Sea Dragin’

Published Jan 16, 2020, 10:00 AM

Some things sound too amazing to be real, but thankfully we can look at photographs to dispell the doubt. Here are two additions to the Cabinet that tick that box.

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Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. Siblings don't always get along. The younger brother or sister usually wants to tag along and be part of what the older one is doing, and the older one doesn't want to be stuck babysitting. The younger sibling went out with friends, but Chang and Ang Bunker didn't have that problem. They were stuck with each other literally. Born in Siam in eighteen eleven, Chang and Eng were raised in a small village by their widowed mother. Despite being joined at the stern um, they played and went about their lives like average children. Then in eight four a British merchant named Robert Hunt came to the village. He spotted Chang and Ang swimming in the Menhum River, originally mistaking them for some kind of, in his words, strange animal. He'd never seen two people physically connected to one another in such a way. He guessed many others hadn't either, and they'd probably pay money to do so. It took years of convincing, but in eighteen twenty nine, Hunter and his friend Able Coffin were eventually able to put them on a boat bound for the US. Rumors had circulated that their mother had sold the twins into slavery. However, they had actually entered into a five year contract with Hunter and Coffin as entertainers. They traveled to Boston for their unveiling to the world before setting off for England and Ireland, then finally a return to the US. As they toured, Chang and Ang learned English and the American ways of life. Their shows were a combination of racial stereotypes and sideshow tricks, unfortunate products of the time, but the young men did carve out a comfortable living for themselves. Most places were quite welcoming too. However, not everyone was happy to see the twins perform. During one stay in Massachusetts in eighteen thirty one, they were out hunting when they encountered a group of men. Chang and Ang felt that they were being bullied by these men, and one of the twins struck an attacker and anger. They were arrested for public disturbance and had to pay a bond for good behavior in order to leave. On a later trip to Alabama, the twins were in the middle of a performance when a surgeon in the audience demanded to see the skin that connected them. He was refused, and he accused Chang and Ang a fraud. His outburst insided a small riot in the theater. Again, they were arrested for disturbing the piece, but pay a fine and quickly escaped. Their relationship with Able Coffin soured over the years, though, as his wife did more and more of the negotiating on his behalf. When the twins would ask for things like a few extra dollars, she would deny them. In late eighteen thirty one, Mr Coffin took a trip to Asia that was land to last into the year. During that time, the twins had grown tired of his wife's greed and control, and they rebelled. They traveled to New York, where they experienced true freedom. They drank alcohol and gambled. Coffin eventually returned to the States and confronted them about their behavior. After a lengthy discussion, however, he had no choice but to leave them on their own, thus ending their contract. After that, the twins made some changes to their show. Rather than the stereotypical dress they wore on stage, they started wearing more traditional American clothing, such as suits and tuxedos. They also changed their stage name. Coffin had advertised them as boys, but Chang and Ang now refer to themselves as men, more specifically as the Siamese Twins. They continued to tour the United States in Europe for several years before eventually settling down in North Carolina. They eventually married a pair of sisters, Sarah and Adelaide Yates, and started having children. Sadly, the lure of the American dream had captivated Chang and Eng in the worst way. In order to maintain the hundreds of acres of land they now owned, they also began purchasing slaves. Rumors circulated that the twins were particularly brutal owners, despite their protest to the contrary. In eighteen fifty three, to support their growing brood, the twins came out of retirement for another world tour. Seven years later, they signed a contract with P. T. Barnum to put on a show in his American Museum in New York City. The years passed by, and the twins continued to travel around the United States, but something was brewing. The Civil War was on the horizon, and it would change their lives forever. Though they'd stopped touring during the war, their conditions served as fodder for political cartoons. They were often portrayed as rival factions within the Democrat Party, conjoined in the middle, but separated by their beliefs. The twins themselves also became the news. Papers made up stories where one twin favored secession while the others supported preserving the Union. None of it had been true, but the public believed every word. It was true that the years had driven them apart metaphorically speaking, of course. By the end of the war, they had legally separated their land their slaves and had drawn up two separate wills, and the end of the war also brought them financial ruin. They were forced to resume touring in order to make ends meet, but audiences in the North saw them as slave owning Confederate sympathizers. The papers ridiculed them. They took their show back to Europe, where they were met with some success. However, Chang suffered a stroke while they were traveling and became paralyzed on his right side. The side closest to his brother. The incident ended their tour for good. The men retired, growing their family and tending to their land. Between them, Chang and Ang Bunker had become fathers to twenty one children. In the early morning hours of January seventeenth of eighteen seventy four, one of Ang's sons entered his father's bedroom. He discovered that his uncle Chang had passed away in his sleep. Ang, upon waking up and seeing what had happened, exclaimed that he would be following soon enough, and he did. Two hours later. Ang was gone, and we're pretty sure we know why. As they were growing up, doctors told them that surgery would mean almost certain death for both of them. They were not only joined by flesh and cartilage, but they also shared a liver. Because of that, the prevailing theory about Ang's death was that he had suffered from loss of blood as a result of his brother's circulatory system shutting down, but the twins legacy lives on. In fact, they had claimed quite a few honors before they died. They held the record as the longest living conjoined twins, a record that lasted all the way up to two thousand twelve, and they introduced the term Siamese twins into the American lexicon. Chang and Eng are still entertaining audiences to this day. After their death, their torsos were cast in plaster and a mold was made. It's on display alongside their conjoined liver at the Mooder Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Even in death, the two brothers remain inseparable. Here be dragons a phrase once thought to have been inscribed on ancient European maps back when unexplored territories may as well have been filled with any number of mythological beasts. Over time, the phrase took on different meanings. It's wording even changed. It's sometimes misquoted as here be monsters. Yet as far as we know, there are no monsters, at least not like the ones we tend to imagine in uncharted worlds. Perhaps no world is more uncharted than that of the ocean. Despite making up seventy of the earth surface, humanity has only explored about five percent of it. Beneath its glistening surface is an untold number of creatures that have never been captured on camera or by the human eye. To some, that's proof enough to suggest that there very well maybe a monster or two down there. It's believed that such a monster was spotted on December twenty seventh of nineteen twenty four, and his presence changed the lives of many people. That day, a pair of killer whales were in the middle of an intense ocean battle with another creature. Brief glimpses of black and white were mixed up with something else. According to eyewitness reports, the creature they were fighting was enormous and covered in white fur. It had a tail with a claw like a lobster's at the end of it, as well as a long trunk. However, the choppy water and constant movement made getting a good look at it almost impossible. Their battle raged on for three hours, with the ocean turning red as the whales took chunk after chunk out of the beast. Two whales had proven to be too formidable for the beast, and eventually it washed ashore, dead and defeated. Onlookers approached it cautiously, unsure as to whether it was really dead or not. They'd never seen anything like it before. Upon closer inspection, they estimated its size to be forty seven feet long by ten feet wide. It's fur was thicker and longer than anything else on land, and its trunk measured about five feet in length, with a pig snout at the end. Oddly, there was no sign of blood anywhere on the sand or near the creature. It's carcass remained on the beach for over a week before the water reclaimed it. No one had bothered to take a photo. No zoologists or marine biologists were summoned to examine its remains, and that should have been the end of the story, but word of the creature spread to the Daily Mail newspaper. Their article found its way to other papers who were more liberal in their reporting. Rather than use the eyewitness accounts to inform their story, one paper out of Pennsylvania reported the opposite, that the furry monster with the long trunk had slain the whales, but it had been too badly injured to survive, and so it beached itself to die on the sand. Regardless of which version is to be believed, the story of the long trunked animal became the subject of much debate for years. Experts didn't think it was some unknown creature from the depths, but a decomposing whale or elephant seal that had floated into the Orchest territory. What witnesses thought was a fight was simply a trip to the seafood buffet. Others believed that the beast was in fact a new species, but of some large whale or hybrid without photographic proof, though there was no way to be sure. It was a cryptozoologist named Karl Shuker who may have cracked the case. In two thousand ten. That was the year another man, Marcus Hemmler, reached out to Schooker with information. As it turned out, someone had been taking photos the day the creature washed ashore, and Mr Hemmler had discovered the only known image in existence. It had been posted to a German website and gone unnoticed until then. Shooker examined the photo and then scoured the web for more information. In his research, he found a few more photos, but they hadn't been dated for December of nineteen four. They've been taken in July of the following year and depicted a massive animal carcass on the beach. The photos were real, but Shugar wasn't convinced they were of the creature. The witnesses had described to him the dead animal was nothing more than a globster. That's what whales are called when they've rotted to the point where they can no longer be identified as animals, but more like floating blubber sex so globsters. Despite Shuger's insistence that the strange animal had really been a deceased whale, skeptics weren't so quick to accept his conclusion. No physical tissue was recovered from the corpse, and the photos were taken from a distance, making the subjects composition difficult to discern. Still, Shoogar's research into what washed up on the South African shore did result in one thing everyone could agree on. It's name. He coined it in his nineteen six book The Unexplained, and it ended up sticking for good. He called it trunco. 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 Manky 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 world of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious, Yeah,

Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities

From the creator of the hit podcast Lore comes a new, bite-sized storytelling experience. Each twice 
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