Strange and Unexplained with Daisy Eagan

We're taking a break this week so here's an episode from our first season you may not have heard yet. There she lay face down on a beach towel, naked in the sand: handless, dead and with a mouth full of expensive dental work. In 1974, when a kid and her dog discovered the body of a young woman in Provincetown, Massachusetts, a mystery took off. Who was she? Well, she’s the Lady of the Dunes. 

In the early hours of a June morning in 1997, 26-year-old Lori Ceci Bova stepped outside for a smoke break and never came back. She forgot her cigarettes, for one, and as the search for Lori unfolded more questions than answers emerged. Loved ones, police and bystanders took turns being cagey, and the abundance of psychic input on the case led everyone astray. When someone disappears truly without a trace –not a clue, suspect or body identified– how can the truth unearth itself?

Welcome to the magical world of Disney theme parks, where the huggable characters, glistening turkey legs and all around sparkle are a sheen over some dark secrets –which makes sense. Any place touting a policy of zero death on its grounds has to have some skeletons hidden away. 

We're taking a break this week so here's an episode from our first season you may not have heard yet. We'll be back with a new episode next week! This is the story of a cook who refused to wash her hands and the health department that chased her around New York City in search of a stool sample. She’d end up alone on an island, but everyone knew her name. Here’s how Mary Mallon became Typhoid Mary.

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.