The Creepy.org account has almost 600k followers. That is a lot when you consider it's not even 1 year old – its inception was in February 2023. Bored Panda wrote about Creepy.org back in May and we even had a short conversation with the creator.

They were kind enough to tell us the backstory of the page. "I have a great passion for creepy things in general, but what inspired me to create a community in this niche was when I bought the domain name http://creepy.org last year through an auction."

"My first thought was to create a site about morbid curiosities and oddities, but due to lack of time, I abandoned the project and focused on a Twitter account instead. That's how the 'Creepy' Twitter page was born, and now I use the http://creepy.org domain to redirect to it," the creator of the page told us back then.

Even then, the creator was taken aback by the success of the page. "I think I was kind of lucky that my page became so popular because many big accounts started following me and retweeting my posts right from the beginning," they said in May.

The 'Creepy' owner also talked about how they find content to post on X . "I must say that I'm an avid Redditor and also a moderator of some large subreddits, and from there I choose most of my posts."

The creator must know the secret to why morbid and scary things are so on the rise right now. They had a theory about why we like creepy and scary things: "It happens because when we are terrified, the brain releases a hormone called dopamine, which some people find thrilling." 

"Also, creepy stuff is often intriguing: is the devil real, are ghosts real, does hell exist? Humans have a tendency to find solutions to everything, but these are questions humans don't have a definitive answer for yet," the creator concluded.

But what do The Box of Oddities hosts have to say about why we're into scary and unusual stories? Kat says it's likely because it's a way for us to escape from mundane everyday life. "I think a lot of people are not particularly wowed by the everyday small talk that we end up having on a day-to-day basis," she says. "They want to get deeper and see what makes us, as humans, tick."

Jethro seconds her: "We're drawn to the things on the fringe of society because they are interesting, they’re the things we couldn’t learn at school or that we shouldn’t talk about at the dinner table."

If you haven't clocked it yet, Kat and Jethro are married. The couple says that the contents of their podcasts are things they would end up discussing with each other at the end of a day. 

"These are the kinds of things that intrigue us and we'd end up talking about at the end of the day," Kat says. "Things like 'Did you know they found a 12,000-year-old fossilized Viking poop in York, England?' is kind of our 'pillow talk,'" Jethro steps in with his quick wit.

Kat and Jethro say that they rarely have trouble finding stories for their podcast. Even after 600 episodes! "There are so many things that fit into The Box of Oddities," Jethro says. "Because the world around us is composed of the bizarre and the paranormal, we have no problem finding incredible things to talk about." 

The process of research is organic for them. "We each choose a topic to surprise each other and we both have our own research and writing style," Jethro tells Bored Panda. The pair tries to balance more outrageous stories, leaving the more lighthearted ones for the ending.

"[We] decide, if one of us has a particularly rough story, that should 'go first' so as not to leave the listener with a bummer topic," Kat says. Jethro calls himself more of a believer of the two. “[Kat] says sometimes my topics require more fact-checking,” he chuckles.

Jethro shares a story that left a deep impression on him. "One of my favorite topics was about Cheddar Man, the oldest complete human skeleton ever found in Britain, dating back over 10,000 years to the Mesolithic period. The skeleton was discovered in Gough's Cave in Cheddar Gorge, Somerset, 1903."

The story had a breakthrough in 2018 – experts conducted a groundbreaking DNA analysis of Cheddar Man's remains. "It revealed that the 9,000-year-old skeleton had a living relative named Adrian Targett," Jethro continues. "Separated by nearly 300 generations, Adrian taught history less than a mile from where the skeleton was discovered."

We also asked the hosts whether they've ever encountered a story that they deemed too heavy for the podcast. "There's not been anything that we COULDN'T put in the podcast, but there have been many topics we've chosen not to," Jethro admits.

Kat says that they've perhaps become more selective over the years. "We have changed as people, our topics have changed. For example, there are events that we've talked about in earlier episodes that I think now I maybe wouldn't have abandoned, but certainly might have approached differently," she reflects.