Ten years ago, over three hundred men, women and children disappeared from a small town in Tennessee, never to be heard from again. In this seven-part podcast, American Public Radio host Lia Haddock asks the question once more, "What happened to the people of Limetown?"
So I’ll admit here that I didn’t immediately twig that this was fictional. I have many excuses for this, such as baby-brain and lack of coffee, but for normal people who've had realistic human levels of sleep it will quickly become obvious that this is a story, told in an investigative reporting style that I find really engaging. Limetown does a great job of making things feel as real as possible, though, with only a few bits of scripting that don't quite ring true to pull you out of the mystery.
The documentary-style narrative follows Lia as she investigates the eponymous deserted town and its (without spoilers, clearly suspicious) research facility, interviewing relatives of the missing inhabitants and consulting with witnesses and experts.
There’s something fundamentally unsettling and lonely about abandoned places that I find completely fascinating*, so this combined with the (I'm assuming) paranormal bent of the story meant that I was hooked in immediately; a great chance to suspend belief for a while and be entertained by an intriguing, well made podcast.
The first episode has left me anxious to resolve the cliff-hanger, so I have high hopes for the rest of the series and I'm really excited for the second episode to be released. Have a look at the Limetown website here to listen along with me!
The internet informs me that if I enjoyed this I'll like The Black Tapes, another documentary-style podcast with a paranormal theme that was funded on Kickstarter earlier this year. I'm off to add it to my subscription list while I wait for more episodes of Limetown - let me know if you have any other suggestions!
*Along the 'abandoned places' theme, and entirely unrelated to podcasts, I recently read through the photobook Dark Pripyat which documents the decaying abandoned city of Pripyat that serviced the ill-fated Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine. Really haunting and worth a look if you get the time - it's available for free here as a PDF. Also @abandoned_pics and @DesertedPlaces are worth a follow on Twitter for more 'urban exploration' pictures along the same lines, or search for #urbex.
