Strange Epochs • Weird History

On July 4th, 1826 — fifty years to the day after the Declaration of Independence was adopted — two of the men who wrote it, signed it, and spent their lives arguing about what it meant died on the same day. Within five hours of each other. John Adams in Quincy, Massachusetts. Thomas Jefferson at Monticello in Virginia. Adams' last words, spoken in the failing light of that afternoon, were these: T...

On March 3rd, 1876, on a clear afternoon in Bath County, Kentucky, chunks of raw meat fell from a cloudless sky onto a farm near Olympian Springs. The event lasted approximately two minutes. The meat covered an area roughly the size of a football field, in pieces ranging from the size of a hailstorm to the size of a woman's hand. The New York Times reported it. Scientific American wrote it up. Lab...

In 1325, soldiers from Modena snuck into the city of Bologna in the middle of the night and stole a wooden bucket from a well. Bologna declared war. Two thousand men died. The bucket is still in Modena. Bologna has never gotten it back. That is the legend. The truth is messier, bloodier, and in some ways more interesting. Behind the bucket were two hundred years of accumulated grievance between tw...

A book exists. It is sitting right now in a climate-controlled vault at Yale University. It has been photographed, digitized, and made freely available online. Professional cryptographers, linguists, historians, and astronomers have studied it for over a century. The NSA has studied it. The greatest codebreaker of the twentieth century studied it for years and walked away without an answer. Not on...

In late March of 1922, six people were murdered on a remote Bavarian farmstead north of Munich. The killer was never caught. But what makes Hinterkaifeck unlike any other unsolved case in German history is not the murders themselves—it is what came after. Someone stayed. For four days following the killings, whoever did it continued living on the farm. They fed the livestock. They lit the fires. T...

On the morning of June 30th, 1908, something traveling at sixty thousand miles per hour entered the atmosphere above central Siberia and exploded with the force of a thousand Hiroshima bombs. Eighty million trees were flattened across two thousand square kilometers of forest. The shockwave circled the globe twice. For several nights afterward, the skies over London glowed bright enough to read a n...

In 1996, a German author named Heribert Illig published a theory that became a bestseller: that 297 years of human history were simply invented. The entire Carolingian period. The life and reign of Charlemagne. The Viking Age. The rise of Islam. All of it, according to Illig, fabricated by a Holy Roman Emperor, a Pope, and possibly a Byzantine Emperor — men who conspired to insert three centuries...

In medieval France, a pig was formally arrested, given a defense lawyer, brought before a judge, found guilty, dressed in human clothing, and publicly hanged. This was not an isolated incident. Between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries, there are documented records of over two hundred animal trials across Europe — pigs, bulls, rats, weevils, caterpillars, and at least one rooster accused of...

In 1816, summer never came. Crops failed in June. It snowed in July. Families across the Northern Hemisphere watched their harvests die in the ground and had no idea why. A volcano on the other side of the world — Mount Tambora in Indonesia — had erupted the year before with a force so massive it put enough material into the atmosphere to change the climate of an entire hemisphere. The people star...

On the morning of May 23rd, 1618, a group of Protestant noblemen marched into the royal council chamber of Prague Castle and threw three men out of a window. The drop was seventy feet. All three survived. Catholics said it was angels. Protestants said it was a dung heap. Both sides immediately printed pamphlets. And within months, the Thirty Years War had begun — a conflict that would kill up to e...

In 1932, the Australian government deployed soldiers and machine guns to the Western Australian outback to deal with a crisis threatening the livelihoods of desperate farmers. The enemy: twenty thousand emus. What followed was one of the most absurd military operations in recorded history — and the emus won, decisively and without any apparent awareness that they had done so. Host Shawn Spainhour...

In September of 1944, residents of Mattoon, Illinois began reporting a prowler outside their windows — one who left no footprints, no face, and no trace. Only a smell. A sweet, sickening gas that paralyzed legs, caused vomiting, and sent families to the hospital. The local newspaper ran the story. Then more victims came forward. Then more. The town was terrified, the police were baffled, and the a...

In the year 897, the body of Pope Formosus was dug up, dressed in papal robes, propped on a throne, and put on trial before a room full of bishops in Rome. A deacon was appointed to speak on the corpse's behalf. The verdict was decided before the first word was spoken. Host Shawn Spainhour takes you into the unstable world of the ninth-century papacy — the collapse of Carolingian power, the Roman...

In the summer of 1518, a woman named Frau Troffea stepped into the streets of Strasbourg and began to dance. She didn't stop for days. Within weeks, dozens of others had joined her — and the city of Strasbourg found itself in the grip of one of the strangest, most inexplicable events in recorded history. Host Shawn Spainhour guides you through the full story: the medieval world of famine, plague,...