Odd Tonic

Odd Tonic is staged as a visit. Jennifer and Maxwell welcome a 'dear guest' into their parlour, remark on the chill or the first signs of spring, and pour something warm: cinnamon stick tea in one episode, peppermint tea and mulled cider in another. Only then do the stories start. The openings follow a pattern of their own. Three short teasers phrased as instructions come first, then the promise of weird history, strange science and the paranormal, then a drink-themed label for the episode, such as a 'Concealed Concoction' or a 'mind-bending mixer'. The tonic in the title runs right through the show. The history strand favours folklore that hides inside ordinary homes. 'Hidden Curses, Corpses, and Cash' looks at witch bottles used in hexing and at shoes and boots tucked into walls or around the hearth, believed to guard a household against misfortune and malevolent forces. Its teasers weigh a mummified cat against a rabbit's foot. The Bell Witch gets its own telling, drawn from Brad Steiger's book 'Real Ghosts, Restless Spirits, and Haunted Places', about a poltergeist said to have tormented John Bell and his family starting in 1817. The science strand leans toward the fringe. 'The Secret Life of Plants' recounts an experiment in which plants in separate rooms were attached to galvanometers while brine shrimp were tipped into boiling water at random moments, to see whether the plants reacted. Its teasers ask whether a cup of yogurt might be more in touch than a person. The paranormal strand is where listeners come in. 'Parlour Stories' editions gather accounts sent in by the audience and billed as true, and other episodes mix listener stories with researched ones. One submission comes from a husband convinced that an inverted pentagram he used as a young man tied a spirit to his wife for years. Another describes a Christmas-morning phone call that a family still waits for every year. 'The Terrors of Christmas' also draws on the work of a paranormal investigator named Stephen Wagner, passing along a woman named Caitlin's account of a sudden cold in an old family home. The holidays have their own ritual here: a 12 Days of Christmas Ghost Stories run pitched as reclaiming spooky storytelling for the longest nights, and a collection episode rounding up twelve sets of ghost stories with commentary in between. That commentary is half the pleasure. The pair joke about recording everything to catch ghost evidence, trade blame over how long the parlour sat quiet, and hand out mock relationship advice when a dead aunt keeps interrupting a couple's fights. The sign-offs finish the act, usually picturing an eerie scene tied to the theme, such as mummified figures behind a smashed wall or shadowy outlines eating pancakes in a basement, before telling the listener not to worry, since it is only them. It is ghost storytelling with the lamps left on.