Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosity's, a production of IHeart 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 Curiosity's.

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, Bella Legosi.

Well, I'll tell you, it was no laughing matter.

This story comes from a collection of Prussian folklore, placed in the year 1591, the 20th of

September, to be precise, it begins, as so many horror stories do, with death. A shoemaker

from the city of Breslau in Celesia, Central Europe, cut his own throats 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

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