The Crippen Case

On a December morning in 1926, a small grey car was found halfway down a grass slope in Surrey, with its headlights still burning. It belonged to Agatha Christie, already a well-known writer of detective stories, and nobody saw her for eleven days.A husband who had asked for a divorce, police and volunteers searching the Downs, newspapers following every turn, and a spa hotel in Harrogate where a guest had signed in as Mrs Teresa Neele of South Africa.Cover picture: the Daily Herald, December 1926. Public domain.Narrated by an AI voice.

Before the pumpkin, there was the turnip. In Ireland and Scotland, faces were carved into turnips and set beside the house, and the jack-o'-lantern took its name from Stingy Jack, a man who tricked the Devil. This episode follows the night from a Gaelic festival at the end of summer, through the feast days the church laid on top of it, across the Atlantic with Irish and Scottish emigrants, and on to paper party guides, candy corn and the first cries of trick or treat. Along the way, some two hundred boys leave a stuffed dummy on a railway track in Kentucky.Cover picture: "A Merry Halloween" postcard, about 1910. Public domain.Narrated by an AI voice.

On the last evening of January 1910, four people played cards in a rented house in north London. One of them, the music hall singer Cora Crippen, was never seen again.The American doctor Hawley Crippen, his typist Ethel Le Neve travelling as his son, the Scotland Yard inspector who crossed the Atlantic on a faster ship to meet them, and the ship's wireless that let the newspapers follow the chase day by day.Cover photo: Dr Crippen and Ethel Le Neve in the dock, London, 1910. Library of Congress (Bain Collection), public domain.Narrated by an AI voice.

Twenty-two men waited on Elephant Island for four and a half months, living under two upturned boats, while Shackleton tried four times to reach them. Life on the island, the ships he borrowed and begged for, and how the expedition ended, including the second party on the far side of Antarctica.Cover photo: the Yelcho arriving at Elephant Island for the rescue, August 1916. Frank Hurley, public domain.Narrated by an AI voice.

After the ship went down, 28 men camped on the drifting sea ice for five months, then took to three lifeboats and reached Elephant Island. From there, six of them sailed a 22-foot boat 800 miles to South Georgia, and three of those six walked across the island's mountains, which no one had ever crossed, to the whaling station at Stromness.Cover photo: the James Caird being launched from Elephant Island, April 1916. Frank Hurley, public domain.Narrated by an AI voice.

In January 1915 the Endurance was frozen into the ice of the Weddell Sea, and she never sailed again. How the expedition was paid for, how the ship was built and the crew chosen, the long winter aboard, and the slow drift that left 28 men stranded on the ice.Cover photo: the Endurance held fast in the ice of the Weddell Sea, 1915. Frank Hurley, public domain.Narrated by an AI voice.