S02E21: Kate Warne, the heroic first woman Pinkerton detective, and Pearl Tytell, handwriting detective and trailblazing forensic document examiner.

When you need a tricky job done, you have to hire the best! As the first lady detective, Kate Warne’s work with the Pinkertons opened new investigative doors for the agency, helped foil a presidential assasination plot, and paved the way for the creation of the CIA. (We’re also told that she did a fabulous southern belle cosplay.) Pearl Tytell’s groundbreaking document investigation techniques exposed fraud in the highest levels of the government and the lowest reaches of backroom business deals and career-ending gossip mills. (She once even uncovered a fake claim to Russian royalty!) At times, her analysis carried more weight in the courts than the opinion of the FBI. From typewriter quirks to ink colors and paper stock, when Pearl was the expert witness, everybody listened!

S02E20: Slender Man and the Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

Heads up: The first story involves violence against children. Listen at your own discretion.

Whether written at the dawn of a nation or crowd-sourced on the internet, all urban legends hold within them at least a tiny kernel of truth. Here’s what happens when those distorted stories stop being fiction and become real living nightmares.

S02E19: Mrs. Margaret Smith-Wilkinson, nicknamed the Countess of Monte Cristo, and Lady Jane Lewson, the possible real life inspiration for Miss Havisham.

Come meet a hotel mogul turned high society con artist (who probably wasn’t a black widow), and the enigmatic walking fire hazard that might have inspired Dickens’ fictional jilted bride; two women whose actual lives are truly the stuff of fiction.