A Haunted Murder Island, a Vampire Panic, and the Virus That Ruined Michelangelo's Birthday

0:00Hey there, it's Ryan Seacrest for Safeway. It's stock up savings time. Now, three April 2nd. Spring in for store-wide deals and earn four times of points. Look for in-store tags to earn on eligible items from Lindor. Chipsahoy, Gatorade, Post, Ziploc, and Zoa. Then, clip the offer in the app for automatic event-long savings. Stack up those rewards to save even more. Enjoy savings on top of savings when you shop in store or online for easy, drive up and go, pick up or delivery. Restrictions apply. See website for full terms and conditions. When you run a business, there are a lot of boxes to check. Let's see, payroll, check, inventory, check, insurance, ah. Well, good thing Simply Business makes getting small business insurance fast and easy. Just answer a few questions, review your quotes, and get covered in under 10 minutes, all online. It's that simple. Check insurance off your list at simplybusiness.com. You compare prices when shopping for flights, hotels, cars, so why not small business insurance?

1:00At Simply Business, we'll show you policies that fit your business and a range of prices to help you save. Who knew buying insurance could be so simple? Visit SimplyBusiness.com for your free quote today. This is your morning weird darkness. A darker way to start your day. It's Friday, March 6, 2026. And today, a mother walks in a courtroom with a loaded gun and a very specific target. A midnight axe murder on a tiny island leaves one survivor and one very convenient story. A road island family digs up their dead daughter. Certain she's a vampire. A computer virus waits for one specific birthday before destroying everything on your hard drive. A single baby survives when a plane carrying 103 people drops out of the sky.

2:00The world's fastest jet crosses the entire country in under 68 minutes. And a pharmaceutical company trademarked aspirin and heroin in the same year, both as medicine. All of that's coming up and make sure you stay with us all the way to the end of the show because our podcast band, Dark Weirdness, has put together a custom song written specifically for today's episode, built around one of the stories I'm about to share with you. Your challenge is to figure out which story gets the musical treatment before we get there. So keep listening. As always, we'll begin with some historically strange or unexplained events. On March 6, 1888, the British First Fleet arrived in Norfolk Island. A small volcanic speck of land roughly halfway between Australia and New Zealand and established one of the most remote penal colonies in history. The island had no indigenous population, no infrastructure, and no particular appeal to anybody except people who needed to put other people somewhere very, very far from England.

3:00What makes today interesting is that Norfolk Island still celebrates March 6 as foundation day, a public holiday marking the occasion. They turned the founding of a prison island into an annual celebration. I can only assume Norfolk Island is really desperate for things to celebrate. On the same date in 1810, Illinois became the first date in the union to pass a mandatory vaccination law, requiring inoculation against smallpox. The interesting part is that this mandate came decades before anybody had worked out at a cellular or biological level exactly why vaccines functioned the way they did. They knew the inoculations worked, the science of why came later. The requirement came first, and the population was expected to comply in the meantime. It's like if they mandated the COVID vaccine without knowing if it'd work or how it works. Wait, that did happen, didn't it? Or anyway, in 1896 a man named Charles Brady King drove what he called a horseless carriage

4:02down Woodward Avenue in Detroit. The first automobile the city had ever seen move under its own power. One specific spectator watched him from the curb that day, a bicycle mechanic who went by Henry Ford. Within a few years, Ford had his own vehicle. Within a decade, his own factory. Within a generation, he had reshaped the world's economy and the physical landscape of the American cities. History doesn't record exactly what Ford was thinking as King rolled past him on the street that day, but it's difficult to imagine he was thinking about bicycles. On March 6th, 1924, Egyptian authorities opened the inner money case of Tuton Common, the boy Farrow, who was sealed burial chamber Howard Carter at first breached two years earlier. By this point, the international press had already decided that there was a curse in play. Lord Carter von, the man who'd funded the excavation, had died from an infected mosquito bite in the months following the original opening of the tomb. What made that death feel like something more

5:03than ordinary bad luck was what reportedly happened the moment he died. Every light in Cairo went out simultaneously across the entire city. His dog, back in England, allegedly how old once, and then collapsed dead at the same moment. Whether those details are precisely accurate or whether they grew in the retailing over the following weeks, the press ran with them enthusiastically. By the time the inner money case was opened in March 1924, there were already a dozen deaths being attributed to the Tuton Common Curse. The archaeologists continued working. Several of them lived long lives, which either disproves the curse or suggests it has a very selective enrollment process. Even Howard Carter, the main guy in charge, the guy who found the crypt, opened the case, he was just fine in the following years. In 1943, the Battle of Fardy Combos concluded when an entire Italian battalion surrendered to Greek resistance fighters, one of the more significant partisan victories of the war on that front.

6:06It probably deserves more coverage than it typically gets, though, if I'm being completely honest with you here, I only included it because, well, or the Combos is an exceptionally satisfying word to say aloud. I encourage you to try it at least once before breakfast, or the Combos. On March 6, 1967, Spelana Alli Luyava, the only daughter of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, walked into the American Embassy in New Delhi and requested political asylum. She was 41 years old and had traveled to India to return the ashes of her late partner's family. At some point during that trip, she decided, nope, I'm not going back. The Kremlin's official response was to suggest she'd been manipulated and was mentally unwell, which is historically what authoritarian governments tend to say when somebody with inconvenient family connections declines to come home. On this date, in 1975, the Zapruder film was broadcast on American Network Television for the first time. If you need context, the Zapruder film is the 26th second home movie that a Dallas dressmaker named

7:10Abraham Zapruder captured on November 22, 1963, showing the actual assassination of President Kennedy. After the shooting, Time Life Inc purchased the film and locked it in a vault, where it stayed for 12 years. The Warren Commission used it in their investigation, but the American public never saw it, which, in the intervening years, had given the imagination considerable room to work with. When it finally aired in 1975, it did not settle the question that had been building around it. It only added more questions, and continues to. On March 6, 1981, Walter Cronkite signed off from the CBS evening news for the final time, ending a 19-year run as the anchor of the most watched news broadcast in the country. A Gallup poll from 1972 had named him the most trusted man in America. Tens of millions of people watched his last broadcast. His successor was Dan Rather, which is a fact history has had some complicated feelings about ever since.

8:11In 1990, a United States Air Force crew flew a Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird from Los Angeles to Washington, DC in 67 minutes and 54 seconds. The SR-71 cruised its beads exceeding Mach 3, roughly 2,200 miles per hour, and in its entire operational history, no missile ever successfully intercepted one. To put the coast-to-coast record in perspective, by the time of flight attendant finishes the seat belt demonstration, an SR-71 would already be in a different time zone. That record has never been broken, and given that the aircraft was retired in 1998, it likely won't be, at least not by anything that were allowed to know about. The only thing that moved faster in Washington, DC around that period was President George H. W. Bush's position on no new taxes, which reversed itself in approximately the time it took the Blackbird to clear the Rockies. On March 6, 1992, a computer virus, called Michelangelo, activated exactly as programmed, silently,

9:12on schedule without any warning to the people sitting at their desks that morning. The virus had been spreading for months through floppy disks, the primary method of transferring data between machines at the time. Without triggering any visible symptoms on infected computers. When March 6 arrived, though, it woke up. It began overriding the first 100 sectors of every infected hard drive with no characters, replacing years of stored files, business records, family documents, financial data, with nothing. Permanently, no recovery possible. The method of destruction was elegant in a grim sort of way. Thoreau, untraceable and complete. In retrospect, it's a technique that would have been instructive to any number of political figures who happened to have a hard drive in a bathroom that they were trying to clear out. We can only speculate about that, though. The virus was named Michelangelo, and it chose March 6 for a very specific reason, which we will explain in a bit. On March 6, 2003, Air Algier Flight 6289 crashed immediately after takeoff

10:17from Tom and Ronsat, Algeria, of the 103 people aboard 102 were killed. The only survivor, one survivor, was a six-month-old baby. As of the last available reporting, that child who would now be in their early 20s has never been publicly identified by name, and the details of their subsequent life have remained private. Some stories belong entirely to the person who lived them, and that seems like the right call here. Still, what a miracle. On the state in 2015, NASA's Dawn spacecraft entered orbit around the Dwarf Planet series, becoming the first spacecraft in history to achieve orbit around two separate extraterrestrial bodies, having previously done the same with the asteroid Vesta. Almost immediately, the photos coming back from series generated a specific kind of attention. Two intensely bright, white spots were visible inside a large crater on the surface, and nobody could immediately explain what they were. Years of scientific debate followed, along with a fair amount of public speculation

11:19leaned toward structures of non-natural origin. They turned out to be exposed sodium carbonate deposits. The salt, essentially. Science went and checked. To be fair, it's also documented that author Whitley Streiber has reportedly orbited several extraterrestrial bodies over the years as well, though by his own accounts those were mostly tall blondes, which raises different questions entirely. And on March 6, 2018, the woman walking a beach in Western Australia found a glass bottle with a handwritten note inside, needed June 12, 1886. Making it, at 132 years old, the oldest confirmed message in a bottle ever authenticated, meeting a previous record by several decades. The odd thing is it was just a note asking, how were the Chicago White Stockings doing this season? Hey there, it's Ryan Seacrest for Safeway. It's stock up savings time, now through April 2nd. Spring in for store-wide deals and earn four times of points. Look for in-store tags to earn on eligible items from hunts, nerds, pillsbury, loweries, briars, quaker, and culture pop.

12:22Then clip the offer in the app for automatic event-long savings. Stack up those rewards to save even more. Enjoy savings on top of savings when you shop in store or online for easy, drive up and go, pick up or delivery. Restrictions apply, see website for full-terms and conditions. I've got Dan Morgan here on the pod. Say hi, Dan. Hey, how's it going today? It's going good, man. Tell us who you are and what you do. I'm Dan Morgan. I'm an attorney and a managing partner at Morgan Morgan, which is America's largest injury law firm. That's pretty awesome. I think I saw Billboard years recently that said 20 billion won. 20 billion is insane number. Yeah, 20 billion recovered. It's actually, I think, somewhere north probably closer to 22, 23 after this year. And each year we get bigger and batter and our army grows, so the number will hopefully keep getting bigger and bigger as time goes on. Awesome. So how does someone do in contact with Morgan and Morgan? What would I do if I got into an accident? Probably the easiest way is dialing pound law. That's pound 529 from

13:23your cell phone. We are always open. Our call center is always waiting to take your call. 24-7-365. Wow, Dan Morgan. From Morgan and Morgan, America's largest injury law firm. Thanks for coming by the show. Thanks for having me. Visit forthepeople.com for an office near you. Work moves fast from emails and reports to proposals and updates. You're expected to think clearly, write confidently, and get it right the first time. And every message counts. That's where Grammarly comes in. It gives you everything you need to think, write, and finish in one place, or anywhere you type in text. You'll never have to switch tools or tabs. Grammarly's AI agents are built for how you work and where you work. So you can find the right words, adjust your tone, and predict how your message might land before you hit send. Your ideas will get a boost, while still sounding natural, credible, and just the way you want. For nearly 17 years, Grammarly has been the standard for responsible AI. It's the premier writing tool that 93%

14:24of users trust to get more work done. In a world of generic AI, don't sound like everyone else. With Grammarly, you never will. Download Grammarly for free at Grammarly.com. That's Grammarly.com. Moving on to true crimes, murders, infamous criminals, and the consequences that followed. On the morning of March 6th, 1970, a bomb accidentally detonated inside a brownstone townhouse on West 11th Street in Greenwich Village, New York City, killing three of the people who had been in the process of building it. The bomb makers were members of the Weather Underground, a domestic terrorist organization operating at the radical fringe of the anti-war movement, and the explosion was part of the plan. What investigators later determined the plan had been was considerably worse. The device had been packed with roofing nails, and it was intended to be carried to fort dicks in New Jersey and detonated at a dance being held for soldiers and their dates. The three people who died in the explosion were Diana Auton, Ted Gold, and Terry Robbins.

15:29Two other members of the group escaped before the building collapsed. One of them, Bernadine Dorn, spent more than a decade as a federal fugitive. The organization went underground in both the figurative and literal sense after that day and continued operating for another decade, though they never again came as close to mass casualty violence as they had on March 6th, 1970. On March 6th, 1951, the espionage trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg opened in federal court in New York City. Both were accused of passing nuclear weapons secrets to the Soviet Union, charges that at the height of Cold War anxiety were a bonus series as charges got. Both were convicted, both were executed in the electric chair in June 1953. The case is never fully settled in the consensus. Historians largely accept that Julius Rosenberg was involved in intelligence work for the Soviets, though the scope of what he actually passed has been debated for decades. The case against Ethel has been harder to sustain on the evidence.

16:32Her brother David Greenglass was the primary witness against her, and in a 2001 interview, he admitted that he had lied on the stand, specifically about Ethel's role to protect his own life from prosecution. Ethel Rosenberg died in the electric chair based in significant part on testimony her brother later admitted was false. The United States government has never formally revisited the verdict, although they should definitely revisit that brother. On March 6th, 1978, Larry Flint and his attorney Jean Reeves were shot by a sniper outside a courthouse in Lawrenceville, Georgia, where Flint had been standing trial on obscenity charges. The gunman was a white supremacist named Joseph Paul Franklin, who later told investigators he'd specifically targeted Flint because of an interracial photo spread published in Hustler magazine. The shooting left Flint paralyzed from the waist down for the remainder of his life. Franklin was not charged with the Flint attack until years after the fact, and in the time between

17:32the shooting and his eventual reckoning, he had continued. By the time investigators put together the full picture, he'd been linked to at least 20 racially motivated killings across multiple states, including the 1980 shooting of civil rights leader Vernon Jordan, who survived. Franklin was executed in Missouri in 2013, 35 years after the afternoon he put bullets into a man on a courthouse sidewalk in Georgia. On March 6th, 1981, a woman named Marianne Bachmeier walked into the Illubik district courtroom in Germany, where a man named Klaus Grabowski was standing trial for the murder of her seven-year-old daughter Anna. Bachmeier had a pistol in a purse. She pulled it out and fired seven shots into Grabowski's back, killing him almost instantly in front of the judge, the jury, and the assembled courtroom. When police took her into custody, she said, I did it for you, Anna. Bachmeier was tried for the killing, and ultimately convicted of manslaughter, rather than murder. The court concluded she'd acted under extreme emotional distress. She served

18:33the last then three years. Public opinion in Germany was complicated, but a significant portion of the country at least quietly did not condemn her. Klaus Grabowski had confessed to strangling Anna and had attempted in his defense to blame the child for what happened to her. Whether what Marianne Bachmeier did constitutes justice is a question people tend to answer for themselves, and the answers are not consistent. On March 6, 1984, a man named William Suff was released on parole from a Texas prison after serving ten years of a seventy-year sentence. He had been convicted of beating his two-month-old daughter to death. The parole board released him anyway. Within a couple of years of getting out, Suff had relocated to Riverside County, California, where he began abducting, torturing, and murdering women. He killed at least thirteen before his arrest in 1992. During that time, he held a job as a county employee and entered a local chili cook-off in 1990, which he won. Please tell me his murder victims were not part of the recipe.

19:35He's currently on death row in California. On March 6, 2010, a 30-year-old woman named Jennifer Dordy was murdered in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. Dordy had an intellectual disability, and she had trusted the wrong people. Six individuals, people she knew, people she accounted as part of her social world, subjected her to a prolonged period of torture before killing her. The details of what she endured in the hours before her death are among the most disturbing in Pennsylvania criminal history, and they've not faded from the record. Someday, I'll have to cover that case in the podcast. All six perpetrators were convicted, several received life sentences. Jennifer Dordy's family had continued in the years since to advocate for stronger legal protections for people with intellectual disabilities who face a significantly elevated risk of abuse and exploitation, and who too often have no one in their corner when the worst happens. Now for the section of the show, I'm sure most of you like the best, the paranormal, supernatural, and genuinely scary true stories. On March 6, 1872, a girl named Sarah Roberts was born in Exeter

20:42Road Island, and years later, after she died of tuberculosis, her family did what a troubling number of New England families were doing in the latter half of the 19th century, when the disease came for one member after another. They dug her up. The New England vampire panic was a documented social phenomenon, not a legend. When tuberculosis moved through a household, as it often did, given that its airborne, communities began to interpret the pattern as evidence that one of the recently dead was continuing to feed on the living of their own family. The prescribed response was exclamation. The body that still appeared too fresh, that had not decomposed on the expected schedule, was identified as the source. Its heart was removed and burned, and in some documented cases, surviving family members were instructed to inhale the smoke as kind of a cure. Sarah Roberts was one of several Road Island residents subjected to this practice after death. The illness was bacterial, transmitted through the air, and the family members who followed her to the grave died of the same disease rather than the same curse. But germ theory was not yet the

21:47operating framework for most rural New England families in the 1870s, and the explanation that they had felt true. They acted on it accordingly. On the 9th of March 5, 1873, bleeding into the early hours of March 6, a man rode approximately 12 miles through darkness to reach Smuddy Nose Island, a barren, largely uninhabited rock of the New Hampshire coast, and broke into a house where a group of Norwegian immigrant women were sleeping. Two of them, sisters-in-law, Karen and Annette Christensen, were killed with an axe before the sun came up. The third woman, Baron Haltbet, survived by escaping the house and hiding in a crevice of rocks along the shoreline, pressing herself into the cold stone through the remaining hours of the night until she could signal for help at dawn. A man named Louis Wagner was arrested, tried, convicted, and eventually hanged for the murders. He maintained his innocence until the end. In the 150 years since, a credible alternative theory has been advanced and taken seriously by multiple historians and

22:49criminologists that Baron Haltbet herself was responsible, and that Wagner, who had motive to be near the island that night, was convicted largely because he couldn't effectively counter the story told by the one person who survived. The truth has never been definitively resolved, and at this point it may never be. What makes Smuddy Nose different from most cold cases is that the island reportedly has not let go of what happened there. In the decades following the murders, fishermen putting in near the island and the occasional visitor who make the crossing report hearing a sound they consistently describe the same way, sobbing, crying, coming from somewhere on another wise empty rock in the middle of the North Atlantic. Others reported seeing two figures near the shoreline, women or things shaped like women who were there and then were not. Cold spots in a place that's already cold, the distinct and persistent sensation of being watched on an island where there is by every verifiable account no one there to watch you. Reports of

23:49this kind appear in the New England paranormal documentation spanning more than a century, and across all of them the description is the same. Two figures, the sound of crying, and then nothing. Hey there it's Ryan Seacrest for Safeway. It's stock up savings time now through April 2nd, spring in for store-wide deals and earn four times the points. Look for in-store tags to earn on eligible items from Celsius, Body Armor, Aura Ida, Silk, Capri Sun, Bavarian Meets, and Charmin. Then clip the offer in the app for automatic event-long savings. Stack up those rewards to save even more. Enjoy savings on top of savings when you shop in-store or online for easy drive-up and go pick up or delivery. Restrictions apply, see website for full terms and conditions. I've got Dan Morgan here on the pod. Say hi, Dan. Hey, how's it going today? It's going good, man. Tell us who you are and what you do. I'm Dan Morgan. I'm an attorney and a managing partner at Morgan and Morgan, which is America's

24:50largest injury law firm. That's pretty awesome. I think I saw Billboard years recently that said 20 billion one. 20 billion is an insane number. Yeah, 20 billion recovered. It's actually, I think, somewhere north probably closer to 22, 23 after this year. And each year we get bigger and better and our army grows. So the number will hopefully keep getting bigger and bigger as time goes on. Awesome. So how does someone get in contact with Morgan and Morgan? What would I do if I got into an accident? Probably the easiest way is dialing pound law. That's pound 529 from your cell phone. We are always open. Our call center is always waiting to take your call. 24-7-365. Wow, Dan Morgan. From Morgan and Morgan, America's largest injury law firm. Thanks for coming by the show. Thanks for having me. Visit forthepeople.com for an office near you. Hey, this is Byard Winthrop, founder of American Giant. Back in 2011, I was fed up sick of cheap disposable clothes that fell apart after a few washes and even more sick of the fact that almost nothing good was made here anymore. So I started American Giant to prove something that we could

25:54still make the absolute best hoodies, t-shirts, and pants right here in America with American cotton, American factories, and American workers earning real wages. We exist to bring manufacturing home, create good jobs and towns that need them, and build clothes that actually last. No shortcuts, no overseas compromises. Get 20% off your first order when you use promo code giant20 at American-giant.com. That's 20% off when you use code giant20 at American-giant.com. Now we lighten things up a bit with some real observances, some useful sun debatable, all technically real. Today is National Dentists Day. It's an occasion honoring the most consistently anxiety-provoking healthcare profession in the country. A group of highly trained specialists who spent years and schools specifically so that they can lean over you with bright

26:56lights and sharp tools and then tell you warmly that you really should be flossing more. Survey data reliably ranks dental visits among the top sources of adult anxiety, ahead of public speaking for a significant number of respondents. Yours truly included. It says something about how we as a species prioritize our fears. National Dentists Day officially encourages you to thank your dentist, schedule the appointment you've been postponing, and perhaps consider why it's been as long as it has. Today is also National Oreo Cookie Day, marking the anniversary of the first retail sale of the Oreo Cookie in 1912. More than 40 billion Oreos are now produced annually across 18 countries, making it the best-selling cookie in documented human history. A holiday that most dentists would prefer their patients observe privately and quietly, particularly those with appointments this afternoon. What the official observance tends to leave out is that the Oreo was essentially a copy of a cookie that already existed. The Hydrox, it had already been on shelves since 1908,

27:59four years earlier. Nabisco studied the competitor's product, redesigned it slightly, gave it a better name, and put the weight of superior marketing behind it. Within a few decades, the Oreo had so thoroughly dominated the market that most people today have genuinely never even heard of the Hydrox. It still exists, it was revived in 2015, and by most accounts, it's a perfectly respectable cookie that has spent over a century being commercially overshadowed by its own knockoff. Plus, it's a cookie with a name that sounds like laundry detergent. If neither cookies nor dental anxiety is doing it for you spiritually this morning, well, today is also the anniversary of the 1998 theatrical premiere of The Big Lebowski, which the Church of the latter day dude has designated the annual High Holy Day of Doodism, a legally recognized religion, believe it or not, with hundreds of thousands of ordained ministers worldwide. The core theological position of Doodism holds that life improves significantly when you stop trying so hard. Let most things go, and don't let the man get you down. March 6th is,

29:05for adherence, essentially their Christmas. The Dood Bides And now for some strange, ironic, historically absurd or humorous events and dates. Earlier in the show, I mentioned that a computer virus called Michael Angelo activated on this date in 1992, and that it shows March 6th for a specific reason. While here's that reason, March 6th, 1475, and the village of Caprice in the Florentine Republic, a child was born who would go on to paint the Sistine Chapel, sculpt David, design the dome of St. Peter's Basilica, and become arguably the most consequential artist of the Italian Renaissance. His name was Michael Angelo Water Roadie. Or, like Madonna and Albus, we'll just call him Michael Angelo. He only needs the one In 517 years after his birth, a software programmer, whose identity was never publicly confirmed, honored his birthday by writing a virus designed to activate on Michael Angelo's birthday every year

30:07and silently destroy the contents of any hard drive it had managed to infect. Whether this constitutes a tribute to the artist's legacy or the exact opposite of one, perhaps is a matter of artistic interpretation. I'm hoping by this point, though, I mean this was all the way back in 92. I'm hoping by now you don't have to worry about that virus. The story gets a layer more interesting, though, when you factor in John McCaffey, who in the weeks leading up to March 6th 1992, made a very public prediction that 5 million computers could be destroyed by the Michael Angelo virus before the day was over. The coverage was enormous. Businesses panicked, emergency patches were distributed, people wiped their machines out of precaution. When March 6th arrived, when the final count came in, the actual number of affected systems was estimated somewhere between 10 and 20,000. McCaffey's company, which sold anti-birus software, had seen a significant spike in sales in the weeks preceding the activation date. Whether that constitutes good forecasting, good marketing, or something in between is again,

31:10perhaps a matter of artistic interpretation. On this date in 1521, Ferdinand Magellan became the first European to make landfall on Guam. The Chamorro people who lived there peddled out to his ships and, being the Chamorro people, helped themselves to some of the items on deck. Magellan responded to this first meeting between civilizations by naming the islands Islas de la Toronés, or islands of thieves. The name stuck for over a century. The people of Guam have had several hundred years since then to reflect on the fact that you never get a second chance to make a first impression. Though in fairness, Magellan was the one showing up uninvited. On March 6th, 1831, Edgar Allen Poe was court-martialed and dismissed from West Point Military Academy for gross neglect of duty and disobedience of orders. Both charges were entirely accurate. Poe had for months been skipping formations, skipping classes, skipping chapel, and skipping most of the basic obligations that come with being a military cadet.

32:15According to historical accounts, he even at some point encouraged fellow cadets to show up to a parade in nothing but their crossbelts and rifles, though exactly how apocryphal that story is depends on who he asks. What historians largely agree on though is that Poe engineered his own expulsion deliberately because he wanted to pursue being a writer, and the army was in the way of that. West Point did let him go. He went on to invent the detective story, laid a groundwork for American horror fiction, and, dying mysteriously in Baltimore in 1849, under circumstances that have never been satisfactorily explained and are actually worthy of one of his own books. The army has not issued a formal comment on any of this. And finally, on this date in 1899, the bare pharmaceutical company officially registered the trademark for aspirin, a sound and responsible business decision. On the exact same date, in the exact same year, bare also registered the trademark for heroin, for a new cough remedy that they were bringing to market, which their promotional materials described as a safe,

33:19effective and non-habit forming alternative to morphine. The syrup contained diacetyl morphine. Bare sold it over the counter, recommended it for children's coughs, and distributed it internationally for years before the problems attached to it became difficult to ignore. Aspirin remains available at every pharmacy in the world. Heroin? Oh, that's a scheduled one controlled substance now. Bare no longer holds that trademark. You win some, you lose some. Interestingly, bare also lost the trademark on aspirin, in the United States, and most of the world, ceased as German war reparations under the Treaty of Versailles after World War I, at which point it became a generic term that anybody could use. In Germany, however, bare never lost the trademark, and it still holds the trademark to this day. So anywhere else in the world you can buy aspirin, and it could be any brand. In Germany, if you're buying aspirin, it's specifically bare. It's the only one allowed to call itself aspirin. Something kind of quietly poetic there about a German company losing the rights to its own

34:23product name in most of the world because of a war Germany started. We asked Mrs. June Mellon of Parkover, California to compare our pain reliever commercial with the leading brand pain reliever commercial. Now, Mrs. Mellon, you've watched both pain reliever commercials, which one proved more effective? The leading brand commercial or new Ibu no fun with new formula Ibu U2. Oh, Ibu no fun. It made me feel sick. It gave me a headache almost immediately. I couldn't wait till it was over. It made me want to take a strong pain reliever right away. Alright, there you have it. Ibu no fun pain reliever commercials with new formula Ibu U2, instant pain for your relief. Ibu no fun, the wonder drug that makes you wonder. Hey there, it's Ryan Seacrest for Safeway. It's stock up savings time. Now through April 2nd, spring in for store-wide deals and earn four times of points. Look for in-store tags to earn on eligible items from Lindor, Chipsahoy, Gatorade, Post, Ziploc, and Zoah. Then clip the offer

35:29in the app for automatic event-long savings. Stack up those rewards to save even more. Enjoy savings on top of savings when you shop in store or online for easy, drive up and go, pick up or delivery. Restrictions apply. See website for full terms and conditions. I've got Dan Morgan here on the pod. Say hi, Dan. Hey, how's it going today? It's going good, man. Tell us who you are and what you do. I'm Dan Morgan. I'm an attorney and a managing partner at Morgan Morgan, which is America's largest injury law firm. That's pretty awesome. I think I saw Billboard years recently that said 20 billion one. 20 billion is insane number. Yeah, 20 billion recovered. It's actually, I think, somewhere north probably closer to 22, 23 after this year. And each year we get bigger and better and our army grows, so the number will hopefully keep getting bigger and bigger as time goes on. Awesome. So how does someone get in contact with Morgan and Morgan? What would I do if I got into an accident? Probably the easiest way is dialing pound law. That's pound 529 from your cell phone. We are always

36:31open. Our call center is always waiting to take your call. 24 7 365. Wow, Dan Morgan. From Morgan and Morgan, America's largest injury law firm. Thanks for coming by the show. Thanks for having me. Visit forthepeople.com for an office near you. Warning, the following Zippercruder radio spot you are about to hear is going to be filled with F words. When you're hiring, we at Zippercruder know you can feel frustrated for Lauren even. Like your efforts are futile and you can spend a fortune trying to find fabulous people only to get flooded with candidates who are just fine. Fortunately, Zippercruder figured out how to fix all that. And right now, you can try Zippercruder for free at zippercruder.com slash zip. With Zippercruder, you can forget your frustrations. Because we find the right people for your roles fast, which is our absolute favorite F word. In fact, four out of five employers who post on Zippercruder get a quality candidate within the first day. Fantastic. So whether you need to hire four, 40 or 400 people,

37:32get ready to meet first rate talent. Just go to zippercruder.com slash zip to try Zippercruder for free. Don't forget that's zippercruder.com slash zip. Finally, that's zippercruder.com slash zip. There you go. That'll do it for this Friday morning. If you've made it through a vampire examination in Rhode Island, axe murders on a haunted island, a courtroom shooting in Germany, a pharmaceutical company that looked at the word heroin and thought, yeah, for coughs. And a computer virus that shows a renaissance painter's birthday to ruin everybody's day. Well, that's a solid Friday. Keep an eye out today for one or two weird dark news episodes dropping as well. Shorter, sharper, no less strange. And tonight, I'll be back with the regular weird darkness episode. If you want to watch it premiere live and hang out with our weirdo family, you can do so in the chat. Head over to WeirdDarkness.com slash YouTube. We go live at 10 Eastern nine central eight mountain seven Pacific. That's WeirdDarkness.com slash YouTube

38:3210 Eastern seven Pacific. Coming up immediately after the show, our podcast band Dark Weirdness performs a custom song written for today's show based on one of the stories from this morning that I've shared. If you've not guessed it yet, well, try. You got a few seconds left to figure it out. And once you hear it, if you like it and you want to hear more from the guys, you can find more music from Dark Weirdness on the music tab at WeirdDarkness.com. All the songs are released to Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, Amazon Music, most major streaming platforms worldwide. I'm Darren Marlar. I'll see you in the podcast. And somewhere off the coast of New Hampshire, something is crying on an empty island. Somewhere in Bavaria, a pharmaceutical executive is hoping you've forgotten about the heroin thing. And somewhere a six-month-old baby grew up not knowing they were the whole point of a story people are still telling. Some mornings are just like that.

39:446 miles off the coast on a 27-hour rock, three Norwegian women, a single door to life. The men were stuck in ports, myth-weighting on a train, and a man with nothing left felt the pull of his again. He asked Thrice that night if the women were alone. Thrice they said yes, the island was their own. He stole the Dory off the walls at half-pass state. He rode 10 miles through Moonlight straight to someone's fate. We'll, we'll, we're on the wind. Screams into the dark before she fell. A man who rode 10 miles to sin. Has an island that still got a story to tell. The only word she could

40:50form. The way lowly lowly. Heron woke up screaming in the kitchen. Cole, a chair, came down hard on the 39-year-old, marrying grabbed her sister, derricated the room. But since went out the window straight into her doom. He tracked her through the snow, size 11, and frosty lit the lamps, matey. Didn't know she'd been lost. He dragged the body to the boat and rolled back through the night while Marin held the rock face, waiting for the light. Loin, loin, loin, loin, on the wind. Screams into the dark before she fell. A man who rode 10 miles to sin. Has an island that still got a story to tell. The only word she could form. The way lowly lowly.

41:51She crossed the breakwater, calling out to the video. We think she spoke, was very worse to say. The way three times was all she could speak. By dust, Boston law, and the man that weak. His books matched every print in the snow. His landlady said he had nowhere else to go. He had his stolen money in the shirt in the shed. Nine days under jury wanted him dead. Loin, loin, loin, loin, on the wind. Screams into the dark before she fell. A man who rode 10 miles to sin. Has an island that still got a story to tell. The only word she could form. The way lowly lowly. While it was Marin who held up blade. Cleaned her husband by the jury and the case was made by

42:54Sonnest and Prisons. Swung its gallows door. She named him from a rock before the dawn turned gray. She couldn't have known that the witnesses would say whatever truth was buried. It won't rise no more. A cottage burned down the red house is no more. With some things in the fog just off of that shore. She servings a buck about cry from the rock. Go see the shore like nothing by the cloud. Loin, loin, loin, loin, on the wind. Screamed into the dark before she fell. A man who rode 10 miles to sin. An island that still got a story to tell. The only word she could form. The way lowly lowly.

44:02The only word she could form. The way lowly lowly lowly lowly. Hey there, it's Ryan Seacrest for Safeway. It's stock up savings time. Now through April 2nd. Spring in for store-wide deals and earn four times of points. Look for in-store tags to earn on eligible items from Lindor. Chipsahoy, Gatorade, Post, Ziploc, and Zoah. Then clip the offer in the app for automatic event-long savings. Stack up those rewards to save even more. Enjoy savings on top of savings when you shop in store or online for easy drive up and go. Pick up or delivery. Restrictions apply. See website for full terms and conditions. Here's the truth. You could literally be adored by everyone and then come home and still get completely ignored by your own cat. It's classic cat behavior. But new Shiba Premium puree is a lickable treat that changes all that. Their protein rich made with bone broth and have the

45:02smooth creamy texture cats go crazy for, especially when it's hand-fed. Yeah, it's more than a treat. It's a fast pass to favorite human status. So feed your cat Shiba and go from totally ignored to truly adored in just 12 days, guaranteed, or your money back. Learn more at Shiba.com. Warning, the following Zippercruder radio spot you are about to hear is going to be filled with F words. When you're hiring, we at Zippercruder know you can feel frustrated. For Lauren even, like your efforts are futile and you can spend a fortune trying to find fabulous people only to get flooded with candidates who are just fine. Fortunately, Zippercruder figured out how to fix all that. And right now, you can try Zippercruder for free at zippercruder.com slash zip. With Zippercruder, you can forget your frustrations because we find the right people for your roles fast, which is our absolute favorite effort. In fact, four out of five employers who post on Zippercruder get a quality candidate within the first day. Fantastic.

46:05So whether you need to hire four, 40, or 400 people, get ready to meet first straight talent. Just go to zippercruder.com slash zip to try Zippercruder for free. Don't forget that zippercruder.com slash zip. Finally, that zippercruder.com slash zip.