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[Assistant] When everything was gone, she would move on and repeat the crime somewhere else. Another thing she repeated, I'm sad to say, was prison time. In 1875, while her son John was only a year old, Kate began serving an 18-month term in Wandsworth Prison, right there in London.


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[Assistant] It was one of many stints in police custody, even though she moved around a lot and used various aliases to disguise herself. And all the while, her friend Sarah Kreese helped by watching and caring for young John.


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[Assistant] Some think that Sarah was an enabler. She gave Kate the freedom to live her life of crime without the burden of parenthood. But others view Sarah as a hopeful friend. She saw a young boy who needed looking after, and she did her best to help out. She also worked hard to get Kate a real honest job. Something that had the potential to turn the woman's life around.


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[Assistant] In 1879, Sarah's employer asked if there was someone who could do some house cleaning for a friend of hers, a woman named Julia Martha Thomas.


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[Assistant] Mrs. Thomas lived in the Richmond area of London. She was a widow in her mid-50s and had a reputation for being a little strict and prone to anger. But it was a job, and Sarah immediately suggested Kate Webster.


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[Assistant] The relationship between Webster and Mrs. Thomas began cordially enough, but quickly devolved into daily arguments. Webster claimed that Thomas would follow her around and criticize her work, while Mrs. Thomas claimed that Webster came to work drunk most of the time.


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[Assistant] Needless to say, it wasn't a match made in heaven, but the two women tried hard to make it work.


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[Assistant] After a little over a month, Julia Thomas decided it was time to cut Kate Webster loose.


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[Assistant] Kate, to her credit, tried to change. She begged for just a few more days of employment, and for some unknown reason, Thomas agreed to the terms. But the relationship was eating at her like an ulcer, and she couldn't stop thinking about it. She thought that Kate was stealing from her, but she didn't have any proof, and she feared for her life.


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[Assistant] On March 2nd of 1879, Mrs. Thomas showed up at church clearly upset. She just had another argument with Webster, and it had shaken her deeply. Her friends there claimed that Thomas seemed distracted and agitated, and she left early to go attend to matters at home. But Kate was waiting there for her.


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[Assistant] And this time, they would trade more than angry words.


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[Assistant] Julia Thomas thought the house was empty, but went searching for Kate Webster anyway. They had unfinished business and it was time Kate found someplace else to work. It was settled, as far as she was concerned at least.


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[Assistant] While Mrs. Thomas was in the upstairs hallway, Webster stepped out of a dark room and attacked her employer. The two women struggled for a moment, and then Kate gave the older woman a shove. Thomas tumbled down the staircase, where she slammed into the floor below. Her skull now fractured and bloody. She began to scream where she lay.


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[Assistant] Kate was immediately concerned that the neighbors might hear. There was a busy pub next door, and if someone happened to hear the shouting, Kate was sure to be discovered and arrested. Launching herself down the stairs, she sat on the injured woman's chest and began to squeeze her throat with both hands.


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[Assistant] Julia Thomas lay dead on the floor of her own home, and Kate Webster had graduated from theft to murder in the course of just a few heartbeats. But Kate was stronger than her fears, and she knew she had to act fast.


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[Assistant] She grabbed a razor, a meat saw, and a carving knife and set about cutting Thomas' body into pieces.


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[Assistant] Later, Webster would admit that while she believed she had always had a strong stomach, this work in particular tested her limits. There had just been so much blood, she later told the police.


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[Assistant] Webster put the pieces into a large copper laundry kettle and boiled them in an attempt to reduce them to a more manageable state.


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[Assistant] It was essentially rendering, the process where meat is cooked until the fat and protein separate.


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[Assistant] Witnesses would later come forward and talk of the stench coming from the home, but no one complained at the time. This was London in the late 19th century.


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[Assistant] Perhaps people were just a little more forgiving of odd odors back then.


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[Assistant] When the boiling was complete, Webster fished out each part from the remaining lard and placed them in a box she found in the home.


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[Assistant] Most of it, that is. She couldn't seem to fit the head and one of the feet, so she had to get creative. She tossed the foot into a local trash heap, but the head was more problematic. In the end she found a gladstone bag, something like an old physician's handbag, and stashed it inside there.


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[Assistant] And then she cleaned the house, removing as much of the evidence as she could that something horrible had taken place there. It took her two full days to do it. But when she was finished, she put on a dress from her former employer's wardrobe and went to the pub next door to meet a friend for drinks.


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[Assistant] This friend, a Mrs. Porter, later told police that Webster arrived at the pub carrying a large black bag. She kept it with her almost the entire evening, as if it contained something very valuable to her. Oddly though, Webster excused herself from the table at one point, and when she returned a short while later, the bag was gone.


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[Assistant] Webster's next order of business was to get rid of the box that contained what remained of Mrs. Thomas. So she enlisted the help of Mrs. Porter's son to carry it out of the house and to the nearby Barnes Bridge. He carried the heavy box all the way to the bridge and then she sent him home, claiming that a friend was on the way to meet her there.


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[Assistant] This boy would later tell police that as he was walking away, he heard a large splash. It was as if something heavy had been tossed into the river.


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[Assistant] Webster had disposed of the body, and I can't help but wonder if she perhaps sighed with relief when the box finally dipped beneath the surface of the Thames and vanished from sight.


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[Assistant] The following day, though, things got more complicated. Unaware that the box containing Mrs. Thomas had floated to the surface and drifted to shore overnight, Kate Webster dug in deeper. She took on the identity of her former employer while beginning to sell off all of the items in the house. Old habits die hard, apparently.


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[Assistant] And it was about this time, according to a later witness, that Webster stepped outside and spoke to a pair of neighborhood boys. She had two bowls in her hand and they were steaming hot. She told them it was lard from a pig, she added, and they were welcome to have it for free if they wanted it. The boys ate two bowls each.


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[Assistant] While the police were investigating the discovery of the box full of body parts, they had no clues that might point them to the killer responsible. It even took them a bit of time to figure out that the parts were actually human, rather than butcher cast-offs. But even then, all they could be sure of was that the victim had been a middle-aged woman.


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[Assistant] Kate Webster, meanwhile, was making money hand over fist. She sold off all the smaller items first. The jewelry, the knickknacks, even the victim's gold teeth, and then began to spread word that the furniture was for sale as well.


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[Assistant] And that led to an agreement with a local man, who arrived on March 9th with a small group of men to help him carry the items out of the house.


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[Assistant] A neighborhood woman saw the activity and approached one of the men.


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[Assistant] Who ordered the removal of these items, she asked him. The man simply turned and pointed to Kate Webster, who stood on the front steps of the house. She did, he replied. Mrs Thomas.


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[Assistant] When the police finally arrived, they entered the house and immediately found signs of something tragic. A charred finger bone in the fireplace. Blood stains on the floor. Splatters of grease or lard around the copper kettle. But the one thing they wanted to find, the killer, was nowhere to be seen. Kate Webster had skipped town.


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[Assistant] In the end the authorities tracked her down in Ireland. She'd taken her son and made her way back to her hometown as fast as she could.


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[Assistant] When she arrived, she did so while still wearing clothing and jewelry taken from Mrs. Thomas. But her stay there was short-lived. The local chief of police, the man who 15 years earlier had put her in jail for the first time, recognized her in the bulletin from Scotland Yard and quickly took her into custody.


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[Assistant] Everything after that moved quickly. Webster was transported back to England, and at every train stop between Liverpool and London, crowds gathered to jeer and shout at her. By March 30th, she had formerly been charged with murder.


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[Assistant] Of course, she tried to lie her way out of it. This was the woman who had changed her name dozens of times to outsmart the police, who had moved into room after room and sold off the possessions inside. She was a thief and a liar, so it was only natural for her to try and talk her way out of this, too.


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[Assistant] First, she blamed the murder on Henry Porter, the husband of her friend from the pub.


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[Assistant] When his alibi held up, she shifted the blame to the man who had come to buy the furniture from the Thomas house. But he too was easily dismissed. When it appeared that she wouldn't be able to squirm out from under the charge of murder, she took credit for the crime but claimed that she only did it because others told her to do so.


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[Assistant] When asked if there was any reason why she should not be executed, Webster told the judge yes, insisting that she was, in fact, pregnant. A new jury of women were gathered together, along with a physician, and after examining Webster, they declared that the pregnancy, like everything else the woman had said, was a lie.


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[Assistant] She returned to Wandsworth Prison where she had served time before working for Mrs. Thomas, and it was there that she wrote her formal confession. She described all of the details of the murder, right down to how she burned the internal organs to get rid of them, how she chose her tools, and even how she removed the head.


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[Assistant] On July 29th, Kate Webster stepped onto the platform inside the prison's execution chamber, a building ironically nicknamed the Cold Meat Shed. The governor announced the time, a priest administered last rites, and then she was guided onto the trap doors with a sack over her head.


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[Assistant] Afterward, she was buried in an unmarked grave right there at the prison.


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[Assistant] It's hard to nail down the real reason behind our fascination with death, but it's safe to at least make a guess. Death puts our mortality on display. No matter how hard we try to avoid it as a topic, to ignore its slow, steady approach from the distance, we can't seem to get away from it either.


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[Assistant] Whether we want it or not, death will come for us all, one day.


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[Assistant] And the dead body stands as that singular, visceral reminder of that death. In the horror movies, it's the clue that's dropped in our laps early on in the film. It highlights the danger our heroes find themselves in. It represents what's at stake, what could happen if they fail, and the true power of the killer.


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[Assistant] When the London police pulled the box containing the remains of a woman from the cold waters of the Thames, they didn't know a lot, but they did know one thing.


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[Assistant] There was a killer in London and whoever it was needed to be stopped. Thankfully, they managed to do just that.


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[Assistant] But in a wild twist of irony, the body of Julia Thomas has been lost. It might have been a result of the way evidence was handled in the late 19th century, or the state of decay when the remains were found. Whatever the reason, there's no grave for Julia Thomas. No tombstone with her name etched into the surface. Her body was lost, then found, and then finally lost again.


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[Assistant] Well, most of it. As luck would have it, the neighborhood where her house once stood has gone through some renovation over the years. In October of 2010, a wealthy London homeowner was having an addition built in his backyard when the work crew unearthed something small and white. It was a skull.


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[Assistant] The teeth were missing, but there was a fracture at the back of the head. And after doing a bit more research, investigators determined that the structure that once stood in the homeowners backyard was a stable. A stable behind the pub that stood next door to the home of Julia Thomas.


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[Assistant] Her body might be lost forever into the pages of history, but the head that Kate Webster had tried so hard to get rid of has finally been recovered.


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[Assistant] Oh, and the wealthy homeowner who stumbled upon that skull?


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[Assistant] None other than English naturalist, Sir David Attenborough.


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[Assistant] Murder most foul. That's the headline many of us might conjure up for stories like this. And thankfully, over the centuries, they are the sort of crime that has been a bit less common than other types.


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[Assistant] But not too uncommon. Which means I've tracked down another thrilling tale of murder, disposal, and eventual discovery. And if you stick around through this free sponsor break, I'll tell you all about it.


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[Assistant] Mary seemed to fill her life with tragedy. From the top of her head to the tip of her toes, she was the sort of person who welcomed the darkness and allowed it to harm the people around her.


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[Assistant] She and her husband lived in Shaftesbury, Vermont at the beginning of the 20th century, but it was far from an idyllic home life. After getting married at the young age of 15, the couple had their first child three years later in 1901. That's when the first tragedy arrived, in the form of their six-month-old daughter Helen dying from a mysterious injury.


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[Assistant] Her husband Marcus suspected foul play. So did his family. Months later, after Marcus became violently sick from a cup of tea given to him by Mary, the tensions in the house reached its peak. Mary moved out shortly after that, and then both of them went their separate ways to begin new lives.


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[Assistant] They stayed in touch, but what Mary really wanted was a clean break.


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[Assistant] A clean break and a small nest egg to build her life upon. And she knew just where to get it. Her estranged husband's life insurance policy. Of course, that meant doing something most of us would never even consider. For Mary Mabel Rogers, though, it felt like second nature.


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[Assistant] I would have to imagine he assumed Mary was interested in reuniting, but when she arrived with another man at her side, he knew that might not be the case. Mary had brought along a friend named Leon Parham and introduced him as just that, a friend, and then the three of them sat down for an awkward lunch beside the river.


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[Assistant] Now, this is where things get weird, and if we were all watching it happen live on TV, each and every one of us would be shouting at the screen for Marcus to run away.


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[Assistant] Mary informed Marcus that she had just learned a rope trick and offered to show him. Someone produced a length of rope and Mary proceeded to tie up the wrists of her friend Leon. Leon easily broke out of it and Mary frowned in a playful yet defeated sort of way. She tried again and Leon broke out a second time.


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[Assistant] So she tried it on Marcus, wrapping his wrists in the series of special knots she had memorized. And just like Leon, he too freed himself without so much as a struggle.


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[Assistant] Fine, Mary pouted. You try it, Leon. And she handed the rope to her friend while Marcus willingly held out his wrists for another test.


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[Assistant] Only this time, it worked. Leon managed to get the man's hands tied behind his back and then bound his feet as well. And while he did that, Mary pulled a glass vial of chloroform out of her bag, poured it on a handkerchief, and then pressed it to her husband's nose and mouth.


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[Assistant] I'd like to say that Marcus reached the end of his rope, because that sounds clever and cliche, but his actual murder was much more simple. Mary pinned a fake suicide note to his hat, and then she and Leon lifted his unconscious body and tossed him in the river.


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[Assistant] Somehow, that was supposed to fool the authorities. But of course, it didn't.


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[Assistant] There was a quick trial and Mary was found guilty of murder. Her story was covered by newspapers all across the country, which brought on an outpouring of efforts to try and save her, all while her execution day was being planned and prepared for. But delays were headed her way.


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[Assistant] First, her case went before the state legislature, and later moved to the U.S. Supreme Court. The governor of Vermont granted not one, but three reprimes at the eleventh hour, and for a while it seemed as if Mary's sentence would never be carried out.


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[Assistant] When she finally stepped onto the gallows at 1pm on December 8th of 1905, it had been over four years since she had killed Marcus. The sheriff placed the noose around her neck, and then the platform was opened, dropping Mary into the space below, where she landed on the tips of her toes.


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[Assistant] Now, hangings have been botched before. We've covered a lot of those here. And accidents happen. Usually, though, the criminal is taken down, the gallows is reset, and then they try again. But not this time, though.


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[Assistant] Instead, the executioner and an associate reached out and grabbed the rope that hung taut through the opening in the platform, and then together they pulled up as hard as they could.


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[Assistant] This episode of Lore was researched, written, and produced by me, Aaron Manke, with 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.


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[Assistant] I also make and executive produce a whole bunch of other podcasts, all of which I think you'd enjoy. My production company, Grim and Mild, specializes in shows that sit at the intersection of the dark and the historical. You can learn more about all of our shows and everything else going on over in one central place. Grimandmild.com


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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] It was the last thing the farmer expected to find on his way to the fields that morning. The air was cold, the leaves were damp, and his body was unhappy with his decision to start work so early. But he forgot all of that the moment he saw the wolf pit.


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[Assistant] Inside the dark hole in the ground that had been dug to capture wolves was something else entirely. Two somethings. In fact, a boy and a girl.


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[Assistant] They were both shivering, perhaps due to the cold, but maybe also a bit out of fear.


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[Assistant] The farmer had never seen them before. Or their clothes. Or even heard their language. But the strangest thing about them was their skin. And that's because it was green.


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[Assistant] Not faintly green, or green in a certain light. These children, according to the tale, were bright green, like clover on a hot summer day.


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[Assistant] But somehow, despite the bizarre nature of the situation, the farmer decided to help, so he rescued the children and brought them home.


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[Assistant] He offered them food but they refused everything until finally they were given raw beans, which they apparently ate with delight.


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[Assistant] The story, passed down to us over the years by the 12th century historian William of Newburgh, goes on to tell us how the children were brought into the care of a local lord. Both of them eventually lost their greenish hue, but sadly the boy died shortly after being baptized. The girl, however, grew up.


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[Assistant] She learned to speak English and eventually married into the village community.


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[Assistant] Later in life, she was said to have explained that she and her brother had come to England from a place called St. Martin's Land. But over time, the locals began to say that they'd fallen from the sky.


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[Assistant] How else could two strange children appear at the bottom of a filthy wolf pit? Naturally, they had to be visitors from another world.


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[Assistant] And others though have suggested that the story might be the leftover bits from a darker tale. That the children might not have really been green at all, but they were certainly real, and they came to the village by way of abduction.


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[Assistant] Let's be honest, it certainly wouldn't be the first time a community invented an elaborate lie to hide an unsavory truth.


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[Assistant] Each possibility offers most of us something to be afraid of. Whether it's the threat of visitors from another place, or being taken against our will, we're left feeling uncomfortable and insecure. Which is why, for a very long time,


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[Assistant] The combination of those two fears has been a common unrelenting human obsession.


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[Assistant] You could probably recreate it today and get almost the exact same feeling and experience if you wanted to.


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[Assistant] The small two-lane highway still cuts through the never-ending expanse of pine trees, just like it did 50 years ago, and as it had for decades before that.


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[Assistant] The trees are like a tall green wall along either side of the road. A wall that separates the wild from the tamed.


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[Assistant] It's beautiful, for sure. But pull yourself out of the modern world for a moment, and take a seat inside a car from the 1950s, in the dead of night, with no cell phone or GPS to wrap you in that warm blanket of confident safety.


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[Assistant] I get that it wasn't a 16th century carriage ride through unexplored territory, but it was still unnervingly primitive by today's standards.


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[Assistant] Not all danger comes from the natural world though. Sometimes the threat is just part of our everyday lives. For the couple in the car, that was something they faced each and every day.


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[Assistant] Betty was a white middle-aged social worker, but her husband, who worked for the postal service, was black. Even a thousand miles from the 1960s south, their interracial marriage was an uncommon sight to the people around them. Uncommon. And oftentimes unwelcome.


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[Assistant] I don't know why they had decided to make the drive through the night.


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[Assistant] Maybe they just wanted to get home sooner rather than later, but perhaps there was just no safe stop along the way.


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[Assistant] According to the 1961 edition of The Traveler's Green Book, a sort of guidebook for African Americans that helped them find safe restaurants, gas stations, and hotels in a country with deep racial issues, there wasn't much along their route. So they drove.


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[Assistant] It wasn't long after they passed through the town of Lancaster just north of the White Mountains when both of them noticed a light ahead of them, far off in the distance.


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[Assistant] Now, from where they sat, the mountains were this looming presence in the darkness. The highway they were traveling would eventually cut straight through them, following a gap known as the notch. But this light was higher than the dark shadow of the mountains. And it was moving.


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[Assistant] They continued on, but as they both watched it, they began to feel less and less certain about its true nature.


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[Assistant] Not only was it moving, but it was moving oddly, in ways that an airplane simply couldn't.


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[Assistant] Betty's husband even pulled the car over a few times so he could get a better look at the light through his binoculars. What he saw made him nervous enough to reach over, open the glove box, and pull his pistol out, which he then placed on the seat between them.


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[Assistant] The lighted object was still there up in the sky when they entered the notch, but it had moved close enough that the couple could now see details. Betty later described it as a thin band of light that was sort of curved, like a pinstripe around a circular object. And as it moved through the air, she swore she could see it spinning.


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[Assistant] That's when things got weird. Well, they were already weird, sure, but if there'd been a dial, someone had turned it way up. And that's when the object in the sky changed course without warning and headed straight toward them.


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[Assistant] Betty's husband panicked and took his foot off the gas, letting the car coast to a stop in the middle of the road. Not the safest thing to do, I know, but let's just assume that he was frightened out of his wits.


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[Assistant] When the object arrived, it stopped about a hundred feet above them, just off the road on the passenger side.


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[Assistant] Up close, they had a much better view of the thing, and it was a lot bigger than they had expected. Across the front of the object was a band of clear glass, like a window, and inside it, they later said, were human-like figures. Figures dressed in glossy black uniforms.


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[Assistant] Wanting a better look, Betty's husband grabbed the binoculars and opened the car door. Just before he stepped out, he reached over and took the pistol off the seat, slipping it into his coat pocket. Then, he climbed out and slowly walked forward a few paces.


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[Assistant] As he did, the hovering object reacted, crossing the highway to have a better view of his side of the car, as if it were watching him specifically.


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[Assistant] That's when it descended even lower. And as it did, lights extended out from the sides of the object. Betty would later describe how she could see something, a ramp or metal column or something long and solid, stretched down to the ground. Down toward them.


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[Assistant] She screamed at him to get back inside, but he just laughed. It was that sort of nervous sound you make when you're simply too frightened to do anything else. He muttered something about how ridiculous it all was, and then turned around and dashed back to the car.


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[Assistant] as he closed the door he turned to his wife and spoke


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[Assistant] They're going to capture us, he said, repeating it over and over again with panic in his voice. He slammed his foot down on the gas pedal, and the car lurched forward. As they sped away, both of them claimed to hear a sort of beeping sound, and at the same time, their car began to vibrate and shake and hum.


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[Assistant] And that's when darkness washed over them like a tidal wave.


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[Assistant] When they opened their eyes, they didn't recognize where they were. They could remember driving away from the flying object, but after that, everything was indistinguishable.


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[Assistant] It was as if someone had taken an eraser and dragged it across the chalkboard. Not much was left to reflect on, and what was there was smeared and blurry.


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[Assistant] They were still sitting in their car, though, and still on that long stretch of tree-lined New Hampshire highway. But they were no longer in the middle of the White Mountains.


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[Assistant] It turned out they were over 30 miles south of where they last remembered, near the town of Ashland, and neither of them felt good about that.


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[Assistant] Betty and Barney Hill somehow managed to make their way home to Portsmouth, though, driving another 70 miles southeast. That hour and a half was filled with conversation, too.


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[Assistant] Betty was sure of what they'd seen, but Barney was more skeptical, as if he weren't remembering things as clearly as her. But she was adamant. What they had seen could be nothing else. It had been a UFO.


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[Assistant] Now, before we dive into what she might have meant by that, I want to point out a small but important detail. The Hills knew when they should have arrived home in Portsmouth. The math was easy, and we've all done it before. Roughly an hour per 60 miles, right? So when they arrived at home and looked at the clock,


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[Assistant] They were confused, because it appeared that they were hours late. It was as if they had stopped somewhere for a very long time, but just had no memory of it.


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[Assistant] Another thing to keep in mind is that, while the term UFO had been a household name since the late 1940s, the public had heard of very few believable sightings.


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[Assistant] The Roswell incident of 1947 is the biggest one that comes to mind, but there were others, such as the death of an Air National Guard pilot in 1948, who had been apparently chasing a flying object over Kentucky.


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[Assistant] And Betty's dress was torn in multiple locations. And Barney's shoes, his nicest pair and the ones that he kept as pristine as possible, had scratches and scuffs along the toes.


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[Assistant] Both of them had been wearing watches, but neither of those were working now. Even though they had no memory of it, it felt as if they had both been through some sort of ordeal. If only they could remember what.


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[Assistant] The day after they returned home, Betty reached out to her sister for advice, who in turn directed her to a retired local chief of police. After listening to her story, he recommended reaching out to the military over at the nearby Peace Air Force Base. If anyone knew what had been going on in the skies that night, it would be them. Barney, though, was fighting it.


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[Assistant] Yes, he had seen the physical evidence with his own eyes, and yes, he later reported that he felt a certain amount of violation the morning they arrived home. He even took a very long shower, as if he were trying to wash away something that had happened.


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[Assistant] When she called the Air Force Base, Betty spoke to a man named Major Paul Henderson.


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[Assistant] At his request, both of the Hills visited the base to make official statements, but Barney's was very different from his wife's. While she was willing to share all of the things they had witnessed before their blackout, Barney held a lot more of the details back. Only after Major Henderson pressed him further, did Barney begin to share more.


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[Assistant] A few days after their reports were given, which, as far as I can tell, was the first time both of them sat down and talked their way through everything, Betty started having unusual dreams. Nightmares, really. In them, she was reliving that moment on the road beneath the flying object. But while her memories ended there, the dreams were taking her deeper.


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[Assistant] In them, she could see herself being removed from the car by small figures. She and Barney were led to the mysterious craft and then taken inside. And then they were separated.


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[Assistant] Each time she awoke from these dreams, they felt as real as anything she'd ever experienced. But when she told Barney about the new details, he refused to believe her.


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[Assistant] After weeks of not hearing back from Major Henderson, Betty reached out to another organization called the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, a non-profit research group that focused on UFO sightings and experiences. She and Barney met with an investigator named Walter Webb and repeated their stories to him.


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[Assistant] Maybe it was all the talking they were doing. All that remembering and dwelling in the past and dredging up of forgotten events. But it was all starting to take a toll on them. Barney had relapsed on over a decade of sobriety. He also discovered a mysterious rash on his skin and couldn't make it go away.


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[Assistant] Both of them were exhausted on multiple levels. As 1961 bled into 1962, and the months ticked by, it began to feel more and more as if they were falling apart.


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[Assistant] And that's when Betty reached out to a psychiatrist. Maybe what they both really needed was someone to listen and guide them through it all. To help them heal and recover.


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[Assistant] It was trauma, after all, even if the source seemed a little out there.


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[Assistant] After meeting with him through 1963, though, they were eventually referred out to someone else. A hypnoanalyst.


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[Assistant] For a span of seven months in 1964, Betty and Barney Hill drove back and forth between their home in Portsmouth and the Boston office of Dr. Benjamin Simon.


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[Assistant] Over multiple sessions, each of them was hypnotized, interviewed and recorded.


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[Assistant] The goal was to go deeper into the past, to sift through their memories of what had happened on that lonely New Hampshire highway back in the fall of 1961.


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[Assistant] To peel back the layers and reveal the parts that each of them had forgotten or repressed. What they uncovered though was more frightening than anyone expected.


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[Assistant] The voice in his head told him to drive off the road. At least, that's what Barney Hill told Dr. Simon while under hypnosis. He called it a mind voice, a sort of telepathic invasion that pushed the voice of someone or something else into his own brain. He could hear it, but not really hear it, if you know what I mean.


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[Assistant] Barney didn't know how he knew where to drive, but he guided the car through the woods for a while before they could see an orange glow up ahead through the trees. Betty seemed to understand intuitively that it was the flying craft, the one that they had seen on the highway, but that it had landed among the trees.


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[Assistant] As they approached, Barney said the car's engine cut out and died. When they rolled to a stop, a dozen dark figures stepped out of the trees, their shapes silhouetted against the orange glow of the flying thing.


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[Assistant] A few stood at a distance, but three of them walked over to Barney's side and opened his door. Five others did the same on Betty's side of the car. As they did, one of the figures pulled Barney's pistol out of his pocket and placed it back on the seat, and then both of them were led away toward the bright light.


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[Assistant] Betty and Barney both described the figures in the same terms, even when interviewed separately. The creatures were smaller than they were, with narrow hips and wide shoulders. The skin that could be seen had a gray tone that looked otherworldly.


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[Assistant] And I can't help but think of all the stories over the centuries of the small creatures that litter our folklore. Native American Pukwudgies and European Goblins, Icelandic Elves and the Brownie of Scotland, World War II Grimlins and the Indonesian Ibu Gogo. If there's one tale that all cultures seem to have in common, it's the presence of small versions of ourselves.


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[Assistant] Betty recalled speaking to her husband as they were led inside the object.


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[Assistant] Then, after assuring her that no one would be harmed, she was led by two of the creatures into a small room, without her husband. Barney's story confirms this, describing how he was separated from Betty and led into a room of his own.


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[Assistant] But these weren't meeting rooms or places for conversation. No, these were apparently exam rooms, and they were the brief calm before a horrifying storm.


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[Assistant] Barney recalled the creatures leading him to a stool and helping him to sit down.


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[Assistant] Once there, he remembered having samples drawn from his body. Skin cells were scraped off with sharp tools. Other tools were inserted into his ears and down his throat. If his body had something to offer up, the creatures seemed interested in taking a piece of it with them.


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[Assistant] These unusual beings also talked to each other while they worked, although Barney could not understand their language. When they needed to speak to him, it happened just as it had in the car, through their unusual mind-voice technique. Their mouths never opened, and yet he heard everything they said to him.


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[Assistant] Betty's experience was much the same. Her dress was pulled off and she was seated on a stool, unable to resist or leave. The same types of samples were taken from her own body, the scraping of her skin, the probes in her mouth and ears. They examined her teeth, her feet, even her fingernails.


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[Assistant] Things became more invasive after that. The creatures brought in a new device that was equipped with sharp pins, which were pressed into various parts of her body. Betty remembered feeling her muscles react to the pressure, but feeling no pain. That changed a moment later though, when a long needle was pressed into her navel. When she cried out.


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[Assistant] One of the creatures passed a hand over her eyes, and the pain mysteriously went away.


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[Assistant] Betty recalled a brief conversation with one of the creatures. In it, she asked for proof of who they were and where they came from. And according to her, one of them handed her a book filled with maps of the stars.


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[Assistant] After a moment though, the bean changed its mind and took the book back.


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[Assistant] After all of that, we know how the rest of the night played out. Betty and Barney were placed back in their cars in the woods. They watched the bright lights of the flying object ascend back into the sky before vanishing into the night. And then they drove.


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[Assistant] It would take them another 30 minutes before the fog lifted and they were fully aware of themselves once again. Nothing, though, would give them back that lost time.


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[Assistant] Maybe it was the pain that she had endured that Barney seems to have escaped. Or maybe it was something in her personality that refused to let go of the experience. We don't know why Betty fought to hold on to her memories, but she certainly did.


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[Assistant] Then as the years unfolded, it was she who pushed herself and her husband to figure out exactly what had happened.


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[Assistant] She eventually had her dress from that night examined by a handful of different laboratories and she wrote and spoke often about what had happened to them. Barney suffered more than Betty though. He was never the same man who had left Colebrook, New Hampshire on the 19th of September in 1961. He was Barney, sure, but he was different too. Maybe he was afraid or broken or even sick or all of the above.


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[Assistant] Barney Hill died of a cerebral hemorrhage in February of 1969 at the age of 46.


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[Assistant] Betty outlived him by decades, passing away in 2004 after a battle with cancer. She'd spent half her life telling her story, trying to put the pieces together and find the answers hidden in the back corner of her own foggy past.


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[Assistant] Whether she succeeded though is open to interpretation.


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[Assistant] She told a story to the world that was difficult to swallow, and yet for many, it offered an unusual form of hope.


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[Assistant] We may or may not be alone in this universe, but it's clear that there's much to explore.


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[Assistant] Barney might have run away from it all, but Betty took a different path.


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[Assistant] When Abraham Maslow proposed his theory for human motivation back in 1934, he included safety among his five essential human needs. We want to feel safe.


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[Assistant] Some would say that we need to, that a life of fear and uncertainty can harm our ability to function properly. When our safety is threatened, we react from the core of our being.


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[Assistant] So it's no wonder that stories of abductions send us into fits of anxiety.


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[Assistant] The idea that our freedom might be taken away, that we might be taken away. Well, it's a deep fear that all of us flinch away from. Which is why folklore has always explored that concept. Just think about the Irish legend of the changeling.


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[Assistant] Folklore spoke of elves in the woods outside the safety of the community, and that sometimes, when you least expected it, those elves could creep into your home and steal a loved one. Sure, the changeling was used to explain away drastic changes in personality or health, but they also poked at that dark ancient fear. We don't want to be taken.


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[Assistant] So while there are a lot of ways of viewing the experiences reported by Betty and Barney Hill, it's important not to forget one of the most basic elements of their story.


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[Assistant] Fear can cause people to do and say a lot of unusual things. And if that fear is deep enough, perhaps it can also cause people to see things. What the hills witnessed certainly falls under the category of unusual.


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[Assistant] Here's what I do know. The story of Betty and Barney Hill's road trip changed things for us.


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[Assistant] It altered the public narrative in a way that seldom happens. In much the same way that the Exhumation of Mercy Brown in 1892 led to the modern version of the vampire legend, the Hills tale of missing time and flying objects represents the birth of a new mythology.


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[Assistant] Without the Hills, we wouldn't have any of those alien abduction scenes where the cars die and the watches all stop working. They gave us the examination room and lost time and hypnosis as a treatment. Without them, we certainly wouldn't have Chris Carter's X-Files or Steven Spielberg's Taken.


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[Assistant] New folklore isn't often created today, but the hills did just that.


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[Assistant] That doesn't necessarily mean it's all true, though. There are a lot of people who think the story was a total fabrication.


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[Assistant] They don't believe a single element of the tale, and point to the lack of other witnesses or physical evidence as proof.


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[Assistant] Sometimes the real things we experience in our waking lives can influence our dreams. That's what the hills were claiming.


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[Assistant] But dreams can also become so vivid and powerful that even after we wake up, they felt as if they really happened.


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[Assistant] Without proof to back up their claims, the Hills could fall into either camp.


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[Assistant] In 1965, a reporter named John Luttrell wrote an article about the hills for the Boston Traveler.


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[Assistant] Their story had become more and more popular and he wanted to make sure that a local publication did the story justice.


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[Assistant] He was thorough too, traveling around New Hampshire and putting the events together on his own. And he found something. Witnesses.


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[Assistant] Luttrell managed to find other people who had looked up into the night sky on September 19th, 1961. People who had looked toward the White Mountains and had witnessed something unexpected.


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[Assistant] He took statements from all of them, people who did not know the Hills or even each other, and then gathered them together in his files for the article. For whatever reason though, they never made it into the final piece.


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[Assistant] Years later, when he moved on to other jobs, he handed his files over to his editor at the Boston Traveler, in case an article ever needed fact-checked or expanded upon.


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[Assistant] Which means that anyone today might be able to reach out to them and rediscover the lost evidence of the Hills story. Except, we can't. That's because those records have gone missing.


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[Assistant] Lost, perhaps, or intentionally destroyed to hide an unsettling truth.


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[Assistant] Perhaps we've dismissed the Hill's story because it rings with delusion and fantasy.


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[Assistant] This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Manke, with research help from Marsette Crockett and music by Chad Lawson. Hey, do you want to know a secret?


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[Assistant] I've been a fan of the X-Files since my college days in the early 90s. It's a love affair that has lasted decades, and thanks to having legendary X-Files writer and producer Glenn Morgan work on the first season of the Lore TV show,


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[Assistant] I had a chance to visit the set as they filmed episode 2 of season 11 of The X-Files back in August.


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[Assistant] And if you look real closely at the beginning of the scene that takes place in the classroom, you'll see me sitting in a chair before standing up and walking out of the room. My own 15 seconds of fame.


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[Assistant] Speaking of side projects, the second book in the World of Lore series, called Wicked Mortals, comes out tomorrow. You still have a chance to go pre-order it if you want to, but any sales that happen in this first week are essential to helping the book land on the bestseller lists. There's a lot of you out there, and I know how much you love this show. If you can, please give this book a boost this week.


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[Assistant] Head over to theworldoflore.com slash wickedmortals to find a link where you can buy a copy now.


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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.


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[Assistant] All they wanted to do was get rid of the garbage, so it's hard to fault them for what was about to happen. Given the chance to live life in their shoes for a day or two, I doubt it would have come out any other way for us.


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[Assistant] The town had taken over an old strip mine in early 1962 and repurposed it as a landfill, which was admittedly a good thing. A number of unofficial landfills had popped up around the town and they were hoping this would clean things up a bit.


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[Assistant] But this new official landfill sat right up against a cemetery and people were starting to complain about the mess. So the town council met and planned the cleanup.


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[Assistant] On May 27th of 1962, someone working for the town struck a match and set the whole pile of trash on fire.


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[Assistant] But there was a problem. A big, lurking, underground problem. That landfill, you see, was directly on top of an abandoned coal mine. And coal, as we all know, has a tendency to burn when you add fire.


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[Assistant] They tried putting the fire out, of course. They tried digging it out, pouring in wet sand, and cutting off the oxygen supply the fire needed to burn. But nothing worked. The fire just kept burning. And as it did, it started to transform the town above it.


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[Assistant] Over the decade since the fire was set, the population of roughly 1,000 townsfolk has all but vanished. The toxic, sulfurous fumes and carbon monoxide have driven people from their homes. The weakened spiderweb of mines beneath their streets have caused sinkholes some deeper than a house.


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[Assistant] In 1992, the governor of Pennsylvania exercised eminent domain and condemned the town. Only seven people still live there, refusing to leave their home. But once they pass away, the government will take full possession of Centralia. Meanwhile, 55 years later, the fire still burns.


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[Assistant] We tend to think of cities as permanent locations. That our hometown will always be there when we find the time to visit family. Or that population numbers will always climb higher as the years go by.


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[Assistant] Maybe it's a point of pride, or a sign of human arrogance, but most of us believe that these centers of human civilization represent our indelible, immortal mark on the pages of history.


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[Assistant] But life doesn't always play along with our assumptions. There's always an exception to the rule. Sure, most towns and cities do grow and swell as time goes by.


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[Assistant] But sometimes they don't. Sometimes they burn, or crumble, or get washed away.


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[Assistant] Like a tire pierced by a nail, they slowly leak everything that ever made them a community. Until finally, there's nothing left.


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[Assistant] If you get in a car and head north of Boston, following the coastline, you'll eventually wind your way up to a small peninsula known as Cape Ann. It's a deeply historical area, with settlers dating back to the 1620s.


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[Assistant] Where the northern side of the tip of that peninsula is the town of Rockport, and on the southern side is Gloucester.


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[Assistant] In 1693 though, a group of settlers headed toward the area right between them in the middle of that stretch of land and set up a sort of common settlement. They called it, now get ready because this was incredibly inventive of them, the common settlement. Yeah, I know, just roll with it.


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[Assistant] The name was accurate, though, since the entire five-mile area was meant to serve the whole community. You could harvest timber from the trees there and graze your livestock in the fields. Being farther inland, it was also safe from the pirates that plagued the coast, so eventually people began to build homes there.


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[Assistant] By the mid 1700s, there were roughly 100 families living in the common settlement. But not all utopian dreams can last forever.


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[Assistant] After the American Revolution was fought and won, pirate ships were a lot less common around Cape Anne, so people started to move back to the coastline where life was easier. And as they did, the town was just sort of left behind, discarded like old toys in the backyard.


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[Assistant] Some people even left their dogs, which ended up becoming feral, roaming the area long enough for locals to start referring to the settlement as... Dogtown. There were stories, too.


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[Assistant] Tales of witches that stayed behind to torment the people around them. One legend says that a witch named Tammy Younger was so feared by people passing through that they would pay her a toll when they did so just to keep her happy. In the end though, even the witches moved away.


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[Assistant] Today, Dogtown is a wilderness of tall trees, oddly shaped boulders, and whispers of witchcraft and shadows. And sprinkled throughout it all are large holes in the ground, the cellars of those long gone buildings that settlers once called home. So, if you ever visit, watch your step. You never know what you might stumble into.


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[Assistant] The northwestern corner of Connecticut is another heavily wooded region of New England and it always has been.


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[Assistant] But when settlers arrived in the mid 1700s, they tried their best to tame it. A community there was eventually called Cornwall, but according to the legend, sometime in the 1750s, members of one particular family started to move to the southern edges of town, away from everyone else.


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[Assistant] Gideon Dudley was the first, followed a short time later by two of his brothers. Then a distant cousin named Martin Dudley arrived. Other families followed them, of course, but the settlement never grew very large. By the 1850s, there were just over 20 families living there. And thanks to the founding Dudley brothers, Cornwall would always be known by another name. Dudley Town.


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[Assistant] Then, as is sometimes the case, life changed. The Midwest opened up and people moved in that direction for a fresh start and a new life. The iron industry that had thrived for decades began to dwindle until finally there was little reason to stick around at all.


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[Assistant] Three of the four original Dudleys moved away, and they fared much better in their new homes. But Abiel, the one who remained behind, didn't share in that good fortune, which has led some to believe in a curse that hovers over the region.


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[Assistant] Some say the curse is connected to a Dudley ancestor who was executed for treason back in England and that this curse followed the Dudley family to Connecticut.


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[Assistant] It's mostly just a lot of local legend, but what we do know is that some pretty odd things have happened in Dudley Town. So the curse story sure looks like a great hook to hang your coat on, if you know what I mean.


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[Assistant] Because ABL Dudley ended up losing his entire fortune.


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[Assistant] Shortly before he passed away in 1799, the town of Cornwall actually stepped in and took possession of his property to cover his debts. But rather than disappearing, a curse, if it really exists at all, seems to have just stayed with the land, as a whole string of unusual events seem to point out.


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[Assistant] First, it was a neighbor of ABL's, who was killed while helping another neighbor build a barn.


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[Assistant] The neighbor who survived was a man named William Tanner, and he managed to escape the curse and live to the ripe old age of 104. But during his long years in Dudley Town, he claimed to have seen unusual things. Things like unnatural creatures that approached his house from the woods at night, or shadows that moved through the trees.


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[Assistant] One final tale from Dudleytown tells us that Sarah Fay, the wife of a Revolutionary War general, was standing on her front porch sometime in 1804 when a freak storm blew in.


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[Assistant] Then, as she was looking up at the clouds, a bolt of lightning flashed down and struck her, killing her instantly. Her husband Herman was said to have gone insane after that.


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[Assistant] Like Dogtown, the Dudley town of today is little more than dense woods and the occasional stone-lined foundation hole. And while the people who lived there are long gone, each location still plays host to its own mix of folklore and rumor. Because even when you take the people out of a town, something always stays behind.


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[Assistant] And, sure, New England is really old, relatively speaking, and time has a way of helping everything fade away. People, events, even places. So maybe it's not a big surprise that Dogtown and Dudleytown no longer exist.


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[Assistant] That said, a community doesn't have to be ancient for that to happen.


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[Assistant] In fact, there are some places that are far younger than any New England town, and yet their past is full of violence and tragedy and death.


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[Assistant] When gold was discovered in the American West back in the early 1800s, it acted like a beacon, attracting thousands of adventurous Americans to its light.


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[Assistant] They flocked to California, Alaska, Colorado, New Mexico, and many other dusty, rocky, harsh environments. And in 1862, after gold was found at Grasshopper Creek, they rushed to Bannock, Montana.


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[Assistant] Being the 1860s, some of Banach's first settlers included civil war deserters. People who preferred getting rich over fighting for their country.


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[Assistant] They were joined by common thugs, con artists, and career miners who had failed so many times before that they were beyond desperate. Putting them all together in one place could never end well.


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[Assistant] There is constant danger from the outside too. Remember, once gold was collected, it needed to be transported away to truly be valuable.


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[Assistant] Which, of course, created ample job opportunities for anyone interested in the age-old profession of highway robbery. And when it came to stealing gold from travelers in 1860s Montana, no one did it better than the innocents.


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[Assistant] The Innocents were a legendary gang of outlaws, preying on the people who had finally struck it rich.


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[Assistant] Once gold was packaged up and transported out of town, it was this collection of thieves and gunmen who chased them down and relieved them of their burden, so to speak. They did it often, and if anyone resisted, they did it with violent force.


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[Assistant] The documents we have today show evidence of at least 8 murders committed by the innocents. But local legend puts that number much higher, closer to 100.


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[Assistant] The trouble was, local sheriff Henry Plummer didn't seem interested in helping to track the innocents down.


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[Assistant] So as humans have always been so very good at doing, the people of Bannock took justice into their own hands. And they caught them.


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[Assistant] It turns out the leader of the innocents was none other than Sheriff Henry Plummer himself, which explained a lot. And because the crimes went beyond highway robbery and deep into the realm of murder, he and 22 other members of his gang were rounded up and executed in nearby Virginia City.


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[Assistant] Over 5,000 people turned out to watch the hangings. Hangings, by the way, that took place on gallows built years before, on the orders of one man, Sheriff Plummer.


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[Assistant] Bannock is empty now, and appears exactly as you would imagine an old west ghost town to look. Many of the original buildings are still there, but they're just empty shells now, void of human life.


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[Assistant] Some say the town is far from empty, though. That something still walks the dusty streets and empty buildings. The ghost of Sheriff Plummer.


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[Assistant] The town of Bodie has its own dark history. Situated roughly 200 miles to the east of Sacramento, near the Nevada border, this abandoned California mining town has everything you might expect, from glory days and tragic collapse, to other, less explainable qualities. And it all began in 1859.


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[Assistant] That was the year that four men discovered gold just north of Mono Lake. After one of the men, a 44-year-old former tin merchant from Poughkeepsie, New York named W.S. Bodie, died in a blizzard, the others decided to name the camp after him. It's Ben Bodie ever since. Give or take a change in spelling, that is.


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[Assistant] A mining town quickly grew up around the camp, and by the 1870s, it was booming. Millions of dollars of gold were being shipped out of the town every year, and people were flocking to that golden glow.


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[Assistant] But all good things come to an end, even if that ending is slow and drawn out.


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[Assistant] Another fire fifteen years later. The Great Depression.


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[Assistant] Each event acted like a nail, slowly locking the lid of the coffin down on a town that had once been so alive and vibrant. Still.


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[Assistant] Some things refuse to completely go into the grave.


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[Assistant] Multiple spirits have been seen by visitors to the Old Town over the decades since it was abandoned. Some have seen what they describe as a ghostly Chinese woman peering out from the window of one of the buildings, while other buildings have played host to the sounds of laughing children.


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[Assistant] The stories that attempt to explain these experiences, pairing names and legends with the sights and sounds, are a bit of a mixed bag, but all of them speak to a powerful idea.


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[Assistant] Human settlements, even after all the inhabitants have moved away, seem to have a way of living on.


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[Assistant] But there's something else in Bodhi that's darker than the ghosts of the past. If the stories are true, the town is also home to a curse.


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[Assistant] I've heard it rationalized a number of ways. Some people think that the remains of Bodhi are so precious to its ghostly inhabitants that they actively hate thieves. Others think it has roots in the town's survivalist spirit. The people of Bodhi suffered through starvation, exhaustion, even tragedy.


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[Assistant] All to earn a living there. And that means everything in town was precious and valuable.


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[Assistant] As a result, there are multiple stories of people who have visited the town and left with souvenirs, only to have life fall apart a short time later.


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[Assistant] One man stole a glass bottle, triggering a series of accidents in his family that left him injured and afraid. Another took a rusty nail home and experienced so much hardship that he actually put it in an envelope and nailed it back. But some things can't be mailed back.


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[Assistant] Occasionally, the things that poison the spirit of a town can't be blamed on random tragedy or events outside their control.


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[Assistant] Sometimes a town seems to voluntarily invite the shadows in. Once they arrive though, they tend to put down roots.


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[Assistant] Folks have lived in the area for decades. They started to roll in before the ink on the Louisiana Purchase was dry and just kept moving west. Right here though, in the flat green land about three miles north of Spring River, they encountered a community of Native Americans from the Osage tribe and had to fight to claim the land.


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[Assistant] Don't get me wrong, this was Osage land. They'd been there for at least two centuries after being forced out of their original home territory farther east. But the white man was good at pushing, and they pushed the Osage right out of town. And since the 1820s, the community there had grown like a weed.


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[Assistant] In the late 1850s, two of the more prominent men in town, D.S. Holman and P.A. Love, worked together and registered their town with the state of Missouri, just to make it official. The state welcomed them in, and life continued on in the same way it always had. Except, you know, more officially, I suppose.


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[Assistant] Naturally, the freshly minted town known as Avila needed a post office, so Mr. Holman set it up and gave the job of postmaster to himself. And it was through that post office that so much of the news from the outside world flowed in. Within a year though, that news started to take on a darker flavor. War was coming, they said.


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[Assistant] A war between the states over the issue of slavery. Which was a bit tricky for the people of Avila. Because while slavery was legal in Missouri, most of the people in town didn't care for it. In fact, when it came time to pick sides, they threw their hat in with the Union without ever thinking twice about it.


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[Assistant] The local physician, Dr. Stemmins, even freed his slaves, literally putting his money where his mouth was.


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[Assistant] When Confederate troops in the area caught wind of it though, they rode to a villa.


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[Assistant] On March 8th of 1862, a raiding party fell on Doc Stemmon's home, looting what they wanted before burning it all to the ground. Then they stood the good doctor up and put a bullet in his head, sending a message to anyone else in town who might be thinking of following in his footsteps. The plan backfired.


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[Assistant] A villa rose up, created their own local militia, and began to patrol the area looking for confederates who might be doing the same thing in other towns.


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[Assistant] They were vicious too, taking down groups of Rebels much larger than their own, sometimes defeating a hundred or more in a single battle. Then, something happened.


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[Assistant] Legend says that on one of their patrols, they discovered the corpse of a man in a Confederate uniform. No one knew who had killed the man, but judging by the state of decomposition, he'd been killed days before.


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[Assistant] The bullet hole in the man's rotting skull certainly told them how, though.


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[Assistant] As a way of warning the other Confederates to stay away, one of the soldiers brought the dead man's head back to a villa. There, he found a tree in the orchard alongside the road near the Dunlop farm, and hung the skull from a branch. And that skull hung there for so long that people began to call its home the Death Tree.


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[Assistant] The Civil War eventually ended, and peace returned to Avila. But folks left that skull in the tree as a reminder of how strong and determined they all were. The next few decades tested that strength, though.


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[Assistant] First, a new railroad line was installed between Springfield and Carthage, but it skipped a villa entirely. Business dried up for many of the shops in town, and by the 1940s, the younger generation was moving out in search of work elsewhere.


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[Assistant] There's not much left of a villa today. The few original buildings still standing are just empty shells waiting for their turn to fall over. But there are about a hundred people still living there, still holding on to their community, and still doing their best to get by. But they're not alone.


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[Assistant] According to the stories, a villa is home to something else, something far less human than you might expect.


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[Assistant] Multiple witnesses have reported seeing a shadow-like figure that moves through town, sometimes even passing through locked doors. It's said that the figure is more visible out of the corner of your eye than straight on, but it's been seen at all hours of the day in multiple locations around town.


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[Assistant] The Darkest Tales, though, are about a more visible entity. They call him Rotten Johnny Reb, a nickname that hints at both the stench he seems to give off as well as his origin story.


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[Assistant] Johnny Reb, you see, was a common term for Confederate soldiers. According to the stories, this figure is the very same soldier who lost his head all those years before.


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[Assistant] Witnesses describe him as a walking, rotting corpse dressed in military clothing. Some say he wears a long leather coat and carries a rusty Winchester rifle, while others claim that he's been seen crawling around on the ground as if he's looking for something important.


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[Assistant] And while the shadowy figures never seem to bother anyone, Rotten Johnny Reb is another story entirely. Not only does he notice people in town, he's been said to approach them.


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[Assistant] Whether the stories are true or not, ghost towns certainly represent something powerful in the world of folklore. They seem to be two very different things all at the same time. Empty, forgotten places that are also somehow overflowing with tales and activity.


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[Assistant] We can debate the existence of ghosts and curses all we want, but there's no denying the power of story. Still.


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[Assistant] Ghost towns are oddly attractive to us. There's something magnetic about being able to step into a place where an entire town once thrived and be the only person there.


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[Assistant] To walk through buildings that were once homes, or streets that used to hum with life.


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[Assistant] For the briefest of moments, it can seem like you're the only person in the world.


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[Assistant] On the other hand, ghost towns can also be a little horrifying.


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[Assistant] Think of it this way. Archaeologists have found graffiti that dates back thousands of years in places like the interior of the Great Pyramid and the walls of Pompeii. It's part of who we are. We have a deep need to leave our mark on the world.


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[Assistant] Legendary martial arts pioneer Bruce Lee once said that the key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering. And that's why ghost towns can be a bit frightening, because they stand as proof that, no, not everything we build will stand the test of time. But sure, some things still remain.


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[Assistant] People who visit Bodhi get to walk through buildings that still feel like a time capsule. The general store still has product on the shelf, and homes still have furniture in them. As I mentioned before, some of those old items have been stolen by tourists, only to be sent back when life starts feeling a little, well, cursed.


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[Assistant] In fact, the park rangers there in Bodhi say they receive packages all the time. And over at the museum gift shop, they keep a photo album full of the letters that came with those returned objects. Letters that are full of guilt and regret and hope.


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[Assistant] Hope that maybe, by returning these items, they might end the curse.


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[Assistant] Even though the post office is still open in Avila, Missouri, there's nothing to send back. For that town, it's more a matter of finding things.


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[Assistant] That's because the tale of Rotten Johnny Reb points to a particular solution. You see, all those sightings of the ghostly rebel crawling around on the ground were a hint. He's looking for his head, they say. But if the town wants to be rid of him for good, they have their work cut out for them.


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[Assistant] According to locals, they just need to find that old tree.


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[Assistant] Dig up the skull beneath it, and then set the whole thing on fire. And really, how hard could that be? But then again, that's the trouble.


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[Assistant] This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Manke, with research help from Marsette Crockett and Carl Nellis, and music by Chad Lawson.


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[Assistant] This is my friendly reminder that Lore is a lot more than just a bi-weekly podcast. There's an ongoing book series from Penguin Random House, a television show available on Amazon Prime, a membership site with extra episodes, and so much more. And you can learn about everything over in one place. TheWorldOfLore.com slash now.


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[Assistant] You can also follow the show on social media. We're over there on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Just search for Lore Podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button. If you do, say hi. I like it when people say hi.


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[Assistant] In the early 1990s, two boys were playing on a gravel hill near an old abandoned mine outside of Griswold, Connecticut. Kids do the oddest things to stave off boredom, so playing on a hill covered in small rocks doesn't really surprise me. And my guess is that they were having a blast.


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[Assistant] That is, until one of them dislarged two larger rocks. But when the rocks tumbled free and rolled down the hill, both boys noticed something odd about them. They were nearly identical in shape, and that shape was eerily familiar.


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[Assistant] They headed down the hill one last time to take a closer look and that's when they realized what they'd found. Skulls.


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[Assistant] At first, the local police were brought in to investigate the possibility of an unknown serial killer. That many bodies all in one place was never a good sign. But it became obvious very quickly that the real experts they needed were, in fact, archaeologists.


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[Assistant] They were right. In the end, 29 graves were discovered in what turned out to be the remnants of a forgotten cemetery. Time and the elements had slowly eroded away the graveyard, and the contents had been swallowed by the gravel.


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[Assistant] Many skeletons were still in their caskets though, and it was inside one of them, marked with brass tacks in the form of the initials of the occupant, that something unusual was discovered.


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[Assistant] Long ago, it seems, someone had opened this casket shortly after burial and had then made changes to the body.


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[Assistant] Specifically, they removed both femurs, the bones of the thigh, and placed them across the chest. Then, moving some of the ribs and the breastbone out of the way, they placed the skull above them. It was a real-life skull and crossbones, and its presence hinted at something darker.


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[Assistant] The skeleton, you see, wasn't just the remains of an ordinary early settler of the area. This man was different, and the people who buried him knew it. According to them, he was a vampire.


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[Assistant] While it might be a surprise to some people, graves like the one in Griswold are actually quite common.


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[Assistant] Today we live in the Brom Stoker era of vampires, so our expectations and imagery are highly influenced by his novel and the world it evokes. Victorian gentlemen in dark cloaks, mysterious castles, sharp fangs protruding over blood-red lips.


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[Assistant] But the white face with red lips started life as nothing more than stage makeup, an artifact from a 1924 theatrical production of the novel called Count Dracula.


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[Assistant] Another feature we associate with Dracula, that high collar, also started there. With wires attached to the points of the collar, the actor playing Dracula could turn his back on the audience and drop through a trap door, leaving an empty cape behind to fall to the floor moments later.


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[Assistant] The true myth of the vampire, though, is far older than Stoker. It's an ancient tree with deep and twisted roots. As hard as it is for popular culture to fathom, the legend of the vampire and the people who hunt it actually predate Dracula by centuries.


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[Assistant] Just a little further into the past from Bram Stoker, in the cradle of what would one day become the United States, the people of New England were identifying vampire activity in their towns and villages, and then assembling teams of people to deal with what they perceived as a threat.


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[Assistant] It turns out that Griswold was one of those communities. According to the archaeologists that studied the 29 graves, a vast majority of them were contemporary to the vampire's burial, and most of those showed signs of an illness. Tuberculosis is the most likely guess, which goes a long way toward explaining why the people did what they did.


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[Assistant] The folklore was clear. The first to die from an illness was usually the cause of the outbreak that followed. Patient zero might be in the grave, sure, but they were still at work, slowly draining the lives of others. Because of this belief, bodies all across the Northeast were routinely exhumed and destroyed in one way or another.


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[Assistant] In many ways, it was as if old superstitions were clawing their way out of the depths of the past to haunt the living.


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[Assistant] The details of another case from Stafford, Connecticut in the late 1870s illustrate the ritual perfectly. After a family there lost five of their six daughters to illness, the first to have passed away was dug up and examined. This is what was recorded about the event.


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[Assistant] Exhumation has revealed a heart and lungs, they wrote, still fresh and living, encased in rotten and slimy integuments. And in which, after burning these portions of the defunct, a living relative, else doomed and hastened to the grave, has suddenly and miraculously recovered.


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[Assistant] This sort of macabre community event happened frequently in places like Connecticut, Vermont, New York, New Hampshire, and even Ontario, Canada. And long-time listeners of lore will of course remember the subject of the very first episode and how the family of Mercy Brown in Rhode Island exhumed her body after others died, doing a similar thing.


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[Assistant] Mercy Brown wasn't the first American vampire, though. As far as we can tell, that honor goes to the wife of Isaac Burton of Manchester, Vermont, all the way back in 1793. And for as chilling and dark as the exhumation of Mercy Brown might have been, the Burton incident puts that story to shame.


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[Assistant] Captain Isaac Burton married Rachel Harris in 1789, but the marriage was brief. Within months of the wedding, Rachel took sick with tuberculosis, what was then called consumption because of the way the disease seemed to waste away the person, as if they were being consumed by something unseen.


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[Assistant] Rachel soon died, leaving her husband a young widower. But that didn't last long.


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[Assistant] Burton married again in April of 1791, this time to a woman named Hulda Powell. But again, within just two years of their marriage, Burton's new bride became ill.


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[Assistant] Friends and neighbors started to whisper, and as people are prone to do, they began to try and draw conclusions. Unanswered questions bother us, so we tend to look for reasons, and the people of Manchester thought they knew why Hulda was sick.


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[Assistant] Although Isaac's first wife Rachel had been dead for nearly three years, the people of Manchester suggested that she was the cause.


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[Assistant] Clearly, from her new home in the graveyard, she was draining the life from her husband's new bride. With Burton's permission, the town prepared to exhume her and end the curse.


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[Assistant] A town blacksmith brought a portable forge to the gravesite, and nearly a thousand people gathered there to watch the grim ceremony unfold. Rachel's heart, liver, and lungs were all removed from her corpse, and then reduced to ashes. Sadly, though, Holda Burton never recovered, and she died a few months later.


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[Assistant] This ancient ritual, at least as far as the people of Manchester, Vermont were concerned, had somehow failed them. They did what they had been taught to do, as unpleasant as it must have been, and yet it hadn't worked.


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[Assistant] Which was odd. Because that hadn't always been the case.


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[Assistant] A lot of what we think we know about the roots of the vampire legend is, thanks to Dracula, the novel by Bram Stoker. Most of us know the basics. Stoker built a mythology around a historical figure from the 15th century named Vlad III.


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[Assistant] Vlad was from the kingdom of Wallachia, now part of modern-day Romania.


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[Assistant] Vlad had two titles. Vlad Tepes, which meant the Impaler, referred to his brutal military tactics in defense of his country. The other, Vlad Dracul, or the Dragon, referred to his membership in the Order of the Dragon, a military group founded to protect Christian Europe from the armies of the invading Ottoman Empire.


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[Assistant] But Bram Stoker never traveled to Romania. The castle that he describes as the home of Dracula, a real life fortress known as Bran Castle,


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[Assistant] Was just an image he found in a book that he felt captured the mood he was aiming for.


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[Assistant] Bran Castle, as far as historians can tell, has no connection to Vlad III whatsoever.


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[Assistant] The notion of a vampire, or at least of an undead creature that feeds on the living, does have roots in the area though. Stoker was close, and he missed the mark by a little more than 300 miles. The real roots of the legend, according to most historians, can be found in modern day Serbia.


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[Assistant] Serbia of today sits at the southwestern corner of Romania, just south of Hungary.


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[Assistant] Between 1718 and 1739, the country passed briefly from the hands of the Ottoman Empire to the control of the Austrians.


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[Assistant] But because of its place between these two empires, the land was devastated by war and destruction. And people were frequently moved around in service to the military. And is so often the case. When people cross borders, so do ideas.


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[Assistant] In the eight days that followed Peter's death, other people in the village began to pass away. Nine of them, in fact. And all of them made startling claims on their deathbeds.


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[Assistant] Details that seemed impossible to prove, but were somehow the same in each case. Each person was adamant that Peter Blagojevich, their recently deceased neighbor, had come to them in the night and attacked them.


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[Assistant] Peter's widow even made the startling claim that her dead husband had actually walked into her home and asked for, of all things, his shoes. She believed so strongly in this visit that she moved to another village to avoid future encounters. And the rest of the people of Kiselova took notice. Something had to be done. And that would begin with digging up Peter's corpse.


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[Assistant] Inside the coffin, they found Peter's body to be remarkably preserved. Some noticed how the man's nails and hair had grown. Others remarked at the condition of his skin which was flush and bright, not pale. It wasn't natural, they said, and something had to be done.


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[Assistant] They turned to a man named Frumbald, a local representative from the Austrian government, and together with the help of a priest, he examined the body for himself.


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[Assistant] In his written report, he confirmed the earlier findings and added his observation that fresh blood could be seen inside Peter's mouth.


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[Assistant] Frumball describes how the people of the village were overcome with fear and outrage, and how they proceeded to drive a wooden stake through the corpse's heart.


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[Assistant] Then, still afraid of what the creature might be able to do to them in the future, the people burned the body. Frumbled's report details all of it, but he also makes the disclaimer that he wasn't responsible for the villagers' actions.


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[Assistant] Peter's story was powerful, and it created a panic that quickly spread throughout the region. It was the first event of its kind in history to be recorded in government documents, but that report was still missing an official cause. Without it, the story might have died where it started. But then, just a year later, something happened, and the legend has never been the same.


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[Assistant] Arnold Paul was a former soldier, one of the many men transplanted by the Austrian government in an effort to defend and police their newly acquired territory. No one is sure where he was born, but his final years were spent in a Serbian village along the Great Mureva River near Parisan.


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[Assistant] In his post-war life, Arnold had become a farmer, and he frequently told stories from days gone by. In one such story, Arnold claimed that he had been attacked by a vampire years before while living in Kosovo. He survived, but the injury continued to plague him until he finally took action.


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[Assistant] He said that he cured himself by eating soil from the grave of the suspected vampire. And then, after digging up the vampire's body, he collected some of its blood and smeared it on himself.


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[Assistant] And that was it. According to Arnold and the folklore that drove him to do it, he was cured.


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[Assistant] When he died in a farming accident in 1726, though, people began to wonder. Because within a month of his death, at least four other people in town complained that Arnold had visited them in the night and attacked them.


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[Assistant] When those four people died, the villagers began to whisper in fear. They remembered Arnold's stories, stories of being attacked by a vampire, of taking on the disease himself, stories of his own attempt to cure himself.


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[Assistant] But what if they hadn't worked? Out of suspicion and doubt, they decided to exhume his body and examine it.


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[Assistant] Here, for what was most likely the first time in recorded history, the story of the vampire was taking on the form of a communicable disease transmitted from person to person through biting.


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[Assistant] This might seem obvious to us now, but we've all grown up with the legend fully formed. To the people of this small Serbian village though, this was something new, and horrific.


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[Assistant] What they found seemed like conclusive evidence too. Fresh skin, new nails, longer hair and beard. Arnold even had blood in his mouth. Putting ourselves in their context, it's easy to see how they might have been chilled with fear. So they drove a stake through his heart.


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[Assistant] One witness claimed that as the stake pierced the corpse's chest, the body groaned and bled. Unsure what else to do, they burned the body. And then they did the same to the four who had died after claiming Arnold had attacked them. They covered all their bases, so to speak, and then walked away.


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[Assistant] Five years later, though, another outbreak spread through the village. And we know this because so many people died that the Austrian government sent a team of military physicians from Belgrade to investigate the situation. These men, led by two officials named Glasser and Fluchinger, were special, though, because they were trained in communicable diseases.


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[Assistant] At first, Glasser and Flueckinger looked for signs of a contagious disease, but they came up empty-handed.


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[Assistant] They noted signs of mild malnutrition, but nothing deadly could be found.


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[Assistant] The clock was ticking though. The villagers were living in such fear that they had been gathering together into large groups at night, taking turns keeping watch for the creatures they believed were responsible. They even threatened to pack up and move elsewhere. Something needed to be done. And quickly.


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[Assistant] Thankfully, there were suspects. The first was a young woman named Stana, a recent newcomer to the village, who had died during childbirth early in the outbreak. It seemed to be a sickness that took her life, but there were other clues as well.


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[Assistant] Stana had confessed to smearing vampire blood on herself years before as protection, but that, they claimed, had possibly backfired and most likely turned her into one instead.


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[Assistant] The other suspect was an older woman named Milica. She was also from another part of Serbia and had arrived shortly after Arnold Paul's death. Like so many others, she had a history. Neighbors claimed that she was a good woman who never did anything intentionally wicked.


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[Assistant] But she had told them once of how she'd eaten meat from a sheep killed by a vampire.


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[Assistant] And that seemed like enough evidence to push the investigators to go deeper. Literally.


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[Assistant] With permission from Belgrade, Glasser and the villagers exhumed all of the recently deceased, opening their coffins for a full examination. And while logic and science should have prevailed in a situation like that, what they found only deepened their belief in the supernatural.


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[Assistant] Of the 17 bodies, only 5 appeared normal in that they had begun to decay in a manner that should be expected. Those were reburied and considered safe.


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[Assistant] But it was the other twelve that alarmed the villagers and government men alike, because these bodies were still fresh.


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[Assistant] In the report filed in Belgrade on January 26th of 1732, signed by all five of the government physicians who witnessed the exhumations, these 12 bodies were completely untouched by decay. Organs still held fresh blood, their skin was healthy and firm, and new nails and hair had grown since burial.