Phishing

Today's tour tries to clarify some myths and legends.

Order the official Cabinet of Curiosities book by clicking here today, and get ready to enjoy some curious reading!

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Nke'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):
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 lwer details are difficult to believe. In

(00:56):
early October of two thousand and nine, a strange news
stories started circulating from the Chinese news agencies shin Hua
and Harbin News. It was a curiosity piece about a
place in northern Sweden with a particular history, a town
known as Chakabo. Founded in eighteen twenty, Chakabo City had
a population of twenty five thousand people, about the same

(01:19):
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 Chakabo
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,

(01:40):
working there, or even visiting. The article explained that the
woman who had founded it almost two hundred years earlier
was a wealthy widow who desired a sanctuary far away
from the eyes of men, so she founded 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

(02:01):
its gates. Women, however, were welcome to visit as tourists.
As for the citizens, the over twenty thousand women who
lived within its walls primarily worked in woodworking and forestry.
This was not a nunnery, however. The citizens of Shakabo
were permitted to leave the city if they wanted to
have a relationship with the man, They would just have
to wash themselves before they returned, a practice that doesn't

(02:24):
sound dissimilar from the Amish concept of from Springer. The
women who didn't leave developed romantic relationships with each other.
This naturally caught the eyes of the headline writers all
around the world. As the news of the city spread
throughout the international news. It was publicized as Sweden's secret
lesbian city. Swedish tourist sites were swamped with requests for

(02:47):
information about this place, leading several sites to fully crash
from the traffic. Eventually, representatives of Sweden's Tourism board had
to issue a statement regarding Chakabo's city. It does not
ex exist. The Swedish government said that there is no
way a city of that size in northern Sweden went
unnoticed for so many years. There is no secret lesbian

(03:09):
city lurking in the forests. Once the announcement was made,
it all seemed rather obvious. The rumors about Chacowell City
read like a laundry list of cliches. A town full
of women who work as lumberjacks all day, who only
know the touch of a man when they went on holiday.
It's the sort of fantasy that feels like it was
dreamed up by a lonely single guy. As amusing as

(03:32):
this hoax was, one question that was never fully definitively answered,
How and why did this story reach actual news agencies?
Was it an anonymous tip a prank from within the
staff of those agencies? Well to this day, while there
are many theories, the motive remains a mystery either way.
Although it was definitively proven false, the Internet latched onto

(03:55):
the story as an amusing fiction. Online communities created a
flag for the fake Lesbian City, wrote humorous web comics
about the hoax. Someone even made a short film set
in the city in twenty ten, less than a year
after the initial hoax. And of course, the Internet of
today is a much more noisy place than it was
in two thousand and nine. There are even more websites,

(04:17):
content mills, and social media accounts entirely dedicated to churning
out misinformation. Throw in the use of AI to create
images and text, and it's hard not to imagine a
website making a claim like this today, even one that
purports to be a press outlet. What is hard to
imagine is this story achieving a similar level of virality today.

(04:38):
After all, when it comes to fake stories on the Internet,
misinformation is no longer the exception. Sadly, it's the rule.

(05:01):
If you go to enough trivia nights at the local bar,
you're bound to get a question like this, what tenth
century Viking king is a modern Wi Fi technology named
after Bluetooth technology? Is the answer. It was named after
Harold Bluetooth Gormson, the Viking king of Norway and Denmark,
and he got the name because he had a dead

(05:21):
bluish black tooth in his mouth. Now, Bluetooth was considered
a great uniter because he was the first king to
unify the Danish territories, and that's why the company named
their technology after him. Bluetooth as a technology brings all
of your devices together. Oh and by the way, the
company logo that you'll actually see in your phone's settings

(05:43):
is Bluetooth's name written the way that it would be
carved into ronestones from all those years before. During the
Viking Age, runestones were stone monuments that were erected to
remember significant battles or events, or to honor the dead.
They were painted with bright colors and put in high
traffic areas where the entire community would see them often.

(06:04):
There are only about two hundred and fifty known runstones
from the Viking Age, so for a Viking's name to
be carved into a runestone that was kind of a
big deal, which means it's fair to say that King
Harold Bluetooth was one of the most famous Vikings to
have ever lived. And yet if being mentioned on a
runstone is proof of a Viking's importance, there was actually

(06:26):
someone who was far more celebrated than Bluetooth. In fact,
this Viking is honored on more runstones throughout Denmark than
any other Viking of their age, and yet their story
has been mostly lost to history. The Viking in question
you see was related to Bluetooth. It was his own mother, Tyra,
the Forgotten Viking Queen. She lived in Denmark in the

(06:47):
tenth century, but because histories were oral at the time
and that oral history has largely been lost, almost nothing
is known about her life. She married King Gorm the Old,
who enjoyed a relatively uneventful reign, and of course she
had a son that's Harold Bluetooth. In most modern history books,
that is the beginning and the end of Tyra's story.
She's a side character in narratives about powerful men. But

(07:11):
new evidence suggests that there is more to Tyra than
we originally thought. Recently, archaeologists at the Swedish National Heritage
Board conducted a study on four runestones scattered across Denmark.
They all celebrate a Viking named Tyra, but Tyra was
a common name at the time, so there was no
way of knowing whether it was the same Tyra being
mentioned on all four stones. Two of those stones are

(07:34):
located in Yelling, Denmark, which was the royal seat of
power when Tyra was alive. The other stones are located
in nearby towns, and so a senior researcher named kitzler
Afeld study the runestones using a three D scan. The
scan let her analyze the carvings in a way that's
similar to modern day forensic handwriting examinations. The scans revealed

(07:54):
that all four runstones were carved by the same person.
On one of the ruinstones, that person gives gives Tira
the title of queen, and the other stones all linked
to King Gorm and King Harold, and that proved that
all four stones were celebrating the same Queen, Tira. They
say that she was a powerful woman of status. She
owned land and had legal authority, but carvings also suggests

(08:17):
that Tira played a key role in unifying the Danish realm.
She may have even been more influential in that cause
than Bluetooth himself. One runestone calls her Denmark's strength and salvation.
The idea is supported by historical records from the twelfth century.
They credit Tira as the one who built the Dona
Verka Fortifications, an eighteen mile long series of walls and

(08:39):
trenches that protect Denmark from foreign invaders. But maybe what
proves this legacy most is the fact that two of
her runestones were commissioned by her husband and her son.
They wanted to immortalize her legacy, which begs us to
ask an important question. If Tira was so beloved, why
don't we remember her story today. While historians began to

(09:01):
study Vikings in the early nineteenth century at a time
when the Western worldview was predominantly male oriented, now researchers
think that these early historians relegated Viking women to the sidelines,
and instead they focused on the men who ruled the
Viking Age. In reality, Viking women enjoyed more freedom than
women in most other societies at the time. Political life

(09:25):
was still dominated by men, but Viking women were seen
as capable rulers as well. The men in Tyra's life
understood this, and that marriage gave her the title of Queen,
a title carved in stone. But her accomplishments, it seems,
are what carved her place in history. I hope you've

(09:46):
enjoyed today's 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 in partnership with how Stuff Works.
I make another award winning show called Lore, which is
a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can

(10:09):
learn all about it over at Theworldoflore dot com. And
until next time, stay curious.