The Velvet Guillotine

Velvet Guillotine | Dastardly Objects, Ep. 1 | "The Book Nobody Can Read — The Voynich Manuscript"

It is nine inches tall. The vellum is the color of old butter. You are wearing nitrile gloves. You are not allowed to bring in a pen. You turn the first page. There is a plant — or something plant-shaped, with leaves doing things leaves do not do. Underneath it is a block of writing. You can read English. You can sound your way through Latin, French, Italian on a menu. You have looked at Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Devanagari. If you didn't understand them, you could at least tell what kind of writing they were. This writing is not any of those things. There are 240 pages like this. They have been sitting in front of researchers for somewhere between four and six centuries. Nobody has ever been able to tell you what any of it says. Welcome to Dastardly Objects — the series that asks the same questions Dastardly Figures asks about people, but about the objects that have outlived everyone who ever made, owned, or studied them. Objects with biographies. Objects with dark gravity. Objects that have killed people, refused to be decoded, or been very deliberately mythologized by someone who understood exactly what a strange book is worth. In this series opener, April Rain takes on the most famous undeciphered manuscript in human history: Beinecke MS 408. The Voynich Manuscript. She covers all of it — the carbon dating that eliminated half the existing theories in one result, the six-hundred-year chain of custody that runs from a Bohemian alchemist to the imperial court at Prague to two and a half centuries of Jesuit library silence to a Polish revolutionary turned rare book dealer who understood, immediately, that mystery was the asset. The script that follows Zipf's law and linguistic entropy like a real language, and then does things no real language does. The century of failed decipherments — the respected University of Pennsylvania professor whose breakthrough unraveled within years, the man who broke the Japanese PURPLE cipher during World War II and still got nowhere, the 2019 announcement that made international headlines and collapsed within days. The hoax question, taken seriously, with the statistical evidence laid out on both sides. And then what the manuscript actually is, after you've stripped every theory away: an object that has been waiting, since roughly the lifetime of Joan of Arc, for someone to read it. An object that has outwaited cryptographers, linguists, the entire arc of modern computing, and every AI model thrown at it in the last decade. It is the people looking at it who need it to mean something. The book itself has no opinion. Velvet Guillotine is a podcast about dark history and institutional cover-ups — the events buried, misread, or filed under "weird old stuff" and left there. Dastardly Objects is a companion series exploring the objects that carry their own dark gravity. New episodes drop Fridays. Part of The Downpour podcast network. Hosted by April Rain.

Velvet Guillotine | The Dancing Plague | Postscript: "What Happened After — The Long Tail of the Dancing Plague"

The main episode told you what happened in Strasbourg in the summer of 1518. The dancers. The musicians. The dead. This is the part nobody tells you after that. What happened to the survivors — the people who danced for days or weeks at a stretch, whose tendons tore and hearts gave out and bodies sustained damage they would spend months recovering from, if they recovered at all? What happened to Frau Troffea, the woman who started it, after she was carried to the shrine of Saint Vitus and then quietly disappeared back into history? What happened to a city that watched its own citizens move in circles until they dropped — and then sent them back to the exact same lives they had danced to escape from? In this postscript, April Rain follows the long tail. The ban on dancing that changed nothing. The Protestant Reformation that swept through Strasbourg within a generation — because a population that had collectively broken down in 1518 was a population primed for a different story. The German Peasants' War of the 1520s, which tore through the same Rhine Valley communities, the same social class, the same geography, less than a decade later — and left between 100,000 and 130,000 people dead in its suppression. The witch trials that followed fifty years after that, in the same corridor, targeting the same margins, running on the same mechanism: find an external cause for internal suffering rather than address the conditions producing it. The Dancing Plague said: our bodies are out of our control and we don't know why. The witch trials said: our lives are out of our control and we know exactly why. It's her. One turned inward. One turned outward. Both born from the same place. The pressure never disappeared. It just changed its form. And April Rain argues that the shift from we are suffering to they are making us suffer is one of the most dangerous transitions in human social psychology — and that the Rhine Valley in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a laboratory for it. We are still running the experiment. The dancing never really stopped. It just changed its shoes. Velvet Guillotine is a podcast about dark history and institutional cover-ups — the events that got buried, misread, or filed under "weird old stuff" and left there. New episodes drop Fridays. Part of The Downpour podcast network. Hosted by April Rain.

The Countess Who Bathed in Blood — Elizabeth Báthory | Serial Killer, Political Target, or Both? | Dastardly Figures Ep. 1

Six hundred and fifty victims. The most prolific female serial killer in recorded history. A noblewoman who tortured and murdered young women in her castle and bathed in their blood to preserve her youth. That's the story you know. Here's what the historical record actually says. In this episode of Dastardly Figures, host April Rain forensically dismantles one of history's most famous monster narratives — and finds something considerably more complicated underneath. Because the evidence against Elizabeth Báthory was extracted under torture, the man who prosecuted her stood to inherit her lands, the king who authorized the investigation owed her estate an enormous debt, and the detail that defines her legend — the blood bath — does not appear anywhere in the trial record. It first appears in a Jesuit history published 115 years after her death. What we cover: * Who the Báthorys actually were, and what noble power looked like in sixteenth-century Hungary * Elizabeth's marriage to Ferenc Nádasdy — the celebrated war hero who, by the same testimony used to convict her, was an enthusiastic participant in the abuse of servants * Why Elizabeth's widowhood made her politically dangerous, and who specifically had financial incentive to destroy her * The trial that never happened — why the most powerful noblewoman in Hungary was walled into her own rooms rather than put before a court * How testimony extracted under torture became the foundation of a four-century legend * Where the blood bath story actually came from — and when * What the Blood Countess legend does to our understanding of systemic aristocratic violence, and who it lets off the hook Maybe she was guilty of everything. Maybe the number was ten and not six hundred and fifty. Maybe the blood bath happened. Maybe it didn't. What is certain is that the story we've been telling about Elizabeth Báthory was built by people who needed her to be a monster. And we have been elaborating on their verdict ever since. Referenced in this episode: Tony Thorne, In the Footsteps of the Blood Countess | Kimberly Craft's primary document translations | László Turóczi's 1729 Jesuit history | Trial transcripts, January 1611

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

In the summer of 1518, a woman named Frau Troffea walked into the streets of Strasbourg and started dancing. She didn't stop. Within a month, hundreds of people were dancing alongside her — through the August heat, until their feet were destroyed, until their hearts gave out, until some of them simply died. And no one could stop them. The Dancing Plague of 1518 is one of the most documented and least understood events in European history. In this episode, host April Rain goes beyond the "weird medieval history" headlines to examine what actually happened — and why it was never as strange as it sounds. What we cover: * The famine, plague, and feudal oppression that pushed Strasbourg to its breaking point * Who Frau Troffea was, and what we know (and don't know) about what happened to her * How the city's response — hiring musicians and building official dance floors — made everything catastrophically worse * The science of mass psychogenic illness: why the symptoms were real, the suffering was real, and "hysteria" is not the dismissal it sounds like * Why the Dancing Plague of 1518 was not the first — and what the 150-year pattern of Rhine Valley dancing plagues actually tells us * The direct line from 1518 Strasbourg to the German Peasants' War, the witch trials, and the present day * What it means that the dancers were exclusively poor This is not a story about superstitious medieval peasants doing something inexplicable. It is a story about what happens to human beings when the world becomes genuinely unlivable and no one in power acknowledges it. The body says what the mind cannot. Referenced in this episode: John Waller, A Time to Dance, A Time to Die | Dr. Paracelsus | The Strasbourg City Council records, 1518 | Sebastian Brant's Strasbourg Chronicle

History Is a Crime Scene | Meet Velvet Guillotine

What if everything you learned about history was the cleaned-up version? Velvet Guillotine is a dark history podcast that goes where textbooks don't — into the mechanisms of power, the bodies that paid for progress, and the stories that got buried so the wrong people could put their names on buildings. In this intro episode, host April Rain explains what Velvet Guillotine is, what it isn't, and why engaging seriously with dark history isn't morbid curiosity — it's a moral obligation. Coming up in Season One: the Dancing Plague of 1518, the body trade that built modern medicine, the witch trials as a tool of social control, medical experimentation on enslaved women, the Great Fire of London, and much more. This is not a murder podcast. Not a ghost story podcast. Not a conspiracy theory podcast. It's documented, sourced, deeply researched history — which is stranger and more disturbing than any of those things. New episodes drop three times a week.