Extraordinary Stories Podcast

Extraordinary Stories Podcast is a narrated show about real events strange enough to sound made up. Barry tells them, and the telling is half the appeal. The show is filed under true crime, and crime is certainly present, but the recent run reaches further. One story concerns a man the world almost entirely forgot: an idea for a moving photograph, his wife Lizzie, a move from Leeds to New York, and his insistence that nobody learn what he was working on. Another centres on Ellen, who by Anne's account came home from hospital, went to sleep and did not wake, while curious villagers and journalists kept knocking at the door Anne shared with Thomas. A third follows Gregorian, a man in Romania who built a following around yoga and claimed he escaped jail by bending the bars with his mind. Barry is having none of it. Some material comes in themed runs. 'And Then The Crowds Came' is about groups that get swept along: in Ireland, gossip about Bridget Cleary turns into a belief that something supernatural has happened and she is not herself, and at a festival, police open extra entry points to manage the flow of people. The 'Transformation' series takes change as its theme, and one part follows a widow whose husband was killed and who came to believe UK law had to change to properly punish those who kill emergency workers. Structurally, the episodes open the same way, with a cold open stitched from dramatic lines, questions and warnings. Then the register flips. Barry greets listeners warmly, gives shout-outs, sings a couple of lines by way of hello, and pauses to insist he is not dead, whatever one online review implied. The narration is plain and conversational, with plenty of room for asides, such as his admission that he would have been the villager calling the newspapers. That contrast defines the listen: grim material, delivered by someone who sounds delighted to be back at the microphone. He flags the darkest material, warning ahead of one episode that it contains a bloody, brutal description of a death. Strong language does surface in places. Episodes end on a goodbye, and most in this run then play the same short snippet of repeated audio. For a first listen, the two 'And Then The Crowds Came' parts show the range and the method together, moving from folk belief in Ireland to a festival with DJs. For Barry at his most openly doubtful, the Gregorian story is the one to pick.