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.

Virginia Shepardt. Virginia shivered as she limped along the mountain road, her prosthetic leg dragging in the deep snow.

There was nothing but danger and death behind her in France.

The Gestapo had learned her identity, and she'd woken days ago to find her own face staring back at her from thousands of posters that blanketed the city. Her only hope now

was Spain. She wondered what would happen if she died out here, crossing the Pyrenees on foot.

Would anyone find her? Would her body make it back to America? Because if Virginia had done her job

well, no one would ever know who she was, and Virginia was very, very good at her job.

Born in 1906 in Baltimore, Maryland, to a middle-class family, Virginia discovered early on

that she longed for adventure. She was great with languages, so after studying French, Italian, and German in college,

she ended up moving to Poland.

There, she worked as a clerk in the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw.

Her real ambition, though, was to be a diplomat.

Virginia thought that she could be useful in international relations.

Yet, despite multiple

applications and an appeal to Franklin Delano Roosevelt himself, the State Department wouldn't

make her an ambassador. There's a big chance gender played a role in that. At the time,

only six U.S. ambassadors were women. Around the same time that Virginia was petitioning the State

Department, an incident

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