Dark Histories

In the 19th Century, the Elysian Fields in New Jersey, lay just a short boat trip away for New Yorkers looking to stretch their legs, take in some rural, countryside air or relax on the lawn of a riverside refreshment house with a glass of lemonade. Mostly famous for being the birthplace of modern baseball, the fields have another, somewhat less well-known story connected to their dense thickets a...

When the Allied forces hit the beaches of Normandy on D-Day, in June of 1944, everyone was well aware of the importance of success. Gaining a foothold on the beaches was the first step in the liberation of France, placing a force on the ground that would go on to steamroll to Berlin, ending the war outright. The plan was vast. multi-faceted and was as audacious as it was complicated, hinging on th...

Some time around the turn of the fifteenth century, a Cistercian monk of Byland Abbey took it upon himself to pen a series of ghost stories on the empty pages of a folio containing some of the library's more prestigious works. A medieval monk scribbling down ghost stories was, in truth, not entirely unusual. In the case of the Byland monk, however, the stories seemed to be less concerned with reli...

Depression-era New York was a tough time for a guy just looking to get by. The pressure of feeding a family, the lack of available work, the poor conditions suffered from much of the work that was available and at the end of the day, you couldn’t even relax with a drink or drown your sorrows in the bottom of a bottle. At least, not legally. Whilst laws attempted to stop people from drinking alcoho...

An evolution of centuries-long efforts to contact and communicate with the dead, the practice of recording voices from the great beyond was attempted almost as soon as radio and tape recording technology became widely available in consumer devices. From garbled electrical chirps emanating out of swathes of white noise, to perfectly clear, eloquent speech, the results across the years have been as...

Given a certain degree of infamy thanks to Charles Darwin, the Galapagos Islands are far less famous for their role in playing host to a tiny, isolated German ex-pat community in the 1930s, living quietly, surrounded by the unending blue of the Pacific Ocean. The motley crew of settlers included a doctor with philosophical aspirations, a pregnant housewife and an eccentric Baroness bent on creatin...

In the 1940s the Bahamas was something of a tropical paradise for the world’s rich. Used as a tax haven and an island getaway far removed from the battlefields of war, it was an idyllic retreat for those that could afford it. Its society had a somewhat darker underbelly, however, with ties to money launderers, smugglers, spies and mobsters. At least, that was how it started to appear in stories af...

High up in the peaks of the Himalayas, a footprint in the snow baffles a mountaineer as he attempts to climb Everest for the first time. Pulling out his camera, he prepares to snap a shot, eyeing the horizon nervously before placing his icepick down alongside the print for scale and bringing the viewfinder up to his eye. In India, a tea planter reads about the photograph in a local newspaper and t...

Happy New Year! Here is part of the Christmas (New year? Holiday?) Campfire episode! This year's campfire was a brilliant collection of stories, thank you so much to everyone who sent in stories and got involved. Onwards and upwards, here's to 2022! x Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Happy Holidays everyone! Here is the first part of this years Christmas Campfire episode and I have to say a massive thank you to everyone who sent stories in! This year the Campfire episode had overwhelming interest from everyone and there were so many great stories from everyone, it was such an enjoyable experience reading them and collating them for the episode,...

From the ancient pages of the Old Norse Edda to the interwar pages of American adventure magazines, the depths of our oceans have, in imagination, been host to unspeakable monsters for many hundreds of years. In modern times, the phrase “Here Be Dragons” has been absorbed into popular culture as titles for books, films, TV shows, bands and video games, all this despite the fact that it only ever a...

New York journalism in 1897 was in a pretty technicolor space. Newspapers, so long the grey, stolid, medium of the merchants and businessman, were instead being filled with lurid stories of murder, scandal and drunken debauchery and the public were loving it. As papers fought for readers in the streets, sometimes quite literally, the stories that filled the pages and the methods utilised on order...

Prior to the First World War, ghostly apparitions across battlefields tended to be confined to large scale skirmishes fought in the skies. In America, Modern folklore has helped to spawn a cottage industry within the tourist trade of Civil War battlefields. The equation of such high death rates, paired with intense levels of trauma seems to equate to an acceptance that wars were surely the perfect...

When Harry Price published his first book covering Borley Rectory in 1940, he would have been well aware of how sensational, and potentially controversial, the title would appear. “The Most Haunted House in England” shot Borley Rectory to fame, cementing the name in history with the likes of Jack the Ripper, The Salem Witch Trials and later, The Amityville Horror. That the contents of the book sti...

1938 saw one of the world's most famous media hoaxes terrify a nation of unexpecting listeners when the original War of the Worlds radio broadcast was sent out across the airwaves unannounced, leading many to believe it to be a genuine news item. Somewhat more obscure is the tale of its precursor, when 103 years earlier in August of 1835, daily New York newspaper The Sun ran a week-long series of...

The North American mineral rushes of the 19th Century saw hundreds of thousands flock to mountains and mines across the continent in search of fame and fortune, from panning for gold to working long, dangerous shifts down poorly run mines, entire industries exploded overnight, sucking in workers from around the world. During the San Juan Silver Rush of the 1870s, one of these workers was a young m...

Hi everyone, I'm taking a small summer break for a couple of weeks, so to cover the gap I have a few older patreon bonus episodes to put out for the main feed and give everyone a chance to hear them. Here is an interview I did with Professor Derek Abbott on the recent news about the Exhumation efforts in the Somerton Man case.  Professor Derek Abbott is Director of the Centre for Biomedical Engine...

In Victorian England, fishing all manner of filth, detritus and human body parts from the Thames River in London was not such an unusual affair. Used for centuries as a dumping ground and waste disposal, it became so bad by the mid 19th Century that it was renamed “The Great Stink”. In 1879, a coal porter pulled out an old wooden box and unearthed one of the more macabre treats the river has tosse...

In 1628, the Batavia, a flagship Dutch Indiaman left the port of Texel in the Netherlands bound for the Dutch capital in the East Indies filled to the upper decks with gold, silver, gems and jewellery, along with a crew made up of a host of down and out soldiers, sailors and officers. Life in the Dutch East India Company was notoriously hard, but the crew aboard the Batavia were in for a special k...

The life of Percy Harrison Fawcett was never short of adventure. An amateur explorer who obtained a gold medal for his services to the Royal Geographical Society, in a time long before planes, GPS and radio communication. He was a man with a story and a character so much larger than life, that popular fiction has drawn influence on them for years, from Arthur Conan Doyle's “The Lost World” to the...

In 1885 a terrifying string of attacks in Austin, Texas erupted through the city, preying on the servant class. An unknown attacker, or band of attackers, broke into the residences of servants across the city, striking many of them in the head with an axe. The attacks carried on for months with police making little advancement until the night of Christmas Eve saw two of the city's gentry struck do...

In 1953, a strange story crept out of the Philippines, when newspapers began reporting on the Dracula Girl, a young, Filipino vagrant, who had been arrested for prostitution and who now appeared to be facing even darker powers, as she battled with a pair of tormentors, collectively known as The Thing. For over two weeks, doctors, reporters, prison guards and inmates watched over the strange behavi...

Hey everyone, just a quick message and to let you all know that all the recent technical difficulties the podcast has been having that has been stopping the feed from distributing the podcast should be all fixed! Huzzah! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The end of the 18th Century saw the birth of a long line of religious movements focused on the end of days and the biblical second coming. Central to this string of beliefs was an unimposing domestic servant who began to have visions in her mid-life, which she claimed were divine in nature, eventually leading to her insistence that she was a prophetess and at the young age of 64, was pregnant with...

  In the late Spring of 1937, the murder of a young Italian immigrant stormed the Paris headlines. The first murder to have taken place on the Metro, it was a baffling affair with no witnesses and a murder of unusual precision. As the country mired in political turmoil, newspapers filled their columns with rumours of the victims life, quickly filling the information void with sensational stories o...