MrBallen’s Medical Mysteries - Ep. 26 | The Birds

Episode Date: April 2, 2024

In the summer of 1999, a mysterious outbreak rages through New York City, paralyzing and even killing its victims. Doctors scramble for a solution, not realizing the answer is lying at their feet.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey Prime members, you can binge episodes 49 to 56 right now and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the app today. In late July of 1999, a 35-year-old woman stepped out of her apartment building in Manhattan, New York, just as the sun was coming up. It had been an especially hot summer, so she'd been going for runs as early as possible to try to beat the heat. She strapped her walkman to her waistband and settled headphones over her ears as she jogged down the sidewalk toward the park. But when she turned the corner, she came to a sudden stop. Just in front of her in the middle

of the sidewalk lay something big and black. The woman peered at the motionless object and saw that it was covered with these blue and black feathers. She inched closer and realized it was a huge dead crow. Then she glanced at the sidewalk ahead of her and she gasped. Dead crows were all over the sidewalk. She counted six or seven scattered all down the street. The woman looked around her, trying to find some kind of explanation for what she was seeing,

but as she did, another crow right above her suddenly stopped flying and fell to the ground with a thud. Clearly, something in this park was killing these birds, but the woman had no idea what it was. I'm Marcia Clark, host of Informance Lawyer X. Join me as we tell the shocking true story of a lawyer who wasn't just representing some of Australia's most dangerous gangland criminals. She was informing on them to the police. Informance Lawyer X is available exclusively on Wondery Plus.

Join Wondery Plus for access to this and more Exhibit C true crime podcasts. Kill List is a true story of how I ended up in a race against time to warn those whose lives were in danger. Follow Kill List wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Kill List and more Exhibit C true crime shows like Morbid early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. From Ballin Studios and Wondery, I'm Mr. Ballin, and this is Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries, where every week we'll explore a new baffling mystery originating from the one place we all can't escape, our own bodies. If you like today's story, please bring the follow button on their

first ever ski trip and tell them you'll start them out really easy. But as soon as you get to the mountain, immediately bring them up to a double black diamond slope, wave and ride away. This episode is called The Birds. 60-year-old Douglas Wise knelt down inside of his garden, pulling weeds out of the small vegetable patch behind his townhouse in Queens, New York. It was August 1999, and just like every other day that summer, it was hot and muggy. Doug's shirt stuck to his back as he worked. After he finished pulling up all the weeds, he sprayed the soil with some weed killer. He paused for a moment to admire the fat tomatoes ripening on the vines he'd planted that spring.

He intended to use every one of them in homemade marinara sauce. When his garden was looking neat and trim, Doug gathered the weeds into a garbage bag and then took them to the compost bin inside of his garage. Doug tried not to gag as he opened the lid. On hot days like this, the bin could smell absolutely disgusting. He dumped the weeds onto the decaying pile of eggshells and table scraps. Then, to help the composting process along, he took a bucket of rainwater he'd collected the week before and poured a little into the bin. He smiled to himself, knowing how his wife Carmen quietly hated that he collected rainwater in large buckets, but it had actually come in handy

earlier in the summer when they'd gone more than a month without rain. Doug had enough water for composting and a little extra for his garden, all while being able to conserve tap water. Doug closed the bin and then grabbed a beer from the garage refrigerator and sat in a folding chair on the porch near the sidewalk. After a few hours in his garden, Doug liked to have a drink and people watch. It was his idea of a perfect Sunday afternoon. When Doug finished the last of his beer, he tossed the can into a recycling bin and headed inside for a shower. He was careful not to touch anything on his way to the bathroom.

Carmen had just cleaned the house from top to bottom, and she'd kill him if she saw dirt smudges on anything. After Doug rinsed off and had some dinner, he joined his wife in the living room to watch some TV. But as he sat there, he started to feel a headache come on, and so he began rubbing his temples, and he wondered if maybe staring at the screen and straining his eyes was causing this headache. So he asked his wife to turn off the TV. But even after she did, over the next few minutes, his headache only got worse. Doug finally went to the kitchen and took some aspirin. And while that did help his head feel a bit better, his stomach now started to feel queasy. And so Doug told his wife that he just

didn't feel right and so he was going to go to bed early. He wasn't sure if maybe he ate something bad or if he was actually getting sick like with the flu. Carmen agreed that he should just go to bed because after all he'd spent the whole day in the yard under the beating sun. Doug kissed his wife goodnight and headed upstairs hoping to feel better in the morning. But the next morning when his alarm went off at 7 a.m., he was groggy and still had a headache, and his stomach still churned. Next to him, his wife had sat up, and she turned to him and said, you know, you better get up if you don't want to be late for work. But Doug asked her to grab the phone for him because he felt absolutely terrible and he needed to call in sick. Three days later, Carmen ladled some chicken noodle soup into a bowl,

then placed it on a tray alongside a glass of ginger ale and some saltine crackers. Carefully, she carried it all up the stairs to the bedroom. Doug was in the bedroom, in bed, propped up on pillows. After three days of feeling totally sick, he'd lost a lot of fluids and looked very pale. As she set the tray onto the bedside table, she told her husband that she'd also bring him up a Gatorade. Carmen frowned as Doug nodded feebly. Her husband had been sick only a handful of times over the years, and when he was, it was rarely for more than 24 hours, and he had never been this weak and pale. Whatever bug her

husband had caught, it had knocked him flat out. Carmen left the bedroom and headed downstairs to get the Gatorade from the fridge, and then when she had it, she went back up the stairs, and when she went back into the bedroom, she was surprised to see that Doug was not eating his soup. She asked if he was hungry, and Doug said that he was, but he said his hands were not steady enough to hold the bowl. Then he asked for Carmen's help walking to the bathroom. He said he was just too weak to get up on his own. Now Carmen was truly concerned. As she helped her husband to his feet and led him to the bathroom, she did her best to

conceal her worry. Once Doug came out of the bathroom and was tucked back into his bed, Carmen asked him if he'd like her to feed him some soup. But Doug didn't respond. Instead, he just kind of stared out the window like he didn't even hear her. For several moments, Carmen spoke Doug's name with increasing urgency, but he just continued his glassy stare, saying nothing. Carmen was now terrified. She thought maybe Doug was having a stroke.

So she grabbed the phone and called 911. It took a few minutes for an ambulance to arrive. While they waited, Carmen sat on the edge of the bed as Doug seemed to slip in and out of a trance, at times barely registering what was happening around him. By the time the paramedics arrived and moved Doug onto a stretcher, he was barely conscious. Carmen followed the paramedics downstairs and then out onto a stretcher, he was barely conscious. Carmen followed the paramedics downstairs and then out to the ambulance waiting in the driveway. She prayed silently as two EMTs hoisted up Doug's stretcher and secured it in the back of the ambulance. Then one of the

men turned around and offered Carmen a hand, helping her into the back of the ambulance as well. Carmen took a seat on the bench, keeping one hand on her husband. As they sped towards the hospital, for the first time in her life, Carmen worried about losing her husband. Once the ambulance arrived at Flushing Hospital, Doug was rushed into the emergency room while a nurse brought Carmen to the waiting area. After about a half hour, a doctor wearing scrubs and a lab coat approached Carmen and brought her to Doug waiting area. After about a half hour, a doctor wearing scrubs and a lab coat approached Carmen and brought her to Doug's room. Doug was lying in bed, still looking a bit out of it, with an IV hooked up to his arm. Carmen rushed over to him and kissed his forehead.

The doctor told Carmen that he was fairly positive Doug had pneumonia and if everything went well, he'd be back to normal in just a few days. Carmen squeezed Doug's shoulder, relieved to hear that he'd be okay. Later that same afternoon, the infectious disease specialist at Flushing Hospital, Dr. Debbie Asness, was pouring herself a cup of coffee in the staff break room when her pager beeped. She checked the message and saw there was an emergency downstairs and she was needed right away. Dr. Asness raised her eyebrows. It was unusual for the infectious disease specialist to be paged to the emergency room. If she was being called, it had to be a very unusual case that required outside-of-the-box thinking. And Dr. Asness loved a challenge. Throughout her nearly 20 years as a

doctor, she'd always been drawn to puzzling cases. She'd spent a lot of her career researching HIV, and she'd witnessed firsthand how bad things could get when doctors did not understand how a disease worked. So, without a second thought, she set her coffee down, headed out of the break room, and ran to the elevator. The moment the elevator doors opened back up on the ER floor, she could hear a man's voice carrying down the hallway. He was yelling about some strange woman standing near his bed. As Dr. Asness approached, the ER doctor who had paged her popped his head out of the man's room and waved her in. The patient who was yelling was Doug. For the first few hours he'd spent in the ER, he'd mostly just slept, but he'd woken up

in a sudden panic and now he was yelling incoherently at the people all around him. At the same time, Carmen, his wife, was standing by his side, trying to remind him who she was. As Dr. Asness watched this, she immediately noticed something strange. Despite being agitated, Doug's arms and legs remained still and limp on the hospital bed. The ER doctor explained to Dr. Asness that Doug was being treated for pneumonia, but the medical team was starting to think that that was not the right diagnosis. Ten minutes ago, Doug woke up confused and agitated and didn't recognize his wife. He started flailing his arms and the nurse ran in to restrain him,

but then his arms and legs just went limp, and he'd not been able to move them since. Now Dr. Asness understood why she had been called. Pneumonia does not make people paralyzed. Doug's symptoms were far more likely to have been caused by an infectious disease, and that was Dr. Asness's area of expertise. And Dr. Asness was very thankful the ER staff paged her so quickly because she now suspected that Doug's confusion was likely being caused by swelling in his brain, which is very, very dangerous. Just then, Doug suddenly went silent. Dr. Asness bent over the bed and realized he was gasping for air.

Dr. Asness said that Doug needed to be moved to the intensive care unit in case his breathing got even worse. The ER doctor agreed and told the nurse to get Doug ready to move. Within minutes, the nurse and the ER doctor each grabbed a side of Doug's hospital bed and wheeled it out of the room. As she followed Doug, Dr. Asness turned to Carmen and asked her to stay behind until they stabilized her husband. Then, as Doug was wheeled down the hallway, Dr. Asness grabbed onto his bed to help steer him to the elevator. She was already thinking about which tests Doug would need. A few hours later, Dr. Asness stood in her office reviewing Doug's charts.

She had ordered a test of Doug's spinal fluid because to her, something was clearly wrong with his nervous system. But she was puzzled by the results she was looking at. The test found clear evidence of a brain infection called viral encephalitis, but Dr. Asness was not sure that was correct. Although many of Doug's symptoms were consistent with viral encephalitis, it wouldn't explain his sudden muscle weakness. And Doug's breathing problems were more severe than the doctor normally saw in a case of viral encephalitis. Before Dr. Asness could think any further, her pager sounded, and when she looked at it, she saw she was needed again in the emergency room. So Dr. Asness ran back to the elevator,

she took it down to the main floor of the hospital, and then she began running down the hallway towards the ER. But when she was only about halfway down the hallway, a colleague came out of the ER and ran right up to her and began telling her about the emergency that she was being called to. A man named Harold Marsh had been rushed in from his home in Queens, which was not far from Doug's home, after suffering a massive heart attack. But it wasn't the heart attack they wanted to talk to her about. They were afraid the heart attack was only part of this man's problems. The colleague from the ER explained to Dr. Asness that like the first patient, Doug Wise, Harold, the second patient here, was older but active

and healthy. His family reported that he had suddenly developed muscle weakness, flu symptoms, and worst of all, a staggeringly high 105-degree fever. Dr. Asness felt a knot growing in her chest. Fevers that high were practically unheard of in heart attack patients. Dr. Asness thanked her colleague and then just ordered Harold to be moved immediately to the ICU. Her mind was racing as she began to connect the dots. Two men living only blocks apart had both come down with the same mysterious symptoms in less than a week. This could be the beginning of an outbreak.

For the moment, Harold was stable, so Dr. Asness hurried back to her office to have some time to think. But as soon as she arrived on the fourth floor where her office was, she saw a nurse sprinting into Doug Wise's room. So Dr. Asness ran down the hallway and went into Doug's room as well, just in time to see a colleague shove a breathing tube down Doug's throat and hook him up to a ventilator. The colleague, who was an ICU doctor, then explained to Dr. Asness that Doug's muscle weakness was now so severe that his lungs had basically stopped working. Dr. Asness was thankful her colleague had acted so quickly, but she was afraid this was only the first case of something much bigger. And if others out in the streets were contracting this virus, the consequences

could be catastrophic. Dr. Asness turned on her heel and rushed toward her office. She needed to alert the New York Health Department right away. For more than two centuries, the White House has been the stage for some of the most dramatic scenes in American history. Inspired by the hit podcast American History Tellers, Wondery and William Morrow present the new book, The Hidden History of the White House. Each chapter will bring you inside the fierce power struggles, the world-altering decisions, and shocking scandals that have shaped our nation. You'll be there when the very foundations of the White House are laid in 1792, and you'll watch as the British burn it down in

1814. Then you'll hear the intimate conversations between FDR and Winston Churchill as they make plans to defeat Nazi forces in 1941. And you'll be in the Situation Room when President Barack Obama approves the raid to bring down the most infamous terrorist in American history. Order The Hidden History of the White House now in hardcover or digital edition, wherever you get your books. From the award-winning masters of audio horror. I see a face right up against the window. Bleach white, no hair, black eyes, a round hole for a mouth. It's flat, Taylor. It's completely flat. I don't know what that is. I don't know what kind of a head is flat. Comes the return of Dark Sanctum.

Look. What is that coming under the door? It's blood. Seven original chilling tales inspired by the Twilight Zone and Tales from the Crypt. Get back in your car. Lizzie, it's okay. I'm here now. Josh, get in your car! the crypt. Starring Bethany Joy Lenz, Clive Standen, and Michael O'Neill.

Welcome to The Dark Sanctum. Listen to Dark Sanctum season two exclusively on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Five days later, on August 27th, a medical investigator at the New York Department of Health hung up the phone in her office, wishing she'd never answered it in the first place. Her name was Annie Fine, and after a long week of work, she was ready to go home. She was knee-deep in planning her wedding, and she and her fiancé had wanted to knock out as many to-do items as possible over the weekend, but instead, it looked like she would spend her weekend at Flushing Hospital. A doctor there had called in a potential outbreak on Monday, and after several days of discussions and three more patients in the hospital with identical symptoms, her boss had finally decided it was worth investigating.

Dr. Fine reminded herself that, in all fairness, she was the on-call epidemiologist that weekend. That meant she would be responsible for any emergency that came up. But in addition, her boss and good friend, Dr. Marcy Layton, had asked her personally to help out. And she was always game to help Dr. Marcy Layton, had asked her personally to help out, and she was always game to help Dr. Layton. So, on Saturday morning, Dr. Fine woke up a minute before her alarm clock began screeching, she managed to turn it off before it had the chance to wake her fiancé, and then she quietly

got out of bed. Half an hour later, she headed down the stairs of her apartment building and saw Dr. Layton's car parked outside. She smiled as she jumped into the passenger seat, and Dr. Layton laughed and apologized for interrupting her weekend plans. Then Dr. Layton handed Dr. Fine a cup of to-go coffee, and they peeled off toward Flushing Hospital. After a short drive, Dr. Fine and Dr. Layton parked near the hospital and climbed out of the car.

As soon as Dr. Layton parked near the hospital and climbed out of the car. As soon as Dr. Layton had stepped onto the curb, she made a disgusted noise, and Dr. Fine turned to look at what she was disgusted at, and she saw there was a dead crow lying in the gutter right near Dr. Layton's feet. Both doctors had been seeing dead crows all over New York that entire summer, so they both just walked around the dead bird and the two women headed for the hospital. Right outside the ICU, the two doctors were greeted by a tall, thin man wearing a lab coat. He told Dr. Fine that he was the chief resident, which meant he was a doctor in training, standing in for Dr. Asness, who was out of town on a family emergency. He explained that in the five days since Dr. Asness first called the Department of

Health about her first two patients, three more people had been admitted to Flushing Hospital with symptoms of viral encephalitis. All five were older people who were previously healthy and active. Most worrisome, all five also had other symptoms not normally caused by viral encephalitis, including fever, stomach pain, confusion, muscle weakness, and severe difficulty breathing. The chief resident added that all five patients had declined really quickly. Four were now on ventilators, and the fifth was not, but they were delirious with pain. Dr. Fine felt unnerved. All of a sudden, wedding planning was the last thing on her mind. There were usually only about 10 viral encephalitis cases every year in all of New York City.

But now, one small neighborhood in New York City had five cases in less than a week, and so far, nobody had figured out why. Dr. Fine asked the resident to go collect blood samples from each of these patients and submit them for additional testing. In the meantime, she and Dr. Layton would interview the patient's families and anyone else who was with these people in the week leading up to their hospitalization. The resident nodded and then led Dr. Fine and Dr. Layton to an empty conference room where they could call people and interview them. Dr. Layton would ask the questions and Dr. Fine would take notes. By that afternoon, Dr. Fine's writing hand was totally cramped. She spent hours taking notes as she and Dr. Leighton spoke with the patient's family members. Outside, it was starting to get dark, so Dr. Fine rolled her chair toward the wall and switched on the overhead lights. The

conference room table was littered with textbooks, stacks of medical journals wall and switched on the overhead lights. The conference room table was littered with textbooks, stacks of medical journals, and reports on annual encephalitis cases in New York. Dr. Fine looked over at Dr. Layton and sighed. Despite hours of interviews and poring over the patients' files, they still did not know how these five patients in Flushing Hospital had contracted encephalitis. But they had found that all five patients had two things in common. First, that they all lived within a few square miles from one another in Queens, and second, they all loved to spend time outdoors in the evenings. A few of the patients, like Doug Wise, the first patient, would work in their gardens until

nightfall. Others just liked to watch the sunset from their back decks or take long walks along the East River after dinner. Dr. Fine looked out the window as the street lamps flickered to life, and right as they did, it hit her. People were not the only ones who loved summer evenings. It's also the time when mosquitoes are at their most active. All five of their encephalitis patients were probably swatting away mosquitoes as they gardened or walked or gazed at the sunset in the gathering darkness each night. And Dr. Fine knew something else about mosquitoes. They spread disease. Diseases like encephalitis, a condition that often strikes older people like Doug and Harold more frequently. Dr. Leighton was intrigued by Dr. Fine's

idea, but she was cautious. If mosquitoes really were spreading some new virus to people, they should be able to find mosquitoes infected with the disease. And so until they were able to isolate the virus in mosquitoes, then Dr. Fine's idea was really just a theory. Before the doctors left the hospital that night, Dr. Fine wrote up an alert that Dr. Leighton sent to all the neighboring hospitals, asking them to report any cases of viral encephalitis to the Department of Health. That way, she and Dr. Leighton would know if the virus was spreading. Two days later, on the morning of September 1st, Dr. Fine sat at her desk, twisting her pencil in her hands. She was back in her office feeling frustrated by the lab results she had just read.

That morning, she and Dr. Leighton had sent a small team to Northern Queens, where all these patients had lived, and the job of this team was to canvas that neighborhood and visit the houses of each encephalitis patient and try to find breeding mosquitoes. Well, that team collected several samples of mosquito larvae from standing water around the neighborhood, but none of those mosquitoes were infected with viral encephalitis. Meanwhile, Dr. Fine was still waiting for lab work to come back on the blood samples she'd collected from the five infected patients. While Dr. Fine thought about what she should do next, Dr. Layton knocked on her door. She said she had bad news. One of the encephalitis patients, Harold Marsh, had grown so weak

that the doctors determined he would not recover. Moments ago, the family had decided to take him off life support. Dr. Fine's heart broke for Harold and his family. She was frustrated that she couldn't even tell them for certain what had killed their loved one. It felt like they were back at square one. But at the very least, Dr. Fine knew that the doctors at Flushing Hospital would be able to do an autopsy and take tissue samples they couldn't get while Harold was alive. Dr. Fine hoped that these samples could help them identify the virus and warn the public at large. The following morning, Dr. Fine walked into her office to find her boss, Dr. Layton, waiting for her with news about Harold Marsh's autopsy tissue

samples. Tests indicated that Harold had died of something called St. Louis encephalitis, a very rare strain of the disease that's only spread by mosquitoes. Dr. Layton said that federal health officials had also checked the blood samples from the other four encephalitis patients in Queens, and they found that they too had tested positive for St. Louis encephalitis. All five of the patients had gotten sick from mosquito bites. Dr. Fine frowned. On the one hand, it was nice to know that her theory that mosquitoes could have caused this was in fact what caused this, but this diagnosis didn't really make sense. The patient's symptoms were all consistent with St. Louis encephalitis, but there had never been a reported case of St. Louis encephalitis in New York City until now. In fact, there were only about 30 reported cases

a year in the entire United States, and these were almost exclusively in southern swamplands. Dr. Fine wondered if infected mosquitoes had somehow migrated north, but if they had, there would have been cases of it in other places along the eastern seaboard, and so far, the only cases of it were from this outbreak in Queens. Something just didn't add up. Dr. Fine told Dr. Layton that she was glad they finally knew what was going on, but deep down, she still could not shake the feeling that there was something off about this diagnosis. A few weeks later, Dr. Fine was in her office at the Department of Health when Dr. Leighton knocked on the door. When she came in, she had a very serious expression on her face.

Dr. Leighton explained that she'd just gotten off the phone with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, and Dr. Fine's suspicions were correct. The virus they were investigating was not actually St. Louis encephalitis. It was much worse. A pathologist at the Bronx Zoo, of all places, had figured out the mistake. She'd been trying to understand why all these birds were dying all over the city, and she had discovered that they were actually contracting some form of encephalitis. And then after she learned about contracting some form of encephalitis and then after she learned about the St Louis encephalitis outbreak in the city she began to investigate whether that was what was killing all these birds but tissue samples from the dead birds

showed no sign of St Louis encephalitis instead the birds had a different strain that can easily be confused with the St Louis strain but it's actually much more dangerous and the birds had a different strain that can easily be confused with the St. Louis strain, but it's actually much more dangerous. And the birds were loaded with this different strain. In fact, the birds got this strain of encephalitis at such a high concentration that a mosquito sucking their blood could pass on the disease to the next creature it bites, including humans. And sure enough, when the CDC retested the blood of

the patients at Flushing Hospital, they found that they too had the same strain of encephalitis as the birds. This strain is known as West Nile Virus. West Nile is something that likely lots of people have heard of, but it's actually even more rare than the St. Louis strain, at least in the United States, because until this point, it had never been seen in the United States. It was only really seen in Africa. The CDC suspected that an infected mosquito from some other part of the world had found its way onto a plane maybe, and then come to the U.S. that way, or maybe a sick bird had gotten onto a boat, and that's how the disease came to the United States. But now that this disease had crossed the ocean and arrived in the U.S., Dr. Fine knew it was here to stay.

By the time the CDC put the puzzle together, as many as 1,900 residents of northern Queens were infected with West Nile virus. 62 people landed in the hospital and 7 people died that summer in 1999 before the mosquitoes disappeared with the fall. And in the years since those initial cases, over 56,000 people have been infected in the United States. 2,776 have died as of 2022. Although the mortality rate of St. Louis encephalitis and West Nile is comparable, West Nile is far more dangerous. Because it can be carried by birds, West Nile has spread to all 50 states, while St. Louis encephalitis remains fairly localized and far less common. Doug Wise, the first patient to come in with West Nile, remained in Flushing Hospital for several weeks before he was healthy enough to transfer to a physical rehabilitation facility where he stayed for the

next month. By spring of 2000, Doug was able to walk with the assistance of a special cane, but his left side never regained its former strength and he continued to suffer episodes of short-term memory loss. But ultimately, Doug knew he was one of the lucky ones from that painful summer of 1999. He could at least still tend to his garden as long as he wore his mosquito repellent. From Ballin Studios and Wondery, this is Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries, hosted by me, Mr. Ballin. A quick note about our stories. We use aliases sometimes because we don't know the names of the real people in the story. And also, in most cases, we can't know exactly what was said, but everything is based on a lot of research. And a reminder, the content in this episode is not intended to be a substitute for professional

medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. This episode was written by Aaron Lan. Our editor is Heather Dundas. Sound design is by Andre Pluss. Coordinating producer is Sophia Martins. Our senior producer is Alex Benidon. Our associate producers and researchers are Sarah Thank you. Metub Zare. Executive producers are myself, Mr. Ballin, and Nick Witters. For Wondery, our head of sound is Marcelino Villapondo. Senior producers are Laura Donna Palavoda and Dave Schilling. Senior managing producer is Ryan Lohr. Our executive producers are Aaron O'Flaherty and Marshall Louis for Wondery. I'm Tristan Redman, and as a journalist, I've never believed in ghosts. But when I discovered that my wife's great-grandmother was murdered in the house next door to where I grew up, I started wondering about the inexplicable things that happened in my childhood bedroom.

When I tried to find out more, I discovered that someone who slept in my room after me, someone I'd never met, was visited by the ghost of a faceless woman. So I started digging into the murder in my wife's family, and I unearthed family secrets nobody could have imagined. Ghost Story won Best Documentary Podcast at the 2024 Ambies and is a Best True Crime nominee at the British Podcast Awards 2024. Ghost Story is now the first ever Apple Podcast Series Essential. Each month, Apple Podcast editors spotlight one series that has captivated listeners with masterful storytelling, creative excellence, and a unique creative voice and vision. To recognize Ghost Story being chosen as the first series essential, Wondery has made it ad-free for a

limited time only on Apple Podcasts. If you haven't listened yet, head over to Apple Podcasts to hear for yourself.