Pick the Next Extra History Series! "Magic, Occult & Spooky Vibes"

It's time for our Extra History poll! Where you get to vote on what our next Extra History Series is about!

These four topics were selected from our "Magic, Occult & Spooky Vibes" Patreon Suggestions and are listed in no particular order below.

London Horror: From Ghosts to Spring-Heeled Jack

Doctor Johnson famously said that when one tires of London, one tires of life—and that's apparently true for spooks too. Not only does London have a history of hauntings, there are times when it transcended mere myth or rumor to become a major part of the city's life. Take the sightings of Spring-Heeled Jack, an iron-clawed, fire-breathing figure said to be able to leap walls and carriages to make his escape. He began a citywide panic so profound, the Duke of Wellington himself started nightly patrols. Or the London Monster, an assailant who between 1788 and 1790 attacked random women in the street, pricking or stabbing them with needles. The resulting press firestorm eerily presaged the later Jack the Ripper killings, and the resulting arrest, trial, and possibly false conviction of a florist remains controversial to this day. And of course, no account would be complete without the Cock Lane Ghost, a hoax poltergeist that accused a recently-widowed man of having poisoned his wife, leading to a media circus, a sex scandal, an investigation by the city's leading minds (including Samuel Johnson, Sir John Fielding of Bow Street, and Horace Walpole) before a trial landed several participants in prison. What else? Well, we'll keep our options open.

History of the Yeti: Out of the Snows

What does a Yeti look like? Big, white and apelike? Not in the Nepali folktales. There the Yachê (yeti) or the related nyalmu (wild man) are intelligent creatures who sometimes become devotees of Buddhist monks or even kidnap and have children with wandering mountain travellers. They are a spiritual figure, possibly pre-Buddhist, and seen as a religious omen or cosmic enforcer. Or at least, they were until western mountaineers got their hands on them. As western climbers entered the Himalayas and especially competed to summit Everest, sightings of unidentified animals combined with folktales from Nepali guides to create a full-on sensation, as a largely spiritual Himalayan symbol became zoologized into an unidentified missing link. Climbers, too, got in on the action—realizing newspapers would sponsor their adventure or scientific expeditions if they also involved yeti-hunting. The result was not only a fever of media but also real international crimes, as unscrupulous investigators stole hair or bones from Buddhist monastery relics and no less than actor Jimmy Stewart smuggled a "yeti finger" past customs. Perhaps inevitably, this interest created a tourism market in the region, where yetis now serve as mascots of airlines, climbing tours, and the government of Bhutan has designated an official wildlife sanctuary for the creature.

Nazi Occultism: Oh, It Gets Weirder!

IIndiana Jones and Hellboy aren't great history, but they get one thing right—Nazis were into some weird crap. However, it's probably not exactly what you imagine. From the earliest days of the party, before Hitler encountered them, what would become the Nazi movement was obsessed with such pseudosciences as World Ice Theory (the idea that ice moons had smashed into the Earth, destroying ancient advanced civilizations), and the kind of mystical and spiritualist beliefs you'd more associate with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. What's shocking, however, is how this blending of myth, occultism, and bizarre beliefs about the ancient past not only drove archaeological study in Nazi Germany (in an attempt to prove that ancient Germans settlers had started Rome, ancient Egypt, and Greece) but also helped underpin the expansionist political claims on those territories. Throughout the war, many top-level figures in Germany consulted followers of pseudoscience on things as important as Russian weather patterns, and as bizarre as whether dowsing could help discover Allied shipping convoys. Though perhaps the most interesting aspect came at the end of the war, as Germany stared down defeat—when the Nazis turned against public displays of the supernatural, banning psychics, Tarot card readings, magic performances and even executing fortune tellers for predicting an Axis defeat.

Jack the Ripper: Beyond the Killings

For over 135 years, we've wondered—who carried out the horrible slayings in Whitechapel? Well, we're not going to answer that. In fact, this series isn't so much about the killings themselves, and instead focuses on what they show us about London at the close of the Victorian Age. We'll look at the Ripper's victims—low-wage workers, frequently homeless, and occasionally (but not always or permanently) engaging in the sex trade. We'll look at the development of London's police force and newspaper culture, which played into the furore surrounding the killings, as well as the place of London within the wider British Empire and Atlantic World, where news (and people) could disseminate across vast distances. The London we see is not the lurid alleyways we've been trained to see when looking at the Ripper killings. It involves active women-led labor movements, a police force in the midst of modernizing reforms, and a city with a large immigrant population where the description of a killer in a "leather apron" could actually be a dog whistle attempting to pin the crime on minority groups. However, we also see a city in the grips of major poverty and an employment crisis, with cheap, government-subsidized alcohol wreaking havoc on those who'd fallen through the cracks. Finally, we see a social movement arising from the killings that would reinvent the slum area of Whitechapel.

Our Current Schedule is:

Hypatia of Alexandria - Starting 5/25 -> Invasion of Canada: The Battle of Quebec -> Giuseppe Garibaldi: Unifying Italy -> Your Vote!

***Friendly reminder: The poll will end at 11:59 PM PT on Wednesday the 29th. You can vote for as many choices as you want! This style of voting helps us see what people are most interested in without having to make tough decisions between a couple of close favorites. ***