This is an IHeart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

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.

In late 19th century Paris, rescue workers pulled a young woman's body out of the river Sen. At the time she was lifted out of the water, she was already dead from an apparent drowning.

But strangely, there was no panic or fear in her eyes. Instead, a rescue

worker brushed the damp hair away from her face and found a beautiful, peaceful, half-smile

on her lips. The workers didn't find anything in the woman's pockets that identified her by name.

So, as was customary at the time, they took her body to the Paris mortuary.

There, she was put on display in the window that hopes that someone passing by would recognize

and put a name to her serene face. The woman's family never did come by and identify her,

but her enigmatic expression turned the heads of everyone who walked past.

Morbid crowds gathered in the street to get a look at her eerily calm smile, and the unknown

woman of the Sen, as she became known, was a local celebrity. The pathologist who worked at the

mortuary was so taken by her mysterious beauty that he made a cast of her face,

and before long it was being used to create plaster replicas that were sold in souvenir shops all across Europe.

Over the next few decades, the unknown woman became the subject of poems, paintings, and novels,

all of which tried to fill in the

blanks of who she was and what had led to her drowning. The most popular legend was that she

had thrown herself into the river due to a broken heart. One novelist imagined her as an

...