Episode 47: Serving Toxic Hospitality

This week, we’re leaning into the darker side of the holidays — the kind that looks festive on the surface and deeply unsafe once you scratch it.

Tayler kicks things off with the infamous Dybbuk Box, the object that went viral after being sold on eBay and quickly earned a reputation as one of the most “haunted” items on the internet. We dig into where the story came from, how it spread, and how a piece of folklore became a full-blown paranormal phenomenon through resale listings, media attention, and a lot of very bad decisions.

Then Colleen takes us back to Victorian Christmas, a time when the holidays were beautiful, elaborate… and quietly lethal. From arsenic-laden dresses and toxic decorations to traditions that were actively dangerous, we break down how celebrating Christmas in the 1800s often meant exposing yourself to poisons, hazards, and risks people didn’t fully understand — and why so many festive traditions were, historically speaking, a terrible idea.

It’s a holiday episode about cursed objects, deadly fashion, and the unsettling realization that Christmas has been trying to kill us for much longer than we’d like to admit.