Speaker
Alaina Urquhart
Appearances over time
7 episodes
Episodes
7
Lorena and John Wayne Bobbitt
The Green River Killer - Gary Ridgway (Part 1)
Blanche Taylor Moore, The Oldest Woman on Death Row (Part 2)
Morbid Book Club: Victorian Psycho By Virginia Feito
Listener Tales 111: Camping Tales
Amusement Park Disasters (Volume 2) : Theme Parks
Episode Revisit: The Radium Girls
Podcasts
Quotes & moments
Despite employment ads stating a minimum age of 18, some painters at Radium Dial in Ottawa, Illinois were as young as 11 years old.
Prior to the mid-1970s, sexual assault within marriage was exempt from rape laws in the United States, meaning it was not illegal for a husband to rape his wife.
Gary Ridgway was convicted of murdering 49 young women and girls, making him one of the most prolific serial killers in American history.
Sarah's French bulldog projectile vomited at the exact moment a man in a white van reached for something — he pulled out beers instead of his guns, possibly saving their lives.
At its peak, radium was selling for $120,000 per gram, roughly equivalent to $3 million in 2024 dollars, making working with it seem glamorous and exciting.
In Virginia in 1993, the marital rape charge legally required that the husband and wife be living apart at the time of the assault — cohabiting couples had no legal protection.
The man who handed beers to Chago was later apprehended by police; he had two loaded guns in his van and had threatened to kill everyone in the area.
Beyond his 49 convictions, Gary Ridgway later admitted to murdering 65 people in total.
Samuel Little surpassed Gary Ridgway as the most prolific serial killer in the United States, with 93 known victims.
The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection estimates approximately 4,000 women around the country worked as dial painters over several decades.
Surgeons Dr. Jim Sen and Dr. David Berman spent more than 9 hours successfully reattaching John Bobbitt's severed penis in the early morning of June 23, 1993.
Marie Curie required several tons of pitchblende to extract just one-tenth of a gram of radium, illustrating how extraordinarily rare the element was.
Three campers entered a Canadian national park forest on Wednesday and emerged on Saturday, despite only experiencing three nights — meaning they lived through an extra day that shouldn't have existed.
At the time of the killings, an estimated 600 teenagers were living on the streets of King County, many supporting themselves through sex work.
On January 21, 1994, a jury found Lorena Bobbitt not guilty by reason of temporary insanity, recommending she be committed to a psychiatric facility for evaluation.
Most horror-comedies make the horror itself the punchline, which waters everything down. Victorian Psycho and the TV show Widow's Bay pull off the rarer trick: the comedy and horror exist independently, each at full strength. Paul Tremblay says he struggles to name many films that achieve this.
Paul Tremblay spent 30 years as a high school math teacher at a Catholic boys' school before finally going full-time as a writer. The day job was his safety net — it let him write weird books without financial pressure and say no to publishers when he needed to.
Paul Tremblay was one of the first four plaintiffs to sue OpenAI on behalf of writers, alongside Sarah Silverman, Christopher Golden, and Richard Cadre. He calls any writer using AI a 'scab' — because AI trains on stolen books and produces work with zero human connection.
A man in a vegetative state signs his body over to a Silicon Valley tech giant, which then implants AI and nanobots to remote-control him like a video game character. His estranged daughter is hired to 'Weekend at Bernie's' him across the country. It's part satire, part nightmare.
Victorian Psycho's Winifred doesn't just kill the rich and villainous — she kills babies, innocents, and servants with equal enthusiasm. The magic trick is that her voice is so funny and inviting that readers root for her anyway. Paul Tremblay calls it one of the best reader manipulations he's read.
Halfway through Victorian Psycho, a name on a document — John Pounds — reveals that the head of the household is Winifred's biological father. It reframes her entire mission and explains why she engineered her way into that specific household. The hosts and Paul all had their jaws drop.
Paul Tremblay's father sold him Jaws as a film about the feeling of catching a fish. It destroyed him. He had a decade of shark nightmares, and still covers his eyes when Quint gets bitten — even after watching it 50 times. Horror's most enduring images never really leave.
As a governess, Winifred occupies a liminal space: she's not family, not a servant, and definitely not an equal. This gives her unprecedented access to every corner of the house and every person in it, while still being treated with contempt. Virginia Feito uses that tension to devastating effect.
Paul Tremblay is a lifelong scaredy-cat: he sleeps with a desk lamp on when alone, still runs up the basement stairs too fast, and admits to having a 2% belief in the supernatural that wakes him in the night — even though the other 98% of the time he's a card-carrying skeptic atheist.
Growing up in an old New England farmhouse, Ash Kelley heard something slam against a closed door from the inside — so hard she launched herself across the hallway. When her father opened the door, nothing was there. Her sister Alaina adds her own story: a Tupperware container of magazines sliding across the same room with violent force at 2am.
Paul Tremblay wasn't even a big reader until a mandatory freshman English class in his senior year of college, where Joyce Carol Oates' 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?' made him say aloud, 'I didn't know people wrote things like this.' His wife then gave him The Stand, and the rest is horror history.
Horror novel acquisitions are up 25% year-over-year, two years running, according to Publishers Weekly. Paul Tremblay credits the shift partly to Get Out forcing mainstream culture to take horror seriously, and partly to an exciting influx of own-voices horror authors — but he worries the boom could pop.
Victorian Psycho ends ambiguously: did Drusilla willingly participate in the 12-Days-of-Christmas massacre of her own family, or was she chained up the whole time and Winifred invented the partnership? The hosts and Paul parse the clues — and disagree about which version they prefer.
Victorian-era green dyes — used in clothing, wallpaper, and furniture — were made with arsenic. The poisonous green dress Mrs. Pounds gives Winifred early in the novel may be slowly driving her mad. The hosts looked it up: this was absolutely a real thing.
The hosts run Paul Tremblay through a gauntlet of would-you-rathers: Winifred vs. villain group chat, ghost vs. book reviewer, Salem ghost vs. salty sea captain, and the ultimate question — Stephen King in the Bridgewater Triangle. Paul's answers reveal a man who deeply fears both random internet reviewers and the Puritan God.
Analysis
What they talk about
- True Crime 43%
- History 24%
- Science 11%
- Society & Culture 11%
- Education 3%
- Kids & Family 3%
- Sports 3%
- Leisure 2%
Connections
Shows they appear on and people they share episodes with. Drag to explore.
