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[Assistant] By 1655, though, Thomas had passed away, leaving Rebecca and her son Thomas Jr. to fend for themselves. And they did well.


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[Assistant] Thomas Senior had been very well connected, and their Boston Inn had earned them a good amount of money. Most of the kids had grown up and left the house, but Thomas Junior, who was their oldest, had stuck around, along with his own wife and children, to help manage the house. That's when things fell apart.


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[Assistant] On the night of February 8th of 1673, a lot of things happened.


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[Assistant] Rebecca stayed in the sitting room to smoke her pipe while the rest of the family ate in the dining room.


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[Assistant] A short while later, Thomas sent his son Edward to check on her, but he became distracted by one of the family dogs that bolted out of the room.


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[Assistant] It was Thomas who came into the sitting room next and when he did, he found his mother on the floor.


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[Assistant] She was dead and her body was covered in burns from head to toe. A later inspection by the local physician tried to put a tidy bow on an unfortunate event. Rebecca Cornell had most likely fallen asleep, dropped her lit pipe in her lap and burned to death. It was resolution, but it was also short lived.


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[Assistant] Just four days after her death, Rebecca's brother John went to the authorities with a story. He'd recently had a vivid dream in which his sister was standing beside his bed, her body covered in flames.


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[Assistant] In the dream, John claims that she looked at him and cried out that someone had burnt her with fire.


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[Assistant] That was it. No actual proof. No physical evidence. Just an old man's dream. And yet somehow that was enough to cause the physician to take another look at Rebecca's body.


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[Assistant] What he found was a wound in her stomach that was unrelated to the fire causing the authorities to make a leap in logic that even Springhill Jack would be proud of. Thomas Cornell had killed his mother. The trial was brief.


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[Assistant] Character witnesses were brought in who claimed that there was no love between Thomas and his mother. His Uncle John's dream was admitted as official evidence, and Thomas was sentenced to death.


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[Assistant] Unlike the Russell Colvin case, there was no miraculous reappearance of his mother to save him.


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[Assistant] Thomas was hanged a short while later, and all because a few people had a bad opinion of him. Well, and that dream, of course.


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[Assistant] I have no pithy ending for you today. The trial of Thomas Cornell Jr. was an insult to the justice system we place our trust in. But even though his life was taken, his family line continued. And it's amazing just how well known his family has become.


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[Assistant] Yes, Cornell University was founded by one of his descendants, Ezra Cornell. Others include one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, a Revolutionary War General, Amelia Earhart, Bill Gates, and Presidents Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon.


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[Assistant] Oh, and Lizzie Borden, a young woman thought by many to have used an axe to murder her mother and father. But that's a story for another time. Perhaps there really is a lesson here for us. You never know what people are capable of.


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[Assistant] I talk a lot about New England folklore. One of the biggest reasons for that is because the northeast part of the United States serves as a sort of cultural bridge between the old world and the new. It was there, more than anywhere else, where the old tales and superstitions first set foot on American soil.


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[Assistant] The witch hysteria of the late 1600s was an aftershock of a larger tremor that had been shaking Europe for decades.


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[Assistant] The American version of the vampire has roots in Eastern European folktales and legends. Even holidays, like Christmas and Halloween, were really just old world injections into the cultural soft tissue of America. And the needle pierced us first in New England.


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[Assistant] Of course, there are other parts of the country that also played host to pioneers and adventurers. People who risked their lives and loved ones to travel across the cold Atlantic and build a new home here on our shores. And the age of colonization brought more than just settlers and supplies. It brought lore.


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[Assistant] Up and down the east coast of what would one day become America, people came ashore with heads full of superstitions and a propensity to attach meaning to things that we might overlook today.


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[Assistant] Put another way, they brought food for the journey and the seeds to grow more here.


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[Assistant] They came with minds that were perfectly wired to build new folklore on the backs of old tales, new fears, new legends, new hauntings. And we can still find those creations in many places along the eastern seaboard. Places like North Carolina.


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[Assistant] Before the vacation homes and sun-baked tourists crowded along the sandy shores of the Outer Banks, pioneers were attempting to carve out an existence there. Those that survived left behind more than buildings and descendants, though.


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[Assistant] Today, the Outer Banks is home to tales that still send shivers down the spines of locals and tourists alike.


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[Assistant] Briggins Bay sits on the northern coast of the southern part of Hatteras Island, between the towns of Frisco and Buxton.


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[Assistant] Heteros is part of the Outer Banks, which on the map look like nothing more than a thin string of earth and sand a few miles off the coast of North Carolina. Imagine the island as a backwards capital L, hugging the coastline near the Pamlico River.


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[Assistant] But don't let that thin strip of sand and state parks fool you. Hatteras, like many of the other islands out there, is still big enough for stories to take root. And that's because it has a long history. Longer than most parts of the country, in fact.


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[Assistant] Near the northern tip of the island, just to the west, is Roanoke Island, the site of England's first settlements in the New World.


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[Assistant] Although the colony there disappeared sometime between 1586 and 1587, Europeans didn't stay away long. It was their constant activity in the region that gave rise to so much of the local stories still told today.


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[Assistant] There is a legend in Hatteras of the horrible deeds of one particular captain.


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[Assistant] According to the story, in 1710, an English ship crossed the Atlantic carrying refugees from Germany. They were known as Palatines, and they had originally fled the Middle Rhine area to settle in England. But there were so many that the English decided to help them move to the New World.


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[Assistant] When these refugees boarded the ship, they hid their valuables, afraid that they might be stolen by the ship's crew. After a successful journey, the ship entered the waters inside the outer banks, heading toward New Bern on the coast. Their new home was in sight, and after such a long journey, it must have been a relief to see.


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[Assistant] Sensing that they would soon disembark, the Palatines removed their valuables from hiding and gathered them together for the final leg of their journey.


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[Assistant] Now, maybe it was the sight of all that treasure, the jewelry and coins and precious heirlooms, that triggered what happened next. Or perhaps the crew had planned it all along. But here was their chance, and they decided to act.


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[Assistant] During the night, the crew moved systematically throughout the ship, killing the sleeping refugees and stealing their treasures.


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[Assistant] After killing the passengers, the captain and crew set fire to the ship and headed to shore in lifeboats.


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[Assistant] But the ship didn't sink. Instead, the legend claims that the flames grew higher and higher while the ship began to move forward in the calm waters. Fearing for their lives, the crew abandoned their lifeboats and were never seen again.


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[Assistant] To this day, locals whisper of a ghost ship that can be seen under the first full moon of September. The ship, orange with flames, passes near the Ocracoke Inlet three times and then vanishes as quickly as it appeared.


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[Assistant] Another prominent local story involves the capture of the legendary pirate Edward Teach, also known as Blackbeard. Teach patrolled the Atlantic and the Caribbean in his ship, Queen Anne's Revenge, for a little over two years, and in the process became one of the most feared pirates of his day.


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[Assistant] As history records, Blackbeard was finally cornered by Lieutenant Robert Maynard and his men in November of 1718, just inside the Outer Banks near the southern tip of Hatteras.


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[Assistant] In a battle that was horribly bloody for both sides, the Great Blackbeard suffered no fewer than twenty sword wounds and five gunshots before he was finally brought down.


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[Assistant] The English beheaded his corpse and tossed the body into the sea. His head though was kept. Maynard hung it from the bowsprit of his ship and it was turned in later to collect his reward.


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[Assistant] Locals there near Ocracoke tell of a spot known as Teach's Hole, where the legendary pirate once anchored his ship.


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[Assistant] If the stories are to be believed, Blackbeard's ghost haunts the location. There are those who claim to have seen strange lights, both above and below the water there on the coast. They say it's Blackbeard, swimming through the waters he used to patrol.


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[Assistant] Hatteras is still popular with visitors today, though I would assume none of them are pirates. People still build homes there. They have streets and restaurants and parks and trees. Tourists flock there every summer to take in the scenery.


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[Assistant] But right there on Snug Harbor Drive near Briggins Bay is a tree that's called the island home for centuries. In fact, it was most likely ancient when the colonists first arrived hundreds of years before. And although most of the people driving by it are completely unaware, this tree has a story to tell.


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[Assistant] According to local legend, it starts with the arrival of a woman near Frisco Bay back in the early 1700s. They say her name was Cora and she brought a baby along with her.


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[Assistant] They were always seen together, the child held tight to her chest or strapped into a sling. For an area frequented by sailors or widows of those who were lost at sea, that wasn't an unusual sight.


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[Assistant] The Briggins Bay area was even more wooded than it is now, and it's said that she took up shelter in the forest there, rather than in the small community that was forming on the coast. But it wasn't living on the literal outskirts of society that earned her a reputation as an outsider. It was her knack for the unusual.


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[Assistant] Some have said that cows she touched would dry up and turn sick. When the fishing got rough and nets were empty, Cora still managed to bring in enough to feed herself and the child. And when a local boy decided to poke fun at the baby, legend says that he got so sick he nearly died.


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[Assistant] Naturally, people talked. People always talk when things don't fit the norm. And that talk spread. In an era when it didn't take much more than an unpleasant disposition or off-color comment to earn a woman a reputation as a witch, it seemed Quora was making it a little too easy for the locals to be suspicious.


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[Assistant] The legend also tells of how, during Korra's stay there, a ship called the Susan-G ran aground off the northern coast of the island. The captain and his crew left the ship and came to town, and from there, they made their plans to repair it and continue their commercial delivery.


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[Assistant] It sounds simple, right? Just repair the damage and move on. But doing so meant unloading all of the cargo piece by piece and bringing it to shore.


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[Assistant] The captain's name, according to local legend, was Eli Blood. And that better have been his real name too, because, come on, how perfect is that, right? Captain Blood.


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[Assistant] Anyway, this captain enlisted the help of locals to move the cargo off of his grounded ship and in the process he got to know quite a few of them, which was good. Judging by the repairs, he and his crew from Salem, Massachusetts were bound to be there for a very long time.


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[Assistant] And it was during this long stay that he and his crew heard the stories of Cora and her baby. The heart of the rumors pointed to one single sensational conclusion.


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[Assistant] Cora was a witch, and the child she brought with her was her familiar, her supernatural pet. And as it turned out, Captain Blood was probably the last person on Earth that this mysterious Cora wanted to draw the suspicion of.


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[Assistant] The captain, it seems, was not just a sailor from Salem. He claimed to know Cotton Mather, the Puritan minister who was a passionate voice in support of the Salem witch trials. He had read Mather's books. He had studied them. He was a student of Mather's methods and apparently shared the man's intense hatred for the dark arts.


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[Assistant] So much so, in fact, that he considered himself a white witch, someone trained in combating the forces of darkness with their own brand of magic. He claimed to have his own familiars, which he fed with drops of blood. And those familiars acted like spies for him, informing him of black magic nearby.


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[Assistant] Captain Eli Blood considered himself a witch hunter.


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[Assistant] And I realize that this sounds incredibly hypocritical, which it was, of course. But back then, it was heroic. It gave the people of the area a feeling of safety. At least, they might have said, we have someone here who can deal with Cora the Witch if she ever gets out of hand. And that's when the body of a man washed up on the beach.


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[Assistant] The body wasn't one of Captain Blood's men, but it drew his concern nonetheless. It was the body of a young man from town, and although no marks could be found that pointed to the cause of his death, there were a number of other clues.


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[Assistant] Local legend tells of how the man's face was twisted into a horrible expression of fear. His hands, they say, were clasped together, as if he'd been kneeling before someone powerful begging for his life. The man even had the numbers 666 carved into his forehead.


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[Assistant] The most damning evidence of all, however, were the footprints in the sand near his body. They were smaller than a man's and they moved away from the body in a clear, definable direction. The woods.


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[Assistant] Someone needed to investigate the man's death, they said. And who better to do it than the witch hunter himself, Captain Eli Blood.


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[Assistant] This sounded like the perfect job for his idle mind. Captain Blood for his parts, agreed.


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[Assistant] He gathered his men, mostly slaves from Barbados, who had a healthy cultural fear of black magic, and together they went in search of Cora's shack in the woods. When they found her, she was inside making breakfast for herself and her child, and the men seized both of them and brought them back to town.


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[Assistant] They accused Korra of witchcraft and murder, of course. How could they not, in a society governed by deep superstition and intense fear of people who failed to fit in? But before you write them off as barbaric, remember that this is a flaw we all have yet to overcome. We still fear those who are different from us.


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[Assistant] Maybe it's genetic, maybe it's culturally ingrained, and that fear is like a snake hiding in the bushes, always ready to strike.


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[Assistant] If she floated, she was a witch. And seeing as how the tide was low and the waves were calm, of course she didn't sink. How could she?


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[Assistant] Satisfied with the results, the captain moved on to his second test. Pulling his knife free, the man tried to cut a handful of Korra's hair, but the blade failed to do its job. More proof, he declared, that she was a witch.


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[Assistant] Or at least proof that he needed to sharpen his knife, but hey, I'm no witch hunter.


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[Assistant] Final test was the most creepy and ambiguous of them all. Taking a bowl of seawater, the captain asked each of his crew to cut their fingertip and drip blood into the bowl. When they had all done so, he stirred this mixture with his knife until it foamed and swirled. And then he chanted words that no one else understood while staring hard into the bowl. And then raised his face in triumph.


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[Assistant] She is a witch, he exclaimed, and then, as if needing a second opinion, he passed the bowl around to the others. Each of them, according to the legend, saw two things in the bowl, the devil and the face of Korra.


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[Assistant] It was all the proof they needed. Korra was a witch, pure and simple. Now her execution would be completed. The captain had his men gather firewood and branches and pile them at the base of a large oak tree near the bay.


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[Assistant] And then Cora and her child were tied to the tree, ready to be burned alive.


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[Assistant] Now, what happened next will sound unusual. That's the fingerprint of an old story. They sometimes take on a patina of oddities and otherworldliness. But sometimes that patina adds texture, even value, to an antique. I'll let you be the judge.


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[Assistant] According to the locals who tell the tale to this day, Captain Blood approached the tree with a lit torch in his hand, ready to set fire to the wood and burn the witch and her familiar alive.


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[Assistant] But another captain, a local man named John Smith, held him back, asking instead for Cora's trial to go through the proper legal channels. Smith, being a sane man, wanted to do things right.


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[Assistant] But as the men argued, two things happened. First, the child in Korra's arms twisted and writhed as it transformed into a large black cat with shimmering green eyes. Second,


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[Assistant] A dark, ominous cloud began to gather overhead on an otherwise cloudless day.


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[Assistant] Both men cried out in horror and then Captain Blood lunged forward with the torch to ignite the kindling. It was at that very moment that the cloud overhead rumbled and a lightning bolt flashed down, striking the tree and blinding everyone around it. When the smoke cleared, the base of the tree was empty.


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[Assistant] The ropes were still there, as was the pile of branches and firewood, but the woman and the cat were gone without a trace.


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[Assistant] The Outer Banks is just like any other place in the world on many levels. It has a history, and over the centuries that comprise that history, stories have been told.


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[Assistant] In a lot of ways, story is one of our greatest legacies. Wherever we've been, we've left story in our wake, like footprints in the mud.


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[Assistant] Some stories are true and act like time capsules. Some are exaggerations of the truth and are meant to entertain later generations more than anything else. Some, though, serve to fill in the blanks, to answer those lingering questions, or to explain the things we can't wrap our minds around.


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[Assistant] Are there really fiery ghost ships and headless pirates haunting the Outer Banks? Was the word on the Korra tree, a word that you can still go see for yourself if you want, really carved into the bark by lightning? The chances are pretty good that it's all just a collection of old entertaining folktales.


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[Assistant] But sometimes stories do both. Beneath their decorative paint and fantastical flourishes, they conceal a grain of truth deep in their core.


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[Assistant] The most famous local legend in the Outer Banks, by a mile, is the story of the lost colony of Roanoke. The island is located off the west coast of Hatteras, and when the English settled there in 1585, they knew they were on the edge of the world. Building a settlement there took a lot of guts, and it came with a lot of risk and danger.


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[Assistant] When John White and a hundred new settlers landed there in July of 1586, the first settlement was gone, so they started to investigate. They set up their own fort there and also worked to establish relations with the local Native American tribes, the Croatoan on what is now Hatteras and the Khoree on the mainland.


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[Assistant] White left for England one year later to get more supplies, but didn't return for three years. And when he did come back, no sign of the English could be found. He'd left them with a plan though. If they were forced to leave, they'd been told to carve a cross into a nearby tree so that White would know they'd been attacked. And he did find a carving. But it wasn't a cross. It was a single word. Croatoan.


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[Assistant] This was good news, because it meant that they departed peacefully. But where did they go? White wanted to search Hatteras immediately, but when a terrible storm blew in, his men refused to stay. However painful it might have been, after all, White's own granddaughter was among the missing, they had to leave the very next day.


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[Assistant] It's interesting to note that the Croatoan lived in southern Heteros, in the area between modern-day Buxton and Frisco, right by the Cora tree. And if it wasn't really lightning that carved those letters, perhaps it was an actual human being.


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[Assistant] Sure, it could be nothing more than a centuries old prank. Or just a bit of lover's graffiti. Anything is possible, right?


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[Assistant] Or maybe, like a myth with a grain of truth at its heart, this tree is the last hint in a chain of clues that point to the final destination of the settlers from Roanoke.


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[Assistant] The Outer Banks have a certain air of mystery and legend about them. From lost colonies to pirates and witchcraft, there seems to be no shortage of dramatic tales for us to enjoy. And to prove it, I've pulled together one last story of danger and legend to share with you. Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about it.


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[Assistant] Life in the Outer Banks has long meant life on the edge. To be so close to the harsh Atlantic meant a constant struggle for safety and comfort. And a century and a half ago, one way they fought back was through a series of outposts known as life-saving stations.


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[Assistant] We've discussed lighthouses before, and those are pretty easy to describe. Lights on the edge of land that helped warn ships of danger. But life-saving stations were a bit different. They were, in a sense, a sort of ocean-centered firehouse, staffed by a crew of men who were on call to come to the rescue of nearby shipwrecks.


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[Assistant] One such facility built in 1874 was the Kitty Hawk Station. Now, just like lighthouses, these stations had keepers. Men who were in charge of the facility and who acted as a sort of captain to the crew of six surfmen who were on call. And the position of keeper was, at least back then, a job that was filled by appointment.


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[Assistant] In 1884, the keeper of the Kitty Hawk station was a man named James Hobbs. As usual, Hobbs oversaw his team of six other men, and their work there along the coast kept them busy. But it also earned Hobbs a jealous eye from at least one local man, a guy named T.L. Daniels. And Daniels played dirty.


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[Assistant] That year he reported station keeper Hobbs to the authorities. The man's crime? He apparently used some leftover paint from the station building to do some touch-up work on his personal boat.


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[Assistant] Whether it was true or not wasn't the point. Daniels just wanted to cause Hobbes to lose his job so that maybe he could take it over instead.


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[Assistant] On July 7th of 1884, an investigator arrived to look into the matter. Lieutenant E.C. Clayton walked into a storm, though. Yes, Hobbs was there, as station keeper, to answer his questions and show him around.


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[Assistant] But Daniels was also there and wouldn't leave and that led to a lot of bickering between him and Hobbes and Clayton was caught right in the middle.


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[Assistant] At one point, all three men were inside the life-saving station, where the temperature was growing hotter than the summer heat outside. It's said that Daniels, the troublemaker looking to steal Hobbs' position out from under him, threatened the Keeper's life right in front of Clayton. And then he reached for a gun.


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[Assistant] Station keeper Hobbs wasn't about to put up with that, so he opened a cupboard and pulled out his shotgun. Now, one would think that Daniels had the upper hand, reaching for his pistol first, but apparently his hand got caught on his own coat, and that gave Hobbs enough time to step forward, rest the shotgun on the shoulder of the investigator, and pull the trigger. That first shot only hit Daniels in the left shoulder.


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[Assistant] And it might be projecting here, but I'd have to believe that this would have been a good moment for him to back down.


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[Assistant] Instead, Daniels finally got his pistol free and moved closer to Hobbs.


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[Assistant] One more blast from the shotgun though, and Daniels was dead.


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[Assistant] Hobbs would be arrested and put on trial that fall, but perhaps thanks to Clayton's testimony, his actions were deemed self-defense and he was acquitted on September 8th. Whether or not he got in trouble for using that paint though, I have no idea.


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[Assistant] Over the years to come, the life-saving stations all across the country would eventually get merged into what is now the Coast Guard, and the Kitty Hawk station went through a number of changes as well.


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[Assistant] Both physically and geographically, the wooden building was moved twice, and after that, additions were made. And today, it's home to a restaurant, the Black Pelican.


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[Assistant] That unusual name, they say, comes from another story from the station's past. Apparently, shortly after opening in 1874, a large pelican, covered in black feathers, started to show up and warn the crew of approaching ships.


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[Assistant] And for many years it served as a hybrid of an omen and a lookout, helping the men do their job.


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[Assistant] When the station was shut down in the early part of the 1900s, the bird simply vanished.


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[Assistant] But don't worry, there's still plenty of history to be found inside the restaurant that bears its name. The Black Pelican has received numerous reports of unusual activity, and many of the people who have worked there over the years place the blame for it squarely at the feet of that angry interloper, Daniels.


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[Assistant] There's a spot on the wooden floor that locals believe is the place where Daniels bled to death back in 1884. And at least one person has also seen fresh blood running down one of the walls inside.


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[Assistant] Of course, a lot of the usual rumors also fill the restaurant, from mysterious footsteps and voices to objects that move on their own.


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[Assistant] Whether or not Daniels is still there, haunting the current occupants in search of that's ever elusive keeper position is something you'll have to decide for yourself. But thanks to that legend and countless others, at least one thing is undeniably true.


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


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[Assistant] Lore is much more than just a podcast. There is a book series available in bookstores and online, and two seasons of the television show on Amazon Prime Video. Check them both out if you want more lore in your life.


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


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


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[Assistant] In 1841, at the age of just 17, Lydia married an older man named Edward, and they went on to have seven children.


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[Assistant] Two decades later, though, her youngest child died of an intestinal illness. A year later, her husband died of consumption. Less than two months after that, three more of her children passed away. Fever and respiratory illness were blamed for those.


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[Assistant] Over the next two years, her last three remaining children would also die of horrible illnesses. And every time it happened, Lydia would be there, taking care of them and making them comfortable.


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[Assistant] She married again, but two years after that, that new husband passed away.


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[Assistant] The attending physician said it was most likely cholera that did it. But Lydia found a way to move on, marrying yet again in 1870 to a man with three children. She had a family once again.


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[Assistant] Months later, their youngest child died. Then, the next oldest. A year after that, the last child passed away. All under the care of poor Lydia.


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[Assistant] So when her husband died next, one doctor decided to look a bit deeper. Past the sympathy and bedside manner of the three-time widow. Past the tragedy of so much illness and death. And what he found was horrifying.


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[Assistant] For eight years, Lydia Sherman had been slowly killing everyone around her with poison. In fact, her last husband had enough arsenic in his system to kill three men. It wasn't accidental or a product of carelessness. Lydia Sherman, the Derby Poisoner, did this for fun.


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[Assistant] Some historians think the driving force behind it all was a deep desire to care for people. To be their anchor through horrible illness. In some twisted way, she wanted to help.


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[Assistant] In the end though, she gave new meaning to the phrase, killing them with kindness.


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[Assistant] It's a vulnerable place to be on the edge of death. When illness or suffering have worn you down to a thread and you need to be cared for by someone else. We're at their mercy. In some instances our life is literally in their hands. Without a doubt, that's a lot of power. Power.


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[Assistant] When Peter showed up on the doorstep of the Boston Female Asylum in February of 1863, he was a complete and utter wreck. He was a tailor with fondness for the bottle, but that was a relationship he had a difficult time controlling.


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[Assistant] It's hard to fault the guy though. Life had certainly thrown a lot of speed bumps his way.


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[Assistant] Sometime after their third child was born, Peter's wife Bridget died from tuberculosis, leaving him as the sole provider for three daughters. His oldest, Nellie, would eventually be committed to a state mental institution where she would spend the rest of her life.


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[Assistant] Rumors about Peter Kelly swirled around the bustling city of Lowell, Massachusetts, causing him all sorts of troubles. He was usually described as angry, alcoholic, and more than a little insane, earning him the nickname, Kelly the Crack.


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[Assistant] But he hadn't arrived at the Boston Female Asylum to get help. No, he'd come to abandon his daughters.


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[Assistant] And they took them. This place was essentially a hybrid between a prep school and an orphanage. Girls would arrive young, be taught basic skills and manners, and then placed out into local homes as indentured servants who had to work off long contracts. It was a hard life. There's no doubt about that.


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[Assistant] The oldest Kelly girl, Delia, took four years to be placed. But we don't know why. Maybe she was rebellious. Perhaps she protested against the slavery-like conditions that awaited her. All we know is that she went on to become a prostitute and eventually died after a life of too much drinking.


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[Assistant] The youngest, Nora, was placed much faster. In November of 1865, less than two years after arriving, she found herself moving into a new home. In fact, it was a return to her hometown of Lowell, which must have offered at least a small bit of comfort in the middle of all of that chaos.


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[Assistant] The family took her in and gave her a new name, although there's no record that she was officially adopted by them. Still, from that point forward, she would be Jane. Jane had a tough climb ahead of her.


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[Assistant] The family had their own daughter, Elizabeth, but from everything I could find, the girls did not get along. Jane was an orphan with no social status. Elizabeth, though, was well off, secure in her place in life, and set to inherit everything.


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[Assistant] Imagine the sibling dynamics between Cinderella and her stepsisters, and I think you'll get pretty close.


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[Assistant] The next 20 years were hard for Jane. She grew up. She learned about running a household. Her foster mother Anne passed away, but rather than find herself free to go and build her own life, her sister Elizabeth took over the household and Jane's contract. She was stuck.


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[Assistant] She also watched the country recover from civil war and move on into what historians call the Gilded Age. It's a fancy term for an explosion of wealth in America in the late 1870s, but it also hides a dark underbelly. Yes, the rich became mega-rich, building massive estates in places like Newport, Rhode Island, but the poor only spiraled further downward.


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[Assistant] So when her contract was completed in 1885, Jane moved out and decided to follow her dreams.


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[Assistant] What she wanted, what she needed was a chance at a better life, a way to elevate herself above the poverty she seemed destined for. And she found her answer at Cambridge Hospital, where she went to attend nursing school.


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[Assistant] But that's where things got complicated. Because Jane had a darker side, and her training only seemed to draw it out. Perhaps we can blame that on her rough childhood, or her deep desire to prove the elites around her were wrong. Maybe she just wanted to be in control.


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[Assistant] Whatever the reason might have been, Jane became a problem very quickly.


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[Assistant] At first, it was just the line. She claimed that her father lived in a far-off land and that royalty had asked to hire her after school. She told lies about her classmates and managed to get others in trouble for things that she herself did. Some of them were even expelled as a result.


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[Assistant] But the patients loved her. Some say it was her smile, how she would take care of their needs so cheerfully. They felt cared for and attended to, and that was an important skill for any nurse, and Jane excelled at that. The truth though was a lot less pleasant.


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[Assistant] Once, during her training in Cambridge, she was heard to say, which might explain how fast and loose she was with the drugs she administered to them.


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[Assistant] Pharmacists keep narcotic painkillers under lock and key. There are rules built around our complete understanding of how these drugs work. But remember, this was the 1880s. Jane and her fellow students didn't have the benefit of all that expanded knowledge.


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[Assistant] In fact, some drugs were completely misunderstood.


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[Assistant] Morphine, for example, wasn't seen so much as a painkiller back then as a sleep aid, albeit one that was highly addictive, so much so that a former Confederate colonel named John Pemberton created a cocoa wine, sort of a tonic made of wine and cocaine, as a medicinal cure.


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[Assistant] When the city of Atlanta passed prohibition laws in 1886, Pemberton swapped out the wine for carbonated water, but the cocaine stayed in the beverage for almost two more decades. Today, Pemberton's drink is still sold as Coca-Cola, but the medicinal roots are long gone.


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[Assistant] Jane, though, wasn't looking for a solution. In fact, she saw great potential in the veritable treasure trove of drugs at her disposal. Morphine, yes, but also strychnine, mercury, arsenic, and atropine. All of which were widely available, liberally used, and highly poisonous. And it was right there.


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[Assistant] At the intersection of Jane's training, her access and her twisted ideas.


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[Assistant] That something horrifying was about to be born.


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[Assistant] Morphine was Jane's gateway drug. It was the tool that led to darker things. As a nursing student, Jane would often administer the sedative to elderly patients and watch them slip into a coma. Then she would stand over them or sit beside them and wait for their last breath. It was her favorite part.


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[Assistant] As nursing school equipped her with more knowledge, Jane added tools to her kit. The stimulant atropine was the perfect pairing to morphine because it seemed to counteract the visible signs of poisoning. The patients who died under her care were more often than not completely overlooked. Tragic victims of heart failure or complications from diabetes.


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[Assistant] But at the same time, she was failing miserably at hiding her other, less horrifying crimes. She continued to tell lies about her coworkers, to steal from patients, and even steal drugs from the hospital. And it eventually caught up with her. In the summer of 1890, Jane was kicked out of Cambridge Hospital before she could complete her degree.


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[Assistant] Oddly, she stayed in town and set up shop as a private nurse, which led to glowing recommendations from the physicians she interacted with, which led to, and I kid you not, a job offer from Cambridge Hospital. Yeah, the school that kicked her out ended up hiring her back.


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[Assistant] It didn't last as long as she wanted though. Within months, one of the doctors on staff took notice of the disproportionate number of deaths that happened on Jane's watch. He assumed she was just incompetent, and he fired her.


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[Assistant] And today, that would be the end of it. The future would look a lot less bright, and it certainly wouldn't involve caring for others as a professional nurse. But this was a different time. In the darkness before the age of the internet and social media, paper trails were a lot harder to follow, and all you really had to do was just move on and start over.


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[Assistant] That was the spring of 1891. Jane was 32 and still had a lot of faith in her ability to sell her services as a private nurse.


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[Assistant] For the next four years, that's exactly what she did. She lived in a spare room at the home of an elderly couple in Cambridge. Although whenever necessary, she would move into the homes of her patients until they no longer needed her. The business, it turns out, was very good.


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[Assistant] Due to her round figure, cheerful mood, and ever-present smile, people began to call her Jolly Jane. Her patients loved her, and their families felt as if she really truly cared for their loved ones. And maybe she did. Jane was twisted and broken, after all. To her, what she did was care.


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[Assistant] She was a matchmaker, in a sense, guiding them into the sweet embrace of death.


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[Assistant] Her favorite remedy was a glass of European mineral water that she imported from Budapest. She would mix in a combination of morphine and atropine and then let the drugs do their work.


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[Assistant] Not just for patience though. No, she also used this trick on her landlords, the Dunhams. First poisoning the husband, and then two years later doing the same to his widow.


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[Assistant] Jane, it seems, was the sort of person who brought her work home with her.


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[Assistant] Every summer though, she got away from it all. She packed up her room in Cambridge, Massachusetts and traveled south to the Cape Cod area where she rented a cottage from an older couple, Alden and Maddie Davis. It was a way to get away from city life and enjoy the fresh air and ocean waves.


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[Assistant] But it wasn't all pleasure seeking. Jane did her fair share of work there on the Cape, helping out when locals needed medical advice or a quick remedy. And they loved her for it. She would stay on for a few months, help the community in her spare time, and then move home to Cambridge at the beginning of winter.


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[Assistant] At the end of the summer of 1899, Jane received a letter from her original foster sister, Elizabeth, and invited the older woman to come visit her there on the Cape.


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[Assistant] By then, Elizabeth was married to a man named Oremil Brigham and had enjoyed all the benefits of wealth and privilege that Jane had only dreamt of.


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[Assistant] On August 26th, the two women spent the afternoon at the beach, soaking in the sunshine and salty air, and then returned home for their evening meal. Jane, always the thoughtful hostess, produced a cold glass of European mineral water and handed it to Elizabeth, the older woman, thirsty from the warm day, downed it quickly,


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[Assistant] When Elizabeth fainted a half hour later, Jane helped her to bed and quickly became the professional, experienced nurse that everyone believed her to be. Except for the poisoning part, I suppose.


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[Assistant] She was attentive and did her best to make the older woman comfortable.


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[Assistant] As Elizabeth became worse and worse though, as that cocktail of toxic medication sent her body into fits of seizures and pushed in and out of sleep, Jane actually moved closer to the bed.


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[Assistant] She wanted to watch. She wanted to see it all happen. To see her foster sister suffer. And she did it all with that smile on her face.


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[Assistant] Then, when the end seemed near, Jane took her obsession one step further.


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[Assistant] She climbed in bed with Elizabeth and laid herself down right beside her.


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[Assistant] Later, she would describe those final moments with a cold clinical frankness that betrayed the sheer horror of it all. I held her in my arms, she said, and watched with delight as she gasped out her life.


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[Assistant] Jane left the Cape that autumn and returned to normal life in Cambridge. But it was more than that. She also left the emotional high of murdering her foster sister, Elizabeth, only to slip back into her less eventful life as a private nurse. That might explain why she went looking for a change.


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[Assistant] In January of 1900, only a few months after returning home, Jane caught word that an old friend of hers, Myra Connors, had become ill. She rushed to the woman's apartment to help her, but not out of some altruistic design to care for a friend. No, Myra had something that Jane wanted, and this was her chance to take it.


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[Assistant] Myra worked in town as a dining hall matron at St. John's Theological School. It was a job that came with a lot of perks, such as an apartment on campus and even a housekeeper. It wasn't much, but it represented the high life that Jane had always wanted for herself.


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[Assistant] After all, if resentment of that sort of life fueled her murder of Elizabeth, perhaps murder could also be her way of achieving it.


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[Assistant] Jane arrived at Myra's apartment at the end of January. By February 11th, her old friend was dead. And thanks to a bit of sweet talking and straight up lying, Jane managed to take her friend's job and home.


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[Assistant] She rented a room for Mr. and Mrs. Beadle, an elderly couple in Cambridge, and settled into her old routine. And by routine, I mean killing patients by day and slowly poisoning her landlords at night. This went on for months without a hint of trouble until the summer of 1901, when Jane heard a knock on her door.


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[Assistant] When she opened it, it was Maddie Davis. If you remember, Maddie and her husband Alden were the older couple that rented a cottage to Jane during her summers on the Cape. Maddie, it turns out, had traveled up to Cambridge to see her own daughter and thought she would stop in at Jane's to settle some business from the previous year.


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[Assistant] Jane, you see, hadn't been paying the full rent for years, claiming she would make up the difference later. But that deficit had begun to add up, and by the time Maddie Davis knocked on Jane's door, her tab was roughly $500. Throw in economic differences and inflation, and that's roughly $15,000 in modern money.


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[Assistant] Jane smiled that warm, jolly smile of hers and welcomed Maddie inside. It was unusually hot outside, and with the sun blazing bright in the sky, it was better to have the conversation in the cool shade of her sitting room.


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[Assistant] Then, Jane slipped away for a moment and returned with a tall, refreshing glass of mineral water for Maddie.


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[Assistant] A short while after the older woman had finished her drink, Jane offered to walk to the bank with her and withdraw the funds to pay her debt. Maddie smiled and stood up, and then sat back down as waves of dizziness washed over her. She didn't feel well, she told Jane. She didn't feel well at all.


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[Assistant] Jane kindly sent for Maddie's daughter and helped the older woman to a bed. When a physician arrived, she worked right alongside him to find the cause of the illness and restore Maddie's health. But it was a frustrating experience. One minute she would be in a deep sleep, and the next she would be awake and having seizures. No one could make rhyme or reason of it all. No one, that is. Except Jane.


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[Assistant] When no one was looking, she was dosing the woman with her usual cocktail of medication, reveling in the chaos and suffering that it was creating. And she did this for an entire week, at the end of which she gave Maddie one massive dose of morphine, and then let the drug do its job. Maddie Davis died a short while later.


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[Assistant] What happened next was a whirlwind of damage control and covering her tracks. First, Maddie's two daughters, Genevieve and Minnie, both converged on Jane's house and asked her for help.


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[Assistant] Their father Alden, now widowed and heartbroken, needed someone to look after him. They trusted and loved Jane and wanted her to travel to Cape Cod and take care of him.


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[Assistant] I think it serves as a powerful testimony to just how confident Jane was in her ability to fool the people around her. She had just killed their mother.


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[Assistant] And yet here they were, practically begging her to go help their father.


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[Assistant] She must have felt like a kid in a candy store thinking of all the fun she would have. So she agreed and traveled south.


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[Assistant] Jane wasn't done though. In fact, as far as the Davis family was concerned, she was only getting started. When she arrived at Alden's home in Cape Cod, everyone in the family let out a sigh of relief. Jane, their favorite nurse, had come to help. She was a ray of hope in the midst of their darkness.


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[Assistant] Jane's arrival at the Davis home was met with a sigh of relief. She was very good at her job, after all. But Alden Davis and his two adult daughters were still completely unaware of just how much Jane was very good at. So they opened their home and welcomed her in.


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[Assistant] For what she had planned, Jane needed to build a case. She needed the answers to be obvious when people started asking questions. And they were certainly going to be asking a lot of questions. People around her always did. So she set about planting evidence that could help her later on. Convenient reasons why people might be dying.


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[Assistant] She started by setting random fires throughout the house. And I'll be honest with you, I'm not really sure what her plan was with those. Maybe it was just an attempt to get it all over with and kill everyone at once. But that wasn't Jane's style. I think she just wanted the family members to suspect each other of being a bit unstable.


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[Assistant] She told Minnie, the older of the two sisters, that she'd seen Genevieve in the garden shed, just sort of standing there, eyes focused on a box of rat poison. She told Minnie that she was worried about how her sister was handling the loss of their mother and suggested that they all keep an eye on her. Less than a week later, on July 26th,


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[Assistant] Genevieve was dead. When the family went looking for answers, Jane brought up the rat poison again. She even told someone else that she'd seen a syringe on the young woman's bedside table. Perhaps, she suggested, it was simply a tragic suicide. And having planted those stories days before, everyone seemed to accept it.


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[Assistant] Not that it was easy. This would be the second family funeral within a month, and that was a lot of emotional weight to carry around. Obviously Alden Davis and his last remaining daughter Minnie were devastated, as well as being more than a little numb throughout the funeral.


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[Assistant] Two weeks later, another Davis was gone. This time, it was the father Alden, and the stories that were whispered painted an innocent, if tragic, picture.


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[Assistant] He'd already been old and unhealthy. Add in the loss of his wife and one of his children and, well, it all just seemed to be a bit too much for him to handle.


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[Assistant] After that, there were three people left in the Davis household.


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[Assistant] Good ol' Jolly Jane herself. Minnie Davis Gibbs. And Minnie's 10 year old son, Jesse.


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[Assistant] It was a precarious place to be, with all of the tragedy that had occurred and the town filling up with questions and theories. But Jane held on and stayed the course. Her work, however horrible it was, wasn't finished just yet.


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[Assistant] When she found the right moment, Jane asked Minnie about the debt she had owed her parents and wondered if, perhaps, in light of their recent deaths, that debt might be forgiven. Minnie was appalled and refused to even consider it. That, I think, left Jane with only one option to pursue.


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[Assistant] Just four days after the death of her father, Minnie went to bed sick in the afternoon of August 12th. It seemed to be digestive, but all she'd had before feeling ill was one of those early Coca-Cola type drinks known as a Coca-wine.


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[Assistant] She was emotionally drained and overstressed and had certainly needed something to settle her nerves. But as I'm sure you've already guessed, that beverage had been prepared by Jane.


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[Assistant] The nurse did her best to help by heavily medicating Minnie. By that evening, she was in a deep sleep, completely unresponsive and unaware of her surroundings.


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[Assistant] Right before her usual bedtime, Jane did something entirely unexpected. Rather than toying with her victim a bit more, she prepared a syringe with a massive dose of hermorphine cocktail, then injected it into Minnie.


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[Assistant] Then she walked upstairs and gathered Minnie's sleeping son, Jesse, in her arms and carried him back down.


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[Assistant] I'm sure she woke him up, either on purpose or just through the sheer act of lifting him. And then she sat down beside Minnie's bed, Jesse on her lap, and watched as the woman's body spasmed and violently convulsed.


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[Assistant] Poor Jesse could do nothing but watch as his mother died. Right before his eyes.


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[Assistant] Later, the family doctor would scratch his head and chalk Minnie's death up to severe exhaustion. The town was stunned.


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[Assistant] Later, when her past had caught up with her and she had nothing left to lose, Jane was a bit more honest about her true feelings on the events that summer in Cape Cod.


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[Assistant] After being asked how she felt about killing so many people so quickly, her answer was delivered with that trademark smile and a twinkle in her eye.


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[Assistant] I made it lively, she said, for the undertakers and the gravediggers.


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[Assistant] It takes a lot of trust to place ourselves in the hands of a caretaker when we're sick. Illness as a way of taking away our power. We are at our weakest and most vulnerable. So it's understandable to want that caretaker to be someone we know and trust.


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[Assistant] On so many levels, the Davis family did absolutely nothing you or I wouldn't have done in their shoes.


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[Assistant] Then again, trust is a funny thing, isn't it?


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[Assistant] We assume the people around us are who they claim to be. That they have our best interests at heart. That they care.


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[Assistant] But all too often, the faces we see are nothing more than a mask that hides a darker purpose. A mask, very much like Jolly Jane's cheerful smile.


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[Assistant] This is where we all want it to end, I think. She'd already done so much, taken so many lives and caused so much pain and suffering. And now an entire family was gone. For most stories, this would be more than enough.


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[Assistant] She kept trying, but her luck seemed to have run out.


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[Assistant] Next, she headed north to Lowell to try and seduce the husband of her late foster sister, Elizabeth. But that plan sort of fell apart. Perhaps as a cry for attention, she took a dose of her own morphine, but was discovered and taken to a hospital. But she wasn't the only newcomer there with a secret.


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[Assistant] One of the patients in a nearby room was not who they claimed to be. The man who had entered the hospital pretending to be ill was actually a detective hired by Captain Paul Gibbs, the father-in-law of Minnie Davis.


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[Assistant] The detective was there to watch Jane, because Captain Gibbs had some suspicions about the nurse's true nature.


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[Assistant] Back on the Cape, the old captain was putting those suspicions into action by having the body of Minnie Davis exhumed. He was looking for evidence of foul play and it wasn't long before they found it. Jane, who had since left the hospital to stay with friends, was arrested on charges of murder and brought in for questioning. It was finally over.


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[Assistant] The trial, though, exposed just how horrible her spree of healthcare killings had been. According to Jane herself, she had murdered at least 31 people that she could name, but there were dozens more that were less known. Some estimates put the number somewhere closer to 100.


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[Assistant] Jane was declared morally insane by the court, and on June 23rd of 1902, she was transferred to the Taunton Insane Hospital in Massachusetts.


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[Assistant] It said that she entered the facility fully confident she would recover and be set free. The time proved her wrong. Her smile slowly slipped from her face and was replaced by outbursts of yelling and complaints about everything around her.


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[Assistant] She even suspected the hospital staff of poisoning her food. And in the end, she refused to eat.


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[Assistant] There's irony in her final years, of course. This woman, a nurse who claimed to care for so many while actually delivering death to them in a glass of water, found herself in the care of other nurses. It's no wonder she suspected the staff of sinister plots.


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[Assistant] She had authored nearly a hundred deaths with that same pen of trust and power.


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[Assistant] They say old habits die hard, and that's very often the case. Sure, Jane had been removed from society, but it was a lot more difficult to remove the thing that made her Jolly Jane.


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[Assistant] One last tale provides us with chilling proof of that.


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[Assistant] Years after Jane died, one of the nurses who had cared for her there in Taunton told a story about one experience she had.


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[Assistant] This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Manke, with music from Chad Lawson and research assistance from Marset Crockett. New kid on the block, Carl Nellis, handles everything administrative.


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[Assistant] You can pick up right now in hardcover, ebook, or audiobook. And if you want to see lore live and in person, Chad and I still have a few shows left on the schedule this year.


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[Assistant] We'll be in Phoenix, Dallas, Austin, and Denver, all starting on November 29th. Check the Lore website for details and dates. And we'll be performing for the first ever PodCon in Seattle on the morning of December 9th. Grab your tickets now over at podcon.com.


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[Assistant] And hey, if you're a social media sort of person, you should follow the show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Just search for Lore Podcast, all one word. Click that follow button. When you do, be sure to say hi.


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[Assistant] Some places are more frightening than others. It's hard to nail down a specific reason why, but even so, I can't think of a single person who might disagree. Some places just have a way of getting under your skin.


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[Assistant] For some it's the basement, for others it's the local graveyard. I even know people who are afraid of certain colors. Fear, it seems, is a landmine that can be triggered by almost anything.


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[Assistant] And while history might be full of hauntingly tragic stories that span a variety of settings and climates, the most chilling ones, literally, are those that take place in the harsh environment of winter.


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[Assistant] The incident at Dyatlov Pass. The tragedy of the Donner Party. Even the sinking of a Titanic in 1912 happened in the freezing waters of the North Atlantic. Winter, it seems, is well equipped to end lives and create fear.


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[Assistant] And when I think of dangerous winters, I think of Maine, that area of New England on the northern frontier.


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[Assistant] If you love horror, you might equate Maine with Stephen King. But even though he's tried hard over the last few decades to make us believe in Derry and Castle Rock and Salem's Lot, the state has enough danger all on its own. Maine is also home to nearly 3,500 miles of coastline, even more than the state of California. And that's where the real action happens.


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[Assistant] The main coastline is littered with thousands of small islands and jagged rocks, ancient lighthouses and even older legends, and all in the cold north, where the sea is cruel and the weather can be deadly.


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[Assistant] It's often there, in the places that are isolated and exposed, that odd things happen. Things that seem born of the circumstances and the climate. Things that leave their mark on the people there. Things that would never happen on the mainland. And if the stories are to be believed, that's a good thing.


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[Assistant] The coastline of Maine isn't as neat and tidy as other states. Don't picture sandy beaches and warm waves that you can walk through. This is the cold north. The water is almost always chilly, and the land tends to emerge from the waves as large, jagged rocks. Go ahead and pull up a map of Maine on your phone.


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[Assistant] Because of that, ships have had a long history of difficulty when it comes to navigating the coast of Maine. Part of that is because of all the islands. They're everywhere. According to the most recent count, there are over 4,600 of them scattered along the coastal waters like fragments of a broken bottle.


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[Assistant] One such fragment is Seguin Island. It's only three miles from the mainland, but it's easy to understand how harsh winter weather could isolate anyone living there very quickly. And when you're the keeper of the lighthouse there, that isolation comes with the job.


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[Assistant] The legend that's been passed down for decades there is the story of a keeper from the mid-1800s. According to the tale, this keeper was newly married, and after moving to the island with his bride, they both began to struggle with that gulf between their lives there and the people on the coast.


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[Assistant] So to give his wife something to do with her time, and maybe to get a bit of entertainment out of it for himself, the keeper ordered a piano for her.


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[Assistant] They say it was delivered during the autumn, just as the winter chill was creeping in. In the story, it had to be hoisted up the rock face, but that's probably not true. Seguin is more like a green hill protruding from the water than anything else. But hey, it adds drama, right? And that's what these stories provide. Plenty of drama.


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[Assistant] When the piano arrived, the Keeper's wife was elated, but Bayer's remorse quickly set in. You see, the piano only came with the sheet music for one song. With winter quickly rolling in from the north, shipping in more music became impossible. So she settled in, and made the best of it.


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[Assistant] The legend says that she played that song non-stop, over and over, all throughout the winter. Somehow, she was immune to the monotony of it all. But her husband, the man who had only been hoping for distraction and entertainment, took it hard. They say it drove him insane.


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[Assistant] In the end, the Keeper took an axe and destroyed the piano, hacking it into nothing more than a pile of wood and wire. And then, still deranged from the repetitive tune, he turned the axe on his wife, nearly chopping off her head in the process. The tragic story always ends with the Keeper's suicide, but most know it all to be fiction.


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[Assistant] At least that's the general opinion. But even today there are some who claim that if you happen to find yourself on a boat in the waters between the island and the mainland, you can still hear the sound of piano music drifting across the waves.


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[Assistant] Boone Island is near the southern tip of Maine's long coastline. It's not a big island by any stretch of the imagination, perhaps 400 square yards in total. But there has been a lighthouse there since 1811 due to the many shipwrecks that have plagued the island for as long as Europeans have sailed in those waters.


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[Assistant] The most well-known shipwreck on Boone Island occurred there in the winter of 1710 when the Nottingham Galley, a ship captained by John Dean, wrecked there on the rocks. All 14 crew members survived, but the ship was lost, stranding them without help or supplies.


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[Assistant] As the unfortunate sailors died one by one, the survivors were forced to eat the dead or face starvation.


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[Assistant] And they did this for days until fishermen finally discovered and rescued them.


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[Assistant] But that's not the most memorable story from Boone Island. That honor falls to the tale of Catherine Bright, the wife of a former lighthouse keeper there from the 19th century.


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[Assistant] According to those who believe the story, the couple had only been on the small island for a few months when Catherine's husband slipped while tying off their boat. He fell and hit his head on the rocks and then slid unconsciously into the water where he quickly drowned.


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[Assistant] At first, Catherine tried to take on the duties of keeping the light running, but after nearly a week, fishermen in York on the mainland watched the light flicker out and stay dark. When they traveled to the island to investigate, they found Catherine sitting on the tower's stairs. She was cradling her dead husband's corpse in her arms.


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[Assistant] Legend has it that Catherine was brought back to York, along with her husband's body, but it was too late. Just like the lighthouse they had left behind, she was cold and dark.


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[Assistant] There's been a lighthouse on the shore of Rockland, Maine for nearly 200 years. It's on an oddly shaped hill with two large depressions in the face of the rock that were said to remind locals of an owl. So when the light was built there in 1825, it was, of course, named Owl's Head.


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[Assistant] Give any building long enough, mix in some tragedy and unexplainable phenomenon, and you can almost guarantee a few legends will be born. Owl's Head is no exception.


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[Assistant] One of the oldest stories is a well-documented one from 1850. It tells of a horrible winter storm that ripped through the Penobscot Bay area on December 22nd of that year. At least five ships were driven aground by the harsh waves and chill wind.


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[Assistant] It was destructive and fierce, and it would be an understatement to say that it wasn't a wise idea to be out that night, on land or at sea.


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[Assistant] A small ship had been anchored at Jamison Point that night. The captain had done the smart thing and gone ashore to weather the storm inside, but he left some people behind on the ship. Three, actually. His first mate, Richard Ingram, a sailor named Roger Elliott, and Lydia Dyer, a passenger.


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[Assistant] While those three poor souls tried to sleep that night on the schooner, the storm pushed the ship so hard that the cables snapped, setting the ship adrift across the bay. Now, it's not exactly a straight shot southeast to get to Owl's Head. It's a path shaped more like a backward sea to get around the rocky coast, but the ship somehow managed to do it anyway.


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[Assistant] It passed the breakwater, drifted east, then south, and finally rounded the rocky peninsula where the Owl's Head light is perched, all before smashing against the rocks south of the light.


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[Assistant] The three passengers inside survived the impact, and as the ship began to take on water, they scrambled up to the top deck. Better the biting wind than the freezing water, they assumed. And then they waited, huddled there under a pile of blankets against the storm, waiting for help.


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[Assistant] When the ship began to actually break apart in the waves though, Elliot, the sailor, was the only one to make an escape from the wreckage. I can't imagine how cold he must have been, with the freezing wind and ocean spray lashing at him from the darkness.


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[Assistant] But standing on the rocks with his feet still ankle deep in the waves, he happened to look up and see the lighthouse on the hill.


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[Assistant] If he was going to find help, that was his best option. So he began the climb.


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[Assistant] He was practically dead by the time he reached the lighthouse, but when he knocked, no one answered. A moment later, the keeper of the light rode up the path on a sleigh, having been out for supplies, and realized at once that Elliot needed help. He took him in, gave him hot rum, and put him into a warm bed.


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[Assistant] But not before Elliot managed to whisper something about the others.


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[Assistant] The Keeper immediately called for help and gathered a group of about a dozen men. Together they all traveled back down to the shore where they began to look for the wreck of the ship and the people who may still be alive on board.


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[Assistant] When they found the remains of the schooner, the men began to carefully climb across the wreckage looking for signs of the other passengers. It was treacherous work, the wood was encrusted in ice, and each step swayed dangerously with the waves. When they finally found them, they were still on the portion of the deck where Elliot had left them.


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[Assistant] But they seemed to shimmer whenever the light of a lantern washed over them. Climbing closer, the men discovered why.


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[Assistant] Ingram and Dire were both encased in a thick layer of ice, completely covering their bodies. They were frozen, in sea-no-man style, in a thick crust of ice.


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[Assistant] Not taking any chances, the men somehow managed to pry the couple free from the deck of the ship, and the entire block was transported back up the hill to the lighthouse.


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[Assistant] All that night they worked fast and carefully. They placed the block of ice in a tub of water and then slowly chipped away at it. As it melted, they moved the limbs of each person in an attempt to get their blood flowing again.


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[Assistant] And somehow, against all logic and medical odds, it worked. It took them a very long time to recover, but Ingram and Dyer soon opened their eyes. Ingram was the first to speak, and it was said that he croaked the words, What is all this? Where are we?


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[Assistant] Roger Elliott didn't survive in the aftermath of the shipwreck. Maybe it was the trauma of climbing up the hill to the lighthouse, soaked to the bone, and exposed to the freezing winds of the storm. Perhaps it was an injury he sustained in the shipwreck itself, or on the climb to the lighthouse. But his sacrifice did not go unrewarded.


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[Assistant] Dyer and Ingram fared better though. They eventually recovered and even married each other. They settled down and raised a family together in the area. All thanks to the man who died to bring them help, when all seemed lost.


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[Assistant] Later stories from inside Owl's Head Lighthouse have been equally chilling. Although there are no other tragic events on record there, it's clear from the first-hand accounts of those who have made Owl's Head their home that something otherworldly has taken up residence there.


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[Assistant] The Andrews family was one of the first to report any sort of unusual activity on the property.


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[Assistant] I can't find a record of their first names, but the keeper and his wife lived there along with her elderly father. According to their story, one night the couple was outside and looked up to see a light swirling in her father's windows. When they climbed the stairs they found the older man shaking in his bed from fright.


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[Assistant] Some think he might have seen the old sailor, a common figure witnessed by many over the years. When John Norton was keeper in 1980, he claimed to have seen the same apparition. He had been sleeping, but when a noise woke him up, he opened his eyes to see the figure of an old sea captain standing over the bed, just staring at him.


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[Assistant] The old sailor has also been blamed for mysterious footprints that tend to appear in the snow. Footprints that could be found on the walk toward the house. The prints never seem to have an origin point and always end abruptly in the middle of the sidewalk.


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[Assistant] Others have claimed to feel cold spots in the house, while some have gone on record to swear that brass fixtures inside the lighthouse, fixtures that were usually tarnished and dark, would be found mysteriously polished. None of the keepers have been able to figure out who was doing the cleaning for them.


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[Assistant] There have been other stories as well. Tales of a white lady who has been frequently seen in the kitchen, of doors slamming without anyone in the room, and of silverware that has been heard to rattle in the drawers. Despite this though, most have said that they felt at peace with her there. More at peace, at least, than they are with the old bearded sailor.


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[Assistant] In the mid-1980s, Andy German and his wife Denise lived there while tending the light. They moved in and settled into life on the harsh coast of Maine. Andy divided his time between tending the light and a series of renovations on the old lighthouse, which left the yard outside rather chaotic and full of construction materials.


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[Assistant] One night, after climbing into bed, a couple heard the sound of some of the building supplies outside falling over in the wind. Andy pulled on his pants and shoes and then left the room to go take care of the mess before the wind made it worse. Denise watched him leave and then rolled back over to sleep with the lamp still on.


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[Assistant] A short while later, she felt him climb back into bed. The mattress moved, as did the covers, and so she asked out loud how it had gone, if there had been any trouble or anything unusual.


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[Assistant] She found that Andy's spot in the bed was still empty.


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[Assistant] Well, almost. In the spot where he normally slept beside her, there was a deep depression in the sheets, as if an invisible body were laying right there beside her.


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[Assistant] Of course, it was just the dent where Andy had been sleeping moments before. At least that's what she told herself then. But thinking back on it later, Denise admits she has doubts. There were moments when she was lying there, staring at the impression in the sheets that she could have sworn the shape was moving.


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[Assistant] Maybe she was too level-headed to get upset. Or perhaps she was too tired to care.


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[Assistant] Whatever the reason, Denise simply told whoever it was to leave her alone and then rolled back over and fell asleep.


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[Assistant] At breakfast the next morning, she wanted to tell Andy about the experience, thinking he would laugh it off and help her to explain it away. But before she could, he told her his own story. It turns out, Andy had an unusual experience of his own the previous night.


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[Assistant] He explained how, as he exited the room and stepped out into the dimly lit hallway, he saw what could only be described as a faint cloud hovering close to the door. And this cloud had been moving.


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[Assistant] According to Andy, when he walked down the hall it moved right up to his feet and then passed on through him.


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[Assistant] You don't have to travel to a lighthouse to bump into tales of the unexplained or otherworldly. You can hear them from just about anyone you meet. From the neighbor down the street to your real estate agent. But lighthouses seem to have a reputation for the tragic.


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[Assistant] And maybe that's understandable. These are, after all, houses built to help save lives in a dangerous setting. It might be safe to say that the well for these stories runs deeper than many other places. But are they true?


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[Assistant] Like a lot of stories, it seems it all depends on who you talk to. Keepers across the decades have had a mixed bag of experiences. Some see odd things, and some don't. Maybe some people just connect with the stories more than others and go looking for hints and signs where there are none.


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[Assistant] One recent family described their time there as normal. They never saw ghosts, never watched objects move, and felt right at home the whole time they were there. Another family, though, acknowledged that something unusual seemed to be going on in the lighthouse. They would find light bulbs partially unscrewed, and their thermostat would constantly readjust itself.


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[Assistant] Perhaps whatever it was that's haunting the lighthouse is just very environmentally conscious.


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[Assistant] It's easy to laugh off most of these stories, but we've never lived there. We've never heard or felt something that can't be explained away. And like most samples of data, there's always the outlier.


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[Assistant] Another family who lived at the lighthouse in the late 1980s, though, claimed to have experienced their fair share of unusual activity. One night, while Gerard and Debbie Graham were asleep, their three-year-old daughter Claire opened her eyes and sat up in bed.


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[Assistant] She stared into the darkness for a moment, as if listening carefully to something, and then climbed out of her bed and left her room.


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[Assistant] Her little bare feet padded on the cold floor of the hallway as she made her way down toward her parents' room. Inside, she slowly approached the side of their bed and then tapped her father on the arm to wake him. When he did, she asked Claire what was the matter. The little girl replied that she was supposed to tell him something. Tell me what, her father asked.


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[Assistant] There's a fog rollin' in, Claire replied, somehow sounding like someone infinitely older. Sound the horn. When he asked her who had told her this, the little girl looked at him seriously. My friend, she told him. The old man, with the beard.


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[Assistant] It's hard to beat the chilling stories found up north in the state of Maine. From the dangerous weather to life on the edge of civilization, each tale seems to be dripping with tension and dread.


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[Assistant] Which is why I figured you'd want a bit more. And don't worry, even though it's a bit more inland, today's bonus story will deliver just as many chills. Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about it.


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[Assistant] Samuel McDonald was a frontiersman living in the wilderness of Maine in the early 19th century. Actually, home was a small community called Standish, a few miles outside of Portland. But every summer, he headed north about a hundred miles to a lake on the border of what is now New Hampshire to work with others there.


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[Assistant] We don't know exactly what that work entailed. He might very well have been a trapper, which was a lucrative but challenging occupation back then. The forests of Maine were certainly rich in the sorts of animals that were trapped and hunted for their fur. Or perhaps he worked in the lumber industry, felling trees that might be used as timber in the more populated southern parts of New England.


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[Assistant] Whatever the work was, it took him north in 1815. He left behind his wife and two grown sons and made the same journey he had year after year until he reached the lake where all the other seasonal workers had gathered. At some point in his time there, though, Samuel took sick and was not getting better.


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[Assistant] The trouble with frontier life is that oftentimes there is no one to take care of you if you become sick or injured. Everything had the potential to be deadly in those circumstances. Even a broken foot or a simple infection. Throw in the comparatively primitive medical knowledge of the early 1800s and you have a recipe for disaster.


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[Assistant] One evening after work, Samuel laid himself down in front of his fire to rest and recover. He was sick and tired, literally, and probably hoped a good night of sleep would do him well. But he never woke up.


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[Assistant] It wasn't until the next day that a couple of other woodsmen passing by noticed his body laid out there beside the remnants of a campfire that anyone even knew what had happened.


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[Assistant] Word was sent south to tell Samuel's family the news. It said that his two adult sons made the journey of a hundred miles in just one day, but that would be an extraordinary pace if it were true. They traveled quickly, though, and soon arrived at the campsite where some friends had brought Samuel's body inside to keep it safe. But there was a problem. Winter was coming.


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[Assistant] Knowing that the journey back south with their father's body would take them too long, the two sons purchased a cheap wooden box and buried Samuel there in the wilderness of Maine. Then they settled in for the winter and waited.


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[Assistant] When spring arrived, they took it upon themselves the grim task of disinterring their father so that they could transport him home for a proper burial. The two brothers made quick work, uncovering the wooden box they had buried in a shallow grave.


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[Assistant] When it was exposed, they lifted it out and onto their wagon. But they couldn't resist just one more look at the man who had raised them. Prying off the lid of the coffin, the brothers looked inside and then stopped as horror flooded over them.


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[Assistant] Even though Samuel had been buried on his back, the body had somehow turned over.


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[Assistant] More disturbing though was his face. The dead man's lips were raw and covered in dry blood, and splinters of wood could be seen in his gums and tongue.


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[Assistant] Their father's hands told the same terrible story. The fingertips were torn and bloody, and many of the fingernails were missing, torn off in an attempt to escape.


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[Assistant] There was no question about what had happened, and that was what frightened them the most, because it put the blame squarely on them.


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[Assistant] Samuel McDonald had not died that winter day, as his friends had assumed. He had simply fallen into a deep sleep, perhaps even a coma.


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[Assistant] Unable to tell the difference, though, everyone assumed the worst. When Samuel's sons arrived, they did what made sense. They buried their father.


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[Assistant] And in doing so, they did the very thing they never thought possible. They killed him.


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[Assistant] This episode of Lore was researched, written, and produced by me, Aaron Manke. 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] 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. 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] There's the world we all know, with its streets and houses and the bustle of everyday life.


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[Assistant] And then there's the other world, filled with places that are set away from the center of our lives. Places that most of us rarely interact with. Graveyards are a good example of this. And maybe even hospitals. We go there for specific reasons, but only rarely if we're lucky.


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[Assistant] There are few buildings that harbor such powerful meaning and purpose in our world.


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[Assistant] Without fail though, they have stood watch for millennia, right on the border between safety and danger, between darkness and light, between hope and despair.


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[Assistant] And yet, by their very nature, they are isolated and nearly forgotten.


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[Assistant] Since the earliest known accounts, right up to modern times, the purpose of these buildings has changed very little. To cast a light into the darkness so that sailors might better understand where they are and what's ahead.


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[Assistant] They rarely waver, they frequently save lives, and they're universally understood, which is why we have such a hard time believing that even there, in the narrow walls and never-ending stairs, stories have taken root that chill the mind.


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[Assistant] There doesn't seem to be a lighthouse in the world without some whisper of unusual activity, some tale of tragedy, or rumor of lost love. Oftentimes, those stories speak of dangers from the world outside. Others, though, hint at something worse.


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[Assistant] A darkness that's right inside the walls.


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[Assistant] For thousands of years, sailors around the world have used coastal lights to avoid risky waters and locate safe harbors. In an age before GPS, electrical lights, or anything more complex than celestial navigation, a lighthouse was often the only thing standing between a ship's crew and certain death.


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[Assistant] One of the oldest lighthouses in the world is the Tower of Hercules in Spain.


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[Assistant] It dates back nearly 2,000 years and is the oldest known functional Roman lighthouse. It illustrates the simplicity of a design that has changed very little over the centuries. A bright light held as high as possible with room in the building for a caretaker or staff.


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[Assistant] And it's that last bit, the staff, that sits at the center of nearly every whispered tale of lighthouse folklore. After all, without people there would be no tragedy. That's our legacy as humans. We bring pain and fear with us wherever we go, even to the edge of the world.


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[Assistant] And the staff who live inside each lighthouse eventually comes to call the place their home. It's the center of their life.


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[Assistant] Occasionally though, it becomes the final resting place for them as well.


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[Assistant] There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of stories of unusual activity inside the walls of lighthouses all around the world.


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[Assistant] One such place, the Hasida Head Lighthouse in Oregon, has a reputation that goes back decades. There is a long forgotten grave on the property that belonged to an infant. According to local legend, the baby was the daughter of the lighthouse keeper and his wife. And when she died, the mother fell into a deep depression from which she never fully recovered.


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[Assistant] Since the 1950s, nearly every keeper on duty has reported unusual activity inside the lighthouse. Screams have been heard in the middle of the night. Cupboards that were purposely left open were found closed, and objects were seen to move in front of people.


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[Assistant] In the 1970s, a groundskeeper was washing the windows of the house, inside and out. And while he was in the attic, he turned to see a silver-haired woman floating inches above the floor.


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[Assistant] The man, clearly frightened, bolted from the attic and refused to return. And so he was given permission to clean the outside of the attic window by way of a ladder.


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[Assistant] In his effort to rush the job, though, the man broke the glass, but rather than go back into the attic to clean it up, he left it. Later that night, the lighthouse keeper was pulled from sleep by the sound of glass moving across the floor. When he checked the next morning, he found that the glass had all been swept into a neat little pile.


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[Assistant] Another lighthouse, this one near Fairfield, Connecticut, holds an equally chilling history.


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[Assistant] Three days before Christmas in 1916, keeper Fred Jordan set off for the mainland in his rowboats, leaving his assistant Rudy in charge of the light. Rudy watched Fred row off into the distance, which turned out to be a good thing, because Fred's boat capsized about a mile from the island.


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[Assistant] Hoping to rescue his friend and boss, Rudy climbed into a second boat and rode to help.


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[Assistant] Unfortunately though, strong winds had pushed Fred far from the location of the accident, and Rudy never found him.


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[Assistant] Two weeks later, Rudy claimed to have seen Fred's ghost inside the lighthouse. According to his entry in the logbook, a light descended the stairs right in front of him and then began to act strangely. It moved toward the Keeper's quarters, disappearing into the room.


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[Assistant] When Rudy caught up, the light was gone, but the log book had been left open.


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[Assistant] Rudy checked the date on the page, then it was the day of Fred's death.


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[Assistant] In 1942, two boys were fishing near the lighthouse when their boat capsized in an eerie echo of Fred Jordan's accident. Thankfully, a strange man happened to be there and he pulled them both to shore on the island, telling them to walk to the lighthouse for help.