Family Plot

This week we are joined by Hopper of the Brilliant Final Trace Podcast to discuss the mysterious disappearance of Brandon Swanson on May 14th 2008. We cover the histroy of the world around him, the events in his life and the events that led up to him going missing and openly discuss what we found in this truly mysterious disappearance spooky season episode of the Family Plot Podcast! Learn more ab...

In this episode, we dive deep on the man who would become The Great Beast, the self proclaimed 'wickedest man in the world' and the founder of his own religion, Aleister Crowley. Celebrated by pop culture, the man who is involved in dozens of conspiracy theories and who was believed by some to be a spy, we cover the birth of the boy that would grow up to be the man that influenced bands like the B...

This week, we dig into a mystery from the early days of Hollywood. This Wholly Odd case (what we did there, did you see it) looks into the death of film legend Thelma Todd. Signed to Paramount, on loan to Hal Roach studios, she was hired to be a 'Greta Garbo-Type' but Thelma had a talent. She was naturally funny and wore comedy as easily as she wore a dress. She made regular appearances in Laurel...

What an episode do we have for you! This episode we drift over the 19th and 20th century to pick out the worst medical products, quacks and crazy health trends we could find. We discuss the man who is responsible for the term 'Snake Oil Salesman', we discuss a surgeon with a degree HE PURCHASED who installed bits of goat testicle (or sometimes the whole darn thing) into his patients scrota...scrot...

Laura, Arthur and Dean gather round the mic to discuss the 1900 Unsolved Murder and Dismembertment of Ernst Winter in 1900 in the Prussian City of Konitz (these days, the modern Polish city of Chojinice). The crime itself was never solved. In a town with German officials and a culturally Polish populace with an influx of Jewish residents and no modern investigation techniques, a solution was by an...

Our latest episode and we are joined by Courtney from the Book of the Dead Podcast to discuss the New England Vampire Panic. We discuss the discovery of a body ritually staged to prevent rising in Burial #4 in the Jewett City area. We also discuss the case of Mercy Brown and other vampire shenanigans that all happened 200 years AFTER the Salem Witch Trials. We then briefly discuss vampire panics i...

What an episode. This week we ride the Elevator of History TM (patent pending) down to the 1700's to discuss the birth of Dolley Madison. We discuss her upbringing among the Quakers her first marriage, the birth of her sons and how she lost her husband, one of her children,and so many other members of her family to yellow fever. She eventually was introduced to James Madison by Alexander Hamilton....

There is so much in this episode. We are not a family of sports fans but we do go back to 1919 in the Elevator of History to discuss the 1919 World Series between the Chicago White Sox and the Cincinatti Reds. We talk about how some players agreed to lose for money, some players weren't entirely sure what they agreed to and eventually saw baseball install a commissioner that banned all eight men i...

This is our longest episode yet. Today we dig into the origins of the Batman. Gotham's darkest Caped Crusader, the man who puts fear into the criminal underworld. We discuss his creators, his origin, his allies, his rogues gallery and the city he was born into, Gotham. We talk about how the world influenced him and how he influenced the world in this comic book history, nerdy deep dive episode of...

What an episode.  This time we go back to the 1830's when America had lied to the Indigenous People of America, forced them to sign removal treaties, even though the Supreme Court had just declared that the Cherokee were a sovereign culture.  Indigenous people were rounded up, often at gunpoint, taken with just the clothes on their backs in many cases and marched thousands of miles into...

Here we are with another 'Summerween' episode.  this time we are digging into musicians who supposedly made deals with the devil for their skill and fame.  We start with the Mississippi Delta's favorite crossroads legend, Robert Johnson.  We tell both the legendary version of his tale and then we dig down to what is likely the truth behind his life.  Then we jump back to Europe...

Well, this week we head to what would eventually become the state of Connecticut in the 1600's where we discover that the people of Hartford and multiple other Connecticut villages had their own witch trials complete with Minister's weighing in, a code that included witchcraft as a capital crime and spectral evidence and these trials, in the days before America was a thing, in the days before Sale...

Man, what an episode!  We are joined by our spooky Friend Brenda from Horrifying History to dig into the life of liar, cheater and serial killer (meaning he killed more than one person for a similar reason, he was not a pattern killer) known as HH Holmes.  He was born Herman Webster Mudgett and as a child he was quiet, smart and studious.  He tried to claim a legacy as a devil or a...

Man kids, this was an episode, and definitely our longest!  Have you ever heard about the Democratic Governor of Kentucky was assassinated in 1900, leaving the state with two rival governors, two different governments commanding, effectively, two separate militias!  Into this chaos there is a populace who either can't stop talking about local politics or are desperately sick of local pol...

TW:  Suicide and Drug Use - What an episode!  This episode we flashback to the 20's to attend the birth of Timothy Leary, a man who would get a doctorate in psychology and go on to become a respected psychologist before a trip to Mexico introduced him to psilocybin mushromms.  We cover how psilocybin shaped and changed who he became, how he went on to be a central figure of the counterculture, his...

Another fun episode filled with learning and family banter.  Today we examine the life of Charity Adams Earley.  One of four children, she was raised by parents who loved her and insisted on education, so much so that when school started, she was jumped to the second grade.  She eventually graduated college at 19 with a triple major and a minor in history.  We dig deep into this lady who became fa...

So, as June 2026 draws to a close, we present the life and times of Barbara Gittings, a woman who refused to let the world define her as insane or a degenerate just because she was a lesbian.  She set out to change things, curating museum collections so not everything about the LGBT+ was written by doctors, moralists or police.  She made libraries a safe space for queer people trying to discover w...

There is a lot in this show.  Arthur discusses some of Dad's health problems in his corner leading to discussions about movies he's been watching with Dad, including most recently Big Fish.  (It's arguably Tim Burton's best movie) then we get into talking about the celebration that is Jineteenth which leads us to discussing how Abraham Lincoln wound up in the Wrestling Hall of Fame as the inventor...

In this episode, we celebrate the diversity and inclusion of pride month with an examination of the world of the paranormal, the world of spiritualism and even the world of the Horror space, and how these dark, liminal spaces are not only super inclusive, but also are currently being used to expore and reveal more LGBTQ+ history.  This week we go deep into the cultural phenomenon of gay Ghost Hunt...

Have you heard of 'Tail-Gunner Joe' McCarthy and the Red Scare?  What about Roy Cohn?  These two not only kicked off the Red Scare where they pursued supposed communists in Government and later the military, but also went aafter gays under the theory that they were 'moral perverts susceptible to blackmail.'.  Despite no evidence appearing that even one of these people were blackmailed outside the...

We have a heck of an episode for you.  Arthur is turning 17 and our episode is inspired by the right wing pushback against Christopher Nolan's 'The Odyssey'.  We dig into the origin of the work, what we know of it's 'author' Homer, the real, the mythical, the things that are somewhere in between.  We say goodbye to a family friend and gget downright hostile about people judging movies based on tra...

Such An Episode!  On Deck we have Jane Stanford, born Jane Lathrop out of Albany New York, she married her lawyer husband who lost everything in a fire, went west to seek his fortune in the Gold Rush and found it selling supplies to miners and settlers.  When his wife joined him in San Francisco, he had become a railroad baron.  Eventually they had a child and Jane doted on the boy.  We won't tell...

This episode, we go deep into the life, heroism and spectacle that was Audie Murphy.  Audie Murphy was a sharecropper's son from Hunt County Texas, small, skinny, barely fed and full of work.  When his dad would disappear, he worked, when his mom died, he worked.  When his family came apart, he tried military service.  He was rejected by the marines, the paratroopers, only the Army would eventuall...

Well, in this episode we dig into our Kansas City Roots.  We go to Kansas City in the 1920's where under 'Boss' Pendergast the city was a machine that kept clubs open all night and the liquor flowing.  It was a town famous for being a little naive, jazz, good barbecue and something called the Kansas City Stomp.  Kansas City had heard rumors of Prohibition and wanted no truck with it.  It was into...

This episode has so much.  We cover the Jewel Box Revue, the drag show that originated in the thirties and toured through the seventies creating a space for drag, female impersonators and gender bent comics in a show that advertised itself as 25 men and 1 girl.  We also cover anti-crossdressing laws, the police's informal three article rule and how newspapers at the time published the names  of th...