PODCAST · history
True Weird Stuff
by Now! Media
True Weird Stuff is the award-winning podcast hosted by Sheri Lynch. Surprising, odd, bizarre - and sometimes insane. Always true. Let us tell you a story…
Episodes
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The Ogress of Reading - The Serial Killer Who Murdered Babies for Money
Today's True Weird Stuff - The Ogress of Reading: The Serial Killer Who Murdered Babies for Money In Victorian England, desperate mothers entrusted their babies to a seemingly compassionate nurse named Amelia Dyer. But behind her promises of loving homes lay a horrifying secret. Known as the…
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Your Beautiful Ankle - The Bizarre History of Ankle Beauty Contests
Today's True Weird Stuff - Your Beautiful Ankle - The Bizarre History of Ankle Beauty Contests Once upon a time, a woman's ankle was considered so alluring that entire beauty contests were devoted to finding the prettiest pair. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, ankle beauty contests…
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For the Lady, a Lysol Douche
Today's True Weird Stuff - For the Lady, a Lysol Douche Today, you use Lysol to clean the kitchen or disinfect the bathroom. But for decades, it was marketed to American women for something far more intimate. Behind vintage ads promising “feminine hygiene” and marital happiness was a coded…
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Deadly Belle - The Serial Killer Who Lured Men to Her Murder Farm
Today's True Weird Stuff - Deadly Belle - The Serial Killer Who Lured Men to Her Murder Farm Known as one of America’s most notorious female serial killers, Belle Gunness lured wealthy bachelors to her farm in Indiana, took their money, and buried their dismembered bodies. But when her farmhouse...
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Tilt-A-Whirl: From a Kitchen Table to the American Midway
Today's True Weird Stuff - Tilt-A-Whirl: From a Kitchen Table to the American Midway Long before the Tilt-A-Whirl became a fixture of carnival midways across America, it began with a strange little experiment involving an inventor, his young son, a wooden chair, and a kitchen table. Discover the...
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Olney House of Horrors: The R.C. and Eugene Horsch Serial Killer Mystery
Today's True Weird Stuff - Olney House of Horrors: The R.C. and Eugene Horsch Serial Killer Mystery A routine arrest near Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell lead police to a decaying house filled with hidden compartments, mysterious chemicals, fake IDs, and possible connections to multiple missing…
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Revisiting Bloody Benders: America’s Killer Family (Airdate 9/4/2026)
Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting Bloody Benders: America’s Killer Family (Airdate 9/4/2026) For pioneers traveling the lonely Kansas prairie, the Bender family's roadside inn seemed like a welcome refuge from the hardships of the frontier. Then, travelers started disappearing. As suspicion...
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Revisiting Charlie No-Face - The Tragic Truth Behind the Green Man Legend
Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting Charlie No-Face - The Tragic Truth Behind the Green Man Legend For decades, teenagers in western Pennsylvania whispered about a faceless figure walking the roads at night. They called him Charlie No-Face, or the Green Man. But behind the urban legend was...
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Revisiting Rest In Peace: The Church Built Over a Pit of Corpses
Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting Rest In Peace: The Church Built Over a Pit of Corpses In the 1800s, London was running out of room for the dead. At Enon Chapel, bodies were crammed beneath the church floor while worshippers gathered above the stench of decay. As overcrowded graveyards…
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Revisiting Hammer Time - The Hollywood Love Triangle That Ended in Murder
Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting Hammer Time - The Hollywood Love Triangle That Ended in Murder In 1922, former showgirl Clara Phillips became convinced her husband was having an affair with 19-year-old Alberta Meadows. What followed was one of Los Angeles’ most sensational crimes: a jealous...
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Revisiting Teenage Nazi Hunters - The Sisters Who Became Nazi Assassins
Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting Teenage Nazi Hunters: The Sisters Who Became Nazi Assassins Freddie and Truus Oversteegen were teenage girls who exploited society's tendency to underestimate them, turning innocence into one of the most effective weapons against the Nazi occupation. Their...
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Revisiting Ballsy: The Prison Doctor Who Experimented on Thousands of Inmates
Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting Ballsy: The Prison Doctor Who Experimented on Thousands of Inmates At California's San Quentin Prison, Dr. Leo Stanley believed crime could be cured through surgery. Over the course of decades, inmates became subjects in a series of bizarre and disturbing...
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Revisiting Human Product 12 - The Man Secretly Injected With Plutonium
Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting Human Product 12 - The Man Secretly Injected With Plutonium In 1945, Ebb Cade survived a car accident near Oak Ridge, Tennessee, only to become part of a secret experiment. Without his consent, doctors injected him with plutonium to study how radiation moved...
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Revisiting The Enema King: Louis XIV's Strangest Obsession
Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting The Enema King: Louis XIV's Strangest Obsession Louis XIV was known as the Sun King, but history gave him another, far less majestic nickname. At Versailles, doctors prescribed them for everything from headaches to digestive problems. Convinced that enemas…
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Revisiting Shock Doc - Inside Bellevue’s Horrific Child Psychiatry Experiments
Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting Shock Doc - Inside Bellevue’s Horrific Child Psychiatry Experiments Dr. Lauretta Bender became one of the most controversial child psychiatrists in America. At Bellevue Hospital, she used electroshock therapy on children diagnosed with childhood…
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Revisiting Corpse Medicine - When Doctors Prescribed Human Remains
Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting Corpse Medicine - When Doctors Prescribed Human Remains Before modern medicine, some cures came from the grave. For centuries, Europeans swallowed powdered skull, drank human blood, and consumed ground-up mummies in the belief that the dead could heal the...
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Revisiting King of Quacks: The Greatest Medical Fraud in American History
Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting King of Quacks: The Greatest Medical Fraud in American History Curtis Howe Springer claimed to be a doctor. He wasn't. He also claimed to be a minister. That was questionable, too. Yet somehow he convinced thousands of people to trust him with their health,...
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Revisiting The Baroness: The Galápagos Murder Mystery Nobody Solved
Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting The Baroness: The Galápagos Murder Mystery Nobody Solved The Galápagos Islands were supposed to be an escape from the world. But for a handful of European settlers, jealousy, betrayal, and suspicion turned their isolated paradise into the setting for one of...
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Revisiting Unholy City: The Cult Leader Who Built His Own Town
Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting Unholy City: The Cult Leader Who Built His Own Town His followers called him a prophet. Everyone else called him dangerous. In the hills of California, cult leader William E. Riker built a community known as Holy City...a town founded on racial segregation,...
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The Phantom Barber
Today's True Weird Stuff - The Phantom Barber In the summer of 1942, paranoia gripped the town of Pascagoula, Mississippi. An unknown intruder began sneaking into homes at night, not to steal valuables, but to cut the hair of sleeping children. As the attacks escalated into violence, mass…
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Bloody Bishop
Today's True Weird Stuff - Bloody Bishop In 1976, a respected U.S. diplomat named William Bradford Bishop murdered his wife, mother, and three sons. He drove their bodies 275 miles to a swamp and set them on fire. Bishop vanished soon after, abandoning his car near the Great Smoky Mountains. He...
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Revisiting The Living Corpse: The Man Who Made a Career Being Buried Alive
Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting The Living Corpse: The Man Who Made a Career Being Buried Alive Before modern mortuary science, being buried alive was a real and terrifying possibility. But in mid-century America, one man turned that fear into a career. Meet “Country” Bill White, aka "The...
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The Morlok 4
Today's True Weird Stuff - The Morlok 4 In 1930, four identical baby girls were born against impossible odds. The medical marvel of the Morlok quadruplets brought hope to a society ravaged by the Great Depression. But what the world didn't see was the strict, authoritarian home life behind closed...
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The Hello Girls: The Women Who Helped Win WWI...and Were Forgotten
Today's True Weird Stuff - The Hello Girls: The Women Who Helped Win WWI...and Were Forgotten Before women could vote or officially serve in the Army, 223 American women were sent to the front lines of World War I to run battlefield communications. They worked under bombardment, wore gas masks at...
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The Angel Makers: The Village That Poisoned Its Husbands
Today's True Weird Stuff - The Angel Makers In a quiet Hungarian village with no doctor and no escape from abusive marriages, the women found salvation in a midwife called Auntie Suzy. She delivered babies by day and, by night, brewed arsenic from flypaper. Husbands, lovers, parents, even…
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Revisiting Beavers On The Moon
Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting Beavers On The Moon Claims that the Apollo 11 moon landing was a hoax have existed for decades. Meet the grandaddy of moon landing conspiracy theories, Bill Kaysing. He believed the Apollo Moon landings between 1969 and 1972 were faked. However, this isn't…
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Amelia's SOS
Get 15% off OneSkin with the code TRUEWEIRDSTUFF at https://www.oneskin.co/trueweirdstuff #oneskinpod #sponsored Today's True Weird Stuff - Amelia's SOS In 1937, the world was told that Amelia Earhart simply vanished — swallowed whole by the Pacific, leaving nothing behind but silence. But what…
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Revisiting Tripping Johns
Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting Tripping Johns One of our first episodes of True Weird Stuff was about the CIA dosing unsuspecting men with LSD and luring them to surveillance brothels. We're doing something a little different in this episode; we're providing live commentary as we listen…
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Revisiting Talking To Heaven
Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting Talking To Heaven What happens when we die? Are you a person who believes that we flicker into and out of existence like earthbound fireflies, here and then gone? Or maybe you believe in an eternal soul that recycles itself lifetime after lifetime? What if…
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Killer Ouija Board
Today's True Weird Stuff - Killer Ouija Board Some say the Ouija board is just a game. A toy. A harmless way to pass the time. But in 1933, Dorothea Turley—once celebrated as America’s ideal of beauty—found herself trapped in a life she no longer wanted. Isolated, restless, and searching for...
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Cursed Bread
Today's True Weird Stuff - Cursed Bread In 1951, a quiet French village descended into chaos after people began hallucinating, screaming about monsters, and even jumping from windows—all after eating bread. Officially blamed on contaminated grain, the case took a darker turn when connections to…
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The Jumper
Today's True Weird Stuff - The Jumper On November 28, 1953, a man crashed through a tenth-floor window at New York City’s Hotel Statler. His name was Frank Olson — a scientist working on some of the most disturbing top-secret programs of the Cold War. Days earlier, the CIA had secretly dosed him...
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Open Wide
Today's True Weird Stuff - Open Wide In the early 1900s, psychiatrist Dr. Henry Cotton claimed he could cure mental illness by removing hidden infections in the body. His theory led to a shocking medical practice at the New Jersey State Hospital for the Insane in Trenton—patients had all of their...
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Scarlett Sisters
Today's True Weird Stuff - Scarlett Sisters Born into Southern privilege, sisters Ada and Minna Simms escaped violent marriages, stumbled into show business, and eventually pivoted into running what became the most luxurious brothel in America. The Everleigh Club catered exclusively to...
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Jeffrey Epstein, Vampire
Today's True Weird Stuff - Jeffrey Epstein, Vampire How do you build a conspiracy theory? Start with a villain. Add power. Stir in mystery. True Weird Stuff examines the internet's bizarre claim that Jeffrey Epstein is an immortal vampire who once lived as President Andrew Jackson. We trace the...
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Swing Your Partner
Today's True Weird Stuff - Swing Your Partner From 17th-century folk traditions to 20th-century propaganda, the square dance traveled a long road before landing in your elementary school gym. What looks like homespun Americana hides a secret: a powerful man’s fear that jazz was a threat to white...
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Chronovision
Today's True Weird Stuff - Chronovision In 1972, a Vatican priest claimed he built a machine that could watch past events like a television...everything from ancient Rome to the crucifixion of Christ. Father Pellegrino Ernetti called his invention the Chronovisor, and Ernetti claimed the Vatican...
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Internal Sunshine
Today's True Weird Stuff - Internal Sunshine William J.A. Bailey wasn’t a doctor, but he convinced the public to trust him anyway—selling radium-laced water as a cure for nearly everything. One of those believers was Eben Byers, a wealthy athlete who drank more than a thousand doses, slowly...
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The Perfect Baby
Today's True Weird Stuff - The Perfect Baby In 1919, a toddler known as one of America’s “Perfect Babies” vanished from his New Jersey home. Searchers scoured the woods. Accusations spread. Theories multiplied. When his remains were found deep in the swamp, they answered nothing. The…
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Lynnewood Hall
Today's True Werid Stuff - Lynnewood Hall Lynnewood Hall was built as a monument to wealth, power, and permanence—an American Versailles, commissioned by the Widener family, meant to last for generations. But tragedy struck the Widener family at the height of their fortune, tying the mansion...
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Tiny Pedro
Today's True Weird Stuff - Tiny Pedro In 1932, a prospector blasting for gold in Wyoming uncovered something no one expected: a tiny mummified human seated upright in a cave. Scientists examined it. Crowds paid to see it. And then—like so many pieces of ancient history—it disappeared. Join us as…
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The Award Winning "Doomsday Clock"
Today's True Weird Stuff - The Award Winning "Doomsday Clock" True Weird Stuff is currently on hiatus, but Sheri and Max will be back with a brand new episode next week. Until then, we present to you another one of their award winning episodes. Winner of two Signal Awards for best history episode...
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The Award Winning "Once Upon A Shroom"
The Award Winning "Once Upon A Shroom" Sheri and Max have placed True Weird Stuff on hiatus through the holiday season. Today, we present to you another one of their award winning episodes. Winner of a W3 Award for best history episode, Once Upon A Shroom dives into the story of the man who...
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The Award Winning "Cokey & Lucky"
Today's True Weird Stuff - The Award Winning "Cokey & Lucky" Sheri and Max have placed True Weird Stuff on hiatus as we enter the chaotic crunch time of the Christmas season, In their stead, we present to you one of their award-winning episodes. Winner of a W3 Award for best history episode…
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The Phantom Killer
Today's True Weird Stuff - The Phantom Killer In 1946, the twin cities of Texarkana were gripped by terror; an unknown person began attacking couples in the night, murdering five people over the course of weeks. As the murders mounted, fear and paranoia consumed the community. Despite an…
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Dopey & Sad: The Year In Review
Today's True Weird Stuff - Dopey & Sad: The Year In Review It's been quite the year for the True Weird Stuff crew. We won awards and spent countless hours writing and editing dozens of stories that may or may not have been lost to time. We don't have a story for you in this episode, per se, but…
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Revisiting The First War On Christmas
Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting The First War On Christmas We're off for the Thanksgiving holiday, so in honor of Christmas here's a tale about a group of Grinches who hated the holiday. The Puritans in Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 17th Century, people like Governor William Bradford and...
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Road Zoo
Today's True Weird Stuff - Road Zoo As cars and family road trips exploded across America in the early 20th century, hundreds of mom-and-pop zoos sprang up along the highways, promising exotic animals, cheap thrills, and quick profits. But behind the quirky billboards and hand-painted signs, many...
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The Fall of Fatty
Today's True Weird Stuff - The Fall of Fatty In 1921, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was one of Hollywood’s biggest stars—beloved, bankable, and untouchable. But a wild party at San Francisco’s St. Francis Hotel changed everything. When young actress Virginia Rappe fell mysteriously ill and later died,...
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Gorillas in the Myth
Today's True Weird Stuff - Gorillas in the Myth Long before Bigfoot roamed through modern folklore, there was another giant said to haunt the jungles. For centuries, explorers called it a monster, a savage man-beast that couldn’t possibly exist. Then one day, proof was uncovered. From cryptid...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
True Weird Stuff is the award-winning podcast hosted by Sheri Lynch. Surprising, odd, bizarre - and sometimes insane. Always true. Let us tell you a story…
HOSTED BY
Now! Media
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does True Weird Stuff have?
True Weird Stuff currently has 188 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is True Weird Stuff about?
True Weird Stuff is the award-winning podcast hosted by Sheri Lynch. Surprising, odd, bizarre - and sometimes insane. Always true. Let us tell you a story…
How often does True Weird Stuff release new episodes?
True Weird Stuff publishes regularly with 188 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to True Weird Stuff?
You can listen to True Weird Stuff on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts True Weird Stuff?
True Weird Stuff is created and hosted by Now! Media.
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