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.

Picture the scene with me.

It's midwinter 1918.

The hospital ward is packed this season.

Row upon row of ailing patients lie trembling,

unable to raise their heads,

their faces fixed, eyes glazed,

caught between sleep and waking in an unnatural half-dream state. Each suffers from a disease that doctors have not yet understood,

encephalitis lethargica, or simply EL, an illness concurrent with the influenza just beginning

to sweep the globe. But this disease, EL, affecting between

one and five million people worldwide, manifests differently, intense sleepwalking,

ocular disturbances, and a motor skill impairment. Many permanently develop Parkinson's-like symptoms,

and they call it the sleeping sickness, and it kills between 10 to 30 percent of

people infected. The first documented cases came in 1916 when St. Petersburg, Paris, and Vienna

simultaneously reported an illness characterized by severe fatigue, fever, and a disturbing ability

to stay awake. It was thought that refugees and soldiers of the

Great War helped to spread the disease across Europe. As cases rose, health officials issued

...