The Box of Oddities

The Box of Oddities

The Webby Award-winning “Box of Oddities" is a podcast that delves into the strange and mysterious aspects of our world, exploring topics ranging from bizarre medical conditions to unsolved mysteries, and from paranormal phenomena to strange cultural practices from around the world. With a focus on oddities, curiosities, and the macabre, each episode is a journey into the unknown, where hosts Kat and Jethro Gilligan Toth share their love for unusual stories and inject their humor and commentary. From the strange history of medical practices to chilling true crime stories, to natural (and unnatural) events, "The Box of Oddities" satisfies your thirst for the weird and the unusual, offering an informative and entertaining look into the dark and mysterious corners of our world. JIMMY KIMMEL, ABC-TV says, "Should you be the type who has an interest in weird stuff, this is a fun thing to allow in your head!" “Truth is stranger than fiction, and the Box of Oddities is the strangest of all!” -SLUGGO, SIRIUS XM LITHIUM “Kat & Jethro wring humor from bizarre, macabre and perplexing places.” -BOSTON MAGAZINE

Episodes

Inbox Of Oddities #98

September 4, 2026 • 26 mins
This week’s Inbox of Oddities is full of the kinds of stories that make you wonder whether the universe is gently trying to get your attention. From a beloved dog who may have kept watch long after he was gone, to a grandmother’s promise delivered through a stubborn patch of flowers, the Freak Family shares paranormal experiences, unexpected kindness, rescued pups, healing, and a reminder that sometimes we get the chanc...
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Freaks, Feathers, and Yellow Fever

September 2, 2026 • 39 mins
A sideshow performer known as Koo-Koo the Bird Girl becomes one of the most unforgettable faces in Tod Browning’s 1932 film Freaks—yet the real Minnie Woolsey remains almost a mystery. We trace the strange, sad, and surprisingly human story behind the feathers, enormous glasses, and a few seconds of dancing that outlived nearly everything else known about her. Then: a young doctor named Stubbins Ffirth sets out to prov...
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Ten Dimes and One Very Stubborn House

August 31, 2026 • 27 mins
What can ten dimes do? For Osceola McCarty, they represented a lifetime spent washing other people’s clothes—and a quiet act of generosity that would eventually change the lives of more than a hundred students. Discover how a Mississippi laundress who left school in the sixth grade saved a remarkable fortune and created an educational legacy that continues growing decades after her death. Then, when developers decided ...
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Inbox Of Oddities #97

August 28, 2026 • 24 mins
Can you feel time passing—or taste pizza using only your imagination? This week, the Freak Family opens our eyes to the wildly different ways our brains experience the world, including one listener whose sense of time appears as a constantly shifting spectrum of colors. We also hear about an eerily timed Dolly Parton “Boo Effect,” an Australian linguistic injustice, sad nipple syndrome as bedroom conversation, and...
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Black Holes, Nazis, & Fresh Baked Goods

August 26, 2026 • 35 mins
Are We Living Inside a Black Hole? And Why You Should Never Trust a Nazi With a Plate Of Cookies. What if our entire universe is hiding inside a black hole? The James Webb Space Telescope has uncovered strange new clues about the early cosmos—including an ancient galaxy that appears far more developed than it should be and a mysterious imbalance in the way distant galaxies rotate. Then, meet the WWII interrogator who extrac...
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The Boys Who Refused to Become Monsters

August 24, 2026 • 32 mins
What happens when six teenage boys are stranded on a deserted island for more than a year? Forget Lord of the Flies. The true story of the boys of Ata reveals something far more surprising—and far more hopeful—about human nature. Then, during World War II, a Muslim family in Sarajevo risks everything to hide their Jewish neighbors from the Nazis. Nearly fifty years later, with Sarajevo under siege once again, an extrao...
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Inbox Of Oddities

August 21, 2026 • 22 mins
A listener dreams that Mothman shows up at her patio door—and refuses to let him inside because of his dust. Aerial arts may have accidentally cured another Freak’s lifelong motion sickness. And a woman dreams of playing with her late grandfather in an old hot rod, only to discover it may be a memory from infancy—and that her father dreamed about him on the very same night. Plus, the modern medical condition still...
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Buried for 246 Years—and Finally Identified

August 19, 2026 • 34 mins
He Vanished at 14. DNA Found Him 246 Years Later—and Why So Many Towns End in “Kill” A teenage soldier vanished during one of the American Revolution’s most devastating defeats. Nearly 250 years later, DNA recovered from a tiny piece of bone may have finally given him back his name. The remarkable story of Private John Pumphrey begins beneath the soil of a South Carolina battlefield—and ends with a fa...
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Charlie No-Face & The Jesus Mothership

August 17, 2026 • 37 mins
A glowing faceless figure stalks the lonely roads of western Pennsylvania—or so the legend goes. But behind the terrifying tale of Charlie No-Face was Ray Robinson, a real man whose tragic childhood accident transformed him into the infamous Green Man of Pennsylvania. Then, Kat and Jethro explore the bizarre, darkly funny, and sometimes completely unhinged final words of executed criminals—including baked-apple jokes, ...
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Horse Manure Apocalypse

August 14, 2026 • 35 mins
HORSE MANURE CRISIS! And Victorians Crawl Inside Dead Whales for a Bizarre Cure! A Freak Family Favorite returns! First, the Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894—and the very real fear that cities would eventually disappear beneath nine feet of horse poop. Then, the spectacularly revolting Victorian “whale cure” for rheumatoid arthritis, which involved spending hours inside a warm, decomposing whale carcass. Two his...
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Glitch in Reality & Ghost in the Family Tree

August 11, 2026 • 32 mins
What if the world didn’t move smoothly—but jumped from moment to moment like a broken film reel? Meet LM, the woman who could see colors, faces, and objects clearly but couldn’t see them move. Her rare neurological condition, akinetopsia, revealed something astonishing about how the brain constructs reality. Then, an adopted man searching for his biological mother discovers that she had spent nearly 50 years at t...
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Before Your First Memory & Valley Of The Calls

August 10, 2026 • 37 mins
Your brain was listening before you ever took your first breath. Newborns can recognize their mother’s voice—and even stories heard in the womb—but could any of those experiences survive as actual memories? JG explores prenatal learning, infantile amnesia, and the unsettling possibility that your earliest memory may be something your brain quietly invented. Then, Kat follows a voice across Saskatchewan’s Qu...
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Inbox Of Oddities #95

August 7, 2026 • 22 mins
The Freak Family has been busy. This week on Inbox of Oddities, Kat and JG crack open the listener mailbag and discover a funeral urn that can preserve the voice of the person inside it, a legendary Texas rock that may have swallowed a man whole, and the deeply unfortunate mystery of a toilet seat that suddenly developed a perfect blue butt print. Then there’s a possible Boo Effect at one of America’s strangest museum...
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Is My Red Is Your Red?

August 5, 2026 • 35 mins
What if your brain suddenly decided that words had colors? In this episode of The Box of Oddities, Kat and Jethro dive into one of neuroscience's strangest documented phenomena: a woman who suffered a traumatic brain injury and awoke seeing vivid colors every time someone spoke. Her condition—known as acquired speech-to-color synesthesia—raises an unsettling question: if the brain can rewrite reality after an injury, h...
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Oscar Wilde, Dutch Schultz & Sad Nipples

August 3, 2026 • 29 mins
What were someone's last words really supposed to reveal? During the Victorian era, people believed a person's final moments exposed the truth about their soul. Families gathered around deathbeds with notebooks in hand, hoping to capture profound final wisdom—but history suggests many of the world's most famous last words may have been polished, embellished, or invented entirely. In this episode of The Box of Oddities, Jet...
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Bat People, Lunar Beavers & Human Skin Books

July 31, 2026 • 39 mins
Freak Family Favorites: Bat People, Moon Hoaxes, and Museums That Shouldn't Exist This Freak Family Favorites episode comes straight from the recommendations of the Freak Family, and it's packed with the kind of stories that remind us why history is often stranger than fiction. First, Kat unpacks one of the greatest media hoaxes ever printed: The Great Moon Hoax of 1835. Newspapers convinced thousands of readers that a giant tele...
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The Silence Between the Signals

July 29, 2026 • 39 mins
Long before smartphones and satellites filled the sky with signals, early radio experimenters were hearing something they couldn't explain. Giant antennas stretched across fields captured strange repeating pulses, mysterious buzzing, and what some believed sounded almost like language. Even Nikola Tesla and Guglielmo Marconi wondered if the transmissions might be coming from Mars. In this episode, JG shares a remarkable story from ...
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Echoes in the Clay, Monsters in the Water

July 27, 2026 • 32 mins
Could an ordinary clay pot be the oldest recording device in human history? On this episode of The Box of Oddities, JG explores one of archaeology's most captivating ideas: the theory that ancient pottery may have accidentally preserved microscopic traces of sound while spinning on a potter's wheel. From the birth of "acoustic archaeology" to modern AI-assisted research, discover why scientists still haven't completely ruled out t...
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Inbox of Oddities #94

July 24, 2026 • 24 mins
Inbox of Oddities: Lettuce Lotion, Florida Organ Recitals & Envelopes Full of Crap It's time to open the Inbox of Oddities, where the Freak Family always delivers the unexpected. This week, Kat explains the surprisingly heartfelt tradition of sending an "envelope full of crap," while listeners share stories that are equal parts hilarious, touching, and gloriously strange. There's the mystery of disappearing podcast subscripti...
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The Strange Birth of the Jesus Machine

July 22, 2026 • 27 mins
When Benjamin Franklin's Ghost Designed a Machine and the strange story of The Underwater Orchestra. What happens when people become convinced they can build a messiah out of magnets, copper, and electricity? In this episode of *The Box of Oddities, Kat and JG dive into one of the strangest forgotten chapters in American history: the bizarre true story of John Murray Spear's "New Motive Power," an electrical machine that followers...
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