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This week, we travel back thousands of years ago where people across Iron Age Europe were laid to rest in peat bogs. The unusual conditions preserved bodies for centuries. From Tollund Man and Grauballe Man in Denmark to Clonycavan Man and Old Croghan Man in Ireland, these ancient bog bodies hold clues to their lives, violent deaths, and the mysterious rituals of the past. Let's dig deep into the history of Europe's bog bodies, ancient human sacrifice, and the secrets buried beneath the peat.

Serious history. Told not so seriously.

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Sources:

• https://moesgaardmuseum.dk/en/exhibitions/current-exhibitions/iron-age-exhibition/the-grauballe-man
• https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/tollund-man-bog-body-life-death
• https://scalar.usc.edu/works/humanity-on-display/the-old-croghan-man
• https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/ireland-ancient-bog-men-science
• https://irishheritagenews.ie/irish-iron-age-bog-body-clonycavan-man-wore-exotic-hair-gel/
• https://archive.archaeology.org/1005/bogbodies/clonycavan_croghan.html
• https://www.museum.ie/collections/collection/antiquity-18641/

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This week, We cover the Lizzie Borden murder case of 1892, one of the most famous unsolved crimes in American history. Lizzie was accused of killing her father and stepmother with a hatchet in their Fall River, Massachusetts home and tried for the axe murders.

Jamie and Leo cover the murders, the trial, the evidence that never made it to court, a Wild Man theory that suggests the real killer may have walked away entirely and some theories of their own. Come with us as we hack into this Darkive together . Also check out the now streaming Netflix original Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story.

Serious history. Told not so seriously.

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Sources:

• https://famous-trials.com/lizzieborden/1441-chronology
• https://www.biography.com/crime/a73581416/lizzie-borden-trial
• https://lizzie-borden.com/blog/the-fascinating-truth-behind-lizzie-bordens-high-stakes-acquittal/
• https://crimearchives.net/1893_borden/html/trial.html
• https://www.britannica.com/biography/Lizzie-Borden-American-murder-suspect
• https://lizzie-borden.com/blog/after-the-axe-lizzie-bordens-post-trial-life/
• https://www.crimeandinvestigation.co.uk/articles/wild-man-theory-lizzie-borden

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This week Jamie and Leo tell three true stories of history's feral children. Cases that inspired literature and raised questions about what it actually means to be human.

In 1725, Peter the Wild Boy was a feral boy found living wild and alone in the forests of Germany. He was brought to the court of King George I, and treated as a royal novelty.

In 1828, a teenage boy Kaspar Hauser appeared in Nuremberg unable to speak, claiming to have been held in a dark cell his entire life. By the end of his tale he would be attacked twice, found dead, and his true origins were never confirmed.

And In 1867, hunters in the jungles of India found a six-year-old boy living among wolves. Dina Sanichar, the real-life Mowgli whose story is believed to have inspired Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book.

The Wild Boy of Hanover, the Wolf Boy of India , and the boy with no past, all will be uncovered in this episode of The Darkives.

Serious history. Told not so seriously.

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Sources:

• “ A Pet For the Princess - The Tragic Story of Peter The Wild Boy.” YouTube, Accessed 6 Sept. 2026.
• https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-14215171
• “Kasper Hauser: The Mystery of the Boy with No Past” YouTube, Accessed 6 Sept. 2026
• https://www.historydefined.net/life-of-dina-sanichar/
• https://allthatsinteresting.com/dina-sanichar
• https://www.mentalfloss.com/history/mystery/mysterious-life-and-death-kaspar-hauser
• https://allthatsinteresting.com/feral-children

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This week it's shark week, we dip our toes in the waters of the Jersey Shore, summer of 1916. Twelve days changed how we felt about sharks permanently. Five people were attacked, four of them fatalities, Two of those deaths were miles inland in brackish water.

Nobody had seen anything like it. Nobody knew what to do about it.

These are the real life stories of shark attacks that inspired Jaws and made many Americans afraid to go back in the water. we cover the attacks, the stats, and even talk a little smack in this file of The Darkives.

Serious history. Told not so seriously.

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Sources:

• https://www.britannica.com/story/the-1916-shark-attacks-that-gave-sharks-a-bad-rap
• https://www.gilisharkconservation.com/whats-more-likely-to-kill-you-than-a-shark/
• https://sharkallies.org/the-media-landscape/our-irrational-fear-of-shark-attacks
• Fernicola, R. G. (2016). Twelve Days of Terror. Simon and Schuster

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This week Jamie and Leo dig into the life of Viktor Frankl, his career before the war, the four camps he survived, and the book he wrote in nine days when it was all over. Man's Search for Meaning was published anonymously in 1946 because Frankl didn't think anyone would care. It has since sold over 16 million copies and was listed by the Library of Congress as one of the ten most influential books in the United States.

Viktor Frankl was a respected psychiatrist deported to Theresienstadt in September 1942. He had corresponded with Sigmund Freud as a teen and treated more than 3,000 suicidal patients a year at Vienna's Steinhof Psychiatric Hospital. He developed Logotherapy (his own school of psychotherapy).

Viktor had a visa out of Vienna that he chose not to use because he couldn't leave his aging parents behind. Next came four camps in three years: Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Kaufering, and Türkheim. He was the witness to many horrors of the concentration camps and left with the understanding that through suffering one finds ones reason to live.

Serious history. Told not so seriously.

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Sources:

• https://www.auschwitz.org/en/history/kl-auschwitz-birkenau/
• https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/theresienstadt-concentration-camp
• https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/dachau
• https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/kaufering
• https://www.britannica.com/biography/Viktor-Frankl
• https://viktorfranklamerica.com/viktor-frankl-bio/
• https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8763215/
• Frankl, V. E. (1946). Man’s Search For Meaning. Beacon Press.

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In this episode of The Darkives, we look at the history of adoption in the United States and the story of Georgia Tann. Georgia Tann ran the Tennessee Children’s Home Society in Memphis. What looked like an organization helping children was actually hiding something far darker.

Tann and her network took children from streets, front porches, hospitals and poor neighborhoods, and placed them in adoptive homes. More than 5,000 children passed through her operation, while hundreds of children are estimated to have died in the care of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society.

Let's take a deeper look at the history of early adoption malpractice in the United States, the families whose lives were permanently changed, and the survivors who spent decades trying to understand where they came from.

Serious history. Told not so seriously.

Check out our website: darkivespodcast.com

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Sources:

• https://adoptionnetwork.com/history-of-adoption/
• https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2019/10/22/lisa-wingate-before-and-after-orphans-tennessee-children
• https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-08-20-vw-882-story.html
• https://www.businessinsider.com/georgia-tann-tennessee-children-home-society-survivors-speak-out-2019-12
• https://www.ranker.com/list/life-of-georgia-tann/nicky-benson

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This week Jamie and Leo take a tour through history's most disturbing execution methods across civilizations and centuries. From the Code of Hammurabi (one of the earliest written legal codes), to ancient Rome and how they got down with a death sentence. We also have a few remarkably specific capital offenses from the Aztec Empire, China's Lingchi ( AKA death by 1000 Cuts), and the British practice of blowing condemned prisoners from the mouth of a cannon...

Is there anything people won't do?

Some of these methods were designed to deter. Some were designed to humiliate.

History has always had a lot of ideas on how to end a life and humanity has always had strong feelings about punishment. We go through some examples of the reasons why and the methods used across time to exact "justice" on others.

Serious history. Told not so seriously.

Check out our website: darkivespodcast.com

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Sources:

• youtube.com/watch?v=QEko2CMykuk
• law.yale.edu
• worldhistory.org
• law.yale.edu2
• historyhit.com
• historyhit.com2
• cambridge.org
• wikipedia.org
• historyskills.com

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licensed through: Pixabay

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This week Jamie and Leo dig into the story of Jane Toppan. Born Honora Kelley, and later she was known as Jolly Jane. Raised as an indentured servant, dismissed from two of Massachusetts' most prestigious hospitals, Doctors recommended her by name, she was one of the most sought-after private nurses in her region.

She confessed to 31 confirmed murders. The real number may have been as high as 100. Poisoning, bringing patients to the edge of death then back. Killing landlords, friends, foster sisters, and entire families.

Her own words were that killing gave her exquisite pleasure...

Sit back and take your medicine, this episode we got a nurse whose a baddie with an attie.

Serious history. Told not so seriously.

Check out our website: darkivespodcast.com

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Sources:

• https://maamodt.asp.radford.edu/psyc%20405/serial%20killers/Toppan,%20Jane%20-%202005.pdf
• https://www.lowellhistoricalsociety.org/lowells-ties-to-jolly-jane-massachusetts-female-serial-killer/

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This week Jamie and Leo dig into the full story of Mount Tambora. On April 10th, 1815, a volcano on the island of Sumbawa in Indonesia erupted. It was the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history. The explosion sent so much ash and sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere that it created an aerosol cloud the size of Australia, blocking sunlight from reaching Earth's surface for two years.

This eruption killed thousands on the island immediately, the ash that buried an entire kingdom so completely it lay undiscovered for nearly 200 years, and the global chain reaction that followed. Crops failed across Europe and North America. Grain prices in the United States soared by 400 percent. A new strain of cholera emerged in India and spread to Moscow and eventually North America. Riots broke out across European cities. And a group of writers trapped indoors by the relentless cold and rain at Lake Geneva in Switzerland held a writing contest that produced Frankenstein.

One volcano. Years of fallout.

Serious history. Told not so seriously.

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Sources:

• Goldrick, Richard. Tambora's Rumblings in The Annals of Lang Xang.
• https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/1816-the-year-without-summer.htm
• https://www.science.smith.edu/climatelit/the-eruption-of-mount-tambora-1815-1818/
• https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/year-without-summer-poverty-year
• https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/200-years-after-tambora-volcano-eruption-unusual-effects-linger-180954918/
• https://science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-observatory/mount-tambora-volcano-sumbawa-island-indonesia-39412/
• https://visittambora.com/long-lost-kingdom-excavation-site/

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This week Jamie and Leo dig into spontaneous human combustion. We go over the the cases, the wick effect theory that might explain it, and question... how does a human body burn to ash while the chair next to them survives?

For centuries people have been found burned beyond recognition in rooms that barely show a scorch mark. No accelerant. No external ignition source. No good explanation. Coroners have listed it as an official cause of death. Scientists have spent decades arguing about whether it's real.

Starting with a knight in the 17th century, then to Mary Reeser, who was found reduced almost entirely to ashes in her St. Petersburg, Florida apartment in 1951 (with only her left foot remaining- still in its slipper), and finishing with Michael Faherty, whose 2010 death in Galway, Ireland became the first case in the history of that country officially ruled as spontaneous combustion by a coroner. The cases are bizarre, the evidence is strange, and even Jamie isn't sure what to believe.

Also...

Somewhere in here we go completely off the rails on the existence of aliens. Amaze! Amaze!

Serious history. Told not so seriously.

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Sources:

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7

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