Bone and Sickle

Latest Episodes
The Man Who Crucified himself
A self-crucifixion that occurred in 1806 on the island of San Servolo in the Venetian lagoon is the topic of our story this time around. The perpetrator and object of this crucifixion was Mattio Lova
An Irish Ghost Story
An Irish ghost story seems a good way to add a bit of Halloween spice to your St. Patricks Day.Our selection, which will be read by Mrs. Karswell, comes from the 1825 publication Fairy Legends and T
Epitaphs
Epitaphs can sum up the life of the individual buried beneath or can comment on the human condition generally. Fromthe melancholy to the absurd to the catastrophically caustic, we survey in this epis
A Remarkable Circumstance
A potpourri of peculiar tales culled from a favorite 19th-century volume. This episode features some outstanding British eccentrics, an extraordinary case of delusional morbidity, lethal religious fa
The Stone Eater and other Curious Cases
Enjoy with us a collection of short curious tales culled from a favorite Victorian volume the Stone Eater of London, a mariners report of fire from the sky, the rise and fall of a French giant, 18
P.T. Barnum’s Magnificent Museum Fire
The fire that destroyed P.T. Barnums American Museum on July 13, 1865 was a luxuriantly surreal and tragic event, one described beautifully in a contemporary New York Times piece, which we share in t
A Christmas Ghost Story
The Christmas Eve ghost story is a fine old tradition associated with Victorian and Edwardian England, one now making a comeback on both sides of the Atlantic. Since 2018, Bone and Sickle has enthusia
Christmas Devils and the Feast of Fools
From St. Nicholas Day through Christmas, the Devil figured prominently in medieval plays, embodying a subversive seasonal element also celebrated in the Feast of Fools. We enter the topic of medieval
An After-Dinner Reading: Decadent Dining in the Satyricon
This short off-format episode is intended as a sort of fireside reading to beenjoyed by our overfull American listeners as they struggle to digest their Thanksgiving dinners. Its from the late 1st-
Villainous Victorian Women
Our survey of villainous Victorian women examines six individuals associated with some of the most ghastly crimes of the era, many directed against children (and for this reason possibly a bit of a ro