Nuns Gone Wild, Idaho's Beaver Drop, Ogoh-Ogoh & Nyepi, The Newport Sex Scandal

This week on The Oddities Department, history gets feral, airborne, spiritually cleansed, and deeply inappropriate.In Episode 20, Gavin and Lindsay take you through four bizarre true stories from the stranger corners of history. First, we enter the medieval convent, where The Nuns Go Wild, stressed-out nuns started meowing, biting, clawing, and spiraling into full group chaos. Was it mass psychogenic illness, repression, neurospicy energy, or the world’s holiest cat choir? Probably yes.Then we head to 1948 Idaho for The Great Idaho Beaver Drop, also known as Operation High-Dive — the real wildlife management plan where officials solved a beaver relocation problem by putting beavers in crates and dropping them from airplanes with parachutes. Somehow, against all logic and reason, it worked.From there, we travel to Bali for Ogoh-Ogoh and Nyepi, a powerful New Year tradition where giant demon effigies are built, paraded through the streets, shaken, burned, and followed by a full day of silence, reflection, and reset. It’s emotional arson with cultural depth, and honestly, we’re obsessed.Finally, we end in Newport, Rhode Island, with one of the wildest scandals in U.S. Navy history: the 1919 Newport Sex Scandal. What began as a moral crusade against queer sailors turned into an outrageous undercover investigation involving entrapment, hypocrisy, explicit reports, Senate outrage, and an accidental archive of early 20th-century queer life.This episode has everything: meowing nuns, airborne beavers, Balinese demon rituals, Navy scandal, queer history, government incompetence, moral panic, and just enough education to make the chaos feel productive.Content warning: This episode contains explicit sexual language, discussion of anti-queer persecution, institutional abuse, religious repression, and historical mistreatment of marginalized people.Send us Fan Mail