Bone and Sickle Podcast
1) #23 Ghastly Saint Stories
Our collection of ghastly stories of saints highlights notions of extreme self-mortification as a spiritual practice along with a preoccupation with the saintly body after death. While these aspects ...Show More
2) Rhymes for Those Who Can Neither Read Nor Run
Gammer Gurton’s Garland, published in 1784, is one of the earliest collections of English nursery rhymes, and contains verses both familiar and alarmingly unsettling. Intended to be read to todd...Show More
3) A Christmas Ghost Story, VIII
The Christmas Eve ghost story is a fine old tradition associated with Victorian and Edwardian England, one that’s been making a comeback on both sides of the Atlantic. Since 2018, Bone and Sickl...Show More
4) Christmas is Carnival: Carols and Calendars
Historically, the celebration of Christmas and Carnival could overlap, and there is some reason to believe that customs associated with the former were inherited by the latter. A clue to this calendri...Show More
5) A Werewolf in Court
In our second short episode for November, we take a close look at a the 1692 trial of Thiess of Kaltenbrunn, a purported werewolf in the town of Jürgensburg, in Livonia, (a Baltic region now divided ...Show More
6) Horror, Fact, Fiction, and a Revelation
This is a special short episode looking at fictional evidence used to bolster horror narratives in literature, film, and broadcast media. We compare the found-footage phenomenon with earlier literary...Show More
7) Halloween Fortune-Telling Party
This year, in the tradition of Halloween fortune-telling, we have an interactive divination game you can play at home. It comes from aa 19th-century book on cartomancy called, The oracle of human des...Show More
8) Mr. Ridenour’s Haunted Basement
If you've been curious regarding Mr. Ridenour's and Mrs. Karswell's troubles with anomalous events in the house, this short episode should answer some of your questions as Dr. Bartusch and crew attemp...Show More
9) Update: GO LOOK AT THE GRAVE!
(SPOILER ALERTt: Do not listen to this until you have heard Episode 146 "Urban Legend".) This is a short postscript to our "Urban Legend" episode based on feedback from a listener. It has to do with ...Show More
10) Urban Legend
A 1968 Halloween "Spook Show" in the Midwest left an unsettling heritage of urban legends possibly rooted in even more unsettling facts. What little is definitively known regarding this event comes f...Show More