The Velvet Guillotine

March 25, 1911. A Saturday, payday, a quarter to five. On the top floors of a Lower Manhattan loft, five hundred workers — mostly young Jewish and Italian immigrant women — are finishing the week's last hour at the Triangle Waist Company. The stairwell doors are locked. They usually are. A scrap bin catches. Eighteen minutes later, one hundred and forty-six people are dead, many with their pay...

Matthew Hopkins was not a judge. He was not an official inquisitor. He was not appointed by Parliament. He called himself the Witchfinder General. And for a brief, brutal stretch of the English Civil War, that was enough. In this Velvet Guillotine episode, April Rain examines Matthew Hopkins, the self-styled Witchfinder General whose name became permanently attached to one of the darkest outbreaks...

Before the witch trials became fire, they became paperwork. The Malleus Maleficarum — the Hammer of Witches — was published in 1486 and became one of the most infamous texts in the history of European witch persecution. Written by Dominican inquisitor Heinrich Kramer, with Jacob Sprenger traditionally attached to its publication history, the book did not invent fear of witches. It did something mo...

The main episode gave you Würzburg and Bamberg as events: the machinery, the chronicle, the purpose-built prison, the forced confessions, the names, the men who kept the system running. This postscript does something colder. It sets aside the theology — the devil, the pact, the Sabbath, the supernatural apparatus the people inside the witch trials believed they were operating within — and looks at...

Between 1626 and 1631, the city of Würzburg became one of the deadliest centers of witch persecution in European history. Under Prince-Bishop Philipp Adolf von Ehrenberg, accusations became procedure, procedure became machinery, and machinery became mass execution. The Würzburg Chronicle does not read like a horror story. It reads like a ledger. The wife of a brewer. The blind girl. A boy of twelv...

On the morning of August 11, 1676, the sisters of a Benedictine convent in Palma di Montechiaro found Sister Maria Crocifissa della Concezione on the floor of her cell. Her face was smeared with ink. Beside her was a sheet of paperbearing fourteen lines of writing no one could read. She said the Devil had attacked her in the night, seized her hand, and written the letter himself. In his Dastardly...

Most places hold their history quietly — the walls hold their tongues. You walk into a great cathedral, look up at the ceiling, and you do not see what happened here in January of 897. Sacred spaces excel at absorbing the parts of their past that don't suit the candlelight. The building would prefer you didn't. And then, darlings, you find out what happened inside the Archbasilica of San G...

Here is the thing about Tomás de Torquemada. The ones who knew they were doing evil and did it anyway at least had a conscience to override. Torquemada had nothing to silence. He believed — completely, without visible doubt — that the torture he authorized was an act of love, and the people he sent to the fire souls he was rescuing. A body destroyed now was a small price against a soul damned fore...

How does an institution convince the world that it cannot be wrong? Not that it is usually right — that it cannot be wrong, that there is a category of its pronouncements where error is impossible. That is not perfection. It is removing the smoke detector and calling the house fireproof. The Church made the claim formal in 1870; the machine behind it took eight hundred years to build. In this Dast...

You have just come from the Cadaver Synod — a pope digging up his dead predecessor, propping the body on a throne in full vestments, convicting it, and throwing it in the Tiber. You may think that is as bad as it ever got. That there is nowhere to go from a corpse in a chair. Oh, darlings. There is so much further to go. In this postscript, April Rain runs a guided tour through the most unhinged s...

January, 897. Rome. A sitting pope had his dead predecessor exhumed, dressed in full papal regalia, propped upright on a throne, and put on trial. A deacon was appointed to speak for the corpse. The corpse lost. This is the Cadaver Synod, and it is not a metaphor. Pope Stephen VI dug Pope Formosus out of the ground — nine months dead — convicted him on every charge, cut the blessing fingers from h...

Think about what you assume happens to your body after you die. You assume your wishes will be respected. That your name will stay attached to your remains. That someone will claim you — and that if they don't, the institution holding you will operate within a legal framework that treats your body as belonging, in some meaningful sense, to you or to your people. Those assumptions are not universal...

In a yellow house in Monroe, Connecticut, inside a glass case, sits a Raggedy Ann doll. Red yarn hair. Stitched triangular nose. Faded smile. A mass-produced object — one of millions of identical dolls made in the mid-twentieth century. You probably know someone who had one. On the front of the case, in capital letters: POSITIVELY DO NOT OPEN. She has sat in that chair for over fifty years. In Aug...

There is a small square in Edinburgh's Old Town that most tourists walk past without stopping. It sits just off the Royal Mile, tucked behind the university's medical buildings, unremarkable in the way that places with very remarkable histories often are. A few historic plaques. Some academic architecture. The kind of quiet institutional atmosphere that communicates: serious work happens here. Has...

Content note: This episode contains discussion of the murder of children, torture, and the abuse of power. Listener discretion is strongly advised. Joan of Arc had a companion. You know Joan. Everyone knows Joan. The man who rode beside her at Orléans, who fought alongside her at Patay, who held the title of Marshal of France at twenty-six years old — he is considerably less well known. His name w...

Content note: This episode contains discussion of racial medical exploitation and systemic injustice. Listen to Episode 2A first — these two episodes are designed as a diptych. The body trade ended. The logic didn't. In Episode 2A, April Rain followed the black market for human corpses from the resurrection men of Edinburgh to the Anatomy Act of 1832 — a century and a half of medicine consuming th...

Content note: This episode contains discussion of death, bodily violation, racial exploitation, and systemic violence. The knowledge that makes modern surgery possible — that sits at the foundation of every medical school on earth, that has saved hundreds of millions of lives — did not come from nowhere. It came from bodies. Specifically, it came from roughly a hundred and fifty years during which...

It is nine inches tall. The vellum is the color of old butter. You are wearing nitrile gloves. You are not allowed to bring in a pen. You turn the first page. There is a plant — or something plant-shaped, with leaves doing things leaves do not do. Underneath it is a block of writing. You can read English. You can sound your way through Latin, French, Italian on a menu. You have looked at Greek, Ar...

The main episode told you what happened in Strasbourg in the summer of 1518. The dancers. The musicians. The dead. This is the part nobody tells you after that. What happened to the survivors — the people who danced for days or weeks at a stretch, whose tendons tore and hearts gave out and bodies sustained damage they would spend months recovering from, if they recovered at all? What happened to F...

Six hundred and fifty victims. The most prolific female serial killer in recorded history. A noblewoman who tortured and murdered young women in her castle and bathed in their blood to preserve her youth. That's the story you know. Here's what the historical record actually says. In this episode of Dastardly Figures, host April Rain forensically dismantles one of history's most famous monster narr...

In the summer of 1518, a woman named Frau Troffea walked into the streets of Strasbourg and started dancing. She didn't stop. Within a month, hundreds of people were dancing alongside her — through the August heat, until their feet were destroyed, until their hearts gave out, until some of them simply died. And no one could stop them. The Dancing Plague of 1518 is one of the most documented and le...

What if everything you learned about history was the cleaned-up version? Velvet Guillotine is a dark history podcast that goes where textbooks don't — into the mechanisms of power, the bodies that paid for progress, and the stories that got buried so the wrong people could put their names on buildings. In this intro episode, host April Rain explains what Velvet Guillotine is, what it isn't...