Episodes

The Man Who Carried His Own Key You hike eleven miles on snowshoes to a locked Forest Service cabin. You have the only key. And the stove is warm. For thirteen years in the 1930s and ’40s, someone lived off the locked backcountry cabins of north-central Idaho, letting himself in and out without ever breaking a thing. The men who worked that country had a nickname for him before they ever had a face. They called him the Ridgerunner. In this episode of Shadows in the Pines, Dan and Bekah head ...

Bryan Kohberger pleaded guilty to the murders of Madison Mogen, Kaylee Goncalves, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin. But that plea ended the case before a jury ever heard the evidence, before experts were cross-examined, and before some of the biggest unanswered questions surrounding 1122 King Road were tested in open court. Now, with Kohberger attempting to withdraw his guilty plea, those questions matter again. In this episode of Shadows in the Pines, Dan takes another look at the evidence and ...

The House Made of the Hill: The Wilbur-Hahn House At the end of a dead-end road on Spokane’s South Hill sits a century-old house built directly into the basalt beneath it. It’s beautiful, historically significant, privately owned—and by local reputation, one of the most haunted houses in Spokane. But the documented history of the Wilbur-Hahn House is stranger than most of the legends. Built in 1916 as an elaborate “love cottage,” the house passed from mining wealth and a marriage that lasted ...

Finding Kit: Missing in Omak In the summer of 2021, sixteen-year-old Kit Mora left Yakima for what was supposed to be a temporary stay with their biological mother in Omak, Washington. By November, their closest friends and family had stopped hearing from them. Kit stopped posting online. They stopped attending school. And yet months would pass before anyone realized this teenager had seemingly disappeared. In this episode of Shadows in the Pines, we follow Kit’s story from the people who knew...

The Bridge of the Gods There was a bridge across the Columbia River. Not the steel one at Cascade Locks with the toll booth and the hikers walking single file — the first one. Stone and dirt and the broken bones of a mountain, wide enough to walk across, with the river running underneath it in the dark. For a long time, the people who told you about it were not believed. This is the story of a tired man in a canoe who wrote down the answer in 1805 and didn’t know it. A young novelist who hear...

The day after Thanksgiving in 1989, 18-year-old Mandy Stavik left her family’s home in the small community of Acme, Washington, for an afternoon run along the roads she’d known her entire life. She never came home. What followed was one of the Pacific Northwest’s most haunting unsolved murders. Despite an extensive investigation, a massive search effort, and crucial biological evidence, detectives spent nearly three decades without knowing who had taken Mandy’s life. Then an ordinary conversa...

The Murder of Mandy Stavik | A Cold Case Solved Nearly 30 Years Later Description: The day after Thanksgiving in 1989, 18-year-old Mandy Stavik left her family’s home in the small community of Acme, Washington, for an afternoon run along the roads she’d known her entire life. She never came home. What followed was one of the Pacific Northwest’s most haunting unsolved murders. Despite an extensive investigation, a massive search effort, and crucial biological evidence, detectives spent nearly...

Don't Whistle Back: The Stick Indians of the Pacific Northwest There's a rule some people in this part of the country still follow: don't whistle at night. No explanation offered. Just — don't. Because something will hear you. This episode is about what's on the other end of that whistle. The Salish called them tsiatko. The Nisqually called them Seatco. In English they became the Stick Indians, or the Night People — though the older tradition holds that naming them at all is a way of drawing t...

The Lewis-Clark Valley murders remain one of the Pacific Northwest’s most haunting unsolved mysteries. Between 1979 and 1982, five people either disappeared or were murdered across southeastern Washington and north-central Idaho, leaving investigators to wonder whether they were hunting a single offender who operated undetected for years. In the conclusion of our series, we follow the investigation as detectives begin laying decades of evidence side by side, transforming what were once separate...

Deep in the cedar and spruce forests of the Oregon coast, where the fog comes in sideways and you can lose fifty feet of visibility in the time it takes to blink, the men who logged those slopes in the 1880s and 1890s had a story. It was called the Gumberoo. Coal-black, barrel-bodied, and completely indestructible — bullets bounced off its glossy hide, axes glanced away, even a charging elk got knocked backward by its own momentum. It would eat anything, couldn't be hurt by anything, and th...

The Lewis-Clark Valley was already living with unanswered questions after the disappearance of Christina White and the murder of Kristin David. Then, in the span of just a few months, the investigation took a devastating turn. In Part Two of our deep dive into the Lewis-Clark Valley murders, we examine the disappearance of two-year-old Ricky Barnett, the vanishing of Kristina “Brandy” Miller and Kristina Nelson after a short walk to a neighborhood grocery store, and the mysterious disappearance...

In April 1979, twelve-year-old Christina White left a friend’s house in Asotin, Washington, and never made it home. Two years later, University of Idaho student Kristin David disappeared while riding her bicycle between Moscow and Lewiston. Her murder would send shockwaves through the Lewis-Clark Valley and leave investigators asking whether these two cases were connected—or simply heartbreaking coincidences. In Part One of our deep dive into the Lewis-Clark Valley murders, we follow the inves...

The Selkirk Mountains are among the oldest and most remote wilderness areas in the Pacific Northwest—and for generations, they’ve been home to stories of something that walks upright through the trees. In this episode of Mini Pines, we explore documented Bigfoot encounters, Indigenous traditions, eyewitness accounts, mysterious tracks, and why the Selkirks have quietly become one of North America’s most active Sasquatch regions. From a hunter’s unforgettable encounter near Sasquatch Lake to mod...

The Witches of Rathdrum | Mini Pines For decades, people across North Idaho whispered about a lonely stretch of Highway 41 where hooded figures formed human chains across the road, bonfires flickered deep in the trees, and anyone brave enough to drive through after dark risked encountering something they couldn’t explain. But where did those stories come from? In this episode of Mini Pines, we separate folklore from fact as we trace the origins of the infamous Witches of Rathdrum legend. What...

The investigation into the murders of Jennifer Bastian and Michella Welch had already spanned decades. Detectives had followed leads, families had endured years of unanswered questions, and an entire community had learned to live with the possibility that the truth might never be known. Then everything changed. In Part Two of Bound by Assumption, Dan and Bekah follow the investigation through the breakthroughs that finally transformed these cold cases. From groundbreaking DNA analysis and gene...

The Maury Island Incident It’s the summer solstice, 1947. A man named Harold Dahl is out on a salvage boat in Puget Sound when six enormous, doughnut-shaped objects appear in the sky above him. One of them falters. Debris rains down — burning the hull, injuring his teenage son, killing the family dog. And the morning after Dahl tells his story, a stranger in a dark suit shows up at his door, knows exactly what happened, and tells him to stay quiet. That stranger is, by most accounts, the v...

For decades, the murders of Jennifer Bastian and Michella Welch haunted Tacoma, Washington. Two young girls. Two bicycle rides. Two families left searching for answers. And for more than thirty years, investigators believed they were looking at a single mystery. In Part One of Bound by Assumption, Dan and Bekah examine the disappearances that terrified an entire community, the massive search efforts that followed, the heartbreaking discoveries that changed countless lives, and the decades-long ...

CrimeCon 2026 was an experience we’ll never forget. This week, Dan and Rebekah take a break from the case files and pull back the curtain on their trip to Las Vegas for CrimeCon 2026. From Nancy Grace’s opening remarks and discussions about the Gabby Petito investigation, to meeting victims’ families still searching for answers, this episode explores the people, stories, and moments that left a lasting impact. We’ll talk about the creators we met, including our favorite booth from Shirley You ...

The Loneliest Road to the Stars — Nevada’s Extraterrestrial Highway What if the most famous alien highway in America has been hiding its biggest secret in plain sight? This week on Mini Pines, we travel Nevada’s mysterious Extraterrestrial Highway—a lonely stretch of desert road forever linked to Area 51, Bob Lazar, UFO sightings, and the legendary Black Mailbox that became a pilgrimage site for believers from around the world. But beneath the stories of flying saucers and government secrets ...

🔎 Part 2 of our Diane Downs series is available now. As detectives continue pulling apart the story from Old Mohawk Road, the investigation begins shifting in a dramatic direction. What started as the search for a mysterious roadside gunman slowly becomes something much darker as timeline problems, forensic evidence, and survivor statements begin pointing investigators toward an unthinkable possibility. In Part 2, Dan and Bekah cover Christie Downs’ recovery and testimony, the mounting case ag...

🚨 This week on Shadows in the Pines, we head to Springfield, Oregon for one of the most disturbing and psychologically unsettling cases in true crime history: the case of Diane Downs. On a dark stretch of Old Mohawk Road in May of 1983, three children were shot inside a family car. Seven-year-old Cheryl Lynn Downs was killed. Eight-year-old Christie and three-year-old Danny barely survived. Their mother claimed a bushy-haired stranger stepped out of the darkness and opened fire. But almost imm...

Just a soft recap of what we’ve learned and final thoughts along with show announcements

🏔️🪣 This week on Mini Pines, we head deep into the high desert of eastern Oregon for one of the strangest lost-treasure legends in American history — The Blue Bucket Mine. 🌵✨ In 1845, a wagon train following the infamous Meek Cutoff became hopelessly lost in the Oregon wilderness. Families starved. People died. And somewhere during the nightmare journey, children playing in a dry creek bed may have unknowingly filled a blue bucket with raw gold nuggets years before the California Gold Rush ever...