This might qualify as our first “live show”. For this episode I travelled deep into the forests of Alabama... to my mother’s house. On her back porch overlooking the Black Warrior river, I spoke with a pair who have worked in one of the most unsettling occupations in existence.
Robert Liston has been misremembered for long enough. On this episode, Rachel Fisher from Hollywood Crime Scene helps us dispel the many myths that surround this famous surgeon.
Occasionally, a mistake can change the course of history and even distort the face of the earth. When the Khwarazmian Shaw humiliated and killed a couple of Mongolian trade emissaries, he arguably made one of the most consequential mistakes in all of human history. This mistake would lead to the deaths of millions. Borders would be redrawn. Family lines would end. Entire cities and cultures would disappear, and the Khwarazmian Empire would fall.
The 2nd and final part of our 2 parter on what might be the most painful human death ever recorded.
On September 30th, 1999 a 35 year old man named Hisashi Ouchi was working at the JCO Tokaimura Plant in Tokaimura, Japan. On this day, he’d been asked to forgoe his normal daily responsibilities and assist with a project being conducted at a nearby experimental nuclear reactor. Shortly after work began a coworker screamed, “Run for your lives!”. Ouchi darted from the room and found himself inside a changing area. There, he began vomiting and soon lost consciousness. Over the following months, almost everyone who came into contact with Ouchi would, in their own time, come to wish that he’d never awoken from his collapse. But he did wake up. This was the first of 83 days that would eventually prove themselves to be among the most painful that a human being has ever endured.
Part 2 of our possibly never-ending series on the Yellow Fever outbreak that devastated Philadelphia in 1793.
In southern France, on the West Bank of the Rhone river, sits the picturesque village of Pont-Saint-Esprit. The village itself looks exactly like what you might expect; Stone buildings with colorful shutters covering their windows sit beneath the clock tower of 15th century church. The village looks sleepy today, it probably is, and it probably has been throughout the majority of its history. In August 1951 though, over 250 residents of Pont-Saint-Esprit unexpectedly started tripping balls. Husbands and wives chased each other with knives, people screamed in terror and ran from flames that did not exist, a mother howled in grief believing that her children had been ground into sausages. By the events conclusion, more than 250 people would suffer from hallucinatory visions, 50 would be institutionalized, and 7 would lose their lives.
The demise of this episode's subject wasn’t one that played out with expedience. In November 2009 a 26-year-old spelunker named John Jones was exploring the Nutty Putty Cave system in Utah, when he got stuck. For 28 hours, rescuers attempted to free a still conscious John Jones, but they were unsuccessful in doing so. Jones was wedged so tightly in the crevice in which he found himself that even after his death, rescuers were still unable to retrieve his remains. In fact, John Jones is still down there, his body still wedged in the 10 by 18 inch passage where he got stuck over a decade ago. How did John Jones get stuck in Nutty Putty? Why could he not be rescued? And what did this terribly unfortunate man experience during those last 28 hours of his life? Find out on this episode of Where is the Line?
On this episode of Where is the Line? we'll speak with a very forthcoming mortician who will educate us on the details of what really happens to our bodies in the intervening time between our deaths and when we're buried or cremated. We'll also learn a few mortician jokes, and we'll hear about some of the most gruesome cases ever worked by "Ramone" the mortician. Additionally amid this episode, Kevin and Samantha will share their plans for their own post-mortem remains.
Every Halloween, someone will inevitably make the local news by going a little too far with their decorations. Police will often arrive at what some citizen believed to be the genuine scene of a horrible crime only to find that the dismembered bodies on display are dummies, and the blood covering them is ketchup. Occasionally though, an opposite scenario plays out. October is the one month of the year that people might walk past a mangled body lying on their neighbor's lawn and think nothing of it. On this episode we'll be discussing two instances in which this actually happened. Both Rebecca Cade and Patricia Ward were brutally murdered and left on public display. Numerous passersby saw their corpses, believed them to be Halloween decorations, and scooted past without ever considering that they were looking at the scene of a homicide.
Where is the Line? 