Time Tellers

Join Renee and Dan as they leave the safety of bright rooms and civilized history to step into three uncanny tales that refuse to stay buried. First, a Tennessee farm where an invisible presence spoke, sang, and claimed a man’s life, a haunting that turned a family home into a house of terror.
Then travel to Elizabethan England, where a violent storm, a trembling congregation, and a massive black hound blur the line between thunder and omen, a church service shattered by a creature whose claws burned the door and whose story was printed for a fearful nation.
Finally, sail the cold Channel toward the Goodwin Sands, where a jealous mutiny, a doomed wedding voyage, and a shipwreck that resurfaces every fifty years conjure the impossible image of a phantom vessel that never finds shore.
These are stories of grief, superstition, and the human need to tell tales that make sense of loss. Turn down the lights, lean in close, and let Time Tellers guide you through mysteries that are as much about the living as the dead.

On a snowy night in March 1782, nearly a hundred Christianized Lenape, men in one cabin, women and children in another, face dawn with hymns on their lips. Told as a story of faith, betrayal, and the brutal choices of a frontier at war, this episode follows missionaries, settlers, and militia into the moments that turned a peaceful mission town into a scene of unspeakable violence.
Through eyewitness accounts, survivor memories, and the bitter irony of a democratic vote that sealed their fate, we trace how neutrality became a death sentence and how the massacre echoed across years of frontier vengeance. Listen as the past unfolds like a slow, tragic portrait, one that asks who counts in the stories we tell about liberty and expansion.

January 1946: in a Washington, D.C. office, a neurologist taps an instrument through an eye socket and forever changes a woman's life. This episode follows Walter Freeman from medical privilege to national spectacle, the fast, brutal transorbital lobotomy that promised quick fixes for overcrowded asylums and desperate families.
Through the stories of patients like Rosemary Kennedy and a 12-year-old boy named Howard, we trace how medical ambition, media miracles, and institutional pressure turned a crude procedure into a staple of midcentury psychiatry ,and how the true consequences were hidden behind claims of success.
We end with the slow unraveling: pharmaceutical alternatives, shocked colleagues, a hospital committee, and the haunting legacy left by thousands who were made easier to manage, often at the cost of their minds.

Take a curious, fast-paced ride through North Carolina's strangest statutes: a five-hour cap on charity bingo (breaks and setup included), municipal codes that police who can share a hotel room and how many guests can linger after dark, and laws keeping you sober around railroad tracks — still enforced in parts of the state.Along the way we parse verdicts and enforcement, separating courtroom reality from dusty ordinances that read like folklore. Then we detour to Ohio for a wink — fish, drunken donkeys, and bans on disrobing in front of portraits — tying quirky laws to the human stories that created them.Part legal history, part roadside folklore, this episode blends colorful characters, surprising enforcement, and the strange logic of statutes that outlived their era.

Imagine strolling through turn-of-the-century New York and being told flirting could land you a $25 fine or ten days behind bars — a 1902 statute that was rarely enforced but never repealed. We trace the dusty fine print and ask: how does a law like this survive the ages?Along the way we bust a sweet urban legend about Sunday ice cream cones in pockets, and uncover a more practical quirk: if you want to perform with a puppet in a city park, the Parks Department expects a permit — the same red tape tangles musicians and magicians. These snippets spin a portrait of a city where folklore and bureaucracy collide.Join us as we close this chapter on New York’s oddities and head to North Carolina next — bingo time limits and hotel crimes await.

Start with a whisper: can a dentist moonlight as a professional dancer in New Mexico? That rumor — born of an old misreading of statutes — sends our narrator on a curious fact-finding trip through the state’s legal folklore.Along the way we chase the real stories behind three stubborn laws: the surprising licensing rules that follow anyone who runs bingo night, the actively enforced anti-idling ordinances around schools that cut down exhaust and protect kids, and the myth that dentists are barred from the stage. Each turns out to be less about moral panic and more about zoning, public safety, and paperwork — sometimes sensible, occasionally baffling.We finish in New York, where lighter oddities — ice cream cones, flirtations, and puppet permits — add texture to a narrative about how communities regulate behavior and how rumors outpace statutes. This episode is part detective story, part road-trip, and entirely about how laws shape everyday life in unexpected ways.

Picture this: you pull up to a New Jersey station and reach for the pump—only to remember it’s been illegal for drivers to pump their own gas since 1949. What started as a safety rule has hardened into a tradition upheld by jobs, enforcement, and an almost mythic status in the state’s identity.
Then there are the laws that sound like they belong in a comic book: committing a crime while wearing a bulletproof vest can turn a misdemeanor into a second-degree felony—an escalation known as "judging for battle" that still carries real consequences in courtroom verdicts today.
Not everything you hear is true, though. The internet swears you can be fined for slurping soup in public—spoiler: it's not a law, just bad manners. We separate the folk tales from the enforceable statutes, pairing surprise with clarity.
Hold tight for the next stop: New Mexico, where dental dancing and bingo permits await—another episode of surprising rules, human stories, and the curious ways laws shape daily life.

On a moonlit New Hampshire beach you stoop to pick up a piece of seaweed—an innocent shrug of curiosity that, by a colonial quirk, makes you a criminal. That odd law, born when seaweed was black-market fertilizer, sits beside other small-town statutes that feel lifted from a period drama: bans on hunting in cemeteries, and an explicit prohibition on checking into a hotel under a false name.We move from the hush of graveyards and hotel ledgers to New Jersey’s pragmatic oddities—self-serve gas is off-limits, and armored vests invite suspicion. These laws are real, occasionally enforced, and woven into the everyday life of two very different states. Listen as ordinary places reveal their unexpected legal histories—and learn how respecting seaweed, tombstones, and the hotel log can keep you on the right side of a very particular kind of law.

Drive west with us as Route 66 sheds its Midwestern coat and dons mesas, neon, lava fields, petrified forests, and Mojave heat. From the glow of the Blue Swallow Motel and the countdown of the Jackrabbit signs to Meteor Crater’s lunar hole and Elmer’s Bottle Tree Ranch, this episode stitches together roadside wonders, ghost towns, and the people who kept the neon alive.
Along the way we meet traders, preservationists, miners, tourists, and descendants of deeper histories—Indigenous homelands, railroad towns, and the strange commerce of souvenir culture. Each stop is a small story: survival, loss, stubborn revival, and the contradictions of a road that made myth out of place.
Listen for rich scenes, surprising connections across deep time, and the real human beats behind the postcards—this is Route 66 not as a single image but as a thousand signposts that ask us what we choose to remember.

In a dusty Nevada town a legend lingers: a man with a mustache kissed a woman in Eureka, and the rumor goes that the town passed an ordinance to stop such smooches. The image is absurd and intimate — a single kiss sprouting a community rule — and the story follows the way folklore can outlive official records.As the episode peels back layers, it contrasts this charming bit of folk law with laws that are anything but whimsical: Nevada’s surprisingly broad felony against launching “missiles” at buses, and the real public‑health ban that retired vintage X‑ray shoe‑fitting machines. Each law has a grain of truth that explains why the stories stick, even when the original ordinances fade.Through first‑person quips and small‑town detail, the episode moves from chuckle‑worthy gossip to the stranger-than-fiction ways rules evolve — and why some legends refuse to die. Next stop: New Hampshire’s nighttime seaweed ban.