Dan Snow's History Hit - The Mummy's Curse, Nazi Gold Train & Other History Mysteries

Episode Date: November 30, 2023

History is full of the weird and wonderful and in this episode Dan is joined by polymath, author and fellow podcaster Dan Schreiber to talk about stories of lost treasure, curious relics and Edwardian superstitions. In Dan's long career as a broadcaster, he's come across all sorts of unexplained phenomena, myths and mysteries- from searching for the Nazi Gold Train in Poland to debunking the mummy's curse in Tutankhamun's tomb to looking for answers about ball lightning. You can read up on the things mentioned in this podcast, and more, in the History Hit Miscellany book available now online and in bookshops.Dan Schreiber is the host of the We Can Be Weirdos podcast and the author of The Theory of Everything Else.Discover the past with exclusive history documentaries and ad-free podcasts presented by world-renowned historians from History Hit. Watch them on your smart TV or on the go with your mobile device. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW sign up now for your 14-day free trial We'd love to hear from you! You can email the podcast at [e-mail].

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. If you were to hack into my phone, and I urge you not to do that, you would find a lot of pictures of my kids pulling stupid faces in selfies when I've left my phone in the kitchen for an unguarded moment. You would also find a heavily used version of the Twitter app, and you'd find collections of historical facts that I've been harvesting over my career and sticking in my notes app. There are some really niche things in there, like lists of 18th dynasty New Kingdom pharaohs. There are a lot of quotes that have meant something to me that I've come across over the years. And just the other day, I was reminded on the 13th of November on the anniversary of

Benjamin Franklin's line, nothing is certain except death and taxes. There are a lot of debunked myths in there. Vikings having no horns on their helmets, Napoleon not being short, etc. And all of those strange things have now been scraped off my phone and stuck in our new history book, Miscellany. It's available online and in all good bookshops. But the facts and the bits of trivia that people seem to have really warmed to are the ones in which we refer to mysteries, buried treasure, strange occurrences in the past that couldn't really be explained at the time. And that inspired me to get my good friend Dan Schreiber on the podcast.

He's podcasting royalty. He's a legend, host of the We Can Be Weirdos podcast. He's published the book, The Theory of Everything Else, and he has got an encyclopedic knowledge of the weird and the wonderful. He's a polymath. I want to get him on the show to have a little seasonal fun and talk about some of the weirder things that we've stumbled across in our studies. Here he is. Enjoy. T minus 10.

The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. T-minus 10. Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. Dan the Man, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me. You had me on your wonderful podcast, which is all about sort of mysteries and coincidence and strange superstition.

And it made me think, because you just were such a font of knowledge about weird history, I want to get you back on and talk through some of the weird episodes that I've stumbled across. Yeah, okay. Because I know you'll be able to throw a lot back at me. Well, it's the greatest thing about history, isn't it? Is that every person, every place, it's just packed with madness, with weirdness. Walking up here today, we're recording in Soho. There's a road literally down the road from us where William Hazlitt, the essayist, he died, right? It's the place he died. And there's a weird thing I know about it,

which is that when he died, the landlady who owned the apartment was so keen to re-let it immediately that she took his dead body, shoved it under the bed and started showing potential new tenants the room. So while they're looking around, Hazlitt was dead under the bed. It's just- That's crazy. And you just walked past it. It's hot now. Yeah, exactly. That's wild, isn't it?

Yeah. I think that also really drives through something to me, which is that we think of the modern world as being sexy and anarchic and weird and chaotic and sometimes tragic and violent as well, sadly. And yet, the more you study the past, the more you realize that actually maybe these earlier periods were even wilder than ours are now because we lived a long time. We're quite staid. Things were quite settled. Things were real back then. I mean, if you were renting a room, they needed the next person to come in there and rent it straight the minute you died, right?

Because you mean life expectancy was shorter? Yeah, life expectancy was shorter. I think there was a greater concentration of people in the middle of town. I don't know. Everything's more spread out. I think we're a bit more docile today. We're watching Netflix half the day, right?

Yeah. We listen to podcasts. They weren't doing that. They were working a bit and then causing, you know, riots in the streets. Yeah, that's true. I heard someone say

the other day that we're living in a time where our mind, our brain space is now the commodity to all the companies of the world because we've turned ourselves

into consumers of things. So if they can buy your brain space, your time within there, that's the big retail areas used to buy land it was bo burnham the comedian he was like we'd buy land and that's where you'd make your money now we're buying brain land that's the it's a weird it's a weird time we're in and unfortunately you and i are in that business yep keep listening i think the

weirdest one i want to share with you i have personally been involved in and i've done some weird things was when we thought there was a train full of nazi gold in poland in a tunnel remember this and it was hit the headlines it was a big story like about 2014 and when you say we it's not your theory no tragically so basically i was going about my business one day and my phone exploded in my hand because the Polish government announced that they had found or their remote sensing archaeologists had found a train supposedly laden with looted Nazi gold in a blocked up tunnel on the Polish railway network. And I went completely berserk because I was like, this is the biggest history story of my lifetime. And the Polish government, and I mean, obviously expect some like metal tech to announce it,

try and generate some interest, but this was the minister of the interior had a press conference about this and showed images on a wall and stuff and i immediately got in touch the bbc and said mike i hope you're bidding for this and it was super exciting and it was the early days of netflix and amazon it was like what's going to happen my son was born and i walked out of hospital and i got a text message going we got it we've got the rights like this in the production I was working we got the rights we're making the exclusive show we're gonna dig it up and I thought well that's the rest of my life sorted I am gonna climb down a ventilation shaft yeah discover in pitch black a massive 1940s steam engine and it's gonna be

like gold in the back of it, and there's going to be rolled up missing Van Goghs and stuff. You are kidding me. I was like, darling, she's just had a baby. And I'm like, we're never going to be hungry again. I'm like dancing down the street. Wait, did you think you could keep the looted gold? No, I didn't want the looted gold.

I want the fame and the fortune. No, just the fame. I don't care any of the looted stuff. I just have this sort of narcissistic desire to, you know, trend. So we then get out to Poland, and the first day we get there, first we interview the two guys who'd found it, and immediately I was like, this doesn't feel good. And you've got a crew, presumably?

I've got a crew, and I had a special haircut. I bought a cool leather jacket. I was like, this, okay. It's funny. You're right. It still hurts because I thought this was it. I thought a cool leather jacket. I was like, this, okay. It's funny. You're right. It still hurts because I thought this was it. I thought this was going to be the launch pad. Wow.

But then we go into the university, the local university in Wrocław. And I interview the geologist. And he goes, these images are rubbish. It's all nonsense. Oh, no. And I was like, what? So there's no train. Oh, no. And I was like, what? So, there's no,

there's no train down in that tunnel. He's like, there's no tunnel in that tunnel. There's definitely no train. He's like, I'm sorry,

but I'm a remote sensing expert and I don't know what's happened here. The government have just been hyping this. It's ridiculous. Anyway, good luck with the search.

And we then spent three weeks trying to make a documentary with obviously nothing. Oh, my God. Was the story real? Was the train a real thing that disappeared? Well, yes, there were accounts of, I mean, this is 1945, the Red Army.

Yeah. Snapping at the heels of the Wehrmacht, they're retreating. In fact, late 44, I think. I mean, it is Armageddon. Yeah. It is like a kind of gotten dammerung of extraordinary levels of violence, war crimes, appalling.

And I should say, Wroclaw at the time was in Germany proper, so that's right. They'd crossed into Germany. It's now a piece of Germany. It's in Poland. We could do another thing about borders changing and countries changing shape, but no one's changed shape more than Poland in the last hundred years. So they were in Germany proper, and it was just looting. And yeah, lots of things went missing we did interview one German aristocratic family

who buried treasure because the idea was that as the Soviets were advancing everyone was just burying everything it was hiding everything and then they just got

all the domestic staff at this kind of schloss this castle and shot them one by one until they told them where stuff was buried so we know where most of it is

but there are also council trains going back to the Soviet Union with just huge amounts of looted stuff from Germany. But no, nothing concrete. That's so interesting. And it was heartbreaking. I love missing treasure.

I think that's something I like collecting stories about. And there's one that's a World War II one as well, which I wonder if you've heard about, which is, it's to do with Alan Turing. Do you know about Alan Turing? No, I don't know the treasure. Okay, so Alan Turing helped crack the Enigma as part of Bletchley.

Hero, he's on our notes. He's on the £50 note for anyone who is not in the UK. He got really scared that all of his valuables would be looted during the war. So he thought, I've got to do some way of protecting all the stuff that I have. So he traded stuff in that was expensive for silver bars. So he got these silver bars. He went out into the countryside and he buried it. And he made a map of it and he made a code of it and so on.

War happens, finishes. He goes to look for it. And I think it's a combination of the landscape having changed. Someone said that he did such a good code, he couldn't uncrack his own code. And he never found it. So somewhere, unless it's been dug up, in the British countryside

are the lost silver bars of Alan Turing. Oh my goodness. That's cool. I mean, that would be really cool. You know, if you go to a party and you say, what's the one coolest thing that you can probably think that you have in as part of your life? Mine is to do with secret treasure, which is I'm one of maybe five or six people in the world who know where a bit of lost treasure is that I'm not telling anyone. Do you remember the Masquerade Hare? Did you ever remember that book? Yeah, I know the name. Yeah. There was a book that came out, which is called Masquerade by Kit Williams. And in it, it was a kid's book. And in it, there were all these

different clues as to where you would eventually find if if you cracked it, somewhere in the world buried this beautiful necklace of a golden hair that was made by Kit Williams and a designer. And so he went out, he buried it somewhere in the world, wrote this book, and it became the first ever global treasure hunt, basically. People spent years trying to crack it. People went mad. People were having to be rescued off the side of cliffs because the tide had come in and they were convinced it's right here yeah exactly and um it was eventually found and it was a cheat for how it was found but it was found and it got sold off at an auction at sotheby's but no one knows who bought it and a couple years ago i found out who bought it and i know exactly where it is but no

one else does oh wow kit williams only himself just found out not too long ago, a couple of years ago, where it is. Knowing our treasure is very cool. Yeah. And I am obsessed with King John's treasure in the wash. People on this podcast have heard me talk about this before. So King John, as you know, hopeless king. We inherited an empire that covered much of France, Britain, and Ireland.

When he died, his empire encompassed East Anglia. And so it was all going pretty badly. Rebels and the French had taken over most of his land, the great French invasion of the mid-1210s. And he's traveling. He's got dysentery. He's traveling from Norfolk to Lincolnshire across the Wash, which in those days was far more wild and dramatic.

Great, huge tidal. It's all been drained and embanked into agricultural land now. But this was quite a dramatic thing to do and as they were crossing the wash, the wagon containing the crown jewels got stuck. And the tide came in, they had to abandon it and they all made it to Lincolnshire where he died shortly after. So the last thing that happened in his reign is he lost the crown jewels. He didn't just lost his kingdom, he lost the crown jewels. It's like, come on, mate. And they're all down there somewhere. Still.

Yeah, but the thought is because it's been reclaimed, it's probably now under agricultural land. But it could have been the tide. Who knows where they could have moved it around. But yeah, the Plantagenet crown jewels of England are somewhere in northwest Norfolk. Wow. Yeah. That's your fame and fortune. That is it. No, that's the big one. That's the big one. Yeah. That's your fame and fortune. That is it. No, that's the big one.

That's the big one. Yeah, that's the retirement project. And we have no, no one's been able to work out even where a tide would take it? No, I think it's pretty, we don't really know enough about what, because it's very dynamic,

literally dynamic. So, you know, winter storms, the mudflats come and go and it's moving, it's shifting. Something that I think modern humans find it quite hard to understand is our coasts would have been liminal spaces some years they'd have been out and some years they'd have been in you know you'd attack and retreat so it's pretty difficult finding that

what would be your one thing then that if you could find just a historical item it doesn't matter if it's oh and a lost item yeah as a geek, it would be missing manuscripts. In fact, there's a few. Of course, we've lost the majority of the classical world's text plays, histories, and things like that. We know that Alexander, the great, the official account of his conquests by someone who was there, sort of the day-to-day accounts, we know that existed some years after.

That's been lost. Right. We think hadrian wrote like a very private memoir the emperor hadrian like a really for his successor yeah and that's obviously been lost but my favorite is a guy called pithias who was a sort of colonial greek living in southern france kind of in marseille and he leaves an account of sailing out into the atlantic and going up seeing the northern lights seeing 24 hour sun so going up, seeing the Northern Lights, seeing 24-hour sun, so going as far as the Arctic Circle,

Britain, Ireland, etc., possibly icebergs. And we know about that through other people's writing. So other people incorporate, as Pythios says, but we've lost that original text. So to have that description

of a Greek mariner going, I would just love. Is it possible that it's out there? Oh, yeah, for sure. So you know about the Herculaneum you know about the scrolls in Herculaneum yeah yeah yeah

so the hope is that we will now be able to decipher these scrolls these carbonized they look like rocks but they were scrolls that were

covered in volcanic debris during Vesuvius eruption during the famous eruption and when in the 19th century they were finding those

and they thought they were bits of coal they were putting them on the fire and they were actually carbonized scrolls from this extraordinary library, like this massive library on this super villa on the clifftop in Herculaneum,

and they have now gone away, as you know, have x-rayed them, and they've just been able to make out the first sentence from them, so it is entirely possible we're going to get the missing books. Tastos, we're going to get. Oh, what else is there? That is very exciting.

That's very exciting. But yeah, it's not treasury in the traditional sense, but the Amber Room is good. The Amber Room. What's the Amber Room? The Amber Room is the one that was ripped out of Catherine the Great's palace near St. Petersburg by the Nazis.

Oh, okay. And it was all amber, obviously, Amber Room. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was transported, and it's very well attested, and people have lost track of it. But now that I've said that, listeners will endlessly hear people go, oh, this might be the amber room in this shipwreck it's thought it could potentially be on the villain gusloff which is the worst maritime disaster in history it was a

ship full of german refugees leaving eastern europe basically and heading towards western germany so the allied zone it was sunk by soviets uh in the last months of the war 10 000 people died in right extraordinary. Extraordinary. So it's conceivable it was on them. I remember reading, I don't know the details of this, but I remember reading, it's I think the coolest treasure map that must have ever been made, which was by Gordon Cooper, the astronaut. Do you remember that? No. Cooper's gold, it's called. He was up in space, just going around the world. And he was convinced that he'd spot where a ship had sunk that most likely had a lost hoard of gold that no one had ever found. So he made a treasure map in space. He wrote the X

marks the spot and he gave it to someone and someone's been over the last 10 years or whatever looking for the astronaut's gold, basically. What? It's just so cool. He was just looking down at earth and just saw this kind of patch and went, I think that could be it there. So made his map. It's a rock. It's a rock. Yeah, exactly. But that's cool. That's very cool. It is very cool. I do think it would be cool to find, there's so many relics from history that have disappeared. I think I told you about this when we spoke last, but it's one of my favorite facts, which is the whoopee cushion was invented by an emperor called Basianus.

which is the whoopee cushion was invented by an emperor called Basianus. And his real name is obviously Elagabalus. And obviously that's not how you pronounce it. It's Basianus or whatever. But when you're bad at reading and you see the words, it's Basianus. And he's credited with inventing the whoopee cushion. And where is that? That's a museum item.

Yeah, that's one I'd go for. And the other one that I obsess over is there used to be a relic. I obsess over relics from religion and they go on tours around the world, which is very exciting. And there used to be a relic which was, and it's lost now. I think it got smashed up in the Reformation, but I feel like someone might have saved it. It's the putty from which God modeled Adam. Oh, that's an important relic. You used to visit it. It's the putty from which God modelled Adam. Oh, that's an important relic. You used to visit it. This was the putty that he made Adam out of. Why would you lose that? You listen to Dan Snow's history. Don't go anywhere. There's more to come.

To be continued... who were rarely the best of friends. Murder, rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. Your discussion of Bacianus makes me think we need to do a whole separate episode on historical nominative determinism. Oh yes. Because I mean that surely there's going to be some important stuff there. There's relics

that we don't know existed but we can be certain they were amazing. So like Ramesses' funeral goods. Because we look at Tutankhamen, a very short pharaoh in a small tomb, and the goods there are some of the most important in archaeological history. So you think to yourself, what did the goods of one of the really long-serving, Aramisith, Thothmosis, Hatshepsut, what was going on with those? But we don't have an account of those, so I guess it's intangible.

It's so fun to, when you know something existed, but now has been lost. I mean, that's the tragedy, right? No, but you're right, because the stuff we found in Tutankhamun's tomb is not just gold. It was random bits of like... Lots of underpants. There were socks. Yeah, exactly. Which means he was a socks and sandals kind of guy, which is an incredible thing.

There were trumpets. There was... Well, there was the trumpet. They blew the trumpet and it fell apart. Oh, really? Yeah, that's great that we lost that because of lost that because what did ramses have then like what like just domestic stuff that would have been unbelievable and his tomb is like a multi-story complex compared to a toot and garment so that's very sad um speaking of mummies in egypt the

victorians and wardians obviously found those just so compelling didn't they yeah and i was once doing some filming a museum and they said they were doing some testing of mummy and they got very excited. They found traces of cocaine in this mummy. So they were like, my goodness, is this pre-Columbian Egyptian? Is this kind of conspiracy theory about the Phoenicians, right?

That they're going to sell in the Atlantic, right? And it turns out no, because the mummies were brought back and they would be the centerpiece of Edwardian dinner parties. And people would be like having seances around them and before you hand it over to the Ashmolean or the British Museum whatever and you'd have candles everywhere and you'd be eating and they'd all these aristocrats be doing

cocaine right and some of the cocaine found its way into the mummy. So it had nothing to do? No it had nothing to do with it. I weirdly thought that that yeah they did cocaine yeah that's the that's a very weird bit of history. The mummy unwrapping parties. Yes. And the smoking the ground up mummies. Crazy. Like time travel wise, I think that would have to be a dinner destination for me. You'd be up for that. Just to see what was going on.

Because sometimes history does come across as too mad. Yeah. You think, how is that a normal... I don't think I've ever had a dinner party where something as eccentric has happened. You can say that again. And that was a norm. Not around me in the New Forest. I mean, dinner parties are pretty, pretty conventional.

Yeah, exactly right. And it's not like that was consistent with other kind of dinner parties there. That was just, hey, come over. We've got a mummy. We're going to unwrap it. You would be thinking, what diseases are going to be unlocked here?

Is there a curse? Is that, you know, there know there's all these well that does slightly bring me back to my kind of initial point about how actually the past i think there was more opportunity for weirdness because we were seeking it every day all day whereas now people just go home in the evening right it's sedentary whereas back then it's like yeah i'm gonna organize a dinner party where we're gonna run around unwrapping a mummy. That's going to be great. Yes. Better that

or watching the paint dry at home. Yeah, yeah. But curses are exciting and the mummies. Even today, the Tutankhamun's curse, lots of things

people said in my childhood have sort of aged and disappeared. That's one that is alive and kicking. Like, I made a show about Tutankhamun

and people will stop you and be like, well, I hope you don't get the curse. I hope the curse doesn't get you. And you're like, there isn't a curse. It doesn't even stand up. even kicking like i made a show about tin carmen and people will stop you and be like well i hope you don't get the code it doesn't get you and you're like there isn't a case it doesn't even stand up you can analyze the lifespans of all the people that went into that tomb in the initial investigation party and they all lived longer than usual like yes it's not a thing i mean famously lord carnarvon died of an infected mosquito bite very shortly afterwards but like that it was that

i mean it's yeah yeah curses are fascinating because it's all psychological. And I think they do work if you believe that they're going to work. That's the dangerous thing of the mind. And there's a story, I was talking about this weirdly, I had Ross Noble on my show because he did a thing where he used to sell coast mummy sand at his gigs off the back of doing The Apprentice Australia. He was given sand and they said, sell sand. And he tried to think, how do I do this? So he created envelopes where he said, this is the cursed mummy sand. Everyone who's associated with the Tutankhamun excavation are now dead. Just stuff like that. And he sold it and he made tons of money. And after the show

went out, everyone said, where can I get some of this mummy cursed sand? And so at his gigs, he would sell not even the sand, just envelopes with hieroglyphics on it saying, put your own sand in and it will be the cursed sand. Donated all the money to charity. But people's fascination with it. I was saying to him, I would buy that envelope because there's something alluring about an object in a house that might in some way have magical somethingness about it. And I was telling them the story, which is a lot of people will go to places like Uluru in Australia, formerly Ayers Rock, and they'll take a rock secretly, they'll put it in their coat and they'll go home. And then if it just so happens they go through a patch in their life where things are going bad

they'll go it's the rock and so they send the rock back to Uluru to kind of fix this problem this curse that's sitting over their house the really fun thing about that is it's a nightmare for Uluru they've had to set up a rock reclamation kind of office where they bring in all the rocks and they don't want them back. There's quarantine. They've got to quarantine every single rock that comes in because it's going to have bacterias and stuff that you don't want to spread into the Australian outback. The giant packages that come, what are we going to do with this giant rock? They're often sent rocks that never came from Uluru. So like you've just sent us a rock from, I don't know, someone's backyard who sold

it to you as an Uluru rock. And now we've got this thing here. What do we do with it? All the locals who I think everyone thinks they would be upset that these things are going, they're like, no, no, we don't. If it's gone, just keep it. What's going on? So I love the admin of curses. I think that's great where it's just so horrible on their life that they keep getting, I'm sorry, I stole this rock and it's caused seven deaths in my family. You need it back now. And they're like, mate, this is my whole day now, quarantining this thing, doing certificates, the paperwork. Yeah, that's for me the great thing. That's the power of superstition. And obviously there are so many examples from history, but, and clearly the present of people who believe those things so passionately that they...

I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends.

Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. I have come across in, I think it was Captain Cook's first voyage, where someone believes themselves to be unlucky and actually ends their own life. Like, this is just that sort of sense of unlucky. Napoleon said, I want my generals lucky.

Do you believe in luck? Yes, I do, yeah. Yeah, but Napoleon said, I don't care if my generals can do this, that, and the other, but are they lucky? Yeah. And there's an urban myth, which I'd love someone to email in and tell me it's true is the french do have still have a box tick for their officer's promotion system like is this person lucky really yeah but it's it's annoyingly i can't i don't know if it's true but actually that rings true to me however that's not consistent throughout life like i had a very lucky 15 years like even when i really screwed up something weird

would happen to unscrew it, which made me very lazy because then I didn't have to worry about things. And then that caught up with me a bit later on. I went through a run of things, not just miraculously working out. Did you happen to bring home a rock from some sacred site? My God, that's right. I did. There's your problem. Fixed it in one. Yeah, it is interesting. I think it was you that made the point that you think that people who believed that they were lucky kind of became the big people of our planet. They designed their own destiny by believing that luck happened.

If you look at all the leaders, I'm pretty sure it was you that told me this. You're like, look at all the leaders. They all said, yeah, I'm destined for greatness and luck is what's going to happen. Extraordinary self-belief. Yeah. And I guess if you don't believe you're lucky, you're not going to stand for election that first time. You're not going to throw your hat in the ring, right? Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. No, it's fascinating. And weirdly, the mummy curse stuff, one of my favorite journalists from the UK, WT Stade, he ran very odd things. Again, London's such an amazing, every street, there's just something incredible. On the Strand, he ran an agency that was called Julia's Bureau with a lady called Julia, where you could come in and try and contact someone on the other side. And he had agents all around the UK who would be mediums on your behalf. So if they thought that you had a good reason to contact someone, they would take on your case. Julia would approve of it and they would look into it and get the message back to you.

look into it and get the message back to you. And it turned out that Julia, who set up the company, had actually no idea the company existed because she had died like a decade before. And it was during a weird automatic writing seance session that Julia got in contact with WT State, said, set up this bureau for me. So she was the head of a company, but was dead and had no idea it would ever be set up on her behalf. So he was an odd character who was also an amazing journalist in the UK. And it was him who wrote a book where, along with a few other people, he had the prediction of a boat in the mid-Atlantic sinking, there not being enough lifeboats. Wrote it, I don't know, a few years before the Titanic disaster. And then it turned out that he never got to sort of claim that he was incredible as someone with premonition powers because he died on the Titanic. He was one of the casualties. He was on the ship. But there's a story that before he died, the night before, he was regaling everyone around the table about the cursed mummies. museum looking at a mummy with a friend of his and creating an idea of cursed mummies and so on and when everyone the survivors got back from the titanic and they were talking about wt stayed

because he was a very famous guy they said yes on the night before he was telling us about a cursed mummy and it's thought that the whole tootin car moon cursed mummy thing is off him saying it on that night on the titanic on the penultimate night because a lot of people thought there's a cursed mummy on the titanic yes that was the yeah yeah but he's one guy who is so in the fabric of weirdness for the things we still talk about today well and seances and speaking from beyond the grave is so fascinating and i always love the fact that the last woman convicted of 18th century witchcraft under 18th century witchcraft legislation was actually a woman in the UK during the Second World War in the 1940s, because she told family members about the loss of a battleship called the Barham in the Mediterranean.

And she'd heard it, loose talk around the dock or whatever. But she started to say, well, I know that your relatives on Barham and they've been killed. And this was when it was embargoed. Then the police nabbed her and like, we actually, we're not sure we can prosecute her and they dug up this mid-18th century witchcraft legislation. Wow. She was banged to rights. Oh my God.

Yeah, so it was the last witch in the UK. So they were worried that she was going to be slipping out secrets. Well, yeah, they were worried that she'd keep telling people

the word on the bar and would get out and who knew what she knew. Yeah. That's very interesting. Is this true? Have you ever come across this? Because I've only in passing sort of never looked into it. But during the Second World War, there was a huge thing

of the idea of using magic and occultism as part of war tactics. There's a story that there's an amazing bookshop called Watkins, which is an occult bookshop. And it was run by a guy called John Watkins. And I think it was his son who apparently Churchill brought in to be the official person for astrology, even though he didn't believe it, but he wanted to understand what they might be thinking if they were using astrology, give insight into the army. And there's a lady who, again, lives in London, who supposedly was doing psychic warfare on the soldiers over in Germany, I think it was. And there's a story that when the bombing of London happened,

a very specific site was picked to be bombed because it's where she lived and they wanted to take out the psychic warfare that was going on. And I don't know if that's 100% true. So if your listeners can write in and let me know. It's interesting that London Blitz bombing, it feels like that's, does it? The level of precision would be probably a little, I mean, they did go for buildings and avoid buildings. Famously, Kaiser Wilhelm ordered no royal palaces were to be bombed in the First World War. He was angry at his relatives, but he didn't want to kill them.

It was beneath the dignity of an imperial family member to be killed by an aerial bomb. And wasn't Oxford and places like that left? family member to be killed by an aerial bomb. And wasn't Oxford and places like that left? Edinburgh, yeah. Because wouldn't it be great to have that? Famously, Blackpool was left because it was going to be the German sort of R&R, the leisure of the German occupying garrison. Only one bomb dropped by mistake. Only one raid happened on Blackpool. Isn't it terrifying, that thought, that such level of power that like, I've just moved into a new home and you do look at each room and go, what should we do that? Let's take down the paints, you know, change the colours

here. Let's do the floors. They're literally looking at the UK. They're going, oh, that will be a great leisure center. Let's keep that. That's mad, the power in that. Well, that's why they do go mad. I mean, that's just ultimate power. Yeah.

I think as well, they rounded up. There was definitely one of the guys, the high commanders of the Nazis, who believed in psychic ability and psychic warfare, and they rounded up a lot of the local psychics, and they kept them in one camp because they needed to, they wanted them to concentrate on where they could find various people that were hiding from them. But this stuff was a real thing. I mean, it's bizarre.

Alistair Crowley was brought in by Ian Fleming in order to be a part of spreading occult stuff to the Germans because they thought they would believe that this person had magic powers. Well, they don't call it Total War for Nothing, do they? And it is fascinating. Every single aspect of the human story, every piece of our character, that's what's so interesting about the Second World War, none of it is left unturned.

They harness every single conceivable thing in that quest for victory. It's so fascinating. Yeah, it's interesting. I've never been properly into war as such. If I could pick a museum to go to in London, I would never go to the Imperial War Museum. I'd go to the Natural History Museum, Science Museum. I went for the first time the other day to the Imperial War Museum. It's the greatest museum I've ever been to in my life. Listen, bud, it's called middle age. Oh my God. Is that what it is?

It's called dad. You just had your youngest kid. Oh my God. Is that what it is? It's called dad. Oh no. You just had your youngest kid. It's just the level of invention. It's incredible. As you say, every single thing is thought of.

And, you know, they've got that tree there that was used in No Man's Land where they sketch a tree, they take it down, they put in a fake tree, and then they've got people in there being able to relay messages. You would have been, Churchill would have snapped you up in a second because you are, he liked people that think in wiggly lines. He didn't want people who think in straight lines. And you are one of those people. Your brain is so fascinating. You would be constantly coming up with amazing innovations and different ideas and ways of doing things.

Something else I want to ask you about, because I heard it in a recent podcast of yours and it reminded me of Tintin where Professor Calculus is always doing these. And that's ball lightning. You read these accounts. Like what's going on there? It's really weird. I'd never heard of this before. So I had a guest on my show called Ella Alshamahi. She's a anthropologist, really cool, really badass,

goes into Yemen and places like that. She's been on the pod. Has she? Right. Very cool. And I was asking her, you know, cause she's a very, very rational kind of person. So I was trying to find that little bit of weirdness in her. And she said, when I was a kid, my know, because she's a very, very rational kind of person. So I was trying to find that little bit of weirdness in her. And she said, when I was a kid, my mom told me the story that she was in the house and suddenly through the window, this ball of lightning just came in, went all over the house and then shot back out again. There's two stories that her family tells, and I'm not sure she's settled on which one was right.

The first time she told me, she said it came in through one door, her auntie saw it coming, opened up the other door, and it went back out the house again. But it's a real thing. It's a real phenomena, this idea of ball lightning. And there's a few scientists and historians who are studying accounts from history where it's been reported. No one really knows what it is. There's a bunch of theories.

You get it in naval logs, don't you? Yeah. Yeah, that's that's where i've come across and like a monk recorded it on the thames i mean again so cool william hazlitt's there you got ball lightning recorded by monks down the road um it's something to do with energy that's we honestly don't know which is it's just a phenomenon which and people have accounts where they have no reason just to make stuff up. They just say, I was in my house, this ball came down, it stopped in front of my face as if it was like looking at me and then it just bounced around and went away and they had singed hair and everything. There's no reason for them to make it up because have they even heard of ball lightning? That's not how you get in the papers. So scientists have been looking into it. It's not a pressing matter, bizarrely, because it's quite rare. I think we should get to some kind of answer.

Yeah, exactly right. That's what I kept asking them. I was like, so you're making this a priority? And they're like, nah, it's just an interesting thing to look at. Crack on. Yeah. I can see why there's so little time for them to focus their attention on things like ghosts and stuff like that, because there's so many natural phenomena that remains a mystery to the world of science, like ball lightning, that you go, well, get in the queue, ghosts. We have actual accounts. Yeah, we've got much more interest, rather than just made up Jane Austen type people walking around. Yeah, exactly.

There's things like ball lightning. There's ball lightning. So you're telling me there is no scientific explanation for ball lightning? I think there's a few theories, but none of them stack up entirely because it's such a rare phenomena that we don't know. It's kind of like one thing I wanted to point out about how mysterious everything is on our planet. It goes from things as big as do ghosts exist or is there an afterlife, is there God, you know, all that stuff, all the way down to the fact that scientists can't agree why when you're in the shower, the shower curtain billows in towards you.

They just don't have a solid answer for it. There are four competing theories at the moment which say, oh, it's because of this effect. It's this effect. But it doesn't answer all the things that are needed to make sure that's a thing. So next time you're in the shower, if there's a shower curtain coming in towards you, we have no idea why. We've got a basic idea, but there's no agreed reason for it. That's very worrying.

Yeah, but it goes all the way from as big as God to shower curtains. Yeah. You know what? Speaking of ball lighting, I was once asked to present a TV show when I was in my early 20s. And it was basically some natural phenomena. And the tagline was, filming the impossible. And I was like like there's a problem here yeah guys yeah which is this episode ball lightning what do i do you can hang around yeah

in like lightningy places that's what's so exciting about this stuff it's actually still very difficult to capture on camera yeah exactly it's why it remains a mystery but as you know because it's your entire career it it's storytelling, isn't it? It's the people who've experienced these things. And hearing those stories gives you a context of a lot of life in very weird ways. So it's like a Bill Bryson book, right? You don't really care about the science, but you want to find out about that person who's trying to prove that they think that this effect is happening or whatever. But yeah, on screen, it's really dull to not see ball lightning. As someone who's made

lots of programs about things that turn out not to be there at the end of the day. How did you fix the Nazi gold? We went and filmed in lots of underground. There are lots of very interesting underground installations

built in that part of Germany or that was part of Germany because it's as far as you can get from Allied bombers based in the UK. So they built a lot of underground factories there. And so there were some superb tunnels and exciting things,

but they were like open to the public. Okay, right. We just made them look really cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah, nice. An hour after we left, they just turned all the lights on and let the public back in. Did you admit within the documentary that this thing... Oh, that's great.

Oh, no, no, in the documentary I was like weeping, going, there's nothing here. But it doesn't mean that it's still not out there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's still not out there yeah yeah so it's fun but the interesting of course about remote sensing whether from space or metal detectors or of course subsea has gone crazy is we're going to find a lot more stuff over the next few years right so sometimes we might think of the golden age of archaeology being like a while ago with kenosis and tootin carmen troy i don't know like we are going to be able to get into and

open up and have a look at every shipwreck in the ocean, which contains more artifacts than every museum on the planet. Yeah, that's pretty amazing. So I think our life, the next 30, 40 years, are going to be extraordinary. Thank you for coming on this podcast and sharing all of your weird history. Thanks so much. you