexed by someone.He hoped she would be able to identify whoever was cursing him.Maybe John already knew the drill as Emma held out her hand and he put a dollar bill inside.
After all, this was not his first time dealing with Hexemeisters. See, John grew up in a family that didn't have a lot of money.What extra cash they did have, John's parents put towards healers.
John was often sick when he was a young child, and he was raised in a family that firmly believed in their culture's folk doctors.When he grew up, life wasn't any easier.John often felt like he couldn't sleep, couldn't eat, and had no energy.
He was suffering, and those feelings were invading every aspect of his life. Nowadays, experts familiar with the case suggest John was experiencing depression and anxiety.
In the 1920s, the medical doctors John visited called it a nervous disease, hypochondriacal melancholia, suggesting John didn't really need to be so obsessed and worried about his health.
Clearly, the understanding of mental health back then wasn't what it is today.John even received what they called at the time electric treatments and spent several weeks in a psychiatric hospital in 1923.
The doctors there stated that on top of his quote, nervous condition, he also experienced delusions.That could be because they knew he believed in witchcraft, At any rate, one day John escaped from the hospital grounds.
Perhaps he felt that if he had to choose between Hexenmeisters and the electric treatments, he would choose Folk Magic.According to reports, nobody ever figured out how he'd escaped. While on the run, he stopped in to surprise his wife.
And we don't know what happened between them, but John apparently tried to kill her and was arrested.He spent just three or four months in jail, which actually helped him go undetected while hospital officials were searching for him.
After that, he went by a pseudonym and moved around a lot.A few years later, John was still living somewhat undercover, but his issues with sleeping and eating hadn't resolved.He felt he couldn't really carry on with his everyday life as he wanted.
Beyond his physical ailments, life had also dealt him a tragedy. Two of his three children passed away.He'd spent months, if not years, trying to understand what was happening to him.And he'd finally reached the conclusion that he was bewitched.
Now, he wanted to know who was doing this to him. To find the answer, John went to a series of hexamesters.Many of them affirmed his belief.The root of his problems was bewitching.
They wouldn't tell him any more than that though, so John kept searching for a name.Then, one day in the fall of 1928, he sat down with the River Witch of Marietta. and she told him to look closely at the dollar bill he had placed in his palm.
See the phrase, in God we trust, which added divinity to the ceremony.She instructed him to stare intently at the face on the bill, because when she took the bill away, there would be an imprint of a different face left on his hand in its place.
When she stole the bill away and placed it in her pocket, John was left staring at his hand, trying to make out the face of the person who was bewitching him, the face of the person responsible for his mental anguish.
And there, in his palm, he saw the face of a man he recognized, Nelson Ramire.
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Emma had just showed John something he'd been waiting so long for, the person who was supposedly bewitching him.John knew exactly what Nelson looked like because Nelson was one of the many bracha practitioners John had consulted over the years.
Not only that, John had worked on Nelson's farm, picking potatoes.He'd actually known the man for over 20 years since John was just a 10-year-old boy.
By the end of John's session with Emma Knopps, she had told him exactly what he needed to do to break the hex.
Secure a lock of Nelson's hair and bury it in the ground, six to eight feet deep, or find Nelson's copy of Long Lost Friend, the book of prayers and spells used in Bracha.After that, John needed to burn the book to ash.
This way, Nelson couldn't use its contents against him. It was around this time that John met a factory worker named Milton Hess, and their fateful meeting changed Milton's life forever.One day, Milton was on a break at work.
John Bleimeyer happened to be hanging around the outside of the factory, so they struck up a conversation. They must have talked for a while, because Milton began telling John about all his woes.
He'd had a lot of problems with his farm lately, harvests weren't great this year, animals had gone missing, and some family members had fallen ill, like his teenage son Wilbert, who'd been sick as a child, just like John.
Then Milton explained he'd had more than his fair share of family drama.His sister-in-law owned the farm next to his and they'd been squabbling over boundaries and a shared driveway.
It had gotten so bad, Milton wouldn't even put it past her to pay a witch to hex him.Remember. John and Milton's meeting was totally random.
So when John learned that the Hess farm was close to Raymeier's Hollow, less than 10 miles away, it must have seemed like a sign.Because John became absolutely convinced that the Hess family was also bewitched by Nelson Rehmeyer, just like he was.
But John believed he knew how to stop the witch.And he may have assumed that if he buried the lock of Nelson's hair or burned the book, then both of the hexes would be broken at once, like killing two birds with one stone.
So he offered to help the Hess family. See, ever since John was little, his parents had instilled in him the belief that he too had a gift, that he could be a powerful Hexenmeister.
And it really irked him that he hadn't been able to break Nelson's spell himself.But now he had a plan.He just needed to convince Milton to help him. Sometime later, John went to Milton's farm.
He brought along his 14-year-old apprentice of sorts, John Curry, who, for clarity's sake, we'll call Curry.The boy swore up and down that he'd previously had all these health problems, and John had cured him.
Since Curry was now a strapping young man, clearly John knew what he was doing. Whether or not that story was true, it worked.Milton was convinced that John was a powerful Hexenmeister who could break the spell on his family's land.
A deal was struck days before Thanksgiving, 1928.But though the Hesses hired John as their protector, he ended up tearing their family apart. On Monday, November 26th, John and Curry paid Nelson a visit at his home.
As they chatted, John kept steering Nelson toward one subject in particular.Did he own a copy of Long Lost Friend? Nelson confirmed that of course he did.John could have tried to take the book then and there.
In fact, he'd come prepared with 25 feet of rope.But something made John change his plans that night.A thought suddenly occurred to him.Nelson was a lot bigger than John had realized, probably around six feet tall.
John wasn't so sure he could pull this off, not even with Curry's help. they needed more backup.Losing his nerve, John didn't take Nelson's book or his hair that evening, but he did do something surprising.
He spent the night in Ramirez Hollow on Nelson's couch.The next day, John took Curry back to Milton's house.He wanted to know if one of their sons could return with him to Nelson's.
Since the Hess family was bewitched, he added, having one of them present would help break the curse.It was decided that 17-year-old Wilbert Hess would go.At first, he didn't wanna be involved, but John assured him.
It was just in case he needed help holding Nelson down while he cut off a lock of his hair.John insisted he'd tell Wilbert exactly what to do every step of the way. The young man eventually agreed, seeing it as his duty to help his parents.
His mother even gave him money to take the bus home once the hex was broken.With that, John and his two teenage accomplices set off for Ramirez Hollow, soon to be known as Hex Hollow.
It was late on Tuesday night when John pounded on Nelson's door again.Rather than greeting his guests downstairs, Nelson stuck his head out from a second story window.
According to Wilbert, John yelled up at the man something about needing to look for a book. It's possible John was talking about Long Lost Friend again, but Wilbert had no idea what book they were referring to.
In fact, he'd never even met John Blymeyer until a few hours ago.And all he knew about Nelson was that he supposedly placed a hex on all of them.Unsuspecting, Nelson invited them inside. John made a show of looking for the book at first.
He even moved the couch he'd slept on the night before and pretended to search the ground.Maybe it was a cover.John was buying himself a few moments to build up his nerve.
Because in the next second, he lunged at Nelson, grabbing holds and pushing him to the ground. At John's urging, they all beat the old Hexemeister with pieces of wood.Nelson tried to protest, tried to comply with whatever it was they wanted.
When John demanded to see the book, Nelson begged to just let him up and go get it for them, he promised. But Nelson didn't come back with his copy of Long Lost Friend.Instead, he handed over his pocketbook, his money.
Clearly he thought that's what the men were after.Strangely, John took the pocketbook and in the exchange, somehow Nelson ripped John's jacket.So John reared back and hit Nelson again.
He smashed a chair over Nelson's head, breaking it to pieces and fracturing Nelson's skull. John instructed the boys to tie the man up.His arms were bound together and a rope was tightened around Nelson's neck.
John pulled on it, choking Nelson until it seemed like he wasn't breathing anymore. All along, Wilbert had urged John to get the lock of hair.Just get the hair so we can leave.He couldn't understand why John wouldn't listen to him.
But John would later testify the hair was too bloody.It made him sick to look at.Besides, John believed the hex would be broken now whether he took the hair or not.As John put it, quote, the man will be buried and his hair will be buried.
because Nelson Ramire was dead.Wilbert wanted to leave.He'd gone to Nelson's house that night to help out his parents, and in just a minute or two, everything had changed.
He'd seen the life go out of an old man's eyes, and he'd been an unwilling accomplice to murder. Before they could leave, John wanted to erase any incriminating evidence.Fingerprints were wiped off of surfaces.John threw his own jacket in the stove.
And then he said they would set fire to the house and everything in it, starting with Nelson.They covered his body with a flammable straw mattress and doused it in lamp oil.
According to Wilbert, Curry offered up the match and John set the crime scene ablaze.After ensuring that the flames engulfed Nelson's body, the three disappeared into the night.
John wanted to be certain that the fire had covered their tracks, but something outside Nelson's house that night scared the killers away.What exactly it was, nobody knows.
John testified in court that he told his accomplices, there's something standing in the road.They only saw a shadow, but whatever it was, it saw them too, or sensed them.It moved with a jolt and backed away.
Seeing the figure, John, Curry, and Wilbert all ran off into the woods.They didn't stop until they reached the Hess farm, covering several miles on foot in the middle of the night.
It was just a little over a day later on Thanksgiving that one of Nelson's neighbors made the horrifying discovery at Raymeier's Hollow after hearing the animals crying out.As John Blymeier would soon find out, his plan had gone terribly wrong.
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When Nelson's neighbor David reached the hollow on Thanksgiving morning, he saw the horror of Nelson's body sprawled out on the floor.But unfortunately for John Blymeyer and his two accomplices, the so-called witch's house was still standing.
John had intended to destroy any evidence of his crime with the fire, but though Nelson's body was charred, it was not burned entirely.In fact, nothing in Nelson's house had been incinerated.
A medical doctor was called to the house to inspect the Hexemeister's body. First, the doctor noticed that Nelson's legs had been tied together, but the rope had fallen off during the fire.He then carefully turned Nelson over onto his back.
His legs had been singed by the flames.The front of his torso and his face were bruised and covered in dried blood, but somehow they hadn't been burned by the fire.
A quick analysis showed at least three lacerations on Nelson's head, one of which was three inches long.The doctor inserted his finger into the wound and instantly knew the skull had been fractured.He stepped back and surveyed the room.
He noticed the fire had been strong enough to burn a hole in the floorboards, two feet across, directly under the lower half of Nelson's body.Only, the destruction pretty much ended there.
At some point, not long after the match was lit, the flames had died out.John thought all the evidence would be burned into oblivion, but it was all right where he'd left it.
The lamp used to accelerate the fire, the bloody basin of water where one of the killers washed his hands, the ligature that had choked any remaining life out of Nelson's body.
Failing to make sure the fire covered his tracks wasn't the only mistake John made.When he, Curry, and Wilbert rushed out of Ramire's Hollow on the night of the murder, John had one last command.
He told Wilbert not to tell his mother what had happened. It might seem like good sense.Don't tell your mom we just murdered a man.But here's the thing.
When police came knocking at the Hess farm, Wilbert's mother had no idea her son had anything to hide.She told investigators all she knew about John and Curry setting off for Nelson's house that night.
And as a result, they both were arrested and gave up Wilbert as their accomplice. For all the misguided attempts John made to cover up the crime, when it came to speaking to investigators, he was very forthcoming, as were his partners.
In custody, each of them confessed to the murder of Nelson Rehmeyer.Three separate trials were scheduled, one right after the next in January, 1929.First John, then Curry, then finally Wilbert, who had just celebrated his 18th birthday.
Even though the prosecution had evidence and confessions, they faced a unique problem.Remember, witchcraft, hysteria, and condemning people to death for being a quote unquote witch was well in our rear view mirror by this point.
Pennsylvania Germans still believed in hexamesters and witches within their own communities, but the rest of the country had no idea this was going on in the 20th century.Perhaps the prosecution was worried that the story would bring negative press.
Even though there was a major difference between what happened in Salem in the 1600s and what had just happened in York County, the case could cause some embarrassment.
That's why prosecutors went into the trial intending to prove that the murder happened as the result of a robbery.They didn't want to talk about witches in the courtroom at all, if possible.
They did have some evidence to back up their robbery theory.There was the pocketbook that Nelson had handed over to John and John's testimony revealed that Curry and Wilbert had allegedly taken something out of Nelson's bedroom.
John thought it was money, but it turned out avoiding any mention of witches or hexes was pretty much impossible. Wilbert's older brother Clayton was called to the stand on the very first day of the trial.
John had come to him on Thanksgiving before the arrest and said he needed a ride to Nelson's house to see if it had burned down.As Clayton relayed in the courtroom, John told him, I got the witch. With those words, newspapers pounced on the story.
Some journalists covered the case faithfully, but others, well, they didn't really bother to clarify between witches and hexenmeisters.
They might've misunderstood Bracha altogether, or they might've cared more about printing headlines that would sell papers. Meanwhile, John's court appointed lawyer was actually hoping to spotlight his cultural beliefs.
He was going for an insanity defense and thought it would help his case.John's fear of witches and his mental health were brought up throughout the trial.
Most of all, his defense team zeroed in on John's total conviction that Nelson had bewitched him.John testified that he really hadn't meant to kill Nelson.It just happened. and he genuinely didn't think he had done anything wrong.
Before he left the stand, John reported that he could finally eat and sleep normally.He felt stronger now that Nelson was deceased.He believed the spell that had plagued him for years had been broken.
John was found guilty of first degree murder and the jury recommended a life sentence.That was unusual.Most murderers around this time would have gotten the death penalty.
Even though John's lawyers hadn't been able to get his insanity defense to stick, the sentencing suggested his peers took his mental health and cultural beliefs into account.Curry's trial started immediately after John's ended.
His defense team made the case that the 14-year-old boy hadn't intended to kill Nelson either.Whatever the court believed about John, they insisted there was no premeditation on Curry's part.
Just like his mentor, Curry got a first degree murder conviction along with a matching life sentence.Wilbert's trial went a little differently.His family had hired the tenacious Harvey Gross, a former district attorney.
Gross wasn't going to shy away from taboo subjects.If anything, he leaned into them.He even got Wilbert's father Milton to say under oath that while he was bewitched, he felt like he was being boiled alive.
The press caught on and painted Wilbert as the dupe, an overly trusting kid who wanted to help his parents through a rough time.Gross obviously knew what he was doing.
In all three trials, he was the only defense lawyer who proved that nobody knew exactly what had killed Nelson.The doctor who performed the post-mortem couldn't say whether Nelson died from blunt force trauma, the fire, or something else.
He did seem certain that the small piece of wood Wilbert had hit Nelson with wouldn't have likely caused his death.
You could say hiring Harvey Gross was money well spent because unlike John and Curry, Wilbert was convicted of second degree murder and received a 10 to 20 year sentence.
As a result of these high-profile trials and the sensationalized reporting on them, some Hexenmeisters felt like they could no longer practice their beliefs out in the open, and the custom began to die out.
Wilbert was released in 1939, 10 years later.That same year, Curry, then in his mid-20s, got out early, provided that he joined the army.
John Blymeier spent 23 years and 5 months imprisoned at Eastern State Penitentiary, the notorious prison that's said to be one of the most haunted places in the U.S.
The case had exposed some shocking truths, like the brutality of Nelson's murder and a belief in witches that had never really gone away.One thing, however, remains unclear.We don't know what became of Nelson's copy of Long Lost Friend.
What I can say is this, if you flip the book open to a certain page, You'll find an entry that seems particularly useful in Nelson's final moments.A set of instructions detailing how to extinguish fire without water.
And so, when the teens sneak up to Hex Hollow on Halloween night to peer into the windows and see the scene of Nelson's murder, maybe that's not the only part of the legend that's true.
Maybe folk magic really did happen in that house that night, preserving Hex Hollow as a reminder of Nelson Rehmeier, the witch who would not burn. Thanks for tuning into Serial Killers, a Spotify podcast.We'll be back Monday with another episode.
I'm your guest host, Kaylin Moore of the podcast, Heart Starts Pounding.Check out my show for more tales of the supernatural, dark history, and true crime.
For more information on the Hex Hollow murder case, we found Witchcraft, a History in 13 Trials by Marian Gibson, as well as the trial testimony reprinted in Trials of Hex by J. Ross McGinnis, extremely helpful to our research. Stay safe out there.
This episode was written and researched by Mickey Taylor and Kaelin Moore, edited by Connor Sampson and Maggie Admeyer, fact-checked by Lori Siegel, and sound designed by Alex Button.
Our head of programming is Julian Boisreau, our head of production is Nick Johnson, and Spencer Howard is our post-production supervisor.Matt Brown is the producer for Heart Starts Pounding.
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