True Weird Stuff

Revisiting Shock Doc - Inside Bellevue’s Horrific Child Psychiatry Experiments

Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting Shock Doc - Inside Bellevue’s Horrific Child Psychiatry Experiments   Dr. Lauretta Bender became one of the most controversial child psychiatrists in America. At Bellevue Hospital, she used electroshock therapy on children diagnosed with childhood schizophrenia. Her work became tangled in the dark history of government-backed mind control research and society's terrifying faith in experimental psychiatry.

Revisiting Corpse Medicine - When Doctors Prescribed Human Remains

Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting Corpse Medicine - When Doctors Prescribed Human Remains   Before modern medicine, some cures came from the grave. For centuries, Europeans swallowed powdered skull, drank human blood, and consumed ground-up mummies in the belief that the dead could heal the living. It sounds like folklore, but corpse medicine was once accepted as a real treatment for everything from headaches to epilepsy.

Revisiting King of Quacks: The Greatest Medical Fraud in American History

Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting King of Quacks: The Greatest Medical Fraud in American History   Curtis Howe Springer claimed to be a doctor. He wasn't. He also claimed to be a minister. That was questionable, too. Yet somehow he convinced thousands of people to trust him with their health, their money, and their dreams. Selling miracle cures from his desert empire, Springer built a fortune on deception and became one of the most successful medical frauds in American history...the self-crowned King of Quacks.

Revisiting The Baroness: The Galápagos Murder Mystery Nobody Solved

Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting The Baroness: The Galápagos Murder Mystery Nobody Solved   The Galápagos Islands were supposed to be an escape from the world. But for a handful of European settlers, jealousy, betrayal, and suspicion turned their isolated paradise into the setting for one of history's strangest mysteries. When the self-proclaimed Baroness of this remote island suddenly vanished, everyone became a suspect.

Revisiting Unholy City: The Cult Leader Who Built His Own Town

Today's True Weird Stuff - Revisiting Unholy City: The Cult Leader Who Built His Own Town   His followers called him a prophet. Everyone else called him dangerous. In the hills of California, cult leader William E. Riker built a community known as Holy City...a town founded on racial segregation, strict control, and his own twisted interpretation of Christianity. What began as a religious movement grew into one of the strangest cult compounds in American history.