Weird stories with excellent timing.
The Box of Oddities is a two-voice tour through eerie claims, weird objects, cemetery lore, listener stories, and small household disasters. It treats the unexplained seriously enough to stay interesting, then punctures the dread with fast banter and absurd everyday detail.
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The Box of Oddities is a fast, conversational catalog of the strange, the creepy, and the accidentally hilarious. It treats weirdness as a daily condition, not a special occasion. Recent episodes move through cemetery legends, woman-in-white sightings, thin places, strange metallic spheres, hidden corners of the brain, possible time slips, and listener stories that land somewhere between eerie and sweet. Then the show swerves. A rainy day becomes a reflection on feeling safe in bad weather. A house-sitting note for dogs becomes a running bit. A patio jar full of things dropped from an upstairs balcony becomes its own tiny museum of nonsense. That is the show’s real rhythm: atmosphere, interruption, escalation, reaction, and a joke that arrives right before things get too solemn. The paranormal material is handled with curiosity rather than blank belief. Urban legends get room to breathe, but patterns, sources, and ordinary explanations are still part of the conversation. The Box of Oddities is especially good at the uneasy middle ground, where a story might be folklore, misperception, hoax, art, memory glitch, or something harder to name. It does not need certainty to have fun. It needs texture. The comedy comes from quick domestic asides, gross little details, listener contributions, and the pleasure of two people catching each other off guard. The show can be spooky. It can also be deeply silly. That contrast is the point. It suits listeners who like mysteries with banter, folklore with side comments, and macabre subjects softened by human mess. It is not a dry archive of odd facts. It is a strange little cabinet that keeps rattling after the lid is closed.
Made for: For listeners who like paranormal folklore, odd science, listener-submitted weirdness, and everyday comedy tangled together. Best for people who enjoy creepy subjects but want the pressure released with banter.
What sets it apart: The show’s strength is its whiplash between eerie research and domestic absurdity. Cemetery thresholds, brain mysteries, and metallic-sphere speculation sit comfortably beside patio debris, dog notes, rainy-day feelings, and laundry mistakes.
The Webby Award-winning “Box of Oddities" is a podcast that delves into the strange and mysterious aspects of our world, exploring topics ranging from bizarre medical conditions to unsolved mysteries, and from paranormal phenomena to strange cultural practices from around the world. With a focus on oddities, curiosities, and the macabre, each episode is a journey into the unknown, where hosts Kat and Jethro Gilligan Toth share their love for unusual stories and inject their humor and commentary. From the strange history of medical practices to chilling true crime stories, to natural (and unnatural) events, "The Box of Oddities" satisfies your thirst for the weird and the unusual, offering an…
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
It traces how hazards, rumors and unexplained experiences become the stories people preserve, embellish and pass along.
Kat and Jethro Gilligan-Toth turn strange stories into a lively two-person exchange, moving between sourced explanation, speculative questions and jokes that rarely flatten the underlying mystery.
Radioactive cats, cemetery doorways, and the ball cutter: Kat and Jethro make your curiosity regret nothing.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Dog-sitting chatter frames a cemetery tour of woman-in-white lore, red eyes, and threshold imagery.
The episode opens in a grounded register, with dog-sitting and house-sitting chatter setting up a familiar, conversational entry point before the focus moves into cemetery lore.
A loose, funny mailbag of strange stories, light banter, and a little creeping unease.
The inbox edition opens with a loose, funny stretch about Last One Laughing and the kind of silent laugh that takes over your shoulders, then moves into listener stories that get steadily stranger.
A Colombian metal sphere anchors a measured, oddball argument about evidence, art, and the appeal of leaving a mystery open.
The boogasphere takes a cold, seamless metallic object found in a Colombian field and treats it as a small stress test for modern mystery. The episode works best when it keeps curiosity pressed against evidence: one side wants qualified scrutiny before the story gets too grand,…
A river legend with human-looking teeth turns one brush against a leg into a nasty little mystery.
A remote river in Papua New Guinea gives the episode its central shiver: something moves below the surface, and the local name, the ball cutter, is as blunt as the fear itself.
A nuclear-waste question becomes a story about memory, warning, and one deliberately stubborn cat song.
The episode frames radioactive waste as a problem of memory as much as engineering: how do people warn the far future when language, buildings, and records may all fail?
A blue-whale nightmare leads Kat and Jethro Gilligan-Toth into hybrid research, human-chimp lore, and a shaky Sasquatch theory.
The episode starts in a small, memorable place: a listener's recurring nightmare about being swallowed by a blue whale and sliced by baleen, even as his wife points out that baleen is soft and built to filter.
A rainy-day chat turns comfort viewing, repeat rituals, and two unexplained taps into something warm and strange.
Box of Oddities uses a rainy day in Orlando to get at why gloomy weather can feel exciting, safer, and strangely soft. From there, the episode slips into a sharp little disagreement about comfort viewing: one host returns again and again to Ken Burns' Civil War documentary,…
Kat and Jethro compile ten cannibal-themed episodes from their podcast Box of Oddities for a Thanksgiving special.
This episode explores strange and bizarre stories with hosts Kat and Jethro, starting with a discussion about having an incredible internal clock.
This episode features listener Connie's story about a cargo ship that spilled millions of LEGO pieces into the ocean decades ago, with pieces still washing up on beaches today, as part of a series sharing bizarre and unexpected family favorites.
This episode of the History of Egypt podcast introduces the series with a teaser about Ancient Egypt, followed by a personal anecdote about accidentally trapping lizards with gnat traps.
This episode of Inside the Box of Oddities discusses unexplained Montauk radio transmissions and the hosts' personal experiences with the Twilight series.
Kat and Jethro Gilligan Toth host an 'Inbox of Oddities' episode where they read and discuss listener emails and messages.
Kat and Jethro Gilligan-Toth share chilling first-hand accounts from psych ward employees, including a patient who gouged out her eyes and a nine-year-old who murdered his mother.
The Box of Oddities opens with R.
The hosts discuss cleaning up their patio after a rainstorm and collecting items dropped by their upstairs neighbor's children from the balcony.
The hosts discuss their unexpected emotional reaction to the sci-fi movie Project Halo (Hail Mary) after confusing it with another book adaptation.
A husband apologizes to his wife for putting her bathing suit in the dryer, leading to a humorous discussion about laundry mishaps and marital communication.
The hosts discuss their personal feelings about rainy days, exploring why they find them exhilarating and safe rather than depressing, touching on science and cultural heritage.
The hosts share a humorous personal story about forgetting to remove notes left for dogs while house-sitting, leading to a funny reaction from the homeowner.
It opens with dog sitting, which the host says is helping raise money for Straying North, and the dogs quickly make it clear they have no respect for sleep.
The Box of Oddities opens with a very particular kind of domestic chaos: one host laughing too hard at Last One Laughing while the other checks to make sure she is still alive.
The Box of Oddities centers on the Buga Sphere, a metallic object recovered in Colombia that was described as cold, seam-free, and almost biological.
The river keeps its secrets.
The Box of Oddities' "The Atomic Priesthood Problem" frames radioactive waste as a 10,000-to-20,000-year communication problem, anchored by plutonium-239's 24,000-year half-life.