Family lore, carefully brought into the light.
Family Ghosts treats family history as a living pressure, not a closed archive. Across memoir, interviews, reruns, and companion projects, it follows the stories people inherit, suppress, romanticize, and finally decide to face.
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Family Ghosts is built around the idea that a family story is rarely just a story. It can be a romance told too brightly, a name nobody mentions, a song that arrives after a divorce, or a childhood performance that explains more than it should. The show moves slowly enough to let those details matter. It has the intimacy of live storytelling, but it often carries the structure of memoir and reported audio. Recent episodes show a feed in transition, with reruns, bonus presentations, and introductions to projects that share its interest in memory, inheritance, and moral complication. Sam is a steady presence in those transitions, speaking candidly about the emotional weight of the original project and pointing toward adjacent work. The center still holds. Family Ghosts is about what people carry from relatives they knew, relatives they misunderstood, and relatives they never had the chance to question. In one strand, a romantic family legend about escape from fascist Italy opens onto darker questions about Mussolini, separation, and responsibility. In another, a Mississippi family history exposes how silence can be used as protection, erasure, or both. A rerun about Bone Hill turns family formation into a story marked by race, labor, and belonging. The show can also move sideways into art, as with conversations about songwriting or music. Those detours are not random. They treat creative work as another way people process rupture, longing, and self-invention. The tone is warm without becoming soft. It allows for jokes, embarrassment, grief, and plainspoken discomfort. Its true-crime-adjacent bonus material brings in police misconduct, contested confessions, and wrongful arrest, but even there the interest stays close to human consequence. Family Ghosts suits listeners who want narrative nonfiction with emotional patience. It is less concerned with shocking twists than with the slow recognition that a family myth has been shaping the room all along.
Made for: For listeners drawn to intimate narrative nonfiction, family history, memoir, and emotionally patient true stories. It especially suits people who like mystery without sensationalism and personal essays with real stakes.
What sets it apart: Family Ghosts stands apart by treating family legends as emotional evidence rather than puzzle boxes. Its stories linger on objects, songs, places, and half-told memories until the larger inheritance becomes visible.
Every house is haunted. In each episode of Family Ghosts, we investigate the true story behind a mysterious figure whose legend has followed a family for generations. Grandmothers who were secretly jewel smugglers, uncles who led double lives, siblings who vanished without a trace, and other ghostly characters who cast shadows over our lives in ways that might not be immediately obvious. We are all formed in part by our familial collections of secrets, intrigues, and myths. By engaging with each others’ legends, perhaps we can see each others’ realities more clearly. Hosted by Moth Grand Slam winner Sam Dingman, whos...
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Family Ghosts shows how inherited stories shape identity, and how much changes when the person inside the story controls its telling.
Family Ghosts follows inherited stories to the point where memory, harm and authorship begin competing with one another. Sam Dingman combines narrated framing, memoir and extended conversation, giving people room to challenge the versions of family history that have settled…
This is where you go when a family secret needs more than a neat reveal.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A family love story becomes a searching look at fascism, memory, and the duty to remember honestly.
David turns a family love story into a harder look at inheritance, memory, and political history, revisiting his grandparents' escape from fascist Italy and the more complicated truth beneath the version he grew up with.
A Family Ghosts handoff turns a true-crime preview into a sharp question about power and belief.
This Family Ghosts bonus works as a clean handoff from a workplace milestone to a story about power. The host notes a first day as a reporter and co-host at KJZZ in Phoenix, then turns to Steve Fishman's The Burden.
A funny, self-aware account of how a dramatic teenage instinct turned into a creative identity.
Sam's visit to Breadcrumbs reads as a story about the first clues that point a person toward the life he leads now: a theater program run by children, an early need to be seen, and the odd confidence that comes from going all in.
A farewell-toned conversation about starting over, making music, and staying honest after divorce.
Family Ghosts lands as a quiet goodbye. Sam says another new episode may be a long way off, because the project has grown too heavy on his heart and he does not have the bandwidth to meet these stories with the care they need. That gives the talk its ache.
A rerun that turns a family marriage story into a tense, reflective portrait.
Bone Hill Reprise reads as a rerun that sets a family marriage story against a sharper public moment, and the host makes clear that this choice is central to the episode's impact.
A Family Ghosts bonus episode follows Josh Ritter into the strange inner logic of one song.
Family Ghosts returns to a temporary bonus episode from the uncertain stretch after season one, with former producer Jason DeLeon bringing Sam Dingman into the music of Josh Ritter.
A buried Mississippi family story opens into a quiet reflection on shame, inheritance, and protective silence.
A family secret comes into focus through a newspaper clipping, a cousin's email, and the unsettling fact that the people who could explain it are gone.
A baseball lesson opens into a quietly bruising story about knowledge, grief, and the men who carry it.
Family Ghosts begins with a teenage ritual at Oriole Park at Camden Yards and follows how admiration can turn into a private education. The narrator studies his father calling breaking balls, reading a pitcher's nerves, and expecting a fourth changeup, then tries to build the…
A field notebook in audio form.
True crime with a live-wire conscience.
Comedy tangents with too many witnesses.
East End culture, told close-up.
Fast quests for story-hungry kids.
Disney parks talk with side-quest energy.
The host shares a personal story about investigating baseball radio broadcasts to understand his father's definition of greatness, blending family history with sports documentary.
Pack One Bag, introduced via the Family Ghosts feed, is a documentary podcast by filmmaker David Modigliani about his Italian Jewish grandparents — Nobel Prize-winning economist Franco Modigliani and his wife Serena — who fled fascist Italy on the last passenger ship before World War II broke out.
The host updates listeners on his new job and introduces a preview of 'The Burden,' a true crime podcast investigating NYPD detective Louis Scarcella, accused of wrongful convictions.
Sam stops by again.
Sam returns with bittersweet news: Family Ghosts may go quiet for a while because carrying other people's hard stories has taken more out of him than he has left.
Family Ghosts takes a rare rerun pause.
A temporary episode returns.
March 2021 cracks open a story the family had kept shut.
A father knew the Orioles inside out.
A warm Mazda kicks the memory open.
A godfather call hits harder than expected.
A question sits over the whole story.
In this mixtape episode, host Sam Dingman explores how music serves as a form of time travel, weaving personal anecdotes with songs from guests like Alan, Martha Redbone, and Kyria Traber to uncover family secrets and utopian dreams.
Larry's funeral smoothed out his life.
Craig follows faint family signals.
Craig starts with faith.
All great dramas begin with family.
A carpet is the clue.
Old files start the haunting.
Janelle Kastner comes back through grief.
An old choice gets reopened.
This episode features two stories about maternal relationships: Bradford Jordan recounts how selling his mother's Beanie Babies led to guilt after her murder, revealing her true collection was family photos, while Ophira Eisenberg shares how her mother's lies about health issues and a car accident highlight family dynamics of secrecy and care.
Sam Dingman explores his past as a New York City cab driver, weaving together stories of danger, identity, and family secrets.
Sam introduces and plays the first 15 minutes of The Rumor, a new investigative show about a long-standing Baltimore rumor involving a 1997 Orioles game delay, allegedly faked to cover up a scandal between Cal Ripken Jr.
Sam Dingman introduces two family ghost stories linked by themes of inherited values and racial resilience, framing them through his own discovery that his pacifist identity traces back through his grandfather to two great-great-uncles who went to jail as conscientious objectors in World War II.
This episode explores graphic novelist T.
Sam Dingman explores family secrets through personal stories, including his grandmother's cryptic tale about Mr.
This episode features Mac Montandon's essay 'A Hollywood Ending,' which explores the murder of his brother Asher in Los Angeles in 1992 and its lasting impact on his family.
This episode features Ian Koss discussing his podcast 'Forever is a Long Time,' which explores divorce across generations in his family, including interviews with his parents about their painful split and broader reflections on marriage, legacy, and storytelling.
In the finale of 'The Namesake,' host Sam Dingman and Jessie interview Danny, Aunt Jessie's boyfriend, who shares intimate stories about her life, from childhood to her death in a car accident.
In this episode of Family Ghosts, host Sam Dingman continues the story of Jessie Pasquarelli, who is named after her aunt Jessie who died in a car accident.
This bonus episode of Family Ghosts previews the new podcast The Grand Scheme, Snatching Sinatra, hosted by John Stamos, which delves into the 1963 kidnapping of Frank Sinatra Jr.
Jesse Pasquarelli explores being named after her aunt Jessie, who died in a car accident, uncovering fragmented family memories and a near-accident during a bus trip that echoes her aunt's story.
The second chapter of Jiayang Fan's Family Ghosts story Motherland continues her essay about the intersection of COVID-19, her mother's ALS, and the complexities of Chinese immigrant identity in America.
Jiayang Fan narrates her family's immigration from China to America, exploring her mother's struggles as a physician turned housekeeper and her own experiences with online harassment from Chinese nationalists.
Two live storytelling pieces explore fathers, fear, and the neighborhoods that shaped the speakers.
Host Sam Dingman interviews Andrew Chugg, creator of the fictional episode 'The Faith Exam', to explore the real family secrets and personal experiences that inspired it.
Family Ghosts host Sam Dingman introduces a bonus episode featuring a story from the podcast The Secret Room, hosted by Ben Hamm, in which a woman reveals under an alias that when her brother died she felt relief rather than grief.
Aaron Barker tells the story of moving to England as an 11-year-old evangelical Christian girl when her mother relocated for work, and gradually uncovering that her mother was having an affair with a coworker named Andy.
Sam Dingman explores spiritualism through the lens of the documentary 'No One Dies in Lillydale,' interviewing filmmaker Stephen Cantor and individuals seeking closure from mediums.
This bonus episode from Family Ghosts features an interview with Bruce Maitland, father of missing Brianna Maitland, discussing his grief and the founding of Private Investigations for the Missing.
Family Ghosts host Sam Dingman opens with a personal memory of finding what appeared to be a large bullet as a child during soccer practice, and how his father's quiet, urgent reaction to it planted a seed of mystery that only resolved years later when Dingman learned his Uncle Dick had taken his own life with a hunting rifle.
In this episode of Family Ghosts, host Sam Dingman introduces a story by Kimberly King Parsons about a mother grappling with her ex-husband's absence and her daughter's violent, imaginative storytelling.
This episode explores family dynamics through two personal stories: one about a man grappling with his father's attempt to embody his late mother's pride, and another about a son's lifelong competition with his pool-hustling dad, ultimately finding acceptance.
Sam Dingman hosts an episode of Family Ghosts featuring the podcast Unwell, exploring themes of family, memory, and the supernatural in a Midwestern setting.
In the final part of Kate Crane's story, she continues investigating her father Eddie's 1987 disappearance, uncovering leads about a wall where his body might be hidden and threats from his business partner Augie.
Sam Dingman continues the story of Kate Crane, whose father Eddie disappeared in Baltimore in 1987, following Kate from her breakdown in the D.C.
This episode follows Kate Crane as she recounts her father Eddie's mysterious disappearance in 1987, exploring her childhood memories, the emotional aftermath, and a journalist's investigation that revealed possible murder and business conflicts.
Sam introduces Fisher Family Ghosts, a spinoff podcast discussing the HBO series Six Feet Under with his partner Adrian, who has never seen the show.
Sam Dingman hosts a panel with Eleanor Hyde and TK Dutez exploring subjectivity in storytelling, discussing how documentary illusions, historical fiction, and narrative immersion challenge traditional truths.
Family Ghosts: Two Goofs and a Con follows Sam Dingman and Ben from a 2000 college radio sketch show to New York comedy, including Audience of Two and classes at Upright Citizens Brigade.