Episode 001 - THE WAYSTONE INN: A True Crime Fairy Tale About the Bloody Benders

THE GRIMM NOIR | Episode 001: The Waystone InnAt the center of the Greymark — a vast, flat country of black soil and grey sky where the north-south and east-west roads cross — sits the Waystone Inn. The fire is warm. The food is good. The family who runs it is the friendliest you've ever met.Eli Crane is a saddler from the town of Millhaven. His wife Clara died in the spring. He sold his shop, packed two saddlebags, and pointed his horse west. He is looking for somewhere to begin again. The Waystone Inn looks like exactly the kind of place where a man like that might stop and rest.He should have kept riding.The Waystone Inn is the first story in Grimm Noir — a series set in the kingdom of Aldenmere (Season 1), where every episode blends a real true crime case with a fairy tale or piece of folklore to create something that lives in the space between both. Each story is told like a fairy tale. Each story actually happened. The distance between those two things is always smaller than it looks.THIS EPISODE IS BASED ON:True Crime — The Bloody Benders (Kansas, 1870s)Between 1871 and 1873, a family running a small inn and general store along the Kansas frontier murdered at least eleven travelers. The Bender family — a father, mother, son, and daughter — were charming, hospitable, and unremarkable. When investigators finally came, they were gone. They were never found.Folklore — "The Robber Bridegroom" (Grimm's Fairy Tales, No. 40)A young woman visits her betrothed's home deep in the forest and discovers it is a slaughterhouse. She hides. She watches. She carries the truth out in her memory, and one day — at a gathering, in a room full of people — she tells it. The tale is one of Grimm's darkest: a welcoming house that is a trap, a door that only works in one direction, and a witness who survives because no one thought to look for her.Grimm Noir is a serialized audio fiction podcast set in the kingdom of Aldenmere — a world built on the architecture of fairy tales and the bones of true crime. New episodes follow recurring characters across the kingdom's regions: the fog-heavy capital of Carentum, the deceptively comfortable river valley, the isolating flatlands of the Greymark, and the cold, closed highlands of the Nordenfell...Some roads in the Greymark lead nowhere no matter how far you follow them.This one leads to the Waystone Inn.Content note: This series contains depictions of violence, murder, and themes drawn from real criminal cases. Listener discretion is advised.