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.

If you've ever been to a Halloween party or a pumpkin patch, you've probably seen someone dressed as a fortune teller with dangly earrings and wrapped in shawls.

She might have looked into a crystal ball and told you your future.

Of course, the fortune teller

was probably an actor, and you understood that her predictions weren't real. But the character

she's playing is inspired by a real woman who travel the globe conducting seances. She was

an adventurer, an occultist, and the mother of an entire New Age movement.

But much like fortune tellers at the party, it was hard to tell which parts of her story were real and what was invented to entice her audience.

She was a clear fraud, but she also was a brilliant mind who left her mark on history,

which might be why we're still captivated by the unconventional

life of a very mysterious individual. Helena was born in 1831 in Russia, but they soon moved to

Odessa in present-day Ukraine. And according to family members, this is where Helena first began to

see ghosts. She would spend hours in the

unused passageways under her house, playing with the ghosts who lingered there. She also developed

a supernatural gift that she called Solomon's Wisdom. It's unclear what it meant exactly,

but the neighborhood kids said that she could use the gift to lull street pigeons to sleep.

For the next decade, life moved quickly for Helena.

Her family moved around and then married her off to an older man when she was just

...