LEGEND: Giants

For thousands of years, cultures with no connection to one another told the same story: enormous, violent beings who once walked the earth — and had to be destroyed. Then came the physical evidence — oversized bones and ten-foot skeletons pulled from caves and fields across the American frontier. Most of it vanished. Some say it’s all a hoax. Others think there might be a scientific explanation. One that makes the idea of Giants not so far fetched after all.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Traditional home security only alerts you after a break-in, and that's too late. SimpliSafe is changing that.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Stop. This is SimpliSafe. Police are on the way.

• 0:09Speaker 00

  We don't just alert, we help stop crime before it starts. Plans starting around a dollar a day. Right now, get 60% off your new system with professional monitoring at simplisafe.com/truecrime. SimpliSafe, ahead of crime, in real time. Outdoor deterrence plans start at $49.99 a month. Visit simplisafe.com/licenses for alarm license information.

• 0:32Yvette Gentile?

  If you've ever stood at the base of a fossilized dinosaur skeleton, then you can understand the magic this planet used to hold. Adult T. rexes stood 21 feet tall. Woolly mammoths, dwarfed modern elephants. Ice Age deer stood seven feet at the shoulder, with antlers stretching another 12 feet above that. And if you're terrified of bugs like me, do not look this up. But 50 million years ago, millipede-like insects grew to over eight feet long.

• 1:13Yvette Gentile?

  Scientists still aren't sure why ancient species grew so large. It could have been higher oxygen levels in the atmosphere, maybe more efficient digestive systems, lighter bones. I mean, these theories exist, but none are definitive. What is clear is, millions of years ago, everything was much bigger. Dinosaurs, insects, mammals. So the question worth asking is, what about us?

• 1:48Rasha Pecoraro?

  Mythology across nearly every ancient culture talks about giants. Massive, human-like beings that are powerful and dangerous. The stories seem too widespread across civilizations to dismiss it as pure coincidence. And here's where it gets interesting. Over the past few centuries, archaeologists have reportedly found artifacts that suggest giants weren't just legends. Enormous teeth, unusually large skeletal remains, discoveries that quietly disappeared from history. And if you're wondering why you've never heard about them,

• 2:31Rasha Pecoraro?

  well, that might be intentional. I'm Rasha Pecoraro.

• 2:36Yvette Gentile?

  And I'm Yvette Gentile. This is So Supernatural.

• 3:13Yvette Gentile?

  Most people have never heard of megalophobia. But chances are, you already understand it. It's the fear of large objects and animals. And it's more common than you'd think. Tall statues, ancient trees, whales, open water. Something deep in your brain registers "big" and immediately files it under danger. And it's not hard to see why. A garter snake in your yard is, yeah, startling. But a 10-foot python is a whole other story. The bigger something is, the scarier it is.

• 3:57Rasha Pecoraro?

  While it might sound like an overreaction, the instinct behind it is primal. Something in our brain has always registered "big" as dangerous. But that fear didn't just live in our heads. It lived in our stories. And it wasn't just bugs, or animals, or trees. It was people, too.

• 4:20Yvette Gentile?

  Nearly every culture in human history has legends about giants. Dangerous, violent, human-like beings that threatened the ancient world. Some of the oldest legends come from ancient Egypt. And it's important to note, the ancient Egyptian empire lasted an incredibly long time. Over 3,000 years. So let's just rewind back to about 820 C.E. The Roman Empire has fallen. Christianity has started sweeping across Europe. And the rulers of Egypt look at these millennia-old pyramids and tombs scattered throughout their country and wonder, "What's inside?"

• 5:04Yvette Gentile?

  Because they were built so long ago, nobody even remembers. Rumors and legends said giants hauled the enormous pyramid stones into place thousands of years before. Once they were built, they hid all of their gold and jewels and other treasures inside. But in 820 C.E., archaeologists began exploring the pyramids to see if the legends were true. And along the way, they found something that seemed to confirm it. Artwork depicting massively tall people. This included one statue of a pharaoh that would have towered over his enemies.

• 5:47Yvette Gentile?

  Hieroglyphics referred to him as "the Scorpion King." And they said that he was the first king to ever rule over Egypt around roughly 3,100 BCE.

• 6:01Rasha Pecoraro?

  Right around the time archaeologists were learning this, another culture was rising. Ancient Greece, which had its own legends about giants. In their mythology, the world used to be ruled by massive, evil creatures called titans. The stories never specified exactly how tall they were. They were presumably large enough to level out plains and valleys and dig trenches that became the oceans because it was said they literally shaped the Earth. But they didn't seem to take good care of their creation. They tortured their subjects and enjoyed cruelty for cruelty's sake. The king of the Titans, Cronus,

• 6:46Rasha Pecoraro?

  actually overthrew his father so he could seize the throne for himself. After his rule began, Cronus received a prophecy. It said one of his sons would defeat him and take his throne, just as he had done to his own father. To prevent the prediction from coming true, Cronus ensured none of his children would live to adulthood. Each time his wife Rea gave birth, he would take his child from its mother's arms and eat them alive. So Rea came up with her own plan. When she gave birth to a baby boy named Zeus,

• 7:27Rasha Pecoraro?

  she tricked her husband into swallowing a rock instead of her son. It worked just long enough for them to escape. Rea hid Zeus on an island in the human world, and he grew up there. Once he was an adult, he led a revolt against all of the Titans, including his own father. After 10 years of warfare, he overthrew them and became the new king of the gods. Since the Titans were immortal, Zeus couldn't kill them. But he did put most of them in a prison in the underworld.

• 8:04Yvette Gentile?

  We could go on and on because lots of cultures have giants in their creation myths. And around 500 BCE or so, legends about giants were also being recorded in the Bible. I mean, so we think. That's when scribes began recording what would become some of the most well-known stories in human history. Tales that appear across three major world religions: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. And one of those stories features, you guessed it, a giant. And it goes a little something like this. Two armies are facing off.

• 8:46Yvette Gentile?

  The Israelites on one hill, their enemies the Philistines on another, with a wide valley between them. Before anyone can charge, a single Philistine warrior steps forward into that valley and stops everything. His name was Goliath, and he was enormous. Goliath made an offer. Forget the battle. Send out one soldier to fight me, one-on-one. If I lose, the Philistines surrender. If I win, the Israelites submit to our rule. It was a simple deal. One fight instead of a full-blown war. The only catch?

• 9:28Yvette Gentile?

  Goliath was so massive, so intimidating, that not a single Israelite soldier was willing to step forward and face him. So reportedly, Goliath gave the Israelites some time to think about his offer. He came back the next morning to issue the same challenge. But again, no one spoke up. And on and on it went for 40 days. The two armies just sat on their hills, locked in a stalemate. Until a teenager came along and changed everything.

• 10:04Rasha Pecoraro?

  His name was David. He wasn't even a soldier. He was just a kid who had come to the front lines to drop off a care package to his three older brothers who were serving in the Israelite army. But when David heard about Goliath's challenge, his mind was made up. He was going to fight. A soldier offered David his armor. David turned it down. He'd never worn armor before and didn't want to be stumbling around in unfamiliar equipment on a battlefield. Instead, he walked out to face the most feared warrior of the ancient world, armed with nothing but a sling and a bag of rocks. When Goliath came forward, David loaded his sling,

• 10:49Rasha Pecoraro?

  took aim, and fired a single stone directly at Goliath's head. It landed, and Goliath dropped. And just to be sure, David walked over and swiftly cut off his head. David had walked out onto that battlefield as a nobody. He left as a hero. And the Israelites won the war. Many interpret this story as a metaphor. Whether it's true or not, how underdogs can overcome incredible obstacles. But there's another story from the Bible about how giants were created and then destroyed

• 11:32Rasha Pecoraro?

  that seems to hint at a more literal interpretation. According to the Bible, after Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden of Eden, humanity spread across the earth. But somewhere along the way, something unexpected happened. Angels came down from the heavens and mated with human women. Their children were called the Nephilim. They weren't fully human, and they weren't fully angels. And by most interpretations, they never should have existed at all. God hadn't intended for them to be born, but what they became was monstrous, enormous, violent, and cruel.

• 12:15Rasha Pecoraro?

  Creatures that tormented the people around them and couldn't be reasoned with. God decided that they had to go. He warned a man named Noah that a catastrophic flood was coming, enough to wipe the slate clean. Noah was told to build an ark and save his family. And y'all probably know the rest of this story. But here's what most people don't realize. The story of Noah's ark isn't really about punishing humanity. And at its core, it's about wiping out a race of giant, half-human, half-angel hybrids who had made the world unlivable.

• 13:00Rasha Pecoraro?

  All to say, the legends about giants are endless. While there are major differences from one story to the next, it's also striking how similar many of these tales are. All of them say giants are evil, and that the gods had to violently wipe them out for the benefit of humanity. Now, according to writer John Junta, giants simply represent the chaos of nature. They are a metaphor for the uncontrollable forces we face every day and how we can still overcome them. But it's possible these stories aren't just lessons baked into legends,

• 13:40Rasha Pecoraro?

  because it turns out, some have claimed to find evidence that giants really did exist.

• 13:53Speaker 00

  When an intruder approaches a home, they expect a camera. What they don't expect... Stop. This is SimpliSafe. Police are on the way. Using smart AI cameras, live US-based agents help deter intruders in under 30 seconds. Don't just record a break-in, stop it from ever happening. Plan starting around a dollar a day. Right now, get 60% off your new system with professional monitoring at simplisafe.com/truecrime. 30 seconds response time requires monitoring plan with outdoor protection starting at $49.99 a month. Visit simplisafe.com/licenses for alarm license information.

• 14:24Speaker 04

  Hi, I'm Ashley Flowers.

• 14:25Speaker 05

  And I'm Britt. And if you're on the edge of your seat listening to this show, Crime Junkie needs to be your next listen.

• 14:31Speaker 04

  Every Monday, I dive into a new true crime case that our reporting team has been on the ground looking into. From lesser-known disappearances to the most chilling cases hitting the headlines. And I'm gonna walk you through it the way I tell my best friend, because, well, that's what I'm doing.

• 14:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's me. And I'm right there with you as we listen together, react to every wild detail, and of course, I ask all the questions.

• 14:55Speaker 04

  And I'm gonna have the answers, because we have case files. We're talking to detectives and family members, and we're gonna stay focused on the facts.

• 15:02Speaker 05

  So if you're not already listening to Crime Junkie, what are you waiting for? There are over 300 episodes available right now.

• 15:08Speaker 04

  And you can listen to new episodes of Crime Junkie every Monday, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 15:19Rasha Pecoraro?

  In the fall of 1705, a farmer was walking along the shores of a river near Albany, New York, when he spotted something in the dirt. It was a tooth, presumably the same shape as an ordinary molar. Because when the farmer showed it to some other people, they all told him it looked human. Except there was one strange detail that stood out. It was huge, way too big to fit in any person's mouth. And it weighed about five pounds. The farmer and the people he showed believed the person would have had to have been 30 or 40 feet tall to need teeth of that size.

• 16:00Rasha Pecoraro?

  Eventually, news of the tooth reached a Boston-based Puritan minister named Cotton Mather. And his name may ring a bell, because he was considered an expert on witchcraft demons and the dark arts. During the Salem Witch Trials in 1692, he actually wrote several letters to the judges and the courts in Salem about how to fight the forces of evil. Cut to 13 years after the witch trials. When Cotton heard about the tooth, it reminded him of another enormous fossil discovered in the Albany area. Someone had recently found an enormous leg bone in the region. Records are vague around this time,

• 16:45Rasha Pecoraro?

  but reports suggest it may have been something like 3 and 1/2 to 4 feet long. And that was just one bone. Cotton thought the tooth and the leg bone had come from the same species, an enormous person who once stood dozens of feet tall. And as a man of faith, Cotton assumed this giant was a Nephilim, one of those angel-human hybrids that drowned in Noah's flood. Which is when he took the finding a step further. Cotton believed this was proof that the Book of Genesis in the Bible was literally true.

• 17:26Rasha Pecoraro?

  Cotton wrote countless letters about it to research groups and the Royal Society of London. He seemingly wanted them to acknowledge this as proof that Christianity was the one correct faith. It's safe to say the people he wrote to were skeptical. But some scientists agreed with Cotton's conclusion that giants were real, including a man named Thomas Molyneux. He was born and raised in Dublin, Ireland. He received a degree in medicine and became a pretty well-known doctor. But he was also a naturalist and a scientist. He spent his career studying human and animal bodies, trying to understand how every living creature worked.

• 18:11Rasha Pecoraro?

  Five years before Cotton wrote about the alleged Nephilim tooth and leg bone, Thomas visited a museum in the Netherlands. There, he saw a bone on display. It was the front part of a skull. The museum directors didn't know who or what kind of creature the bone had come from. And they didn't have the rest of the skeleton available for study. But Thomas took one look at it and realized it was far too large to come from a human being. That is, unless that person had been between 11 and 12 feet tall. So Thomas wondered if perhaps giants were, in fact, real, especially once he heard about Cotton's declarations.

• 18:56Rasha Pecoraro?

  And his suspicions seemed to be confirmed 12 years later, in 1717. And that's when an archaeological team discovered a grave very near to Stonehenge. When they excavated it, they once again found really large bones. They seemed to come from people who were around nine feet tall. This was especially notable because many of the oldest legends about Stonehenge claim it was built by giants. This grave seemed to confirm those old myths were at least partially true. And the evidence just kept piling up from there.

• 19:39Rasha Pecoraro?

  Sometime in the late 1800s, a farmer was plowing a field in Minnesota. That's when he found something unexpected in the dirt. Large stone tools that looked too big for any average-sized human to use. After one look at them, he knew exactly what they were. Numerous indigenous communities in the area had legends saying giants used to live on the land. Well, roughly around the same time, a pair of construction workers changed the game when they made a discovery on October 16, 1869. Their names were Gideon Emmons and Henry Nichols.

• 20:21Rasha Pecoraro?

  A farmer named William Newell had hired them to dig a well on his land, which is in a tiny New York town of Cardiff. So that day, Gideon and Henry grabbed their shovels and started delving into the earth, until they hit something unexpected about three feet down. It looked like a human foot, only it was rock-hard, as though it was made of stone. And it was far larger than any ordinary person's foot. Henry and Gideon presumably kept digging, and soon enough, they uncovered a leg, a torso, arms, and a head. By the end of the day,

• 21:06Rasha Pecoraro?

  Gideon and Henry had found a massive 10-foot-tall man. And his whole body seemed to be made of rock. But they didn't think it was a statue. They believed it had actually been petrified by the waters of a nearby swamp. So they came to believe it was a giant, one that had been buried very long ago and had since turned to stone.

• 21:35Rasha Pecoraro?

  Henry and Gideon then went into the town of Cardiff and told everyone what they had found. Word spread, and before long, the newspapers were full of reports that giants were real, and one had been discovered in their very own backyard. The top universities in the United States sent professors and experts to study the mummified giant. P.T. Barnum even tried to buy it so it could be part of his traveling circus. But the landowner, William Newell, wasn't interested. He had a better offer. A group of local businessmen wanted to invest in the Cardiff Giant. They offered William $30,000.

• 22:20Rasha Pecoraro?

  In exchange, William agreed to give those businessmen a cut of all the future profits he made, from sending it on tours, selling tickets to let the people view it, and so on. It was a great deal for William, but P.T. Barnum did not take the rejection lying down. He made his own fake stone giant and sent it on a tour around the nation, pretending it was the real deal. And if you've seen The Greatest Showman, that tracks.

• 22:48Yvette Gentile?

  And what you could imagine created a lot of controversy. I mean, rumors spread that the Cardiff Giant was a hoax, and especially when other con artists made counterfeit stone mummies. Before long, the general public lost interest in the original body, and William ended up selling it to someone who brought it on tours. But they later tossed it in a barn and forgot all about it. And then many people concluded that giants weren't real after all. However, a few true believers remained, especially as more discoveries were made public.

• 23:29Rasha Pecoraro?

  Reportedly, a group of researchers found a skeleton that was almost 10 feet tall in Brewersville, Indiana, in 1879, a decade after the Cardiff discovery. They wanted to study it to learn more, but unfortunately, a flood destroyed the building where it was being stored before they could give it a thorough examination. About 30 years later, in 1911, miners were digging in Lovelock Cave, Nevada. There, they discovered numerous indigenous artifacts and bones. They notified the local authorities and asked them to take a look. Over the next decade and a half, various archaeological teams excavated the cave, and

• 24:14Rasha Pecoraro?

  supposedly, they found skeletons of people who were 8 to 10 feet tall.

• 24:21Yvette Gentile?

  The evidence appeared to exist, so, I mean, you're probably wondering, why aren't giants accepted as fact today? Well, the answer to that question may lie in a very old conspiracy. The truth started to surface back in 2014, when a news article quoted an anonymous official from the Smithsonian Institute. For the sake of the story, we'll call them Fallon. And allegedly, they admitted that they and their colleagues had been part of a massive cover-up. And according to Fallon, this cover-up began in the early 1900s, right around the time

• 25:04Yvette Gentile?

  the Lovelock Cave skeletons, the Brewersville bones, and the Cardiff Giant were making headlines. And those discoveries created a serious problem for the scientific community. And let me just tell you, here's why. At that time, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was still deeply controversial. So controversial that the state of Tennessee actually made it illegal to teach in schools. When a teacher named John Scopes broke that law in 1925, he was arrested. And his two-week trial became a global news story. Everyone had an opinion. Everyone had to pick a side.

• 25:48Yvette Gentile?

  And that was the issue. Many scientists felt they had to choose between science and religion, between evolution and the Bible, because in their minds, both couldn't be true at the same time. But the fossil record was pointing somewhere uncomfortable. If giants were real, that meant the Nephilim were real. And if the Nephilim were real, that meant Noah's flood really happened. And if that was true, maybe everything else in the Bible was true, just like Cotton Mather had proposed. For scientists, you could imagine, who had spent their entire careers arguing against

• 26:32Yvette Gentile?

  the Bible, that was an impossible thing to admit. So according to Fallon, they just didn't. Instead, scientists at the Smithsonian made sure no one would ever realize giants were real, even if that meant destroying all of the evidence.

• 27:00Speaker 00

  Traditional home security only alerts you after a break-in, and that's too late. SimpliSafe is changing that.

• 27:06Speaker 01

  Stop. This is SimpliSafe. Police are on the way.

• 27:09Speaker 00

  We don't just alert. We help stop crime before it starts. Plans starting around $1 a day. Right now, get 60% off your new system with professional monitoring at simplisafe.com/truecrime. SimpliSafe, ahead of crime, in real time.

• 27:24Speaker 01

  Outdoor deterrents plans start at $49.99 a month. Visit simplisafe.com/licenses for alarm license information.

• 27:28Speaker 04

  Hi, I'm Ashley Flowers.

• 27:32Speaker 05

  And I'm Brett. And if you're on the edge of your seat listening to this show, Crime Junkie needs to be your next listen.

• 27:38Speaker 04

  Every Monday, I dive into a new true crime case that our reporting team has been on the ground looking into, from lesser-known disappearances to the most chilling cases hitting the headlines. And I'm gonna walk you through it the way I tell my best friend, because, well, that's what I'm doing.

• 27:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's me. And I'm right there with you as we listen together, react to every wild detail, and of course, I ask all the questions.

• 28:01Speaker 04

  And I'm gonna have the answers, because we have case files. We're talking to detectives and family members, and we're gonna stay focused on the facts.

• 28:09Speaker 05

  So if you're not already listening to Crime Junkie, what are you waiting for? There are over 300 episodes available right now.

• 28:15Speaker 04

  And you can listen to new episodes of Crime Junkie every Monday, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 28:26Rasha Pecoraro?

  In 2014, a news article published an interview with an anonymous Smithsonian employee who we're calling Fallon. They revealed that the Smithsonian had spent more than a century covering up evidence that giants ever existed. They seemed to suggest that museum officials censored all of the records they had of past discoveries of giants, and they destroyed as many of the fossils as they could. They apparently ruined thousands of artifacts. But they couldn't get away with the cover-up forever. According to Fallon, the Supreme Court somehow got wind of the conspiracy in or around 2014.

• 29:09Rasha Pecoraro?

  They ordered the Smithsonian to release all the records that still existed that hadn't been destroyed. That's why Fallon was now allowed to speak publicly about what they knew. That revelation was big news, of course. After the article was published, lots of other websites picked up the story. It swept across social media like wildfire. Photos also began circulating online, supposedly released by the Smithsonian after the Supreme Court ruling. And they apparently showed dig teams uncovering skeletons that were much taller than the average human being. One even showed an enormous skull in a pit.

• 29:50Rasha Pecoraro?

  It was so large, the excavators couldn't lift it on their own, and they needed construction equipment.

• 29:57Yvette Gentile?

  There's just one problem with these claims. They were part of a practical joke. The website that broke the story was World News Daily Report. It's a satirical page that shares fake news stories, similar to The Onion. Their logo even reads, quote, "Where facts don't matter." So in other words, Fallon, the Smithsonian cover-up, the Supreme Court ruling, were all lies. The website's authors made the story up for clicks. All of those other websites and social media users either failed to realize it was satire or intentionally spread misinformation.

• 30:40Yvette Gentile?

  That photo we mentioned of the team digging up the large head? Well, that came from a Photoshop competition hosted by a site called Design Crowd in 2013. Others were doctored pictures of different digs where teams found extinct animals like mammoths or dinosaurs. There are similar issues with the so-called giant fossil from centuries ago. The enormous tooth Cotton Mather examined in 1705 is now thought to be from a mastodon, ancient elephant-like creatures that lived in the Ice Age. And they weren't officially discovered or classified until 1792.

• 31:22Yvette Gentile?

  So of course, when Cotton saw a mammoth tooth roughly a century before then, he had no idea what he was even looking at. Equally, it's hard to say if the skull that biologist Thomas Molyneux saw in the Netherlands Museum really came from a human being, because he only saw one bone. And as far as we can tell, the specimen has been lost to time. So we don't know if it came from a giant or an ordinary animal. Other discoveries appear to be hoaxes too. Earlier, we mentioned how miners and archaeologists reportedly found giant bones

• 32:04Yvette Gentile?

  in a cave in Nevada during numerous excavations between 1911 and 1924. Well, the excavations were real. Teams found tools, pottery, and cloth, which has been put on display and studied by other experts. But nobody has ever seen the supposed giant skeletons they recovered. And there's no record of them being discovered in the archaeologist's logs. So it's very possible that the newspapers from the time made up the reports just to drum up excitement.

• 32:41Rasha Pecoraro?

  Which brings us to the granddaddy of all the evidence, the Cardiff Giant. You'll remember the mummy was discovered on William Newell's property in October of 1869. And almost immediately after it was uncovered, William found a way to make a profit off of it. He set up a big tent around the excavation site, and he charged people a quarter apiece to come see it with their very own eyes. Tons of people were willing to pay to see the mummy. Demand was so high, William doubled the price to 50 cents after just two days. And still, tourists traveled to Cardiff from all across the country to view his giant.

• 33:25Rasha Pecoraro?

  William made a whole lot of money. But eventually, the entire thing was exposed. Because just a few months after the mummy's discovery, at some point in early 1870, a man named George Hall made a public confession. He said he was William's cousin, the Cardiff Giant was a hoax, and he'd helped fake the entire thing.

• 33:50Yvette Gentile?

  So you see, George was an atheist, and one of his favorite pastimes was arguing with Christians about whether God existed and whether the Bible was literally true. In 1867, he got into a debate with a devout preacher who insisted every single word of the Bible was accurate, no exceptions. George pushed back, quoting a passage from Genesis about giants walking the earth. He said, "Surely, you don't actually believe that." The preacher said he absolutely did. If it was in the Bible, it was true. And that's when George had a lightbulb moment go off in his head.

• 34:33Yvette Gentile?

  It was equal parts scam and social experiment. If he created a fake giant and passed it off as a real discovery, religious people would believe it without question, no matter how obvious the forgery was. He could charge admission to see it, make money, and then reveal the whole thing was just a hoax. Proving that blind faith makes people dangerously easy to fool. He wanted to make a point, and of course, get rich doing it. So George bought a massive block of stone and hired a sculptor to carve it into the shape of a giant human body.

• 35:17Yvette Gentile?

  Basically, like a fossilized mummy. He brought his relative William in on the plan, and William agreed to let George bury the statue on his farm in exchange, of course, for a cut of the profits. By November 1868, the statue was carved and buried. And then, they waited nearly a year, most likely to let the grass grow back over the site so it wouldn't look freshly dug. Finally, in October of 1869, William hired two workers named Henry and Gideon to dig a well, right on top of where the statue was buried. And everything went exactly as planned.

• 36:02Rasha Pecoraro?

  In total, George spent roughly $3,000 on the hoax. But he made roughly $20,000 on the scam even after he'd split the proceeds with William. Adjusted for inflation, that's roughly half a million dollars today. But if George's goal was to make people more skeptical, it didn't work. Because to this day, people are still falling for giant hoaxes like the World News Daily Report story. And honestly, that's not surprising. Misinformation is hard to spot. We've all been fooled by something at some point. But that doesn't mean that giants are entirely fictional.

• 36:46Yvette Gentile?

  Scientists believe some ancient people suffered from rare medical conditions that caused extreme, uncontrollable growth. In a time before anyone understood hormones or genetics, a person who grew to an extraordinary height may have seemed less like a sick human being and more like something out of mythology. Yes, it sounds far-fetched. Until you hear about Robert Wadlow.

• 37:17Rasha Pecoraro?

  Robert was born in Alton, Illinois on February 22, 1918. He was an average-sized baby born to average-sized parents. But when he was a toddler, he went through a massive growth spurt. By the time he was five years old, he was already five foot four, meaning he was the same size as many adults. And he kept growing after that. Some sources said he stood six foot two on his eighth birthday. When he joined the Boy Scouts at age 13, they had to make him a special tent and sleeping bag because he didn't fit into the standard ones. He was more than eight feet tall by the time he graduated high school.

• 38:01Rasha Pecoraro?

  Throughout his adulthood, Robert just got bigger and bigger until he eventually reached a whopping height of eight feet 11 inches. As the years went on, Robert's size caused him serious health problems. His body was too heavy for him to walk upright unless he wore braces on his legs and used a cane. On top of that, according to Discover Magazine, his head and his feet were too far apart to communicate with each other. His brain literally couldn't receive sensations from the nerves on the lower parts of his body. It was like his toes were always numb. And if he stubbed them or stepped on something sharp, the pain just didn't register.

• 38:45Rasha Pecoraro?

  This became a major problem in early July of 1940, when Robert was 22 years old. That month, he had to replace the brace on his right ankle. But the doctor didn't put it on correctly, and it rubbed against his skin, irritating it. If this had happened to anyone else, the friction would probably have caused him a lot of pain, but not Robert. Because he couldn't feel his feet or his ankles, he didn't notice. He wore the brace for an entire week until it blistered. Then, the blister became infected. By the time he realized what was going on, it was too late.

• 39:28Rasha Pecoraro?

  The infection had spread to the rest of his body. Robert died from it on July 15, 1940, at the tender age of 22.

• 39:40Yvette Gentile?

  Some medical professionals believe if he'd lived longer, he would have continued to grow even when he reached his middle age. And it's hard to say how big he could have gotten because there was just no limit. But the truth was, Robert was diagnosed with a glandular disorder. Most people have glands that produce hormones to make them grow. And once they reach their adult height, they don't make those chemicals anymore. But Robert's body made too much of the hormone, and it never stopped. There was no treatment for this disorder during Robert's lifetime. But these days, people can actually get surgery to fix the glands that make the hormones,

• 40:25Yvette Gentile?

  basically halting the growth. Before those treatments were invented, other people could have grown to be just as tall as Robert or larger. Perhaps that would explain some of the nine-feet-tall skeletons that were discovered during the archaeological digs.

• 40:43Rasha Pecoraro?

  The fossil record has something to add here, too. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, a creature called Gigantopithecus blacki walked the earth. They were closely related to orangutans and distantly related to humans, but potentially 10 feet tall and covered in hair.

• 41:04Yvette Gentile?

  So, the question is, were giants real? Yes, maybe in a sense. Not necessarily mythological monsters or half-angel hybrids, but monumental, extraordinary beings that walked this earth and left an impression so powerful that human beings have been telling stories about them ever since. That's what mythology does. It takes the extraordinary and tries to make sense of it. And more often than not, buried somewhere deep beneath the legend, lies something that is very true.

• 41:46Yvette Gentile?

  We may never know the full story of what once roamed this planet. But the fact that so many cultures across so many centuries kept telling the same story? That's not nothing. That's a memory. And memories don't survive thousands of years for no reason.

• 42:20Rasha Pecoraro?

  This is So Supernatural, an AudioChuck original produced by Crime House. You can connect with us on Instagram at So Supernatural Pod and visit our website at sosupernaturalpodcast.com. Join me next Friday for an all-new episode.

• 42:41Rasha Pecoraro?

  I think Chuck would approve.

• 42:46Speaker 06

  When the nights grow longer, the shadows start to stir, and that can only mean one thing. Full Body Chills is back. This season, Step Inside: Original Tales, where every doorway leads somewhere darker, every stranger carries a secret, and nothing is ever quite what it seems. Each story takes you somewhere new, but be careful, you never know what might follow you home. So gather round, listen close, and stream Full Body Chills wherever you get your podcasts.