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Episode 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.

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EPISODE 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.

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EPISODE 11 — The Oddities Department

This 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.