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, welcome to this, my eighth episode. Thank you for joining me, and thank you so, so much, for rating the show on Spotify. I asked if you would bring me to 50 ratings, and I was afraid I was being greedy, but you brought me to 57.

It's like that scary feeling of asking people to come to your party, and you get scared,

no one will show up, but they all do, and they bring seven more cool people with them.

It's a really nice feeling, so thank you. Please continue to rate the podcast on Spotify,

review, if you're listening on Apple Podcasts or YouTube, subscribe and share the podcast with your weird sexy friends.

I love talking to weird sexy people.

Today's podcast is going to be a little different. I've been sticking to one-ish topics per episode so far,

but today is a bit of a hodgepodge. I just keep falling down rabbit holes while trying to

figure out how to properly do an episode on Amelia Dyer. She was the baby farmer who killed at least

300 babies. I'm procrastinating this by reading other kinds of horrifying stories in the Illustrated Police News from 1871.

If you've never seen this publication, it was kind of like the Inquirer,

but if the Inquirer contained stories of people getting burned alive and eaten by pigs

or children throwing themselves in waterfalls in double suicides.

It was basically a salacious recounting of police reports from the Victorian and Edwardian eras, but also random clippings about naughty orgies, seances performed on coffin-shaped tables, or a guy that fell out of a tree

and got his face stuck in a wooden plaque? It's kind of all over the place, but it's pretty

extraordinary, also hideously racist and sexist at times, as you would imagine any publication

or current events written only by white men in 1871 would be. Even though it's wild and inflammatory and

often offensive with its subjects, in many ways it had its finger on the pulse of society of the time

for better or for worse, mostly worse. I mean this mostly in regard to how you can read

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