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Welcome to Erin Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and mild.

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Our world is full of the unexplainable. And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.

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Monsters are an interesting concept. They're supposed to be terrifying, yet they can also be reductive. Humans love to put labels on things that scare us, and after thousands of years, those labels have taxonomies as complex as any given mammal. Nowadays, it's easy to mock things like zombies, vampires and werewolves because they've become cliches devoid of mystery. But what was our relationship with the dead like before those cliches? Before Universal Studios? Boris Karloff Bela Lugosi well, I'll tell you, it was no laughing matter. This story comes from a collection of Prussian folklore placed in the year 1591, 20 September, to be precise. It begins, as so many horror stories do, with death. A shoemaker from the city of Breslau in Silesia, central Europe, cut his own throat and bled to death, to the shock and horror of his family. His wife, in particular, was devastated. At the time, it was considered a great shame to take one's own life. So with the help of her sisters, she concealed the act from their neighbors instead. The story she told was that a stroke had taken the shoemaker. His widow turned away mourners from their doors and hired help to clean and dress the neck wound. The dead man was promptly buried three days after he had taken his own life. No one but the family knew what had befallen him. And yet, these things rarely do stay quiet. Rumors began to circulate, perhaps due to the haste of the burial, perhaps due to the widow refusing to show people her husband's corpse. And people whispered that the shoemaker had died by his own hand. Eventually, the rumor became so prevalent that the Breslau City Council questioned the widow about her husband's fate. She told them that he had fallen and cut his throat on a sharp stone. She refused to let them dig up the body for evidence, as it would be a further disgrace. It was during this investigation, though, that the haunting started. Locals in Breslau started seeing the shoemaker around town. He would wake people at night with startling noises, terrorizing them in their homes, sometimes even while the sun was still up. Laborers claimed that they would come home from a hard day's work only to be awakened by a horrible form pressing down on them. A dead man trying to smother the life out of their bodies. They presented bruises and finger marks as evidence. The panic built to a fever pitch, some even saying that they ought to take this story to the Kaiser. Eventually, the town council ruled that the body would be exhumed. And on April 18th of 1592, that was done. The body was dug back up, a body that had laid in the ground for eight months. All of Breslau was there to witness the exhumation. And to the horror of everyone, the body in the grave was bloated, its limbs still flexible and free of rigor mortis. The dead skin had peeled away, revealing fresh, new skin beneath. It was as if the dead man had new life in his veins. The body was put on display, as was custom with suicides. But the hauntings continued. The sightings of the dead shoemaker only grew more aggressive. They tried reburying the corpse, but it didn't work. They tried placing it beneath the gallows, and that didn't help either. In fact, the corpse seemed fresher and fresher by the day, and its spirits mocked them at night. Finally, the city council gave permission to the hangman to dispose of the body. He removed the head, the hands, and the feet before cutting open its back and taking out its heart. All of these things were burned, and finally, the shoemaker walked no more. The story, retold so many times that it became as vague as folklore contains wisps of truth within it. Corpses often shed skin so that they appear fresher after death, which is also aided by postmortem swelling. To an untrained eye, it looks as if the body is not decomposing as normal. And like I said earlier, people like to put labels on things. So the villagers of Breslau referred to this being that haunted them as a gespenst, or simply a ghost. But as you can tell, it doesn't square with our modern idea of ghosts. It's a corporeal, physical presence that assaults the people that it haunts. It was probably called this because a better name for this sort of undead creature didn't exist yet. You see, eventually, these sorts of hauntings would gain another name, as army doctors of the Habsburg Empire collected similar stories, Central and Eastern Europe, of dead men supposedly coming back from the grave. More than a hundred years after this shoemaker supposedly died, his kind would finally become known as vampires. Everybody makes mistakes. It's inevitable, really. But for the most part, calling your teacher mom or autopiloting to work on a weekend won't cost you much more than time. And embarrassment. Back in 1943, however, the brand new crew of the USS William D. Porter was making mistakes left and right. And with one little slip up, the Willie D, as it was called, nearly changed the course of history forever. The Willie D was a huge naval destroyer built in 1943. After several months of training, it was finally ready for its first ever mission. Escorting a battleship called the USS Iowa to North Africa. The crew of the Willy D was excited. They had a hugely important task. The President of the free world himself, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was secretly traveling aboard the Iowa. While to outsiders this trip appeared to be a training exercise, really the fleet was bringing Roosevelt to meet with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin. This mission would determine the entire course of World War II. That was if the Willy D didn't mess it up first. The first incident occurred before the ships even made it out of the harbor. On November 12th of 1943, the ship was reversing in the Norfolk, Virginia harbor when it caught its anchor on the side of another destroyer. The Willy D scraped alongside it, taking railings, life rafts and valuable equipment with it. The battleship itself came away with just a scratched anchor. The other ship, it needed an entire facelift. And perhaps this should have been an omen for the trip to come. And yet, the following day, November 13, the Willie D left Norfolk along with the Iowa and several other battleships. At this time, Nazi U boats were treating the Atlantic Ocean like their own private hunting ground. The American fleet was under orders of strict radio silence. One errant broadcast and it could be picked up on sonar and they could be blown to smithereens. So when an explosion ripped through the fleet, everyone's first thought was that the Nazis had found them. But when no further blast sounded, the sailors were confused. Why weren't they attacking? It was then that the radios crackled to life. The captain of the Willie D broke radio silence to sheepishly admit that he was the cause of the explosion. A depth charge had fallen off the ship and exploded. There were no Nazis. It was just the Willie D. Yet another opportunity to maybe send the Willie D packing. But the fleet had a guest to impress and he wanted to see what the Navy's brand new ships could do. On President Roosevelt's orders, the USS Iowa launched weather balloons so the ships in the fleet could fire at them with their anti aircraft guns. At the same time, each ship ran through their battle procedures. Over on the Willie D, the torpedo crew were acting out a mock firing exercise. They loaded three torpedoes and on the chief engineer's order, they fired. Now For a practice run, standard procedure was to remove the primer from the torpedo chamber. The primer was the explosive device that launched the torpedo into the water. So when the crew fired a torpedo with no primer, the nothing would actually happen. It was a test run after all. At least that's the way it was supposed to go. But when the order was called, a loud whooshing noise came from torpedo tube number three. Someone had left the primer in the chute and a fully armed torpedo had been launched from the Willie D and was heading straight toward President Roosevelt. Chaos reigned on the Willie D. At first, the captain tried to signal the USS Iowa with lights, as he had already been chastised for breaking radio silence. But instead of broadcasting a warning, he accidentally signaled that his ship was backing up. Realizing his mistake, the captain finally broke radio silence again to call the USS Iowa and tell them that he had fired a torpedo at the President. Reportedly, President Roosevelt, excited by the whole thing, asked for his wheelchair to be brought to the railing so that he could see the torpedo speeding towards them. Luckily for him, the USS Iowa was able to move in time. The torpedo hit the Iowa's wake and exploded safely away from the leader of the free world. After determining the crew of the Willy D were not assassins, just deeply incompetent, the fleet arrested the entire crew. Thanks to Roosevelt's intervention, the captain and crew were let go without jail time, but were exiled to Alaska for the bulk of the war. The crew of the Willie died. Always wanted to make a splash, but in hindsight, perhaps they should have avoided the explosives.