On September 13th, 1848, a dynamite blast rocketed a 43-inch long, 13-pound iron bar completely through the skull of 25-year-old railway worker Phineas Gage. It landed some eighty feet away, covered in Phineas' blood and brains. And after a few minutes, Phineas got up, started talking, walked over to an oxcart, rode it to the hotel where he was sta…

Have you heard about the recent case of Shelby Hewitt? The 32 year-old Massachusetts Social Worker enrolled in two different Boston area public high schools as a sixteen year-old sophomore, and then later enrolled in another Boston area school as a 7th grader, spending nearly a year as a fake teen student before her real identity was uncovered. How…

On June 22nd, 1983, 15-year-old Emanuela Orlandi disappeared after attending a music lesson in Rome. Following her disappearance, a mystery surrounding it has deepened for over four decades, involving the KGB trying to assassinate the Pope, an allegation of a satanic sex cults within the Vatican, Catholic prophecies in Portugal, anti-communist revo…

What a tale I have for you today! In 1518, a very peculiar form of madness fell over the people of the city of Strasbourg (modern day France) in the Holy Roman Empire. People started... dancing. A lot of people. As in hundreds. And out in public in full view of anyone who wanted to watch! And many of them only stopped when they died. They literally…

Have you ever heard of serial killer Gerald Stano? For years, he sat on death row in Florida, just a few cells down from Ted Bundy. He's also believed my most sources to have killed more girls and young women than Bundy did. So why is this monster, whose first six months of his life were so brutal he was deemed "unadoptable" by the government agenc…

We take a look at the recent, tragic final act of a doomsday cult in Kenya that left 448 dead and another 613 missing in March of 2023. How did cult leader Paul Mackenzie, pastor of Good News International Ministries, convince his followers to starve their own children and then themselves to death? And how did the Pentecostalism he based his messag…

Does not having a penis make you feel inferior due to a bad case of penis envy? Do you or have you ever wanted to have sex with your mother? Or your father? When most people think of Freud they think of his more extreme notions and theories, stuff like his Oedipus and Electra complexes. But he also really helped us understand our unconscious mind a…

Today I'm sharing a wild story that I'm surprised isn't much more known - that one time Germany intentionally hired known pedophiles to be the foster parents of unsuspecting little boys, thinking that these fosters parents would care more for the boys since they were more invested in them.... because they were having sex with them. Yep. This really…

The true story behind the incredible 2003 film, Monster, about sex worker and serial killer, Aileen Wuornos, who killed seven men over the course of one year beginning in November of 1989. Aileen's story is incredibly unique, the exceptionally rare female serial killer who murdered the men who paid her for sex, instead of the other way around. If y…

Happy Veteran's Day! On D-Day, June 6th, 1944, over 150,000 Allied troops stormed Nazi-defended beaches in northern France in the largest military amphibious assault operation the world had ever seen. D-Day led directly to Allied forces pushing the Nazis back into Germany and winning the war. And D-Day would have never worked without the troop and …

Today I'm sharing the little known Servant Girl Annihilator murders. A series of crimes just as shocking as the crimes of London's Jack the Ripper murders, but occurred three years earlier, in Austin, Texas. Who kept dragging woman after woman from their beds and killing them with an ax? For Merch and everything else Bad Magic related, head to: htt…

Back in the 1950s, America was very afraid of Soviet spies and communist sympathizers infiltrating the government and destroying the United States from within. And there were actual spies sharing secrets with the Soviets. But concern soon gave way to paranoia, and a political witch-hunt began, with a self-serving senator from Wisconsin leading a ve…

In the early 1980s, Suzan and Michael Carson were very worried about witches. They thought there witches all over America, even the President, Ronald Regan, was a witch. And sometimes, in order to defend themselves from the dark magic of witches, they had to kill them. They had to! It was self-defense. This is what they and there defense attorney w…

Today I’ll be sharing the strange and spooky story of Olivia Mabel. It's a story presented as a true story, centered around the unsettling concept of a “tulpa.” A thought form and sentient being willed into existence by, essentially, the power of one's imagination. Is that possible? And if not, aren't characters akin to tulpas created all the time …

In 1975, two young boys in Tuam were exploring the grounds of one of Ireland's abandoned Mother and Baby Homes when they lifted up a loose concrete slab and found several tiny human skulls hidden underneath. Over three decades later, this discovery would lead to the uncovering of another massive and shocking Catholic scandal, centered around some o…

I highly doubt you have ever been conned by anyone to the degree Robert Hendy-Freegard conned his victims. This 21 year-old pub bartender, waiting to go on trial for planning to kidnap his ex-girlfriend, decided to start lying to some of his customers one day. And when they believed his lies, he lied some more. And he just kept lying. For years. An…

Magdalena Solís was a Mexican cult leader and the extremely rare sexually motivated female serial killer. She was recruited to help a couple of grifters keep running a cult-based scam out of a cave in the mountains of rural Mexico in 1963 by pretending to be an Aztec goddess, and then started to believe she really was that goddess, took over the cu…

Carl Panzram is one of the most interesting serial killers we've ever covered. He was incredibly self-aware. He knew he was bad. He didn't pretend, following his final arrest, that he hadn't done any of the horrible things he did. He only wished he could've done more horrible things. He truly hated the entire human race. Including himself. To the p…

In an episode about the most infamous series of murders in the history of the state of South Australia, somehow the murders are the least interesting part of the story. The characters in this tale, collectively, are some of the most dysfunctional we've ever covered. No one is even remotely normal, healthy, or well-adjusted in an episode that comes …

On the evening of October 30th, 1938, the CBS Radio Network broadcasted Orson Welles's live adaptation of the 1897 HG Wells classic, groundbreaking sci-fi novel, The War of the Worlds, all across America. And those who paid close attention knew it was fiction. But thousands and thousands of others who didn't... literally thought the US was currentl…

Who are the Yakuza? How similar are they to the Mafia? What's up with all the tattoos they have? And why are so many of them missing one of their pinkie fingers? Digging into Japanese organized crime today. I learned a lot and hope you do, too! Merch and more: www.badmagicproductions.com Timesuck Discord! https://discord.gg/tqzH89v Want to join the…

In honor of the 420 episode, I decided to smoke a nice strong joint for this one while recording. And the topic pairs perfectly with weed: a philosophical discussion on the nature of life. Why are we here and what is the point of life? We'll summarize Friedrich Nietzsche's thoughts on nihilism, Albert Camus's musings on absurdism, and Jean-Paul Sar…

On March 31st, 1922, on a cold, snowy, and quiet night in Germany, at a small unassuming farm roughly an hour’s drive north of Munich, six gruesome axe murders were committed after various people in the home had been hearing strange noises coming from the attic for months. Who was in the attic? Who killed the entire Gruber family? For Merch and eve…

Do you remember when seventeen-year-old Amy Fisher shot the wife of her thirty-five-year-old lover, Joey Buttafuoco, in the face in May of 1992? At the time, I was too young to really give this story any attention, but what a wild story it is! Today, we get a little tabloid-esque, but also share the history of the cringey term "Lolita" and discuss …

When did we meatsacks start torturing one another? How did we do it? How have torture methods changed over the years, and what are some of the worst torture methods of all time? Where does the "music" of Yoko Ono fit into all this? Covering so much strange information today. Merch and more: www.badmagicproductions.com Timesuck Discord! https://disc…