Yore Town

THE ALIEN BURIED IN TEXAS: THE AURORA UFO CRASH OF 1897 Welcome to creepy season on the Yore Town Podcast! More than 125 years ago, something extraordinary supposedly happened in the little town of Aurora, Texas. On April 17, 1897, a mysterious flying machine reportedly appeared above the community, lost altitude, and crashed into a local judge's windmill. According to a newspaper report published...

On October 17, 1814, a 700-pound iron hoop fell from a massive wooden vat inside London’s Horse Shoe Brewery. The vat held more than one million pints of porter. The workers noticed the problem. They reported it. But hoops had slipped before, and nothing catastrophic had happened. About an hour later, the vat exploded. The resulting flood tore through the brewery, brought down a wall, and poured i...

Virginius Island was built because of the river. Factories harnessed the power of the Shenandoah. Workers followed the factories. Homes, roads, gardens and a school followed the workers. Before long, a tiny island beside Harpers Ferry, West Virginia had become a thriving industrial community. Then, on September 30, 1870, the river rose. Fast. Reports preserved by the National Park Service describe...

THE GREAT DIAMOND HOAX OF 1872 What if you traveled hundreds of miles into the American West, discovered genuine diamonds with your own hands, and still got scammed? In 1872, Philip Arnold and John Slack convinced some of California's wealthiest businessmen that they had discovered an enormous diamond field. Their evidence was convincing. They had real gemstones, a secret location, and a mining en...

On Sunday night, September 5, 1926, the people of Dromcollogher, County Limerick, gathered for something special: a night at the movies. There was no cinema in the village, so roughly 150 people climbed into a wooden loft above a hardware store where a traveling film show had been set up. The room had a narrow staircase, barred windows, highly flammable nitrate film and candles being used near the...

In 1901, Buffalo, New York, built a city that wasn't supposed to last. The Pan-American Exposition was a spectacular World's Fair designed to show millions of visitors what the new century could become. Enormous buildings surrounded illuminated fountains, hundreds of thousands of electric lights transformed the grounds after dark, and the power of nearby Niagara Falls helped create a spectacle unl...

On September 1, 1894, Hinckley, Minnesota was a booming lumber town surrounded by forests dried by months of drought and littered with highly combustible logging debris. By the next morning, much of the town was gone. In this episode of Yore Town , Matt and Megh revisit the Great Hinckley Fire and the terrifying hours when an ordinary Saturday became a fight for survival. As the firestorm closed i...

On the afternoon of August 26, 1926, 57 men were working underground at the Clymer No. 1 coal mine near the small Pennsylvania community of Clymer. At exactly 1:00 PM, the mine exploded. Five or six minutes later, it exploded again. The second blast ripped through the already-damaged underground workings, destroyed parts of the ventilation system and sent flame and coal dust more than 100 feet int...

On the night of August 21, 1986, families living beneath Lake Nyos in Cameroon went to sleep with no reason to believe they were in danger. By morning, roughly 1,700 people were dead. There was no massive fire. No flood had swept through the villages. No lava had destroyed their homes. In many places, almost everything was still standing. The killer was the air itself. Lake Nyos had suddenly relea...

On August 14, 1936, thousands of people arrived in Owensboro, Kentucky before sunrise. They came to watch a man die. Rainey Bethea's hanging would become known as the last fully public execution in American history. Estimates placed the crowd between 10,000 and 20,000 people, nearly the size of Owensboro itself at the beginning of the decade. But what happened that morning, and what America rememb...

In July 1976, thousands of American Legion veterans gathered at Philadelphia’s luxurious Bellevue-Stratford Hotel. They came to celebrate America’s bicentennial, reconnect with old friends, and attend their annual convention. Then they went home. Within days, previously healthy men began developing high fevers, confusion, breathing problems, and a severe form of pneumonia. Some died shortly after...

Ottawa, Illinois Told Women to Lick Radioactive Paint At first glance, Ottawa, Illinois is a quiet river town with historic streets and small-town charm. But beneath that peaceful image lies the story of one of the most shocking industrial disasters in American history. In this episode of Yore Town, Matt and Megh explore the rise of the radium dial industry, the young women who were instructed to...

New London, Texas changed America forever—and most people have never heard why. New London: Why Gas Smells Like Rotten Eggs tells the true story behind the deadliest school disaster in American history. On March 18, 1937, nearly 300 students and teachers were killed when the London Consolidated School exploded without warning. There was no smell. No alarm. No chance to escape. Today, every time yo...

Bath, Michigan: The First Explosion Wasn't the End. The true crime history of the Bath School Disaster becomes even more disturbing after investigators uncover what really happened on May 18, 1927. Most people know the explosion. Almost nobody knows what happened next. As the people of Bath rushed to rescue children trapped beneath the collapsed school, the man responsible drove directly into the...

Bath, Michigan: The Bomb Beneath the Children. The true crime history of the Bath School Disaster begins with an almost impossible fact: for months, children attended class directly above explosives hidden beneath their school. On May 18, 1927, the small farming community of Bath Township, Michigan became the site of the deadliest mass murder at a school in American history. Nearly a century later...

Love Canal: The American Dream That Poisoned America is one of the most shocking true crime history and environmental disaster stories in American history. What began as a quiet neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York became one of the nation's darkest examples of government failure, buried toxic waste, and families fighting to save their children. Thousands of Americans believed they had found th...

Lily Dale's Forgotten Mystery | Yore Town Lily Dale's Forgotten Mystery takes us to a tiny community in western New York where thousands of people still travel hoping to hear from loved ones who have died. This is the true crime history, spiritual history, and unsolved mystery of one of America's most unusual small towns. Tucked away among lakes and old-growth trees, Lily Dale looks like any quiet...

Dryden Mystery: Inside the Village of the Damned explores one of the most disturbing chapters in New York true crime history. For nearly a decade, the small town of Dryden, New York became the center of a string of murders, disappearances, suspicious deaths, and tragedies that left residents wondering if their community had somehow become cursed. Nestled in the Finger Lakes region, Dryden looked l...

Black Donnellys: The Family Nobody Would Save is the chilling true crime history of a family whose name became synonymous with fear, violence, and controversy in rural Ontario. This forgotten mystery explores how decades of feuds, rumors, and small-town resentment culminated in one of the most infamous acts of vigilante justice in Canadian history. On a freezing February night in 1880, a mob desce...

Port Chatham: Why Did Everyone Leave? | Yore Town Port Chatham: Why Did Everyone Leave? That's the question that has haunted this abandoned Alaskan settlement for decades. In this true crime history and unsolved mystery deep dive, we investigate the legend of the Nantiinaq, the mysterious creature some locals believed drove an entire town away. Nestled on the remote coast of Alaska, Port Chatham w...

Deep in rural Quebec, the Burnt River Horror became one of the most disturbing true crime history cases Canada has ever seen. The Ant Hill Kids cult began as a peaceful back-to-the-land commune before transforming into a nightmare filled with manipulation, isolation, abuse, and horrifying amateur surgeries performed deep in the wilderness. The Ant Hill Kids case remains one of the most shocking fo...

Elisa Lam Mystery That Broke the Internet | Yore Town The Elisa Lam mystery became one of the most disturbing true crime history cases the internet has ever seen. What began as a missing person case inside Los Angeles’ infamous Cecil Hotel quickly spiraled into an unsolved mystery filled with conspiracy theories, disturbing footage, internet obsession, and heartbreaking reality. In this episode of...

Elisa Lam Mystery: The Hotel That Hides Secrets | Yore Town The Elisa Lam mystery is one of the most haunting unsolved mystery cases in modern true crime history—and it all leads back to a hotel with a past as dark as the story itself. In 2013, Elisa Lam vanished inside the infamous Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles, leaving behind an eerie elevator video that still confuses investigators and viewers to...

Hydesville NY Mystery Explained | Yore Town dives into one of the most chilling pieces of true crime history tied to an unsolved mystery that blurred the line between belief and deception. This Hydesville, New York case didn’t just scare a small town—it reshaped how people across the country viewed death, the unknown, and what might be hiding in plain sight. In 1848, a quiet farmhouse in Hydesvill...

Silent Twins Mystery: A Deadly Pact | Yore Town explores one of the most disturbing true crime history cases ever documented—an unsolved mystery involving two sisters whose bond ended in death. The Silent Twins mystery remains one of the strangest small-town crime stories, where psychology, isolation, and obsession collide. In a quiet corner of Wales, identical twins June Gibbons and Jennifer Gibb...