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In December 1976, a television crew filming inside the Laugh in the Dark funhouse at the Pike amusement park in Long Beach reached out to move a neon-painted prop hanging from a gallows. The arm snapped off, and inside was human bone. The body belonged to Elmer McCurdy, born in 1880 in Washington, Maine, to an unmarried 17-year-old and raised to believe his aunt and uncle were his parents. Learning the truth pushed him toward drink, and a run of family deaths in 1900 left him drifting between plumbing and lead mining jobs before he joined the Army in 1907.

A little nitroglycerin training at Fort Leavenworth convinced him he could crack safes. He could not. This episode follows his short, hapless career as a train and bank robber in Oklahoma and Kansas, his death in a hayloft shootout in October 1911, and the far stranger career that followed: more than six decades as a paid attraction, passed from an undertaker in Pawhuska to carnival promoters, crime museums, film lobbies, and finally a funhouse, until a coroner pieced his identity back together.

• In March 1911 he used so much nitroglycerin on a train safe said to hold $4,000 that the silver coins inside melted into the steel, leaving the gang with a few hundred dollars.
• His final job targeted a train carrying an estimated $400,000 in Osage royalty payments, but he stopped the wrong train and left with $46, whiskey, a revolver, a coat, and the conductor's watch.
• The undertaker embalmed him with arsenic, propped him up with a rifle, and charged a nickel a look, claiming the body was collateral for an unpaid bill.
• In 1916 two carnival promoters posing as his brothers claimed the body, and by 1933 filmmaker Dwain Esper was displaying it in theater lobbies as a supposed drug addict to promote the film Narcotic.
• The autopsy turned up arsenic, tuberculosis scarring, a gas check bullet jacket made only between 1905 and 1940, and a 1924 penny and museum of crime ticket stubs sealed in the mouth. He was buried in Guthrie in April 1977 under two feet of concrete.

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The movie anaconda is a boat swallowing, man hunting monster. The real green anaconda, Eunectes murinus, is something stranger: a study in biological efficiency. This episode starts with the name. The Carib people called it the great snake, while Carl Linnaeus in 1758 gave it a Latin label that actually means mouse hunter. It then takes on size. Guinness notes that no living animal has been more exaggerated, and 19th century naturalists repeated rumors of 30 and 40 foot specimens. Dr. Jesus Rivas has measured more than 900 wild anacondas, and the longest was a female just over 17 feet and about 214 pounds.

What the snake does with that bulk is the remarkable part. It floats with only its eyes and nostrils above the surface, drowns prey as large as capybaras and caimans, and walks its jaws over the carcass on stretchy ligaments while breathing through an extendable windpipe. Females dwarf males, sometimes eat them, give birth to live young, and can reproduce with no male at all. The episode closes in Florida, where that same adaptability has made the species a prohibited invader.

• On a 1937 expedition in Guyana, team members guessed a resting anaconda at 20 to 60 feet. The tape measure said 19 feet 4 inches.
• Tanned skins can stretch by more than 50%, which is why museum hides once passed as proof of 30 foot giants.
• Up to a dozen males wrap around one female in a breeding ball that can last two to four weeks, using pelvic spurs that are remnants of hind legs.
• In 2014 a female housed alone at West Midlands Safari Park in the UK gave birth to three healthy young through parthenogenesis.
• As of August 2023 at least 11 green anacondas had been verified in the wild in Florida, from Gainesville to Homestead. The state added the species to its prohibited list in April 2021.

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The man who dropped the blade on King Louis XVI in 1793 spent his evenings reading philosophy that argued against the death penalty. Charles-Henri Sanson, chief executioner of Paris, was born in 1739 into a hereditary office his great grandfather had founded. He wanted to be a doctor, but his school in Rouen expelled him in 1753 when it learned his father's trade, and a stroke soon left that father paralyzed. By 15 he was doing the family's work. At 18 he assisted at the drawing and quartering of Robert Francois Damiens, an ordeal so gruesome that his uncle quit the profession.

That horror shaped everything after. When the 1791 penal code required one method of execution for all classes, Sanson told the assembly why the sword would fail: blades dull, arms tire, and a botched stroke can start a riot. The guillotine removed the human element, and with it the friction that had limited killing. This episode follows Sanson through the Reign of Terror, where he oversaw nearly 3,000 deaths under successive governments, and examines a man who clung to procedure while privately despising political executions.

• The guillotine prototype was tested in April 1792 at Bicetre Hospital on straw bales and then live sheep, days before its first use on a criminal named Pelletier.
• Sanson demanded written orders before executing the king, then published his own newspaper account stating that Louis met the blade with composure and firmness.
• When a carpenter slapped Charlotte Corday's severed head, Sanson reported him to the Revolutionary Tribunal and made clear the man was not his employee.
• On October 31st, 1793, he and his crew executed 21 Girondins in 36 minutes.
• He resigned in August 1795 and died in his bed in 1806. Sensational fake memoirs, with Honore de Balzac among the hired writers, appeared in the 1830s and were disowned by his son.

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Search for the phrase hole in the wall and the results include a rock arch, a Norwegian country rock band, a Polish game show, and a British cash machine. This episode follows those four words through geography, culture, and everyday speech. The trail starts with literal gaps in rock, from a sea arch on South Africa's Eastern Cape to a cave on Mount Cory in Alberta, and with the pass in Wyoming's Bighorn Mountains that sheltered Wild West outlaws. That pass was no dead end. It was the narrow, easily watched front door to a secluded valley, a choke point no posse could approach unseen.

From there the phrase moved indoors, to a notoriously rough 19th century New York saloon and then to the modern compliment for an unpolished place with great food. The episode considers why a lack of polish now signals authenticity, and how artists have filled the same title with opposite meanings, from a 1921 silent film to bluegrass and industrial rock. It ends with the phrase at its most literal and its most hopeful: a wall with a cutout rushing at a game show contestant, and a computer set into a wall beside a New Delhi slum.

• Bela Fleck and the Flecktones released a track called Hole in the Wall in 1991. Two years later, in 1993, the German industrial band KMFDM used the same title on the album Angst.
• The game show began in Japan as a segment called Brain Wall, ran in the US from 2008 to 2012, and later inspired a popular Minecraft mini game.
• In British slang a hole in the wall is simply an ATM, named for the opening punched into a bank's brickwork.
• In 1999 Dr. Sugata Mitra placed an internet computer in a wall facing a slum and walked away. Children taught themselves and one another to use it.
• The charity now known as SeriousFun Children's Network, which runs camps for seriously ill children, was originally the Association of Hole in the Wall Camps.

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In the winter of 1895, an aging man with a ruined foot soaked in a bathhouse in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. He was Bill Doolin, founder of the Wild Bunch, and he was about to be arrested without firing a shot. This episode traces how he got there. Born in 1858 to a sharecropping family in Johnson County, Arkansas, Doolin left for Indian Territory in 1881 and found work on Oscar Halsell's ranch alongside George Newcomb, Charlie Pierce, and Emmett Dalton. A street shootout over confiscated beer in Coffeyville, Kansas on July 4th, 1891 made him a wanted man with nowhere to go but crime.

Doolin is widely suspected of being the sixth man who held the horses and slipped away when the Dalton Gang was shot to pieces trying to rob two Coffeyville banks at once in October 1892. He studied that failure and built a smarter gang, with safe houses, paid sympathizers, and teenage lookouts. Then a bullet in the foot cost him his mobility, a dead deputy marshal brought federal pursuit, and reward money turned friends into informers. The episode treats his fall as the story of how the frontier itself closed.

• Coffeyville townspeople did not wait for the sheriff. They armed themselves at the hardware stores and caught the Daltons in a crossfire that killed four outlaws.
• Two teenage girls remembered as Cattle Annie and Little Britches listened to lawmen's gossip in town and carried warnings back to the gang.
• In September 1893, 14 U.S. Marshals surrounded Ingalls, Oklahoma. Doolin killed Deputy Marshal Richard Speed and escaped, which drew in the Three Guardsmen: Bill Tilghman, Chris Madsen, and Heck Thomas.
• In May 1895 George Newcomb and Charlie Pierce were killed for the reward by the older brothers of Newcomb's teenage girlfriend, Rose Dunn.
• Doolin broke out of jail in the summer of 1896 only to see his wife. Heck Thomas tracked him down that August and killed him with a shotgun at age 38.

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In 1871 a man in Abilene, Kansas was shot dead through a hotel wall because he snored too loudly. The shooter climbed out a second story window in his night clothes, hid in a haystack, and fled the state on a stolen horse. He was John Wesley Hardin, born in Texas in 1853 to a traveling preacher and named for the founder of the Methodist Church. This episode follows his path from a schoolyard stabbing to his first killing at 15 in late 1868, after which his father, distrusting Reconstruction authorities, told him to run. He stayed a fugitive for years.

Hardin treated killing as a craft. He had holsters sewn into the chest of his vest for a faster cross draw and practiced it every day, and he inflated his own body count because fear made opponents hesitate. The episode covers his standoff with Wild Bill Hickok, his role as a gunman in the Sutton-Taylor feud, and the 1874 killing of Deputy Charles Webb that got his brother and two cousins lynched. Then comes the strangest chapter: 17 years in Huntsville Prison, a law license, and a new office in El Paso.

• Ordered by Marshal Hickok to hand over his guns, Hardin offered them butts first and then spun them back into his hands. Hickok laughed it off.
• Asked about the hotel shooting of Charles Cougar, Hardin objected only to the rumors, insisting he killed just one man for snoring.
• Texas Rangers intercepted a letter and caught him on a train in Pensacola, Florida in 1877, where his revolver tangled in his suspenders.
• His prison autobiography claimed 42 kills, while contemporary newspapers attributed about 27 to him. He also ran the prison Sunday school.
• On August 19th, 1895, Constable John Selman shot him in the back of the head at the Acme Saloon as he rolled dice. In 1995 a court fight broke out over moving his grave.

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A thousand pound predator swims up to a National Geographic photographer in Antarctic water, opens its jaws, and gently offers him a dead penguin. It keeps doing so for four days. This episode takes that encounter as the starting point for a portrait of the leopard seal, an animal first described in 1820 from a faded, stretched taxidermy skin. The living seal is a countershaded giant up to 11 and a half feet long, with females as much as 50% larger than males, and it powers through the water with its front flippers in the manner of a sea lion.

Its feeding habits seem to belong to two different animals. With inch long canines but no slicing teeth, it tears penguins apart by whipping them against the water's surface. With interlocking molars, it strains krill from the sea like a baleen whale. Males hang upside down beneath the ice and sing at up to 177 decibels. The episode also weighs the species' unpredictable record with humans, from Shackleton's expedition to a fatal attack in 2003, and asks what becomes of an ice loving hunter as the pack ice melts.

• To dive past 80 meters without the bends, the seal collapses its own lungs. Surfactants keep the air sacs from sticking so they reopen at the surface.
• Researchers count leopard seals with underwater hydrophones, because mature males sing a consistent repertoire of five distinct calls.
• Pups weigh 66 pounds at birth and are nursed for about a month before being left on the ice. Roughly 25% die in the first year.
• A scarred female known as Owha lived around New Zealand's North Island for a decade, and seals there have learned to hunt ghost sharks and stingrays.
• Marine biologist Kirsty Brown was dragged to 70 meters and drowned while snorkeling near a UK research station, the only recorded human death attributed to a leopard seal.

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In the late 18th century, rotting warships with their masts stripped away sat low in the River Thames, packed with hundreds of men. This episode traces how the prison hulk began as a stopgap. Britain had long shipped its convicts to the American colonies, and when the rebellion closed that route, courts kept handing down transportation sentences with nowhere to send anyone. In 1775 a private ship owner named Duncan Campbell offered the Home Office a vessel moored in the river, and by 1776 legislation had turned the holding pen into a sentence of hard labor lasting three to ten years.

The model spread quickly and at terrible cost. British prison ships in Wallabout Bay near New York, the HMS Jersey most infamous among them, killed 12,000 American prisoners during the Revolutionary War. On the Thames, a single typhus case forced the invention of quarantine and intake procedures. The episode follows the idea to Sydney Harbour's school ships for wayward boys, to the Bay of Lubeck in May 1945, and into recent decades, where floating detention has served governments seeking distance from public view and from the law on land.

• One prisoner transferred from Maidstone Jail in October 1776 brought typhus aboard, and within seven months 28% of the prison ship population was dead.
• Reforms included washing and observing new arrivals for up to four days, two men to a bunk, and daily ox heads. Mortality fell from 18% in 1783 to 7% by 1786.
• French memoirs describing Napoleonic era hulks as extermination camps proved largely fictitious. Actual prisoner mortality ran between five and eight percent.
• On the Sobraon in Sydney, the commander aimed for a moral earthquake in every new boy, using marks and grades much like a token economy.
• New York's Vernon C. Bain Correctional Center, opened in 1992, was a purpose built five story prison barge, and in 2009 the USNS Lewis and Clark held captured pirates.

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A patterned cone shell on a tropical beach looks like a souvenir. Inside is one of the fastest and most venomous predators on the planet. This episode explains how the cone snail, a family with roughly 33 million years of evolutionary history, solves the problem of a slow animal hunting fast fish. It tracks sleeping prey by scent using an organ called the osphradium, loads a hollow barbed tooth made of chitin into its proboscis, and fires it with hydrostatic pressure at up to 90 kilometers per hour. The venom that follows freezes a fish before it can thrash.

That same venom can kill a person. Larger species strike hard enough to pierce a neoprene wetsuit, and the geography cone is nicknamed the cigarette snail for the time a victim supposedly has left. Yet the toxins are so precise that researchers call them nature's pharmacy. The episode covers the painkiller ziconotide, the weaponized insulin some species release into the water, and the centuries of shell collecting that left scientists with more than 3,200 species names to untangle before DNA testing settled the question.

• The harpoon accelerates at 400,000 meters per second squared. Hours after a meal the snail regurgitates scales, bones, and its own spent harpoon.
• Medical literature records about 27 human deaths, and the venom includes a painkiller, so victims may feel little agony as paralysis and respiratory failure set in.
• A single species can make up to 200 active peptides, with roughly 50,000 unique conopeptides estimated across the family.
• The geography cone and tulip cone release insulin that sends fish into a hypoglycemic coma. Because it does not clump, it is a model for faster acting human insulin.
• The glory of the seas cone was once locked in bank vaults as a priceless rarity, until its habitat was discovered and the market crashed.

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The cassowary is billed as the world's most dangerous bird, a flightless giant from the rainforests of New Guinea, the Moluccas, and northeastern Australia with a five inch dagger claw on each foot. This episode tests that reputation against the evidence. The southern cassowary stands up to six and a half feet tall, weighs upwards of 160 pounds, sprints at 30 miles per hour through thick vegetation, and jumps nearly five feet straight up. Yet ostriches kill more people each year, and recorded history holds only two human deaths by cassowary, in 1926 and 2019.

Much of the story lies in the bird's odd engineering. The hollow casque on its head works as a radiator and helps it handle the lowest frequency bird call known to science, and a 2026 study found that it fluoresces under ultraviolet light. A fast, gentle gut lets the bird eat poisonous fruit and pass seeds unharmed, making it a keystone gardener of the forest. Females are larger and dominant, and they leave the males to incubate the eggs and guard the chicks for nine months. Roads, dogs, and feral pigs now threaten all of it.

• Stiff quills on its tiny wings and a wedge shaped body let the cassowary part vines like a brush guard on an off road vehicle.
• Seeds of the Australian Ryparosa tree germinate about 4% of the time on their own and 92% of the time after passing through a cassowary.
• New Guinea highlanders raised cassowary chicks thousands of years before the chicken was domesticated, and the Kalam people regarded the birds as kin.
• World War II officers were told to boil the tough meat with a stone: when the stone is ready to eat, so is the cassowary.
• Of 150 documented attacks, 75% involved birds that people had fed. Of 140 deaths studied in Queensland, 55% were vehicle strikes and 18% dog attacks.