Strangely Odd

In July 1518, a woman named Frau Troffea stepped into the street in Strasbourg and began to dance. She couldn't stop. Within weeks, four hundred people had joined her — dancing in the summer heat, collapsing from exhaustion, some dying. Historian Dr. Priya Voss joins Sterling Gray to examine one of history's most documented and least explained mysteries: a collective madness that the city made worse by trying to help, and that disappeared as suddenly as it began.

Tonight's Numbers Station Puzzler: crack the broadcast, then email your answer and the episode number (episode 71) to [email protected] for a shot at a secret line to the show.

Presented by Double Secret Labs — we do science so you don't have to.

Find Strangely Odd on YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Since 2007, at least twenty-one human feet — most still inside their shoes — have washed ashore along the Salish Sea's islands and beaches. No bodies. No obvious source. Just the shoes. Forensic anthropologist Dr. Owen Lester joins Sterling Gray to examine what the water is telling us, why running shoes float, and what the coast of British Columbia might still be keeping. Then the lines open — and the sea, as always, delivers.

Tonight's Numbers Station Puzzler: crack the broadcast, then email your answer and the episode number (episode 70) to [email protected] for a shot at a secret line to the show.

Presented by Double Secret Labs — we do science so you don't have to.

Find Strangely Odd on YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

In February 1959, nine experienced Soviet hikers made camp on a mountain the local Mansi people called Dead Mountain — and were found weeks later under circumstances that Soviet investigators could only describe as 'a compelling unknown force.' Sterling Gray sits down with forensic investigator and Cold War historian Dr. Sarah Kessler to examine what the Dyatlov Pass case files actually reveal, why the official avalanche theory still doesn't satisfy the people who've read the evidence, and what the mountain may be keeping from us sixty-six years on.

Tonight's Numbers Station Puzzler: crack the broadcast, then email your answer and the episode number (episode 69) to [email protected] for a shot at a secret line to the show.

Presented by Double Secret Labs — we do science so you don't have to.

Find Strangely Odd on YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

For decades, a low-frequency drone — felt more than heard — has been reported in towns across the world. Most can't hear it. No instrument has reliably recorded it. And in most cases, no one can find the source. Sterling Gray is joined by acoustic researcher Dr. Siobhan Reeve to trace the Hum from a Bristol newspaper in the nineteen-seventies to the twenty-two thousand complaints filed in Windsor, Ontario in a single night — and to ask the question no scientist has fully answered: why do only some people hear it, and why does it follow them when they move?

Tonight's Numbers Station Puzzler: crack the broadcast, then email your answer and the episode number (episode 64) to [email protected] for a shot at a secret line to the show.

Presented by Double Secret Labs — we do science so you don't have to.

Find Strangely Odd on YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Every night for ninety-one nights, the eight hundred residents of Stillwater, Oregon have woken at exactly three thirty-three a.m. from the same dream: a flooded valley, a submerged church tower with its windows still lit, and a voice counting upward from below the waterline. Sleep researcher Dr. Vivienne Aldine arrived for a week. She is still there. The anniversary is in eleven days.

Tonight's Numbers Station Puzzler: crack the broadcast, then email your answer and the episode number (episode 65) to [email protected] for a shot at a secret line to the show.

Presented by Double Secret Labs — we do science so you don't have to.

Find Strangely Odd on YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

In November 1970, a burning body was found in a remote Norwegian valley called Isdalen — the Valley of Ice. Every label had been cut from her clothes. Her face was partially destroyed. At the railway station, her suitcases held wigs, multiple currencies, and a coded diary tracing a circuit of Cold War intelligence hubs across Europe. She has never been identified. Forensic historian Dr. Alastair Voss examines fifty-five years of deliberate silence around a woman who went to extraordinary lengths to have no name.

Tonight's Numbers Station Puzzler: crack the broadcast, then email your answer and the episode number (episode 66) to [email protected] for a shot at a secret line to the show.

Presented by Double Secret Labs — we do science so you don't have to.

Find Strangely Odd on YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

April sixth, nineteen sixty-six. Quarter past eleven on a clear autumn morning at Westall High School in Melbourne, Australia. A disc-shaped craft descended in silence and landed in a paddock behind the school. More than two hundred students and teachers ran toward it. Within the hour, men in dark suits arrived, the science teacher was silenced, and the students' drawings were taken. Sixty years later, three hundred witnesses have never had an answer.

Tonight's Numbers Station Puzzler: crack the broadcast, then email your answer and the episode number (episode ep67) to [email protected] for a shot at a secret line to the show.

Presented by Double Secret Labs — we do science so you don't have to.

Find Strangely Odd on YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

On a rural Texas highway in December 1980, Betty Cash, Vickie Landrum, and a seven-year-old boy drove into a wall of heat from a diamond-shaped object — and left with burns no doctor could explain. Twenty-three military helicopters were seen in the sky that night. The government said it knew nothing. Betty Cash spent the rest of her life asking for an answer that never came. Tonight, investigator Dr. Ray Pryce walks us back down the Huffman road.

Tonight's Numbers Station Puzzler: crack the broadcast, then email your answer and the episode number (episode 68) to [email protected] for a shot at a secret line to the show.

Presented by Double Secret Labs — we do science so you don't have to.

Find Strangely Odd on YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1817, Robertson County, Tennessee: a family on the Red River frontier begins hearing things in the night — knocking, chains, a voice that knows scripture by heart and names strangers on sight. Historian Dr. Marcus Eakins walks through the Bell Witch case, the death of John Bell, and the question that still haunts Adams: was Kate real, or was she made?

Tonight's Numbers Station Puzzler: crack the broadcast, then email your answer and the episode number (episode 63) to [email protected] for a shot at a secret line to the show.

Presented by Double Secret Labs — we do science so you don't have to.

Find Strangely Odd on YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Deep beneath the Pacific, a fiber-optic cable that carries the world's data has started producing something no one put in — structured signals that pass phoneme detection, partial matches to extinct languages, and a response to a maintenance ping sent thirty-six hours earlier. Marine cable systems engineer Dr. Mara Thorne has been inside the investigation since the first anomaly was logged, and tonight she tells us what she found at three thousand meters down.

Tonight's Numbers Station Puzzler: crack the broadcast, then email your answer and the episode number (episode 62) to [email protected] for a shot at a secret line to the show.

Presented by Double Secret Labs — we do science so you don't have to.

Find Strangely Odd on YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.