Notes From The Dead

Shirley Jackson wrote The Lottery and The Haunting of Hill House . She also wrote funny stories about raising four kids and keeping house. Meanwhile, her husband, Bennington College professor Stanley Hyman, reportedly figured cheating didn’t count if he did it more than 100 miles from home. On this episode of Notes From The Dead , comedian Rebecca D and special guest Sarah Lamagna head to Benningt...

What do you do after a disastrous business deal nearly wipes out your fortune? If you’re P.T. Barnum, you go on tour telling other people how to make money. This week on Notes From the Dead, REBECCA D is joined by Caroline Smith of Smith Realty to follow Barnum’s dreams of building an industrial empire in East Bridgeport, Connecticut. At the center: a clock company, enormous promises, and financia...

They were hanged. They were supposed to die. They had other plans. In the Season 2 premiere of NFTD, we're telling the extraordinary stories of two women who survived the hangman's noose. First, there's Mary Webster of Hadley, Massachusetts, a woman accused of witchcraft in the 1680s who survived a brutal attack by her own neighbors and became known to history as Half-Hanged Mary . The...

Imagine spending three years alone on a tiny sailboat. No phone. No podcasts. No group chat. Just you, the Atlantic, and occasionally a goat eating your hat. This week on Notes From the Dead , we follow Captain Joshua Slocum—the first person to sail solo around the world. His journey includes hallucinations, pirates, carpet tacks, fake sailors, doughnuts, sea shanties, and one of the greatest adve...

What do an 18th-century celibate religious movement and today's incels have in common? More than you might think. This week on Notes From the Dead , Rebecca explores the bizarre world of the Shakers—a New England religious community that banned sex, embraced gender equality, built thriving villages, and somehow became one of the most successful utopian societies in American history... despite...

Why were graham crackers invented? To stop masturbation. Really. In this episode of Notes From the Dead , we follow the bizarre story of 19th-century health reformer Sylvester Graham, the preacher who believed bland food could tame sinful urges and save America. Along the way we explore cholera outbreaks, anti-sex crusades, the birth of the fad diet, and why today's wellness influencers—from r...

In 1892, the people of Exeter, Rhode Island, decided that 19-year-old Mercy Brown was a vampire. Mercy’s body was exhumed, her heart was burned, and the ashes were used in a desperate attempt to save her dying brother. But New England’s last vampire panic was not really about the supernatural. It was about tuberculosis, grief, misinformation, and what frightened people do when science cannot provi...

One winter night in 1673, Rebecca Cornell was found dead in her home in Portsmouth, Rhode Island. Authorities ruled it an accident. Then Rebecca's brother claimed she appeared to him in a dream and insisted she had been murdered. What followed became one of the most extraordinary murder investigations in early American history. A body was exhumed. A son stood accused. And testimony from a ghos...

Most people know the famous story of Phineas Gage —the railroad foreman who survived an iron tamping rod blasting through his skull and forever changed the way we understand the human brain. What most people don't know is that it happened in Cavendish, Vermont , where freight trains still roll past the site of one of history's most extraordinary accidents. But this isn't just the story...

America is 250 years old, and we're still arguing about the same questions. Who belongs? What makes a good life? What happens when fear takes hold? Notes From The Dead explores New England's strangest stories—from ghost witnesses and vampire panics to forgotten scandals and unlikely heroes—and connects them to the debates still shaping America today. Hosted by comedian, writer, and newest...