Don't Look Now

Mixing fantasy and true crime for our 200th episode.  The idea of a Changeling, a replacement creature left in place of  a child or other relative taken by the fairies, is a concept that permeates th…

The International Space Station (ISS) has been a model of international cooperation, being run by five cooperating space agencies (US, Russia, Europe, Japan, and Canada).  It has been continuously ma…

The Statue of Liberty was dedicated in 1886 as a gift to the United States from the people of France.  We discuss the history of the statue, so well known bits like the statement above, and others le…

The Filles du Roi or Daughters of the King, was a term used to describe roughly 800 young French women who's dowries and passage to the new world was paid for by King Louis the 14th in an attempt to …

We discuss the invention of manmade snow and how its usage at ski resorts around the world has increased economic activity but also resulted in many unintended impacts.

We discuss two topics tied to birth control: Margaret Sanger's fight to make birth control and information about it accessible to American women and George Rosenkranz and his work to synthesize human…

The concept of wandering spirits seems to be ubiquitous across cultures.  While most will say they don't believe in ghosts by the light of day, this stand gets a bit less firm in the middle of the ni…

Haunted houses are a hallmark of the Halloween season in the United States.  When did they become a thing and when did they morph into the modern high end professionally run houses of today.  Buckle …

Listen in and learn about Pepper's Ghost, an illumination technique developed in the the 1860s and still in use today to project ghostly images onto the stage where they can be seen to appear in appa…

George Remus went from celebrated defense attorney at the onset of Prohibition to one of the most notorious bootleggers in the country.  After he eventually landed in jail, his wife Imogene ran off w…

Now that we have reached October, it's time for some spooky season stories.  Today we discuss one of the scary creatures from Irish folklore, the banshee.  Rumored to wail in signal of the impending …

We discuss the horrific case of the Radium Girls, young women who worked for companies in the early 20th century painting watch dials with glowing radium based paint.  They were told the product was …

New historical anthropology has unearthed a treasure trove of artifacts relating to the many Chinese workers that worked for the Central Pacific Railroad constructing the Transcontinental Railroad ac…

Imogene Rechtin started a campaign in 1910 to ban the pernicious scourge of kissing.  It's probably not a great spoiler to say that she failed in her attempt, but take a listen an find out about her …

Thomas Andrew Parker, better known as Colonel Tom Parker, is famous for being Elvis Presley's controlling manager during is career.  However, few knew that he was not from West Virginia as he claimed…

Courage the Cowardly Dog was a cartoon that ran for four seasons on Cartoon Network in the late 90s and early 2000s.  While the show consisted of Courage subjected to all kinds of scary situations, f…

We discuss the history of the Heaven's Gate cult that burst into the national consciousness in 1997 after a mass suicide of its members in the belief that they would spiritually join an alien spacesh…

Plato famously mentions the lost civilization of Atlantis which was a naval power that was supposedly defeated by Athens, long before his day, which was eventually plunged into the sea by the gods as…

Myths of dragons and dragon-like creatures exist in cultures around the world.  How do dragons differ around the world?  How are they similar?  What would lead just about all cultures to create myths…

The Bell Witch is a long time legend of the American South.  From 1817 to 1821 a supernatural entity is said to have hounded the family of John Bell, a local farmer, leading to his death.  The tale b…