The MR HANSoN Podcast

In 2012, Romanian director Cristian Mungiu released Beyond the Hills, a two-and-a-half-hour film with no musical score, no demon, and no exorcist standing under a streetlamp while the orchestra announces that evil has arrived. What it has instead is mud, cold rooms, black robes, prayer, and two young women named Alina and Voichita. It won Best Screenplay at Cannes and a shared Best Actress prize for its two first-time leads. And almost everything in it happened.Alina never existed. Not exactly. The young woman she was built from was named Maricica Irina Cornici, and in June of 2005 she died on a hillside in Vaslui County, in the poorest corner of eastern Romania, inside an unfinished religious community called the Holy Trinity monastery.This episode walks the real case from the beginning. Irina's childhood in a Romanian orphanage after her family came apart. Her work abroad as a nanny. The friend from the orphanage who told her there was room at Tanacu, and the January arrival that put her inside a closed world run by a twenty-nine-year-old priest named Daniel Petru Corogeanu, a former footballer who had never finished his theological training and who had already told his own bishop that canon law was a nineteenth-century invention written by Freemasons.It covers what changed that spring. The giggling during Mass. The fast she said the Virgin Mary had ordered. The voice she said was the devil's, telling her she was sinful. The two weeks in a psychiatric hospital, the schizophrenia diagnosis, the April twentieth release into the monastery's care with medication and instructions to return in ten days, and the return that never happened.Then June. The hands and feet bound during the Ascension liturgy. The boards nailed together with arm supports added as an afterthought, a thing that everyone who saw it afterward called a cross. The chains. The towel. Three days in the church with holy water on her lips and nothing else. The moment the priest declared her cured, the bread and tea, the collapse, the ambulance that took an hour to reach a community with no telephone, and the six doses of adrenaline given by a doctor trying to bring her back.And then the parts most retellings skip. The hospital staff who looked at her wrists and called the police. The autopsy finding of dehydration, exhaustion and a lack of oxygen. The 2007 verdicts in Vaslui, the appeal that cut them in 2008, the Romanian Orthodox Church closing the monastery and defrocking Corogeanu, and his parole in November of 2017. The coroner who took part in exhuming her body years later and said publicly that what killed her was the adrenaline, not the boards. Corogeanu's own claim that his mistake was calling for help at all. Her brother's testimony that he watched Satan enter his sister. And the village where people will still tell you the priest did everything he could.Finally, the road from a death to a screen. Journalist Tatiana Niculescu Bran, who ran the BBC's Bucharest bureau, went past the headlines into court documents and village conversations and produced two non-fiction novels, Deadly Confession and The Book of Judges. Andrei Serban adapted the first for the stage. Cristian Mungiu saw that play in New York in 2007 while promoting his Palme d'Or winner, and five years later Irina became Alina. Then in 2017 an American production made The Crucifixion from the same case and did the thing Mungiu refused to do. It put the demon on screen, gave it a face, gave it music, and gave the audience the relief of knowing which explanation was correct.That is the trade this season exists to examine. Hollywood hands you a monster so you do not have to look at the hillside. Before Hollywood, her name was Irina.Hosted by Jeremy Hanson. Full archive at www.MRHANSoNpodcast.com..

Bill Ramsey became known around the world as the Southend Werewolf, but his disturbing story raises a much older question: What if the legends of werewolves were never simply legends?In this episode of MR HANSoN, Jeremy Hanson investigates the strange case of Bill Ramsey of Southend-on-Sea, Essex, England—a carpenter whose unexplained violent episodes, extraordinary strength, animal-like behavior and memory gaps eventually attracted paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren.One of the most dramatic incidents occurred at Southend police station in July 1987. Sergeant Terry Fisher encountered Ramsey after a frightened woman reported that the man who drove her to the station had somehow “changed.” Ramsey allegedly attacked Fisher with extraordinary strength, and roughly a dozen officers became involved in restraining him.After Ramsey was placed in a cell, witnesses reported even stranger behavior. His head, shoulder and arm reportedly came through the food hatch in the cell door. Sedatives failed to immediately subdue him, and the fire brigade was eventually called to help officers remove him.But the Bill Ramsey werewolf case is only the beginning.This episode travels through the forgotten history of werewolves, lycanthropy and European werewolf trials, when courts and governments treated reports of werewolves not as entertainment, but as a genuine threat.We examine the 1573 Parlement of Dole werewolf edict, Gilles Garnier, the infamous Peter Stumpp werewolf case of Bedburg, Judge Henri Boguet, Jacques Roulet, and the transformation of the werewolf from a legal and supernatural category into what modern medicine recognizes as clinical lycanthropy.Then the story returns to Ramsey.Following earlier unexplained episodes and a 1983 incident at Southend Hospital, Ramsey eventually traveled from England to Connecticut, USA, where Bishop Robert McKenna performed an exorcism attended by Ed and Lorraine Warren, Nina Ramsey, John Zaffis and others.Was Bill Ramsey suffering from a rare psychological or medical condition?Was the Southend Werewolf story exaggerated by newspapers and paranormal investigators?Or do centuries of werewolf folklore preserve fragments of something we stopped allowing ourselves to consider?The mystery isn't what we can prove Ramsey did.It's what witnesses believed they saw.Criminal investigations depend on descriptions. But when witnesses describe something impossible, investigators have little choice but to remove the impossible details.Animal movement becomes confusion. Impossible strength becomes adrenaline. A distorted face becomes poor lighting. A growl becomes a frightened memory.Eventually, the description becomes human again.There hasn't been a box on the form for “werewolf” for centuries.Maybe there shouldn't be.But what if that's exactly why we would never find one?MR HANSoN — Season 3: Before HollywoodDiscover the true stories, historical mysteries, folklore, cryptids, paranormal encounters and unexplained events that existed long before Hollywood transformed them into monsters.Topics: Bill Ramsey, Southend Werewolf, werewolf true story, werewolf history, lycanthropy, clinical lycanthropy, Ed and Lorraine Warren, Southend-on-Sea, Essex England, Peter Stumpp, Gilles Garnier, Bishop Robert McKenna, exorcism, paranormal investigation, cryptids, supernatural legends, unexplained mysteries, true crime, MR HANSoN Podcast.

A boy walks a frozen dirt road in rural Sweden with boxes of matches in his coat pocket. He buys them cheap in bulk in Stockholm and sells them one at a time to his neighbors for a few coins. The matches are beside the point. What he is really doing on those doorsteps is teaching himself how to take the plainest object anyone can name and move it in a way that makes people reach for their money. His name is Ingvar Kamprad, and the habit will become IKEA.This episode of the MR. HANSoN Podcast traces the rise of the man who built one of the largest retail empires on earth out of ten thousand small refusals to accept waste. From the stone-choked soil of Småland, to founding IKEA at seventeen with his father's gift money, to the accident on a loading dock when a worker pulled the legs off a table to fit it in a car, to the industry boycott that only handed him a cheaper cost base, to the radical proposition that good design should not be a privilege of the wealthy.It is told straight, hard parts included: Kamprad's extreme frugality, his tax-minimizing foundation structures, and — handled with full gravity — his documented youthful ties to Sweden's pro-Nazi and fascist movements, which he called the greatest mistake of his life, and which historians later found ran deeper and longer than his apologies admitted. The achievement and the stain, held in the same hand. The story of a man who built a company, and underneath it, a way of thinking. Ingvar Kamprad, IKEA history, who founded IKEA, IKEA flat-pack origin, Smaland thrift, Kamprad matches, IKEA name meaning, Elmtaryd Agunnaryd, flat-pack furniture invention, democratic design, affordable design for everyone, Kamprad frugality, Kamprad Nazi ties, Per Engdahl, Elisabeth Asbrink, IKEA boycott Poland, retail empire history, narrative history podcast, biography podcast, MR HANSoN Podcast, Empire Builders, relentless incrementalismThis has been a Fuzzy Life Production

In 1937, a forty-year-old woman in Fairfield, Connecticut opened her oven and pulled out a failure. The loaf was one inch high. She said later it was hard as a rock, and that it belonged in the Smithsonian as a specimen of bread from the Stone Age. She had never baked a loaf of bread in her life. Upstairs was her nine-year-old son Mark, whose asthma and food allergies were severe enough that the family allergist had told her the mass-produced white bread on every counter in America was likely making him worse.Her name was Margaret Rudkin. Twenty-four years later she sold Pepperidge Farm to the Campbell Soup Company for roughly twenty-eight million dollars in stock and took a seat on Campbell's board of directors, the first woman ever to sit on it.This is the story of what happened in between, and it is not the story you have been told. The legend says a sweet housewife stumbled into baking and got lucky. The record says something else entirely. Margaret Fogarty graduated valedictorian in New York City, spent four years at a bank as a bookkeeper and a teller, and worked on Wall Street at the brokerage firm McClure, Jones and Company before she ever ran a household. When the crash of 1929 and her husband's polo injury took the family's income, she sold the horses, let the staff go, and turned a Connecticut estate into a working farm business years before bread entered the picture.Then came the brick, and everything that followed it. The Irish grandmother's recipe. The allergist who started prescribing her bread to other patients. The first commercial sale at Mercurio's Market in Fairfield at twenty-five cents a loaf against a dime for everything else on the shelf, in the middle of the Great Depression. Henry Rudkin carrying loaves on the morning train to Charles and Company in Manhattan. The Reader's Digest article that made the country find out all at once. The wartime decision to cut production rather than cut the formula. The trip to Brussels, the Delacre licensing deal, and the hundred-and-fifty-foot cookie oven shipped across the Atlantic.We also tell the part the inspirational version leaves out. Premium bread in a Depression was a luxury, and the same insistence on real butter and whole milk that made it trustworthy is what put it out of reach for millions of families. Both things are true, and an honest story carries both.Full episode list and show archive at www.MRHANSoNpodcast.comMy name is MR. HANSoN. And now, you know the rest of the story.This has been a Fuzzy Life Production

In a laboratory built for war, a self-taught engineer with no college degree reached into his pocket and found his chocolate bar had melted — with no flame, no heat, nothing but a humming radar device nearby. Almost anyone else would have wiped their hand and forgotten it. Percy Spencer asked why. And in asking, he discovered microwave cooking and changed nearly every kitchen on earth.This episode of the MR. HANSoN Podcast tells the Percy Spencer story straight — including the parts the legend gets wrong. Orphaned and dirt-poor in rural Maine, Spencer left school at twelve, taught himself electricity, radio, and advanced math with no instructor, and rose at Raytheon on results alone. During World War II he didn't invent the magnetron — the British did — but he cracked how to mass-produce it, turning a trickle into thousands a day and helping win the radar war. That mastery is exactly why, when a candy bar melted near a magnetron, he was the one person on earth prepared to understand it.But here's the twist that makes this episode the season's counterpoint: Spencer built an empire for everyone but himself. He reportedly received the standard two-dollar patent gratuity while the microwave became a multi-billion-dollar industry. He wasn't ignored — he rose to senior vice president, joined Raytheon's board, held some 300 patents, and earned the Navy's highest civilian honor — but the fortune proportional to what he unleashed never came to him. A story about the difference between seeing an opportunity and capturing it, and about the quiet, world-changing power of simply paying attention.Q: Who was Percy Spencer? A: Percy Spencer (1894–1970) was a self-taught American engineer at Raytheon who discovered microwave cooking. Orphaned and poor in rural Maine with no formal education, he became one of the world's foremost experts on the magnetron and rose to senior vice president and a board seat.Q: How was the microwave oven discovered? A: While working near an active magnetron during radar research, Spencer noticed a chocolate bar in his pocket had melted. He experimented with popcorn (which popped) and an egg (which exploded), proving microwaves could rapidly cook food by exciting water molecules."Most people would have wiped their hand and moved on. Percy Spencer asked why.""The difference wasn't the chocolate. It was the man.""He didn't invent the magnetron — he figured out how to make it by the thousands.""The accident found the right man because the right man had spent decades preparing to receive it.""A technology built to find enemy bombers ended up reheating last night's coffee.""He built an empire. He just built it for everyone else.""Seeing the opportunity and capturing the opportunity are two completely different things.""The biggest breakthroughs don't always come from the loudest people — they come from the ones who notice what everyone else ignores."This has been a Fuzzy Life Production