The Ohio Penitentiary Fire of 1930: 322 Men Who Burned Behind Locked Doors
On Easter Monday 1930, a careless candle set a Columbus prison ablaze. Behind steel doors, hundreds of men waited for keys that came too late.
The Sodder Children: The Christmas Eve Fire and the Family That Never Stopped Searching
On Christmas Eve 1945 a fire took the Sodder family home in West Virginia in less than an hour. Five of the children were never seen again, and not a single bone was ever found in the ashes. Their parents spent the rest of their lives certain the children had been carried off alive.
The House That Grief Built: Sarah Winchester and the Mansion Meant to Confuse the Ghosts
A grieving widow with one of the largest fortunes in America spent 38 years building a mansion that never stopped growing — stairs that climbed into ceilings, doors that opened onto empty air, and rooms without number. The story of Sarah Winchester is stranger, and sadder, than the ghost tale it became.
Lord Timothy Dexter: The Fool Who Got Rich Selling Coal to Newcastle
An illiterate leather-dresser who called himself a lord, Timothy Dexter took every ruinous piece of advice his rivals gave him – ship coal to Newcastle, warming pans to the tropics, cats to the Caribbean – and turned every one of them into a fortune.
The Pig War of 1859: How a Loose Boar Nearly Set Two Empires at War
In 1859 an American farmer shot a British pig rooting in his potato patch. Within weeks, hundreds of soldiers, a fleet of warships, and 2,000 sailors faced off on a foggy little island – and the only casualty was the pig.
The Emperor of the United States: How a Bankrupt Merchant Named Himself Ruler and Won a City’s Heart
In 1859 a ruined San Francisco businessman walked into a newspaper office and declared himself Emperor of the United States. For twenty-one years a whole city played along – and when he died, tens of thousands came to mourn their emperor.
The Salad Bar Conspiracy: How a Cult Poisoned an Oregon Town to Steal an Election
In the autumn of 1984, hundreds of people in a small Oregon town fell violently ill and no one knew why. The truth, when it came, was stranger than any of them imagined: the first large-scale bioterror attack on American soil, carried out to win a local election.
The Boy Who Signed With an X: America’s Oldest John Doe Finally Gets His Name Back
In 1777 a fourteen-year-old orphan made his mark on an enlistment paper because he could not write his own name. Three years later he was buried anonymously at Camden. It took 246 years and three kinds of DNA to give it back to him.