After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Welcome to After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal

Episode Date: October 13, 2023

Introducing After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal, the podcast that takes you to the shadiest corners of the past, unpicking history’s spookiest, strangest, and most sinister stories.Meet your hosts, historians Anthony Delaney and Maddy Pelling, who will be taking a look at the darker side of history. From haunted pubs and Houdini, to witch trials and weird UFO sightings.New episodes every Monday and Thursday, from Monday 16th October.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal - a podcast by History Hit, the world's best history channel and creators of award-winning podcasts Dan Snow's History Hit, Gone Medieval, and Betwixt the Sheets.

In this godforsaken world of snow and shadows, the cold has gnawed us to the bone. The ship is long ago abandoned to the ice, a bitter sign of our failure. What are we now? Remnants of a crew, remnants of men? If only some evil abomination would come thundering out of the blizzard and save us from ourselves, save us from the meal we are about to eat. My gut aches, not with hunger now, but with the thought that in the pot lies... I cannot bring myself to say it. In the pot is...

Oh, hi there. Sorry to interrupt the captain's recipe, but you'll have to listen to After Dark to get the rest of the story of HMS Terror. What's After Dark, I hear you say? Well, it is a new podcast from History Hit, all about the history of myths, misdeeds and the paranormal. I'm Maddy Pelling. And I'm Anthony Delaney.

And on After Dark, there'll be murder aplenty. There'll be ghosts galore. There'll be a whole world of weirdness. Everything from Victorian England's most prolific arsenic poisoner to the secrets of Loch Ness. Now, Maddy and I are historians by training, but we are also drawn to the boundaries between the known world and what hides in the dark. So why are you here, Anthony?

What is it about the world of the spooky and the dark that actually attracts you? For me personally, I think what drew me to this side of history was growing up in the Irish countryside where just across the field from our house, there was this abandoned old church, which apparently St. Patrick had set up. I have my doubts about the factuality of that. But if you look out my parents' sitting room window, it's just up on a hill across the way. And at night time, it's pitch black in the Irish countryside. You can see nothing. And so for me, that's when your imagination starts to set in motion and you start to kind of populate the church up on top of the hill and start to think about the people that were living up there. You then also have people, a couple of generations above you, my granny telling me that you can't cross that road up

there because a woman with red eyes will start to sweep across the road. And I mean, that's literally three minutes from the house, you know, that kind of way. So the countryside, the Irish countryside, the dark Irish countryside was definitely something that I found inspiring and something that kind of enlivened my imagination when I'm looking at the historical past. But what about you? So for me, I think this podcast is an amazing opportunity to take these stories of ghosts, of ghouls, of the paranormal, some of which we're really familiar with, and others which we are probably going to introduce a lot of listeners to. I think having a historical perspective, thinking about things critically,

thinking about the human beings at the heart of these stories, thinking about their motivations, how human beings perpetrated crimes, how they were maybe victims, how they overcame being victims, how they enacted revenge, how they murdered each other. All of these things can teach us so much about the past and how we've got to where we are today. What does it mean to believe in ghosts, if we're talking about the Victorian era, for example? Or what is the difference between a Georgian ghost and a Victorian ghost? Or how is murder different in ancient Rome than it is in the early 20th century? Absolutely. And, you know, we tell each other stories of the past in terms of these great days in history. You know, we all learn our historical dates. We think about

people getting married, people dying, people fighting battles. And we want to shine a light on those darker corners, I guess. So if you think this is the kind of podcast that you would enjoy listening to, come with Maddy and I every Monday and Thursday when we'll take a look at the darker side of history, from haunted pubs to Houdini to witch trials, weird UFO sightings and arsenic-laced breakfasts. Follow After Dark Myths, misdeeds and the paranormal wherever you get your podcasts, brought to you by History Hit.

Well, thank you for listening to this episode of After Dark. Please follow this show wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. Don't forget, you can listen to all these podcasts ad-free and watch hundreds of documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. And as a special gift, now don't say we never give you anything, you can also get your first three months for £1 a month when you use the code AFTERDARK at checkout.