January 8, 2026 • 9 mins
Some curious tales are more sticky than others. WE hope this tour through the Cabinet will help you understand why.
Order the official Cabinet of Curiosities book by clicking here today, and get ready to enjoy some curious reading!
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
iHeartRadio and Grimm 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 Curiosities.
(00:36):
January fifteenth of nineteen nineteen was an unusually warm winter's
afternoon in Boston. In the North End, near the waterfront,
workers sat outside to eat their lunches. Firefighters were playing
cards in the garage of the engine House, and near
a warehouse on Commercial Street, a group of children were
gathering firewood for their families when they heard a strange,
(00:57):
metallic groan. It was come out from the fifty foot
tall steel tank full of molasses that towered over the
North End. The tank had been built a few years
earlier by the Purity Distilling Company, and locals were used
to its regular leaking and rumbling, but this time it
sounded different. The rapid warming weather was causing the molasses
(01:18):
in the tank to expand, putting increased pressure on the
poorly constructed walls. The quiet groan grew into a deep growl,
and then with a sudden bang, the rivets shot out
of the tank, ripping the sides open and sending a
twenty five foot wave of molasses crashing down the street.
The sticky brown wave rolled through the North End at
(01:40):
a shocking speed of about thirty five miles an hour.
They was powerful enough to crush buildings and knock an
elevated train off its tracks. The firefighters at the engine
house ducked for cover as the walls collapsed around them,
leaving them trapped in a waste deep huddle of molasses.
A truck was picked up and hurtled all the way
into to Boston Harbor and down the block. A man
(02:03):
woke up in his third story bedroom to see a
flood of molasses several feet deep surrounding his bed. He
had to climb on top of the bed frame to
keep from drowning. In total, about two point three million
gallons of molasses poured into the streets, covering several blocks
in two to three feet of gooey sludge. Within minutes, Police, firefighters,
(02:25):
and Navy sailors rushed to the scene. They had a
hard time maneuvering through the sticky streets. Especially as the
molasses began to thicken in the cool winter air, but
they worked through the night, pulling survivors and bodies out
of the ruins. Despite the best efforts of the rescue crews,
twenty one people died in the Great Molasses Flood, including
(02:46):
two of the children who were collecting firewood nearby. Another
one hundred and fifty people were injured. It took hundreds
of workers weeks to clean up the molasses in the
immediate area, and even longer to clear the residue from
the rest of Greater Boston. Clean Up crews had to
fill a fireboat with water from the harbor and spray
the streets with saltwater to dissolve the molasses. The Boston
(03:09):
Harbor was stained brown until summer, and for decades after
the disaster, the syrupy smell of molasses lingered over the
North End, becoming a distinctive part of the Boston atmosphere.
In the aftermath of the Great Molasses Flood, survivors filed
one hundred and nineteen separate lawsuits blaming the explosion on
(03:29):
the tank's poor design and shoddy construction. This led to
massive changes in construction laws nationwide, including a new requirement
that engineers and building inspectors had to sign off on
every project. More than one hundred years later, those new
regulations have successfully ensured that such a sticky tragedy will
never happen again. On November fifteenth of nineteen sixty six,
(04:06):
two young couples were driving past an abandoned National Guard
armory in West Virginia. It was a dark night, with
only the headlights on their car to guide them. The
armory was a strange place. Underground storage bunkers lay covered
in graffiti, with their big metal doors lying open like gaping,
yawning mouths ready to swallow someone up. Looking at one,
(04:28):
you wondered what strange weapons might have been stored inside them,
and what might remain. West Virginia was already a sufficiently
spooky place all on its own. The Blue Mountains feature
deep canyons dotted with thick tangles of trees hiding strange
monsters and occasionally strange people. It is truly both beautiful
(04:49):
and sinister, and that night these two couples, Roger and
Linda Scarberry and Steve and Mary Malette, were about to
learn this in spades as they traveled along the highway.
Something st came into focus. Several feet ahead of them.
Two bright red pinpricks of light shot out like flares
in the dark. At first, they thought these might be
the tail lights of another car, but the red lights
(05:11):
hovered off the ground as if they weren't attached to
any vehicle at all. Because they weren't lights. They were eyes,
buggish orbs set into the gray fur covered head with
no neck, and below that, a gray bipedal body with
long insect like wings stretched out hideously behind it. The
couple screamed and the driver slammed on the gas. They
(05:33):
plunged forward, growing even more shocked as this hideous creature
simply jumped up into the sky, turned around and followed them,
flapping its wings with ease. They drove as fast as
they could to one hundred miles an hour, desperate to
escape the strange creature, but it seemed to keep up
with them with no problem. Everyone in the car looked
(05:54):
eagerly toward the approaching lights of the city. It was
their last hope. They crossed over onto the main thoroughfare
and looked behind them, and the creature was gone. The
most sinister part of this now infamous mothman story isn't
the eerie details of that first encounter, but the fact
that several other people claimed to see the exact same
thing in the coming days. Before the initial sighting was
(06:16):
well reported on, there was no opportunity for these witnesses
to corroborate their stories and get the details straight. It
seems they really did see this creature. One man even
claimed that it ate his dog. Within a few years,
a journalist named John Keel traveled across West Virginia documenting
these strange occurrences. He noted the mothman phenomenon as being
(06:38):
a part of a larger UFO sighting phenomenon going on
throughout the United States at the time. But the mothman
sightings seemed to come to a climax on December fifteenth
of nineteen sixty seven. That was when the Silver Bridge
connecting Point Pleasant to Gallipoli, Ohio, collapsed, killing over forty people.
There are claims that the mothman was seen flying around
(06:59):
the bridge just before the accident, as if it could
predict what was about to happen. John Keel ultimately came
to a conclusion that's arguably stranger than the initial phenomena.
He believed that UFOs, the Mothman, and every other strange
sighting at the time could be attributed to the work
of extra dimensional beings who were causing people to hallucinate
(07:20):
all of these different creatures. Of course, nothing has ever
come of this theory. The bridge collapse can be attributed
to structural failure, UFO sightings to human aircraft and mass paranoia,
and the Mothman, well, the Mothman is harder to explain away.
At the very least, it's difficult to provide a rational
explanation for those rapid initial sightings when the individuals involved
(07:43):
had no chance to build off each other's stories. And
as I mentioned, West Virginia can be a spooky place.
There's a long tradition in the area of folklore relating
to different kinds of monsters in the woods. Maybe the
people of Point Pleasant in the nineteen sixties were just
primed by those earth stories and ready to create a
monster of their own after seeing a large owl or
(08:05):
a crane in the dark. Mothman is now a beloved
cryptid on par with bigfoots or the Lockness Monster, and
the people at Point Pleasant have fully embraced the legend
by erecting a statue in the center of town and
holding an annual Mothman festival. Still, you're more likely to
see it depicted as acutesy plushy on Etsy than as
(08:26):
something sinister. But with no satisfying answers to the original sightings,
folks always will be curious about whether the monster could
have been real or not. Maybe it will come back
one day to chase down some more cars, or to
warn us of impending doom. I hope you've enjoyed today's
(08:46):
guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free
on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by
visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by
me Aaron Mankey and partners with how Stuff Works. I
make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast,
book series, and television show, and you can learn all
(09:08):
about it over at Theworldoflore dot com. And until next time,
stay curious.
Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
iHeartRadio and Grimm 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 Curiosities.
(00:36):
January fifteenth of nineteen nineteen was an unusually warm winter's
afternoon in Boston. In the North End, near the waterfront,
workers sat outside to eat their lunches. Firefighters were playing
cards in the garage of the engine House, and near
a warehouse on Commercial Street, a group of children were
gathering firewood for their families when they heard a strange,
(00:57):
metallic groan. It was come out from the fifty foot
tall steel tank full of molasses that towered over the
North End. The tank had been built a few years
earlier by the Purity Distilling Company, and locals were used
to its regular leaking and rumbling, but this time it
sounded different. The rapid warming weather was causing the molasses
(01:18):
in the tank to expand, putting increased pressure on the
poorly constructed walls. The quiet groan grew into a deep growl,
and then with a sudden bang, the rivets shot out
of the tank, ripping the sides open and sending a
twenty five foot wave of molasses crashing down the street.
The sticky brown wave rolled through the North End at
(01:40):
a shocking speed of about thirty five miles an hour.
They was powerful enough to crush buildings and knock an
elevated train off its tracks. The firefighters at the engine
house ducked for cover as the walls collapsed around them,
leaving them trapped in a waste deep huddle of molasses.
A truck was picked up and hurtled all the way
into to Boston Harbor and down the block. A man
(02:03):
woke up in his third story bedroom to see a
flood of molasses several feet deep surrounding his bed. He
had to climb on top of the bed frame to
keep from drowning. In total, about two point three million
gallons of molasses poured into the streets, covering several blocks
in two to three feet of gooey sludge. Within minutes, Police, firefighters,
(02:25):
and Navy sailors rushed to the scene. They had a
hard time maneuvering through the sticky streets. Especially as the
molasses began to thicken in the cool winter air, but
they worked through the night, pulling survivors and bodies out
of the ruins. Despite the best efforts of the rescue crews,
twenty one people died in the Great Molasses Flood, including
(02:46):
two of the children who were collecting firewood nearby. Another
one hundred and fifty people were injured. It took hundreds
of workers weeks to clean up the molasses in the
immediate area, and even longer to clear the residue from
the rest of Greater Boston. Clean Up crews had to
fill a fireboat with water from the harbor and spray
the streets with saltwater to dissolve the molasses. The Boston
(03:09):
Harbor was stained brown until summer, and for decades after
the disaster, the syrupy smell of molasses lingered over the
North End, becoming a distinctive part of the Boston atmosphere.
In the aftermath of the Great Molasses Flood, survivors filed
one hundred and nineteen separate lawsuits blaming the explosion on
(03:29):
the tank's poor design and shoddy construction. This led to
massive changes in construction laws nationwide, including a new requirement
that engineers and building inspectors had to sign off on
every project. More than one hundred years later, those new
regulations have successfully ensured that such a sticky tragedy will
never happen again. On November fifteenth of nineteen sixty six,
(04:06):
two young couples were driving past an abandoned National Guard
armory in West Virginia. It was a dark night, with
only the headlights on their car to guide them. The
armory was a strange place. Underground storage bunkers lay covered
in graffiti, with their big metal doors lying open like gaping,
yawning mouths ready to swallow someone up. Looking at one,
(04:28):
you wondered what strange weapons might have been stored inside them,
and what might remain. West Virginia was already a sufficiently
spooky place all on its own. The Blue Mountains feature
deep canyons dotted with thick tangles of trees hiding strange
monsters and occasionally strange people. It is truly both beautiful
(04:49):
and sinister, and that night these two couples, Roger and
Linda Scarberry and Steve and Mary Malette, were about to
learn this in spades as they traveled along the highway.
Something st came into focus. Several feet ahead of them.
Two bright red pinpricks of light shot out like flares
in the dark. At first, they thought these might be
the tail lights of another car, but the red lights
(05:11):
hovered off the ground as if they weren't attached to
any vehicle at all. Because they weren't lights. They were eyes,
buggish orbs set into the gray fur covered head with
no neck, and below that, a gray bipedal body with
long insect like wings stretched out hideously behind it. The
couple screamed and the driver slammed on the gas. They
(05:33):
plunged forward, growing even more shocked as this hideous creature
simply jumped up into the sky, turned around and followed them,
flapping its wings with ease. They drove as fast as
they could to one hundred miles an hour, desperate to
escape the strange creature, but it seemed to keep up
with them with no problem. Everyone in the car looked
(05:54):
eagerly toward the approaching lights of the city. It was
their last hope. They crossed over onto the main thoroughfare
and looked behind them, and the creature was gone. The
most sinister part of this now infamous mothman story isn't
the eerie details of that first encounter, but the fact
that several other people claimed to see the exact same
thing in the coming days. Before the initial sighting was
(06:16):
well reported on, there was no opportunity for these witnesses
to corroborate their stories and get the details straight. It
seems they really did see this creature. One man even
claimed that it ate his dog. Within a few years,
a journalist named John Keel traveled across West Virginia documenting
these strange occurrences. He noted the mothman phenomenon as being
(06:38):
a part of a larger UFO sighting phenomenon going on
throughout the United States at the time. But the mothman
sightings seemed to come to a climax on December fifteenth
of nineteen sixty seven. That was when the Silver Bridge
connecting Point Pleasant to Gallipoli, Ohio, collapsed, killing over forty people.
There are claims that the mothman was seen flying around
(06:59):
the bridge just before the accident, as if it could
predict what was about to happen. John Keel ultimately came
to a conclusion that's arguably stranger than the initial phenomena.
He believed that UFOs, the Mothman, and every other strange
sighting at the time could be attributed to the work
of extra dimensional beings who were causing people to hallucinate
(07:20):
all of these different creatures. Of course, nothing has ever
come of this theory. The bridge collapse can be attributed
to structural failure, UFO sightings to human aircraft and mass paranoia,
and the Mothman, well, the Mothman is harder to explain away.
At the very least, it's difficult to provide a rational
explanation for those rapid initial sightings when the individuals involved
(07:43):
had no chance to build off each other's stories. And
as I mentioned, West Virginia can be a spooky place.
There's a long tradition in the area of folklore relating
to different kinds of monsters in the woods. Maybe the
people of Point Pleasant in the nineteen sixties were just
primed by those earth stories and ready to create a
monster of their own after seeing a large owl or
(08:05):
a crane in the dark. Mothman is now a beloved
cryptid on par with bigfoots or the Lockness Monster, and
the people at Point Pleasant have fully embraced the legend
by erecting a statue in the center of town and
holding an annual Mothman festival. Still, you're more likely to
see it depicted as acutesy plushy on Etsy than as
(08:26):
something sinister. But with no satisfying answers to the original sightings,
folks always will be curious about whether the monster could
have been real or not. Maybe it will come back
one day to chase down some more cars, or to
warn us of impending doom. I hope you've enjoyed today's
(08:46):
guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free
on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by
visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by
me Aaron Mankey and partners with how Stuff Works. I
make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast,
book series, and television show, and you can learn all
(09:08):
about it over at Theworldoflore dot com. And until next time,
stay curious.
Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities News
Host
Aaron Mahnke
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