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Vermont is known for the beauty of its woods and mountains, but the cost of that beauty is often forgotten. For much of our history, Vermonters endured unimaginable hardship and poverty that limited opportunities for growth and preserved, as if unchanged, the landscape of today. Their suffering is always with us, written on the land, inscribed in cellar-holes and graveyards and orchards gone to wild. Welcome to These Dark Mountains.
A supper-table knife turns ominous; you'll want the witness accounts before you settle on a story.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A covered bridge, a failing Canada story, and a confession that brings Alice's death into view.
A murder investigation gathers its force from the sounds of a single night in the Little River district: a black mare, a buggy, a scream, and a team stopping inside Barber's Bridge.
A child's death becomes a record of the adults who saw suffering and let it continue.
Alice Meeker's death at nine, after drinking strychnine from a china mug marked "Remember me," gives These Dark Mountains a grim account of abandonment turning fatal.
A Burlington supper turns a folding knife into the center of a murder case.
A chicken supper on Cherry Street becomes the turning point in a Burlington murder case, drawing Agnes Willis, Gilbert Farmer, Louisa LaCruz, and Julia Brace Bennett into a tense December evening in 1899.
A family tragedy tightens into a barn confrontation where testimony keeps every verdict unstable.
A smallpox-ravaged household sets the episode on a hard path toward a barn confrontation where grief, marriage, and violence never quite settle into one clear verdict.
Black Hills history, told on location.
Vegas history with a barstool pulse.
Connecticut history with national echoes.
Texas history, sourced and road-tested.
Maine history, widened through public talks.
Emmeline Meeker says, "I have worked outdoors a good deal ever since I was married."
Alice Meeker's autopsy by Dr.
These Dark Mountains traces the April 23, 1880 disappearance of nine-year-old Alice Meeker in Waterbury, Vermont, through witnesses at Barber's Bridge and River Road.
These Dark Mountains follows the December 11, 1899 killing of Agnes Willis at 18 Cherry Street in Burlington, using police reports, newspaper coverage, and family records to reconstruct the case.
These Dark Mountains traces Lumen Smith, Alma Wood Smith, and Joseph Wood through the 1873 smallpox deaths at Heinsberg and the 1879 barn shooting in Williston.
These Dark Mountains examines the 1875 murder of 17-year-old Josie Langmaid near Suncook, New Hampshire, and its connection to Marietta Ball’s 1874 killing in St.
A narrative history podcast exploring the hardships and dark stories of Vermont's past, beginning with a 1868 home invasion.
A historical true crime episode recounting the discovery of a newborn's body in a box at a Vermont paper mill in 1895 and the subsequent cover-up.
The episode recounts the 1877 disappearance of three-year-old Victory Plouffe in Vermont, blending historical context with a true crime mystery.
The episode introduces Clarence Adams, a Vermont farmer who dreamed of becoming a detective and stumbled into a real crime story in 1902.