Loading...

PODCAST

Strange Epochs • Weird History

Strange History • Sleep Podcast

Strange Epochs: History"s Most Extraordinary True StoriesHistory is full of events so remarkable, so inexplicable, that they seem like they couldn"t possibly be real. And yet they are.Every week, host Shawn Spainhour takes you deep inside one of history"s most extraordinary true stories. Not the events you studied in school — the ones that got left out. The ones historians still argue about. The ones that make you question everything you thought you knew about the past.From medieval mass hysteria to

history documentary

All Episodes

45:07

The Great Impostor: The Man Who Became Everyone — 1951

Strange Epochs • Weird History ·

2026/09/29

Ferdinand Waldo Demara Jr. was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1921. Over the course of his life he impersonated, among other things, a Trappist monk, a cancer researcher, a prison warden, a civil engineer, a college dean of philosophy, and a surgeon in the Royal Canadian Navy during the Korean War. He had no formal qualifications for any of them. He had never been to medical school. He simply read the relevant books, absorbed the vocabulary, and became — convincingly, sometimes brilliantly —

en

44:13

The Lost Colony of Roanoke: One Hundred and Fifteen...

Strange Epochs • Weird History ·

2026/09/22

In August of 1590, a supply ship finally reached Roanoke Island off the coast of what is now North Carolina. The governor, John White, had been away for three years — delayed by war, politics, and circumstances always just beyond his control. He had left behind one hundred and fifteen English men, women, and children, including his daughter, his son-in-law, and his infant granddaughter Virginia Dare, the first child born in the Americas to English parents.He landed. He walked through the gate of the

en

44:18

The Black Death Flagellants: When Europe Bled for God...

Strange Epochs • Weird History ·

2026/09/15

Between 1348 and 1350, the Black Death killed one in three people in Europe. In some cities, half the population. In some villages, everyone. The priests were dying alongside their congregations. The doctors had nothing. And into this catastrophe, a movement emerged.Groups of men — sometimes hundreds, sometimes thousands — walked from town to town across Europe in white robes marked with red crosses. When they arrived at the town square, they stripped to the waist and beat themselves with leather

en

42:48

The Mad Parliament: The Day Barons Cornered a King —...

Strange Epochs • Weird History ·

2026/09/08

Here's the full package for Episode 23:The Mad Parliament: The Day Barons Cornered a King — Oxford, England, 1258In June of 1258, a group of English barons rode into Oxford wearing armor, surrounded their king, and forced him to accept something no English monarch had ever accepted before: that he could not govern without their permission.Henry III needed money. The barons had it. The price was a document called the Provisions of Oxford — a set of constitutional reforms that stripped the crown of

en

44:37

The Ghost Army: Inflatable Tanks, Sound Effects, and...

Strange Epochs • Weird History ·

2026/09/01

In the spring of 1944, the United States Army assembled a unit unlike any other in the history of warfare. Eleven hundred men — painters, illustrators, designers, architects, sound engineers, and radio operators recruited from art schools, advertising agencies, and theater companies — were given inflatable tanks, a collection of sound effects records, and one mission: make the Germans believe they were somewhere they weren't.The 23rd Headquarters Special Troops. The Ghost Army.They carried out

en

43:46

The Somerton Man: A Body, a Code, and a Mystery That...

Strange Epochs • Weird History ·

2026/08/25

On the morning of December 1st, 1948, the body of a well-dressed man was found propped against a seawall on Somerton Beach in Adelaide, Australia. He had no wallet. No identification of any kind. The labels had been cut from every item of his clothing. The cause of death could not be determined. The only unusual item found on his person was a small scrap of paper tucked into a hidden pocket in his trousers, printed with two words in Persian.Tamám Shud. It is finished.What followed is one of the most

en

44:09

The London Beer Flood: When a Wave of Porter Killed...

Strange Epochs • Weird History ·

2026/08/19

On the afternoon of October 17th, 1814, an iron hoop on a twenty-two-foot fermentation vat at a London brewery snapped. The pressure triggered a chain reaction. The back wall of the brewery collapsed. Between one hundred and twenty-eight thousand and three hundred and twenty-three thousand gallons of dark porter ale poured into the streets of St. Giles — one of the most overcrowded and desperately poor neighborhoods in the city — at the speed of a wave.Eight people died. Five of them were mourners

en

45:31

The Taiping Rebellion: The Bloodiest Civil War You've...

Strange Epochs • Weird History ·

2026/08/12

In 1836, a young man named Hong Xiuquan failed the imperial civil service examination and walked home carrying a packet of Christian pamphlets a missionary had handed him on the street. Two years later he suffered a complete mental breakdown — forty days of fever and visions. When he finally read those pamphlets six years after receiving them, he understood with complete and terrible clarity what the visions had meant.He was the younger brother of Jesus Christ. The second son of God. Sent to China

en

46:46

The Mad Monk of Portugal: The Hidden King Who Never...

Strange Epochs • Weird History ·

2026/08/05

In August of 1578, King Sebastian of Portugal rode into battle in the African desert against the advice of his commanders, the King of Spain, and the Pope. He was twenty-four years old. He led fourteen thousand men deep into Morocco in the heat of an African summer, toward a waiting army he could not defeat, because he believed — genuinely, completely believed — that he was the Hidden King of prophecy, destined to conquer Africa and usher in a new age of divine justice. He did not come back. Eight

en

43:40

The Bell Witch: America's Most Documented...

Strange Epochs • Weird History ·

2026/07/29

In 1817, a farming family in Robertson County, Tennessee, began hearing sounds in the walls of their log house at night. Knocking. Scratching. Chains being dragged. Over four years, whatever it was grew into something that spoke. That sang hymns. That quoted scripture. That slapped, pinched, and pulled hair. That drove the man of the house to his death and, according to the accounts, took credit for it.The Bell Witch is considered America's most documented supernatural case. Not the most famous —

en

45:09

The Great Moon Hoax: Bat-Men, Blue Unicorns, and the...

Strange Epochs • Weird History ·

2026/07/22

In August of 1835, a New York newspaper called The Sun published a story claiming that the British astronomer Sir John Herschel, using a powerful new telescope in South Africa, had discovered life on the moon. Not signs of habitability. Life. Lush forests, rushing rivers, herds of blue unicorns, bipedal beavers who carried their young under their arms, and a race of winged humanoids — bat-men — who lived in communities, built temples, and appeared to practice agriculture.The story ran across six

en

43:31

The Cottingley Fairies: The Hoax That Fooled Sherlock...

Strange Epochs • Weird History ·

2026/07/15

In the summer of 1917, two girls in a village in Yorkshire cut fairy figures out of a book, propped them up with hatpins in the grass beside a stream, and took a photograph. The photograph eventually reached Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the most famously rational fictional detective in the history of literature, who announced publicly, in the Christmas issue of The Strand Magazine, that it was the most important photographic evidence of supernatural phenomena ever produced. He staked his

en

45:06

Thomas Jefferson Still Survives: A Fourth of July...

Strange Epochs • Weird History ·

2026/07/05

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: Thomas Jefferson still survives. He was wrong. Jefferson had died five hours earlier.Host Shawn Spainhour

en

43:18

The Kentucky Meat Shower: It Rained Flesh in Bath...

Strange Epochs • Weird History ·

2026/07/01

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. Laboratories across the country analyzed the samples and confirmed they were genuine animal tissue—lung,

en

43:58

The War of the Bucket: Two Cities, One Wooden Pail,...

Strange Epochs • Weird History ·

2026/06/24

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 two rival Italian city-states, the grinding factional violence of the Guelph and Ghibelline conflict, and a

en

43:16

The Voynich Manuscript: A 500-Year-Old Book No One...

Strange Epochs • Weird History ·

2026/06/17

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 one word of it has ever been decoded.The Voynich Manuscript is a five-hundred-year-old book written in a

en

42:00

Hinterkaifeck Murders: Six Dead, One Killer Who...

Strange Epochs • Weird History ·

2026/06/10

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. They ate food from the kitchen. They turned the calendar page. The bodies of the family lay covered in

en

43:58

The Tunguska Event: The Largest Impact in Recorded...

Strange Epochs • Weird History ·

2026/06/03

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 newspaper by at midnight. The thing that caused all of it left no crater, no wreckage, and almost nothing

en

46:46

The Phantom Time Hypothesis: Did Someone Steal 297...

Strange Epochs • Weird History ·

2026/05/27

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 into the historical record so their own reigns would fall at the symbolically significant year one

en

43:32

The Pig That Was Executed: Justice, Animals, and the...

Strange Epochs • Weird History ·

2026/05/20

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 the capital crime of laying an egg. Every proceeding was conducted with complete legal seriousness

en

26 results

Similar Podcasts

pplpod

pplpod

Today In History with The Retrospectors

The Retrospectors

The Old Front Line

Paul Reed

This Day in Disney History

ATIS Products

Blues Moments in Time...

The Blues Hotel Collective