The choice of podcasts to subscribe to in 2020 is truly phenomenal. Naturally, you already listen to STARBURST’s own output (right?), but what other audio pleasures await your ears? May we recommend…

LORE

We all like stories, the more bizarre and disturbing the better. Hosted by writer Aaron Mahnke, Lore takes a look at weird and unsettling historical tales collected from all over the world, with a tagline of “sometimes the truth is more frightening than fiction.” Originally created as a way of marketing Mahnke’s self-published supernatural thrillers, the podcast quickly spiralled in popularity to become its host’s full-time job. The extent of its success is such that some episodes have been adapted into a TV series for Amazon Prime Video, the events of the stories being dramatised while retaining the mesmeric intonation of Mahnke’s narration.

Released every fortnight (with a double dose during October), the typically 30-40 minute episodes sometimes feature common and popular topics, such as vampires, werewolves, zombies, ghosts, or aliens. Some have a more folklore slant, telling stories of the likes of lake monsters, tricksters, changelings or skinwalkers. Some episodes involve well-known historical figures such as Typhoid Mary, “Countess Dracula” Elizabeth Báthory, America’s first serial killer H.H. Holmes, or witchfinder general Matthew Hopkins. Many more feature little-told events of people barely even a footnote in the history books, but each have secrets to relate that engage and enthral in different but equally compelling ways.

Whatever the episode’s focal point, its tales are always told in the context of historical events rather than sensationalised yarns, relating the narrative matter-of-factly regardless of how fantastical it might have seemed at the time. The narrative also gets inside the heads of the people featured to relate their thoughts and beliefs and explain what might seem, to our modern perspectives, some ignorant and backward thinking. It’s also not always centuries-old tales being related. Some stories take place as recently as the 1990s, while one episode’s introduction references that story from 2012 about a Russian ghost ship crewed by cannibal rats.

Quite often, the closing moments will relate a detail about the story that doesn’t add up, something that even the passage of time and greater understanding of how the world works can’t quite explain. There is never an overt suggestion of anything genuinely supernatural, but rather a reminder to the listener that there still remain things that humanity’s continued advancement is yet to fully comprehend, and that hidden in the shadowy nooks of reality we briefly glimpse out the corner of our eye, there might still be some magic left in the world.

HIGHLIGHT EPISODES

Episode 11: Black Stockings

Tales of the folklore surrounding changelings, faeries left in the places of children stolen away by the fair folk and the parents unwittingly raising them as human. The main story deals with Bridget Cleary, a woman who was murdered by her husband in 1895 because he believed her to be a changeling.

Episode 24: A Stranger Among Us

Stories and folktales involving visitations by outsiders that involve the giving of rewards or the doling out of punishments in accordance of one’s behaviour, such as the anti-Santa Krampus, and the Pied Piper of Hamlin.

Episode 40: Everything Floats

A collection of stories about New Orleans, including the Voodoo queen Marie Laveau, the murder of a mysterious Arabian sultan, and the ghosts said to haunt the narrow gaps between the above-ground tombs of Saint Louis Cemetery, as well as the bloody history of the city itself.

Episode 45: First Impressions

The bizarre story of Mary Toft, a woman who in 1726 managed to convince numerous people, including many professional doctors, that she was regularly pregnant with, and giving birth to, rabbits.

Episode 79: Locked Away

The story of the life and history of Sarah Winchester, the wealthy widowed heiress to the company producing the famous rifles. She believed herself to be haunted by the ghosts of people killed by the weapons, and ordered the constant construction of a haphazardly designed mansion as a trap for the spirits.

For more on LORE, head to www.lorepodcast.com