So, you're sitting in the football stadium at the University of Texas at Austin.

All around you, a hundred thousand people are clapping, cheering, stomping their feet.

Suddenly the marching band swarms onto the fields decked out in these bright orange costumes

with tassels and cowboy hats.

Everything looks teeny tiny from this distance.

Everything except for one thing.

She's about eight feet wide, around five hundred pounds.

And her history, it takes her all the way from the stockyards of Chicago to a nuclear test

during the Manhattan Project to this stadium right here at the University of Texas at Austin.

I'm Dylan Thuras and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible

and wondrous places.

And today we're bringing you the story of the sweetheart of the Longhorn band.

That's after this.

Clifton Cruz says that there's one thing people always ask him when they first lay eyes on Big

Bertha.

People are always like, you know, well, can I hit it?

You know, when I got hired, I said the exact same thing.

Cruz is the director of the Longhorn band.

And his answer to that question is usually, no, no, you cannot hit Big Bertha.

Not unless you want to join the marching band because Big Bertha is a drum, a really, really

big drum.

And it takes especially trained crew to take care of her and four people just to wheel

...