Dumb Dee Dumb

Published Jan 14, 2025, 10:00 AM

Today's trip through the Cabinet will take us on a journey through darkness and stupidity. Both paths promise to be very curious.

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Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild. Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. Monsters are an interesting concept. They're supposed to be terrifying, yet they can also be reductive. Humans love to put labels on things that scare us, and after thousands of years, those labels have taxonomies as complex as any given mammal. Nowadays, it's easy to mock things like zombies, vampires, and werewolves because they become cliches devoid of mystery. But what was our relationship with the dead like before those cliches, before universal studios? Boris Karloff bel Lagosi, Well, I'll tell you it was no laughing matter. This story comes from a collection of Prussian folklore placed in the year fifteen ninety one, the twentieth of September to be precise. It begins, as so many horror stories do, with death. A shoemaker from the city of Breslau in Celesia, Central Europe, cut his own throats and bled to death, to the shock and horror of his family. His wife, in particular, was devastated. At the time, it was considered a great shame to take one's own life, so with the help of her sisters, she concealed the act from their neighbors. Instead, the story she told was that a stroke had taken the shoemaker. His widow turned away mourners from their doors and hired help to clean and dress the neck wound. The dead man was promptly buried three days after he had taken his own life. No one but the family knew what had befallen him, and yet these things rarely do stay quiet. Rumors began to circulate, perhaps due to the haste of the burial, perhaps due to the widow refusing to show people her husband's corpse, and people whispered that the shoemaker had died by his own hand. Eventually, the rumor became so prevalent that the Breslau City council questioned the widow about her husband's fate. She told them that he had fallen and cut his throat on a sharp stone. She refused to let them dig up the body for evidence, as it would be a further disgrace. It was during this investigation, though, that the haunting started. Locals in breslaus started seeing the shoemaker around town. He would wake people at night with startling noises, terrorizing them in their homes, sometimes even while the sun was still up. Laborers claimed that they would come home from a hard day's work only to be awakened by a horrible form pressing down on them, a dead man trying to smother the life out of their bodies. They presented bruises and finger marks as evidence. The panic built to a fever pitch, some even saying that they ought to take this story to the Kaiser. Eventually, the town council ruled that the body would be exhumed, and on April eighteenth of fifteen ninety two, that was done. The body was dug back up, a body that had laid in the ground for eight months. All of Breslau was there to witness the exhumation, and to the horror of everyone, the body in the grave was bloated, its limbs still flexible and free of rigor mortis. The dead skin had peeled away, revealing fresh new skin beneath. It was as if the dead man had new life in his veins. The body was put on display, as was custom with suicides, but the hauntings continued. The sightings of the dead shoemaker only grew more aggressive. They tried reburying the corpse, but it didn't work. They tried placing it beneath the gallows, and that didn't help either. In fact, the corpse seemed fresher and fresher by the day, and its spirits mocked them at night. Finally, the city council gave permission to the hangman to dispose of the body. He removed the head, the hands, and the feet, before cutting open its back and taking out its heart. All of these things were burned, and finally the shoemaker walked no more. The story retold so many times that it became as vague as folklore contains wisps of truth within it. Corpses often shed skin so that they appear fresher after death, which is also aided by post mortem swelling. To an untrained eye, it looks as if the body is not decomposing as normal. And like I said earlier, people like to put labels on things so the villagers of Breslau referred to this being that haunted them as a guest penst or simply a ghost. But as you can tell, it doesn't square with our modern idea of ghosts. It's a corporeal, physical presence that assaults the people that it haunts. It was probably called this because a better name for this sort of undead creature didn't exist yet. You see, Eventually, these sorts of hauntings would gain another name, as army doctors of the Habsburg Empire collected similar stories from Central and Eastern Europe of dead men supposedly coming back from the grave. More than one hundred years after this shoemaker supposedly died, his kind would finally become known as vampires. Everybody makes mistakes. It's inevitable, really, but for the most part, calling your teacher mom or autopiloting to work on a weekend won't cost you much more than time and embarrassment. Back in nineteen forty three, however, the brand new crew of the USS William D Porter was making mistakes left and right, and with one little slip up, the Willie D, as it was called, nearly changed the course of history. Forever. The Willi D was a huge naval destroyer built in nineteen forty three. After several months of training, it was finally ready for its first ever mission, escorting a battleship called the USS Iowa to North Africa. The crew of the Willy D was excited. They had a hugely important task. The President of the Free World himself, Franklin Delanor Roosevelt, was secretly traveling aboard the Iowa while two outsiders. This trip appeared to be a training exercise. Really, the fleet was bringing Roosevelt to meet with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin. This mission would determine the entire course of World War II. That was, if the Willy D didn't mess it up first. The first incident occurred before the ships even made it out of the harbor. On November twelfth of nineteen forty three. The ship was reversing in the Norfolk, Virginia Harbor when it caught its anchor on the side of another destroyer. The Willie D scraped alongside it, taking railings, life rafts, and valuable equipment with it. The battleship itself came away with just a scratched anchor the other ship and needed an entire facelift. And perhaps this should have been an omen for the trip to come. And yet the following day, November thirteenth, the Willie D left Norfolk, along with the Iowa and several other battleships. At this time, Nazi U boats were treating the Atlantic Ocean like their own private hunting ground. The American fleet was under orders of strict radio silence. One errant broadcast and it could be picked up on sonar and they could be blown to smithereens. So when an explosion ripped through the fleet, everyone's first thought was that the Nazis had found them. But when no further blast sounded, the sailors were confused, why weren't they attacking. It was then that the radios crackled to life. The captain of the Willi D broke radio silence to sheepishly admit that he was the cause of the explosion. A depth charge had fallen off the ship and exploded. There were no Nazis, it was just the Willi D. Yet another opportunity to maybe send the Willy D packing, But the fleet had a guest to impress, and he wanted to see what the Navy's brand new ships could do. On President Roosevelt's orders, the uss Iowa launched weather balloons so the ships in the fleet could fire at them with their anti aircraft guns. At the same time, each ship ran through their battle procedures. Over on the Willid, the torpedo crew were acting out a mock firing exercise. They loaded three torpedoes, and on the Chief Engineer's order, they fired. Now for a practice run. Standard procedure was to remove the primer from the torpedo chamber. The primer was the explosive device that launched the torpedo into the water, so when the crew fired a torpedo with no primer, nothing would actually happen. It was a test run, after all, at least that's the way it was supposed to go. But when the order was called, a loud whooshing noise came from torpedo tube number three. Someone had left the primer in the shoot, and a fully armed torpedo had been launched from the Willid and was heading straight toward President Roosevelt. Chaos reigned on the willi D. At first, the captain tried to signal the uss Iowa with lights as He had already been chastised for breaking radio silence, but instead of broadcasting a warning, he accidentally signaled that his ship was backing up. Realizing his mistake, the captain finally broke radio silence again to call the uss Iowa and tell them that he had fired a torpedo at the President. Reportedly, President Roosevelt, excited by the whole thing, asked for his wheelchair to be brought to the railing so that he could see the torpedo speeding towards them. Luckily for him, the uss Iowa was able to move in time. The torpedo hit the Iowa's wake and exploded safely away from the leader of the Free world. After determining the crew of the Willi D were not assassins, just deeply incompetent, the fleet arrested the entire crew. Thanks to Roosevelt's intervention, the captain and crew were let go without jail time, but were exiled to Alaska for the bulk of the war. The crew of the Willie D always wanted to make a splash, but in hindsight, perhaps plaps They should have avoided the explosives. I hope you've enjoyed Today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at the Worldoflore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.

Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities

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