The Box of Oddities

In this Halloween-season episode of Box of Oddities, Kat and Jethro explore a grisly chapter of New England folklore: the 1817 exhumation of Dartmouth student Frederick Ransom. As tuberculosis—then called consumption—devastated his Vermont family, his father followed a desperate “vampire” remedy: Frederick’s heart was removed from his grave and burned in a blacksmith’s forge.

Then, from the frighteningly human to the wonderfully alien: octopuses can edit their RNA in response to changing water temperatures, have neurons spread throughout their arms, solve problems, use tools, and may be far more emotionally complex than we ever imagined. Pl...

Edgar Allan Poe’s Rattling Skull & The Honeymoon Murder at Acadia National Park

What happens when you dig up the remains of one of history’s most famous masters of horror and discover something rattling around inside his skull? And how does a romantic honeymoon in one of America’s most beautiful national parks end in murder?

This week on The Box of Oddities, we’re digging into two disturbing true stories involving mysterious deaths, buried secrets, and some deeply unsettling discoveries.

First, JG explores the bizarre 1875 exhumation of Edgar Allan Poe. More than 25...

The Box of Oddities Halloween Special Preview: True Ghost Stories, Haunted Houses & Unexplained Encounters

Something strange is happening, Freak Family. And this time, you're the ones telling the stories.

As we count down to our 9th Annual Box of Oddities Halloween Special, Kat and Jethro crack open the archives to revisit some of the creepiest, strangest, and most unforgettable paranormal experiences submitted by listeners.

A postal worker hears mysterious humming in an empty office—just before a broken telephone begins ringing. A childhood accident leads to a terrifying out-of-body experience. A woman recalls gr...

Can riding a train actually drive you insane? And why have cultures around the world spent centuries telling stories about women with teeth in places teeth absolutely do not belong?

This week on The Box of Oddities, Kat and Jethro explore two bizarre intersections of history, folklore, psychology, and humanity's most uncomfortable fears.

First, we're heading to Victorian England, where a mysterious phenomenon known as Railway Madness had people convinced that traveling by train could cause sudden, violent insanity. From gun-wielding passengers and naked aristocrats to terrified travelers trapped inside moving railway carriages, the strange...

Welcome our newest sponsor, FÜM ⁠⁠tryfum.com/BOX⁠⁠ and use code BOX at checkout to get a free bite-friendly silicone Topper with purchase.

What happens when scientists open a 134-year-old coffin and discover a body that has been remarkably preserved? And what happens when an inventor decides the automobile would be better if the passengers rode inside one enormous wheel?

This week on The Box of Oddities, Kat and Jethro explore two extraordinary stories where science, mystery, and human ingenuity take some very strange turns.

First, the mysterious death of Robert Kennicott, a 19th-ce...

Inbox of Oddities: Ghostly Voices, Time Travel & Homesick Nipples

The Freak Family has spoken, and once again, we're questioning whether any of you should be allowed out in public unsupervised.

In this episode of Inbox of Oddities, Kat and Jethro dig into another gloriously strange collection of listener emails, bizarre personal experiences, paranormal encounters, and unsolicited corrections.

First, a chilling Halloween ghost story takes us to Kentucky's historic Mayo Mansion, where a late-night ghost hunt produces a mysterious humming voice caught on an audio recording. Was someone—or something—trying to communicate from the...

You’ve seen the Hindenburg footage. You’ve heard the famous radio broadcast. But what was it actually like to be inside the Hindenburg when it caught fire?

Kat and Jethro revisit one of history’s most recognizable disasters through the eyewitness accounts of the people who survived it. Passengers were thrown across rooms as the airship tilted, an acrobat hung from the outside waiting for the right moment to drop, a mother threw her children from a window, and a teenage cabin boy survived thanks to an extraordinary accident involving a ruptured water tank. Of the 97 passen...

A body emerges from a California glacier more than sixty years after a World War II training plane vanished in the Sierra Nevada. He’s still wearing his military uniform, carrying coins, a fountain pen, and an address book—but who is he, and what happened to the other men aboard the missing aircraft?

Then, we head to Colorado for the strange story of Emma Crawford, a young woman whose dying wish was to be buried high atop Red Mountain. Unfortunately, death was only the beginning of Emma’s travels. Her grave was moved, her coffin was swept...

It’s time for another Freak Family Favorite, pulled from deep inside The Box of Oddities archives!

First, Kat explores the surprisingly widespread history of dwarf mythology and reverence. From ancient Egypt, where people of short stature could hold prestigious positions and dwarf deities were associated with protection, childbirth, and regeneration, to Norse mythology and legends of mysterious underground craftsmen, the connection between dwarves, gods, magic, and folklore stretches across cultures and centuries.

Then, Jethro revisits the deeply troubling disappearance of five-year-old Stephen McKernan. In 1988, Stephen vanished from a crowded Scottish holiday park after being ou...

A letter disappears in one of the deadliest tornadoes in American history—then turns up 130 miles away.

In 1925, the catastrophic Tri-State Tornado destroyed the Indiana home of Will Jones. Among the possessions swept away was a letter written decades earlier by his late wife. About a week later, a farmer found that same piece of paper lying in a field more than a hundred miles away—and somehow, against absurd odds, it found its way back to the man who treasured it.

Then, Kat takes us inside Bayernhof, the spectacularly eccentric Pittsburgh mansion built by mill...

What if the streets beneath San Francisco aren’t sitting on solid ground at all—but on the remains of abandoned ships?

During the California Gold Rush, crews deserted vessels by the hundreds, leaving ships stranded along the waterfront. Some became warehouses, hotels, saloons, even a jail. Others were swallowed by landfill as San Francisco expanded outward into the bay. Today, dozens of nineteenth-century ships may still lie beneath downtown—including the Niantic, whose buried hull has repeatedly resurfaced during construction, complete with artifacts and bottles of wine and champagne sealed underground for more than a century.

...

The Inbox of Oddities is open, and the Freak Family has delivered another beautifully strange collection of listener stories.

This time, Kat and Jethro dive into an accidentally perfect sign at a spay-and-neuter clinic, a spectacularly unfortunate product mistranslation involving “aging horniness,” a rabbit openly mocking someone’s gardening defenses, and a listener determined to bring a beloved Box of Oddities song back into heavy rotation.

There’s also a Phoenix-versus-Tucson debate, memories of a skateboarding Pope look-alike, mysterious internet rabbit holes, questionable bathroom barbecue-tong etiquette, and plenty of pet pictures.

But things take a d...

A quiet French town is hit by a wave of sickness, terror, and impossible visions after its residents eat the same bread. Were the horrors of Pont-Saint-Esprit in 1951 caused by ergot poisoning, contaminated flour, or something even stranger? Then, deep in the Amazon, male pink river dolphins have a baffling social habit involving aerial urination, zigzagging streams, and very interested onlookers.

The Box of Oddities investigates cursed bread, Cold War suspicions, hallucinations, and why nature remains undefeated at being weird.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An accidental Australian takeover of The Box of Oddities begins with Vegemite and somehow ends with a prehistoric mystery and a disappearance that only gets stranger.

First, buried in ancient Australian rock are the delicate remains of a forest that vanished from the world millions of years ago. Scientists knew these trees only through fossils—until a park ranger climbed into a remote canyon and noticed something he couldn't explain. What he found would rewrite a small piece of botanical history and eventually trigger an extraordinary fight to keep something ancient from disappearing all over again.

...

Halloween is creeping closer, and the Inbox is filling up with teeth, doppelgängers, bizarre coincidences, pet opossums, and the kind of heartfelt notes that make Kat and JG question whether they deserve any of you.

This week: a listener wakes from wisdom-tooth surgery determined to show Kat and JG her teeth, a mysterious ambulance/fire-alarm “Boo Effect,” a license plate coincidence involving the word Gordita, and a pet opossum named Myrtle with absolutely no survival instincts. Plus, a listener suggestion sends the hosts down a dark historical path toward Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries.

And, of cour...

There are ghosts in your DNA—entire lost populations whose names, languages, and worlds vanished, yet whose genetic fingerprints are still moving through people alive today. Then: the deeply unsettling truth about seeds that have sprouted in human lungs, ears, and other places nature never intended a garden to grow.

In this episode of The Box of Oddities, Kat and Jethro explore ancient “ghost populations,” Neanderthals, Denisovans, and the 7,100-year-old woman whose DNA revealed a hidden branch of human history. Plus, they meet the unfortunate people who discovered that sometimes “it went down the wrong pipe” can become a v...

A forgotten 1952 Pan Am crash helped shape the safety briefing you hear on every flight—and now, 74 years later, the Clipper Endeavor has been found 2,000 feet beneath the Atlantic. Then: a skull discovered during a renovation connected to David Attenborough leads back to one of Victorian London’s most gruesome unsolved-for-131-years murder mysteries.

A lost airliner, a missing head, and the very specific reason you should never inflate your life vest inside the plane. This is Box of Oddities.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this Inbox of Oddities, Kat and Jethro open the mailbag for a wonderfully strange collection of listener stories: gargoyle-like creatures watching from a grandmother’s curtain rod, an eerie phone call from a man who may have been dead, a child who seemed to know far too much about the “lady upstairs,” and an unexpected bathroom encounter with Monkees legend Mickey Dolenz.

They also reflect on the 25th anniversary of 9/11, hear a powerful reminder that bravery can mean doing the thing even while you’re afraid, and put out the call for your true spooky stories for the...

A young woman boards an elevated train in 1907, reaches her stop…and simply cannot make herself leave. Her strange case of “nervousness” becomes a newspaper curiosity, but more than a century later, it feels startlingly familiar. Then, why do lost people so often make the one choice most likely to keep them lost? From the forests of Nova Scotia to the Sahara Desert, we explore the unnerving ways panic can scramble your internal compass.

The Box of Oddities: where history gets weird, the brain gets stranger, and sometimes the best thing you can do is stay put.

...

In this classic episode, we celebrate Labor Day by looking at the most unusual jobs. Some people get paid to break into buildings, test mattresses, cuddle strangers, or bring horses into therapy sessions. Then there’s the far darker side of deciding who is “fit” for society: the true story of Carrie Buck, a young woman institutionalized and sterilized against her will in a Supreme Court case whose legacy still haunts America. It’s strange work, terrible pseudoscience, and the kind of history that should never be forgotten.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphon...

This week’s Inbox of Oddities is full of the kinds of stories that make you wonder whether the universe is gently trying to get your attention. From a beloved dog who may have kept watch long after he was gone, to a grandmother’s promise delivered through a stubborn patch of flowers, the Freak Family shares paranormal experiences, unexpected kindness, rescued pups, healing, and a reminder that sometimes we get the chance to be somebody else’s Santa.

Plus, Jethro and Kat put out the call for your true scary stories for the ninth annual Box of Odd...

A sideshow performer known as Koo-Koo the Bird Girl becomes one of the most unforgettable faces in Tod Browning’s 1932 film Freaks—yet the real Minnie Woolsey remains almost a mystery. We trace the strange, sad, and surprisingly human story behind the feathers, enormous glasses, and a few seconds of dancing that outlived nearly everything else known about her.

Then: a young doctor named Stubbins Ffirth sets out to prove that yellow fever isn’t contagious by conducting one of history’s most stomach-turning medical experiments on himself. Plus, cow muffin bingo, lawnmower races, frog jumping, crab beauty p...

What can ten dimes do? For Osceola McCarty, they represented a lifetime spent washing other people’s clothes—and a quiet act of generosity that would eventually change the lives of more than a hundred students. Discover how a Mississippi laundress who left school in the sixth grade saved a remarkable fortune and created an educational legacy that continues growing decades after her death.

Then, when developers decided one stubborn little house stood in the way of progress, its owners refused to budge. What followed was a three-year standoff that left their home balanced atop a towering pill...

Can you feel time passing—or taste pizza using only your imagination? This week, the Freak Family opens our eyes to the wildly different ways our brains experience the world, including one listener whose sense of time appears as a constantly shifting spectrum of colors. We also hear about an eerily timed Dolly Parton “Boo Effect,” an Australian linguistic injustice, sad nipple syndrome as bedroom conversation, and a deeply moving message about grief, hospice, dark humor, and permitting ourselves to feel it all. It’s heartfelt, hilarious, occasionally inappropriate, and brought to you entirely by the beautiful weirdos who fill our...

Are We Living Inside a Black Hole? And Why You Should Never Trust a Nazi With a Plate Of Cookies.

What if our entire universe is hiding inside a black hole? The James Webb Space Telescope has uncovered strange new clues about the early cosmos—including an ancient galaxy that appears far more developed than it should be and a mysterious imbalance in the way distant galaxies rotate.

Then, meet the WWII interrogator who extracted secrets from hundreds of Allied pilots without threats or violence. His weapons were casual conversation, carefully placed misinformation…and sometimes a pl...

What happens when six teenage boys are stranded on a deserted island for more than a year? Forget Lord of the Flies. The true story of the boys of Ata reveals something far more surprising—and far more hopeful—about human nature.

Then, during World War II, a Muslim family in Sarajevo risks everything to hide their Jewish neighbors from the Nazis. Nearly fifty years later, with Sarajevo under siege once again, an extraordinary act of courage comes full circle.

Two remarkable true stories of survival, kindness, and ordinary people choosing to become the helpers when...

A listener dreams that Mothman shows up at her patio door—and refuses to let him inside because of his dust. Aerial arts may have accidentally cured another Freak’s lifelong motion sickness. And a woman dreams of playing with her late grandfather in an old hot rod, only to discover it may be a memory from infancy—and that her father dreamed about him on the very same night. Plus, the modern medical condition still treated with bloodletting, a breathtaking encounter in Norway, and a desperate plea for the return of “What You Got for Me?” It’s another stra...

He Vanished at 14. DNA Found Him 246 Years Later—and Why So Many Towns End in “Kill”

A teenage soldier vanished during one of the American Revolution’s most devastating defeats. Nearly 250 years later, DNA recovered from a tiny piece of bone may have finally given him back his name. The remarkable story of Private John Pumphrey begins beneath the soil of a South Carolina battlefield—and ends with a family hearing the name history had forgotten.

Then, Kat turns a 3,000-mile road trip into a linguistic excavation. Why do so many towns end in kill, ville, bur...

A glowing faceless figure stalks the lonely roads of western Pennsylvania—or so the legend goes. But behind the terrifying tale of Charlie No-Face was Ray Robinson, a real man whose tragic childhood accident transformed him into the infamous Green Man of Pennsylvania.

Then, Kat and Jethro explore the bizarre, darkly funny, and sometimes completely unhinged final words of executed criminals—including baked-apple jokes, complaints about SpaghettiOs, one killer’s suggested newspaper headline, and Aileen Wuornos’ promise to return with Jesus aboard a giant mothership.

Urban legends, death-row one-liners, and a Rolex rescued from the sewer af...

HORSE MANURE CRISIS! And Victorians Crawl Inside Dead Whales for a Bizarre Cure!

A Freak Family Favorite returns! First, the Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894—and the very real fear that cities would eventually disappear beneath nine feet of horse poop. Then, the spectacularly revolting Victorian “whale cure” for rheumatoid arthritis, which involved spending hours inside a warm, decomposing whale carcass. Two historical problems. Two deeply questionable solutions. One unusually fragrant episode of The Box of Oddities.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What if the world didn’t move smoothly—but jumped from moment to moment like a broken film reel? Meet LM, the woman who could see colors, faces, and objects clearly but couldn’t see them move. Her rare neurological condition, akinetopsia, revealed something astonishing about how the brain constructs reality.

Then, an adopted man searching for his biological mother discovers that she had spent nearly 50 years at the center of one of Massachusetts’ most haunting unsolved mysteries. The Lady of the Dunes finally had a name—but identifying Ruth Marie Terry was only the beginning.

Along th...

Your brain was listening before you ever took your first breath. Newborns can recognize their mother’s voice—and even stories heard in the womb—but could any of those experiences survive as actual memories? JG explores prenatal learning, infantile amnesia, and the unsettling possibility that your earliest memory may be something your brain quietly invented.

Then, Kat follows a voice across Saskatchewan’s Qu’Appelle Valley, where the landscape can make distant calls seem impossibly close. An Indigenous tradition, a tragic love story, and Pauline Johnson’s haunting poem all became tangled in the meaning of a name: “Who...

The Freak Family has been busy.

This week on Inbox of Oddities, Kat and JG crack open the listener mailbag and discover a funeral urn that can preserve the voice of the person inside it, a legendary Texas rock that may have swallowed a man whole, and the deeply unfortunate mystery of a toilet seat that suddenly developed a perfect blue butt print.

Then there’s a possible Boo Effect at one of America’s strangest museums, the surprisingly fascinating history of the Brannock Device, a road trip tradition involving the Uranus Fudge Factory, and the...

What if your brain suddenly decided that words had colors?

In this episode of The Box of Oddities, Kat and Jethro dive into one of neuroscience's strangest documented phenomena: a woman who suffered a traumatic brain injury and awoke seeing vivid colors every time someone spoke. Her condition—known as acquired speech-to-color synesthesia—raises an unsettling question: if the brain can rewrite reality after an injury, how much of the world we experience is actually being created inside our own minds?

From disappearing colors and tetrachromats who may perceive millions of shades the rest of us n...

What were someone's last words really supposed to reveal? During the Victorian era, people believed a person's final moments exposed the truth about their soul. Families gathered around deathbeds with notebooks in hand, hoping to capture profound final wisdom—but history suggests many of the world's most famous last words may have been polished, embellished, or invented entirely.

In this episode of The Box of Oddities, Jethro explores the fascinating history behind legendary final quotes from Oscar Wilde, Admiral Horatio Nelson, Nathan Hale, and gangster Dutch Schultz, asking whether these iconic farewell lines tell us...

Freak Family Favorites: Bat People, Moon Hoaxes, and Museums That Shouldn't Exist

This Freak Family Favorites episode comes straight from the recommendations of the Freak Family, and it's packed with the kind of stories that remind us why history is often stranger than fiction.

First, Kat unpacks one of the greatest media hoaxes ever printed: The Great Moon Hoax of 1835. Newspapers convinced thousands of readers that a giant telescope had discovered life on the Moon—including winged bat people, intelligent beavers that built villages, strange temples, and an entire lunar civilization. It spread across America an...

Long before smartphones and satellites filled the sky with signals, early radio experimenters were hearing something they couldn't explain. Giant antennas stretched across fields captured strange repeating pulses, mysterious buzzing, and what some believed sounded almost like language. Even Nikola Tesla and Guglielmo Marconi wondered if the transmissions might be coming from Mars. In this episode, JG shares a remarkable story from his grandfather's homemade crystal radio in rural Maine and explores the forgotten mystery that convinced some of the world's greatest inventors they might not be alone.

Then, discover the incredible story of...

Could an ordinary clay pot be the oldest recording device in human history?

On this episode of The Box of Oddities, JG explores one of archaeology's most captivating ideas: the theory that ancient pottery may have accidentally preserved microscopic traces of sound while spinning on a potter's wheel. From the birth of "acoustic archaeology" to modern AI-assisted research, discover why scientists still haven't completely ruled out the possibility that a vessel thousands of years old could one day reveal echoes of the distant past.

Then Kat ventures into the tannin-dark waters of Florida's St. Johns...

Inbox of Oddities: Lettuce Lotion, Florida Organ Recitals & Envelopes Full of Crap

It's time to open the Inbox of Oddities, where the Freak Family always delivers the unexpected.

This week, Kat explains the surprisingly heartfelt tradition of sending an "envelope full of crap," while listeners share stories that are equal parts hilarious, touching, and gloriously strange. There's the mystery of disappearing podcast subscriptions, the linguistic adventures of perimenopause (including the unforgettable phrase "lettuce lotion"), a child's perfectly executed two-sentence ghost story, and a voicemail transcription that turns "ashes" into something considerably more awkward.

...

When Benjamin Franklin's Ghost Designed a Machine and the strange story of The Underwater Orchestra.

What happens when people become convinced they can build a messiah out of magnets, copper, and electricity? In this episode of *The Box of Oddities, Kat and JG dive into one of the strangest forgotten chapters in American history: the bizarre true story of John Murray Spear's "New Motive Power," an electrical machine that followers believed would be born* rather than switched on. Guided by séances, messages from the spirits of Benjamin Franklin and other historical figures, and a ceremony that m...