The Oddities Department

Send us Fan MailIn Episode 18 of The Oddities Department, we take you through four wildly unsettling (and occasionally hilarious) exhibits where history, science, and human curiosity collide in the most chaotic ways imaginable.🧠 Einstein’s Brain Heist When Albert Einstein died in 1955, he asked for a simple cremation—no autopsy, no spectacle. A pathologist ignored that, removed his brain without permission, and spent decades slicing it up and distributing it to scientists around the world. Science… or theft?💀 Operation Mincemeat (WWII’s Most Absurd Spy Plan) British intelligence used the body of a homeless man, gave him a fake identity, a fiancée, and top-secret documents—then dropped him into the ocean to trick Nazi Germany. It worked. Somehow.😬 Medieval Torture Devices Designed for Women From iron masks that shredded tongues to devices built for public humiliation and mutilation, we uncover the disturbing reality of gender-targeted torture in history.🐀🎷 Cocaine Jazz Rats (Yes, This Is Real Science) In a real 2011 study, researchers gave rats cocaine and discovered something unexpected—they started preferring jazz music. What sounds like a joke is actually a fascinating look at how addiction rewires the brain.

Send us Fan MailEpisode 17 of The Oddities Department is what happens when the museum staff quits, the exhibits get hostile, and absolutely no one is left in charge.This week’s tour is unstable from the jump.We begin with June and Jennifer Gibbons — The Silent Twins, a haunting true story of two sisters who spoke only to each other, mirrored each other’s every move, and ultimately made a pact that only one of them could survive.From there, we open a window—literally—with Defenestration, the long-standing historical tradition of solving political disagreements by throwing people out of buildings. Prague really committed to the bit.Then we step into the Australian rainforest and meet the Gympie Gympie Tree, a plant so excruciatingly painful that contact with it has driven people to the brink. Nature, once again, chooses violence.Next, we follow Juan Pujol García, the Spanish chicken farmer turned double agent who built an entire fake spy network and convinced the Nazis to believe every word of it—helping reshape the outcome of World War II through pure deception.And then… things get worse.Because we arrive at Mr. Liu and the 2023 Butthole Eel, a modern medical emergency that proves not every idea deserves follow-through.Finally, we close with Tarrare, the man who ate everything—objects, animals, entire meals meant for dozens—and left behind one of the most disturbing and unexplainable medical cases in history.Six exhibits. Zero janitorial support. And something is definitely still moving in the basement.Welcome back to The Oddities Department.

Send us Fan MailIn Episode 16, we explore a collection of unbelievable historical moments that will keep you on your toes...• The Great Molasses Flood of 1919, one of the strangest disasters in U.S. history • The only confirmed case of a human struck by a meteorite (Ann Hodges) • The disturbing story of Mary Toft, the woman who convinced doctors she gave birth to rabbits • The brutal fate of Johan de Witt, in one of history’s most shocking acts of political violence • The dangerous and often deadly history of beauty standards and cosmetics • And a list of Black Death “cures” that somehow made a deadly plague even worseThis episode blends true crime, dark history, science, and absurd human behavior, uncovering how misinformation, desperation, and curiosity have shaped some of history’s most chaotic moments.If you’re into podcasts about: Strange historical events  Bizarre medical stories  Silly Historical Figures  Unexplained or unbelievable history …you’re in the right place.🎙️ New episodes of The Oddities Department drop regularly—where history gets messy, and the truth is always stranger than fiction.

Send us Fan MailEpisode 15 of The Oddities Department cracks open another tour of historical chaos.This week’s tour contains six stories that are equal parts fascinating, horrifying, and deeply, deeply hilarious.We begin with The Story of Nellie Bly, the fearless journalist who got herself committed to an insane asylum in 1887 to expose the brutal conditions inside, then came back out and changed journalism forever.Next is The King of Sting, Dr. Justin Schmidt, the entomologist who turned getting stung by some of the world’s most painful insects into legitimate scientific research… and then described the agony like a deranged poet.Then we stop by The Weird History of the Dildo Exhibit, tracing one of humanity’s oldest inventions from stone-age pleasure tools to modern taboos and beyond. Because apparently, some ideas survive every civilization.From there, we slide into Casanova & The Oyster, the slippery, seductive history of how one legendary lover turned shellfish into foreplay and helped cement oysters as history’s most overrated aphrodisiac.Then comes The Cadaver Synod, the unbelievably real moment in church history when a dead pope was dug up, dressed in robes, and put on trial by his enemies in one of the most grotesque acts of medieval pettiness ever recorded.And finally, we descend into the chaos of Operation Cat Drop, the time humans tried to fix one ecological disaster by parachuting cats into the Borneo jungle like that was a perfectly normal thing for a government to do.Six exhibits. Zero sanity. Maximum historical whiplash.Welcome to The Oddities Department.

Send us Fan MailEpisode 14 of The Oddities Department drags us even deeper into the archives, where the case files smell faintly of meat, whiskey, and very poor decision-making.This week’s crate contains six stories that should have stayed under lock and key.We begin with The Kentucky Meat Shower, the bizarre 1876 incident where chunks of flesh rained down over a woman’s yard in Kentucky… Then comes The Curious Case of Juliane Koepcke, the teenage girl who survived falling out of a plane over the Amazon rainforest and somehow walked out of the jungle alive.Next is the 1875 Whiskey River in Dublin, where a warehouse fire unleashed a flood of liquor through the streets, and locals responded with buckets, cups, and catastrophically bad judgment.From there, we step into Mad Hatter Syndrome, the grim industrial history behind the phrase “mad as a hatter,” where mercury poisoning slowly destroyed the minds and bodies of 18th & 19th-century hat makers.Medicine takes a hard left turn with the inception of chiropractics, a system born from a back crack, a deaf janitor, and a founder who claimed the whole idea came to him from a ghost doctor.And finally, we witness The Great Camel Experiment, the moment the United States Army decided the solution to Southwestern logistics was a full-blown camel corps.Six case files. Maximum absurdity. Minimum supervision.Welcome to The Oddities Department.

Send us Fan MailEpisode 13 of The Oddities Department takes us way in the back of the museum, and it gets weirder by the minute. This week’s crate contains six stories that history couldn't keep locked up. We start with The Mississippi Scheme, a French colonial program that tried to populate Louisiana by forcing prisoners to marry sex workers and shipping the couples across the ocean.Then comes Princess Caraboo, a servant girl who convinced an entire English town she was a mysterious foreign princess from a completely fictional island.Next is Inês de Castro, the murdered noblewoman who was exhumed, crowned Queen of Portugal, and presented to a horrified royal court forced to kiss her corpse.From there we dive into The Berners Street Hoax, the most elaborate prank in history, where thousands of letters summoned doctors, clergy, musicians, and dignitaries to one very unlucky London address.Science gets aggressively weird with the mating ritual of flatworms, where reproduction is decided through a literal duel known as penis fencing.And finally we meet Diogenes the Cynic, the philosopher who lived in a jar, bullied Plato with a plucked chicken, and told Alexander the Great to move out of his sunlight.Six case files. Maximum audacity. Minimum dignity.Welcome to The Oddities Department.

Send us Fan MailEPISODE 12: Welcome back to The Oddities Department, where the paperwork is optional and the back halls are absolutely not OSHA-compliant.This week’s unauthorized tour proves, once again,  that history is just humanity repeatedly making eye contact with bad decisions and proceeding anyway.Inside tonight’s crate:A scandal-prone French medium who convinced actual scientists she was producing ghost goo… while fully naked. A powerful Korean king who could command armies but couldn’t stop historians from documenting the day he absolutely ate dirt. The Bavaria Beer Riots of 1844 — when Munich collectively chose violence over beverage pricing. Ten wildly avoidable historical deaths that will make you question natural selection’s patience. A medical deep dive into retrograde menstruation (yes, it goes the other way). And the jaw-dropping case of Suze Lopez — who went in for tumor surgery and discovered a full-term abdominal pregnancy nobody saw coming.It’s weird. It’s uncomfortable. It’s aggressively educational.And as always… it somehow gets worse.🎧 Listener discretion advised. Curiosity encouraged.

Send us Fan MailEPISODE 11 — The Oddities DepartmentThis week… history and modern history fully loses its mind.Suzi and Gavin crack open six case files that feel less like real events and more like something a sleep-deprived historian made up while trippin. We start in 1870 Paris, where a starving city made the deeply unfortunate decision to put the zoo on the menu. Then we head to the South Atlantic, where a luxury cruise ship gets dragged into World War I and ends up in a naval fight… with another cruise ship pretending to be it.Because human judgment is a fragile thing, we also examine two modern ER visits involving World War I explosives and choices that absolutely did not need to be made.From there, the tone shifts. Gavin tells the powerful and complicated story of Henrietta Lacks — the woman whose cells changed modern medicine without her knowledge. Suzi brings the fire with Mariya Oktyabrskaya, the Soviet widow who processed grief by literally buying a tank and driving it into battle. And we close with the Radium Girls, one of the most infuriating and heartbreaking labor stories in American history.It’s weird. It’s heavy. It’s occasionally unhinged.Welcome back to the basement.Stay weird. Stay curious. But not too curious.

Send us Fan MailWelcome back to the staff-only basement of the museum… where the lights flicker for reasons we don’t investigate anymore.In Episode 10, we open a crate packed with cursed productions, scientific lunatics, catastrophic weather, medical breakthroughs with body counts, funeral industry nightmares, and a frog that turns its own skeleton into a weapon.This one swings hard between horror, wonder, tragedy, and absolute disbelief — because history, once again, refuses to behave.📂 CASE FILES THIS WEEK:🎬 Case File #53: Haunted Film Sets Suzi takes us through Hollywood productions where the horror didn’t stay on screen — fires, deaths, lightning strikes, and sets that may have been genuinely cursed.🦴 Case File #54: William Buckland Gavin introduces the Oxford genius who helped invent paleontology… and also tried to eat his way through the entire animal kingdom. Including, somehow, the heart of a king.🌪️ Case File #55: The Joplin EF5 Tornado Suzi covers one of the deadliest tornadoes in modern American history — a story of unimaginable destruction, and a community that refused to stay broken.🩻 Case File #56: The Invention of the X-Ray Gavin tells the story of the discovery that let humanity see inside itself for the first time… and the pioneers who paid for that miracle with their bodies.⚰️ Case File #57: Mad Morticians Suzi guides us through the strange, unsettling, and occasionally criminal history of the funeral industry — from Victorian corpse photography to modern crematory scandals.🐸 Case File #58: The Hairy Frog And finally, Gavin introduces nature’s most unhinged evolutionary choice: a frog that breaks its own bones to create claws. Because apparently that’s a thing that exists.Six files. Zero chill. Welcome to Episode 10.🎧 Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.

Send us Fan MailWe’ve unpacked cosmic delusion, bird violence, ethically bankrupt science, peak female rage, and one of the most profitable headless animals in American history.📂 IN THIS EPISODE:Case File #48: Madame Vesta La Viesta. Gavin introduces a spiritualist who found fame during the Golden Age of Mysticism… and then committed to a very specific kind of long-distance love. Case File #49: Pope Francis & The Dove Incident. Suzi covers the 2014 peace-dove release that immediately turned into a sky mugging, broadcast live from the Vatican. Case File #50: The Dolphin Language Experiments. Gavin dives into the NASA-funded attempt to teach dolphins English, featuring LSD, a flooded house, and a relationship dynamic no one saw coming lmao. Case File #51: Olga of Kiev. Suzi brings you the patron saint of revenge: boats, bathhouses, weaponized birds, and a body count that somehow ends in sainthood. Case File #52: “Mike” The Headless Chicken. Gavin tells the true story of a rooster who lived 18 months without a head and went on tour, proving you don’t need a brain to become a celebrity.🎧 LISTEN & SUBSCRIBE: If you enjoyed this unauthorized tour through the museum’s back rooms, please rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform. It helps us keep the lights flickering and the dolphin tank paid for.🏷️ TAGS: #OdditiesDepartment #WeirdHistory #HistoryPodcast #ComedyPodcast #WTFHistory #Spooky #ScienceGoneWrong #Vatican #OlgaOfKiev #HeadlessChicken #DolphinExperiment #MartiansStay curious. Stay weird. And please… don’t pet the dolphin, he has mommy issues.

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, Suzi and Gavin pry open the crates that prove history is actually a fever dream we can't wake up from. Tonight, we are exploring horrific surgical tools turned lumberjack hardware to wars over a bucket? We go hard with this one. We've unpacked a whole lot of female rage, more cats, fashion, a whole lot of war, and a huge medeival "I told you so".📂 IN THIS EPISODE:Case File #42: The Origin of the Chainsaw. Suzi reveals the horrifying truth: the chainsaw wasn't invented for trees. It was invented by doctors... for childbirth. (Trigger Warning: It’s a medical nightmare).Case File #43: The Lioness of Brittany. Gavin tells the story of Jeanne de Clisson, a widow who sold everything to buy three black warships and spent 13 years being an absolute menace to the French Crown out of pure female rage.Case File #44: Pope Gregory IX vs. Cats. The story of how one Pope decided cats were agents of Satan, ordered them exterminated, and accidentally rolled out the red carpet for the Black Death.Case File #45: The Invention of the High Heel. Men, you did this to yourselves. Gavin explains how high heels started as masculine military gear for short kings before men decided they were "too painful" and dumped them on women.Case File #46: The War of the Bucket. That time Bologna and Modena went to war, killed thousands of people, and held a grudge for 700 years... all over a stolen wooden bucket.Case File #47: Eleanor of Aquitaine. The ultimate medieval "I told you so." When the King of France divorced her for not producing a son, she married his rival and immediately built an empire of male heirs.🎧 LISTEN & SUBSCRIBE: If you enjoyed this tour through the hot mess of history, please rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform! It helps us keep the lights flickering. 🏷️ TAGS: #OdditiesDepartment #WeirdHistory #TrueCrime #MedicalHistory #ChainsawOrigin #PirateQueen #MedievalHistory #Podcast #Comedy #SpookyStay curious. Stay weird. And seriously... don't Google "Symphysiotomy."

Send us Fan MailIn Episode 7 of The Oddities Department, we travel all over the world, and back and forth through time to show you some of history's wildest oddities. In this episode, we cover:Case File #36: Wojtek The Bear. The incredible true story of a Syrian Brown Bear who drank beer, smoked cigarettes, and carried ammo for the Polish II Corps during World War II.Case File #37: The Winchester Mystery House. Sarah Winchester spent 38 years building a mansion to confuse the ghosts of the Civil War. Was it madness, or was it the most expensive panic room in history?Case File #38: The War for Breakfast. Dr. John Harvey Kellogg didn't invent Corn Flakes to help you start your day right. He invented them to stop you from sinning.Case File #39: The Teenage God Emperor. Meet Elagabalus, the 14-year-old ruler of Rome who replaced Jupiter with a giant rock, kept pet lions in guest bedrooms, and smothered his enemies with rose petals.Case File #40: The 10,000 Year Warning. How do we tell the future not to touch our nuclear waste? The government’s solution involved "hostile architecture" and glow-in-the-dark cats.Case File #41: The Judas Goat. The dark industrial history of the "traitor goats" who led sheep to the slaughterhouse in exchange for a nicotine addiction.Join the Department: If you enjoyed this tour through the weirdest corners of history, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify! It helps us keep the lights on in the basement.Follow Us: TikTok: @TheOdditiesDept Instagram: @TheOdditiesDeptStay curious. Stay weird. And don't eat the cornflakes.

Send us Fan Mail In Episode 6, Gavin and Suzi crack open the "Staff Only" files to explore what happens when biology, technology, and monarchy go horribly wrong.We travel from the frozen isolation of Antarctica, where a surgeon faces an impossible choice, to the throne room of France, where the King makes a bunch of questionable choices. We dive into the ocean to find ancient computers that shouldn't exist, and we look at the animal kingdom's most brutal dating rituals (spoiler: the male usually dies).If you’ve ever felt like your brain is working against you, or if you think your job is hard, this episode is for you.IN THIS EPISODE:Case File #30: Charles VI (The Glass King) We recount the tragic and bizarre reign of the French King who believed his butt was made of glass and sewed iron rods into his pants to prevent shattering.Case File #31: The Arctic DIY Surgeon The harrowing true story of Leonid Rogozov, the Soviet doctor who performed his own appendectomy in the middle of an Antarctic blizzard with no anesthesia.Case File #32: "Male-Hating" Female Animals Romance is dead. Suzi explains the mechanics of the Praying Mantis, the Deep-Sea Anglerfish, and the absolute nightmare of Spotted Hyena birth.Case File #33: The Antikythera Mechanism Gavin explains the 2,000-year-old "laptop" found in a Roman shipwreck that rewrote the history of technology.Case File #34: Alien Hand Syndrome A look at the neurological condition where one hand develops a mind of its own—unbuttoning shirts, slapping faces, and sometimes choking its owner.Case File #35: Emperor Norton I The heartwarming story of the homeless man who declared himself Emperor of the United States, and the city of San Francisco that decided to play along.LINKS & NOTES:Mentioned in this episode: The "Mating Ball" of the Green Anaconda, The "Blue Hour" of Polar Night, and the currency of Emperor Norton.Rate & Review: If you enjoyed this tour of the strange, please leave us a review! It helps keep the Department lights on.FOLLOW US:TikTok: @TheOdditiesDepartmentInstagram: @TheOdditiesDeptTAGS: History, Science, Weird History, Medical Mysteries, True Story, Antarctica, Emperor Norton, True Crime, Biology, Comedy, The Oddities Department

Send us Fan Mail🎧 Episode 5 — When Humans Get Confident and Reality Gets CreativeIn this episode of The Oddities Department, we open six case files that prove one uncomfortable truth: humans are very confident… and very often wrong.We start in 18th-century France, where people feared potatoes so deeply they would rather starve than eat them, until a pharmacist staged one of history’s earliest PR campaigns and changed a nation’s diet forever.From there, we step into the private world of Princess Alexandra of Bavaria, a royal woman whose belief that her body was made of glass went unquestioned, not because it was true, but because no one was allowed to challenge it.We then walk the long corridors of the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, a place built with hope that collapsed under overcrowding, outdated medicine, and the dangerous idea that silence meant success.Next, we meet Timothy Dexter, a loud, illiterate man who failed upward so aggressively that luck became a personality trait—and history mistook chaos for brilliance.The episode turns darker with the Atacama “Alien,” a tiny skeleton mislabeled as extraterrestrial until science revealed a far harder truth: the remains belonged to a human child, and the real mystery was how quickly dignity was sacrificed for a better story.We close underground with naked mole rats, nearly ageless, cancer-resistant, pain-ignoring mammals that break almost every biological rule we assume applies to us.Episode 5 is about confidence, belief, and the consequences of deciding we’re right before we’re careful.Welcome back to The Oddities Department. Stay curious. Stay weird. And don’t take anything at face value.5nFqzazAMlTW7f7gmNA9

Send us Fan Mail🗂️ EPISODE 4 — When Will We Ever Learn?In Episode 4 of The Oddities Department, we explore what happens when humans encounter something strange, dangerous, or misunderstood and confidently make it worse.This episode spans centuries, continents, oceans, and outer space, all tied together by a familiar thread: human audacity.We begin with the Black Orlov Diamond, a gemstone rumored to carry a trail of tragedy and suspicious deaths through its ownership history. Curse or coincidence, the vibes are undeniably bad.From there, we head to the Arctic with the bowhead whale and the harpoon, a real-world case involving a whale discovered with a 19th-century explosive harpoon embedded in its body, having survived and healed around the wound for more than a century — a quiet reminder that nature plays the long game.Next, we examine the India Cobra Problem, where a colonial-era bounty program meant to reduce venomous snakes accidentally encouraged people to breed them instead, making the situation far worse.Then we leave Earth with Project MOOSE, a Cold War–era NASA contingency plan that seriously considered having astronauts eject from spacecraft and reenter the atmosphere alone, wrapped in a personal heat shield. No steering. No guarantees.We also meet Tycho Brahe, the brilliant and deeply eccentric 16th-century astronomer who lost his nose in a duel over math, built the world’s first research institute, and kept a psychic court dwarf and a pet elk — all while laying the groundwork for modern astronomy.We close with octopus wrestling, the strange mid-20th-century practice of humans deciding to physically grapple octopuses, unintentionally revealing just how intelligent and strategic these animals truly are.It’s an episode about endurance, ego, unintended consequences, and the human impulse to throw the last punch...even when no one asked for a fight.

Send us Fan MailIn this episode of The Oddities Department, Gavin and Suzi crack open another drawer in the archives and wander straight into the wonderfully weird corners of history, biology, coincidence, and human incompetence.We kick things off with a parasite that hijacks snails and turns their eyeballs into psychedelic “eat me” billboards for birds. Then we head to 1915 South Carolina, where Essie Dunbar sat up in her own coffin and sent an entire funeral sprinting for their lives. From there, we dive into the case of the “Jim Twins” — two strangers living parallel lives so identical it feels like the universe copy-pasted a man by mistake. Gavin then unpacks the Halifax Explosion, one of the most devastating man-made blasts before the atomic age. And finally: Oregon. A whale. Dynamite. And a decision so catastrophically ill-advised it became legend.It’s an episode full of biological chaos, historical mayhem, uncanny coincidences, and government choices that absolutely should’ve gone through another meeting.If you love strange science, impossible-seeming stories, dark humor, and those “wait… WHAT?” moments, this one’s for you.Stay curious. Stay weird. And welcome to The Oddities Department.

Send us Fan MailIn Episode 2, Gavin and Suzi dive headfirst into some of the strangest, funniest, and most bewildering stories history and science have to offer. We start with the explosive tale of the tooth that literally detonated, then dance straight into the madness of the 1518 Dancing Plague, where an entire town couldn’t stop moving even as it collapsed from exhaustion.Things get bird-brained as we unpack Australia’s Great Emu War, a real conflict the emus famously won. Victorian medicine then delivers peak chaos with the invention of the vibrator, originally created to “treat” hysteria in ways that were… let’s just say not very medical.Gavin then unravels the chilling mystery of the severed feet washing ashore around the Pacific Northwest — a case that baffled the public and sparked years of speculation. And finally, Suzi explores Autobrewery Syndrome, the condition where the human gut ferments carbs into alcohol, turning unsuspecting people into walking microbreweries.It’s bizarre, it’s hilarious, it’s unsettling, and it’s exactly why The Oddities Department exists.Stay curious. Stay weird. Nothing is ever quite what it seems.

Send us Fan MailStep inside The Oddities Department, where history gets weird, science gets weirder, and Gavin and Suzi open the drawers of the bizarre for your listening pleasure. In this debut episode, we’re diving headfirst into five real stories so strange you’ll wonder how humanity survived long enough to make a podcast about it.We explore Victorian high society’s obsession with wearing live jewel beetles as fashion accessories, the medieval town that put a rooster on trial for witchcraft, and the CIA’s multi-million dollar attempt to turn a housecat into a Cold War cyborg spy. Then we meet the alchemist who boiled fifty buckets of pee trying to make gold (and accidentally discovered phosphorus), before ending with the hauntingly modern case of Nesyamun, the ancient Egyptian priest whose voice was resurrected 3,000 years after his death.If you love bizarre true stories, eerie historical oddities, questionable science experiments, and “wait… WHAT?” moments, you're in the right place. Grab your curiosity and step into the archive. Nothing is ever quite what it seems.