SALT LAKE CITY, UT – In the summer of 1518, a woman named Frau Troffea stepped into a narrow Strasbourg street and began to dance. She danced for days without stopping. Within a week, dozens had joined her. Within a month, hundreds. Physicians were baffled. City officials, desperate for a solution, rented a hall and hired musicians — believing that the only cure was to let the dancing run its course. People collapsed from exhaustion. Some suffered strokes. Some died. And no one, in five centuries, has produced a satisfying explanation for what happened.
That story is the subject of the debut episode of Strange Epochs, a new weekly narrative history podcast hosted by Shawn Spainhour. The show is now available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and all major podcast platforms.
Strange Epochs is built around a simple but underserved idea: history’s most extraordinary moments deserve more than bullet points. Each episode — running between thirty-five and fifty-five minutes — immerses listeners in a single forgotten or overlooked event, reconstructing it from the ground up. Spainhour draws from historical scholarship, primary sources, and contemporary accounts to build episodes that feel less like lectures and more like guided journeys into another world. The show is designed to be listened to on a long drive, in the dark before sleep, or anywhere a listener wants to be transported somewhere strange and true.
The debut episode on the Dancing Plague of 1518 traces the outbreak from its first mysterious moments in a Strasbourg side street through the city’s desperate and increasingly surreal attempts to manage it. It examines the leading theories — ergot poisoning, mass psychogenic illness, religious ecstasy — and weighs what each gets right and where each falls short. By the end, listeners are left not with a tidy answer, but with something more valuable: a genuine feel for what it was like to be alive in a city that had lost its mind, and no way to explain why.
“History isn’t just a sequence of dates — it’s full of moments that still don’t have answers. Strange Epochs exists to sit inside those moments and actually feel the weight of them. I want listeners to forget they’re being educated.” — Shawn Spainhour, host of Strange Epochs
The series publishes new episodes every Tuesday at 5 AM EST. Season one includes twenty-six episodes covering events that range from the darkly comic to the genuinely unsettling. Upcoming subjects include the Cadaver Synod of 897 CE — in which a sitting pope put his predecessor’s exhumed corpse on trial — the unexplained 1908 Tunguska explosion over Siberia, the unsolved murders at the Hinterkaifeck farmstead in 1922, and the story of the Voynich Manuscript, a five-hundred-year-old book written in a language no one has ever decoded.
The show draws clear inspiration from the immersive long-form storytelling popularized by series like Fall of Civilizations, and is crafted specifically for listeners who find that the most compelling history is the kind that refuses to be neatly explained. Episodes are written and narrated by Spainhour, with each script built to be heard rather than read — paced for atmosphere, grounded in evidence, and attentive to the human beings at the center of every event.
Strange Epochs fills a specific gap in the history podcast landscape: narrative-first, deeply researched, and willing to sit with ambiguity rather than paper over it. For listeners who have ever finished a history book and thought “but what did it actually feel like?” — this is the show.
Strange Epochs is available now. New episodes release every Tuesday at 5 AM EST on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever podcasts are available. Listeners can subscribe, follow, and access full episode descriptions and source citations at the link below.
Media Contact
Company Name: Space City Concepts
Contact Person: Shawn Spainhour
Email: Send Email
Country: United States
Website: https://rss.com/podcasts/strange-epochs/