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[Assistant] Because this isn't just a Chinese interpretation of the story that we've all grown up with.


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[Assistant] In fact, this story came about long before Disney gave us the animated classic, and before Drew Barrymore helped us to see the character in a new light. Know the tale of Yaxiang is far older.


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[Assistant] It has its roots in ancient China, during the years between the Qing and Han dynasties, which span the centuries from roughly 220 BC to 220 AD, which makes it over 2000 years old.


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[Assistant] Proving yet again that the stories we tell are often older and more diverse than we could ever imagine.


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[Assistant] Folklore might often discuss tales that people set at odds with each other, but in the end, it also does something more magical. It unites us around a common experience. That of our shared humanity.


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[Assistant] As always folks, 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 date. You can learn more about the show, plus the book series and the television adaptation from Amazon 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, give it a 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 listening.


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[Assistant] Everyone loves a good loophole. What heist movie or true crime drama would be complete without the suspect getting away from the authorities due to a gap in the law or a weird gray area that makes them untouchable? It's the stuff at the center of so many good stories. And it exists in real life, too.


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[Assistant] To understand what I mean, we need to talk for a moment about a Michigan State University law professor named Brian Calt. About 20 years ago, he started to write an essay about the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which, in simple terms, entitles people accused of a crime to a fair trial.


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[Assistant] Some trials require a jury of peers, who are all pulled from the same district and state that the crime was committed in. And Cole began to wonder, are there any areas in the US that don't have enough people to fill a jury? Because if that were to happen, he suggested that no major crime committed there could legally be punished.


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[Assistant] It's a legal theory, but it certainly makes sense. A zone on a map where crimes might be committed, but without residents who could be part of a jury.


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[Assistant] And it turns out there is one such location in America. It's a 50 square mile slice of Idaho that's uninhabited for a very specific reason. It's part of Yellowstone National Park.


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[Assistant] And it's ironic, I think, that a place of such natural beauty, of such purity and tranquility and simple gorgeous landscapes could potentially play host to the perfect crime. In fact, it's hard to see these places protected as anything other than special and good.


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[Assistant] But sadly, history has given us plenty of evidence of at least one dependable truth. The more unspoiled the canvas, the darker the possibilities.


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[Assistant] Open skies, crystal clear water, mountains, and ancient trees that stretch to the heavens. Whenever someone mentions a national park, these are ideas that come to mind. Something untouched and pristine that has been frozen in time and left exactly as we found it.


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[Assistant] Except that's not true. It's easy to think that we've created all of these amazing national parks as a way of protecting nature, which we certainly did. But we also did it to protect them from ourselves, and a good example of that took place in the Yosemite Valley of California back in the middle of the 1800s.


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[Assistant] The first Americans to arrive there and see the towering sequoias wanted to capture that beauty. They painted copies of it, made engravings, and later on, when it became more common, they even took photographs. And all of those images traveled back east where they captured the imagination of an entire nation.


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[Assistant] Pretty soon there were people setting up makeshift hotels to earn some money off the first wave of tourists. Then in June of 1853, a group of gold rush miners passed through and used chisels and a hand drill, and they cut down a 300 foot tall tree that historians estimated to have been over 1200 years old.


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[Assistant] The bark was then removed and reassembled into an empty shell within which people gathered to hear live music. Within months, there was a hotel built nearby, and the stump of the massive tree was used to host entire dance parties upon it.


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[Assistant] And more and more similar trees met the same fate. It would take another decade for the federal government to realize what sort of treasure they were losing. In 1863, they gifted the entire grove of ancient trees to the state of California to protect and maintain. But that was just one battle in a war that would be waged all across the country. Niagara Falls didn't fare so well.


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[Assistant] Prior to 1850, that massive river was lined with wildflowers and old, beautiful trees. But once people got a hold of it, those were all torn out in favor of gift shops and hotels. In an effort to accommodate as many people as possible to see the spectacle and beauty of it all, they slowly chiseled that beauty away.


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[Assistant] Now, while national parks might have restrictions today that prevent people from permanently living inside them, it's important to remember that many of these special locations had been home to entire cultures for thousands of years. And a good example of that would be the legendary national park, Yellowstone.


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[Assistant] For at least 11,000 years, the indigenous people of the region called it home, hunting and living on the same land that tourists visit today. When American settlers headed west and started arriving, they would have found a landscape flourishing with life, from the abundance of animals and resources to the people who managed it all.


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[Assistant] But in the early 1870s, just after Yellowstone was officially established as a national park, the United States Army was used to push those people out of their home. All of a sudden, they no longer had access to their hunting grounds or resources they depended on, like the obsidian they mined to create blades and arrowheads.


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[Assistant] I mention all of this because it's important to hold everything within its proper context. So while our national parks preserve the beauty of the natural world for generations in the future, we can't forget that they only needed preserving because of our own parasitic nature as humans.


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[Assistant] And in setting them up, we stripped many of them from their former caretakers. Yes, they are special, but there's a dark shadow around their wonderful glow.


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[Assistant] For those who like to keep track of records, the very first official national park was Yellowstone, established in 1872. Today there are 62 of them around the country, broken up into hundreds of smaller units, and together they cover over 85 million acres of land.


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[Assistant] The largest on the list is Wrangell St. Elias National Park up in Alaska at over 13 million acres. And the smallest is the Thaddeus Kosciuszko National Memorial in Philadelphia at just over 870 square feet.


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[Assistant] Every legendary location deserves an equally legendary story. And for those who visit Yellowstone, that's exactly what you can expect.


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[Assistant] Now when most people think of Yellowstone, they picture Old Faithful. That dependable geyser that shows off the volatile power deep beneath the park.


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[Assistant] But nearby is another frequently visited place, the Old Faithful Inn. Built in 1903, it's a massive log cabin style structure, quite possibly the largest of its kind in the world.


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[Assistant] And one specific story has haunted guests for years. It tells the tale of a newly married couple who traveled to the inn from far out east in 1915. It seems that the bride was the daughter of a wealthy businessman who fell in love with a servant who worked inside the family home.


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[Assistant] Daddy didn't approve though and gave her a choice. Ditch the poor man or take a small inheritance and never come back.


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[Assistant] The daughter took the second option and the pair married and left town.


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[Assistant] I don't know what their final destination was going to be, but the road eventually brought them to the Old Faithful Inn.


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[Assistant] But along the way, the groom had gambled away almost all of her small inheritance and that left them in a constant state of tension and shouting matches.


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[Assistant] They had checked into room 127 when they arrived, but no one saw either of them for days.


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[Assistant] Finally, the hotel staff opened the door, only to find the bride's headless body, still wearing her wedding dress, they say, lying inside the bathtub. It would take another few days to find the head, thanks to a growing odor that emanated from a public space at the peak of the hotel, known as the crow's nest.


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[Assistant] Ever since, guests have reported seeing the ghost of a headless woman, dressed in white, pacing around the staircase leading to the crow's nest. Others have sworn that they've heard the sounds of invisible footsteps running up and down the hallway, and it would be easy to assume that the long-dead bride was cursed to forever search for her head.


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[Assistant] Except for one small detail. The story is all made up.


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[Assistant] It's the creation of George Bornman, who worked there in the 1980s. It seems that he had been asked so many times by guests over the years if the old hotel was haunted, that he eventually invented a story that gave them a satisfactory answer. But what's oddest of all is that despite the legend being pure fabrication,


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[Assistant] Guests continue to report identical sightings and sounds near the crow's nest. Maybe sometimes the folklore we create takes on a life of its own.


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[Assistant] Miles away at Yosemite National Park is a body of water known as Grouse Lake. Tall pines stand above its rocky shores, giving the place a calm persona. But if the stories are true, not everything there is so peaceful.


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[Assistant] Back in 1857, a ranger named Galen Clark visited the lake and the indigenous people who lived near it, and they took him on a deer hunt. While out near the lake, though, Clark claimed to hear what he described as the cries of a lost puppy or maybe a small child. But the locals had another explanation.


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[Assistant] Those were the cries of a ghost, the spirit of a boy who drowned there, long before.


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[Assistant] For a while, Clark assumed that the locals were trying to prey on his gullibility.


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[Assistant] Surely it must have been an unusual bird, perhaps a species no one had documented before. But after standing on that rocky shore and hearing it for himself, he walked away fully convinced. Grouse Lake is haunted.


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[Assistant] And back east, one of America's most haunted national parks is actually a former battleground from the American Civil War.


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[Assistant] Gettysburg National Park is a memorial to one of the war's most bloody battles, which took place back in July of 1863. And right in the middle of the battlefield itself is a natural feature with an unnatural reputation. The Devil's Den.


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[Assistant] It's a collection of massive boulders that seem to have been dropped there in a pile by whatever forces shaped the landscape millions of years before.


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[Assistant] As for the name of the place, there are all sorts of theories about where it comes from. But the most prominent is that it was once the home of a vicious legendary snake known as the Devil, making the outcropping the Devil's den.


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[Assistant] Now during the battle, that collection of tall rocks offered shelter to soldiers.


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[Assistant] But war is deadly, and it's said that over 2,500 men were killed on or around the boulders, and that much bloodshed is bound to leave a stain, as a number of visitors to the site have reported over the years.


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[Assistant] Along with random disembodied cries of soldiers at war, many people have encountered a mysterious person in tattered clothing and bare feet.


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[Assistant] Most who see him assume he's just a local reenactment enthusiast or maybe a tour guide in costume. But he's been seen for so long by so many people that he's becoming less and less likely to be either.


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[Assistant] One day in the 1970s, a woman was there touring the battlefield, but she had wandered away from her friends and was beginning to feel a bit worried and lost. That's when she stumbled upon a man fitting that same description. Bare feet, torn clothes, long hair, and the two made eye contact.


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[Assistant] The strange man raised his arm, pointed in a direction somewhere over her shoulder and then spoke, What you are looking for is over there.


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[Assistant] Naturally, the woman turned to see which way he had pointed her, hoping it would lead her to her friends, and then turned back to thank him. But when she did, her breath caught in her throat.


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[Assistant] The man who had been there a moment before had disappeared.


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[Assistant] Few national parks are as visible or memorable as the Grand Canyon. In fact, it might just be the most famous of them all, known to people all over the world thanks to its glamorous name and stunning landscapes.


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[Assistant] And it's easy to see why. It stretches 277 miles from one end to the other. And while the average depth of the canyon is around 4,000 feet, some parts go as far as 6,000 feet deep. That's over a mile, if you're keeping track. And naturally, it is breathtaking.


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[Assistant] One of my favorite anecdotes about the earliest Europeans to see the place is how in 1540, Spanish explorers set eyes on it and wrote it off as a wasteland. In fact, for three centuries, it was sometimes referred to on maps as simply the Great Unknown.


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[Assistant] Just a reminder of how funny it is when people are so utterly and spectacularly incorrect.


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[Assistant] And as with any location that's so vast and dangerous, there are countless ghost stories to fill that space. Some are old, like the tales that are whispered about the El Tovar Hotel, a building that sits just 20 feet from the edge of the south rim of the canyon.


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[Assistant] Legend says that there's a painting inside that inn that features a person with eyes that seem to follow people around the room.


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[Assistant] Other stories claim that a ghostly gentleman has been spotted in the lobby. He's been known to walk up to ghosts and invite them to his holiday party.


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[Assistant] Oh, and then there are the spirits that haunt the rooms, sometimes tugging on the bedsheets as people sleep. But some stories are newer as well.


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[Assistant] Back in 1956, for example, two passenger planes took off from Los Angeles International Airport, only minutes apart, both headed to destinations in the Midwest. But somewhere over the Grand Canyon, their paths intersected, and the flights, United Flight 718 and TWA Flight 2, collided in the sky.


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[Assistant] Each of the collective 128 people aboard the flights died that day, and the wreckage dropped into the canyon below, a location that some refer to today as Crash Canyon. And it was a deadly tragedy that left a mark on the spiritual landscape of the area there, as one story in particular demonstrates for us.


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[Assistant] It seems that one night while camping in that same region of the Grand Canyon, a park ranger reported seeing mysterious lights in the distance.


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[Assistant] From her tent, she spotted a group of a dozen or so men and women, all dressed in business attire. They were slowly walking in a line down the trail, led along by a handful of Native American men. But when this ranger stepped out to confront them, they had vanished.


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[Assistant] Oh, and maybe this is a good time to point out that this little part of the canyon has been said to be sacred Native American ground for generations. In what way? It's reportedly a place where this world and the next are closer than normal, allowing the dead to pass through the veil. One last story.


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[Assistant] Far to the northern end of the Grand Canyon, there are stories of the Wandering Woman.


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[Assistant] Think of her as the Grand Canyon's own version of La Llorona, often described as a woman dressed in a white gown with small blue flowers embroidered upon it, who wears a scarf on her head as she wanders the trails near the North Rim.


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[Assistant] Those who have encountered her have reported that she's almost always weeping, as if she's experiencing some enormous personal tragedy. Sometimes people will approach the sound, assuming that someone needs help, only to find that there's no one there.


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[Assistant] Of course, like most ghost sightings, there are legends that fill the gaps. Some say that she once lived in the area, but sometime in the 1930s she received word that her husband and her only son both had died in a hiking accident, and so she took her own life. It's the sort of origin story that is both impossible to prove,


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[Assistant] And easy to believe, thanks to the lack of evidence in either direction. Well, most evidence.


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[Assistant] It seems that many years ago, a ranger who worked in the area was inside his cabin there when he heard the sounds of a person crying.


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[Assistant] That first night he ignored it, but the following night the crime resumed. He claimed that he was assuming that it was simply one of the other rangers, perhaps homesick or distraught over some personal issue.


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[Assistant] But when the sounds returned for the third night, he opened his door to get to the bottom of it. Looking out into the darkness of the night, with the stars spread out like diamonds above the land, he glanced toward the path that passed by the camp.


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[Assistant] And that's when he saw something. It was a ghostly woman in white, slowly walking down the trail.


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[Assistant] America is a huge, diverse, and wonderful, yet flawed place to live. There's a lot of beautiful stuff out there to see, but much of it has a tinge of darkness. And while many people look at our national parks as a spotless treasure, the truth is something different.


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[Assistant] At the end of the day, our job as citizens of the world is to recognize two very opposite things. Our past is filled with good intentions, but it's also loaded with tragic mistakes. People aren't perfect, so maybe that's the best we can hope for. Either way, we'd be good to remember that even our national parks are far from unspoiled.


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[Assistant] And yet the march of progress and exploration continues to show us new places that need to be set apart and protected. From industry, from greed, and yes, even from our own mismanagement. Heck, even as the pandemic of 2020 began to rear its ugly head, a brand new national park was established, continuing that long tradition.


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[Assistant] The New River Gorge National Park and Preserve is located in West Virginia and covers over 70,000 acres around the New River, just east of Mount Hope.


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[Assistant] Today it's a place where people from all over the world can hike and climb and mountain bike and even do a bit of whitewater rafting. But just a century ago, it was home to a different sort of activity. Coal mining.


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[Assistant] As was so often the case, the boom in mining along the river valley also brought a boom in new settlements. Communities would pop up almost overnight to serve the needs of the people who worked in those mines. And by some estimates, there was one town for every half mile of river.


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[Assistant] Train stations, lamp houses, general stores, hotels, you name it, the mining industry attracted it like moths to a flame.


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[Assistant] Today though, just about all of those towns are empty, abandoned in the decades leading up to the 1950s. One such place is Thurmond, which had its own train depot and boasted a bar that never closed at the Dunglenn Hotel.


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[Assistant] Back then, the place had a reputation for gambling and heavy drinking, but today it's just a collection of empty buildings. Well, maybe not entirely empty.


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[Assistant] One park ranger recently claimed that it's common to lock up buildings for the night, only to return later and find all of the doors wide open and water running in some of the sinks.


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[Assistant] Perhaps some of the former residents aren't too happy to see their once bustling community left to fade away.


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[Assistant] And it makes me wonder, as we continue to welcome additional national parks into the fold of protected space, how many more forgotten stories from the past will they reveal? And how many ghost towns will be given a second life?


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[Assistant] Some national parks are a slice of pristine nature. Some are our best attempt to build a wall around a disappearing landscape so others can enjoy it. And a few are something more. A new chapter in a dark story that many have long since forgotten.


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[Assistant] In Kentucky, they have a number of things in abundance, like bourbon, horse racing, and bluegrass music. But beneath all of that is another natural resource.


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[Assistant] In fact, Kentucky is home to the largest known cave system, with over 400 miles of subterranean tunnels already mapped, and another 600 miles estimated to be waiting for explorers.


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[Assistant] Folks started noticing the caves pretty much right as settlers were moving into the area. By 1816 there were already people offering guided tours and charging admission.


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[Assistant] Heck, if you want some entertaining Saturday morning reading, do an internet search for the Kentucky Cave Wars and then bask in its weird glory.


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[Assistant] Many historians believe that the cave system as it exists today wouldn't have been studied if it hadn't been for the work of an enslaved man named Stephen Bishop, who was rumored to have placed a narrow, rickety ladder across an opening called the Bottomless Pit, and then crawled across it with a lantern clenched in his teeth.


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[Assistant] It was Bishop's personal maps of the cave system, drawn from memory with his own hand, that guided explorers for years, until modern equipment became available and his routes were confirmed. Without him, the National Park might not even exist.


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[Assistant] But before that cave system became Mammoth Cave National Park in 1941, there was a darker story playing out there. It started in 1839, when a doctor named John Krogan purchased Mammoth Cave for the modern equivalent of about $300,000, hoping to use it for medical purposes.


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[Assistant] You see, Krogan was battling tuberculosis and one of the prevalent treatment theories of the time was fresh air. He had encountered the unusual damp air of the caves before and found them to be invigorating. So he bought the caves and then began setting up a recovery center inside them.


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[Assistant] In the winter of 1842, 16 of Dr. Krogan's patients moved into a collection of wood and limestone huts that had been constructed inside the cave, where they hoped that the change in atmosphere would give their bodies a chance to recover. And they paid good money for this opportunity, too. And for a while, it seemed to be working.


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[Assistant] Dr. Krogan saw improvement in his patients early on, a good sign that his intuition had been correct.


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[Assistant] But over time that progress fell apart. Looking back on those events now though, historians are pretty sure why. Living inside a cave where a number of fires and oil lamps were constantly burning actually flooded their lungs with smoke and ash, which reduced their ability to absorb oxygen.


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[Assistant] As their health failed them, more and more of those patients left the cave-based recovery center.


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[Assistant] Not all got out alive, though. Before operations were shut down in early 1843, five people died inside the cave. Their bodies were placed on a low, long slab of rock known today as corpse rock, and then everything was simply abandoned.


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[Assistant] Corpse Rock is still there today, as are a few of the limestone huts that Krogan's patients stayed in.


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[Assistant] But there are other echoes of the past that haven't faded away as well. Some people believe that an unseen spirit follows them on journeys through the tunnels. And while they can't prove it, they are convinced that it is Stephen Bishop, still at work mapping the caves.


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[Assistant] Others think that they have seen him. According to one story, a tour group stopped in a large canyon known as the Chief City Room and spent some time listening to the guide.


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[Assistant] At one point though, a number of people looked up above the guide and pointed toward a stone known locally as Sacrifice Rock.


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[Assistant] There, as if perched on the rock high above them, was a figure holding a lantern. The figure of a black man in old-fashioned clothing.


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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.


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[Assistant] And of course, be sure to click 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 this 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 listening.


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[Assistant] Dorothy Ford stood next to William Street inside his own church while a visiting priest performed their marriage rites. It was November 27th of 1667 in Southpool, a village in Devon, England, and the church was packed.


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[Assistant] Most people hadn't actually expected the wedding to take place, so they'd all come out to witness the miracle.


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[Assistant] They hadn't doubted it because William Street had been the rector of their own parish. They hadn't doubted the couple's love for each other. Or that Street was 66 years old. And they certainly hadn't doubted it because the original wedding date had been postponed.


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[Assistant] They doubted it because William Street had died a year and a half earlier in a riding accident. His funeral was followed by a series of community dreams. Multiple people in Southpool began to have nightmares, and all of them were eerily similar. In each, Street himself would appear and tell them that he couldn't find peace. Only his wedding could do that.


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[Assistant] After months of this, with dozens of people reporting the same dreamlike demands from their dead clergymen, the village relented. The church was decorated for a wedding, Street's coffin was exhumed, and Dorothy stood beside it while the priest married them. Afterward, Street was reburied and the vision stopped. Dreams are a funny thing, aren't they?


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[Assistant] We don't always remember them when we wake up, but when we do they often leave us feeling entertained and informed.


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[Assistant] We see them as signs of things to come, of glimpses into treasured memories. They often seem real enough that we hope for dreams of lost loved ones. In our dreams we might take flight, or travel the world, or run as if we're waist deep in a pool of water.


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[Assistant] Dreams have held deep cultural meaning since the earliest days of humanity, and that meaning has always varied. Depending on when and where in history you pick, dreams have been viewed as either a blessing or a curse. They've revealed unknown truths to rulers and warned others of impending danger. Or, you know, so they thought.


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[Assistant] In ancient Egypt, if you had vivid dreams, you were considered special. How they proved that, I have no idea. But they were so obsessed with it that they built special sleeping rooms where people could go to help them dream better. Because practice makes perfect, right?


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[Assistant] The Greco-Roman world was full of dream interpretation. They even had a god devoted entirely to dreams, named Morpheus. The ancient Hindu scriptures known as the Veda divide our existence into three distinct states, the waking, the sleeping, and the dreaming.


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[Assistant] But even without the attachment of religion, dreams have long been seen as a predictor of things to come. Whether we call them premonitions or dark omens, the things we see in our sleep have long been viewed by some as a preview of what's about to happen. And history is full of stories that claim to be true life examples.


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[Assistant] John Brody Innes was a clergyman and close friend of Charles Darwin. In 1919, he recorded a story from his time in Germany decades earlier about two friends who had fallen into an argument over the love of a young woman.


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[Assistant] One friend was an American, and the other a Hungarian nobleman, and when the American felt slighted he challenged the Hungarian to a duel. The two men set a date, and the Hungarian was given his pick of weapons. When he picked cavalry sabres, the message was clear. This would be a fight to the death. Now all they had to do was wait.


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[Assistant] A week before the duel, John was called to the American's quarters to see something. The man claimed to have had a vivid dream the night before. A dream in which he was wounded in the face before killing the Hungarian. John wrote that the American stood before him with a large red welt on his face. A product, he claimed, of his dream.


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[Assistant] That same morning, John was summoned to the Hungarians' home, where he heard something even more fascinating. The nobleman told John that he had also had an odd dream the night before.


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[Assistant] In his, he claimed that the American struck him down and killed him. The dream frightened the man so much that he issued what John called a handsome apology to the American, and the duel was called off. Both men were happy with that.


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[Assistant] This idea that the things we experience in our dreams can somehow have a physical effect on us after we wake up is an old one. Dreams, it's been said, have the ability to manifest, to take shape and walk among us. And it's not just about premonitions and visions of the future. Some believe that dreams can take physical shape.


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[Assistant] For example, take the story of a young woman from Scotland in the early 1800s. She was unmarried, but in late 1816 she became pregnant and sought to make things right and reached out to the courts for help. The woman was asked who the father was, and she identified him as one John Woods, a respectable local gentleman.


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[Assistant] After hearing the woman's claims and being called to court over them, Woods adamantly denied them. He said, in fact, that he wouldn't believe he was the father unless his own name was written across the child's face.


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[Assistant] The young woman was devastated, and rightly so, and the tragedy weighed on her constantly, more and more as the baby inside her grew. And then, in 1817, the woman gave birth to a healthy son.


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[Assistant] It confounded the doctors and so the mother and child were sent to Edinburgh for a more educated inspection. Professors, faculty, and experts in other fields were all brought in and each of them left the room completely astonished.


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[Assistant] John Woods, to his credit, had been waiting and watching. When he caught word of what the doctors had discovered, he bolted. No one ever saw him in town again.


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[Assistant] And one last story. Joseph Merrick was born in England in 1862. In his early childhood, he started to develop growths on his skin. His face became enlarged and covered with lumps that led to him being eventually known as the Elephant Man.


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[Assistant] For years, he toured England and Europe with human novelty exhibitions. Today, we would call them freak shows.


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[Assistant] During his lifetime, the accepted theory about the cause of his condition was that Merrick's mother had been frightened by an elephant when she was pregnant. Somehow, the traumatic event had embedded itself so firmly in her mind that the image manifested itself in her son.


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[Assistant] And as fantastical as it might sound for a pregnant mother's thoughts to have a real physical effect on her unborn child, it wasn't an idea limited to popular rumor or the musings of university professors. In fact, in the 18th century, something happened that left the medical world and everyone else completely baffled.


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[Assistant] They had a term for it, like so many other mysteries in life. Centuries ago, it was referred to as maternal impression, and it was a way of explaining the unexplainable. According to the theory, strong emotional events in the life of a pregnant woman could have a lasting impact on her unborn child.


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[Assistant] It was a backwards approach to things that were outside the scope of our understanding, though. They looked at the evidence after birth and made assumptions about what caused it.


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[Assistant] Joseph Merrick's story is a perfect example of that logic. Why did his body begin to deform and twist? Well, it must have begun in the womb. And this logic was applied to things like birthmarks, depression, and congenital diseases. If a baby seemed to be born with it, they chased that cause back to the life of the pregnant mother.


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[Assistant] And pregnancy is something that Mary and Joshua knew all too well. They were a young poor couple from Godalming, a village in Surrey, England. They rented a small home on a farm that they were both required to work. Although Mary was in the field much more than Joshua, who was also working as a clovier.


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[Assistant] Now, that word, clotheer, might make his occupation sound fancy, but believe me, it wasn't. Joshua's family, the Toffs, had lived in the area for well over a century, and for a long time had been prominent, successful clotheers. Apprentice records from the mid-1600s always listed family members among the masters in their trade.


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[Assistant] And of course, with all that prominence came wealth. It's easy to imagine that the family grew very used to a certain standard of living. And then manufacturing pushed its way onto the scene.


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[Assistant] Records started to show signs of that wealth and prominence slipping. When master clothiers were listed as dying inside workhouses instead of their own shops, the signs were pretty obvious. And this was the generation that Joshua was born into.


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[Assistant] Raised on tales of former glory, Joshua and his family now lived as peasants. At the risk of projecting, it probably stung a bit.


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[Assistant] The couple married young, and within five years, Mary had given birth to three children. Then, at the age of 23, she became pregnant again.


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[Assistant] Remember though, if you were poor and working in the fields to pay your rent in 1726, pregnancy wasn't enough to get you pulled off the job. So like everyone around her, Mary worked. She worked long and hard, and she did it day after day after day, well into her pregnancy.


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[Assistant] One day, she and another woman were in the field. There's no date for the story, but a safe guest would be sometime in late May of 1726. And while they worked, they talked.


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[Assistant] At some point though, the other woman pointed over to the edge of the field and Mary followed the gesture. There, nibbling on some weeds was a rabbit, or as they would have called it three centuries ago, a good home-cooked meal.


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[Assistant] The women tried to catch it, but they failed. A few days later they saw it again and, like the first attempt, failed to get their hands on it. And that must have been frustrating. So it's no wonder that Mary had a dream that night. She described it months later, and even then it was still vivid in her mind.


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[Assistant] In the dream she was sitting down in the field, her skirts piled up in her lap, and there, curled up in the folds of the fabric, were not one, but two rabbits. They were finally hers.


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[Assistant] It wasn't long after the dream that she started to have complications with her pregnancy. For a while, the couple had thought that perhaps she had even miscarried. But by early September, she was still pregnant and growing. So she continued to work in the fields, continued to hope, and continued to have weird dreams about rabbits.


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[Assistant] On the 27th of September, Mary went into early labor. She sent word to her mother-in-law, Anne Toft, to help her. Anne, who was an experienced midwife, arrived later that day, and by the evening, Mary was in the final moments of birth. But something was wrong.


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[Assistant] Something was so wrong in fact that Anne, a woman who had delivered eight children of her own, as well as dozens of others in the village, felt out of her league. So she called for John Howard, the physician in nearby Guilford. Maybe he would know what to do, she thought.


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[Assistant] When Dr. Howard arrived, he asked Anne to bring him up to speed on the delivery so far, and then examine the situation for himself. And then, like Anne, he stared in disbelief at what lay on the sheets in front of them. It defied logic, but it was right there for his eyes to see, still wet and still covered with blood.


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[Assistant] Mary Toft, you see, had not given birth to a baby at all. Something had come out of her body, but it wasn't what anyone had expected. It was a large handful of pieces of an animal. Each piece was hairless, as if it had been skinned.


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[Assistant] But despite that, it was still easy to recognize what the creature had been. It was a rabbit.


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[Assistant] Dr. Howard was understandably horrified, but also skeptical. He told the others in the room that night that he wouldn't believe it to be true until he delivered the head. Then for a while that seemed like it wasn't going to happen. Labor had stopped and Mary rested.


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[Assistant] For days, it seemed as if the events of that night were going to fade into memory and be written off as a medical oddity, and nothing more.


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[Assistant] But one week later, Mary went into labor again.


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[Assistant] This time, Dr. Howard was present, and it appears that he got his wish. Mary delivered the rabbit's head.


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[Assistant] At this point, Howard decided that Mary needed more observation, so he had her moved from her home to his own.


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[Assistant] Maybe it was just the action of a concerned physician, but it also could have been an attempt to discover if the unnatural births were really just a hoax. Surely, he thought, Mary wouldn't be able to keep up the act if she were right there under his roof. But the mystery continued.


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[Assistant] In the days that followed, Mary proceeded to give birth to more and more rabbits. Sometimes they came days apart, and sometimes closer together. And each time Dr. Howard was right there, a 30-year veteran of childbirth, to help her through the ordeal.


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[Assistant] He reported that he would often place his hand on her belly and feel movement, as if whatever was inside of her wanted out.


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[Assistant] This went on long enough that Howard even gave Mary some money to make up for the work that she was missing out on. I think that's also a good sign that Howard was fascinated. How could he not be though? He was delivering rabbits. From a human.


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[Assistant] By early November, according to the doctor's own count, Mary had given birth to a total of nine rabbits. They were all dead, all hairless, and all young. It was mind-boggling and defied all logic and reason. Mary, however, was just getting started.


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[Assistant] After delivering nine rabbits personally, Dr. Howard decided it was time to bring in more experts, so he sent word to Nathaniel St. Andre, physician to the Royal Household. St. Andre brought a friend with him named Samuel Mullineau, who worked as secretary to the Prince of Wales.


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[Assistant] The men arrived and found that Howard had amassed a collection of the delivered animals, all arranged in glass jars filled with a clear liquid. They set to work examining the samples, studying their color and features, and then the men opened the jars and took the pieces out.


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[Assistant] When I was in college, we dissected pigs in my biology class. Thanks to that experience, I have images in my head of metal trays containing dead animals, with pins holding back flaps of gray skin. I'm sure it wasn't pretty, but it was a good way for them to see things that Dr. Howard might have missed.


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[Assistant] These men were trying to be scientific and analytical. After all, if these births were fake, then there must be a clue hidden somewhere in the animals themselves.


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[Assistant] According to a later report, the lungs floated in water, which suggested that the animals had breathed air at one time. But while that information was persuasive, both men were present at a number of new births, each producing the same result.


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[Assistant] And the longer they stayed there in Dr. Howard's house, the more difficult it was becoming to not accept what their eyes were seeing.


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[Assistant] After the fifteenth rabbit was born, news was sent back to King George, who responded by sending his personal surgeon to investigate, a man named Syriacus Alers. Alers arrived just in time to witness the sixteenth birth, but right away, he noticed some odd circumstances.


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[Assistant] First, prior to the birth, Mary seemed to walk to the bed with her knees held tightly together. It was as if he suggested she was afraid something might fall out. A second, Dr. Howard eagerly suggested that Alers deliver the first rabbit, but after it was done, he wasn't allowed to examine her further.


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[Assistant] The final oddity was something that he kept to himself that day. After helping with the birth of the first piece of dead rabbit, Alers was ushered out of the room by Howard, but he managed to smuggle a partial rabbit with him. In a private room, Alers set about dissecting it, and discovered something remarkable.


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[Assistant] Alers made an excuse and left Guilford early, heading back to London to report his findings to the King. Once King George was up to speed, he ordered St. André and Moulinot to return as well. When they arrived, they brought news that Mary Toft had given birth to yet another rabbit. Her 19th, in fact.


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[Assistant] And that was apparently it for the king. He wanted to properly get to the bottom of the matter, so he ordered that Mary be brought to London for examination there.


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[Assistant] And at this point, word was spreading about Mary and her miraculous deliveries. So she was discreetly put up in an out-of-the-way, low-cost boarding house. Without Dr. Howard, mind you. And St. Andre was assigned to keep a watchful eye on her. And then something amazing happened. The births stopped.


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[Assistant] For Alers, who'd already been suspicious up to this point, this was the final straw. He had a judge sent to the boarding house to question Mary and get the truth out of her. But the judge was met with silence. Mary didn't want to talk about it, and he left empty-handed. So Alers dug around for the truth in other places. And that's when he struck gold.


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[Assistant] First, Dr. Howard approached him after Mary's arrival and asked for help. Mary had been out of work for a long time now, he told Alers. Considering how much of a medical marvel she was, he suggested that perhaps the King might grant her a pension. Howard asked Alers to make that request and Alers, being a smart man, sought right through it.


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[Assistant] Second, Mary's sister Margaret was caught smuggling a rabbit into the boarding house. She claimed that it was a meal for Mary, but, well, that'd be a pretty tough sell given the circumstances. Then it came to light that Mary's husband Joshua had been pretty busy over the previous weeks buying all of the rabbits he could find. The younger, the better, apparently.


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[Assistant] And finally, when word got out that Mary herself had tried to pay the porter of the boarding house to go out and buy her a rabbit, the authorities had all the evidence they needed. She was taken into custody in early December of 1726 and immediately questioned about the mysterious births. How, they asked her, did you pull off such a hoax?


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[Assistant] Mary, for her credit, denied the hoax entirely. She claimed that she had asked the porter to buy her the animal because she was hungry. She insisted that she was currently pregnant with more rabbits and despite all the questions that were being thrown at her, she refused to budge from that declaration.


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[Assistant] That is until she received an offer that she couldn't refuse.


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[Assistant] One of the men who had been questioning her, a Sir Richard Manningham, was a prominent physician in London. He had been brought in as an expert in the field, having specialized in pregnancy and birth for much of his career.


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[Assistant] On December 6th, he looked at Mary from across the room and told her that if she did not confess, he would, and I quote, perform very painful operations and experiments on you to discover your secret. Mary took just one night to think it over. The following morning, she confessed to the hoax.


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[Assistant] Historians are a bit torn about what Mary's motivation really was. Some view her as a woman caught up in something bigger than herself. They think that she was the victim of a mother-in-law with a hunger for fame and fortune, and a local doctor with his eyes set on moving up the medical ladder.


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[Assistant] Others, though, see her as a shrewd and careful individual. She planned every last detail, they say, and orchestrated all of the events, from chasing the rabbit with a neighbor woman to the purchase of rabbits, all without anyone noticing.


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[Assistant] Maybe no one thought that she was capable of it. Certainly no one would have expected a woman to skin and cut up a bunch of young rabbits and then insert them. Well, you get the idea.


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[Assistant] It's hard to know for sure whether Mary believed in some strange detached way that her dreams and emotions were truly creating the rabbits inside of her. It is clear though that enough of the world around her believed that it was possible. For a couple of months at least, it appeared that all of London was falling for it, hook, line, and sinker.


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[Assistant] Either way, Mary's adventure seems to have been a chase for glory. She wanted the fame and all that came with it. The attention, the money, the renown. She'd married into a family that had once been prominent and important, so perhaps she just wanted to do her part in restoring them to that position.


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[Assistant] But after her confession, that House of Lies came crashing down, and it took a lot of the key players with it. Two years after Mary's trial, Samuel Molino became sick and collapsed while on the floor of the House of Commons. His old friend St. André was there to treat him, but he died a few weeks later.


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[Assistant] St. André somehow managed to retain his position as the royal physician for a while, although the king took away his salary for the services. Interestingly, on the same night that Molino died, St. André eloped with Molino's wife.


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[Assistant] Widow. You get the point. And naturally, that aroused suspicions. Molino's cousin accused St. Andre of murder.


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[Assistant] St. André's career was never the same after that. His new wife lost her position in the court of the Queen, and the couple retired to an estate outside of London. He died at the ripe old age of 96.


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[Assistant] On January 7th of 1727, after carrying on their hoax for months and then undergoing weeks of questioning, Mary Toft and Dr. John Howard were brought before the judge's bench.


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[Assistant] For his involvement, Howard was fined the equivalent of $140,000 in modern currency and then released. He went home and continued to practice medicine for another three decades.


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[Assistant] Mary though was charged with, and I quote, being an abominable cheat and imposter in pretending to be delivered of several monstrous births.


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[Assistant] She was sent to Toddlefield's prison for, well, they weren't really sure. Being deceitful? Tricking a lot of people? Cruelty to animals? Mary's story was complicated after all.


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[Assistant] She was released in April, just a few months after arriving. To be honest, the court wasn't sure what charge she could be held on. They didn't have an official sentence for pretending to give birth to rabbits. Plus, crowds were gathering outside the prison each day to catch a glimpse of her. It was annoying. Better to just let her go home, they figured. And I can't blame them.


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[Assistant] For a very long time, birth was a process filled with mystery. And of course, wherever there are questions, someone is always ready to step in and offer an answer. In the case of Mary Toft, we got to see the general public express those unusual answers in their readiness to believe her story.


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[Assistant] But the concept of maternal impression wasn't limited to Mary's story or even her generation or country. In fact, we've chased down one more powerful example. Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about it.


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[Assistant] When the idea of maternal impression was popular, it laid the blame for birth defects and other problems squarely on the mother. After all, only someone with monstrous thoughts could have bred such a monster of a child, right? But why do we consider someone to be monstrous? What is monstrosity, really?


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[Assistant] According to an essay titled The Uncanny, published by Sigmund Freud in 1919, the difference between fantasy and horror is a matter of where the action takes place.


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[Assistant] In fantasy, the fantastical thing is happening in an environment where that's normal. For example, dragons may exist in a world where they're as common as dogs and cats. Horror, on the other hand, allows that fantastical or monstrous thing to bleed into our world, like a demonic spirit or an evil clown.


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[Assistant] So by that standard, pregnancy and birth might also be considered uncanny in their liminality. A child on the verge of being born is straddling between two worlds, crossing between realms. It makes sense that the act of birth would instill superstition in those who bring life into the world, just as death tends to do.


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[Assistant] And this is why the label monster is thought by some to be a way for society to deem a person as incompatible with our world. They clash with the status quo, and they contain elements that do not belong beside each other.


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[Assistant] People such as Fedor Jeftichu, who is also known as Jojo the dog-faced boy. He was born in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1868 with a condition called hypertrichosis. Those affected by hypertrichosis grow hair all over their face and often their body, hence its other name. Werewolf syndrome.


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[Assistant] On his torso and limbs, with the exception of the hands, feet, neck, and inner side of the arms, the hair was almost colorless, thick, and up to six centimeters long.


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[Assistant] And what was the reason for someone to be born in such a way? Well, before the days of genetic testing and advanced medicine, the answer was a lot simpler, maternal impression. In this case, hypertrichosis was the result of the mother being scared by a dog while pregnant.


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[Assistant] When Fedor was very young, he toured as a sideshow act with his father Adrian, who also had been born with hypertrichosis and was known as the Wild Man from the Kostroma Forest. There are two plausible stories surrounding their relationship.


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[Assistant] The first is that Adrian truly was Phaidor's biological father, and it would make sense given the similarity of their conditions.


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[Assistant] The other is that Adrian adopted Fedor, who had been born to Russian peasants and had come from the Kostromo region of the Russian Empire, just like Adrian. However, getting to the truth is difficult now, since the legend surrounding the two performers simply paints them as a father and son duo.


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[Assistant] Those who believe the adoption story claim that Adrian once had a wife and two children. The children had died at a very young age, and so Adrian, seen Fedor on display, chose to take him under his wing and show him the ropes of being a successful sideshow act.


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[Assistant] Adrian was something of a rockstar on the sideshow circuit, and much of the money he made was spent on booze. He eventually died of alcoholism, leaving Fedor an orphan and a ward of the state. Fedor, however, continued to tour with various other showmen, until one man in particular came to see the hair-covered wonder for himself. One look, and he knew he had to work with him. That man's name? P.T. Barnum.


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[Assistant] Barnum brought Fedor on board his famous sideshow when the boy was 16 and got to work weaving an origin story made for the tabloids. According to the showman, Fedor, or Jojo the dog-faced boy, had been discovered living in the forests of Russia with his even wilder father. The hunters who had found them took Jojo to Barnum.


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[Assistant] In some tellings, the hunters killed his father for being too feral to take alive. But regardless of how it was told, the story worked. According to one source, Fedor was earning $500 per week as a sideshow act. That's roughly $15,000 today. Few performers made more than that.


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[Assistant] Fedor was often seen sporting a tight-buttoned Russian military suit, staring at the audience as the lights rose, their anticipation mounting. Then he would let out a terrifying growl that shocked and amazed. Barnum made sure to highlight his resemblance to a dog as part of the show.


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[Assistant] Fedor couldn't pretend that he didn't look a certain way. Those were in the cards that he had been dealt. But that didn't mean that he had to sit there and take abuse from audiences or even Barnum himself.


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[Assistant] In 1898, several years after his employer's death, the 30-year-old Fedor organized a number of Barnum's former sideshow performers in protest against their being labeled freaks. His activism helped them win the legal right to be advertised as prodigies instead, which was granted the same year.


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[Assistant] After that, Fedor continued to tour all over the world, giving audiences everywhere a glimpse at something that they had never seen before. A man covered entirely in hair.


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[Assistant] This episode of Lore was researched, written, and produced by me, Aaron Manke, with additional help from Jenna Rose Nethercotts and Harry Marks, and music by Chad Lawson.


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[Assistant] Lore is much more than just a podcast. There's a book series available in bookstores and online, and two seasons of the television show on Amazon Prime Video. Check them both out if you want more lore in your life. You can find information about all of those things over at lorepodcast.com.


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[Assistant] You can also follow this show on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. 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 listening.


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[Assistant] Things break. That's one of the earliest lessons we learn as kids, isn't it? Our favorite toy, those shoes we loved, sometimes even our dreams. And Willem knew all about that.


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[Assistant] Let's just say that he had a hard time living up to his own expectations. And what did he hope for himself? Success, of course.


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[Assistant] So when he took a job working in a store at the age of 16, he probably assumed that he would be successful and climb that ladder, right? And for a while, he was.


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[Assistant] His job took him to London, the big city, and then later on to Paris, the city of lights. But then, after all that he had put in, he got fired. So he decided that success would have to mean something else entirely. This time he would follow in his father's footsteps and train to be a minister.


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[Assistant] Two years later though, he'd given up on school. He tried a less formal training course, but three months after that, he failed out of there as well. Willem just couldn't escape his broken dreams. At just 26, his life had become one long series of failure, disappointment, and hopelessness.


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[Assistant] But thankfully, he didn't give up, because there was one more thing he felt inspired to try. Art.


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[Assistant] Today, there are few people in the world who haven't heard of Vincent Willem van Gogh. And while his paintings are things of beauty, we can also see them as symbols of something bigger.


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[Assistant] That even when everything has fallen apart, there's still hope that from the most fiery wreckage and destruction, something else can be born.


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[Assistant] So today, I want to take you to a place that embodies that lesson, right down to its core. A city that pushed through ruin and pain, only to discover a world of story on the other side.


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[Assistant] When the Spanish arrived in the 1770s, they did what they've always done. They built a mission.


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[Assistant] Looking around at the beautiful coastline and vegetation, they first named the place after one of the fragrant plants there, the Yerba Buena.


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[Assistant] But in 1776, it received the name we know today, San Francisco.


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[Assistant] In fact, to put things in perspective, some historians believe the city officially began on June 29th of 1776, just a handful of days before the Declaration of Independence was signed on the other side of the continent.


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[Assistant] Little did the folks know back in the Northeast that a community was forming at the same time that would become, centuries later, one of the most densely populated cities in the country.


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[Assistant] Now of course, the Spanish started that community by eradicating the native population that already lived there. The Ohlone people had once numbered in the hundreds of thousands, but by 1900 there were fewer than 25,000 left, with the last speaker of the Ohlone language passing away in the 1930s.


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[Assistant] For the next 70 years, control of the land around San Francisco would pass from nation to nation before finally becoming a part of the United States in 1848. And what happened after that is sort of like buying a house just before the housing market explodes in value. Because just months later, gold was discovered.


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[Assistant] What happened in San Francisco is similar to other gold rush settlements.


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[Assistant] The population went from less than a thousand people in 1849 to 25,000 just a year later. And within a generation, that figure had multiplied to an astounding 150,000 residents.


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[Assistant] Most came for the gold, and the rest settled there to build lives around the miners. And a large number of them all arrived by ship.


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[Assistant] Now think about it for a moment. You and the rest of your crew have been sailing for weeks, maybe months, looking forward to the hope and promise that San Francisco held.


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[Assistant] There was gold to be found, and fortunes to be made. So the moment they dropped anchor in the bay, every single person on board would leave abandoning the ship, and the water became very crowded very quickly. What did they do?


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[Assistant] Well, people started turning the abandoned ships into businesses, churches, and even jails. And some of these less hospitable vessels just sort of rotted there, eventually sinking into the bay. Actually, that happened to a lot of nicer ships too, but on purpose.


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[Assistant] You see, the city needed more land, and filling in the waterfront could transform the area into a new foundation for the future. So they offered lots for sale in the shallow water, on the condition that buyers would fill them in with dirt.


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[Assistant] The others got around the purchase price altogether by simply scuttling their own ships on other people's lots, thereby claiming the land as part of the salvage.


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[Assistant] But whatever the method, the results became the area known today as the Embarcadero.


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[Assistant] Oh, and a cool little detail. Many years later, when a subway tunnel was being dug through that area, one length of tunnel was constructed right through the hull of a large ship called the Rome. Historians think it's the only ship in the world with a subway running through it.


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[Assistant] But it wasn't the only area of the city coming to life. Among the many newcomers to San Francisco in 1849 were immigrants from China. And for a brief moment, the white settlers were enthusiastic about welcoming them in, literally holding a welcome ceremony in 1850 in Portsmouth Square.


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[Assistant] They were all handed Bibles and told that they hoped even more would follow.


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[Assistant] But racist sentiment took root pretty quickly, and a series of laws were passed that discouraged Chinese citizens from working the gold mines, taking away their right to testify in court, and in 1882 with the Chinese Exclusion Act effectively prohibiting any more to immigrate to America.


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[Assistant] Abandoned and constantly abused, the Chinese citizens that already lived there gathered together to build a community that could support and protect itself.


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[Assistant] Chinatown became a universe unto itself, where Chinese folks could find work, food, education, places of worship, entertainment, and more. But the Chinatown of the late 19th century looked nothing like the photos you've seen of San Francisco today.


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[Assistant] Early on, it was just block after block of the same Italianate architecture that filled much of the city.


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[Assistant] No, the Chinatown of today was built much later, and designed by white architects to cater to the imagination of visitors. And why did it need to be rebuilt in the first place?


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[Assistant] Well, the answer is an event you probably already know about.


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[Assistant] It was a disaster unlike anything the country had seen before, and it left the entire city wondering if the world was about to end.


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[Assistant] The ground began to shake at 512 a.m. That was the moment on April 18th of 1906 that 300 miles of the San Andreas Fault ruptured, sending out shockwaves that were felt by people as far away as Oregon and Nevada. The world, at least to the people of San Francisco, had come undone.


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[Assistant] One person described the feeling as being on a ship tossed about on a rough sea and spoke of how their chandelier swung like a pendulum. Another witness, Fred Hewitt, said that the pavement pulsated like a living thing and spoke of how screeches rent the air as terrified humanity stepped out into the open in agony of despair. And of course, as buildings and homes were tossed to the ground,


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[Assistant] Gas pipes were torn apart, and then ignited by hundreds of fireplaces and stoves that spilled their contents in a quake.


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[Assistant] The result was a fire that quickly engulfed the rubble of the city and burned for several days. If someone's home was lucky enough to survive the earthquake, the fire most likely claimed it.


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[Assistant] Being a natural disaster that took place after the advent of photography, this is one of those rare moments that simultaneously feels ancient to us 21st century observers, but also tactile and visceral, because we can see it all with our own eyes.


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[Assistant] Over 3000 people died that day, and over half of the 400,000 residents found themselves homeless in an instant.


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[Assistant] Now of course the city got right back to work rebuilding. Over 28,000 buildings had been destroyed, dumping an estimated 6.5 billion bricks into the mangled streets.


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[Assistant] If you've ever visited the city and taken a walk in the Marina district, you've stood on that rubble, because most of it was dumped into the water that once covered that area, turning it into new land to build on.


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[Assistant] One casualty of the disaster was City Hall, which had just been completed less than a decade before. And that was frustrating, I'm sure, since it had taken almost 20 years for them to build it. And it was work that had started on a terrible note.


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[Assistant] Back in the 1850s, that area of the city was being eyed for development, but something was in their way. The old Yerba Buena Cemetery.


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[Assistant] So in February of 1853, the city started digging up those graves so they could use the land. According to one local paper, Boddy's


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[Assistant] Those bodies were placed in a new cemetery. But when San Francisco wanted to build their city hall in the 1870s, they unfortunately picked that burial ground as their location, which meant moving the corpses again.


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[Assistant] When we think about the mangled remains of City Hall following the earthquake, it's important not to forget the other mangled remains it was built on.


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[Assistant] One place that found new life after the earthquake, though, was a large island in San Francisco Bay.


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[Assistant] Although Angel Island had been used by native peoples for hundreds of years prior to the arrival of Europeans, it had spent much of the 19th century serving a variety of purposes, such as a repair station for ships and even a quarantine area during an outbreak of the bubonic plague.


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[Assistant] But Angel Island truly became part of the city's history in 1910, when it was set up as an immigration center. For the next three decades, over a quarter of a million Chinese and Japanese immigrants made their way across the Pacific looking for a better life, just as many of their relatives had a few generations before. Instead, what they found was not much better than a prison.


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[Assistant] Many immigrants there were detained on the island for months and subjected to intense questioning. Incoming people were divided up into cell blocks for men and women, and often left with no privacy or sanitation.


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[Assistant] It was a level of treatment that was never carried out at its east coast counterpart, Ellis Island, and it broke the people who stayed there.


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[Assistant] One of the shadows their pain and suffering left behind is the poetry they carved onto the walls of their cells. Over 200 poems have been preserved, and there were probably many hundreds more that are now lost. They expressed their regret for leaving home, their sadness at their inhumane treatments, and their loss of hope for the future. And then, there's the ghost.


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[Assistant] It was a common story among the women who were imprisoned there. They often spoke of a ghostly woman in a wedding dress who they believed had been a young bride who had come to America to be with her husband. Unable to reunite with him though, she took her own life in the showers.


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[Assistant] Over the years, many women there reported seeing this ghostly figure near the bathroom. There had been reports of flickering lights, eerie footsteps and movement at the corner of some people's eyes.


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[Assistant] Before the facility shut down in 1940, one Chinese teenager reported the most frightening story of all. She awoke in the middle of the night to the sensation of a heavy weight sitting on her chest.


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[Assistant] And according to this story, the wait only disappeared when she began to pray. Sleep paralysis?


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[Assistant] But sadly, Angel Island isn't the only place of tragedy in the Bay.


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[Assistant] And most who have made this journey to its rocky foundation never managed to escape.


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[Assistant] The Spanish named it after the Pelicans that nested there, Alcatraz's. But today we know it as one of the most infamous prisons in American history.


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[Assistant] Scholars are certain the native peoples of the area used the island for a very long time. But thanks to the efforts of Europeans to eradicate their culture from the area, we are unclear on what those uses were.


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[Assistant] Some think it was used as a place of isolation for tribal members who violated the law, while others believed it was a hunting ground for birds and their eggs.


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[Assistant] In 1854, the first lighthouse on the west coast was built on the island to serve ships coming and going in the bay there. Within just a few years, that light was joined by a military base. Which makes sense from a strategic location perspective.


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[Assistant] Soon enough, one of the functions that the base served was as a military prison. And for the next 70 years, that's what it was. A place for the US government to lock up people who posed a threat to national security.


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[Assistant] You know, like conscientious objectors, confederate sympathizers, and Native Americans who refuse to be abused and mistreated.


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[Assistant] The government wanted to take away their children and put them into white boarding schools, and these men committed the crime of wanting to keep their families together.


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[Assistant] In 1934, though, the island began a new phase. That was the year it transitioned from a military jail into a high-security federal prison that we all know from the stories we've heard in pop culture.


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[Assistant] Perhaps thanks to the Nicolas Cage action movie about it. The Rock.


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[Assistant] A lot of people can name a few of the more infamous inmates of Alcatraz. Al Capone, Machine Gun Kelly, and even Whitey Bulger. All of them spent time there. But most of the inmates weren't household names. The first inmate to arrive, for example, was Frank Lucas Bolt, a soldier in the US Army whose only crime was being gay.


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[Assistant] Most of the inmates, though, were sent there because other prisons had found it difficult to keep them behind bars. At least there, on the rock, there was the dangerous San Francisco Bay to help keep them in. That's not to say no one tried to break out, though.


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[Assistant] In fact, over the years it operated, there were 14 documented escape attempts from Alcatraz involving 36 prisoners. Of them, 23 were recaptured.


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[Assistant] Six others were shot to death, two drowned, and the remaining five just went missing. Although there are rumors that one or two survived the swim to the mainland to live out the rest of their days in hiding.


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[Assistant] Before Alcatraz shut down in 1963, a number of lives were lost there on the rock.


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[Assistant] Along with prisoners killed while attempting to escape, there were a number of riots against the guards over the years.


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[Assistant] In 1946, for example, an incident known as the Battle of Alcatraz saw six prisoners overpower the guards and take control of their cellhouse. Over the three days that followed, two officers and three prisoners were killed, and another two inmates were executed for their involvement.


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[Assistant] Naturally, with such a dark and bloody past, a prison has been home to some haunting tales. Many of them are the sort that you might hear about any number of other locations around the world.


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[Assistant] The sound of footsteps in empty areas, unexplainable screams and voices, the constant feeling that something in the shadows is watching you.


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[Assistant] One of the most talked about though is an entity known only as The Thing. It has often been spotted in or near cell 14D, and visitors there have reported an overwhelming sense of negative energy, and temperature drops of 20 to 30 degrees or more.


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[Assistant] Before the prison shut down, both guards and prisoners claimed to witness the Thing for themselves. Described as a dark shape with red glowing eyes, they claim just seeing it can drive a person mad. There's even a rumor that the Thing caused one inmate to take his own life. And his cell? 14D. One last story.


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[Assistant] In the early days of Alcatraz as a federal facility, it's said that the prison's first warden, James A. Johnston, hosted a Christmas party there on the island.


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[Assistant] I imagine it was about as festive as it could be for a high security lockup on a tiny island in the middle of a bay, but it was well attended by guards and administrative people.


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[Assistant] At some point in the evening though, a man walked in that caught everyone's attention. He was dressed in a gray suit and wore a brimmed cap, although most people noticed his large bushy, mutton-chopped sideburns. He was pale and ghostly.


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[Assistant] The moment the figure entered the room, the people there said the temperature dropped and everyone turned at the sound of the fire in the fireplace instantly blowing out. When they glanced back to the door though, they all caught their breath. The man, they said, had vanished.


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[Assistant] Everything has a fault line. A breaking point. A place where there's always risk of failure or breaking down. And San Francisco, more than most, has fault lines in spades.


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[Assistant] Whether geological or cultural, it seems that the city has, from the very beginning, been a place where everything has been built on shaky ground. From the mistreatment of local native population, to the Chinese community, to the construction of a small dark prison on a cold forbidding rock.


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[Assistant] San Francisco has always been a city built on flaws. Today's version of San Francisco is no less at risk.


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[Assistant] Look, I love the city. It's life and people and adventurous spirit, and it has grown a lot, socially speaking, since those early days. But beneath those shining towers and expensive homes is the same soil that the 1906 earthquake turned into a roiling sea.


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[Assistant] I should point out that shortly after the 1906 earthquake, the city's real estate board met together to discuss how to move forward in a way that kept people from running away.


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[Assistant] They decided that the tragedy should be referred to as the Great Fire rather than the Great Earthquake. Why? Because fires can be fought. Tectonic plates and fault lines, however, cannot.


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[Assistant] But people have stuck around. Today there are nearly 900,000 of them. Double the population of 1906. And along with them are countless local ghost stories. And I suppose as long as people live there, they'll have tales to tell. Like the White Lady of Stowe Lake.


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[Assistant] She's said to be the ghost of a mother who lost her baby in the waters of the lake over a century ago. Some whisper a very specific story about two mothers excitedly chatting and not noticing one of their prams rolling down the hill and into the water.


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[Assistant] Others think it's connected to reports of a dead infant found in the lakes waters shortly after survivor camps were set up along the shoreline there in 1906.


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[Assistant] Either way you approach the legend, the reports all seem to agree that the White Lady has been spotted over the years. Dressed in white, broken by grief, and haunting the edge of the lake, they say she wanders at night, asking anyone who passes by if they've seen her baby.


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[Assistant] And according to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle back in 1908, one of those sightings almost led to a riot. It seems that a large group of terrified motorists all brought their cars to a standstill near Lake Stowe when someone spotted the figure of a woman who seemed to shine with light.


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[Assistant] Witnesses describe this woman as barefoot, blonde-haired, and thin. But because traffic was blocked by the people who were stopping to get a look, the police were called.


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[Assistant] But the motorists weren't so much frightened as they were upset, and they made quite an unusual demand. They wanted the police to arrest the ghost.


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[Assistant] Mary came in with the flood. She arrived sometime around 1852, in those first few years when San Francisco was swelling up from all the gold rush activity. Just like the rest of them, she came looking for a new start in life, and a chance at striking it rich. She just didn't look for that in the mountains and the mines.


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[Assistant] No, instead, Mary got to work building an empire. She amassed a collection of restaurants, laundries, and boarding houses that all catered to the needs of the other fortune seekers. And she was very, very good at it. So good, in fact, that soon enough she was one of the wealthiest, most powerful women in the city. But Mary had a secret that most people didn't know about.


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[Assistant] Sure, if you were in her inner circle or interacted with her in person, it was just an obvious part of who she was. But that list was short. Most people only heard about Mary in the newspapers and would never see her on the street. Her secret? Mary was black.


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[Assistant] Which is why from the very beginning in her career there in San Francisco, she used her newfound fortune to support the black community.


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[Assistant] For example, do you remember the story of the John Brown raid on Harper's Ferry?


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[Assistant] Brown was a prominent abolitionist who, in October of 1859, led a group of men on a raid of a federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, in what was then Virginia. The raid failed and a number of his men were killed.


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[Assistant] Still more were captured, along with Brown himself, and they were executed a short time later.


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[Assistant] My cause was the cause of freedom and equality for myself and for my people. And I'd rather be a corpse than a coward.


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[Assistant] And as long as she didn't come out in the community as black, it seems that her growing fortune would continue to fund those efforts.


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[Assistant] When the California law that prohibited Black people from testifying in court was finally repealed, it was mostly thanks to the work that Mary put into it. Perhaps that's why she's known today as the Mother of Human Rights in California. But in 1865, Mary came out to the city as Black, and everything changed.


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[Assistant] Overnight the press went from gushing over her successes


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[Assistant] To false claims that she was a murderous witch, a practitioner of voodoo, and a baby snatcher.


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[Assistant] No crime or social taboo had been committed, and yet her reputation was destroyed instantly.


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[Assistant] To her credit, Mary Ellen Pleasant never slowed down. Her businesses might have suffered, and her fortune stopped growing, but she never quit spending what she had to support the people in need. She even had time to mock her detractors, carrying around a crystal ball as a prop, just to tick them off.


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[Assistant] Mary went from being the first African-American self-made millionaire to utter poverty. And she died in 1904 with almost nothing to her name.


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[Assistant] And while the magnificent house she once lived in was demolished decades ago,


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[Assistant] Some small pieces of it remain, namely the large eucalyptus trees that she herself planted.


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[Assistant] Today, they're still there, part of the tiny Mary Ellen Pleasant Memorial Park at the corner of Bush and Octavia Streets in the Pacific Heights neighborhood of the city. A small reminder of a large personality.


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[Assistant] Sadly, some tour guides still pass off those 1865 rumors as the truth, filling the heads of visitors with images of voodoo and murder, even going so far as to hint at cannibalism. They're lies, of course, but Mary is no longer around to defend herself.


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[Assistant] And that's the danger of some folklore, especially around things that happened so long ago. Sometimes all that's left is what lies beneath, and sometimes all that's left are lies.


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


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[Assistant] Lore has been a podcast since 2015 with over 375 million downloads to date. You can learn more about this show over at lorepodcast.com, including the book series from Penguin Random House and the TV show on Amazon Prime.


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[Assistant] And of course, be sure to click the subscribe button and the bell icon so that you don't miss future episodes. And if you enjoy today's episode, be sure to click the thumbs up.


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[Assistant] 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] They called him the handsome bandit. And he was.


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[Assistant] Good looking, well groomed, and, according to the stories, quite the charmer.


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[Assistant] But that life of crime came with a string of prison terms. The first was a seven-year stay in Missouri State Prison, ending with his release in 1890.


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[Assistant] He was back in 1893 for 14 more years. And then, as if he hadn't learned his lesson yet, he was arrested and convicted for burglary in 1908, spending one more year behind bars.


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[Assistant] But crime was like a well-worn path in his life, and it was far too easy to slip back into the rut. So on New Year's Eve of 1910,


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[Assistant] He put on his best suit, his freshly polished shoes, and that bowler hat he always wore and headed out into the cold Chicago air.


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[Assistant] When he entered the PAX Saloon on West 16th Street, he pulled a gun and shouted for everyone to fill his sack with their cash and jewelry. And he almost got away with it.


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[Assistant] At the last minute though, a police officer walked in and caught him in the act.


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[Assistant] Shots were fired. Bullets tore through the clothing of both men.


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[Assistant] But only the handsome bandit toppled over. He died a few minutes later.


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[Assistant] Some people see more than a shootout, though. Some believe there were other forces at work. A curse, they say, for betraying one of America's most notorious serial killers.


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[Assistant] And even though that killer had died 14 years earlier, it was more than logical that the handsome bandit, Marion Hedgepeth, was his newest victim. From beyond the grave.


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[Assistant] The man that history has come to know as H.H. Holmes certainly built a legacy for himself. Except his legacy was filled with secret chambers, trap doors, gas valves, and a list of victims that some historians think exceeds 200 innocent lives. And we've heard his story here before. Well, part of it.


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[Assistant] You see, the lion's share of historical attention always falls on the castle, the apartment complex built by homes that functioned more like a dungeon than home sweet home.


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[Assistant] We're filled with a morbid fascination regarding his methods, his madness, and his mastery of the art of murder. But in an effort to uncover what went on behind the walls of the castle, we miss an entire chapter of his story. But first, a reminder.


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[Assistant] It was the 1893 Chicago World's Fair that brought his victims into his web. Some came for work, some for pleasure, and some for a chance to start a new life. Most of them were young women, and upon arriving, they needed a place to stay.


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[Assistant] Holmes gladly accommodated as many as he could, and thanks to his methods, his tenant turnover rate was, well, brisk.


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[Assistant] When the World's Fair ended on October 30th of 1893, it was like the fire hose had been turned off. Rental income, along with that steady flow of new victims, dried up almost overnight.


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[Assistant] What didn't stop though was the knocking on the door by his creditors, who were starting to circle closer and closer, like vultures around a dying animal. So Holmes did something unthinkable. He abandoned ship.


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[Assistant] Think about it for a moment. He spent years building the castle, planning his crimes, and then slaughtering dozens, perhaps hundreds of people there. But it was either face the creditors and give them access to the building, or make a run for it while he still had a chance.


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[Assistant] And he didn't run alone. Holmes had a helper named Benjamin Peitzel, who served as his right-hand man, and there was no one Holmes trusted more.


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[Assistant] Life hadn't been kind to Peitzel, though. Jobs had been hard to come by, and the work he performed for Holmes wasn't really the sort that left him feeling good about himself. Add in the pressures of supporting a wife and five young, hungry children, and it's no wonder that he had a reputation for being an alcoholic.


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[Assistant] So in early 1894, they made a run for it, hoping to find work on the road.


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[Assistant] And their first stop was Fort Worth, Texas. You see, one of the women Holmes had killed months earlier, Minnie Williams, had conveniently signed over her inheritance to him. It was a sizable sum, and he planned to collect it. But he and Pytel quickly discovered that the authorities in Fort Worth were a bit too nosy for their taste, and they gave up.


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[Assistant] Before leaving Texas, Holmes managed to use forged documents and counterfeit money to purchase several train cars full of horses, and then he traveled north with them.


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[Assistant] Once in St. Louis, he sold them, but the authorities there caught wind of it and tracked him down. By July of 1894, he'd been arrested and sentenced to prison under the false name of Henry Howard.


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[Assistant] It was during this time in prison that he got to know Marion Hedgepeth, the handsome bandit.


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[Assistant] Hedgepeth seemed like a smart man. He was experienced and well connected, so Holmes began to tease more and more information out of him. Specifically, he was looking for a crooked lawyer who could help him get away with future insurance fraud and offered $500 for a solid tip. Hedgepeth claimed that he knew just the man for the job.


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[Assistant] After Holm's third wife bailed him out, he quickly moved on and forgot the deal. He reconnected with Peitzel, who'd recently brought his wife and children to St. Louis to resettle, and reached out to the attorney that Hedgepeth had told him about. The man, Jephthahau, agreed to meet, and soon the three men began planning.


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[Assistant] How would later declare Holmes to be, and this is a quote, one of the smoothest and slickest men that he ever heard tell of,