Bad, Mad & Northern

Lucy Sheridan
  • 5.0 (1)
  • History
  • Weekly

Bad, Mad & Northern is a historical true crime podcast unearthing the darkest, strangest stories from the North of England. From infamous killers to the villages that vanished beneath reservoirs, the myths that still cling to the moors, and the history no one talks about at Sunday dinner. Hosted solo, told slow, and steeped in northern wit, each episode digs past the headlines to find the real story underneath. Equal parts investigation and ghost story, this is history with the lid off.

  1. 2d ago

    15. The Blue Death: Cholera Comes to York, Liverpool, Leeds and Manchester

    Manchester, September 1832. A crowd of more than three thousand carries an open coffin through the streets, chanting “Burn the hospital!” Inside lies a four-year-old boy who died of cholera, and where his head should be, someone has left a brick. Who took that little boy’s head, and why? Why did thousands of ordinary people across the North come to believe the cholera hospitals were there to kill them? And were they really so wrong? In 1832 cholera, “the Blue Death”, swept across the North of England, killing people within hours. Lucy follows the epidemic and the panic it caused from York to Liverpool, Leeds and Manchester. On the way, more questions turn up: Why do hundreds of people walk past a cholera burial ground beside York station every day without knowing it’s there?How did a woman escape a cholera hospital by leaping from a window, and who paid for the posters that turned her escape into propaganda?Why is there a water pump in York with no handle?Why was it a priest standing on a barrel who stopped a riot, when the doctors and magistrates couldn’t?It’s a story about disease, class, rumour and trust, and it feels uncomfortably modern. With huge thanks to Dr Frances Pearson for her brilliant research. Content warning: death of a child, mutilation of a body, graphic descriptions of disease, violence, and historical prejudice. Follow Bad Mad and Northern so you never miss an episode, and if you enjoyed it, 5* a rating really helps new listeners find the show. Thanks lads! **** About the show About the show Bad, Mad & Northern is a history and true crime podcast about the villains, eccentrics and extraordinary stories of the North: murderers and body snatchers, kings and rebels, drowned villages and Cold War secrets. Released very Wednesday and Saturday, each new episode is carefully researched and told with honesty about the sources, and a healthy dose of northern sarcasm. Meet your host I'm Lucy Sheridan: author, speaker, and proud northerner, recording from an armchair in the Peak District. I've always been drawn to the darker corners of our history, and this show is where I get to share them with you. Pull up a chair. **** Website: www.badandmad.com Newsletter 'The Landlady' join for BTS and case report extras at www.badandmad.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/badandmadpod/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@badandmadlucy Got a story suggestion, feedback or a correction? Email hello@badandmad.com

  2. 5d ago

    14. Remember, Remember: Who Was the Real Guy Fawkes?

    This Bonfire Night, we go back to the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and the York lad behind it: the most notorious traitor in English history, and the face we still burn every 5th of November. Born on Stonegate in 1570 to a respectable family of Protestant church lawyers, Guy Fawkes grew up in a York where being Catholic could cost you everything. Within twenty-five years he was a soldier for Spain, calling himself Guido, and guarding 36 barrels of gunpowder under the House of Lords. In this episode of Bad, Mad & Northern, come with me and follow the powder from a secret crossing of the Thames to the cellar beneath Parliament. Along the way: The real ringleader, Robert Catesby, and the plotters’ first meeting at the Duck and DrakeThe anonymous Monteagle letter, read in full, and the mystery of who wrote itKing James I’s own torture order, and Fawkes’s signatures from before and after the rackThe disastrous last stand at Holbeche HouseHow Guy Fawkes cheated the executioner on the scaffoldWhy we still say “remember, remember the fifth of November”, and how a Catholic terrorist from York gave the world the word “guy”Was the plot a government set-up? Would the gunpowder even have worked? And why does one York school still refuse to burn a guy? Follow Bad Mad and Northern so you never miss an episode, and if you enjoyed it, 5* a rating really helps new listeners find the show. Thanks lads! **** About the show About the show Bad, Mad & Northern is a history and true crime podcast about the villains, eccentrics and extraordinary stories of the North: murderers and body snatchers, kings and rebels, drowned villages and Cold War secrets. Released very Wednesday and Saturday, each new episode is carefully researched and told with honesty about the sources, and a healthy dose of northern sarcasm. Meet your host I'm Lucy Sheridan: author, speaker, and proud northerner, recording from an armchair in the Peak District. I've always been drawn to the darker corners of our history, and this show is where I get to share them with you. Pull up a chair. **** Website: www.badandmad.com Newsletter 'The Landlady' join for BTS and case report extras at www.badandmad.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/badandmadpod/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@badandmadlucy Got a story suggestion, feedback or a correction? Email hello@badandmad.com

    14. Remember, Remember: Who Was the Real Guy Fawkes?

  3. Oct 28

    13. Phossy Jaw: The Victorian Match Girls of the North

    Content warning: this episode includes graphic descriptions of disease, disfigurement and surgery, harm to children, child labour and human remains. Please take care while listening. It began with toothache. Then the gums ulcerated, the teeth fell out, and the jawbone underneath began to die. This was phossy jaw, the industrial disease of Victorian England’s match factories. It was caused by the white phosphorus that made 'strike-anywhere' matches cheap, and it left young match girls disfigured, shunned, and sometimes without a lower jaw at all. Doctors named it in 1839. Manchester surgeons were documenting cases by the 1850s. So why did it take until 1910 for Britain to ban the poison? Who knew, who profited, and who covered it up? From Stockton-on-Tees to Manchester, North Shields to the match works of Bootle and Liverpool, this is the dark, forgotten Northern history behind the humble match. Follow Bad Mad and Northern so you never miss an episode, and if you enjoyed it, 5* a rating really helps new listeners find the show. Thanks lads! **** About the show About the show Bad, Mad & Northern is a history and true crime podcast about the villains, eccentrics and extraordinary stories of the North: murderers and body snatchers, kings and rebels, drowned villages and Cold War secrets. Released very Wednesday and Saturday, each new episode is carefully researched and told with honesty about the sources, and a healthy dose of northern sarcasm. Meet your host I'm Lucy Sheridan: author, speaker, and proud northerner, recording from an armchair in the Peak District. I've always been drawn to the darker corners of our history, and this show is where I get to share them with you. Pull up a chair. **** Website: www.badandmad.com Newsletter 'The Landlady' join for BTS and case report extras at www.badandmad.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/badandmadpod/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@badandmadlucy Got a story suggestion, feedback or a correction? Email hello@badandmad.com

  4. Oct 25

    12. The Pendle Witches, Part 2: The Finger of God

    What happens when the only witness who can hang a family is a nine-year-old girl? In August 1612, the accused from Pendle stood trial at Lancaster Castle. In Part Two, we’re in the courtroom as Jennet Device is stood on a table to give evidence against her own family, and as Alizon Device kneels before John Law, the pedlar whose collapse started it all. We follow the verdicts, the executions, and the book Thomas Potts wrote to make sure the story was told his way. Then we follow what came after. Twenty years later, Jennet herself was accused of witchcraft, and the case reached the king’s own physician. The story went on to London’s stages, and some historians link it to Salem. In 2011, a sealed-up cottage was found near Barley with a mummified cat inside. And we look at why Scotland apologised for its witch trials in 2022, while England never has. Content note: this episode includes executions, the deaths of adults and children, and a child used as a witness against her own family. Follow Bad Mad and Northern so you never miss an episode, and if you enjoyed it, 5* a rating really helps new listeners find the show. Thanks lads! **** About the show About the show Bad, Mad & Northern is a history and true crime podcast about the villains, eccentrics and extraordinary stories of the North: murderers and body snatchers, kings and rebels, drowned villages and Cold War secrets. Released very Wednesday and Saturday, each new episode is carefully researched and told with honesty about the sources, and a healthy dose of northern sarcasm. Meet your host I'm Lucy Sheridan: author, speaker, and proud northerner, recording from an armchair in the Peak District. I've always been drawn to the darker corners of our history, and this show is where I get to share them with you. Pull up a chair. **** Website: www.badandmad.com Newsletter 'The Landlady' join for BTS and case report extras at www.badandmad.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/badandmadpod/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@badandmadlucy Got a story suggestion, feedback or a correction? Email hello@badandmad.com

    12. The Pendle Witches, Part 2: The Finger of God

  5. Oct 21

    11. The Pendle Witches, Part 1: A Handful of Pins

    Content note: this episode includes executions, the deaths of adults and children, and a child used as a witness against her own family. How could a few pins on a muddy Lancashire road lead to ten people being hanged? In March 1612, a pedlar called John Law refused to give some pins to a poor young woman called Alizon Device near Colne. Moments later, he collapsed in the road. By the end of the summer, the families who lived in the shadow of Pendle Hill would be accused of witchcraft, and an old blind woman known as Demdike would die in a cell beneath Lancaster Castle. In Part One, we meet two feuding families, a magistrate with something to prove, and a king who had written his own book on witches. We also meet Thomas Potts, the court clerk whose account is almost all we have, and who wasn’t anywhere near as neutral as he’d like us to think. We follow the case from the Colne road to a secret gathering at Malkin Tower on Good Friday, and to the arrest of Alice Nutter, a wealthy woman whose respectability couldn’t save her. And back in Pendle there’s Jennet Device, aged nine, who is about to become the most important witness in Lancashire. Part Two follows the trials at Lancaster. My gratitude to Jade Reilley, my researcher, for such a brilliant job with the case report. To check out her work, please follow her on Instagram! https://www.instagram.com/msjadereilly?stkn=MWxmdGhlcTdwZW1vMg%3D%3D Follow Bad Mad and Northern so you never miss an episode, and if you enjoyed it, 5* a rating really helps new listeners find the show. Thanks lads! **** About the show About the show Bad, Mad & Northern is a history and true crime podcast about the villains, eccentrics and extraordinary stories of the North: murderers and body snatchers, kings and rebels, drowned villages and Cold War secrets. Released very Wednesday and Saturday, each new episode is carefully researched and told with honesty about the sources, and a healthy dose of northern sarcasm. Meet your host I'm Lucy Sheridan: author, speaker, and proud northerner, recording from an armchair in the Peak District. I've always been drawn to the darker corners of our history, and this show is where I get to share them with you. Pull up a chair. **** Website: www.badandmad.com Newsletter 'The Landlady' join for BTS and case report extras at www.badandmad.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/badandmadpod/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@badandmadlucy Got a story suggestion, feedback or a correction? Email hello@badandmad.com

    11. The Pendle Witches, Part 1: A Handful of Pins

  6. Oct 17

    10. The Halifax Gibbet: England’s Guillotine That Beheaded Thieves for Pennies

    The Halifax Gibbet was a beheading machine used in Halifax, West Yorkshire, from 1286 until 1650. Under the town’s ancient Gibbet Law, anyone caught stealing goods worth thirteen and a half pennies or more could be tried by their neighbours and beheaded on the next market day, more than a century before the French guillotine. So how did a Yorkshire market town of weavers and sheep end up cutting off its own neighbours’ heads in front of the Saturday market? Why did travellers pray to be delivered “from Hell, Hull and Halifax”? And why, when workmen dug up a forgotten stone platform in 1839, were two skeletons found nearby with their skulls lying two feet from their bodies? In this episode: The Gibbet Law, and why stealing cloth from the tenter frames could cost you your lifeA trial with no judge and no lawyers, just sixteen local menThe machine itself, where the whole crowd pulled the rope so that nobody was the executioner, and a stolen sheep could pull the pinThe prisoners who escaped by dodging the blade and running for the Hebble Brook, and the man who came backA father and daughter beheaded togetherThe last two men executed on Saturday 30 April 1650The Scottish earl said to have copied the machine, and then been beheaded by itContent note: this episode describes executions by beheading and includes human remains. Bad, Mad & Northern is a history and true crime podcast about the darker stories of the north of England, hosted by Lucy Sheridan. If you enjoyed this episode, please hit Follow. It’s like a tip that costs nothing, and it helps these northern stories reach new listeners. Website: www.badandmad.com Newsletter 'The Landlady' join for BTS and case report extras at www.badandmad.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/badandmadpod/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@badandmadlucy Got a story suggestion, feedback or a correction? Email hello@badandmad.com

    10. The Halifax Gibbet: England’s Guillotine That Beheaded Thieves for Pennies

  7. Oct 15

    9. The Holiday That Created Dracula, Part 2: The Monster Escapes

    Bram Stoker went home from Whitby with the bones of a monster. So how did they become the most famous vampire in the world? In Part Two here, we follow the seven years it took Stoker to write Dracula, and the disastrous stage reading at the Lyceum Theatre in 1897. We look at what the novel was really saying about Victorian Britain: its fear of the “New Woman”, who was independent, outspoken and sexual, and its terror of syphilis, the disease that passed through the blood and haunted the age. Then we follow the Count’s strange afterlife: Florence Stoker’s court battle against Nosferatu, Bela Lugosi being buried in his cape, Christopher Lee’s years with Hammer, and Francis Ford Coppola’s Oscar-winning film. We finish back where it all started, in Whitby, where the Goth Weekend has brought thousands of people in black to the town since 1994. Missed Part One? Start there for the holiday that started it all. Huge thanks to my researcher, Lauren, for her invaluable input: Website: laurenburles.com IG: yogabylauren Substack: laurenburles.subtack.com Follow Bad Mad and Northern so you never miss an episode, and if you enjoyed it, 5* a rating really helps new listeners find the show. Thanks lads! **** About the show About the show Bad, Mad & Northern is a history and true crime podcast about the villains, eccentrics and extraordinary stories of the North: murderers and body snatchers, kings and rebels, drowned villages and Cold War secrets. Released very Wednesday and Saturday, each new episode is carefully researched and told with honesty about the sources, and a healthy dose of northern sarcasm. Meet your host I'm Lucy Sheridan: author, speaker, and proud northerner, recording from an armchair in the Peak District. I've always been drawn to the darker corners of our history, and this show is where I get to share them with you. Pull up a chair. **** Website: www.badandmad.com Newsletter 'The Landlady' join for BTS and case report extras at www.badandmad.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/badandmadpod/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@badandmadlucy Got a story suggestion, feedback or a correction? Email hello@badandmad.com

    9. The Holiday That Created Dracula, Part 2: The Monster Escapes

  8. Oct 14

    8. The Holiday That Created Dracula, Part 1: Bram Stoker in Whitby

    Why did a man on holiday in Whitby go home with a monster in his pocket? In the summer of 1890, Bram Stoker, a Dublin civil servant turned manager of London’s Lyceum Theatre, took a break in Whitby. He arrived with a few pages of notes and a villain called Count Wampyr. He went home with the bones of a novel. In Part One of this two-part story, we follow Stoker from a sickly childhood in Clontarf to his life-changing dinner with the actor Henry Irving, and then on to Whitby itself, from the founding of its abbey in 657 to the town he found in 1890. We visit the library where he came across the word Dracula, hear about the 1885 wreck of the Russian ship Dmitry that became the Demeter in the novel, and climb the 199 steps to St Mary’s churchyard, where he copied names from the headstones. Part Two follows what he did with it all, and the unhinged making of the legend! Huge thanks to my researcher, Lauren, for her invaluable input: Website: laurenburles.com IG: yogabylauren Substack: laurenburles.subtack.com **** Follow Bad Mad and Northern on your podcast app now, so you never miss an episode, and if you enjoyed it, 5* a rating really helps new listeners find the show. Thanks lads! **** About the show Bad, Mad & Northern is a history and true crime podcast about the villains, eccentrics and extraordinary stories of the North: murderers and body snatchers, kings and rebels, drowned villages and Cold War secrets. Released every Wednesday and Saturday, each new episode is carefully researched and told with honesty about the sources, and a healthy dose of northern sarcasm. Meet your host I'm Lucy Sheridan: author, speaker, and proud northerner, recording from an armchair in the Peak District. I've always been drawn to the darker corners of our history, and this show is where I get to share them with you. Pull up a chair. **** Website: www.badandmad.com Newsletter 'The Landlady' join for BTS and case report extras at www.badandmad.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/badandmadpod/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@badandmadlucy Got a story suggestion, feedback or a correction? Email hello@badandmad.com

    8. The Holiday That Created Dracula, Part 1: Bram Stoker in Whitby
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Ratings & Reviews

About

Bad, Mad & Northern is a historical true crime podcast unearthing the darkest, strangest stories from the North of England. From infamous killers to the villages that vanished beneath reservoirs, the myths that still cling to the moors, and the history no one talks about at Sunday dinner. Hosted solo, told slow, and steeped in northern wit, each episode digs past the headlines to find the real story underneath. Equal parts investigation and ghost story, this is history with the lid off.

Information

  • Creator
    Lucy Sheridan
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    15
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Lucy Sheridan
  • Show Website
    Bad, Mad & Northern

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