Hello and welcome to my Victorian nightmare. I'm your host, Genevieve Mannion,

and I'm here to talk about mysterious deaths, morbid fascinations, disturbing stories, and otherwise

spooky events from the Victorian era. Because to me, there's just something especially intriguing,

creepy, and oddly comforting about horror and mayhem from the 19th century. So, listener discretion

is advised.

Hello, friends, and welcome to this my 23rd episode.

I have some deeply disturbing and unsettlingly charming articles from the Illustrated

Police News, Law Courts, and Record that I cannot wait to share with you today. I hope you all

had a lovely holiday. My Christmas was perfectly jolly. Thank you very much for asking. I spent it

with family in Jersey, and you will be pleased to know that I ate my weight in shrimp. I got there

nice and early this time, and I was delighted to find that my Aunt Maureen had to set up the shrimp plate in a clandestine location this year.

She nestled the shrimp plate into a dark corner of her sitting room.

She has a big, elegantly decorated, beautiful home with a big living room where the family tends to congregate,

but she has another smaller

sitting room where people go to talk shit and cry and stuff. You only really go there when you need

to get away from the rest of the clan for a bit, because we are a lot. I love a little step

away, a little area where you could just go to step away. I can swallow a little air,

have a burp or two, collect myself. And to my glittering

delight, the shrimp was there when I wanted to have a private moment, and still there, when I wanted

to have a spicy conversation with a cousin. I also learned an important lesson that I keep saying

that I've learned, but clearly I haven't because it just keeps happening. I can't talk to people

about things that I am interested in. I can't tell people things that I know. I am reminded regularly

...