In the summer of 1929, Detroit became the scene of one of the most brutal—and baffling—murders in the city’s history.

Benny Evangelista, his wife Santina, and their four young children were found slaughtered inside their home on St. Aubin Street. Benny had been decapitated. Upstairs, Santina and the children had been attacked as they slept. There were no signs of forced entry, no clear motive, and almost no physical evidence pointing to the killer.

Then police entered the basement.

There, they discovered an extraordinary collection of handmade figures, religious writings, and the remains of what Benny called his Great Celestial Planet Exhibition. Newspapers seized upon the scene, transforming an already horrifying crime into a sensational story of cults, black magic, and ritual murder.

But behind those headlines was an Italian immigrant family, several possible suspects, and an investigation repeatedly shaped by rumor, prejudice, and the public’s appetite for the bizarre.

Nearly a century later, the murders of the Evangelista family remain unsolved.

Welcome to the Archives. 

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

In 1908, six teams stood in Times Square, pointed their automobiles west, and decided to drive to Paris, France. 

There were no highways.
No GPS.
No reliable maps.

But there were blizzards dumping feet of snow onto nonexistent roads, cars hauled out of drifts by horses, engines rebuilt nightly in the cold, and entire continents where the idea of an automobile was still closer to rumor than reality.

This wasn’t a race in the modern sense. It was an endurance experiment dreamed up by newspapers and fueled by national pride, overconfidence, and a truly alarming lack of planning. Teams followed railroad tracks across America, argued over what “counted” as driving, attempted to cross Siberia by following telegraph lines, and—at one point—fully expected to drive across the not-so-frozen Bering Strait.

Through mud that swallowed cars whole, duels that nearly happened, champagne shared in the middle of the Siberian tundra, and rules that bent just enough to keep the whole thing moving, one battered American car refused to quit.

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

On May 18, 1927, a series of explosions tore through Bath Township, Michigan, killing forty-four people and injuring dozens more in what remains the deadliest act of school violence in American history.

This episode traces the full arc of the Bath School Disaster-- from the conditions that allowed it to happen, to the devastation that followed, to the stories that were shaped in its aftermath.

Along the way, we look closely at Andrew Kehoe’s carefully constructed narrative of grievance, the failures of oversight that gave him access and proximity, and the lives that were forever altered-- including the life of his wife, Nellie Kehoe, whose death came before the bombing and was largely absorbed into the disaster that followed.

The Bath School Disaster is often reduced to a single morning of violence. But understanding how it happened requires looking earlier-- at silence, at power, and at the stories that are allowed to stand unchallenged.

Content note: This episode contains discussion of mass violence, domestic murder, and the deaths of children.

Welcome to the Archives.

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

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