What happens when the U.S. Navy, Cold War paranoia, and a quiet patch of northern Wisconsin collide? You get one of the weirdest stories in American history. WTF: The Wisconsin Test Facility They Hoped You’d Never Find Forget everything you think you know about secret government projects. Area 51 had its remote Nevada desert. The …
It’s July 1914 in Horicon, Wisconsin. A Croatian laborer named Joseph Dejanovich wakes up in the middle of the night to the blow of an axe — and somehow survives. His wife, nineteen-year-old Barbara, is arrested and charged with attempted murder. The evidence seems damning: a sharpened axe, a fired revolver, a bloodstained nightgown. But …
On a bitter November day in 1914, the C.F. Curtis, the Selden E. Marvin, and the Annie M. Peterson headed out onto Lake Superior carrying lumber, freight, and a crew of working people bound for another routine run — and vanished into one of the lake’s worst storms. More than a century later, the wrecks …
OLD COLD CASE Horicon City Marshal William Gibson — Civil War veteran, father of four, a man his community trusted with their safety — was shot once, point-blank, on the steps of his own jailhouse, in front of his ten-year-old son. The killer vanished into the dark Wisconsin night. Suspects were arrested across the state. …
Forget everything you think you know about spies. James Bond had an Aston Martin and the full backing of British intelligence. Jason Bourne had black-ops conditioning and a talent for parkour. The American Founders had a printing press, some tobacco to barter with, and a desperate shortage of gunpowder. They still pulled it off. When …
This week on One Shot at History, we’re trading Wisconsin weather for Arkansas weirdness — and there is a lot of it. We start in Little Rock in 1920, where two police officers on a routine patrol stumble into a ditch, see lights floating into the treetops, and nearly get shot by three women who …
On the morning of July 4th, 2003, a retired truck driver named Art Rantala was in his workshop outside Mayville, Wisconsin when he watched three perfect circles form silently in a wheat field across the road. It took roughly twelve to fifteen seconds. No sound, no light, no wind — just the wheat flattening in …
Murder in the Big Woods Generations of Americans grew up with Laura Ingalls Wilder’s version of frontier life — and it’s a beautiful one. Warm, honest, and full of the kind of resilience that made the Little House series an enduring piece of American literature. But Laura was also a careful storyteller. And careful storytellers …