Move over, Krampus—this episode uncovers the true nightmares of the Yuletide season, taking you on a global tour of the gruesome, the ghostly, and the grotesque. From the visceral horror of France’s Père Fouettard—the butcher who pickled children in barrels—to Austria’s belly-slitting Frau Perchta and the rap-battling skeletal horse of Wales, we explore the dark folklore that transforms the holidays into a fight for survival. We break down the obsession with counting that stops the Cajun Lutin and Greek Kallikantzaroi, survive the chimney-smashing rage of Scandinavia's Lussi, and finally make a case for the most disturbing legend of all: Hans Trapp, the Alsatian "Christmas Scarecrow," a figure based on a real-life 15th-century psychopath whose cannibalistic legacy is a horror movie waiting to happen.

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This episode focuses on Dr. Jules Wallace, arguably one of the most controversial and successful mediums in American history, who perfected the blend of showmanship, psychology, and trickery that defined the Spiritualist craze of the late 19th century. Arriving in St. Louis in 1893, Wallace quickly became a national sensation by staging elaborate séances and "materializations"—where he would ostensibly summon full-bodied apparitions from his spirit cabinet. His career peaked with a spectacular public duel against the rival mind-reader Professor Tyndal. Despite his masterful illusions, Wallace's elaborate fraud was ultimately exposed by reporters and police, leading to his charge of fraud before he vanished with a bag of cash, successfully escaping arrest and solidifying his legacy as the adaptable grifter who exploited the national yearning for proof of the afterlife.

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This show highlights Houston's most disturbing true crime and supernatural legends, beginning with the Rice Hotel, famous as the last resting spot of President Kennedy and now known for the unsettling apparitions of spectral dancers haunting its grand ballroom. The episode also details the gentle, musical haunting of the Julia Ideson Library by its late caretaker and his dog, contrasting it with the intense, traumatic hauntings of the Old Jeff Davis Hospital and the Black Hope Cemetery, both built over disturbed burial grounds, where residents report screams, poltergeists, and the palpable energy of a curse. Finally,we also revisits the grotesque 1965 Icebox Murders—the unsolved dismemberment of an elderly couple—and the baffling vanishing of their reclusive son, Charles Rogers, whose disappearance fueled decades of sensational conspiracy theories, including claims connecting him to the JFK assassination.

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