Welcome to Aaron Manky's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of I Heart Radio and

Grim and Mild. 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. It's practically cliche now, the young hopeful moving to Hollywood wanting to be discovered.

Yet it still happens.

Every year, thousands of people uproot their lives to pursue their dreams of stardom.

But one man found his fame a different way, by bringing the movies to him. Mexican Revolutionary Pancho Villa was born in Durango, Mexico in 1878,

with a very full name of Jose Doroteo Arango, Arambula.

Many stories about his early life are either apocryphal or just downright false.

But it's widely believed that he grew up in poverty with his parents and four siblings.

They suffered under the Hasienda system in which wealthy estate

owners would exploit poor workers for their labor. After the death of his father,

via abandon his schooling to find work and help his family keep their home. He did a number of jobs

working as a bricklayer and a sharecropper among other things but his life took a

sharp turn when he was just 16 years old. He'd been living in Chihuahua when he got word that his sister had been

assaulted by a local Hacienda owner back home. He returned to Durango for revenge.

After killing the owner and stealing one of his horses, Via became a bandit to get by.

Pretty soon he found himself in trouble

with the law getting arrested for stealing mules and guns.

But while other criminals would have been sentenced to death

...