About SPARTANS!
The SPARTANS! podcast now has its own section HERE.
SPARTANS! is a teen ghost story anthology—think “Are You Afraid of the Dark?” meets haunted mixtapes and 90s nostalgia.
Follow @Spartans_Radio for episode updates, audio, pics, behind-the-scenes, 90s nostalgia, and Easter eggs.
The SPARTANS! Series
Welcome to Maplewood-Sparta, where suburban streets are lined with shadows. Some say the 90s are dead and gone. But here, they linger . . .
in velvet chokers and friendship bracelets, in haunted tunnels and November hayrides. They wait in thrift shop windows, in church basements, in a mean girl’s Christmas curse, and in the hush after the cheering fades. So gather close for spooky campfire tales woven together stand-by-strand like a friendship bracelet.
Written by Nina Alvarez and narrated by professional voice actors, each episode is tied to a different haunted 90s wearable: a leather jacket, a friendship bracelet, a choker, a flannel . . . And to a holiday. Homecoming, Halloween, Christmas . . . The kind of objects and moments that carry memory, grief, and magic.
We’ll see you by the fire.
SPARTANS! Season One Episodes
Episode 1: THE JACKET
A story about a leather jacket, a haunted mixtape, and the strange magic of being seen.
Episode 2: THE BRACELET
A story about Halloween 1994, Old World magic, and a friendship bracelet that bound more than anyone ever intended.
Episode 3: THE CORDS
A story about Thanksgiving 1994, a good Catholic boy with a beastly hunger, and a hayride to hell.
🎙️Episode 4: THE CHAIN (Spartans!)
A story of the Winter Solstice 1994, a Chanel double chain belt, and a mean girl’s Krampus curse.
Show Schedule
On the second-to-last Wednesday of every month, we’ll premier a new episode—working out the kinks, building community, and (fingers crossed) raising funds to secure the music rights to someday be able to release it with the commercial music on major podcast platforms. For now, though, you’ll hear the music as it was meant to be—just for our private campfire circle.
Paid subscribers will get early access to the episode on Mondays, two days early.
And all episodes will post without the commercial music to Spotify, Apple, YouTube, Amazon Music, and Audible the following Friday.
Campfire Scale
To help listeners choose the right vibe for their listening, each episode will be marked with a rating on our Campfire Scale.
Listen to the Mixtapes
Music plays a huge role in the episodes and each will have a Spotify playlist (mixtape) to accompany it.
The Word on the Suburban Streets
Whispers travel fast in Maplewood-Sparta—here’s what listeners are saying:
“Just listened to THE JACKET. It was so good. I had chills at the end.”
— Juliette P, New York“We listened to THE JACKET last night as our bedtime story. We lit a candle. I felt like I had crawled into the main character’s skin—into the leather jacket. It was such a refreshing way to spend the evening, so counter to the media culture of TV and phones. People are going to love it.”
— Rebecca Joy, Massachusetts“I listened to THE JACKET! Brilliant and so nostalgic. I have to listen again and then again to THE BRACELET. Something about these stories captures my imagination so vividly. They have everything! The haunted jacket, ghostly voices, tragic mystery, us vs them, music rebellion from the crowd, the yearbook clue!!! So deeply layered! I can’t wait for more!”
— Jennifer S, New York“Well, this has become my favorite podcast to listen to.”
— Kristina D, Maryland
Join the Campfire Circle
For discussion, 90s nostalgia, and behind-the-scenes fun, join our Campfire Circle Facebook group.
For early access to episodes, extra behind-the-scenes content, and to help fund voice actors, sound design software, and music rights, become a paid subscriber at The Codex, Legends of the Lost, or join our Patreon at the Spartans! tier.
The Making of SPARTANS!
It started with a ritual.
Every year, as autumn approaches, I find myself listening to short spooky audio stories from R.L. Stine or the writers of “Are You Afraid of the Dark?” I never thought of myself as someone who would write those kinds of stories. Not serious enough. Not “mature” enough.
But one day back in August 2025, I thought: if they bring me so much joy to listen to, maybe writing them would bring me joy too.
The first story began with an image—simple, cinematic: a girl on Homecoming night, standing at the edge of the crowd, unseen and unsure. A boy drapes an old leather jacket over her shoulders, then vanishes. In its pocket: a mixtape. A relic of 1994, full of my favorite alternative music from that era—and the sadness, fondness, and real grief I still carry for a friend who died that year, when he was just sixteen.
And from there, everything spiraled outward.
From the beginning, I imagined it as an audio drama, not just prose. I wanted the narrator’s voice to feel like someone telling the story by a campfire—intimate, eerie, personal. The kind of tale that makes you shiver a little, but still carries a core of warmth.
The Narrative Storytelling
As I finished the story, I realized the narrator wasn’t just some omniscient voice in the ether. It was the boy in the story—the one Maya befriends by the end. Every episode of SPARTANS! would have its own storyteller, and none of them would be neutral. They’re all diegetic—telling the story of someone they actually knew, or their own. That revelation rewired the entire structure, turning each episode into a layered meditation on memory, regret, and the act of being seen.
The Audio Storytelling
I refined the script scene by scene and then transcribed it into Descript, an app that let me mock it up in sound (a “scratch track,” in audio terms) with a lifelike AI narrator. I focused on how it would sound: how the dialogue would breathe when spoken, where the silences would fall, how the narrator’s tone could shift between warmth, ache, and awe.
Then I layered in music and sound effects. I planned every detail with performance in mind—even down to the rhythm of the lines and how the mixtape songs might shape emotional beats.
The story became more than text. It became a sensory experience: Homecoming lights fading, the hiss of cassette static, the hum of the bonfire.
And this turned out to be one of the most unexpected creative gifts of the process. Hearing my story through the AI narrator’s voice (which I could edit on the fly) made the writing so much better. Hearing it helped me refine the language, pacing, and rhythm. I’ve been an editor for twenty years, but this was the cleanest, most intuitive revision process I’ve ever experienced.
When I hired my first human voice actor to actually perform the piece, I already knew what tone I was looking for, the music was picked out an placed, and the script was really tight. So the AI scratch track served its purpose beautifully and then I was able to replace it with the human performance.
The Visual Storytelling
I designed the visuals too—the cinematic campfire art, the tone and vibe. I searched for a font that felt like one used for a sports team, but sort of faded and cracked. And since each episode is named after a 90s wearable, I just needed to let each item stand visually for the whole episode as well. It felt really good to establish a look early on and has made it much easier to create visuals for each episode going forward.
Rituals and Intentional Repetition
Finding rituals in the words themselves really brought the SPARTANS! series to life. For example, the campfire narrator’s ritual opening:
“Welcome back to Maplewood-Sparta, where shadows stretch down suburban streets, and the 90s are never quite dead.”
—and its closing:
“We’ll see you by the campfire. The Spartans aren’t finished with you yet.”
Together, those lines set the emotional DNA for everything to come: nostalgia, grief, transformation, and belonging through storytelling.
We Are Our Characters
Through all of this, THE JACKET became a mirror for my own creative process. It’s a story about being awakened by the lingering heart of the past, about what remains and what still wants to be seen—Maya through the jacket, Todd through memory, and me through the act of building this new creative world that I, and my listeners, could inhabit.
So, though spooky campfire stories like those you would find on Are You Afraid of the Dark? may seem limited in depth, writing this genre my own way, with my own orientation toward emotional nuance and honesty about heavier themes, I think the final product is more like Are You Afraid of the Dark? mixed with My So-Called Life (with a little Buffy thrown in).
So 90s! :)
Planning Season One
At the end of October, THE BRACELET premiered, and at the end of this month, THE CORDS will come out. There will be 8 episodes in all in season one, released once a month:
THE JACKET - September 2025
THE BRACELET - October 2025
THE CORDS - November 2025
THE CHAIN - December 2025
THE CHOKER - January 2026
THE STARTER - February 2026
THE CROSS - March 2026
THE FLANNEL - April 2026
Subscribe and Listen
You can listen to SPARTANS! at Camp Cosmographia Radio on Substack (with the commercial music) or on Spotify and other platforms like Apple, Amazon Music, and YouTube (without).
Paid subscribers at The Cosmographia Codex and on Patreon (at the Spartans! tier) get early access to episodes, as well as exclusive minisodes as they’re released.
So thank you to everyone reading here, free or paid. If there’s something you’d like to hear more about—creative process, behind-the-scenes, or anything else—drop me a note.
I’ll see you by the fire.
-Nina