In the summer of 1917, two girls in a village in Yorkshire cut fairy figures out of a book, propped them up with hatpins in the grass beside a stream, and took a photograph. The photograph eventually reached Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the most famously rational fictional detective in the history of literature, who announced publicly, in the Christmas issue of The Strand Magazine, that it was the most important photographic evidence of supernatural phenomena ever produced. He staked his considerable reputation on it. He was wrong. He would not discover he was wrong for years.

Host Shawn Spainhour takes you into the full story: Frances Griffiths, newly arrived from South Africa and homesick in an English village, and her older cousin Elsie Wright, the girl who knew how to use a camera. The specific grief of a world at war that made millions of people desperate to believe in something beyond the material. The decades of interviews, investigations, and expert analyses that failed to expose what two girls had done with scissors and hatpins. And the ending — sixty-six years later, when both women were old, when they finally admitted what they had done. One of them added a caveat: the fifth photograph, she said, was real.

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 fourteen more waiting for you.

Sources:

• Wikipedia contributors. Cottingley Fairies. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024.
• Cooper, Joe. The Case of the Cottingley Fairies. Robert Hale, 1990.
• Conan Doyle, Arthur. Fairies Photographed: An Epoch-Making Event. The Strand Magazine, December 1920.
• Conan Doyle, Arthur. The Coming of the Fairies. Hodder and Stoughton, 1922.
• University of Leeds. The Cottingley Fairies: A Study in Deception. Google Arts and Culture Exhibition, 2021.
• Historic UK. The Cottingley Fairies. 2023.
• Time Magazine. Fairies and Fake News: Lessons of the 1917 Cottingley Hoax. 2017.
• National Science and Media Museum, Bradford. Cottingley Fairies collection.
• Google Arts and Culture. The Cottingley Fairies — A Study in Deception. University of Leeds Special Collections.

On July 4th, 1826 — fifty years to the day after the Declaration of Independence was adopted — two of the men who wrote it, signed it, and spent their lives arguing about what it meant died on the same day. Within five hours of each other. John Adams in Quincy, Massachusetts. Thomas Jefferson at Monticello in Virginia.

Adams' last words, spoken in the failing light of that afternoon, were these: Thomas Jefferson still survives. He was wrong. Jefferson had died five hours earlier.

Host Shawn Spainhour takes you into the full story: the friendship between Adams and Jefferson, the bitter political falling out that silenced them for years, the remarkable fifteen-year correspondence that brought them back together, and the two old men, separated by five hundred miles, writing to each other about death as it slowly approached. This is not a patriotic episode. It is a story about what it means to outlive your era, to reconcile with your oldest enemy, and to die on the most symbolically loaded day in the history of the country you helped create.

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 thirteen more waiting for you.

Sources:

• McCullough, David. John Adams. Simon and Schuster, 2001.
• Meacham, Jon. Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power. Random House, 2012.
• Cappon, Lester J., ed. The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams. University of North Carolina Press, 1959.
• Wikipedia contributors. Deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024.
• Massachusetts Historical Society. Thomas Jefferson Survives: The Last Letters of Jefferson and Adams. Beehive Blog, 2016.
• Monticello.org. Jefferson and Adams. Thomas Jefferson Foundation, 2024.
• History.com editors. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams die. A and E Television Networks, 2024.
• Library of Congress. Deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson on July Fourth. Headlines and Heroes Blog, 2022.
• All That's Interesting. Inside the Death of President John Adams. 2025.

On March 3rd, 1876, on a clear afternoon in Bath County, Kentucky, chunks of raw meat fell from a cloudless sky onto a farm near Olympian Springs. The event lasted approximately two minutes. The meat covered an area roughly the size of a football field, in pieces ranging from the size of a hailstorm to the size of a woman's hand. The New York Times reported it. Scientific American wrote it up. Laboratories across the country analyzed the samples and confirmed they were genuine animal tissue—lung, muscle, cartilage, and connective tissue. Real meat. From a clear sky. With no explanation before or after.

Host Shawn Spainhour takes you into the full story: Rebecca Crouch, who was standing outside making soap when it started; the scientists who raced to identify what exactly had fallen; the leading theory involving mass-vomiting vultures; and the deep strangeness of an event that has been documented, analyzed, and discussed for a hundred and fifty years and still sits in that specific uncomfortable gap between almost certainly explained and definitively explained. Bath County, Kentucky, still holds an annual festival to commemorate the day it rained flesh. The meat shower is their thing. They have leaned into it completely.

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 twelve more waiting for you.

Sources are listed in the show notes:

• Wikipedia contributors. Kentucky meat shower. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024.
• New York Times. Flesh Descending in a Shower. March 9, 1876.
• Kastenbine, L.D. The Kentucky Meat Shower. Louisville Medical News, 1876.
• Edwards, Arthur Mead. The Kentucky Shower of Flesh. Scientific American Supplement, 1876.
• Hamilton, Allan McLane and Arnold, J.W.S. Analysis of specimens from the Kentucky meat shower. Medical Record, 1876.
• Scientific American. The Kentucky Shower of Flesh. 1876.
• Fort, Charles. The Book of the Damned. Boni and Liveright, 1919.
• BBC Science Focus Magazine. Here's the very strange reason Kentucky was once showered in meat. 2025.
• LPM Public Radio. Kentucky Meat Shower one hundred and fiftieth anniversary draws hundreds to Bath County. March 7, 2026.
• Transylvania University Monroe Moosnick Medical and Science Museum. Preserved specimen from the 1876 Kentucky meat shower.