Speaker 1: Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
Speaker 1: iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild.
Speaker 2: Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history
Speaker 2: is an open book, all of these amazing tales are
Speaker 2: right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.
Speaker 2: Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. Deep in the mountains
Speaker 2: of West Virginia, the New River runs its ancient course
Speaker 2: through the gorge. The land around it has been preserved
Speaker 2: as a National park, and so there are miles of
Speaker 2: natural beauty. There's a sort of quiet out there in
Speaker 2: the depths of Appalachia. One could almost be forgiven for
Speaker 2: not seeing the deep scar in the limestone cliffs, or
Speaker 2: for not knowing of the catastrophic industrial event that caused
Speaker 2: it all. Here in this beautiful place, hundreds of lives
Speaker 2: were claimed by a slow, suffocating death. The nineteen twenties
Speaker 2: were a time of incredible industrial expansion, and the chemical
Speaker 2: giant Union Carbide decided that it needed to power its
Speaker 2: plants in Alloy, West Virginia. This would require something of
Speaker 2: an engineering feat. The site of the new hydroelectric plant
Speaker 2: was not next to water. In fact, they would have
Speaker 2: to dig a tunnel three miles long to tap the
Speaker 2: new river so that the plant could make power. It
Speaker 2: was going to be one of the marbles of modern engineering.
Speaker 2: Thousands of laborers were brought in for the project, predominantly
Speaker 2: black men recruited from the South. They were to blast, drill,
Speaker 2: and then clear the tunnel. They would work long hours
Speaker 2: in small, confined spaces, and this would prove to have
Speaker 2: devastating consequences for those workers. You see, the rock through
Speaker 2: which the tunnel was bored was rich in a mineral
Speaker 2: called silica, and when pulverized into a dust, it becomes
Speaker 2: lethal to inhale. And the air was thick with silica dust,
Speaker 2: so thick that it was impossible to see more than
Speaker 2: a few feet in front of you. There were no
Speaker 2: masks to protect the men's lungs, no ventilation system to
Speaker 2: draw the toxic particles away. The men essentially toiled away
Speaker 2: and a death trap. Now, a common disease found among
Speaker 2: miners is chronic silicosis, which scars the lungs, making them
Speaker 2: unable to absorb oxygen. It normally takes years to develop,
Speaker 2: but the men who worked in the Hawk's Nest tunnel
Speaker 2: their working conditions were so extreme that they developed acute
Speaker 2: silicosis within just months. They suffered through shortness of breath,
Speaker 2: chest pain, and relentless coughing, and eventually their lungs would
Speaker 2: shut down completely. It's estimated that between seven hundred and
Speaker 2: fifty and one thousand workers due to respiratory failure from
Speaker 2: working in the Hawk's Nest tunnel, making it the deadliest
Speaker 2: industrial disaster in US history, surpassing even the infamous Triangle
Speaker 2: Shirtwaist factory fire. Although massive in scale, the tragedy compounded
Speaker 2: by a complete lack of accountability. Instead of helping the
Speaker 2: workers who were affected, the company fired many of those
Speaker 2: who began to show symptoms, sending them back home to die,
Speaker 2: and those who did die were often buried by the
Speaker 2: company in unmarked graves. At one point, workers gathered together
Speaker 2: to file a class action lawsuit, but it was largely dismissed,
Speaker 2: leaving victims without money for medical bills and lost wages,
Speaker 2: and so for decades, the corporate record of these men
Speaker 2: remained lost to neglect and cover up, but the disaster
Speaker 2: could not be forgotten. You see, the real story of
Speaker 2: Hawk's Nest doesn't lie in some redacted memos or columns
Speaker 2: on a spreadsheet, But in the fragmented accounts of the
Speaker 2: victims themselves, the oral histories collected over the years painted
Speaker 2: a bleak picture. These were men whose coughing shook them
Speaker 2: so hard they could barely speak, men who described it
Speaker 2: as dry drowning and the feeling of sand filling their lungs.
Speaker 2: They were fathers and sons, and it's impossible to ignore
Speaker 2: the racial dimension of this disaster as well. The vast
Speaker 2: majority of the men who died were black, recruited from
Speaker 2: the rural self, and when the illness began settling in Union,
Speaker 2: Carbide's response was as cruel as it was fast. Instead
Speaker 2: of treatment, the men would receive their final paycheck and
Speaker 2: a train ticket home. What became of them after that
Speaker 2: was none of the management's business, and this physical distance
Speaker 2: meant that the company could deny any responsibility. As these
Speaker 2: men wasted away, their skin turning gray, their breathing reduced
Speaker 2: to a mere rattle. The company's silence was nearly as
Speaker 2: deadly as the dust itself. But in the following years,
Speaker 2: the survivors and families of the dead found each other,
Speaker 2: gathered in community centers and churches to share their stories
Speaker 2: of loved ones lost.
Speaker 1: These meetings became the first real oral history of the
Speaker 1: events and the people it most affected. In time, these
Speaker 1: were archived and others began to tell the stories through writing, photography,
Speaker 1: and art, and it remains an indictment of the human
Speaker 1: cost of industrial greed. The miners of Hawk's Nest may
Speaker 1: have been forgotten by the company, but they are remembered
Speaker 1: by history today. Their story is a call to action,
Speaker 1: a reminder that we must never forget the sacrifices made
Speaker 1: in the pursuit of progress, and that we must always
Speaker 1: protect the lives of those who build our world. The
Speaker 1: skies have always been a great source of mystery and wonder,
Speaker 1: even in our modern age. Looking up at the stars
Speaker 1: or the vastness of a storm cloud can be a
Speaker 1: potent reminder of how small we human beings really are
Speaker 1: in this universe. They make all our triumphs and struggles
Speaker 1: seem insignificant. For all of human history, we projected our myths,
Speaker 1: our dreams, and our stories into the heavens above, and
Speaker 1: when we didn't have our heads in the clouds, sometimes
Speaker 1: we wondered what could lie beyond them. It was April
Speaker 1: fourteenth of fifteen sixty one in the city of Nuremberg.
Speaker 1: This was long before the formation of Germany, back when
Speaker 1: it was a city in the Holy Roman Empire. Residents
Speaker 1: of the city stepped out of their homes as dawn
Speaker 1: was breaking. A number of them froze in place, staring
Speaker 1: up at the heavens. The sun looked strange as it
Speaker 1: rose to its usual place in the sky, and as
Speaker 1: they watched, two arcs of red light appeared in the
Speaker 1: middle of the sun. They looked something like large crescent moons,
Speaker 1: and around them other lights started to spark into existence,
Speaker 1: red spots above and below the sun. Other dark orbs
Speaker 1: started appearing, as well as red crosses and stripes of green.
Speaker 1: Before the eyes of the Nuremberg citizens, all of these
Speaker 1: strange celestial objects started to fly aggressively against each other,
Speaker 1: disappearing in and out behind them, the sun weaving around
Speaker 1: like agitated birds, a flurry of light that was so
Speaker 1: striking none of the people below knew how to make
Speaker 1: sense of it. They could only describe it as a
Speaker 1: battle of some kind. Some of the objects appeared to
Speaker 1: exhaust themselves and fell down to the horizon. Enormous columns
Speaker 1: of smoke came from the crash sites, although no one
Speaker 1: dared to investigate. It lasted for about an hour. Finally,
Speaker 1: as the skies quieted, another object larger than all the
Speaker 1: rest appeared, and it looked like an immense black spear
Speaker 1: pointing to the east, and then the skies were clear again.
Speaker 1: At the time, no one knew what to make of
Speaker 1: what they had seen. A local woodcutter named Hans Glesser
Speaker 1: made a wood carving of the event, depicting the various
Speaker 1: celestial objects and their interaction with the sun. He wrote
Speaker 1: his description of the event below the woodcut, including his
Speaker 1: own interpretation that the sites had been a sign of
Speaker 1: God's might. Centuries after glare Us would cut, a different
Speaker 1: interpretation became the primary one, and I'm sure you've probably
Speaker 1: already guessed what it is you see. UFO enthusiasts eventually
Speaker 1: became convinced the so called battle in the skies was
Speaker 1: so strange and unique that it had to have been
Speaker 1: an early glimpse of some kind of alien activity. The
Speaker 1: truth is, Glasser's account had fallen into obscurity before it
Speaker 1: was mentioned in a nineteen fifty eight book called Flying Saucers.
Speaker 1: Modern myths of things seen in the sky, and the
Speaker 1: book raised some interesting questions. Was this an interstellar war
Speaker 1: or some sort of attempt at communication that the sixteenth
Speaker 1: century Nuremberg citizens just couldn't understand. Skeptics of the UFO
Speaker 1: Battle theory say that the people of fifteen sixty one
Speaker 1: Nuremberg merely saw some unusual celestial phenomenon and elaborated on it.
Speaker 1: The description of two crescent moons of light seemed to
Speaker 1: be similar to sun dogs, an effect where the Sun's
Speaker 1: halo produces two sharp flares on either side of the horizon,
Speaker 1: and the other shapes likely came from staring at the
Speaker 1: sun for too long. But if you've seen sun dogs,
Speaker 1: you know that the effect is impressive, but it's mild.
Speaker 1: It's hard to imagine even the most superstitious person looking
Speaker 1: at them and thinking that there's actually whole celestial battles
Speaker 1: being waged in the heavens. Hans Glesser's woodcut shows a
Speaker 1: sky practically chalk full of spots and shapes. The other
Speaker 1: popular point of skepticism is the author of the original story.
Speaker 1: As far as we're aware, Hans Glesser wasn't a con
Speaker 1: artist or a fabuloust, but his account is the only
Speaker 1: one that we have of the event at all. Everything
Speaker 1: he says is filtered through his perspective and artistic depiction.
Speaker 1: Even the fact that many Nuremberg residents saw the lights
Speaker 1: in the sky is a claim with a single source.
Speaker 1: This all isn't unsurprising for the period, though, but it
Speaker 1: does give us an almost infinite number of ways to
Speaker 1: express skepticism or credibility of what happened, depending on what
Speaker 1: you're most like to believe. The world is a place
Speaker 1: full of awe inspiring sites. The earth skies produce auroras
Speaker 1: in the Arctic Circle and green flashes on the ocean's horizon.
Speaker 1: All that said, there is one thing that we know
Speaker 1: to be true, even if we never know what happened
Speaker 1: that day in Nuremberg, will never be short of signs
Speaker 1: from above, and humanity will always spring to the task
Speaker 1: of interpreting them. I hope you enjoyed today's guided tour
Speaker 1: through the Cabinet of Curiosities. This show was created by
Speaker 1: me Aaron Mankey in partnership with iHeart Podcasts, researched and
Speaker 1: written by the Grim and Mild team, and produced by
Speaker 1: Jesse Funk. Learn more about the show and the people
Speaker 1: who make it over at Grimandmild dot com slash Curiosities.
Speaker 1: You'll also find a link to the official Cabinet of
Speaker 1: Curiosity's hardcover book, available in bookstores and online, as well
Speaker 1: as ebook and audiobook. And if you're looking for an
Speaker 1: ad free option, consider joining our page. It's all the
Speaker 1: same stories, but without the interruption for a small monthly fee.
Speaker 1: Learn more and sign up over at Patreon dot com,
Speaker 1: slash Grimandmild, and until next time, stay curious.