Phishing

Summary

Cabinet of Curiosities: "Phishing"

Podcast: Aaron Mahnke’s Cabinet of Curiosities
Host: Aaron Mahnke
Episode Date: October 14, 2025
Theme: Exploring two curious stories—one about an internet-age urban legend of a hidden Swedish city and another about the overlooked legacy of a Viking queen.

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Overview

This episode of "Cabinet of Curiosities" delves into the nature of misinformation and historical erasure through two captivating tales. The first story examines the viral 2009 hoax of an all-women city in Sweden—a case study in how fake news can enchant and mislead in the digital age. The second story brings light to Tyra, a forgotten Viking queen, revealing how new archaeological methods can uncover lost legacies even when mainstream history has overlooked them.

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Story 1: The Swedish "Secret Lesbian City" Hoax

[01:10–05:29]

Key Discussion Points

• The Unbelievable Tale:

  • In October 2009, Chinese news agencies reported on a mysterious city in northern Sweden—Shakabo—allegedly populated only by women, with men strictly forbidden.
  • The “founder," a wealthy widow from 1820, purportedly sought to create a male-free sanctuary. Women leaving the city for relationships with men had to "wash themselves" before returning.
  • The city’s residents reportedly worked in woodworking and forestry, with some sources describing the city as Sweden's "secret lesbian city."
  • The viral story crashed Swedish tourism websites with requests for verification.

• Debunking the Myth:

  • The Swedish government ultimately debunked the myth, confirming no such city existed.
  • Aaron notes the ease with which the story aligned with "a laundry list of cliches," calling it, “the sort of fantasy that feels like it was dreamed up by a lonely single guy.” (Aaron Mahnke, 04:30)

• Misinformation in the Modern Era:

  • Despite the official debunking, the internet enthusiastically adopted the hoax: communities created flags, web comics, and even a short film about the fictional city.
  • The story is framed as an early example of the virality of false information, before the current content-saturated internet environment.
  • Mahnke reflects, “Misinformation is no longer the exception. Sadly, it’s the rule.” (Aaron Mahnke, 05:25)

Memorable Moments

• Quote:
  • “A town full of women who work as lumberjacks all day, who only know the touch of a man when they went on holiday. It’s the sort of fantasy that feels like it was dreamed up by a lonely single guy.” (Aaron Mahnke, 04:30)
• Cultural Impact:
  • Creation of a flag, viral web content, and a 2010 short film inspired by a city that never existed.

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Story 2: The Forgotten Viking Queen

[07:07–11:52]

Key Discussion Points

• Trivia with Historical Depth:

  • The segment opens with trivia about Bluetooth technology’s namesake: Harald Bluetooth Gormson, a Viking king known as a great unifier, from whom the wireless technology takes its name and logo.
  • Mahnke pivots to highlight an even more commemorated Viking—Harald’s mother, Tyra (sometimes spelled Tira or Thyra), dubbed "the forgotten Viking queen."

• Rediscovering Tyra’s Legacy:

  • Tyra is referenced on more Viking runestones in Denmark than any contemporary, yet her story is largely lost due to oral histories and male-dominated historical narratives.
  • Recent archaeological research utilized 3D scanning and forensic analysis of runestones dated to her era.
  • Findings showed that four stones—across different locations—were likely carved by the same person, and all celebrated the same Queen Tyra, emphasizing her prominence.
  • Titles and inscriptions identified her as "Denmark’s strength and salvation," highlighting her key role in unifying Denmark and constructing the Danevirke fortifications.

• Historical Erasure and Gender:

  • Discusses how Tyra’s achievements were overshadowed due to the male-dominated focus of 19th-century historians.
  • Reinforces that Viking women often enjoyed more freedom and power compared to their contemporaries, but Western narratives still marginalized them.
  • Mahnke states, “Marriage gave her the title of queen, a title carved in stone. But her accomplishments, it seems, are what carved her place in history.” (Aaron Mahnke, 11:46)

Memorable Moments

• Quote:
  • “If Tyra was so beloved, why don’t we remember her story today?” (Aaron Mahnke, 11:30)
  • “What proves this legacy most is the fact that two of her runestones were commissioned by her husband and her son. They wanted to immortalize her legacy.” (Aaron Mahnke, 11:23)

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Notable Timestamps

• 01:10 — Intro to Shakabo City hoax
• 03:00 — Details of the city and sensationalist media frenzy
• 04:30 — Debunking and analysis of the story’s appeal
• 05:25 — Misinformation and the internet’s role
• 07:07 — Bluetooth trivia segue to Viking history
• 09:00 — Archaeological findings on Queen Tyra
• 10:35 — Discussion on gender and historical erasure
• 11:46 — Reflecting on Tyra’s legacy

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Episode Tone

Aaron Mahnke delivers the episode with his signature blend of intrigue and skepticism. He encourages curiosity about the sources of our information and the stories history chooses to remember or forget, all while employing wry humor and an engaging storytelling style.

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Summary for the Uninitiated:
This episode uses one modern and one ancient curiosity to explore how easily facts slip into fiction, whether by viral hoax or historical neglect, and how we can recover lost truths with a discerning, curious mind.

Transcript

[Erin Menke]

This is an iHeart podcast.

[Capital One Bank Guy]

Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet with no fees or minimums on checking accounts and no overdraft fees. Just ask the Capital One Bank Guy. It's pretty much all he talks about in a good way. He'd also tell you that this podcast is his favorite podcast too. Oh really? Thanks Capital One Bank Guy. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See capital1.com bank Capital One NA member FDIC.

[Erin Menke]

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

[Aaron Mahnke]

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.

[Erin Menke]

Nothing spreads faster than a good piece of trivia from a far off land. We all have an appetite to learn the strange and wonderful quirks of far off places. That's partly why you listen to this show. Sometimes what we can learn can shock us. Sometimes it can amuse us, and sometimes the lure details are difficult to believe. In early October of 2009, a strange news story started circulating from the Chinese news agencies Xinhua and Harbin News. It was a curiosity piece about a place in northern Sweden with a particular a town known as Shakabo. Founded in 1820, Shakabo City had a population of 25,000 people, about the same size as Key West, Florida today, large enough to provoke interest, but small enough that it wasn't surprising that the world at large had never heard of it. What made Shakabo City worthy of news coverage, however, was the nature of that population. The report claimed that this city was populated entirely by women. Men were categorically forbidden from living there, working there, or even visiting. The article explained that the woman who had founded it almost 200 years earlier was a wealthy widow who desired a sanctuary far away from the eyes of men. So she founded an enclave where only women could live to the present day. If a man showed up, they would be harshly turned away, maybe even beaten up by blond guards who stood at its gates. Women, however, were welcome to visit as tourists. As for the citizens, the over 20,000 women who lived within its walls were primarily worked in woodworking and forestry. This was not a nunnery. However, the citizens of Xacobo were permitted to leave the city if they wanted to have a relationship with a man. They would just have to wash themselves before they returned, a practice that doesn't sound dissimilar from the Amish concept of Rumspringa. Women who didn't leave developed romantic relationships with each other. This naturally caught the eyes of the headline writers all around the world. As the news of this city spread throughout the international news, it was publicized as Sweden's secret lesbian city. Swedish tourist sites were swamped with requests for information about this place, leading several sites to fully crash from the traffic. Eventually, representatives of Sweden's tourism board had to issue a statement regarding Shakobo City. It does not exist. The Swedish government said that there is no way a city of that size in northern Sweden went unnoticed for so many years. There is no secret lesbian city lurking in the forests. Once the announcement was made, it all seemed rather obvious. The rumors about Chacobel City read like a laundry list of cliches. A town full of women who work as lumberjacks all day, who only know the touch of a man when they went on holiday. It's the sort of fantasy that feels like it was dreamed up by a lonely single guy. As amusing as this hoax was one question that was never fully, definitively how and why did this story reach actual news news agencies? Was it an anonymous tip? A prank from within the staff of those agencies? Well, to this day, while there are many theories, the motive remains a mystery either way, although it was definitively proven false, the Internet latched onto this story as an amusing fiction. Online communities created a flag for the fake lesbian city, wrote humorous web comics about the hoax. Someone even made a short film set in the city in 2010, less than a year after the initial hoax. And of course, the Internet of today is a much more noisy place than it was in 2009. There are even more websites, content mills, and social media accounts entirely dedicated to churning out misinformation. Throw in the use of AI to create images and text, and it's hard not to imagine a website making a claim like this today, even one that purports to be a press outlet. What is hard to imagine is this story achieving a similar level of virality today. After all, when it comes to fake stories on the Internet, misinformation is no longer the exception. Sadly, it's the rule.

[Capital One Bank Guy]

Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet with no fees or minimums on checking accounts and no overdraft fees. Just ask the Capital One bank guy. It's pretty much all he talks about in a good way. He'd also tell you that this podcast is his favorite podcast too. Aw, really? Thanks, Capital One Bank Guy. What's in your wallet? Terms apply see capitalone.com bank capital1na member FDIC.

[Bobby Bones]

Hey, it's Bobby from the Bobby Bones show. I had an incredible time at this year's iHeartRadio music festival and even got the chance to hang out with Diplo and Bailey Zimmerman while I was there. So check this out. So how did Ashes come together, Diplo?

[Diplo]

Well, I kind of briefly met Bailey, I think at Morgan's show, one of them. And I think he's just the guy in Nashville. He's cool as hell, and I had a new kind of sound I wanted to do, and I think he's the one guy that could carry it. And I came to his house, I had a show, I pulled up real quick, he was about to leave on tour. You're about to jump in your tour bus. And we had like three hours play the record for him. We'd kind of like got a scratch, and then he handled it on his own on the road.

[Bailey Zimmerman]

Yeah, it was really cool. He really just like randomly showed up to my house and like, oh, hey, Diplo, what are you doing? He's like, I have a song that I want to show you. And I was like, okay. And then now we're here playing it live.

[Bobby Bones]

You can listen to the full episode out now, wherever you get your podcasts. And big shout out to my friends at Hyundai for making this possible. Had a blast cruising around festival weekend in the all new Palisade hybrid.

[Erin Menke]

If you go to enough trivia nights at the local bar, you're bound to get a question like this. What 10th century Viking king is a modern wi fi technology named after Bluetooth? Technology is the answer. It was named after Harald Bluetooth Gormson, the Viking king of Norway and Denmark. And he got the name because he had a dead bluish black tooth in his mouth. Now, Bluetooth was considered a great uniter because he was the first king to unify the Danish territories. And that's why the company named their technology after him. Bluetooth as a technology, brings all of your devices together. Oh, and by the way, the company logo that you'll actually see in your phone's settings is Bluetooth's name written the way that it would be carved into runestones from all those years before? During the Viking age, runestones were stone monuments that were erected to remember significant battles or events or to honor the dead. They were painted with bright colors and put in high traffic areas where the entire community would see them often. There are only about 250 known runestones from the Viking age. So for a Viking's name to be carved into a runestone, that was kind of a big deal. Which means it's fair to say that King Harald Bluetooth was one of the most famous Vikings and to have ever lived. And yet, if being mentioned on a runestone is proof of a Vikings importance, there's actually someone who was far more celebrated than Bluetooth. In fact, this Viking is honored on more runestones throughout Denmark than any other Viking of their age. And yet their story has been mostly lost to history. The Viking in question, you see, was related to Bluetooth. It was his own mother, Tyranny, the forgotten Viking queen. She lived in denmark in the 10th century. But because histories were oral at the time, and that oral history has largely been lost, almost nothing is known about her life. She married King Gorm, the old, who enjoyed a relatively uneventful reign. And of course she had a son. That's Harald Bluetooth. In most modern history books, that is the beginning and the end of Tyra's story. She's a side character in narratives about powerful men. But new evidence suggests that there is more to Tyra than we originally thought. Recently, archaeologists at the Swedish National Heritage Board conducted a study on four runestones scattered across Denmark. They all celebrate a Viking named Tyra. But Taira was a common name at the time, so there was no way of knowing whether it was the same Tyra being mentioned on all four stones. Two of those stones are located in Yelling Denmark, which was the royal seat of power when Tyra was alive. The other stones are located in nearby towns. And so a senior researcher named Kitzler Affeld studied the runestones using a 3D scan. The scan let her analyze the carvings in a way that's similar to modern day forensic handwriting examinations. The scans reveal that all four runestones were carved by the same person. On one of the runestones, that person gives Tira the title of Queen. And the other stones all linked to King Gorm and King Harald. And that proved that all four stones were celebrating the same Queen Tira. They say that she was a powerful woman of status. She owned land and had legal authority. The carvings also suggest that Tira played a key role in unifying the Danish realm. She may have even been more influential in that cause than Bluetooth himself. One runestone calls her Denmark's strength and salvation. The idea is supported by historical records from the 12th century. They credit Tira as the one who built the dhanevirke Fortifications, an 18 mile long series of walls and trenches that protect Denmark from foreign invaders. But maybe what proves this legacy most is the fact that two of her runestones were commissioned by her husband and her son. They wanted to immortalize her legacy. Which begs us to ask an important question. If Tyra was so beloved, why don't we remember her story today? Well, historians began to study Vikings in the early 19th century at a time when the Western worldview was predominantly male oriented. Now, researchers think that these early historians relegated Viking women to the sidelines and instead they focused on the men who ruled the Viking Age. In reality, Viking women enjoyed more freedom than women in most other societies. At the time time, political life was still dominated by men, but Viking women were seen as capable rulers as well. The men in Tyra's life understood this, and that marriage gave her the title of queen, a title carved in stone. But her accomplishments, it seems, are what carved her place in history.

[Aaron Mahnke]

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 curiositiespodcast.com this show was created by me, Aaron Manke, 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 [e-mail] and until next time, stay curious.

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[Erin Menke]

This is an I Heart podcast.