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The Box of Oddities — Comedy
The Box of Oddities

The Webby Award-winning “Box of Oddities” is a podcast that delves into the strange and mysterious aspects of our world, exploring topics ranging from bizarre medical conditions to unsolved mysteries, and from paranormal phenomena to strange cultural practices from around the world. With a focus on oddities, curiosities, and the macabre, each episode is a journey into the unknown, where hosts Kat and Jethro Gilligan Toth share their love for unusual stories and inject their humor and commentary. From the strange history of medical practices to chilling true crime stories, to natural (and unnatural) events, “The Box of Oddities” satisfies your thirst for the weird and the unusual, offering an informative and entertaining look into the dark and mysterious corners of our world.
JIMMY KIMMEL, ABC-TV says, “Should you be the type who has an interest in weird stuff, this is a fun thing to allow in your head!”

“Truth is stranger than fiction, and the Box of Oddities is the strangest of all!” -SLUGGO, SIRIUS XM LITHIUM

“Kat & Jethro wring humor from bizarre, macabre and perplexing places.” -BOSTON MAGAZINE

Copyright: © 2023 Eleven Eleven llc

Latest Episodes:

Inbox Of Oddities #69 Jan 02, 2026

Show notes

This week on Inbox of Oddities, Kat and Jethro open the mailbag to stories that blur the line between coincidence, consciousness, and the truly unexplainable. From an apartment building where the elevator refuses to stop on one occupied floor, to a deeply moving firsthand account of near-death experience, angelic visitation, and spiritual awakening, these listener submissions linger long after the episode ends.

You’ll also hear eerie workplace anomalies that feel like time slips, mysterious recurring figures appearing in years of photographs, intimate moments of human-animal connection, and reflections on how trauma, survival, and compassion can reshape a life. Along the way, Kat and Jethro explore ideas of interconnected consciousness, the illusion of separation, and what it might mean to glimpse the larger web we’re all part of.

Equal parts unsettling, heartfelt, and quietly profound, this Inbox of Oddities episode delivers true listener stories of glitches in reality, unexplained encounters, and moments that forever change how we see the world—and ourselves.

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Bodies Left Behind: The True Story of Alabama’s Memorial Mound Dec 31, 2025

Show notes

In this episode of The Box of Oddities, Kat and Jethro Gilligan-Toth begin the new year by pulling apart something we all use but rarely question: the calendar. From Julius Caesar’s ego-driven timekeeping decisions to the leap year, misplaced months, and how entire civilizations quietly agreed on when the year should begin, it’s a surprisingly strange history of how humans try — and often fail — to organize time itself.

But once the clock runs out, the episode takes a much darker turn.

Jethro dives into the true story of the Memorial Mound in Bessemer, Alabama — an underground burial mausoleum inspired by ancient Roman catacombs and Indigenous burial traditions, designed to last for centuries. Instead, it became one of the most disturbing cases of abandonment in modern funeral history.

After the site quietly closed, human remains were left behind for years. Caskets stacked like warehouse inventory. Bodies decomposing in sealed darkness. An infant among them. When urban explorers finally entered the structure in 2014, what they found triggered a federal investigation and raised troubling questions about oversight, neglect, and how easily the dead can be forgotten.

Along the way, you’ll hear:
• The strange origins of month names and New Year’s Day
• How calendars slowly drifted out of reality
• A “Thing in the Middle” packed with bizarre machine and technology facts
• And a documented case of human remains abandoned inside an American mausoleum

It’s a story about time, memory, and what happens when systems fail — quietly, slowly, and out of sight.

Keep flying that freak flag.

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Bizarre Smuggling Stories & Snake Island: The Deadliest Place You Can’t Visit Dec 29, 2025

Show notes

This week on The Box of Oddities, Kat and Jethro Gilligan-Toth open the lid on some of the strangest true stories the world has to offer — from bizarre smuggling schemes that absolutely should not have worked, to an island so dangerous Brazil made it illegal to visit.

You’ll hear verified cases of smugglers hiding gold, drugs, wildlife, and even live animals in places that defy both logic and anatomy. From marijuana disguised as carrots and cocaine packed inside frozen shark carcasses, to turtles smuggled through airport security inside a fast-food sandwich, these are real criminal attempts that prove human creativity has no off switch.

Then, we shift from border absurdity to genuine biological horror with Snake Island — Ilha da Queimada Grande — a real, government-restricted island off the coast of Brazil where thousands of golden lancehead vipers evolved into some of the most venomous snakes on Earth. Learn how isolation, evolution, and a diet of migratory birds created a nightmare ecosystem so lethal that even scientists need military clearance to visit.

Along the way, you’ll also hear:
• A true “Thing in the Middle” miracle involving a church explosion that spared every choir member
• The evolutionary science behind hyper-toxic venom
• Why wildlife smuggling is one of the most dangerous black markets in the world
• And why, for the love of all that is holy, airports are not storage facilities

It’s strange history, real science, true crime stupidity, and unsettling natural horror — all documented, all factual, and all deeply odd.

Keep flying that freak flag.

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Weird Ways To Survive Holiday Parties Dec 26, 2025

Show notes

his Christmas Box contains a fine selection of fascinating topics you can bring up during awkward moments at holiday parties. (or anytime, really) Jethro discusses the bizarre and intriguing histories of common foods while Kat shows us how numbers can be weird.

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A Christmas Greeting From Kat & JG Dec 25, 2025

Show notes

Happy Christmas, Freak Fam! 🎄✨

From the bottom of our weird little hearts, thank you for another year of curiosity, kindness, and glorious oddity. You make this community what it is, and we’re endlessly grateful to share the strange with you.

May your days be filled with joy, your nights be peaceful, and your holidays come with just the right amount of mystery.

With love and appreciation,
Kat & Jethro 🖤

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Stories of Christmas Past Dec 24, 2025

Show notes

Holiday Oddities: Stolen Santa Bones, Pooping Logs, and the Strangest Christmas Traditions on Earth

This holiday bonus episode of The Box of Oddities unwraps the weirdest, darkest, and most unexpectedly heartwarming Christmas stories from history. Kat and Jethro explore the true fate of Saint Nicholas’s bones, including the medieval relic theft that scattered Santa’s remains across Europe—and the unsettling legend of “Santa juice” still collected from his tomb.

From there, the episode sleighs straight into bizarre holiday traditions from around the world: Catalonia’s infamous pooping nativity figure, the gift-pooping Christmas log that children beat with sticks, Iceland’s child-eating troll Grýla and her terrifying Yule Cat, and the unsettling folklore behind Santa once writing threatening letters to children instead of the other way around.

Balancing the strange with the sincere, the episode also highlights true stories of compassion and humanity during wartime, including the Christmas Truce of 1914, enemies sheltering together on Christmas Eve during World War II, George Washington returning an enemy general’s dog, and a Japanese pilot gifting his ancestral samurai sword to an American town decades after bombing it.

It’s a holiday episode filled with macabre history, unsettling folklore, absurd traditions, and genuine hope—a reminder that even in the darkest seasons, people can still surprise us.

Listener discretion advised… and Merry Weird Christmas.

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When the Dying Speak Clearly—and Animals Speak at Midnight Dec 22, 2025

Show notes

In one ICU room, patients repeatedly report seeing the same silent man standing in the same corner—often just before sudden clarity, recovery, or death. Nurses notice the pattern. Doctors document an unusual concentration of terminal lucidity. The room keeps being used.

In this episode of The Box of Oddities, Kat and Jethro explore a real medical mystery involving repeating end-of-life visions tied to a single hospital room, and why science struggles to explain why place—not patient—seems to matter.

Then, we examine ancient Christmas folklore warning that animals speak at midnight—and that overhearing them reveals forbidden knowledge, often about death.

From hospital wards to medieval superstition, this episode asks: what if clarity at the end comes after something leaves?

Listener discretion advised.

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Inbox of Oddities #68 Dec 19, 2025

Show notes

From roadside alligators and paranormal children to phantom music in office vents, this Inbox of Oddities is packed with listener stories that blur the line between coincidence, the paranormal, and pure “what the hell just happened?”

Kat and Jethro share unsettling and heartfelt emails from the Freak Fam, including a young child casually chatting with a grandmother who passed before he was born, a mysterious 1940s ballad heard only by one overnight janitor, and a chilling brain-surgery encounter where a deceased loved one may have appeared in the operating room.

You’ll also hear classic BOO Effects, eerie synchronicities, haunted roads in England, ghost tours gone strange, cursed dolls no one asked for, rats with impeccable comedic timing, and a very real reminder that quicksand is not just a cartoon problem. Add in Florida alligators, Canadian border misunderstandings involving shovels and tarps, creepy toys, and inexplicable moments that stop the second you notice them—and you’ve got an Inbox episode that delivers equal parts humor, heart, and goosebumps.

As always, these stories come straight from listeners around the world and remind us why the weird finds us when we least expect it. Keep flying that freak flag.

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Linguistic Ghost Limbs & the Melon Heads of Connecticut Dec 17, 2025

Show notes

Why do we still dial phones with no dials, roll down windows that don’t roll, and store things in cupboards that hold no cups?

In this episode of The Box of Oddities, Kat and Jethro explore linguistic ghost limbs—words and phrases that outlived the objects they once described. From cupboard, dashboard, and glove box to carbon copy, footage, horsepower, and deadlines, language refuses to let go of the past. These verbal fossils reveal how history lingers in everyday speech through semantic shift, fossilized metaphors, and semantic bleaching.

Then the show heads deep into New England folklore with the chilling legend of the Melon Heads of Connecticut—grotesque figures said to haunt back roads like Velvet Street and the edges of Roosevelt Forest. Are they escaped asylum patients, outcasts turned monsters, or something far darker?

Language is haunted. So are the woods.

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Awake During Brain Surgery Dec 15, 2025

Show notes

Awake brain surgery sounds impossible—until you hear about musicians who play instruments while surgeons operate on their exposed brains.

In this episode of The Box of Oddities, Kat and Jethro explore the true medical phenomenon of awake craniotomy, including the astonishing case of a professional violinist who played during brain tumor removal to protect the neural pathways that control her music.

Then, things take a historical turn as we dive into the bizarre wellness craze known as the Grape Cure, once promoted as a treatment for cancer, tuberculosis, and nearly everything else—despite zero scientific evidence.

From neuroscience and identity to medical quackery and human absurdity, this episode asks: How do you protect the part of yourself that makes you who you are?

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