June 13, 2026 • 35 mins
In the 1300s, the Black Death sprang up in central Asia and swept across continents, killing millions. Quarantines became common as various nations sought safety in isolation, and some met with more success than others. Norway may have staved off the plague for years, were it not for a mysterious ghost ship -- listen in to learn more.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Fellow ridiculous historians. We are fun at parties, and in
a classic episode from twenty nineteen, we got super obsessed
with just telling random people about ghost ships and the
Black Death, ghost ships, plague ships, Dealer's choice.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
We were recently talking on our sister podcast, Stuff They
Don't Want You to Know about the hantavirus and the
way it potentially may have been brought on a ship
of sorts, a cruise ship, not a ghost ship. But
this is something that throughout history we often hear about
rats in the galley carrying all kinds of icky diseases
that come from far away lands and then infect the
(00:42):
places where the ships dock.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
In the thirteen hundreds, what we call the Black Death
today sprang up in Central Asia, and it swept across
continents and it killed millions millions of people. Have fundamentally
changed history. And you know, to that earlier point, man,
I gotta say, history does rhyme a little bit, and
(01:06):
ghost ships are fascinating.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
Yeah, history has got bars for sure. Norway, however, might
have been spared from some of this Black Death were
it not for the aforementioned mysterious ghost ship. Tune in
find out how.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeart Radio. Ridiculous History
is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to the show,
(01:57):
fellow Ridiculous Historians. My name is Been. My co host Nol,
who usually fills in here with me, is on adventures. However,
never fear, because we have our returning special guest with
us here today, Christopher Hasiotis. Thanks again for saving the show.
Speaker 3 (02:17):
Good afternoon or good evening, good morning. I really have
no idea what time it is. We're here in the studio.
There's a fake sun outside, a fake moon. I think
that maybe actually that's just Casey's face shining and beaming
in a rays of goodness.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
The radiant face of super producer Casey Pegram. Thank you, Casey.
We need your light for this episode because things are
about to get very very dark.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
Yeah, Ben, let me set the stage for you. It's
a gloomy evening. You're in the northern northern reaches of Europe.
The sun doesn't get too high, the clouds get low,
the light even lower. You're sitting by the water by
a fjord, maybe because you're in Norway, and just in
the distance you start to see a shadow coming. It's moving,
(03:12):
it's on the water, it's listing from side to side.
It's a ship. It's a dark ship. It's a big ship.
But there's something different about the ship. The sails are
slightly tattered. There doesn't seem to be much life on board. Ben,
what you're looking at it's a ship of death. And
(03:33):
that's what I'm gonna tell you for right now. I
just creeped myself out a little bit.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
Wow, that was great.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
There's a ship of death coming towards you. Uh, Let's
let's rewind a little bit and get a little context.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
Yeah, let's let's rewind. So I was spellbound, man, Casey,
did you like that? I was wrapped with attention over here? Yeah,
Casey on the case.
Speaker 3 (03:53):
That was great.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
Uh So, yes, let's let's step back just a tad here.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
Why why are we talking about Norway now? And when
are we talking about? Right? Why? And when?
Speaker 1 (04:06):
Two very important questions were the show whom?
Speaker 3 (04:10):
Wherefore?
Speaker 2 (04:11):
So?
Speaker 3 (04:12):
Whence? Whether I'm going to toss them all to you?
Speaker 1 (04:16):
Well, don't forget whither. I feel like whither needs to
get whither the point of this story. Yes, yes, to
the very same Christophers. So we are traveling back to
the fourteenth century to the thirteen hundreds. If you are,
you know, on some level aware of European history at
(04:37):
the time, then you will have heard of the catastrophic
fatal affliction known today as the Black Death. From the
years thirteen forty six to thirteen fifty three. This spread
across the European continent. The name only came several centuries later.
(05:03):
We called it the Black Death or the Black Plague
as a retronym. But Genoese merchant ships brought this plague
to Sicily in the early thirteen forties, and no one
was quite prepared for the magnitude of damage that this
(05:26):
and havoc that this thing would wreak.
Speaker 3 (05:29):
Yeah, I mean the the bubonic plague as it's more
technically known, because you know, one of the symptoms are
these bubos or growths that infected people get, and it's
just got such a magnificently high mortality rate. And when
a human contracts a disease, you have a couple of
days for it to show up, a couple of days
(05:50):
of symptoms, and then you die. It's it's a miserable,
miserable way to go. The plague and the time we're
talking about it. In the middle of the fourteenth century
was generally regarded as the first Black Death and Black plague.
Right Europe, the Middle East, Northern Africa, parts of Western
Asia all kind of experienced different waves. And then there
(06:11):
was a bigger return of the plague in kind of
the seventeen hundreds. But yeah, it wiped out massive portions
of the population. Estimates are really hard to come by,
and sometimes, you know, things are inflated. Population counts aren't
as accurate. But if you said a third of the
population of Europe died over the span of time, that's
(06:35):
pretty pretty right on, right right. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
Nowadays we can reasonably guess that this was caused by
a bacterium called Urcinia pesties. This resulted in several different
forms of plague, and our best guess for the origin
point of this affliction is somewhere in Central Asia, the
(06:59):
dry places of Central Asia, traveling along the Silk Road,
reaching Crimea in the as you said, the mid fourteenth century.
Most likely it was it was carried by not rats,
but the fleas living on the rats, technically black rats
(07:20):
that traveled on these merchant ships, which was one of
the most efficacious If you wanted to spread a disease
internationally at this time, spreading it via a merchant ship
is brilliant. You could not have planned it better if
you were trying to, you know.
Speaker 3 (07:39):
So there's this concept of rats being plague bearers and
carrying this pestilence. But I believe and our good friends
at house stuffworks dot com may have dug into this
in the past, that there's something is ringing a bell
in my deep in my memory that there's been some
research done that it was actually not rats that originated
the black plague kind of rodent zero, if you will,
(08:03):
but it was more something like a squirrel or a
chipmunk or something much cuter but still more sinister.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
Yeah, okay, you know what, I could see that because
the flea would probably not discriminate and a lot of historically,
a lot of human leisure time has been spent vilifying rats.
Speaker 3 (08:24):
Yeah. Well, what I will do is I will dig
into the archives at houstuffworks dot com, and when I
figure that out, I will share that on Ridiculous Historians,
the Facebook group for this podcast that you're listening to
right now. If you guys are not on Facebook, let
me just switch from Death and disease mode to promotional
and social media mode. Point your machines over towards Facebook
(08:48):
and look at ridiculous historians. You can chat with Ben,
you can chat with Noel. Casey's there sometimes I'm around. Yeah,
I was sharing info about stories. But I will post
a link to that story over there on the site.
Thank you so much, Christopher, trying to find some light
in this, this grim grim tail.
Speaker 1 (09:06):
This is a very grim grim tail. And we know
that the disease itself appears to be ancient. We have
some fairly compelling arguments that it hit parts of the
world in the human population way before the thirteen hundreds.
In How Stuff Works by our own In an article
by our own Tracy Wilson, good friend of ours, good
(09:28):
friend of the show, one of the hosts of stuff
you missed in history class. In her work on How
Stuff Works, she notes that Justinian's plague from five p
forty two to five forty six AD was thought.
Speaker 3 (09:42):
To be.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
One of the pandemics caused by you know, the bubonic
plague or the black plague. As you said, Christopher, this thing,
when it strikes strikes hard, it strikes fast. It doesn't
tick all the boxes for a perfect disease, because a
perfect disease would hopefully have a longer gestation rate such
(10:08):
that it allows for more infections. And this thing was
knocking people down left and right. So we mentioned Norway. Right,
when we mentioned Norway, we need to talk a little
bit about the cycle of infection for this disease. So
(10:28):
plague was spread considerable distances by these rats on these ships.
And the first thing you would think is, well, how
long does a rat live in the wild? How long
does a rat live running for its life in a
ship right where it's probably going to be maybe tolerated,
but killed if the opportunity.
Speaker 3 (10:46):
Pretty so swept overboard, tossing a bag eaten, Yeah, eaten,
worse comes to worse.
Speaker 1 (10:52):
So these rats would and did die at a.
Speaker 3 (10:56):
Pretty high rate, right, I mean they had plague, they
had had the plague.
Speaker 1 (11:02):
That's a really good point. But their fleas would survive
and they would find new rat hosts wherever they landed,
because docs were dirty, filthy places that were home to
lots like rats and insects and other.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
Acum of things for all of those things to eat.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
Yes, yeah, exactly, And.
Speaker 3 (11:20):
Those rats would die. But then the fleas who lived
on them didn't necessarily die and they needed a new
place to live. And when you're on a ship, if
you don't have the rats to live on, who are
you going to jump to? People? Whatever?
Speaker 1 (11:34):
The next warm mammal is yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
You and me and old Swaby over there on your
pony from their previous episode. My pony's name is not Swaby.
My pony does not swap that day, although you know what,
actually maybe she does. I think if we could train
a pony to tie them up to her tail and
swab decks and avoid the plague. Okay, I'm down with that.
(11:58):
All right, let's let's uh, let's listeners. I don't know
what we're talking about. And if this is your first
episode of Ridiculous History, go check out last our most
previous episode, where we talked about something a little more
lighthearted than boils and pustules and death, where we talked
about ponies and princesses. It was a little more fun, yes,
a lot more fun. I know.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
It's always fun being here with you, Ben and Casey,
thanks man. And Noel of course is here in spirit.
Speaker 3 (12:25):
He doesn't have to deal with boils and pustules and
black death and rats and fleas and scratching and itching
and bleeding and ghost ships.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
I don't know that.
Speaker 3 (12:34):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
I don't know what he's doing.
Speaker 3 (12:36):
That's true, Yeah, he might be. Nole's idea of a
vacation is very different than mine I have found over
the years.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
That's quite true.
Speaker 4 (12:45):
So, speaking of what we could call Nole's idea of
a vacation, the bubonic blague, at least at the time
of this particular wave of plague, this particular pandemic, people
didn't have, for instance, theory, the idea of washing one's hands,
the idea that infections could be carried by a life
(13:07):
form as small as to be invisible to the naked eye.
Speaker 3 (13:13):
It was.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
It was an alien concept, you know, And a lot
of what we would consider medical treatment at this time
was fundamentally intertwined with religious belief.
Speaker 3 (13:26):
That's true. But while the specifics of transmission of bubonic
plague weren't known to people at the time, there was
knowledge that people would transmit it from person to person,
perhaps from animal to person, not knowing how, but knowing
that it did happen, And so word of plague spread
before plague it self spread necessarily, and so a lot
(13:49):
of these communities, especially the merchant marine communities, the ones
on the on the coast, put in place safeguard so
they knew that an infected person could spread plague to
another infected person. So if we're back in Norway, you know,
they essentially established offshore quarantines where if a ship is
(14:11):
coming into trade goods, you couldn't just bring the ship
into harbor and have no control over who or what
gets off board. You would have to stay a little
bit off offshore and only uninfected sailors or crewmen could
then come into town. And this was a way of
these cities, which are in pretty remote places, remaining plague
(14:33):
free and trying to protect themselves and putting in place
as much as they could preventative measures to keep their
population safe. And it totally worked. When a ship that
had let's say half the crew had plague, they wouldn't
come into the shore. They would stop and the ones
without plague would come in and do the trading. Everything
(14:55):
was working fine, ideally, ideally right, And that worked fine
when a few of the crew members had plague. It
worked fine when some of the crew members had plague,
or even many of the crew members had plague. It
did not work so well when everybody died.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
Right, right, And this is where our story takes the
turn to Norway. In thirteen forty nine, an English merchant
ship carrying wool set out northward. They were bound for
(15:33):
the north and along the way they realized they had
lost the lottery of disease and crew members were getting
the plague. They didn't all die once, but they were
dying one by one and not being dummies themselves. The
people who were surviving or who had not yet contracted
(15:56):
the plague, attempted to quarantine the sick. These people have
the plague. Again, they don't know that it's carried by
these parasites, on these smaller creatures, or on these parasites,
these fleas that are probably on all of them to
some degree. So they try to quarantine the people who
(16:16):
are ill, and it doesn't work. They're a buck short
and a day late.
Speaker 3 (16:22):
I mean, that's the thing. When everyone on the ship dies,
you have no control over what happens to the ship.
And so, you know, let's go back to the way
we started this show. We have this looming, hulking, empty vessel,
somewhat devoid of human life, but teaming with rats. The
(16:42):
rats still have fleas on them, they're still plague on them.
And so we're near the town of Bergen in Norway.
Normally this would have been, you know, not a great situation,
but they would have dealt with it. But no, this
ship had a completely dead crew and just it ran aground,
(17:02):
it crashed.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
Which is such an unfortunate lottery to win because it
could have also plausibly just drifted off into the sea
and then sink in rough water.
Speaker 3 (17:15):
The very last living person aboard could have could have
thrown down.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
An anchor or scuttled it, yeah, you know what I mean.
Speaker 3 (17:21):
But didn't. And that's the thing. It's it's literally a
ship of death, and that, you know, there's not too
much ridiculous about this history today, but that, to me
is is what touches on the verge of the absurd,
and that it's it's so scary, so cinematic and terrifying
to have a literal ship of death going to the
(17:44):
frosty North where it also seems like sort of a
death metal kind of way to go. Yeah, you know,
and that music is super popular up in those parts,
but to have this, yeah, just a ship of death
crashing into your town despite all your preventive measures and
everything you've tried to do to save your town from plague.
(18:08):
Ship of death going to get you.
Speaker 1 (18:10):
The ship of Death's gonna get you. To the tune
of the rhythm is gonna get you. I think our
syllables are slightly off, but the gist is there, and
this is a terrifying moment. I think that's why Casey
and I both felt so enthralled when you were when
you were painting that image for us at the beginning,
(18:32):
because this, like most of the scariest of stories, is
a true story. And when we say that it ran
around in Bergen Harbor, we don't mean that it just
infected the people of Bergen Harbor. Contemporary accounts, although exaggerated,
(18:55):
seem to indicate that around a third of the population
of or Away died. And the thing with you know,
I think you made a tremendous point about how much
margin of error we have with any kind of population
estimate or death toll estimate for things that occurred at
this point in time in history. Despite that, you have
(19:17):
to admit that even if it was just twenty percent,
it's still one out of every five people dying. It's
a lot of people, So it's more than one out
out of every five, possibly around one out of every
three people died because this one ship washed up in
this one place. And it didn't stop there, did it
because it expanded beyond Norway.
Speaker 3 (19:39):
Yeah, it just all over. And what this really reminds
me of is you know, in any zombie film or
TV show where the people have taken all the safeguards
they can, They've holed up inside of a safe house, right,
and then someone makes a fatal mistake, one bite comes
through and then that's it. Then things crumble from there.
(20:02):
So all the Walking Dead and all those series and
show there may be something to it. That's how that's
how society crumbles, perhaps.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
Perhaps not with a bang, but with a whimper. And
here's another thing. This plague, this catastrophe affected Norway in
more ways than one. It did not just kill one
fifth to one third of the population. It made a
(20:33):
fundamental impact on their culture and folklore which remains in
the modern day.
Speaker 3 (20:39):
Yeah, this is not a story just about corpses and
people dying. I mean the experience of the Black Death
and the Black Plague really manifests itself, not just with
a death count, but in the culture. In the story
of Pesta, the witch Pesta, as listeners may guess for
themselves rightly, is related to the terms of pestas and
(21:00):
pst pstules.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
And not pesto.
Speaker 3 (21:03):
Uh that's everything that I just thought because of what
you just said is disgusting to me and disgusting to everyone,
but I had to do it. Yeah, No, so Pesta right,
So Pesta is in Norwegian folklore, this witch a harbinger
(21:23):
of doom and death. She's the embodiment of the plague,
but she's not an embodiment of complete annihilation, right, because
the plague didn't kill everyone. So what do we know
about the story of Pasta and who she is and
what happens if you encounter her on a dark and
gloomy Norwegian road?
Speaker 1 (21:42):
Oh yes, check this out, Christopher. I love the way
you're differentiating to between pestilence and straight death. Right, they're
two very different but related things.
Speaker 3 (21:52):
Yeah, in this case, they're usually you know that then
diagram is almost just a circle. But yes, yeah, yeah,
but it's not always that way.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
It's not always that way, but it's a tremendously unfortunate
occurrence to encounter Pesta. You see, Pesta travels from one
village to the next. She has a broomstick, but she's
also doubled down. She possesses a rake. If you happen
upon the witch Pesta with her rake, then you know
(22:23):
she will spare some of the people in your community.
But if she begins sweeping with her broomstick, there's no
point in running.
Speaker 3 (22:34):
You're dead and so is everyone around you. Yeah, that's
the thing. So Pesta the embodiment not just of death,
but the embodiment of this specific type of death link
to this illness. If she rakes through your community, those
claws will tear up your loved ones, your neighbors. But
there are gaps between the teeth of a rake, and
(22:54):
some people will make it their way through. But if
she's sweeping with a broom you're all done for. And
it's just a it's a really creepy, kind of terrifying
embodiment of this experience to think that it's not just
not just something that happens, but that there's some will
behind it, that there's this terrifying woman in a deep
(23:17):
red skirt who will just clean the earth as she
sees fit, and you and your friends and neighbors have
little to do with with the way things turn out.
Speaker 1 (23:30):
And there's a fatalism there as well. You know, because
your odds of survival are already very, very low, the
best you can hope is that some survive. I do
want to point out one myth busting thing here, let's
do it that may be of interest to many of
us listening. You know those really cool masks that they
always show the doctors wearing.
Speaker 3 (23:51):
Yeah, they show up in like in you know, Brazilian
Carnival and in New Orleans and then also in the
sci fi remake of that Monkeys series.
Speaker 1 (24:01):
Ah yeah, yeah, those pestilence masks. The the way that
they're depicted is this the concept being before they were
totally taken over by goth kids in this country, the
concept was that the people wearing them were protecting themselves
from exposure to diseased bodies, and that that long bird
(24:25):
bill snout looking thing is actually a container for herbs,
and that the herbs would be ignited sometimes and that
they would gently burn.
Speaker 3 (24:35):
And the mask you're talking about is to get that
sort of conical, long proboscis. That's sort of like creepy
bird ibis Egyptian god.
Speaker 1 (24:45):
Kind of vibe going on right, right right, sort of
abstract attempt at rendering an anti.
Speaker 3 (24:51):
So there's a there's a myth about that is that
is that not a thing?
Speaker 1 (24:54):
There's no concrete evidence that people in the fourteenth century
were wearing these, and medical historians were wearing these at
the time, and medical historians will say that they were
not invented until three hundred years later, when a sixteenth
century French doctor named Charles de l'Orme designed what could
be described as one of the world's earliest hazmat suits.
(25:19):
So it did occur in response to the plague, but
in a later wave of the plague. Okay, that's the
other myth that I think we busted pretty effectively.
Speaker 3 (25:26):
Not just one black day.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
It was no. No, things just kept being terrible, great, great.
We don't have to end it that way.
Speaker 3 (25:36):
No, let's talk about some good news.
Speaker 1 (25:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (25:44):
I don't know how much good news this is. But Ben,
let me ask you, you seem like the kind of
person who likes all of these things. Do you like
some suit models.
Speaker 1 (25:53):
I like in general in general?
Speaker 3 (25:56):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (25:56):
Sure, you know, I'm not opposed to swim suits or
people modeling.
Speaker 3 (26:01):
Okay, do you how do you feel about European men
in flashy cravats.
Speaker 1 (26:07):
I'm in yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm not opposed to either.
Speaker 3 (26:09):
Okay, what about zombified knights, Templar.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
I mean, if I have to choose between the three,
I'm going with number three.
Speaker 3 (26:16):
What if I told you Ben ben Bollen that you could,
in one film have all three of those, I.
Speaker 1 (26:24):
Would say thank you for saving my weekend. Christopher hasiotis
all right.
Speaker 3 (26:29):
Nineteen seventy four's film The Ghost Galleon is a film
that I want to put on your radar. Then it's
a Spanish movie. It's not great. I don't know that
it's even good, but it's really enjoyable. In Spanish it's
called El Bouque maldito, which means like the you know,
the damned vessel or the ship of the damned. Yeah,
(26:51):
but in English it's The Ghost Galleon. It's really campy,
but it's got a lot of zombie knights. Templar. Who
there are these there are these two swimsuit models who
to see a ghost ship off the coast and decide
to Hey, let's go see what's on that ghost ship.
The answer is zombies. So yeah, zombie zombiefide Knights Templar
(27:13):
who have come back from I guess crusading. And then
there's like some real like flashy dudes wearing ascots and
trying to punch skeletons. This is another thing I will
share with the Facebook community group. I will put the
trailer for the Ghosts Gallon up for your enjoyment, and
(27:34):
you can decide for yourself if you want to dig
into the film as a whole. I love it. I
also really love low budget, questionably acted horror from the seventies.
Speaker 1 (27:45):
Yes, yes, as you should. Christopher. Thank you for this recommendation.
Beat me to the punch. We have to put the
trailer up. I'm actually I'm gonna watch this after after
we finished recording today. I did, I did. While you
were talking about this, I did remember one piece of
good news that baffled me. I kid you not. This
(28:07):
is actual good news. From the series of pandemics known
collectively as the Black Plague or the Bubonic Plague, there
is a book, which I may have mentioned in previous episodes,
by a fellow named Norman Cantor the name of this
book is in the Wake of the Plague. When I
first read this book, there's something that Cantor tosses aside
(28:31):
in a fairly cavalier fashion, and it is that there
is compelling evidence that the evolutionary pressure of the Black
Plague led to the HIV resistant genes that exist in
parts of Europe today. Because you remember, we've seen those
stories in years past about bone marrow transplant recipients who
(28:55):
also find that their HIV had their viral load has
gone down and then it has disappeared. It appears that
there is compelling evidence, While not one hundred percent, there's
compelling evidence that the same infection disease that killed so
many people in Europe, Eurasia and beyond may have made
(29:17):
us more resistant to HIV and ultimately aids.
Speaker 3 (29:21):
No, that's fascinating, and yeah, there are myriad ways you
can look at a terrible, terrible instance in history like
the Black Death and glom some sort of positive from it.
I mean that that is a wonderful thing and not
the sort of thing you would ever expect, but it's
the way history unfolds. I mean, there are a number
(29:43):
of other things attributed to the Black Death and kind
of what society had to do afterwards. There's an idea
that a lot of the smaller universities around Europe really
developed because people didn't want to travel when they went
to school, because the more the more you travel, the
more you risk coming across people who had plague. So
(30:03):
more schools, more communities had to develop their own local
universities and colleges, and so that led to some education.
It is also credited with perhaps popularizing English across the continent.
The idea was that so many learned monks and scholars
(30:23):
passed away because of Black Death, that more people who
spoke the vulgar tongues you're German, your English, they had
to assume those positions of power in universities, in higher learning,
and so English became more widespread. It's the same idea
why the printing press had to be invented because so
(30:44):
many monks died, they didn't have enough people to hand
copy bibles, so they needed to find a way to
kind of adapt to a situation where you've lost a
significant portion of your population. You know, whether you can
say it's a one to one causal relationship is a
little tricky, but these are some theories that are out there,
and I think they're pretty interesting.
Speaker 1 (31:05):
That's fascinating, and it feels like we are on the
verge of a completely new conversation the upsides of terrible
events throughout world's history. That may be an episode for
another day, but for now, why don't we throw it
to you, fellow ridiculous historians? What are some of the unintended?
(31:30):
How do we put a silver linings of terrible events
throughout human history? I think we illustrated just a couple
with the Black Plague to keep what may indeed be
our most death metal of episodes from being completely grimy
and grim. But let us know. You can visit us
(31:51):
on Facebook, as you said, Christopher, at our community page
Ridiculous Historians, you can see Casey Nol, Christopher hasiotis self
and yours truly dropping in to field questions to check
out and share some of the amazing stories throughout our
species collective adventures. Let's see what else in the meantime.
Speaker 3 (32:15):
In the meantime, I have a question for any listeners
here who happened to be around about northern Wales, maybe
over near Liverpool. I read about a ship of Death
that they've got going on right there. It just launched.
Apparently for the past thirty years there's been a ship
called the Duke of Lancaster which was kind of run
(32:36):
aground and abandoned near I think the town is called
whole Well or holy Well in Wales, Northern Wales, and
there's this company who kind of I think is comparable
to like escape rooms here in the US, and they
kind of put on those haunted houses. But they've turned
this ship into a ship of death and you can
kind of go on there and experience a zombie attack
(32:57):
on the ship. What Yeah, I just read up. I
read it. I remember reading about this at the end
of twenty eighteen, and apparently this is a thing that
has opened in this year twenty nineteen. Zombie infection, as
I believe the company. Not that we're giving props or
speaking to their merit, but if anyone's listening, who is
in kind of like around the corner from Liverpool, and
(33:19):
you've been on this ship of death or you want
to go on the Ship of Death and report back,
I'd like to hear about.
Speaker 1 (33:24):
It, me too, Sign me up. I want to hear
if it lives up to the hype. You can tell
us about that on the aforementioned Ridiculous Historians Facebook page.
You can find us on Twitter. You can find us
on Instagram. You can find my pal Nol on Instagram.
He's at Embryonic Insider. You can find me on Instagram
as well. Follow my adventures as I get kicked into
(33:46):
and out of various countries at Ben Bolan. In the meantime,
we hope that you enjoyed this episode. Thank you so
much as always to super producer at Casey Pegram. I
know we can't see it because it's an audio podcast
in Casey. I know you can't see me do this
because there's a barrier between us. But every time I
say your name, I like to throw my right arm
(34:08):
wide in a grand gesture towards you, sir. We'd also
like to thank Alex Williams who composed our track. As always,
thanks to Noel Brown, and thanks to you Christopher Ahasiotis.
You know, I know, after we did our Grifter episode
you have me questioning everything, so I'm still gonna stick
(34:30):
with the alias you provided when we met all those
years ago.
Speaker 3 (34:33):
Remain questioning. It's good to be a skeptic. Thanks for
having me. It's been really really nice talking about the
end of so many people's lives.
Speaker 1 (34:42):
We'll see you again soon.
Speaker 2 (34:51):
For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
For more podcasts from my heart radio at the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Fellow ridiculous historians. We are fun at parties, and in
a classic episode from twenty nineteen, we got super obsessed
with just telling random people about ghost ships and the
Black Death, ghost ships, plague ships, Dealer's choice.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
We were recently talking on our sister podcast, Stuff They
Don't Want You to Know about the hantavirus and the
way it potentially may have been brought on a ship
of sorts, a cruise ship, not a ghost ship. But
this is something that throughout history we often hear about
rats in the galley carrying all kinds of icky diseases
that come from far away lands and then infect the
(00:42):
places where the ships dock.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
In the thirteen hundreds, what we call the Black Death
today sprang up in Central Asia, and it swept across
continents and it killed millions millions of people. Have fundamentally
changed history. And you know, to that earlier point, man,
I gotta say, history does rhyme a little bit, and
(01:06):
ghost ships are fascinating.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
Yeah, history has got bars for sure. Norway, however, might
have been spared from some of this Black Death were
it not for the aforementioned mysterious ghost ship. Tune in
find out how.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeart Radio. Ridiculous History
is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to the show,
(01:57):
fellow Ridiculous Historians. My name is Been. My co host Nol,
who usually fills in here with me, is on adventures. However,
never fear, because we have our returning special guest with
us here today, Christopher Hasiotis. Thanks again for saving the show.
Speaker 3 (02:17):
Good afternoon or good evening, good morning. I really have
no idea what time it is. We're here in the studio.
There's a fake sun outside, a fake moon. I think
that maybe actually that's just Casey's face shining and beaming
in a rays of goodness.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
The radiant face of super producer Casey Pegram. Thank you, Casey.
We need your light for this episode because things are
about to get very very dark.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
Yeah, Ben, let me set the stage for you. It's
a gloomy evening. You're in the northern northern reaches of Europe.
The sun doesn't get too high, the clouds get low,
the light even lower. You're sitting by the water by
a fjord, maybe because you're in Norway, and just in
the distance you start to see a shadow coming. It's moving,
(03:12):
it's on the water, it's listing from side to side.
It's a ship. It's a dark ship. It's a big ship.
But there's something different about the ship. The sails are
slightly tattered. There doesn't seem to be much life on board. Ben,
what you're looking at it's a ship of death. And
(03:33):
that's what I'm gonna tell you for right now. I
just creeped myself out a little bit.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
Wow, that was great.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
There's a ship of death coming towards you. Uh, Let's
let's rewind a little bit and get a little context.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
Yeah, let's let's rewind. So I was spellbound, man, Casey,
did you like that? I was wrapped with attention over here? Yeah,
Casey on the case.
Speaker 3 (03:53):
That was great.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
Uh So, yes, let's let's step back just a tad here.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
Why why are we talking about Norway now? And when
are we talking about? Right? Why? And when?
Speaker 1 (04:06):
Two very important questions were the show whom?
Speaker 3 (04:10):
Wherefore?
Speaker 2 (04:11):
So?
Speaker 3 (04:12):
Whence? Whether I'm going to toss them all to you?
Speaker 1 (04:16):
Well, don't forget whither. I feel like whither needs to
get whither the point of this story. Yes, yes, to
the very same Christophers. So we are traveling back to
the fourteenth century to the thirteen hundreds. If you are,
you know, on some level aware of European history at
(04:37):
the time, then you will have heard of the catastrophic
fatal affliction known today as the Black Death. From the
years thirteen forty six to thirteen fifty three. This spread
across the European continent. The name only came several centuries later.
(05:03):
We called it the Black Death or the Black Plague
as a retronym. But Genoese merchant ships brought this plague
to Sicily in the early thirteen forties, and no one
was quite prepared for the magnitude of damage that this
(05:26):
and havoc that this thing would wreak.
Speaker 3 (05:29):
Yeah, I mean the the bubonic plague as it's more
technically known, because you know, one of the symptoms are
these bubos or growths that infected people get, and it's
just got such a magnificently high mortality rate. And when
a human contracts a disease, you have a couple of
days for it to show up, a couple of days
(05:50):
of symptoms, and then you die. It's it's a miserable,
miserable way to go. The plague and the time we're
talking about it. In the middle of the fourteenth century
was generally regarded as the first Black Death and Black plague.
Right Europe, the Middle East, Northern Africa, parts of Western
Asia all kind of experienced different waves. And then there
(06:11):
was a bigger return of the plague in kind of
the seventeen hundreds. But yeah, it wiped out massive portions
of the population. Estimates are really hard to come by,
and sometimes, you know, things are inflated. Population counts aren't
as accurate. But if you said a third of the
population of Europe died over the span of time, that's
(06:35):
pretty pretty right on, right right. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
Nowadays we can reasonably guess that this was caused by
a bacterium called Urcinia pesties. This resulted in several different
forms of plague, and our best guess for the origin
point of this affliction is somewhere in Central Asia, the
(06:59):
dry places of Central Asia, traveling along the Silk Road,
reaching Crimea in the as you said, the mid fourteenth century.
Most likely it was it was carried by not rats,
but the fleas living on the rats, technically black rats
(07:20):
that traveled on these merchant ships, which was one of
the most efficacious If you wanted to spread a disease
internationally at this time, spreading it via a merchant ship
is brilliant. You could not have planned it better if
you were trying to, you know.
Speaker 3 (07:39):
So there's this concept of rats being plague bearers and
carrying this pestilence. But I believe and our good friends
at house stuffworks dot com may have dug into this
in the past, that there's something is ringing a bell
in my deep in my memory that there's been some
research done that it was actually not rats that originated
the black plague kind of rodent zero, if you will,
(08:03):
but it was more something like a squirrel or a
chipmunk or something much cuter but still more sinister.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
Yeah, okay, you know what, I could see that because
the flea would probably not discriminate and a lot of historically,
a lot of human leisure time has been spent vilifying rats.
Speaker 3 (08:24):
Yeah. Well, what I will do is I will dig
into the archives at houstuffworks dot com, and when I
figure that out, I will share that on Ridiculous Historians,
the Facebook group for this podcast that you're listening to
right now. If you guys are not on Facebook, let
me just switch from Death and disease mode to promotional
and social media mode. Point your machines over towards Facebook
(08:48):
and look at ridiculous historians. You can chat with Ben,
you can chat with Noel. Casey's there sometimes I'm around. Yeah,
I was sharing info about stories. But I will post
a link to that story over there on the site.
Thank you so much, Christopher, trying to find some light
in this, this grim grim tail.
Speaker 1 (09:06):
This is a very grim grim tail. And we know
that the disease itself appears to be ancient. We have
some fairly compelling arguments that it hit parts of the
world in the human population way before the thirteen hundreds.
In How Stuff Works by our own In an article
by our own Tracy Wilson, good friend of ours, good
(09:28):
friend of the show, one of the hosts of stuff
you missed in history class. In her work on How
Stuff Works, she notes that Justinian's plague from five p
forty two to five forty six AD was thought.
Speaker 3 (09:42):
To be.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
One of the pandemics caused by you know, the bubonic
plague or the black plague. As you said, Christopher, this thing,
when it strikes strikes hard, it strikes fast. It doesn't
tick all the boxes for a perfect disease, because a
perfect disease would hopefully have a longer gestation rate such
(10:08):
that it allows for more infections. And this thing was
knocking people down left and right. So we mentioned Norway. Right,
when we mentioned Norway, we need to talk a little
bit about the cycle of infection for this disease. So
(10:28):
plague was spread considerable distances by these rats on these ships.
And the first thing you would think is, well, how
long does a rat live in the wild? How long
does a rat live running for its life in a
ship right where it's probably going to be maybe tolerated,
but killed if the opportunity.
Speaker 3 (10:46):
Pretty so swept overboard, tossing a bag eaten, Yeah, eaten,
worse comes to worse.
Speaker 1 (10:52):
So these rats would and did die at a.
Speaker 3 (10:56):
Pretty high rate, right, I mean they had plague, they
had had the plague.
Speaker 1 (11:02):
That's a really good point. But their fleas would survive
and they would find new rat hosts wherever they landed,
because docs were dirty, filthy places that were home to
lots like rats and insects and other.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
Acum of things for all of those things to eat.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
Yes, yeah, exactly, And.
Speaker 3 (11:20):
Those rats would die. But then the fleas who lived
on them didn't necessarily die and they needed a new
place to live. And when you're on a ship, if
you don't have the rats to live on, who are
you going to jump to? People? Whatever?
Speaker 1 (11:34):
The next warm mammal is yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
You and me and old Swaby over there on your
pony from their previous episode. My pony's name is not Swaby.
My pony does not swap that day, although you know what,
actually maybe she does. I think if we could train
a pony to tie them up to her tail and
swab decks and avoid the plague. Okay, I'm down with that.
(11:58):
All right, let's let's uh, let's listeners. I don't know
what we're talking about. And if this is your first
episode of Ridiculous History, go check out last our most
previous episode, where we talked about something a little more
lighthearted than boils and pustules and death, where we talked
about ponies and princesses. It was a little more fun, yes,
a lot more fun. I know.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
It's always fun being here with you, Ben and Casey,
thanks man. And Noel of course is here in spirit.
Speaker 3 (12:25):
He doesn't have to deal with boils and pustules and
black death and rats and fleas and scratching and itching
and bleeding and ghost ships.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
I don't know that.
Speaker 3 (12:34):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
I don't know what he's doing.
Speaker 3 (12:36):
That's true, Yeah, he might be. Nole's idea of a
vacation is very different than mine I have found over
the years.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
That's quite true.
Speaker 4 (12:45):
So, speaking of what we could call Nole's idea of
a vacation, the bubonic blague, at least at the time
of this particular wave of plague, this particular pandemic, people
didn't have, for instance, theory, the idea of washing one's hands,
the idea that infections could be carried by a life
(13:07):
form as small as to be invisible to the naked eye.
Speaker 3 (13:13):
It was.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
It was an alien concept, you know, And a lot
of what we would consider medical treatment at this time
was fundamentally intertwined with religious belief.
Speaker 3 (13:26):
That's true. But while the specifics of transmission of bubonic
plague weren't known to people at the time, there was
knowledge that people would transmit it from person to person,
perhaps from animal to person, not knowing how, but knowing
that it did happen, And so word of plague spread
before plague it self spread necessarily, and so a lot
(13:49):
of these communities, especially the merchant marine communities, the ones
on the on the coast, put in place safeguard so
they knew that an infected person could spread plague to
another infected person. So if we're back in Norway, you know,
they essentially established offshore quarantines where if a ship is
(14:11):
coming into trade goods, you couldn't just bring the ship
into harbor and have no control over who or what
gets off board. You would have to stay a little
bit off offshore and only uninfected sailors or crewmen could
then come into town. And this was a way of
these cities, which are in pretty remote places, remaining plague
(14:33):
free and trying to protect themselves and putting in place
as much as they could preventative measures to keep their
population safe. And it totally worked. When a ship that
had let's say half the crew had plague, they wouldn't
come into the shore. They would stop and the ones
without plague would come in and do the trading. Everything
(14:55):
was working fine, ideally, ideally right, And that worked fine
when a few of the crew members had plague. It
worked fine when some of the crew members had plague,
or even many of the crew members had plague. It
did not work so well when everybody died.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
Right, right, And this is where our story takes the
turn to Norway. In thirteen forty nine, an English merchant
ship carrying wool set out northward. They were bound for
(15:33):
the north and along the way they realized they had
lost the lottery of disease and crew members were getting
the plague. They didn't all die once, but they were
dying one by one and not being dummies themselves. The
people who were surviving or who had not yet contracted
(15:56):
the plague, attempted to quarantine the sick. These people have
the plague. Again, they don't know that it's carried by
these parasites, on these smaller creatures, or on these parasites,
these fleas that are probably on all of them to
some degree. So they try to quarantine the people who
(16:16):
are ill, and it doesn't work. They're a buck short
and a day late.
Speaker 3 (16:22):
I mean, that's the thing. When everyone on the ship dies,
you have no control over what happens to the ship.
And so, you know, let's go back to the way
we started this show. We have this looming, hulking, empty vessel,
somewhat devoid of human life, but teaming with rats. The
(16:42):
rats still have fleas on them, they're still plague on them.
And so we're near the town of Bergen in Norway.
Normally this would have been, you know, not a great situation,
but they would have dealt with it. But no, this
ship had a completely dead crew and just it ran aground,
(17:02):
it crashed.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
Which is such an unfortunate lottery to win because it
could have also plausibly just drifted off into the sea
and then sink in rough water.
Speaker 3 (17:15):
The very last living person aboard could have could have
thrown down.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
An anchor or scuttled it, yeah, you know what I mean.
Speaker 3 (17:21):
But didn't. And that's the thing. It's it's literally a
ship of death, and that, you know, there's not too
much ridiculous about this history today, but that, to me
is is what touches on the verge of the absurd,
and that it's it's so scary, so cinematic and terrifying
to have a literal ship of death going to the
(17:44):
frosty North where it also seems like sort of a
death metal kind of way to go. Yeah, you know,
and that music is super popular up in those parts,
but to have this, yeah, just a ship of death
crashing into your town despite all your preventive measures and
everything you've tried to do to save your town from plague.
(18:08):
Ship of death going to get you.
Speaker 1 (18:10):
The ship of Death's gonna get you. To the tune
of the rhythm is gonna get you. I think our
syllables are slightly off, but the gist is there, and
this is a terrifying moment. I think that's why Casey
and I both felt so enthralled when you were when
you were painting that image for us at the beginning,
(18:32):
because this, like most of the scariest of stories, is
a true story. And when we say that it ran
around in Bergen Harbor, we don't mean that it just
infected the people of Bergen Harbor. Contemporary accounts, although exaggerated,
(18:55):
seem to indicate that around a third of the population
of or Away died. And the thing with you know,
I think you made a tremendous point about how much
margin of error we have with any kind of population
estimate or death toll estimate for things that occurred at
this point in time in history. Despite that, you have
(19:17):
to admit that even if it was just twenty percent,
it's still one out of every five people dying. It's
a lot of people, So it's more than one out
out of every five, possibly around one out of every
three people died because this one ship washed up in
this one place. And it didn't stop there, did it
because it expanded beyond Norway.
Speaker 3 (19:39):
Yeah, it just all over. And what this really reminds
me of is you know, in any zombie film or
TV show where the people have taken all the safeguards
they can, They've holed up inside of a safe house, right,
and then someone makes a fatal mistake, one bite comes
through and then that's it. Then things crumble from there.
(20:02):
So all the Walking Dead and all those series and
show there may be something to it. That's how that's
how society crumbles, perhaps.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
Perhaps not with a bang, but with a whimper. And
here's another thing. This plague, this catastrophe affected Norway in
more ways than one. It did not just kill one
fifth to one third of the population. It made a
(20:33):
fundamental impact on their culture and folklore which remains in
the modern day.
Speaker 3 (20:39):
Yeah, this is not a story just about corpses and
people dying. I mean the experience of the Black Death
and the Black Plague really manifests itself, not just with
a death count, but in the culture. In the story
of Pesta, the witch Pesta, as listeners may guess for
themselves rightly, is related to the terms of pestas and
(21:00):
pst pstules.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
And not pesto.
Speaker 3 (21:03):
Uh that's everything that I just thought because of what
you just said is disgusting to me and disgusting to everyone,
but I had to do it. Yeah, No, so Pesta right,
So Pesta is in Norwegian folklore, this witch a harbinger
(21:23):
of doom and death. She's the embodiment of the plague,
but she's not an embodiment of complete annihilation, right, because
the plague didn't kill everyone. So what do we know
about the story of Pasta and who she is and
what happens if you encounter her on a dark and
gloomy Norwegian road?
Speaker 1 (21:42):
Oh yes, check this out, Christopher. I love the way
you're differentiating to between pestilence and straight death. Right, they're
two very different but related things.
Speaker 3 (21:52):
Yeah, in this case, they're usually you know that then
diagram is almost just a circle. But yes, yeah, yeah,
but it's not always that way.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
It's not always that way, but it's a tremendously unfortunate
occurrence to encounter Pesta. You see, Pesta travels from one
village to the next. She has a broomstick, but she's
also doubled down. She possesses a rake. If you happen
upon the witch Pesta with her rake, then you know
(22:23):
she will spare some of the people in your community.
But if she begins sweeping with her broomstick, there's no
point in running.
Speaker 3 (22:34):
You're dead and so is everyone around you. Yeah, that's
the thing. So Pesta the embodiment not just of death,
but the embodiment of this specific type of death link
to this illness. If she rakes through your community, those
claws will tear up your loved ones, your neighbors. But
there are gaps between the teeth of a rake, and
(22:54):
some people will make it their way through. But if
she's sweeping with a broom you're all done for. And
it's just a it's a really creepy, kind of terrifying
embodiment of this experience to think that it's not just
not just something that happens, but that there's some will
behind it, that there's this terrifying woman in a deep
(23:17):
red skirt who will just clean the earth as she
sees fit, and you and your friends and neighbors have
little to do with with the way things turn out.
Speaker 1 (23:30):
And there's a fatalism there as well. You know, because
your odds of survival are already very, very low, the
best you can hope is that some survive. I do
want to point out one myth busting thing here, let's
do it that may be of interest to many of
us listening. You know those really cool masks that they
always show the doctors wearing.
Speaker 3 (23:51):
Yeah, they show up in like in you know, Brazilian
Carnival and in New Orleans and then also in the
sci fi remake of that Monkeys series.
Speaker 1 (24:01):
Ah yeah, yeah, those pestilence masks. The the way that
they're depicted is this the concept being before they were
totally taken over by goth kids in this country, the
concept was that the people wearing them were protecting themselves
from exposure to diseased bodies, and that that long bird
(24:25):
bill snout looking thing is actually a container for herbs,
and that the herbs would be ignited sometimes and that
they would gently burn.
Speaker 3 (24:35):
And the mask you're talking about is to get that
sort of conical, long proboscis. That's sort of like creepy
bird ibis Egyptian god.
Speaker 1 (24:45):
Kind of vibe going on right, right right, sort of
abstract attempt at rendering an anti.
Speaker 3 (24:51):
So there's a there's a myth about that is that
is that not a thing?
Speaker 1 (24:54):
There's no concrete evidence that people in the fourteenth century
were wearing these, and medical historians were wearing these at
the time, and medical historians will say that they were
not invented until three hundred years later, when a sixteenth
century French doctor named Charles de l'Orme designed what could
be described as one of the world's earliest hazmat suits.
(25:19):
So it did occur in response to the plague, but
in a later wave of the plague. Okay, that's the
other myth that I think we busted pretty effectively.
Speaker 3 (25:26):
Not just one black day.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
It was no. No, things just kept being terrible, great, great.
We don't have to end it that way.
Speaker 3 (25:36):
No, let's talk about some good news.
Speaker 1 (25:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (25:44):
I don't know how much good news this is. But Ben,
let me ask you, you seem like the kind of
person who likes all of these things. Do you like
some suit models.
Speaker 1 (25:53):
I like in general in general?
Speaker 3 (25:56):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (25:56):
Sure, you know, I'm not opposed to swim suits or
people modeling.
Speaker 3 (26:01):
Okay, do you how do you feel about European men
in flashy cravats.
Speaker 1 (26:07):
I'm in yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm not opposed to either.
Speaker 3 (26:09):
Okay, what about zombified knights, Templar.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
I mean, if I have to choose between the three,
I'm going with number three.
Speaker 3 (26:16):
What if I told you Ben ben Bollen that you could,
in one film have all three of those, I.
Speaker 1 (26:24):
Would say thank you for saving my weekend. Christopher hasiotis
all right.
Speaker 3 (26:29):
Nineteen seventy four's film The Ghost Galleon is a film
that I want to put on your radar. Then it's
a Spanish movie. It's not great. I don't know that
it's even good, but it's really enjoyable. In Spanish it's
called El Bouque maldito, which means like the you know,
the damned vessel or the ship of the damned. Yeah,
(26:51):
but in English it's The Ghost Galleon. It's really campy,
but it's got a lot of zombie knights. Templar. Who
there are these there are these two swimsuit models who
to see a ghost ship off the coast and decide
to Hey, let's go see what's on that ghost ship.
The answer is zombies. So yeah, zombie zombiefide Knights Templar
(27:13):
who have come back from I guess crusading. And then
there's like some real like flashy dudes wearing ascots and
trying to punch skeletons. This is another thing I will
share with the Facebook community group. I will put the
trailer for the Ghosts Gallon up for your enjoyment, and
(27:34):
you can decide for yourself if you want to dig
into the film as a whole. I love it. I
also really love low budget, questionably acted horror from the seventies.
Speaker 1 (27:45):
Yes, yes, as you should. Christopher. Thank you for this recommendation.
Beat me to the punch. We have to put the
trailer up. I'm actually I'm gonna watch this after after
we finished recording today. I did, I did. While you
were talking about this, I did remember one piece of
good news that baffled me. I kid you not. This
(28:07):
is actual good news. From the series of pandemics known
collectively as the Black Plague or the Bubonic Plague, there
is a book, which I may have mentioned in previous episodes,
by a fellow named Norman Cantor the name of this
book is in the Wake of the Plague. When I
first read this book, there's something that Cantor tosses aside
(28:31):
in a fairly cavalier fashion, and it is that there
is compelling evidence that the evolutionary pressure of the Black
Plague led to the HIV resistant genes that exist in
parts of Europe today. Because you remember, we've seen those
stories in years past about bone marrow transplant recipients who
(28:55):
also find that their HIV had their viral load has
gone down and then it has disappeared. It appears that
there is compelling evidence, While not one hundred percent, there's
compelling evidence that the same infection disease that killed so
many people in Europe, Eurasia and beyond may have made
(29:17):
us more resistant to HIV and ultimately aids.
Speaker 3 (29:21):
No, that's fascinating, and yeah, there are myriad ways you
can look at a terrible, terrible instance in history like
the Black Death and glom some sort of positive from it.
I mean that that is a wonderful thing and not
the sort of thing you would ever expect, but it's
the way history unfolds. I mean, there are a number
(29:43):
of other things attributed to the Black Death and kind
of what society had to do afterwards. There's an idea
that a lot of the smaller universities around Europe really
developed because people didn't want to travel when they went
to school, because the more the more you travel, the
more you risk coming across people who had plague. So
(30:03):
more schools, more communities had to develop their own local
universities and colleges, and so that led to some education.
It is also credited with perhaps popularizing English across the continent.
The idea was that so many learned monks and scholars
(30:23):
passed away because of Black Death, that more people who
spoke the vulgar tongues you're German, your English, they had
to assume those positions of power in universities, in higher learning,
and so English became more widespread. It's the same idea
why the printing press had to be invented because so
(30:44):
many monks died, they didn't have enough people to hand
copy bibles, so they needed to find a way to
kind of adapt to a situation where you've lost a
significant portion of your population. You know, whether you can
say it's a one to one causal relationship is a
little tricky, but these are some theories that are out there,
and I think they're pretty interesting.
Speaker 1 (31:05):
That's fascinating, and it feels like we are on the
verge of a completely new conversation the upsides of terrible
events throughout world's history. That may be an episode for
another day, but for now, why don't we throw it
to you, fellow ridiculous historians? What are some of the unintended?
(31:30):
How do we put a silver linings of terrible events
throughout human history? I think we illustrated just a couple
with the Black Plague to keep what may indeed be
our most death metal of episodes from being completely grimy
and grim. But let us know. You can visit us
(31:51):
on Facebook, as you said, Christopher, at our community page
Ridiculous Historians, you can see Casey Nol, Christopher hasiotis self
and yours truly dropping in to field questions to check
out and share some of the amazing stories throughout our
species collective adventures. Let's see what else in the meantime.
Speaker 3 (32:15):
In the meantime, I have a question for any listeners
here who happened to be around about northern Wales, maybe
over near Liverpool. I read about a ship of Death
that they've got going on right there. It just launched.
Apparently for the past thirty years there's been a ship
called the Duke of Lancaster which was kind of run
(32:36):
aground and abandoned near I think the town is called
whole Well or holy Well in Wales, Northern Wales, and
there's this company who kind of I think is comparable
to like escape rooms here in the US, and they
kind of put on those haunted houses. But they've turned
this ship into a ship of death and you can
kind of go on there and experience a zombie attack
(32:57):
on the ship. What Yeah, I just read up. I
read it. I remember reading about this at the end
of twenty eighteen, and apparently this is a thing that
has opened in this year twenty nineteen. Zombie infection, as
I believe the company. Not that we're giving props or
speaking to their merit, but if anyone's listening, who is
in kind of like around the corner from Liverpool, and
(33:19):
you've been on this ship of death or you want
to go on the Ship of Death and report back,
I'd like to hear about.
Speaker 1 (33:24):
It, me too, Sign me up. I want to hear
if it lives up to the hype. You can tell
us about that on the aforementioned Ridiculous Historians Facebook page.
You can find us on Twitter. You can find us
on Instagram. You can find my pal Nol on Instagram.
He's at Embryonic Insider. You can find me on Instagram
as well. Follow my adventures as I get kicked into
(33:46):
and out of various countries at Ben Bolan. In the meantime,
we hope that you enjoyed this episode. Thank you so
much as always to super producer at Casey Pegram. I
know we can't see it because it's an audio podcast
in Casey. I know you can't see me do this
because there's a barrier between us. But every time I
say your name, I like to throw my right arm
(34:08):
wide in a grand gesture towards you, sir. We'd also
like to thank Alex Williams who composed our track. As always,
thanks to Noel Brown, and thanks to you Christopher Ahasiotis.
You know, I know, after we did our Grifter episode
you have me questioning everything, so I'm still gonna stick
(34:30):
with the alias you provided when we met all those
years ago.
Speaker 3 (34:33):
Remain questioning. It's good to be a skeptic. Thanks for
having me. It's been really really nice talking about the
end of so many people's lives.
Speaker 1 (34:42):
We'll see you again soon.
Speaker 2 (34:51):
For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
For more podcasts from my heart radio at the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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