Strange Epochs • Weird History

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 script that matches no known language, filled with detailed illustrations of plants that do not exist, star charts for constellations no one recognizes, and page after page of small nude figures arranged in elaborate systems of pools and tubes that make no physical sense. The vellum is real. The ink is real. The hand that wrote it was confident and practiced. And whatever it says has defeated every attempt to read it.

Host Shawn Spainhour takes you through the full story: the manuscript's journey from a Holy Roman Emperor's collection to a Jesuit archive to a Yale vault; the statistical properties of the script that suggest it is not random; the parade of failed decipherments; and the two possibilities that remain—that the manuscript contains something genuinely significant or that it is the most successful hoax in the history of Western culture. Both are extraordinary. Neither has been ruled out.

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 ten more waiting for you.

Sources are listed in the show notes:

• Wikipedia contributors. Voynich manuscript. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024.
• Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Voynich Manuscript collection page. 2024.
• Britannica editors. Voynich manuscript. Encyclopaedia Britannica, updated 2024.
• History.com editors. The Mysterious Contents of the Voynich Manuscript. 2025.
• Montemurro, Marcelo A. and Zanette, Damian H. Keywords and Co-Occurrence Patterns in the Voynich Manuscript: An Information-Theoretic Analysis. PLOS ONE, 2013.
• The Art Newspaper. The Voynich Manuscript revealed: five things you probably didn't know about the Medieval masterpiece. 2025.
• Kennedy, Gerry and Churchill, Rob. The Voynich Manuscript. Orion Publishing Group, 2004.
• D'Imperio, Mary. The Voynich Manuscript: An Elegant Enigma. National Security Agency, 1978.

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 hay in the barn the entire time.

Host Shawn Spainhour takes you into the full story: the Gruber family and the specific shadows in their history that may have sealed their fate; the footprints in the snow that led to the farm and never led back out; the sounds in the attic that the previous maid had reported for weeks before she quit; and the over one hundred suspects investigated across a century of trying. In 2007, a team of German Police Academy students re-examined the case and claimed they knew who the killer was—but refused to name them.

The case has never been officially solved.

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 ten more waiting for you.

Sources are listed in the show notes:

• Wikipedia contributors. Hinterkaifeck murders. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024.
• Mental Floss. The Chilling Story of the Hinterkaifeck Killings, Germany's Most Famous Unsolved Crime. 2023.
• All That's Interesting. The Gruesome True Story of the Unsolved Hinterkaifeck Murders. 2023.
• Bavarian State Archives Munich. Investigation files on the Hinterkaifeck case, 1922 to 1923.
• Reingruber, Georg. Initial investigation report, Hinterkaifeck farmstead. April 5, 1922.
• Aumüller, Johann Baptist. Post-mortem examination report, Hinterkaifeck victims. April 5 and 6, 1922.
• German Police Academy Fürstenfeldbruck. Criminological re-examination of the Hinterkaifeck case. 2007.
• Headcount Coffee. The Unsolved Hinterkaifeck Murders That Still Defy Explanation. 2026.

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 recoverable. It simply vanished.

Host Shawn Spainhour takes you into the full story: the indigenous Evenki people who felt the heat and were thrown from their feet and named it after their god of thunder, the Russian scientist who spent years fighting for an expedition to reach the site, and the century of investigation that followed — from alien spacecraft theories to the quiet, definitive work of dendrochronology and microparticle analysis. The Tunguska event is not a mystery anymore. But what it means for the planet we live on is a question worth sitting with very carefully.

Strange Epochs tells true stories from history's stranger corners. Each episode is written for deep listening — slow, atmospheric, and immersive. Whether you're behind the wheel, unwinding after a long day, or settling in for sleep, this show is built to pull you in and carry you somewhere else.

Sources are listed in the show notes:

• Wikipedia contributors. Tunguska event. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024.
• NASA History. One hundred and fifteen years ago: The Tunguska Asteroid Impact Event. 2023.
• Britannica editors. Tunguska event. Encyclopaedia Britannica, updated 2024.
• Planetary Science Institute. The 1908 Siberia Explosion: Reconstructing an Asteroid Impact from Eyewitness Accounts. 2023.
• Royal Observatory Greenwich. The Tunguska Event Explained. 2023.
• Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective. The 1908 Tunguska Event and the Threats of Tomorrow. Ohio State University, 2018.
• Vasiliev, N.V., Kovalevsky, A.F., Razin, S.A., Epiktetova, L.E. Eyewitness Accounts of Tunguska. 1981.
• Kulik, Leonid. Reports on the Tunguska expeditions, 1927 to 1939. Soviet Academy of Sciences.

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 thousand.

Host Shawn Spainhour walks you through the full theory — the calendar argument that started it, the archaeological gaps Illig pointed to, and the case for a fictional Charlemagne — and then through the evidence that dismantles it: astronomical records, tree rings, radiocarbon dating, and the meticulous calendars of the Islamic world, none of which were consulted by Illig and none of which cooperate with his timeline. The Phantom Time Hypothesis is wrong. But the question underneath it — how do we actually know what we know about the past? — is one worth sitting with.

Strange Epochs tells true stories from history's stranger corners. Each episode is written for deep listening — slow, atmospheric, and immersive. Whether you're behind the wheel, unwinding after a long day, or settling in for sleep, this show is built to pull you in and carry you somewhere else.

Sources are listed in the show notes:

• Illig, Heribert. Das erfundene Mittelalter: Die größte Zeitfälschung der Geschichte. Econ Verlag, 1996.
• Wikipedia contributors. Phantom time conspiracy theory. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024.
• Ethik und Sozialwissenschaften. Symposium on the Phantom Time Hypothesis. Volume 8, 1997.
• Discover Magazine. What Is the Truth Behind the Controversial Phantom Time Hypothesis? 2023.
• Big Think. Phantom time hypothesis: Did a power-hungry pope fabricate centuries of history? 2023.
• Damn Interesting. The Phantom Time Hypothesis. Alan Bellows, 2005.
• Sky History. The Phantom Time Conspiracy: Are three hundred years of human history made up? 2023.
• Discovery UK. Phantom Time Hypothesis: Did We Really Invent Centuries of History? 2025.

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. Every sentence was carried out by a professional executioner who received new gloves afterward, as they did after hanging a human being.

Host Shawn Spainhour takes you inside the worldview that made this not just possible but perfectly logical — a medieval understanding of justice, order, and humanity's place in creation that was coherent, deliberate, and deeply revealing about how an entire civilization understood itself. This is not a story about superstition or madness. It is a story about what law means, who it applies to, and what happens when a society draws the boundaries of moral responsibility around everything that lives.

Strange Epochs tells true stories from history's stranger corners. Each episode is written for deep listening — slow, atmospheric, and immersive. Whether you're behind the wheel, unwinding after a long day, or settling in for sleep, this show is built to pull you in and carry you somewhere else.

Sources are listed in the show notes:

• Evans, E.P. The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals. William Heinemann, 1896.
• Cohen, Esther. Law, Folklore, and Animal Lore. Past and Present, Volume 110, 1986.
• Dinzelbacher, Peter. Animal Trials: A Multidisciplinary Approach. Journal of Medieval History, Volume 32, 2006.
• Gins, Sven. Casting Justice Before Swine: Late Medieval Pig Trials as Instances of Human Exceptionalism. University of Groningen, 2023.
• Wikipedia contributors. Animal trial. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024.
• History Today. Pigs Might Try. Alexander Lee, 2020.
• JSTOR Daily. When Societies Put Animals on Trial. 2020.
• Popular Science. In Medieval France, Murderous Pigs Faced Trial and Execution. 2026.
• Ancient Origins. Medieval Justice: Pig Was Tried in Court, Sentenced and Executed for Murder. 2022.