Strange Epochs • Weird History

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 — whatever he needed to be.

He did not do it for money. He did not do it primarily to avoid justice. He did it, as best as anyone could ever determine, because he could. Because performance felt more real to him than identity itself.

And then nineteen wounded soldiers were brought aboard his ship off the coast of Korea, one of them needing emergency chest surgery, and the man who was not a doctor had to operate. Every patient survived.

Host Shawn Spainhour takes you through the full story: the restless, rootless early life that produced Demara, the string of impersonations that preceded the Navy, the afternoon on the HMCS Cayuga that made him famous, and the specific question his life keeps raising — what is identity, really, if a man with no credentials can perform it better than the people who earned them?

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-five more waiting for you.

Sources:

• Wikipedia contributors. Ferdinand Waldo Demara. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024.
• Crichton, Robert. The Great Impostor. Random House, 1960.
• UPI Archives. Ferdinand Waldo Demara Jr., The Great Impostor. June 9, 1982.
• War History Online. The Great Impostor — Fred Demara Pretended to Be a Ship's Surgeon and Didn't Lose a Soul. July, 2022.
• Soyummy.com. The Great Impostor Who Faked His Way Into History. June, 2025.
• Academic Block. Ferdinand Waldo Demara: His Biography and Scams. November, 2025.
• Time Magazine. Ferdinand Demara. Top Ten Imposters. time.com.
• Lessons from History. The Fascinating Story of the Great Imposter Who Fooled the World. January, 2023.

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 palisade wall. The settlement was empty.

No people. No bodies. No signs of violent struggle. The houses had been carefully dismantled, the timber removed. The colonists' possessions were buried in chests, as if waiting to be recovered. Whatever happened, it was not a sudden attack in the night. It was a deliberate departure. Carved into the post of the gate, in capital letters: CROATOAN. On a nearby tree: CRO.

That is all that remains of them. A word and three letters.

Host Shawn Spainhour takes you into the full story: the ambitions and failures that produced the Roanoke Colony, the people who lived on that island and what their lives actually looked like, the theories that have been proposed across four centuries of searching, and what the archaeology and the documentary record actually tell us — and don't tell us — about where they went.

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-four more waiting for you.

Sources:

• Wikipedia contributors. Roanoke Colony. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024.
• Britannica editors. Lost Colony. Encyclopaedia Britannica, updated 2024.
• History.com editors. Did the Lost Colony of Roanoke Disappear or Just Assimilate? A and E Television Networks, 2025.
• National Geographic. The Search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke. nationalgeographic.com, 2021.
• National Park Service, Fort Raleigh National Historic Site. Major Theories of the Lost Colony. nps.gov, 2024.
• History Guild. What We Now Know About the Lost Colony of Roanoke. historyguild.org, 2021.
• All That's Interesting. Archaeologists Say They've Just Solved the Four-Hundred-Year-Old Mystery of the Lost Colony of Roanoke. 2025.
• Kupperman, Karen Ordahl. Roanoke: The Abandoned Colony. Rowman and Littlefield, 2007.
• Miller, Lee. Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony. Penguin, 2002.

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 whips tipped with metal spikes until the blood ran down their backs and spattered the walls. Three times a day. For thirty-three and a half days. In front of everyone who had gathered to watch.

They were the Flagellants. The Brothers of the Cross. They believed that their blood would wash away the collective sin of humanity and stop the plague. They also believed they did not need the Church — that their sacrifice superseded the sacraments entirely. That last belief is why the Pope condemned them.

Host Shawn Spainhour takes you into the full story: the specific scale of devastation that produced the movement, the theology that drove it, the crowds that welcomed them and the authorities that feared them, and what happens when a civilization's entire framework for understanding suffering stops being sufficient.

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-three more waiting for you.

Sources:

• Wikipedia contributors. Flagellant. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024.
• Wikipedia contributors. Black Death. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024.
• History in Numbers. Flagellants. historyinnumbers.com, 2024.
• Catholic Encyclopedia. Flagellants. newadvent.org, 2024.
• Grokipedia. Flagellant. grokipedia.com, 2026.
• Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. The Flagellants. fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk, 2024.
• Boccaccio, Giovanni. The Decameron. Circa 1353.
• Ziegler, Philip. The Black Death. Collins, 1969.
• Kelly, John. The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death. HarperCollins, 2005.

Here's the full package for Episode 23:

The Mad Parliament: The Day Barons Cornered a King — Oxford, England, 1258

In 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 its personal authority and distributed it among a council of fifteen barons who would supervise his ministers, control his treasury, and oversee the administration of his kingdom. Parliament would meet three times a year to monitor them. The king had been cornered, outmaneuvered, and systematically dismantled in a single afternoon.

Henry's supporters called it the Parliamentum Insanum. The Mad Parliament.

Host Shawn Spainhour takes you into the full story: the financial disasters and foreign favorites that had made Henry III one of the most resented kings in English history, the French-born baron Simon de Montfort who led the reform faction against his own brother-in-law, and the specific afternoon in Oxford that — in a direct and traceable line — became one of the ancestors of every modern democratic legislature. The men in that hall were acting entirely out of self-interest. History didn't care.

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-two more waiting for you.

Sources:

• Wikipedia contributors. Oxford Parliament (1258). Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024.
• Wikipedia contributors. Provisions of Oxford. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024.
• Wikipedia contributors. Simon de Montfort, sixth Earl of Leicester. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024.
• Britannica editors. Provisions of Oxford. Encyclopaedia Britannica, updated 2024.
• UK Parliament. The Provisions of Oxford. parliament.uk, 2024.
• The National Archives. The Mad Parliament, 1258. nationalarchives.gov.uk, 2024.
• Britain Express. The Provisions of Oxford. britainexpress.com, 2024.
• Carpenter, David. The Struggle for Mastery: The Penguin History of Britain 1066 to 1284. Penguin, 2004.
• Maddicott, J.R. Simon de Montfort. Cambridge University Press, 1994.

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 twenty-one deception operations in ten months across France, Luxembourg, and Germany. They impersonated entire divisions. They broadcast the sounds of massed tank columns through speakers mounted on half-tracks. They painted fake unit insignia on real vehicles and staged them where German reconnaissance aircraft would photograph them. They saved an estimated fifteen thousand to thirty thousand American lives. Their existence was classified for fifty years. Most of the men came home, had careers and families, grew old, and never told anyone what they had done.

Host Shawn Spainhour takes you into the full story: how the unit was conceived, how it operated, the men who served in it, and the specific audacity required to conduct a deception operation within earshot of the enemy with nothing more lethal than a paintbrush and a recording of tank engines.

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-one more waiting for you.

Sources:

• Wikipedia contributors. Ghost Army. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024.
• Ghost Army Legacy Project. Official History of the Twenty-Third Headquarters Special Troops. ghostarmy.org, 2024.
• Smithsonian Magazine. How the Ghost Army of World War II Used Art to Deceive the Nazis. November, 2023.
• National World War II Museum. Ghost Army: The Combat Con Artists of World War II. Traveling Exhibition, 2023.
• War History Online. Ghost Army of World War II: They Fought with Art, Not Guns — and It Worked. February, 2026.
• Beyer, Rick. The Ghost Army of World War II. Princeton Architectural Press, 2015.
• Reit, Seymour. Masquerade: The Amazing Camouflage Deceptions of World War II. Hawthorn Books, 1978.
• United States Army. Fort Leonard Wood examines World War II Ghost Army deception tactics. army.mil, 2021.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.