Welcome to BAD TOWN...

Bad Town PodcastPodcast
Written By Kolby LaBree
City of Subdued…. BAD TOWN

We’re co-hosting A podcast!

We have been busy recording a lot of “bad” Belling-history as guest hosts on the City of Subdued ___ Podcast!

As many of you may know, the Good Time Girls have a lot of stories about bad people doing bad things… (with “bad” being a rather subjective term at times). This is hardly surprising, given the fact that our main tours are called the “Sin and Gin” tours, which are all about how the town was largely funded by booze and brothels… and then our very popular spooky “Gore and Lore” Tours cover creepy history – ghost stories, murders and true crime. 

If something “bad” happened in Bellingham, we have probably researched it. And we’re here to tell you ALLLLLL about it!

We teamed up with our friends and fellow Bellingham bad-ass ladies from the City of Subdued Podcats, Annika and Maria, to bring you the darkest, the most oppressive, the spookiest, and the baaaaaadest parts of Bellingham History!

The name for this season is “Bad Town” a nickname for Bellingham with origins in Kolby’s own “bad kid” years in the early 1990s (see photos below).

We will be posting supplemental photos and information here on our blog for each episode! Sign up for our mailing list or check back here on our blog to be sure to get the deets!

Be sure to join us for all the good BAD belling-history we have to share.

You’ll have to decide for yourself whether the name fits.

Welcome to Bad Town.

Listen

You can listen on google podcasts, apple podcasts, spotify, or podbay!

Here are all the episodes on a Spotify playlist:

P.S. We had to make a playlist of all the good old BAD TOWN songs. You can listen here:

Scans of photo relics of Kolby’s 1990s “Bad Town Years” … crappy cameras, real film no filters!

Related Posts
BAD TOWN BONUS Q&A
BAD TOWN BONUS Q&A

We’ve reached the end of the season and we recorded a bonus episode to Answer all the Qs! We requested questions from YOU, the listeners and you sent them! Thanks for asking! In this episode you will here us to attempt to answer the following…

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Last call for Q&A + New Years Cheers!
Last call for Q&A + New Years Cheers!

As we wind up 2020 and Season 2 of the City of Subdued BAD TOWN podcast, we are reflecting on all that this year has been, and boy has it been a doozy.

As you probably know, Good Time Girls Kolby, Marissa and Wren teamed up with the City of Subdued Hostesses with the mostesses Annika and Maria to bring you a season of the darkest, the most oppressive, the spookiest, and the baaaaaadest parts of Bellingham History!  If you have questions about anything you heard on the podcast, now is your chance to ask and get answers!

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BAD TOWN #12 BAD REPUTATION TOWN
BAD TOWN #12 BAD REPUTATION TOWN

In this week’s FINAL episode we get into the “vintage” era of the 1970s and 1980s and Bellingham’s divey waterfront scene with a discussion of our legendary “Serial Killer Bar” as well as a crazy unsolved mystery of a body found in the former Georgia Pacific mill complex. That’s right, it’s another podcast companion blog update for episode 12 of season 2 of the City of Subdued... BAD TOWN. The Good Time Girls have teamed up with the ladies of The City of Subdued Podcast to bring you a season of the darkest, the most oppressive, the spookiest, and the baaaaaadest parts of Bellingham History!

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BAD TOWN #11 BAD MURDER FARM TOWN
BAD TOWN #11 BAD MURDER FARM TOWN

If you have been following the podcast collaboration we’ve been doing with the ladies of The City of Subdued Podcast, this post is in reference to season 2 (BAD TOWN), episode 11 where we continue our discussion from episode 10 and introduce the story of the MAPLE FALLS MURDER FARM! We discuss the creepy murderer who took the blame for the death of Frederick Dames (episode 10) … and while he was perhaps Whatcom County’s first serial killer… did he really butcher the butcher? You be the judge!

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BAD TOWN #10 BAD BUTCHERED TOWN
BAD TOWN #10 BAD BUTCHERED TOWN

In this week’s episode, we get into one of our favorite Bellingham true-crime stories, an unsolved mystery and murder of a local butcher. The victim was Frederick Dames, a civil war veteran who opened a meat market on Elk Street (now State Street) where he was found brutally murdered in 1905… Content warning for extremely gruesome descriptions of this particularly heinous murder.

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BAD TOWN #9 THE WORST BAD TOWN
BAD TOWN #9 THE WORST BAD TOWN

Once again, If you didn’t already know - the Good Time Girls have teamed up with the ladies of The City of Subdued Podcast to bring you the darkest, the most oppressive, the spookiest, and the baddest parts of Bellingham History! This week’s episode is particularly dark and oppressive. We discuss the history of the Ku Klux Klan, aka the KKK, here in Bellingham, Whatcom County and the PNW.

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BAD TOWN #8 BAD BOOZE TOWN
BAD TOWN #8 BAD BOOZE TOWN

This week in episode 8 we get into prohibition era Bad-Town, complete with rum running, bootlegging and speak-easies (aka Blind Pigs). AND a story straight from the LaBree family vaults. …I discovered the story of the D’Aprile brothers when searching the Bellingham Herald archives and found my great-grandfather was a “runner” who helped to supply the brothers with booze to sell in their “blind pig,” and did some time in the Whatcom County Jail….

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BAD TOWN #7 BAD (LADY) BARBER TOWN
BAD TOWN #7 BAD (LADY) BARBER TOWN

In this week’s episode, we discuss a 1922 court case involving Bellingham’s “baddest” lady barber, Lorena Upper, accused of violating the “red light statute.”

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BAD TOWN #6 BAD LADY TOWN
BAD TOWN #6 BAD LADY TOWN

If you didn’t already know - the Good Time Girls have teamed up with the ladies of The City of Subdued Podcast to bring you the darkest, the most oppressive, the spookiest, and the baaaaaadest parts of Bellingham History! In this week’s episode we feature stories of the less-often-arrested sex. We tell stories about women who ran afoul of the law, as well as the women charged with policing them!

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BAD TOWN #5 BAD TRIAL TOWN
BAD TOWN #5 BAD TRIAL TOWN

THIS EPISODE’S STORY is about a murder that occurred on Forest Street, near the Majestic Hall in Bellingham, Washington. It is a rather sordid tale that involves a whole cast of seriously damaged folks. It’s about a man who shot his wife and his son-in-law,--- who was also his wife’s lover---. It’s about fancy-talking lawyers with pink toupees --and-- a particularly savage and patriarchal biblical law (even for the 1890's) filed under the Laws of Moses. And lastly, it’s about the flaws in our justice system then and NOW.

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BAD TOWN #4 BAD ARSON TOWN plus -Halloween Special!
BAD TOWN #4 BAD ARSON TOWN plus -Halloween Special!

As autumn brings spider webs and spooky things, here is a seasonal tale from the Good Time Girls’ “Gore and Lore” crypt… That summer things really started “heating up” around Fairhaven as the town was swept by a series of fires, believed to be of “incendiary origin.”  

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BAD TOWN #3 BAD BUD TOWN
BAD TOWN #3 BAD BUD TOWN

Late one night in 1902 two graduates from the state prison decide to rob a few of the boys at Butch’s Place Saloon. The clientele and bullets flew like promises at election time. Two men were wounded, one man killed, and two sent up the river for a stretch of 12 to 20 years.” And in all caps, a quote from Bad Bud Cox: “I’M GLAD THE WITNESSES ARE ALL YOUNG SO THAT THEY WILL LIVE UNTIL I GET OUT OF THE PEN AND CAN KILL THEM!”

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BAD TOWN #2 BAD CURSED TOWN
BAD TOWN #2 BAD CURSED TOWN

Our second episode is now live! The Good Time Girls have teamed up with the ladies of The City of Subdued Podcast to bring you the darkest, the most oppressive, the spookiest, and the baaaaaadest parts of Bellingham History! This episode is on its surface about “local lore” that is creepy and bad indeed, but in the worst way. Because the reality behind it is undeniably dark and shameful.

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Kolby LaBree https://bellinghistory.com
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