Explore every episode of the podcast The Raccoon Insider Podcast

What did the Raccoon City Police Department actually know before Resident Evil 2 begins? All of it was already inside the building, in writing. Nobody looked.

Welcome to The Raccoon Insider Podcast, and to our second season: Fall of the R.P.D. This season is about one building. The Raccoon City Police Department, and the people who worked in it. Not the city. Not the outbreak. The station.

Everybody knows how it ends. Almost nobody has seen how it started, because no game has ever shown you this building working.

In this episode we spend one night inside a working police station. The twentieth of September, 1998. A Sunday. Six officers off sick and everybody calling it flu. A sergeant out at the sewer outflows on his own, because there was nobody left to send with him. A locked office with a fax machine that keeps starting up behind the door. And a watchman walking his rounds who has already written the last line of his diary.

In this episode:

• The April water story in the Daily Raccoon, and the year of rising readings behind it.
• Don Weller, Umbrella's own courier through the sewers, and the first infection anybody wrote down.
• Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine's mansion reports: received, filed, and discredited from the top.
• The federal reply about Chief Brian Irons that printed inside a sealed S.T.A.R.S. office.
• Irons himself: the ledger in his own handwriting, the art, the statue, and the nerve gas he signed for.
• Rodney Gray in the cells, and what he said when the questioning was started again.
• A west wing six men down, and the version going round that it is not flu.
• Sergeant Neil Carlsen's patrol report, and what Marvin Branagh made of it.
• George Scott's diary, four entries, ending on the twelfth of September.

Built from the station's own paperwork, read end to end: the Watchman's Diary, the Secretary's Diary, the Chief's Diary, Mail to the Chief, the Patrol Report, the Fax and the Security Manual, alongside the newspapers, notices and diaries the city left lying around outside the station. Where somebody left us a surname and nothing else, we say so, and the gap is filled with creative licence rather than left blank.

The Raccoon Insider makes narrative deep dives into the Resident Evil universe: established canon, the in-game files and real-world sources, strung together with a dash of creative licence to bridge the gaps the games leave blank.

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Not affiliated with, endorsed by or associated with Capcom Co., Ltd. All Resident Evil trademarks and copyrights are the property of their respective owners. This is a transformative work of commentary, lore analysis and dramatised storytelling, made under Fair Use. Invented scenes bridge established canon and are dramatisation, not fact.

After four episodes, you've only ever heard the voice — never met the person behind it. This is the story of Shadows of Arklay: why one burnt-out Resident Evil fan spent a year filling the gaps the games never explained.

Shadows of Arklay is Series 1 of The Raccoon Insider Podcast — a four-part deep dive into the forgotten origins of the Spencer Mansion, told like a true-crime story, just with a few more zombies. This bonus is the behind-the-scenes: the obsession that started it, the research (every canon Arklay source in one giant spreadsheet), how to bridge the gaps without breaking canon, the setup it was all made on, and what's next for The Raccoon Insider.

Watch the video version on YouTube: [YOUTUBE LINK]

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Not affiliated with, endorsed by or associated with Capcom Co., Ltd. Shadows of Arklay is a transformative work made under Fair Use.

Welcome to Shadows of Arklay: The Origins of a Madhouse — a four-part deep dive into the forgotten and shadowy origins of one of Resident Evil's most infamous locations.

This series uncovers the Arklay Mansion's true purpose: not just a summer home for Umbrella's elite, but a secret stronghold for twisted eugenics experiments and genetic manipulation, long before S.T.A.R.S. ever set foot there. More than the games reveal — buried truths uncovered through the established canon, the in-game files, and real-world sources, strung together with a dash of creative licence.

In the last episode, Tyranny's End, we followed the Tyrant project from its earliest failures to its first success — Beta 2, to Delta, and finally the Prototype Tyrant, T-001 — and the December 1997 night it finally breathed behind the glass.

In this finale, we find out what that promise cost. Two hundred and twenty days that turned Umbrella's crown jewel into a tomb. How did the T-virus actually leak? What happened inside the mansion between the accident and S.T.A.R.S. arriving? And what became of the forty-four people still alive in there? From the 5 a.m. leak during the T-002 surgery, through the slow rot and the mass turning, to Albert Wesker arriving as the man in the sunglasses to seal the survivors in — this is the road to ruin of Arklay, and the setting of the scene for the night Chris, Jill and the rest of S.T.A.R.S. took those fateful steps into the mansion.

This is Episode 4 — Countdown to X-Day.

Chapters
0:00 — Prologue
1:57 — Part 1: The Real Thing
8:00 — Part 2: The Production Model
16:38 — Part 3: The House Full of People
26:15 — Part 4: The Leak
35:19 — Part 5: The Slow Rot
53:53 — Part 6: The Turning
1:08:23 — Part 7: The Man in the Sunglasses
1:21:56 — Part 8: Sealed Below
1:35:03 — Part 9: Deadly Silence

This episode explores the full Tyrant Project origin story, breaking down how Umbrella moved from failed T-Virus experiments to the creation of the first true super-soldier.Set between 1988 and 1997 inside the Arklay Mansion, this chapter of the Resident Evil timeline covers the turning point where everything changed—when the limits of the T-Virus forced Umbrella to evolve, leading to the creation of Tyrants, the discovery of the G-Virus, and the influence of the Nemesis parasite.In this Resident Evil lore deep dive, we uncover how:-William Birkin and Albert Wesker pushed the Tyrant Project beyond its limits-Lisa Trevor became the key to the G-Virus breakthrough-The Nemesis parasite from Umbrella Europe changed the direction of bio-weapons research-Oswell E. Spencer secretly shaped the future of Umbrella behind the scenes-What led to the creation of T-001-Umbrella solved the “Tyrant Profile” problem and created a viable super-soldier-The Arklay Mansion began to lose importance as NEST rose in Raccoon CityThis is a Resident Evil explained documentary, built using in-game files, canon reports, and official source material—reconstructed into a chronological narrative focused on Arklay’s most important years.If you’re searching for:Resident Evil Tyrant Project explainedG-Virus origin storyNemesis parasite originsLisa Trevor full storyResident Evil timeline before RE1Umbrella experiments explained…this episode covers it all.

In this episode, we discover the beginnings of the Umbrella Corporation and how we go from Progenitor to the T-Virus. Along the way, we discover the deplorable experiments conducted beneath Arklay, the betrayals and backstabbings in the boardrooms and the search for the Ultimate Bio Weapon conducted by the dream team of Spencer, Birkin and Albert Wesker.

Welcome back to the Shadows of Arklay Origins of Madhouse. This is Episode 2 - Umbrella’s Decades of Horror.

In this episode, we trace the origins of the Arklay Mansion — its construction, its architect, and the man who envisioned it not just as a home, but as a vessel for godhood. We’ll explore how a forgotten 19th-century book inspired Oswell Spencer’s obsession with human evolution, how George Trevor was lured into designing his own tomb, and how the mansion’s hidden depths began to stir with early  biological experiments long before the world ever heard the word T-virus.

This is not just the beginning of a building.