Fresh Hell Podcast

Before there was Hollywood scandal, there was THE Hollywood scandal. In this first part of our series on the murder of William Desmond Taylor, we're setting the scene: Los Angeles in the 1920s, the silent film industry at its decadent, chaotic peak, and the lives of the people who would soon be swept up in one of the most notorious unsolved murders in Hollywood history. We’re talking about the met...

This week’s episode covers everything from the grim legacy of racist alligator myths to actual gator attacks, pet alligators ordered through the mail, and that one time a gator rang a doorbell in Florida. You’ll learn why the myth of sewer gators exists (and how Eleanor the Nile crocodile ended up beneath Paris), what black caimans are capable of (spoiler: it’s a lot), and how to keep your pets an...

This week, we’re trading murder for mayhem of the ancient reptilian variety. We take a deep dive into the world of crocodilians—those prehistoric apex predators that have been lurking in rivers, swamps, and sometimes swimming pools for millions of years. From the surprisingly gentle Chinese alligator to the misunderstood American alligator and the unexpectedly terrifying black caiman, we explore t...

In this week’s solo episode, Johanna takes you to the picture-perfect Austrian town of Werfen — home to falcons, frozen caves, The Sound of Music, and once... a baker with a deadly secret. Johann Oberreiter was a respected businessman, a model Catholic, and even a former town leader. But behind closed doors, he was also a poisoner. In the mid-19th century, two young women in his household died sud...

So... you almost died. Or you technically did—for a moment. And then came the tunnel, the music, the relatives made of light, the surgeons flapping like chickens, or the sudden drop into a shadowy void full of screaming. Welcome to the Fresh Hell guide to near-death experiences. In this episode we explore what happens when people come this close to the other side. We cover ancient NDE accounts fro...

Congratulations—you’ve died! Now what? In this our version of the "Handbook For the Recently Deceased" (and the morbidly curious). We take you on a cross-cultural tour of the afterlife. Whether you’re heading for a bureaucratic judgment hall, a tunnel of light, a reincarnation lottery, or just... absolute nothingness, we’ve got you covered. This episode explores what different religions and belief...

In this week’s episode, Johanna takes us deep into the shadows of pre-WWI Austria-Hungary to tell the true story of Colonel Alfred Redl, once one of the most trusted man in the Austro-Hungarian military....and also its most infamous traitor. From his modest beginnings in Lemberg to the very top of the empire’s intelligence apparatus, Redl’s rise was as improbable as his betrayal was devastating. B...

In part two of our deep dive into the 1982 Tylenol Murders, we pick up with the immediate aftermath of the cyanide-laced capsules that killed seven innocent people in the Chicago area. As the city and the whole nation started to panic, Johnson & Johnson faced a nightmare scenario. We’ll walk you through the frantic investigation, the theories that didn’t pan out, the suspect who looked promising b...

In September of 1982, a 12-year-old girl in suburban Chicago took a Tylenol for a cold—and never got back up. Within days, six more people would die the same way. The connection? A bottle of Extra Strength Tylenol and a horrifying dose of potassium cyanide. In this first part of our two-part series, Johanna and Annie walk through the events that stunned the nation: who the victims were, how invest...

This week, we’re taking a peel behind the Vatican’s heaviest doors. From popes who put each other on trial...AFTER DEATH...to rumors of devilish deals and sweating tombs. We’ll also tell you about the Vatican’s key master (yes, that’s a real job), the Room of Tears (because popes cry too), and how sometimes it's important that "they hang well"! Vatican, Vatican Museums, Pope Sylvester II, Cadaver...

In the final part of our Nellie Bly series, we follow her through yet another reinvention ...as wife to industrialist Robert Seaman and, after his death, one of the first female CEOs in the U.S. We look at her lesser-known interviews with a ten-year-old Helen Keller and the terrifying Lizzie Halliday, and how she returned to journalism under William Randolph Hearst after her business collapsed und...

In Part 3 of our Nellie Bly series, the whole world starts to pay attention. We’ll follow her from the publication of Ten Days in a Madhouse to her globe-circling race against the fictional Phileas Fogg. Along the way, Nellie becomes a household name, fields marriage proposals from strangers, and gets immortalized on trading cards and weird ads. But fame doesn’t make her lazy. She investigates sha...

In 1887, Nellie Bly got herself committed to one of the most notorious mental institutions in the country — not because she needed help, but because she wanted the truth. In Part 2, we follow Nellie through the gates of Blackwell’s Island, where the food was inedible, the baths were freezing, and silence wasn’t just expected — it was enforced. What she found wasn’t a place for healing. It was a pl...

Before she became one of the most daring journalists in history, Nellie Bly was Elizabeth Jane Cochran — a smart, stubborn girl from Pennsylvania with very few options and even fewer rights. In this episode, we’re going back to the beginning: the poverty, the abusive stepfather, the letter that launched her career, and the fight to be taken seriously in a newsroom that didn’t want women there at a...

From flood panics and flaming cities to gas masks for comet poison, humanity has always had a flair for predicting the end of the world—with spectacular inaccuracy. In this special palate cleanser episode, Annie and Johanna walk us through some of the weirdest, funniest, and most deeply unserious doomsday predictions in history. We'll cover the Great Flood that never came in 1524, London’s fire-an...

Between 1960 and 1967, three children disappeared without a trace from the small city of Pirmasens, in southwest Germany. Walter Broschat. Klaus-Dieter Stark. Eveline Lübbert. All of them were between 9 and 10 years old. All vanished on a Friday. And to this day, not a single clue has been found. In this episode, we revisit one of Germany’s most haunting cold cases. We’ll examine what we know abou...

In this episode, we look at the brief and heartbreaking life of Dorothy Stratten—Playmate of the Month in August 1979, aspiring actress, and the victim of one of Hollywood’s most disturbing murder cases. We trace Dorothy’s rise from a Dairy Queen in Vancouver to the pages of Playboy, her toxic relationship with Paul Snider, her affair with director Peter Bogdanovich, and the events that led to her...

In this fifth and final part of the Lizzie Halliday story, Lizzie escapes the electric chair—but not justice. She continues to lash out, nearly killing the sheriff’s wife, and ultimately stabbing a beloved young nurse more than 200 times in what would become the first recorded line-of-duty death of a female law enforcement officer in the U.S. Along the way, Lizzie makes a claim to her murdered hus...

After the discovery of two women’s bodies buried in the manure pile of the Halliday barn, the search for Paul Halliday continues. But as authorities dig deeper—literally and figuratively—they uncover even more horrors. Lizzie Halliday remains in custody, shifting between moments of eerie calm and violent outbursts, but she isn’t done hiding evidence just yet. Meanwhile, the identities of the two m...

Lizzie Halliday has left a trail of destruction behind her...arson, theft, fraud, and at least one suspicious death! But in this episode, her crimes take a truly horrifying turn. After a year in a mental institution, Lizzie is released back into the care of her much older husband, Paul Halliday. His family and neighbors are already wary of her, and with good reason. Fires, violent outbursts, and u...

Lizzie Halliday is back, and somehow, she’s only getting started. In this episode, we pick up where we left off—with Lizzie abandoning another husband, scamming her way into new homes, and setting literal fires along the way. She takes her insurance fraud scheme to new levels, makes a scene at her father’s grave, and leaves a path of destruction across the Northeast. Meanwhile, a traveling peddler...

Lizzie Halliday is often called America’s first female serial killer, but long before she made headlines, she was already leaving a trail of chaos behind her. In this episode, we look at her early years—from her family’s immigration from Ireland to her first marriages and the, let’s say, unfortunate fates of the men in her life. Lizzie had a habit of marrying quickly, fighting dirty, and possibly...

In this episode of Fresh Hell, we’re heading up to the remote and brutal heights of the Säntis mountain in Switzerland, where, in February 1922, Heinrich and Magdalena Haas were found murdered in their isolated weather station. Their killer? A man they knew, a man who had once wanted Heinrich’s job, and a man who decided to settle his grudge in the most violent way possible. Säntis double murder,...

In our final episode on the world of Freak Shows, we’re closing the curtain with the incredible, tragic, and sometimes triumphant stories of the performers themselves. Meet Schlitzie, the performer who inspired Freaks (1932), a beloved and misunderstood figure of the sideshow world. Krao, the so-called “Missing Link,” whose life challenges the cruel narratives forced upon her. Myrtle Corbin, the "...

This week, we’re bringing you two of the most fascinating and deeply unsettling stories from the world of freak shows: Chang & Eng Bunker, the original Siamese twins, and Julia Pastrana, the so-called ‘Bear Woman.’ Chang and Eng weren’t just a medical curiosity—they were brilliant businessmen, plantation owners, and, oh yeah, enslavers. Their story is full of contradictions—two men who were once p...