True Weird Stuff

Today's True Weird Stuff - The King's Rhinoceros In the 1500s, King Manuel of Portugal gifted Pope Leo a beautiful, white elephant as a gesture of obedience to the Vatican. Unfortunately, the majestic beast passed away after only two years. To make up for it, King Manuel tried to ship Pope Leo a rhinoceros named Ganda; however, the rhino met its demise in a shipwreck before it could make it to Rome. The only good thing to come from this debacle was the immortalization of Ganda by an artist who created a sculpture without ever having seen a rhinoceros.

Today's True Weird Stuff - The Appetite Tarrare was a French Showman in the 1700s who had an insatiable appetite. His eternal hunger terrorized him to the point he literally tried to consume everything: live animals, garbage, inanimate objects, and even human flesh. The curious case of the 100lb Tarrare baffled even the greatest medical minds, and the medical findings of his autopsy were the definition of truly weird stuff.

Today's True Weird Stuff - The Bunker In the 1950's and '60s, fallout shelters were all the rage. Tensions due to America's Cold War with Russia led to a looming fear of nuclear disaster. These underground bunkers, equipped with a living space and food rations, were a civil defense strategy aimed at reducing casualties in a nuclear war. And no fallout shelter was more elaborate than the Greenbrier Hotel; a luxurious resort paid for by the government as a cover for the secret bunker designed to house Congress below.

Today's True Weird Stuff - A Real Stiff Elmer McCurdy was an American outlaw who couldn't pull off a smooth heist to save his life. He tried to use his Army training with nitroglycerin to rob banks and trains, often to no avail. After accidentally robbing the wrong train in 1911, a drunken McCurdy met his demise after firing at the deputy sheriffs searching for him. And for the next 65 years, McCurdy's mummified corpse wound up being used as a traveling sideshow attraction known as "The Bandit Who Wouldn't Give Up."

Today's True Weird Stuff - Human Cloning In the previous episode of True Weird Stuff, we told the story of Raëlism, the religious UFO cult led by Claude Vorilhon. We're now diving into one of their core beliefs: that Jesus was resurrected through cloning and humans need to perfect human cloning to achieve immortality. That would lead to a claim made in 2002 by a scientific company created by Raëlians that the first human clone had been born.

Today's True Weird Stuff - The Messenger This is the story of a man who created a religion around UFO's. Claude Vorilhon was a journalist who claimed he was abducted by aliens in 1973. He said they told him humans were created by extraterrestrial species using advanced technology, and then they renamed him Raël and sent him back to Earth to serve as ambassador to their faith. And thus, Raëlism was born.

Coconut Cult In the early 1900s, a German author named August Engelhardt packed up his library of books, moved to the South Pacific island of Kabakon, and started a sun-worshipping coconut cult. He believed the way to become closer to God and gain immortality was by consuming coconuts and nothing else. Engelhardt convinced dozens of people to join him on the island, but many of them died from illness or malnutrition. And the ones who didn't perish fled, having realized the lunacy of a man who was cuckoo for coconuts.

Today's True Weird Stuff - A Curse on You Alchemist. Astrologer. Magician. Georg Faust was considered a heretic in medieval Europe, primarily because he practiced black magic and summoned the spirits of the dead. Through legend and literature, Faust was hated by many, not just because of his fraudulent ways, but because of his pact with the devil for knowledge and power; a debt the devil would quickly collect.

Today's True Weird Stuff - Once Upon A Shroom R. Gordon Wasson was an author, and worked in banking for J.P. Morgan. He was also responsible for popularizing shrooms in America...you know, the ones with psychedelic properties. Even the CIA got in on the action, covertly funding Wasson's expedition to study and collect hallucinogenic species of mushrooms for MK-Ultra's subproject 58. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today's True Weird Stuff - Asylum Ladies In the 1800s, women could be placed in mental institutions simply for not behaving the way society believed they should. Mental diagnoses at the time were simple: you were either deemed a lunatic, a moron, an imbecile, or feeble-minded. Like many others, a woman named Josephine Shaw Lowell believed poor women who lived in almshouses were promiscuous and prone to having illegitimate children. That's why in 1878 she created a place to house those women called the New York State Custodial Asylum for Feeble-Minded Women. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today's True Weird Stuff - Forbidden Island In the early 1900s, a woman known as Typhoid Mary was identified as patient zero for a series of typhoid outbreaks in New York. As a result, she was forced into quarantine on North Brother Island and lived the rest of her life in exile. Not only was the island a quarantine zone, it was the location of the General Slocum steamboat disaster, the deadliest event to happen in New York before 9/11. Today, North Brother Island has been abandoned for over 60 years, and travel to the island is strictly forbidden. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today's True Weird Stuff - Dark Twinning Stewart and Cyril Marcus were identical twin gynecologists. Though regarded as brilliant men in their profession, the Marcus twins' personal lives were shrouded in darkness. In 1975, the 45-year-old brothers' partially-decayed bodies were found inside a locked apartment littered with garbage and pharmaceuticals. An investigation led to the discovery of lives that had been just as mysterious and tragic as their deaths. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today's True Weird Stuff - Hammersmith Ghost (Airdate 11/15/2024) In 1803, residents of the Hammersmith district of London reported being terrorized by a ghost. The hysteria was so intense that a man named Francis Smith did the unthinkable: he shot and killed a man wearing white clothing, having mistaken the man for the Hammersmith Ghost. Can a man be found guilty of trying to kill a ghost? It's a decision that would take English courts 180 years to figure out. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today's True Werid Stuff - Cokey & Lucky His name is Lucky Luciano. An Italian-born gangster, Luciano was credited as the Godfather of American organized crime. From extortion, to bootlegging, and prostitution, Luciano was on top of the world as he rose to power beyond his wildest dreams. That is, until a woman named "Cokey Flo" helped expose his prostitution ring in front of a jury, causing Luciano's luck to finally run out. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today's True Weird Stuff - Welcome to the Multiverse Do you remember as a kid it being called the Berenstein Bears with an "e?" It was actually spelled with an "A". How about the Monopoly man's monocle? Turns out he never actually had one. Oh, and Ed McMahon never showed up on anyone's doorstep during the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes. These collective false memories we share with others are called the "Mandela Effect." Is this a coincidental phenomenon, or part of something bigger in a multiverse reality? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today's True Weird Stuff - The DUNE Project Neutrinos are tiny, fundamental particles that may contain a key to better understanding the universe. Roughly a thousand trillion of these mysterious particles harmlessly pass through your body every second. In order to better understand them, scientists shoot an intense beam of neutrinos from a facility in Illinois to an underground detector 1,300 kilometers away in South Dakota. They call it The DUNE Project. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today's True Weird Stuff - Rest In Peace London in the early 1800s had a graveyard problem. A lack of space led to unsanitary burial practices as the smell of rotting corpses and overflowing sewers consumed the city. One such place was Enon Chapel, a church in which the pastor was getting paid to allow bodies to be buried in the chapel's basement. But a man nicknamed "Graveyard Walker" made it his mission to put an end to these filthy practices. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today True Weird Stuff - The Rightest Stuff Astronaut Gordon Cooper had to manually control his spacecraft after a series of equipment failures. Edgar Mitchell avoided disaster by deactivating spaceship abort commands caused by a faulty switch. Becoming an astronaut has been the dream of generations of children, but it's more than exploring strange new worlds. The job of an astronaut is stressful, demanding and requires quick life-or-death decision making. This episode looks at a few tales in space where astronauts rose to the occasion to avoid catastrophe. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today's True Weird Stuff - Beavers on the Moon Claims that the Apollo 11 moon landing was a hoax have existed for decades. Meet the grandaddy of moon landing conspiracy theories, Bill Kaysing. He believed the Apollo Moon landings between 1969 and 1972 were faked. However, this isn't the only lunar conspiracy...The Great Moon Hoax of 1835 went as far as to trick people into believing that animals lived on the moon. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today's True Weird Stuff - The Pineys The Pine Barrens of New Jersey may be a forbidding wilderness, but people have called the place home for hundreds of years. It's also where folks have reported sightings of a terrifying beast, capable of a blood-curdling scream that can send chills down the sturdiest spines. It's the legend of the Jersey Devil that haunts the Pineys. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.