Strange and Unexplained with Daisy Eagan

Imagine surviving a freak accident and coming out the other side unrecognizable – not on the exterior, but inside. Where do our personalities live, and how can they shift drastically? In season one, we covered miraculous talents resulting from traumatic brain injury. On this episode, we’ll head to the dark side of personality change with the stories of Phineas Gage, Eadweard Muybridge and someone whose identity became the personae of whoever they were nearest. 

Can you hear that? It’s like a car –idling in the distance– or a plane on a tarmac, with a tinge of oil crackling in a pan. Since the 1970s a mysterious sound has tormented communities across the globe and confounded those curious to find its source. With no recording of it in existence, and only 2 to 10 percent of affected area populations able to hear it, this hum is a sonic mystery for the ages that we’ll try to get to the bottom of in this episode. 

In 1974, an article in a local paper turned the sleepy town of Stull, Kansas upside down. It was about an abandoned church and its surrounding cemetery. Accounts of cold brushes with spirits and theories on a stairway to hell drew the likes of rowdy college students and celebrities alike, including Kurt Cobain and Ariana Grande. But what’s more haunted: the places that fascinate us or the stories we spin about them?

The possibility of parallel universes has long been considered in science fiction, pop culture and even plain, old physics. Accounts of interdimensional travel stretch back to the 12th century and forward to the annals of reddit today. On this episode, we’ll parse through some of these stories about slipping out the other side.

Jack and Janet Smurl were your typical, civically engaged, small-town couple. That is, until they –and their four kids– moved into a haunted house in West Pittston, Pennsylvania. Exploding appliances, strange sounds, violent events and a foul odor tortured the family inside while drawing onlookers and media outside. But was this craze the work of a demon or something more morally sinister?

The trial of teenage murderer Alice Mitchell was an all out spectacle. After killing her former lover Freda Ward in a crime of passion, no one seemed to believe her motivation –least of all her own defense team. She’d end up pleading present insanity under the counsel of men who couldn’t even begin to comprehend any deviation from the sexual and gendered norms of the late 19th century. In the second half of our pride series on Alice Mitchell and Freda Ward, we’ll cover what happened to Alice in the wake of Freda’s murder and how their story got warped by the time and place in which they lived.

When 19-year-old Alice Mitchell jumped from a carriage and slit the throat of 17-year-old Freda Ward one fateful day in 1892, a rampant fascination over the drama soon followed. Alice loved Freda and killed her accordingly –to the crazed confusion of nearly everyone in Memphis, Tennessee and beyond. In the first half of our pride series, we’ll go over the story of their sapphic relationship, how it functioned in the American South during the Victorian era and how it unraveled to the point of tragedy.

The mythic metropolis of Atlantis has long been an object of our curiosity, but the search for where it was and who lived there has left its origin story underwater. On this episode, we’ll explore how this thought experiment about a fallen empire from the mind of Plato turn into a justification for grand projects of bigotry from eugenicists, pseudo-archeologists and –you guessed it– Nazis. 

We're taking a break for the holiday so we wanted to feature an episode from our first season you may not have heard yet. We'll be back with a new episode next week!

Columbus Ohio 2006, 1:15 am: 27-year-old medical student Brian Shaffer is seen on a surveillance camera walking into a bar with two friends. But he never comes back out. Somehow, in a bar packed with potential witnesses, Brian vanished into thin air seemingly INSIDE the bar. 
Then in New York city in 2011, 22-year-old Ian Burnet, visiting friends to celebrate New Year's Eve gets onto a crowded subway car and is never seen again. How is it possible for someone to vanish without a trace from places packed with people and security cameras? What happened? Where did they go?

When Neil Armstrong touched down and said “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” he meant it, right? The 1969 moon landing was a long-awaited event that brought the world together and the United States across the Space Race finish line. But, as with any historic victory for powerful people in powerful governments, doubters soon followed. To this day, many still believe the Apollo 11 mission was a Hollywood hoax.