30 Morbid Minutes

Sometimes the most dangerous place to be in the Victorian Era was inside your own home, thanks to the overwhelming number of chemicals and toxins that were in everyday use and objects. We unravel how substances like gas, lead, arsenic, formaldehyde and mercury, infiltrated and poisoned the nineteenth century home, and could be found en masse in products like children’s toys, beauty products, wallpaper, and even food.

The modern funeral industry capitalizes on stigmas about death, creating a deliberate air of mystery and secrecy around how funeral homes operate. We go inside the unspoken practices of morticians, and debunk some of the myths and tall tales surrounding the post-mortem process.

The average lifespan of someone diagnosed with CTE is just 51 years. Promising athletic careers have been cut short, and lasting legacies have been marred by this debilitating neurodegenerative disease. We investigate the effects of CTE and repetitive head trauma, and how contact-heavy sports like football and wrestling are navigating the connection between the two.

Time can be a truly scary concept. In this episode, we investigate the personification of time, through imagery and art. We talk about chronophobia, the fear of time, and how Doomsday Clocks and Millennium Clocks exacerbate that fear. We take a look at what some of the world's richest people and most advanced scientific minds are doing to stop the progression of time. And finally, we examine how external forces like technology and the COVID pandemic have distorted our relationship with time, warping an already fragile mental construct.

Spooky enthusiasts rejoice, it's the most wonderful time of year: Halloween season! No better time than now to dive into the history behind America's most morbid holiday; how it started, where certain traditions like trick-or-treating come from, and how Halloween has evolved and popularized into more than just a commercial candy and costume fest.

Ritualistic human sacrifice was a common practice in early and classical cultures. While we know it was done to earn the blessings of the gods, many scholars and archaeologists point to the underlying ways that human sacrifice served to enforce social control. In this episode, we take a walk down world history's morbid memory lane of sacred slaughter, to see how different civilizations did the deed.

A chair. A doll. A painting. Relatively innocuous, but ask a paranormal expert and you might hear otherwise. In this episode we learn the history behind some of the world's most notoriously cursed and dangerous objects and artifacts, alleged to carry evil and malice beyond what we could imagine, including Robert the Doll, Busby's Stoop Chair, The Crying Boy Painting, and King Tut's Tomb.

The Mariana Trench is the deepest location on earth and widely unexplored. The harsh conditions make it impossible for shallow ocean life to exist, and chartered explorations are a challenge, even with the most advanced submersible technology. Only 27 people have descended into its depths, including film director, James Cameron. We investigate the unusual creatures that dwell within the deep, and what happens if a journey into the trench goes wrong.