In August 1869, John Wesley Powell’s first Colorado River expedition hits its hardest day: a violent rapid, battered boats, sour rations—and a split at Separation Canyon, where three men choose to climb out of the gorge and walk toward settlements instead of facing more whitewater.

In the Time and Tales Podcast Season 1 finale,, we follow the river from Green River Station to the mouth of the Virgin, then trace what little evidence we have for William Dunn, Oramel Howland, and Seneca Howland after they leave the boats—sorting surviving diaries, later testimony, and local rumor into what’s plausible, what’s likely propaganda, and why their disappearance still feels like an American fable: three men who walked out of the canyon alive and were never seen again.

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Sources:

• John Wesley Powell – Exploration of the Colorado River of the West and Its Tributaries (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1875).
• John Wesley Powell – The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons (Flood & Vincent, 1895).
• Frederick S. Dellenbaugh – A Canyon Voyage: The Narrative of the Second Powell Expedition (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1908).
• Henry F. Dobyns & Robert C. Euler – “The Dunn-Howland Killings: Additional Insights,” Journal of Arizona History (Spring 1980).
• A. Scott – “The 150th Anniversary of the 1869 Powell Expedition,” U.S. Geological Survey (2020).

In May 1993, three eight-year-old boys vanished in West Memphis, Arkansas. Their bodies were found the next day in a drainage ditch at Robin Hood Hills—naked, bound with their own shoelaces. Within days, a town already steeped in Satanic Panic turned away from careful investigation and toward a story it already believed: that three local teens who liked metal, black clothes, and occult books must have carried out a ritual killing.

This Time and Tales dark history episode walks through how Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley Jr. became the West Memphis Three: from a contaminated crime scene and a coerced confession to “occult experts,” trials built on vibes instead of evidence, and the 2011 Alford pleas that freed them without clearing their names. It’s a case study about what moral panic does to policing, courts, and anyone who looks like an easy villain.

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Special Guest Host: Horror author Tristan Zelden

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Sources: – Encyclopedia of Arkansas, “West Memphis Three” (case overview, key dates, legal outcomes) – UMKC “Famous Trials” archive on the West Memphis Three (trial materials, testimony excerpts, legal chronology) – Mara Leveritt – Devil’s Knot and related feature writing on the case and prosecution strategy – 1990 Census of Population and Housing profile for West Memphis, Arkansas (poverty data) – NCES Digest of Education Statistics – NAEP reading results, early 1990s (Arkansas/Tennessee vs. U.S. baseline)

In the summer of 1518, a woman stepped into a Strasbourg street and began to dance—and didn’t stop. Within days, dozens of people were staggering and convulsing beside her in the heat, some dancing until they collapsed from exhaustion. City leaders watched a crowded market square turn into one of Europe’s strangest public-health crises.

This Time and Tales Podcast episode walks through Strasbourg’s Dancing Plague from the first recorded dancer to the city’s escalating response—physicians, bans on public dancing, appeals to St. Vitus—and into the modern debates over what really happened: ergot poisoning, mass psychogenic illness, or some mix of fear, famine, faith, and imitation that spiraled out of control.

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Links:

Email-timeandtalespodcast@gmail.com

Website- timeandtalespodcast.com

Patreon- patreon.com/timeandtalespodcast

Instagram: instagram.com/timeandtalespod

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Sources:

• John Waller – A Time to Dance, a Time to Die: The Extraordinary Story of the Dancing Plague of 1518 – John Waller – scholarly work on the 1518 Strasbourg outbreak (journal articles/abstracts)
• Public Domain Review – “The Dancing Plague of 1518”
• The Guardian – feature coverage of the Strasbourg dancing mania
• History.com – “The Dancing Plague of 1518”
• Wikipedia – “Dancing Plague of 1518”; “Strasbourg”