Phishing

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Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, All of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.

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 lure details are difficult to believe.

In early October of 2009, a strange news story started circulating from the Chinese news agencies Xinhua and Harbin News.

It was a curiosity piece about a place in northern Sweden with a particular history, a town known as Xacobo.

Founded in 1820, Shakabo City had a population of 25,000 people, about the same 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 Shacobo 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, working there, or even visiting.

The article explained that the woman who had founded it almost 200 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 its gates.

Women, however, were welcome to visit as tourists.

As for the citizens, the over 20,000 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 a man.

They would just have to wash themselves before they returned, a practice that doesn't sound dissimilar from the Amish concept of Rumspringa.

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 information about this place, leading several sites to fully crash from the traffic.

Eventually, representatives of Sweden's tourism board board had to issue a statement regarding Chacobo City.

It does not 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 city lurking in the forests.

Once the announcement was made, it all seemed rather obvious.

The rumors about Chacobo City read like a laundry list of clichés.

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 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 this story as an amusing fiction.

Online communities created a flag for the fake lesbian city, wrote humorous webcomics about the hoax.

Someone even made a short film set in the city in 2010, 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 2009.

There are even more websites, 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.

After all, when it comes to fake stories on the internet, misinformation is no longer the exception.

Sadly, it's the rule.

Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet, with no fees or minimums on checking accounts and no overdraft fees.

Just ask the Capital One Bank guy.

It's pretty much all he talks about.

In a good way.

He'd also tell you that this podcast is his favorite podcast, too.

Oh, really?

Thanks, Capital One Bank Guy.

What's in your wallet?

Terms apply.

See capital1.com/slash bank.

Capital One NA member FDIC.

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If you go to enough trivia nights at the local bar, you're bound to get a question like this.

What 10th century Viking king is a modern Wi-Fi technology named after?

Bluetooth technology is the answer.

It was named after Harold Bluetooth Gormsson, the Viking king of Norway and Denmark.

And he got the name because he had a dead 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 is Bluetooth's name written the way that it would be carved into rune stones 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.

There are only about 250 known runestones 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 runestone is proof of a Viking's importance, there's actually someone who was far more celebrated than Bluetooth.

In fact, this Viking is honored on more runestones 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 10th 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 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 located in Jelling, 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 studied the runestones using a 3D scan.

The scan let her analyze the carvings in a way that's similar to modern-day forensic handwriting examinations.

The scans reveal that all four runestones were carved by the same person.

On one of the runestones, that person gives Tira the title of queen, and the other stones all link to King Gorm and King Harald.

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.

The carvings also suggest 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 12th century.

They credit Tira as the one who built the Daneverke fortifications, an 18-mile-long series of walls and 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 Tyra was so beloved, why don't we remember her story today?

Well, historians began to study Vikings in the early 19th 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 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 enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities.

Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts or learn more about the show by visiting CuriositiesPodcast.com.

This 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 learn all about it over at theworldoflore.com.

And until next time, stay curious.

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