In the summer of 1858, London — the largest city in the world at two and a half million people, the heart of the British Empire — was sitting on top of its own filth. For centuries the River Thames had served as the city's sewer. An exceptional heat wave arrived at exactly the wrong moment, baking the exposed riverbanks and accelerating years of accumulated waste into a smell so total, so inescapable, that it stopped the government of the most powerful nation on Earth from functioning.

Members of Parliament hung curtains soaked in chloride of lime over the windows in a desperate attempt to filter the air. It did not work. Sittings were disrupted. Committee rooms were abandoned. There was serious discussion of relocating Parliament entirely, upriver, away from the smell.

The Great Stink, as newspapers of the time called it, did what decades of public health warnings, cholera epidemics, and reformist campaigning had failed to do. Within eighteen days, the British government passed legislation and funded one of the great engineering achievements of the Victorian age — a sewer system so well built that most of it is still in use beneath London today.

Host Shawn Spainhour takes you into the full story: the city that produced this crisis, the specific week Parliament could no longer ignore it, and the engineer whose sewer system quietly saved hundreds of thousands of lives from waterborne disease for generations afterward.

If you love history, true crime, or storytelling — or if you're just looking for something to listen to on a long drive or drift off to sleep — this one is for you.

Strange Epochs is a weekly narrative history podcast hosted by Shawn Spainhour. Each episode takes one strange, true, documented moment from somewhere in the long span of human history and sits with it — slow, atmospheric, and built for deep listening. New episodes every Tuesday. If this is your first episode, there are thirty-one more waiting for you.

Sources:

• Wikipedia contributors. Great Stink. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024.
• World Atlas. The Great Stink of London. worldatlas.com, January, 2025.
• Historic England. The Story of London's Sewer System. heritagecalling.com, June, 2025.
• London Museum. The Great Stink of 1858. londonmuseum.org.uk.
• London Museum. How Bazalgette Built London's First Super-Sewer. londonmuseum.org.uk.
• Historic England. The Great Stink: A Victorian Solution to the Problem of London's Waste. historicengland.org.uk.
• History Is Now Magazine. London's Great Stench in the Nineteenth Century, Part Two: Bazalgette, Sewers and Stench. April, 2022.
• The Genealogist. The Great Stink. thegenealogist.co.uk.

On December 4th, 1872, roughly four hundred miles east of the Azores, the crew of a British ship called the Dei Gratia spotted another vessel wandering an erratic course, sails up, no one visibly at the helm. It was the Mary Celeste — an American brigantine that had left New York a month earlier bound for Genoa, captained by a man the Dei Gratia's own captain knew personally.

They boarded her and found her completely deserted. Not the captain, not his wife, not their two-year-old daughter, not a single one of the seven crew members. The ship was seaworthy. Her cargo of seventeen hundred barrels of industrial alcohol was almost entirely intact. The crew's money and valuables were still in their quarters. There was food and fresh water aboard. The captain's log was current only to ten days earlier — when the ship should have been near the Azores, not four hundred miles further along. The only thing missing besides the ten people was the ship's single lifeboat.

No bodies were ever found. No wreckage. No trace. More than a hundred and fifty years later, the Mary Celeste remains one of the most famous unsolved mysteries of the sea — not for lack of theories, but because every one of them requires imagining ten people making a single, catastrophic, irreversible decision together, for reasons that died with them.

Host Shawn Spainhour takes you into the full story: the ship, the captain and his family, the discovery, and the long list of theories — from mutiny to sea monsters to a badly misjudged abandonment — that have tried and failed to fully explain what happened.

If you love history, true crime, or storytelling — or if you're just looking for something to listen to on a long drive or drift off to sleep — this one is for you.

Strange Epochs is a weekly narrative history podcast hosted by Shawn Spainhour. Each episode takes one strange, true, documented moment from somewhere in the long span of human history and sits with it — slow, atmospheric, and built for deep listening. New episodes every Tuesday. If this is your first episode, there are thirty more waiting for you.

Sources:

• Wikipedia contributors. Mary Celeste. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024.
• Royal Museums Greenwich. The Mystery of the Mary Celeste. rmg.co.uk.
• Britannica editors. Mary Celeste. Encyclopaedia Britannica, updated 2026.
• Smithsonian Magazine. An Abandoned Merchant Ship Was Discovered Floating in the Atlantic in 1872. December, 2024.
• All That's Interesting. The Chilling Mystery of the Mary Celeste. November, 2023.
• Mental Floss. The Unsolved Mystery of the Mary Celeste. March, 2024.
• Ancient Origins. The Mystery of the Mary Celeste: Crew Vanishes from Seaworthy Ship. September, 2020.
• Seattle's Tall Ship. Haunted Ship: The Mysterious Disappearance of the Mary Celeste. October, 2024.
• Doyle, Arthur Conan. J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement. Cornhill Magazine, 1884.

In 1637, a wagon wheel crushed the leg of a young farmer named Miguel Juan Pellicer so badly that surgeons amputated it below the knee to save his life. The severed limb was buried in a hospital cemetery. For two and a half years, Pellicer begged for alms outside a basilica in Zaragoza on a wooden leg, a familiar and pitied figure to the people of the city.

On the night of March 29th, 1640, his mother walked into the room where he was sleeping and saw two feet sticking out from under the blanket.

This is not a story about a misdiagnosis or an amputation that never happened. Multiple surgeons who performed and witnessed the original operation testified under oath, before an ecclesiastical court, that they had removed Pellicer's leg years earlier. When investigators exhumed the burial site afterward, they found it empty. The Archbishop of Zaragoza opened a formal canonical investigation. Over one hundred witnesses testified across more than a year of hearings — doctors, surgeons, priests, neighbors, and Pellicer's own family. In 1641, the archbishop formally declared the restoration of his leg a miracle. The Catholic Church holds that position to this day.

Host Shawn Spainhour takes you into the full story: Pellicer's accident and amputation, the night his leg reappeared, the extraordinary investigation that followed, and the specific fact that has kept this case alive for nearly four centuries — no natural explanation has ever been produced.

If you love history, true crime, or storytelling — or if you're just looking for something to listen to on a long drive or drift off to sleep — this one is for you.

Strange Epochs is a weekly narrative history podcast hosted by Shawn Spainhour. Each episode takes one strange, true, documented moment from somewhere in the long span of human history and sits with it — slow, atmospheric, and built for deep listening. New episodes every Tuesday. If this is your first episode, there are twenty-nine more waiting for you.

Sources:

• Wikipedia contributors. Miracle of Calanda. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024.
• Association of the Children of Mary Immaculate. Miracle of Calanda: Miguel Juan Pellicer. clairval.com.
• Eucharistic Miracles of the World. Reported Eucharistic Miracle of the Miracle of All Miracles in Calanda, Spain, 1640. eucharisticmiracles.faith.
• ChurchPOP. When God Cured an Amputee: The Astonishing Miracle of Calanda. May, 2023.
• Deeper Truth Catholics. The Guardian Angel: The Eucharistic Miracle of Calanda, Spain 1640. January, 2026.
• Roma Locuta Est. The Historicity of the Miracle of Calanda. May, 2024.
• Messori, Vittorio. Il Miracolo. Rizzoli, 1998.
• Biblical Scholarship. Interview with Vittorio Messori Concerning the Miraculous Healing of Miguel Juan Pellicer's Severed Leg. March, 2022.