Allie In the Archives

In 1908, six teams stood in Times Square, pointed their automobiles west, and decided to drive to Paris, France.  There were no highways. No GPS. No reliable maps. But there  were  blizzards dumping feet of snow onto nonexistent roads, cars hauled out of drifts by horses, engines rebuilt nightly in the cold, and entire continents where the idea of an automobile was still closer to rumor than reali...

On May 18, 1927, a series of explosions tore through Bath Township, Michigan, killing forty-four people and injuring dozens more in what remains the deadliest act of school violence in American history. This episode traces the full arc of the Bath School Disaster-- from the conditions that allowed it to happen, to the devastation that followed, to the stories that were shaped in its aftermath. Alo...

Charles Dickens is synonymous with Christmas.  With generosity. Redemption. Kindness.  But behind the stories that shaped Victorian morality was another story-- one carefully rewritten, tightly controlled, and believed for more than a century.  In this episode, we examine the marriage of Charles Dickens and Catherine Hogarth Dickens, a union that collapsed under the weight of celebrity and power. ...

Long before ghost tour tickets were sold and Ouija boards became party games, Michigan was at the center of a national movement-- one that believed the dead were still speaking, and the living could learn to listen. This is the strange and powerful world of Spiritualism: seances in pine groves, table rappings by candlelight, and the people who built communities around messages from the other side....

It began as an eviction. It ended in fire. In 1900, the Burt Lake Band of Ottawa and Chippewa watched their homes burn on the shores of northern Michigan-- a community destroyed not by war, but by paperwork. This episode traces the story of Cheboiganing, the village the law tried to erase, and the generations who kept its memory alive. Welcome to the Archives.  Bloodstained: Exploring Michigan's D...

Across Michigan, old buildings whisper their stories. The Linden Hotel in Genesee County. A grand home in Fenton. A quiet farmhouse in Maybee.  Each has its own ghosts-- and its own history to explain them.  Through archival records, family documents, and forgotten local accounts, the legends begin to align with fact. Ghost stories meet documented history, revealing the real lives behind Michigan'...

Just off the northern tip of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, where Lake Huron turns cold and clear, there’s an island that remembers. Beneath the postcard charm of Mackinac-- the fudge shops, the bicycles, the horse-drawn carriages-- lies a history far older and far deeper. Before it was a tourist destination, it was a center of trade. A crossroads between worlds. And at the heart of it all was Magdel...

Michigan’s first “official” serial killer is usually dated to the 1960s. But the records say otherwise. In 1916, a new husband, a picnic, and a bag left at a Grand Rapids grocery store unraveled a man of many names-- James Allen, James Curtis, John Allerton-- until only one remained: Henry Scott Mausell. We trace the pattern that shadowed Mausell for years: a dead son, two sisters in a staged scen...

When we think of pirates, we picture the tropics. Rum. Cannonballs. Eye patches and parrots. But not all piracy came with a flag. And some of it happened much closer to home. In this episode, we dive into the eerie and violent history of piracy on the Great Lakes and inland waterways-- from the Harpe Brothers and the bloody bluffs of Cave-in-Rock to the Apostle Islands bandits and a timber thief t...

At the height of its influence, the House of David was a utopian religious colony in Michigan—a place that promised purity, community, and the second coming of Christ. But behind its walls, something far darker was unfolding. This episode unearths the rise and fall of Benjamin Purnell, a charismatic preacher who claimed to be the seventh and final messenger of God. As his following grew into the t...

On Christmas Eve, 1913, nearly 700 striking miners and their families packed into the Italian Hall in Calumet, Michigan, for a children’s holiday party. It was meant to be a moment of joy during a season of hunger and fear. Then someone shouted a single word:  Fire. What followed was one of the most horrifying tragedies in Michigan’s history. Seventy-three people died, fifty-nine of them children....

You’ve heard of the KKK. But you probably haven’t heard of this other group. The one that wore black robes instead of white. That hid in mayor’s offices, police stations, and factory floors. That didn’t march, but hunted. They called themselves the Black Legion. And for a time, they were one of the most dangerous domestic terror groups in the country. In this episode, we uncover their strange orig...

On a warm August evening in 1930, fifteen-year-old Alice Collier was sent to the corner store to buy a dozen eggs. She never came back. What followed was a citywide search, a grieving mother’s voice on the radio, and months of rumors that led nowhere-- until a rabbit hunter stumbled across her body in a field nearly ten miles from home. This episode traces the disappearance, the brutal discovery,...

In the fall of 1898, a wealthy former legislator in Battle Creek, Michigan, died quietly in his home. He was 80. His new wife was 28. And just weeks after their wedding, he was gone. At first, no one questioned it. Until a servant came forward with a story—one so strange, so specific, it cracked the case wide open. But the questions didn’t end with one death. They spread-- through old family wills...

Henry Ford is often remembered as the man who put America on wheels. An industrial titan, a visionary, a symbol of progress. But beneath the shine of the Model-T lies a darker legacy. This episode unearths the other machine Ford built: one driven by control, fear, and silence.  From his antisemitic publications that inspired Nazi ideology, to his private army that brutalized labor organizers, to t...

In Fenton, Michigan, the name Joe Smallbone still lingers—like the faint hum of a radio just past the dial. He was the town’s quiet repairman. A man who lived alone in a soot-covered house on Wakeman Street, surrounded by broken machines and rusting cars. Most people knew his name. Fewer knew his story. This episode traces the life of Joseph Milo Smallbone—from his childhood shaped by absence and...

In 1935, the body of seven-year-old Richard Streicher Jr. was found beneath a footbridge in Ypsilanti, Michigan—cleaned, staged, and partially frozen. His murder shocked the town, but within months, the case went cold. Nearly a century later, it remains unsolved. In this episode, we revisit the quiet snowfall of that March afternoon, the frantic search that followed, and the uneasy details that st...

In the spring of 1922, 25-year-old Gertrude Hanna stepped out into a rainstorm and vanished. Nearly a month later, her body was found in the basement of a vacant church parsonage—bound, poisoned, and six months pregnant. The case drew headlines across the country. But there were no arrests. No answers. And no justice. This episode explores a story of mental illness, family secrecy, and a desperate...

In 1929, the body of Etta Fairchild was found at the bottom of a backyard cistern in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Her skull had been shattered. Her body was wrapped in wire and weighted with a cement block. Her killers didn’t deny what they’d done—they insisted it was necessary. They believed Etta was a witch. This episode unearths a forgotten crime that feels centuries older than it is. A tale of paranoi...

In 1934, Paul Ostin was a husband, a father, and just another working man in Detroit. Then he was found dead—posed beneath a tree, dressed in women’s clothing. For a few weeks, the newspapers couldn’t get enough of the story. The speculation was feverish, the headlines sensational. And then—nothing. The press went silent. The public moved on. Paul Ostin’s name was lost to history. Until now. In th...