The Necropolyst: The Professor Who Kept the Dead as Dolls

This episode covers real-life horror far more extreme than usual, including a Russian professor arrested in 2011 for keeping the mummified corpses of 29 women and girls in his apartment, each one fitted with a hidden music box. It also includes the story of a 19th-century whiskey heir who paid six handkerchiefs for a 10-year-old girl so he could watch cannibals kill and eat her, and the theory that Alexander the Great was declared dead nearly a week before he actually died. Content is more graphic than usual, so listener discretion is advised.

EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/necropolyst

READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8e5eme

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding
00:00:47.354 = Show Open
00:01:58.356 = Alexander the Great
00:05:52.710 = The Ravenous Beast of Gévaudan
00:09:41.943 = The Rape and Burial of Jessica Lunsford ***
00:11:55.911 = The Dyatlov Pass Incident
00:15:29.080 = The Torture Dungeon of Leonard Lake and Charles Ng
00:19:10.197 = Robert The Doll
00:23:08.785 = The Disappearance and Eerie Return of Bobby Dunbar ***
00:26:33.271 = Albert Fish – The Brooklyn Vampire
00:30:06.498 = The Strange Disappearance of the Sodder Children
00:34:28.570 = Anatoly Moskvin, The Russian Who Mummified Dead Girls
00:38:41.505 = The Jameson Whiskey Cannibal ***
00:42:29.572 = Show Close
*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad break

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SOURCES and RESOURCES:
“Real-Life Horror Stories More Freaky Than Fiction” by Marco Margaritoff for AllThatsInteresting.com:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p8p9c72
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Originally aired: March 2022
Weird Darkness this episode gathers real-life horror too extreme for scripted television, spanning from ancient Macedonia to the Congo basin and landing, along the way, in a Russian apartment stacked with mummified girls.It opens with Alexander the Great, who collapsed in Babylon in 323 B.C. after a 24-hour drinking binge triggered a sudden fever, a stabbing pain in his back, and creeping paralysis that eventually left him speechless; doctors pronounced him dead at 32. His body reportedly stayed "pure and fresh" for six days afterward, evidence ancient Greeks took as proof of his divinity. In 2019, Dr. Katherine Hall of New Zealand's University of Otago proposed in the Ancient History Bulletin that Alexander actually suffered from Guillain-Barré Syndrome, an autoimmune disorder that paralyzes the body while leaving the mind fully intact; since fourth-century-B.C. doctors checked for breath rather than a pulse, Hall's theory suggests Alexander may have been declared dead nearly a week before he actually died, and was buried alive.From there, the story moves to 18th-century France, where a wolf-like creature killed or mauled close to 300 people across three years in the Gévaudan region, most of them women and children. Fourteen-year-old shepherdess Jeanne Boulet was the first confirmed victim in 1764; a fifteen-year-old girl killed a month later survived long enough to describe her...