Supposedly

Supposedly runs on a trade between cohosts Rue and Jessi: each one shows up with a story, and the other gets to hear it, react to it and pick at it. The stories come from paranormal lore, folklore and true crime, three neighbouring areas that often overlap. Take Thomas Edison. One story follows his attempts to build a spirit phone. Then comes the claim that his ghost gave the plans to researchers at a seance in 1941, and that the device they built worked no better than the ones he made while alive. The hosts decide the whole affair is really Edison's grudge against Nikola Tesla, part two. Another story pairs the wendigo legend with the case of Swift Runner, who murdered and ate his family, and brings up the term wendigo psychosis along the way. The questions come as the story goes. The listening host asks whether a possessed man would still deserve to be tried, and the storyteller already has the answer ready. A survival story at sea gets the same close treatment, beat by beat, as a group loses its life raft in a storm and ends up clinging to a rubber Zodiac. When one woman goes back for another who is tangled in the rigging, the hosts stop to cheer her on. Folklore turns up too, such as the tale of Iktomi weaving a web inside a hoop, set against the Ojibwe dream catcher. None of it is told from a distance. Pop culture keeps cutting in, from a Scooby-Doo impression in a cold open to a Ghostbusters firehouse fantasy that drifts into Princess Diaries. Episodes open with catch-up, like a broken sink or a birthday package, before anyone gets to the creepy part. The hosts cheerfully admit their rough edges and joke that they should probably come up with a better intro. At least once, the format changes. In one episode the story swap gives way to a conversation with Denise Sia of Mystic Moms Paranormal, a medium and paranormal investigator who is also a certified Reiki master. She talks about growing up in a haunted farmhouse and about picking up past-life energy during energy work. Episode titles come in mismatched pairs joined by an ampersand, such as Grandaddy's Spirit Box & A Barbecue Sauce Baby, Spaghetti-O Furbies & Princess Diaries Pokemon and Alien Cellulite & A Great Time to be a Ghost. Most closings invite listeners to send in their own strange experiences, and one asks specifically for weird conception stories. What a listener gets is less a case file than two people trading odd tales and laughing at the parts that deserve it.