Paul G's Corner

Chicago. 1912.The air hung heavy—coal smoke and lake wind trapped between brick tenements and unkept promises. It was an age of mediums and miracle cures, when grief was a business and hope came bottled or candle-lit.

In a modest parlor on Ogden Avenue, Louisa Lindloff offered comfort to the grieving. No table-rapping, no hysterics. She simply sat still, hands folded and let silence do the work. A widow in black, a crystal ball at her elbow, and a gaze steady enough to make you question what she saw in you that you couldn’t.

People believed her. That was the trick.

They came with hair locks, old letters, and questions whispered through trembling fingers: Is he happy? Does he forgive me? Louisa answered softly, with the conviction of someone who has seen both sides and prefers neither. For a few coins, she made the unbearable seem negotiable.

She wasn’t cruel. She was practical. Grief was endless, but groceries were not.

The Ledger and the Lies

Her husband, Arthur Lindloff, worked when he could and complained when he couldn’t. Their son, Arthur Jr., filled the silence with toy soldiers dragged across the floorboards. A boarder coughed through the nights upstairs, paying rent late but never leaving.

Louisa kept a ledger—clients, payments, séances, debts—and like every ledger, it began to show its imbalance. The small sums she collected from widows and laborers didn’t stretch far enough to cover coal, rent, and the kind of respectability that kept a woman safe from gossip.

Then came the insurance man with his stack of industrial policies: burial money for those too poor to die properly. Arthur scoffed. Louisa signed. A few cents a week for peace of mind, he’d said.

Peace of mind turned out to be a matter of dosage.

The Experiment

It started, as most damnations do, with curiosity. Louisa had read about arsenic, this household staple in rat poison, common, unsuspicious. She studied it the way a pianist studies a new piece: slowly, with caution, until muscle memory took over.

The first time, her hand trembled. The sound of the spoon against porcelain was louder than it should have been. Fear and resolve traded places until she couldn’t tell which one she wanted to win.

When Arthur died, the doctor called it sunstroke. The neighbors called it tragedy. Louisa called it proof.

The Pattern

Chicago forgets quickly. Another death in another tenement doesn’t even make the paper.

Weeks later, the boarder fell ill. She nursed him like someone who might have actually cared would be expected to. She brought him broth, a cool cloth, she whispered prayers. Even so, he died grateful. The next boarder moved in; she signed another set of forms. The ledger began to balance itself.

For a time, Louisa felt relief, even pride. Order had returned to her world. But order built on death is fragile. It creaks. It leaks. And it invites company.

Whispers followed her. Neighbors noticed the smell of a sweet, chemical, that now seems unmistakable. One woman swore she’d seen Louisa stirring something white into a teacup. Another claimed the widow’s calm was too calm.

When Arthur Jr. became sick, the gossip turned to certainty. A mother who kills her husband might not stop there.

The Discovery

The authorities came slowly, as they always do when the victims are poor and the killer polite. By the time they tested what remained in the kitchen, the evidence had dissolved into rumor and grief. But arsenic has a way of surviving paperwork.

Louisa Lindloff was arrested in her black dress, the same one she wore to every séance and funeral. She didn’t protest. She didn’t cry. She simply said, “It must have been the tea.”

The papers called her The Fortune Teller Killer. The city called her evil. But the truth is colder than that: she was efficient. She learned that belief can be the easiest poison of all—because people drink it willingly.

The Afterlife of a Lie

Today, Louisa Lindloff’s name drifts somewhere between folklore and footnote. Some say she was a con artist, others a woman cornered by poverty and pride. Either way, she turned the oldest currency—trust—into tender for murder.

Her story isn’t about arsenic. It’s about faith. About how desperation, when dressed in ritual and respectability, can look almost holy.

In her world, death was not a crime; it was customer service.

Why She Still Matters

More than a century later, Chicago has changed its skyline, but not its appetite. We still buy comfort. We still want to believe that someone out there knows the answers, even if it costs us a little piece of truth.

Louisa didn’t invent deception; she perfected its tone. She made belief feel gentle while it killed you slowly.

And that’s what makes her story stick—the quiet terror of realizing that the voice offering you peace might be the one stirring the poison.

If you want to hear the full story—the séance, the suspicion, the arrest—you’ll find it in this episode “The Fortune Teller Killer.”You can stream it, share it, or play it loud enough to scare your neighbors. I won’t judge. (might even celebrate that, just sayin)

And yes, if you’re into supporting this madness, there’s swag—shirts, mugs, and other questionable life choices—over at www.paulgnewton.com.They’re not haunted. Probably, well, hopefully. There is a hoodie that may be suspect.

Hate mail, praise, and your own theories can all go to [email protected].I read them all. Eventually.

Thanks for reading Paul G's Substack! This post is public so feel free to share it.

In 1964, deep in the Nevada desert, America tried to make a nuclear reactor fly.At a place called Jackass Flats — a name too perfect to be a coincidence — engineers tested an engine that could have changed the course of history or ended it entirely. They called it Project Pluto, a nuclear-powered cruise missile with unlimited range and a heart of uranium.

Imagine a weapon that could fly forever — roaring just above treetops, armed with multiple hydrogen bombs, spewing radiation as it went. It wasn’t fiction. It was tested. It worked. And yet, the project died quietly, buried under its own brilliance and madness.

This episode dives into the minds of the men who built it — pioneers, not monsters — who genuinely believed they were creating the next leap in defense technology. They didn’t fully understand what radiation could do, but they understood fear, progress, and pride. And for a few surreal years, that was enough to keep the engines running.

Project Pluto: The Missile That Wouldn’t Die is the story of how Cold War genius danced with insanity — and how America’s obsession with being first almost built a flying apocalypse.

Don’t miss this one. Then visit www.paulgnewton.com to grab some Things I Want to Know: Voices swag, support future episodes, and remind the world — don’t irradiate any cows.

Some people escape their past. Others study it, survive it, and turn it into a lesson for the rest of us.

This week on Paul G’s Corner, I talk with Meg Hall, a nurse who grew up in a home defined by control, chaos, and cruelty — and somehow came out the other side determined to heal others. From her years in hospice to her work helping people rediscover who they really are, Meg has seen the full arc of what it means to be human — the pain, the regret, and the surprising grace that sometimes comes at the end.

We talk about what it takes to rebuild a life after trauma, what the dying really think about living, and why so many of us don’t start being authentic until we’re halfway through our story.

It’s not a light conversation, but it’s real — and real’s the only thing worth talking about.

Stick around for the close — I’ve got a few thoughts on mediocrity, truth, and the Arkansas State Police pretending they don’t see my FOIA requests.

Then go to PaulGNewton.com.I make everything there — the shirts, the art, the chaos. It’s all part of the story.

Paul G's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The American dream didn’t vanish—it got shrink-wrapped, up-charged, and delivered late.

This week on Paul G’s Corner, I talk with Micco Costello, a former restaurant owner turned activist who’s calling out the predatory games played by big delivery apps.

Michelle watched as billion-dollar platforms turned customer tips into corporate subsidies and “independent contractors” into digital serfs. Then she got scammed out of thirteen grand by a company that promised to help her grow—and instead served her a buffet of flies.

But she didn’t quit.She built a movement—one aimed at taking the money and the power back from the middlemen. Together, we dig into:

* How apps manipulate “base pay” and tips to cheat drivers.

* Why restaurants are paying 30% commissions just to stay visible.

* The ghost-kitchen hustle and what happens when small business meets algorithm.

* How customers, drivers, and merchants can all reclaim control.

This one’s for anyone who’s ever been told to “be your own boss” by a company that owns the app, the map, and the paycheck.

🔗 Guest: Michelle Costello, MBA — creator of the No Customers, No Business YouTube channel📅 Upcoming Live Dates: October 13, 15 & 17📺 Watch: YouTube – No Customers No Business

💬 Follow & Support: paulgnewton.com | Substack – Paul G Newton

Thanks for reading Paul G's Substack! This post is public so feel free to share it.

This week in Paul G’s Corner, we sit down with Eugene Mandelcorn — a man who’s heard more bad film pitches than a Little League coach on a losing streak.

Eugene ran an international filmmakers’ group for twenty years, spent another decade selling films around the globe, and now runs a studio without borders, walls, or patience for Hollywood clichés. We dig into his start in the industry, his unusual path from tents to Cannes, his philosophy of “solution films,” and some of the wild scripts he’s got cooking.

It’s part filmmaking masterclass, part war story, and all in the unpredictable spirit of Paul G’s Corner.

In 1962, the Pentagon’s highest brass drafted a plan that reads today like madness on paper. They called it Operation Northwoods. The logic was simple, the methods monstrous: stage terrorist attacks on American soil, blame Cuba, and unleash the cry for war.

The proposals were not scribbles from a shadowy fringe. They were signed at the top. Blow up a U.S. ship in Guantánamo Bay. Hijack airliners, switch them for drones, then script fiery crashes on live television. Plant bombs in Miami. Even sink a boatload of refugees. Each idea cold, clinical, typed in black and white.

The plan climbed to the Oval Office. And there, President John F. Kennedy said no. His refusal buried Northwoods—but not forever. Decades later, the files surfaced, signatures intact, proof that the unthinkable had once sat on America’s desk.

This episode of Things I Want to Know: Voices drags that ghost back into the light. We move from the ashes of the Bay of Pigs to the thunder of the Cuban Missile Crisis, tracing how close the republic came to devouring itself in the name of war.

Because history’s darkest truths are rarely foreign inventions. Sometimes, they are born at home.

They call it Project Broken Arrow. A phrase meant to sound clean, contained, under control. But the truth is anything but. Since the 1950s, American bombers have dropped nuclear weapons into oceans, onto farmland, even across foreign soil. Some were recovered. Others… vanished.

The official line has always been the same: “no danger.” Yet behind those words lies a record of near-disasters, of one switch away from thermonuclear fire. At Tybee Island, Goldsboro, Palomares, and Thule, the United States came closer to catastrophe than it ever admitted.

And in the shadows, it wasn’t presidents or generals who saved the world, but mid-level officers whose decisions in seconds kept us all alive.

This is the story of the bombs America lost — and the terrifying truth that they’re still out there.

In 1927, a hospital “cure” for ringworm burned a child’s skull. He wore a hat for eighty years. This is the record—how a promise of progress became a lifetime of harm.

Karen Silkwood knew too much. What happened to her on that empty Oklahoma highway still echoes in Congress, in courtrooms—and in the dark.

This is The Woman Who Glowed in the Dark.A true story. A corporate betrayal. A radioactive legacy.

February 1984. A second bomb rips through the National War College. No casualties. No arrests. Just another hole in the floor and a deeper one in the American psyche. Most people don’t remember it ever happened.

They should.

This week’s story isn’t about a movement. It’s about a method. A campaign of fire and timing wrapped in ideology and detonated beneath the symbols of American power. The Capitol. The Navy Yard. The War College. A long-forgotten domestic insurgency unfolding while most of the country was looking the other way.

You won’t find Jack Connors in a textbook. He didn’t give interviews. He didn’t write a memoir. That’s because Jack doesn’t exist. But what he represents does: the nameless figures inside the Bureau, inside counterterror units, trying to catch shadows while the public changes the channel.

This isn’t fiction. It’s dramatized history.

We know the names—Laura Whitehorn, Susan Rosenberg, Marilyn Buck, Linda Sue Evans. But we don’t remember the weight of their actions. Not really. Not the planning, not the pressure, not the kind of silence that comes after a detonation and before the headlines fade.

Most people skipped the story. We didn’t.

This episode is about memory. It’s about what happens when ideology turns tactical. When conviction goes underground. When belief is built out of wires and timers and communiqués.

And yes, it’s about what happens when you catch them. What they say. What they don’t. What it costs.

No one died in the Capitol bombing. That’s luck, not virtue. It could’ve gone the other way. If you think careful targeting makes you noble, you’ve already stepped off the cliff.

We’ve spent decades worrying about foreign threats. Meanwhile, some of the most coordinated, ideology-driven attacks on American soil were authored by people born here. Educated here. Radicalized by our own fractures.

Some served time. Some walked out.

But the message didn’t die.

It just found a new printer.

🎧 Listen to the episode now: The Capitol Bombing: A Story of Revolution and Pursuit

🎤 Brought to you by FMS Studios, Things I Want to Know, and Paul G’s Corner.

Got thoughts? Disagree? Think you remember it differently?

📩 Reply or comment. Or better yet—bring your facts.