Welcome to Short and Interesting – the podcast that reads to you short excerpts from old, weird, interesting books. For Halloween, we’re reading the single best story from Charles MacKay’s 19th “Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,” about alchemists throughout history. The notorious Gilles de Rais wanted gold, so he turned to alchemy, and then the devil. He became one of history’s earliest and most notorious serial killers, but as far as we know he never ended up turning lead into gold.

Download this public domain book for free from Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24518

There’s plenty more about this historical figure out there. If you want some more gnarly details, you could sim ...