Episode 146 - America's Orphan Trains

New York had tons of street children. Farmers in the midwestern U.S. needed help shucking corn. So putting a bunch of orphans on trains to Kansas to be claimed by farmers was a win-win, right?

Sources:

Prairie Public short videos

https://www.history.com/news/orphan-trains-childrens-aid-society

Orphan Trains Brought Homeless NYC Children to Work on Farms Out West by Erin Blackmore

Riding An Orphan Train West in 1859, A Tough Street Kid Named John Brady Formed a Friendship With Fellow Orphan Andrew Burke.  One Would Grow Up to Govern Alaaska; The Other, North Dakota By Victoria Mechler

https://www.cowboysindians.com/2017/05/orphan-train-friends-and-future-governors/



We're Taking a Break

We are taking a quick break - working on some new episodes and some of us are working at our day jobs. We will be back in about a month, so maybe listen to some oldies that you may have missed. Look for new episodes to resume on February 13. Happy New Year everybody! Looking forward to good changes in 2020 (in the world, Weird World isn’t changing one bit). Thank you for listening!

Episode 143 - Strange Lakes: Skeleton Lake and Lake Peigneur

How did all those bodies get into a tiny lake in an isolated Himalayan valley? And you’ll never guess how old they were. Then find out if it is a good idea to drill for oil in a lake above a mine. Hint: It’s not.

Sources:

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/skeleton-lake-of-roopkund-india

The Mystery of the Himalayas’ Skeleton Lake Just Got Weirder by Robin George Andrews, Aug 20, 2019

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/20/science/skeleton-lake-archaeology-roopkund.html

Episode 138 - The Disappearance of Zigmund Adamski - Part 2

The case takes a turn when Constable Godfrey "remembers" what happened to him after he saw something hovering in the early morning mist. And we try to figure out what happened to Zigmund for five days and how he wound up dead on a coal pile.

Sources:

https://www.historicmysteries.com/zigmund-adamski/

https://www.darkhistories.com/zigmund-adamski-alan-godfrey-a-tale-of-two-halves/

http://www.theironskeptic.com/articles/zygmund/zygmund.htm

http://www.theparanormalguide.com/blog/alan-godfrey-and-zigmund-adamski-part-two

https://wearethemutants.com/2017/08/23/the-alan-godfrey-abduction-case-1980/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Adamski

Read more

Episode 136 - Carl Tanzler: Devoted Lover and Psychopath

Doctor, count, husband, lover, Carl Tanzler was so many things. It was just that those last two things involved a dead woman. Happy Halloween!

Sources:

Carl Tanzler: In Love with the Dead

https://www.historicmysteries.com/carl-tanzler-in-love-with-the-dead/

Carl Tanzler Kept a Corpse Bride for 7 Years in an Actual American Horror Story, Moriah Gill, June 28, 2019

https://rare.us/people/carl-tanzler-elena-hoyos-florida/

Morbid Monday: The Macabre Romance of a Man and a Mummy, Jessica Guerra, October 27, 2014

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/morbid-monday-the-macabre-romance-of-a-man-and-a-mummy


Episode 135 - Close Encounters of the Sexy Kind

Extraterrestrials don’t just need us for our access to phones. They also want to have sex with us. A lot, if you go by how many humans claim to have been nailed by ETs. Warning: Listener discretion is advised, as in we advise you to listen to this episode.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_encounter

https://www.paranormal-encyclopedia.com/u/ufo/close-encounters/

https://curiosity.com/topics/the-hynek-scale-is-a-six-item-system-for-classifying-ufo-sightings-and-alien-contact-curiosity/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant%C3%B4nio_Villas_Boas

https://metro.co.uk/2018/09/19/sex-with-an-alien-was-the-most-pleasure-i-ever-had-et-lovers-reveal-secrets-in-new-book-7959148/

https://www.vice/com/en_us/article/9bzp37/the-paranormal-portraitist-0000576-v22n2

https://livescience.com/20250-alien-abductions-origins.html

https://www.wired.com/2010/12/pl-column-alieninvasion/

Episode 134 - Dr. Moron

Meet the man who invented the word moron. Hitler absolutely loved him, and he influenced American science for decades. Thank you, Dr. Moron.

Sources:

The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness (1912) by Henry Goddard

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3987907/

Who Was Deborah Kallikak? Article by J. David Smith

Podcast – Science VS. by Gimlet Media

Episode 133 - Affluenza: First World Problem

Episode 131 - Murder in Jefferson Davis Parish

From 2005 to 2009, eight women were murdered in Jennings, Louisiana. It might have been a serial killer. It might have been something far worse. These murders are the subject of the new Showtime series, Murder in the Bayou.

Sources:

Dark Truth Behind 8 Sex Workers Murdered in the Bayou, Rolling Stone article by Cady Drell - https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/dark-truth-behind-8-sex-workers-murdered-in-the-bayou-113264/

Who Killed the Jeff Davis 8, Medium article by Ethan Brown - https://medium.com/matter/who-killed-the-jeff-davis-8-d1b813e13581

Murder in Jeff Davis Parish - https://jdpkiller.wordpress.com/

Episode 130 - Uncle Clarence

A six year old girl and her grandmother were attacked in their home. She fled to her neighbor’s house after the killer left. She shouldn’t have.

Sources:

Maurice Possley, National Registry of Exonerations - https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/casedetail.aspx?caseid=3202

Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_Elkins

https://www.innocenceproject.org/cases/clarence-elkins/

https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-54-melinda-and-clarence-11-4-2016/

NBC news - Killer Instinct on Dateline