Welcome to Interesting If True, the podcast that remembers to air previously referenced stories way after the fact. With me are my co-hosts Shea, Steve, and your host, Jenn! Ghost Girls A morbid footnote in the history of the fight for workers’ and women’s rights, from the ‘good ole days’: * https://www.buzzfeed.com/authorkatemoore/the-light-that-does-not-lie * http://theradiumgirls.com/the-girls/4593781028 * https://www.thehorrorzine.com/Morbid/RadiumGirls/RadiumGirls.html * https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/radium-girls-kate-moore/515685/ * https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/curies-isolate-radium * http://theradiumgirls.com/ And we’re gathered together again for me to tell a story from history. This one is not as weird as much as it’s mind boggling and terrible, but it’s also fascinating and was extremely important in the fight for safer American workplaces and basic human regard for women. It’s also tragically unknown. If you’re like me, when you hear or read someone lamenting the loss of the ‘good ole days’, you know immediately they a.) have no knowledge of history b.) are a straight white man or c.) both. Things are much better for most people in the United States currently than they have ever been. Perfect? No way. But better. Also, some government oversight into things like, oh, large corporations, is imperative. And this story proves it (as does our current administration). I’m here to present the story of the Ghost Girls. But before I dive in, I need to give some backstory for historical context, as well as a quick chemistry lesson refresher: In 1898 science power couple Marie and Pierre Curie discovered the elements radium and polonium while breaking down the components of pitchblende (which is a form of the mineral uraninite occurring in brown or black masses and containing radium; it is also the favorite mineral of Satan). Now, even if it has been a few years since high school chemistry, I bet everyone knows a little something about radium and polonium, and for the first, a hint is right in the name. That’s right! They are both highly radioactive. Which, as we all know, is pretty dangerous to us bio-lifeforms. But, as scientific knowledge is often based on trial and error experimentation, the Curie’s were not aware at first what long term repercussions resulted from close contact. It took until 1900 for the dangers to really begin to make themselves known, when a colleague of theirs, Antoine Becquerel, carried a tiny amount of radium in his waistcoat for about 6 hours and was dismayed to find over the following weeks his skin burned, ulcerated and refused to heal. That didn’t deter Marie and Pierre, however, and by 1902 Marie had successfully isolated the element radium. In addition to a doctorate in science and a Nobel Prize for this discovery, Marie also received a dose of radiation high enough to cause her death by aplastic anemia in 1934. (Had Pierre not been accidentally killed by being run over by a horse-drawn cart in 1906, I bet he would have also had radium on his list of causes of death.) But 1934 is getting ahead of my story, which begins right around the start of World War I, so 1915-ish. The setting is industrial America, and serious changes are on the horizon. Much like what Rosie the Riveter came to symbolize for WWII, as the US came closer and closer to entering The Great War, women were called upon to do their part for the war effort. In this instance it involved women flocking to jobs in factories, plants and other work facilities that had previously been mostly denied to them. It’s at one of these factories where my story truly kicks off. We are in Orange, New Jersey at a company known as the USRC, which at this time sees their production of clocks, dials,