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PODCAST

The Box of Oddities

Kat & Jethro Gilligan Toth

The Webby Award-winning “Box of Oddities" is a podcast that delves into the strange and mysterious aspects of our world, exploring topics ranging from bizarre medical conditions to unsolved mysteries, and from paranormal phenomena to strange cultural practices from around the world. With a focus on oddities, curiosities, and the macabre, each episode is a journey into the unknown, where hosts Kat and Jethro Gilligan Toth share their love for unusual stories and inject their humor and commentary

true crime

All Episodes

34:37

Buried for 246 Years—and Finally Identified

The Box of Oddities ·

2026/08/19

He Vanished at 14. DNA Found Him 246 Years Later—and Why So Many Towns End in “Kill”A teenage soldier vanished during one of the American Revolution’s most devastating defeats. Nearly 250 years later, DNA recovered from a tiny piece of bone may have finally given him back his name. The remarkable story of Private John Pumphrey begins beneath the soil of a South Carolina battlefield—and ends with a family hearing the name history had forgotten. Then, Kat turns a 3,000-mile road trip into a

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37:17

Charlie No-Face & The Jesus Mothership

The Box of Oddities ·

2026/08/17

A glowing faceless figure stalks the lonely roads of western Pennsylvania—or so the legend goes. But behind the terrifying tale of Charlie No-Face was Ray Robinson, a real man whose tragic childhood accident transformed him into the infamous Green Man of Pennsylvania.Then, Kat and Jethro explore the bizarre, darkly funny, and sometimes completely unhinged final words of executed criminals—including baked-apple jokes, complaints about SpaghettiOs, one killer’s suggested newspaper headline, and

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35:24

Horse Manure Apocalypse

The Box of Oddities ·

2026/08/14

HORSE MANURE CRISIS! And Victorians Crawl Inside Dead Whales for a Bizarre Cure! A Freak Family Favorite returns! First, the Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894—and the very real fear that cities would eventually disappear beneath nine feet of horse poop. Then, the spectacularly revolting Victorian “whale cure” for rheumatoid arthritis, which involved spending hours inside a warm, decomposing whale carcass. Two historical problems. Two deeply questionable solutions. One unusually fragrant episode of

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32:23

Glitch in Reality & Ghost in the Family Tree

The Box of Oddities ·

2026/08/12

What if the world didn’t move smoothly—but jumped from moment to moment like a broken film reel? Meet LM, the woman who could see colors, faces, and objects clearly but couldn’t see them move. Her rare neurological condition, akinetopsia, revealed something astonishing about how the brain constructs reality.Then, an adopted man searching for his biological mother discovers that she had spent nearly 50 years at the center of one of Massachusetts’ most haunting unsolved mysteries. The Lady of the

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37:47

Before Your First Memory & Valley Of The Calls

The Box of Oddities ·

2026/08/10

Your brain was listening before you ever took your first breath. Newborns can recognize their mother’s voice—and even stories heard in the womb—but could any of those experiences survive as actual memories? JG explores prenatal learning, infantile amnesia, and the unsettling possibility that your earliest memory may be something your brain quietly invented. Then, Kat follows a voice across Saskatchewan’s Qu’Appelle Valley, where the landscape can make distant calls seem impossibly close. An

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22:27

Inbox Of Oddities #95

The Box of Oddities ·

2026/08/07

The Freak Family has been busy.This week on Inbox of Oddities, Kat and JG crack open the listener mailbag and discover a funeral urn that can preserve the voice of the person inside it, a legendary Texas rock that may have swallowed a man whole, and the deeply unfortunate mystery of a toilet seat that suddenly developed a perfect blue butt print. Then there’s a possible Boo Effect at one of America’s strangest museums, the surprisingly fascinating history of the Brannock Device, a road trip

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35:10

Is My Red Is Your Red?

The Box of Oddities ·

2026/08/05

What if your brain suddenly decided that words had colors?In this episode of The Box of Oddities, Kat and Jethro dive into one of neuroscience's strangest documented phenomena: a woman who suffered a traumatic brain injury and awoke seeing vivid colors every time someone spoke. Her condition—known as acquired speech-to-color synesthesia—raises an unsettling question: if the brain can rewrite reality after an injury, how much of the world we experience is actually being created inside our own

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29:52

Oscar Wilde, Dutch Schultz & Sad Nipples

The Box of Oddities ·

2026/08/03

What were someone's last words really supposed to reveal? During the Victorian era, people believed a person's final moments exposed the truth about their soul. Families gathered around deathbeds with notebooks in hand, hoping to capture profound final wisdom—but history suggests many of the world's most famous last words may have been polished, embellished, or invented entirely. In this episode of The Box of Oddities, Jethro explores the fascinating history behind legendary final quotes from

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39:40

Bat People, Lunar Beavers & Human Skin Books

The Box of Oddities ·

2026/07/31

Freak Family Favorites: Bat People, Moon Hoaxes, and Museums That Shouldn't ExistThis Freak Family Favorites episode comes straight from the recommendations of the Freak Family, and it's packed with the kind of stories that remind us why history is often stranger than fiction. First, Kat unpacks one of the greatest media hoaxes ever printed: The Great Moon Hoax of 1835. Newspapers convinced thousands of readers that a giant telescope had discovered life on the Moon—including winged bat people,

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39:36

The Silence Between the Signals

The Box of Oddities ·

2026/07/29

Long before smartphones and satellites filled the sky with signals, early radio experimenters were hearing something they couldn't explain. Giant antennas stretched across fields captured strange repeating pulses, mysterious buzzing, and what some believed sounded almost like language. Even Nikola Tesla and Guglielmo Marconi wondered if the transmissions might be coming from Mars. In this episode, JG shares a remarkable story from his grandfather's homemade crystal radio in rural Maine and explores

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32:51

Echoes in the Clay, Monsters in the Water

The Box of Oddities ·

2026/07/27

Could an ordinary clay pot be the oldest recording device in human history?On this episode of The Box of Oddities, JG explores one of archaeology's most captivating ideas: the theory that ancient pottery may have accidentally preserved microscopic traces of sound while spinning on a potter's wheel. From the birth of "acoustic archaeology" to modern AI-assisted research, discover why scientists still haven't completely ruled out the possibility that a vessel thousands of years old could one day

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24:13

Inbox of Oddities #94

The Box of Oddities ·

2026/07/24

Inbox of Oddities: Lettuce Lotion, Florida Organ Recitals & Envelopes Full of Crap It's time to open the Inbox of Oddities, where the Freak Family always delivers the unexpected. This week, Kat explains the surprisingly heartfelt tradition of sending an "envelope full of crap," while listeners share stories that are equal parts hilarious, touching, and gloriously strange. There's the mystery of disappearing podcast subscriptions, the linguistic adventures of perimenopause (including the

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27:52

The Strange Birth of the Jesus Machine

The Box of Oddities ·

2026/07/22

When Benjamin Franklin's Ghost Designed a Machine and the strange story of The Underwater Orchestra. What happens when people become convinced they can build a messiah out of magnets, copper, and electricity? In this episode of *The Box of Oddities, Kat and JG dive into one of the strangest forgotten chapters in American history: the bizarre true story of John Murray Spear's "New Motive Power," an electrical machine that followers believed would be born* rather than switched on. Guided by séances,

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38:17

Dinosaurs,Viagra, & Bubble Wrap

The Box of Oddities ·

2026/07/20

What do dinosaur fossils, Bubble Wrap, Super Soakers, Viagra, and Bob Ross have in common? More than you'd think. In this episode of The Box of Oddities, Jethro introduces the astonishing true story of Baron Franz Nopcsa—the eccentric Hungarian aristocrat who transformed himself into one of history's most visionary paleontologists. Decades before mainstream science caught up, he proposed that some dinosaurs were warm-blooded, cared for their young, and evolved through island dwarfism. But his

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26:28

Inbox Of Oddities #93

The Box of Oddities ·

2026/07/17

A stranger vanishes into a dead-end Savannah alley, leaving behind a lesson that will last a lifetime. A grieving listener receives possible signs from both her grandmother and beloved dog, while JG recalls the mysterious cab driver who appeared during his family’s desperate trip to Boston Children’s Hospital—and disappeared before he could be thanked. Also: Ghost the Great Dane and his “trotting farts,” an unexpectedly controversial use for A.1. Sauce, a nature trail shaped like an air freshener,

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30:58

Copper Age Cobblers & College Con Artists

The Box of Oddities ·

2026/07/15

The Mysterious Cave of Ancient Shoes & Georgia Tech's Imaginary Graduate This week on The Box of Oddities, Kat and Jethro uncover one of archaeology's most baffling discoveries: a 5,500-year-old leather shoe found inside Armenia's Areni Cave—along with hundreds of other ancient shoes, a ritual site, and the world's oldest known winery. Why were prehistoric people leaving their footwear behind? Was it practical storage, sacred ritual, or something we've yet to understand? Then, meet George P

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35:05

Time Eats Everything

The Box of Oddities ·

2026/07/13

What if an advanced industrial civilization existed on Earth millions of years before humans... and every trace of it has been erased? In this episode of The Box of Oddities, Kat and Jethro explore the fascinating Silurian Hypothesis—a real scientific thought experiment that asks whether an ancient technological civilization could have risen, fallen, and disappeared so completely that only faint chemical fingerprints remain in the geological record. From plate tectonics and fossilization to the

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29:18

Inbox Of Oddities #92

The Box of Oddities ·

2026/07/10

The inbox of Oddities is overflowing with unforgettable listener stories this week. A terrifying real-life child abduction that ended in a miraculous rescue, eerie Boo Effects that blur the line between coincidence and the unexplained, a ghostly Roman legion mystery solved decades later, and one listener's emotional account of how the Box of Oddities community helped rebuild a life after abuse. Along the way, Kat discovers that nutmeg isn't what most of us think it is, an enormous toad claims

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36:34

The Corpse In The Lighthouse

The Box of Oddities ·

2026/07/08

What happens when the most isolated lighthouse in the world becomes a floating prison with a corpse... and what if one of history's strangest duels was fought over flower arrangements? In this episode of The Box of Oddities, Kat and Jethro explore two unbelievable tales that prove history is often stranger than fiction. First, journey to the infamous Smalls Lighthouse off the coast of Wales, where lighthouse keeper Thomas Howell found himself trapped for months with the decomposing body of his

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31:58

The X-Files Mystery That Actually Happened

The Box of Oddities ·

2026/07/06

The Village Where People Slept for Days and How a DNA Test Solved a 73-Year-Old Missing Child Case. What would you do if people in your town simply... fell asleep without warning? In this edition of The Box of Oddities, Kat and Jethro investigate one of the strangest medical mysteries of the modern era: the "sleeping village" of Kalachi, Kazakhstan, where healthy adults and children suddenly collapsed into days-long sleep, vivid hallucinations, and memory loss. Was it a virus, radiation from

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