S3 · CH 1
Chapter 1 · A box in the basement
A clerk retires, a town hall floods, and a sealed records box surfaces with the wrong year written on its lid.
43:11
Jan 7, 2026
Season Three
Now airing — Ch. 1–4 live
A narrative-documentary podcast
Spool
One story, told over a season. This year: a town, a missing archive, and forty years of silence.
Listen on
New chapters every Wednesday through the season.
Season Three
Spool
Narrative documentary · Hosted by Adaeze Okonkwo
The room with no windows
S3 · CH 4 · 47:20
16:08
47:20
3
Seasons
8
Chapters this season
411,000
Avg listeners / chapter
Hartwell
Audio Prize
Winner — 2025
As heard on
The Atlantic Monthly
Harper’s Review
The Lanternpost
Aperture Weekly
The Marginalia
Foghorn Culture
The Northern Quarterly
Driftwood Magazine
Season Three
The Hartwell tapes
Eight chapters. One missing archive. A complete story, told from the first day of reporting to the last.
4 of 8 chapters live
S3 · CH 2
Chapter 2 · The names that don’t match
Two ledgers describe the same forty acres. Only one of them lists the family that lived there.
49:38
Jan 14, 2026
S3 · CH 3
Chapter 3 · Everyone remembers the fire
Six witnesses, six versions of one night in 1984 — and a fire department log that records no call.
51:02
Jan 21, 2026
S3 · CH 4
Latest
Chapter 4 · The room with no windows
Inside the county annex, behind a door that isn’t on any blueprint, we find what the box was meant to replace.
47:20
Jan 28, 2026
S3 · CH 5
Chapter 5 · A list, and the man who typed it
Releases Wednesday, February 4 — the typist is still alive, and he agrees to talk.
Locked
Feb 4, 2026
S3 · CH 6
Chapter 6 · What the county never sent
Releases Wednesday, February 11 — a records request, eleven months late, finally answered.
Locked
Feb 11, 2026
S3 · CH 7
Chapter 7 · The neighbor’s account
Releases Wednesday, February 18 — the one person who kept her own copy of everything.
Locked
Feb 18, 2026
S3 · CH 8
Season finale
Chapter 8 · Forty years, in one afternoon
Releases Wednesday, February 25 — the archive is found, and the town reads it together.
Locked
Feb 25, 2026
About the show
A season is a complete story. Nothing carries over but the way it’s told.
Spool is a narrative-documentary podcast built on a single rule: one story, told from the first day of reporting to the last. Each season runs eight chapters and ends. You can begin with whichever season pulls you in — they don’t depend on each other.
Season Three is about a town in the river valley, an archive of public records that vanished sometime in the 1980s, and the forty years of careful silence that grew up around the gap. It started with a flooded basement and a box that didn’t belong to the year on its lid.
We don’t reconstruct from a distance. We follow the reporting as it happens — the dead ends, the records requests, the afternoon a source finally says yes — and we let you hear the work, not just the conclusion.
Start here
Spool is serialized — the season builds chapter by chapter, so begin at the start. Three good entry points:
Who makes it
Reported and narrated
AO
Adaeze Okonkwo
Host & reporterAdaeze is an investigative audio reporter who spent nine years covering county government and public records before Spool. She has a documentarian’s patience for paper — and a reporter’s instinct for the one ledger that doesn’t add up. She wrote, reported, and narrates all three seasons.
@adaeze.reportsSeason Three crew
Producer
Tomás Renner
Sound design
Priya Lindqvist
Fact-checker
Halvor Espinoza
Original score
Yara Castellanos
“Spool does the thing prestige documentary keeps promising and rarely delivers — it makes the absence of a record feel like the loudest thing in the room. Season Three is the best work this show has done.”
Previously on Spool
The back catalog
Each season is its own complete story. New here? Any of these is a clean place to start.
Season One
The lighthouse keeper’s ledger
A coastal lighthouse logged a ship that maritime records insist never existed — and one keeper kept writing it down for thirty years.
8 chapters·2023
Season Two
The wrong photograph
A single image ran in a hundred newspapers under a name that wasn’t the man in the frame — and the correction never came.
8 chapters·2024
Now airing
The Hartwell tapes
A town, a public archive that vanished in the 1980s, and forty years of silence built carefully around the gap.
4 of 8 live·2026
Questions
Before you press play
Do I need to start from episode 1?
Within a season, yes — Spool is serialized, and each chapter assumes you heard the last one. But the seasons are independent. You can begin with Season 1, 2, or 3 and lose nothing. If you’re starting with the current run, that means Season Three, Chapter 1: “A box in the basement.”
How many episodes are in a season?
Eight chapters, every season — it’s the length we’ve found a single story can carry without padding. Most chapters run between 43 and 52 minutes. We also publish occasional standalone bonus episodes between seasons, which don’t require any prior listening.
When does the next season drop?
Season Three is releasing now — a new chapter every Wednesday through February 25, 2026. We take a reporting break between seasons rather than rushing the next one, so Season Four doesn’t have a date yet. The Field Notes newsletter is where we announce it first.
Are there transcripts and a sources list?
Yes to both. Every chapter ships with a full, human-corrected transcript posted the same day, and each season has a sources page listing the documents, records requests, and interviews we relied on. Where a public record can be linked, we link it — we’d rather you check the work than take our word for it.
Is it based on a true story?
Spool is a work of audio fiction presented in documentary form — the towns, archives, and people are invented. We write it the way a real investigation unfolds because that structure is the point, but nothing here is a report on actual events. Each season’s closing credits state this plainly.
Start the season today.
Four chapters of The Hartwell tapes are live, with a new one every Wednesday. Subscribe wherever you listen and the rest finds you.
New chapters every Wednesday through the season