Whispers in the Cradle - Brittany Weinberger

True Crimecast

Stove Leg Media

True Crime, Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.8 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 15 September 2025

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Brittany Weinberger is the author of a fascinating book called "Whispers in the Cradle: Uncovering the Dark Side of English Nursery Rhymes". Jamie and John met Brittany at CrimeCon, and they HAD to have her on to talk about the book. Buy "Whispers in the Cradle" here! https://amzn.to/41LVI52 Follow Brittany online! Instagram: @tinybrit05 TikTok: @tiny_bit05 Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1373152197067111 Book Description: How could something as innocent as “London Bridge is Falling Down” carry the weight of destruction and death? Why does “Ring Around the Rosie” feel eerily like a whispered funeral dirge? And who—or what—really inspired “The Muffin Man”? With each page, I peeled back the layers of folklore and unearthed stories of political intrigue, forbidden faiths, brutal punishment, and untold tragedy. This isn’t just a collection of familiar tunes—it’s a descent into the shadowy corners of history, where nursery rhymes served as coded messages, laments, and warnings. They speak of kings toppled, children exploited, families torn apart, and lives consumed by fire, famine, and fear. These songs were never as innocent as they seemed. If you think you know nursery rhymes, think again. Whispers in the Cradle will shatter everything you thought you understood about the melodies of your childhood. Some truths are too dark to stay buried, and some whispers too haunting to ignore.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Stoveleg Media, igniting conversation. We're joined here today by Brittany Weinberger, author of Whispers in the Cradle.
0:31.5	Brittany's an author that we met while we were out at CrimeCon.
0:34.8	Brittany, thanks for talking to us today.
0:37.4	Of course. Thanks for having me.
0:39.8	I think our listeners are probably getting tired of hearing us talk about crime con, but it was
0:43.4	very eventful for us. Was this your first one? It was my first one. I was very excited. I had heard
0:50.3	about it. I don't think I really grasped how big it was until I got there. And
0:58.3	yeah, it was it was huge and oh so much fun. That's a lot. Brittany, you've wrote a book that
1:06.2	just really piqued my curiosity at crime con is called whispers in the cradle i almost said
1:13.5	whispers in the dark but it whispers in the cradle uh i knew just kind of in passing knowledge
1:21.3	that some nursery rhymes were a little bit on the sinister sty but you've researched everyone that I can think of and have
1:29.3	given us a lot of information. So I guess how, what was your research process like for this
1:35.7	book? It had to be a lot of time. It was. So I, it started with Google. And then I went to Wikipedia. And I know you can't really
1:50.3	trust a lot of what's on Wikipedia, but it gave me somewhere to start. So all of this kind of
1:56.3	started because I heard a crazy claim that the muffin man was based off of a serial killer.
2:02.5	And me being me, I called BS and had to look it up.
2:06.1	And he was.
2:08.3	And so that kind of spiraled.
2:11.0	I ended up getting laid off from my career of over 10 years due to the market and had
2:16.3	nothing but time on my hands, fighting with
2:18.6	unemployment, looking for a new job, and decided to go back to my friend, The Muffin Man,
2:24.6	and see how many were that dark because I knew about Ring Around the Rosie.
	...

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