Dark Histories

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...

“In war, one of our great protections against the dangers of air attack after nightfall will be the "blackout". On the outbreak of hostilities all external lights and street lighting would be totally extinguished so as to give hostile aircraft no indication as to their whereabouts. But this will not be fully effective unless you do your part, and see to it that no lighting in the house where you l...

In the winter of 1896, a spate of airship sightings spread out from California, stampeding across the United States until, in the Spring of 1897, they hit a wall in the midwest, after a brief flirtation on the East Coast. The sightings totalled in their tens of thousands and many included fantastical descriptions of both the ship and the people riding it. As the ships flew from state to state, the...

  Haunted human remains are a trope popular in modern horror, from the twisted ivory puppet in the House on Haunted Hill to the skeletal corpses, floating in the swimming pool of Poltergeist, human bones have long held a place of fear, worship and power throughout history and cultures, eventually manifesting within the horror genre of the 20th Century. At the time of the English Civil War, the whi...

  With a long and winding path through history from ancient times, to the renaissance and beyond, Alchemy was a vast subject with a multitude of practitioners, from the legendary and mythical to established medical gentry and scholarly clergy. In fact and fiction, they were men and women obsessed by the magical bending of the laws of nature to their will, creating gold, the elixir of life, stones...

The mid 19th Century newspaper headlines saw no shortage of cases involving poison. Unsurprisingly, given the relative ease of obtaining such deadly materials, a long narrative of death, whether by accident or design, formed throughout the period and still today the Victorian period is often characterised as something of a heyday for poisons and poisoners. From time to time, salacious stories of a...

Heya! I hope you had a great Christmas and are relaxing and taking it easy before the New Year. Here's the second part to this years Christmas Campfire. I messed up the timing a little bit and so this episode is not as long as I thought it was going to be, but it was nice to have it in two parts anyhow! I hope you enjoy it, here's to 2021 and a much better year than the mess that was 2020! Learn m...

Merry Christmas everyone! It wouldn't be Christmas in 2020 if it wasn't at least a bit of a cock-up right?! Half way through recording this episode, the heart of my recording setup completely gave up on me and crapped out, so I had to re-record it the only way I had available, which means the audio quality is a little diminished, though I think I did a reasonable job on it in the end. Hopefully yo...

From Salem to East Anglia, Bordeaux to the black forest of Germany, it seems there is no end of infamous witch trials that took place in history, spanning hundreds of years and thousands of miles. Somewhat less well known are the many hundreds of werewolf trials that took place alongside them and with such a degree of crossover, that made them ultimately, synonymous with the occult world of demons...

Wrong email address for the submissions! My apologies! The link in the shows original notes should be right, so if you went by that rather than my nonsense, then you'll be fine anyhow, but just in case, the email address for all Christmas Campfire submissions is: social@darkhistories.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

(There was a bit of an issue with the sound getting scrambled in the original upload of this episode. If you find you bump into this, please delete the file and re-download and you should get the updated, fixed version! Apologies!) The interwar years saw a sharp rise in followers of Spiritualism throughout Europe and the wider world. Family houses in the most benign suburban neighbourhoods curtain...

The disappearance of James Eugene Harrison, a young entrepreneur who set out on a business trip in the winter of 1958 and never returned, signalled a tragic loss for his family. Their life suddenly flipped on its head. Mrs Harrison slowly came to terms with the difficult life of a widow with two young sons to raise. A Californian convict admitted to the murder, complete with a detailed confession...

In the mid-1970s, a series of purported supernatural events took place in a small, yellow, wooden slatted house in a suburb of Bridgeport, Connecticut. At a time when demonic forces were very much in vogue, the Goodin family were plagued by all manner of phenomena that quickly drew the attention of the national press, along with thousands of curious onlookers. Despite the contemporary fervour that...

Rumoured as a top contender as the inspiration for F. Scott Fitzgeralds most enigmatic of characters, Jay Gatsby, Joseph Bowne Elwell was among other things, a property developer, race horse owner, author, socialite, broker, tutor and, last but certainly not least, thoroughly famous  card player. Winning sums that totalled into the tens of thousands on a nightly basis, he built both wealth and a s...

There is no shortage of famous names associated with the Golden Age of Piracy. Captain Kidd, Blackbeard, Henry Morgan or Jack Rackham hold such levels of fame, they have become household names, legends with largely fictional tales still told of their lives at sea. There is, however, one man who managed to outdo them all. His largest, most audacious crime is one of the most successful pirate raids...

In the spring of 1871, a young servant girl was found in the middle of the night, lying on the ground following a brutal attack that would eventually prematurely end her life. Following a series of fantastic police blunders, a suspect was arrested, tried and promptly acquitted. As far as the police were concerned, the murder had been solved, but the culprit had escaped the hand of justice and as s...

In 1921, a series of accidents on a small, rural road, carving through the heart of the boggy marshes and fields of Dartmoor, in South East England, led to a brief explosion in excitement concerning the ghostly image of a pair of disembodied hands, forcing drivers off the road and into potentially fatal accidents. Following a little dash of press magic, the story took hold and grew for over a hund...

Just before dawn, on the outskirts of New York harbour, a small Sloop sailed listlessly into the bay. The ship had no crew, no lights and a deck covered in blood. It presented a mystery to the local police, who set their detectives on the case which led to a manhunt up the East Coast of the United States in pursuit of a phantom. The police may have had a description, a name, but they had no idea o...

When William Harrison left his house on a calm midsummer evening of 1660, no one expected him to not return for two years, Except maybe William himself… Or maybe not. Equally surprising would have been the confessions that would follow of his murder from a trio of servants, one of whom was an alleged witch and none of whom can possibly have been guilty, given that the victim was very much alive. L...