The Halifax Gibbet was a beheading machine used in Halifax, West Yorkshire, from 1286 until 1650. Under the town’s ancient Gibbet Law, anyone caught stealing goods worth thirteen and a half pennies or more could be tried by their neighbours and beheaded on the next market day, more than a century before the French guillotine.

So how did a Yorkshire market town of weavers and sheep end up cutting off its own neighbours’ heads in front of the Saturday market? Why did travellers pray to be delivered “from Hell, Hull and Halifax”? And why, when workmen dug up a forgotten stone platform in 1839, were two skeletons found nearby with their skulls lying two feet from their bodies?

In this episode:

• The Gibbet Law, and why stealing cloth from the tenter frames could cost you your life
• A trial with no judge and no lawyers, just sixteen local men
• The machine itself, where the whole crowd pulled the rope so that nobody was the executioner, and a stolen sheep could pull the pin
• The prisoners who escaped by dodging the blade and running for the Hebble Brook, and the man who came back
• A father and daughter beheaded together
• The last two men executed on Saturday 30 April 1650
• The Scottish earl said to have copied the machine, and then been beheaded by it

Content note: this episode describes executions by beheading and includes human remains.

Bad, Mad & Northern is a history and true crime podcast about the darker stories of the north of England, hosted by Lucy Sheridan.

If you enjoyed this episode, please hit Follow. It’s like a tip that costs nothing, and it helps these northern stories reach new listeners.

Website: www.badandmad.com

Newsletter 'The Landlady' join for BTS and case report extras at www.badandmad.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/badandmadpod/

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Got a story suggestion, feedback or a correction? Email hello@badandmad.com

Bram Stoker went home from Whitby with the bones of a monster. So how did they become the most famous vampire in the world?

In Part Two here, we follow the seven years it took Stoker to write Dracula, and the disastrous stage reading at the Lyceum Theatre in 1897. We look at what the novel was really saying about Victorian Britain: its fear of the “New Woman”, who was independent, outspoken and sexual, and its terror of syphilis, the disease that passed through the blood and haunted the age.

Then we follow the Count’s strange afterlife: Florence Stoker’s court battle against Nosferatu, Bela Lugosi being buried in his cape, Christopher Lee’s years with Hammer, and Francis Ford Coppola’s Oscar-winning film.

We finish back where it all started, in Whitby, where the Goth Weekend has brought thousands of people in black to the town since 1994.

Missed Part One? Start there for the holiday that started it all.

Huge thanks to my researcher, Lauren, for her invaluable input: Website: laurenburles.com

IG: yogabylauren Substack: laurenburles.subtack.com

Follow Bad Mad and Northern so you never miss an episode, and if you enjoyed it, 5* a rating really helps new listeners find the show.

Thanks lads!

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About the show About the show Bad, Mad & Northern is a history and true crime podcast about the villains, eccentrics and extraordinary stories of the North: murderers and body snatchers, kings and rebels, drowned villages and Cold War secrets. Released very Wednesday and Saturday, each new episode is carefully researched and told with honesty about the sources, and a healthy dose of northern sarcasm.

Meet your host I'm Lucy Sheridan: author, speaker, and proud northerner, recording from an armchair in the Peak District. I've always been drawn to the darker corners of our history, and this show is where I get to share them with you. Pull up a chair.

****

Website: www.badandmad.com

Newsletter 'The Landlady' join for BTS and case report extras at www.badandmad.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/badandmadpod/

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@badandmadlucy

Got a story suggestion, feedback or a correction? Email hello@badandmad.com

Why did a man on holiday in Whitby go home with a monster in his pocket?

In the summer of 1890, Bram Stoker, a Dublin civil servant turned manager of London’s Lyceum Theatre, took a break in Whitby. He arrived with a few pages of notes and a villain called Count Wampyr. He went home with the bones of a novel.

In Part One of this two-part story, we follow Stoker from a sickly childhood in Clontarf to his life-changing dinner with the actor Henry Irving, and then on to Whitby itself, from the founding of its abbey in 657 to the town he found in 1890.

We visit the library where he came across the word Dracula, hear about the 1885 wreck of the Russian ship Dmitry that became the Demeter in the novel, and climb the 199 steps to St Mary’s churchyard, where he copied names from the headstones.

Part Two follows what he did with it all, and the unhinged making of the legend.!

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Follow Bad Mad and Northern on your podcast app now, so you never miss an episode, and if you enjoyed it, 5* a rating really helps new listeners find the show.

Thanks lads!

****

About the show Bad, Mad & Northern is a history and true crime podcast about the villains, eccentrics and extraordinary stories of the North: murderers and body snatchers, kings and rebels, drowned villages and Cold War secrets. Released every Wednesday and Saturday, each new episode is carefully researched and told with honesty about the sources, and a healthy dose of northern sarcasm.

Meet your host I'm Lucy Sheridan: author, speaker, and proud northerner, recording from an armchair in the Peak District. I've always been drawn to the darker corners of our history, and this show is where I get to share them with you. Pull up a chair.

****

Website: www.badandmad.com

Newsletter 'The Landlady' join for BTS and case report extras at www.badandmad.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/badandmadpod/

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@badandmadlucy

Got a story suggestion, feedback or a correction? Email hello@badandmad.com

What would you do if you were told your village had to disappear so a city could have water?

(Content note: this episode includes a fatal explosion and the exhumation of graves.)

In the first half of the twentieth century, three northern valleys were flooded to make reservoirs. This episode tells the story of each of them. Mardale Green in the Lake District was drowned beneath Haweswater to supply Manchester. Fernilee in the Goyt Valley, near Buxton, was home to a gunpowder works that lost three men in the 1909 explosion before the water came. At Derwent in Derbyshire, the graves were dug up and moved before Ladybower filled, and the church spire was left standing above the water until it was dynamited in 1947.

This is a gripping story about loss, progress, and who pays the price for both. In a dry summer, all three places still come back.

Please follow Bad Mad and Northern so you never miss an episode, and if you enjoyed it, 5* a rating really helps new listeners find the show.

Thanks lads! Lucy x

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About the show

Bad, Mad & Northern is a history and true crime podcast about the villains, eccentrics and extraordinary stories of the North: murderers and body snatchers, kings and rebels, drowned villages and Cold War secrets. Each episode is carefully researched and told with honesty about the sources, and a healthy dose of northern sarcasm.

Meet your host

I'm Lucy Sheridan: author, speaker, and proud northerner, recording from an armchair in the Peak District. I've always been drawn to the darker corners of our history, and this show is where I get to share them with you. Pull up a chair.

Website: www.badandmad.com

Newsletter 'The Landlady' join for BTS and case report extras at www.badandmad.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/badandmadpod/

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@badandmadlucy

Got a story suggestion, feedback or a correction? Email hello@badandmad.com

How long would your grave stay yours?

In the 1820s, the answer might have been a matter of days. Anatomy schools needed bodies, the law supplied very few, and across the north of England a trade grew up to fill the gap. Bodies moved like freight, with paperwork, addresses and paying customers at the end of the line.

This episode follows that trade across the North: a trunk at Newcastle's Turf Hotel, casks in a Liverpool cellar, Resurrection Cottage in Leeds, a case in Hull, and the watch house built to guard the graves of Doddington in Northumberland. Everyone has heard of Burke and Hare. Fewer people know about the network that was already operating long before them.

This is a story about grief, money, and what happens when the dead become a commodity.

Content note: this episode includes discussion of grave robbing and human remains.

Follow Bad Mad and Northern so you never miss an episode, and if you enjoyed it, 5* a rating really helps new listeners find the show. Thanks, lads!

****

About the show Bad, Mad & Northern is a history and true crime podcast about the villains, eccentrics and extraordinary stories of the North: murderers and body snatchers, kings and rebels, drowned villages and Cold War secrets. Each episode is carefully researched and told with honesty about the sources, and a healthy dose of northern sarcasm.

Meet your host I'm Lucy Sheridan: author, speaker, and proud northerner, recording with an armchair vibe in the Peak District. I've always been drawn to the darker corners of our history, and this show is where I get to share them with you. Pull up a chair.

****

Website: www.badandmad.com

Newsletter 'The Landlady' join for BTS and case report extras at www.badandmad.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/badandmadpod/

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@badandmadlucy

Got a story suggestion, feedback or a correction? Email hello@badandmad.com

Who was digging up the dead of the North? What would you give up so a city a hundred miles away could turn on a tap? And how did a holiday in Whitby create the most famous toothed monster in the world?

In this short voice note, Lucy says a heartfelt thank you for taking Bad, Mad & Northern into the UK history charts within days of launch, and previews a properly dark October.

Coming up this spooky season:

• The body snatchers. Burke and Hare were just the tip of the iceberg. This is the whole northern trade in the dead.
• The drowned villages. These are the homes, chapels and graves the North gave up to keep its cities running.
• Dracula (two parts). A shipwreck, a black dog, a clifftop graveyard and Bram Stoker's notebook.
• The Pendle witches (two parts). In 1612, a Lancashire hillside and a trial still argued about four hundred years later.
• Surprise content. It won't be announced. It'll just appear.

New episodes drop every Wednesday, starting with a double drop this week, then two a week through October.

Enjoying the show? Please follow wherever you listen, and share it in your WhatsApp or Facebook groups. It's the biggest thing you can do to help an independent podcast get found.

Content note: this episode includes violence against children and teenagers, including the deaths of two boys under eighteen.

For more than thirty years, from 1870 to the early 1900s, the streets of Manchester and Salford belonged to the scuttlers: teenage gangs armed with belts, bricks and clasp knives. They fought for territory and pride, and for the coveted title of King of the Scuttlers. Some of them were fourteen years old.

This episode follows the scuttlers from a mass street fight inspired by a war on the continent, through the slums of Angel Meadow, to two trials that gripped the city, including the case of a sixteen-year-old sentenced to hang. Along the way, we find what may be Britain's first youth cult, decades before the Peaky Blinders, and a surprisingly direct link to Manchester United and Manchester City.

Were the scuttlers just bad lads, or did the city around them make them what they were? Manchester couldn't agree at the time, and it's an argument we're still having.

Follow Bad Mad and Northern so you never miss an episode, and if you enjoyed it, 5* a rating really helps new listeners find the show.

Thanks lads!

****

About the show Bad, Mad & Northern is a history and true crime podcast about the villains, eccentrics and extraordinary stories of the North: murderers and body snatchers, kings and rebels, drowned villages and Cold War secrets. Each episode is carefully researched and told with honesty about the sources, and a healthy dose of northern scepticism.

Meet your host I'm Lucy Sheridan: author, speaker, and proud northerner, recording from an armchair in the Peak District. I've always been drawn to the darker corners of our history, and this show is where I get to share them with you. Pull up a chair.

****

Watch on Youtube from 1st October 2026

Website: badandmad.com

Newsletter:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/badandmadpod/

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@badandmadlucy

Got a story suggestion, feedback or a correction? Email hello@badandmad.com

Content note: this episode includes descriptions of executions and exhumed human remains.

In May 1660, Charles II rode back into London to cheering crowds. For the men who had signed his father's death warrant, the celebrations meant something else: it was time to run.

In the second of two episodes, we follow what happened next. We cover the Act of Oblivion and the men it left out, the October 1660 trials, and the grim January of 1661, when Cromwell and others were dug up to face a punishment their deaths hadn't spared them.

We follow the fates of the North's regicides and the generals who refused to sign, visit the legend that Cromwell's body lies hidden at Newburgh Priory in North Yorkshire, and look at plague, fire and a brother's crown. We finish with the world of Robert Harris's novel Act of Oblivion, which inspired this episode.

It's a story about revenge, survival, and how long a king's memory can be.

Missed Part One? Start there for the road to the scaffold!