In 2003, a peat cutter in Ireland found an arm in the bog. It belonged to a man who stood 6'6" tall, with manicured nails and a diet of meat. He wore bronze armbands—symbols of kingship.

Then they found how he died: stabbed, mutilated, decapitated, cut in half.

This wasn't murder. This was sacrifice. When the harvests failed for three years, the people killed their king to appease the gods.

Old Croghan Man teaches us about the terrifying burden of being held accountable for things no one can control—and why we still do this today.

A pinch of salt to hold what lasts,
A tale to carry what time forgets.

Picture this: You're walking through an apartment in the Arctic. There's a teacup on the table, half-empty. Sheet music open on a piano. A child's toy on the floor. Everything covered in frost.

The people who lived here left twenty-seven years ago. And they left everything behind.

Welcome to Pyramiden—the Soviet ghost town at 78 degrees north, where polar bears now patrol the streets and time stands completely still.

In this episode of House of Salt & Story, historian Alexandria Love takes you inside one of the most remote, most perfectly preserved ghost towns on Earth. From 1927 to 1998, the Soviet Union built a utopia in hell: heated swimming pools in permanent darkness, grand pianos shipped to the Arctic, crystal chandeliers in a place where the sun doesn't rise for four months of the year.

A pinch of salt to hold what lasts,
A tale to carry what time forgets.

Amsterdam, 1944. Corrie Hartog had one potato to feed her two daughters for three days. She cut it into eight pieces—and gave three to her Jewish neighbor hiding under false papers.

This isn't a story about surrender. It's about the quiet rebellion of acceptance: the choice to stop wasting energy fighting what you cannot control and pivot that energy into the humanity you can choose.

Through archival diaries and forgotten letters, historian Alexandria Love uncovers the most subversive act of World War II—not armed resistance, but radical compassion in the face of starvation.

A pinch of salt to hold what lasts,
A tale to carry what time forgets.

Welcome to the House of Salt & Story. I’m historian and writer Alexandria Love, and I’m inviting you into a space designed for reflection and free thought in a world deafened by constant noise. Here, we don’t just recount history; we examine the grit required to survive it.

To christen this space, we turn to a story of beauty, betrayal, and a refusal to disappear.

In 1917, Grace Fryer secured what looked like the American Dream: a job painting watch dials with radium. It was the "miracle element" of the age—a substance that promised vitality and made her skin glow in the dark. But by 1927, the miracle had decayed into a nightmare. Grace could barely walk. Her jaw was shattering. And the company that poisoned her was betting on the timeline—counting on her to die before she could testify.

This is the story of how Grace Fryer turned her own disintegrating body into evidence. It is a look at the legal battle that rewrote American labor law and the haunting legacy of the "Ghost Girls"—women whose fight was so fierce, and whose exposure was so absolute, that their graves still trigger Geiger counters ninety years later.

Step inside. The history is heavy, but the light is undeniable.

A pinch of salt to hold what lasts,
A tale to carry what time forgets.