Dark History: Where The Darkness See’s The Light

Ah… yes. This one makes people uneasy.

They expect something violent. Something obvious. They rarely expect a picture.

This is Exhibit II — The Crying Boy.

He once hung in ordinary homes. Passed without comment. Bought cheaply. Placed wherever there was space on the wall. Nothing about him seemed remarkable — until people began taking him down. Quietly, at first. Then urgently.

This particular print was recovered after everything else in the room was gone.

I won’t tell you why.
I won’t tell you what was found — or what wasn’t.

Only this: some objects don’t need to act. They only need to remain. To watch. To survive things they shouldn’t.

Look at him if you must.
Just don’t ask why his eyes are still wet.

We’ll open the cabinet now.

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For centuries, people across Europe were gripped by a terrifying belief: that their bodies were made of glass.

In this episode of The Dark History Podcast, we uncover the forgotten psychological phenomenon known as The Glass Delusion — a historical mental illness that convinced kings, scholars, poets, and servants alike that a single touch could shatter them into pieces.

From Charles VI of France, the king who ruled an empire while terrified of sitting down, to a learned scholar who believed he had transformed into a fragile glass vessel, this episode explores how fear, culture, medicine, and metaphor fused into one of the strangest mass delusions in recorded history.

Set against the backdrop of the late Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Scientific Revolution, this story reveals:

Why glass became the ultimate symbol of human fragility

How early medicine failed those suffering from delusions

Why the Glass Delusion spread among intellectual and aristocratic circles

How cultural fears shape the way mental illness presents itself

And why this condition vanished almost entirely by the 18th century

This isn’t just a strange historical curiosity. It’s a deeply human story about anxiety, identity, and what happens when the mind turns the body into a prison.

If you’re fascinated by dark history, forgotten mental illnesses, historical psychology, medieval madness, and the unsettling ways culture influences fear — this episode is for you.

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A cracked brass pocket watch.
Its glass is shattered.
Its hands are frozen at 3:47.

This is Exhibit I of the collection — recovered from the body of Thomas Cutbush in Whitechapel, 1887. At first glance, it’s unremarkable. A cheap timepiece. A forgotten object. But this watch was not used to keep time. It was used to announce endings.

In the gaslit streets of Victorian London, Cutbush approached women with the same ritual. He would ask the time. When they answered, he would show them his watch — its ticking loud in the silence — and tell them their time was nearly up. What followed was violence, measured not in minutes, but in obsession.

This exhibit traces the short, brutal career of a man some later suspected as a precursor to Jack the Ripper — a figure hovering on the edge of that greater terror. It explores fixation, escalation, and the thin line between the forgotten attacker and the monster history remembers.

The watch stopped during Cutbush’s final struggle, wrenched from motion as he was overpowered, its hands locked forever at the moment his violence ended. It has never been rewound.

In this museum, time does not heal.
It only remembers.

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At 5:10 a.m. on November 11th, 1918, the First World War was officially over.
But the killing didn’t stop.

Six hours later, as clocks edged toward eleven, men were still being ordered forward. Shells were still falling. Machine guns were still firing. And across Europe, soldiers who had survived four years of industrial slaughter were killed in the final minutes — some seconds — before peace.

In this episode of The Dark History Podcast, we narrow the lens to those last moments. We follow the final soldiers killed by Britain, France, the United States, Canada, and Germany — men who endured the entire war only to die when it no longer mattered. George Edwin Ellison. Augustin Trébuchon. Henry Gunther. George Lawrence Price. Names tied not to victory or defeat, but to timing.

This isn’t a story about treaties or triumph.
It’s about delay. Obedience. And a war that refused to end cleanly.

Because when the guns finally fell silent, the world moved on — and left these men behind.

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In this first-ever Hearth & Home Horrors, we step away from grand events and turn instead to the darker histories hidden in the places we grow up, walk through, and call home. These are the stories that don’t make national headlines — the ones carried quietly in local memory, passed down in families, spoken of in pubs, whispered across generations.

In this special post-Christmas bonus episode, Rob shares three true tragedies rooted in three very different hometowns:

• Wigan, UK (1908): A coal mine explosion that tore through the Maypole Colliery, killing 75 miners and boys, and leaving a permanent scar on a northern community built on hard labour and harder lives.

• York, UK (1800s): The chilling story of Mary Bateman, the “Yorkshire Witch,” whose manipulation, fraud, and eventual murder of Rebecca Perigo reveal how fear and superstition can be twisted into something far more dangerous than folklore.

• Portland, Maine, USA (1866): A firestorm that swept through the city on Independence Day, destroying nearly 2,000 buildings and leaving 10,000 people homeless — a disaster that forced Portland to rebuild itself from the ashes.

These are small places with enormous shadows — ordinary towns shaped by extraordinary events.Stories from hearth, home, and the edges of memory.

Settle in by the fire. Pour a drink.This is a bonus tale told between holidays, where the world slows down and history feels close enough to touch.