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[Assistant] They were newlyweds, although they probably wouldn't have looked like it. Fremont was 75 and his new bride Annie was 60. They had found new love late in life and had traveled to New York City to celebrate. Their hotel of choice? The Hotel Margaret.


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[Assistant] What she found was a scene of horror. Annie Jackson's lifeless body was on the bathroom floor, her teeth clenched in an eternal grimace of pain and agony. Her lips and chin were stained with dried blood and the color of her face had shifted to an odd blue tone.


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[Assistant] Just outside the bathroom her husband's body was in the same condition. He was positioned as if he had been trying to crawl to the bathroom, to his wife, only to die along the way.


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[Assistant] It was like walking into a moment frozen in time A moment that no one would ever want to experience


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[Assistant] Except, it wasn't. With the autopsies complete, the authorities were left with more questions than answers. Yes, there had been a minuscule amount of cyanide in their stomachs, but it wasn't enough to kill a person. So, the stomachs of both victims were removed and sent to an expert for further analysis. A chemist named Alexander Gettler.


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[Assistant] Begetler confirmed what they already knew. The stomachs showed none of the usual evidence of cyanide poisoning.


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[Assistant] So the police returned to the hotel and began to ask more questions of more people. And in doing so, they learned something interesting. One of the maids revealed that the hotel had recently sealed some of the basement rooms with paper, which was standard practice for fumigation. And that got the authorities thinking.


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[Assistant] You see, back in the 1920s, the way people took care of cleaning was very different from today. For example, it was common to polish your family's silver with a product that contained cyanide.


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[Assistant] It worked amazingly well and that's why they used it, of course. But it was also highly toxic. In fact, it was said that if you had a small cut on your hand when you did this, it could actually kill you. And while it was rare, this did happen from time to time.


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[Assistant] Cyanide was also a common ingredient in the cleaner used to scrub dirty pots in the kitchen. Although most people had gotten really good at thoroughly rinsing them before using them. And the toxic chemical was used in something else. Fumigation.


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[Assistant] On a hunch, the medical examiner exhumed the bodies and had the lungs removed for study. And sure enough, Dr. Gettler found the evidence he was looking for. And with this, the final piece of the puzzle fell into place.


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[Assistant] It seems that the Jacksons had retired to their room the day before, just like any other guest in the hotel. But while the basement rooms were being fumigated, some of the cyanide gas managed to leak out and find its way up to their room.


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[Assistant] After that, the effects of the poison would have shut down their body's ability to process oxygen, and they would have essentially strangled to death.


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[Assistant] Sadly, the rest of the case did not go the way we might assume it should.


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[Assistant] The hotel manager denied that they had fumigated anything. And when the manager and the fumigator who did the job were brought to court, their lawyers attacked the medical evidence as unreliable and then called on paid witnesses to confirm those denials. And in the end, it worked.


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[Assistant] The manager and fumigator walked away from the trial without consequences for their obvious actions, and the family of Fremont and Annie Jackson had to endure attack after attack on the character of their dead loved ones.


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[Assistant] Poison feels like a weapon pulled straight from the pages of folklore. Almost magical in nature, a little vial of liquid or dash of powder could have the power to change lives, alter careers, and gift death to the unsuspecting.


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[Assistant] In the mythology of Ancient Greece, Heracles was a divine hero known for his feats of strength and victory over monsters. In one story, he used the venom of the hydra to coat the tips of his arrows, allowing him an advantage over his foes.


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[Assistant] So maybe it's no wonder that the Greek writer Homer mentioned soldiers in the Trojan War crafting poisoned weapons of their own. Poison makes us feel like gods, changing the fate of others with a seemingly magical substance. Maybe that's why it's not surprising that so many people have abused that power over the course of human history.


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[Assistant] And clearly, stories like the one about the Fremonts leave us aware of all the toxicity around us. In an ideal world, no one is slipped a deadly toxin or denied justice for a clear and obvious murder. But our world has never been ideal, has it?


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[Assistant] For some, justice has arrived though. It's just taken a long time.


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[Assistant] A great example of this would be a woman named Mary Ann Cotton. She was born in England in 1831, and over the course of her short life of 40 years, managed to kill three of her four husbands, all but two of her 13 children, a couple of lovers, and a number of stepchildren.


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[Assistant] All told, it's estimated that Mary Ann Cotton was responsible for at least 21 murders. And in all cases, she used a slow-acting poison with arsenic as the main ingredient. And in doing so, she became England's first female serial killer.


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[Assistant] Hers was a killing spree that happened right under the nose of just about everyone she knew. And it took years for all that baggage to catch up. But in 1873, it did. And she was tried and sentenced to death for the murder of her stepson, Charles. On the 24th of March, she was hanged for her crimes.


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[Assistant] Lillian had a job in the city. She worked as a typist for one of the businesses in the Townsend building which stood over near Madison Square Park at the corner of West 25th Street and Broadway. Her employer made dress clothes, and by all accounts, she loved her job.


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[Assistant] Lillian was only 17 and she lived with her parents. But I have to imagine there was something magical for her about stepping out into the hot New York City streets in the summer of 1922.


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[Assistant] Everything must have felt alive and prosperous. After all, the country was still a few years away from the precipice of the Great Depression, and everything just seemed to be firing on all cylinders.


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[Assistant] On the morning of July 31st, Lillian left the house for work, but was stopped by her mother. Would she care for a packed lunch, the older woman asked her, but Lillian laughed it off. The heat would probably take away her appetite, she told her mother, but if she got hungry, there were plenty of places to grab a bite to eat. Then she said goodbye and headed to work.


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[Assistant] She had a sandwich, and then for dessert, a cup of coffee and a generous piece of their huckleberry pie. And then she went back to work.


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[Assistant] Sensing a larger emergency, doctors were called to the building and they began to try treating every sick person they could find. They brought stomach pumps with them and were moving from patient to patient, trying to remove whatever they'd eaten before the symptoms became worse. And they had reason to be afraid.


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[Assistant] The worst of the sick were showing signs of something far more terrifying than food poisoning. Some were actually turning blue in the face and constantly cried out in pain. And one of those was poor young Lillian.


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[Assistant] At first, the investigation made headway into the mystery. After medical reports on the contents of the stomachs of each victim, the food was narrowed down to one of the pies offered at the restaurant. And that meant that the poison had been in the crust. The next day, tests at the restaurant confirmed what they all suspected.


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[Assistant] Despite posting a hefty reward for any evidence that might lead to an arrest, no one stepped forward and the two bakers kept their mouth shut through multiple interviews. In the end, with no one to arrest, there was no trial and no consequences for the six murders and dozens of critically ill patrons.


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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.


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[Assistant] 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] When you see the body, the first thing that strikes you is just how much detail you can see. The hair standing up on an arm. The dirty fingernails. The pull of the skin over the knuckles. It has a way of making the body seem permanent and real.


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[Assistant] Then it is real, don't get me wrong. It's just that most bodies don't look this good after death, even when they're relatively fresh. Which is what makes this particular body all the more amazing.


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[Assistant] The casual man, as they call him, is roughly 4,000 years old. He's older than the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun by six centuries, and yet here he is, making eye contact and showing off the pores of his skin. All thanks to the preserving power of an Irish peat bog.


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[Assistant] These bog bodies, as they're called, tend to be easy books to read, telling a clear story to archaeologists. Age, social status, even their occupation. But the most important detail is how they died.


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[Assistant] And nearly all Irish bog bodies share one common cause of death. Human sacrifice.


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[Assistant] Some were run through with a sword. Others were clubbed over the head.


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[Assistant] Some were even strangled with a length of rope. All of it, though, was to send a message to the gods. Life was precious, so to willingly give up one of their own was a powerful way of making a point. It was a primitive email to the deities, typed in bold, underlined, all capped words. Ireland is a beautiful country with a dark past.


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[Assistant] Long before the troubles of the last century, before the country was divided, even before British rule itself, Ireland was already a land full of dark tales and frightening lore.


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[Assistant] Ireland is a country that lives up to its reputation. The Emerald Isle is just as overwhelmingly green and lush as you might expect. In the countryside, rolling hills seem to go on for as far as the eye can see. In places like Dublin, ancient buildings play host to laughter and song.


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[Assistant] But there's a deep history that swirls around those green hills and dark halls, like a cold wind. And while many of them have drifted beyond the boundaries of Ireland to influence global folklore, those are just a few samples from a much deeper and much darker well.


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[Assistant] Of course, we all know of the Banshee, the female spirit that's said to enter our world through one of the many ancient stone mounds, the she that dot the Irish landscape. They come to announce impending death, and the legend says that if you can hear her cries and wailing, you or someone you love is not long for this world.


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[Assistant] We've covered puka and leprechauns before, but Irish folklore has a plethora of other little creatures skittering about.


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[Assistant] The grogok is described as a small old man, covered in thick hair that's matted and tangled with sticks and leaves. Most legends say that the grogok is half fairy, half human, but unlike the tales of the puka, these are friendly creatures that help humans with daily life.


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[Assistant] Then of course, there's the human stealing fairy known as the Changeling, yet another of Ireland's popular folklore exports.


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[Assistant] But they aren't the only fairy creature to be afraid of. Irish legends speak of the Daragdua, the red bloodsucker, which may have had a bit of influence on Brom Stoker, who was born and raised in Ireland.


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[Assistant] The darugdua is described as a pale young woman who lures men into a graveyard, where she then drains them of their blood.


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[Assistant] To stop her, folklore says that all you really need to do is find her grave and pile stones on top of it.


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[Assistant] That's an episode of Supernatural right there, just waiting to be written. Throw in some pie, and it's perfect.


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[Assistant] But Ireland is more than just spooky mythology. However entertaining it might be.


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[Assistant] For every wailing woman and tiny old man cobbling shoes in the night, there seems to be two or three local spots with their own unique stories to tell.


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[Assistant] One such tale comes to us from the coastline north of Belfast in the small village of Ballygally. It was there in 1625 that a castle was constructed by a man named James Shaw. They say the castle was immaculate, that it was beautiful and well designed, and that Shaw obsessed over every detail.


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[Assistant] And naturally, he wanted to pass his beloved home down to his heir someday.


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[Assistant] But when his wife, Isabelle, finally gave birth to their first child, Cha was enraged to discover it was a daughter, and not a son.


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[Assistant] Of course, this is the sort of frustration you're guaranteed to experience when you base your entire system of inheritance and power on the biological role of the dice. But I doubt anyone could have convinced Shaw of the folly of it all. His response, they say, was brutal.


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[Assistant] He locked Isabelle away in one of the towers and had the infant girl removed from the castle entirely.


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[Assistant] Shortly after, his wife fell to her death from the window of the tower.


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[Assistant] Some say it was suicide, driven by her grief over the loss of her daughter. Others, though, say it was an accident, that her desire to see her child again drove her to climb out and try to escape.


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[Assistant] Today, the castle is a hotel, but the tower prison cell, now known as the Ghost Room, is off limits to guests. Still, those who've managed to spend time in it claim to have felt a dark presence.


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[Assistant] Laughter has been heard in the castle hallways, and some have even seen the ghostly figure of a woman disappearing around corners.


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[Assistant] For another legend full of mystery and death, we need to travel to County Clare, home to the ancient McMahon Castle. It's nothing more than an abandoned shell today, absent of life and the comforts of home. But according to the legend, there is something there, hidden inside the castle's walls. A secret chamber.


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[Assistant] No one is sure what the chamber was used for, but the story tells of how a great evil was locked inside and hidden away from the rest of the world. Locked away, that is.


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[Assistant] Until the 1920s, when a local priest was brought in to cleanse the space.


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[Assistant] They say that the exorcist opened the room and stepped inside, but never walked back out again.


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[Assistant] The following morning, someone found the priest's dead body lying just outside the chamber door. Most assumed the man had died of a heart attack, which wouldn't be entirely unusual.


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[Assistant] What was unusual, though, was the expression on the dead man's face. Complete and utter horror. As if he'd been frightened to death.


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[Assistant] The list could go on and on. Buildings and bridges and public spaces that are filled with the ominous echoes of another time. But there's one place in Ireland that seems to hold more darkness, more bloodshed, and more treachery than all the others combined.


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[Assistant] From its ancient roots in bloody conflict to Victorian tales of spiritualism, there isn't much that hasn't taken place within its walls.


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[Assistant] If you're looking for frightening tales, dark history, and unsolved mysteries, there's no better place in Ireland than Lep Castle.


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[Assistant] The earliest mention we have on record in Ireland of the O'Carroll clan is a soldier named Ciarll, who fought alongside King Brian Baru at the Battle of Clontarf in 1014. And I want to point out right away that the name Ciar literally means to hack.


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[Assistant] It's both appropriate, given the man's occupation, and more than a little bit of foreshadowing.


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[Assistant] The O'Carrolls claim descent from an Irish clan that dated back at least a thousand years. By the 16th century though, the O'Carrolls of County Offaly represented the last powerful fragment of that older clan.


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[Assistant] But it was sometime before that that the O'Carrolls took control of a castle in their territory, once held by a secondary clan, the O'Bannons. The castle was called Lep.


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[Assistant] Dating the age of the original structure has proven a bit challenging to historians, but there are a couple of things that are known for certain.


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[Assistant] First, there are signs of significant settlement on the site of the castle dating back at least 2500 years. Second, most scholars agree that the main keep was built around the year 1250, which means that it was already well known and very old by the time the O'Carrolls moved in near the end of the 1400s.


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[Assistant] Lep Castle certainly had a reputation, too. Originally built as a simple tower house, essentially a tall solid rectangle of stone and mortar, its purpose was to protect anyone inside.


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[Assistant] Over the centuries more wings and extensions were added on, but that protective nature never really went away.


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[Assistant] For a very long time, it seems, LEP was considered impenetrable. From the outside, at least.


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[Assistant] You see, the O'Carroll clan wasn't known for getting along with their neighboring clans or even themselves. Family discord like that has a way of creeping inside the walls like a cold December wind. And if the story hasn't piqued your interest yet, don't worry. Winter is coming.


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[Assistant] The first O'Carroll to rule in Lep Castle was John O'Carroll, but he died of the plague around 1490, passing the leadership on to his son Mulrooney. And this new clan leader filled his father's shoes beyond anyone's expectations.


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[Assistant] Through the years, he became known for his bravery in battle and his honor as a leader. He even earned the nickname The Great Mulroney, at least among his clan.


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[Assistant] When he passed away in 1532, after over four decades in control, he left Lep Castle in the hands of at least three sons.


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[Assistant] Tyge was known as a hothead, always quick to move toward violence. Thaddeus had trained as a priest and served the family in the chapel at the top of the castle. And the youngest, Farganum, seems to have been a bit more calm than the others.


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[Assistant] Following the death of their father, the three brothers fell into months of arguing over who should lead the clan and control the castle. The tensions were high, and with Tyg, that was never a good thing. It was a stewing pot of frustration and entitlement. It was about to boil over.


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[Assistant] The legend says that Thaddeus, the family priest and one of the contenders for the leadership of the clan,


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[Assistant] had waited to start mass until his brother Tyge could arrive. But eventually he gave up and just began without him.


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[Assistant] Sometime later, Tige walked through the door, and despite being late, was shocked to see that the service had already begun.


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[Assistant] In a fit of rage, it's said that Tyge drew his sword and rushed at his brother Thaddeus, screaming about how insulting it was to be left out. Of course, Thaddeus was in the right and would have explained that to his brother if Tyge hadn't run the sword straight through him first.


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[Assistant] The priest screamed as Tige pulled the blade free and blood began to spill out on the floor of the chapel.


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[Assistant] Mortally wounded, Thaddeus staggered backward, swaying in front of the others who had come for mass. And then, he toppled over the altar, face down, and stopped breathing.


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[Assistant] Because people are very good at giving incredibly obvious names to places, you might not be surprised to hear that ever since, the site of this gruesome murder has been known as the Bloody Chapel.


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[Assistant] Humor aside, there are those who believe that something dark took place that day.


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[Assistant] A brother killing brother. Putting ambition and petty disagreement ahead of loyalty and family.


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[Assistant] Those things have a way of standing out as powerful actions. They're atypical in the grand scheme of things. On top of that though, a priest was killed right inside his chapel and in the middle of a religious service no less.


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[Assistant] It wasn't long after the murder of Thaddeus that Tyge himself was killed by a nephew.


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[Assistant] In the end, the only remaining brother, Varganum, took over leadership of the clan and castle. But even he wasn't immune to the bloodshed.


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[Assistant] Legend says that during his reign, the O'Carrolls hired another clan, the McMans, to help them defeat a common enemy.


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[Assistant] The plan worked, and the O'Carrolls achieve victory in battle.


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[Assistant] And to celebrate, the McMahons were invited to Lep Castle for a grand meal. With a hidden purpose.


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[Assistant] Some say they were given poisoned wine, while others say they were murdered in their sleep. Either way, the McMahons never left Lep Castle alive.


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[Assistant] Now, I'll admit, this is a lot of death for one family over the course of just a single century. Some would say it's so atypical that given enough time, this sort of history could leave a mark.


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[Assistant] It's this then, this dark cocktail of violence, betrayal, and blasphemy that many think was enough to taint the well, so to speak. It tore a hole in the very fabric of reality. Something the rest of the story only seems to confirm.


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[Assistant] The bloodshed inside Lep Castle went on for generations. Until 1659, when the fortress passed into the hands of a new family through marriage between Fanola, the daughter of the ruling O'Carroll, and an Englishman named Captain Darby.


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[Assistant] Over the years, Lep Castle was improved and extended. Gothic architectural elements were added, and the gardens were expanded. With every change, it became less an Irish tower house, and more an English manor house. It was being tamed, at least from the outside.


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[Assistant] In 1881, the castle passed to Jonathan Darby, and after his marriage to Mildred Dill in 1889, the couple settled into their new life there.


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[Assistant] Perhaps inspired by the dark atmosphere of the castle, Mildred soon began to write novels in the popular gothic genre. That beautiful blend of horror and romance, terror and literature that attracted the likes of Mary Shelley, Anne Radcliffe, and Edgar Allan Poe.


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[Assistant] She published under the pen name Andrew Mary, and her novel Patty Risky was well received. But it was more than the architecture of Lep Castle that inspired her fiction. The halls there, at least according to her, were full of something darker and more evil.


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[Assistant] At first, there were noises, as if furniture were being moved in distant parts of the house. But noises quickly evolved into something more sinister.


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[Assistant] One October night, Mildred was awoken after midnight by the sensation that someone was in the room with her.


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[Assistant] After looking toward the foot of her bed, she was horrified to see the shape of a person in the darkness. This figure was dressed all in red and had raised a hand toward her.


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[Assistant] What is it, she said aloud, thinking a servant had come in to wake her. And then she reached for the bedside table to find a match. She struck it, lit a candle, and then lifted it to illuminate the darkness. When she turned toward the foot of the bed though, she caught her breath. The room was empty.


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[Assistant] Now, this was the sort of experience that would probably convince most of us to back off and avoid the castle's dark history.


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[Assistant] But not Mildred. She was obsessed. Instead of turning away, she rushed head first into the world of the occult and paranormal. She held seances and occult gatherings. Maybe just to deepen her reputation as a gothic novelist, or perhaps to quench a personal thirst.


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[Assistant] The consequences, though, were darker than she could have imagined.


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[Assistant] Something was there in the castle with them and her experiments only seemed to attract its attention. Then, one night, it made itself known.


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[Assistant] According to Mildred, she'd been up late writing in her room when she heard something in the hallway bump against her door


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[Assistant] She opened it to find the hall filled with a putrid, rotting odor, but otherwise empty. So she closed it again.


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[Assistant] Moments later, the bumping and scratching sounds returned, only this time she could also hear sniffing at the foot of the door.


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[Assistant] Expecting a burglar, Mildred picked up a loaded pistol and quickly pulled the door open once again, and then froze, the hair on the back of her neck standing on end. There was something squatting in the doorway, something unnatural and gruesome.


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[Assistant] The Thing, she later wrote, was about the size of a sheep, thin, gaunt, and shadowy in parts. Its face was human, or to be more accurate, inhuman in its vileness, with large holes of blackness for eyes, loose, slobbery lips, and a thick, saliva-dripping jaw.


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[Assistant] According to Mildred, the thing stood silently in the doorway, locking eyes with her for what seemed like an eternity. Then, with a jump, it moved inside her room.


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[Assistant] She raised the pistol and fired, nearly point blank, but still somehow managed to miss. She fired again, this time even closer to the thing, and still the bullet exploded against a piece of furniture behind it.


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[Assistant] Whatever the creature was, whether immaterial spirit or some demonic animal, the shots didn't seem to have an effect on it.


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[Assistant] Frightened out of her mind, she brought the pistol up for a third shot and claims she pressed the gun right against the thing's chest, just as it brought its arms up to reach for her.


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[Assistant] She fired, and then quickly pulled back from its grasp, tripping over something on the floor behind her. Then, she claims, everything went black.


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[Assistant] Later, Mildred reported all of this in the most unusual manner. She wrote it up and had it published in a journal called The Occult Review in December of 1908. But like her novels, she signed the name Andrew Mary to this new tale.


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[Assistant] The following month, the journal also published letters from others that seemed to verify and support the stories. But whenever a novelist is involved, it's impossible to be 100% certain everything is being reported with undecorated accuracy. Still, it's not difficult to believe, is it?


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[Assistant] This castle, designed for warfare and built around generations of bloodshed, was home to more than the people inside.


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[Assistant] Evil events have a way of filling a building like explosions. While the initial shock might eventually fade away, the echoes can still be heard ringing through the halls long after it's over.


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[Assistant] Whether those echoes took the form of red ghosts and rotting elemental creatures or just an overwhelming atmosphere of dread, we can't deny the power and the darkness of the explosion itself. In the end, it seems.


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[Assistant] The only thing more frightening than our deepest nightmares might just be our own violent humanity.


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[Assistant] Ireland certainly has a lush and fertile landscape when it comes to folklore.


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[Assistant] The stories that are still told around fires and in crowded pubs cover the spectrum from the deeply mythological to the downright terrifying. And I wouldn't expect anything less from such a textured, poetic culture.


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[Assistant] But that line between fact and fiction has a way of getting blurry when you add in our own violent human nature.


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[Assistant] The events we hear about, or the things we ourselves do to others, those things have a way of giving birth to tales far more frightening than anything we could invent.


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[Assistant] Reality, though, often fails to have the tidy ending we've come to expect from books and film. Lep Castle isn't the same today as it once was. In fact, it's literally a shell of its former self.


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[Assistant] In early 1922, sensing a growing political tension in the country, the Darbys left their home and moved to England.


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[Assistant] Eleven men knocked on the door of the castle and demanded that the caretaker, Richard Dawkins, provide them lodging for the night.


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[Assistant] When he opened the door for them though, they forced their way inside and began to cover everything with gasoline. And then, they set it all on fire.


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[Assistant] The following day, more men arrived and burned the parts of the castle that had been missed the night before.


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[Assistant] Dawkins trying to save as much of the furniture and belongings as he could, but the outbuilding he hid them in was later broken into and looted.


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[Assistant] By the time the Darbys returned, Lep Castle was nothing more than a smoldering ruin of charred stone.


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[Assistant] One of the tragic losses that resulted from the burning of the castle was the vast collection of stories and novels that Mildred had yet to publish. According to one report, she lost an estimated 150 short stories, roughly 40 larger manuscripts, and two finished novels. Some things, though, still remain.


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[Assistant] For decades, while the castle sat empty, locals would look up at night to see lights in the old fortress windows. It was as if someone were walking the halls armed with a pale candle.


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[Assistant] Others who ventured closer to the property reported that the ruins smelled of rotting flesh. And although they could never find the source, many reported hearing the sounds of some animal or creature. Sniffing sounds.


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[Assistant] Today, Lep Castle is being restored by the current owner, with work being done to rebuild the two wings that extend out from the original tower house. But it's something else. Something that was discovered decades earlier. It might be the most chilling revelation of the castle's last century.


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[Assistant] Upstairs. Just north of the bloody chapel, in fact. Workmen stumbled upon a secret chamber.


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[Assistant] Think of it more as a pit, because it was only accessible from a trap door above.


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[Assistant] The room below was small, barely larger than a closet. These sorts of rooms were called oubliettes, a French term that loosely means a place of forgetting. Unwelcome visitors or betrayed family members might be led over to the trap door and tossed inside. If the fall didn't kill them, the large spikes protruding from the floor certainly would. And this oubliette, it turns out, was filled with skeletons.


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[Assistant] So many skeletons, in fact, that when the workmen began to remove them, they quickly filled up their cart.


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[Assistant] Three cartfuls later, they had finally moved all the bones out. When they were finished though, they found something else in the pit. A watch.


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[Assistant] A pocket watch to be precise. And after studying the maker's marks on the watch, researchers were able to estimate its age


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[Assistant] According to them, it had been manufactured in the 1840s, mere decades before it was rediscovered. Which raises a very interesting question.


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[Assistant] If the oubliette had stopped being used when the Darbys took over the castle in 1659, how did the watch get there two centuries later?


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[Assistant] It seems the oubliette of Lep Castle had been used a lot more recently than we'd care to admit.


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[Assistant] This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Manke, with research help from Marsette Crockett. And you can also follow the show on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Just search for Lore Podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button. When you do, say hi. I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening.


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[Assistant] For centuries, it was nothing more than a statue. The seated figure of the Buddha, with its gold painted face and round features, had been kept at a temple in China since at least the 14th century. But a few years ago, it started to do some traveling.


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[Assistant] That was when the government of China loaned it to a museum in the Netherlands. As you might imagine, the process of transporting something that hadn't been moved in centuries made it possible to see new things. And this statue turned out to be more than it appeared.


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[Assistant] After some restoration work revealed some mysterious clues, experts took the statue to a local hospital for a CT scan. Think of it like a three-dimensional x-ray, allowing them to build a virtual model of anything inside the statue. What they found though, blew them away. It was the mummified body of a human being.


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[Assistant] Since then, further research has netted experts more answers. Most agree that the body inside the gilded statue are the remains of a Buddhist monk who died at the beginning of the 12th century. A couple of centuries after that, his body was encased inside the statue.


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[Assistant] And then time did what it's so good at, helping people forget the secret inside.


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[Assistant] But there's a bigger lesson here that I want to point out.


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[Assistant] For centuries, people passed by this statue and assumed that was all it is. They glanced over the stylized carvings of a smiling face and crossed legs and admired the craftsmanship of the object, never realizing that it was simply a mask covering something much more real. Never judge a book by its cover.


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[Assistant] We've all heard it, but sometimes it takes a concrete object like this to make it feel true.


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[Assistant] We humans are really good at judging things by appearance alone.


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[Assistant] But clearly, there is so much more to our world than we can see on the surface.


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[Assistant] But that hasn't stopped us from leaning into that flaw. So much so that it's become entirely automatic, like a compulsion or a mindless habit.


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[Assistant] Why do different people have different personalities? Or different skills? Or different breaking points? How can two children from the same home and parents grow up into two vastly different individuals? These are just some of the questions that have haunted us for thousands of years.


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[Assistant] Of course, there have been people along the way who have assumed they had all the answers. About 2,000 years ago, the Greek physician Galen believed that it all could be boiled down to four distinct substances inside the human body, fluids that he called humors, which I'm sure most of you have heard about. An imbalance of one of these humors, according to Galen, could result in illness or bad behavior.


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[Assistant] And I know how easy it is to look back and laugh at what we might perceive as primitive medicine, but some of Galen's ideas are still with us. If you've ever heard of a redheaded person referred to as hot-tempered or fiery, that's all thanks to Galen and his humours, who believed that red hair was a physical symptom of excessive heat inside the body.


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[Assistant] And as the centuries went on, those basic assumptions stuck with us. This idea that you could look at someone's physical characteristics and make a judgement about their moral character. Just think back to all the stories we've heard about witch trials. What was one of the key signs that they were always looking for when they interrogated the accused?


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[Assistant] Witch marks, little imperfections on the skin, like freckles or moles, that, in their mind, were actually the place where they nursed their satanic familiars.


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[Assistant] And then, with the advent of the Enlightenment at the beginning of the 18th century, the focus began to change. Before, all of those physical signs were given supernatural roots, like witch marks. But a few hundred years ago, people began to see more of a scientific point of view, and the discussion leaned heavily toward crime and crime detection.


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[Assistant] Something else began to change, too, though. You see, for thousands of years, cultures around the world believed that the mind of a person, all of our thoughts and personality and character, was located somewhere in the body, usually in the heart. But it wasn't until the Enlightenment that we began to question that. And much of that change was the result of one man, Dr. Frantz Joseph Gull.


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[Assistant] Dr. Gall was a physiologist from Vienna in Austria who was active during the second half of the 1700s and early part of the 1800s. And according to him, it was the brain and not the heart that was the seat of all that makes us who we are. All thought and passion and morality and everything else. All located in our heads. In our brains.


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[Assistant] His idea was pretty simple, actually. He believed that each aspect of our behavior was connected in some way to its own area of the brain. It was assumed that higher functions and qualities like civility and manners were located higher up in the head.


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[Assistant] After all, violent crime is often seen as a base behavior, so in a weird way, it sort of made sense.


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[Assistant] Here's how it worked. If someone engaged in violent behavior constantly, they were working the part of their brain that controlled violence and therefore made that part larger. It was like working out a muscle, making it bigger over time.


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[Assistant] And it was possible, according to Gall, to run your fingers over a person's scalp and feel lumps where those larger muscles in the brain were pushing against the skull.


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[Assistant] Many of the experiments by Gall and his students and contemporaries involve measurements. They would take a group of people known to be violent criminals and measure their heads with a wide assortment of tools. Then they would measure people they viewed as the opposite of that and look at all the data and make assumptions based on the numbers.


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[Assistant] Up until the 1840s, this new discipline, referred to as phrenology, was seen as a hard science. But from the 1840s onward, it gained huge traction in the public space as well, and began to be more of a fad. It permeated all sorts of aspects of popular culture.


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[Assistant] Phrenology shows up in Jane Eyre and in Sherlock Holmes stories. Queen Victoria was a firm believer in it, as was Karl Marx.


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[Assistant] And I have to stop for a moment and point something else out, however uncomfortable it might be.


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[Assistant] Phrenology started out as a theory to help people understand the mind, but it became a major driving force behind racism in Europe and America. People began to look at the differences between civility and savagery and invent correlations to the physical characteristics of African and European head shapes.


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[Assistant] It was wrong and evil, but it was also common and pervasive in all levels of society. And it's one of those embarrassing moments in the past when scientists were actually trying to find evidence that their racism was founded in physical truth.


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[Assistant] Another outcome of phrenology though, was something that still has a way of attracting viewers today.


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[Assistant] You see, as with any study, the more samples one had, the better. Asking only a hundred people what their political views are isn't a good way to take the pulse of an entire nation. And so phrenology practitioners began to collect human skulls in order to have bigger data samples.


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[Assistant] One man named Johann Friedrich Blumenbach put together a personal collection of nearly 250 skulls during the 19th century. But his was one of the smaller displays. A professor of anatomy from the University of Pennsylvania named Samuel Morton had amassed over 1,200 of them by 1850.


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[Assistant] And a British physician named Joseph Davis managed to collect over 1,700 for his own study.


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[Assistant] There was even military involvement on both sides of the Atlantic.


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[Assistant] The Army Medical Museum in Kent in England only had about 600 skulls, but they came from all sorts of countries and cultures around the world.


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[Assistant] And in America, the US Army Medical Museum built a collection of over 3,000, many stolen from Native American gravesites, executed prisoners, patients in asylums, and unclaimed deaths in hospitals.


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[Assistant] Phrenology had grown into something bigger than Dr. Franz Gall had expected. Decades after his own death, his disciples and followers were demonstrating just how far they had wandered from the path. It was no longer about understanding what parts of our biology make us unique individuals.


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[Assistant] Now it was about finding new and better ways to study the skull. To treat it more like esoteric fields like fortune telling or palm reading.


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[Assistant] And at the center of it all was a focus that only grew over time.


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[Assistant] It was an obsession grounded in a mixture of fear and hope. One that drove scientists to dig deeper for answers that might be applied and used, rather than just observed. One that offered a tantalizing possibility. What if, by studying human skulls, we could ultimately stop crime?


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[Assistant] In 1853, two men found themselves on trial in Melbourne. Patrick O'Connor had arrived in Australia from Ireland just three years prior, although he filled that short time with a number of crimes. His new friend, Henry Bradley, had lived there much longer, since 1840, but he was far from perfect himself.


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[Assistant] On September 14th of 1853, though, it seems these two men partnered up for a violent crime spree. Despite the fact that both of them had jobs that paid high wages, they broke into a number of farmhouses in the area where they tied up the people who lived there and stole their shotguns.


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[Assistant] Then, armed with what they needed, they knocked on the front door of a final home, this one belonging to a man named Mr House. It was the son who answered,


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[Assistant] Bradley and O'Connor demanded to be let in, shouting and waving their shotguns. But rather than come to his son's defense, Mr. House slipped out the back.


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[Assistant] Frustrated, the two men tied everyone else up, and then shot another of the adults staying there, killing him instantly.


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[Assistant] And then they fled. What little cash they had managed to find in the home tucked away in their pockets. By the time they were finally captured on October 1st, they had shot several more people, stolen a boat, and taken a number of others hostage. So it should come as no surprise to any of us that their trial seemed like an open and shut case. And it was, honestly.


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[Assistant] Both men were sentenced to death by hanging, and on October 24th, they stepped onto the gallows and said their final words.


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[Assistant] But here's the problem. The people of Melbourne were really tired of executions. It seems that there were hangings every single day, often in multiples of two or three. It was giving Australia a bad reputation, and they wanted to stop it.


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[Assistant] So after O'Connor and Bradley were dead, their skulls were examined for signs that could explain their behavior.


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[Assistant] It wasn't very scientific. These physicians went into the process already biased. They weren't looking for objective evidence, but rather for confirmation of their already agreed upon conclusion. So naturally, they determined that both men possessed the skulls of someone without self-control or intelligence.


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[Assistant] Another powerful example of phrenology at work took place in Maine in June of 1834. That's when a nine-year-old boy named Major Mitchell ruthlessly beat a classmate named David Crawford. I won't go into the dirty details of the attack, but just know that Mitchell left poor Crawford bloody, bruised, and lacerated from head to toe. And when his mother found out, the authorities were called in.


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[Assistant] Mitchell immediately confessed to the crime, and in November of 1834, he went on trial for the violent assault. And that's when something interesting happened. As part of his defense, his head was examined and measured, and the reports were submitted as evidence.


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[Assistant] Why? Because it seems that Mitchell had been injured years before, resulting in a blow to his head, which had left a lump that had never gone away.


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[Assistant] It was the first time in American history that a defendant tried to get a less severe sentence because of what they claimed to be a brain disorder. But the judge wouldn't allow it. Chronology, he said, was just a theory, and heavy decisions like this needed to be made based on hard fact.


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[Assistant] So Mitchell was found guilty and, despite being a nine-year-old boy, was sentenced to nine years in prison and hard labor.


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[Assistant] One last story. Diago was born in Spain in 1810 to a poor family, but he grew up with a strong desire to better his station in life. So as he grew older, he moved to Lisbon, the capital of Portugal, where he started working as a servant to a number of very wealthy families there. But that would only be enough for a while.


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[Assistant] One of the things that he noticed was that all of the homes he served in were located along a massive aqueduct, a sort of man-made river on a raised platform designed to transport fresh water from the outlying countryside into the city. It had been built in the mid-1700s, but it was modeled on ancient Roman examples, and it did its job well.


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[Assistant] But Diago noticed that it also served as a bridge for farmers and merchants traveling into the city from the countryside. Every morning they would follow the flow of the water into town and sell their goods to support their families. Then in the evening, they would follow it back out to their homes, their pockets full of coins.


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[Assistant] He saw this as an opportunity and began to take advantage of it right away. Each afternoon, he would climb up and follow the aqueduct out of town aways and then wait in hiding for one of those coin-heavy merchants to appear. When they did, he would attack them, rob them, and then push them off the ledge, letting the 200-foot drop do the rest of the work.


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[Assistant] Early on, the authorities didn't seem to notice the few bodies that were found at the foot of the aqueduct. The liberal revolution of 1820 had left the city of Lisbon and the surrounding area in a deep economic depression. And suicide wasn't uncommon. Folks were just jumping off the bridge. That's all.


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[Assistant] But as Diago kept up his crime spree, the numbers started to become more difficult to ignore. Soon enough, at least 70 people had been found dead as a result of his activities. And that got the attention of the police. So he made a change, hiring a team of accomplices to help him break into the nice, wealthy homes he once worked inside.


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[Assistant] In late 1840, Diego Alves and his gang of thieves were all captured after robbing a local doctor's house and killing four of the people inside.


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[Assistant] He was hanged in February of 1841, falling to his death through the gallows trapdoor. He had used a thing designed to bring life into the city, the aqueduct, and turned it into a river of death. And he paid the ultimate price for it.


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[Assistant] But his death came at the same moment that a new thing called phrenology was sweeping through Portugal. So in an effort to better understand why someone would do the things that Diego Alves had done, his body was taken to a medical facility where his head was removed and placed in a glass jar for future study.


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[Assistant] Obviously, the goal was to render his head down to nothing more than a gleaming white skull, measure its contours and bumps, and make an assessment. But that day never came.


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[Assistant] For whatever reason, his severed head remained untouched for years, eventually making its way to the University of Lisbon. And it's still there to this day.


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[Assistant] We might not know what made Diego Alves tick, but the fact that his head is still floating in that jar makes one truth abundantly clear. No matter how our skulls are shaped, we humans are capable of horrendous things.


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[Assistant] Joseph was a lover of music. And I know what you're thinking. Who isn't, right? Everyone has a favorite songwriter or band or live performer. But Joseph was a superfan. And being a well-off young man in Vienna at the turn of the 19th century, he had a lot of music to choose from.


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[Assistant] We know that he loved music because of the records he kept. You see, Joseph was an accountant working for Prince Nicholas II of the powerful Esterhazy family, and he applied that accountant mindset to his concert attendance, recording each and every performance in a ledger, including the date, location, and musician.


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[Assistant] In fact, he was so obsessive about it that those records are still helping music scholars today piece together what the music scene was like in Vienna back then. But like any true superfan, Joseph wasn't content to just attend these performances. He had to meet the artists as well. And because of that, he knew one of the greatest.


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[Assistant] Joseph Haydn is widely considered the father of the symphony by music historians today.


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[Assistant] He, just like our accountant friend Joseph Rosenbaum, worked for the Esterhazy family as their court musician. But he also composed his own music and taught others. In fact, Haydn was one of Beethoven's early teachers, as well as mentoring Mozart and his two young sons.


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[Assistant] So here they were, two Josephs in Vienna at the turn of the 19th century, Rosenbaum and Haydn, both passionate about music and both very well connected. Now they weren't the best of friends, but they were friendly, and Rosenbaum seemed to worship Haydn for his obvious musical genius.


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[Assistant] You can imagine how heartbroken Rosenbaum must have been when Haydn passed away on May 31st of 1809.


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[Assistant] The world had lost one of the greats, and the younger accountant had lost a friend. But his death also came at a time when the Napoleonic Wars were making life difficult for the people of Vienna. So instead of an elaborate celebratory funeral, the composer was taken outside the city and given a simple burial in nearby Hundsturm Cemetery. And that was it. Or at least, it should have been.


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[Assistant] But just a few days after his quiet burial, Haydn's grave was violated. Dug opened in the middle of the night by a local grave robber. It was a grim scene, really. You can picture the grass painted in silver moonlights and the hundreds of grave markers standing up like broken teeth. And a lone figure, shovel in hand, turning over the soil as he dug for his prize.


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[Assistant] When Haydn's coffin was opened, the grave robber did not steal his belongings or even strip the body and take it to a medical lab as one might expect. Instead...


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[Assistant] He cut off the dead man's head, dropped it into a cloth sack and then filled the grave back in.


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[Assistant] When he was finished, he picked up the sack and his shovel and headed back to the entrance of the cemetery.


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[Assistant] And waiting for him there was a figure hidden in the shadows. The man who had hired him to do the unthinkable.


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[Assistant] The severed head was exchanged for payment, and the gravedigger wandered off into the night. And when the mastermind finally stepped out of the darkness, he was probably thankful there was no one else around to identify him. Because, after all, folks in town knew who he was. The Accountant Joseph Rosenbaum


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[Assistant] It seems that Rosenbaum had a secret. Not only was he a lover of music and a friend to many popular performers in his day, but he was also a student of phrenology, that up-and-coming science that had shifted the center of our personhood from the heart to the head.


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[Assistant] And it just might be that he had prepared for this opportunity for a while, because just a year earlier, he and some friends had done the same to a recently deceased local actress. A trial run, if you will.


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[Assistant] The next steps were more dirty work, the removal of the flesh from the head, until there was nothing left but the skull of his old friend, Joseph Haydn. For that, Rosenbaum paid a physician to help him, most likely watching over his shoulder as skin and muscle were pulled away. And when the task was finished, he took his prize home.


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[Assistant] Now there's a tendency to see this story as nothing more than one more follower of phrenology collecting yet another skull to measure. And that might have been partly true.


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[Assistant] But Rosenbaum also wanted to capture the genius of the composer to preserve it and admire it. And that genius, according to Phrenology, was mapped out in the contours of the dead man's skull.


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[Assistant] Once home, Rosenbaum had a special display case built to hold his relic, and surrounded it with other musical collectibles.


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[Assistant] If he'd been alive today, that probably would have included ticket stubs and limited edition posters from the concerts he'd attended. It was a display that represented this odd mixture of grim violation and deep respect, of love and admiration taken way too far.


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[Assistant] And in that way, phrenology becomes a natural expression of a lot of our flaws as humans. Our desire to learn and grow and better understand who we are has often come at the cost of human rights, personal responsibility, and social boundaries.


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[Assistant] We take things too far and justify every sin along the way as necessary for the common good.


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[Assistant] Dr. Franz Gahl did it. And so did his students. The skull collectors who dug up Native American graves in the service of science also did it. And so did Joseph Rosenbaum. Looking back, it all sounds more than a little crazy. And that's probably because it was.


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[Assistant] In the end, phrenology really did teach us what it means to be human. Not through the information each skull unlocked. But by the way, they were collected.


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[Assistant] The work of Dr. Franz Gall unlocked a mysterious door for a lot of people. This belief that human nature was written in our biology, mapped out in our very skulls, was tantalizing and addictive. And I think that's most clearly seen in the stories of those who collected them.


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[Assistant] One early student of phrenology was an Englishman named George Comby. He was lured into the pseudoscience by the possibilities. And so he placed an order for dozens of high quality casts of human skulls. When they arrived though, it said that he lost all hope because he couldn't see a single difference between them.


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[Assistant] And that's the irony of phrenology. In the pursuit of what it is that makes us individuals, humanity was stripped back to nothing more than white bones, ultimately dehumanizing all of them. We wanted to figure out what made these people different and ended up with the exact opposite.


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[Assistant] Now, phrenology didn't leave nothing but destruction and error in its path. There are ways in which modern medical science can thank those early misguided students of Dr. Gall. The biggest contribution hands down is that shift in our understanding of where the human mind is physically located. Thanks to Gall, the brain has become the important organ that it is today.


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[Assistant] Also, the old theory that tied specific functions to certain areas of the brain proved to be true. Of course, those early maps were completely wrong, and the bumps on the skulls had nothing to do with human behavior, but the idea got us into the neighborhood.


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[Assistant] Today, it's the bedrock of neuroscience and has allowed us to make huge advances in treating certain illnesses with brain surgery and implants.


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[Assistant] But for Joseph Rosenbaum, none of that was important. For him, it was all about preserving the genius of a man he knew in life to make sure that the skull that once housed his powerful mind was given a place of importance. Haydn was, after all, a beloved composer and respected by many.


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[Assistant] But Rosenbaum's plan hit a snag about a decade after the composer's death.


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[Assistant] Prince Nicholas II, his former employer and Haydn's main patron, decided that the musician deserved a better burial than that quick and simple one he'd received in 1809. So in 1820, he gave orders to disinter Haydn's remains and move them to Eisenstadt. But when it arrived,


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[Assistant] The coffin was opened and the contents were examined, revealing that the head was missing. Prince Nicholas was furious and set a police investigation in motion to solve the mystery. And eventually that investigation led the authorities to the front door of Joseph Rosenbaum.


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[Assistant] I want you to picture the police bursting into his home, spreading out and beginning their hunt through every box and shelf and cupboard in search of Haydn's skull. And picture Rosenbaum and his wife, Theresa, watching it all happen. He standing nervously in some corner and she reclined on a small daybed.


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[Assistant] And if you notice a twinkle in her eye, there's a good reason for that because she had seen them coming and stashed the skull away inside the mattress that she was now resting upon.


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[Assistant] The police left that day empty handed, but the prince was not going to be deterred. Finally, after being offered a cash reward, Rosenbaum confessed to the theft and agreed to hand over the skull. But after doing so, the prince changed his mind and refused to pay the promised reward. It seems that the accountant came out the loser in the deal.


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[Assistant] Well, that's what it seemed like. But in reality, Rosenbaum had assumed the prince wouldn't be so trustworthy, so he had handed over a different skull instead, keeping Haydn's white dome tucked away in some dark corner of his house. Both men had tricked the other, but only Rosenbaum knew the truth.


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[Assistant] Years later, as he lay dying in bed, Rosenbaum told a friend about all that had happened. Then he decided that it was time to let others enjoy the genius of hide and skull. So he instructed his friend to take it and deliver it to a local museum. And that's where it stayed for many years.


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[Assistant] It was a journey with many twists and turns, although few would guess it by looking at his beautiful, decorative crypt.


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[Assistant] At the end of the day, chronology might not have opened the world up to a whole new branch of science, but it certainly did teach us an awful lot about ourselves.


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[Assistant] Science has often driven people to cross the line between right and wrong. Obviously, today's exploration of phrenology gives us a lot of good examples to back that up. But sadly, there are others. And not all of those violations were inflicted on the dead.


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[Assistant] Stick around after this brief sponsor break to hear one more frightening tale.


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[Assistant] Some things have a way of hanging around a lot longer than you'd expect. For example, if you've ever heard someone refer to themselves as left-brained or right-brained, you probably nodded with understanding. But that notion is actually an artifact from the days of phrenology.


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[Assistant] Back when Dr. Franz Gall proposed his idea that the brain was really made up of a lot of smaller organs, and each one had its own function,


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[Assistant] Scientists in France began to move toward a more holistic idea. That the brain activity was a result of the entire organ, not smaller pieces of it.


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[Assistant] They were trying to disprove phrenology. To get rid of what they saw was a silly idea. But they hit some snags. One example took place in 1860 when a French surgeon named Paul Broca discovered a number of patients who had suffered strokes and then encountered speaking problems. All seemed to have lesions on the same area of the brain.


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[Assistant] Even today, that part of the brain is referred to as Broca's area.


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[Assistant] It seems that Dr. Franz Gall might have been onto something. Perhaps certain areas of the brain were specialized. And this was put to the test in Germany during the 1870s by physicians who used electrical charges to stimulate the brains of animals, typically dogs and monkeys. But we have an American to blame for taking it a bit too far.


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[Assistant] When Mary walked into the Good Samaritan Hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio, she was looking for help. Mary, like a lot of young women in the 1870s, had grown accustomed to wearing a fashionable wig, and hers was built on a framework of whalebone, which had been rubbing against her scalp for a long, long time.


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[Assistant] That spot had become infected, and over time the wound had actually started to open up wider and wider, until not only was part of her skull exposed, but a part of her brain was too.


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[Assistant] I have to imagine that she was in a lot of pain and looking for someone to help her get better. So on January 26th of 1874, she was introduced to neurosurgeon, Dr. Robert Bartolo.


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[Assistant] Now that probably sounds like a good thing to you. Woman with hole in head meets neurosurgeon is probably the best sort of headline in this situation. But Bartolo was more than a surgeon.


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[Assistant] All of the research we've been able to dig up about her situation makes it clear that Mary was not going to survive much longer.


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[Assistant] This was 1874, long before antibiotics, and an infection powerful enough to have eaten away part of her skull meant that she was not long for this world. I'm not justifying what happened next, but I hope it offers necessary context.


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[Assistant] Dr. Bartolo welcomed Mary into his care, explained the procedure that he wanted to try on her, and then received her permission to do so. Then he attached two small electrodes to her brain through the opening in her skull, turned the knob on a generator, and watched the effects of a small trickle of electricity on his patient.


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[Assistant] Mary was reported to twitch from the current, mostly on her right side. The fingers on her right hand even moved involuntarily, which caught Bartholow's curiosity right away.


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[Assistant] So he then moved the electrodes to another part of her brain and repeated the process. This time, Mary cried out in pain. Moments later, she passed out, slipping into a coma that lasted roughly half an hour before waking back up.


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[Assistant] Mary was sent home after that, but he called her back two days later. If the first experiment had been challenging and cruel, this session would prove to be barbaric.


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[Assistant] Rather than using a small amount of electricity as before, Bartolo cranked the knob wide open. Somehow, with another human life suffering and crying out in front of him, he calmly made notes about the location of the electrodes and the effects of the current on that part of the brain.


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[Assistant] Mary didn't handle the ordeal very well, as you might imagine. Her lips turned blue, she felt overwhelmed with dizziness, and the pain was utterly excruciating. So one of the nurses used chloroform to help her sleep, and then she was taken home.


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[Assistant] But it would turn out to be her last journey. The next day, Mary discovered that she couldn't get out of bed due to paralysis that had taken over her entire right side.


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[Assistant] Mary Rafferty meant so little to Dr. Bartolo that he didn't even record the date of her death. Thankfully, her gravestone tells the rest of that story for us, listing her death date as March 3rd of 1874, roughly five weeks after the experiments had started.


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[Assistant] She had only been 30 years old, but suffered more than anyone should be expected to.


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[Assistant] Dr. Bartolo went on to publish his research, but, surprise surprise, he was met with an enormous amount of criticism for his unethical study. He published an apology a short while later, but by then, Mary was dead and gone. He had been so enamored with moving forward.


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[Assistant] That he never stopped to notice the sacred line he was crossing in the process.


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[Assistant] As we've learned so many times in the past, folklore is often an attempt to better understand the world around us. But if you've read enough stories, you know that most of the time, we've gotten it wrong.


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[Assistant] But even in those rare instances when people are actually right, human nature has a way of driving us to take things too far.


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[Assistant] And that's a personality trait that we don't need a skull to agree on.


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[Assistant] This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Manke, with research by Sam Alberti, and music by Chad Lawson. 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] And 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.


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[Assistant] You can learn more about all of those shows and everything else going on over in one central place, GrimAndMild.com. 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] A handful of tales that painted a picture of long ago, passed down from generation to generation among the First Nations people who lived along the Pacific coast of British Columbia. Stories of ancestors in the distant past living at the ocean's edge, fishing and hunting, and building their lives in partnership with nature.


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[Assistant] And then, those stories became fact. In 2017, archaeologists working on a small island called Triquet made a discovery that brought modern scientific understanding in line with ancient folklore.


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[Assistant] It was the remains of a human settlement, complete with fishing tools, spearheads for hunting and elaborate cooking pits.


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[Assistant] It was when the charcoal from those pits was analyzed that the archaeologists realized just how significant the site truly was. It dated back over 14,000 years, making it the oldest known human settlement in North America.


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[Assistant] But for lovers of oral history, ancestral folklore, and the narrative fibers that make us who we are, it's confirmation of something else. Sometimes the stories we tell actually turn out to be true.


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[Assistant] In fact, it was the legends about those ancient communities that drew the researchers to the island in the first place, which is something I can't help but get excited about, because it shows just how valuable our collective folklore truly is, and that if we treat stories with respect and give them the benefit of the doubt,


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[Assistant] They have the potential to unlock forgotten pieces of our past.


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[Assistant] And you probably don't need me to tell you that that's a good thing.


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[Assistant] Oftentimes, all we have left of a culture or a period in history are the stories they left behind. It's as if the cathedral is gone, but the shadows are still on the grass where it once stood. And if we work real hard and follow the clues, we can use those remnants to piece it all back together again.


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[Assistant] But despite victories like those on Traquette Island, some journeys into history are more dangerous. Because while legends might offer us a window into the past, we have no control over the things we might learn.


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[Assistant] Folklore might hold a new detail that could unlock our understanding of who our ancestors really were, but it can also reveal something else.


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[Assistant] It's hard to imagine a richer landscape than the Pacific Northwest. Seemingly endless miles of ocean lined by green forests and dark soil. It almost has a primordial aspect to it, and that beauty has a way of drawing you in.


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[Assistant] If you look at a map of the west coast of British Columbia, the thing that's most obvious is just how many islands there are. In the grand scheme of things, Triquet Island and its neighbors are miniscule examples of that. But farther south, toward the American border, is the granddaddy of them all, Vancouver Island.


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[Assistant] It's a place most of us have probably heard of, I'm sure. At a little over 12,000 square miles, Vancouver Island is about the size of the American state of Maryland, but home to only 870,000 people. But while modern life is centered around the city of Victoria and its surrounding area, there's so much more to the island's story.


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[Assistant] Obviously, the history of the place stretches far back into the distant past, with various First Nation peoples having lived there. In fact, historians believe that more than 50 unique tribes were scattered across the island before European settlers arrived in the late 1700s.


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[Assistant] They were, like the ancient settlements on Triket Island, communities built mostly around hunting and fishing and all the aspects of life that came with it.


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[Assistant] But Europeans changed all of that. In 1774, Spain sent a number of expeditions up the Pacific coast to explore the area, even establishing a small settlement. But four years later, the British arrived when Captain James Cook sailed along the coast, kicking off decades of arguments about which European country could lay claim to the island.


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[Assistant] In 1792, the British government sent a representative to negotiate with the Spanish. For a while, it seemed like war would break out between the two nations over the dispute. But in the end, it was the British who took ownership. By 1794, the island had a new name, taken from the name of the man who had negotiated on behalf of the British, George Vancouver.


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[Assistant] After that, the island acted like a lot of the North American territory controlled by the British by providing natural resources that could be traded elsewhere. About half a century after taking control, the Hudson Bay Company arrived and set up a trading post where the modern-day city of Victoria stands now.


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[Assistant] And they came with a mission, attract settlers and grow the population.


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[Assistant] What drew most of the people to the island early on was a fever that had gripped much of the west coast of North America at the time. Gold. And for a while the gold mining industry was central to the economy of the place. But it was temporary. And there's evidence all over Vancouver Island of that in the form of ghost towns.


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[Assistant] One good example is Cape Scott. It was settled in 1896 by two Danish fishermen at the northwest tip of the island. They had originally come for the gold, but that quickly proved to be too challenging for them, and they fell back on fishing, much like the First Nations people who had lived there before them.


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[Assistant] Over the years, a number of others joined them there, and the community peaked at around 75 families. But this place was about as isolated as you could get. There wouldn't even be a paved road connecting them to the rest of the island until 1910. Combined with the harsh weather and difficult landscape, things began to turn against them.


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[Assistant] By the late 1930s, the settlement was all but empty.


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[Assistant] And then there's Leech Town, situated about 25 miles due west of Victoria. It originally started as the campsite of one man, Lieutenant Peter Leech of the Royal Engineers, who had followed rumors of gold into the interior of the island.


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[Assistant] And he was successful too. Within months, hundreds of other prospectors flocked to the site, turning it into a full-fledged town almost overnight.


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[Assistant] All of a sudden, Leechtown was born, with half a dozen general stores, a few hotels, and three dozen saloons. Basically, if it was a business that could benefit from the search for gold, that popped up in Leechtown. And for a while, it worked. But within a year, the gold dried up, and with it, the economy.


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[Assistant] Today, the bones of Leach Town are still there, hidden in the grass and trees of the valley. Visitors can see remnants of old wood cabins, but there's a lot of stuff there that's not original.


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[Assistant] You see, back in the early days of the Great Depression, people tried to open the minds back up. And while those efforts failed as well, the machinery they brought in to do the work is still there, slowly vanishing within the forest's embrace.


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[Assistant] But those aren't the only remnants of the past on Vancouver Island. As we've already discussed, sometimes you have to look in places that are more difficult to see with the human eye.


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[Assistant] Because while the island might not have a lot of communities, it has more than its fair share of legends.


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[Assistant] But like the landscape that contains them, those stories are wild and untamed. And if they're true, they are more than a little terrifying.


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[Assistant] It was the gold that brought them north. Adelaide and Benjamin had made the long and dangerous journey up the western coast of North America, leaving the warmth of San Francisco behind for the lush forests of Vancouver Island.


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[Assistant] Ever since Word of Gold had found its way to California in 1858, people had been migrating north in search of a better life and a chance to make it big. This young couple would have been one of hundreds, if not thousands, who were flooding into the port of Victoria.


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[Assistant] They must have felt equal parts excitement and fear to be one of so many others looking for the very same thing.


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[Assistant] They decided that rather than chase the gold themselves, it would be better to stay in Victoria and open a business that all those gold diggers would love. It was called the Boomerang Inn and Saloon, and as you can imagine, business was very good for a while.


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[Assistant] But in the fall of 1861, Adelaide became sick with typhus and quickly passed away, leaving Benjamin alone in a land that was still not quite home. She had left him, but if the stories are true, it wouldn't be for long.


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[Assistant] In December of that same year, someone visiting the Quadra Street Burying Ground claimed to see her standing in the darkness, her pale figure clothed in a white dress, before vanishing into the shadows. Some say her heartbroken husband took that as a sign that she wanted to speak with him, and that he spent years inside seance rooms trying to do so. But those are stories that are difficult to prove.


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[Assistant] In the years since the demolition of the Boomerang Inn, sightings of Adelaide have moved from the cemetery to the location of her former business. And even today, there are ghost tours in the city that will take you there, tell you the story, and leave you with more than a few chills. But Adelaide isn't the only woman in white that's said to haunt Victoria.


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[Assistant] Those who share the legend of the April Bride tend to do so in a whisper. They say it began in 1936, when a young nurse named Doris Gravlin agreed to meet her estranged husband Victor for a conversation. At night, on the beach at the southeastern tip of Victoria. Honestly, could there be a more obvious setup?


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[Assistant] Doris went missing after that night, although to be fair, so did Victor. A few believed that they'd run away together, but most suspected foul play.


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[Assistant] Five days later, in late September, Doris' body was found on a nearby golf course. A couple of weeks after that, Victor's body was also discovered there, just at a different hole. Local authorities ruled it a murder-suicide, and then life went on.


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[Assistant] But ever since, the stories suggest that life did everything but move on. Every spring for a couple of weeks in April, they say, Doris returns to the location where her corpse was found.


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[Assistant] Early reports came from random locals who happened to see her, or fishermen passing by the golf course in their boats. Later on though, as the rumor spread, those witnesses came to include local teenagers who specifically went looking for her each spring.


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[Assistant] What they found was always the same too. The vision of a pale woman dressed in white, standing in the darkness. While most people over the years have made a hasty retreat after spotting her, a few have tried to get closer.


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[Assistant] In November of 1886, while on a trip to Alaska, the Catholic Archbishop of Vancouver Island, Charles John Sagers, was murdered.


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[Assistant] The killer immediately confessed, was tried and found guilty, and then sent to prison. But the Archbishop's body didn't immediately return home to Victoria. In fact, it wouldn't be until November of 1888, two years later, when he was finally laid to rest inside St. Andrew's Cathedral, which was still under construction at the time.


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[Assistant] When his body came home though, so did legends. One claims that despite the two years between death and burial, the Archbishop's body had barely decayed. All except for his face, which, as the story goes, had been eaten by mice inside the coffin.


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[Assistant] Again, that's the legend, with not a lot of fact to back it up. It helps us understand just how fertile this man's story was for new offshoots and superstitions, but it also explains the events that took place just two years later. Because that's when a second murder took place, this time just outside the cathedral.


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[Assistant] It seems that a local man named David Fee was attending the Christmas Eve Mass in 1890 and then left to attend a party with friends. Because of that, he was wearing a white coat, which must have helped him stand out against the darkness of the late evening.


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[Assistant] But when another man spotted him moving through the yard between the old and new cathedrals, he grabbed his rifle and fired a shot at the pale figure.


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[Assistant] David Fee passed away almost instantly from the gun wound, and his killer turned himself in a short while later. His reason for shooting a man that he didn't know or have contact with? According to him, it was an act of self-defense, because he thought he'd spotted the ghost of Archbishop Seger's.


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[Assistant] Legends are slippery creatures. They can lure us in with pieces of fact dressed in fiction and then drive us to believe the most irrational of things. But Vancouver Island has an older tale to tell. One that's been whispered along the shores there for more than a thousand years.


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[Assistant] It's not the details that are the most frightening aspect of this legend though, but what the events of the past two centuries have revealed.


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[Assistant] Because if we connect the dots and follow the evidence, we are forced to wrestle with a terrifying conclusion.


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[Assistant] They had talked about it for generations. In fact, the various indigenous people groups of the area each had their own names for it. They were names that instilled fear and became characters in traditional stories that were passed around the island.


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[Assistant] But even so, it was the description that made it terrifying.


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[Assistant] Among the Manuset people on the western end of Vancouver Island, the creature's name literally translates as, he who moves by wriggling from side to side. Another First Nation culture described it as, like a snake. Even adding that this creature had long hair on its back and head, and could sometimes even have wings.


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[Assistant] There's even physical evidence that backs up the stories. Researchers have found a number of petroglyphs, ancient stone carvings, that depict a long, thin creature with a head like a snake, a mane of hair, and appendages that look either like wings or flippers depending on how you interpret the images.


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[Assistant] And as if that weren't enough, back in 1939, researchers in nearby Washington discovered a 1700-year-old spear thrower, a device known as an atlatl, that was carved to resemble a man's head, with a serpent-like creature on top.


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[Assistant] And right there on its back are what appear to be wings or fins. Obviously, this creature, its shape, its features have all been part of the folklore of the region for a very long time.


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[Assistant] When Europeans arrived in the late 1700s, they brought changes to a lot of life there. Obviously, they moved in and took over indigenous land, and they brought new technology and new ways of life to the island. But they also brought fresh eyes to see and explore the land. And so it's no surprise that they started to notice things that left them wondering.


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[Assistant] In October of 1791, a trading ship stopped at the western tip of Vancouver Island, part of their fur hunting efforts. While the crew was on the shore near an inlet, they looked out into the ocean waves and spotted something incredible. They described it as very large, with a long neck, large mouth, and sharp teeth.


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[Assistant] One of the traders mentioned their experience to one of the indigenous people they worked with, and the man told them that they had witnessed Haiklik, a deity described as having the head of a dog and the body of a giant snake. And it wouldn't be the last sighting like that, either.


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[Assistant] Nearly a century later in 1863, a similar creature was spotted in the Strait of Georgia, between Vancouver Island and the city of Vancouver on the mainland.


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[Assistant] All through the 1880s, more and more sightings trickled in, and they were all eerily similar too. Long necks, snake-like bodies, dark skin, and heads that resembled dogs or horses.


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[Assistant] But I have to stop us for a moment, because sea creatures are something we've discussed here before. If we just read the descriptions of this particular creature and ignore the rest, we might miss a pattern to the various sightings in North America, and the pattern hints at something more concrete than we'd like to admit.


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[Assistant] Other mysterious water creatures we've covered include one off the coast of Gloucester, Massachusetts, and another in Lake Champlain. And a common description by witnesses of both of those was that they had heads like a horse, dark skin, and long serpent-like bodies.


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[Assistant] So, yes, while it's exciting to hear stories about a sea creature off the coast of Vancouver Island, it's all the more incredible when those descriptions line up with sightings an entire continent away. What that all means, though, is still a mystery.


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[Assistant] But then something happened that gave all of these stories new life.


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[Assistant] A whaling vessel working in Queen Charlotte Sound to the northwest of Vancouver Island found something inside the belly of a sperm whale.


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[Assistant] They had captured it looking for ambergris, a waxy deposit that was used in, of all things, perfume. And that required cutting open the whale's stomach. What they found inside, though, terrified them.


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[Assistant] It was the corpse of a creature that measured roughly 10 feet in length, with a long serpent-like tail and a head they described as dog or horse-like.


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[Assistant] But this wasn't 1791. It was 1937, an era with cameras and scientific labs that could do deeper studies. So photos were taken and the remains were sent to a nearby museum.


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[Assistant] The trouble was the museum's curator of vertebrates was out of town at the time, so the only person who looked at the corpse was the resident taxidermist who, however skilled at their job they were, wasn't a scientist. After pronouncing the remains to be that of a baleen whale, they were destroyed, rather than wait for the proper curator to return.


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[Assistant] Ever since, those who have studied the photographs and sketches of the remains have kept the mystery alive. Most believe that the creature in the photos was not a baleen whale, although they haven't made a definitive declaration about what it actually was either. To this day, that's a question that still hasn't been answered.


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[Assistant] Of course, while we're waiting for a name and classification for the creature, enterprising folks have tried to help out. By the early 1930s, people were already referring to it by a very scientific sounding name. Although, no one's really sure where that name came from.


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[Assistant] All through that decade, newspapers published sighting after sighting, always referring to the creature as a Cadborosaurus, named after Cadboro Bay off the east coast of Victoria. To locals though, it quickly became easier to just call the thing Caddy. And it's stuck ever since.


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[Assistant] Because regardless of whether it's an actual undiscovered animal, or simply a centuries old thread in the fabric of local culture, caddy represents the power of story. And as long as we keep an open mind, and our eyes on the sea,


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[Assistant] Our world is constantly changing. Cultures and languages and the cities we call home, all of it evolves over time. Sometimes things get better, like medical science or communication technology, while other times they break down.


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[Assistant] But through it all one thing will always be a constant for us. Story.


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[Assistant] The tales we tell have a way of lasting beyond a moment. Maybe that's because we consider our stories to be precious.


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[Assistant] Or perhaps it's because we know deep down they hold some grain of truth that needs to be preserved. Not everyone can build a time capsule to fill with artifacts from our lives, but story can do all of that and more.