This is an IHeart podcast.

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.

Nothing spreads faster than a good piece of trivia from a far-off land.

We all have an appetite to learn the strange and wonderful quirks of far-off places.

That's partly why you listen to this show.

Sometimes what we can learn can shock us.

Sometimes it can amuse us, and sometimes the lure details are difficult to believe.

In early October of 2009, a strange news story started circulating from the Chinese news agencies Shihua and Harbin News.

It was a curiosity piece about a place in northern Sweden

with a particular history, a town known as Shakabo. Founded in 1820, Shacobo City had a population

of 25,000 people, about the same size as Key West Florida today, large enough to provoke interest,

but small enough that it wasn't

surprising that the world at large had never heard of it. What made Chakabot City worthy of news

coverage, however, was the nature of that population. The report claimed that this city was populated

entirely by women. Men were categorically forbidden from living there, working there, or even

visiting. The article explained that the woman who had founded it almost 200 years earlier was a wealthy

widow who desired a sanctuary far away from the eyes of men. So she found that an enclave

where only women could live. To the present day, if a man showed up,

they would be harshly turned away, maybe even beaten up by blonde guards who stood at its gates.

...