The Compendium: An Assembly of Fascinating Things

An entire colony of 117 men, women and children vanished without leaving behind a single body. There was no blood, no sign of an attack and no ruined settlement. Their homes had been carefully dismantled and taken away. All they left behind was one word carved into a wooden post: CROATOAN.

In 1587, the colonists were stranded on Roanoke Island instead of reaching their intended home in Chesapeake Bay. Governor John White sailed back to England for supplies, leaving behind his daughter Eleanor and newborn granddaughter Virginia Dare. War, privateering and disaster kept him away for three years. By...

In 1692, an enslaved woman named Tituba told a Salem courtroom that the Devil had come to her and bid her serve him. Her confession lit the fuse that would become known as the infamous Salem witch trials, the deadliest witch hunt in American history.

Within months, more than a third of Salem Village had been accused, imprisoned and were awaiting trial. Nineteen people were hanged. One man was pressed to death under stones for refusing to plead. And a four-year-old girl sat in custom-made shackles while her accusers watched.
But this is not really a story...

On the last morning before half term, 240 children walked into Pantglas Junior School beneath a mountain of coal waste. Minutes after lessons began, Tip 7 collapsed above Aberfan, sending liquefied spoil through homes and classrooms and killing 116 children and 28 adults.

But the Aberfan disaster did not begin with the slide, and it did not end when the rescue stopped. The warning signs had been there: natural springs beneath the tip, earlier slips on the mountainside and concerns that failed to produce action. The tribunal later placed responsibility on the National Coal Board and concluded that the disaster could...

A trillion-dollar company. Two women who worked inside it, years apart. And the exact same warnings, ignored twice.
 
This episode traces Frances Haugen, the Facebook product manager who walked out with a phone full of leaked documents and wiped six billion dollars off the company's share price in a single day, and Sarah Wynn-Williams, Facebook's former global policy chief, whose tell-all memoir Careless People landed her in emergency arbitration and a gag order so strict she's legally barred from discussing her own book.

We cover the Instagram research on teenage girls, the Myanmar cri...

For 17 years, the Unabomber hid behind handmade bombs, false clues and the initials F.C. Then his need to explain himself gave the FBI the break it had been waiting for.

Part Two turns from the bombing campaign to Ted Kaczynski himself. We trace the gifted, isolated child who entered Harvard at 16, the controversial psychological study led by Henry Murray, the anti-technology ideas that hardened into violent ideology, and the contradictions of his off-grid life in a tiny Montana cabin.

When Industrial Society and Its Future was published, Ted’s brother David recognised something chilling in...

In 1978, a brown-paper parcel was found between two cars at a Chicago university. It looked ordinary. The professor named as the sender had never seen it before. Then it exploded.

That first device began a 17-year bombing campaign that moved from university campuses to an airliner, computer shops and private homes. Sixteen bombs would kill three people and injure 23, while investigators struggled with devices deliberately built from common materials and a bomber capable of disappearing for years.

What the FBI did have was strange: scrap-built components, pieces of wood, the initials F.C., a witness...

Aileen Wuornos killed seven men along Florida's highways between 1989 and 1990, but the question at the centre of her story has never been quite as simple as whether she was a serial killer.

Wuornos said her first victim, Richard Mallory, violently attacked and raped her before she shot him in self-defence. She later gave dramatically different accounts of what happened, eventually claiming that robbery, not survival, motivated the killings. Even then, her story continued to shift.

Behind those contradictions was a life already shaped by abandonment, alleged childhood abuse, homelessness, sex work, violence and an intense...

In a respectable Massachusetts household in 1892, two people were hacked to death in broad daylight, and nobody in the house heard a thing.

This episode traces the Borden family from Andrew's rise from nothing to a $10-million-in-today's-money fortune he refused to spend, through the locked doors, the pigeon massacre, and the property dispute that split the household in two. Then: the morning of August 4th, the two-hour gap between the murders, the botched police investigation, the burnt dress, and the trial that put actual human skulls in front of a jury.

Lizzie Borden walked free...

Nasubi thought he had agreed to a private television challenge. What he didn’t know was that millions of people were already watching him, alone, hungry and completely naked.

In 1998, the aspiring comedian was taken to a bare Tokyo apartment and told he had to survive entirely on prizes won through mail-in sweepstakes. No food. No clothes. No running total. To finish A Life in Prizes, he had to win goods worth one million yen.

And while the door to the apartment was technically unlocked, what was keeping Nasubi hostage was the fact producers had ta...

In 2016, five members of the Tromp family fled their farm in a single car, leaving behind their passports, credit cards and mobile phones. Why they fled remains one of Australia's greatest modern mysteries—a mystery that not even the Tromp family can fully explain.

Over the following week, the family scattered across two states. One son, Mitchell, abandoned the journey and caught a train home. Two daughters, Riana and Ella, stole a car near the Jenolan Caves before reporting their own parents missing more than 100 miles away. Riana was later found catatonic in the back of a st...

A man falls from a New York hotel window. The CIA calls it suicide. Decades later, the story starts to look much darker.

MKUltra is one of the most disturbing secret programmes in CIA history: a Cold War attempt to find out whether drugs, hypnosis, interrogation, sensory manipulation, and psychological pressure could break the human mind and reshape it. At the centre is Frank Olson, a biological warfare scientist who was secretly dosed with LSD at a CIA retreat and died days later after falling from Room 1018A of the Hotel Statler.

But Olson’s de...

Lucy Letby was convicted as Britain’s most prolific child serial killer, but the case has never stopped raising questions.

At the Countess of Chester Hospital, a sudden rise in neonatal deaths and collapses led consultants to suspect a young nurse who seemed impossibly ordinary. The prosecution said the pattern was clear: insulin poisoning, alleged air embolisms, overfeeding, suspicious notes, Facebook searches, hospital documents under her bed, and one nurse present again and again.

But this Lucy Letby case does not end neatly at conviction. We look at the medical evidence, the shift chart, the NH...

A boy from a two-bedroom house in Gary, Indiana becomes the most famous human being alive. But the same childhood that built Michael Jackson may also be the thing that began to break him.

In Part 1 of this two-part story, we go back to the very start: a steelworker father with stalled musical dreams, a houseful of children, and rehearsals enforced with belts and fear.

From talent-show wins to a Motown deal, from the Jackson 5 to "I Want You Back" topping the charts, Michael's rise is explosive, and so is the pressure. We follow the...

Aileen Wuornos stood on the shoulder of a Florida highway with a pistol in her bag and a partner at home demanding rent money. Within a year, seven men were dead. She said it started as self defense, that her first client raped her and she fought back. The press called her the Damsel of Death and America's first female serial killer. But was she a victim striking back after a lifetime of abuse, or a killer who got a taste for it and did the rest for money?

This is the story of Aileen Wuornos, told...

A single cheese sandwich helped bring down a multimillion dollar brand. Fyre Festival was sold as the most exclusive party on earth: supermodels, private jets, villas and live music on an island once linked to Pablo Escobar. What guests actually found was rain-soaked disaster-relief tents, no running water and assemble-your-own sandwiches in styrofoam boxes.

This is the story of Billy McFarland, the young entrepreneur who scammed his way to the top long before Fyre, through a fake-exclusive members club called Magnises and a string of schemes that should have been red flags years earlier. Alongside the rapper...

A headless body hung in a Wisconsin barn, strung up like a deer carcass. That was what police found when the Ed Gein case broke open on the first day of hunting season in 1957, and it was only the beginning of what waited inside his farmhouse.

This is the true story of Ed Gein, the quiet, polite handyman from Plainfield, Wisconsin, who became known as the Butcher of Plainfield and inspired some of the most terrifying characters in film history. We trace how a domineering, deeply religious mother named Augusta shaped a lonely boy who never broke...

Princess Diana thought she was marrying into a fairytale. By the honeymoon, she had to send a memo just to have lunch with her own husband.

This is Princess Diana before the icon, before the cameras, before the People's Princess the world thought it knew.
In Part 1 of our Princess Diana trilogy, we go right back to the beginning: a wealthy but emotionally cold childhood, parents locked in a bitter divorce, and a young Diana Spencer who grew up convinced she was never quite good enough.

We follow her into the strangest courtship imaginable...

Genie Wiley was locked away for thirteen years, but rescue was only the beginning of one of psychology’s most haunting cases.

This episode follows the story of Genie Wiley, a child kept in near-total isolation, deprived of language, movement, comfort and the outside world until she was discovered at thirteen. Her case became a landmark in debates around language acquisition, childhood development and the critical period hypothesis — but behind the research papers was a vulnerable girl who needed care, safety and time.

We trace Genie Wiley’s childhood isolation and abuse, the Los Angeles welfar...

A body on an Adelaide beach. A hidden scrap of paper. A mystery that seemed to end with a name, yet still refuses to feel solved.

The Somerton Man case is one of Australia’s most enduring real life mysteries: an unidentified man found dead on Somerton Beach in 1948, no ID in his pockets, and a tiny hidden clue reading “Tamám Shud”. This episode follows the Somerton Man mystery through The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, the alleged code, the mysterious nurse Jessica Thomson, poison rumours, Cold War spy theories and the decades of speculation that turned a lonel...

Bob Lazar, Area 51, S-4 and Element 115 are concepts that all sit at the centre of one of the most famous UFO stories ever told — a claim that helped drag alien cover-up lore into the mainstream and turned Area 51 into modern conspiracy culture.

Sounds wild, and the actual story will leave you questioning everything you know. Because in 1989, renowned investigative journalist George Knapp introduced America to a man claiming the US military was hiding alien spacecraft near Groom Lake. That man would later reveal himself as Bob Lazar.

Today, we unpack Bob Lazar’s extraordinary claim that...

A respected historian. A flat full of dolls. And a discovery that turned a cemetery investigation into something far darker.

This bonus feed-swap episode is a special cross-promotion with our friends over at Fringe Beyond Limits, who bring us their take on Anatoly Moskvin, the Russian historian and linguist better known as the Doll Maker. In 2011, police investigating grave desecrations in Nizhny Novgorod searched Moskvin’s apartment and found what appeared to be life-sized dolls. They were, in fact, mummified remains taken from local cemeteries, dressed, arranged, and treated as if they were still alive.

DashCon 2014 was supposed to be Tumblr’s great real-world fandom convention. Instead, it became one of the internet’s most infamous event disasters: a chaotic weekend of guest cancellations, volunteer confusion, a sudden $17,000 hotel panic, the Welcome to Night Vale fallout, and one tiny ball pit that became a meme so powerful it practically achieved sentience.

Today we unpack how DashCon went from sincere community dream to public internet humiliation. We’ll trace the Tumblr culture that made the convention possible, the amateur planning and budget fantasy that made it unstable, and the disastrous decisions that turned a fand...

Taylor Parker had already been caught in one impossible lie: she claimed she had given birth on the side of a highway, but doctors quickly realised she had not been pregnant at all.

In Part 2 of the Taylor Parker case, we go behind the fake pregnancy and into the years of deception prosecutors said led to the murder of Reagan Hancock and the death of Braxlynn Sage. This is the part of the story where the scattered lies start to form a pattern: invented illnesses, fake inheritances, forged paperwork, spoofed phone calls, false identities, and a relationship w...

A woman is pulled over on a Texas highway with a newborn baby in her lap, covered in blood, claiming she has just given birth behind the wheel. But when Taylor Parker reaches hospital, the story begins to fall apart.

In part one of the Taylor Parker case, we follow the strange and escalating trail of fake pregnancy claims, inheritance lies, family sabotage, burner phones, alleged threats, arson, a multimillion-dollar ranch deal and a relationship with Wade Gryphon that becomes tangled in one impossible story after another. At the centre of it all is Parker’s need to...

Marilyn Monroe is one of the most recognisable women who has ever lived, but the version the world fell in love with was, in many ways, built in a studio.

Today, we trace how Marilyn Monroe emerged from Norma Jean’s unstable and abusive childhood to become the Hollywood icon everyone thinks they know. We follow her early modelling career, her studio-made voice, and the blonde bombshell image she spent years trying to outrun. But there is a darker side to this story too: the marriages, the power struggles, and the myths that shaped her final years. Ma...

The Zodiac Killer did not just murder people — he turned the whole case into a public game of fear, letters and ciphers.

From the first lovers’ lane killings to the murder of Paul Stine, this episode follows the Zodiac Killer’s attacks, the taunting letters, the four ciphers, the surviving witnesses, but also the mystery of why he seemed to vanish.

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