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Nicole Davis always knew she was adopted. What she didn’t know was how strange the story behind her adoption would look once she started examining it as an adult.

Nicole was born in Alabama in 1974. Her adoptive parents had spent years trying to have a child and then trying to adopt. According to the family story, they eventually failed a home inspection because a step between their kitchen and sunken living room wasn’t up to code.

Then Nicole’s mother wrote a letter to Alabama Governor George Wallace. Within a few months, her parents got a call. They drove to Montgomery and brought Nicole home.

Her mother has always believed Wallace made it happen. Nicole grew up thinking that was a great story. Today, she has a lot more questions about it.

In Part 1 of our conversation, Nicole talks about growing up adopted in rural Alabama, the family she was raised in and the fears that followed her from childhood. As a little girl, she worried someone would come and take her away. Eventually, she found herself staring down the road and hoping someone from her biological family would show up and do exactly that.

Years later, Nicole began finding biological relatives and learning how much of what she thought she knew about her origins was incomplete or simply wrong. Then an Ancestry match appeared.

Nicole initially ignored it. When she finally looked more closely, she discovered she shared 27 percent DNA with the woman trying to contact her. She had found a sister.

That sister had another surprise: the biological father Nicole had believed was dead for 12 years was alive.

Nicole also happens to be a serious horror fan, and the connection between her adoption experience and the things that scare her is fascinating. Horror gave her something real life often didn’t: predictable fear. Freddy Krueger had rules. A Stephen King novel had an ending. Her childhood could be much harder to predict.

That makes Nicole a natural crossover guest for Family Twist and our other podcast, Horror Heals.

In Part 1, we talk about adoption trauma, abandonment, biological family, DNA discoveries, rural Alabama, evangelical Christianity, the questions surrounding Nicole’s adoption and the possibility that George Wallace played a role in how she became part of her adoptive family.

And just when you think Nicole’s family story couldn’t sound more like a horror movie, she says it herself:

Her family dynamic is “a nightmare.”

Part 2 is coming next week.

Remember, family secrets are the ultimate plot twist.

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