Strange Epochs • Weird History

Strange History • Sleep Podcast
  • 0.0 (0)
  • History
  • Updated Weekly

Strange Epochs: History's Most Extraordinary True Stories History is full of events so remarkable, so inexplicable, that they seem like they couldn't possibly be real. And yet they are. Every week, host Shawn Spainhour takes you deep inside one of history's most extraordinary true stories. Not the events you studied in school — the ones that got left out. The ones historians still argue about. The ones that make you question everything you thought you knew about the past. From medieval mass hysteria to unsolved disappearances, from forgotten wars to events that defied every reasonable explanation — Strange Epochs brings history to life the way it actually felt to the people who lived it. Immersive. Atmospheric. Completely true. This isn't a history lecture. It's an experience. Episodes explore stories like: The Dancing Plague of 1518 — when hundreds of people danced uncontrollably for days and couldn't stop The Cadaver Synod — when a Pope put a dead man on trial The Great Emu War — when the Australian military lost a war against birds The Tunguska Event — the largest unexplained explosion in recorded history The Lost Colony of Roanoke — America's oldest unsolved mystery Hinterkaifeck — the farmstead murder that was never solved The Voynich Manuscript — a book no one has ever been able to read The Ghost Army of WWII — the secret unit that won battles with illusions New episodes every Tuesday. If you love history podcasts like Fall of Civilizations, Hardcore History, or Cautionary Tales — Strange Epochs is your next listen. Subscribe now and never miss an episode.

  1. 1d ago

    The Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic: When an Entire Region Could Not Stop — Tanzania, 1962

    On January 30th, 1962, three girls at a boarding school in Kashasha, on the western shore of Lake Victoria in what was then Tanganyika, began laughing uncontrollably. By the end of the week, nearly sixty percent of the school's one hundred and fifty-nine pupils were affected — fits of laughter lasting hours, sometimes days, accompanied by crying, fainting, rashes, and difficulty breathing. No joke had been told. No toxin was found. No physiological cause was identified. The school was closed. The students went home. The laughter went with them. Over the following eighteen months the epidemic spread to at least fourteen schools and villages across the region, affecting nearly a thousand people. Schools closed for months. The local government and the medical community were baffled. The colonial administration found the situation both scientifically inexplicable and politically inconvenient. The Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic of 1962 is documented, investigated, and written up in medical journals. It was not funny. It was terrifying. And it remains, more than sixty years later, stubbornly not fully explained. Host Shawn Spainhour takes you into the full story: the mission school where it started, the specific pressures of colonial Tanganyika that may have made a population vulnerable, the medical response that failed to contain it, and what the best current science says about how fear and stress can move through a community like a contagion with no pathogen at all. If you love history, true crime, or storytelling — or if you're just looking for something to listen to on a long drive or drift off to sleep — this one is for you. Strange Epochs is a weekly narrative history podcast hosted by Shawn Spainhour. Each episode takes one strange, true, documented moment from somewhere in the long span of human history and sits with it — slow, atmospheric, and built for deep listening. New episodes every Tuesday. If this is your first episode, there are twenty-six more waiting for you. Sources: Wikipedia contributors. Tanganyika laughter epidemic. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024.Rankin, A.M. and Philip, P.J. An epidemic of laughing in the Bukoba District of Tanganyika. Transcultural Psychiatric Research, 1963.Atlas Obscura. The 1962 Laughter Epidemic of Tanganyika Was No Joke. atlasobscura.com, 2025.HowStuffWorks. Not So Funny: The Mysterious 1962 Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic. health.howstuffworks.com, 2023.Commonplace Fun Facts. The Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic of 1962: When Giggles Shut Down a Nation. January, 2026.Mental Floss. The Strange Months-Long Laughing Epidemic of 1962 No One Could Stop. May, 2026.Owaahh. The Tanganyika Laughing Epidemic of 1962. owaahh.com, 2024.Provine, Robert R. Laughter: A Scientific Investigation. Viking, 2000.Bartholomew, Robert E. and Wessely, Simon. Protean nature of mass sociogenic illness. British Journal of Psychiatry, 2002.

    The Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic: When an Entire Region Could Not Stop — Tanzania, 1962

  2. Sep 29

    The Great Impostor: The Man Who Became Everyone — 1951

    Ferdinand Waldo Demara Jr. was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1921. Over the course of his life he impersonated, among other things, a Trappist monk, a cancer researcher, a prison warden, a civil engineer, a college dean of philosophy, and a surgeon in the Royal Canadian Navy during the Korean War. He had no formal qualifications for any of them. He had never been to medical school. He simply read the relevant books, absorbed the vocabulary, and became — convincingly, sometimes brilliantly — whatever he needed to be. He did not do it for money. He did not do it primarily to avoid justice. He did it, as best as anyone could ever determine, because he could. Because performance felt more real to him than identity itself. And then nineteen wounded soldiers were brought aboard his ship off the coast of Korea, one of them needing emergency chest surgery, and the man who was not a doctor had to operate. Every patient survived. Host Shawn Spainhour takes you through the full story: the restless, rootless early life that produced Demara, the string of impersonations that preceded the Navy, the afternoon on the HMCS Cayuga that made him famous, and the specific question his life keeps raising — what is identity, really, if a man with no credentials can perform it better than the people who earned them? If you love history, true crime, or storytelling — or if you're just looking for something to listen to on a long drive or drift off to sleep — this one is for you. Strange Epochs is a weekly narrative history podcast hosted by Shawn Spainhour. Each episode takes one strange, true, documented moment from somewhere in the long span of human history and sits with it — slow, atmospheric, and built for deep listening. New episodes every Tuesday. If this is your first episode, there are twenty-five more waiting for you. Sources: Wikipedia contributors. Ferdinand Waldo Demara. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024.Crichton, Robert. The Great Impostor. Random House, 1960.UPI Archives. Ferdinand Waldo Demara Jr., The Great Impostor. June 9, 1982.War History Online. The Great Impostor — Fred Demara Pretended to Be a Ship's Surgeon and Didn't Lose a Soul. July, 2022.Soyummy.com. The Great Impostor Who Faked His Way Into History. June, 2025.Academic Block. Ferdinand Waldo Demara: His Biography and Scams. November, 2025.Time Magazine. Ferdinand Demara. Top Ten Imposters. time.com.Lessons from History. The Fascinating Story of the Great Imposter Who Fooled the World. January, 2023.

    The Great Impostor: The Man Who Became Everyone — 1951

  3. Sep 22

    The Lost Colony of Roanoke: One Hundred and Fifteen People, One Word, No Answers — North Carolina, 1590

    In August of 1590, a supply ship finally reached Roanoke Island off the coast of what is now North Carolina. The governor, John White, had been away for three years — delayed by war, politics, and circumstances always just beyond his control. He had left behind one hundred and fifteen English men, women, and children, including his daughter, his son-in-law, and his infant granddaughter Virginia Dare, the first child born in the Americas to English parents. He landed. He walked through the gate of the palisade wall. The settlement was empty. No people. No bodies. No signs of violent struggle. The houses had been carefully dismantled, the timber removed. The colonists' possessions were buried in chests, as if waiting to be recovered. Whatever happened, it was not a sudden attack in the night. It was a deliberate departure. Carved into the post of the gate, in capital letters: CROATOAN. On a nearby tree: CRO. That is all that remains of them. A word and three letters. Host Shawn Spainhour takes you into the full story: the ambitions and failures that produced the Roanoke Colony, the people who lived on that island and what their lives actually looked like, the theories that have been proposed across four centuries of searching, and what the archaeology and the documentary record actually tell us — and don't tell us — about where they went. If you love history, true crime, or storytelling — or if you're just looking for something to listen to on a long drive or drift off to sleep — this one is for you. Strange Epochs is a weekly narrative history podcast hosted by Shawn Spainhour. Each episode takes one strange, true, documented moment from somewhere in the long span of human history and sits with it — slow, atmospheric, and built for deep listening. New episodes every Tuesday. If this is your first episode, there are twenty-four more waiting for you. Sources: Wikipedia contributors. Roanoke Colony. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024.Britannica editors. Lost Colony. Encyclopaedia Britannica, updated 2024.History.com editors. Did the Lost Colony of Roanoke Disappear or Just Assimilate? A and E Television Networks, 2025.National Geographic. The Search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke. nationalgeographic.com, 2021.National Park Service, Fort Raleigh National Historic Site. Major Theories of the Lost Colony. nps.gov, 2024.History Guild. What We Now Know About the Lost Colony of Roanoke. historyguild.org, 2021.All That's Interesting. Archaeologists Say They've Just Solved the Four-Hundred-Year-Old Mystery of the Lost Colony of Roanoke. 2025.Kupperman, Karen Ordahl. Roanoke: The Abandoned Colony. Rowman and Littlefield, 2007.Miller, Lee. Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony. Penguin, 2002.

    The Lost Colony of Roanoke: One Hundred and Fifteen People, One Word, No Answers — North Carolina, 1590

  4. Sep 15

    The Black Death Flagellants: When Europe Bled for God — Germany, 1349

    Between 1348 and 1350, the Black Death killed one in three people in Europe. In some cities, half the population. In some villages, everyone. The priests were dying alongside their congregations. The doctors had nothing. And into this catastrophe, a movement emerged. Groups of men — sometimes hundreds, sometimes thousands — walked from town to town across Europe in white robes marked with red crosses. When they arrived at the town square, they stripped to the waist and beat themselves with leather whips tipped with metal spikes until the blood ran down their backs and spattered the walls. Three times a day. For thirty-three and a half days. In front of everyone who had gathered to watch. They were the Flagellants. The Brothers of the Cross. They believed that their blood would wash away the collective sin of humanity and stop the plague. They also believed they did not need the Church — that their sacrifice superseded the sacraments entirely. That last belief is why the Pope condemned them. Host Shawn Spainhour takes you into the full story: the specific scale of devastation that produced the movement, the theology that drove it, the crowds that welcomed them and the authorities that feared them, and what happens when a civilization's entire framework for understanding suffering stops being sufficient. If you love history, true crime, or storytelling — or if you're just looking for something to listen to on a long drive or drift off to sleep — this one is for you. Strange Epochs is a weekly narrative history podcast hosted by Shawn Spainhour. Each episode takes one strange, true, documented moment from somewhere in the long span of human history and sits with it — slow, atmospheric, and built for deep listening. New episodes every Tuesday. If this is your first episode, there are twenty-three more waiting for you. Sources: Wikipedia contributors. Flagellant. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024.Wikipedia contributors. Black Death. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024.History in Numbers. Flagellants. historyinnumbers.com, 2024.Catholic Encyclopedia. Flagellants. newadvent.org, 2024.Grokipedia. Flagellant. grokipedia.com, 2026.Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. The Flagellants. fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk, 2024.Boccaccio, Giovanni. The Decameron. Circa 1353.Ziegler, Philip. The Black Death. Collins, 1969.Kelly, John. The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death. HarperCollins, 2005.

    The Black Death Flagellants: When Europe Bled for God — Germany, 1349

  5. Sep 8

    The Mad Parliament: The Day Barons Cornered a King — Oxford, England, 1258

    Here's the full package for Episode 23: The Mad Parliament: The Day Barons Cornered a King — Oxford, England, 1258 In June of 1258, a group of English barons rode into Oxford wearing armor, surrounded their king, and forced him to accept something no English monarch had ever accepted before: that he could not govern without their permission. Henry III needed money. The barons had it. The price was a document called the Provisions of Oxford — a set of constitutional reforms that stripped the crown of its personal authority and distributed it among a council of fifteen barons who would supervise his ministers, control his treasury, and oversee the administration of his kingdom. Parliament would meet three times a year to monitor them. The king had been cornered, outmaneuvered, and systematically dismantled in a single afternoon. Henry's supporters called it the Parliamentum Insanum. The Mad Parliament. Host Shawn Spainhour takes you into the full story: the financial disasters and foreign favorites that had made Henry III one of the most resented kings in English history, the French-born baron Simon de Montfort who led the reform faction against his own brother-in-law, and the specific afternoon in Oxford that — in a direct and traceable line — became one of the ancestors of every modern democratic legislature. The men in that hall were acting entirely out of self-interest. History didn't care. If you love history, true crime, or storytelling — or if you're just looking for something to listen to on a long drive or drift off to sleep — this one is for you. Strange Epochs is a weekly narrative history podcast hosted by Shawn Spainhour. Each episode takes one strange, true, documented moment from somewhere in the long span of human history and sits with it — slow, atmospheric, and built for deep listening. New episodes every Tuesday. If this is your first episode, there are twenty-two more waiting for you. Sources: Wikipedia contributors. Oxford Parliament (1258). Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024.Wikipedia contributors. Provisions of Oxford. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024.Wikipedia contributors. Simon de Montfort, sixth Earl of Leicester. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024.Britannica editors. Provisions of Oxford. Encyclopaedia Britannica, updated 2024.UK Parliament. The Provisions of Oxford. parliament.uk, 2024.The National Archives. The Mad Parliament, 1258. nationalarchives.gov.uk, 2024.Britain Express. The Provisions of Oxford. britainexpress.com, 2024.Carpenter, David. The Struggle for Mastery: The Penguin History of Britain 1066 to 1284. Penguin, 2004.Maddicott, J.R. Simon de Montfort. Cambridge University Press, 1994.

    The Mad Parliament: The Day Barons Cornered a King — Oxford, England, 1258

  6. Sep 1

    The Ghost Army: Inflatable Tanks, Sound Effects, and the Artists Who Fooled the Nazis — Europe, 1944

    In the spring of 1944, the United States Army assembled a unit unlike any other in the history of warfare. Eleven hundred men — painters, illustrators, designers, architects, sound engineers, and radio operators recruited from art schools, advertising agencies, and theater companies — were given inflatable tanks, a collection of sound effects records, and one mission: make the Germans believe they were somewhere they weren't. The 23rd Headquarters Special Troops. The Ghost Army. They carried out twenty-one deception operations in ten months across France, Luxembourg, and Germany. They impersonated entire divisions. They broadcast the sounds of massed tank columns through speakers mounted on half-tracks. They painted fake unit insignia on real vehicles and staged them where German reconnaissance aircraft would photograph them. They saved an estimated fifteen thousand to thirty thousand American lives. Their existence was classified for fifty years. Most of the men came home, had careers and families, grew old, and never told anyone what they had done. Host Shawn Spainhour takes you into the full story: how the unit was conceived, how it operated, the men who served in it, and the specific audacity required to conduct a deception operation within earshot of the enemy with nothing more lethal than a paintbrush and a recording of tank engines. If you love history, true crime, or storytelling — or if you're just looking for something to listen to on a long drive or drift off to sleep — this one is for you. Strange Epochs is a weekly narrative history podcast hosted by Shawn Spainhour. Each episode takes one strange, true, documented moment from somewhere in the long span of human history and sits with it — slow, atmospheric, and built for deep listening. New episodes every Tuesday. If this is your first episode, there are twenty-one more waiting for you. Sources: Wikipedia contributors. Ghost Army. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024.Ghost Army Legacy Project. Official History of the Twenty-Third Headquarters Special Troops. ghostarmy.org, 2024.Smithsonian Magazine. How the Ghost Army of World War II Used Art to Deceive the Nazis. November, 2023.National World War II Museum. Ghost Army: The Combat Con Artists of World War II. Traveling Exhibition, 2023.War History Online. Ghost Army of World War II: They Fought with Art, Not Guns — and It Worked. February, 2026.Beyer, Rick. The Ghost Army of World War II. Princeton Architectural Press, 2015.Reit, Seymour. Masquerade: The Amazing Camouflage Deceptions of World War II. Hawthorn Books, 1978.United States Army. Fort Leonard Wood examines World War II Ghost Army deception tactics. army.mil, 2021.

    The Ghost Army: Inflatable Tanks, Sound Effects, and the Artists Who Fooled the Nazis — Europe, 1944

  7. Aug 25

    The Somerton Man: A Body, a Code, and a Mystery That Won't Close — Adelaide, Australia, 1948

    On the morning of December 1st, 1948, the body of a well-dressed man was found propped against a seawall on Somerton Beach in Adelaide, Australia. He had no wallet. No identification of any kind. The labels had been cut from every item of his clothing. The cause of death could not be determined. The only unusual item found on his person was a small scrap of paper tucked into a hidden pocket in his trousers, printed with two words in Persian. Tamám Shud. It is finished. What followed is one of the most famous cold cases in history. There is a book of Persian poetry with a phone number penciled in the back. There is a woman who knew more than she ever admitted. There is a coded message that no one has ever deciphered. There is a suitcase at the train station containing items labelled with a name that is not the dead man's. There is a plaster cast that, when shown to the woman with the phone number, made her physically faint. Seventy-four years after the body was found, DNA analysis gave the man a name. It did not explain the code, or the woman, or how he died, or why he came to Adelaide at all. Host Shawn Spainhour takes you through the full story — every thread, every dead end, and the parts that remain, in all the ways that matter most, completely open. If you love history, true crime, or storytelling — or if you're just looking for something to listen to on a long drive or drift off to sleep — this one is for you. Strange Epochs is a weekly narrative history podcast hosted by Shawn Spainhour. Each episode takes one strange, true, documented moment from somewhere in the long span of human history and sits with it — slow, atmospheric, and built for deep listening. New episodes every Tuesday. If this is your first episode, there are twenty more waiting for you. Sources: Wikipedia contributors. Somerton Man. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024.Smithsonian Magazine. The Enduring Mystery of the Somerton Man. February, 2025.CNN. Somerton Man mystery solved as DNA points to man's identity, professor claims. July 26, 2022.InDaily. Somerton Man's identity revealed, professor says. July 27, 2022.UPI. Identity mystery of Australia's Somerton Man solved with DNA after seventy-four years. July 27, 2022.Abbott, Derek A. and Fitzpatrick, Colleen M. Forensic genetic genealogy identification of the Somerton Man. Research announcement, University of Adelaide, 2022.PR Newswire. The Somerton Man Identified. July 26, 2022.Explore the Archive. The Mystery of the Somerton Man. 2023.

    The Somerton Man: A Body, a Code, and a Mystery That Won't Close — Adelaide, Australia, 1948

  8. Aug 19

    The London Beer Flood: When a Wave of Porter Killed Eight People — St. Giles, London, 1814

    On the afternoon of October 17th, 1814, an iron hoop on a twenty-two-foot fermentation vat at a London brewery snapped. The pressure triggered a chain reaction. The back wall of the brewery collapsed. Between one hundred and twenty-eight thousand and three hundred and twenty-three thousand gallons of dark porter ale poured into the streets of St. Giles — one of the most overcrowded and desperately poor neighborhoods in the city — at the speed of a wave. Eight people died. Five of them were mourners at an Irish wake for a two-year-old boy who had died the day before. A mother and her daughter taking tea were killed when the flood collapsed their house. A girl died in the street. An elderly woman died of the shock. The brewery was taken to court. The court ruled it was an act of God. The brewery avoided paying any compensation to the victims' families — and received a refund from Parliament for the lost beer. Host Shawn Spainhour takes you into the full story: the specific poverty of St. Giles, the industrial brewery that towered over it, the people who died on an ordinary Monday afternoon, and the specific geometry of who bears the cost when the law has not yet caught up with the industry that caused the harm. If you love history, true crime, or storytelling — or if you're just looking for something to listen to on a long drive or drift off to sleep — this one is for you. Strange Epochs is a weekly narrative history podcast hosted by Shawn Spainhour. Each episode takes one strange, true, documented moment from somewhere in the long span of human history and sits with it — slow, atmospheric, and built for deep listening. New episodes every Tuesday. If this is your first episode, there are nineteen more waiting for you. Sources: Wikipedia contributors. London Beer Flood. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024.History.com editors. The London Beer Flood. A and E Television Networks, 2025.Historic UK. The London Beer Flood of 1814. 2023.The History Press. The London Beer Flood. 2024.The History Reader. The London Beer Flood of 1814. 2025.Explore the Archive. The Tragic and Bizarre London Beer Flood of 1814. 2023.The Social Historian. London Beer Flood of 1814. 2018.Cornell, Martyn. So What Really Happened on October 17th, 1814? Zythophile Blog, 2009.

    The London Beer Flood: When a Wave of Porter Killed Eight People — St. Giles, London, 1814
See All (27)

About

Strange Epochs: History's Most Extraordinary True Stories History is full of events so remarkable, so inexplicable, that they seem like they couldn't possibly be real. And yet they are. Every week, host Shawn Spainhour takes you deep inside one of history's most extraordinary true stories. Not the events you studied in school — the ones that got left out. The ones historians still argue about. The ones that make you question everything you thought you knew about the past. From medieval mass hysteria to unsolved disappearances, from forgotten wars to events that defied every reasonable explanation — Strange Epochs brings history to life the way it actually felt to the people who lived it. Immersive. Atmospheric. Completely true. This isn't a history lecture. It's an experience. Episodes explore stories like: The Dancing Plague of 1518 — when hundreds of people danced uncontrollably for days and couldn't stop The Cadaver Synod — when a Pope put a dead man on trial The Great Emu War — when the Australian military lost a war against birds The Tunguska Event — the largest unexplained explosion in recorded history The Lost Colony of Roanoke — America's oldest unsolved mystery Hinterkaifeck — the farmstead murder that was never solved The Voynich Manuscript — a book no one has ever been able to read The Ghost Army of WWII — the secret unit that won battles with illusions New episodes every Tuesday. If you love history podcasts like Fall of Civilizations, Hardcore History, or Cautionary Tales — Strange Epochs is your next listen. Subscribe now and never miss an episode.

Information