Episodes

This week we tackle the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum theft, one of the most notorious and high-value art heists of all time. One March night in Boston, 1990, two men donned police disguises to enter the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Once inside, they subdued security and walked off with a collection of art potentially valued at over $1 billion in 2024. Vermeers, Rembrandts and more were lost to the world that night, never to be seen again. To this day, no one has ever been charge...

This week, we're celebrating all kinds of mums - but no, that isn't in observance of America's Mother's Day holiday this upcoming Sunday! No, the collection of mums we're discussing are of a decidedly drier type: mummified human remains. And these aren't the millennia-old corpses of ancient Egyptian Pharoahs; no, all the mummies we're discussing come from the last century (and change) and all across the world. From a drag queen's closet in New York City to a musty Sicilian catacomb to Moscow's R...

This week we're tackling the "ancient astronaut" hypothesis: the idea that ancient humans had repeated contact with extraterrestrials that is borne out in their myths, art, and monumental achievements. How were the Great Pyramid of Giza and the Moai of Easter Island erected without modern technology? Could the Bible, the myths of the Babylonians and Mayan religion all be cultural memories of heavenly beings from another planet? Are the Annunaki and Planet X on their way back to the inner solar s...

Last week we shared the first half of the dramatic tale of one of America's so-called "Crimes of the Century" - the kidnapping, and tragic murder, of Charles Lindbergh Jr., toddler son to one of the most famous men in the world: aviator Charles Lindbergh. In this, our 2nd and final part, we detail the painstaking investigation that eventually led to the arrest of German immigrant Richard "Bruno" Hauptmann for the murder of little Charles. The years-long search for the kidnapper and killer involv...

On the night of March 1st, 1932, little Charles Lindbergh Jr. was tucked into his crib for a good night's sleep. Mere hours later, the family nurse discovered that Charles Jr. was no longer in his bed...nor was he anywhere else to be found. The disappearance kicked off the beginning of one of America's so-called "crimes of the century", and one of the world's earliest international true crime sensations. Because Charles Jr. wasn't just any toddler - he was the son of megastar aviator Charles Lin...

It's an old school ghost story this week - and we mean *way* old school, as we jump back to the early 19th century to explore the Bell Witch Haunting. From 1817 to 1821 John Bell Sr. and his family were harassed by an invisible presence with a clear, distinct voice and a penchant for slapping people around. This week Sean introduces us to the Bell family, the mischievous spectral gossip known as Kate, and the series of events on this Tennessee farm that would eventually turn deadly. (I mean, may...

[Obvious TW this week for discussion of suicide.] Over the years, certain songs have attracted dark reputations. Reputations like that the songs might drive you made enough to end your own life... or make others made enough to end another's. This week, we discuss 3 famous examples of these "suicide songs": the morosely melancholic "Gloomy Sunday", the sinister legend of the Lavender Town Syndrome, and the very real rash of "My Way" murders, centered within Philippines karaoke culture. Can a song...

Born in small-town Italy in 1893, Leonarda Cianciulli had led a hard and tragic life - but her friends and neighbors in Correggio, Reggio Emilia knew her as a kindly woman and a good neighbor. Naturally, they were all shocked when she was arrested for luring three local women to their violent deaths. Axe Murder March finishes with a bang (a whack?) as we find out why Cianciulli is known as the Soap-Maker of Correggio, and explore whether her murders really were, as she claimed, motivated by huma...

This week, we finish our two-parter on the rise of the Norwegian black metal scene and the leaders of the pack, Mayhem, as the culture descends into edgelord-on-edgelord crime - first with a series of arsons across Norway, and eventually spinning into the inevitable end of chaos and murder. Experience such real-life characters as Varg Vikernes, black metal musician and out-and-proud white supremacist-turned murderer; Euronymous, the (still-young) godfather of the Norwegian black metal scene and ...

In the early 1990s, a series of crimes rocked the historically peaceful country of Norway. Churches were burned, home-grown terrorist plots were revealed, and arrests were made. Then, the murders came. This rash of crime all stemmed from one seemingly-innocuous source: Norwegian black metal bands and their fans. It seemed like these musicians were trying to out-edgelord each other, and no band pushed harder for the title of "Most Evil" than the fathers of Norwegian black metal, Mayhem, led by th...

The raison d'etre for our whole series on Hannibal and the Punic Wars is here this week, and that's very bad news for 50,000 Roman soldiers. After being beaten and humiliated by Hannibal for two years straight, the Romans came out swinging in 216 BC with the largest army the Republic had ever raised. Nearly 100,000 men chased the Carthaginian army to the small town of Cannae, which would become the site of the greatest military disaster in Rome's history - and one of those times and places in hi...

Welcome back to the dusty horrors of ancient warfare, in part 2 of our rapidly expanding series (well, to 3 episodes, anyway) on Hannibal and the Second Punic War! It's 218 BC, and Hannibal just marched a whole army across the Alps to surprise the Romans in Italy. The next move is Rome's, and they've got all the wrong ones. We step into the shoes of Roman infantry as tens of thousands of our buddies are slaughtered on the field at the Trebia and Lake Trasimene, before Fabius the Delayer steps in...

Sean has the podcast reins for two weeks of HANNIBAL. No, not the cannibal - the Carthaginian general who made himself the worst nightmare of the Roman legions. Take a trip with us back to the third century B.C., where new horrors wait around every corner - from children sacrificed to ancient gods, to sieged cities starving behind their walls, to armored men tumbling off high alpine peaks. Oh, and a crapload of elephants. Settle in for next week, because Hannibal is saving the worst for the Roma...

This week, Carrie takes us on a trip back to the 1930s Mississippi Delta with the mysterious story of Robert Johnson, American blues icon and “first ever rock star.” Johnson has long been identified with the legend that he, desperate to become an incredible guitarist, went down to the crossroads one dark night and sold his soul to the Devil for musical glory. Did Johnson really make some kind of Faustian bargain with Satan himself? If not, how did he go from no-talent blues wannabe to musical vi...

Since at least the 16th century, the English counties of Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex have told stories of "Black Shuck", a ghostly black dog who appears as an omen of death. But ol' Shuck isn't the only spectral hound going around portending doom in the British Isles! In this episode, Sean takes us on a tour of Black Dog stories from folklore all over England and Great Britain, and tries to get to the bottom of how the best boys got stuck with such a creepy rap. Along the way we get lost in 19th ...

On Christmas Eve, 1945, a mysterious fire burned the home of George and Jennie Sodder to the ground. George, Jennie, and four of their children escaped the blaze. The five remaining Sodder children, aged 5 to 14, were not so lucky. However, no remains - of any of the five Sodder children who were lost that night - were ever found. As the years went on, it became clear there was a conspiracy of silence surrounding the Sodder case in their town of Fayetteville, West Virginia. Had George Sodder pis...

Perhaps the most notorious carnival sideshow performer of all time, Grady Stiles Jr. is known to history as Lobster Boy. Born with severe ectrodactyly, a genetic condition that left him unable to walk and with forked, two-fingered hands, Grady followed his father into the family business playing to the crowds in traveling carnival sideshows. But as he got older, and had a family who he would also pull into the carnival circuit, a lifetime of resentment and hard drinking boiled over into violence...

Hello Scary Squad! We apologize for not getting a new episode out this week - we both came down with pretty rough illnesses in the post-Christmas week. Sean wanted to hop on and give this little update, so you wouldn't think we'd left you in the dust of Christmas past! We hope you've had a lovely New Year, and can't wait to get back to it next week (don't worry - this isn't an extended hiatus!). See you a little further into 2024! ________________________________________ Connect with us on socia...

In lieu of taking a total holiday break, we've instead brought you a post-Christmas treat: an interview with local author Patrick Scalisi and illustrator Valerie Ruby-Omen regarding their recent book release Connecticut Cryptids: A Field Guide to the Weird and Wonderful Creatures of the Nutmeg State ! Pat and Val discuss what inspired them to compile the stories of Connecticut Cryptids into this extraordinary field guide, which includes tales like that of the Grench, the Black Dog of Hanging Hil...

With the Christmas holiday upon us for those who celebrate, we’re indulging a spooky new tradition with the Ain’t It Scary Holiday Special! Last year, Sean and Carrie presented competing casts for the modern classic, “Ain’t It Scary? Saves Christmas.” This year, having run out of original IP during the writer’s strike, we set out to remake 1988 Christmas classic Die Hard with a cast cobbled together from some of the freakiest and most festive characters we’ve covered in the last three years. Wil...

This week we tiptoe around the border between worlds, in an episode dedicated to fairy photography! Taken between 1917 and 1920 by two young girls, the Cottingley Fairy photographs seem to depict tiny, dance-happy fairies (and, in one weird case, a sneaky gnome) playing with the human children. Over the decades the Cottingley Fairy pictures have fascinated many fans of the occult - most famously Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who would dedicate a surprising portion of the 1920s ...

More than 10,000 people (and, honorarily, one dog) have been made Catholic saints in the more than 2,000 years that the religion has existed - and in all that time, there are bound to be some crazy stories along the way. Inspired by the holiday season, reformed Catholics Carrie & Sean go through some of the wildest backstories of the saints this week, including tales of stigmata, possible fraud, religious ecstasy, incorruptible remains, holy relics, and a wide variety of absolutely brutal deaths...

Our two-part jaunt into murder, madness and 19th century elections continues (and ends) this week, as Sean finishes the heartbreaking tragic story of the death of James Garfield — followed by the slapstick comedy romp that was the trial of Charles Guiteau. Convinced he was destined to play a role in history and spurned in his several half-assed attempts to earn it, Guiteau turned his efforts toward eliminating the man most emblematic of the system that rejected him...and also waved his arms arou...

James Garfield was shot on July 2, 1881, just a few months into his tenure as 20th President of the United States. The man who shot him, Charles Guiteau, was a lifelong loser who had previously tried his hand at (manic) street preaching, lawyering and insurance sales - and who had made James Garfield a sworn enemy without the President ever giving him a second thought. In this first of a two-part series, we learn about the lift and times of the incredibly annoying Mr Guiteau, and introduce James...