In this video I touch on the toxic jaundice suffered by munitions workers during the First World War. One effect of it was to turn their skin yellow, leading to them being given the nickname of “...
2023-12-12 11:15:01 +0000 UTC View Post
As with many disasters, there are a few stories about people who – at the very last minute – decided not to board the doomed ship. One that I found particularly interesting is a story ...
2023-12-05 11:15:05 +0000 UTC View Post
One piece of evidence that supports this story takes the form of a painting. Italian artist Fortunino Matania produced a painting from a photograph that featured Henry Tandey carrying a wounded sol...
2023-12-01 11:15:01 +0000 UTC View Post
As you might expect from such a long-held tradition, there’s a lot of history around the Aggie Bonfire. One thoroughly memorable footnote (that I couldn’t find space for in the video) concerns ...
2023-11-28 11:15:01 +0000 UTC View Post
In the video I mention that many insurers only paid out claims relating to damages caused by fire, not damages caused by the quake itself. One exception to this was Lloyds of London. In the afterma...
2023-11-21 11:15:00 +0000 UTC View Post
A manchineel might be one of the deadliest fruits on the planet… but we do still have some indications as to what it tastes like. 2023-11-17 11:15:01 +0000 UTC View Post
I’ve lived in some pretty old buildings in my life, some of which were built around the peak of asbestos use in the UK.
The house I lived in as a child, for example, was built in the late 1...
2023-11-14 11:15:01 +0000 UTC View Post
In some footage of this disaster you can see Search and Rescue dogs brought in to look for survivors in the aftermath of the disaster. During my background reading I happened to stumble across a st...
2023-11-07 11:15:01 +0000 UTC View Post
I mention a couple of the most common theories about Poe’s death in the video… but there are plenty more out there that are worth considering. 2023-11-03 11:15:01 +0000 UTC View Post
While researching this story (using the excellent book Over the Edge: Death in the Grand Canyon by Michael Ghiglieri and Thomas Myers) I went down a bit of a rabbit hole on one specific de...
2023-10-31 11:15:01 +0000 UTC View Post
While researching this story I came across a video which features an interview with two of the miners who survived the explosion. 2023-10-24 10:15:01 +0000 UTC View Post
As is often the case when I cover an unusual animal in a Short, the horned lizard is suffering from population decline. While they’re excellent at defending themselves against four-legged predato...
2023-10-20 10:15:01 +0000 UTC View Post
In this video, I mention that one of the cars making up the Colonial was older than the others. This was, in fact, a “heritage” car – something that was a feature of some Amtrak trai...
2023-10-17 10:15:00 +0000 UTC View Post
In the video I mention that, when this accident took place, Captain David Cronin was just about to retire. I was curious about what happened to him after Flight 811, and so did a little digging to ...
2023-10-10 10:15:00 +0000 UTC View Post
One of the sources I used for this story was this newspaper extract from the B...
2023-10-06 10:15:01 +0000 UTC View Post
There are so many unique stories from this event that I didn’t have space for in the main video. Here are just three (somewhat lighter) stories that I really enjoyed. I’m sure there’...
2023-10-03 10:15:01 +0000 UTC View Post
There’s one interesting tangent to this story that I wasn’t able to find space for in the video – the crashes form the background for an award-nominated work of fiction by author Judy Blume. ...
2023-09-26 10:15:01 +0000 UTC View Post
The Smalls Lighthouse Tragedy is credited with inspiring a contemporary horror film. Robert Eggers – producer and director of The Lighthouse (2019) lists the tale as one of the influence...
2023-09-22 10:15:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Doodlebugs have pretty much disappeared from our railways now, apart from a few that are maintained for heritage purposes. There are still diesel-powered engines in use in some countries, but they...
2023-09-19 10:15:59 +0000 UTC View Post
I’ve now covered three different unusual floods – the other two I have in mind are the Boston Molasses Flood ...
2023-09-12 10:15:00 +0000 UTC View Post
The wreck of the plane is certainly very Instagram-friendly… and, like many famous Instagrammable landmarks, it’s a bit of a contentious subject. People are often seen climbing (or even 2023-09-08 10:15:01 +0000 UTC View Post
In this video I briefly mention the Gotthard Base Tunnel – the most recently-constructed tunnel to pass under the Gotthard Massif mountain range. What I didn’t mention is that this impressive f...
2023-09-05 10:15:01 +0000 UTC View Post
I mention that McCurdy was a rather incompetent bank robber… but it’s worth emphasising just how incompetent he was. As well as blowing up safes (rather than blowing the doors...
2023-09-01 10:15:01 +0000 UTC View Post
Locals were complaining about the pollution from the mills for many years before and after the deadly smog. Here’s an extract from 2023-08-29 10:15:00 +0000 UTC View Post
One of the most interesting sources I used for this story was the website DeepCave.com – a site that, in large pa...
2023-08-22 10:15:01 +0000 UTC View Post
Lunge mines are mostly consigned to history… but they have made an appearance recently in the videogame Battlefield V (published in 2018). 2023-08-18 10:15:01 +0000 UTC View Post
While looking into the background of this disaster, I was surprised to find that this is not the first time a Trans World Airlines Flight 800 has crashed. A previous accident destroyed a plane with...
2023-08-15 10:15:01 +0000 UTC View Post
There are dozens of spite houses around the world, and each and every one of them has a bizarre and utterly absurd story behind it. There’s a list of some of the most prominent ones 2023-08-11 10:15:01 +0000 UTC View Post
While the sinking of the General Slocum never received as much attention as the sinking of the Titanic a few years later, it was nonetheless a huge event at the time. News of the ...
2023-08-08 10:15:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Of course, I’m going to use this space to recommend that – if you haven’t already – you give both The Sno...
2023-08-04 10:15:01 +0000 UTC View Post