Sometimes it's hard to believe the things we see with our own eyes, while other times we have to trust our ears to reveal the truth. Both of these tricky moments are on display in the Cabinet today.
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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. It's called binomial nomenclature, and it's how scientists classify species of living organisms. When someone describes a great white shark as a car carridan car carrious, they're using binomial nomenclature. In fact, your average four year old probably knows all about the Tyrannosaurus rex, one of the few things to be known only by its Latin classification. And for this naming system we have one Homo sapien to think. Carlus Linnaeus, also known as Car, a Swedish botanist and scientist. Carl is often considered the father of modern taxonomy. He spent his years in Sweden studying nature and lecturing students on the subject of botany. In the seventeen forties, he traveled throughout his homeland, collecting different types of plants and naming them according to his new system, eventually publishing his findings across several books. But Carl had another book, one that he kept outside of his scientific wheelhouse. He called it the Nemesis Davina, and he treated it as a hybrid journal and commonplace book, away for him to explore the things that couldn't be explained in the classroom. He wanted to know how so much horror and tragedy occurred in a world that believed in a just and true God. Within the pages of the Nemesis Divina, Carl collected passages from books that he found interesting and lines of scripture that reinforced his worldview. He also recorded pieces from his life, such as stories and happenings of the day, and one such happening occurred on the night of July twelfth, seventeen sixty five, in the museum attached to his home. The facility most likely held various plant species that were important to his work, so at the end of every night, Carl would walk through and lock all the doors and carry the key with him to bed. As the midnight hour rang out and July twelfth became July, Carl's wife shook him awake. She told him she heard someone walking around the museum. Carl heard footsteps too, but couldn't understand why he'd locked the doors. Just as he'd always done, and the key was still in his possession. He knew those footsteps too. They belonged to someone with a heavy gate who tromped around wherever he went. Soon enough, they faded away, and both Carl and his wife somehow went back to sleep. Days later, Carl got some bad news. It's her now that a friend of his, commissioner, Carl Clerk. Yes, I know another Carl, had passed away earlier that week, specifically, at midnight on July twelfth. Linnaeus froze. He suddenly realized why the footsteps had sounded so familiar years earlier when both men worked together. It was how Linnaeus could tell his friend Clerk was nearby due to the heavy steps of the Clerk's boots on the floor. But that isn't even the oddest story recorded in Carl's nemesis Davina. Remember, this wasn't a journal, but a repository of anecdotes, quotes, and texts that resonated with him. And it just so happened that one of the strangest tales that he kept didn't happen to him at all, but rather it happened in Philipstad, a town several hundred miles north of Karl's birthplace. As the story goes, the mayor of that town was a man named Rizal who lived there with his sizeable family. Among the many children he had was a fourteen year old her and in the story that carl Annaeus recorded later in his book, this daughter had fallen asleep one night while her mother was still awake. Roselle's wife watched one of the other children walk into her fourteen year old daughter's room in a daze, practically sleepwalking. The young girl pulled a fancy dress down and draped it over her sister's sleeping body. There had been no reason to do so. It was not something that she had ever done before, and typically such clothes were laid out the night before special occasions like a wedding or a party or a funeral. After the girl had left, her mother peeked in and asked her daughter if she'd really been asleep. The teenager whispered back that she'd been awake the whole time. She knew all about the white dress, but had no idea why her sister had placed it upon her. She certainly wasn't getting married and had no party to attend. The Next day, the fresh faced fourteen year old girl joined her tutor for lunch, having forgotten about the strange incident the night before. She mentioned a bird outside who's tweeting was bothering her during her meal, and she asked him to fetch his rifle. The tutor obliged. He grabbed his rifle, cocking it as he strode through the house towards the bird. The rifle, however, malfunctioned as he passed the young girl and it went off. She died instantly, and waiting for her upstairs was the white funeral dress her sister had picked out for her the night before. No one had heard of erth Camera, Iowa. Before. According to an article published in the Clarion soun Telegraph, a paper from a neighboring town, a man had stopped for gas in erth Camera before heading back out on the oad. He only made it two miles before his car petered out the tank had been empty. Angry at having paid for gas he never actually received, the man walked two hours back to town to get his money back, except he never made it. No, nothing ever happened to him. Don't worry, It's just that the closer he got to Earth cameer the farther away he seemed. It was a fellow traveler who eventually helped the man by giving him some of his own guests, but the whole experience left him feeling rattled, so much so that he checked himself into a sanitarium A short while later. The pilots also heard the rumors about the mysterious town and took it upon himself to snap photos of it from above. What he captured on film were unkept fields and abandoned homes. A deserted town should have been on the lips of every Iowan everywhere, but the local news took a back seat. After the stock market crash, of or Camera faded once again into obscurity. Stories emerged here and there over the years from people passing through. In nineteen thirty, two farmers fleeing the dust Bowl to California stopped in or Camera to rest. Two men from the camp went out into town in search of supplies, mainly liquor. Imagine their surprise when the steps of the front door disappeared right beneath their feet. One witness described it as those stepping through a cloud. They returned to camp empty handed, and their story was laughed off as a cheap ploy to pocket the cash they had been given for the booze. It was only when the men offered to give the money back that the rest of the camp got worried. Soon the two men turned into twelve who marched back to the general store to see what was going on. They too tried to climb the steps to the front door, and once again they fell through to the ground. Next, the men tried bridging the distance between the ground and the door with a wooden plank, but ended up with the same results. The board fell through the steps as though nothing was there. When they had had enough, they quickly returned to camp and instructed everyone to pack up their belongings. It was time to go. State police finally got word of the stories and did some investigating of their own. They attempted to speak with the earth Camera sheriff directly, but each time they knocked on the door, their hand passed right through it like smoke. Contact with anyone connected with the town seemed almost impossible. As the years passed, it wasn't just stairs and doors that disappeared. The houses did too, leaving behind fences, bathtubs, and overgrown fields. After the last vestiges of the town had evaporated, a group of Romani travelers set up camp in one of the empty fields. It didn't take long for them to realize something was amiss about the area, and just as soon as they arrived, they set out again on the road. The leader of the group told a local official that the area was and I quote, saturated with the tears of the dispossessed and with the despair of those who had never borne names. In all of their statements, not a single person who had ever been to the town ever remembered seeing a soul. No locals, no shopkeepers, no children playing in the fields. Erth Camera, from the very beginning had been deserted. So after all this time, the question remains, what happened to erk Camera, Iowa. The truth is nothing. The newspaper in which it was mentioned didn't actually exist. The first anyone had ever heard about the town was in two thousand fifteen. The story of Erth Camera circulated around the Internet so quickly and organically people began to assume it had existed for hundreds of years. And that's the funny thing about modern folklore. Our technology has made it possible to di still generations of storytelling and mythology into just a few years. An entire town that has only existed for less than a decade has become a historical touchstone as real to readers as Shangri La or El Dorado. So while or camera might have come and gone within a few short years, it doesn't look like our knack for telling compelling stories will disappear anytime soon, as long as we never forget the golden rule, don't believe everything you read on the Internet. 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. H