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.

The ocean is full of secrets.

It covers the majority of the planet,

and only through immense technical effort can we even begin to glimpse what lies in the depths.

Before deep-sea submarines, we could only judge what lay below by what made it to the surface,

which has led to some pretty curious tales. On November 30th of 1896, two boys were walking along a beach on Anastasia Island off the coast of Florida. They spotted something that they

couldn't quite make sense of. It was a large mass, about 21 feet long,

seven feet wide, and just over four feet tall. They didn't know what to make of it. It seemed to

rise out of the sand, unmoving. So the boys ran to the nearby town of St. Augustine and told

a local physician that they'd found a dead whale washed up on the beach. The physician was Dr. DeWitt Webb,

the president of the local scientific society. Excited by the boy's story, he immediately went to

see this thing for himself. And when he arrived, he too was puzzled by its appearance. This was

some kind of animal, but it didn't look much like a whale. It was largely featureless,

partially decayed, with several stump-like limbs, and its skin was a faded pink gray,

with a tough, rubbery texture. Needless to say, this was a creature unlike any kind he had ever

seen before, and soon enough, crowds of locals were flocking to the beach to get a glimpse

of the thing.

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