Pepper spray, podcasts and panic attacks

How true crime made me fear for my life

An illustration of a woman sitting on a bed with eyes surrounding her. Consuming large amounts of true crime podcasts can lead to heightened anxiety, especially in women. // Illustration by Julia Vreeman

Written by Nina Walsh

Content warning: this story mentions sexual assault and death in relation to true crime podcasts.

My ears are turned toward my front door like a dog — perked up and listening for the slightest of sounds. I calm my own breathing to better hear what’s on the other side of the door.

I swear I hear a scuffle against it.

It’s 2 a.m. and I’m in my bed, in my own apartment, living alone for the first time in my 21 years of life. My door doesn’t have a peephole, so I climb onto my kitchen sink and attempt to peer out the small window above it that sits directly adjacent to my front door. I try to see if anyone’s there.

Because I swore I heard something.

This routine of hearing sounds, not sleeping and climbing onto my kitchen sink has become an almost nightly occurrence since I moved in a few weeks ago. I even bought a door jam that’s supposed to fit snugly under my doorknob. It claims it can stop an intruder.

When I set it up, the bottom of it easily slips on the slick tile floor beneath my front door with the slightest pressure. It’s not stopping anyone, that’s for sure. I still set it up every night for my own peace of mind — another step in my inane, paranoid routine.

I would scavenge Reddit threads in the middle of the night, searching “how safe is it to live alone as a woman?” and “how to prevent break-ins?”

With every search, I found more women in the exact same position: scared, anxious and looking for reassurance that we’re safer than we feel.

Every time I walked outside my door, I was on guard, pepper spray in hand — certain that the men who lived in the apartment building across from me were watching me, learning I lived alone.

I can look back at this time in my life with a fresh perspective now almost two years later. I still live in the same apartment, still alone. But I’m not afraid anymore.

Not as afraid, at least.

I’m not afraid anymore for a few reasons. I hadn’t been ambushed, kidnapped or had my apartment broken into in the three years I’ve lived here — so I just have plain likelihood on my side. In my mind, if it was going to happen, it probably would have happened by now.

Another reason might be an even bigger contributing factor to my lessened fear: I stopped listening to true crime.

For years prior to living alone, true crime podcasts were my constant companion. Whether it was washing dishes, showering or working out, I was probably listening to a true crime podcast in the background.

Brutal stories of women being murdered, raped, kidnapped and tortured. I didn’t think I was affected by it much while I was listening — it was actually almost a comfort for me, as wrong as it sounds. Listening to the same podcast hosts, each week, felt more like a routine than anything.

I became desensitized to the horrific stories. I would be completing mundane tasks, like driving to work or folding laundry, to the soundtrack of gruesome descriptions of a woman being abducted and her arms being cut off. I likely felt so nonchalant towards the gruesome stories because that’s how a majority of podcasts treated the matter. Cracking jokes while reading the Wikipedia pages of murder victims is a common format for true crime podcasts, like “True Crime and Cocktails” or “My Favorite Murder.”

“True Crime and Cocktails” is precisely what it sounds like — middle-aged white women getting tipsy and telling tales of kidnapping, murder and rape. Not exactly what I would describe as handling sensitive topics in a careful way.

Podcasts like “My Favorite Murder” preach to their listeners to always lock their car doors immediately upon entering, to not walk through empty parking lots while looking down at their phone, to arm themselves with weapons like mace or a taser and to never trust a stranger.

They attempt to sell the narrative that the women they depict in their Wikipedia retellings wouldn’t have been murdered if they had just been a little more careful and a little bit more paranoid. If they had just listened to this podcast, they wouldn’t be dead.

Oftentimes, they inadvertently place blame on the victims in the process.

I thought these podcasts were arming me with information that would help me to not face the same fates as these women, but it was likely just making me more afraid than I needed to be.

By listening to stories of women being attacked and stalked and their homes being broken into on a constant loop, I had internalized that this is a far more common and likely thing to happen than it actually is.

I thought that I needed to look around every corner for a potential attacker and that I needed to peek out my kitchen window every night for fear of someone on the other side of my door, trying to come and get me.

In reality, these random attacks of violence are far less common than true crime leads us to believe. According to the CDC, women are more likely to be murdered by an intimate partner than by a stranger, but this is never what’s sensationalized in the news. More than 90% of sexual assault survivors knew their attacker, according to a study by Glasgow University.

Violent crime has even been on a downward trend for decades, according to data collected by the Pew Research Center.

You would never know this by listening to true crime, though — a genre that thrives on breeding fear in its listeners.

I haven’t actively consumed any form of true crime in almost two years now. I’m still afraid, to an extent. But I’m not more scared than I need to be. I’m less paranoid, I sleep better and I’m more trusting of strangers.

I still lock my car doors as soon as I get inside, though. Old habits die hard.