When Ladies Fought in the Mud for Plants

In the 1850s, Victorian Britain experienced “Pteridomania” or Fern Fever, when the entire nation became obsessed with collecting ferns to the point of ecological disaster. Wealthy women abandoned society events to crawl through mud hunting rare specimens, single ferns sold for months of working wages, and collectors hired teams to strip entire valleys bare of every fern they could find. The mania was so intense that people built special glass buildings just for their fern collections, printed fern patterns on literally everything from wallpaper to tombstones and drove species like the Killarney fern to near extinction. The fever only broke in the 1890s when collectors had literally taken so many ferns that there weren’t enough interesting ones left to collect, leaving behind environmental damage that still affects endangered fern species today.

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When San Francisco Crowned Its Own King

In 1859, a broke businessman named Joshua Norton declared himself Emperor of the United States, and amazingly, the entire city of San Francisco just went with it. For 21 years, Norton I issued decrees (like ordering a bridge to be built exactly where the Bay Bridge stands today), printed his own money that stores actually accepted, and was treated like real royalty by everyone from police officers to Mark Twain. When he died in 1880, 10,000 people attended his funeral, and the city gave him a royal burial, proving that sometimes a community's decision to embrace harmless eccentricity can create more joy and lasting good than most "real" authority ever does.

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On March 3, 1876, chunks of fresh red meat fell from a clear Kentucky sky for several minutes, covering an area the size of a football field around Mrs. Allen Crouch's farm in Bath County. The meat appeared fresh enough that two men tasted it raw (declaring it mutton or venison), and samples were preserved and sent to scientists who couldn't agree whether it was horse lung, bear muscle, or even human infant cartilage. The leading scientific explanation, published in medical journals, was synchronized vulture vomit, though no birds were seen during the clear-weather event. Nearly 150 years later, the Kentucky Meat Shower remains unexplained, with preserved samples still existing in museums as testament to one of history's most bizarre and disgusting meteorological mysteries.

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Yes, you read that correctly.

In 1325, medieval Italy witnessed one of history's most ridiculous wars when Modena stole a wooden bucket from Bologna's city well. What should have been a minor prank between rival city-states escalated into full-scale warfare, with Bologna sending 32,000 soldiers to reclaim their bucket while Modena defended it with just 7,000 troops. The Battle of Zappolino resulted in over 2,000 deaths, proving that medieval honor was apparently worth dying for—even when it involved ordinary household items.

The truly absurd part isn't just that thousands died fighting over a bucket, but that Modena still proudly displays their war trophy nearly 700 years later in their town hall, where tourists can visit the "Secchia Rapita" (stolen bucket) that sparked a 12-year conflict. The two cities maintain their rivalry to this day, though thankfully it's now limited to soccer matches and arguments about whose food is better, serving as a perfect reminder that humans have always been willing to fight over the stupidest things imaginable when pride is on the line.

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On October 17, 1814, a 22-foot-tall vat containing 135,000 gallons of beer exploded at London's Horse Shoe Brewery, triggering a catastrophic chain reaction that released 388,000 gallons of porter into the streets. The resulting beer tsunami raced through the St. Giles slum at 25 miles per hour, demolishing houses, drowning eight people including children, and creating surreal scenes of human nature at its worst—locals arrived with buckets to collect free beer from streets where people had just died, entrepreneurs charged admission to view the disaster scene, and at least two more people died from alcohol poisoning at the victims' funeral wakes. The brewery successfully avoided all liability and even got a tax refund for their lost beer, while the victims' families received nothing, making this not just one of history's most bizarre disasters but also a stark reminder that industrial negligence paired with corporate immunity is nothing new.

In the next episode, we're heading to medieval Italy, where two city-states went to war over a stolen wooden bucket. Yes, a bucket. Over 2,000 people died fighting for this bucket. And here's the kicker—the bucket still exists. You can go see it. It's in a museum. Proudly displayed. Because they won the bucket war.

New episodes drop weekly. Subscribe to never miss history's weirdest moments.

Until then, remember: truth is stranger than fiction, and history is weirder than you think.

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In July 1518, a woman named Frau Troffea began dancing in the streets of Strasbourg and couldn't stop. Within days, dozens had joined her in this compulsive, uncontrollable dancing; within a month, up to 400 people were dancing themselves to death. The city's authorities, consulting the best medical minds of the time, prescribed the worst possible solution: more dancing, complete with hired musicians and constructed stages to "help them dance it out of their systems." This catastrophically bad decision led to scores of deaths from exhaustion, heart attacks, and strokes before the plague mysteriously ended in September. The Dancing Plague of 1518 remains one of history's most documented cases of mass psychogenic illness, showing what happens when extreme social stress meets spectacularly incompetent crisis management.

This is the second episode of "Wait, That Actually Happened?" a weekly podcast exploring history's most unbelievable true stories. Up next: we're heading to London in 1814, where a tsunami of beer killed more people than sharks do in a year. Yes, really. It's called the London Beer Flood, and it's exactly as bizarre as it sounds.

Be sure to check out my Substack (Intelligence Bulletin from Author Daniel P. Douglas) for more podcast series, written articles, and links to my books.

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In 1932, farmers faced an invasion of 20,000 emus devastating their wheat crops in Western Australia. Their solution? Call in the military with machine guns and 10,000 rounds of ammunition. What followed was one of history's most absurd "wars"—a month-long campaign where trained soldiers with automatic weapons failed spectacularly against large, flightless birds. Despite multiple operations, strategic adjustments, and thousands of bullets fired, the military managed to kill perhaps 200 emus out of 20,000, ultimately withdrawing in defeat. The Great Emu War became an international embarrassment, proving that sometimes nature wins by simply refusing to play by human rules, and cementing the emu's place as the only bird species to defeat a military force in open combat.

This is the first episode of "Wait, That Actually Happened?" a weekly podcast exploring history's most unbelievable true stories. Up next: The Dancing Plague of 1518, when hundreds of people literally danced themselves to death in France.

Be sure to check out my Substack (Intelligence Bulletin from Author Daniel P. Douglas) for more podcast episodes, written articles with full sources, and links to my books.

New episodes drop weekly. Subscribe to never miss history's weirdest moments.

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