Dust and Echoes

Seventeen-year-old Tyler is three hours into his first solo cattle run across the high desert, alone on a two-lane at one in the morning, when he pulls off at a rest area set half a mile back from the highway. One concrete building. No windows. No lights for fifty miles.

Something knocks on the door.

His grandfather taught him one rule for country this empty: if something calls to you out here, and you know there is no one who coul...

La Llorona, the Weeping Woman, is the most enduring ghost of the American Southwest... a woman in white who drifts along the rivers and the irrigation ditches at night, weeping for the children she drowned, and who will take yours if she mistakes them for her own. But she was never one ghost...she is very misunderstood. 

In this episode of Dust and Echoes, James Cawley digs down through five centuries of real history beneath h...

The Mystery of Everett Ruess and the NEMO 1934 Carving in the Escalante Desert 

Everett Ruess was a twenty year old artist and wanderer who walked alone into the canyon country of southern Utah in November of 1934 and was never seen again. His disappearance has never been solved, and it remains ...

The warmest table on the Kansas frontier was bait. This is the true story of the killers the prairie swallowed whole.

The Bloody Benders ran a small inn and general store on the lonely Osage Trail in 1870s Labette County, Kansas, and for two years, travelers who stopped there for a hot meal were never seen alive again. Behind a hanging canvas curtain, a family of se...

A little before eleven on a hot August night in 1955, two cars came down a Kentucky road too fast and stopped wrong in a police station lot. Eleven people climbed out. Five terrified adults and a huddle of frightened children. For hours, something small and pale and glowing had laid siege to their farmhouse outside the tiny community of Kelly. The family emptied their guns into it again and again. And it would not die.

This is the ...

In 1928 a troubled young man stared at the dollar bill in his palm and watched George Washington's face slowly become the face of the man who had cursed him. That man was the gentlest soul in the county, and naming him was a death sentence.

This is the true story of the Hex Murder. The night three fr...

Three men kept a light on a rock twenty-one miles out in the North Atlantic. One December night in 1900, the sea took all three of them and left no bodies behind. It left only a single coat, still hanging on its hook, and a question that has gone unanswered for more than a hundred years.

This is the true story of the Flannan Isles lighthouse mystery, one of the most haunting unsolved disappearances in maritime history. On the remot...

Some things in the desert are not meant to be found.

In the empty stretch of the Mojave, witnesses have whispered for decades about a towering figure moving through the heat haze — too tall to be a man, too silent to be an animal, and always seen where no one should be standing.

This week on Dust and Echoes, we follow the legend of The Yucca Man: the military sightings, the desert encounters, the impossible footprints, and th...

6,000 DEAD: THE WIND FROM DUGWAY A Dust and Echoes Original — written & performed by James Cawley

In the spring of 1968, the wind carried something invisible across a Utah valley. By the next morning, the snow was full of the dead.

This is the true story of the day a secret Army base on the edge of the Great Basin tested one of the deadliest substances ever made — and the wind did not cooperate. Six thousand animals...

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Open the U.S. topographic map of the Grand Canyon.

Read the names.

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