Charles Dickens is synonymous with Christmas. 
With generosity. Redemption. Kindness. 
But behind the stories that shaped Victorian morality was another story-- one carefully rewritten, tightly controlled, and believed for more than a century. 
In this episode, we examine the marriage of Charles Dickens and Catherine Hogarth Dickens, a union that collapsed under the weight of celebrity and power. 
Drawing on letters, contemporary accounts, and modern archival scholarship, this episode explores how a cultural icon became one of the earliest examples of a global media figure shaping "truth," and how Catherine Dickens quietly ensured that her own story would survive long enough to be heard. 

Welcome to the Archives. 

Long before ghost tour tickets were sold and Ouija boards became party games, Michigan was at the center of a national movement-- one that believed the dead were still speaking, and the living could learn to listen. This is the strange and powerful world of Spiritualism: seances in pine groves, table rappings by candlelight, and the people who built communities around messages from the other side.

 Bloodstained: Exploring Michigan's Darkest Murders Forgotten By Time
Householdhistory.com
Instagram: @allieinthearchives

It began as an eviction.
It ended in fire.

In 1900, the Burt Lake Band of Ottawa and Chippewa watched their homes burn on the shores of northern Michigan-- a community destroyed not by war, but by paperwork. This episode traces the story of Cheboiganing, the village the law tried to erase, and the generations who kept its memory alive.

Welcome to the Archives. Bloodstained: Exploring Michigan's Darkest Murders Forgotten By Time
Householdhistory.com
Instagram: @allieinthearchives

Across Michigan, old buildings whisper their stories. The Linden Hotel in Genesee County. A grand home in Fenton. A quiet farmhouse in Maybee. 
Each has its own ghosts-- and its own history to explain them. 
Through archival records, family documents, and forgotten local accounts, the legends begin to align with fact. Ghost stories meet documented history, revealing the real lives behind Michigan's most mysterious hauntings. And how memory lingers long after the living are gone. Welcome to The Archives.Bloodstained: Exploring Michigan's Darkest Murders Forgotten By Time
Householdhistory.com
Instagram: @allieinthearchives

Just off the northern tip of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, where Lake Huron turns cold and clear, there’s an island that remembers. Beneath the postcard charm of Mackinac-- the fudge shops, the bicycles, the horse-drawn carriages-- lies a history far older and far deeper.

Before it was a tourist destination, it was a center of trade. A crossroads between worlds. And at the heart of it all was Magdelaine La Framboise, a Métis fur trader, Odawa woman, and entrepreneur who built one of the most successful trading empires in the Great Lakes.

Her story is one of power, loss, and legacy, a woman navigating between languages, faiths, and nations at a time when few women held any authority at all. She retired to Mackinac Island decades before it became the place we know today, leaving behind a church, a school, and a memory that the island still carries.

This is the story of the woman who kept the island alive long before it became a souvenir.

Welcome to The Archives.Bloodstained: Exploring Michigan's Darkest Murders Forgotten By Time
Householdhistory.com
Instagram: @allieinthearchives

Michigan’s first “official” serial killer is usually dated to the 1960s. But the records say otherwise.In 1916, a new husband, a picnic, and a bag left at a Grand Rapids grocery store unraveled a man of many names-- James Allen, James Curtis, John Allerton-- until only one remained: Henry Scott Mausell. We trace the pattern that shadowed Mausell for years: a dead son, two sisters in a staged scene, and countless women who answered his letters and disappeared.  
Welcome to The Archives.Bloodstained: Exploring Michigan's Darkest Murders Forgotten By Time
Householdhistory.com
Instagram: @allieinthearchives

When we think of pirates, we picture the tropics. Rum. Cannonballs. Eye patches and parrots. But not all piracy came with a flag. And some of it happened much closer to home.

In this episode, we dive into the eerie and violent history of piracy on the Great Lakes and inland waterways-- from the Harpe Brothers and the bloody bluffs of Cave-in-Rock to the Apostle Islands bandits and a timber thief turned government informant. These are stories without palm trees. Without treasure maps. Just cold water, easy targets, and men who vanished into the fog.

Welcome to The Archives.

Instagram: @allieinthearchives

At the height of its influence, the House of David was a utopian religious colony in Michigan—a place that promised purity, community, and the second coming of Christ. But behind its walls, something far darker was unfolding. This episode unearths the rise and fall of Benjamin Purnell, a charismatic preacher who claimed to be the seventh and final messenger of God. As his following grew into the thousands, so did the accusations: fraud, abuse, and the exploitation of teenage girls. We trace his early life, his mysterious disappearances, the shocking 1927 trial, and the devastating legacy left in his wake.

Bloodstained: Exploring Michigan's Darkest Murders Forgotten By Time
Householdhistory.com

Instagram: @allieinthearchives

On Christmas Eve, 1913, nearly 700 striking miners and their families packed into the Italian Hall in Calumet, Michigan, for a children’s holiday party. It was meant to be a moment of joy during a season of hunger and fear.

Then someone shouted a single word: Fire.

What followed was one of the most horrifying tragedies in Michigan’s history. Seventy-three people died, fifty-nine of them children. And over a century later, we still don’t know who was responsible.

In this episode, we travel to the copper mines of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, trace the rise of Calumet, and examine the brutal strike that set the stage for a massacre. We follow the grief, the cover-up, and the generations-long fight for truth.

Because the fire was a lie.
But the cost was real.

Welcome to the Archives. 

Bloodstained: Exploring Michigan's Darkest Murders Forgotten By Time
Householdhistory.com
Instagram: @allieinthearchives

You’ve heard of the KKK.

But you probably haven’t heard of this other group.
The one that wore black robes instead of white.

That hid in mayor’s offices, police stations, and factory floors.

That didn’t march, but hunted.

They called themselves the Black Legion.
And for a time, they were one of the most dangerous domestic terror groups in the country.

In this episode, we uncover their strange origins, their brutal tactics, and the chilling truth behind the murders they carried out—including the suspicious death of a Black activist in Lansing… whose son would later be known as Malcolm X.  

Welcome to the Archives. 

Bloodstained: Exploring Michigan's Darkest Murders Forgotten By Time
Householdhistory.com
Instagram: @allieinthearchives