Introducing WHAT THE FACT with Connor Tomlinson and Carter Roy, a new Rewind podcast!

Fun fact: Did you know Jaws almost never existed because the shark kept sinking while filming? That is Connor Tomlinson just getting started. If that sounds fascinating, you are going to love Rewind Studios’ new podcast out now called WHAT THE FACT hosted by Connor Tomlinson and Carter Roy. It’s produced by the same team that brings you Serial Killers & Murderous Minds. Connor and co-host Carter Roy pull three unbelievable true facts every week and tell you the full story behind each one. Nothing is off limits. Myths and monsters. Forgotten scandals. Accidental discoveries. Untold stories behind the songs everyone knows. Disasters that sound made up but absolutely happened. Carter sets the scene and Connor makes you fall in love with history. The wildest stuff is real, and the real stuff is wilder than you think. New episodes every Wednesday. What the Fact with Connor Tomlinson and Carter Roy is a Rewind Original, powered by PAVE Studios. Listen and Follow:https://pod.link/6811124906

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

• 0:01Vanessa Richardson?

  Hi, everyone. Before today's episode, there's another show I want to tell you about. It's called What the Fact with Connor Tomlinson from Netflix's Love on the Spectrum and Carter Roy. Every week, they take three unbelievable true facts from history and tell you the full story behind them. Plus Connor's infectious energy that'll make you realize history is the most fascinating thing on earth. Follow What the Fact wherever you listen or subscribe on YouTube at What the Fact Pod.

• 0:33Vanessa Richardson?

  Hi, everyone. I've got a special bonus for you in the feed today. It's an episode of What the Fact, a new fun history show hosted by Connor Tomlinson from Netflix's Love on the Spectrum and Carter Roy from Crime House's Murder True Crime Stories. If you love incredible true facts, What the Fact is going to be your next podcast obsession. If this already sounds good to you, follow What the Fact on your favorite podcast app. Every week, they take three unbelievable true facts from history and tell you the full story behind them. Carter sets the scene and Connor brings the deep cut facts, the hilarious tangents, and his totally infectious energy that'll make you realize history really is the most fascinating thing on earth.

• 1:16Vanessa Richardson?

  The wildest stuff is real and the real stuff is way wilder than you think. So stick around. We've got an episode for you right now. And if you like what you hear, follow What the Fact wherever you listen or subscribe on YouTube at What the Fact Pod. New episodes drop every Wednesday. There's also a link to the show in this episode's description. This is Rewind.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  I could just imagine two dinosaurs looking at each other going, "You know, it just don't get no better than this." And one of those says, "Yeah." And then,

• 1:55Speaker 01

  "Oh, no." A giant meteorite strikes the earth. Goodbye dinosaurs.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  Hi and welcome to What the Fact, the show that reveals the wildest true facts ever recorded and tells you the whole story behind them.

• 2:21Speaker 02

  Hi, I'm Connor and I am here to bring the charm and humor and maybe a British accent or two to your history lesson.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  And I am Carter Roy. I will be your guide through history. What happened, how it happened, and why it happened.

• 2:35Speaker 02

  Follow wherever you get your podcasts and leave a review to help us build this community.

• 2:40Speaker 01

  So today, we have three years, three very real stories and one question. Which one was actually the worst?

• 2:49Speaker 02

  Carter, has anything terrible ever happened in your life? And then something unexpectedly good came of it?

• 2:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so. You know, actually the pandemic. I had to be alone at home all the time and I ended up doing a lot of art because I had to kill time. So like now I ended up being like a visual artist and I didn't even know I could really do that until the pandemic happened. How about you?

• 3:14Speaker 02

  Me? I actually started watching more shows to help pass the time. And honestly, it made me rethink the fantasy genre altogether. Like how some things that could have happened in the Middle Ages could happen in modern day.

• 3:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:32Speaker 02

  Hidden, you know?

• 3:34Speaker 01

  Totally. So it made you rethink everything a little bit?

• 3:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:38Speaker 01

  Very cool. Well, that is actually the theme of everything we are covering. Catastrophe makes things. So today we have three years for you. Three years from human history that you absolutely did not want to be alive for. At the very end, you and I will vote on which was actually the worst. Okay, Connor, first reaction, how bad do you think this is about to get?

• 3:59Speaker 02

  Oh, I think it's going to get pretty, pretty, pretty bad.

• 4:03Speaker 01

  It is going to get pretty bad.

• 4:07Speaker 02

  Do you know which year a volcano canceled summer, caused a global famine, and also gave us Frankenstein and the bicycle? That year was 1816, also known as the Year Without a Summer.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  It's amazing. It's fascinating. Like how something terrible can lead to something good in the end. Yeah, and the year without a summer, that just seems like seasons are such a part of life we expect. It's crazy to think of just like a season not happening. Can you imagine life without a summer?

• 4:39Speaker 02

  I can imagine how terrible it would be, how miserable everyone would be.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  Oh, my God, people would be not happy. Okay, so the year is 1816. Europe should be having the best year it's had in a generation. Napoleon had just been defeated at Waterloo, ending over 20 years of war.

• 4:55Speaker 02

  Finally.

• 4:56Speaker 01

  Yes. Yes. All anyone wants to do is have a normal summer.

• 5:00Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  But what happens?

• 5:03Speaker 02

  1816, no summer.

• 5:06Speaker 01

  No summer. In New England, it snows in June?

• 5:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:11Speaker 02

  Crazy.

• 5:12Speaker 01

  Crazy enough to bury new crops and kill birds right where they sit.

• 5:16Speaker 02

  That's so sad.

• 5:18Speaker 01

  So sad. Can you imagine looking out and just seeing dead present birds? In July, the hard frost turns the corn black. The people who lived through it called 1816 1800 and froze to death.

• 5:29Speaker 02

  Yes, they had some kind of sense of humor back then and trying to make the best out of a bad thing.

• 5:34Speaker 01

  In Europe, grain rotted from Switzerland to Ireland. Bread prices doubled, doubled again. There were food riots across France, Belgium, Switzerland. People were eating bread cut with sawdust.

• 5:48Speaker 02

  Oh, that doesn't sound appetizing. I've got three things to say about that. Hard to bite, difficult to chew, and impossible to swallow.

• 5:57Speaker 01

  You won't see me eating bread with sawdust, though. Okay, in Switzerland, families were boiling weeds and eating the family cat.

• 6:07Speaker 02

  Oh, that's disgusting. I understand you get resourceful in a famine, but no way would I ever eat my pet, even if I was super hungry.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, that shows you just how bad it was. And this was not just a European problem. It was a planet problem. In China, the cold wrecked the rice harvest. The Yangtze Valley flooded in Yunnan Province. Famine lasted three full years. In India, the monsoon failed entirely. So many historians believe a new strain of cholera emerged from that broken weather in the Bay of Bengal, the first truly global pandemic. Tens of millions of people dead over the following century.

• 6:46Speaker 02

  I thought this Pepsi was bad.

• 6:49Speaker 01

  Every bit of it traces back to one mountain. Okay, before I tell you which one, what's your guess?

• 6:55Speaker 02

  Krakatoa, maybe?

• 6:57Speaker 01

  That's what I would have guessed. That's the only one I know.

• 6:59Speaker 02

  But no, it was Tambora. It erupted in Indonesia. Its ash and smoke carried miles across the world, miles. It was the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history. True story. I was actually in Sicily. I saw Mount Etna from a distance. And I happened to learn from my brother that Mount Etna was used in filming Star Wars Episode III, Revenge of the Sith, that scene where Anakin and Obi-Wan were fighting on Mustafar. Right where they were grappling, there was a huge blast of lava. That was Mount Etna erupting.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  Amazing. Did they have the real Mount Etna in the background and then they, yeah, made it look like it's erupting? Well, this is about as bad as it gets. It was April 10th, 1815. And as you said, Tambora in the island of Zimbabwe, what is now Indonesia, detonates the largest volcanic eruption in recorded human history, and directly killed roughly 10,000 people and eventually 80,000 to 90,000 more. The blast was heard 1,600 miles away, which I don't, I can't even really comprehend that. How far away do you think the loudest you could hear?

• 8:08Speaker 02

  Um, probably about, well, if the explosion was loud enough, maybe 10,000 miles or more. Or I mean, I thought Pompeii's destruction by Mount Vesuvius was bad.

• 8:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is bad. Okay, so people 1,600 miles away thought it was cannon fire, like a battle just over the horizon. And eruptions are measured on the VEI scale, the Volcanic Explosivity Index.

• 8:34Speaker 01

  Talk about an on the nose name. Every step is roughly 10 times bigger than last. So, whoa.

• 8:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, crazy.

• 8:40Speaker 01

  Crazy. Okay. So, Mount St. Helens in 1980, that's a V E I five. Krakatoa, 1883, a V E I six. Tambora was a V E I seven. So, that'd be 100 times uh, bigger than Mount St. Helens. And like, I was alive when Mount St. Helens erupted. I was in Montana and like, it, it was like, you know, we had ash, changed life.

• 9:03Speaker 02

  You know, this is, you're gonna find this fascinating, Carter, but did you know volcanic ash is actually good for plant growth? I mean, if it mixes with soil, some pretty unique plants grow from it. I know, because I was, I was actually in Hawaii once. I saw exotic plants.

• 9:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:21Speaker 02

  Stuff you would never see back here in the mainland.

• 9:24Speaker 01

  And right, all that volcanic ash makes it so fertile. And yeah, Mount St. Helens, when it, as a kid, I couldn't believe it. It's one of those things you're like, I didn't know this actually happened, volcanoes exploding. And I'm imagining it like, the, the tambora being that loud, it'd almost be like Helm's Deep, you know, when the, the urukai are coming and there's that like

• 9:43Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, the fire, they were putting fire pots into a drain at the base of the wall.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  Yes. And then it went, and you're like, what? Like, nobody'd ever seen anything like this before.

• 9:52Speaker 02

  And that berserker took his own life just to blow the wall.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  Remember, they're like, hit him, hit him, except for the volcano.

• 9:58Speaker 02

  Arrow after arrow Legolas shot, and not one could bring down that uruk.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  Nope. Well, that's basically what Krakatoa was. And then Tambora was 10 times that, 100 times Mount St. Helens. Possibly the loudest sound recorded in human history. It was heard nearly 3,000 miles away. Sailors had eardrums ruptured 40 miles away. Some people link the red skies it left behind to the sky in Edvard Munch's The Scream.

• 10:28Speaker 01

  And now we know it might be because of volcanic skies. There was so much ash thrown in the atmosphere, it formed a thin gray veil around the entire earth, bouncing sunlight back into space before it could reach the ground. And here is the, the most disturbing number in the segment, all of it. The famine on three continents, the birds dying in June snow, the family counts, happened because the earth got colder by just one degree Fahrenheit.

• 10:53Speaker 02

  One degree? That was all it took?

• 10:55Speaker 01

  Right. Which doesn't seem like much at all. One degree in the wrong year canceled summer across an entire hemisphere.

• 11:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. The technical term for this is a volcanic winter. It looks like snow falling from the sky when really it's soot and ash.

• 11:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:11Speaker 02

  Scientists believe that one time when a volcanic winter happened, all the dinosaurs were wiped out after a giant meteorite struck the earth. This was known as the K T event.

• 11:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:24Speaker 02

  A meteorite the size of Mount Everest struck the earth, changing the weather. No animals larger than a cat could have survived. But in the sea, they say life could find a way.

• 11:39Speaker 01

  Is that where like sharks are still sort of prehistoric, because they survive?

• 11:42Speaker 02

  There are many living fossils today. Fun fact for you, sharks, skates, rays, sea laccams, turtles, and crocodiles.

• 11:52Speaker 01

  Are all like vestiges from that.

• 11:54Speaker 02

  Living fossils.

• 11:56Speaker 01

  Amazing.

• 11:57Speaker 02

  I could just imagine two dinosaurs looking at each other going, you know, it just don't get no better than this. And one of those says, yeah.

• 12:07Speaker 01

  And then

• 12:10Speaker 01

  oh no.

• 12:12Speaker 02

  A giant meteorite strikes the earth, goodbye dinosaurs.

• 12:16Speaker 01

  Okay. Now, the part you did not see coming, because 1816 is not only doomed, that freezing ruined summer produced some of the most iconic creative work in history. And you have lived your entire life inside the things it made. Okay. Picture a rented mansion on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Perpetual rain, lightning over the lake, counting till the thunder, candles at noon. A group of young writers trapped inside decides to make a game of it.

• 12:45Speaker 02

  How about a little competition?

• 12:47Speaker 01

  The poet Lord Byron challenges everyone to write a ghost story. One of his guests is 18 years old, Mary Godwin, soon to be Mary Shelley.

• 12:59Speaker 02

  Author of one of the most famous horror novels ever written.

• 13:03Speaker 01

  I'm glad you bring that up, because a few nights in, between two or three in the morning, she has a waking nightmare, a pale student kneeling over something he has built, watching it stir. She wrote later that she believed what terrified her would terrify others. The next morning, she started writing.

• 13:20Speaker 02

  Oh, that's, that sounds a lot like a familiar book.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  I wonder which one it would be? Let's see, A Doctor Who Creates a Monster Who Rises? Maybe with lightning helping animate it? Could it be?

• 13:34Speaker 02

  Frankenstein.

• 13:35Speaker 01

  Frankenstein, written at 18, very impressive. What many consider the first true science fiction novel.

• 13:42Speaker 02

  And contrary to popular belief, Carter, Frankenstein isn't the monster itself. Frankenstein's the name of the guy who creates the creature. Although, oh, I believe the creature, as it's more known as, or the wretch, Viktor Frankenstein was trying to discover the secret of life. Prove to his colleagues that, that death could be undone, reversed. But when his creature was created, he was terrified by its monstrous appearance.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 14:13Speaker 02

  All that poor creature wanted to do was exist. He did nothing wrong and everyone wanted him dead.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  Totally, right? You think of all the monsters that are like, ah, evil, bad. And yet Frankenstein, well, the wretch, right, wanted to be good, wanted to fit in, wanted to be loved.

• 14:30Speaker 02

  He wanted to belong, to not be alone.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, which we can all relate to, obviously. Well, and in this case, the instigating force was this storm, this volcanic winter they're all inside. And in fact, not only was Frankenstein invented, but in that same house that summer, Byron's physicians catches out the vampire. Dracula, the first suave aristocratic vampire in English fiction, the direct ancestor of Dracula. So, every, every brooding vampire you've ever encountered includes you, Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in interviews for Vampire.

• 15:03Speaker 02

  And Antonio Banderas, don't forget him.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  How could I? And these are three of the sexiest vampires in the history of the world. And it all goes back to that rainy week in Switzerland in 1816.

• 15:12Speaker 02

  Interesting thing, both Frankenstein and, well, Dracula as the vampire went on to inspire would both become adopted by Universal Studios, along with the Wolfman, the Mummy, the Invisible Man, and, and the creature from the Black Lagoon.

• 15:31Speaker 01

  So, I guess in some ways, the volcanic winter was the birth of Universal Studios. Traces all the way back to there, everything we have now. What's your ranking of vampire movies?

• 15:40Speaker 02

  Okay, let's see, Dracula Untold with Luke Evans, I'd put that at around a five. Bram Stoker's Dracula, 10. Who could go wrong with Gary Oldman?

• 15:51Speaker 01

  Oh, you cannot.

• 15:53Speaker 02

  If my sister's watching, sorry, Anna, but on the subject of Twilight, don't get me wrong, I thought it was good, but overall, I give it a, a four and a half.

• 16:03Speaker 01

  Okay, not quite a five, yeah. And of course, it's cross-genre, because it's got vampires and

• 16:09Speaker 02

  Werewolves.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:11Speaker 02

  I'm more of a werewolf guy anyway.

• 16:13Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Well, that's a whole other, well, talk about great werewolf movies. Here's looking at you, Jack. So, that summer Byron also wrote a poem called Darkness, imagining the sun going out and the human race dying in cold and black. He had no idea that he was describing something that had literally already happened.

• 16:30Speaker 02

  Really?

• 16:31Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. Okay, a last thing, in Germany, the cold killed the oat crop. So, horses starved and people were slaughtering animals, they could not feed. And a German inventor named Karl von Andreas asks, well, what if there was another way to get around? A, um, yeah, two-wheeled machine, you straddle and push with your feet? The great-grandfather of the bicycle invented because a volcano killed the horses.

• 16:57Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Poor horses.

• 16:59Speaker 01

  Oh, that part's sad. So, in memory of the horses of 1816, Frankenstein, the modern vampire, the bicycle, all out of one of the worst summers in history, and remember, it's silver lining, out of the worst things that ever happened, some of the best things were left behind. Year two starts with a catapult and a corpse.

• 17:19Speaker 02

  Oh, yes.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  We'll be right back. I want to tell you about another true crime show I think you'll enjoy. It's called American Nightmares. The new season, Canal Murders, takes you to Phoenix, Arizona, where a series of women were found murdered in and around the city's canals. What initially appeared to be separate crimes soon raised a terrifying question. Were these murders connected? And was a killer using the canals to hide his crimes? American Nightmares retraces the investigations, the victim's stories, and the clues that could connect these cases. Follow American Nightmares now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify,

• 18:04Speaker 01

  or wherever you listen to podcasts.

• 18:09Speaker 02

  Do you know which year up to 60% of Europe died from a plague that started with a catapult, spread through flea bites, and the best doctor in the room said, "Have you got a chicken?" That year was 1348, also known as the Year of the Black Death or bubonic plague.

• 18:28Speaker 01

  That sounds as bad as it gets. So to understand 1348, you have to understand Europe was already on its knees. The climate had been cooling for decades. A great famine just one generation earlier left a continent of survivors who were smaller, weaker, and hungrier than their parents. So when the ships came in, carrying one of the worst diseases in human history, Europe was not a healthy body fighting off a cold. It was dry kindling, waiting for a spark.

• 18:56Speaker 02

  Oof. That had to be some real tough breaks.

• 19:00Speaker 01

  Yes, it was tough times then. Okay, Connor, do you know already about the Black Death?

• 19:07Speaker 02

  Oh, I know plenty. Some believe it all happened in China when a Mongolian catapult started firing corpses over city walls, and the corpses were infected terribly, and rats scurried all over the corpses, hungry rats, and they began contracting fleas. Those rats later, they stowed away in the cargo holds of ships bound for Europe.

• 19:34Speaker 01

  Wow, that's exactly right. And here's one of the darkest parts of how it started. The Black Death may have arrived, as you said, an act of war. A city called Kaffa on the Black Sea in what is now Crimea, 1346, a booming trade colony where the Silk Road met the sea, under siege by a Mongol army.

• 19:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, the plague breaks out. Soldiers dying by the thousands. The attackers load their own infected dead onto catapults and fling the corpses over the city walls.

• 20:07Speaker 02

  What barbarism!

• 20:09Speaker 01

  Completely. In fact, some say it is one of the first recorded uses of biological warfare, although to be fair, that story's debated. But still, there's a reason that it stays with us, corpses flying over walls. And maybe taller walls to make sure that you can't fling corpses in?

• 20:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. In fact, by the First World War, Germany was using anthrax as a weapon of biological warfare.

• 20:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, just kept evolving over time. Now, what would you think if you were in the city, getting bombarded? Can you imagine what it'd be like to look up and see corpses flying over the walls, landing in the streets?

• 20:48Speaker 02

  Oh, that would be strange and ultimately sickening, both literally and figuratively.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  That's right, very literally in this case. So the defenders fled by sea to Italy. October 1347, their ships tie up in Messina, Sicily. The men aboard are already dead or dying. Black swellings in the neck and groin, fever, coughing blood. Locals tried to turn the ships away, but it was far too late. The rats were already ashore. From Sicily, it jumped to the mainland, gutted Florence, reached Marseille in dead of winter, climbed the rivers into France through Avignon, where the Pope himself was.

• 21:32Speaker 02

  Oh my gosh.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's getting close to like the heart of Europe.

• 21:36Speaker 02

  And an interesting fact, the Pope protected himself by sitting between two fires of burning rosemary. Kind of ironic when you think about it. A holy man sitting between two fires.

• 21:49Speaker 01

  And then it went on toward Paris. 800 dead a day by the year's end, then it crosses the Channel. It was a single ship. The plague was loose in Britain. And what it did to the body, the swellings were called buboes, which is where bubonic plague comes from.

• 22:05Speaker 02

  Definitely.

• 22:06Speaker 01

  It's lumps in the armpit, neck, groin, swelling to the size of an egg, sometimes an apple, hard and black and agonizing.

• 22:17Speaker 02

  Oy.

• 22:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, can you imagine like dark splotches over the skin, fever, vomiting, smell, people were dead within three days. Yeah, so basically people went to bed well and didn't see the end of the week.

• 22:31Speaker 02

  I understand. I had flu B once, and man, was it agonizing.

• 22:35Speaker 01

  So to get a sense of the scale, 30 to 60% of everyone in Europe dead in under five years. Florence may have lost 60% of its population in a single year. England dropped from five or six million to under 3 million within a generation.

• 22:52Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, whole villages just vanished. And this wasn't only Europe's catastrophe. Same plague tore through the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia. Egypt and Syria may have lost a third or more of their people too. We tell it as a European story, but it was one of the first truly global pandemics.

• 23:12Speaker 02

  Modern science would have been considered witchcraft.

• 23:16Speaker 01

  If they did what they're doing now, they would be like, "This is totally crazy." But what they were doing was pretty crazy. And nobody at the time knows what's causing it. We know now, it was a bacterium called Yersinia pestis, and it rides in the guts of fleas.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  Today, a course of antibiotics clears it up. In 1348, the idea of germs was five centuries away, so people tried everything. Bleeding the patient, packing the buboes with poultices, mercury potions that kill faster than the plague does, vinegar rubs, rosemary burning in the streets or next to the Pope. And then there was the chicken, the belief that chickens breathe through their backsides, so they'd pluck the feathers off live.

• 24:05Speaker 02

  That's ridiculous.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  Totally ridiculous. But they thought, I don't know why they thought that only chickens breathe through their butts, but if they plucked the feathers off of a live chicken's rear end, strap it directly onto the patient's buboes, and let the bird draw the sickness out, then when the chicken gets sick, just try again.

• 24:24Speaker 02

  Interesting thing, though, the ancient Egyptians believed mercury was meant to preserve the spirit, that after someone died, well, now we know better, that stuff will kill you after it makes you go crazy.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  Right? If you get mercury poisoning, don't you go a little nuts?

• 24:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, before you finally die.

• 24:45Speaker 01

  So they were trying that, obviously didn't work. And then finally, somebody does the one thing that actually works. Officials in Italy start holding arriving ships in the harbor before anyone comes ashore. First, they do 30 days, then 40. The Italian for 40 days is quarantana giorni?

• 25:05Speaker 02

  Si, brava!

• 25:07Speaker 01

  Grazie. That is the word we still reach for every time the world faces a new disease, quarantine, a word the Black Death left behind.

• 25:16Speaker 02

  Smart.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, right? They finally realized like, "Oh, we can't stop it. Let's just make sure it doesn't come ashore." Now, there are two things almost everyone gets wrong about 1348. First, that creepy, beaky plague doctor costume with the long black coat, the bird mask, that was not 1348. A French physician named Charles Delorme designed it around 1619, more than 250 years later. The beak was stuffed with herbs because doctors believed disease spread through bad smells. The people of 1348 faced this with just vinegar and prayer.

• 25:51Speaker 02

  You mean like this?

• 25:52Speaker 01

  I mean exactly like that. Although that one might be better designed than they had then. You've got ergonomic straps and everything. You have eye holes.

• 26:00Speaker 02

  The lenses here on the eye holes were meant to prevent the germs from entering through the eyes, while the beak was used to store herbs, garlic, anything that was capable of killing germs, specifically bacteria.

• 26:18Speaker 01

  Amazing. But I see, but that's 250 years later, not from the Black Death, even though it looks like it would be perfect if you were in a movie called The Black Death, you'd think you'd be wearing that. And the second thing is ring around the Rosie. It is not about the plague. Folklorists have basically debunked the whole connection. The rhyme does not even appear in writing until the 19th century. So I guess sometimes a nursery rhyme is just a nursery rhyme.

• 26:42Speaker 02

  And a good thing too, I mean, nursery rhymes that come from dark things make people a little uneasy. You want a creepy nursery rhyme? Watch A Nightmare on Elm Street. Whenever Freddy Krueger's nearby, there are these little jump roping kids. It's that thing, this terrifying rhyme. Interesting thing about A Nightmare on Elm Street, it was the first film to ever star famous actor Johnny Depp.

• 27:11Speaker 01

  That's right. Well, I won't spoil it, but don't go to bed. And one last thing about 1348, the catastrophe that killed half of Europe also slowly remade it. When half the workers die, the survivors are suddenly worth twice as much. For the first time in living memory, a peasant could look a lord in the eye and say, "Pay me or I walk." Wages rose, serfdom started to crack. Historians draw a line from those empty villages straight toward the modern world, to mobility, to higher pay, even to the Renaissance. So again, catastrophe makes things happen.

• 27:47Speaker 02

  Oh, yes, the Renaissance, one of my favorite periods in history, a time of art, music, and poetry. All of that emerged from the tragedy that was the Black Death. And some of the greatest Renaissance masters lived during that era. Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael, and Michelangelo, just to name a few.

• 28:13Speaker 01

  And who knows, might not have come to pass if not for the Black Death before it. But if you thought those two years were bad, little year number three.

• 28:23Speaker 03

  In 2002, Ryan Wedding was an Olympic snowboarder at the top of his game.

• 28:29Speaker 04

  Ryan's style is really gunning gold.

• 28:32Speaker 03

  And in less than a minute, it slipped away. But he continued to chase the high.

• 28:37Speaker 05

  Ryan James Wedding. He controls one of the most violent drug trafficking organizations in this world.

• 28:47Speaker 03

  I'm Michelle Shepherd, and from CBC Podcasts and The Toronto Star, The Most Wanted Olympian, available now.

• 28:55Speaker 01

  Two down and one to go. I am describing this one without naming it. The other two were each one catastrophe. This one was two at the same time. The sun went wrong first. It was dim, bluish, no warmth, no shadow, and it stayed like that. Then, just as people might have started to recover from that, something we've already covered tonight arrived on top of it. Connor, any guesses what it might have been?

• 29:20Speaker 02

  I gotta say, Carter, you've got this history buff stumped.

• 29:25Speaker 01

  All right, well, we're about to de-stump you because not only did the sun go out, the crops failed, the plague arrived, and the Roman Empire never recovered. And the only way we ever figured out why was a grad student, a glacier, and a laser. And the year is 536 C E.

• 29:46Speaker 02

  Lasers in that time?

• 29:49Speaker 01

  Well, the lasers come later, and before everything goes wrong in 536 C E, things are actually looking pretty good. The Western Roman Empire has fallen, but in the east, from Constantinople, modern-day Istanbul was Constantinople. Nobody's business, but anyway, an emperor named Justinian rules what is left. He wants the whole Roman world back. Okay, Connor, what's your take on Justinian?

• 30:14Speaker 02

  He was truly one of the earliest modern men. Roman innovations, indoor heating, plumbing, the aqueduct, running water. Have you ever seen a Roman urinal? They're like these horse trough things full of running water, all triumphs of this time.

• 30:30Speaker 01

  Incredible. He accomplished so much and really advanced his civilization in so many ways. So you'd think, oh, he's gonna do it. This is gonna make the Roman Empire live for another thousand years.

• 30:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:42Speaker 01

  But it does not work out like that.

• 30:43Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 30:44Speaker 01

  And here's what gets overlooked. He didn't do it alone. In that palace was an empress named Theodora, one of the most remarkable women in all of ancient history. When riots nearly toppled Justinian and his advisors told him to flee, Theodora refused. She told him a throne was worth dying on. So he stayed, crushed it, and that is the partnership running Constantinople when 536 arrives.

• 31:12Speaker 02

  In fact, both Theodora and Justinian are actually recognized as saints in the Eastern Orthodox Church. One of the rare husband-and-wife pairs that can be canonized together. Truly remarkable.

• 31:26Speaker 01

  Totally remarkable. Like, they accomplished so much. So this is the world in 536. Ambition, power, a city of golden domes, and then the sun goes out. Not at night, during the day. Early in 536, a strange dry fog rolled in across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, and just stayed. It settled like the world had been sealed under frosted glass. The sun would rise, but it gave a weak, bluish light with no warmth and no shadow. Cassadorius tried to write it down and could barely find the words. He said, "A winter with no storms, a spring with no mildness, a summer with no heat."

• 32:07Speaker 02

  If the sun stopped working, I'd probably be panicking. I would probably try prayers. I'd try offerings.

• 32:15Speaker 01

  I'd probably stay indoors for a while and like try to write it out, watch a lot of TV.

• 32:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  It'd be like night all the time. No need for sunblock. Eighteen months, the coldest stretch in over 2,000 years. In summer 536, it snowed in China, harvests ruined across the northern hemisphere. In Ireland, the chronicles record it in four words: "A failure of bread."

• 32:40Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 32:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. And 536 is not the disaster. It is only the beginning. Around 540, the cold deepens. The recovery that should have started does not. And then into a world already starving and terrified. In 541, the plague arrives. So we covered the sky going dark. We covered a plague. Now it is both at once. It comes ashore at Polysium, a Roman port in Egypt, and it just spreads like wildfire. We call it the Plague of Justinian, and this is the kicker. It is the first known appearance of the exact same disease that 800 years later comes back as the Black Death.

• 33:22Speaker 02

  Oh, so this is like Black Death 1.0, and the Black Death itself is like the sequel.

• 33:29Speaker 01

  And it guts the Eastern Roman Empire. Between a third and a half of the population dead, 25 to 50 million people.

• 33:37Speaker 02

  It's like every era, there's like a huge plague. We recently recovered from COVID-19.

• 33:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you realize like millions died in COVID-19, but like, oh, it could have been so much worse, like 25 to 50 million people dead. And there was so many fewer people in the world population back then. Like, half the people died. It's crazy.

• 33:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, could have been a lot worse.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. And at the peak of the plague, in Constantinople, Procopius, who was there, claims that 10,000 were dying every single day. They ran out of graves. They started stacking the dead in the towers of the city walls.

• 34:16Speaker 02

  Wow, that sounds like the worst possible year to live in.

• 34:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think if you woke up and found that like half the people were dying and stacked up around you, and there was no sun out. I mean, you'd think the world was ending. And Justinian himself catches the plague, survives barely, but his dream does not. The armies hollow out, the reconquest of Rome collapses. Historians draw a line from these years to the final end of the ancient world itself. Everything Justinian built, the plague named after him, tore down. And the plague closes one chapter, the ancient world. Its descendant closes another, the medieval era.

• 34:57Speaker 02

  So basically, Justinian's plague led to the medieval era.

• 35:02Speaker 01

  And then the Black Death 2.

• 35:04Speaker 02

  Led to the Renaissance.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  Bingo. Yeah.

• 35:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  So it's sort of like, yeah, the world, whatever stasis the world is in, the Black Death wobbles it so much that a whole new world is born after it.

• 35:14Speaker 02

  And think about it, when COVID-19 came, what emerged from the ashes? AI has. If you've ever seen the movie Terminator, you would know I don't trust AI, and for good reason.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 35:28Speaker 02

  Judgment Day.

• 35:29Speaker 01

  Judgment Day, bad. And yeah, we do. We live in a much different world already. Who knows like 100 years from now what they'll look back and say about this world now? So for almost 1,500 years, nobody could prove what caused the sun going out. History's greatest cold case, comets, the wrath of God. The mystery just sat there until 2018. A team led by Harvard historian Michael McCormick pulled 72 meters of ice out of a glacier in the Swiss Alps. And packed into that ice, layer by frozen layer, is more than 2,000 years of sky. Every storm, every dust cloud, every speck of pollution, frozen in order like pages in a book.

• 36:14Speaker 01

  They read it with a laser fine enough to shave off a single week of ancient weather at a time. And in the layer from spring 536, a graduate student found two microscopic particles of volcanic glass. Two specks, the width of a human hair traced to a colossal eruption, most likely in Iceland at the very start of 536. So that was the fog. That was the sun going dark over the entire known world. 1,500 years, and the answer was two specks of dust waiting in the ice for someone to build a laser powerful enough to find them. Oh, and remember that Lord Byron poem Darkness, written during that worst summer in centuries?

• 36:58Speaker 01

  Imagining the sun going out and the human race dying in cold and black?

• 37:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, he had no idea. He was channeling something that had already happened. The worst year in history echoing through a poet's nightmare 1,200 years later.

• 37:11Speaker 02

  It kind of reminds me of like how in the history of House Targaryen, Daenerys the Dreamer, a daughter of Aeryn Targaryen, foresaw the doom of Valyria in a dream, something that hadn't even happened yet at the time.

• 37:26Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 37:26Speaker 02

  Until 12 years after her dream.

• 37:29Speaker 01

  And in the Odyssey, Cersei tells Odysseus what's lying ahead, and he tries to change what his men do, but sometimes even if you have the premonition, it doesn't matter.

• 37:39Speaker 02

  But that is another story for another time.

• 37:44Speaker 01

  Okay, we've got three terrible years. 1816, 1348, 536. It is time to settle it. Which one is the worst? But before I tell you where the historians land, where do you land? Which of those three was actually the worst to be alive and why?

• 38:01Speaker 02

  Probably 536 because not only were people dying around you, there was no light, no warmth, no hope.

• 38:12Speaker 01

  I mean, it's hard to argue since, right, it's like the double whammy. It's like the plague and the sun. The only thing that might make me think about 1816 is just that it's later in human history, so there's so many more people. They feel like they're living in the modern world, so when the sun goes out, it's like right now, we feel like, oh, we've got all these technological innovations so we could survive a catastrophe. But then if the sun did show up, it would really just like decimate your trust in society. Historians land exactly where you did, the year 536. Any honorable mentions for worst years? Horrible years that should have been on the list?

• 38:53Speaker 02

  There was 2019 to 2020, the year COVID-19 hit. September 11, 2001, 79 A.D. Pompeii, Mount Vesuvius erupts and destroys an entire city.

• 39:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay, what about you at home? Tell us on YouTube, drop your vote in the comments, which year was the worst? Or if we've missed one, tell us that. Thank you for joining us on What the Fact?

• 39:24Speaker 02

  And follow wherever you get your podcasts and leave a review so we can keep building this community.

• 39:31Speaker 01

  Until then, the wildest stuff is real.

• 39:34Speaker 02

  And the real stuff is wilder than you think. That's a fact.

• 39:40Vanessa Richardson?

  That was an episode of What the Fact with Connor Tomlinson and Carter Roy. If you liked what you heard, there's more to discover on the What the Fact feed. Follow What the Fact on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or subscribe on YouTube at What the Fact Pod. If you're looking for your next podcast, check out What the Fact with Connor Tomlinson from Netflix's Love on the Spectrum and Carter Roy. Every week, they take three unbelievable true facts from history and tell you the full story behind them. Follow What the Fact wherever you listen or subscribe on YouTube at What the Fact Pod.