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PODCAST

Dark Histories

Fortnightly narratives on the unsolved and the unexplained, mysteries, historical true crime, touches of the paranormal and cultural peculiarities.

history

All Episodes

01:36

Concerning the recent technical difficulties

Dark Histories ·

2021/04/26

Hey everyone, just a quick message and to let you all know that all the recent technical difficulties the podcast has been having that has been stopping the feed from distributing the podcast should be all fixed! Huzzah!

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01:04:30

Joanna Southcott, The Panacea Society & The Mystery Box

Dark Histories ·

2021/04/26

The end of the 18th Century saw the birth of a long line of religious movements focused on the end of days and the biblical second coming. Central to this string of beliefs was an unimposing domestic servant who began to have visions in her mid-life, which she claimed were divine in nature, eventually leading to her insistence that she was a prophetess and at the young age of 64, was pregnant with the new messiah. Far from fading away after the holy childs due date came and went, the movement

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01:05:38

The Laetitia Toureaux Affair

Dark Histories ·

2021/04/06

In the late Spring of 1937, the murder of a young Italian immigrant stormed the Paris headlines. The first murder to have taken place on the Metro, it was a baffling affair with no witnesses and a murder of unusual precision. As the country mired in political turmoil, newspapers filled their columns with rumours of the victims life, quickly filling the information void with sensational stories of divey music halls, gangsters and allusions to sordid affairs. The truth, however, would turn out to

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01:23:50

Gordon Cummins: The Blackout Ripper

Dark Histories ·

2021/03/21

“In war, one of our great protections against the dangers of air attack after nightfall will be the "blackout". On the outbreak of hostilities all external lights and street lighting would be totally extinguished so as to give hostile aircraft no indication as to their whereabouts. But this will not be fully effective unless you do your part, and see to it that no lighting in the house where you live is visible from the outside. The motto for safety will be 'Keep it dark!'” So read the opening

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01:13:00

Phantom Airships of the 19th Century

Dark Histories ·

2021/03/02

In the winter of 1896, a spate of airship sightings spread out from California, stampeding across the United States until, in the Spring of 1897, they hit a wall in the midwest, after a brief flirtation on the East Coast. The sightings totalled in their tens of thousands and many included fantastical descriptions of both the ship and the people riding it. As the ships flew from state to state, the stories often grew bolder in their claims until they were heavily dovetailing with the science fiction

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58:56

Haunted Bones: Screaming Skulls

Dark Histories ·

2021/02/15

Haunted human remains are a trope popular in modern horror, from the twisted ivory puppet in the House on Haunted Hill to the skeletal corpses, floating in the swimming pool of Poltergeist, human bones have long held a place of fear, worship and power throughout history and cultures, eventually manifesting within the horror genre of the 20th Century. At the time of the English Civil War, the whisperings of an emergent folk tradition seeded its place in the popular imagination, when stories of

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49:42

The Homunculus: From Science Fact to Gothic Fiction

Dark Histories ·

2021/01/31

With a long and winding path through history from ancient times, to the renaissance and beyond, Alchemy was a vast subject with a multitude of practitioners, from the legendary and mythical to established medical gentry and scholarly clergy. In fact and fiction, they were men and women obsessed by the magical bending of the laws of nature to their will, creating gold, the elixir of life, stones that shone like the sun or offered immortality. Another sect of the sprawling tradition, however, found

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01:11:12

William Dove & The Wizard

Dark Histories ·

2021/01/21

The mid 19th Century newspaper headlines saw no shortage of cases involving poison. Unsurprisingly, given the relative ease of obtaining such deadly materials, a long narrative of death, whether by accident or design, formed throughout the period and still today the Victorian period is often characterised as something of a heyday for poisons and poisoners. From time to time, salacious stories of a murderer utilising these violent compounds broke out and captured the public's attention, stacking up a

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16:50

Christmas Campfire 2020 (Part 2)

Dark Histories ·

2020/12/28

Heya! I hope you had a great Christmas and are relaxing and taking it easy before the New Year. Here's the second part to this years Christmas Campfire. I messed up the timing a little bit and so this episode is not as long as I thought it was going to be, but it was nice to have it in two parts anyhow! I hope you enjoy it, here's to 2021 and a much better year than the mess that was 2020!

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44:24

Christmas Campfire 2020 (Part 1)

Dark Histories ·

2020/12/25

Merry Christmas everyone! It wouldn't be Christmas in 2020 if it wasn't at least a bit of a cock-up right?! Half way through recording this episode, the heart of my recording setup completely gave up on me and crapped out, so I had to re-record it the only way I had available, which means the audio quality is a little diminished, though I think I did a reasonable job on it in the end. Hopefully you'll not find it too bad! Anyway, enough of all that, here's the Christmas Campfire, or at least, the

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59:56

Loup-Garou: Witches, Cannibalism & The Werewolves of...

Dark Histories ·

2020/11/29

From Salem to East Anglia, Bordeaux to the black forest of Germany, it seems there is no end of infamous witch trials that took place in history, spanning hundreds of years and thousands of miles. Somewhat less well known are the many hundreds of werewolf trials that took place alongside them and with such a degree of crossover, that made them ultimately, synonymous with the occult world of demons and the Devil, with witchcraft and the sabbath. Whilst witches may have been feared for the damage they

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00:53

A Small Amendment

Dark Histories ·

2020/11/17

Wrong email address for the submissions! My apologies! The link in the shows original notes should be right, so if you went by that rather than my nonsense, then you'll be fine anyhow, but just in case, the email address for all Christmas Campfire submissions is: social@darkhistories.com

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01:24:26

Nandor Fodor & The Alma Fielding Poltergeist

Dark Histories ·

2020/11/17

(There was a bit of an issue with the sound getting scrambled in the original upload of this episode. If you find you bump into this, please delete the file and re-download and you should get the updated, fixed version! Apologies!) The interwar years saw a sharp rise in followers of Spiritualism throughout Europe and the wider world. Family houses in the most benign suburban neighbourhoods curtains hid seance circles, congregated in dark rooms, as mediums addressed the realm of the spirits, pulled

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53:54

James Eugene Harrison: The Murder That Never Was

Dark Histories ·

2020/11/01

The disappearance of James Eugene Harrison, a young entrepreneur who set out on a business trip in the winter of 1958 and never returned, signalled a tragic loss for his family. Their life suddenly flipped on its head. Mrs Harrison slowly came to terms with the difficult life of a widow with two young sons to raise. A Californian convict admitted to the murder, complete with a detailed confession and the whole sorry affair was tied up neatly for police. That was until James Eugene Harrison showed

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01:18:10

The Lindley Street Poltergeist

Dark Histories ·

2020/10/18

In the mid-1970s, a series of purported supernatural events took place in a small, yellow, wooden slatted house in a suburb of Bridgeport, Connecticut. At a time when demonic forces were very much in vogue, the Goodin family were plagued by all manner of phenomena that quickly drew the attention of the national press, along with thousands of curious onlookers. Despite the contemporary fervour that it sparked and the similarities to several other, far more well traversed, supernatural tales such as

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01:13:30

The Mysterious Death of Joseph Elwell

Dark Histories ·

2020/10/05

Rumoured as a top contender as the inspiration for F. Scott Fitzgeralds most enigmatic of characters, Jay Gatsby, Joseph Bowne Elwell was among other things, a property developer, race horse owner, author, socialite, broker, tutor and, last but certainly not least, thoroughly famous card player. Winning sums that totalled into the tens of thousands on a nightly basis, he built both wealth and a social circle that placed him firmly in the upper echelons of New York Cities elite. That was until, one

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01:13:18

The Pirate Life of Henry Every

Dark Histories ·

2020/08/23

There is no shortage of famous names associated with the Golden Age of Piracy. Captain Kidd, Blackbeard, Henry Morgan or Jack Rackham hold such levels of fame, they have become household names, legends with largely fictional tales still told of their lives at sea. There is, however, one man who managed to outdo them all. His largest, most audacious crime is one of the most successful pirate raids in history and one that nearly brought down one of the richest, most powerful empires the world has ever

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01:14:07

The Murder of Jane Clouson: The Eltham Mystery

Dark Histories ·

2020/08/11

In the spring of 1871, a young servant girl was found in the middle of the night, lying on the ground following a brutal attack that would eventually prematurely end her life. Following a series of fantastic police blunders, a suspect was arrested, tried and promptly acquitted. As far as the police were concerned, the murder had been solved, but the culprit had escaped the hand of justice and as such, the case was closed and eventually buried, slipping into eventual obscurity. Almost 140 years

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58:54

The Hairy Hands of Dartmoor: Birth of an Urban Legend

Dark Histories ·

2020/07/26

In 1921, a series of accidents on a small, rural road, carving through the heart of the boggy marshes and fields of Dartmoor, in South East England, led to a brief explosion in excitement concerning the ghostly image of a pair of disembodied hands, forcing drivers off the road and into potentially fatal accidents. Following a little dash of press magic, the story took hold and grew for over a hundred years, until today where it has become accepted as a staple in British Urban Legend. But how did it

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01:12:15

Albert hicks: The Pirate King of New York

Dark Histories ·

2020/07/14

Just before dawn, on the outskirts of New York harbour, a small Sloop sailed listlessly into the bay. The ship had no crew, no lights and a deck covered in blood. It presented a mystery to the local police, who set their detectives on the case which led to a manhunt up the East Coast of the United States in pursuit of a phantom. The police may have had a description, a name, but they had no idea of the monster they would find at the end of the trail. More than a phantom, they were chasing a legend,

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247 results

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