Episode 218: The Ghost Who Solved a Murder & Deadly Victorian Beauty Trends

This week on Another Fucking Horror Podcast, Monique and Amy are going from evidential mediumship to Victorian death aesthetics, so buckle up babes, because the range on this one is aggressive.First, Amy tells the story of Ivy Sundarji, a lifelong skeptic, atheist and science-minded writer who did not believe in ghosts, mediums or any of this spooky shit. Then her fiancé Jahangir drowned in a surfing accident, the exact kind of death Ivy had once seen in a vision years earlier, and suddenly her house starts acting haunted. Then the story turns into true crime.Ivy begins seeing a little blonde girl who says “Daddy did it.” She hears the name Kayla. She sees a missing-person style image. She gets flashes of New Hampshire, cold weather, a rundown car, a duffel bag, Stark Park, Elm Street and details she has no normal way of knowing. Later, those details connect to the murder case of five-year-old Harmony Montgomery. And the coincidences are off the fucking charts.Then Monique takes us into the Victorian era, where tuberculosis somehow became aspirational. Consumption, also known as the White Death, turned people pale, thin, weak and almost translucent. Instead of saying “that is horrific,” Victorians said “ooh, a new beauty standard!” We’re talking lead makeup, mercury creams, belladonna eye drops, arsenic wafers and radium products. Because apparently if the label says “safe,” everyone just says, “cool, let’s put rat poison in the body and see what happens.”This episode has grief, ghosts, evidence, dead people with better communication skills than the living and the most horrific of them all: toxic beauty standards.