Zapped

Published Feb 18, 2020, 10:00 AM

Today's trip through the Cabinet will introduce us to a castle with a dark past and a pair of people with a special spark.

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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. Fairies as we know them today are a composite of centuries of influence from all over the world. The Scandinavian fairies were portrayed as elves. In Irish folklore, they were described as little folk. Some regions painted them as demons or fallen angels. Although there isn't one definitive origin of fairy folklore, certain characteristics are shared among several cultures. For example, fairies are often depicted as magical beings, curious of their surroundings and wary of humans. They can be mischievous, too, often tangling people's hair as they sleep or stealing small items. More serious conditions used to be blamed on fairies as well, such as tuberculosis. It was once thought that the impish creatures had forced young people to party the night away until they were weak from exhaustion, causing the disease, and they were protective too, of their homes, of the environment, and of themselves. Interloping humans who threatened their way of life, tended to find themselves the victims of a fairi's ill will. In the mountain town of Slavonia, Croatia, there is a castle, well what's left of it, anyway. First mentions of a date back to the mid thirteenth century, more of a walled city than a pure castle. The ruins today spread out across eighties six thousand square feet. When viewed from above, the surrounding forest looks to be swallowing the stone structure, perhaps retribution for what occurred here centuries earlier. According to the stories, a nobleman from the area had chosen this on Papook Mountain as a place to construct his castle. High up and far from the town below, he would be able to see invaders approaching in the distance and protect himself. However, the nobleman ran into a problem. A site on which he had chosen to build his fortress didn't belong to him, at least not in the eyes of the fairies who had already been living there. They've been using the spot as a gathering place to make potions and hated the idea of seeing destroyed by such a massive intrusion, so they did what fairies do best, they started to mess things up. As construction got underway. Builders noticed that their handiwork that they had completed the day before would be completely destroyed by the following morning. No matter how far they got, the fairies managed to undo all of it, setting construction back for weeks. The nobleman, however, refused to budge. He would not find another spot for his castle, nor would he cease construction. Instead, he put up a net. It surrounded the perimeter of the build site and protected the workers from the fairies meddling. One fairy, however, trying to break through the net. Her name was Ruzka, and she had gotten her long beautiful hair tangled up in it, trapping her there. The nobleman caught Ruzka the next day, but rather than letting her go, he decided to make an example of her. He buried the faery deep in the ground as part of the castle's foundation. From that point on, there was no going back. The nobleman and the fairies were at war. They cursed him and his construction site, which the nobleman didn't think too much about. After all, he'd caught and killed one of them already, and he'd taken their homeland. There wasn't much else they could do. The builders continued uninterrupted, returning each morning to see their work exactly as they'd left it the day before. The castle was eventually completed and it was clear that the nobleman had won. He called his new home Ruzicka Grad, a lasting testament to his brilliant scheme to outsmart the fairies that had tormented him early on during construction. As far as he was concerned, their curse had been nothing but hot air, the desperate attempts of wild creatures to hold onto what never belonged to them in the first place. But the Nobleman's joy was short lived. Trumpets blared, celebrating the completion of the fortress to all of Slavonia. Then a stone came loose from above. It fell and struck the nobleman dead. He'd had no children, and the royal bloodline had ended with him. Perhaps the fairies curse had been present all along. Since then, Razka Grad has slowly rotted away to a hollow stone husk, almost entirely consumed by trees. Eventually it will be reclaimed by the mountain, and the land will one day return to its former Glory, just like the fairies had wanted all along. Read any comic book or watch any superhero movie, and you're likely to see a familiar story play out each time a regular person like you or me is suddenly endowed with special powers after experiencing some kind of trauma. Perhaps they've been bitten by a radioactive spider or injected with the super serum, and suddenly they're able to climb walls and lift hundreds of pounds without a struggle. But those are just make believe stories meant to entertain, and on more than one occasion, inspire. After all, it's not the powers that make these characters heroic, but what's inside them. In Orthopedic surgeon Anthony Sikoria was an average family man from upstate New York when he was struck by lightning. He just walked away from a public phone booth after hanging up a call. A woman who had been waiting to use the phone happened to be an intensive care unit nurse and helped him as they waited for paramedics to arrive. The bolt of lightning had struck him in the face and exited through his left foot, both of which were burned badly for Tony. The incident was an out of body experience. According to the statement he gave the press, he watched himself from above and saw his body surrounded by bluish white light. A wave of peace came over him before he was brought back to the world of the living. As he recovered, he could tell his memory wasn't what it used to be. He consulted a neurologist who performed a series of scans on his brain, but they didn't see anything out of the ordinary. Several weeks passed by, and the memory problems seemed to resolve itself on its own. But something else had awakened inside him. When he was younger, his musical tastes had extended to rocket roll and not much else. Now, however, he found himself addicted to classical piano music, though listening wasn't enough for him. Secoria, who had never touched an instrument before in his life, was suddenly compelled to play the piano. He ordered sheet music for pieces by Chopin, his favorite composer, and brought a piano into the house to teach himself how to play. The lessons started out difficult, and his fingers didn't move the way he wanted them to. But as he played, he discovered his obsession went even deeper than he'd thought. He'd wake up in the middle of the night with melodies he just had to get down on paper, even though he really didn't know how to write them down yet. He'd play for hours before he had to leave for work, then come home and plunk out his songs until bedtime. His progress moved at an incredible pace. The term that the doctors had for Tony was acquired savant, and his skills earned him performances in theaters all over the United States, on television, and interviews in countless books and magazines. He even released a CD in two thousand eight entitled Notes from an Accidental Pianist. But Tony's accomplishments were only the tip of the iceberg. Sudden jolts of electricity have affected people all over the world in different ways. A great example is Julia Vorobieva, who was working in a Ukrainian mine in June of nine seven when she was zapped by three volts from her mining equipment. She was pronounced dead and brought to the mortuary, where her body remained on the table for two days awaiting a medical examiner. When the emmy finally arrived to perform her autopsy, he made a single incision. Blood poured from the wound, and that shouldn't have happened with a dead person, And then the body started to shake. Julia wasn't dead after all. It took her six months to fully recover, but she found that she was unable to sleep at night. No matter what she tried, her body could not calm itself. Then one night, she finally slept for hours without interruption. She woke up the next day a new woman, as though the electricity that had been bouncing around inside her had finally settled down. What Julia didn't realize, however, was that the electric shock she had endured had changed her her way to buy bread. That day, she looked over at a woman waiting for the bus and witnessed a horrifying site. Her intestines were completely visible. There was still inside her body, but Julia could see them clearly, even though no one else could. A reporter followed her for the local paper, and she was able to see what he'd eaten for lunch, working its way through his stomach. Her new talent earned her a position at the Ukrainian hospital where she could look into a person's body and see what was ailing them. According to one doctor, Julia never made a single mistake when using her X ray vision, which might be the most shocking thing of all. 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 when 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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