Strange Epochs • Weird History

Strange Epochs • Weird History

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The Somerton Man: A Body, a Code, and a Mystery That Won't Close — Adelaide, Australia, 1948
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 famous cold cases in history. There is a book of Persian poetry with a phone number penciled in the back. There is a woman who knew more than she ever admitted. There is a coded message that no one has ever deciphered. There is a suitcase at the train station containing items labelled with a name that is not the dead man's. There is a plaster cast that, when shown to the woman with the phone number, made her physically faint. Seventy-four years after the body was found, DNA analysis gave the man a name. It did not explain the code, or the woman, or how he died, or why he came to Adelaide at all. Host Shawn Spainhour takes you through the full story — every thread, every dead end, and the parts that remain, in all the ways that matter most, completely open. If you love history, true crime, or storytelling — or if you're just looking for something to listen to on a long drive or drift off to sleep — this one is for you. Strange Epochs is a weekly narrative history podcast hosted by Shawn Spainhour. Each episode takes one strange, true, documented moment from somewhere in the long span of human history and sits with it — slow, atmospheric, and built for deep listening. New episodes every Tuesday. If this is your first episode, there are twenty more waiting for you. Sources: Wikipedia contributors. Somerton Man. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024. Smithsonian Magazine. The Enduring Mystery of the Somerton Man. February, 2025. CNN. Somerton Man mystery solved as DNA points to man's identity, professor claims. July 26, 2022. InDaily. Somerton Man's identity revealed, professor says. July 27, 2022. UPI. Identity mystery of Australia's Somerton Man solved with DNA after seventy-four years. July 27, 2022. Abbott, Derek A. and Fitzpatrick, Colleen M. Forensic genetic genealogy identification of the Somerton Man. Research announcement, University of Adelaide, 2022. PR Newswire. The Somerton Man Identified. July 26, 2022. Explore the Archive. The Mystery of the Somerton Man. 2023.
E21
25 ago 2026
43:46
The London Beer Flood: When a Wave of Porter Killed Eight People — St. Giles, London, 1814
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 at an Irish wake for a two-year-old boy who had died the day before. A mother and her daughter taking tea were killed when the flood collapsed their house. A girl died in the street. An elderly woman died of the shock. The brewery was taken to court. The court ruled it was an act of God. The brewery avoided paying any compensation to the victims' families — and received a refund from Parliament for the lost beer. Host Shawn Spainhour takes you into the full story: the specific poverty of St. Giles, the industrial brewery that towered over it, the people who died on an ordinary Monday afternoon, and the specific geometry of who bears the cost when the law has not yet caught up with the industry that caused the harm. If you love history, true crime, or storytelling — or if you're just looking for something to listen to on a long drive or drift off to sleep — this one is for you. Strange Epochs is a weekly narrative history podcast hosted by Shawn Spainhour. Each episode takes one strange, true, documented moment from somewhere in the long span of human history and sits with it — slow, atmospheric, and built for deep listening. New episodes every Tuesday. If this is your first episode, there are nineteen more waiting for you. Sources: Wikipedia contributors. London Beer Flood. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024. History.com editors. The London Beer Flood. A and E Television Networks, 2025. Historic UK. The London Beer Flood of 1814. 2023. The History Press. The London Beer Flood. 2024. The History Reader. The London Beer Flood of 1814. 2025. Explore the Archive. The Tragic and Bizarre London Beer Flood of 1814. 2023. The Social Historian. London Beer Flood of 1814. 2018. Cornell, Martyn. So What Really Happened on October 17th, 1814? Zythophile Blog, 2009.
E20
19 ago 2026
44:09
The Taiping Rebellion: The Bloodiest Civil War You've Never Heard Of — China, 1850
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 to destroy demons, overthrow the Qing dynasty, and establish the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace on earth. What followed was the bloodiest civil war in human history. The Taiping Rebellion lasted fourteen years. Estimates of the death toll range from twenty million to fifty million people. More people may have died in this conflict than in the First World War. Most people in the Western world have never heard of it. Host Shawn Spainhour takes you into the full story: the examination culture that broke Hong Xiuquan, the theology he built from a fever dream and a borrowed pamphlet, the Heavenly Kingdom he actually governed for fourteen years, and the coalition of forces that eventually destroyed it — leaving behind a death toll that still staggers the imagination. If you love history, true crime, or storytelling — or if you're just looking for something to listen to on a long drive or drift off to sleep — this one is for you. Strange Epochs is a weekly narrative history podcast hosted by Shawn Spainhour. Each episode takes one strange, true, documented moment from somewhere in the long span of human history and sits with it — slow, atmospheric, and built for deep listening. New episodes every Tuesday. If this is your first episode, there are eighteen more waiting for you. Sources: Wikipedia contributors. Taiping Rebellion. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024. Wikipedia contributors. Hong Xiuquan. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024. Britannica editors. Taiping Rebellion. Encyclopaedia Britannica, updated 2024. Britannica editors. Hong Xiuquan. Encyclopaedia Britannica, updated 2024. Platt, Stephen R. Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War. Knopf, 2012. Spence, Jonathan D. God's Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan. Norton, 1996. History Sensei. The Taiping Rebellion: When Jesus Christ's Brother Led the Deadliest War in Human History. 2025. Cosmundus. How a Christian Cult Almost Took Over China: The Taiping Rebellion. 2024. New World Encyclopedia. Taiping Rebellion. 2023.
E19
12 ago 2026
45:31
The Mad Monk of Portugal: The Hidden King Who Never Came Back — Morocco, 1578
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 thousand of his men died with him. His body was never conclusively identified. Portugal lost its king, its independence, and sixty years of its sovereignty in a single afternoon. Host Shawn Spainhour takes you into the full story: a shoemaker in a small walled town who wrote prophecies that were banned by the Inquisition and copied illegally for centuries, the disastrous Battle of Alcácer Quibir, the false kings who rose up in Sebastian's name, and the messianic cult of Sebastianism — the belief that the Hidden King would return on a foggy morning, riding in from the sea, to restore Portugal to greatness. The greatest Portuguese poet of the twentieth century built his masterwork around it. Portugal waited for four hundred years. He has not come back yet. If you love history, true crime, or storytelling — or if you're just looking for something to listen to on a long drive or drift off to sleep — this one is for you. Strange Epochs is a weekly narrative history podcast hosted by Shawn Spainhour. Each episode takes one strange, true, documented moment from somewhere in the long span of human history and sits with it — slow, atmospheric, and built for deep listening. New episodes every Tuesday. If this is your first episode, there are seventeen more waiting for you. Sources: Wikipedia contributors. Sebastianism. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024. Wikipedia contributors. Gonçalo Anes Bandarra. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024. Wikipedia contributors. Battle of Alcácer Quibir. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024. Wikipedia contributors. Sebastian, King of Portugal. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024. Berlin, Henry. Gonçalo Anes Bandarra: The Craft of Prophecy and the Literature of Apocalypse. Writing in the End Times: Apocalyptic Imagination in the Hispanic World. University of Minnesota Press, 2019. Da Cunha, Euclides. Os Sertões. Laemmert, 1892. English translation: Rebellion in the Backlands. University of Chicago Press, 1944. Pessoa, Fernando. Mensagem. Parceria António Maria Pereira, 1934. Algarve History Association. Portugal: Land of Myth and Legend — Of Sebastianismo. 2022. Brewminate. Sebastianism: The Calabrian Charlatan and Medieval Messianic Nationalism. 2024. Visit Portugal. Casa do Bandarra, Trancoso. Portuguese Tourism Board, 2024.
E18
5 ago 2026
46:46
The Bell Witch: America's Most Documented Supernatural Case — Robertson County, Tennessee, 1817
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 — though it is extremely famous. The most documented. There are accounts from dozens of witnesses, including neighbors, visiting clergymen, and at least one future President of the United States. The events ran from 1817 to 1821, and they were written about and argued about for the rest of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. Nobody has ever explained them. Host Shawn Spainhour takes you into the full story: the Bell family; the enslaved people who worked their land; the four years of escalating events; the explanations that have been proposed and the reasons none of them fully close the case; and what it means that a documented paper trail with named witnesses and primary sources still leaves so much unanswered. If you love history, true crime, or storytelling — or if you're just looking for something to listen to on a long drive or drift off to sleep — this one is for you. Strange Epochs is a weekly narrative history podcast hosted by Shawn Spainhour. Each episode takes one strange, true, documented moment from somewhere in the long span of human history and sits with it, slow, atmospheric, and built for deep listening. New episodes every Tuesday. If this is your first episode, there are sixteen more waiting for you. Sources: Wikipedia contributors. Bell Witch. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024. Ingram, Martin V. An Authenticated History of the Famous Bell Witch. Clarksville, Tennessee, 1894. Bell, Richard. Our Family Trouble. Manuscript diary, circa 1820 to 1846. Referenced in Ingram. Appalachian Historian. The Bell Witch of Tennessee: Legend, History, and Memory. 2026. Mental Floss. The Bell Witch of Tennessee. 2023. Explore Southern History. The Bell Witch Haunting — Adams, Tennessee. 2024. Tennessee State Museum. Tennessee Legends: The Bell Witch. 2023. Nashville Adventures. The Bell Witch: Tennessee's Darkest Haunting. 2025.
E17
29 jul 2026
43:40
The Great Moon Hoax: Bat-Men, Blue Unicorns, and the Newspaper That Fooled New York — 1835
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 articles over two weeks, cited a real astronomer, and deployed the vocabulary of nineteenth-century science with enough precision to sound credible. The New York Times called the discoveries probable. Religious groups began planning missionary expeditions. The Sun's circulation shot from eight thousand to nearly twenty thousand copies a day, making it briefly the most widely read newspaper in the world. Every word of it was fabricated. Host Shawn Spainhour takes you into the full story: the cutthroat world of the penny press, the reporter who wrote it, the city that believed it, and the specific question the Great Moon Hoax has never stopped raising, when we want something to be true badly enough, how hard do we actually look to see if it isn't? If you love history, true crime, or storytelling — or if you're just looking for something to listen to on a long drive or drift off to sleep — this one is for you. Strange Epochs is a weekly narrative history podcast hosted by Shawn Spainhour. Each episode takes one strange, true, documented moment from somewhere in the long span of human history and sits with it, slow, atmospheric, and built for deep listening. New episodes every Tuesday. If this is your first episode, there are fifteen more waiting for you. Sources: Wikipedia contributors. Great Moon Hoax. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024. Goodman, Matthew. The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York. Basic Books, 2008. Locke, Richard Adams. Great Astronomical Discoveries Lately Made by Sir John Herschel. The Sun, New York, August 25 through September 16, 1835. Britannica editors. Great Moon Hoax. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2026. History.com editors. The Great Moon Hoax is published in the New York Sun. A and E Television Networks, 2025. The Saturday Evening Post. The Great Moon Hoax of 1835. August 26, 2020. The Conversation. Batmen and Unicorns: Inside the Original Moon Hoax. 2021. EarthSky. The Great Moon Hoax of 1835: Would you have believed it? August 25, 2023. MIT Deepfakes and Media. The Great Moon Hoax as an early example of viral misinformation. 2023.
E16
22 jul 2026
45:09
The Cottingley Fairies: The Hoax That Fooled Sherlock Holmes — Yorkshire, 1917
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 considerable reputation on it. He was wrong. He would not discover he was wrong for years. Host Shawn Spainhour takes you into the full story: Frances Griffiths, newly arrived from South Africa and homesick in an English village, and her older cousin Elsie Wright, the girl who knew how to use a camera. The specific grief of a world at war that made millions of people desperate to believe in something beyond the material. The decades of interviews, investigations, and expert analyses that failed to expose what two girls had done with scissors and hatpins. And the ending — sixty-six years later, when both women were old, when they finally admitted what they had done. One of them added a caveat: the fifth photograph, she said, was real. If you love history, true crime, or storytelling — or if you're just looking for something to listen to on a long drive or drift off to sleep — this one is for you. Strange Epochs is a weekly narrative history podcast hosted by Shawn Spainhour. Each episode takes one strange, true, documented moment from somewhere in the long span of human history and sits with it, slow, atmospheric, and built for deep listening. New episodes every Tuesday. If this is your first episode, there are fourteen more waiting for you. Sources: Wikipedia contributors. Cottingley Fairies. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024. Cooper, Joe. The Case of the Cottingley Fairies. Robert Hale, 1990. Conan Doyle, Arthur. Fairies Photographed: An Epoch-Making Event. The Strand Magazine, December 1920. Conan Doyle, Arthur. The Coming of the Fairies. Hodder and Stoughton, 1922. University of Leeds. The Cottingley Fairies: A Study in Deception. Google Arts and Culture Exhibition, 2021. Historic UK. The Cottingley Fairies. 2023. Time Magazine. Fairies and Fake News: Lessons of the 1917 Cottingley Hoax. 2017. National Science and Media Museum, Bradford. Cottingley Fairies collection. Google Arts and Culture. The Cottingley Fairies — A Study in Deception. University of Leeds Special Collections.
E15
15 jul 2026
43:31
Thomas Jefferson Still Survives: A Fourth of July Special — July 4th, 1826
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 takes you into the full story: the friendship between Adams and Jefferson, the bitter political falling out that silenced them for years, the remarkable fifteen-year correspondence that brought them back together, and the two old men, separated by five hundred miles, writing to each other about death as it slowly approached. This is not a patriotic episode. It is a story about what it means to outlive your era, to reconcile with your oldest enemy, and to die on the most symbolically loaded day in the history of the country you helped create. If you love history, true crime, or storytelling — or if you're just looking for something to listen to on a long drive or drift off to sleep — this one is for you. Strange Epochs is a weekly narrative history podcast hosted by Shawn Spainhour. Each episode takes one strange, true, documented moment from somewhere in the long span of human history and sits with it, slow, atmospheric, and built for deep listening. New episodes every Tuesday. If this is your first episode, there are thirteen more waiting for you. Sources: McCullough, David. John Adams. Simon and Schuster, 2001. Meacham, Jon. Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power. Random House, 2012. Cappon, Lester J., ed. The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams. University of North Carolina Press, 1959. Wikipedia contributors. Deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024. Massachusetts Historical Society. Thomas Jefferson Survives: The Last Letters of Jefferson and Adams. Beehive Blog, 2016. Monticello.org. Jefferson and Adams. Thomas Jefferson Foundation, 2024. History.com editors. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams die. A and E Television Networks, 2024. Library of Congress. Deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson on July Fourth. Headlines and Heroes Blog, 2022. All That's Interesting. Inside the Death of President John Adams. 2025.
E14
5 jul 2026
45:06
The Kentucky Meat Shower: It Rained Flesh in Bath County — Kentucky, 1876
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, muscle, cartilage, and connective tissue. Real meat. From a clear sky. With no explanation before or after. Host Shawn Spainhour takes you into the full story: Rebecca Crouch, who was standing outside making soap when it started; the scientists who raced to identify what exactly had fallen; the leading theory involving mass-vomiting vultures; and the deep strangeness of an event that has been documented, analyzed, and discussed for a hundred and fifty years and still sits in that specific uncomfortable gap between almost certainly explained and definitively explained. Bath County, Kentucky, still holds an annual festival to commemorate the day it rained flesh. The meat shower is their thing. They have leaned into it completely. If you love history, true crime, or storytelling — or if you're just looking for something to listen to on a long drive or drift off to sleep — this one is for you. Strange Epochs is a weekly narrative history podcast hosted by Shawn Spainhour. Each episode takes one strange, true, documented moment from somewhere in the long span of human history and sits with it—slow, atmospheric, and built for deep listening. New episodes every Tuesday. If this is your first episode, there are twelve more waiting for you. Sources are listed in the show notes: Wikipedia contributors. Kentucky meat shower. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024. New York Times. Flesh Descending in a Shower. March 9, 1876. Kastenbine, L.D. The Kentucky Meat Shower. Louisville Medical News, 1876. Edwards, Arthur Mead. The Kentucky Shower of Flesh. Scientific American Supplement, 1876. Hamilton, Allan McLane and Arnold, J.W.S. Analysis of specimens from the Kentucky meat shower. Medical Record, 1876. Scientific American. The Kentucky Shower of Flesh. 1876. Fort, Charles. The Book of the Damned. Boni and Liveright, 1919. BBC Science Focus Magazine. Here's the very strange reason Kentucky was once showered in meat. 2025. LPM Public Radio. Kentucky Meat Shower one hundred and fiftieth anniversary draws hundreds to Bath County. March 7, 2026. Transylvania University Monroe Moosnick Medical and Science Museum. Preserved specimen from the 1876 Kentucky meat shower.
E13
1 jul 2026
43:18
The War of the Bucket: Two Cities, One Wooden Pail, Thousands Dead — Italy, 1325
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 battle in which a seven-thousand-man Modenese force defeated a Bolognese army more than four times its size—then held a celebratory race outside the walls of the city they had just humiliated. Host Shawn Spainhour takes you into the full story: the specific mechanics of how medieval Italian city-states fought and why they could never stop; the Battle of Zappolino and the military craft that turned a hopeless mismatch into a rout; the seventeenth-century satirical epic poem the conflict inspired; and the bucket itself—still sitting in a tower in Modena seven hundred years later, still not returned, still the subject of a rivalry that has never quite died. If you love history, true crime, or storytelling — or if you're just looking for something to listen to on a long drive or drift off to sleep — this one is for you. Strange Epochs is a weekly narrative history podcast hosted by Shawn Spainhour. Each episode takes one strange, true, documented moment from somewhere in the long span of human history and sits with it—slow, atmospheric, and built for deep listening. New episodes every Tuesday. If this is your first episode, there are eleven more waiting for you. Sources are listed in the show notes: Wikipedia contributors. War of the Bucket. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024. Wikipedia contributors. Battle of Zappolino. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024. Tassoni, Alessandro. La secchia rapita. Paris, 1622. Griffoni, Matteo. Conflictus Zapolini, Memoriale historicum de rebus bononiensium. Circa 1325. Abulafia, David, ed. The New Cambridge Medieval History, Volume Five. Cambridge University Press, 1999. Britannica editors. Guelphs and Ghibellines. Encyclopaedia Britannica, updated 2024. HistoryNet. What We Learned from the Battle of Zappolino, 1325. 2022. All That's Interesting. The Bizarre History of the War of the Bucket. 2023. Amusing Planet. The War of the Bucket. 2023.
E12
24 jun 2026
43:58
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