Time Tellers

Step into a realm where the modern symphony of connectivity fades away, and the profound silence of the cosmos takes center stage. In this episode of Time Tellers, we venture into the heart of the National Radio Quiet Zone, a place where silence isn't just golden—it's enforced. Journey with us as we explore 13,000 square miles of tranquility, nestled in the hills of West Virginia and Virginia, whe...

Step into a roadside conversation that reads like a tall tale: Montana still treats placing livestock on train tracks to derail a train as a felony — five years in prison and up to $50,000 in fines — a relic of 1800s sabotage fears that somehow survived into modern ordinances. The narrator's shock and dark humor guide you through the statute’s odd specificity and the imagined absurdity behind it....

At midnight behind the courthouse, two comedians confess they brought rope, a dolly, and an arsenal of bad jokes to tackle one big question: should monuments to problematic figures stay on their pedestals or come down? The episode opens like a heist—only instead of bank vaults there are bronze men in capes and the tools are satire and stubbornness. They walk you through the uneasy history carved i...

What do you do if your neighbor's bull keeps rampaging through town? In Missouri, castrate it. Legally. In this episode we open on a neighborly nightmare—a loose, dangerous bull, a three‑day reign of chaos, and an old statute that lets three neighbors agree to castrate a bull, boar, or ram over one year old after notifying the owner. It sounds like folklore, but the law is real, very old, and stil...

Imagine walking into a diner and ordering a 64-ounce soda — legally yours, thanks to a Mississippi law born out of a feud over New York’s soda limits. This episode peels back the oddball statutes that let you guzzle a bucket of cola, ban certain obscene bumper stickers, and once criminalized public swearing near the vulnerable. We tell the stories behind each statute: the politician or cultural cl...

Follow the thunderous footsteps of Big Boy 4014 as a 1.2 million-pound steam giant becomes a moving time capsule—linking the dreams of 1862, the urgency of 1941, and the celebrations of 2026. We ride the whistle from Cheyenne to Philadelphia, feeling the boiler’s heartbeat, the human hands that made it run, and the towns that stop to watch history pass. Through short, vivid scenes—rooftop vigils,...

Ever imagined running after a greased pig at the county fair? In Minnesota, that slapstick dream collides with the law — greased pig contests and turkey scrambles can actually be misdemeanors under animal-cruelty statutes. This episode opens with a laugh, then sharpens into a real legal bite as we trace why protecting animals turns fairground stunts into crimes. We pivot to local legend: a quirky...

Step into a world where romantic betrayal could land you on a true crime episode — not because you were murdered, but because Michigan still treats adultery like a felony. We follow the curious edges of the state code: a rarely enforced law that could mean up to four years behind bars, a ban on being intoxicated in a train station that applies to Amtrak (sorry, Polar Express), and a blasphemy stat...

Step into a short, surprising tour of Massachusetts law where patriotism, profanity and old-school honor collide. Picture a crowd at Fenway — someone queues up a remix of the Star-Spangled Banner and suddenly the mood shifts from celebration to caution: the state still carries a $100 penalty for dancing to or remixing the anthem. That’s the opening scene. Turn the page and you’re courtside at a yo...

December 19, 1972: Apollo 17 splashes down, three astronauts recovered, and for the first time in human history, no one has returned from another world for more than fifty years. In this episode we tell that final descent as a story of triumph and unraveling—how a Cold War victory, exploding budgets, a nation at war with itself, and the strange absence of what came next combined to pull the curtai...

Imagine being hauled into court for reading tarot, or chased down the bay for stealing oysters — these are not punchlines but real laws with real stories. From a Maryland misdemeanor that treats fortune telling like fraud to Rockville’s almost-forgotten ban on public swearing, this episode walks the boundary between the absurd and the enforceable. We stitch together on-the-street vignettes, 19th-c...

We spent six episodes with the men who flew; this is the story of the thousands who never left the ground. Picture a seamstress in Dover sewing a pressure suit to perfection, a young flight controller with a handwritten list saving a lunar landing, and a handful of programmers rewriting fate in the hours between life and death. These are the moments that made missions possible. Through intimate po...

Pull into South Berwick and you might notice something strange: the best spots in front of Dunkin' are spoken for—reserved for police, by law. What starts as a laughable stereotype—cops and coffee—quickly becomes real when a ticket or a tow looms over anyone who dares park there. Follow the host through the tiny ordinances that make small-town rules feel both absurd and oddly practical. Then the s...

On a humid Louisiana night, a cast-iron pot bubbles over an open flame and an old law quietly gives that pot a pass: traditional jambalaya, made the right way, can be exempt from commercial kitchen rules. In this episode we walk the line between culinary ritual and statute, hearing from cooks and neighbors who treat preservation like an act of resistance. Then the tone shifts—steal more than $1,50...

They say Apollo 11 stole the spotlight, but four months later a rocket became a lightning rod and a young flight controller's memory saved three lives. Apollo 12 is a pulse-pounding blend of catastrophe and calm—warning lights like a Christmas tree, a whispered fix from mission control, and two astronauts who laughed their way into orbit. Then comes the comeback: Alan Shepard, grounded for nine ye...

Step into a courtroom that time forgot: in Kentucky, every public official must swear they never fought a duel — a relic of 1800s honor culture that still decides who can run for office. With a wink at Hamilton and Burr, the episode opens like a legal melodrama where perjury and pistols shape political fate. We roam from the oddly humane ban on selling dyed chicks at Easter to Lexington’s old ordi...

July 16, 1969: a roar of five F‑1 engines, a million on the beaches, and half the planet holding its breath. This episode opens at the launch pad and plunges listeners into the raw, immediate tension of a mission that was never guaranteed to succeed — alarms that nobody expected, split‑second decisions, and a tiny team of people whose choices would decide whether humanity ever returned from the mo...

A dollar disappears into a vending machine, you give it a little love tap—and suddenly you’re committing a crime. This episode opens on that absurd moment and follows the surprising logic of a law that treats a well-meaning nudge as criminal property damage while your stolen cash quietly vanishes. From there we speed off onto the water, where Kansas forbids shooting rabbits from motorboats (paddle...

December 1968 had splintered a nation—assassinations, riots, a war that refused to end. Into that fracture climbed three men in a rocket, not just to test hardware but to answer a Cold War gamble. This episode unfolds the quiet terror and impossible daring of Apollo 8: the hurried decision to send an untested Saturn V, the gut‑clenching 16‑minute radio blackout behind the moon, and the fragile hum...

Step into Iowa where everyday objects become the center of legal drama: a stick of margarine can land a restaurateur in court, substitute sugar packets can stand accused of being illicit pills, and a child’s lemonade stand once required government paperwork. This episode follows the human stories behind these unlikely statutes — the restaurateurs baffled by a butter-first law, prosecutors wielding...

On a golden Florida evening in January 1967, three astronauts climbed into Apollo 1 for a routine ground test. What began as a plugs-out rehearsal became a nightmare: a spark in a pure-oxygen cabin turned ordinary materials into fuel, and in less than 30 seconds the capsule ruptured. In this episode we weave the technical failures, the human stories, and the mounting pressures behind the disaster...

Walk into a curious chapter of Midwestern law where metaphors collide with statutes. In this episode we follow the trail from the odd—shooting fish with a gun or explosives is outlawed by Indiana conservation code—to the almost-mythic: one town’s old rule that black cats must wear bells on Friday the 13th. We unpack which claims are ceremonial, which are lightly apocryphal, and which are codified...

Intro music fades in—tense and cinematic. Dun, dun, dun. On a Friday night in October 1957 a tiny metal beep sliced through the air and the world changed: Sputnik was orbiting Earth, and with it came panic, possibility, and a race that would reshape history. From the morally tangled genius of Wernher von Braun to the anonymous brilliance of Sergei Korolev, from Laika’s lonely orbit to America’s bu...

Imagine wandering into a cheese factory after a long day and deciding it’s the perfect place for a nap — only to be told you’ve just broken the law. That absurd image sets the stage for this episode, where we follow odd, funny, and surprisingly practical rules that lurk inside state codes. We open on the Sanitary Food Preparation Act in Illinois, tracing how a sensible public-health rule about sle...

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