An obscure one this week with the lesser-known case of Gary Mathias and his four friends from Yuba City, CA. Five guys who went to a basketball game and ended up disappearing on a mountain road, 70 miles away, with no explicable reason as to how they got there, nor what led to their eventual fate.
The episode is a bit different this week. We hit our one year anniversary on the day of recording, so we switched it up and had the first annual Dark Histories awards, taking a little look back at some of the people we’ve covered in the last year and then, using listener questions, had a candid chat about behind the scenes things, taking a look back, a little look forward, talking about episodes coming up for the rest of the season as well as some of the decisions and obstacles involved with making a podcast mostly about grim subjects.
In this weeks episode, we tell the story of the Arthurs Seat Coffins, 17 tiny 4″ coffins, each holding a wooden doll complete with handmade clothing, uncovered from the Arthurs Seat area of Edinburgh in 1836. To this day, no one has any explanations for what they were for, or who put them there.
This episode we take a look at the disappearance and eventual reappearance of the Jamison family. A mother, father and daughter trio who mysteriously went missing in the remote wilderness of Red Oak, Oklahoma only for the bodies to be found four years later.
This weeks episode goes a bit more out there as we take a look at a historic exorcism that, despite being a well-documented case for the time, tends to fly under the radar. This is the story of Anna Ecklund, who found herself cursed and possessed by five demons and suffered months of exorcisms lasting for 23 days, in Earling, Iowa, way back in 1928.
This week is a tireless effort to unravel the most tightly wound bundle of gossip, hearsay and bizarre facts that make up the Circleville Letter Mystery. A series of thousands of letters, spanning almost three decades that lead to at least one strange death, a shifty court trial and incarceration and accusations of deep conspiracy. Oh and a booby trap.
This week we take a look at Adam, the name given to a body fished out the River Thames in 2001 and winds down a dark path that leads straight into a voodoo cult in the heart of London, embroiled with child trafficking and sacrifice.
