The Oddities Department

This week on The Oddities Department, history gets cosmic, reincarnated, frozen, and deeply classified. In Episode 23, Gavin and Lindsay take you through four bizarre true stories from the stranger corners of science, history, mystery, and government decision-making. First, Lindsay looks up at The Sirius Problem, where the Dogon people of Mali, a hidden companion star, French anthropology, ancient...

This week on The Oddities Department , history gets wet, explosive, misrepresented, and unclaimed. In Episode 22 , Gavin and Lindsay take you through four bizarre oddities from the stranger corners of history.  First, we head to the Great Lakes , where freshwater looks calm from the shoreline, but underneath the surface, things get cold, violent, ancient, and deeply suspicious. There are vanished...

This week on The Oddities Department , history gets underground, overconfident, tentacled, and fully airborne. In Episode 21 , Gavin and Lindsay take you through four bizarre true stories from the stranger corners of science, history, and human decision-making. First, we descend into Mammoth Cave , where one of the largest cave systems on Earth comes with blind shrimp, fish-eating spiders, ancient...

This week on The Oddities Department , history gets feral, airborne, spiritually cleansed, and deeply inappropriate. In Episode 20 , Gavin and Lindsay take you through four bizarre true stories from the stranger corners of history. First, we enter the medieval convent, where The Nuns Go Wild, stressed-out nuns started meowing, biting, clawing, and spiraling into full group chaos. Was it mass psych...

This week on The Oddities Department , Gavin and Lindsay drag you through four exhibits that somehow connect royal anatomy, prehistoric swamp forests, death rituals, and one of the worst medical ideas humanity ever committed to paper. We start with King Ferdinand VII of Spain , a terrible ruler with an allegedly massive, malformed royal problem that required doctors, strategy, and possibly furnitu...

In Episode 18 of The Oddities Department , we take you through four wildly unsettling (and occasionally hilarious) exhibits where history, science, and human curiosity collide in the most chaotic ways imaginable. 🧠 Einstein’s Brain Heist When Albert Einstein died in 1955, he asked for a simple cremation—no autopsy, no spectacle. A pathologist ignored that, removed his brain without permission, an...

Episode 17 of The Oddities Department is what happens when the museum staff quits, the exhibits get hostile, and absolutely no one is left in charge. This week’s tour is unstable from the jump. We begin with June and Jennifer Gibbons — The Silent Twins , a haunting true story of two sisters who spoke only to each other, mirrored each other’s every move, and ultimately made a pact that only one of...

In Episode 16, we explore a collection of unbelievable historical moments that will keep you on your toes... • The Great Molasses Flood of 1919 , one of the strangest disasters in U.S. history • The only confirmed case of a human struck by a meteorite (Ann Hodges) • The disturbing story of Mary Toft , the woman who convinced doctors she gave birth to rabbits • The brutal fate of Johan de Witt , in...

Episode 15 of The Oddities Department cracks open another tour of historical chaos. This week’s tour contains six stories that are equal parts fascinating, horrifying, and deeply, deeply hilarious. We begin with The Story of Nellie Bly , the fearless journalist who got herself committed to an insane asylum in 1887 to expose the brutal conditions inside, then came back out and changed journalism fo...

Episode 14 of The Oddities Department drags us even deeper into the archives, where the case files smell faintly of meat, whiskey, and very poor decision-making. This week’s crate contains six stories that should have stayed under lock and key. We begin with The Kentucky Meat Shower, the bizarre 1876 incident where chunks of flesh rained down over a woman’s yard in Kentucky…  Then comes The Curiou...

Episode 13 of The Oddities Department takes us way in the back of the museum, and it gets weirder by the minute.  This week’s crate contains six stories that history couldn't keep locked up.  We start with The Mississippi Scheme , a French colonial program that tried to populate Louisiana by forcing prisoners to marry sex workers and shipping the couples across the ocean. Then comes Princess...

EPISODE 12:  Welcome back to The Oddities Department , where the paperwork is optional and the back halls are absolutely not OSHA-compliant. This week’s unauthorized tour proves, once again,  that history is just humanity repeatedly making eye contact with bad decisions and proceeding anyway. Inside tonight’s crate: A scandal-prone French medium who convinced actual scientists she was producing gh...

EPISODE 11 — The Oddities Department This week… history and modern history fully loses its mind. Suzi and Gavin crack open six case files that feel less like real events and more like something a sleep-deprived historian made up while trippin. We start in 1870 Paris, where a starving city made the deeply unfortunate decision to put the zoo on the menu. Then we head to the South Atlantic, where a l...

Welcome back to the staff-only basement of the museum… where the lights flicker for reasons we don’t investigate anymore. In Episode 10, we open a crate packed with cursed productions, scientific lunatics, catastrophic weather, medical breakthroughs with body counts, funeral industry nightmares, and a frog that turns its own skeleton into a weapon. This one swings hard between horror, wonder, trag...

We’ve unpacked cosmic delusion, bird violence, ethically bankrupt science, peak female rage, and one of the most profitable headless animals in American history. 📂 IN THIS EPISODE: Case File #48: Madame Vesta La Viesta. Gavin introduces a spiritualist who found fame during the Golden Age of Mysticism… and then committed to a very specific kind of long-distance love.  Case File #49: Pope Francis &...

 In this episode, Suzi and Gavin pry open the crates that prove history is actually a fever dream we can't wake up from. Tonight, we are exploring horrific surgical tools turned lumberjack hardware to wars over a bucket?  We go hard with this one. We've unpacked a whole lot of female rage, more cats, fashion, a whole lot of war, and a huge medeival "I told you so". 📂 IN THIS E...

In Episode 7 of The Oddities Department, we travel all over the world, and back and forth through time to show you some of history's wildest oddities.  In this episode, we cover: Case File #36: Wojtek The Bear. The incredible true story of a Syrian Brown Bear who drank beer, smoked cigarettes, and carried ammo for the Polish II Corps during World War II. Case File #37: The Winchester Mystery...

 In Episode 6, Gavin and Suzi crack open the "Staff Only" files to explore what happens when biology, technology, and monarchy go horribly wrong. We travel from the frozen isolation of Antarctica, where a surgeon faces an impossible choice, to the throne room of France, where the King makes a bunch of questionable choices. We dive into the ocean to find ancient computers that shouldn&apo...

🎧 Episode 5 — When Humans Get Confident and Reality Gets Creative In this episode of The Oddities Department , we open six case files that prove one uncomfortable truth: humans are very confident… and very often wrong. We start in 18th-century France, where people feared potatoes so deeply they would rather starve than eat them, until a pharmacist staged one of history’s earliest PR campaigns and...

🗂️ EPISODE 4 — When Will We Ever Learn? In Episode 4 of The Oddities Department, we explore what happens when humans encounter something strange, dangerous, or misunderstood and confidently make it worse. This episode spans centuries, continents, oceans, and outer space, all tied together by a familiar thread: human audacity. We begin with the Black Orlov Diamond, a gemstone rumored to carry a tra...

In this episode of The Oddities Department , Gavin and Suzi crack open another drawer in the archives and wander straight into the wonderfully weird corners of history, biology, coincidence, and human incompetence. We kick things off with a parasite that hijacks snails and turns their eyeballs into psychedelic “eat me” billboards for birds.  Then we head to 1915 South Carolina, where Essie Dunbar...

In Episode 2, Gavin and Suzi dive headfirst into some of the strangest, funniest, and most bewildering stories history and science have to offer. We start with the explosive tale of the tooth that literally detonated , then dance straight into the madness of the 1518 Dancing Plague , where an entire town couldn’t stop moving even as it collapsed from exhaustion. Things get bird-brained as we unpac...

Step inside The Oddities Department , where history gets weird, science gets weirder, and Gavin and Suzi open the drawers of the bizarre for your listening pleasure. In this debut episode, we’re diving headfirst into five real stories so strange you’ll wonder how humanity survived long enough to make a podcast about it. We explore Victorian high society’s obsession with wearing live jewel beetles...