The great literary pantheon of horror would be nothing without the master of the macabre, Edgar Allan Poe. His life was every bit as dark and melancholy as all his best writing. And as for his death? Fittingly for the inventor of the mystery novel, it’s shrouded in secrets…

Found in a Baltimore pub, wearing someone else’s clothes, Poe was rushed to hospital – where he hallucinated and screamed incoherently for days, then died before he could say a word of explanation. We take a look at Poe’s greatest mystery of all.

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First, children started to go missing in the villages around the Black Baron’s castle. Then, word spread of his dabbling in sinister, arcane rituals to conjure the Devil himself. And soon, in the dead of night, villagers reported hearing screams from a high castle window.

Some say Medieval French nobleman Gilles de Rais was the first recorded serial killer in history, responsible for the gruesome torture and murder of hundreds, if not thousands, of children. Join us to find out what really happened high up in the dark towers of the Black Baron.

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Boiled in blood, hacked at by knives, torn apart by iron dogs… the world’s religions differ on what exactly might await sinners in the afterlife. But one thing they can all agree on is that if you were naughty on Earth, you are in for one hell of a horrible time.

We take a quick tour of history’s grimmest netherzones: from freezing poison rain in the Norse Helheim, to a river of excrement, where monstrous aquatic beings eat your flesh, down in the Hindu Narakas. Welcome to Hell.

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Behind the façade of the white-picket-fence dream and adventurous childhoods of suburban, late-70s Michigan, lay a web of depravity that law enforcement was not remotely prepared for. Over the course of just one tragic year, the town of Oakland was terrorised: four children vanished, only to turn up dead. Chillingly, one had even been fed his favourite food, just before his murder.

Was this the work of a lone killer? Or an organised, murderous child abuse operation involving a network of predators, stretching all the way to the top? After thousands of leads and countless hours of investigation, not one single arrest has ever been made. So what’s the truth? We open up the coldest case in Michigan: the Oakland County Child Killer.

Watch this episode on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/-y8qK_BkeAw

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Not many of us need convincing that Sesame Street is good; the Muppets have been chaotic TV icons for more than 50 years. But what not many people know is just how much good it did.

Not just unmissable TV, but a revolutionary, massive-scale outreach program. One that used ad-land tactics and groundbreaking psychological research, to reset the balance of educational privilege – and teach disadvantaged, inner-city kids how to read. It’s a sunny day. We’re sweeping the clouds away. This is the ShortHand, sponsored by the letter ‘S’.

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With 2026 bringing widespread anti-government protests to Iran, and the government’s brutal crackdowns leading to thousands of people killed and arrested, we’re rereleasing our coverage on the current regime – and how we got here – through the lens of Mahsa Amini’s murder.

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On 19 May 2024, Ebrahim Raisi – “The Butcher of Tehran” and President of the Islamic Republic of Iran – died in a helicopter crash. Immediately, theories of who had killed him and why, swept the worlds’ media.

But while his passing inspired this episode, we’re also going to look at his many thousands of victims – and in particular how his actions led to the murder of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in 2022. It was a single death which sparked protests that challenged the mullahs of Iran like never before.

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In 2000, Christine Lundy and her seven-year-old daughter Amber were brutally hacked to death in their New Zealand home. Their husband and father, Mark Lundy, had a seemingly watertight alibi: he was over 90 miles away.

But that didn’t stop the New Zealand courts from convicting him. Twice.

With a controversial case built on junk science, shifting timelines, and a microscopic speck of what prosecutors called ‘brain tissue’ (but might have just been lunch), the Lundy saga was New Zealand’s answer to Making a Murderer.

Was an innocent man wrongfully convicted? Or did the police catch a killer who thought he’d pulled off the perfect crime?

Watch this episode on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/kO84-yv9GCA

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‘Anal seepage’ is one of the many potential risks to the consumer due to seafood fraud, a multi-layered conspiracy that goes as deep as the Mariana Trench.

The stats speak for themselves: if you’re in the UK, there’s a 55% chance that the fish you’re eating has been deliberately mislabeled. In the US, 120 samples of ‘Red Snapper’ were tested, and only 7 turned out to be the real thing.

Clearly there’s something fishy going on.

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