E278: MACABRE - See You Next Doomsday

Fresh Hell Podcast

freshhellpodcast

True Crime

4.8 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 18 April 2025

⏱️ 75 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

From flood panics and flaming cities to gas masks for comet poison, humanity has always had a flair for predicting the end of the world—with spectacular inaccuracy. In this special palate cleanser episode, Annie and Johanna walk us through some of the weirdest, funniest, and most deeply unserious doomsday predictions in history.

We'll cover the Great Flood that never came in 1524, London’s fire-and-666-fueled apocalypse panic in 1666, the comet hysteria of 1910 (featuring anti-comet pills), Y2K’s spreadsheet Armageddon, and yes, that time in 2012 when everyone thought the Maya were trying to kill us with a calendar. Add in some cults, bunkers, misinterpreted prophecies, and more than a few tinfoil hats, and you've got a full tour of the world's many failed finales.

Spoiler alert: we’re still here.

apocalypse, doomsday predictions, failed prophecies, end of the world, Halley’s Comet, Y2K, Mayan calendar, 2012 panic, Stöffler flood, Great Fire of London, Fifth Monarchists, cults, comet panic, Jehovah’s Witnesses 1914, doomsday cults, doomsday prepping, comet pills, planetary alignment, funny history, weird history, mass hysteria, Fresh Hell Podcast, Annie and Johanna, historical panic, end times, apocalypse myths, failed apocalypse

Transcript

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0:00.0	You are listening to the Fresh Hell podcast.
0:14.6	Fresh Hell contains stories of a disturbing and often graphic nature and is intended for a mature audience.
0:20.6	Please don't let your kids listen to this, or they might turn out like us.
0:29.8	Hi, I'm Annie from Massachusetts, home of chowder revolutionary history and the ever-present casual threat of Turkey attacks on suburban
0:41.4	streets. And I'm Johanna from Austria. Famous. Well, not I'm famous. Austria is famous for classical
0:48.3	music, chocolate cake. And probably giving the world the most terrifying Christmas traditions, I'd say.
0:55.8	And you're listening to your favorite international podcast.
1:01.3	The podcast hosted by two women who've never met in real life, but still manage to finish each other's morbid sandwiches.
1:11.9	See, it's like we share a break. finish each other's morbid sandwiches. Sentences.
1:13.3	See, it's like we share a brain.
1:21.3	Okay, before we get started, we'd like to take a moment for a huge sincere thank you to our newest Patreon supporters.
1:30.6	They are Anna T. Thank you. Jared K. Barton. Thank you very much, Jared. And Tammy Smith,
1:40.2	thank you, all of you so much. We really appreciate you. You're amazing.
1:50.8	Seriously, your support means the world to us. It's listeners like you who make this podcast even possible.
2:04.8	That's right. So today, we have had some heavy hitter episodes lately. Lots of death, lots of missing children. So you know what that means? We've got a palette cleanser episode for you today. Something a little lighter, just to kind of shake off
2:12.3	some of that gloom and doom of previous cases. Yeah. Grab your safety blanket, stock up on anti-apocalypse umbrellas,
2:21.7	and relax as we talk about some of the most ridiculous, harmless and delightfully wrong
2:28.9	doomsday predictions. Yeah. We're not even getting into Nostronomus today, so that's a whole thing for
2:38.1	another day. Okay, let's dive into the funniest ways the world absolutely did not end. And I'm sure
2:47.8	I'm not alone in thinking that lately it feels like every time you turn on the news,
2:54.3	someone somewhere is casually mentioning how we're inching closer to doomsday.
3:00.2	Climate crisis, pandemics, global conflict. Honestly, at this point, we're basically
	...

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