The Oddities Department

Gavin

Welcome to The Oddities Department, an IMDb Listed podcast where history gets weird, science gets weirder, and Gavin and his museum crew gleefully drag you into the strangest corners of the universe. Every episode takes you on a tour full of bizarre true stories, cursed artifacts, questionable science experiments, forgotten folklore, and so many “wait… WHAT?” moments. If you love learning things that make you clutch your pearls, laugh, or rethink reality, you are in the right place.

  1. Mammoth Cave, The Bone Wars, Paul the Octopus & Balloon Animal Mania

    4d ago

    Mammoth Cave, The Bone Wars, Paul the Octopus & Balloon Animal Mania

    Send us Fan Mail This week on The Oddities Department, history gets underground, overconfident, tentacled, and fully airborne. In Episode 21, Gavin and Lindsay take you through four bizarre true stories from the stranger corners of science, history, and human decision-making. First, we descend into Mammoth Cave, where one of the largest cave systems on Earth comes with blind shrimp, fish-eating spiders, ancient Indigenous exploration, ghost stories, tuberculosis huts, tourist scams, fake police officers, and the Kentucky Cave Wars. Because apparently, even a hole in the ground can become a business rivalry with bad signage and worse judgment. Then we dig into The Bone Wars, the ridiculous scientific feud between Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh. These two brilliant paleontologists helped introduce the world to some of the most famous dinosaurs in history, then spent years turning fossil discovery into a petty, expensive, reputation-destroying slap fight. There are grudges, sabotage, dynamite, academic humiliation, and one dinosaur head placed very confidently on the wrong end. From there, we meet Paul the Octopus, the eight-armed oracle who predicted World Cup winners and made the entire sports world briefly surrender its sanity to a mollusk. What started as a cute aquarium publicity stunt became an international frenzy involving gamblers, angry fans, government officials, death threats, soccer superstition, and one damp little legend with a mussel and vibes. Finally, we float back to the 1700s for Balloon Mania, when Europe discovered hot air balloon flight and immediately decided the responsible thing to do was send up a sheep, a duck, and a rooster first. It was Enlightenment science, public spectacle, animal testing, and barnyard aviation all wrapped into one deeply questionable basket. This episode has everything: cave spiders, fossil drama, psychic seafood, dinosaur beef, cursed tourism, medical hubris, hot air balloons, airborne livestock, and just enough education to make the chaos feel legally defensible. Content warning: This episode contains discussion of death, claustrophobia, entrapment, starvation and exposure, tuberculosis, historical medical experimentation, human remains, animal testing and endangerment, death threats, profanity, and historical mistreatment of people and animals.

    1h 52m
  2. Nuns Gone Wild, Idaho's Beaver Drop, Ogoh-Ogoh & Nyepi, The Newport Sex Scandal

    May 26

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

    Send us Fan Mail 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.

    1h 14m
  3. King Ferdinand’s Royal Rooster, Prehistoric Trees, Unusual Body Disposal Methods & Tobacco Smoke Enemas

    May 18

    King Ferdinand’s Royal Rooster, Prehistoric Trees, Unusual Body Disposal Methods & Tobacco Smoke Enemas

    Send us Fan Mail This week on The Oddities Department, Gavin and Lindsay drag you through four exhibits that somehow connect royal anatomy, prehistoric swamp forests, death rituals, and one of the worst medical ideas humanity ever committed to paper. We start with King Ferdinand VII of Spain, a terrible ruler with an allegedly massive, malformed royal problem that required doctors, strategy, and possibly furniture. Then we travel back more than 300 million years to the Carboniferous Period, when trees refused to rot, oxygen levels went wild, and bugs grew large enough to make eye contact with your soul. From there, Lindsay builds Gavin a deeply cursed post-death menu featuring sky burial, Famadihana, mellification, and possibly the most annoying afterlife option of all: becoming glitter. Finally, Gavin closes the tour with the truly real history of tobacco smoke enemas, the 18th-century medical practice where doctors believed the cure for drowning, disease, and general inconvenience was blowing smoke directly up someone’s backside. This episode has everything: bizarre history, strange science, royal scandals, giant prehistoric insects, creative corpse disposal, questionable medicine, and enough wood jokes to get us escorted out of our own museum. Stay curious. Stay weird. And please… keep the tobacco out of your chocolate starfish. Topics include: King Ferdinand VII, Spanish royalty, bizarre medical history, Carboniferous Era trees, prehistoric insects, odd burial practices, sky burial, Famadihana, mellification, tobacco smoke enemas, weird history, strange science, and The Oddities Department.

    1h 21m
  4. Einstein's Brain Heist, Operation Mincemeat, Medieval Torture Devices, Cocaine Jazz Rats

    May 5

    Einstein's Brain Heist, Operation Mincemeat, Medieval Torture Devices, Cocaine Jazz Rats

    Send us Fan Mail In 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.

    1h 33m
  5. The Silent Twins, Defenestration, The Gympie Gympie Tree, The Duality Of A Spy, Booty Hole Eel & Tarrare

    Apr 27

    The Silent Twins, Defenestration, The Gympie Gympie Tree, The Duality Of A Spy, Booty Hole Eel & Tarrare

    Send us Fan Mail Episode 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.

    1h 43m
  6. The Horrific History of Beauty, Ann Hodges & The Meteorite, Mary Toft & The Rabbit Births, Johan de Witt, The Black Death "Cures"

    Apr 9

    The Horrific History of Beauty, Ann Hodges & The Meteorite, Mary Toft & The Rabbit Births, Johan de Witt, The Black Death "Cures"

    Send us Fan Mail In 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 worse This 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.

    1h 31m
  7. Nellie Bly, The King Of Sting, Dildos, Casanova, Oysters, The Cadaver Synod & Operation Cat Drop

    Mar 30

    Nellie Bly, The King Of Sting, Dildos, Casanova, Oysters, The Cadaver Synod & Operation Cat Drop

    Send us Fan Mail Episode 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.

    2h 1m
  8. The Kentucky Meat Shower, Juliane Koepcke, Dublin's Whiskey River, Mad Hatters, Chiropractic's & The Great Camel Experiment

    Mar 22

    The Kentucky Meat Shower, Juliane Koepcke, Dublin's Whiskey River, Mad Hatters, Chiropractic's & The Great Camel Experiment

    Send us Fan Mail Episode 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.

    1h 44m
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5
out of 5
11 Ratings

About

Welcome to The Oddities Department, an IMDb Listed podcast where history gets weird, science gets weirder, and Gavin and his museum crew gleefully drag you into the strangest corners of the universe. Every episode takes you on a tour full of bizarre true stories, cursed artifacts, questionable science experiments, forgotten folklore, and so many “wait… WHAT?” moments. If you love learning things that make you clutch your pearls, laugh, or rethink reality, you are in the right place.

Information

  • Creator
    Gavin
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    21
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 The Oddities Department
  • Show Website
    The Oddities Department

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