They Danced Until They Died: The Dancing Plague of 1518 - Mass Hysteria, Medieval Suffering & the Body's Breaking Point

The Papacy's Hall of Shame — When the Vatican Went Off the Rails (Postscript)

You have just come from the Cadaver Synod — a pope digging up his dead predecessor, propping the body on a throne in full vestments, convicting it, and throwing it in the Tiber. You may think that is as bad as it ever got. That there is nowhere to go from a corpse in a chair. Oh, darlings. There is so much further to go. In this postscript, April Rain runs a guided tour through the most unhinged stretch of papal history — because if we are going to discuss institutional corruption, we may as well visit the institution with the best-documented record of people doing staggering things in the name of God. The Cadaver Synod was the symptom. This is the diagnosis. The tour: The Year of Four Popes (896) — four pontiffs in twelve months, a revolving door someone set on fire. Ten popes in thirty-two years, at least three murdered, including John VIII — poisoned, then beaten to death when the poison ran slow. Sergius III — back from exile with an army, who found his two predecessors conveniently imprisoned and conveniently dead, and fathered a child with a fifteen-year-old girl who became Pope John XI. Marozia — and here the tour goes dead straight. She installed popes, had one smothered with a pillow in the Castel Sant'Angelo, and ran Rome for three decades through the only channels a world that gave women no formal power left her. When men do this, history calls it statecraft. When she did it, history reached for "pornocracy." April corrects the record. John XII — pope at eighteen. The charges Otto I read against him in 963 are one of the great documents in recorded history: ordaining a deacon in a horse stable, ordaining a ten-year-old bishop for money, blinding his confessor, castrating and murdering a cardinal, toasting the devil by name at a gambling table, and turning the Lateran Palace into a brothel. Benedict IX — who reduced the throne of Saint Peter to a line item. Made pope as a boy, he held the office three times and once sold it — to his own godfather, for cash — leaving three men at once claiming the papacy. And how did the institution survive all of it? Partly through a theology walling the office's authority off from the man holding it — either a profound insight about grace or the most effective self-protection an institution ever built. Probably both. But the part to carry home is this: reform never came from within. Every time, it came from outside — from emperors the institution could not outvote, excommunicate, or bury in a monastery. External accountability. Every single time. Any institution that says it needs no outside oversight — trust the procedure, never mind the outcomes — is walking a road the ninth-century papacy mapped in detail. We have the map. The only question is whether we read it. Pairs with Episode 3A (The Cadaver Synod) — start there. Velvet Guillotine is a podcast about dark history and institutional cover-ups. The Postscript is the companion to each main episode — sources, tangents, and the parts that didn't fit. New episodes every Sunday. Part of The Downpour podcast network. Hosted by April Rain. DISCLAIMER: The content of this episode is for entertainment purposes only. Historical events and figures discussed are based on documented records, scholarly research, and primary sources. This episode contains discussions of murder, assassination, sexual misconduct involving a minor, and the systematic abuse of institutional and ecclesiastical power. Velvet Guillotine does not endorse any political, religious, or ideological interpretation of events portrayed. The criticism offered here is directed at the documented conduct of specific historical figures and the institutional structures of a particular era — not at any faith, religious community, or the beliefs of its adherents. Listener discretion is advised. Sources and research rabbit holes: thevelvetguillotine.substack.comSupport the show: patreon.com/thedownpourEverything else: linktr.ee/thedownpour Stay dark. — April

The Corpse on the Throne — The Cadaver Synod of 897 AD

January, 897. Rome. A sitting pope had his dead predecessor exhumed, dressed in full papal regalia, propped upright on a throne, and put on trial. A deacon was appointed to speak for the corpse. The corpse lost. This is the Cadaver Synod, and it is not a metaphor. Pope Stephen VI dug Pope Formosus out of the ground — nine months dead — convicted him on every charge, cut the blessing fingers from his right hand, and threw the body in the Tiber. It is one of the most unhinged spectacles in the history of organized religion. The moment you stop laughing, it becomes something colder: a study of what an institution does when no one left alive has the power to tell it no. April Rain walks you onto the crime scene — the collapse of Charlemagne's empire, the street-fight papacy of the ninth century, and the politics of revenge under the theater — and asks the only question a crime scene ever really asks: who benefited. History is a crime scene. This week, the body is a pope. Listener note: institutional corruption, political violence, and the desecration of human remains. For entertainment purposes only. Sources and the research rabbit holes: thevelvetguillotine.substack.comSupport the show: patreon.com/thedownpourEverything else: linktr.ee/thedownpour Stay dark. — April

The Doctrine of Bodily Availability — Whose Corpse Belongs to Science (Dastardly Ideas)

Think about what you assume happens to your body after you die. You assume your wishes will be respected. That your name will stay attached to your remains. That someone will claim you — and that if they don't, the institution holding you will operate within a legal framework that treats your body as belonging, in some meaningful sense, to you or to your people. Those assumptions are not universal. They have not always been true. And the legal framework that decided whose body belongs to whom — and whose body belongs, in effect, to whoever needs it — is still deciding. In this episode of Dastardly Ideas, April Rain traces the doctrine of bodily availability from its foundation in English common law — the principle that a corpse was not property, could not be owned, and therefore could not be stolen — through the Anatomy Act of 1832, which took the informal operating logic of the body trade and wrote it into statute. The Act didn't say poor. It said unclaimed. Your poverty made you available. The Act said so in procedural language, which is the language institutions use when they want to make something true without appearing to decide it. Then the American version — which didn't need the fiction of unclaimed at all, because it had something more direct. Enslaved people were property. Their bodies were available by legal definition to whatever use the owner decided to make of them, including medical science, including experimental surgery, including the production of the knowledge base on which American medicine built itself. J. Marion Sims operated on Anarcha thirty times. Without anesthesia. Because the prevailing framework said she felt it differently. Then 1951. Baltimore. Henrietta Lacks — a Black woman, a white institution, a legal framework that had not yet decided that a person's biological material belongs to them. The same architecture. Different language. HeLa cells used in over seventy thousand studies, industries worth billions built on them, a family that couldn't afford the health insurance that might have caught the cancers that killed several of them. The doctrine did not require slavery to operate in 1951. It required only the combination that was already there. The idea has always been the same idea. Poverty makes you available. Race makes you available. Institutional power makes you available. The legal language changes. The architecture holds. This episode pairs with Ep. 2A (The Body Market), Ep. 2B (Henrietta Lacks), and Dastardly Places Ep. 2 (Surgeons' Square) — four episodes that form a complete accounting of the body trade from geography to doctrine to legacy. Listen as a series. Velvet Guillotine is a podcast about dark history and institutional cover-ups — the frameworks we use to understand history are themselves historical, and some of them have agendas. Dastardly Ideas drops weekly. New episodes every Wednesday. Part of The Downpour podcast network. Hosted by April Rain. DISCLAIMER: The content of this episode is for entertainment purposes only. Historical events and figures discussed are based on documented records, scholarly research, and primary sources. Velvet Guillotine does not endorse any political, religious, or ideological interpretation of events portrayed. This episode contains discussions of slavery, racial injustice, and non-consensual medical experimentation. Listener discretion is advised. Sources and the research rabbit holes: thevelvetguillotine.substack.comSupport the show: patreon.com/thedownpourEverything else: linktr.ee/thedownpour Stay dark. — April

Annabelle — The Doll and the Machine Built Around Her (Dastardly Objects)

In a yellow house in Monroe, Connecticut, inside a glass case, sits a Raggedy Ann doll. Red yarn hair. Stitched triangular nose. Faded smile. A mass-produced object — one of millions of identical dolls made in the mid-twentieth century. You probably know someone who had one. On the front of the case, in capital letters: POSITIVELY DO NOT OPEN. She has sat in that chair for over fifty years. In August 2025, the house sold. The buyer was comedian Matt Rife, who — with a paranormal YouTuber — announced plans for overnight stays. The doll described for five decades as a vessel for a demonic entity is now the centerpiece of a planned bed and breakfast. In this episode of Dastardly Objects, April Rain works out how we got here. She covers the origin story — the nursing students, the moving doll, notes in a child's hand on parchment paper neither woman owned, the séance, the scratches — then walks through what can and cannot be checked. Donna: no last name on record, never publicly identified in fifty years. The medium, the priest, the diocese, the hobby shop: all unnamed. The doll received in 1968 per the NESPR website, 1970 per the Warrens' own book. Not a single named independent witness. Every story that cannot be checked drifts. That is what stories do in the absence of fixed facts. Then the Warrens — not the Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga version, but the people who built a self-credentialing organization, attached themselves to high-profile hauntings, and brokered alleged hauntings into book deals and film options. Including the horror novelist they hired to write The Haunting in Connecticut, who has stated publicly for fifteen years that Ed Warren told him to invent what the family accounts couldn't support. Then The Conjuring — which couldn't use the real doll's face, because a soft cloth doll with red yarn hair wasn't frightening enough, so the studio built a porcelain-faced nightmare. The franchise grossed over two billion dollars. The 2025 national tour was timed to The Conjuring: Last Rites. Dan Rivera, NESPR's lead investigator and Annabelle's primary handler — a believer, an Army veteran, a father of four — died of cardiac arrest in his hotel room the morning after the tour's final stop. The Adams County coroner ruled the death natural and added one sentence: "It is confirmed that Annabelle was not present in the room at the time of his passing." Think about what it means for a county coroner to feel his investigation was incomplete without addressing the location of a Raggedy Ann doll. The engine runs. What makes Annabelle different from the thousands of identical dolls in attic boxes across America is not what is inside her. It is what was built around her — fifty years of story, institution, theology, and commercial infrastructure. The system does not require belief. It requires only that the question stay open. That the case stay closed. That the signs stay up. She is a doll. She sits where she is placed. Everything else — the case, the cross, the franchise, the tribute in the closing credits, the Airbnb — that is what people do. What people have always done. Velvet Guillotine is a podcast about dark history and institutional cover-ups. Dastardly Objects explores the artifacts that carry their own dark gravity. New episodes every Monday. Part of The Downpour podcast network. Hosted by April Rain. DISCLAIMER: The content of this episode is for entertainment purposes only. Events and figures discussed are based on documented records, public reporting, and primary sources. Velvet Guillotine does not endorse any political, religious, or ideological interpretation of events portrayed, and makes no claim as to the existence of paranormal phenomena. This episode contains discussion of a recent death. Listener discretion is advised. Sources and research rabbit holes: thevelvetguillotine.substack.comSupport the show: patreon.com/thedownpourEverything else: linktr.ee/thedownpour Stay dark. — April

Surgeons' Square, Edinburgh — The Market That Ran on Corpses (Dastardly Places)

There is a small square in Edinburgh's Old Town that most tourists walk past without stopping. It sits just off the Royal Mile, tucked behind the university's medical buildings, unremarkable in the way that places with very remarkable histories often are. A few historic plaques. Some academic architecture. The kind of quiet institutional atmosphere that communicates: serious work happens here. Has always happened here. That is true. Serious work did happen here. It's just that some of that serious work required a steady supply of human corpses, and the people supplying them were not particular about how those corpses were obtained. In this episode of Dastardly Places, April Rain walks the geography of the body trade — the specific streets and buildings where medicine decided that some people's deaths were more useful than others, and where the line between science and murder turned out to be thinner than anyone wanted to admit. Surgeons' Square, Edinburgh. The anatomical epicenter of early modern medicine. The place where the science of the human body was built, and where the market for human bodies was built alongside it, with considerably less fanfare and considerably more violence. She covers the geography of procurement — the specific graveyards that served as hunting grounds for the resurrection men, the routes the bodies traveled in sacks at night, the etiquette of a transaction that everyone above a certain social station understood and looked away from. Greyfriars Kirkyard, famous today for a small bronze terrier, is scattered with mortsafes — iron cages bolted over graves by families who could afford them, the physical record of a community's terror written in rust. The people who couldn't afford iron responded with grief, helplessness, and occasionally with riots. Then 10 Surgeons' Square. The address where Dr. Robert Knox ran his anatomy school. The address where, on the night of October 31, 1827, William Hare discovered that the body of a dead lodger could be sold for seven pounds and ten shillings — and where, over the following year, Burke and Hare delivered sixteen murder victims to a man who paid without asking questions because the market had its etiquette and the etiquette required not asking. Knox was never prosecuted. The system protected him because the system needed him. Because there was no clean way to draw the line between the murderers and the institution that had created the conditions for them. Then the Anatomy Act of 1832 — which did not end the body trade but legalized its operating principle: that the bodies of the poor were available for medical science in a way that the bodies of the wealthy were not. The workhouses of Edinburgh's Old Town were the source. Surgeons' Square was the destination. The Act drew a legal line between them and called it science. The square is still there. The mortsafes are still in Greyfriars Kirkyard. The archive is more specific than the plaques. The Royal College of Surgeons has a museum. It does not have an exhibit on where the bodies came from. What the square has never had is a memorial to the people whose bodies built the medical knowledge the buildings around it represent. They were people. Fully, completely, recognizably people. People who lived in this city, in these streets, in the closes and wynds that are still there. Walk it knowing what you're walking through. This episode pairs directly with Episode 2A (The Body Market) and Episode 2B (Henrietta Lacks and the Century That Followed) — Dastardly Places provides the physical geography; those episodes provide the historical and contemporary depth. Listen as a trilogy for the full picture. Dastardly Places drops weekly alongside the main episode and postscript. New episodes every Friday. Part of The Downpour podcast network. Hosted by April Rain.