In 1325, soldiers from Modena snuck into the city of Bologna in the middle of the night and stole a wooden bucket from a well. Bologna declared war. Two thousand men died. The bucket is still in Modena. Bologna has never gotten it back.

That is the legend. The truth is messier, bloodier, and in some ways more interesting. Behind the bucket were two hundred years of accumulated grievance between two rival Italian city-states, the grinding factional violence of the Guelph and Ghibelline conflict, and a battle in which a seven-thousand-man Modenese force defeated a Bolognese army more than four times its size—then held a celebratory race outside the walls of the city they had just humiliated.

Host Shawn Spainhour takes you into the full story: the specific mechanics of how medieval Italian city-states fought and why they could never stop; the Battle of Zappolino and the military craft that turned a hopeless mismatch into a rout; the seventeenth-century satirical epic poem the conflict inspired; and the bucket itself—still sitting in a tower in Modena seven hundred years later, still not returned, still the subject of a rivalry that has never quite died.

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 eleven more waiting for you.

Sources are listed in the show notes:

• Wikipedia contributors. War of the Bucket. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024.
• Wikipedia contributors. Battle of Zappolino. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024.
• Tassoni, Alessandro. La secchia rapita. Paris, 1622.
• Griffoni, Matteo. Conflictus Zapolini, Memoriale historicum de rebus bononiensium. Circa 1325.
• Abulafia, David, ed. The New Cambridge Medieval History, Volume Five. Cambridge University Press, 1999.
• Britannica editors. Guelphs and Ghibellines. Encyclopaedia Britannica, updated 2024.
• HistoryNet. What We Learned from the Battle of Zappolino, 1325. 2022.
• All That's Interesting. The Bizarre History of the War of the Bucket. 2023.
• Amusing Planet. The War of the Bucket. 2023.

A book exists. It is sitting right now in a climate-controlled vault at Yale University. It has been photographed, digitized, and made freely available online. Professional cryptographers, linguists, historians, and astronomers have studied it for over a century. The NSA has studied it. The greatest codebreaker of the twentieth century studied it for years and walked away without an answer.

Not one word of it has ever been decoded.

The Voynich Manuscript is a five-hundred-year-old book written in a script that matches no known language, filled with detailed illustrations of plants that do not exist, star charts for constellations no one recognizes, and page after page of small nude figures arranged in elaborate systems of pools and tubes that make no physical sense. The vellum is real. The ink is real. The hand that wrote it was confident and practiced. And whatever it says has defeated every attempt to read it.

Host Shawn Spainhour takes you through the full story: the manuscript's journey from a Holy Roman Emperor's collection to a Jesuit archive to a Yale vault; the statistical properties of the script that suggest it is not random; the parade of failed decipherments; and the two possibilities that remain—that the manuscript contains something genuinely significant or that it is the most successful hoax in the history of Western culture. Both are extraordinary. Neither has been ruled out.

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 ten more waiting for you.

Sources are listed in the show notes:

• Wikipedia contributors. Voynich manuscript. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024.
• Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Voynich Manuscript collection page. 2024.
• Britannica editors. Voynich manuscript. Encyclopaedia Britannica, updated 2024.
• History.com editors. The Mysterious Contents of the Voynich Manuscript. 2025.
• Montemurro, Marcelo A. and Zanette, Damian H. Keywords and Co-Occurrence Patterns in the Voynich Manuscript: An Information-Theoretic Analysis. PLOS ONE, 2013.
• The Art Newspaper. The Voynich Manuscript revealed: five things you probably didn't know about the Medieval masterpiece. 2025.
• Kennedy, Gerry and Churchill, Rob. The Voynich Manuscript. Orion Publishing Group, 2004.
• D'Imperio, Mary. The Voynich Manuscript: An Elegant Enigma. National Security Agency, 1978.

In late March of 1922, six people were murdered on a remote Bavarian farmstead north of Munich. The killer was never caught. But what makes Hinterkaifeck unlike any other unsolved case in German history is not the murders themselves—it is what came after. Someone stayed. For four days following the killings, whoever did it continued living on the farm. They fed the livestock. They lit the fires. They ate food from the kitchen. They turned the calendar page. The bodies of the family lay covered in hay in the barn the entire time.

Host Shawn Spainhour takes you into the full story: the Gruber family and the specific shadows in their history that may have sealed their fate; the footprints in the snow that led to the farm and never led back out; the sounds in the attic that the previous maid had reported for weeks before she quit; and the over one hundred suspects investigated across a century of trying. In 2007, a team of German Police Academy students re-examined the case and claimed they knew who the killer was—but refused to name them.

The case has never been officially solved.

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 ten more waiting for you.

Sources are listed in the show notes:

• Wikipedia contributors. Hinterkaifeck murders. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024.
• Mental Floss. The Chilling Story of the Hinterkaifeck Killings, Germany's Most Famous Unsolved Crime. 2023.
• All That's Interesting. The Gruesome True Story of the Unsolved Hinterkaifeck Murders. 2023.
• Bavarian State Archives Munich. Investigation files on the Hinterkaifeck case, 1922 to 1923.
• Reingruber, Georg. Initial investigation report, Hinterkaifeck farmstead. April 5, 1922.
• Aumüller, Johann Baptist. Post-mortem examination report, Hinterkaifeck victims. April 5 and 6, 1922.
• German Police Academy Fürstenfeldbruck. Criminological re-examination of the Hinterkaifeck case. 2007.
• Headcount Coffee. The Unsolved Hinterkaifeck Murders That Still Defy Explanation. 2026.