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[Assistant] Yes, there's always the chance that many of the lake monsters we've discussed today are in fact real creatures that have yet to be discovered by science. But as far as what actually lives in the waters of Okanagan Lake, I think the answer is a lot more simple. Those waves are haunted by nothing more than our assumptions.


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[Assistant] Laura has been a podcast since 2015 with over 400 million downloads to dates. And you can learn more about this show.


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[Assistant] Plus the book series and the television adaptation over at lorepodcast.com.


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[Assistant] And of course, be sure to click on the subscribe button and the bell icon so that you never miss any future episodes. Oh, and if you enjoyed this one,


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[Assistant] Click the thumbs up. And you can also follow this show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Just search for Lore Podcast, all one word, and then click the follow button. And when you do, say hi. I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for watching.


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[Assistant] Have you ever lost something? I'm willing to bet that you have. For me, it was a box of childhood Christmas ornaments that went missing years ago. Inside it, I had tucked away all sorts of small magical objects that had the power to stir my imagination. And one day, it was just... gone.


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[Assistant] It's honestly one of those nearly universal human experiences. We become attached to something only to misplace it or forget where we've tucked it away. That loss often comes with feelings of frustration, grief, and even fear. Losing things leaves us shaken.


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[Assistant] So much so that there's even a patron saint devoted to the idea.


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[Assistant] Anthony of Padua is the saint of lost items, lost money, even lost souls. And popular culture is filled with thrilling examples of lost things, all built on that idea. The lost ring of Sauron, the lost Ark of the Covenant, the lost colony of Roanoke. I could go on and on.


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[Assistant] People lose things, and whether that's a bit of treasure, a significant historical object, or a childhood pet, we can all agree that it hurts. But it also begs the question, what would you do if the act of losing seems to take place in the same spot over and over again?


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[Assistant] How long would it take and how many lives would need to go missing before an unfortunate happenstance should be treated like an actual risk?


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[Assistant] Amazingly, one such place exists, and it's been active for about as long as we have been paying attention. If the stories are true, entering its borders is a dangerous game of chance, one that might just cost you your life.


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[Assistant] They had been away from home for a very long time, so it's not surprising that they were starting to see things. To be fair, they did go looking for extraordinary experiences.


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[Assistant] One thing to keep in mind is that the captain of the ship wasn't the most honest of guys. His crew was pretty nervous about the length of the voyage, so he had been keeping two different journals of the trip.


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[Assistant] In one, he logged the real actual mileage they'd covered. In the other, he listed shorter falsified distances. And then he only let his crew see the fake one.


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[Assistant] The first weird thing that they saw happened on September 15th. They were floating through the darkness of night when something bright appeared overhead. They would later describe it as a branch of fire falling from the sky, and it set everyone on edge.


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[Assistant] Two nights later, they were trying to make a course adjustment, but their compasses wouldn't match up with the North Star. It was as if the laws of nature had fallen apart and the crew didn't take it very well. The captain had to wait until dawn to make a second adjustment, and this time, it worked.


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[Assistant] Three weeks later, on October 11th, they were starting to get depressed when they spotted evidence of land floating near the ship in the form of debris that could only have come from a coastal region. Among the torn plants and sticks, they even spotted a branch that had been carved by human hands. But scanning the horizon, there was still nothing but water.


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[Assistant] That night, though, they spotted something else. The captain described it as a tiny light, almost as if it were miles away on the shore of some unknown country. But it would fade in and out of view, so he called a couple of other crewmates over to get their opinion. Was it just his imagination, or something real?


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[Assistant] One of them could also see it, but it was far from definitive. Those who could, though, described the light as sort of like a small candle, and it seemed to move, too, rising up from beneath the surface of the water, up into the air above it.


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[Assistant] Now, these men had reason to worry about the unknown. After all, as far as they were concerned, they were on the edge of the world, and each new mile they sailed could be taking them into some uncharted danger. How do I know?


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[Assistant] Now over the years, people have speculated about what Columbus really saw. But there are a couple of important things to know before I tell you.


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[Assistant] First, remember the guy's willingness to lie in the service of his own mission. He was keeping a fake journal of distance traveled, after all.


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[Assistant] And second, we don't even have the original journals. All we have today is a manuscript from the 1530s that quotes and summarizes passages from the original, which is frustrating. But given all the centuries between now and then, it's also not too surprising.


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[Assistant] The two things that people have debated for decades are the branch of fire and the floating light that seem to rise out of the water toward the sky.


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[Assistant] As usually happens, some people have blamed these events on.


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[Assistant] Aliens. Some have gone so far as to claim that Columbus actually witnessed a USO, an unidentified submerged object.


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[Assistant] But surprisingly, those who pushed that idea seem very good at misquoting the secondhand journal from Columbus, often taking words or phrases out of their larger context, which twists their meaning. It's that old adage that's old, but true. When you take the text out of context, all you're left with is a con. I think you get the idea.


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[Assistant] And that branch of fire they spotted in the night sky? The best explanation most historians can come up with is that it was nothing more than a meteor. A short trail of light was


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[Assistant] Probably all the sailors needed to notice it and think it looked sort of like a branch. Honestly, there's no evidence they thought of it as anything supernatural. Although, to them, it would have probably seemed like a bad omen, which might explain their uneasiness.


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[Assistant] Oh, and the reason all those theories have been proposed at all? Well, it has a little bit to do with the things described in them and the person they're attached to. But mostly, it has to do with the location in the Atlantic Ocean where all of these things were said to have taken place. A location where nothing is safe. Anything can happen. And the unexpected is assumed. A place called the Bermuda Triangle.


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[Assistant] Every play needs a stage, and the more detailed the set design, the better. So let's start with some of the larger ideas, shall we?


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[Assistant] The Bermuda Triangle is a massive area of ocean that, depending on who you ask, ranges in size from 500,000 square miles to over 1.5 million square miles.


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[Assistant] It's called a triangle because, well, that's the shape of it. The three corners are Miami, Florida, running southeast over to Puerto Rico, and then north to Bermuda. Exactly where those points are on the map varies from source to source though.


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[Assistant] Like I mentioned a moment ago, it's a big patch of ocean, more than a million square miles, and parts of it cross over very deep sections. In fact, the deepest spot in the entire Atlantic is the Milwaukee depth, and it's located right in the Bermuda Triangle.


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[Assistant] Not important if you're looking for causes behind the mystery, but it sure does mean that anything sinking right there is going to end up a long way down.


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[Assistant] And a lot of things have sunk there too. According to most records, upwards of 50 ships and 20 planes have entered the Bermuda Triangle over the years and simply vanished.


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[Assistant] But that's just counting all of the prominent cases, usually military in nature or industrial ships. Some researchers think the number could be a lot higher once you count small personal watercraft, the sort of boats that don't make the news too often.


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[Assistant] The area has gone by a lot of names over the years. The Devil's Triangle, Limbo of the Lost, the Hoodoo Sea, even the Triangle of Death.


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[Assistant] But it wasn't until 1964 when the name Bermuda Triangle first appeared in print, in a pulp magazine called The Argosy.


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[Assistant] But that doesn't mean its reputation is new. Far from it. In fact, there's a line in Shakespeare's last major play from 1611, The Tempest, where he references the still-vexed Bermuthas, which a lot of people see as a reference to a shipwreck off the coast of Bermuda in July of 1609.


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[Assistant] For a long while, the crew were assumed dead. Until in 1610, they sailed into ports in Virginia aboard a homemade ship they had built to make it back to safety.


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[Assistant] And of course, all those disappearances and mysterious encounters have caused people to propose theories about the place.


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[Assistant] I mentioned aliens a little while ago, and it's kind of amazing how many people subscribe to that idea. And a lot of the blame for that might actually rest with the 1974 book The Bermuda Triangle by Charles Berlitz. But then again, for a lot of people, the answer is always going to be aliens.


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[Assistant] Following close behind are stories of Atlantis. What better place to locate a lost city that slipped beneath the waves than a legendary body of water known for swallowing things in its waves, right?


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[Assistant] It doesn't help that in the 1930s, the famous psychic Edgar Cayce stated that Atlantis was indeed waiting off the coast of Bimini, claiming that it would be discovered in the late 1960s.


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[Assistant] And guess what? Researchers in 1968 discovered what they believed to be massive limestone blocks under the water there off the coast of Vimini that had been cut and laid by hand in a line that extends nearly half a mile.


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[Assistant] It might not be Atlantis, but it was exactly what Casey had predicted, and that alone is just so spooky.


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[Assistant] Other theories claim that sea monsters are patrolling the water there, even giant squid, which sounded fantastical for a very long time,


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[Assistant] Until scientists finally caught a real giant squid on film in 2005. Believers in the Bermuda Triangle often point to that as evidence that old superstitions can sometimes be based in fact, which occasionally is true. Maybe Mother Nature is to blame.


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[Assistant] Some folks have pointed to recent research into geomagnetic conditions there in the triangle. Apparently it does sit near something called an agonic line, where true north and magnetic north line up. And while I don't have enough knowledge about the science behind that to make the call, it does remind me of the compass troubles that Columbus recorded.


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[Assistant] Tropical storms, rogue waves, even something referred to as oceanic flatulence. All of these have been proposed as reasons for the disappearance of so many ships and planes. But what all these theories accomplish is simply guesswork.


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[Assistant] None of them perfectly address the events that have taken place in the Triangle. None of them offer satisfying answers to all the disappearances, and none of them have been conclusively documented. What has been recorded, though, are some truly amazing stories.


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[Assistant] She was built to halt coal. In the days when so many ships in the ocean used coal for fuel, the USS Cyclops was essential. Sort of a floating version of those refueling jets that we use today.


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[Assistant] The Cyclops was launched in 1910, and it had a pretty standard route for a long time. Running between the east coast of Mexico, up through the Caribbean, and across the Atlantic to the Baltic Sea, it had a pretty uneventful career for a number of years. And then,


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[Assistant] World War I arrived, and suddenly a coal-carrying ship was more than just a bit of industry. It was part of an essential wartime supply chain, so the Navy leaned heavily on it to move troops and coal to places that needed them. Everything was going fine until March of 1918, when something unexpected happened. The Cyclops disappeared.


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[Assistant] Now the ship had been hauling, uh, much heavier cargo, manganese ore, which seemed to present the crew with a challenge. But just after stopping in Bermuda for supplies, and then sending a transmission that read, weather, fare, all well, the ship, its cargo, and the 300 people on board, simply vanished.


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[Assistant] After three months of searching for the vessel, the US Navy declared it lost at sea. And a year after that, its story was already being described as a mystery in publications.


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[Assistant] One of the unusual things people brought up was the utter absence of evidence of a shipwreck. No small debris left floating on the surface. No wooden objects or life preservers. Nothing.


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[Assistant] One chilling addendum to the Cyclops story was that the vessel had three other sister ships. Now, one would be sunk by Japanese fighter planes in the Pacific in 1942. And while tragic, that was a fairly normal end to a long career during the war.


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[Assistant] But the other two, the Proteus and the Nereus, sank within three weeks of each other. Both were carrying around 60 people at the time, and both were on a journey from St. Thomas to the southern coast of Maine, and both vanished in the Bermuda Triangle.


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[Assistant] And then there's the infamous story about Flight 19. It was called that because it was the 19th training mission that day, all working out of Fort Lauderdale's Naval Air Station. Each mission had been a success, with nothing odd or unusual to report, but when the 19th flight took off at 2 10 p.m. on December 5th of 1945, that record would change.


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[Assistant] There were five planes in the flight group, with a total of 14 men between them. The flight leader was a World War II combat veteran pilot named Charles Carroll Taylor.


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[Assistant] And his mission was to guide all five planes 64 miles east to a spot called the Hen and Chicken Shoals for a bit of bombing practice.


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[Assistant] After that, they were supposed to fly 73 miles over Grand Bahama Island and then 73 miles north, all before heading back to the base in Florida. But aside from managing the bombing exercise, everything else went off the rails.


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[Assistant] It was the compass that presented the first problem. Sounds familiar, right? Taylor reported that his had stopped working, showing that they were flying in the wrong direction. He believed that he was flying west when he should have been flying east, passing over what he thought was the Florida Keys and then the Gulf of Mexico, the opposite direction from where they were supposed to be going.


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[Assistant] Then Mother Nature got involved when a storm blew in, bringing in thick cloud cover along with wind and rain. One of the other pilots sent the mysterious message that everything looks strange, even the ocean.


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[Assistant] Last ditch effort to stay together and stop moving until help could arrive. But the flaw in that scheme was that the type of plane they were flying, the TBM Avenger, was incredibly heavy, even without fuel. Chance of surviving the crash was pretty slim to none.


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[Assistant] Flight 19 sent one final message at 7.04 p.m. telling the base that it looks like we are entering white water. We are completely lost. After that, they were never heard from again.


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[Assistant] 23 minutes after that, two search and rescue planes took off to find them. Each carried 13 men, a necessary crew if they hoped to rescue the men on board the five missing planes. But 20 minutes into that mission, one of those planes went silent and vanished as well.


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[Assistant] The only evidence anyone could find in the aftermath was an oil slick on the water off the eastern coast of Florida.


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[Assistant] As soon as the sun came up the next morning, the Navy went into full search mode. Over 300 ships and planes began combing the area, running the grid back and forth to make sure every bit of the 300,000 square mile search zone was covered. But after five days, they were forced to call it off. Nothing related to flight 19 or the plane that went after them was ever seen again.


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[Assistant] There's something so very tragic and frustrating about losing something important. And when that important thing is human life, it becomes almost unbearable. Every day around the world, people go missing. Hikers in the woods. Travelers in a foreign land. Here one minute, gone the next.


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[Assistant] But few missing person stories earn as much attention as those centered in the Bermuda Triangle. Which is kind of odd, because there's nothing truly unique about that particular corner of the ocean. Statistically, it doesn't have a higher death or disappearance rate than any other spot. According to the Navy, the only thing weird about it is just how busy the place is. And of course, the busier the road, the more accidents you're gonna have.


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[Assistant] But it's a big area, and we can't keep watch over every square foot, can we? Which is why researchers keep coming back to the idea of rogue waves. These are occasional freaks in the ordinary sequence of waves, where every now and then, enough of the motion combines to form one big wave, sometimes as tall as a hundred feet above sea level. It's a theory that just might offer some explanation.


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[Assistant] And recent research points to rogue waves being a lot more common and dangerous than first believed. Some scientists think that at any given moment around the world there are 10 rogue waves active, rising and falling without anyone there to spot them.


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[Assistant] But if you were on a ship when one of them formed, say a ship that's been awkwardly loaded with heavy, out of balance cargo perhaps, a wave like that and the trough that precedes it could be game over for you.


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[Assistant] At the end of the day, maybe science is our best hope at brushing away the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle. At the very least, it's offering answers to some of the other unusual reports there. Specifically, Christopher Columbus's mysterious lights.


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[Assistant] One theory about that faint light is that it was nothing more than schools of bioluminescent worms.


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[Assistant] They're known as fire worms, and although they spend most of their lives on the ocean floor, they rise to the surface on a regular basis to perform a mating ritual. The process involves the females swimming in circles while glowing with a faint light, while the males follow along and flash some lights of their own.


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[Assistant] We want so badly for there to be some definitive proof of the supernatural qualities of the Bermuda Triangle.


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[Assistant] We secretly, or not so secretly, dream of learning that the true cause is something beyond our wildest dreams. No science, no reason, just solid evidence of something bigger and more powerful than we could ever imagine. But so far?


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[Assistant] We haven't found it. All we have are ideas and theories, a net of guesswork tossed into the water in an effort to snag the prize. And all we have to show for it is hope.


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[Assistant] I don't know about you, but I've always felt like the ocean is hiding something. Some people think it's an alien race or the remains of a lost civilization, while most just think it contains a lot more for us to learn. That's what exploration is all about, after all.


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[Assistant] But a lot of things go missing there, leaving us guessing about the cause. I hope today's tour through the Bermuda Triangle showed you just how complex and confusing that journey really can be. And we're not done just yet.


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[Assistant] We have one last story to share with you about things that were once here, but have mysteriously vanished. Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about it.


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[Assistant] Like so many other stories in the Bermuda Triangle, this one begins with lights. Christmas lights, to be precise. Because apparently viewing them from a boat off the coast of Florida is something worth bragging about.


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[Assistant] Our bragging light lover was a 42 year old man named Daniel Burack. He had retired early after building a fortune in the hotel industry, and one of his favorite things to do was spend time on his 23 foot long cabin cruiser named, I think appropriately for this show, The Witchcraft. Now one thing to know about this boat is that it was deemed


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[Assistant] Unsinkable, thanks to some advanced flotation technology that could keep the craft above the surface, even if it had taken on enough water to sink other vessels. But I'm starting to get the feeling that the only reason anyone would ever declare their ship unsinkable is to test fate, right?


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[Assistant] On the evening of December 22nd, 1967, Daniel and his wife had a friend over for dinner, a 34-year-old Catholic priest named Father Patrick Horgan. And during the course of their conversation, he mentioned how nice the seasonal Christmas lights looked from out at sea. Then, on a whim, and...


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[Assistant] Probably much to his wife's annoyance, Daniel said, Hey, why don't we go see them right now? So the two men got in their car, drove to the port, and started the engine in the witchcraft.


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[Assistant] Around 9pm though, the Coast Guard received a distress signal. It was Daniel, still on board the witchcraft, and there was a problem. They had been moving along when something beneath the surface of the water struck the boat, causing the power to go out. But, true to his belief that the ship was unsinkable, he told them that he wasn't worried about taking on water.


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[Assistant] To be safe though, he gave the Coast Guard his location, fairly close to buoy number 7, still within Miami Harbor though, although technically, and I might also add, within the Bermuda Triangle.


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[Assistant] They in turn asked him to fire his flare gun into the air to help guide them when they arrived. The trouble was


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[Assistant] No flare gun was ever fired. And when the Coast Guard reached buoy number seven, there was no ship in the water nearby. It hadn't taken them that long to get there either, just 19 minutes from the time of the call. And yet, in that short span of time, the witchcraft and both men on board had vanished.


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[Assistant] And you know the drill, right? Daniel Burke was an experienced sailor. His ship was equipped with all the necessary navigational and safety equipment he could possibly need. And of course, it was unsinkable.


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[Assistant] Yet the Coast Guard would spend the next six days scouring a 25,000 square foot section of the ocean looking for him and turn up nothing but empty water and a whole lot of frustration. It seems that despite all the reasons why the witchcraft could not disappear, that's exactly what it had done.


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[Assistant] And to this day, the most common reason people hold tight to is the place where it all happened. The Bermuda Triangle.


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[Assistant] As always folks, thanks so much for watching. Credits for today's episode are in the description below.


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[Assistant] Lore has been a podcast since 2015 with over 415 million downloads to date. You can learn more about this show, plus the book series and the television adaptation over at lorepodcast.com. And of course, be sure to click the subscribe button and the bell icon so that you never miss future episodes. And if you like this one, click the thumbs up.


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[Assistant] You can also follow the show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Just search for Lore Podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button. And when you do, say hi. I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for watching.


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[Assistant] This will probably sound all too familiar to you, but let's explore it anyway.


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[Assistant] People had always had this thing. But some enterprising individuals a while back decided that people needed a newer version of it.


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[Assistant] This version was better, and because the public began to be attracted to it, it also became more and more expensive.


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[Assistant] At the peak of popularity, some of these things had become so expensive that to buy one, you would need to pay roughly 12 times your annual salary.


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[Assistant] And not for a bunch, mind you, but for one single example.


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[Assistant] All sorts of variations were created with all sorts of creative names.


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[Assistant] And people went nuts for them. Investors got involved too, and all of a sudden there were a lot of fortunes riding on this wave. And then, it collapsed.


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[Assistant] All those ledgers that were swimming in extra zeros were suddenly in the red. That bright new economic hope, the investment of the future, had been reduced to just another mundane curiosity. Lives were ruined, businesses failed, and an entire culture was left with a bitter taste in its mouth.


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[Assistant] This thing, this object of desire, was not Bitcoin, as you might have assumed. No, it was a humble flower, the tulip, first brought to the Netherlands at the end of the 16th century.


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[Assistant] But even though the event known as Tulip Mania only lasted a little more than three years before it crashed in 1637, it has stuck around as proof of something undeniable. Whether you travel into the great unknown,


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[Assistant] Sometimes they are simple and fun, while others, like tulips, are a bit more expensive. But regardless, people everywhere are always looking for a new one.


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[Assistant] But centuries later, and across the Atlantic, a new fad would rage in America. Although no one went looking for this particular thing, it was vastly more terrifying than a tulip bulb because of one special detail. This thing came looking for us.


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[Assistant] It was the sort of scene that you would expect from a horror film. Two lovers were parked between the river and the woods in a boat ramp parking lot. Her name was Judy Johnson, and he was Randy. Randy Needham, that is.


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[Assistant] Maybe Desperado by the Eagles was playing on the radio. Maybe the stars were shining in the night sky.


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[Assistant] We can make all sorts of guesses about the setting for this story, but what we know for certain is that sometime around 1130 PM, a sound outside sent a sharp chill down their spines.


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[Assistant] They would later compare it to an eagle shrieking into a microphone, a sound that no human can possibly make. And when they looked out through the windshield, they spotted the thing that had made the sound. Something covered in pale fur, standing roughly eight feet tall, just at the edge of the tree line. And it was heading toward them.


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[Assistant] The lovers thankfully drove away. Speeding, in fact, as you or I might have done in their place. And what's important to point out here is that their relationship was meant to be a secret. And yet despite that, their fear was so powerful that they drove straight to the police station to get their sighting on record together. It was a brave move in such a small town.


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[Assistant] They both lived in the Illinois town of Murphysboro, which back in June of 1973 at least had roughly 10,000 people living there.


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[Assistant] But thankfully, there were three officers on duty, and after listening to the panicked couple, they climbed into a cruiser, along with Randy, to go check it out.


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[Assistant] Back at the boat dock along the big muddy river, the men began searching the woods for evidence by flashlight. They found strange marks in the mud, maybe 12 inches long and 3 inches wide. But the stride was weird, with the footprints sometimes 6 feet apart. And then, the shriek returned.


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[Assistant] Instantly they fled back to the police car, but one of the officers, Jim Nash, was so startled that he even dropped his gun.


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[Assistant] They would return later that night to photograph the tracks and do more searching, but as far as June 25th of 1973 was concerned, that was the end of the drama. Unfortunately, others would have a similar experience the following night, around 10pm.


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[Assistant] That's when a local teen named Cheryl Ray, who was sitting on the patio with her boyfriend, who is also Randy, Randy Crete, that is, spotted something in the field behind the house. Like the creature from the night before, this one was also tall and human-shaped, but covered head to toe in pale fur.


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[Assistant] But along with the visual element, there was also a strong odor, so strong that it could be smelled from over 40 feet away.


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[Assistant] The police were called, including Officer Nash from the night before, and a German shepherd was put on the trail to find the mysterious creature.


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[Assistant] They followed the scent into the nearby woods, all the way to an abandoned barn, but that's where the trail went cold. And before you wonder why they didn't search the barn, I should mention that they did try, but the highly trained police dog refused to step inside.


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[Assistant] There were more sightings after that. The same night, a neighbor who lived nearby claimed that his child had been outside trying to catch fireflies in a jar when they ran back into the house worried about a large ghost they spotted in a nearby field.


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[Assistant] Two weeks later, in an area fairly close to the boat dock the two lovers had made their sighting at, some carnival workers spotted a creature fitting that description lurking around the area where they were stabling the ponies. Not a single footprint was located though.


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[Assistant] Three years later, a group of local boys went looking for a foul ball in the woods near their home when an enormous human-like creature covered in gray fur appeared nearby.


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[Assistant] Officer Nash made another appearance as well, but nothing definitive was discovered to prove the story. And eight days after that, another group of kids spotted a similar mysterious figure in the woods, which their father reported to Officer Nash. As you'd imagine, locals were swept up in the panic.


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[Assistant] Letters flooded into the police department, and while some described other sightings, many were from curious individuals, including locals who were self-proclaimed monster hunters who wanted to help bring it down. One guy simply begged to be able to dissect the monster's corpse if it were captured. Cheerful stuff, for sure.


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[Assistant] And I do need to read to you from one of my favorite letters, written by a little girl with a wonderful recommendation.


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[Assistant] Dear sir, we read in the Fresno Bee about your monster. My mom can catch it. She is good. Please let her try. She loves big adventures like this one. Write her. Her name is Georgie Supnet. Where there is terror, she loves to solve. She is good with guns and knives also.


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[Assistant] It's delightful, I know. But despite letters like this and million-dollar rewards for the creatures' capture, nothing has ever turned up beyond the sights and smells of those small-town woods. And the Big Money Monster has been a mystery ever since.


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[Assistant] We started our journey today with the idea of fads, and I don't want you to think that I've forgotten about that. We just need a few more stories before we can safely call this thing a national trend. But don't worry, the odds are looking pretty good.


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[Assistant] The town of Louisiana, Missouri had around 4,500 people living there back in the 1970s. It's a small community, maybe four square miles in total, but it has its fair share of legends and rumors.


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[Assistant] The screams of a ghostly woman near the old lime kiln, a phantom man along river road, even ghost lights. But few stories there are more popular than those about the Missouri Monster.


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[Assistant] The first sighting took place in July of 1971. Joan Mills and Mary Ryan had driven out to a field alongside a dirt road on the outskirts of town to have a picnic together and enjoy the summer sun.


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[Assistant] But just as they begun to eat, they noticed a powerful smell. In fact, it was so bad that they set down their food and started to look around them for the source. And then, they spotted it at the edge of the trees.


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[Assistant] It was a tall human-like creature covered from head to toe in dark fur or hair. And just as they noticed it, the thing stepped out of the field and began to approach them.


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[Assistant] Both of the women panicked and they bolted for the car, climbing in and locking the doors. There was just one problem. They had left the keys in Joan's purse, which was still on the picnic blanket.


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[Assistant] After a frightening moment where the creature tried to open their car door, Joan honked the horn and eventually frightened it away. Once out of sight, she sprinted to her purse, grabbed it and returned so that they could drive away. Straight to the state police to make a report. Nothing, however, was ever tracked down.


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[Assistant] A year later, two brothers were out playing at the edge of their yard when they spotted something and screamed for help. Their older sister heard the shout and looked out the window just in time to see a very tall, fur-covered creature roughly the size of a human being. And she spotted what had frightened her brother so much.


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[Assistant] The creature was holding a dead, bloody dog under one of its enormous arms.


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[Assistant] It was, they would later discover, their neighbor's dog which had gone missing earlier in the day.


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[Assistant] Now their father, Edgar Harrison, was a man who liked to take charge.


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[Assistant] He was a deacon in his local Pentecostal church, and frequently organized groups and led discussions. And on July 4th of 1972, he apparently had around 50 people at his home for a prayer meeting, when all of them heard the sound of large stones being thrown at a nearby metal water tank, along with loud animal-like growls.


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[Assistant] It was enough to drive everyone away, putting an end to Edgar's meeting. But after that night, he managed to talk a few friends into walking over to the location of the sounds to do a bit of investigating. No one spotted anything unusual, but they all claimed to smell it, a horrible odor that was impossible to describe. But Edgar refused to give up.


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[Assistant] He started to put out baits on the property in hopes of luring it in for a closer look. Things like fish and ham. Although it's said that he also even tried to tie up his own dog outside just to see if it would work.


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[Assistant] There were more searches of the surrounding area, too. A hunt on July 19th consisted of about 20 men and even included the local police chief and a state conservation officer.


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[Assistant] And reporters travel to the house to chat with Edgar and help him look for evidence as well. Although all they managed to find were a few dog bones and some sketchy footprints that have since been disproved.


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[Assistant] There were other sightings in the area as well. On July 21st, a neighbor reported that he went outside to see what his dog was growling at, only to find a tall, human-like creature covered in dark fur standing at the edge of his yard. And a couple of weeks after that, a local farmer reported hearing high-pitched howls and finding odd tracks on his property.


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[Assistant] And by the way, one interesting feature of Louisiana, Missouri is that it sits along the Mississippi River, which is connected less than 200 miles to the south to the Big Muddy River.


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[Assistant] And I offer that up as evidence that we should all keep in mind. Whether it was an actual creature traveling the river.


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[Assistant] Or just the rumors of one. I'll let you be the judge. But interesting, nonetheless.


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[Assistant] But there's one more story with eerie similarities that I want to share with you next. And while it's far outside the network of rivers that connect the mighty Mississippi, it still delivers something that will sound very familiar by now. Stories of a mysterious outsider who put a community in a panic.


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[Assistant] The town of Minerva, Ohio is in the eastern part of the state. It is, oddly enough, not named after the Roman goddess of wisdom, but the town founder's niece. So, there's that.


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[Assistant] Now back in 1978, there were a little over 4,000 people in Minerva, and one of those families was the Claytons.


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[Assistant] Evelyn Clayton was 55 at the time, and she had just been released from the hospital following treatment for some medical issues. One of the instructions the doctors gave her was to avoid stress, but if you've listened to this so far,


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[Assistant] You're probably guessing that that wasn't in the cards for poor Evelyn.


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[Assistant] The first stressful thing to happen was the discovery of the family's dead dog outside in the yard one day. Its neck appeared to have been broken, and then after that, it had been pulled free from its leash.


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[Assistant] In early August of that year, Evelyn's grandchildren were over at the house playing with some neighborhood kids, when all of a sudden they ran into the house screaming about a monster they had spotted at the nearby gravel pit. So, Evelyn and a friend went out to investigate. And you know what?


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[Assistant] They spotted the creature as well, and ran home out of fear.


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[Assistant] On August 21st, she saw it again. The Clayton family had gathered on their front porch with a few friends and everyone heard a strange noise coming from the nearby chicken coop. Looking toward the tree line, they spotted the strangest thing.


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[Assistant] There were two small creatures that they said were similar to cougars, squatting in the shadows. And then a moment later, a tall humanoid creature stepped out of the trees to stand in front of them, almost as if protecting them.


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[Assistant] If you guessed that every single person dashed inside the getaway, you'd be right. Even Evelyn called for the sheriff to come help.


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[Assistant] But while they waited for that help to arrive, the creature actually crossed the yard, walked up to the house, and started looking through the kitchen window at them. And it did so for over ten minutes.


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[Assistant] It turned around and left on its own, about five minutes before the sheriff pulled into the drive.


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[Assistant] Stepping outside, everyone noticed a horrible stench in the air, like sulfur or some other rancid odor. Oh, they noticed one other thing as well.


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[Assistant] Their surviving dog, Missy, had been so nervous for the days leading up to the encounter that she had dug a tunnel into the ground to hide. A tunnel. Over eight feet deep.


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[Assistant] The next day, Evelyn's daughter Mary drove over to pick up her own daughter there and spotted the creature off in the distance.


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[Assistant] It was simply standing at the top of a small hill that overlooked the property, watching everything down below. Once it spotted Mary though, the thing turned and disappeared down the hill.


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[Assistant] On August 23rd, they caught sight of it again, this time around 11pm. Worried about what might happen at night, one of the family members fired a warning shot into the sky. A moment later, the creature fled.


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[Assistant] And finally, on September 8th, Evelyn's daughter Mary made the most disturbing discovery of all.


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[Assistant] She had wandered out past the property to look around and was approaching the old strip mine nearby when movement caught her eye.


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[Assistant] This was after dinner, so the hour was getting late and the daylight had begun to disappear.


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[Assistant] But squinting through the dusk, she could clearly make out movement.


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[Assistant] It was a small version of the larger creature they had all been seen. And it wasn't alone either. There.


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[Assistant] Right beside it was another equally small humanoid beast.


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[Assistant] Because the Minerva Monster had not only stalked its way into their lives, but it had brought along multiple offspring with it, ensuring that the sightings and legends could live on for generations to come.


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[Assistant] Communities love to get in on a good fad. Whether that was bell bottoms, friendship bracelets, the ice bucket challenge, or some new viral video craze, it's almost like we're hardwired to connect with bizarre things, bringing us all together in the process.


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[Assistant] The stories of Bigfoot describe the creature as very tall, human-like, covered in fur from head to toe. A lot of those stories even describe powerful odors. So in one sense, the stories we explore today are just some of the countless chapters in that larger tale.


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[Assistant] But examined more closely, our three bipedal mystery monsters today all seem to have been part of an early 1970s wave of sightings. Between their eerily similar descriptions, right down to the smells they left behind and the creatures' obsession with dogs, it feels to me like a little fad in the middle of a larger wave.


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[Assistant] For the Claytons, that sort of popularity didn't sit well. If someone was faking it, you'd think that they would enjoy the attention, but not Evelyn and her family.


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[Assistant] National newspapers picked up their story and it led to all sorts of visits and requests for interviews.


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[Assistant] One person who became intrigued by the stories was a man named John Nutter. He had grown up in West Virginia and had seen all sorts of wildlife out there, including hundreds of bears. And even after moving to Texas, he remained connected to the outdoor lifestyle.


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[Assistant] A little while after the stories of the Minerva Monster spread around the country, John and his brother passed through the town and stayed a while to explore it for themselves. They even headed out to the same old strip mine that the Claytons live nearby.


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[Assistant] And they understood what was at stake too. If the Claytons had made up the story, there was no chance at all that they would spot their own version of the beast. And yet, they actually did.


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[Assistant] John and his brother were in the woods when they heard sounds that were not quite human, but also very much not from any animal they knew.


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[Assistant] And when the creatures stepped out from behind a tree and howled with a powerful screeching sound, both men were so frightened that they ran for safety.


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[Assistant] What these people were seeing back in the early 1970s, we honestly have no idea. There was very little evidence recovered. Few signs that anything actually took place. Just the stories they left behind, and the fear that followed.


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[Assistant] But perhaps these sightings reveal something else. Considering how many similarities and witnesses there were,


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[Assistant] Like I mentioned before, the three creatures we explored today were just some of the many that seemed to pop up throughout the early 1970s. Almost all of them were spotted during the summer months, mostly in the mid to eastern United States, and they all pretty much shared the same physical descriptions.


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[Assistant] And one other thing, all of the sightings were in rural areas, along dirt roads or near abandoned gravel mines and that sort of thing. Which is why I need to tell you about one more sighting from that era, because its setting was oh so very different.


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[Assistant] Rather than being a town of a few thousand people, Peoria is home to over 110,000, and it was even bigger back in the 1970s. And more than that, the city covers roughly 50 square miles.


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[Assistant] And I think that's what makes July of 1972 so unusual. That was when a group of teenagers noticed unusual footprints around an abandoned house near Cole Hollow Road. Not tracks, mind you. Footprints. And after exploring a bit more around the property, they found the source.


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[Assistant] The creature they described measured anywhere from 8 to 12 feet tall. It stood on two legs like a human but was covered entirely in pale fur or hair. And when it spotted them, it ran quickly away while screeching like an old train whistle.


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[Assistant] Now, maybe I've read about too many reported encounters in preparation for this episode, but all of those howls have started to sound the same in my mind. Train whistles, an eagle screeching into a microphone, an elephant, a trumpet. I know they're all different sources, but I can also sort of hear the overlapping similarities, so this fits.


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[Assistant] One of those teens would claim to spot the creature two more times that summer. But they weren't the only ones noticing odd things.


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[Assistant] Immediately after their story was published in the local paper,


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[Assistant] The police department received over 200 calls with reports of more sightings. And those 200 calls, by the way, took place on one single day.


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[Assistant] And Peoria wasn't alone. In late July of 1972, a whole bunch of witnesses across the Mississippi in the Missouri town of Crieff Core came forward with stories of their own. Many of them centered around the sighting of an ape-like creature swimming in the river. And those who got close enough also reported another familiar feature. A very horrible and very memorable odor.


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[Assistant] And way down at the southernmost tip of Illinois, in the town of Cairo, one resident spotted a 10 foot tall creature covered in white fur that was standing on two legs near the Ohio River.


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[Assistant] Of course, that many reports in one summer was bound to get annoying for local officials.


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[Assistant] One town even declared that all monster sightings needed to be accompanied by a breathalyzer test. And when it was suggested that the creatures were really an alien species, the Chicago office of the IRS expressed hope that these newcomers would at least pay their taxes.


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[Assistant] Even today, we're not quite sure what it was that people were spotting all over the central and southern parts of Illinois back in the 1970s. But the tales sure are entertaining.


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[Assistant] And if they prove anything, it's just how powerful folklore can be.


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[Assistant] How it can spread, how it can link up with other communities and unite them all together under one dark, sometimes frightening umbrella.


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[Assistant] And how, no matter how much we've explored this world, there will always be some people who think that there's one more mystery to solve.


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[Assistant] As always, thank you so much for watching. Credits for today's episode are in the description below.


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[Assistant] Lore has been a podcast since 2015 with over 400 million downloads to dates. You can learn more about this show, plus the book series and the television adaptation over at lorepodcast.com.


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[Assistant] And of course, be sure to click on the subscribe button and the bell icon so that you don't miss future episodes. And if you enjoyed this one, click the thumbs up too. You can also follow the show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Just search for Lore Podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button. And when you do, say hi. I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for watching.


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[Assistant] Everyone remembers their first passions. For many people that might be sports, or theater, or whatever the pop culture obsession was at the time.


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[Assistant] But for me, growing up as a kid in the 80s, there were two similar things that I was absolutely fascinated with.


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[Assistant] The first was a holdover from the Cold War, something that always seemed to have a Russia versus the CIA vibe to it. I think my first glimpse of it was on an old episode of Unsolved Mysteries, grainy black and white video footage of people doing something extraordinary, moving objects with their minds.


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[Assistant] It didn't take long for terms like ESP and telekinesis to embed themselves firmly in my young impressionable brain. And I became one of what must have been a million grade school kids trying to guess what card my brother was holding in his hand. Honestly, there was just something overwhelmingly attractive about that sort of power. And then there was magic.


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[Assistant] Right from the living room, I had a front row seat to all of the David Copperfield television specials, and I was hooked. I mean, come on. The guy made the Statue of Liberty disappear in 1983 for crying out loud. He walked through the Great Wall of China and escaped from Alcatraz. How could you not become obsessed with magic?


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[Assistant] To me, the 1980s felt like the perfect mix of security from a safer, more modern world, but with these vestiges of old superstitions and beliefs still alive and active around me. That's probably a big reason for who I am today.


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[Assistant] But what I know now, decades later, is that I was only seeing the tip of a very big iceberg.


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[Assistant] For a glimpse of the truly bizarre and unusual world at the intersection of the stage and the supernatural, we need to go deeper into the past. So if you're ready, I want to take you on a tour of the wild and fascinating world of celebrity mediums.


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[Assistant] Every generation has had a few stars. I mentioned David Copperfield a moment ago, but perhaps he was a bit before your time. Today there's people like Darren Brown, Penn & Teller, and Justin Willman.


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[Assistant] Decades earlier there was Ricky J and Doug Henning. And of course go back far enough and you'll bump into the granddaddy of them all, Harry Houdini.


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[Assistant] But while each of them brought their own style and bag of tricks to the stage, one thing united all of them. Their audiences knew that they were being tricked.


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[Assistant] The fun is in the spectacle, not that it's actually happening.


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[Assistant] Their careers were built on the idea that the audience was witnessing something supernatural. And a great example of this was William John Warner, who toured and performed under the name Cairo.


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[Assistant] Warner was born just outside of Dublin, Ireland in 1866. He was already deep into the occult by his teen years, but when most students were preparing for university,


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[Assistant] Warner headed east to India, where he studied ancient texts on, of all things, palmistry. And after two years of soaking it all in, he returned and set up shop as a palm reader.


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[Assistant] And Warner was really into hands. You can see it in his stage name, Cairo, taken from the technical term for palm reading, Cairo Mansi.


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[Assistant] He himself claimed to have studied thousands of hands, cast in plaster, impressions in clay, and even printed on paper with ink. And the public loved him.


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[Assistant] You might not have heard of William Warner before, but you've certainly heard of a few of his clients. Thomas Edison, Mark Twain, President Grover Cleveland, Oscar Wilde, and even the Prince of Wales. All of them paid Warner a visit, looking for the sort of guidance only he could glean from looking at their poems.


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[Assistant] By the end of his life, he had set up shop in Hollywood, where he sold upwards of 20 palm readings a day for as much as a thousand bucks a pop. And when he died, no one seemed to question his talents. After all, this was the man who predicted in early 1912 that a shipbuilder named William Peary would be in for the fight of his life.


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[Assistant] A short while later, one of Piri's ships sank in the North Atlantic, putting his career into a tailspin. That ship? The Titanic.


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[Assistant] William Stanton Moses was another star from the stage in the world of mediums. His talent wasn't palm reading, no. No, he was known across England for his talent with automatic writing. Although unlike William Warner, Moses would have a tougher path.


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[Assistant] William Stanton Moses had actually started out his career as a priest in the Church of England, who was adamantly opposed to anything remotely connected to the occult or the supernatural.


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[Assistant] But two years after his ordination, he attended a séance and seems to have become hooked.


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[Assistant] Five months after that, he claimed that he had experienced levitation and could see and feel the spirits around him.


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[Assistant] Soon enough, he was holding his own seances, and his primary method of communication with the dead was automatic writing, where a pencil would write out messages from the other world without a hand to hold or guide them.


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[Assistant] For the most part, he kept his seances to friends and family, but he did branch out enough to capture a bit of fame. And with that renown came skepticism, in the form of researchers hoping to debunk his work.


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[Assistant] But despite being caught with a bottle of oil of phosphorus, something that tricksters would use to make their hands appear to glow, most people just assumed that he was too nice a man to be a fraud.


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[Assistant] And then there was Eusapia Palladino, an Italian woman born in 1854. She came from a poor farming family and struggled for much of her life to be seen as anything other than a country bumpkin. But apparently, even early on, she showed promise in the world of spiritualism.


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[Assistant] In 1886, a well-known local occultist heard about Eusapia and helped her kickstart her career as a traveling medium. Soon, she was touring Europe and America, wowing audiences with her ability to levitate objects, manifest ghosts, and making handprints appear in soft clay without touching it.


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[Assistant] Either she was a bit less convincing than others in her field, or folks were more skeptical about the claims of a woman back then. And honestly, it sounds like it was a bit of both. But Eusepia spent most of the rest of her life fighting against claims of fraud.


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[Assistant] It didn't help that those objects she claimed to move across the table or levitate into the air were also found to have long, almost invisible strands of her own hair tied to them.


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[Assistant] Despite all this though, she kept touring. But as she got older and more tired, those performances became more and more sloppy. Which of course, led to more claims of fraud. Claims that snowballed into a backlash so strong that she was ultimately forced to retire.


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[Assistant] William Warner, William Stanton Moses, and Eusebio Palladino are all wonderful examples of how enterprising individuals turned common public belief in the supernatural into celebrity-level careers.


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[Assistant] And to one degree or another, they also showed us how prevalent deception was in that world.


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[Assistant] But they only gave us a glimpse. No, for a real look at the darker side of celebrity mediums, we need to take a look at the story of one more person. Because much like his career, the way it all unraveled is more than a little spectacular.


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[Assistant] We don't know a lot about Henry's early life, although that's not uncommon for the world of two centuries ago. We're pretty sure that he was born in 1835, but possibly 1836, and came from the Niagara region of New York, which I think is important for at least one reason. Just 50 miles east of his hometown of Johnson Creek,


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[Assistant] is the city of Rochester. And if you remember the early days of spiritualism and mediums, a lot of historians point to one particular household there as the epicenter of the movement, the home of the Fox family.


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[Assistant] It was there in 1847 when sisters Margaret and Catherine began a career that would turn them into international superstars. And there's zero chance that a local 12-year-old boy in a poor farming family would have heard their story and dreamed of a similar path for himself.


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[Assistant] So it shouldn't be a surprise to any of us that by the age of 18, he was demonstrating some of his own unique abilities.


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[Assistant] It said that he could stand half a dozen feet from a table and knock it over with a wave of his hand. He could even make heavier objects like a small piano levitate off the floor, which was certainly one way to get attention. And soon enough, people were talking about the amazing Henry Slade.


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[Assistant] By the age of 20, Henry was traveling from city to city under the stage name Dr. Henry Slade and the Great Slade. And within a decade, he was also in high demand overseas in all of the biggest cities of Europe.


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[Assistant] He was so well loved that French Emperor Napoleon III gifted him with a diamond worth upwards of $100,000 today.


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[Assistant] There was a waiting list for folks who wanted to sit in on one of his legendary seances that was weeks long, and all of those people were paying good money for the experience.


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[Assistant] By some estimates, Slade was worth over 15 million at the peak of his career. So, what was he actually doing?


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[Assistant] Well, Henry Slade was famous for one thing. Slate writing. Here's how it worked.


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[Assistant] Everyone would sit down at the table with a medium, and that medium would offer up a small writing slate. Think of a chalkboard the size of an iPad, with a small wooden frame on it. Sometimes there were two halves and they closed like a book, and sometimes it was just a single open slate.


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[Assistant] After demonstrating that the slate was blank, the medium would close it or turn it over, and then slip it under the table where it would be out of reach from anyone's hands. And then, with both hands visible on the table, the séance would begin. And honestly, that would all play out exactly as you might imagine. Low light from a single candle or lamp,


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[Assistant] Everyone holding hands in the medium speaking out loud to the spirit world. I think you get the idea.


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[Assistant] And when they were done, the medium would reach under the table, retrieve the slate, wouldn't you know it, they would be writing on the slate. A message from the other side.


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[Assistant] Now, seances with the Great Slade included other feats of wonder, of course. Things like levitating tables and other objects. But as you might imagine, these slate writings were the big star. And Henry was good at them, too.


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[Assistant] In England at the time, there was a group by the name of the Society for Psychical Research, which was dedicated to the study of paranormal phenomenon. And one of the members, a guy named Frank Podmore, wrote that


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[Assistant] Of all the physical phenomena of mediumship, the slate-writing performances of such men as Slade appear to have proved most baffling to the expert.


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[Assistant] It was, in a nutshell, proof positive that spiritualism was real. Or at least that's what everyone believed.


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[Assistant] But in 1872, something happened that changed all of that.


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[Assistant] First, a man named John Truesdell attended one of Slade's seances in New York that year, and noticed something odd. It seems that he witnessed Slade using his foot to move objects, and, most importantly here, caught the medium writing on the slate himself.


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[Assistant] And second, Slade went to London a year later to put on a series of performances, and those rumblings of fraud followed him there, which caused the London police to see if they could get to the bottom of the issue. And what they uncovered would shock the world.


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[Assistant] Every investigation needs a leader. To spearhead theirs, the police brought in Ray Lancaster, a professor of zoology at the University of London. He was a protege of Thomas H. Huxley and a friend of Charles Darwin, among many other luminaries in the world of biology and anthropology.


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[Assistant] I guess my point is this, Ray Lancaster was no slouch.


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[Assistant] On September 11th of 1876, he showed up at one of Henry Slade's London shows, and paid the ticket price to attend. Inside, he witnessed exactly what I described a few moments before. An audience around the table, Slade seated among them, and the blank Slades being shown off before being moved out of reach.


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[Assistant] But Lancaster noticed something. Between showing off the blank slate and returning his hands to the tabletop, there was a brief span of time that slate filled with a coughing fit. The famous medium claimed that he had a bad cold, apologized, and then got on with the performance. But Lancaster made a mental note of it.


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[Assistant] Less than a week later, he returned with a friend named Brian Duncan, who was a well-respected criminologist and physician. And during this second performance, Lancaster reached out and grabbed the slate just before Slade placed it underneath the table. When he pulled the slate away, he found something extraordinary. There was already writing on it.


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[Assistant] And that's when Slade tried to drop something. Lancaster and Duncan both made a grab for it and discovered that it was a sort of thimble painted to match Slade's skin, upon which was embedded a tiny chunk of the same type of pencil used to write on the slate. Basically, they had caught the medium red-handed. Henry Slade was a fraud.


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[Assistant] It turns out this would get him into a lot of trouble. You see, in England, they had a law on the books known as the Vagrancy Act, which prohibited taking money under false pretenses. And since each of the people attending those seances had paid slayed money, believing that he was the real deal, they were able to bring charges against him.


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[Assistant] The trial began on October 1st of 1876, and according to everything I've read about it, it was quite the spectacle. The prosecuting attorney called Slade's deception


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[Assistant] Plumsy and stupid and said that the medium's talent was nothing more than the power of an ordinary conjurer and certainly an ordinary conjurer performs far more cleverly than Mr. Slade does.


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[Assistant] Yeah, that had to sting. And it got worse, too. That same prosecuting attorney even performed the slate trick for the jury to enjoy. And when asked if there really were spirits in the room, he replied, yes, but the spirits of wine.


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[Assistant] Apparently the trial was just one long string of laughter from just about everyone in the room.


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[Assistant] It was entertainment, but the man at the center of it all, an entertainer himself, probably didn't appreciate that bit of it.


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[Assistant] In the end, Slade was found guilty, sentenced to three months in prison, and then immediately appealed. A short while later, the case was thrown out on a technicality, but the damage had already been done.


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[Assistant] Slade went to France after that, hoping to pick back up where he left off with his touring. But the news had already crossed the channel. And around the same time, more and more experts were debunking other spiritualist mediums, sometimes even going so far as to declare them mentally unfit or suffering from lesions on the brain.


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[Assistant] In 1884, Slade bravely sat for a committee at the University of Pennsylvania.


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[Assistant] That aim to debunk his work which they promptly did.


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[Assistant] Defeated and depressed, he started to exit the public spotlight and slowly went broke in his final years.


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[Assistant] He did a few more shows here and there, and still managed to find a few people willing to pay a small fee to see his slate writing in action. But his reputation would never be the same.


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[Assistant] In 1901, Henry Slade vanished from public life entirely.


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[Assistant] Four years later, his death was reported in Battle Creek, Michigan, where he had been receiving treatment at a sanitarium. He spent his final years as a penniless, friendless recluse, and was buried in a pauper's grave.


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[Assistant] A year later, a group of spiritualists learned of their hero's tragic ending and raised the funds to give him a proper burial. His remains were exhumed and moved to Riverside Cemetery in Albion, Michigan, and the new headstone was placed over the grave along with an epitaph worthy of his former glory.


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[Assistant] Well, they fared much better than the fraud they managed to expose. Both men were knighted by the king.


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[Assistant] Mind over matter. When I think back to those days in the early 80s as I sat in front of the television and watched people bend spoons without touching them, that's the phrase that always comes back to me. Three simple words that hide a mountain of complexity.


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[Assistant] But when we look at the lives of people like Henry Slade, mind over matter takes on a whole new meaning. For people in the late 1800s, it was up to them to


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[Assistant] Overlook the obvious and the outrageous. Their mind over what truly mattered. And in that battle between logic and superstition, there were winners and there were losers.


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[Assistant] But it's also a battle that never seems to have ended. Even today, we all struggle to punch through the noise and the deception to find the truth that lies behind so much of what we're told. And in the end,


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[Assistant] Maybe that will always be a part of life for us, however exhausting that might sound.


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[Assistant] Now, remember that University of Pennsylvania committee that examined Slade's abilities and declared him to be a fraud? There was another medium at that examination, one who testified against him, and his name was Remigius Weiss, who went by the stage name Remigius Albus, for that added wizardly flavor, I'm sure.


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[Assistant] Weiss was a former medium who had, in a sense, gone straight years before. And in that time he had befriended Slade and learned everything he could from the man. His goal was to obtain definitive proof of the man's fraud. And he finally got it.


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[Assistant] After sitting Slade down and performing all of the medium's tricks back for him, he announced that he was ready to unveil his friend as a fraud. But Slade panicked and offered to sign a written confession, so long as Weiss kept the secret under his hat.


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[Assistant] Feeling sorry for the desperate medium, Weiss agreed. But there was another man out there who didn't care about Slade's feelings, especially after that medium passed away.


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[Assistant] This man was well-versed in just how rife with frauds the world of spiritualism had become, and he'd been working for years to unmask as many of them as possible, both the living and the dead.


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[Assistant] And somehow this man managed to get Weiss to send him not only a description of how Slade performed his slate-writing trick, but also Slade's written confession itself.


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[Assistant] It's easy to step into a discussion of spiritualist mediums and be skeptic. Certainly stories about frauds like Henry Slade made a good case for ignoring everything you might hear from a celebrity medium. But if you're a student of history, you know there's always an exception to the rule.


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[Assistant] David was born into a Quaker family in Philadelphia back in 1857. He studied hard, he went to college, and he finally joined the world of the working class in the 1870s.


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[Assistant] For him, that meant joining his uncles in the family wool business. And after getting married a short time later, it seems that his life was on that typical, expected path.


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[Assistant] But like most of us, David had a hobby. You know, a place to let off steam after a busy day at the 9 to 5.


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[Assistant] For you, it might be video games, reading mystery novels, or painting miniatures for your weekly RPG nights. For David, it was singing.


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[Assistant] He sang in the clubs. He sang in the choir. Basically, if there was an opportunity to sing, David was there. And apparently, he was good at it.


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[Assistant] In 1885, at the age of 28, David made the bold decision to quit his career and travel to Europe to formally train in music. Soon enough, he was in Florence, Italy, learning at the proverbial feet of instructors like Luigi Vannaccini and Francesco Lamporti. And after growing in his ability and experience,


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[Assistant] He finally landed his first professional role in a real opera, La Bazouche.


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[Assistant] Later on, with enough experience under his belt to make him hungry for whatever the future might hold, he took a moment during a trip to London to step into the shop of a local medium. He had decisions to make. Should he pursue opera?


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[Assistant] And the pop culture occurrence of the late 1800s gently guided him toward the supernatural. It was more than a common occurrence.


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[Assistant] This medium in particular used a planchette as their method of communicating with the dead.


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[Assistant] That's that little heart-shaped wooden object that you might find included with the Ouija board.


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[Assistant] Back then, planchettes often had a hole in them near the pointed end where a pencil could be placed, allowing the spirits to write or draw their messages through the medium.


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[Assistant] And this medium's message was clear. Opera was the way to go.


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[Assistant] But not only that, the spirits offered specific advice. He was instructed to focus on four specific operas. Tannhäuser, Tristan und Isolde, Eide, and Meistersinger. And even given the names of specific roles in each that he should prepare for.


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[Assistant] But predictions by mediums, as we've already explored, are often a game of chance. With most mediums for hire, any answer was better than no answer. So a lot of grains of salt were needed to take along with their predictions. And yet David made note of his medium's assistance and filed it away.


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[Assistant] In 1892 though, all of that seemed to become relevant. The Royal Opera at Covent Garden hired David to be part of a performance. Its title? Die Meistersinger.


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[Assistant] But wait, it gets even better, because one of that show's lead cast performers got sick during rehearsals, forcing the producers to cancel, which made David available for another role, one his medium had recommended he train for just in case, in a production of Tristan & Isolde.


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[Assistant] It turned out to be the performance that unlocked his entire career, setting him on a path to be wildly successful and loved by all. And yes, David Skull Bispoom clearly paved his own road through hard work and determination.


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[Assistant] But it's also impossible to ignore the amazing coincidence found in his medium's advice.


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[Assistant] Proof that Spiritualism offered a glimpse into a future already written for us? Or just one more piece of evidence of just how susceptible some people are to the power of suggestion?


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[Assistant] As always folks, thanks so much for watching. Credits for today's episode are in the description below.


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[Assistant] Lore has been a podcast since 2015 with nearly 400 million downloads to date. You can learn more about this show, plus the book series and the television adaptation over at lorepodcast.com. And of course, be sure to click on the subscribe button and the bell icon so that you don't miss future episodes. And if you enjoyed this one, click that thumbs up too.


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[Assistant] And you can also follow the show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Just search for Lore Podcast, all one word, then click that follow button. And when you do say hi, I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for watching.


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[Assistant] In 1897, Boston opened the Tremont Street Subway. It was a pioneer, setting the stage for the future of underground public transit. And as crazy as it might seem, it's still in use today, making it the oldest subway tunnel in North America and the third oldest in the world. Not too shabby for a dark hole in the ground.


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[Assistant] It isn't a long tunnel system, but it helped people travel around the Boston Common, a massive public park in the middle of the city. Grab a map sometime and find the Common, and then trace your finger around the southeastern chin of the park where Boylston and Tremont intersect. That's where the tunnel passes through.


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[Assistant] Two years before it opened to the public though, workers were digging furiously beneath that corner when they ran into something unexpected.


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[Assistant] Skeletons. Hundreds and hundreds of human skeletons. Over 900 in fact, and all of them right smack in the middle of their path.


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[Assistant] But when Boylston Street was extended past there in 1836, the city engineers ran it right over a section of graves. It's more than ironic, really. The burying ground, or at least part of it, got buried.


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[Assistant] After the skeletons were discovered in 1897, they were all moved to a mass grave, which is still nearby today.


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[Assistant] This is what happens in old cities. When people have lived and died in one place for so long, things have a tendency to get buried and lost to time. Bodies for sure, but also the lives those bodies represented. We end up burying our pain, our tragedy, our loss.


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[Assistant] And all those hidden memories have a way of popping back up when we least expect it.


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[Assistant] Boston is one of those old cities. I know it's young by European standards, but it's one of the oldest in America. And all that age comes with a rich history. One that's full of conflict, and tragedy, and pain. Pain, some say, that can still be felt today.


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[Assistant] Boston is one of those cities that probably requires no introduction. It's central to so many of the early ideas and emotions that fueled the birth of America and it's one of the key stages upon which that conflict was played out. Boston was, and still is, an epicenter for the rebellious spirit.


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[Assistant] Many of us know it as the setting for the Boston Tea Party in 1773, which wasn't really a party, by the way. Three years before that, there was the Boston Massacre, which was really a massacre. These are well-known events with their own touch of darkness.


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[Assistant] The Boston's history is even darker than that.


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[Assistant] Sure, locals still used it for cattle grazing all the way up into the 1830s, but long before that, the common was the popular place to execute criminals. Although, criminals might be a misleading term.


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[Assistant] They hanged a good number of pirates and thieves, true, but they also killed Quakers for trespassing and suspected witches for heresy.


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[Assistant] And if tragedy leaves a painful shadow on a city, Boston has some dark spots. The Great Molasses Flood of 1919 is exactly what it sounds like. A company called Purity Distilling had a massive steel tank that contained 2.3 million gallons of molasses, which they used to make rum.


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[Assistant] A wave of syrup 25 feet tall rushed through the streets at 35 miles an hour. Buildings were pushed off their foundations. Children were swept away from their parents. At least 21 people were killed.


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[Assistant] And locals say that on a hot summer day, you can still smell the molasses. Simple chemistry or the ghost of a tragic past reasserting itself.


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[Assistant] There are other echoes, too. Back to the central burying ground above the Tremont Street tunnel, many visitors have seen things that they have trouble explaining away logically. The most common sighting is that of a little girl who's been seen standing among the gravestones, walking between them.


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[Assistant] Just north of the Commons is another graveyard known as the Granary Burying Ground. It's one of the oldest cemeteries in town, dating back to 1660, and that means it holds a lot of history. And story.


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[Assistant] The granary is home to a number of well-known individuals. Paul Revere, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and the parents of some guy named Benjamin Franklin are all among those buried there. All of the Boston Massacre victims are interred there as well.


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[Assistant] The graveyard is home to much more than burials. Some say it's full of restless spirits, too.


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[Assistant] Ghost hunters love the graveyard for its abundance of orbs, those fuzzy white spots that sometimes appear in photos at night. They also claim to have recorded odd voices and unusual spikes in temperature and electromagnetic fields. If that's your cup of tea, the granary offers a strong brew for sure.


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[Assistant] One of the common figures cited in The Granary, though, is said to be a man named James Otis. He was a well-known lawyer prior to the American Revolution, and is famous for coining that main rallying cry of the rebellion, no taxation without representation.


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[Assistant] But in 1769, he had an encounter with a British tax collector that ended in violence. During the struggle, the tax official struck Otis in the head with a blunt object, cutting him and, according to some, accelerating the symptoms of a mental illness that he'd struggled with his entire adult life.


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[Assistant] It's said that years later, Otis was so depressed over his illness that he wrote to his sister and expressed his desire to die quickly. My dear sister, he wrote to her, I hope when God Almighty in his righteous providence shall take me out of time into eternity, that it will be by a flash.


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[Assistant] On May 23rd, 1783, Otis was standing in the doorway of a friend in Andover, Massachusetts, when he dropped dead. The cause? A bolt of lightning.


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[Assistant] When John Pickering Putnam designed and built the Charles Gate Hotel in 1891, he was at the top of his game. As an architect, he was one of the leading designers of modern apartment buildings. As a builder, he was wildly creative, developing a number of new patents for building elements like ventilation systems and plumbing.


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[Assistant] He was just 41 when he finished the Charles Gate. It's a massive, hulking, Romanesque revival structure at the corner of Beacon and Charles Gate. And if you drive past it today, you can't miss it. And although it's been converted into condominiums, it was originally designed to be a luxury hotel.


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[Assistant] In between, it's been a boarding house, a college dorm, and a home to a few other less savory businesses.


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[Assistant] But tragedy moved into the hotel early on. In 1908, just 17 years after it was completed, a manufacturing executive named Westwood T. Windrum ended a long struggle with depression and insomnia right there in the hotel.


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[Assistant] When a loud noise woke Windram's wife on March 14th, she climbed out of bed only to find her husband dead in the closet, gun still in his hand.


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[Assistant] Nine years later, architect John Putnam himself died at the age of 70, right in the hotel he designed. And it's all that death and tragedy, some say, that's helped give birth to a new type of resident in the building. Ghosts.


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[Assistant] Between 1947 and the 1990s, the hotel was converted into dorm space for Boston University, and later on, Emerson College. Many of the darker tales come from that era.


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[Assistant] In one encounter, a student opened his eyes in the middle of the night to see a stranger in his room. That's odd enough on its own, I know, but even more unusual was that this stranger was floating above the student's bed.


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[Assistant] To make matters worse, the student discovered that he was unable to move.


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[Assistant] According to the story, the ghostly floating stranger attacked the student who screamed in horror. A resident assistant and a handful of other students ran to help, and all of them claimed to see the same ghostly figure for just a moment. And then, it vanished.


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[Assistant] Another student reported waking up to see a black cloud hovering near the ceiling of his dorm room. As he watched it, the dark mist moved across the room and vanished through the wall.


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[Assistant] There have been tales of unusual Ouija board encounters, unusual dreams, and strange sensations in places closest to the building's most tragic events. On their own, they are curious stories. Together, though, they paint a haunting picture.


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[Assistant] Another story-filled hotel in Boston is the Omni Parker House. It opened its doors in 1855, which makes it the oldest continuously operating hotel in the country.


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[Assistant] In the 1920s, most of the original building was torn down and replaced with a new 14-story structure. But with all that history comes a lot of baggage.


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[Assistant] The most frequent story told in the hotel is that of a ghostly older man seen walking in the halls late at night.


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[Assistant] Those who have seen this figure describe him as bearded and dressed in Victoria-era clothing. Members of the hotel staff claim it's the spirit of Harvey Parker, the man who built the original hotel nearly two centuries ago.


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[Assistant] If true, Mr. Parker gets around. Not only has he been seen in the halls of the 9th and 10th floors, but on at least one occasion, a guest has witnessed him inside their room.


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[Assistant] We can probably guess what her answer was.


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[Assistant] Most stories, though, are focused on the third floor. Guests there have reported hearing sounds late at night that they identify as a rocking chair slowly creaking back and forth through the night.


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[Assistant] Other guests report that the elevator has an eerie tendency to stop on the third floor, with no one inside.


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[Assistant] The spirit they blame for that is Charlotte Cushman.


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[Assistant] Cushman was born right there in Boston and quickly rose to become one of the most famous American actresses of the mid-1800s. She toured most of the English-speaking world with theater productions, selling out everywhere she went.


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[Assistant] But in 1876, she was at the end of her battle with breast cancer and died of pneumonia at the Parker Hotel that February.


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[Assistant] In the 1940s, a traveling liquor salesman apparently killed himself in room 303, and that tragic event has left an indelible mark on the hotel. Guests in the past have complained about the constant smell of whiskey, while others claim they witnessed odd shadows in the room. Shadows, they say, that moved.


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[Assistant] Other reports claim that the bathtub would turn on all by itself. Guests have heard noises and felt cold spots creating an environment a bit too unsettling for their tastes. Because they've received so many reports, the hotel has permanently closed the room, converting it into a storage space.


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[Assistant] Since then, the hauntings have reportedly stopped.


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[Assistant] Clearly, these spaces have played host to the highs and lows of human life. Somewhere between the wealthy and celebrated and the tragic and painful, something has taken a hold of them. Whether it's ghosts or just the echo of dramatic story, that's ultimately up to the people who experience the effects.


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[Assistant] But the story that just might be Boston's darkest is actually set seven miles to the east, in the middle of a busy harbor.


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[Assistant] It's easy to overlook it now, but 150 years ago, one island played host to an emotional tale filled with loss and misfortune.


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[Assistant] And some say that story has never really ended.


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[Assistant] George's Island isn't large by any stretch of the imagination, but it was big enough for early settlers to use it for farming. In 1825, though, the government purchased it with another purpose. Coastal defense.


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[Assistant] This little island seemed like the perfect place to build a fort, which they did. But by the time they finished building it in 1847, it was already outdated. They called it Fort Warren, named after a local American Revolutionary War hero. And it remained in use for another century, before closing its doors just after World War II.


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[Assistant] Now, admittedly, there aren't any records that support the tale that I'm about to tell you, and I know that makes for wobbly history. But the reality is that sometimes the only evidence of something historical is the folklore that it leaves behind. It's like a shadow, in a way. It hints that something bigger and more real is there, even if we can't see it.


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[Assistant] And in this case, it's also just a story worth repeating.


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[Assistant] During the American Civil War, both sides of the conflict found themselves with a unique problem that none of them could have prepared for. Through the course of battle, prisoners were taken. And prisoners of war needed to be kept somewhere.


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[Assistant] Sometimes, as was the case in Richmond, Virginia, an out of the way place was taken over and converted into a prison camp. Other times, old forts were used, and that's what happened in Boston.


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[Assistant] In October of 1861, about 750 Confederate prisoners arrived on the island. Some were political figures, like Confederate Vice President Alexander Stevens. Most, though, were just soldiers, captured in battle.


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[Assistant] And thankfully, when compared to other prisons like Andersonville in Georgia or Belle Isle in Richmond, the Fort Warren prisoners were treated humanely and with dignity. But they were, nonetheless, prisoners. And one of those prisoners, according to the legend, was a man named Andrew Lanier.


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[Assistant] Shortly after his arrival, Lanier is said to have written a letter to his wife, Melanie, telling her what had happened and where he was. But when she received the letter, Andrew's wife didn't do what most of us would have done. Melanie didn't resign to waiting. She didn't weep and accept defeat. She took action.


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[Assistant] When she got her husband's letter, Melanie saddled her horse and made the journey north to Massachusetts, eventually arriving in the town of Hull in late December of 1861.


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[Assistant] Now, Hull is important because it's on the coast, and just about a mile across the water to the north is a fort. Fort Warren, in fact.


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[Assistant] As the story goes, Melanie hacked off her hair with a knife, dressed up in men's clothing, and then tucked a pistol and a hand axe into her belt.