Season’s Creepings

The Box of Oddities

John Elliott and Kat Walls

True Crime, Society & Culture, Comedy

4.9 • 2.9K Ratings

🗓️ 10 December 2025

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

On this festive but delightfully off-kilter edition of The Box of Oddities, Kat and Jethro return from an impromptu cruise with a pocketful of overheard conversations, a temporarily abandoned “walking rock,” and the kind of people-watching moments that make you wonder if Thin Mints are actually the glue holding society together. Then Jethro descends—figuratively—into the chilling depths of Sweden’s historic Falun copper mine to uncover the true story of Fat Mats, the perfectly preserved miner whose body was found in 1719 after vanishing four decades earlier. Why did he look freshly deceased after 40 years? Why were his legs missing? And how did a simple silver coin become a family heirloom that still survives today? Kat follows with a world-tour of wonderfully unsettling holiday traditions: a rhyming duel with a Welsh dead horse named Mari Lwyd, a frog-eating, piggyback-demanding winter demon lurking in the Balkans, and Frau Perchta—an Alpine holiday enforcer who rewards the tidy and industrious while punishing the lazy with… well, creatively aggressive disembowelment. It’s a globe-spanning celebration of strange seasonal folklore, preserved miners, questionable cruise-ship conversations, and precisely the kind of merry madness you’ve come to expect from The Box of Oddities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	You've always been a very fashionable sort, and I love it when we're out in public and people compliment you on your apparel.
0:06.4	We were at Disney and somebody said, I love that t-shirt you're wearing.
0:10.4	And it just so happened. It was my new shirt from Soon to Be Mythical.
0:14.9	Describe it.
0:15.7	It's a shoe bill playing the drums and on the drum set it says death metal.
0:20.4	That's the thing about Soon to Be Mythical.
0:22.9	It's conservation-driven apparel.
0:25.1	So the Shoebell Stork is in need of our help as a species,
0:29.3	and that's why it's featured on Soon-to-Be Mythical's wear.
0:32.6	It's also conversation-driven apparel as well,
0:35.8	based on people's response that I've seen. It's a great
0:38.5	gift idea this holiday season. Up to 25% of proceeds will be donated to non-profit organizations
0:44.7	that assist with the conservation of endangered species. What could be better for people like you and me
0:50.5	that want to make a difference but also want to wear cool t-shirts? They also take advantage of a print-on-demand model to reduce waste and also decrease our carbon
0:59.6	footprint. We love these guys. The business goal is to become irrelevant by helping these
1:04.9	animals become so common that they're thriving and a t-shirt calling them soon to be mythical
1:10.3	makes absolutely no sense.
1:12.3	So join us in helping postpone the myth.
1:15.4	Visit postpone the myth.com. Use code oddities 10 and get 10% off your order. That's
1:22.6	postpone the myth.com code oddities 10 for 10% off.
1:28.8	We could be shirt buddies.
1:30.1	Who doesn't want to be shirt buddies with Kat?
	...

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