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[loretranscripts]

Episode 219: Unanswered

January 16th, 2023

Trigger warnings: Murder, child death, xenophobia.

Disclaimer: This transcript is entirely non-profit and fan-made. All credit for this content goes to Aaron Mahnke, creator of Lore podcast. It is by a fan, for fans, and meant to make the content of the podcast more accessible to all. Also, there may be mistakes, despite rigorous editing on my part. Feel free to point them out, but please be nice!

To step inside them is to enter another world – at least, that was the idea. It’s located underground, beneath a hill in West Wycombe, just outside of London, England, and by it, I mean the caves. You enter them through a rather imposing set of iron gates that are situated beneath the ruins of what looks like an old church. There had always been a natural cave there, but in the 1750s, a local man named Francis paid a bunch of out-of-work farmers to widen and deepen it, using the chalk debris as road material all throughout town. What they created was a system of hand-cut rooms and passageways that looked like something out of a medieval fantasy movie, and each chamber has a name: The Entrance Hall, the Triangle, The Miner’s Cave, the Steward’s Chamber; you get the idea. There’s even one called Franklin’s Cave, but I’ll get to that in a moment. Nearly a quarter of a mile down the path, rumoured to be directly below the church that stands at the top of the hill, is the final destination, a place called the Inner Temple. You can walk right up to that room today, but back in the 1750s, it was actually cut off from the rest of the rooms by an underground river that was named (appropriately, I think) the River Styx. All of this, by the way, was crafted so that Francis had a place to hold meetings of a rather unusual social gathering. His full name was Sir Francis Dashwood, and his social group was known as the “Hellfire Club”, and they gathered for all sorts of rituals and celebrations. Oh, and the Franklin Cave I mentioned a moment ago? It was named after one of the group’s members: Benjamin Franklin. For as long as we’ve had society, there have been groups that seem to exist outside of it. Some have been secret, while others have put themselves on full display, but if the story of one group in particular is true, they should all be treated with caution, because some paths into the occult only lead to destruction. 

I’m Aaron Mahnke, and this is Lore.

His arrival in America was really what started it all. Benjamin had been born a little north of Naples, Italy back in 1886 – the year coca cola was invented – but in 1904, he and his brother, Antonio, packed up and moved to the United States, chasing after the promise of a better life. Benjamin and his brother settled in Philadelphia, taking on tough, labour-intensive jobs, but early on, cracks appeared in their relationship. It’s said that his very devout Catholic brother wasn’t too fond of Benjamin’s interest in the occult. Unable to get along, Benjamin left the city to find work elsewhere. And for a while, that was York, Pennsylvania, and I’ve not seen anyone else notice this before, but I find it more than coincidental that an occult-obsessed man would travel to one of the hotbeds of witchcraft in America at the time. Heck, just a few years later, in 1929, the York witch trials would take place, where the occult murder of a local white magic practitioner named Nelson Rehmeyer would be convicted. In York, folks believed in the supernatural.

After that, he married a fellow Italian immigrant named Santina, and the couple began trying to build a typical American life together, but that was a steep hill to climb in that era. You see, the last couple of decades of the 1800s and the first couple of decades of the 1900s were the years when a massive wave of Italian immigrants came to America. I have Italian ancestors through my maternal grandmother’s side of the family, and they arrived inside that window as well. But America didn’t treat them kindly – they were branded with stereotypes and pushed to the fringes of society, setting most of them on path into deep poverty and inequality, and this was what Benjamin and his wife found themselves facing. Of course, he did everything he could to fit in. He went by “Benny” instead, gave his last name an American makeover and worked hard, but it wouldn’t be until they moved to Detroit, Michigan that things started to improve. Yes, their financial situation got better - Benny invested in real estate, transforming himself from tenant to landlord - but the biggest change he experienced was a new focus, a new goal, and it all started with the dreams.

Remember, Benny had always been interested in the occult: it’s what had led to the falling out between him and his brother Antonio; it had been the foundation of close friendships, like a fellow Italian immigrant and railyard worker, Aurelius Angelino, back in Pennsylvania. If he was awake, he was thinking about the world beyond our own and how he could harness it. Even in his dreams, he was obsessing over it. In the dreams, Benny believed that he was receiving visions from God, visions of a mission that he was meant to embark on, and a very specific calling. Benny, it seems, was supposed to become a healer and a prophet, and it was in Detroit that he finally leaned into those dreams and made them a reality. You see, Benny and his wife still lived within a pretty tight-knit Italian community, and as his work as a healer and prophet began to increase, people around him noticed and paid attention. Over time, those ideas that he had about world history became the subject of book that he wrote, called “The Oldest History of the World: Discovered by Occult Science.” But mostly, he was focused on his sermons, gatherings where he would invite others to come and hear his teachings about the true history of the world, and it’s said that he even hand-crafted an intricate model of the universe, what he called the “Great Celestial Planet Exhibition”; it was made of wire and wood and paper and wax, and he placed it right in the middle of his makeshift altar in his basement. 

But at the core of so many cults is a business model, and for Benny, that was healing. There were hexes and packets of mixed-up herbs that people could buy from him, all promising to aid in the healing of various illnesses. He even offered animal sacrifices for a fee, for those customers who needed something more than a potion, I guess. But healing of this sort was a gamble. Some people purchased his services and found what they were looking for, but many did not, and as the years went on, that sort of business model has a way of creating something new: disgruntled customers. All of it was bound to catch up with Benny; at least, that was the assumption most people would make. The trouble is, Benny wasn’t alone; in fact, American culture at the time was a hotbed of groups just like his, and there’s a lot we can learn from a brief study of a few. Although, truth be told, none of it bodes well for Benny. 

***

The world that Benny Evangelist lived in was filled with others just like him. Actually, they ran the spectrum, from brushing right up against the edge of normal, accepted religion, to far out on the fringes of what was even considered normal. There were people like Billy Sunday, a former professional baseball player, who traded in one touring life for another, travelling the country as a fire-and-brimstone preacher, whose message of temperance is thought to have helped spark prohibition. Or how about the House of David, a commune that was founded in Michigan in 1903. The folks who started it, a couple named Benjamin and Mary Purnell, proved that Benny wasn’t even the only cult leader by that name in Michigan. Their group, though, followed the teachings of a different prophet, Joanna Southcott, although she received her information the same way Benny did: through visions. Then there was Margaret Matilda Wright Brown*, who started having visions of her own in 1916 that focused on a lot of Doomsday stuff. Her teachings quickly grew her community to over a thousand followers but fizzled out years later with flavours of elaborate fraud and attempted murder. Out in Kansas City, there was the Adam God cult, started by James Sharp in 1903, after he witnessed a meteor crash and believed it was the Holy Spirit giving him a mission to preach a special message, which, if you’re paying attention, probably feels a bit familiar, doesn’t it? The Adam God cult drew a ton of followers, and they settled on a farm that was gifted to them by a wealthy member. By 1906, they were carrying guns and starting trouble, and two years later it all ended in a violent shoot-out that took five lives. Founder James Sharp and his wife, of course, survived. And these is just a small sampling of the seemingly countless groups like Benny’s that were out the in the early parts of the twentieth century. Maybe it was the growing class divisions that made it possible, perhaps it was the Great Depression; my guess is that it was a combination of a lot of those things and more. One European newspaper reporter asked the rhetorical question in an article in 1927: “How do Americans and English residents of the Riviera amuse themselves? They join cults.” And, honestly, if you read enough of them, it really does start to feel like it was becoming America’s pastime, which leads us back to Benny Evangelist. He might not have been the only prophet out there in the market, not even the only one in Michigan, for that matter, but he was having success. 

But like I said before, not every customer was walking away happy. Yes, some were, and those people stuck around, even more convinced than ever that Benny’s healing powers had really chased away their medical problems, but there were just as many who felt that he had failed them. It’s easy to feel their frustration – Benny was apparently charging $10 a session, and while that’s probably what a lot of people today spend on coffee and a bagel each morning, it was roughly two day’s pay back then, the equivalent of about $300 now. It was a big sacrifice, and so when it didn’t pay off, people got upset. Making that an even more bitter pill to swallow was Benny’s new big house. He’d come a long way since his arrival in America a few years before, and some of that had to do with his real estate ventures, but what most people saw was a guy who was making a fat profit off of their suffering. 3587 St. Aubin Street was the address. Benny lived there with Santina and their four children, ranging from eighteen months to eight years old. It was a busy house, where family life was mixed with work, in the normal stuff and the occult. Everyone knew where Benny the healer lived, which is why, on the morning of July 3rd of 1829, a man named Vincent Elias showed up and knocked on their door, and what happened as a result would shake the community to its core. 

***

Vincent didn’t kill Benny. I know that’s what you were expecting to hear, so I thought I would get that right out of the way. No, Vincent had paid them a visit because he and Benny were about to wrap up some real estate business; they knew each other well, and were colleagues and friends. What he found when he knocked on the door and let himself in was a scene of absolute horror. No children came running to greet him, so he turned to Benny’s first-floor office and stepped inside. Benny was there, seated at his desk, but he was slumped over in a pool of blood. Oh, and his head? It was on a chair, beside him. Vincent immediately called for the police. It’s said that nearly the entire homicide squad from Detroit rushed to the scene, and when they arrived, they started investigating the rest of the house. Upstairs, the bodies of all four children, as well as Santina, were found brutally murdered. Benny might have been the only one who had been decapitated, but that doesn’t mean the others didn’t die brutal deaths. I’ll just leave it at that. The killer, however, hadn’t been neat and clean. There was no attempt to conceal their movement through the house, with bloody shoeprints marking each of their steps throughout. The police even found a bloody fingerprint. You don’t need to watch a lot of murder mystery shows to know how sloppy that was. Of course, the first assumption was that some disgruntled member of Benny’s cult had shown up in anger and killed the entire family. As we’ve already learned, he was getting rich off of other people’s misfortunes, and that sure doesn’t sound like the sort of life that leads to a happy ending. It didn’t help that there were a lot of occult objects found inside the house, painting a vivid picture for the police about who Benny really was, so it was a safe assumption. But even though they asked the entire neighbourhood and offered a big, $1000 reward, no one had anything useful to offer them. 

They did also toy briefly with another theory, though. A note was found in the house that basically said, “This is your last chance.” Some people felt that it had the trappings of extortion, a common element found in a criminal organisation known as the “Black Hand”, and yes, they had spent years preying upon well-off Italian immigrants, but by 1929, they had faded away thanks to the growth of a new group – the Mafia. To the police, the letter felt like an amateur’s attempt to frighten Benny to hand over money – not the type of person who would kill a family of six in cold blood. The final theory was about a mysterious “demolition crew”, that Benny was buying some reclaimed lumber from. In fact, just the night before, he had called a watchman at a house the demolition crew was taking apart, so he could set up a time the next morning for them to deliver the wood to his house and receive payment. Maybe they showed up the morning of July 3rdand just decided it would be easier to kill everyone and take the cash. I don’t know, that seems weak to me, they were probably much more likely to just haggle the price higher. They had a business to run, after all, and if they killed all of their customers, that business would fall apart.

And that was the result of their investigation – three separate theories, no arrests, and no answer to the question of who truly killed the Evangelist family. The only witness that ever turned up was the family dog, who was found on a porch of a neighbour a few months later. The poor pup’s reputation proceeded it, too, and the woman refused to take it in and adopt it, and obviously the police weren’t able to get any useful information out of it, either. The family’s funeral service was held three days after their bodies were discovered, on July 6th. Over three thousand people attended, although I have to wonder how many people were their because they loved and respected them, and how many showed up to watch their anger and frustration be buried six feet below the grass of the cemetery. And as far as we know, their killer was never brought to justice. 

***

Humans have always been drawn to those who offer answers. Exactly how that desire has played out over the centuries is a varied and flavourful collection of groups that have left their mark on history. From the Hellfire Club’s debaucherous gatherings of society’s elite, to those struggling to make the most of their lives, cults have always been a vendor designed to provide what people are looking for. Most of them, though, leave those questions unanswered, and in the case of Benny Evangelist and his faithful followers, where the goal was physical healing, it ended in something worse: blood. Now, I could tell you that their house on St. Aubin Street was eventually torn down, but you probably know better than to assume that means the story has faded away. Events like that have a way of living on, even when all the people involved no longer are. Legends, whispers, rumours, all of it keeps them alive. But for Benny Evangelist, there’s one more enticing detail that’s kept people coming back, time and time again, to study the mystery. A little while ago, I mentioned that Benny had a friend back in York, Pennsylvania, who worked with him at the railyard there. His name, as I said, was Aurelius Angelino, and not only was he a fellow Italian immigrant, but he actually came from the same hometown back near Naples, and both men were obsessed with the occult. But here’s the thing I didn’t tell you: ten years before the brutal murder of Benny and his entire family, Aurelius Angelino gathered up his twin four-year-old boys and killed them while his wife was making dinner. Similar to Benny’s killer, Angelino used an axe, and similar to Benny’s crime scene, the police found a single bloody fingerprint. Now, Angelino was caught red-handed in the truest sense of the word, and because his behaviour wasn’t viewed as “sane”, he was sent to a psychiatric institution for the criminally insane. And then, four years later, he escaped. And I know what you’re thinking – what if Angelino was angry that Benny left town and made a better life for himself. Perhaps he followed him to Michigan and found his old friend at the centre of an occult gathering, wielding the power of a true prophet, and maybe he was overcome with jealousy, leading him to kill Benny’s entire family, and that could be it. But there’s one detail that’s left investigators and researchers confounded and stumped for decades, because it points to a timeline and chain of events that no one is prepared to unpack, that somehow, and in some way, Angelino didn’t kill his own kids back in 1919, and that Benny’s 1929 murder was an act of revenge and not jealousy. And that detail? The bloody fingerprint found in Angelino’s house back in 1919 was an exact match to someone he knew very well. It was the fingerprint of Benny Evangelist. 

***

Do an internet search for terms like “cult” and “secret society”, and you’re bound to find a whole slew of books and websites that talk about them. One reason is because they have always been popular to discuss, but another would be because they are real things that have historically made a lot of people nervous. To that end, I’ve got one more unrelated tale of unusual groups to share with you, and all you need to do to hear about it is stick around through this brief sponsor break.

[Sponsor Break]

William Morgan was trying to get ahead in life. Born in 1774 in Virginia, he worked as a bricklayer and a stonemason, work that eventually pulled him north to New York. He seemed like the kind of guy who might settle down, he had a wife and two kids, after all, but the only reputation he really had was that of a drunken drifter. He would pursue one business venture, only to fail, pack up his household, and move on to the next, rinse and repeat, and that was his life for a long time. Honestly, reading about his early life makes me feel like one of the very few respectable qualities this man possessed was his determination and confidence. William was sure he could find a way to put himself on the map, to make something of himself, and in a way, he eventually did, just not the way he intended. It happened when William was chatting with a friend of his named David Miller, who ran a struggling newspaper. Now, the two men had a lot in common. Both of them were horrible at running a business, both firmly believed that they were destined for greatness, and both had very few rules about how they were going to achieve it, which, I’m sure you’d agree, is not a healthy combination. William had an idea, though. All around him, he kept hearing about a secret society that seemingly controlled his entire world, they were embedded deep within the government of the newly born United States of America, and they used that power to become the wealthiest folks around. Who was this group? The Freemasons. 

Now, I highly doubt there’s anyone out there who hasn’t at least heard of the Freemasons. A full third of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were members of the Freemasons; so were other significant Americans, both then and now. George Washington, Paul Revere, Mark Twain, and, uh… Shaquille O’Neal. Anyway, William’s new business idea was really simple – he was going to infiltrate the ranks of the Freemasons, learn all of their incriminating secrets, and then write it up as a book, which David Miller would print and sell. It smelled like easy money to these men, so they got right to work. William did indeed sneak in, pretend to be a member and gain access to all sorts of juicy secrets, and he did in fact write it all up for publication. But he and David were so proud of the progress they were making that they bragged about it all over town, and soon enough, the Freemasons found out about it and set out to stop them. At first, it was just harassment from the masons in their community, angry words, threats of violence, that sort of thing. It was posturing, nothing more, except that posturing escalated quickly. On September 8th of 1826, a group of masons tried to destroy David’s print shop. Two days later, the masons set fire to the homes of both men, and then the following day, William Morgan was arrested on false charges. Basically, a local tavern owner, possibly a mason himself, claimed that William had borrowed a shirt and never brought it back. Once that charge was dropped, William was arrested again, this time for failing to pay a tab in the same tavern. The tab, by the way, was just $2. Yeah, the masons were angry, and they were pulling all the strings they could to unravel William and David’s business plan. 

On the night of September 12th, a huge crowd of masons showed up at the jail where William was being kept and demanded to pay his bail and take him into their own custody. The jailor’s wife was on duty at the time, and she really did try to brush them away, but things got pretty heated and she gave in to save her own skin, and honestly I don’t blame her one bit. Those masons dragged William out into the night while another group visited his wife. They told her that they would let her see her husband, but only if she handed over the unpublished manuscript. Afraid for his life and her own, she did what they asked, and then they took it and sent her away. Her husband William was never seen again. That same night, another group of about fifty masons kidnapped David Miller and locked him up in an undisclosed location. Even still, a bunch of his friends managed to track him down and break him out, and with that, a very wild night came to an end. Now, from one point of view, the masons got what they wanted – they put an end to a critic who had threatened to expose their secrets. In fact, they made him disappear completely, but from another perspective, they really made a mess of things. Why? Because a secret society doing criminal stuff to stay secret didn’t exactly endear itself to the general public. Soon enough, news spread, and as a result, an anti-mason movement sprung up. Not locally, either – nationally. How massive was this movement? Well, a new, short-lived political party popped up, called the “Anti-Masonic Party”. Sitting president, John Quincy Adams, even felt that it was necessary to announce that he had never been, nor ever would be, a mason. Their recruitment numbers dwindled, and within a few years, the organisation was reduced to a shadow of its former self, and in the middle of that storm of bad PR, David Miller saw his next best opportunity. He rewrote the book from notes and memory and published it anyway, which, considering the harassment he had already suffered, was pretty brave of him. And the response from the masons? Not a single thing. David Miller’s tell-all exposé went completely unanswered. 

[Outro]

*The correct name seems to be Margaret Matilda (Wright) Rowen. 

[loretranscripts]

Episode 34: All the Lovely Ladies

16th May, 2016

Trigger Warnings: Torture, extreme violence.

Disclaimer: This transcript is entirely non-profit and fan-made. All credit for this content goes to Aaron Mahnke, creator of Lore podcast. It is by a fan, for fans, and meant to make the content of the podcast more accessible to all. Also, there may be mistakes, despite rigorous editing on my part. Feel free to point them out, but please be nice!

For the past few decades, a vast, global audience has been rediscovering ancient fairy tales through the lens of the animated films pioneered by Disney. They’ve simplified and popularised some of the bigger stories, such as Cinderella and Aladdin, and brought needed attention to lesser known tales, like The Snow Queen or Little Mermaid. But growing up and watching the classics, what struck me the most wasn’t the animation or the music, but the common appearance of that one, key figure in so many tales: the evil woman of power. We can see versions of her in Sleeping Beauty and Snow White, and she’s there, fresh and modern, as the wealthy socialite, Cruella de Vil. It’s a common thread in folklore, in some form or another. Sometimes, she’s a cruel stepmother, while other times, she’s the witch in the faraway castle. Everywhere we look, the image of the woman who rules through violence and fear is right there, waiting for us. There are a few reasons why women, not men, have been featured as the most frightening fairy tale villains throughout the ages. Some experts say it’s because mothers have tended to be the most powerful authority figure in the lives of children throughout history. Making their fictional counterparts evil was an easy way to make the dangers seem more understandable to young minds. Others point to a patriarchal system, built to teach everyone that power should only belong to men, which might just be the biggest fairy tale of them all. Throughout history, when women have taken on positions of power, they’ve shown themselves to be just as wise and benevolent as men – sometimes, more so. But that hasn’t caused the archetype to vanish from folklore. In many ways, folklore as we know it wouldn’t even exist without these powerful women – good or bad. It’s in the edge cases, though, where life too closely imitates art, that things get complicated; because tucked into the dark corners of history, there are stories of real women with real power who have caused real, heart-pounding terror. Sometimes, the evil queen is real. 

I’m Aaron Mahnke, and this is Lore.

Standing on any of the streets in this small, Slovakian village of Čachtice might make you long for idyllic, European life. Tall hedges front each of the homes, and you can catch a glimpse of satellite dishes on most of them. Expensive cars sit in the driveway, and there’s an overwhelming feeling of culture and class, a sense of an older time. It’s hard not to love the lush greenery, the ancient stones, and the centuries-old buildings. It sounds perfect to me, and maybe it is, if that’s your thing. But just a mile and a half away, inside a dark forest, and set up on a rocky hill sits something that pushes Čachtice into the realm of fantasy: a ruined castle. The relationship between the castle and the village is fairly symbiotic today. Prior to restorations of about a decade ago, tourists were known to actually camp inside the crumbling walls, and locals have even held cookouts there  But four hundred years ago, things were different, and it all started with a little girl. 

When Elizabeth married a young count from a noble family in 1575, the count’s family gifted the young couple with an estate of their own. Not that Elizabeth needed charity – far from it. She was born into an influential family, who ruled over a part of Hungary called Transylvania, now part of modern-day Romania. Her family had produced knights, judges, and a cardinal in the Catholic church. Her uncle was even the King of Poland. It was safe to say that Elizabeth had powerful connections. When she and Count Ferenc married in 1575, she was just fourteen years old, and he was twenty. By his own mother’s admission, Ferenc wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, but he sure was athletic, and in the years to come, he would develop a reputation as a hero of war. Because her lineage outranked his own, though, she kept her surname rather than taking on that of her husband. As a result, history would forever remember her as Elizabeth Bathory. Just a note – if you’ve ever read about Elizabeth, you might have assumed that her surname, spelled B-A-T-H-O-R-Y, is pronounced “Bathory”, but you’d be wrong. It’s “Bathory”. Trust me. I did my homework on this. But it’s not because of her name that she’s still whispered about. It’s because of the things she did.

Prior to Elizabeth’s wedding, in the time between her engagement and marriage to Ferenc, it was rumoured that she had become pregnant as a result of an affair with someone of much lower social station. Her future husband took care of the situation in true, sixteenth-century fashion, though. She was moved to a secluded manor house to give birth to the baby (a daughter, it is said) while Ferenc located the father and punished him. The punishment, it seems, was to have him castrated, and then a pack of dogs was set loose on him, tearing him to pieces. It was very possibly a culturally appropriate thing to do, according to the time and place of the events, but I can’t help but imagine that even if it was, it was probably just as barbaric and horrifying to people who heard about it then as it is to us today. Unexpectedly, though, this small bit of torture seemed to intrigue young Elizabeth more than it should have, and some historians think that it was this spark that set something ablaze inside of her, a hunger to punish others, and some say a thirst for blood. 

Just four years after their wedding, Count Ferenc was named the chief commander of all Hungarian troops and led them to battle frequently during the course of the thirteen-year-long war with the Ottoman Empire, called (get this) the “Long War”. And it was while he was gone that Elizabeth took over running the castle and the lands around it. But it was also around that time that rumours began to spread throughout the village near the castle. Today, they sound to us like the setup of a horror film, or maybe the basis of some dark fantasy novel, but in the late 1500s, this was reality, not fiction. The village would receive frequent visits from staff from the castle up on the hill, and these representatives of the count and countess would recruit a small number of young women, girls really by today’s standard, and take them off to serve in one of many roles in the royal household. These were coveted jobs, don’t get me wrong, that wasn’t the problem. Any young woman in a Hungarian village would dream of being asked to serve in the castle of nobility. Outside was a life of poverty, hunger, disease, and filth. Inside those stone walls, though, there was hope – hope of safety, hope of a daily meal, and of living conditions that were better than those of the livestock outside. That wasn’t the problem. No, the problem, as far as the people of the village were concerned, was that their daughters never came home.

***

The truth of their disappearance was more horrible than anyone in the village might have imagined, and according to some reports, it all began not long after the count and countess were wed in 1575. It was shortly after that, when Ferenc was frequently away at war and Elizabeth was in need of help, that she brought on a small team of personal servants and helpers. It was also reported that they both loved to treat their servants horribly. Maybe it was the couple’s aristocratic upbringing or their privilege left unchecked. What we do know is that it was when Elizabeth hired an older woman named Anna Darvulia that things began to get darker. Anna, according to reputation and testimony in Hungarian court documents, was said to be a witch, but at the very least was known for her violent, almost sadistic, nature. And as the months and years went on, Anna became the prime facilitator of Elizabeth’s love of torture. One document describes how Elizabeth and Anna would take servant girls outside in the middle of winter and force them to lie naked in the snow. Then, they would pour cold water over their bodies and wait for it to freeze on their skin. When they were satisfied that the girl’s bodies had become cold enough, they would leave them there to die. In the spring, it was more of the same. Instead of cold fields, though, the girls were brought out in the heat of day, stripped naked against their will, and then covered in honey. Then Elizabeth would watch as insects, drawn by the sweet nectar, would bite and crawl all over the young women. Later, a large room was set up in the lower level of the castle so the torture could be practiced year-round, and it was there that witnesses claimed the countess would have watched the mouths of the servants sewn shut, or sharp instruments forced under their fingernails. And she did it all, it seems, for the pure enjoyment of the experience. 

In 1604, after a long struggle with an unknown illness, Count Ferenc passed away. Before doing so, he made legal arrangements that the care of his wife and children should fall to Elizabeth’s cousin, György Thurzó, the Count Palatine of Hungary. He was one of the most powerful men in the kingdom, and to, Ferenc it seemed like a wise decision. Elizabeth was also apparently a very lonely person. Years without her husband by her side, of running the castle and surrounding villages on her own, of being the prime figure of authority in a world where few women enjoyed such power, all of it was incredibly isolating to her, which made Ferenc’s death all that more difficult to deal with. After nearly twenty-nine years of marriage, she was well and truly alone. The loss reportedly left the countess deeply depressed and antisocial, and rightly so, but her response was to retreat to her quarters, where she stayed in bed for long periods of time. That didn’t mean that the torture had to stop, though. In fact, her loss and loneliness only seemed to escalate. Elizabeth had begun to believe that human blood could help her remain young and healthy. Maybe it was the recent loss of her husband that forced her to face her own mortality. Perhaps it was a bit of forgotten bit of local folklore. Some have even suggested that she discovered the idea by accident after a particularly bloody torture session. Whatever the reason, she became obsessed with blood. Rather than go out, she had Anna bring servants to her room. There, she would cut them, or have portions of their flesh burnt with hot metal, and would even bite them on their bodies, sometimes even on their face. But her hunger for violence came with a price, and as a result, these poor, young women from the village became scarce. Like an addict, she adapted, and started to bring in more and more women of noble birth. She started with daughters of the lowest order of noble families, those with the least amount of wealth and power, but slowly worked her way up the aristocratic chain, and that more than anything else was what became her undoing. After hearing some of the rumours from a member of his royal court, the King of Hungary assigned a trusted advisor to investigate the matter, and his choice was, whether by chance or intention, Count Thurzó, Elizabeth’s cousin and legal caretaker. So, in the Autumn of 1610, he made his journey to the castle. His arrival was a surprise to Elizabeth and her team of attendants. That might be one of the reasons his investigation was so successful at uncovering the truth, but the countess might also have just become careless. She had been carrying on her violent, torturous habit for three long decades, after all. It’s easy for anyone to convince themselves they’ll never get caught after such a long time. Whatever the reason, when Thurzó arrived, it was immediately clear that something dark had been taking place, and before long, he knew why. What he unearthed, though, was almost beyond belief. 

***

Upon his arrival, Thurzó assigned two notaries to begin gathering evidence to support the claims that the king had heard rumours of for years. But rather than being difficult to find, the witness testimony began to flood in. Maybe the people sensed an end to the countess’ evil reign. Maybe, they finally found hope. Whatever the reason, over three hundred people stepped forward to offer testimony against her and her team of helpers. And it wasn’t just the village commoners who spoke up, either. Witnesses included priests and nobles, as well as staff from a number of the countess’ estates. Some spoke of the rumours they heard whispered in the walls of the castle, while others came forward to say they had witnessed some of Elizabeth’s torture sessions first-hand. They described the exposure outdoors, the sharp tools, the hot metal, even the biting. Other servants had only seen the bodies, but they all admitted that the cause of death was always clearly obvious: death by torture. And those bodies began to turn up, too. Some were found in local graveyards, while others were located in various rooms in the castle, where they’d been hidden away. Charred human bones were found in a number of the fireplaces and other remains were unearthed on the castle grounds. While the physical evidence was literally being uncovered, so too was the elaborate network that the countess used to gather her victims. Most of the testimony pointed to her team of servants, including the alleged witch, Anna Darvulia. But there were others. Elizabeth had contacts in the surrounding villages that were responsible for finding new women for her to torture. Sometimes, they were hired away as servants, under the premise of good wages and fair treatment. Other times, they were simply abducted outright. Finally, Count Thurzó had all the evidence he needed to begin a trial.

But there were problems from the beginning of that process. For one, Anna apparently died before the trial could start. Rumours swirled around her role in the string of crimes, ranging from chief executioner, to witchcraft, and even to Elizabeth’s secret lover. She was someone Thurzó wanted to arrest more than all the others, but her death made that impossible. So, he turned to the remaining team of servants. Along with the countess herself, this entire group of accomplices was arrested on December 30th of 1609 and then held for trial. In January of 1610, the evidence was presented, testimonies were heard, and cases were made. In the end, the group was charged with the death (the murder by torture, mind you) of roughly eighty servants; servants who once travelled to the castle with hopes of a better life; servants who, through no fault of their own, became the object of the countess’ desire. But that’s the irony of it all: Elizabeth Bathory, you see, never went to trial. Because of her high rank and political power, the countess never stood trial for her crimes. She was the reason for it all, and yet as each one of her personal attendants were tried and convicted, she remained untouched. Like so many of her other abuses of power over the years, she was immune to the full force of the consequences. Yes, she would be punished, but not to the degree that her helpers were. Each and every one of them was convicted, and in each case, they were sentenced to be executed, all except for the countess - but not before many of them had a chance to speak for themselves. During the trial that built the argument and laid out the crimes (the trial, mind you, that set the number of those tortured to death at the hard to fathom eighty human lives) one servant added an intriguing testimony. The servant claimed that she had special access to Elizabeth’s quarters, and it was during one recent visit, while her mistress was away, that she discovered a journal that the countess kept - a private journal, hidden from sight, and because of that it was excluded from the evidence presented in the trial. In this journal, the servant girl claimed, was a list: the names, as best as Elizabeth could remember, of each and every victim of her love for torture. It didn’t come as a surprise to most of the court that the countess would do something like that, though. This was a woman who killed for pleasure, who revelled in the bloodshed. Some even claimed that she literally bathed in the blood. No, what was shocking about the journal was the number of entries. While the court supported evidence for eighty or so murders, the servants claimed that this secret journal, which she had seen with her own eyes, exposed the true extent of Elizabeth’s evil. According to her, the list had over six hundred and fifty entries. 

***

It seems to me that evil has a way of coming in all shapes and sizes. No matter where we look, there are those who have served to build the legends that we all have come to fear over the centuries. Thankfully, the evil queens of Disney have seemed to live lives that are a lot less bloody than Elizabeth Bathory, although that’s probably not the best place to start. The folktales that inspired many of those movies were almost just as bloody as the countess herself. In that, she’s not alone. There are sceptics, though. Some think that the accusations brought against her were fabricated by powerful relatives in an effort to take her land and wealth. It was  established fact that the King of Hungary himself owed the countess a large sum of money, and many of the key testimonies during the trial came from people with much to gain from her arrest and imprisonment. Even her own cousin, Count Thurzó, benefited from her public downfall. Even though she escaped being put on trial and avoided the executioner’s axe that awaited her faithful helpers, Elizabeth Bathory didn’t go unpunished. She lived on, and so did her personal quarters, which can still be toured today, thanks to some recent restoration work that the castle has undergone. Two of the four towers have crumbled to the ground, and there’s no longer a roof protecting the interior from the elements, but you can still walk through the lower level chamber, where all the torture was said to have taken place, as well as the wing of the fortress where the countess lived. In the end, whatever the truth might have been – no victims, eighty, or over six hundred – Elizabeth Bathory has gone down in history as the bloody countess, but her life didn’t end with honour and accolades. There was no one to see if her beauty treatments had worked, no one to keep her company, or to endure her torture – no one to talk to at all. Because after the trial, she was placed in her personal quarters, and every single window and door of that room was bricked up, locking her permanently inside, with nothing more than a slot in the door for food. The bloody countess lived out the last four years of her life in what must have been nothing short of a nightmare to her: complete and utter isolation. 

[Outro]

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Why would th fact that Aaron mahnke said be enough to convince people that a group of people should be destroyed

Hi! I don't think that should be the case, but I'm not sure what you're referring to. If you let me know what he has specifically said, I'll respond to it.

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Looking for Lore Transcript 142 Reflections

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Episode 142: Reflections

11th May, 2020

Trigger warnings: Child death, slavery.

Disclaimer: This transcript is entirely non-profit and fan-made. All credit for this content goes to Aaron Mahnke, creator of Lore podcast. It is by a fan, for fans, and meant to make the content of the podcast more accessible to all. Also, there may be mistakes, despite rigorous editing on my part. Feel free to point them out, but please be nice!

The gods had abandoned them; at least, that was how the ancient Greeks interpreted the signs in the sky. Earlier in the day, everything had seemed normal and fine, but hours later the sun had grown dark, as if covered by a great disk. The Greeks referred to this as a great abandonment, when their greatest fears had come to life: the gods had forsaken them. It was a sign that great disaster was about to arrive, either from war, or disease, or even the death of their king; and the word for it, ekleípō (ἔκλειψις), is still with us today. We just call it an eclipse. 

The Greeks weren’t alone in how they interpreted rare natural events. Over four thousand years ago in China, the royal astronomers failed to predict an eclipse and the emperor had them executed for the error. Why? Because the ancient Chinese believed that an eclipse happened when a dragon ate the sun, and predicting it meant having a chance to get ready. Interestingly, the earliest word for eclipse in Chinese is shí (蚀), which means “to eat”. And the list goes on and on. In Ancient Egypt, the event signified a battle between Apep, the serpent of death and chaos, and Ra, the sun god. Thankfully, Ra always won, and the sun would return. In the mythology of a number of Native American tribes, an eclipse happened when a little boy trapped the sun in a fishing net; it was only freed when wild animals chewed the ropes away. 

For thousands of years, humans have built deep superstition around rarity. When something happened so infrequently that its occurrence felt otherworldly, stories would be crafted around it. These rare occurrences were miracles, after all, at least in the minds of those who witnessed them. When they happened, it had the potential to be a frightening, life-changing event, and few outliers captured that reverence and fear more fully than when it happened right in our midst, when the very people who told the stories experienced those miracles first hand. Because folklore wasn’t always an invention of the mind, just some clever story invented and then passed along. Sometimes, it was more tangible, more… physical, and more real. Because in the world of the unusual and unexpected, nothing was more powerful than the birth of twins.

I’m Aaron Mahnke, and this is Lore.

Those that visit the village are always struck by its beauty. Tucked away in the south-eastern tip of England in the wield of Kent, the village of Biddenden is a snapshot of another time. Latticed windows adorn ancient Flemish cottages, field stones and thatched rooves and whitewashed plaster cut up by blackened oak beams. Honestly, it’s a crime how stereotypical the place looks, and I’m not going to fault them for it at all; it is a thing of beauty. But that’s not all that’s wonderful about Biddenden. It seems that every year, on Easter, the local church gives out food to the most needy in the region. It is often a meal of tea and cheese and loaves of bread. Funding for that ongoing charity comes from the revenue earned by a plot of farmland now known as the “Bread and Cheese Lands,” land that was a gift from a set of conjoined twins. Mary and Eliza Chulkhurst were born to wealthy parents in the year 1100, but passed away in 1134. In their will, they deeded twenty acres of land to be used as a source for future charity, and ever since, the sisters have been sort of the patron saints of the town. In fact, the cakes that are given out each year, now known as Biddenden cakes, bare their image: the figure of two women, literally joined at the hip. 

But it’s not the only town to revere twins. In south-western Nigeria, there’s a group of people known as the Yoruba. One of the things that sets this group apart from a lot of others is their definition of what a family is. For them, it’s more than just parents, children and siblings, and because of that flexibility, each clan can often grow to over 100 members. The biggest aid to that growth, however, just might be their people’s almost supernatural ability to give birth to twins. While it’s still a relatively low percentage, the Yoruba’s ratio of one set of twins out of every twenty births puts them at the top of the list across the globe, and when those twins arrive, the people there practically worship them. They refer to them as “spirit children”, believing that their births hint at great power, either for good or for evil. 

But that reverence isn’t anything new. For thousands of years, twins have been capturing the imagination of cultures all around the globe. In fact, we can see it in their foundation stories, like the Egyptian tales of Iris and Osiris, or the Greek mythology of Castor and Pollux. Twins are also found in the ancient stories of the Norse, the Jewish, and the Chinese, among many others, and everywhere we find them, these stories highlight just how much twins were both feared and respected. In Greek mythology, for example, Artemis and Apollo were powerful twins, one being in charge of the sun, and the other the moon. Roman mythology claims that it was a set of twins, Remus and Romulus, who founded Rome itself. So it should come as no surprise that when the pharaoh Cleopatra and her husband, the Roman general Mark Anthony, had twins roughly two thousand years ago, they named them appropriately: Alexander Helios, for the sun, and Cleopatra Selene, for the moon. 

And that ancient fascination with twins has never really gone away. In fact, as we’ve grown in our understanding of human biology, that obsession has only deepened. A lot of that can be traced back to an English scientist named Francis Galten. He was the first to publish a paper back in 1875 on how physical traits were passed down from generation to generation. But it opened the door for more questions. One of the age-old debates in psychology has always been nature versus nurture; the question of what makes us who we are. Is it our biology and the traits we inherited genetically from our parents, or is it more about the world we grew up in, and the behaviour and attitudes that were modelled for us. Decades of research have given us a frustrating answer: according to one study that wrapped up in 2015, one that looked at almost 18,000 traits, not just things like eye colour and personality type, the line fell right down the middle. The answer to the question “nature versus nurture” seemed to be both. But whether its ancient cultures treating twins as if they’re powerful beings, or modern scientists looking for truth in the human genome, these quests can only take us so far. As the centuries have gone by, twin studies have yielded us just as many questions as answers, and they’ve taught us something else. There are some things that science can’t explain. 

It's easy to make assumptions. It’s something humans have been very good at for a very long time. If a culture can assume that the sun went dark because a dragon ate it, then the birth of identical twins when only one child was expected must seem even more magical; and if they look the same, surely they must act the same. Of course, you and I know that every person is unique, no matter how much they look alike. I, personally, know twins and triplets, and even if they all dressed the same you would just need to spend about thirty seconds in their company to realise that they are each very unique individuals. But still, we allow appearances to fool us. 

Of course, there are those that buck that trend. Take the Grimes brothers, for example. Ray and Roy were born in Ohio in 1893, and both of the men started careers as major league baseball players in 1920. Ray played for the Boston Red Sox and Roy for the New York Giants, decades before that team moved to San Francisco. Things weren’t all the same for them, though. Ray played six seasons in the major leagues, but his twin, Roy, only managed the one. And then there were the Cray brothers. Ronnie and Reggie were born in October of 1933 in London’s East End. But rather than excel at sports, these twins were good at something else: organised crime. In fact, no gang in the 1950s or 60s was more powerful than their own, affectionally named “The Firm.” Over the course of their career, these twins worked together to commit all sorts of crime. In the public eye, they were the rough owners of a London nightclub, a club that put them in contact with superstars like Judy Garland and Frank Sinatra. But in the shadows, they were the puppeteers behind murder, assault, and armed robbery. 

But few twins in history shared as much in common as one pair, and honestly, this is the stuff that science just can’t explain, and it all started in Ohio, in 1940. That was the year that an unknown mother gave birth to a set of twins, and then placed them both up for adoption. When a young couple named the Lewises arrived at the hospital three weeks later, they said that they didn’t want two infants to care for, so they only took one home. They named him James, and raised him in the city of Lima, Ohio, in the north-western corner of the state. James, who went by Jim, grew up with a dog named Toy, and seems to have done alright in school. He hated spelling but he loved math, and woodworking, and it was a passion that he would carry with him into adulthood. By the time Jim Lewis was “discovered” in the 1970s, he had a laundry list of quirks. He drove a chevy to work every day, where he was a deputy sheriff. He married a woman named Linda earlier in life, but they divorced years later. After that, Jim married Betty, and together they raised his son, James Allen. The family would even drive south to Florida each year, and spend their vacation on the beach, which must have been a wonderful thing. It was a normal life, and one that sounds like countless others. On the surface, at least.

But Jim Lewis’s mother had occasionally mentioned that when he was adopted, there was a twin brother, and as Jim grew older, he started to wonder if that twin was out there somewhere, maybe even looking for him. So, in 1979, at the age of 39, he called the courthouse that had his adoption records, and asked for more information. What he learned was that a family named the Springers had taken his twin brother home that very same week. After digging around some more, he managed to find a phone number for that family, and I can’t pretend to know what Jim Lewis was thinking, or how he felt. He was about to make contact with a long-lost sibling, and that had to have felt exciting and frightening all at the same time. But what he discovered was something more unbelievable. You see, the Springers had taken their infant boy home and named him James, and James, who also went by Jim, grew up with a dog named Toy. He hated spelling in school, but did alright with math and woodworking, a hobby that he still dabbled with in adulthood, and every day he climbed behind the wheel of his chevy and drove to work, where he served as a deputy sheriff. Jim Springer married a woman named Linda, but they divorced after a number of years and he eventually remarried to a woman named Betty. Together they raised their son, James Allen, and took annual family vacation trips to a beach in Florida; the very same beach, in fact, that the Lewises visited each year. Twins, separated at birth, and raised by two very different sets of parents, and yet their path through life was practically identical: the same jobs, the same names for all their spouses, and even their sons, the same car and cigarette brand and vacation spot. On paper, without their last names, Jim and Jim were essentially the same person. But as difficult as it is to believe, the Jim twins are not the oddest case of twins on record. No, that honour goes to an unusual pair of siblings who gave a whole new meaning to the phrase “nature versus nurture”, and if the details of their story are completely true, they bring us face to face with a frightening realisation: there are some bonds that even death can’t break. 

It was a parent’s worst nightmare. John and Florence lived in the little town of Hexham in northern England, where they ran a service delivering milk and other groceries to customers all over town, and their two daughters, Johanna and Jacqueline, spent their time either in school or in the care of their grandmother. But on May 7th of 1957, all of that changed. That’s when a tragic care accident took both of their children from them forever. It seems that a local woman had lost control of her vehicle the very same moment that Johanna and Jacqueline were walking to church, and they were both struck and instantly killed. I’m not going to pretend to understand what John and Florence went through as a result of their loss; as a parent myself, this is one of those topics that’s difficult to comprehend, and touches on very deep fears, and I think any parent would feel the same, but it’s essential to our story today to explain what they went through, because it helps the road before them make more sense. Clearly, this was the sort of trauma that puts a strain on a marriage, and John and Florence dealt with a lot over the coming months. From what I’ve been able to find, Florence understandably retreated deeper and deeper into depression, while John looked for peace through religion. But they worked through it all the best they could, and in early 1958, they received happy news: they were pregnant.

In October of that year, John and Florence went to the hospital expecting to deliver a healthy baby. The heartbeat had been strong all through the summer, and they were both excited for a new beginning, but there were surprises in store for them. Somehow, the doctors had missed a second heartbeat, and now suddenly they were the parents of twins. But not just twins, but twin girls, and for John, who had been looking for hope and some sort of sign that life could return to normal, this was it. His daughters had returned. Florence, though, did not share in her husband’s belief. Either way, they had two brand new babies to take care of, and life very quickly became busy. Shortly after the twins were born, the family moved out of Hexham to Whitley Bay, a coastal town about fifty miles to the east, and then life flew by. Before long, the twins were talking, and that’s when the first mystery occurred. Even though the girls had never seen the old dolls that were in a box in the attic, Christmas gifts that had once belonged to the sisters they had never met, they began to ask for those dolls by name. So, John and Florence brought the toys out of storage, and gave them to the girls. Amazingly, within moments of the box being opened and dumped on the floor in front of them, the girls separated them into two groups, groups that their parents recognised as the division between Johanna’s toys, and her sister Jacqueline’s. And when one of the toddler’s said the words “Santa’s gifts”, it sent a chill down their parents’ spines, and the oddities continued from there. The twins, Jennifer and Gillian, apparently showed a dislike for the same foods that Johanna and Jacqueline had hated. They shared similar gestures and physical behaviour with their older sisters, and as they grew older they even began to look like them, which was odd considering Jennifer and Gillian were identical twins, and yet Gillian grew tall and slender like Johanna, and Jennifer was more stout, like Jacqueline. Perhaps most frightening of all for John and Florence was the innate fear both girls seemed to have for cars. The sound of an engine or a quickly moving vehicle were all it took to cause deep anxiety for the young girls, who would reach out for each other until the noise was gone. Once, Florence overheard the girls discussing a car accident. She peered into the room to see Jennifer laying with her head in Gillian’s lap, who was whispering: “the blood, it’s coming out of your eyes.” And there was simply no explanation for that behaviour, considering Florence and John had never told the girls about that accident, let alone the specific details like that. When the twins were four, John and Florence decided to take a trip back to Hexham for the first time since their older daughters had been killed, but when they arrived, Gillian and Jennifer made it clear that they knew their way around town. They were both able to name specific locations, like the school and shops in the downtown area. They even told their parents they wanted to play at the park, and then began to lead them in the correct direction. Taken as a whole, the coincidences were more than eerie; it was beyond explanation, and yet John and Florence watched things like this happen every day. Eventually, the girls were taken to a child psychologist, to see if there was something that the parents were missing, but those sessions only revealed more unusual connections to the past.

For whatever reason, though, as the girls grew older, those connections began to fade. By the time the twins were five years old, very little of those echoes of the past remained with them. Maybe it was a result of their world getting bigger every day, or the beginning of life at school and all the lessons that came with it, or perhaps time had a way of putting more distance between them and the sisters they had never met. By the time the twins were in their twenties, all of those unusual memories were gone. The only time visions of the past returned to them were in occasional dreams, but even those grew less and less common over the years. But what hasn’t faded is the fascination surrounding their story. Was it an eerie case of reincarnation, as their child psychologist proposed in the years after their meetings, or was it something in their genetic code, a memory of lost siblings, and a deep awareness of their parents’ unspoken grief? They are challenging questions and ones we may never be able to answer. What’s clear, though, is a simple truth that most of us probably don’t need pointed out to us: that we, as humans, are part of a larger community, one that extends outwards around us, yes, but also backwards in time. We are a product of those who came before us, but our unique identity is also, somehow, communal, a reflection of our family, our clan, and our culture, and so its one of the rare moments when our intuition matches perfectly with years of scientific study. Are we a product of nature, or of nurture? The answer, it seems, is perfectly clear: yes.

There’s magic in the unexplainable, isn’t there? I know it feels uncivilised to hear stories about ancient cultures dreaming up wild explanations for natural events that we’ve all grown used to, but those stories make a powerful point: the unexpected and unusual has always been attractive to us, and I think it always will. I know that we’ve conquered a lot of it over the centuries. Through science and exploration, we’ve put the earth into a proper perspective, we’ve broadened our understanding of the universe, and we’ve gained a deeper appreciation for the world we live in, but no matter how far and wide we search, there will always be things that defy our assumptions. And that’s what’s so alluring about the story of the twin girls raised by John and Florence Pollock. Despite no prior knowledge of the sisters who lived and died before they were born, these twins seemed to break the mould. It wasn’t so much about what they had in common with each other, as we might expect, but what they had in common with the past, and that commonality has caused researchers to scratch their heads for decades. At the centre of much of that research was the child psychologist that the Pollocks hired, back in the early 60s. Dr. Ian Stevenson visited the family at home on numerous occasions, and spent hundreds of hours with the girls in an attempt to find the logical explanations behind their eerie connections to the past. He even studied them later in life, after they’d grown into adulthood. Over the course of his career, he would go on to study many more children who demonstrated similar characteristics. He dove deep into the world of reincarnation, and published at least a dozen books on his research before his death in 2007, and to this day, the final chapter is still unwritten; the explanation he had searched for is still alluding us. But he did uncover one unique bit of information during his time with the Pollock twins; it seems that in the larger conversation about behaviour and words and memories of places or toys the girls had never experienced before, Stevenson went looking for proof that was more tangible, and he found it. You see, for a long while, Gillian and Jennifer were thought to be physically identical: same hair colour, same eye colour, same smile and laugh and everything else you would expect from monozygotic twins (that is, twins born from the same egg.) They were, as they should be, mirror images of each other. But not quite – because Dr. Stevenson noticed something that John and Florence had failed to point out: a small birthmark, just outside Jennifer’s right eye, and another around her waist. They weren’t visible on Gillian, but they did have a connection to another member of her family. They were the very same locations on the body where her sister Jacqueline received her mortal wounds. 

The world of twins is a fascinating, mysterious place, and I hope you’ve enjoyed your brief tour through some of the more unexplainable parts of it. But we’re not quite finished; there’s one more tale of the intertwined that I think is a wonderful addition to our journey so far, and if you stick around after this brief sponsor break, I’ll tell you all about it.

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I’m going to be upfront with you, you’ve probably heard parts of this tale before. It’s fascinating and unusual and the sort of story that kids love to read, but I promise you, there’s more to it than you might expect, and I think a little journey is in order. In 1824, a British merchant named Robert Hunter was travelling in Thailand, although back then it was known as Siam. According to his retelling of the events, he was out near the water around sunset, watching the locals go about the last tasks of their day, when he noticed a group of children playing at the water’s edge, and that’s when he saw it. Well, “it” was the best he could do at the time. According to Robert Hunter, what he spotted from a distance looked like an unknown creature, at least to his untrained eyes. After he moved in for a closer look, he realised that he had been way off target. It wasn’t a strange animal after all; it was a pair of twins, brothers, permanently joined at the side. Now, we have to be honest about what happened next. Hunter didn’t see human beings so much as profit. He would later spin the story by telling people that the king of Siam had ordered the execution of these brothers, and that what he did next was an effort to save them, but all you really have to do is read about the years that would follow to understand Hunter’s true purpose, whether or not the king had actually done that. Hunter worked at it for five long years, but eventually managed to secure the brothers for a journey out of the country. Maybe he had to get their parents’ permission, or perhaps he had to win the king over, but soon enough the seventeen-year-old brothers, Chang and Eng, were on their way to America. Upon arrival in Boston, the conjoined twins were presented to a collection of physicians, who spent time examining them. Local newspapers published articles about them, and then, after putting plans together, Hunter took them on tour. Those tours worked as you might expect. The route would be planned out, and then ads would be placed in newspapers of all the towns they planned to stop in. Then, Chang and Eng would board a train and, city by city, they would get a small tour of America, while giving America a glimpse of themselves. Hunter, of course, made money every step of the way. From what I can tell, tickets to see the brothers typically cost a quarter, equivalent to about $7 today. Their shows made heavy use of Asian stereotypes and clothing, and of course highlighted the physical uniqueness that the brothers shared, and for just about everyone, it was the first time in their lives they had ever witnessed conjoined twins first hand.

Chang and Eng did alright for themselves, too. They didn’t earn as much as Hunter, of course, but they saved up. A decade after their tour began, they settled into the American Dream. Well, the American Dream of the south, in the decades before the civil war. They bought neighbouring farms in North Carolina, and while their bodies were permanently joined together, they managed to divide their time between the two homes. They also married, to a pair of sisters, in fact – not twins, mind you, but honestly that might have been a bit too on the nose. And between the two of them, they fathered twenty-one children, which of course opens up a lot of questions, but I’ll let you ponder those on your own. In 1860, the brothers signed a deal with legendary promoter P. T. Barnum. The tour he took them on was brief, though, because the rumblings of war were beginning to spread throughout the nation. Soon enough, the civil war erupted, and when it was over, Chang and Eng’s lives were in disarray. Part of it was simply the economy; war had brought much of the country to a standstill for years, and it made it hard for farmers everywhere, but the bigger problem that the brothers faced was the same one that thousands of others did across the south as well. You see, they had operated their farms through slave labour, and when the war was over, that forced help was gone. Desperate to rebuild their fortunes, they went on tour again, and even travelled to Europe to see new audiences, but they were older by then, and the travelling life was a lot harder on their bodies, even more of a challenge because of their unique condition. So, after about a decade of touring, they headed home to call it quits.

But it was on that trip home from Europe that Chang suffered a stroke, and as a result, he found himself completely paralysed, which is a challenge for anyone, but when you’re permanently joined to your brother’s side, that’s a bigger problem, and then problems began to compound. In January of 1874, he contracted Bronchitis and was put on bedrest, but that meant that Eng was right there with him for it all. Still, they were brothers, and while they didn’t always get along, they faced challenges together as a team, so Eng patiently waited for Chang to recover, spending most of that time at Chang’s farmhouse. On January 15th, feeling much improved, the brothers made the short trip to Eng’s house, and spent their first night there sitting upright in front of the fire. The following night, Eng convinced his brother to sleep in the bed, and the pair dozed off. But when the morning arrived, it was discovered that Chang had passed away in his sleep. He had been sixty-two years old. Eng would hold on for a couple more hours, but soon passed away himself. It’s said that upon learning about Chang’s death, Eng sighed, and declared “well, then I am going too.” And that he did. But even in death, the journey wasn’t over for the brothers. It seems they had one last tour to take. Thanks to the freezing temperatures of January, their bodies remained intact long enough for the college of physicians in Philadelphia to secure permission to conduct their autopsy, so they were placed on a train and sent north, arriving in the middle of February, and that autopsy answered many questions. It provided doctors with enough evidence to suggest that the brothers might have survived separation, although in the 1870s, that surgery would still have been pretty risky, and they learned that it was a blood clot that had taken Chang’s life. But what they weren’t able to learn was what ultimately killed Eng. The brothers shared a liver, and the prevailing theories centred around that, and the risk of blood poisoning when a living person is connected to decaying tissue, but nothing definitive was ever nailed down. Chang and Eng Bunker were superstars, but they were also brothers, and in the end that’s the preferred explanation for Eng’s death so soon after Chang’s. They spent sixty-two years together, side by side, every step of the way. They went everywhere together, and apparently that included death. 

[loretranscripts]

No idea how long this blog has been dead but I feel like doing some transcribing for fun again. Will work through some requests, I think.

[loretranscripts]

Lore Episode 131: Sea of Change (Transcript) - 9th December, 2019

tw: none

Disclaimer: This transcript is entirely non-profit and fan-made. All credit for this content goes to Aaron Mahnke, creator of Lore podcast. It is by a fan, for fans, and meant to make the content of the podcast more accessible to all. Also, there may be mistakes, despite rigorous re-reading on my part. Feel free to point them out, but please be nice!

They call it the Wild Coast. It’s a stretch of land on the eastern side of Africa, starting around the coastal city of Durban and ending 900 miles later at Cape Town, and as for as long as ships have been sailing there, there has been tragedy. They call it the Wild Coast because of the frequency of shipwrecks that have taken place over the years – the Santo Alberto in 1593, the Good Hope in 1685, and the Bonaventura a year after that. Even today, ships occasionally fall victim to the rocky coast and stormy waves, like the Greek cruise liner, the Oceanos, which went down in August of 1991. Thankfully, there were no casualties, but one ship wasn’t so lucky. The S. S. Waratah was also a passenger liner, built and launched in 1908, and measured over 500ft long with a weight of 10,000 tonnes. It was a big ship, and as a passenger liner, it was designed to hold a lot of people in relative luxury. On its fateful journey, there were over 200 passengers on board, as well as dozens of crew members who served them and operated the ship. In July of 1909, the Waratah approached the southern tip of Africa after a long journey from Australia, and it came within sight of the Wild Coast. It made a routine stop at Durban and then continued south with the new destination of Cape Town, but a storm caused ocean swells as high as 60ft, and in conditions like that few ships stand a chance. Somewhere on the way to Cape Town, the Waratah disappeared. There were no survivors.

Ships vanish. It’s one of the risks that humans accepted when they began to venture out into the dark, mysterious waters that separated them from the undiscovered. Because, if we’re honest, there are simply too many opportunities for tragedy on the open water, and sadly some ships don’t make it home. But if you read enough of the stories about lost ocean liners and missing schooners, you’ll start to notice an exception to the rule. Yes, sometimes ships vanish from sight, but every now and then, the unthinkable happens – they return. I’m Aaron Mahnke, and this is Lore.

[2:52]

 Our love affair with the sea is thousands of years old. All you have to do is read the histories and mythology of ancient cultures and you’ll notice right away just how central the open water was to their world view. Homer’s Odyssey, written around the 8th century B.C., tells the tale of Odysseus and his decade of travels around the ancient world, and he does much of that travel by sea. Countless other ancient stories are connected to the ocean as well. 400 years after Homer, the Greek historian Herodotus recorded the Egyptian tale of a pharaoh named Necho II, who had lived and ruled two centuries earlier. Necho was said to have assembled an expedition that left Egypt through the Red Sea on the north-eastern corner and then slowly circumnavigated Africa. They arrived at the mouth of the Nile three years later. But sailing wasn’t a new thing, even back then. Most historians think that humans first jumped into small sailing ships, similar to catamarans, all the way back in 3000BC. They began their migration from the island of Taiwan and slowly spread out south and east. 1000 years later, they were firmly established in what is now Indonesia, and soon after that they spread as far as Vanuatu and Fiji. By the 10th century, they had reached more remote places of the Pacific like Hawaii, New Zealand and Easter Island, and some even made it all the way to the west coast of South America, now settling in what is now Chile. 4000 years of expansion, giving birth to dozens of culture, and all of it thanks to sailing.

Of course, it wasn’t always about migration. For many cultures, the ocean represented the unknown, and each of them had a deep desire to go out, to explore and discover and learn – oh, and to get rich, of course, because nothing kickstarts a new industry like the promise of massive wealth, does it? But as more and more ships set sail for uncharted lands or even simply became part of growing naval fleets and merchant routes, the odds that tragedy could strike began to rise. Most of what we know today about ancient sea-faring cultures was born from that tragedy, too, in the form of shipwrecks, and every year, it seems, older and older wrecks are being discovered. Just last year, in October of 2018, researchers announced the oldest yet, a 2,400-year-old Greek merchant vessel that was discovered at the bottom of the Black Sea. It’s so well preserved that researchers were able to recognise its design from images painted on ancient wine jars, which is crazy to think about. But of course, the shipwreck is real, and that means we can learn so much more about it than a wine jar could ever have taught us.

Shipwrecks were a tragic necessity in an age when humanity was spreading out and taking risks, so much so that shipping companies just sort of assumed they would lose some of their ships in the course of doing business. And that, of course, helped give rise to commercial insurance, where companies could hedge their bets and avoid going bankrupt when random chance got in the way of the bottom line. In London, many local sailors and ship owners would gather in a coffee house owned by a man named Edward Lloyd. By the late 1680s, he had so many customers who were connected to the shipping industry that he posted daily shipping news to keep them informed. But his café also became the place to buy insurance for ships, and even when all those insurance underwriters left the café and set up shop on their own, they remembered his influence by naming their group after him. Today, it’s still around, and known as Lloyds of London.

So many ships have sunk to the bottom of the ocean over the past few thousand years that we’ve even created stories about them, stories that hint at our regret and longing, at the loss we’ve suffered through, and the deepest desire of our hearts – namely, that those long-lost vessels might one day return. They even have a name – ghost ships – and folklore is filled with them. One example is a schooner known as the Young Teazer. It was active during the war of 1812 and worked as a privateer, a government approved pirate ship, in an effort to torment and hamper the British ships off the coast of Nova Scotia, and things went according to plan for a while – until June of 1813, that is. After an encounter with a British naval vessel, the crew of the Young Teazer found themselves trapped in Mahone Bay on the eastern coast of Nova Scotia. Fearing that his capture might lead to execution, one of the crewmen was said to have ignited the powder magazine below deck. The resulting explosion left 30 men dead and the ship nearly destroyed, while the survivors were all captured and thrown in prison by the British, but it also began a new chapter in the ship’s story. Over the past two centuries, stories have been whispered about a flaming ship that has appeared in Mahone Bay. Locals refer to it as “Teazer Light”, and even though many sceptics have pointed out that the sightings could be nothing more than the reflection of the full moon on the water, it hasn’t stopped folks from hoping for the alternative.

Another ghost ship found in folklore is also the most famous: The Flying Dutchman. As far as early modern ghost ships go, the Dutchman is one of the oldest, most likely dating back to the late 1600s. All of the sightings seem to repeat the same, frightening details, too – a mysterious ship, spotted off in the distance, glowing with an eerie luminescence and devoid of all human life. But these stories are all just legends, yarn that’s been spun on the wheel of fantasy, sometimes stitching together real events and people, but never fully true, and folklore is full of stories about ghosts for a very good reason. We like to think that, however dangerous the seas might be, that against all odds those lost ships might somehow come back. Amazingly, though, life has managed to imitate art. Over the last few centuries, some lost ships have pulled off the impossible, and in doing so they’ve put themselves into a whole new category – real ships that were once thought to be lost, only to return to the land of the living.

 They’d been expecting its arrival in Newport, Rhode Island, but it never sailed into the harbour. The SV Seabird was a merchant ship that had departed weeks earlier from Honduras, where it made regular trips. The ship’s captain, John Huxham, knew the route well and shouldn’t have had any trouble. But it’s never safe to assume, is it? When the ship was later found on nearby Easton’s Beach, it was clear it had experienced trouble, and when those that discovered it stepped on board, they entered into a mysterious scene. Coffee was boiling on the stove in the galley, a pair of pets were walking on the deck, but other than that the ship was completely and utterly empty. No crew were onboard. Most people think that Captain Huxham and the others must have exited the vessel while it was still a way off from shore. The missing lifeboat seemed to confirm that idea, and with a bit more time to investigate, there’s a good chance the authorities might have solved the riddle, but a week later they travelled back to the beach, only to discover that the ship was gone, and it was never seen again.

A century later, in 1884, another merchant ship was found drifting through the Atlantic. The SV Resolven was sighted just outside of Catalina Harbour on the east coast of Newfoundland. Like the Seabird, the Resolven was also missing its lifeboat and had been completely abandoned. The only sign of damage was a broken yard, that horizontal beam at the top of the mast that the sails hang from. The ship that found the Resolven was the HMS Mallard, and they did their best to put the pieces together. They’d sighted a tall iceberg in the region and assumed the Resolven had come a bit too close to it, which would explain the damage, but it wasn’t enough to justify abandoning ship, which struck them as odd. Even more mysterious were the signs of normal life inside the ship. All of the lanterns were still lit and below deck, the stove in the galley was hot with a fire still burning inside it, and most mysterious of all was the ship’s log, which contained records of all the activities onboard. The most recent item on the page had been written down just six hours prior to the Mallard’s arrival.

But if we’re going to talk about actual ships that have turned up empty, we simply can’t ignore one particular story, because it’s quite possibly the one that introduced the idea of ghost ships to American culture, giving us our own version of those old-world legends. The Amazon was built in 1860, first sliding into the water at the shipyard owned and operated by Joshua Dewis up in Nova Scotia. It was a wooden brigantine, a two-masted sailing ship, and it was of average size, measuring just shy of 100ft long. But life didn’t start out smooth for the Amazon. On the ship’s maiden voyage, which began in June of 1861, the captain became ill. Before they could even begin to transport their cargo across the Atlantic, the Amazon was forced to return to its home port, where the captain died a few days later. The next captain didn’t fair any better. Under the supervision of John Parker, the Amazon had a number of accidents, including crashing into a brig in the English Channel. Somehow, though, the ship survived. When Captain William Thompson took over command in 1863, he ushered in a period of peace for the ship and it travelled all over, performing the duties it had been designed to do. But four years later, in October of 1867, an ill wind blew the Amazon off course, where it ran aground at Cape Breton Island at the northern tip of Nova Scotia. The extensive damage led the crew to abandon ship, and four days later the wreckage was hauled off by a salvager.

But the Amazon wasn’t finished just yet. After being sold to a local businessman and restored to sailing condition, it was moved to New York City, where it became part of a merchant fleet owned by a man named James Winchester. Oh, and they changed the ship’s name, too. No longer would it be called the Amazon. Instead, it would be the Mary Celeste. The first job for the newly-restored ship was to carry a cargo of over 17,000 barrels of denatured alcohol, a type of ethanol that’s been coloured and made toxic to discourage consumption. The ship’s owners brought on a man named Benjamin Briggs as captain and allowed him to hire a crew of seven experienced sailors, and then they began to plan the route to Genoa on the north-western coast of Italy. Captain Briggs was so confident in his ship and crew that he brought his wife, Sarah, along, as well as his son Arthur and daughter Sophia. Together with the crew, they all settled in to the Mary Celeste, and left port on November 7th of 1872. It was the last time any of them were seen alive.

A week later, on November 15th, another ship left the same harbour in New York. The Dei Gratia was captained by a man named David Morehouse, and depending on the sources you accept as reliable, he was a casual acquaintance of Benjamin Briggs. Their destination was Gibraltar, located at the southern tip of Spain, where the Mediterranean Sea meets the Atlantic, and it was route that placed them on roughly the same line as the Mary Celeste. A month later, on December 4th, the Dei Gratia was off the coast of Portugal, when someone spotted a ship about six miles away. As they drew closer to it, everyone could make out the name on its stern. It was the Mary Celeste. From a distance, they noticed a few key details – the sails were in poor condition, some of the deck hatches were wide open, and the lifeboat was missing. Morehouse ordered two of his crew to row over and investigate. They found the interior cabins to be wet and disorderly, as if a storm had blown through, and Captain Briggs’ sword was discovered beneath a bed. The ship’s compass was damaged, and the cargo hold was filled with about 3ft of water. It was chaos and disorder – but not entirely.

While the hold had taken on water, all of the valuable cargo was still onboard, ruling out pirates, and the ship’s kitchen was neat and orderly, too, with no signs that anyone rushed out unprepared. After searching the whole ship, nothing else alarming could be found. The crew and passengers had simply vanished. In the end, Morehouse decided to bring the ship with him to Gibraltar, where he might be able to earn a potion of its salvage price. It took another week, but eventually the Mary Celeste arrived in port, bringing its mysterious journey to an end. But at least one abandoned ship in the past managed to evade capture entirely. It slipped from their grasp and drifted away, leaving its owners wondering if they would ever see it again, and in doing so, they taught everyone involved a valuable lesson: the only thing more mysterious than a ghost ship is one that keeps coming back.

 When it comes to abandoned ships, few have drifted into the minds of sailors like the story of the SS Baychimo. It was a 1300-ton steamer built in 1914, and for many years it served in the merchant fleet of the Hudson Bay Company, but that’s not where it started out. It seems the Baychimo had actually been a German vessel for its first few months in the water, running the trade route between Germany and Sweden, where the company that operated it was located. But when World War I ended, part of Germany’s reparation agreement included making amends for the loss of ships suffered by other countries, and the Baychimo was given to the United Kingdom. It was there in western Scotland that the Hudson Bay Company took ownership, and because the Baychimo was equipped with a powerful steam engine and a thick, steel hull, it was assigned a route between Scotland and northern Canada, where it picked up animal pelts in exchange for goods that were unavailable to the Inuit communities who lived there.

It wasn’t always an easy trip, though. In 1928, the ship ran aground in Camden Bay in northern Alaska. Thankfully, it was undamaged and moved back into the water, keeping the Hudson Bay Company from losing the cargo. But when it comes to the constant barrage of dangers from the sea, it’s impossible to dodge all the bullets. Three years later, in October of 1931, the Baychimo got caught in heavy ice in the waters north of Alaska, bringing the massive steamer to a halt. The crew initially abandoned ship, but when the ice began to break up, they happily returned. A week later, though, it happened again, this time further out from land. To save the crew, the Hudson Bay Company sent an aeroplane out to rescue them. When the plane arrived, all 37 crew members exited the ship for the last time. Only 22 were able to fit on the aircraft, so the other 15 stayed between to wait for a second flight. A few days later, a powerful snow storm brought whiteout conditions, and when it was over, the ship was gone, sunk by the heavy ice, no doubt. But it hadn’t. A few days later, the ship was spotted in a new location, and the remaining crew were able to board it and remove the valuable cargo in case tragedy finally did catch up with it. And then they left, abandoning the Baychimo to the ice and harsh conditions and kicking off a string of sightings that earnt it a powerful reputation as an Alaskan ghost ship.

In March of 1932, a man named Leslie Melvin was guiding his dog sled team along the coast on his way back to the city of Nome in western Alaska. As he looked up from the sled at the scenery around him, his eye was drawn to the ocean, and he spotted something. It was the Baychimo, floating peacefully without power up the coast. Later that summer, a trading party spotted the ghost ship further north, off the coast of Wainwright, and they actually managed to board the vessel. When they discovered it was empty, though, they exited and went on their way. In March of 1933, a group of Athabaskans, part of the indigenous community in Alaska, also boarded the ghost ship, only to be trapped inside it for ten days while the winter storm cut them off from land. I can’t begin to imagine what it must have been like to be inside in the dark with all the unidentifiable sounds that come with being aboard a ship trapped in the ice and wind. As the months went on, more and more rumours spread out, trickling through each of the nearby Hudson Bay Company outposts like water through a network of pipes.

There was a July, 1934 sighting by a team of scientific explorers, as well as multiple reports in September of 1935 from further up north. It was clear that the Baychimo had not gone away for good, and it was out there, haunting the shores and waiting for someone to capture it. The last time the ship was boarded was in November of 1939, eight years after it had first disappeared. A captain by the name of Hugh Polson brought his whole crew onboard, hoping to either be able to get the ship running again, or at least tow it to port, where it could be salvaged for its valuable materials. But the longer they stayed on the ship, the more ominous and oppressive it felt. When the ice began to build up around them, they panicked and headed back to their own vessel, leaving the ghost ship to fend for itself. No one boarded the Baychimo ever again.

 The idea of ghost ships is one that we’ve held onto for a very long time, whether it’s the ancient tales of ships like the Caleuche of Chiloé Island or the Flying Dutchman of Europe, or newer ones such as the Valencia of Vancouver Island and the Governor Parr, near Nova Scotia. It seems no matter what we do, we can’t escape the stories. Ghost ships, it seems, are here to stay, and they’ve become one of the most popular bits of folklore too, drifting their way into film, television and books over the past couple of centuries. We see glimpses of those legends in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, an epic poem from 1798 by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and The Pirates of the Caribbean films have their own interpretation. It’s impossible to say how long we’ve been telling their stories, but it’s clear that we’ll never really stop. The Mary Celeste has had quite an impact all on its own, too. Since the events surrounding its abandonment in 1872, whispered versions of the story have spread all throughout pop culture. It’s been subject of multiple films, novels and television episodes. It’s even appeared in the British sci-fi series Doctor Who.

Ghost ships have proven themselves to be a thing that simply won’t go away. They may drift off into the fog for a little while, but eventually, when we least expect it, they will make their return, appearing in some new context or location. And no legend backs up that dependability like the SS Baychimo. The ship was spotted off and on over the years that followed its abandonment, making the first eight years of its story something of a mystery, and that’s how it went, decade after decade, until one final sighting was reported in 1969, almost 40 years after the original crew had been rescued. After that, the authorities lost track of the ship once more, and to this day no one is quite sure where it might be. Perhaps the ice finally won, and its resting on the ocean floor, or maybe it’s just drifting a bit too far outside normal shipping routes to be spotted. In our modern world of satellite imagery and commercial air travel, one would think it would be easy to find, but so far, we’ve had no luck. Like many of the ghost ships found in folklore, the Baychimo had come to represent equal parts hope and despair. It shows us just how much is possible when it comes to abandoned ships and their longevity, making it clear that not all that is lost is gone forever. But it also reminds us that real life can sometimes be a bit more frustrating than we’d like. Just because we want the answers, doesn’t mean we’ll always get them.

Tales of ghostly ships that never seem to go away are one of the most attractive and popular stories for lovers of the strange and the unusual, and I hope you enjoyed your voyage onboard many of the better-known ones today. But there’s one more story that doesn’t get told enough, and it adds a new twist to a classic legend. I’ll tell you all about it right after this short sponsor break.

[Sponsor break from The Great Courses Plus, Audible and Squarespace]

The Ellen Austin was a three-mast schooner. It slid off the shipyard and into the cold Atlantic waters, way back in 1854 under the ownership of one Captain Tucker. Back then, Maine was the place to be if you wanted timber for building, and it had been for centuries. Prior to the Revolutionary War, there was a constant flow of resources headed back to England, but now, local ship builders up on the coast of Maine were getting rich making new vessels for wealthy owners, and the Tuckers were one such group. I could tell you about how large the ship was, how it was over 200ft long and weighed in at 1800 tons, and I could tell you how it was sold a few years later, in 1857, but the most important thing to know about the Ellen Austin is that it was very good at making the trip between London and America. Actually, 1857 really wasn’t a good year for the crew of that ship. In February of that year, a report was published in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle that claimed the current captain, William Garrick, had been using violence to abuse and control his men. It seemed he had a temper and tended to take his anger out on anyone near him.

A few months later, in July of 1857, the ship left Liverpool full of passengers and began headed towards New York City. But along the way, a wave of smallpox broke out on the ship, and it had to be quarantined so that the sick could be taken care of. Five months later, it happened again. The Ellen Austin didn’t just travel to New York City, though. In the late 1860s, it was making trips to San Francisco, although after a number of accidents that involved running into other ships, it was eventually repaired and brought back to the east coast. Through most of the 1870s, it was back to that standard London-New York route. And then something changed in December of 1880. The ship had been sold to new owners some time that year, and had been sent on a journey further south, toward Florida and the Caribbean, which is where something rather strange happened to them. Off in the distance, they spotted another ship, but it wasn’t moving. The captain at the time was a bright fellow who was very aware that pirates often used tactics like this to their advantage – pretend the ship was empty, wait for another ship to come closer, and then pounce. So, instead of approaching the mysterious vessel, they lowered their sails and set a watch on it.

After two days of vigilant observation, the captain of the Ellen Austin decided that it was safe to approach. Once on board, they discovered that the vessel had, in fact, been abandoned. The cargo was still intact and safe, and there seemed to be a full supply of food rations, but if the former crew had left because of some emergency, there didn’t seem to be any sign of it onboard. They were just… gone. So, the captain assigned a small party of his crew to get the ship ready to sail, and then the pair of vessels left the area together, headed for London to cash in on their newly salvaged prize. Only, the weather had other ideas. A storm blew in three days later and the two ships became separated. Looking back, we now know that it was a large hurricane that was headed towards the southern portion of the United States, but to the crew of the Ellen Austin, it was just frustration. They had lost sight of the other ship.

The captain ordered the ship to turn around and search the area. It took them days, but finally they spotted the missing ship off in the distance. Relieved that they would be reunited with their prize and the fellow crew members who were operating it, they sailed toward it. But even from a distance, things didn’t look right. The captain of the Ellen Austin hailed the other ship, hoping his men had safely weathered the storm, but surprisingly, no one replied. So, they approached the lifeless vessel and boarded it, guns drawn in case of pirates. What they found, though, defied explanation. Everything seemed just as they had found it days earlier. The valuable cargo was still in the hold, safe and sound, the store of food was still untouched, and the beds all seemed to have been unused. And yet nowhere on the ship could they find any sign of the small crew they had transferred over. The men were gone.

Over the years, new details have been added to this story. Some claim that the captain ordered a second team to pilot the ship home, only to have fog separate them again, resulting in yet another lost crew, but that story comes to use from a naval officer who wrote about it in the 1930s, and there doesn’t seem to be much proof of it outside of that. Still, it’s a fantastic tale that takes the notion of a ghost ship and turns it around in a way that defies explanation, and it also reminds us of just how unpredictable and mysterious life on the open sea really can be. We humans love the predictable, we love consistency and dependability and being able to count on life going a certain way. We build our sense of security and safety around the notion that everything will be okay. But once we set our oars in the ocean or raise our sails and travel to distant lands over treacherous waves, it becomes clear that we’ve stepped into a whole new world that is outside of our control. We might fight it or try and plan against it, but in the end, we are completely at its mercy, because we can never be fully prepared for a sea of change.

[Closing statements]

[loretranscripts]

Episode 33: A Dead End (Further Reading)

This is in no way an official source list used by Aaron Mahnke, but is more meant to be a starting point meant for anyone wanting to dig further into any particular topic.

Pocahontas Parkway:

[Article] Ghosts roamed Varina parkway (Other articles are available on Google, but being in England I couldn’t access them)

General Richmond History:

[Wikipedia] Richmond, Virginia [Wikipedia] History of Richmond, Virginia  [Encyclopaedia Britannica] Richmond [Video] Richmond Remembers 200 Years

Belle Isle:

[Wikipedia] Belle Isle (Richmond, Virginia) [Article] Ruins of Belle Isle [Article] Belle Isle Prison

Wrexham Hall:

[Wikipedia] Lady in Red (ghost) [Article] Haunted Chesterfield [Article] History: That was Then: Wrexham Hall

Hollywood Cemetery:

[Wikipedia] Hollywood Cemetery (Richmond, Virginia) [Website] Hollywood Cemetery [Article] Hollywood Cemetery [Article] Dude, Richmond's Hollywood Cemetery Is Totally Haunted [Article] The Ghosts of Richmond’s Hollywood Cemetery

Byrd Theatre: 

[Wikipedia] Byrd Theatre [Article] Byrd Theatre [Video] The Byrd Theatre : Haunted History

The Richmond Vampire:

[Wikipedia] Richmond Vampire [Video] Legendary Monsters: Richmond Vampire and Hollywood Cemetery [Article] This Creepy Tale Of Vampires In Virginia Is Sure To Give You Nightmares [Article] Richmond Vampire [Article] W.W. Pool: The Richmond Vampire? [Article] The Richmond Vampire

[loretranscripts]

The Aberdeen Bestiary (x, x, x, x, x)

[loretranscripts]

The Fiji Mermaid (x)

[loretranscripts]

Lore Episode 33: A Dead End (Transcript) - 2nd May, 2016

tw: gore

Disclaimer: This transcript is entirely non-profit and fan-made. All credit for this content goes to Aaron Mahnke, creator of Lore podcast. It is by a fan, for fans, and meant to make the content of the podcast more accessible to all. Also, there may be mistakes, despite rigorous re-reading on my part. Feel free to point them out, but please be nice!

When the trucker pulled up to the toll booth on Route 895 in Virginia, it was the middle of the night, and the look on his face was one of confusion and fear. The toll booth attendant listened to the man’s story and then sent him on his way. The state highway there is referred to as the Pocahontas Parkway, so maybe the man’s story was just a play on the name’s motif, but when the highway department received more than few phone calls that night from distressed motorists, each telling essentially the same story, the authorities began to take notice. What the trucker saw, what all of them claimed to have seen, was a small group of Native Americans standing in the grass between the east- and west-bound lanes of traffic near Mill Road. The trucker described them as standing motionless in the grass, each one holding a burning torch. He assumed they were picketing, of course – after all, the parkway is rumoured to cut through land that’s sacred to local Native American tribes – but the middle of the night didn’t seem like the right time for a peaceful protest. So, it didn’t sit well with him, or the others who claimed to see the very same thing. The Times Dispatch caught wind of the story and soon people were flocking to the Mill Street overpass to see if they, too, could catch a glimpse of the ghosts. And that’s what it all comes down to, isn’t it? We all want to see the ghosts, to witness history press it’s face against the glass of the present, to cheat reality, in a sense. Each year, thousands of people around the world claim that they, too, have seen a ghost. They tell their stories and pass along their goose-bumps like some communicable disease. But the reality is that, for most of us, we never see a thing. History is often nothing more than a distant memory. In some places, though, that history floats a bit closer to the surface. I’m Aaron Mahnke, and this is Lore.

 When the English arrived in what is now Virginia way back in 1607, they found the land heavily populated by the original inhabitants of the region. The English called them the Powhatan, although that was just the name of their leader. If you don’t recognise his name that’s understandable, but everyone certainly remembers his daughter, Pocahontas. Before Richmond was… Richmond, the land where it now stands was an important Powhatan settlement. In 1607, a party from Jamestown travelled inland and claimed the location as their own. Possession of the land bounced back and forth between the Native Americans and the English for years, but it was finally in 1737 that the tribes lost, and Richmond was born.

Early on, Richmond played host to important figures in the American Revolution against England. Patrick Henry, the man who shouted: “Give me liberty, or give me death”, did so from St. John’s Church, right there in Richmond. And in the middle of the Revolutionary War, Thomas Jefferson served as the governor of Virginia out of the city. Less than a century later, Richmond became a key city in the Confederacy, as the American Civil War tore the country apart. From its munitions factory and railroad system to the seat of the new government under Jefferson Davis, it was a powerful city, and rightly so – and at the centre of it all is Belle Isle. It sits right there in the James River, between Hollywood Cemetery to the north and Forest Hill to the south. It’s easy to overlook on a map, but far from being an afterthought, Belle Isle is actually home to some of the most painful memories in the history of the city.

Before the English arrived and Captain John Smith stood atop the rocks there, Belle Isle belonged to the Powhatan. Shortly after the English took control of it late in the early 1700s it was a fishery, and then, in 1814, the Old Dominion Iron and Nail Company built a factory there. Positioned on the river with the strong current never tiring, it was the perfect location to harness the power of the water. As the ironworks grew, so did its footprint. The factory expanded, a village was built around it, and even a general store popped up to serve the hundreds of people who called the island home. But they wouldn’t be the only ones to live there. In 1862, Confederate forces moved onto the island and began to fortify it. Their plan was to use the isolated island as a prison camp and began to transport Union captives there by the thousands. Over the three years it was in operation, the prison played host to over 30,000 Union soldiers, sometimes over 10,000 at a time. The crowded space and resentful feelings between Confederate and Union ideals led to deplorable conditions.

In 1882, after living with memories of the prison camp for nearly two decades, New York cavalry officer William H. Wood wrote to the editor of the National Tribune with his observations. “Many froze to death during the winter,” he wrote, “others were tortured in the most barbarous manner. I’ve seen men put astride a wooden horse such as masons use, say, 5ft high, with their feet tied to stakes in the ground, and left there for an hour or more on a cold, winter morning. Often their feet would freeze and burst open.” He also wrote of their lack of food. “A lieutenant’s dog,” he wrote, “was once enticed over the bank and taken into an old tent, where it was killed and eaten raw. Your humble servant had a piece of it. For this act of hungry men, the entire camp was kept out of rations all day.” There were only a few wooden shacks to house the prisoners, so they lived out their days completely exposed to the elements – blistering heat, freezing cold, rain and frost, and all of it contributed to the suffering of the men who were held there. Estimates vary depending on the source, but it’s thought that nearly half of those that were brought to the camp – that’s close to 15,000 – never left alive.

Today, Belle Isle is a public park, but it’s haunted by a dark past, and by those who lived and died there long ago. You can’t see their ghosts, but you can certainly feel them. It’s a heavy place. Those who visit the island claim to have felt its dark past in the air like the stifling heat of an iron forge. But there are other places in Richmond that are said to be haunted. Unlike Belle Isle, though, these locations aren’t in ruins, or nearly forgotten by the living. They’re right in the middle of everyday life, and each one has a unique story to tell. They have their own past, and according to those who have been there, it can still be seen.

 Technically, Wrexham Hall is in Chesterfield County, just south of Richmond, but when you speak to people about the city’s deep, haunting past, it’s always brought up as a perfect example of local lore, and while it doesn’t have a large number of stories to tell, what it does offer is chilling enough. The house was built at the end of the 18th century by Archibald Walthall, who left the home to his daughters, Polly and Susannah. It was Susannah who later sold her childhood home, but because there was always risk that the property might be used for future construction, she required that the new owners at least preserve the family graveyard. Time and the elements, though, have allowed the site of the burial ground to slip from memory, and according to some, that’s why Susannah has returned to Wrexham Hall, perhaps in an effort to make sure some piece of the past is still remembered.

Many years after her death, the home was owned by a man named Stanley Hague. He and a handful of other men had been working in the field near the house when they looked up to see a woman in a red dress sitting on the front porch. They all saw her, and even commented to each other about it. It was hard to miss that bright red against the white home. Later, when Stanley headed home from work, he asked his wife if her mother had been on the porch that day. No, she told him, she’d been away all day in Richmond.

In Hollywood Cemetery, just north of Belle Isle, there are other stories afoot. The graveyard was established in 1849 and is the final resting place of a number of important figures – former US presidents James Monroe and John Tyler, along with Confederate president Jefferson Davis. There are also two Supreme Court Justices buried there, along with 22 confederate generals and over 18,000 troops. The soldiers are honoured with an enormous stone pyramid that reaches up beyond the tree tops, and even though no one is buried beneath it, there have been several reports of moans heard coming from the stones. Others have claimed to have felt cold spots near the base. But it’s really a grave nearby that’s the site of the most activity there. This grave belongs to a little girl who died at the age of three from a childhood illness, and standing beside her tombstone is a large, cast iron dog. According to the local legend, the dog once stood outside her father’s grocery store, but when she passed away in 1862, it was moved to her grave to look after her. That might not be completely accurate, though. In the early 1860s, many iron objects were melted down to be used for military purposes, so the dog was most likely moved to the cemetery as a way of protecting it, but that hasn’t stopped the stories – stories that include visions of a little girl playing near the grave, or the sound of barking in the middle of the night.

Nearby, on Cary Street, is the old, historic Byrd Theatre. It was built in 1928 and named after the founder of Richmond himself, William Byrd. The space inside is enormous – it can seat over 900 on the lower level and another 400 or so in the balcony, and it’s up there that some of the oddest experiences have taken place. When the theatre opened its doors in December of 1928, Robert Coulter was the manager, and he continued to serve in that role all the way up until 1971, when he passed away. For over four decades, he was a permanent fixture in the theatre, often found sitting in his favourite seat up to one side of the balcony, and if we believe the stories, Robert never left. The current manager has been told by a number of people that they’ve all seen a tall man in a suit, sitting in the balcony at times when no one else was up there. Others have physically felt someone pass by them while operating the projector. The former manager has even been seen on more than one occasion by employees locking the front doors at night, as if he were coming out to help them. The stories that are whispered about places like Byrd Theatre aren’t alone. There are dozens of locations across the city that claim unusual activity and equally eerie stories, but none can claim to have played host to a flesh and blood monster. None, that is, except for one.

 In 1875, the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway Company was looking to connect some track in Richmond to another spur 75 miles to the south. Newport News was down that way, and that meant ocean and shipping. It was a gamble to make their railroad more profitable in the wake of the Industrial Revolution and its increasing demand for things like coal, something mined in western Virginia. Part of the new railway line would cut through Richmond, near Jefferson Park, and it was decided that a tunnel would be constructed for the track to pass through. Trains would enter on 18th Street and then exit 4000ft later on the eastern end, near 31st Street. It was one of those ideas that sounded perfect on paper. Reality, though, had a few complications to throw at them. Richmond sits on a geological foundation of clay, as opposed to the bedrock found in other parts of the state. It’s the kind of soil that changes consistency depending on the season and weather. Rainy months lead to more ground water, and that swells the clay. Dry months cause the opposite. As you can imagine, it’s difficult to build on ground that constantly changes density. Even during construction, there were a number of cave-ins. Between the project’s inception in 1875 and its completion six years later, at least ten men died while working in the tunnel. Even after it was open, water had a tendency to seep in and cause problems, something that went on for decades.

Around 1901, though, alternative routes were created, and the Church Hill Tunnel was used less and less. But when the railroad wanted to increase capacity in 1925, they remembered the old tunnel, and began work to bring it up to modern standards. Maybe now, they thought, they could do it right. By the autumn of 1925, the tunnel was playing host to a crew of brave men, supported by a work train powered by steam. They were slowly making their way along the length of the tunnel, making repairs, improving the engineering and hopefully making the tunnel safe for future use. But even after claiming so many lives decades before, the tunnel didn’t seem to be done just yet.

On October 2nd, while doing what they’d been doing for weeks, dozens of men were working inside the tunnel when the ceiling collapsed. Most escaped, but five men were trapped inside, buried alive. And to make matters worse, the steam engine exploded from the weight of the debris pressed down on it, filling the tunnel with steam and dust, eventually contributing to even further collapse. According to the story as it’s told today, something did, in fact, walk out of the tunnel – but it wasn’t human. They say it was a hulking creature, covered in strips of decaying flesh, with sharp teeth and a crazed look in its eye. And because witnesses reported that blood was flowing from its mouth, many have since referred to it as the Richmond Vampire. No one could explain why the creature was there. Some suggested that it had been attracted to the carnage and had come to feed. They say that’s why the early rescue attempts only found one of the five missing men, still seated at the control of the work train. There was no other sign of the other victims of the tragedy, though, so some suggest that perhaps the vampire had something to do with that. Witnesses say that the creature fled out the eastern end of the tunnel, past the gathering crowd of workers, and then made its way south to Hollywood Cemetery. Some of the workmen who had managed to escape the collapse and witnessed the creature’s getaway were able to make chase, following it through the graveyard for a distance. Then, they claimed, it slipped into one of the tombs, the final resting place of a man named W. W. Pool.

Pool, it turns out, was a relatively unknown accountant who had died just three years prior. According to the local legend, this made sense – the blood on the mouth, the jagged teeth, the return to the mausoleum. All of it pointed to one, undeniable fact that quickly spread across the city as one of the premier legends of Richmond. Pool was, of course, a vampire. It’s said that people returned to the cemetery for many nights, each one eagerly waiting to see if the vampire would emerge from its hiding place once more, but there were no other stories to tell us what happened next. If the Richmond Vampire had been active before the Church Hill tunnel incident, it seems he had gone into retirement immediately after it. Like many tales of local lore, this story ends on an unsatisfying note. Just as the mysterious creature’s trail from the collapsed tunnel finally ended in the shadowy doorway of a cold mausoleum, the story of what happened seems to end in shadows as well. Much like the tunnel itself, it was now nothing more than a dead end.

 A funny thing happens somewhere between real life events in the past and the stories we tell each other around the campfire or dining room table. Much like the true and tried telephone game, where the message is passed from person to person through a long chain of possession, these old stories shift and change. The change is never visible. They adapt to a new culture, or take on elements that are only relevant to a particular generation, but after decades, sometimes even centuries, these stories stand before us transformed, which is the difference between history and folklore, after all. History, there’s a paper trail, a clear image of the original that time and distance has more difficult time eroding. Folklore is like water, forever shifting to fit the crevice as the rock breaks down. Richmond is an old city by the standards of most Americans. Yes, there are older places on the east coast, but it has a storied history that makes it feel almost timeless – Jamestown, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War and the Confederacy. American history would be lacking something essential without the role Richmond has played through it all. Some of that history is unchanged, but some, it seems, has undergone deep transformation over the years, and a prime example of that is the story of the Richmond Vampire.

The collapsed tunnel and the train inside are all fact. There have even been modern day efforts to rescue the train car inside and clear the rubble, but the tunnel is now flooded with the same ground water that made it unstable in the first place. The events that happened on that dark, October day in 1925 were real, though – at least to a degree. A lone survivor did crawl from the wreckage, as the story tells us. His teeth were sharp and his mouth was bloody. Even his skin, hanging from his body like wet linen bandages, is documented fact. But the survivor had a name – Benjamin Mosby. He was a 28-year-old employee of the railroad and was described as big and strong. At the moment of the accident, he’d been standing in front of the train’s open coal door, shirt off, covered in sweat, and shovelling fuel into the fire. When the tunnel collapsed, the boiler burst under the pressure, washing Mosby in a flood of scalding water. But he somehow survived, crawled free from the rock and twisted metal, and walked to safety. He died the following day at the local hospital, and it was his appearance, with bloody, broken teeth and skin boiled from his body in ribbons, that fuelled the story we still whisper today. It’s almost cliché to say it, but it’s true – sometimes the real-life events that birth the legend turn out to be more frightening and horrific than any folktale could ever be.

[Closing Statements]

[loretranscripts]

Episode 130: In Plain Sight (Further Reading)

 This is in no way an official source list used by Aaron Mahnke, but is more meant to be a starting point meant for anyone wanting to dig further into any particular topic.

Samuel Barrett Edes’ Mermaid  

[Wikipedia] Fiji mermaid [Article] The Feejee Mermaid: Early Barnum Hoax [Article] The Fiji Mermaid: What Was the Abominable Creature and Why Was It So Popular? [Article] The Feejee Mermaid [Article] What Exactly is a Fiji Mermaid? [Video] Fiji Mermaid at Ripley's Believe It or Not! London 

Pliny the Elder

[Wikipedia] Pliny the Elder [Wikipedia] Natural History (Pliny) [Encyclopaedia Britannica] Pliny the Elder [Book] Natural History  Bestiaries

[Wikipedia] Bestiary [Website] The Medieval Bestiary: Animals in the Middle Ages [Article] Beastly tales from the medieval bestiary [Article] The Bestiary [Article] An Introduction to the Bestiary, Book of Beasts in the Medieval World [Article] 20 Bizarre Beasts From Ancient Bestiaries [Encyclopaedia Britannica] Bestiary 

The Basilisk of Warsaw 

[Wikipedia] Basilisk [Article] Basilisk [Article] On the Trail of the Warsaw Basilisk [Article] The Warsaw Basilisk [Video] Warsaw Legends: The Basilisk

Jesus Christ Lizard/Basilisk

[Wikipedia] Common basilisk [National Geographic] Green Basilisk Lizard [BBC] Jesus Christ lizard runs on water

Komodo Island:

[Blog post] The famous Komodo dragon: facts and legend [Blog post] Dragon Tales [Article] INDONESIA: Here be dragons- History, Myth and Folklore of the Komodo Dragon [Article] A Legend of Dragons and Princesses [News report] The fight for Dragon Island

[loretranscripts]

Lore Episode 130: In Plain Sight (Transcript) - 25th November 2019

tw: none

Disclaimer: This transcript is entirely non-profit and fan-made. All credit for this content goes to Aaron Mahnke, creator of Lore podcast. It is by a fan, for fans, and meant to make the content of the podcast more accessible to all. Also, there may be mistakes, despite rigorous re-reading on my part. Feel free to point them out, but please be nice!

In early winter of 1822, Captain Samuel Barrett Edes became a hero. He was sailing in the south-east Pacific when he and his crew encountered a Dutch ship that was in trouble. Edes managed to save every single one of the Dutch soldiers, and then headed for the city of Batavia, known today as Jakarta, to drop them off and see if a reward could be collected. While he waited, he did some shopping. Now, Edes wasn’t rich by any stretch of the imagination, but he owned a small portion of the ship he sailed and of course, he was expecting a handsome reward for his heroic efforts. With this in mind, he kept an eye open for something unusual and conversation-worthy to take home, and that’s when he saw it. It was a mummified mermaid. It was over two feet long, had the curved tail one might find on a fish, but the upper body of something much more human in shape. It was brown from the preservation process, wrinkled with age and entirely addictive to look at, and Captain Edes knew instantly that he had to own it. In late January of 1822, he did something bold. He sold the ship he did not fully own and used the proceeds to buy the mermaid. Then he found transportation back to London and put the odd creature on display, because just about everyone who saw it believed that it was real.

Of course, there were those who could see through the hoax. Captain Edes had been fooled by a clever craftsman who had sewn the torso of an orangutan onto the lower half of a large salmon. Elements were added to the face and hands to give it a more humanlike appearance, but those with training in natural science and anatomy could spot the hidden clues that gave it all away. That didn’t matter to most people, though. The idea that mermaids could be real had been around for centuries, so when something as powerful as a mummified specimen floated into their world, they were blind to its flaws and impossibility. They wanted to believe, deep down inside, that the hybrids of folklore actually existed. Today, we know a lot more about our world than we used to, but if we were to go back in time and live through a less learned age, we would be amazed at the stories that await us, tales of creatures that sit at the very edge of our imagination, living things that defy logic, and monsters that inspire wonder. Our hearts want to believe while our minds are ready to move on. Instead, what we tend to feel is a mixture of deep curiosity and primal fear, and if the tales from the past are any indication, there’s a good reason why. I’m Aaron Mahnke, and this is Lore.

 When we talk about the natural world, the very first thing we need to do is gain some perspective. Today, we live in a technologically rich society. We carry supercomputers in our pockets that are more powerful than the ones that sent the first humans to the moon. We can walk past an intriguing part of our neighbourhood, pull out our phones and look at a satellite map or do a search for more information. We’re still hungry people, curious and drawn to unanswered questions, but rather than starving in a house with little food, we feast each day on a never-ending buffet of answers and information. Today, if you want to know something, chances are good you can learn about it in an instant, but hundreds of years ago, that was an impossibility. Not that people didn’t try, though. 2000 years ago, a Roman named Gaius Plinius Secundus attempted to gather everything knowable into one place, and he did an admirable job considering the world he lived in. Gaius was born into a wealthy Roman family in the year 24AD and followed a path of privilege all the way to the top. He was well educated, well connected, and when he entered the Roman military, he quickly rose to the second highest level possible – the equestrian order. Once out of the military, he served as a lawyer, before being assigned various governorships around the empire, and towards the end of his life, he had the privilege to serve as advisor to two different emperors. Today, we know him as Pliny the Elder, but in his day, Gaius was a success story.

Looking back, his biggest legacy was his 37 volume collection of knowledge called Natural History. It was possibly the world’s first encyclopaedia, gathering everything known about a whole array of subjects, from farming and botany to geography and anthropology, but the most influential contribution, filling up volumes seven through 11, were his writings on zoology, the study of all living creatures. But here’s the thing – Pliny the Elder, like everyone else in his society, lacked the proper tools to dig deep and apply hard science to every creature he wrote about. He also lacked the ability to travel and see each animal he described, so he relied heavily on others, like Aristotle’s Historia Animalium and the writings of Eratosthenes and Hipparchus, and that meant his collection was less than perfect. How so? Well, his work on zoology included such amazing animals as dragons, mermen, and even something called a blemmyae, a race of hairy, human-like beings who literally had no head on their shoulders, with eyes and a mouth right in the middle of their chest. Pliny was thorough, for sure, but not very discerning with his source material.

But what his work did do was give birth to something a lot of people have heard of, a type of book known as a bestiary. It took a while for their availability to spread, but by the early middle ages, bestiaries were a common enough resource. They were, at the basic level, books about known animals, typically with colourful drawings to help the reader visualise the specific details of each entry, and over the centuries, some editions became more popular than others. One of the most famous is the Aberdeen Bestiary, an illuminated manuscript that dates back to the 12th century. Aside from being a beautiful example of medieval artwork – and I mean that, you should seriously do an internet search for sample pages – the Aberdeen Bestiary is also a powerful example of just how popular these books really were. It’s filled with images of all sorts of animals, along with rocks, fish, trees and even worms, and a lot of the entries in the manuscript include notes about the nature of the thing in question, making it a valuable reference tool for any budding naturalist. But these bestiaries did more than that – they inspired the popular culture of their day.

England’s King John, who reigned from 1177 to 1216 was said to have a copy of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History in his personal collection, and John’s son and successor, King Henry III, even used images from it to decorate one of the chambers at Westminster. As their popularity spread, more and more writers got in on the tradition. The Norman poet Philip de Thaun wrote a bestiary about a generation after William the Conqueror invaded England, and it became a gift for King Henry II’s wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine. Even Leonardo da Vinci made one. It seems if you were an intelligent person in the middle ages or the Renaissance, making your own bestiary was practically a rite of passage – and let’s be honest, colourful manuscripts filled with unbelievable creatures and animals that defied logic couldn’t not be popular. Humans have this innate desire to look at curious things. We’ve always been rubberneckers, straining to take a long, hard look at things that sit outside our normal experience, and the spread of bestiaries is proof of that. But those ancient books and manuscripts also teach us something else about ourselves. Human beings are creative creatures. When faced with a mysterious gap in our knowledge, we’re more likely to invent something to plug the hole than to leave the question unanswered – and what we’ve come up with is equal parts entertaining and downright terrifying.

 I mentioned earlier how the internet and the accessibility of powerful devices has given us an edge over our predecessors, and in a lot of ways that’s true. Yes, we have access to a huge majority of our collective knowledge, but not all of it. In fact, there are still things we don’t know. For example, scientists today believe that there are roughly 8.7 million animal species on this planet, and yet 86% of the ones that would live on land still haven’t been discovered or studied, and it’s even worse inside our oceans, where over 90% of life is still a mystery to us. We know a lot, yes, but our world is massive and diverse, and that makes the learning process slow and tedious. Some animals are also a bit harder to track down, they’re less abundant or more shy, and so it’s made studying them more of a challenge. A good example is the platypus. For a very long time, scientists thought the descriptions of it were nothing more than a hoax. I mean, it was rumoured in 1799 to be a hybrid of a duck and a water rat, part mammal and part bird, with venomous spurs that could kill a dog, and while we’ve learnt more about them over the years, the platypus is still an allusive creature. A recent documentarian was able to get what he considered to be a goldmine of actual footage of the animal, amounting to about 30 seconds, and when only half a minute of film is something to celebrate, you know the animal is hard to study.

Of course, while we’re searching for new species, the ones we do know about are slowly dying off, which doesn’t help. Some estimates place the number of species on the edge of extinction at around 20,000, and more get added to that list all the time. For the medieval writers of bestiaries, this would be their worst nightmare. All those creatures belong in their books, and yet they keep slipping away. But at the same time, not being able to see an animal never really stopped those ancient writers from including it in their catalogue of life on earth. In fact, there are a lot of entries that would cause most people to scratch their heads, because while, yes, we’ve grown in our understanding of the world around us, these bestiaries serve as a time capsule of our gullibility. As far back as Pliny the Elder’s collection on natural history, we can see those less believable creatures pop up. He once wrote that thousands of sea-nymphs known as neriads had washed up on the shores of what is modern day France, and that they looked just like the nymphs of the land, except that they were covered in fish scales. He also wrote about that fiery bird of legend known as the phoenix, which was known to burst into flames before re-emerging from its own ashes. And of course, I’ve already mentioned his fascination with mermen and blemmyae. It seems that Pliny the Elder had an obsession with gathering all known creatures, whether or not he had witnessed them with his own eyes.

Other historians added their own contributions to those mystical lists as well, and if I ran through it for you now, it would sound like a recap of the Harry Potter series. Hippos and elephants shared the same space as hippogriffs and mandrakes. There were dragons and tritons, giants and sea monsters. Honestly, it sometimes seemed that if a young child could draw a picture of it, that was good enough to get it included. Of course, some creatures were more popular than others, and that popularity varied from culture to culture. In Europe, one of the most talked about creatures of all was also one of the smallest, but don’t let its size fool you, because there was nothing safe about the basilisk. Our old friend, Pliny the Elder, wrote about it 2000 years ago, describing it as a serpent with legs that was no larger than a foot in length. But what it lacked in size, it more than made up for with attitude and special features. A basilisk was said to stand tall on its back legs and had a crown-like plume on top of its head. And they were dangerous, too – according to the stories, basilisks were so poisonous that even looking at them could get you killed. Other creatures avoided the like the plague, and wherever they chose to make their nests, the plant life would die and wither away. One description I read said that if a man on horseback stabbed the basilisk with a spear, the poison was so powerful that it could climb up the spear, kill the man, and then kill the horse as well.

Of course, when something is that powerful and deadly, it eventually becomes the centrepiece of tales of valour. It’s said that Alexander the Great once killed a basilisk, and like many of the other legends about him, he did it in a way that proved not just his might but also his intelligence. It’s said that he polished his shield until it was like a mirror, and then approached the creature holding it outward. When the basilisk saw its own reflection, it fell victim to its poisonous gaze and instantly dropped dead. We can find images of the basilisk in just about every bestiary in existence, most of which look like a cross between a snake and a rooster. There’s a statue of one in Vienna, commemorating an 11th century hunt, and there’s even a church in Sweden with a carved relief showing St. Michael stabbing one with a spear. So popular was this creature that people sold powders that they claimed to be ground-up basilisk, something that most people purchased for use in alchemy, but more than a few used as an antidote to poison. Everywhere you look through the middle ages and earlier, the basilisk is waiting to rear its poisonous little head. You can see society’s attraction to it in their folklore and superstition, a mixture of fear and fascination, of wonder and disgust. For centuries, it popped up in stories whispered all around Europe, like a well-loved character in a popular book series. But if one account is any indication, it might not be a work of fiction after all.

 The people of Warsaw had a problem on their hands. They were two decades into a new political structure known as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and while it gave a lot of freedom to the wealthy and elite, it left the lower class in a constant state of fear and oppression. Life in the city was challenging for many people, but that was the new normal. In 1587, though, something happened to put the people of Warsaw on edge. Livestock in the area around an old, ruined building had begun to turn up dead. Even a few of the neighbouring residents had been found poisoned in their beds, washing over the community with a wave of grief and loss. And in the midst of all that confusion and pain, two of the neighbourhood children disappeared. Well, disappeared might not be the right word for it. Folks had seen the two young girls playing near the ruins, they had watched them laugh and skip and revel in the freedom and joy that came with childhood, most likely muttering quiet prayers that it would last as long as possible. The neighbours knew what sort of hard life awaited those girls once they were old enough to work and carry their own weight. Their joy must have been bittersweet.

And then someone watched them step inside the ruins. That was the first reason to worry. Folks avoided the ruins for a good reason – it was dark and dangerous, and the cellar beneath it had been a den for all sorts of animals. So, whoever it was that watched them disappear into the shadows most likely headed over to warn the girls’ parents. When everyone arrived at the ruins to call them out, though, they were no longer visible. While there was a good chance they had simply moved on to a new playground, someone decided to peer inside the dark cellar, and there, laying on the broken stone floor, were the sleeping forms of both girls. So, one of the older women stepped inside to wake them. A moment later, though, she collapsed into a heap beside the girls, sending the growing crowd into a panic. They didn’t know what was causing the people inside the cellar to lose consciousness, but they knew there was something dangerous about the dark space, so they sent for a fire hook – a long pole with a metal hook on the end – and then reached in and pulled each body out into the light. All three of them were dead, and not just dead – they were bloated and dark, as if they’d been dead for days. Most frightening of all, though, was that their eyes seemed to be protruding from their sockets. No one could be sure, but it almost looked as if they’d been frightened to death.

Wanting answers, they sent for Benedictus, the king’s very own physician. If anyone would have the skill to identify the danger, it would be him. And, sure enough, after taking a long look at the trio of bodies, he brought them a definitive answer. All of them had been killed by a basilisk. In an instant, the atmosphere around the old ruins changed. Newcomers came to watch, while leaders gathered to form a plan. Something had to be done, and just like the stories all of them had grown up with, it seemed that a basilisk hunt was in order, but the trouble was no one wanted to risk their lives by entering the cellar to kill it – not even Benedictus, who seemed to know the most about the creature. But they had an idea. A group of leaders from the community quickly headed to the local jail, where two men awaited execution for various capital crimes. Each man was given the same offer: come kill the basilisk, and you will receive a full pardon and your freedom as a reward. It seemed like an easy choice, too – inside jail, there was no chance of survival. Outside, though, there was at least the possibility they might survive. It made sense to everyone.

The first criminal declined the offer, but the other one, a man named Johann Faurer, agreed to help. He was escorted from the jail to the old ruins, where Benedictus awaited him with tools and instructions. The townsfolk had quickly gathered dozens of small mirrors and sewn them onto a pair of leather pants and a coat. I imagine Johann gave the old physician a sideways glance at the sheer ridiculousness of it all, but at the same time, he would have known the folklore just as well as everyone else. Alexander the Great had defeated a basilisk using a mirror-like shield, so why would it not work for him? With a crowd of over 2000 witnesses watching, Johann began to carefully walk into the ruins, where he entered the cellar. He had a long rake in one hand and a torch in the other, to light his way, and as soon as he stepped into the darkness below, he cried out that he could see it – a long, serpent-like tail, with a head that resembled that of a rooster, right down to the crown-like plumage. Benedictus called out instructions to the man. “Grab it with the rake,” he told him, “and then carry it out here into the light.” Johann shouted back that he understood, and the entire crowd began to shift and rumble. If a basilisk was going to be dragged out of the ruins, no one wanted to be around to see it, so they all ran for cover and hid their eyes. When Johann emerged, he held the writhing creature by the neck in one of his gloved hands. They daylight somehow made it weaker, and that gave Benedictus the courage to step closer and examine it. It looked exactly like the bestiaries of old had taught him – the body of a snake, four long legs and a head that looks very much like a rooster.

But sadly, this is where the account of the basilisk hunt ends. Whoever had been recording the events had most likely been in the crowd, and when Johann had begun to emerge from the cellar, they had followed the crowd into hiding, which leaves the ending a bit of a mystery. Who killed the creature, when all was said and done, and how did they do it, knowing the risks the old legends spoke of? What we do know is this: the Warsaw basilisk hunt of 1587 was the last time the creature was reported anywhere in Europe. Maybe it had been the last of its kind, and its death marked its extinction, or perhaps the few that survived had a knack for staying out of sight – like the platypus of Australia. Either way, all that was left from that moment on were legends and stories. Like so many creatures that have once walked the earth, the basilisk – if it was ever real to begin with – has slipped into the shadows of the past, and it’s never been seen again.

 There really is something delightful about the bestiaries of old. Their colourful pages and evocative descriptions were beyond sensational. In a world without television, radio or easily accessible works of fiction, those catalogues of natural history were the closest most people could get to travelling the world. Of course, the things most authors chose to include in their bestiaries would probably never make the cut in our modern times. After all, headless tribesmen with eyes on their chests, unicorns and sea nymphs all feel more like characters in a fantasy novel than entries in a study on the world’s flora and fauna. And yet some of those expectations have been broken over the years. For centuries, sailors told stories about the kraken, enormous sea creatures that could reach out and drag an entire ship underwater with its long tentacles. King Sverre of Norway recorded its description way back in 1180, and for hundreds of years people claimed to spot them in the waters of the ocean. Then, in 1853, the carcass of a giant squid washed up on a Danish beach, giving the legend new life. Over the century and a half since then, scientists have determined that there is indeed a giant sea creature that fits the ancient descriptions – give or take a few sinking ships, of course – and while they’ve been challenging to catch on film, we now know they exist. And those mermaids of old might have roots in actual animals as well. Many scientists and scholars now believe that old reports of mermaids could very well be mistaken sightings of an aquatic mammal known as the manatee. As is so often the case, our misunderstandings had given birth to frightening legends, only to have science bring a bit of clarity to the tale. Sometimes the monsters of the ancient world turn out to be real, and sometimes legends inspire new discoveries.

In the part of the world that stretches from Mexico to South America, scientists have been familiar for over a century with a lizard from the iguana family. It’s not the largest reptile around, but it can grow to around 2ft in length, and it can run at amazing speeds. Some scientists refer to it as the Jesus Christ Lizard because of its strange ability to run across the surface of water. But its most common name is based on other features, like its tendency to run on two legs and its serpent-like body – a body that’s topped with a head and plumes reminiscent of a crown or a rooster, which is why its name is both logical and a bit of a throwback. They call it the basilisk.

 There’s something enticing about the mysteries that fill the gaps in our knowledge of the world around us. Looking back at the bestiaries of the middle ages, its clear humans have had a lot of fun filling those holes, and the creativity of the past has continued to inspire stories today. But there’s one more creature I want to tell you about. Stick around after this brief sponsor break to learn all about it.

[Sponsor break from Bombas, Casper and Fracture]

They had fallen in love, and it was something that would change their destiny forever. At least, that’s how the legend tells it. Long ago, a young man lived on a small island surrounded by deep blue seas, and in the process of hunting one day, he encountered a beautiful young woman. But the hunter quickly learned that there was more to her than he could see with his eyes. The woman, it turns out, was a fairy. In fact, she was well known to the locals there, who referred to her as the Dragon Princess. Despite their differences – him, a normal human being, and her, a magical fairy – the two of them fell in love and were soon married, and that helps this tale become on of those happily ever after stories that we all love so much. The couple went on to have twins, a boy and a girl, and just like their parents, they were an odd pair. The boy was just like his father, a human with no magical powers of his own, while the girl took after her mother, and because of that, both parents decided that the children should be raised in separate places to help them fully become who they were meant to be.

According to the legend, it was many years later when the son was out hunting, just as his father had taught him. He was creeping through the forest, his spear balanced in one hand, when he spotted a deer. He quickly threw the weapon, which found its target, and a heartbeat later the young man was carefully making his way over to collect his prize, and that’s when the dragon stepped out of the trees. It was enormous and frightening, and it clearly wanted to take the deer that he had just killed. The young hunter spoke to it, begging it to leave his future meal alone, but the creature ignored him and proceeded to move toward the deer, so he lifted another spear and got ready to take aim at the dragon. Suddenly, a figure stepped out of the shadows of the forest and stopped him. It was his mother, the fairy princess, who he had not seen since his childhood, and as she approached him, she spoke a word of warning. “Do not throw that spear”, she told him, “for that is no ordinary dragon. That is your sister.” Instead, she taught him to live in harmony with his sister, and according to the legend, that fateful meeting set the destiny of their entire community on a new path. Even today, if you were to visit the place where they lived, the people there would tell you that they are descended from dragons, illustrating how that harmony has continued.

And of course, this story is just one of many tales about dragons that fill the pages of folklore. In fact, most of us would be hard pressed to find a creature mentioned more often than those magical beasts, from the 11th century legend of King George and the Dragon to the fantasy novels and television shows of our modern world. They really do seem to be the king of monsters. Dragons are also one of those nearly universal creatures. It seems just about every culture around the world has had some version of them in their folklore. The ancient Egyptian god of chaos was Apophis, represented as a giant serpent. The Babylonians had their own god of chaos called Tiemat, and in Arcadian mythology there were not one but three dragons on display. Norse mythology features a giant serpent who gnaws at the roots of the world tree. In Ukrainian folklore, there is a dragon with three heads, while images of dragons can be found all over medieval heraldry. And of course, few cultures on earth hold as tightly to their dragon mythology as the Chinese, who have been decorating objects with images of the creature at least as far back as the Neolithic period, and we could speculate why, I’m sure. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see how the accidental discovery of dinosaur bones might spark fear and wonder in the minds of humans thousands of years ago. The places where stories of dragons are most common are also places where such fossils have been uncovered, so it does make sense.

So, when Europeans arrived on an island in the Flores Sea, just south of Indonesia, they probably didn’t think twice about the local stories about dragons. In fact, those tales were probably a bit old hat, as they say. Dragons lived in caves, breathed fire, were vicious killers and could fly when necessary – nothing about all of that was new. What was new, though, were the things they saw there. On an island surrounded by deep, blue sea, an island full of people who believed they were descended from dragons, mind you, they discovered a creature that brought all of their legends to life. It lived in the caves along the shore, it was an enormous killer, and it sometimes even followed its prey up into the trees. It ticked all the boxes. These were 300lb serpent-like monsters that could bring down a half-tonne water buffalo. When they licked the air with their bright red tongue, it looked as if they were spitting fire, and they even dug into the graves of the dead looking for treasure. Of course, that treasure was always food, not gold. And they’re still there, crawling across the sandy beaches of the island, living in harmony, more or less, with the people who still call the place their home. They might not have wings or piles of golden treasure to curl up on, but they are the largest lizard on earth, measuring in at over 10ft in length, and they’re deadly. Sometimes the tales of the past stay shrouded in mystery, and other times we manage to crack the riddle and shed new light on the shadows that once frightened us. This living, flesh and blood dragon seems to offer a fresh answer to an ancient question, however incomplete it might be, but at least we now know that there really is one place in the world where that old cartographer warning is actually true: Here, on Komodo Island at least, there be dragons.

[Closing Statements]

[loretranscripts]

Sorry for the break in posting everyone, my laptop broke so I couldn’t do any transcribing! It’s finally the Christmas holidays though, so I’ll definitely be catching up on transcripts over the next few days. 

[loretranscripts]

Episode 32: Tampered (Further Reading)

This is in no way an official source list used by Aaron Mahnke, but is more meant to be a starting point meant for anyone wanting to dig further into any particular topic.

Ebu gogo:

Further reading on the ebu gogo can be found here.

Púca:

Further reading on the púca can be found here.

Daemon:

[Wikipedia] Daemon (classical mythology) [Article] Daemon [Article] Daemones (Spirits) [Article] Demon – Daimon – Daemon – Greek Word of The Day Lost in Translation

Jinn:

[Wikipedia] Jinn [Article] What Are Jinn: The Arab Spirits Who Can Eat, Sleep, Have Sex, and Die [Encyclopaedia Britannica] Jinni

Genius:

[Wikipedia] Genius (mythology) [Encyclopaedia Britannica] Genius [Article] Genius

Kami:

[Wikipedia] Kami  [Article] Kami [Article] Meet the Gods: 13 Japanese Kami [Article] 7 Shinto Kami You’ll Meet in Japan [Article] Kami: The Evolution of Japan’s Native Gods [Article] Kami

Fyjgja:

[Wikipedia] Fylgja [Article] The Self and its Parts [Encyclopaedia Britannica] Fylgja [Video] Spirits: The Dís and Fylgja in Norse Myth

Goblins:

[Wikipedia] Goblin [Wikipedia] Kobold [Video] Goblins - The Story Behind the Creepy Little Men of European Folklore [Article] Goblin [Article] Goblin [Encyclopaedia Britannica] Goblin [Wikipedia] Saint Taurinus [Wikipedia] Kobalos  [Wikipedia] Knocker (folklore) [Article] The Faeries of the Cornish Tin Mines – Cousin Jack and the TommyKnockers 

Gremlins:

[Wikipedia] Gremlin [Article] The Real Gremlins of WWII [Article] 10 Crazy Claims Of Real-Life Encounters With Gremlins [Article] The gremlins: Not Spielberg or Dahl, they originate with the pilots of Royal Air Force

[loretranscripts]

Lore Podcast Masterpost: Places

This category includes all episodes which primarily cover a specific place or city.

This list is not currently comprehensive, and will be added to as a work through the transcripts. Thank you for your patience.

Episode 33: A Dead End (Richmond)

Episode 129: Digging Deep (London)

[loretranscripts]

Lore Podcast Masterpost: Cryptozoology

This category includes all episodes which primarily cover creatures from folklore, cryptids, and everything that falls into the category of cryptozoology.

This list is not currently comprehensive, and will be added to as a work through the transcripts. Thank you for your patience.

Episode 1: They Made a Tonic

Episode 3: The Beast Within

Episode 5: Under Construction

Episode 7: In the Woods

Episode 9: The Devil on the Roof

Episode 13: Off the Path

Episode 14: The Others

Episode 18: Hunger Pains

Episode 19: Bite Marks

Episode 24: The Stranger Among Us

Episode 26: Brought Back

Episode 30: Deep and Twisted Roots

Episode 32: Tampered

Episode 130: In Plain Sight