A Popular History of Unpopular Things

Join Kelli as she goes over the Hindenburg Disaster. On May 6, 1937, the Hindenburg Zeppelin exploded and caught fire as it was landing at the Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey. 36 of the 97 …

Join Kelli as she goes over the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster, where a massive 9.0/9.1 earthquake 80 miles off the eastern coast of Japan triggers a tsunami that killed tens of thousands and caused mill…

Join Kelli as she goes over the tragedy of the Medusa Shipwreck. When a French frigate bound for Senegal hits a sandbank and sinks, some get on the lifeboats, while a large portion are stuck on a has…

Join Kelli as she talks about Victorian-era hospitals in London, known as the Houses of Death because of their fatality rates. These were the most unsanitary of places, and today we'll go into all th…

Join Kelli as she goes over the tale of Liver-Eating Johnson, a mountain man in the early 19th century American frontier who became legendary for how he avenged the murder and scalping of his Flathea…

Join Kelli as she dives into the world of the Freemasons, Secret Societies, Religious Tension, Political Conflict, and... pugs?

In 1738, Pope Clement XII issued a papal bull denying any Roman Catholi…

Join Kelli as she tells the story of Levi Boone Helm, a frontiersman-turned-outlaw who committed murders across the West at the height of the California Gold Rush. But that's not all this serial kill…

Join Kelli as she goes over a trial from the peak years of Early Modern Europe's so-called werewolf panic - the trial of Peter Stumpp, the Werewolf of Bedburg. Peter confessed to all kinds of horribl…

Join Kelli as she talks about the inspiration for the Silent Hill games and movies - the ghost town of Centralia! In 1962, a fire set the underground coal mines on fire, and they've been burning to t…

Join Kelli as she takes a look at a historic killer - Lizzie Borden - who was accused of killing her father and stepmother with a hatchet in 1892. But despite everything pointing toward her, she was …

Join Kelli as she talks about THREE expeditions to Antarctica in the Heroic Age of Exploration. The first, led by Roald Amundsen, was the first to reach the geographic South Pole. At the same time, R…

Join Kelli as she goes over the difficulties of the early years of the first successful English settlement in North America - Jamestown. From the bloody flux to survival cannibalism, brutal execution…

Join Kelli as she goes over what happened to the USS Indianapolis, the ship that brought atomic bomb parts to Tinian Island so they could be assembled - and dropped - on Hiroshima. Though the ship co…

Join Kelli as she talks about a prion disease called Kuru. Prion diseases occur when misfolded proteins duplicate and clog up the brain, and cause things like Mad Cow Disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disea…

Join Kelli as she discusses the Inca Empire and their religious practices - including capacocha, the practice of sacrificing children and leaving them to mummify on mountain peaks.

Intro and Outro mus…

Join Kelli as she discusses the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, an experiment on black men (without their consent) where the US Public Health Service and the CDC allowed them to live with untreated syphilis…

Join Kelli as she discusses a Stalin Soviet-era plan to deport unwanted citizens and petty criminals to an island in the middle of Siberia - without proper shelter, supplies, or food. It only took a …

Join Kelli as she explores the history that led up to the Waco Siege, where ATF agents conducted a failed raid against Branch Davidian leader David Koresh at his Mount Carmel compound in Waco, Texas.…

Join Kelli as she explores the Celtic roots of Halloween - from Samhain and Celtic mythology, to Puritan fun-sponges, to Irish immigration, and into Spirit Halloween stores, we'll learn the history b…

Join Kelli as she goes over the biggest, manmade, non-nuclear explosion in history - the Halifax Explosion.

On December 6th, 1917, a French ship filled with explosives was heading into Halifax Harbor,…