Certainly Strange

From bigfoot to trees, from nearly burning a king alive to a vintage attempt at Transformers... When you think of masked balls, you probably think of wide halls and chandeliers, women dressed in beautiful gowns and men in elaborate suits, their faces hidden behind colourful masks. But as much as media likes to romanticize these masquerades, the history behind them can be quite strange and quite gr...

It was the 1680´s in France, the time of Louis XIV, The Sun King, a rule under which France thrived into becoming the jewel of Europe. But, as they say, the brightest lights cast the darkest shadows. In a solitary cell in the Bastille sat a man, his face obscured by a deep black velvet mask. No one was allowed to know his identity or to know his face, and the man was not allowed to speak. Today&#3...

The greatest mystery of Agatha Christie is herself. On December 4, 1926, she vanished and was nowhere to be found. CONTENT WARNING: This episode contains mentions of suicidal thoughts This episode features a promo for the podcast Shitting Bricks. Follow us on instagram @certainlystrangethepodcast or visit our website, www.certainlystrange.com

Double double toil and trouble; fire burn and caldron bubble. These lines will forever be associated with witchcraft. Not just because these lines are spoken by witches, but also because the play these lines are from is believed to be cursed. THIS EPISODE INCLUDES SEVERAL MENTIONS OF SUICIDE. certainlystrange.com

Home is where the heart is. Your home is your most sacred space, where you feel guarded and safe from the dangers of the outside world. But, if the stories are to be believed, there is one house in particular that wishes nothing but harm upon anyone who dares live inside its walls. CONTENT WARNING: This episode contains several mentions of cases of suicide. Visit our website certainlystrange.com o...

It seems to be straight out of the storybooks of the brothers Grimm. A girl who fell asleep and who did not wake up for 9 whole years. That is, if we are to believe the story. But perhaps this real-life fairytale has a darker side to it that you might expect... Review us on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, visit our website www.certainlystrange.com , or come say hi over at our Instagram, @certainlystran...

Some secrets are made to be found out with time, yet some secrets are meant to stay secret forever. The latter speaks for the secret of Glamis Castle, so very dark no one dared speak of it – until it was lost to time. But with enough clues, we might deduce the nature of this mystery. And if what I have found is true, these secrets of the castle are quite dark indeed. Follow us over on Instagram at...

We have nothing to fear from fairy tales. The evil witches and wicked stepmothers are nothing more than words on the pages of a book, the tales of our own imagination and nothing more. But this is not true for all fairy tales. Some fairy tales, you see, are true. And one of these tales is the story of a ratcatcher who stole 130 children away from the German city of Hamelin, never to be seen again....

There lay two bodies in the shallow water, dead, and one of them was a king. King Ludwig II of Bavaria had many names. The mad king, the fairy tale king, the swan king. He loved nothing more than fairy tales, and the buildings he commissioned seemed truly as if they had come straight out of a story book. How terrible, then, that his life should change into a tragedy, a murder mystery no one quite...

We all tell a white lie once in a while, simply because it is convenient. But imagine one of those simple, small lies spinning out of control so thoroughly that you suddenly are in the spotlights of an entire nation, with one of the most famous writers in history swearing that your little lie is the truth. This is exactly what happened with Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths when they tried to tri...

The footsteps stopped right in front of her room, like they did every night. Ethel lay in bed, frozen in fear with her bedsheets pulled up to her chin. She hardly even dared to breathe, afraid that whomever – or whatever, was outside of her door would hear her. Then came the knocks, and then the whispers, hardly audible even in the silence of the night. But there was something, she could sense it....

In the 18th century, in the Netherlands and Belgium there were whispers of demons who rode goats through the night sky, robbing any house and church they came upon. Even though witches and fairies have, for most people, faded into the back pages of history as nothing more than fairy tales, I can assure you, the Buckriders were quite real. For more, follow us over on Instagram at @certainlystranget...

Lot 666, then: a chandelier in pieces. Some of you may recall the strange affair of the Phantom of the Opera: a mystery never fully explained. – These lines feature at the opening of the musical The Phantom of the Opera, an adaptation of a book by the same name. There might be a little bit more truth to the fiction than one might think, however, when on may 20th, 1896 the weights of the chandelier...

The house was haunted. The housemaid swore by it. She heard footsteps coming from the attic and strange voices in the walls. Things were displaced whilst everyone swore that they hadn’t touched them. There was only one explanation according to Kreszenz Rieger and that was that the farm on which she worked was haunted. But was it, really? This episode includes a promo for Paranomal Exposed. Follow...

The sea is deep and dark and as much of a mystery to us as the starry skies that we look up to at night, and it has frightened us since the beginning of time. Wherever ships went, whispers of sea monsters were carried on the wind, and stories of ghost ships that seem to never lay anchor, doomed to forever dwell in the unending blue. And the most famous of all these ghost stories is that of the Fly...

When tragedy strikes, there tends to be an echo. It leaves this thick atmosphere of grief and misfortune; some call them ghosts. Though tragic, they are altogether harmless, aren’t they? When Ringo Kelley was found strangled on the exact spot that his friends had died; deaths that he had been responsible for, people could not help but scratch their heads, wondering whether the dead had returned fr...

Have you ever felt strange, like something is just not quite right but you can’t exactly explain why? Have you ever stepped into a room that seemed to exist on an entire different layer of reality, or have had an interaction with a person that the next moment just wasn’t there? There are many stories online about people claiming to have accidentally stumbled into a different dimension, and though...

Stranded in the middle of the night with your car stuck in a ditch. It is a place and time where all manner of things can happen, and I imagine that all the worse scenarios run through your mind as you try to call for help. Your friends don’t pick up their phone – of course, it is the middle of the night. But luckily your parents do. They agree to come and get you, and all is well, isn’t it? But a...

Sometimes you get the feeling that you are not quite alone, but as you look around, there is no one there. Yet again there is that feeling like there is someone standing right behind you. It is one of those common feelings of paranoia everybody gets once in a while. But in one instance in history it seems that this feeling was quite right, as the students of a girl’s school later swore, their teac...

You perhaps feel safest when you are in your own bed, underneath the blankets, under the silent cover of night. But this is also the time when you feel most vulnerable. It is not without reason that children cry out in the night about a monster underneath the bed. We all fear the bogeyman and the chance that he might be lurking in the dark shadows of the night, and for some, this fear becomes real...

History is filled with the strangest stories, and I love diving into them and finding out what’s really behind them. Who was the man in the iron mask? How did Rasputin survive being murdered multiple times? And what’s the deal with the missing children of Hamlin? My podcast, certainly strange, is a collection of bizarre tales such as these. In each episode, I tell one of these stories and try to s...

Do you know that feeling of being watched, that feeling upon your back, creeping up your spine, that you are not alone? Imagine that feeling, that lingering feeling, and living with it for the rest of your life? This is the nightmare faced by Maria and Derek Broaddus. And it all started simply with a letter, delivered to their newly bought home, signed The Watcher. Certainly Strange is a podcast a...

William Townsend was an everyday sort of criminal. All his criminal acts were quite ordinary. Though brutal and vile acts, they lacked any type of pizazz or showmanship. You might wonder how such an unnoteworthy person could have become the centrepiece of one of the greatest criminal mysteries of the 19th century. Certainly Strange is a podcast about the unexplainable. Each episode features anothe...

Being a lighthouse keeper is a lonely business. Especially when you are located on an island with no other people around besides your colleagues. There are only grass planes and an endless grey sea. There is nowhere to go. What, then, if all lighthouse keepers suddenly disappeared? Certainly Strange is a podcast about the unexplainable. Each episode features another strange tale, claimed to be bas...

They ate the prime minister. Quite a gruesome sentence, isn’t it? But it was exactly what happened in the Netherlands in 1672. Johan de Witt was blamed for everything that went wrong. Under his rule, the Republic had flourished as the greatest trading nation in the world and possessed the greatest fleet upon the sea under the command of the great admiral Michiel de Ruyter. But when war broke out o...