Hello, it's Richard McClain Smith here. Season 7 of Unexplained will begin on Friday, July 28.

In the meantime, we are revisiting some of our favourite episodes. This week is one of my personal

favourites. Back in 1958, Friedrich Jürgenstund was recording Birdsong in his garden

when he captured something else entirely. The experience would change his life forever.

With a title taken from a song by Peter Gabriel, this week's rerun is Unexplained,

Season 3 Episode 9. Come, talk to me.

Friedrich Jürgenstund did not believe in ghosts. At least not in the traditional sense of

something that had once lived somehow remaining after death. Much less that the dead could talk.

He did not follow any religion or pin his mast to any one political party. And neither did he

believe in an interventionist god. He had seen too much for that.

Jürgenstund was born in Odessa in February 1903, then a major city of the Russian Empire,

and soon to be cradle of revolution. Though his family lived a relatively charmed life by

comparison to many of its citizens, his formative years were nonetheless surrounded by misery

as he once put it. And it certainly wasn't lacking in drama. By the time he was 40 years old,

Jürgenstund will have fled from Bolshevik revolutionaries to Estonia. Before later moving to Berlin,

to train as an opera singer under the great Italian tenor, Tito Schiepper.

After a period of almost unrivaled sexual and creative freedom in the city,

he will later watch in horror as a new puritanism takes hold.

While those not blessed with the privilege of being able to work in the arts,

struggling under crippling poverty and unemployment,

are drawn ever closer to the rising tide of fascism.

Its subsequent fanning of a growing anti-Semitism leaves the Jewish Schiepper no option

...