Professional Weirdo Podcast

Where I research strange stories and tell them to you. Because, let’s face it, I’m gonna research this anyway and blurt it to someone, might as well be a willing audience. Some of these stories might get dark, morbid, murdery…. so listener discretion is advised.

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Professional Weirdo Podcast

Episode 1 - What Washes Up

March 08, 2025 • Anonymous Narrator • Season 1 • Episode 1

Our oceans aren’t shy about coughing up all kinds of strange items. In this episode I kick-off the podcast by telling you a few stories about what's washing up.

Music recommendation for this episode:

Professional Weirdo by The Haxans
Rock Lobster by the B-52's

To find these and more recommended songs for this podcast, check out the Spotify Professional Weird playlist

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5jIkaamOZlCwtd2peUk9lF?si=0238d524a374492d

Sources for this episode:

Sound mixing performed by Brother Jay from The Rule of Scary podcast - check that out if you’re a horror movie fan! And hey! Thank you for listening to my stories. Keep it weird out there.

To find song recommendations for this podcast, check out the Spotify Professional Weird playlist

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5jIkaamOZlCwtd2peUk9lF?si=0238d524a374492d

Email me at professionalweirdopodcast@gmail.com

Hello! Hi person - or people? This is the first episode, so who knows. Quick background - when I was a kid my babysitter Shirley noticed I liked to read spooky stories and gave me a book she bought at a garage sale. I think it may have been a Time Life series book - I sadly don’t have it anymore because I loaned it to my friend Kim in high school and she moved away. Kim - if you happen across this, I need my book back. Anyway - this book! This book was my introduction to all the heavy hitters of weirdness - spontaneous human combustion, the Winchester mansion, Lizzie Borden, ghost ships, the Donner party…. It was a feast for my hungry little strange brain. The first step on a road that I paved over the years with Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, episodes of Unsolved Mysteries, Ann Rule books, the X-files, and bizarre wikipedia pages. And that brings us here. I have such stories to tell you, so let’s get started.

This is Episode 1 - What Washes Up

Welcome weirdos, to the Professional Weirdo podcast, where I research strange stories and tell them to you. Because, let’s face it, I’m gonna research this anyway and blurt it to someone, might as well be a willing audience. Some of these stories might get dark, morbid, murdery…. so listener discretion is advised.

Today I’m going to tell you a series of stories. I think with each episode of this podcast, I’ll rate stores on a scale of 1-5. There’s no grading matrix for this, it’s not objective - I’ll pick the rating the way I pick the speed limit on the interstate, or the amount of mashed potatoes I put on my plate, or the number of t-shirts I own - it will be with wild abandon and skewed by my mood at the time. And for these stories, the rating scale will be represented by globsters. This is the nickname for a “glob” of large sea animal which could be something totally known to us like whales and sharks, but it’s so decomposed that all that’s left is an eery shape of a thing that’s more similar to those drawn creatures at the far edges of sailors maps. So, for this episode, it’s 1-5 globsters.

Our oceans aren’t shy about coughing up all kinds of strange items - relics of past wars, dinosaurs, hair balls, ice balls, giant trees…

For these first few items on this list, it seems what’s washing up is… the 80’s…

Here we go - What hates Mondays, loves lasagna, and has been washing up on a beach in Brittany, France for 35 years? Garfield. Garfield phones to be specific. This is a collector item landline phone shaped like Garfield the cat. These phones are still bought and sold online today, but for residents and anti-litter groups in the area of Brittany France, these phones are not a welcome sight. The first line of action would typically be to find the source of the phones and remove the problem there, but that was a mystery in the beginning. Then a local farmer offered a clue. He had seen the first phone wash up after a bad storm in the early 80’s, leading to the assumption that a shipping container of phones had been knocked off board during the storm. The farmer even knew where the container was - backed into a sea cave that was only accessible at low tide. Unfortunately it’s in such a tough spot that it can’t be removed, so Garfield will to continue to menace the French coast. I give this story 3 out of 5 globsters.

Now we’re going to Old Portsmouth England. It’s January 2012. Imagine you are working for the authorities when a call comes in about a body being washed ashore with the tide. You arrive, braced for a horrific sight, and there it is - a wide torso, skinny arms with long fingers… where are the legs? And a tiny neck holding up an impossibly large, horrifically shaped head. In the middle of that terrible scene, something starts to feel familiar. Because the body looks an awful lot like…. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. A few months before this night, In September 2011, burglars had broken into the home of Margaret Wells and among the items stolen was a life-size replica of E.T. based on the Steven Spielberg’s movie. Now here’s the best part. When Margaret heard her E. T. had been found and she would get it back, she said “I knew E.T. would come home.” Nice quote, Margaret. Because of that line, I give this 4 out of 5 globsters.

Next I’m going to tell you about an event that rates as a top environmental disaster. I bet when you’re thinking about environmental disasters you aren’t thinking about…. Toys. But that’s what this is - the top toy-related environmental disaster of all time. And it’s called “The Great Lego Spill.” For nearly 30 years beach-combers in Cornwall, England have been finding Legos. And not just any Legos, but ironically these are ocean-themed Legos. Nearly five million pieces went into the ocean in 1997 when a 28-foot wave knocked into the cargo ship carrying them. Some pieces float more easily - like little flippers - and were washing up across beaches right away. But other pieces were heavier and sank, and have been taking longer to show up. And finding an octopus or a dragon is a big deal, as there were less of those in the cargo to begin with. This incident has created collectors, social media pages under “Lego Lost at Sea”, and a book called “Adrift: The Curious Tale of Lego Lost at Sea” by Tracey Williams. I want to give this a high rating - imagine combing the beach and finding an octopus Lego… but that’s a lot of little plastic in the ocean and that’s a bummer. Gonna go with 2 out of 5 globsters.

There are loads of “message in a bottle” stories - some leading to rescues, some with answers about what had happened to lost ships, some ending up in match-making. Really, I could, and maybe will?, jump down this rabbit hole and do a future episode on messages in a bottle all by itself. But one story in particular is worth mentioning here because of WHERE the bottle landed. When Jeremiah Burke’s mother gave him the bottle, it contained holy water. Jeremiah was 19 of Glanmire, Cork in Ireland. In 1912 Jeremiah boarded a ship with his cousin Nora to join Jeremiah’s sisters in Boston. If you are a history buff, you might already know where this is going. The ship they boarded was the Titanic and Jeremiah and his cousin did not survive. A year after the Titanic sank the bottle washed up, but here’s the wild part. It washed ashore only a few miles from Jeremiah’s family home with his message inside. It read “From Titanic, goodbye all, Burke of Glanmire, Cork.” That’s so spooky it’s getting 5/5 globsters.

Okay, just jumping into this next one. It’s feet. It’s human feet. Yes, people feet. This has been reported for a while, It’s out there on the internet, it’s been in podcasts, in news stories, but I can’t do an episode called what washes up and not give this a mention. It’s been happening in the Pacific Northwest and often the feet are found in sneakers. The theory is the buoyancy of this shoe type helps the feet float to shore. The instances most talked about started in 2007, but a leg washed ashore in 1887 in Vancouver, leading them to name that place “Leg-in-boot Square.” Just a quick aside - that’s a significant thing to have happened, but were there no other names for the Square? Anyway, foul play has been ruled out in many of the more recent cases. In some, both the right and left feet have eventually washed up. Some have been identified through DNA and trace back to a variety of situations - a missing fisherman, a woman who had jumped from a bridge but couldn’t be found at the time. Many of the cases were attributed to death through misadventure or suicide. The media attention has also led to a few hoaxes - just.. it’s gross. Someone stuffed raw meat into a sneaker. Why, out of all this entire story, does the idea of someone stuffing raw meat into a sneaker gross me out the most. 3/5 globsters - points for the overall mystery, deduction for the prank. But I guess while we’re talking body parts…

27 pairs of human hands - or 54 hands if we’re doing the math, were found in 2018 in a bag along the Amur River in Siberia, close to Russia’s southeastern border. The hands were… severed. After intense investigation, the authorities said they didn’t know who had disposed of them or who the hands belonged to. I’m baffled - it’s 2018 and we have literally 54 sets of fingerprints. Not to mention the absolute oddity of these being intentionally severed, in sets, and so many! So many hands! Now this next part comes from the Daily Mail, so believe what you will, but their follow-up story reports that Russia has a practice of removing the hands from unidentified bodies when they are found, with the hopes of identifying the remains through fingerprints at a later time. Just the previous year they had severed the hands of 410 unidentified bodies. Call me crazy, but maybe just take the fingerprints at the time the person is found? Seems like storing a fingerprint file would be so much easier than removing both hands and storing those, but who am I to tell Russia what to do? But despite the coincidence of “we have a bunch of severed hands over here” and “yeah, we regularly sever hands over here!” Russia insisted they weren’t missing any and the hands that washed ashore must be unrelated. 4/5 globsters for mystery. And suspicion.

This next couple of stories are great examples of “when life gives you lemons”. But in this case, it’s when life gives you wet cigarettes… specifically 500 containers of cigarettes, estimated to be worth about $4 million. They were lost off a cargo ship in Northern France in a bad storm and in less than a day they were washing up on beaches in the United Kingdom. So how did they turn 500 containers of wet cigarettes into anything good? They burned the cigarettes to make electricity.

Speaking of cigarettes, lighters might also be a way of turning litter to good use. A 2023 article in Regional Studies in Marine Science describes washed up lighters as a way of identifying the flow, drifting patterns, and range of marine litter and plastic pollution. Here’s why lighters are so great at… being litter, I guess? … They are stamped with their source area, are hollow so they can drift for long distances, and are often bright in color so can be found easily on beaches. Studies have already begun using lighters collected at targeted beaches. Cigarettes as fuel, lighters used to study pollution - 4/5 globsters for ingenuity.

My first experience with the ocean was my senior trip. Not all schools do this, so some quick background. While in high school my class would do different fundraising activities so that the night after graduation, students could board a large charter bus and travel to a designation. Ours was to the Gulf of Mexico - specifically Corpus Christi, Texas. What can a person say about their first experience at the ocean? Awe at how immense it is? Shock at that first hit of salt water in your face? Wonder (and maybe a little worry) at what is occupying the water with you? And there was something washing up on the beach then, too. Tar balls. There were even special wet wipes in our hotel rooms to help clean the stubborn tar off the bottoms of our feet. Also known as beach tar, it’s a type of crude oil that seeps from the ocean floor, then rides on the surface until it’s deposited onto the sand, in this case, along the Gulf of Mexico, where it was then transferred to the feet of recent high school graduates as they marveled at the waters of the Gulf of Mexico and forgot to wear adequate sun screen.

Another quick personal story from your anonymous narrator, if you’ll indulge me - we just met and it seems like I’m doing a lot of talking. I grew up in a rural area near the Gasconade River. This was a source of recreation on the weekends and many people in the area have fishing boats. One weekend when I was young - 4 or 5 - I was with my parents in my dad’s boat. I had just finished floating in my inflatable Dumbo the elephant swimming float and was back in the boat, where my mom had unbuckled my life vest to reapply sun screen while I sipped from a freshly opened can of Grape Crush soda. But you see, a tricky thing about the Gasconade is it can be low, high, twisty, straight, and muddy. And what’s beneath the surface can be ever-changing and hard to see. For instance, like the fallen tree under the path of our boat. In a quick moment one side of the boat rose out of the water, running up on the tree, while the other side of the boat tipped down and scooped up water, sinking the boat out from under us. I’m told I went under for just a second before my mom caught me up and swam us away from danger. My dad had gotten the boat tie and, determined to save his boat, was in a one-man tug-o-war contest with the Gasconade River. Thankfully some other boaters came along to assist and all was well again. Or so it seemed. I was very upset - not by the danger of the situation, which I don’t think I really understood, although ever the storyteller, in the days that followed I did announce to people that I had drowned. But the real reason I was upset was because of what was lost in those quick seconds. My grape-flavored Crush soda. And my inflatable Dumbo the elephant float, which I spied floating downriver. I’m sure it became a welcome surprise to some kid wading near a gravel bar, or was snarled in some brush along the river bank. But I like to think it didn’t wash up. That it was carried away on a northeastward path by the waters of the Gasconade River, as it meanders over dolomite and sandstone bedrock, under bluffs, driven by spring water along the way, and coming out into the Missouri River. And later into the Mighty Mississippi River, and then eventually, free and clear, out into the Gulf of Mexico.

And that’s my first episode. I hope you liked it. If you’re interested in supporting this podcast, rate and subscribe and tell your friends. You can also follow me on Instagram under “professionalweirdopodcast”. And you can email me at professionalweirdopodcast@gmail.com

Music recommendation for this episode:

Professional Weirdo by The Haxans
Rock Lobster by the B-52's

To find these and more recommended songs for this podcast, check out the Spotify Professional Weird playlisthttps://open.spotify.com/playlist/5jIkaamOZlCwtd2peUk9lF?si=0238d524a374492d

That’s a wrap! Sources used for this episode can be found in episode notes. Sound mixing performed by Brother Jay from The Rule of Scary podcast - check that out if you’re a horror movie fan! And hey! - thank you for listening to my stories. Keep it weird out there.