In 1901, a refined 63-year-old widow climbed into a custom oak barrel clutching a heart-shaped pillow and plunged 167 feet over Niagara Falls, surviving the impossible only to die penniless. This episode dives into the life of Annie Edson Taylor, the Queen of the Mist, and the societal trap that made a well-educated woman feel a wooden barrel was her only viable retirement plan. We trace her fall from a comfortable, secure childhood into decades of desperate wandering.

An honors graduate and teacher, Taylor lost her son and husband young and bounced between cities and even Mexico City chasing genteel work, lying about her age out of economic survival. Her engineering instincts produced a reinforced barrel, famously tested first on a cat. She survived the plunge over the cushioning Horseshoe Falls but was financially destroyed by managers wh ...