Appalachian Mysteria

Appalachian Mysteria is investigative true crime that stays close to specific Appalachian places, from Morgantown to Frostburg, Maryland, and Shenandoah National Park. Kendall Perkinson and Sarah James McLaughlin make it, and its value is in the reporting behind each story. The two-part 'Unattended Death' puts the pair across the street from the Morgantown police station on an overcast February day in 2023. From there they retrace the 2017 death of an international WVU student, Arthur Bagenda, who was found face down in ditch water beside Decker's Creek Rail Trail, under the Walnut Street Bridge. The details pile up without explaining anything. A backpack holding a mobile meth lab sits on the ledge above. Camera footage shows him dropping his own insurance card outside the police station. Photos show him leaving his apartment building with a group of people that night. They interview people on location, and one conversation about a dropped phone ends with the blunt verdict that it does not add up. Other stories follow the paper trail. A Season 4 story about a house fire quotes a deputy's account of arriving to find flames. It then asks why a 911 dispatcher had not yet alerted the fire department. The same story ends by noting that the show tried to reach a special agent through Virginia State Police, but nobody answered and the voicemail box was full. The show is open about dead ends like that. A planned episode on the disappearance of Fame Cooper was set aside after a law enforcement contact stopped responding and a call for interviewees on Facebook turned up no one. The format has changed along the way. The first three seasons each told one story, or a group of linked stories, across eight to ten episodes: 'Mared & Karen: The WVU Coed Murders', 'Big Savage: The Death Of Alexander Stevens' and 'Outlandish'. The fourth season, 'Listener Suggestions', collects mysteries sent in by the audience and gives each one one to three episodes. 'Outlandish' centered on the killings of Julie Williams and Lolly Winans in Shenandoah National Park. An update episode went back to it after the FBI announced that retested crime scene DNA had led to a suspect. The seasons also connect. 'Unfinished Business' goes back to Frostburg, the college town on Big Savage Mountain that also figured in Season 2. It traces how students there have kept the memory of a woman named Joan alive for decades, and it brings in Tiffany, who pitched Maryland State Police on letting handpicked students work cold cases with full access to police files. Even the holiday episode is dark. 'Away in a Hangar: A Christmas Special' tells of a man who lost heavily when the gold market fell in 1981, blamed his brokers and held one of them in what police called a makeshift torture chamber into the new year of 1984. It ends with a dry warning never to trust Santa. 'Unattended Death' is the clearest example of the show's method and a good place to start.