Strange and Unexplained with Daisy Eagan

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. 

We left off in the ill-fated Dryden, NY with two high school cheerleaders missing and a town in mourning for years of tragedy under its belt. In the second half of this series on the “Village of the Damned,” we’ll go over the hunt for a murderer and the unfortunate string of deaths that followed. How did this decade of terror come to a conclusion? The end would be more bitter than sweet.

Dryden, New York is your typical, small town nestled among forestry, ponds and plains. But in the 1990s, that peace was disrupted by a string of events so tragic it was hard not to suspect a site-specific curse. Dryden would come to be known for a time as the “Village of the Damned,” and in Part 1 of this series we’ll trace the first half of this ominous decade there. 

After former president Abraham Lincoln was shot dead at Ford’s Theatre, a manhunt for John Wilkes Booth ensued immediately. History tells us Booth was captured by Union soldiers on a farm in Virginia 12 days after the assassination, but contrarians to this story have been begging to differ even since. Did John Wilkes Booth escape after all? On this episode, we’ll explore alternative fates for the famed killer and the theories behind them. 

The dream world is a mysterious place of delights, nightmares and lots and lots of memories. But what if we could control it? Many do by harnessing the skill and cultural fascination that is lucid dreaming. On this episode, we’ll explore the origins, possibilities and dangers of the practice. 

What started as mysterious letters to a UFOlogist turned into a rumor straight out of science fiction. The USS Eldridge –a naval destroyer– undoubtedly existed, but how did it become the subject of alleged teleportation in a top secret government experiment? On this episode, we’ll traverse the murky waters of the story that brought The Philadelphia Experiment to life. 

History’s most infamous serial killers had calling cards, from names and symbols to systems and strategies of predation. But the only thing tying together the story of Edward Wayne Edwards was his ability to resist definition. He was a robber and a self-proclaimed “reformed man.” He was a father and a Zodiac Killer enthusiast. He was a vocal opponent of crime while murderously slipping under the radar. To this day, it’s unclear all that he got away with.