Episode 1 – Gwen Shamblin Lara

CW: this episode contains discussion around diets and diet culture, as well as child abuse and infant death. Listener discretion is advised. 

What happens when faith, control, and diet culture collide? In our first episode, we dive into the rise of Gwen Shamblin Lara, founder of the Weigh Down Diet and Remnant Fellowship Church. From her early teachings on weight loss as a path to holiness, to the cult-like control she wielded over her followers, we trace how spiritual hunger was manipulated into obsession and how it all unraveled.

Who…or what…was the Fool Killer? Depending on who you ask, he was a 19th-century satirical invention, a supernatural enforcer born from Melungeon folklore, or a wandering vigilante who struck down the corrupt and the cruel.

In this episode, we dive into the tangled origins of the Fool Killer: from gripping newspaper columns to the whispered Melungeon tales of a devil’s son turned protector. Was he a symbol of rage against oppression, an imagined guardian of isolated mountain communities, or simply a metaphor that took on a life of its own deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains?

We’ll explore how Appalachian spirituality, a fusion of Christianity, folk magic, and Indigenous belief, shaped this figure into something greater than satire. Just as some cultures breathe life into authoritarian gods and others protective tricksters, the Fool Killer emerges as Appalachia’s own divine judge: punishing outsiders, defending the marginalized, and even policing morality within his own people.

Part folklore, part social critique, and part true-crime adjacent myth, the Fool Killer forces us to ask: was he a monster, a metaphor, or a cultural god born of survival on the margins?