Dark Histories

Hungary during the first world war was a difficult place to live, especially if you happened to live in one of the many rural villages, far away from the grand city of Budapest, where the harsh conditions imposed on a country losing a war bit the hardest. Even if you managed to survive all the fighting, the riots, the violent occupations, or the Spanish Flu, there was always the possibility that y...

Sightings of winged creatures flying through the sky have long been a staple of folklore, mythology and legend across the world and across time and cultures. In the ancient world, Gods and monsters were depicted with enormous, scaled and feathered wings, whilst in modern times, sightings have become more and more diverse, from thunderbirds, to the mysterious Mothman. Three years before the one of...

Since the 1960s California has always been a place associated with alternative beliefs, countercultural movements and alternative lifestyles. The hippy movement, with it’s summer of love, fueled by the west coast psychedelic music scene will always be a highlight from the era, but the truth is, the state of California’s links to alternative beliefs go back much further and manifested in much stran...

Part two of this years Christmas Campfire is here! I hope you all had a lovely Christmas and wishing you a very happy and healthy New Year! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Merry Christmas everyone! Thank you so much for your kind support throughout the year, to wrap us up for Christmas, here is this years campfire stories episode. There were loads of great submissions again this year, certainly enough for two episodes, so here is the first part and the second shall follow on shortly! Cheers and Merry Christmas to you and yours xx Learn more about your ad choices. Vi...

For the final episode of this season, at least until the Christmas Campfire episode, here's a little extra from the Patreon bonus feed, originally recorded around Halloween. Thanks so much for all your support this season, here's to season eight (!!) starting in January. ------- This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp, check out betterhelp.com/darkhistories to get 10% off your first month.   Also...

Having risen to the status of international newspaper sensation, The Dalby Spook, or Gef the talking mongoose to those that knew him, was now poised to meet some of the world’s most infamous psychical researchers. Unfortunately, Gef was as shy amongst company as he was talkative to the Irvings. Yet still the story of Gef persisted until eventually, his name ended up associated with a debate that t...

In the 1930s a peculiar story began filtering out from the towns and villages surrounding a small farm on the western coast of the Isle of Man. Reports of a talking animal, a local spook that could sing the Manx national anthem, engross itself in the local gossip and hunt rabbits better than any of the local poachers, had made their rounds locally and shot out into the wilder world, confounding an...

For over a century, 19th century criminal history has been dominated by a single name. With his murders so violent, his acts so senseless, his victims so vulnerable and his legacy so profound, Jack the Ripper is as synonymous with Victorian London as the Queen herself. But whilst Jack was busy ripping, there was another series of murders being carried out that were equally as gruesome, executed by...

Follow MrBallen’s Medical Mysteries wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge the first 8 episodes, early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. The human body is a miracle. But when it’s not working, it can be the stuff of nightmares. On this new series from master storyteller MrBallen, we’re sharing medical horror stories and diagnostic mysteries that are surgicall...

In 1811 a series of brutal murders on the Ratcliffe Highway in the east end of London shook the locals to the very core with their unrivalled brutality and seemingly random, everyday targets. The murders exposed a fear in the city that had been bubbling away beneath the surface for several years and made some of the first inroads into the long debate over the reform of the way the police operated...

In the late 1500s, Britain was, spiritually speaking, in something of a confusing place for the average citizen. With the protestant reform in full swing, many old traditions were being unceremoniously cast aside by the officials, whilst still being clung to by the public, leading to a thriving underground trade in charms and trinkets and the quiet trade of conjurers, folk healers and those minist...

In an old estate situated just outside Chichester, on the South coast of England sits the HInton Ampner manor house. Rebuilt several times over its 1000 year existence, its current iteration is an innocuous brick building with little in common with the Tudor mansion that stood before and no hints to its creepy past. Once considered by the locals to be haunted, it was the site of an old gothic styl...

Amid the opulence of Belle Époque France, a trial took place that threatened to unravel the very meaning of human legal justice. Michel Eyraud and Gabrielle Bompard, two French citizens living their lives quietly in Paris were launched into the spotlight following the discovery of a decomposing corpse, the reconstruction of a destroyed wooden trunk and an international manhunt. Whilst their names...

On the eve of the worst winter for over a century and with France on the brink of war with the English, the 1400s in Paris were a tumultuous period. With a mentally unstable king and a collection of dukes, lords and nobles all vying for power in the background, catastrophe was only a single assassination away. Which is exactly what happened on the night of St Clements Day, 1407, when the Duke of O...

In the winter of 1922, a bizarre series of events fell across an isolated Nova Scotian farmhouse, leaving the locals grappling with a set of mysteries that were as terrifying as they were exciting. Unseen forces braided horses' tails and moved livestock, while bluish lights danced eerily around the property and soon, the situation escalated to a series of unexplained fires igniting within the farm...

In the 1920s as the world reeled from the first world war and the great flu pandemic, people in their collective grief turned to alternative systems of belief. Spiritualism, already making a new rise, was launched into the spotlight as proponents like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle waltzed around the globe giving lectures on the benefits of communicating with the dead. At the same time, there were others...

Hi everyone! Thanks for bearing with me over the short summer break! It's good to be back and I've got a cracking episode to launch into the second half of the season. This one has it all, ghosts, murder... well alright, it's got ghosts and murder, but that's not bad! It is a darker one and has some fairly brutal murdery bits, but I don't think it's especially worse than what we've seen before. Li...

It's time for a mid-season summer break and to tide us over I've got a couple of tales for you from the genius of M.R. James. I've picked two of my favourites to read, I hope you enjoy them! ------- This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp, check out betterhelp.com/darkhistories to get 10% off your first month. This episode is also sponsored by Babbel, check out babbel.com/darkhistories to get 55%...

Deep in the Pacific Ocean, 350 miles off the coast of Central America sits a small, unimposing island, surrounded in natural beauty. One of the island's lesser known claims to fame is that its tropical climate and lost-world appearance were the original inspiration for Jurassic Park's fictional Isla Nublar. Better known, however, are the myths and legends that pertain to the hoards of pirate treas...

When a young woman was found lying on her hearth rug, foaming at the mouth on New Years Day of 1845, few would have guessed that the winding path leading up to her death would result in a mystery that would become entwined with one of the key moments in the history of communication as well as one of the earliest cases of murder by Prussic Acid. In the long catalogue of Victorian poisonings, the ca...

In 1812, in the Manchester settlement of Vermont, a local man named Russell Colvin mysteriously vanished, and despite extensive searches, no trace of him was found. Years later, rumours began to circulate that Russell had been murdered and buried in a cellar on a piece of local farmland. Ghosts were seen, arrests were made, confessions witnessed and convictions completed, before Colvin strolled ba...

19th century London saw two of the most sensational public scares in its long history when the enigmatic Spring Heeled Jack stalked the alleyways of the capital city and in 1888, when Jack the Ripper enacted his reign of the streets, bringing about an autumn of terror that has since become infamous. One hundred years earlier, however, the streets were stalked by another threat, one that many consi...

During the First World War, the Ottoman Empire established a wide network of camps to house prisoners of war from the allied powers. Like most, the conditions were often poor, the treatment often harsh and the complexes often established in some of the most remote, rural and desolate landscapes. Yozgat was one such camp, comprising a small collection of buildings in a rural town commandeered by th...

Almost thirty years before the opening of the tomb of Tutankhamun and the fabled “curse of the pharaohs” was unleashed upon an excitable population, rumours and stories of another curse, attached to an ancient object, had been weaving its way into myth and legend as a complicated tangle of truth and fabrication. The “Anger of the Priestess of Amen-Ra” has links to several high profile deaths and e...