True Weird Stuff

Today's True Weird Stuff - Adam & Eve Declassified   In the 1960s, the CIA classified a book called The Adam and Eve Story. The book claims that Earth undergoes catastrophic events approximately every 6,500 years, leading to the destruction and rebirth of civilization through disasters like pole shifts and mass extinctions. The book became declassified in 2013, but even then, only se...

Today's True Weird Stuff - Casket Girls   In the 1700s, the French colony in Louisiana had a population problem: there weren't enough women. And so the French government rounded up and shipped over hundreds of women across the Atlantic to marry male settlers and help “civilize” the growing colony. The women carried what little belongings they had in small wooden trunks that l...

Today's True Werid Stuff - Doomsday Clock: 89 Seconds To Midnight   Created in 1947, the Doomsday Clock was established by a group of atomic scientists to represent to the public the likelihood of a human-made global armageddon,  whether it's the looming threat of nuclear war, bioterrorism, or cyberwarfare. Over the years, the Doomsday Clock has found itself inching closer to m...

Today's True Weird Stuff - The Arkansas Ghost   January, 1929. A man named Connie Franklin moved to Stone County, Arkansas. The alleged 20-something began courting a 16-year-old girl named Tiller Ruminer, and on March 9th, 1929, the two were on their way to obtain their marriage license when a group of men attacked them. Tiller survived the brutal assault, but Franklin was tortured to death,...

Today's True Werid Stuff - Reliving The Black Eyed Kids   In 1996, reporter Brian Bethel said he had an encounter with two children that left him terrified. Sitting in his car in a parking lot late at night, Bethel was approached by two young boys whose eyes were as black as coal. In the decades since Bethel shared his story, others have claimed to have similar encounters with children with p...

Today's True Weird Stuff - Another Icepick To The Brain   Rosemary Kennedy was part of the powerful and highly esteemed Kennedy Family. Rosemary was born with intellectual disabilities at a time when children with special needs were highly stigmatized. When she was 23 years old, Rosemary's father ordered her to have a lobotomy. The procedure left her permanently incapacitated, and her family...

Today's True Weird Stuff - Headless Valley   The Nahanni Valley in the Northwestern Territories of Canada is a beautiful area that's home to strange and deadly tales, including the story of Frank and William McLeod. The two brothers set off into the Nahanni Valley in hopes of discovering a fortune in gold. Years later, their skeletons were found at an abandoned camp...and their heads wer...

Today's True Weird Stuff - The Last Duel   The most famous duel in American history was between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr in 1804. The premiere way of settling disputes and upholding unwritten codes of honor, the act of dueling would gradually fall out of favor over the 19th Century. However, dueling was still commonplace in Southern states like South Carolina. That is, until a duel i...

Today's True Weird Stuff - Jill the Ripper    In 1888, the people of the Whitechapel district of London were terrorized by someone on a ruthless killing spree. Over 100 suspects were named, including a woman named Mary Pearcey. In 1890, Mary was convicted of brutally murdering her lover's partner and child, and Mary was sentenced to death. The brutal nature of the killings would lead to...

Today's True Weird Stuff - Mirror, Mirror   Margaretha von Waldeck was the real-life inspiration for Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Born to a noble family during the Holy Roman Empire, Margaretha's mother passed away when she was 4 years old. Her father, Count Philip IV, would go on to remarry a woman named Katherina von Hatzfeld. Katherina despised her stepdaughter, and had Margareth...

Brain In A Jar   Phineas Gage was an American railroad foreman who survived a traumatic brain injury.  In 1848, an iron rod shot through his skull and destroyed a chunk of his left frontal lobe. Though he survived the accident, the damage to his brain drastically altered his personality. Gage's story became a catalyst for modern neuroscience, which has advanced to the point scientists ar...

Today's True Weird Stuff - The King's Rhinoceros   In the 1500s, King Manuel of Portugal gifted Pope Leo a beautiful, white elephant as a gesture of obedience to the Vatican. Unfortunately, the majestic beast passed away after only two years. To make up for it, King Manuel tried to ship Pope Leo a rhinoceros named Ganda; however, the rhino met its demise in a shipwreck before it could ma...

Today's True Weird Stuff - The Appetite   Tarrare was a French Showman in the 1700s who had an insatiable appetite. His eternal hunger terrorized him to the point he literally tried to consume everything: live animals, garbage, inanimate objects, and even human flesh. The curious case of the 100lb Tarrare baffled even the greatest medical minds, and the medical findings of his autopsy were th...

Today's True Weird Stuff - The Bunker   In the 1950's and '60s, fallout shelters were all the rage. Tensions due to America's Cold War with Russia led to a looming fear of nuclear disaster. These underground bunkers, equipped with a living space and food rations, were a civil defense strategy aimed at reducing casualties in a nuclear war. And no fallout shelter was more elaborate than the Gre...

Today's True Weird Stuff - A Real Stiff   Elmer McCurdy was an American outlaw who couldn't pull off a smooth heist to save his life. He tried to use his Army training with nitroglycerin to rob banks and trains, often to no avail. After accidentally robbing the wrong train in 1911, a drunken McCurdy met his demise after firing at the deputy sheriffs searching for him. And for the next 65...

Today's True Weird Stuff - Human Cloning   In the previous episode of True Weird Stuff, we told the story of Raëlism, the religious UFO cult led by Claude Vorilhon. We're now diving into one of their core beliefs: that Jesus was resurrected through cloning and humans need to perfect human cloning to achieve immortality. That would lead to a claim made in 2002 by a scientific co...

Today's True Weird Stuff - The Messenger   This is the story of a man who created a religion around UFO's. Claude Vorilhon was a journalist who claimed he was abducted by aliens in 1973. He said they told him humans were created by extraterrestrial species using advanced technology, and then they renamed him Raël and sent him back to Earth to serve as ambassador to their f...

Coconut Cult   In the early 1900s, a German author named August Engelhardt packed up his library of books, moved to the South Pacific island of Kabakon, and started a sun-worshipping coconut cult. He believed the way to become closer to God and gain immortality was by consuming coconuts and nothing else. Engelhardt convinced dozens of people to join him on the island, but many of them di...

Today's True Weird Stuff - A Curse on You   Alchemist. Astrologer. Magician. Georg Faust was considered a heretic in medieval Europe, primarily because he practiced black magic and summoned the spirits of the dead. Through legend and literature, Faust was hated by many, not just because of his fraudulent ways, but because of his pact with the devil for knowledge and power; a debt the dev...

Today's True Weird Stuff - Once Upon A Shroom   R. Gordon Wasson was an author, and worked in banking for J.P. Morgan. He was also responsible for popularizing shrooms in America...you know, the ones with psychedelic properties. Even the CIA got in on the action, covertly funding Wasson's expedition to study and collect hallucinogenic species of mushrooms for MK-Ultra's subproj...

Today's True Weird Stuff - Asylum Ladies   In the 1800s, women could be placed in mental institutions simply for not behaving the way society believed they should. Mental diagnoses at the time were simple: you were either deemed a lunatic, a moron, an imbecile, or feeble-minded. Like many others, a woman named Josephine Shaw Lowell believed poor women who lived in almshouses were promiscuous and p...

Today's True Weird Stuff - Forbidden Island   In the early 1900s, a woman known as Typhoid Mary was identified as patient zero for a series of typhoid outbreaks in New York. As a result, she was forced into quarantine on North Brother Island and lived the rest of her life in exile. Not only was the island a quarantine zone, it was the location of the General Slocum steamboat disaster, the deadlies...

Today's True Weird Stuff - Dark Twinning   Stewart and Cyril Marcus were identical twin gynecologists. Though regarded as brilliant men in their profession, the Marcus twins' personal lives were shrouded in darkness. In 1975, the 45-year-old brothers' partially-decayed bodies were found inside a locked apartment littered with garbage and pharmaceuticals. An investigation led to the discovery of li...

Today's True Weird Stuff - Hammersmith Ghost (Airdate 11/15/2024)   In 1803, residents of the Hammersmith district of London reported being terrorized by a ghost. The hysteria was so intense that a man named Francis Smith did the unthinkable: he shot and killed a man wearing white clothing, having mistaken the man for the Hammersmith Ghost. Can a man be found guilty of trying to kill a ghost? It's...

Today's True Werid Stuff - Cokey & Lucky His name is Lucky Luciano. An Italian-born gangster, Luciano was credited as the Godfather of American organized crime. From extortion, to bootlegging, and prostitution, Luciano was on top of the world as he rose to power beyond his wildest dreams. That is, until a woman named "Cokey Flo" helped expose his prostitution ring in front of a jury, causing L...