The Great Molasses Flood: A Twenty-Five-Foot Wave in Boston — Boston, 1919

In February of 1959, nine experienced hikers set out on a skiing expedition through the northern Ural Mountains of the Soviet Union. They never came home. When a search party finally found their camp three and a half weeks later, the tent had been cut open from the inside, and the hikers had fled into subzero temperatures without proper clothing — some in socks, some barefoot — running down the mountainside away from their shelter and, as far as anyone can tell, away from nothing at all. Some of the bodies had died of hypothermia, tragic but comprehensible. Others were not comprehensible at all: two had crushed chests with no external bruising, injuries typically associated with a serious car accident. One was missing his tongue and his eyes. Some of the clothing tested positive for radiation. The Soviet investigation closed the case within months, attributing the deaths to what the official report called "a compelling natural force," without specifying what that force was. The files were sealed. Host Shawn Spainhour takes you into the full story: the group and their expedition, the specific and deeply strange condition of the camp and the bodies, the six decades of theories ranging from avalanches to secret weapons to the Yeti, and the modern scientific explanation that may finally account for most — though not all — of what happened on that mountain. 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-eight more waiting for you. Sources: Wikipedia contributors. Dyatlov Pass incident. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024. History.com editors. The Dyatlov Pass Incident: Why the Hiker Deaths Remain a Mystery. A and E Television Networks, 2025. Science History Institute. The Russian Roswell. sciencehistory.org, 2024. All That's Interesting. We May Finally Know Why Nine Soviet Hikers Lost Their Lives in the Dyatlov Pass Incident. 2024. History Chronicles. The Dyatlov Pass Incident: What Really Happened in 1959? 2026. École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. Using Science to Explore a Sixty-Year-Old Russian Mystery. epfl.ch, 2021. Gaume, Johan and McElwaine, Alexander. Reconstructing the Dyatlov Pass Incident through a re-evaluation of a slab avalanche. Communications Earth and Environment, 2021. Lost in History. The Mystery of the Dyatlov Pass Incident. 2024.

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.

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.

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.

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.