Time & Tales Podcast

In early 1900s New York, a cook named Mary Mallon moved from one wealthy household to another while typhoid followed in her wake. This episode begins the story of “Typhoid Mary”: the Irish immigrant cook who seemed perfectly healthy, the baffling outbreaks that struck rich families instead of slums, and the medical investigation that changed public health history by identifying one of America’s fi...

In this second part of our Caligula series, Rome’s young emperor stops pretending to be merciful. We follow the purge of rivals and family members, the humiliation of the Senate, the money drain of spectacles and forced taxes, the horse-consul insult, the Jerusalem crisis, and the escalating paranoia that turned the palace into a death trap. This episode covers Caligula at his most volatile: the s...

This episode follows Caligula from “Little Boots,” the adored son of Germanicus, to one of the most infamous rulers in Roman history: his rise under Tiberius, the illness that changed his reign, the deaths of rivals and family members, the war with the Senate, and the assassination that ended his dynasty. In AD 37, Rome welcomed a young emperor from one of its most famous bloodlines, the son of Ge...

In Prague’s Old Town Square, a skeleton pulls a cord, the apostles pass behind tiny doors, the rooster crows, and one of Europe’s most famous clocks marks another hour. This episode follows the dark history and folklore of the Prague Astronomical Clock , or Orloj: a medieval marvel tied to legends of a blinded clockmaker, ghostly warnings, broken gears, and the belief that Prague will suffer if th...

In the final chapter of this three-part series, Time and Tales examines the leading suspects in the Cleveland Torso Murders, including Dr. Francis Sweeney, Frank Dolezal, and Willie Johnson. LaNae and CJ break down Eliot Ness’ investigation into the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run , the evidence tied to the murders, the links between victims Florence Polillo and Rose Wallace, theories involving morph...

By August 1938, the Cleveland Torso Murders had left bodies across Kingsbury Run, the Cuyahoga River, the lakefront, and the city’s industrial edges. In this second part, the case escalates when two more victims appear near the East 9th Street lakefront dump, practically under City Hall’s nose, and the pressure on Eliot Ness becomes impossible to ignore. This episode follows the investigation as i...

In 1930s Cleveland, bodies began turning up in places most of the city tried not to see: Kingsbury Run, the river flats, rail lines, and waste ground crowded with poverty during the Depression. In this episode, we begin the story of the Cleveland Torso Murders —also known as the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run case—and the nightmare that landed on Eliot Ness ’s desk when victims started appearing dec...

In 1892, in Exeter, Rhode Island, a grieving family exhumed the body of nineteen-year-old Mercy Brown in a desperate attempt to save her dying brother. This episode follows the real story behind one of America’s most famous vampire legends: tuberculosis, winter graves, folk belief, and the New England vampire panic that turned a family tragedy into a permanent piece of American folklore. We trace...

In the United States, abandoned mines still hide across deserts, mountains, forests, and public land: open shafts, flooded pits, collapsed tunnels, and unstable ground left behind by gold rushes, hard-rock mining, and coal extraction. In this episode, we trace the dark history of abandoned mines from California and Nevada to Colorado and Appalachia, and ask a harder question beneath it all: when p...

In 1912, rare-book dealer Wilfrid Voynich opened a small vellum codex in Italy and found a manuscript unlike anything he had seen before: strange plants, bathing women, foldout diagrams, star charts, and page after page of writing no one could read. More than a century later, the Voynich Manuscript remains one of the most famous unsolved texts in the world. This episode traces Voynich’s discovery,...

In March 1314, Jacques de Molay—the last Grand Master of the Knights Templar —stood in Paris, withdrew his confession, and was burned alive. In this episode, we trace how a wealthy military order founded to protect pilgrims became the target of King Philip IV: mass arrests on Friday, October 13, 1307, confessions extracted under torture, papal pressure, and the final destruction of the Templars in...

On the night of August 21, 1986, Lake Nyos in Cameroon released a massive cloud of carbon dioxide that rolled down the surrounding valleys and suffocated people and animals in their sleep. By morning, thousands are dead, in one of the deadliest and strangest natural disasters of the twentieth century. This episode follows the Lake Nyos disaster from the crater lake’s volcanic geology to the silent...

In August 1869, John Wesley Powell’s first Colorado River expedition hits its hardest day: a violent rapid, battered boats, sour rations—and a split at Separation Canyon, where three men choose to climb out of the gorge and walk toward settlements instead of facing more whitewater. In the Time and Tales Podcast Season 1 finale,, we follow the river from Green River Station to the mouth of the Virg...

In May 1993, three eight-year-old boys vanished in West Memphis, Arkansas. Their bodies were found the next day in a drainage ditch at Robin Hood Hills—naked, bound with their own shoelaces. Within days, a town already steeped in Satanic Panic turned away from careful investigation and toward a story it already believed: that three local teens who liked metal, black clothes, and occult books must...

In the summer of 1518, a woman stepped into a Strasbourg street and began to dance—and didn’t stop. Within days, dozens of people were staggering and convulsing beside her in the heat, some dancing until they collapsed from exhaustion. City leaders watched a crowded market square turn into one of Europe’s strangest public-health crises. This Time and Tales Podcast episode walks through Strasbourg’...

In June 1912, someone entered the Moore home in Villisca, Iowa, took the family’s own axe, and killed Josiah and Sarah, their four children, and two visiting Stillinger sisters as they slept. The doors were locked from the inside, faces and mirrors were covered, a lamp was turned low—and before investigators could secure the house, the town had already trampled through the scene. In this Time and...

A king who helped write the script for Salem. In this Time & Tales dark history episode, we go back to 1590s Scotland, where James VI—later James I of England—personally questioned accused “witch” Agnes Sampson, convinced that storms against his marriage voyage were assassination attempts raised by the Devil. From the North Berwick witch trials to his demonological handbook Daemonologie and th...

A “shortcut” that turned into a death sentence. In this Time & Tales dark history episode, we follow the Donner Party into the Sierra Nevada winter of 1846–47: from hopeful departure on the California Trail to the fatal choice to take Lansford Hastings’ cutoff, ignoring Shoshone and Paiute warnings about the Wasatch and the Great Salt Lake Desert—lost weeks that became lost lives once early sn...

Edgar Allan Poe — the writer who invented the detective story— also left behind one of America’s strangest unsolved deaths. In this Time & Tales dark history episode, we follow Edgar Allan Poe’s final week in 1849: from his disappearance in Richmond to his sudden reappearance in Baltimore outside Gunner’s Hall on election day, delirious and dressed in another man’s clothes. We walk through the...

A missing climber’s boot has reopened one of mountaineering’s oldest cold cases. In this Time & Tales dark history episode, we journey to Mount Everest through the story of George Mallory and Andrew “Sandy” Irvine , the 1924 British climbers who vanished high on the north side and may—or may not—have reached the summit decades before Hillary and Norgay. We trace the original expedition, Noel O...

A Celtic ruler nearly broke the Roman Empire in Britain. In 60–61 C.E., Boudicca of the Iceni went from Roman citizen to avenger after Roman officials seized her lands and assaulted her daughters—triggering a massive uprising that burned Camulodunum, Londinium, and Verulamium to the ground. In this Time & Tales episode, we dive into Boudicca’s life, the politics of Roman Britain, the assault t...

Between 1764 and 1767, the remote French province of Gévaudan was terrorized by a mysterious predator that parish records called La Bête —“The Beast.” More than 100 people were killed in daylight attacks that witnesses insisted were “like a wolf, yet not a wolf.” Royal hunters claimed victory, yet the killings continued until a local farmer brought down a creature whose proportions defied easy exp...

In 2015, LiDAR scans of the Honduran Mosquitia revealed plazas, earthworks, and ruins long linked to the “White City” or Ciudad Blanca. A joint team of scientists, archaeologists, and filmmakers went in—and came back with a parasitic disease that tabloids called a curse. This episode traces Indigenous origins of the legend, the expeditions and tech that finally pierced the canopy, and how archaeol...

Gilles de Rais, medieval noble and alleged serial killer, was once a war hero who fought beside Joan of Arc. In 1440, a missing boy in Nantes led investigators to the baron’s estates, where rumors of vanished children surrounded one of the richest men in France. This dark history podcast episode follows his rise from hero of Orléans to infamous killer, walks through the trials and testimony, and a...