In Prague’s Old Town Square, a skeleton pulls a cord, the apostles pass behind tiny doors, the rooster crows, and one of Europe’s most famous clocks marks another hour. This episode follows the dark history and folklore of the Prague Astronomical Clock, or Orloj: a medieval marvel tied to legends of a blinded clockmaker, ghostly warnings, broken gears, and the belief that Prague will suffer if the clock ever stops.

We trace the Orloj from its construction in 1410 through war, religious upheaval, fire, WWII damage, restoration, and modern controversy—asking why this beautiful mechanical wonder has been linked for centuries to curses, disaster, and blood in the square below it.

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Links:

timeandtalespodcast@gmail.com

timeandtalespodcast.com

https://www.youtube.com/@LMRiviere

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Sources:

• Prague City Tourism. “The Astronomical Clock.”
• Prague City Tourism. “Old Town Hall with Astronomical Clock.”
• CzechTourism. “Prague Astronomical Clock Returns After Restoration.”
• Radio Prague International. “Prague’s Astronomical Clock Removed for Repairs.”
• Radio Prague International. “Was the Reconstruction of Prague’s Famous Astronomical Clock Botched?”
• Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Prague.”
• Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Hussite.”
• Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Thirty Years’ War.”
• Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Battle of White Mountain.”
• Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Austro-Prussian War.”
• Charles University. Historical materials on Jan Šindel and medieval Prague.
• Prague City Archives. Materials on Old Town Hall and the Prague Astronomical Clock.
• “Prague Astronomical Clock.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation.

In the final chapter of this three-part series, Time and Tales examines the leading suspects in the Cleveland Torso Murders, including Dr. Francis Sweeney, Frank Dolezal, and Willie Johnson. LaNae and CJ break down Eliot Ness’ investigation into the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run, the evidence tied to the murders, the links between victims Florence Polillo and Rose Wallace, theories involving morphine trafficking and organized crime, and why the case remains one of Cleveland’s most infamous unsolved serial killer mysteries.

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Links:

timeandtalespodcast.com

timeandtalespodcast@gmail.com

LaNae's Books: lmriviere.com

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Sources:

Cleveland Police Museum. Torso Murders.

Encyclopedia of Cleveland History. Torso Murders.

Encyclopedia of Cleveland History. Ness, Eliot.

Federal Bureau of Investigation. A Byte Out of History: Eliot Ness and the FBI.

Cleveland Historical. Ness’ Burning of Kingsbury Run.

Collins, Max Allan, and A. Brad Schwartz. Eliot Ness and the Mad Butcher: Hunting America's Deadliest Unidentified Serial Killer at the Dawn of Modern Criminology. William Morrow, 2020.

By August 1938, the Cleveland Torso Murders had left bodies across Kingsbury Run, the Cuyahoga River, the lakefront, and the city’s industrial edges. In this second part, the case escalates when two more victims appear near the East 9th Street lakefront dump, practically under City Hall’s nose, and the pressure on Eliot Ness becomes impossible to ignore.

This episode follows the investigation as it broadens into medical conferences, dead-end suspects, and the growing belief that the killer knew Cleveland’s poorest districts intimately. It also traces Ness’s most infamous response: the Kingsbury Run raid, the burning of the shantytown, and the desperate attempt to disrupt a murderer who always seemed one step ahead.

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Links:

LaNae's Books: lmriviere.com

Request an Episode: timeandtalespodcast@gmail.com

Visit our website: timeandtalespodcast.com

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Collins, Max Allan, and A. Brad Schwartz. Eliot Ness and the Mad Butcher: Hunting America’s Deadliest Unidentified Serial Killer at the Dawn of Modern Criminology. William Morrow, 2021.

“NESS, ELIOT.” Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, Case Western Reserve University.

“TORSO MURDERS.” Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, Case Western Reserve University.

“The Torso Murders.” Cleveland Police Museum.

Schwartz, A. Brad. “How Eliot Ness Wound Up Hunting a Serial Killer in Cleveland.” CrimeReads, 6 Sept. 2022.

Wikipedia

Encyclopedia Britannica

In 1930s Cleveland, bodies began turning up in places most of the city tried not to see: Kingsbury Run, the river flats, rail lines, and waste ground crowded with poverty during the Depression. In this episode, we begin the story of the Cleveland Torso Murders—also known as the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run case—and the nightmare that landed on Eliot Ness’s desk when victims started appearing decapitated, dismembered, and, in some cases, never identified at all.

This first part follows the early victims, the panic building around the killings, and the impossible position Ness found himself in: a famous lawman brought in to clean up a city where corruption, class prejudice, and chaos were already working against the investigation. It’s the start of one of the darkest unsolved serial murder cases in American history.

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Check out LaNae's books: lmriviere.com

Request and episode: timeandtalespodcast@gmail.com

Sign up for our newsletter: timeandtalespodcast.com

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Sources:

Collins, Max Allan, and A. Brad Schwartz. Eliot Ness and the Mad Butcher: Hunting America’s Deadliest Unidentified Serial Killer at the Dawn of Modern Criminology. William Morrow, 2021.

“NESS, ELIOT.” Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, Case Western Reserve University.

“TORSO MURDERS.” Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, Case Western Reserve University.

“The Torso Murders.” Cleveland Police Museum.

Schwartz, A. Brad. “How Eliot Ness Wound Up Hunting a Serial Killer in Cleveland.” CrimeReads, 6 Sept. 2022.

In 1892, in Exeter, Rhode Island, a grieving family exhumed the body of nineteen-year-old Mercy Brown in a desperate attempt to save her dying brother. This episode follows the real story behind one of America’s most famous vampire legends: tuberculosis, winter graves, folk belief, and the New England vampire panic that turned a family tragedy into a permanent piece of American folklore.

We trace Mercy Brown’s death, the exhumation in March 1892, the medical reality of consumption, and the wider fear that the dead could drain life from the living. It’s a story of grief, disease, and superstition in nineteenth-century New England—and why Mercy Brown still haunts American dark history more than a century later.

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Website: timeandtalespodcast.com

Email: timeandtalespodcast@gmail.com

Read LaNae's New Book: A Vow For Breaking

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Sources:

Auerbach, Nina. Our Vampires, Ourselves. University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Bell, Michael E. Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England’s Vampires. Carroll & Graf, 2001.

Bell, Michael E. “Vampires and Death in New England, 1784 to 1892.” Anthropology and Humanism, vol. 31, no. 2, 2006, pp. 124–140.

Brown, Mercy Lena. Obituary notice. Providence Journal, 20 Jan. 1892.

Brown, Edwin Atwood. Obituary notice. Providence Journal, 7 May 1892.

“Exhumation of the Brown Family.” Providence Journal, 19 Mar. 1892.

Rhode Island Historical Society. “Have Mercy…” 31 Oct. 2016.

Stetson, George R. “The Animistic Vampire in New England.” American Anthropologist, vol. 9, no. 1, 1896, pp. 1–18.

Tucker, Abigail. “The Great New England Vampire Panic.” Smithsonian Magazine, Oct. 2012.

In the United States, abandoned mines still hide across deserts, mountains, forests, and public land: open shafts, flooded pits, collapsed tunnels, and unstable ground left behind by gold rushes, hard-rock mining, and coal extraction. In this episode, we trace the dark history of abandoned mines from California and Nevada to Colorado and Appalachia, and ask a harder question beneath it all: when people vanish in remote country, how often is the answer under their feet?

From Joshua Tree and Twentynine Palms to Nevada and West Virginia, this episode follows real deaths, disappearances, and recoveries tied to old mine country while looking at the larger hazard footprint still spread across the United States. It’s a story about ghost landscapes, forgotten industry, and the deadly holes America never really closed.

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Links:

timeandtalespodcast.com

timeandtalespodcast@gmail.com

instagram.com/timeandtalespodcast

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Sources

Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2024 NCIC Missing and Unidentified Person Statistics

Travis W. Heggie, “Dead Men Walking: Search and Rescue in U.S. National Parks”

United States Bureau of Land Management, Abandoned Mine Lands

United States Bureau of Land Management, AML Dangers

California Legislative Analyst’s Office, Improving California’s Response to the Environmental and Safety Hazards Caused by Abandoned Mines

Nevada Division of Minerals, Nevada Abandoned Mine Lands Report 2012

U.S. Government Accountability Office, Abandoned Mine Land: Opportunities Exist to Improve Support for Economic Development and Facilities Planning in Coal Communities, GAO-24-106680

In 1912, rare-book dealer Wilfrid Voynich opened a small vellum codex in Italy and found a manuscript unlike anything he had seen before: strange plants, bathing women, foldout diagrams, star charts, and page after page of writing no one could read. More than a century later, the Voynich Manuscript remains one of the most famous unsolved texts in the world.

This episode traces Voynich’s discovery, the manuscript’s trail backward through Prague, Jesuit collections, and the court of Rudolf II, and the modern fight to explain what it is: cipher, lost language, hoax, or a real medieval book we no longer understand.

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Links:

timeandtalespodcast@gmail.com

timeandtalepodcast.com

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Sources:

• Yale Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Beinecke MS 408
• Johannes Marcus Marci of Cronland to Athanasius Kircher, presentation letter preserved with the manuscript
• Wilfrid M. Voynich, published statements and correspondence on the manuscript after its 1912 acquisition
• University of Arizona radiocarbon dating results on the Voynich Manuscript parchment, 2009
• M. E. D’Imperio, The Voynich Manuscript: An Elegant Enigma
• René Zandbergen, Voynich.nu, provenance and research documentation
• Yale Beinecke records on the manuscript’s twentieth-century chain of custody from Voynich to Kraus to Yale

In March 1314, Jacques de Molay—the last Grand Master of the Knights Templar—stood in Paris, withdrew his confession, and was burned alive. In this episode, we trace how a wealthy military order founded to protect pilgrims became the target of King Philip IV: mass arrests on Friday, October 13, 1307, confessions extracted under torture, papal pressure, and the final destruction of the Templars in fire.

This is the story of the Templar crackdown, the execution of de Molay, the fight between crown and church, and the legend that helped bind the order forever to Friday the 13th.

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Email: timeandtalespodcast@gmail.com

Website: timeandtalepodcast.com

Instagram: @timeandtalespod

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Sources:

• Malcolm Barber:The Trial of the Templars
• Alain Demurger: The Persecution of the Templars / The Last Templar
• Elizabeth A. R. Brown: “Philip the Fair, Clement V, and the End of the Knights Templar…” Viator (2016)
• Vox in Excelso (1312) and Council of Vienne materials
• N. Sussman: “Debasements, Royal Revenues, and Inflation in France during the Hundred Years’ War…” Journal of Economic History (1993)
• Martin Allen: “Currency Depreciation and Debasement in Medieval Europe,” in Money in the Western Legal Tradition (Oxford, 2016)