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The Pirate Life of Henry Every

There is no shortage of famous names associated with the Golden Age of Piracy. Captain Kidd, Blackbeard, Henry Morgan or Jack Rackham hold such levels of fame, they have become household names, legends with largely fictional tales still told of their lives at sea. There is, however, one man who managed to outdo them all. His largest, most audacious crime is one of the most successful pirate raids in history and one that nearly brought down one of the richest, most powerful empires the world has ever known. Captain Henry Every, the pirate that shook the colonies from the Red Sea to the Caribbean and then disappeared without a trace.

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The Balham Mystery: The Death of Charles Bravo

In April, 1876, Charles Bravo took to his bedroom, rubbed a dose of laudanum into his gums and poured himself a glass of water from the jug on his nightstand. Within minutes of retiring to bed, Charles Bravo fell desperately ill. Within two days, he would be pronounced dead, the victim of Antimony poisoning. Suicide, manslaughter and murder have been cast forward by amateur historians and famous crime writers alike. 145 years on, some have claimed to have solved the mystery of the death of Charles Bravo, but in reality, the truth lies as buried as the characters themselves. Two inquests to the good, the question remains, who killed Charles Bravo?

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The Disappearance of Lord Lucan

Lord Lucan, a name of considerable infamy, not as a member of the aristocracy, but for the murder of his children’s nanny in a house in the elitist district of Belgravia, London in 1973 and his subsequent disappearance. It was a story that the press went to town on, a classic us vs them tale of Class superiority and those that would seek to protect the hierarchy at all costs, but how much of it was based on truth and how much just a convenient narrative for the journalists that covered the case? It was a case that was launched into mythical status after the Lord himself vanished without trace, leaving a question that runs until today. Where in the world is Lord Lucan? This is Dark Histories, where the facts are worse than fiction.

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Phantom: The Texarkana Moonlight Murders

In 1946, The American twin city of Texarkana was plunged into the depths of panic and fear. The population of the postwar suburb was subjected to a series of murders that shook the dual cities to their core, prompting curfews, rumours and unease to spread through the area like the rail tracks that crept from it’s central hub. Nights of midnight movies, drive-in cafes, the songs of Duke Ellington and big band orchestras were perforated with tales of a man with a white sheet over his head, holes cut out for eyes, performing brutal executions upon the vulnerable and unexpecting.

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Americas First Documented Ghost: The Nelly Butler Haunting

Half a century before the Fox Sisters showed up on the scene to propel mainstream spiritualism onto the populace of America, there was a much lesser known haunting taking place in the cellar of a small frontier settlement, named Sullivan in Maine. Though it was extensively documented at the time, the many eye-witness testimonies fell to the back pages of history. Despite its relatively unknown status, it remains as one of, if not the very first documented cases of a haunting in North America and is a story that culminates in an event that was utterly bizarre.