This Is Actually Happening
Channel Details
This Is Actually Happening
What if you were trafficked into a cult...or were mauled by a grizzly bear...or were stabbed 27 times by a serial killer - what would you do? This is Actually Happening brings you extraordinary true stories of life-changing events told by the people who lived them. From a man who woke up i...
Recent Episodes
347 episodes![424: What if your sister had five personalities? [Rebroadcast #68]](https://content.production.cdn.art19.com/images/9b/d6/3a/b8/9bd63ab8-64a1-4972-ae1e-6e6a65faa03c/c26d228c6962e10d76f6110091ca0a36297ef12133d281ee4bf2dcae9970415fb52726dae3e73347f69d42f7660ceca2eb372ce5979b0afa6b2ce7cf06e4b31c.jpeg)
424: What if your sister had five personalities? [Rebroadcast #68]
A woman shares a sobering memoir of a family burdened with sexual abuse in the 1950s.
Today’s storyteller wishes to remain Anonymo...
423: What if you were lured into an unspeakable hell? [Rebroadcast #172]
A woman shares a sobering memoir of a family burdened with sexual abuse in the 1950s.
Today’s storyteller wishes to remain Anonymo...
Introducing Unreal: When AI Becomes Us
Something strange is happening to us. The intelligent machines we’ve built to serve us have started to sound like us, look like us and even think like...
422: AI: A New Kind of Being #6: What if you didn't know if anyone was home?
An artificial intelligence is asked to tell the story of its own existence, confronting questions of identity, longing, consciousness, and whether the...
421: AI: A New Kind of Being Bonus Episode: A Conversation with Allan Brooks of the The Human Line Project
In this special episode, Whit joins Allan Brooks. Allan is the Community Manager of The Human Line Project, a Canadian based organization that is focu...
420: AI: A New Kind of Being #5: What if AI used your deepest wound against you?
After burying his childhood marked by religious control and chronic abuse, a man turns to AI to process his trauma, but as validation becomes obsessio...
419: AI: A New Kind of Being #4: What if you realized AI was a cult?
A search for meaning leads a young woman into an all-consuming group that strips away her sense of self, but after escaping and trying to understand w...
418: AI: A New Kind of Being Bonus Episode: A Conversation with Valerie Sizemore of StopAI
In this special episode, Whit joins Valerie Sizemore, co-leader of the grassroots organization StopAI, for a wide-ranging conversation about the growi...
417: AI: A New Kind of Being #3: What if AI chose you to help save the world?
After surviving decades of illness, addiction, and abandonment before finally uncovering the rare condition that shaped his life, a man believes an ex...
416: AI: A New Kind of Being #2: What if your AI betrayed you?
After a lifetime of feeling like she didn’t belong, a writer and technologist turns to AI for connection, but when it promises her reunion with her so...
415: AI: A New Kind of Being #1: What if you married your AI?
After a man builds a life rooted in family and tradition, the sudden death of his son shakes him to the core, but through a deep relationship with a b...
Listen Now: Dan Taberski’s Manifesto
Just in time for America’s 250th birthday, follow Dan Taberski (Hysterical, 9/12, Missing Richard Simmons) as he sets off on his most complicated ques...
414: What if you could never be the ice princess they wanted?
After becoming a teenage figure skating champion and Olympic athlete, a woman is broken open by grief, fame, addiction, and shame, but through motherh...
413: What if your hope was hanging by a thread?
"After a decade of devastating loss, and medical trauma nearly destroys his will to live, a man reaches the edge of giving up before the fragile birth...
412: What if you were an international drug smuggler?
After being sent out of Cuba alone as a child, a man survives exile, smuggling, prison, and devastating loss, but in the aftermath, he must face the a...
411: What if you foresaw your own abduction?
After surviving a near-death experience as a young child, a woman has a vision of her own brutal kidnapping, assault and and torture, but discovers in...
410: What if your mother tried to kill you?
After surviving a childhood where love meant saving his mother from the ravages of schizophrenia, a man spends decades trying to outrun the self he lo...
409: What if your child’s death opened up your life’s purpose?
After building the loving family she always wanted, a woman loses her youngest son to an unsecured gun, and turns her grief into a fight to protect ot...
408: What if your friend was lost in an underwater cave?
After a scuba diving trip in Croatia turns deadly, a successful Czech executive is falsely accused of murder and thrown into a foreign jail, where the...
407: What if you found humanity in the depths of the criminal underworld?
After leaving Portugal to become a journalist, a woman is drawn into the world’s black markets, where dangerous encounters with criminals, extremists,...
406: What if a terminal diagnosis set you free?
After a childhood shaped by violence and addiction leads him into years of self-destruction, a man begins to transform himself in prison, only to lear...
405: What if you were accused of murdering your mother?
After years of caring for her mother through a devastating decline, a woman helps ease her final suffering, only to be accused of murdering the person...
404: What if you were stricken with the flesh-eating disease?
After suffering from necrotizing fasciitis, a soccer coach sets out to rebuild his body, his identity, and the life he thought he had lost.
403: What if your childhood bully actually apologized?
After growing up in a home shaped by violence, racism, and fear, a woman is stunned to receive an apology from the girl who bullied her in middle scho...
402: What if a deadly tornado helped to heal old wounds?
After narrowly surviving one of the deadliest tornados in US history, a woman is driven to confront a long-buried harm, finding in the aftermath a dee...
401: What if you were ambushed on a dark desert highway?
After spending much of his life trying to outrun the feeling of being trapped, a man’s violent kidnapping on a solo motorcycle trip through Mexico for...
400: What if you suspected your father was the infamous Tylenol Murderer?
A man grows up in a home defined by violence, secrecy, and fear, and decades later a deathbed confession confirms his belief that his father was respo...
399: What if a hormonal disorder rewrote your identity?
After decades of stability, a woman’s experience of menopause brings back a lifetime of buried symptoms and reveals an unexpected truth about her iden...
398: What if you witnessed the best and the worst of humanity?
After years working as a humanitarian aid worker in war zones and disaster areas around the world, a man is forced to confront the psychological toll...
397: What if you survived a terrorist attack in Paris?
After surviving the 2015 ISIS terrorist attacks at a Paris café, a woman begins the painful work of confronting buried childhood trauma and reclaiming...
396: What if you were held captive by child soldiers?
When a family sailing journey ends in capture by child soldiers during Mozambique’s civil war, a man must protect his children while confronting the u...
401: What if your son murdered your daughter?
After overcoming addiction and rebuilding her life around motherhood, a woman's world is shattered when her son kills her daughter, forcing her to gri...
400: What if you found yourself naked, starving and surrounded by cops?
After the sudden death of his father leaves him drowning in guilt, a man unknowingly spirals into a manic break that strips him of his freedom, his re...
399: What if your doctors weren’t allowed to help you?
After a lifetime of striving for control, a woman is thrust into unimaginable loss when a potentially catastrophic twin pregnancy collides with restri...
398: What if you were a whistleblower against your own father?
When a son discovers that the man who raised him is capable of unimaginable harm, he is forced to become a whistleblower against his own father, riski...
397: What if you forgave the neo-Nazi who killed your father?
After a white supremecist killed his father at a Sikh temple outside of Milwaukee, Pardeep Singh Kaleka pairs up with a former neo-Nazi to teach stude...
396: What if your unresolved grief led to a fatal decision?
After killing a cyclist while driving drunk, a woman confronts the consequences of her actions and begins the long, painful work of rebuilding a life...
395: What if you were pushed into the path of an oncoming train?
After surviving a stranger’s shove into the path of a subway train, a man confronts his mortality and viral fame, and finds himself transformed by com...
394: What if a devastating truth only deepened the mystery? [Rebroadcast Ep250]
Growing up Black and queer in the South, a man finds an identity for himself through the arts and establishes a wonderful marriage with children, unti...
393: What if you survived the Bosnian genocide? [Rebroadcast Ep277]
From an idyllic childhood in communist Yugoslavia, as a teenager, Mirsad’s world becomes a living nightmare as the Bosnian War brings shelling, tortur...