Vampire Panic

Alexis Pedrick joins Sam Jones and Deboki Chakravarti to bring you an episode from Tiny Matters, an award-winning podcast from the American Chemical Society produced by Multitude. The episode, which originally aired in February 2026, explores the surprising origins and evolution ...  Show more

This episode is a co-production with Lost Women of Science. Agnes Pockels did pioneering work in surface science. Her invention, the Pockels Trough, became the basis for an instrument that helped Katherine Burr Blodgett and Irving Langmuir make discoveries in material science tha ...  Show more

In the winter of 1892, the quiet town of Exeter, Rhode Island, became the stage for one of New England’s most infamous cases of vampire panic. Tuberculosis, then called “consumption”, was killing families one by one, and superstition filled the gaps science couldn’t explain. When ...  Show more

Today, in honor of Halloween weekend, we're revisiting an episode about vampirism. Starting in the late 1700s and, small rural communities in New England were sometimes stricken with a panicked fear that the dead were feeding off the living.

Bloodsucking fiends appear in the folklore of every culture on the planet. But for some, they were more than just horror stories. Today’s story comes from early 18th-century Europe. A doctor tries in vain to save lives, while a monster waits in the shadows… determined to see him ...  Show more

This story is a fan favorite from MrBallen's Medical Mysteries.

In the late 1800s, a young man in rural New England comes down with a deadly illness known as “the White Death.” When his doctor can’t help, the man’s neighbors propose a bizarre treatment… that involves the ...