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82
October 31, 1997

Haunted

Stories of people who are haunted, not by ghosts or phantoms, but by other people.

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  • Transcript
Henning Mühlinghaus

Prologue

Ira reads an excerpt from James Ellroy's memoir My Dark Places. (4 minutes)

By

James Ellroy
Ira Glass
Act One

Hearing Voices

Ira with Lynnette Nyman, who, as a girl, recorded her parents fighting with a cassette recorder she got for Christmas. (15 minutes)

By

Ira Glass
Act Two

Act Two

Binjamin Wilkomirski and New York writer Blake Eskin try and figure out if they are related.

NOTE: A few years after this interview aired, Binjamin Wilkomirski and his Holocaust memoir Fragments were shown to be fabrications. Blake Eskin chronicled this story in his 2002 book A Life In Pieces: The Making and Unmaking of Binjamin Wilkomirski. (20 minutes)

By

Blake Eskin
Act Three

Ashes

David Sedaris, on his mother's lung cancer. (11 minutes)

By

David Sedaris
Act Four

Ghost Story

An excerpt from Heather Woodbury's epic eight-hour solo show WhatEver: An American Odyssey in Eight Acts. (7 minutes)

By

Heather Woodbury

Related

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Act Two: Where the Rubber Meets the Road

Ira discusses James Comey’s Senate testimony this week, testimony that called the president a liar.
576: Say Yes To Christmas
Dec. 25, 2015

Act Three: The First Noel

Andre, 6, and his 4 year old brother Luc are experiencing Christmas for the very first time.
385: Pro Se
July 10, 2009

Act Three: Swak Down

Jeff Simmermon tells a story from his days as a student teacher, about a time when he decided to forgo all the rules, and administer frontier justice on the fly.

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Aug. 13, 2021

Essential

The pandemic forced jobs to change, but then the workers changed, too.

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