Forbidden History - Uncovering Medieval Disease

Episode Date: September 16, 2025

Illness and disease were an unavoidable part of medieval life. With short life expectancies and deaths often hastened by infection, sickness shaped everyday existence. In this episode, archaeologists reveal how a skeleton uncovered in York, England offers insights into how people coped with disease in the Middle Ages.  Cast List:  Tim Sutherland: Archaeologist, University of York Prof. Charlotte Roberts: Bioarcheologist, University of Durham Prof. Don Brothwell: University of York Dr. Piers D. Mitchell: University of Cambridge  Malin Holst: Osteoarcheologist, University of York Dr. Sarah Fiddyment: Bioarcheologist, University of York Dr. Camilla Speller: Bioarcheologist, University of York Helen Goodchild: Archaeologist, University of York Eric Meyers: Narrator Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. York, once considered England's second city in medieval times. Daily life was already hard enough, but everyone from kings to beggars lived under the constant threat of disease. Long before penicillin, people went about the... their lives knowing that if they fell victim to disease, the only help came from the church

or small acts of charity. For more than 700 years, a woman lay buried below the old stone streets of York. There was no record of who she was, or of the awful conditions she had to endure without hope of a cure. You accepted death was going to be with you soon. In this episode, we follow a team of researchers as they unlock the story of her life by uncovering the evidence contained in her bones. I forbid you ever to enter a church, a monastery, a fair, a mill, a market, or an assembly of

people. I forbid you to leave your house unless dressed in your recognizable garb and also shod. I forbid you to share house with any woman but your wife. I command you. I've accosted by anyone while travelling on a road to set yourself downwind of them before you answer. I forbid you to enter any narrow passage, lest a passer-by bump into you. I forbid you, wherever you go, to touch the rim or the rope of a well without donning your gloves. I forbid you to touch any child or give them anything.

I forbid you to drink or eat from any vessel but your own. These are the words of the mass of separation, thought to have been spoken by medieval churchmen, to those suffering with leprosy. By the 10th and 11th centuries, the so-called dark ages were fading, and medieval society was on the rise. The rate of change gathered momentum across Europe and the Near East. Near East, populations grew as birth rates climbed, and more people began moving, both between countries and within countries, from the countryside into urban areas. Towns and cities swelled to accommodate these new arrivals, but with growth came problems such as overcrowding, poverty, and war. As if life in the medieval world wasn't hazardous enough, disease was spreading too.

This was still centuries before anyone understood bacteria or discovered penicillin. In cramped towns and even in remote rural areas, sanitation and hygiene were misunderstood or missing altogether. In the 15th century, the Dutch cleric Erasmus described just how filthy most homes were. Floors were covered with rushes like straw, laid over white clay. Occasionally they would be renewed, but instead of being cleared out completely, new layers were just thrown on top, sometimes left for as long as 20 years. Beneath them built up all sorts of filth, the perfect breeding ground for disease.

And with no vaccines, no medicine, and no real cures, illness spread unchecked. By modern standards, it's almost impossible to imagine how people lived in such conditions. Did they have a really pleasant life, live a life of luxury, eat the right foods, have a really pleasant, you know, rich lifestyle, or did they suffer some of the most horrendous diseases known to man, leprosy, syphilis, things that really affected them and even took the evidence with them to the grave? And so looking at the skeleton, you can see them and say, that was not a nice way to live or to die. Archaeologists now recognize just how much can be learned from the study of disease.

Its effects are locked away in the archaeological record, in the skeletal remains of the population of the Middle Ages. Charlotte Roberts has spent her career studying archaeological human remains through the lens of biological research. She's a bio-archologist. I think the term bio-archeologist melds the two disciplines of biology, so looking at the biological evidence for disease. With the archaeological context, I need to understand the archaeology

of the site from which these skeletons come from to be able to interpret the evidence for disease that I see in the skeletons. Charlotte is an expert in paleopathology, the study of diseases within the archaeological record, tracing their history and development, It's a relatively new discipline that's grown primarily over the past 50 or so years and has been helped by new methods such as DNA analysis of the pathogens that cause infectious diseases. It's a branch of archaeology which has the potential to influence current or future healthcare.

Can we as paleopathologists actually study those diseases and help explain, inform what we see today and perhaps predict the future. We know, even just from historical documents in the past, that a lot of infectious diseases were pretty rife in the medieval period, and a lot of that was to do with the type of living conditions people had, the types of diet they were eating, or what diets they weren't eating. At the University of Durham in England, students learn how to spot evidence of disease. It's part of the skill of a bioarchologist, detects. the traces of infection on skeletal remains.

To be able to teach and research in paleopathology, you need to have skeletal remains or mummified remains to work with. In the medieval period, there's seen to be a huge range of infectious diseases, many of which that we wouldn't actually be able to see on the skeleton because they only affect the soft tissues. But the key ones for me would be tuberculosis and leprosy, and leprosy, both caused by bacteria, as is something called trepanimal disease. So those three, what I would call specific infections, were ones that could cause damage to the skeleton

and were pretty frequent in the medieval period. One of the most prevalent of these medieval diseases was syphilis, still known today as a venereal condition. Archaeologist and paleopathologist Don Brothwell has studied ancient diseases in human and animal remains for almost half a century. First of all, you've got to realize that there are three clinical diseases, and venereal syphilis is just one of them. And that probably, if you're thinking in terms of an evolutionary tree of diseases, that is close to the other two. but in fact probably is the last evolving venereal syphilis from this other group called the trepanemes or trepanemotosis the whole group is called and the other two are endemic syphilis and yours endemic syphilis you pick it up usually during the first ten years of your life

it's linked with poor hygiene sharing food vessels and that sort of thing So it's within family groups, you're all together eating, sharing food utensils and so on. So this is where it all begins. So it's easily caught during childhood and then it gradually progresses through into the adult period. Now endemic syphilis was probably affected a lot of the populations during medieval times in the Near East. Now our connection there, of course, with the Crusades, for instance. So we're likely to have probably picked up endemic syphilis and brought it through into Northern Europe. I think at that stage, probably well-defined venereal syphilis, sexually transmitted syphilis,

probably wasn't around or was extremely uncommon. Through his work in paleopathology, Don believes that syphilis underwent a fundamental change. The transformation happened within the medieval period, at the height of the the great population changes that were occurring at the time. What I think was happening during the medieval period was that, in fact, the disease endemic syphilis was becoming transformed, and it was becoming transformed because it had to move through into northern Europe, into different societies in colder climates and so on. So the medieval world was very interesting from this point of view for the evolution of venereal

syphilis, I think. This is really quite an interesting phenomenon that was going on during the medieval period. We know diseases have changed. They changed their face through the years, modifying themselves and so on. I mean, Darwin would have been excited by this, and he didn't know about it at some. We don't know how many times it's changed. This is something which we still really have to study. We can study the evolution of man, but in relation to that, there's also the evolution of the diseases which were followed. following him through time, as it were. The work of paleopathologists is being assisted as more skeletal remains become available

for study. There's also now less stigma than in previous eras around excavating Christian burials from the medieval period and even later. Now in terms of numbers of bones or skeletons, let's just take England or Britain, now we're excavating more Christian burial grounds. and that's why they're beginning to turn up in more numbers. We have now quite a few cemeteries, either earlier medieval or later medieval. One of the most notorious diseases of the medieval period still carries stigma with it today.

It was a terrible condition to endure in medieval times, though it was, and still is, one made worse by the myths, superstitions, and inaccuracies surrounding it. One myth about leprosy is that it's described in the Bible and unfortunately that myth has led to the continued stigmatization of people with leprosy today. But it is believed now that the word in the Bible that people have used as indicating leprosy was a mistranslation of a Hebrew word which basically means skin diseases, impurity but not leprosy specifically. Misrepresentations like this mean leprosy is still generally regarded as being incurable. Another myth is that leprosy is incurable, but it is curable with antibiotics. And in fact, the treatment's been free since 1995. So if people are getting access to the treatment, then they can be cured.

So leprosy is curable, but people call it the living death. By modern standards, it's a serious, but curable. but curable infection. Lepris is a bacterial infection, so caused by bacteria. The bacteria ends up in the lungs, usually from someone with leprosy coughing and sneezing over someone else and then they inhale

the droplets containing the bacteria. So it establishes itself in the lungs and then potentially it will spread two other parts of the body. The bacteria affect the bones of the face, mainly the architecture of the nasal area. It can also affect the nervous system, the sensory nerves, motor nerves, and the autonomic nervous system.

As feeling is lost, injuries to fingers and toes go unnoticed, turning into ulcers and infections that can spread to the bones. When the infection affecting the hands and feet, or the hand and foot bones, gets established, the fingers and toes are affected and they tend to absorb, So the ends of the fingers and toes absorb and the fingers and toes get shorter and shorter and shorter. But the skin contracts around what's left

of the fingers and toes. And the actual nails, the fingernails and toe nails, are actually retained. So they don't drop off. Tows and fingers just get shorter. So to be able to recognize leprosy in skeletons, we're looking for those facial changes, and we're looking for changes in the hands and the feet.

Probably the greatest myth surrounding leprosy is that it causes death. In fact, it weakens the immune system, meaning death can occur from whatever other infections the individual is also exposed to, such as tuberculosis in medieval times. Yet leprosy sufferers were just as likely to die from everyday conditions such as heart attack or stroke,

though they might have lived with the disease for decades beforehand. Leprosy is called a living death because you don't die from it and you can live for many years with it, but you can get complications that will eventually kill you, like kidney problems. But I think the living death phrase attached to leprosy has perhaps come through history and I'm not entirely certain that that would have been.

been the case for everyone in the medieval period, feeling that it was the living death. Is it possible that medieval people saw leprosy in a more pragmatic, accepting way than we often assume? Our modern view is shaped more by the 19th century when sufferers were exiled to remote leper colonies, treated almost like criminals. So when we come to the 19th century and the treatment of people with leprosy then, we see a lot of islands being used for segregation of people with leprosy. Robben Island off the south coast of South Africa was where people were sent with leprosy.

Spinalonga, the island off the side of Crete in Greece, and Molokai in Hawaii. Documentary sources suggest their existence wasn't very pleasant, so you can imagine the sort of existence these people were having that time. We'll be back with more forbidden history after the break. century was the time of mass transportation of criminals, as well as the sufferers of infectious disease. In the medieval period, this practice was still hundreds of years in the future. They had to deal with the problem of leprosy in society in different ways. Medical knowledge of disease was still in the realm of alchemy and superstition.

If you went to a doctor in medieval period, they would have described describe the cause of illness as being due to an imbalance of your humours. At that time, the idea of health was based upon the four humours of blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile being in balance. And if they were out of balance, or if they were corrupted, then that led to illness. Pears Mitchell is a consultant doctor and bioarchologist. He studied the principles on which medieval medicine was taught and administered. Now, among the higher clergy, we have this concept,

that sin may be a cause of illness. In the 13th century, for example, the Fourth Lateran Council specifically states that before a doctor should treat a sick patient, they should have abolition of their sins, because certain diseases will not get better, regardless of how good a doctor is, unless God forgives the sins that caused it. Most people who fell ill in the medieval period would just be looked after by their family until they got better or died. Those who are wealthy, who could afford a physician, or in fact the nobles who would have employed a physician to look after them full-time as such, these people would have had medical intervention and treatment.

And of course the physician would assess their humeral balance by looking at their urine, checking their pulse, and all the other ways they would interpret humoral balance. Around the 11th century, as the problem of leprosy grew in European cities, special hospitals began to appear. In the medieval period we start to see the setting up of hospitals known as leprosaria, which was specifically for people they felt had leprosy. People with leprosy generally wanted to be in these leprosaria. They were felt to be a good place to be.

They were looked after, they were fed and watered, they had a chaplain, and they could say prayers and prepare themselves for the next life. And they often saw having leprosy as a way of making penance for their sins, so that they already had been cleansed of their sins so that they were in a better position to get into heaven. Leprosaria were places where by relative standards, a genuine humanist approach was adopted. Historians are now saying from documentary data

that they were actually fairly pleasant places to be because at least you got fed and you got a roof over your head somewhere to sleep and it was probably better than living in a gutter with no food and no shelter. They are often independent institutions set up by a rich nobleman or a businessman who would want to have a philanthropic way of spending their money,

so everyone in town thought they were really nice. But also, it was a way of getting prayers said for their soul, so that when they died, if they were not able to go straight to heaven, there were people praying for them so that they would then be able to proceed to go into heaven to make up for the sins that they may have made during that. life. And so we find from the 11th century onwards a rapid rise in the foundation not only of leprosaria for people with leprosy, but also of general hospitals and arms houses and

any way that you are providing care for the poor or the needy where they would say prayers for your soul. Medieval leprosy hospitals were different to the later 19th century colonies. They were not places for people to be cast out from society in forbidden remote places. They were more a part of society and their sighting reflected this. Leprosaria were often in the midst of the new busy towns and cities. People talk about the sighting of leprosy hospitals outside city walls, but if you think about it it was quite a logical place to put them

because they were often on road sides at crossroads, by bridges, and it was a good place to get charity, you know, to get people to give them money, money to get them to give them food. Skeletal remains showing signs of leprosy are rare. The effects of the disease only manifest in the bones in a very small number of cases. Due to the way the disease affects particular parts of the skeleton, such as the bones of the face, they often don't survive well in the ground. In 2007, a skeleton was found following development work in York, in the Wormon.

in the Walmgate area, within the medieval walls. The York Archaeological Trust excavated the site, believed to be the cemetery associated with the lost church of St. Stevens. Osteo-archologist Malin Holst was asked to carry out a full analysis of the skeleton and to confirm that the individual had suffered from leprosy. She was found together with 116 other skeletons in the center. in the center of York, not too far from Clifford's Tower. And it's a female skeleton, you can tell by the pelvis, which is very wide.

And she was quite old, well, for medieval standards, she was at least 46 years old, but probably older. But unfortunately, because the aging of the skeleton relies on the deterioration of the joint, we can't age skeletons beyond the age of 46, So she could have been 93 years old or 47, so we can't tell. So the interesting thing with this skull, we've got some lesions that are associated with leprosy. So the area of the nose is more eroded or is eroded, which normally wouldn't be the case. And that's typical of the so-called rhino-maxillary syndrome in skeletons of individuals with leprosy.

She also has lesions in the fingers that could be associated with leprosy. I think from looking at the skeleton, you can certainly say that she was cared for because she lived to a good age. She probably had the leprosy infection for some time. And normally lepathy infection occurs during childhood or young adulthood. So the fact that she's at least 46 years old means that she's lived for some time with this infection. Now what is interesting as well is that she's got very thick dental plaque on some of the teeth. You can get an awful lot of information from this material because basically everything that goes into your mouth can be trapped in this material. This is rock hard. This is very, very tough stuff.

So it can literally trap anything that can be evidence for smoking or for... what Perth people eat, for example, raspberries and so on. And they can also be flower weevils. So all sorts of things can be trapped in these things. And now we have the technology to analyze it. So this is very interesting stuff, and the thicker, the better. Also the person's DNA that can be trapped there. Research is now being done to broaden the understanding of leprosy

and other infectious diseases in archaeology. in archaeology. Up until now, it's not always been possible to say for certain that an individual had leprosy, only if they'd had it long enough for it to make recognizable changes on the surface of bones. Yet now, with new DNA techniques, it's becoming possible to unlock information preserved within skeletal remains. At the University of York's Department of Bioarchiology, Sarah Fidimant and Camilla Speller are developing new techniques to do this. One involves sampling organic material from within one of the best preserved parts of the skeleton. The teeth. In particular, they're interested in the dental calculus or plaque that builds up through daily life.

If it isn't brushed away, the calculus forms deposits as hard as enamel itself, which can last for thousands of years. Calculus is basically the best reservoir we have of the bacterial history of that person. So we have remains of any of the possible diseases caused by bacteria. The remains are basically mineralised and preserved perfectly. So we're managing to get really good information both from DNA and proteins. So it's an invaluable source, really. It starts off as a biofilm on the teeth, so a thin layer, covering enamel, and as the bacteria grows, and as time goes,

time goes on, what was a film will become mineralised. And that basically is what preserves all the bacteria in a perfect state. And layers just consecutively grow on top. If you don't clean your teeth, then it just accumulates layer after layer. We hope to do two different analyses on it, or three. We'd like to look at the protein components, so looking both at the human proteins but also at the bacterial proteins. We're going to do DNA analysis on it and amplify the bacterial DNA of all the different

bacterial species that are in there. and hopefully we'll be catching the microbiacterium that causes leprosy, so microbacterium lepray. And so we're looking specifically at this skeleton to see if we can reconstruct the ancient genome of microbiacterium lepray. So we can see what leprosy, the genetic makeup of leprosy in the past and compare it to today.

Yeah. We're just only discovering really what a rich reservoir calculus is for these bacteria. And so this is one of the first applications is to look beyond oral bacteria and now look at other maybe systemic diseases. Once you combine that, you know, with the archaeological context and also with other information that you can get

from the skeleton, you can sort of piece together quite a full picture of somebody's life. Sarah and Camilla's research is ongoing and is just one of the ways the long-term history of diseases can be explored and tracked through time. The same way human and other behaviors are contained within the archaeological record. Pierce Mitchell has also studied the archaeological evidence for infectious disease.

In particular, through his work in the Middle East relating to the Crusades, he studied how one of the military orders of knights was dedicated to helping with the problem of leprosy in the disease-ridden Crusader states. The Order of St. Lazarus was a Latin, European-style monastic order that was actually set up in the early 12th century. in the Middle East as a result of the Crusades. It started off as a medical order where people with leprosy would be looked after by healthy people, who were often pilgrims who came out to the East and decided to settle.

By the 1140s, the Order of St. Lazarus expanded, so it didn't just have this lepros area outside Jerusalem. It set up one in Acre and it set up a number of other lepros area, it's Caesarea and so on, other places in the Kingdom of Jerusalem and the other Frankish states. We find them expanding so that the leprosaria that had been built in as independent institutions in Europe were then donated by people who couldn't really afford to run them anymore and given to the Order of St Lazarus. So it was then their job to look after them.

What we find is over time when knights and crusaders either develop leprosy or developed leprosy in Europe but wanted to spend the rest of their life doing something, what they felt important, they could join the Order of St. Lazarus so that we find that by the 13th century, the Order of St. Lazarus has a significant military component where they fight with the army of the King of Jerusalem, and the Knights of the Order of Lazarus would fight in their own component as part of the King's army. But they do tend to have had a reputation of rarely coming back. So while it may be that they deliberately wanted to fight to the death, because they felt if you're going to die fighting the enemies of Christendom, then that that's

That may well have meant that you would then go straight to heaven from their views on what happened after death. But a number of battles in the 1240s and 1250s, we find that either all the members of the Orders on Laceros that took part died, or only a few returned alive. Within decades, the orders' influence extended from the Holy Land in the East to England. In England, there were about perhaps 320 leprosaria built altogether during the medieval period and only eight of them were part of the Order of St. Lazarus. So you can see how the majority of leprosuria were still independent institutions paid for and run by towns or by the nobility. As far as we know, the Order of St. Lazarus operated no hospitals in the city of York. Yet Charlotte Roberts believes the woman from Dixon Lane could still have received treatment in the city.

She's come to the University of York's Department of Archaeology at King's Manor. Her aim is to find out what she can about medieval York's leprosy hospitals and whether there's a link between any of them and the Dixon Lee burial site. Malin Holst knows the city's archaeological sites. She's carried out osteological analysis on many of the skeletons from them. I did a little bit of research trying to find out how many of the... leprosaria there were in York in the medieval period. There was quite an early one in the 12th century, St Nicholas. Right, yeah. I think you found that one, haven't been here.

Yes, that was excavated by the York Archaeological Trust. The records that remain seem to indicate that the city's leprosaria were places where people in need, who did not necessarily have leprosy, could also receive shelter. I noticed in the documentary evidence for this hospital that both people with leprosy and also the poor were admitted to this hospital. Oh right. Yeah. So it's a big mix.

The Dixon Lane skeleton was part of the St. Stephen's Cemetery skeletal assemblage which was excavated right next to the King's Fish Pool. And I think that was excavated together with 113 other skeletons, again none of which had leprosy. So it's that common then that they have a marginal position? Well, it's been suggested that there. It's been suggested that they had a marginal position but my research also suggests that generally skeletons with leprosy from archaeological sites and this is all over the world that I've located are not usually not in lepros area and if they are in just normal parish cemeteries they're not marginalised they're within well with everyone else yeah they're not made special

She was just right amongst all the other skeletons. If the skeleton was buried in a marginal position, this could indicate an association with leprosy, that the burial was deliberately placed away from other graves. The next step is to try and locate the church where the Dixon Lane woman might have been a parishioner. But the area has changed dramatically with modern development. Looking at the medieval layout of the

that area might offer up clues. Helen Goodchild helps Charlotte try to zero in on the archaeology around Dixon Lane, where the lost church of St. Stevens is thought to have once stood. Is there any evidence on early maps, perhaps, of the St. Stephen's Church? So in what period are we talking about? We're talking about 13th, 13th century? 12th, 13th, 14th century. I'll say, well, the earliest map that we do have for you.

York or that actually shows any kind of real detail for the city itself is the John Speed Map, which is actually much later, but it's about 1610. The map doesn't show a connection with St. Stevens, but there are several other churches within a very close area, several of which have connections with leprosy. St. Mary, St. Margaret's, St. Dennis and St. George's, all are very, very near to each other. there's a number of saints actually associated with leprosy and the foundation of leprosaria. George is one of them but also Giles, Mary Magdalene. There's probably a dozen saints associated with leprosy.

Yeah, it is interesting that St George's Church is actually located very close to where we think St. Stevens was and where this lady with leprosy was buried. But what that tells us. Disease was almost impossible to avoid for everyday people in the Middle Ages. So much so that this influenced attitudes towards life and death. Now infectious diseases in the medieval period were clearly feared. We hear of people that ran away from epidemic. So we know that they wanted to live.

They didn't all want to die. But we do also know that attitudes to disease in the medieval period were very very very very. were fairly tolerant of death. They understood that death happened. They didn't all expect to live to a ripe old age. Until relatively recent times, the last hundred or two years, your life expectancy was low. So around earlier populations, medieval and prehistoric and so on, they were seeing people dead and gone their parents, you know, by 30, 40 years of age.

And that we can't understand nowadays. We can't really get a feel for that. That life was short for them all. They didn't see many old folk around, old in the sense of, you know, 80, 90, 100 years of age. A few would make it, but very few. I think we don't realise how much people of those days were, you know, accepted. Life was short and tough if you got a serious condition. You accepted.

Death was going to be with you soon. The church encouraged a fatalistic, yet essentially positive view as to how to live life, knowing that death was never very far away. The teachings from the church told them that if they did die, so long as they had confessed their sins and lived a good life, it didn't matter that they were going to die because they were going to go to heaven. And in that context, the fear of death was something that we would expect would be very different in the medieval period, and much less of us.

period, a much less of a problem than we might expect to find in modern people who may not follow a particular religion and who often fear death as a result because they think the end of their life is the end of everything for them. On the streets of York, Charlotte finds the spot in Dixon Lane where the woman lay buried for more than 700 years. Whether there was actually any hospital nearby where this person had access to treatment is another matter. but she was buried in the normal parish cemetery.

But she had bone changes of leprosy. Whether she had actually been diagnosed with leprosy is another matter. But I would suggest that she was probably accepted in the community as part of that community and was buried in their community churchyard. Perhaps she was a valued member of the community even though she may have been recognised as having this, infectious disease. It will never be known if the woman buried at Dixon Lane received special care for

her leprosy. Yet where she lay was in consecrated ground, in the heart of a city parish, within a short walk of a church whose patron saint was connected with sufferers from that disease. Hers was no exiles burial. She lay at the heart of a community where people seemed to treat her with compassion. Though she suffered from one of history's most feared diseases, she wasn't banished to a colony, she was buried among her own in the society she belonged to. At some degree they are still here because we still have access to them. Sometimes

when they develop a cemetery and they have to clear it, the people have to come up. And as distasteful as some people might find it, sometimes it's in their same Sometimes these people are found by accident, the skeletons. And we have to do them a service by allowing them to tell us their story. And so finding the evidence of these people brings it all back to life. It brings the evidence back straight towards us and it becomes unavoidable. So therefore we've got the buildings, we've got the people, we've got everything. And this is the medieval world.

And it's a privilege to be able to study it. Thanks for exploring the past with us today. If you like this episode, please be sure to follow for more. We post new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. Don't forget to leave a comment below, and feel free to leave us a rating or review. Your feedback helps us reach more listeners like you. And for more from the Like a Shot Network, check out where did everyone go, histories of the abandoned, a deep dive into the incredible stories behind forgotten places,

Available now on your favorite podcast platforms. Thanks for listening.