Mark McNease

Welcome to True Crime Tuesdays on Fearsome Fiction. Today we’re going to talk about “The Giggling Granny,” a woman who baked prune cake, read romance magazines, giggled at her own arrest, and murdered at least eleven people—most of them her own family.

Her name was Nannie Doss. The press called her the Giggling Granny, the Lonely Hearts Killer, the Black Widow, and Lady Bluebeard. She was a small, cheerful, grandmotherly woman from Alabama who seemed like the last person in the world you’d suspect of anything. Which, of course, is exactly why she got away with it for so long.

Her weapon of choice was arsenic—rat poison, mostly, the kind you could pick up at any hardware store in the American South in the 1920s through the 1950s. She put it in whiskey, in coffee, in stewed prunes, in prune cake. She put it in the food of husbands, grandchildren, her own mother, her sister, her mother-in-law. She did it over and over again for nearly thirty years, and nobody suspected a thing—until the very last one. Because Nannie Doss was always smiling. And you don’t suspect the woman who’s smiling.

This is her story. Narration provided by Wondervox.

This week we present “A Terribly Strange Bed” by Wilkie Collins, first published in 1852 in Household Words, the celebrated literary magazine edited by Charles Dickens. A young Englishman in Paris visits a disreputable gambling house, breaks the bank at Rouge et Noir, and makes the mistake of accepting a bed for the night. What follows is one of the most gripping sequences in Victorian fiction—methodical, claustrophobic, and chilling in the way only the best suspense can be.

Wilkie Collins is best remembered for The Woman in White and The Moonstone, but this early story reveals the master at work long before those landmarks. He thought enough of it to adapt it for live readings later in his career. Once you’ve heard it, you’ll understand why.

No ghosts. No monsters. Just a room, a bed, and the slow, silent certainty of something descending.

Narrated in the Fearsome Fiction tradition—atmospheric, unhurried, faithful to the original text.

Story: “A Terribly Strange Bed” by Wilkie Collins (1852) — Public DomainSubscribe for new episodes every week.