Introducing the Fountain Road Files, a new horror fiction podcast from unexplained creator Richard McLean Smith.

In March 2020, 27-year-old Cafe worker Ben Williams began recording an audio diary of the coronavirus pandemic.

Two months later, he was found dead in the South London flat where he was spending lockdown alone.

Also, he thought.

Search the Fountain Road Files wherever you get your podcasts and for more information, go to thefountainroadfiles.com.

Welcome to unexplained Extra, with me Richard McLean Smith.

Where for the weeks in between episodes, we look at stories and ideas that for one reason or other didn't make it into the previous show.

In the last episode, the unceasing cloud, we tracked the inadvertent consequences of Alexander von Humboldt's introduction of Guano to Europe,

from the subsequent explosion of international crop yields to the discovery of the harbour Bosch process,

to arrive eventually at a world forever haunted by the specter of chemical warfare.

As for the phantom gasser of Baddertord County, the jury remains out as to whether the really had been a mystery perpetrator,

terrorising the community or whether in fact it had been gripped by a kind of mass hysteria instead,

or perhaps even a mixture of the two.

At the centre of it all, however, was the looming and polarising presence of chemist Fritz Harbour.

With the episode in danger of becoming too long for its own good, there was much about Harbour's life that I wasn't able to include,

not least of all, the inspiring and tragic story of Harbour's first wife Clara Imavar.

Clara Imavar was born in 1870 in a small town near Breslau in what used to be the Kingdom of Prussia.

With the unification of Germany in 1871, Breslau experienced an explosion of culture and industry,

becoming the sixth largest city in the German Empire as its population tripled between 1870 and 1900.

Being the daughter of a wealthy chemist who was also the owner of a textile store in Breslau,

Clara would spend much of her time in the city, inspired by its newfound dynamism and dreaming of becoming a scientist in her own right.

However, such were the social constraints of the day, the education offered to women was of a somewhat different variety to that offered to men.

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