In Episode 7 of The Oddities Department, we travel all over the world, and back and forth through time to show you some of history's wildest oddities.

In this episode, we cover:

• Case File #36: Wojtek The Bear. The incredible true story of a Syrian Brown Bear who drank beer, smoked cigarettes, and carried ammo for the Polish II Corps during World War II.
• Case File #37: The Winchester Mystery House. Sarah Winchester spent 38 years building a mansion to confuse the ghosts of the Civil War. Was it madness, or was it the most expensive panic room in history?
• Case File #38: The War for Breakfast. Dr. John Harvey Kellogg didn't invent Corn Flakes to help you start your day right. He invented them to stop you from sinning.
• Case File #39: The Teenage God Emperor. Meet Elagabalus, the 14-year-old ruler of Rome who replaced Jupiter with a giant rock, kept pet lions in guest bedrooms, and smothered his enemies with rose petals.
• Case File #40: The 10,000 Year Warning. How do we tell the future not to touch our nuclear waste? The government’s solution involved "hostile architecture" and glow-in-the-dark cats.
• Case File #41: The Judas Goat. The dark industrial history of the "traitor goats" who led sheep to the slaughterhouse in exchange for a nicotine addiction.

Join the Department: If you enjoyed this tour through the weirdest corners of history, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify! It helps us keep the lights on in the basement.

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Stay curious. Stay weird. And don't eat the cornflakes.

In Episode 6, Gavin and Suzi crack open the "Staff Only" files to explore what happens when biology, technology, and monarchy go horribly wrong.

We travel from the frozen isolation of Antarctica, where a surgeon faces an impossible choice, to the throne room of France, where the King makes a bunch of questionable choices. We dive into the ocean to find ancient computers that shouldn't exist, and we look at the animal kingdom's most brutal dating rituals (spoiler: the male usually dies).

If you’ve ever felt like your brain is working against you, or if you think your job is hard, this episode is for you.

IN THIS EPISODE:

• Case File #30: Charles VI (The Glass King) We recount the tragic and bizarre reign of the French King who believed his butt was made of glass and sewed iron rods into his pants to prevent shattering.
• Case File #31: The Arctic DIY Surgeon The harrowing true story of Leonid Rogozov, the Soviet doctor who performed his own appendectomy in the middle of an Antarctic blizzard with no anesthesia.
• Case File #32: "Male-Hating" Female Animals Romance is dead. Suzi explains the mechanics of the Praying Mantis, the Deep-Sea Anglerfish, and the absolute nightmare of Spotted Hyena birth.
• Case File #33: The Antikythera Mechanism Gavin explains the 2,000-year-old "laptop" found in a Roman shipwreck that rewrote the history of technology.
• Case File #34: Alien Hand Syndrome A look at the neurological condition where one hand develops a mind of its own—unbuttoning shirts, slapping faces, and sometimes choking its owner.
• Case File #35: Emperor Norton I The heartwarming story of the homeless man who declared himself Emperor of the United States, and the city of San Francisco that decided to play along.

LINKS & NOTES:

• Mentioned in this episode: The "Mating Ball" of the Green Anaconda, The "Blue Hour" of Polar Night, and the currency of Emperor Norton.
• Rate & Review: If you enjoyed this tour of the strange, please leave us a review! It helps keep the Department lights on.

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• Instagram: @TheOdditiesDept

TAGS: History, Science, Weird History, Medical Mysteries, True Story, Antarctica, Emperor Norton, True Crime, Biology, Comedy, The Oddities Department

🎧 Episode 5 — When Humans Get Confident and Reality Gets Creative

In this episode of The Oddities Department, we open six case files that prove one uncomfortable truth: humans are very confident… and very often wrong.

We start in 18th-century France, where people feared potatoes so deeply they would rather starve than eat them, until a pharmacist staged one of history’s earliest PR campaigns and changed a nation’s diet forever.

From there, we step into the private world of Princess Alexandra of Bavaria, a royal woman whose belief that her body was made of glass went unquestioned, not because it was true, but because no one was allowed to challenge it.

We then walk the long corridors of the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, a place built with hope that collapsed under overcrowding, outdated medicine, and the dangerous idea that silence meant success.

Next, we meet Timothy Dexter, a loud, illiterate man who failed upward so aggressively that luck became a personality trait—and history mistook chaos for brilliance.

The episode turns darker with the Atacama “Alien,” a tiny skeleton mislabeled as extraterrestrial until science revealed a far harder truth: the remains belonged to a human child, and the real mystery was how quickly dignity was sacrificed for a better story.

We close underground with naked mole rats, nearly ageless, cancer-resistant, pain-ignoring mammals that break almost every biological rule we assume applies to us.

Episode 5 is about confidence, belief, and the consequences of deciding we’re right before we’re careful.

Welcome back to The Oddities Department.
Stay curious. Stay weird. And don’t take anything at face value.

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