Photocopier history sounds like the sort of subject best left beneath fluorescent lights with the stationery cupboard locked safely nearby, but the machine changed how information, art and underground culture circulated. From corporate paper avalanches to 1970s copy art, the humble copier gave almost anyone the power to reproduce something instantly — and we have been drowning in copies ever since.

The Bell Witch supposedly spoke, sang hymns, attacked a Tennessee family and even claimed responsibility for a man’s death — but much of the story we know was written down decades later. Dig beneath the Bell Witch legend and an even stranger tale emerges about frontier folklore, family memory and the making of an American ghost story.

Everyone knows the Dead Man’s Hand: black aces and eights, supposedly clutched by Wild Bill Hickok when a bullet ended his final poker game in Deadwood. The murder is historical fact, but the famous cards reveal how quickly the Old West could turn a violent death into an apparently indestructible legend.