Postmortem Chic

The Box of Oddities

John Elliott and Kat Walls

True Crime, Society & Culture, Comedy

4.9 • 2.9K Ratings

🗓️ 21 July 2025

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Box of Oddities Live National Tour September 10 - October 31, Halloween Night. Learn More Here! In this episode of The Box of Oddities, Kat and Jethro raise a glass to history’s most unsettling happy hour. First, a post-mortem fashion icon: the corpse of Countess Virginia Oldoini, a.k.a. the Countess of Castiglione—19th-century Italian aristocrat, secret agent, fashion influencer, and full-time narcissist. She posed for over 400 photos, staged her own haunting re-creations of operas, and spent her final years obsessively preparing to be seen dead just right. Spoiler: her afterlife aesthetic was more “ghost of Versailles” than “eternal slay.” Then, we stumble drunkenly across the globe to explore humanity’s weirdest regional cocktails. From "Fat Ass In A Glass" to "The Burnt Trailer", these aren’t your hipster speakeasy cocktails. They’re historic. They’re horrifying. They’ll make you question your liver’s will to live. Drink deeply from the odd. #BoxOfOddities #WeirdHistory #CountessCastiglione #StrangeButTrue #BizarreDrinks #MacabreFashion #FermentedWhat #OddlyInformative #HistoryIsDrunk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to From Beneath the Hollywood Sign. If you love old movies, Hollywood history, or the golden age of filmmaking, you've come to the right place. This is the podcast that talks about amazing stories of Tinseltown from another era and fascinating conversations with writer Steve Kubine and actress writer Nan McNamara.
0:16.7	So Steve, did Ava Gardner and Howard Hughes have a good relationship?
0:21.1	Well, they did until he dislocated her jaw.
0:23.7	What?
0:24.3	Well, don't worry.
0:24.9	She hitting back with an ashtray.
0:26.4	From beneath the Hollywood sign is the gin joint for you.
0:36.1	Hello, this is Matt from the Explorers podcast.
0:39.1	I want to invite you to join me on the voyages and journeys of the most famous explorers in the history of the world.
0:44.9	These are the thrilling and captivating stories of Magellan, Shackleton, Lewis, and Clark,
0:49.5	and so many other famous and not so famous adventures from throughout history.
0:53.9	Go to Explorespodcast.com
0:55.6	or just look us up on your podcast app. That's the Explorers Podcast.
1:01.0	What follows may not be suitable for all audiences. Listener discretion is advised.
1:06.8	The world is full of stories.
1:13.0	Stories of mysteries.
1:15.9	Of curiosities.
1:18.3	Of oddities.
1:33.8	Join Cat and Jethro Gilligan Toth for the strange, the bizarre, the unexpected, as they lift the lid and cautiously peer inside the box of oddities.
1:36.4	Kat has always had a habit of texting me things that make no sense, And lately it's escalated.
1:44.6	I'll wake up in the morning and there'll be six texts from her that really at first
1:50.9	glance kind of gobbledygook.
	...

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