Inside the Hindenburg & The Dunes That Swallowed a Town

You’ve seen the Hindenburg footage. You’ve heard the famous radio broadcast. But what was it actually like to be inside the Hindenburg when it caught fire?

Kat and Jethro revisit one of history’s most recognizable disasters through the eyewitness accounts of the people who survived it. Passengers were thrown across rooms as the airship tilted, an acrobat hung from the outside waiting for the right moment to drop, a mother threw her children from a window, and a teenage cabin boy survived thanks to an extraordinary accident involving a ruptured water tank. Of the 97 passengers and crew aboard, remarkably, 62 survived. Their stories reveal a side of the Hindenburg disaster that the famous newsreel footage could never capture.

Then, Kat heads to the Great Lakes, where some Michigan sand dunes aren’t content to simply sit there looking picturesque. They move. Slowly. Relentlessly. And occasionally straight through somebody’s house.

Near Silver Lake, homeowners have battled migrating dunes that can advance several feet a year, burying cottages, orchards, and anything else unfortunate enough to be in their path. And beneath the dunes near Lake Michigan lies the remains of Singapore, Michigan—a once-thriving 19th-century settlement gradually swallowed by sand.

Two stories about being in exactly the wrong place at exactly the wrong time: surviving the Hindenburg from the inside, and the very patient sand dunes that will eventually have your house.

Welcome to The Box of Oddities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices