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[Assistant] The arsenic that most people think of, the white or yellow powder, was often the byproduct of the mining industry. Being a metal, it can often be found in mineral ore, inside mines, of other things like silver. And the byproduct was sold and traded and worked its way into a number of practical uses and dangerous plots. Poison, it seems,


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[Assistant] Is all around us. From the shrubs and flowers in our yards, to the water we brew our coffee with. Just how deadly they can be is all a matter of degrees. Thankfully, most people are good at avoiding any dangerous interactions with them. Honestly, aside from murder, dodging poison is basically just a matter of common sense.


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[Assistant] But every now and then, rational thought has been set aside. After all, belief is a powerful thing, and history holds countless examples of how dangerous it can be to set aside sound judgment. Because when folklore gets involved, all bets are off.


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[Assistant] Every story has context. The things that explain the how and the why of it all. The structural supports for the larger, more visible events. And for this story, that context was the Great Depression.


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[Assistant] Now, I doubt it's a period of American history that needs much explanation. And while it was a complex collapse of the economy, most remember the big things like the 1929 stock market crash. But the results of all of that took years to play out and recover, making the 1930s a very difficult decade for a lot of people.


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[Assistant] In Philadelphia, they felt it even harder. While the national unemployment rate was about 15%, it was over 25% in the city of Brotherly Love.


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[Assistant] Lots of people were out of work. Money didn't hold much value, even if you had some, and food was scarce. And when people get desperate, two things happen. Common sense goes out the window, and criminals step in to take its place.


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[Assistant] And that's where Herman and Paul Petrillo enter the picture. They were cousins, Italian immigrants, and struggling businessmen. Paul had been a tailor, and a pretty successful one, from what I can tell. And his cousin Herman worked as a spaghetti salesman, which, yes, was a thing. But the Depression changed all of that.


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[Assistant] So the cousins made a pivot into the insurance business. But not the typical sense. No, Paul decided to sell life insurance to sick people, getting himself named as their beneficiary, and then cashing the checks after their death.


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[Assistant] And Herman followed Paul's example, starting up a nice little racket involving home insurance and arson for hire, netting him and his clients a bit of profit.


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[Assistant] But business might not have been as lucrative as he'd hoped, so he eventually added in another idea that was guaranteed to print money. Counterfeiting.


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[Assistant] They were apparently flying pretty low under the radar for a long time. But all of that changed in June of 1938.


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[Assistant] That was when a guy named George Meyer was released from jail, and he went looking for work. He had this dream of starting his own business, but it would require a loan. And in the process of finding a lender, he met Herman Petrillo.


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[Assistant] Herman offered Meyer a sweet deal. He could either walk away with $600 in real currency, or $2,500 in counterfeit bills, both of which were enormous sums of money, given the economy.


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[Assistant] The catch? He had to help kill one of Herman's insurance clients. A young day laborer named Ferdinand Alfonsi, yet another of Philadelphia's many Italian immigrants.


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[Assistant] It seems that Alfanti's insurance policy offered a bigger payout if his death was violent, but accident. So the plan was for Meyer to hit him over the head and then dump him down a flight of stairs. And Meyer really did consider taking the job. The money was really good, after all. But in the end, he got spooked and ran to the police instead. And the police?


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[Assistant] It was too far-fetched, too complicated, and too difficult for them to just take in. But they did think that the counterfeit aspect deserved some more investigation, so the U.S. Secret Service was brought in to look into the claim.


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[Assistant] That agent, Stanley B. Phillips, reached out to Herman Petrillo to offer his own services as an assassin, with the hope that some of that fake money might exchange hands. And it worked.


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[Assistant] But in October of 1938, their reason for talking went away. It seems that Alfonsi had been admitted to a local hospital complaining of stomach pains.


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[Assistant] Herman offhandedly told Phillips, our intrepid undercover secret service agent, that it was a miracle Alfonsi was still alive at all considering they'd given him enough poison to kill six men.


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[Assistant] Something else happened, though. Independent of Philip's case, a trio of Philadelphia police detectives noticed something odd on Alfonsi's autopsy report. It was discovered that a huge amount of arsenic was inside him, and it was a cause of death that these detectives had been seeing a lot of lately, so they did their own digging around. In the wake of Alfonsi's death, arrests were made.


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[Assistant] Thanks to Phillips, the police were able to arrest Herman Petrillo, naturally, but they also brought in the victim's widow, Stella Alfonsi. It turns out she was the beneficiary on not one, but several insurance policies taken out in his name and was set to receive a massive payout, something the authorities considered good motivation for murder. And just like that, the murder case went to trial.


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[Assistant] They were hoping to convict Herman Petrillo and close the books.


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[Assistant] But what they uncovered in the process changed everything.


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[Assistant] I won't bore you with court proceedings. There's no need to get a blow-by-blow of the witness, evidence, and daily drama inside the courtroom. But there are a few things that we need to know. First, this wasn't a small operation.


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[Assistant] Herman and Paul Petrillo had been working for years with a large network of about 25 members in a sort of deadly social club. We know this because Paul's nephew, John, was in Sing Sing Prison serving time for the murder of his own girlfriend. And when John heard about the Alfonsi case, he reached out to the authorities to testify.


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[Assistant] Few people in the organization were connected through friendship. This was all business, which meant that when the police started poking around, everyone started to talk. And it was John's explanation of his own experience and how it all worked that gave the police the tools they needed to pull confessions from a number of people who only wanted to protect themselves.


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[Assistant] But here's where it gets wild. This wasn't a carbon copy of all those mafia stories that you might have seen or heard. This wasn't a network of trained killers, clandestine encounters, and big business. No, this was an organized, weaponized group of people who used two things to get the job done. Arsenic and folklore.


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[Assistant] You see, when people move from one place to another, they take things with them. Clothes, furniture, mementos, and their beliefs. At the core of the entire Patrillo conspiracy were a handful of women who leaned heavily on the old world beliefs that they had brought with them from Italy.


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[Assistant] Superstitions about black magic, and the evil eye, as well as folk remedies like amulets and potions.


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[Assistant] These women set up shop as spiritual advisors, a sort of modern version of what might have been viewed as a folk healer a couple of centuries earlier. And desperate people came to them looking for help.


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[Assistant] Mostly wives trapped in loveless or abusive marriages. They came looking for advice, for a solution to their worries. And these women, employed by Petrillo, had just the thing. A love potion.


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[Assistant] After spending some of a session or two chatting with these desperate housewives, offering general relationship advice, and getting a better feel for their situation, these witches, for a lack of a better term, would move things into the realm of the supernatural.


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[Assistant] Their love potions were explained very carefully to each customer in an effort to make it clear who would be to blame if things went badly.


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[Assistant] They were not to reveal the potion to their husband, but they needed to know the risks. If he was a good man, it would cure his bad behavior and bring romance and peace back into their house. A good outcome for sure.


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[Assistant] And women were buying these hand over fist. Each potion sold for the modern equivalent of roughly $5,000, making them a huge investment for the women who needed them. And of course, big business for Herman and Paul Petrillo. And the key ingredient in these potions? Oh, you know the answer. Arsenic.


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[Assistant] Through the investigation and trial, this entire ring of folklore-driven poisoners was exposed for what they really were. At least twelve so-called witches worked to sell the potions, while other members of the ring helped with the life insurance policies.


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[Assistant] One woman known by everyone at the time as the Philadelphia Witch was Carina Favado, who killed her husband, his brother, and another man to the tune of close to $30,000 in life insurance money. A small fortune today.


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[Assistant] When it was all said and done, the trial was able to pin at least 70 deaths on the Poison Witch insurance fraud. Of the 25 people who were tried, 22 of them were convicted. Because she turned state's evidence against the ringleaders, Carina Favado, the Philadelphia witch, got away with life in prison. But others weren't so lucky. Paul and Herman Petrillo were found guilty and sentenced to death.


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[Assistant] Looking back over the past few thousand years, you can see the stains left behind by poison, if you know where to look. From rulers to consumers, poison has made a dramatic appearance in just about every culture and century, and it's easy to see why.


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[Assistant] Remember the features that made poison so popular? It was almost always invisible and undetectable. It allowed the killer to be very far away from their victim when they died, and it was easy to explain away the visible symptoms with other, less treacherous rationale.


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[Assistant] Why assume it was murder when it could just as easily be a sudden illness? Ferdinand Alfonsi was admitted to the hospital for toxemia, blood poisoning from a bacterial infection. Yes, they got the toxic part right, just not the cause. So you can see just how easy it would be for folklore to step in and fill the gaps in so many of those stories.


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[Assistant] Without proof, all people had were guesses, and assumption is the foundation that so much of folklore is built on. So for a very long time, those who died from arsenic poisoning were rarely documented as such. You can see why a desperate killer would view that white powder as a miracle drug.


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[Assistant] But even toxins like arsenic eventually lost their clandestine power, thanks to modern science.


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[Assistant] Back in the 19th century, an American forensic scientist named Rudolf Withaus did a study of over 800 deaths that had been known to be caused by arsenic between 1752 and 1889. And what he found was shocking. Over half of them were the result of murder.


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[Assistant] Of course, our journey today makes all of that pretty clear. The black magic poisoning ring of the 1930s Philadelphia area found the sweet spot. Still early enough for folklore to have a major role, but modern enough to allow science to step in and solve it. A couple of centuries earlier in that story would have ended in a very different way. Poison made murder possible, profitable, and relatively easy. But it was folklore that made it unforeseeable.


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[Assistant] He died just eight years after they married. It was far too soon, and he was certainly far too young.


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[Assistant] But for those who knew James and Flory Maybrick, it wasn't all that much of a surprise. The couple had married in 1881, and those early days were full of so much promise.


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[Assistant] But just a few years in, it was all falling apart. In 1887, Flory discovered that her husband had a mistress, and had for some time. She also learned that their finances weren't as healthy as she had assumed, and it was going to force them to drastically alter their lifestyle, something that she was not very happy about.


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[Assistant] Well, rocky, to say the least. But in April of 1889, James became very sick. It seemed like a stomach bug with a lot of vomiting, and you know how it is, everyone assumed it was one of those seasonal things and that he would be better in a couple of days.


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[Assistant] But he wasn't. In fact, by May 11th, James was dead. And when the authorities took their troubled marriage into consideration, all of a sudden his death wasn't looking too natural. So an autopsy was performed, and traces of arsenic were found in his blood.


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[Assistant] Now, to make matters worse, the police found large amounts of arsenic in the house. And all of a sudden, Flory was a suspect, on trial for murder.


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[Assistant] Now, you and I might assume that all of the pieces point to the obvious answer. It seems like it was murder, given all the information that we know right now. But when Flory's defense attorney spoke up, he offered an alternative that had roots in Europe, and a decades old story.


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[Assistant] To understand why, we need to go back to a time in the 1850s in the Austrian state of Styria. It's best known for its wine, its castles, and bodybuilder turned acting legend Arnold Schwarzenegger. But the real talk of the town for a while was a group of people known as toxicophagy. Literally speaking, they were arsenic eaters.


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[Assistant] The practice is exactly what it sounds like. For a very long time, a small group of people developed a habit of intentionally ingesting small amounts of arsenic. They did it because they believed that it offered health benefits, like a more vibrant complexion and better endurance on long walks in the mountains there.


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[Assistant] In 1856, a doctor named W.B. Kestavin wrote a long article about the practice for the British Medical Association, but no one believed him. Arsenic was a poison, and who would do such a thing so willingly? Besides, no one had proof, so it was probably just a legend and nothing more.


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[Assistant] But more experts began to weigh in on it. Chemists like Charles Heisch and Henry Roscoe traveled to Austria and confirmed arsenic in the blood of those who claimed to use the poison as a vitamin. Roscoe even brought one of those white tablets back and tested it, and wouldn't you know it, it was arsenic.


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[Assistant] The locals said that it wasn't dangerous if it was done right. New users would start with a minuscule dose and slowly build their way up.


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[Assistant] Those at the peak were known to ingest twice the known lethal dose each day. But like a lot of drugs, both then and now, quitting the habit meant excruciating withdrawal symptoms, and there had been the occasional overdose as well.


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[Assistant] The scientific community wouldn't accept any of this as truth, though. At least, not until 1875, when two doctors from Scotland traveled to Styria and brought two arsenic eaters back with them. And there, in front of a group of fearful scientists, these two men popped a good amount of arsenic into their mouths and lived.


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[Assistant] Which brings us back to 1889 and the murder trial of Flory Maybrick, whose husband James clearly died as a result of ingesting arsenic. Her defense? James had been an arsenic eater, and their pharmacist confirmed that James purchased the stuff often.


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[Assistant] That was why the substance was found all over their house, and that was why he had become sick. He accidentally overdosed on a chemical that he voluntarily took for dietary reasons.


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[Assistant] Sadly for Flory, the jury didn't buy it. They were looking at a woman who had cheated on her husband, a man who had died by poison, and centuries of stories told them that murder was the only option to consider. So Flory was sentenced to death.


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[Assistant] The only silver lining in this story is that the public outcry over her trial saved her life. A petition was started and over half a million people signed it in the UK, requesting that Flory be given a second chance. As a result, the Queen stepped in and Flory's sentence was commuted to life in prison.


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[Assistant] As always folks, thanks so much for watching. Credits for today's episode are in the description below. Lore has been a podcast since 2015 with nearly 400 million downloads to date. You can learn more about this show, plus the book series and the television adaptation over at lorepodcast.com.


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


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[Assistant] Well, to be more precise, the mistake was all about where they had put their focus.


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[Assistant] Egyptologists had been uncovering the tombs of pharaohs there since the late 1700s, and they had made one big discovery after another. But each tomb also bore the distinctive and frustrating efforts of tomb robbers. And you know what?


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[Assistant] That was life in the Valley of the Kings. Honestly, to put a few dozen royal tombs all in the same small area and then just expect them to stay untouched for thousands of years was probably a bit optimistic. Sure, there was still a lot that archaeologists could learn from the leftovers, but it wasn't what they had dreamed of.


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[Assistant] And like I said, they were focused. But it wouldn't be until 1922 when they would realize their focus on the obvious had caused them to miss something spectacular. Because that was the year that they uncovered the tomb by which all others would be forever judged. A small, four-chambered burial site at the bottom of a narrow set of stairs belonging to a young pharaoh known the world over as King Tut.


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[Assistant] The folks before Howard Carter missed it because the entrance had been filled in with debris from ancient construction and countless floods.


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[Assistant] There were more visible things to pursue, and that kept them from noticing something better.


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[Assistant] Sometimes it pays to explore the shadows that few others have paid attention to. To go against the flow. To look for the outliers. Because as the story of the famous young pharaoh's tomb has shown us, it's often in the exceptions that we make the most surprising discoveries.


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[Assistant] In order to explore the unfamiliar, we have to start with what we already know. And trust me, we know a lot about this topic already. As usual though, the best place to begin is with a bit of context.


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[Assistant] Almost 400 years ago, all the way back to 1542, England passed its first anti-witchcraft act, making just about anything that smelled of witchcraft punishable as a crime. But the trouble actually started 25 years earlier in Germany, because that was when something massive happened in the world of Christians throughout Europe.


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[Assistant] People split from the Catholic Church out of protest to what they viewed as a major theological problem. They protested and then they tried to reform how the Church was run. And that's why the movement was called the Protestant Reformation. Easy enough, right?


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[Assistant] But what it also did was create competition. Before 1517, there was just one show in town, but all of a sudden there was a new player, and that created a rivalry. For churches all across Europe, their new challenge became proving that they were the most pious and fervent church around, to attract parishioners and their tithes.


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[Assistant] And what better way to make yourself look more holy than the competition than to point your finger at things you don't like and call it evil?


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[Assistant] Throw in an act of parliament declaring witchcraft illegal and you have all the ingredients necessary for a tragic social movement.


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[Assistant] And who suffered the most? Well in the stories we usually hear about, that would be women. Here are some stats to help make that more clear.


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[Assistant] Up in Scotland, who had a much more passionate approach to witchcraft crimes, that same period saw almost four times the number of people tried in court. 1733, to be exact. And how many were women? 86%.


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[Assistant] And you have to stop and think about the way that sort of focus changed the way people used a word like witch. If I asked you to drive over to your local Halloween store next October and buy me a witch costume, what would you bring back?


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[Assistant] One of the best ways to see the stereotype in action is to look at one of the earliest trials in England after that first anti-witchcraft law was passed.


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[Assistant] It started in February of 1582 when a woman named Grace Thurlow paid a visit to the local justice of the peace, a guy named Brian Darcy. And Grace had a crime to report.


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[Assistant] It seems that Grace had been having a hard winter. First, her infant child had fallen out of its crib and tragically died of a broken neck. And then immediately after that, Grace had come down with what was recorded as a lameness in her legs.


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[Assistant] Now you're probably wondering where the crime was, right? And I'm right there with you. Grace had experienced some horrible things, sure, but life is sometimes like that for no other reason than, well, being life.


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[Assistant] But for Grace, there was a criminal at the center of those events. Her neighbor, Ursula Kemp.


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[Assistant] Once Grace accused Ursula of being a witch, things started to roll pretty quickly. Justice Brian Darcy started to ask around, and sure enough, a lot of other people in town believed that Ursula was a witch as well.


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[Assistant] They even interrogated Ursula's 8-year-old son Thomas, who gave them a great story about his mom, who was feeding evil spirits by letting them drink her own blood. Ursula quickly confessed too.


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[Assistant] See, this was early enough in the days of England's witchcraft trials that most historians think that she was being optimistic about her odds. Rather than deny the charges outright and let things get nasty, she opted to give them what they wanted, thinking that it would result in a more lenient sentence. But sadly, that wasn't the case.


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[Assistant] In March of 1582, Ursula Kemp was found guilty of witchcraft, and then hanged for her crime.


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[Assistant] And her tragic story gives us the cookie cutter that will get used for more than a century. A marginalized person with no power or clout in her community, accused of having a familiar spirit who is then led to believe that confessing is the best way out. But all patterns have a flaw.


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[Assistant] They can be broken, and however much Ursula Kemp's story sounds like every single other witch trial you have ever heard before, there were exceptions to the rule. Most people just haven't heard them before. So pull up a chair and lend me your ear, because it's time to explore some long-forgotten shadows.


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[Assistant] There was more to the world than just England. Yes, they were a major player on the international stage, but in that post-1580 world of witch trials, they were far from the only show in town.


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[Assistant] In the German town of Trier, a wave of which trials occupy the community for 12 whole years, beginning in 1581.


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[Assistant] By the time it was over, 368 people had been executed. But what was unusual about the demographics of those victims is that over a third of them were prominent, powerful men. Like judges, college deans, and even priests.


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[Assistant] In Normandy, there was a 100 year period, beginning in 1564.


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[Assistant] That saw 59 people accused of witchcraft, and close to 50% of them were men. In fact, there was something else odd about the folks arrested there. Most of them were shepherds, and their magic seemed to be centered around stolen communion elements of bread and wine.


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[Assistant] And then in places like Ukraine, Finland, and Russia, the numbers were even higher with over 80% of the people accused of witchcraft being men.


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[Assistant] And while stats and percentages and all of that are good, the better path to take is a simple question. Why?


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[Assistant] Well, it comes down to Russia's historically isolated culture. That Reformation that I mentioned a few minutes ago, it didn't impact Russia the same way it did other places. Their moral stance on magic was more in line with the Middle Ages, meaning that cases had a lot less to do with theology and a whole lot more to do with secular laws that they broke.


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[Assistant] Because of that, Russian witchcraft accusations were almost always the result of some social power struggle. Leaders in the community battling for superiority. And in a patriarchal society, that meant that those struggles were usually involving men, not women.


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[Assistant] And those stories played out in very different ways compared to the trials in England or Scotland. Take the biggest and most deadly trial in 17th century Russia, which took place in a town northeast of Moscow called Luk. It started on December 6th of 1656 when a church service was disrupted by a woman having an unusual seizure.


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[Assistant] Her name was Tatiana, and her symptoms were frightening to most of the community.


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[Assistant] More chilling though was how her condition seemed to spread to others.


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[Assistant] Soon after that first disruption, women all over town were having seizures of their own.


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[Assistant] They call the affliction klikashestvo, which loosely translated means shrieker or spirit possessed.


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[Assistant] Think of it like the sort of demon possession stories that you've seen in Hollywood horror films like The Exorcist, but as a result of some nefarious person making it happen to others. And there were three known cures for someone with this condition.


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[Assistant] First, exorcism. That makes sense, right? It was possession, after all.


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[Assistant] And because of that, a second option was the direct intervention of the saints. But that was probably a bit less dependable, though. And that led to the third method for ending it. The same witch who started it could just as easily turn it off.


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[Assistant] For the next two years, more and more people fell victim to this supernatural plague. There were a couple of men who showed signs of the illness, but at least 33 women made up the majority. But remember, these were the victims, the targets, if you will. Clearly what the authorities were really looking for was the person responsible for it all.


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[Assistant] And soon enough, their suspicions led them to a prominent healer in the community. Tereska Malakurov. A man.


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[Assistant] Soon after Malakura was formally accused, the authorities in Moscow sent a special investigator to dig deeper into the case. He was a terrifying man named Ivan, although not the Ivan the Terrible. Just, well, I think you get it.


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[Assistant] And his methods involved interviewing all sorts of people and suggesting to them that Malik Kurov could be their attacker. Just about all of them, if you can believe it, nodded in agreement.


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[Assistant] So, Malikurov was arrested and tortured. Three times, in fact.


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[Assistant] The first time he confessed in nothing more than being a healer, but soon he graduated to admitting that some of his healing involved basic magic, before finally admitting, thanks to the pain of hot metal pincers, to being the criminal that they were all looking for.


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[Assistant] He also did that thing that happened in most witch trials, where the person in charge asked for more names of other witches, and wanting the torture to stop, he identified a whole bunch of random townsfolk as his accomplices.


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[Assistant] Interesting side note, three of the others that he accused were also town healers, and all of them bizarrely seem to focus mostly on healing hernias. I have no idea what significance that adds, but it's interesting nonetheless.


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[Assistant] On July 27th of 1658, Malikurov and two others were beheaded for their crimes. Ivan the investigator then wrote up his report and sent it back to Moscow, claiming that the problem had been solved and the criminals had been executed.


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[Assistant] But he stuck around in Luke for a little while. You know, just in case.


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[Assistant] And a while after that, after believing the problem had been solved, yet another woman fell ill with the same symptoms as the others. This time though, the community knew what pointing their finger might mean for them. So they kept their mouth shut. There were no more confessions or executions. Ever again.


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[Assistant] That was the conflict brewing in Iceland about a thousand years ago. Two worlds were slowly colliding, and as so often is the case, the wreckage would be measured in human lives.


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[Assistant] Iceland had always had magic as a part of their culture. After the Scandinavians settled the island back in the late 800s, they planted their own beliefs and practices in that new soil. It was already ancient stuff, even then, tied to Norse gods like Odin and Freyja. But it was magic outside the filters that we might use today.


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[Assistant] For so longs, you and I have heard terms like black magic or the dark arts, words that clearly draw a moral line that separates good from evil. But the magic of Iceland had no association with the Christian devil. Well, until the year 999, that is.


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[Assistant] That was the year that Christianity arrived on Iceland's shores. And when it did, the transformation that had already taken place all over Europe and elsewhere began to spread.


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[Assistant] But unlike those other places, it was a change that moved at a glacial pace. Honestly, it was so slow and it took place at only the highest levels of society that there was this big divide for a very long time between the everyday people's opinion of witchcraft and that of the authorities. So when a witch trial took place in Iceland,


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[Assistant] It was something different. It wasn't the theological battle between the Catholic and the Protestant churches that you would find in England, for example, nor was it the criminal felony trials of Russia. It was a showdown between the old world and the new.


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[Assistant] Oh, and one other detail that you probably saw coming. Most practitioners of old world magic in Iceland were men. They performed the rituals. They owned the magic books. They wrote and read the runes. Magic was the world of men.


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[Assistant] Men like John Rokevoldsen, who was accused in 1625 of killing several horses in his village and making a young boy deathly ill.


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[Assistant] Now in most cases at that time, Jan would probably have gotten out alive. But the local Balef was a guy who had moved to Iceland after living in Copenhagen for years. And he brought back all of those European, devil-centered notions of witchcraft with him.


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[Assistant] The result was a search of Jan's house, where papers covered in hand-drawn ruins were discovered, a form of magic known as Galdrar. And despite Jan's brother's insistence that it was benign, low-level stuff, just old country magic, the court didn't see it that way. So Jan Rokvoldsen was burned at the stake as a witch.


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[Assistant] Thirty years later, in 1655, another Icelandic village had their own showdown between the old and the new.


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[Assistant] And that was where a father and son team got into a bit of trouble with the local minister. And I need to apologize upfront here because almost all of the key players in this story are also named Yan.


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[Assistant] Jan Jansson and his father, also Jan Jansson, lived in a town called Issa Fjordor, and both men were well respected. Both of them even sang in the choir.


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[Assistant] But that didn't mean that they didn't ruffle feathers from time to time. And one day in church, the younger Janssen apparently punched a woman, which led to a lecture from the minister, the Reverend Jan Magnusson.


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[Assistant] Now, Magnussen had never been the healthiest of guys, but a few weeks after the incident, he noticed new ailments. He felt pressed to his bed at night by an invisible force, and noticed the sensation of needles being stabbed into his feet and legs.


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[Assistant] Today we'd probably see this affliction as sleep paralysis and pins and needles, but in his eyes, it was something darker.


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[Assistant] So Magnusson made a complaint to the local sheriff, telling him that the Jansons were tormenting him with witchcraft. It didn't help that one night around that time, the elder Jansson got drunk and ranted to some friends that he had sent an evil spirit to bother the minister.


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[Assistant] Adding everything up, the sheriff felt that the evidence was clear. The Jansons were practicing witchcraft and needed to be dealt with.


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[Assistant] Their punishment was easy enough. All they had to do was swear an oath that they hadn't colluded with the devil, which they gladly complied with. But Magnuson claimed that the night terrors continued, and so the father and son were thrown in jail. And there they sat for seven long months, before finally caving in and giving a formal confession.


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[Assistant] They claimed they owned a book of spells and had used it to kill cattle and poison the beer in town. They also said that they had created a type of rune known as a Fretranir, which roughly translated were fart spells, which caused their targets to be overcome with uncontrollable fits of flatulence.


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[Assistant] Today we might laugh. Back then, though, this was serious business, at least in concept, so the Janssens were tried and convicted before being burned at the stake on April 10th of 1656.


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[Assistant] Their possessions were then gathered up and awarded to Magnusson, and the matter was considered done and dusted.


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[Assistant] Except the night terrors returned. And now that Magnusson didn't have the Jansson men to blame, he leveled his accusations against the younger Jans sister.


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[Assistant] But she turned out to be a fighter. Not only had she lost her brother and her father, but she lost her inheritance and she didn't want to stand by and lose her own life as well. So she countersued Magnusson for wrongful persecution and won. And her reward for the victory in court?


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[Assistant] All her family's possessions were stripped from Magnus' hands and given back to her.


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[Assistant] I think we can all agree that there are a lot of witch trial stories out there. Over the eight years that I've been making this show, we have covered a lot of them. And while they tend to have the same tones and basic shape, there's always something special and important about each one.


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[Assistant] And yet they've missed out on something that we've all been blind to for a very long time. That the stereotypical, powerless, often outcast and marginalized woman was not the only witch that people knew about.


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[Assistant] Right there among them, to different degrees depending on the country you visited.


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[Assistant] ...were male witches who suffered the same prejudices and punishments as the rest.


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[Assistant] Honestly, I wish it could all be as fun and entertaining as fart spells and punching church ladies. But considering how many lives were lost, none of it is really humorous.


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[Assistant] Which trials happened? And it was deadly for thousands of people across Europe.


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[Assistant] And the impact of that panic can still be felt today through the typical connotations that most people associate with that one powerful word, which


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[Assistant] One of the most famous books about witchcraft was published way back in 1486, almost a century before witch trials really took off in England and Scotland.


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[Assistant] That's a recommendation from the Malleus Maleficarum. So was the shift from felony charges to church-driven claims of heresy. And of course, the sexist focus on women.


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[Assistant] Back in 2019 though, a new English translation of the book was published. And in it, a major change was made.


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[Assistant] The Latin word in the original document that had been translated to English in 1928 as witches was given a new look.


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[Assistant] Modern scholars believed a better interpretation would be sorcerers, given the context at the time that the book was written.


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[Assistant] It's a change that certainly takes the focus off of women and makes witchcraft a more unbiased crime.


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[Assistant] If only our approach to history and the stories of wish trials that it contains could be as neutral.


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[Assistant] There are few topics in folklore that are as hotly debated and deeply studied as witch trials. And it's a concept that's followed Europeans across oceans and mountains, like a dark stain left by every footstep along the way.


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[Assistant] And to truly understand the tragedy of it all, we have to remember all of the victims, not just the ones that we're usually told about.


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[Assistant] But there's one more powerful figure at the center of witch trial folklore who can't be ignored. And if you stick around through this brief sponsor break, I'll tell you all about him.


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[Assistant] When it comes to missing the outliers because of a focus on the obvious, the American public isn't innocent. Because the Salem witchcraft panic of 1692 happened here on our shores, in places we still live in and talk about today, it's easy to miss the forest for the trees.


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[Assistant] That's been one of my hopes over the years on this show, that I might help people look beyond the obvious and catch a glimpse of similar stories far away.


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[Assistant] But today, after doing so much of that, I wanted to bring it all back home, back to the granddaddy of all American folklore tragedies, the Salem witch trials.


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[Assistant] Don't worry, I'm not going to rehash all of it for you, but I do want to explore the statistics that we've gotten used to today. Of the 19 people executed by hanging in Salem, 14 of them were women. That's 74%. Right on track with similar trials back in England.


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[Assistant] Oh, and I also want to point out something else. Most of England's historic witch trials took place in the county of Essex on the eastern side of the country. And most of America's witch trials took place in a county in Massachusetts called, you guessed it, Essex. Weird, right?


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[Assistant] Anyway, of the 25 people who died as a result of the Salem trials, 19 were hanged, and 5 died in jail. Which leaves one execution that folks tend to forget. That of a man named Giles Corey.


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[Assistant] Giles was a local farmer who had been born back in England in 1611.


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[Assistant] He and his first wife Margaret emigrated to the colonies and moved to the city of Salem in the late 1650s. Then, out to the farming community just outside of town, known then as Salem Village. Today it's the town of Danvers, something that gets overlooked by people who are obsessed with the name Salem.


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[Assistant] Margaret Corrie passed away in 1664, and soon after Giles married for a second time. Then in 1684, she too passed away, and in 1690 he married again to an old widow named Martha.


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[Assistant] And in a lot of ways, Giles and Martha were still newlyweds when the witchcraft panic blew in just two years later. But other events in life had left Giles Corey with a


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[Assistant] A bit of a reputation. In 1675, for example, he beat one of his farmhands with a stick, and the young man, Jacob Goodale, actually died from the injuries. Giles managed to get out of court without anything more severe than a fine, but the rumor was that he had bribed the magistrate to do that.


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[Assistant] And after that, folks didn't look at him the same. And it's easy to see why. Throw in his reputation for being a cranky old man who was beyond stubborn and a bit scandalous, and it would have been better for old Giles Corey to lay low during the witchcraft panic.


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[Assistant] Instead, he and Martha attended the trials at the meeting house to see the spectacle for themselves. Martha though wasn't buying it. She was a lot more skeptical than Giles was and at some point just decided to stop attending. And that was not interpreted well by those in charge.


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[Assistant] On March 21st of 1692, Martha was arrested as a suspected witch and Giles, who really did believe in the stories being told, threw her under the bus. It was only later, after he tried to recant his testimony and save her, that he too got accused and arrested. That was April 18th.


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[Assistant] After that, he and Martha sat in jail for months, all the way up to September, when he was dragged out and put on trial. And while I won't get into the nitty gritty details of the trial, let's just say that his cranky attitude and his stubborn nature did not serve him well in that moment.


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[Assistant] Specifically, Jow's quarry decided that he wasn't going to let them turn him into another one of their spectacles.


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[Assistant] There was a common English law at the time known as standing mute, which essentially allowed someone accused of a crime to keep their mouth shut. No answering questions, no defensive testimonies, nothing. Just silence. And of course, that's the option that stubborn old Giles Corey decided to take. The court's response?


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[Assistant] He was sentenced to a method of torture known as peneforte due, which is French for strong and hard punishment. And the way the English interpreted the notions of strong and hard involves something horrific.


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[Assistant] Basically those sentenced to that fate were stripped naked and laid on the ground outside with a wide board over their body. Then in slow increments, large stones would be set on the board, building up over time to become an unbearable weight.


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[Assistant] The hope was that Giles Corey would eventually confess. That was the nature of the torture method, after all. Time to think and reflect. Or at the very least, to give in to the pain and beg for relief. But not Giles Corey.


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[Assistant] His torture began on September 18th of 1692 and lasted a full two days. With each passing hour, the pressure on his body became more and more intense. But through it all, he refused to confess to something that he didn't do.


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[Assistant] There's even a legend about the town sheriff, George Corwin, using his walking stick to push Cory's bulging tongue back into his mouth. And his final words?


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[Assistant] On September 19th, Jouscory reportedly uttered the simple phrase, more weight.


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[Assistant] Maybe it was a plea to end his suffering for good. Or maybe it was an act of stubborn defiance from an infamously stubborn old man.


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[Assistant] Regardless, he goes down in history as the only person to ever be pressed to death by court order in the United States.


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[Assistant] As always folks, thank you so much for watching. Credits for today's episode are in the description below. Lore has been a podcast since 2015 with over 400 million downloads to date. You can learn all about the show, plus the book series and the television adaptation over at lorepodcast.com.


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[Assistant] And of course, be sure to click the subscribe button and the bell icon so that you never miss a future episode. And if you enjoyed today's episode, click that thumbs up. And you can also follow the show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Just search for Lore Podcast.


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[Assistant] All one word, and then click the follow button. And when you do, say hi. I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for watching.


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[Assistant] The heading on the Change.org petition page said it all. Let people drink the red liquid from the dark sarcophagus. And even if you know exactly what that's a reference to, I want to tell you about every disgusting detail. Because, well, why not?


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[Assistant] You see, back in 2018, archaeologists announced the discovery of a large sarcophagus inside a 2000-year-old tomb in Alexandria, Egypt. Crafted of black granite, weighing in at a massive 66,000 pounds, and being completely sealed, you can bet this discovery captured the attention of a lot of people.


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[Assistant] But the moment they opened it up, that excitement seemingly took over the entire internet. Why?


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[Assistant] Because inside, along with the remains of the sarcophagus's original owner, scientists found a mysterious red liquid. And of course, the biggest question on everyone's mind was, what exactly is that red stuff?


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[Assistant] There were wild theories, of course. Red mercury used to preserve the body. Or a mysterious Egyptian elixir of life. Which is where cries from someone to taste it came from. Including that change.org petition. One, by the way, that over 36,000 people signed.


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[Assistant] It seems that even though the sarcophagus was unopened and buried 16 feet below the surface, all of those barriers eventually gave way and allowed local sewage to seep in at least once over the centuries. And it's a lesson we can all learn something from.


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[Assistant] Whether they are layers of stone, the bone and sinew of our own bodies, or humanity's best intentions, everything eventually breaks down.


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[Assistant] Every plot of land has a story to tell. Often it has to do with what stood there long ago and how that was erased in favor of something we see today. In some ways, that's our story today. In others, not so much.


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[Assistant] It was just a plot of land for a very long time. Being in northern Ohio, the land had belonged to the local communities of Native Americans for centuries. But the arrival of white settlers in the earliest parts of the 19th century created a tug of war over who was going to keep it.


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[Assistant] During the War of 1812, American troops and settlers sent wave after wave of attacks against the native peoples of the area, and they responded in kind.


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[Assistant] Lives were lost on both sides of the conflict, and for a while, it must have seemed like hell on Earth. And it didn't immediately get better.


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[Assistant] In fact, as new communities were built, their lack of sanitation led to a slew of diseases like dysentery and cholera. Child mortality was incredibly high, and many mothers died in labor. But people kept moving forward, kept trying, and kept holding on to their plans.


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[Assistant] Then the Civil War arrived. States and counties all over the country started to gather supplies and bring together their troops in preparation for the conflict ahead.


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[Assistant] In Northern Ohio, there were a lot of disparate military groups that needed rounded up and brought under one banner. And that meant that they also needed a place to live and train.


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[Assistant] The answer was a plot of land in Mansfield that would officially be named Camp Bartley after a former governor who'd been born there. But most people just called it by the more obvious name of Camp Mansfield. It was a training ground, a gathering point, and a waiting room.


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[Assistant] Waiting to be called to action, to be needed elsewhere, to march off to face mortal danger. While they waited though, danger found them.


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[Assistant] All those different people gathered from miles around brought their own collection of illnesses with them. Smallpox, typhoid, scurvy. Make yourself a board with the names of all sorts of 19th century illnesses on it and just throw a dart at it. Chances are good that you'll hit one that they suffered through.


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[Assistant] The end of the war, though, didn't bring an end to their trouble. Ohio as a state started to notice that they had more and more young men being sent to prison.


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[Assistant] These were men in a sort of middle ground, not quite young enough to fit into the juvenile correction centers that communities used, and definitely not the sort of hardened criminal that one might associate with prison.


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[Assistant] There were some who believed that these men, most of them young, first time offenders, just needed a chance to make things right. To improve themselves. To reform. So they proposed a new kind of prison that would aim for that lofty goal. A place where young criminals could unlearn their bad behavior and replace it with skills they could build a life around.


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[Assistant] On paper, it was a solid idea. Everyone's made mistakes, after all, and everyone deserves a second chance, right?


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[Assistant] It took a while to make things happen, though. Legislation needed to be passed, which took place in 1884, and funds needed to be raised. But even before all of that, they needed a plan to present to the powers that be. So they hired an architect by the name of Levi Schofield, known throughout Ohio for his impressive state mental health facilities.


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[Assistant] What Schofield drafted was a plan for an imposing building complex. Something that would send a clear message to everyone inside the facility that it was strong and professional and ready to accomplish things. Technically, it was designed in what's called


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[Assistant] Richard Sonian Romanesque style, but all you really need to know is that it looks a lot like a medieval castle.


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[Assistant] Like a lot of buildings at the time, there were two wings that branched off the central structure. Each wing was four stories tall, with a total of 1200 cells between them. The whole place is roughly 250,000 square feet, so


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[Assistant] The doors opened in September of 1896, but the work on the facility hadn't been finished at that point. Instead, those first 150 inmates were all put to work. Their job?


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[Assistant] Dig and install the sewer system for their own prison. And between that and a few other projects, it would take 14 more years before everything was accomplished.


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[Assistant] For the young men who were sent there, life was modeled on a particular prison method known as the Auburn system.


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[Assistant] Think of old time prison scenes in the movies where inmates were dressed in black and white striped uniforms, they get locked into their own cells at night, and they walk in lockstep with their feet chained together. That is the Auburn system.


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[Assistant] And that was the plan. Bring in new inmates who are young and impressionable.


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[Assistant] Give them 18 months to change their ways and learn new skills, and then return them to society. For a lot of those men, it worked too. They picked up trades like bricklaying, furniture building, farming, and even printmaking.


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[Assistant] Obviously, a lot of them stuck around longer than planned, and most of the inmates were far from happy to be there at all.


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[Assistant] But what I've spelled out for you was the goal, the plan, the way things were supposed to be. But as is so often the case, plans are meant to be broken.


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[Assistant] The biggest clue can be found outside. Proof that life, even inside the carefully planned facility of the Ohio State Reformatory, was far from perfect.


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[Assistant] It's a graveyard, one with more than 200 individual headstones.


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[Assistant] Now it's not unusual for most prisons to have a cemetery, but considering how short a stay inmates were expected to remain there, and the complete lack of any executions there, it does make one wonder what led to all those deaths. And the biggest category is one we've already covered. Illness.


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[Assistant] Whenever large groups of people get together, they share things. You know, conversations, interests, unexpected connections, and sickness. For the inmates of the Ohio State Reformatory, the biggest name on that list was tuberculosis, a bacterial infection that mostly takes up residence inside a person's lungs.


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[Assistant] The worst thing about tuberculosis, apart from the whole dying thing of course, was that for most people, they didn't know that they were sick until it was too late.


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[Assistant] They would spend weeks coughing and spreading the disease to others and in a closed up tight quarters sort of place like a prison. I think you can see how that wouldn't be a good thing. So a number of the graves outside can be blamed on TB and other illnesses like it.


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[Assistant] But sometimes it was the experience of imprisonment itself that took lives. Over the years the reformatory operated, a number of inmates took their own lives. Sometimes in horrific ways.


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[Assistant] The first on record from May of 1909 was Marshall Miller, who was only 19 years old at the time. According to the newspaper article from that week, it was believed that the shame of being there drove him to do it.


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[Assistant] 1916, Anthony Michalich took his own life by leaping from the top of one of the cell blocks. The 60-foot drop didn't instantly kill him, though, but the resulting injuries proved fatal. And another young man, 24-year-old Harold Sykes, died by suicide after he arrived in 1973 to begin a 10-year sentence.


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[Assistant] But the most horrific and in some ways legendary death was that of 22 year old James Lockhart. On January 30th of 1960, he stayed in his cell while the rest of the block went to dinner. While they were gone, he doused himself and his cell with lighter fluid and set everything on fire.


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[Assistant] By the time the guards arrived to put the flames out, he had covered himself with a burning mattress, and they couldn't reach him.


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[Assistant] One of the reasons historians believe the morale was so low inside Ohio State Reformatory was the solitary confinement area in the bowels of the facility, affectionately known as The Hole.


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[Assistant] In fact, a number of suicides took place inside those tiny one-man cells. They are tragic stories. Men driven to hopelessness by their oppressive conditions, who ultimately broke down under the pressure.


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[Assistant] Like most prisons, there are a few escape attempts, too. In fact, one of them started inside the hole. It seemed that a visitor brought a small handsaw and a few other handy tools to one of the inmates there, a guy named Merrill Chandler, and he led himself and a few others out along the way.


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[Assistant] In the resulting violence, a guard named Frank Hanger was killed. Chandler and three others were tried in Frank's murder, and two of them were sentenced to death.


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[Assistant] One last tragic story needs to be mentioned. Along with the prison blocks, there were administrative rooms, and the apartments for the prison warden. In November of 1950, death arrived inside that safe residential space.


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[Assistant] Helen Glatke was the wife of the warden at the time, Arthur Glatke, although he's sometimes referred to as the superintendent, which seems to be an interchangeable term for folks back then. On the night of November 5th, around 10pm,


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[Assistant] Helen went into a closet to track down a box of jewelry.


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[Assistant] Maybe she was setting out her clothing for the next day and wanted a necklace to match it all. Or perhaps she was putting something away. But in the process, she came across Arthur's loaded .38 revolver.


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[Assistant] Picking it up so that she wouldn't accidentally knock it off a shelf, she kept up her search while holding the gun. When she found the jewelry box and reached for it, her other hand slipped and the revolver fell to the floor.


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[Assistant] The impact caused the weapon to fire, and while the shot had anywhere to travel, it found her chest, piercing her left lung and ending her life.


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[Assistant] Arthur wouldn't last much longer at the reformatory. In 1959, at the age of just 56, he too experienced chest pain, this time in the form of a heart attack while working in his office. Staff rushed him to the hospital, but he was dead by the time they arrived.


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[Assistant] It wasn't what Helen and Arthur Glacke had planned, I'm sure, but as was true of so much around the Ohio State Reformatory,


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[Assistant] Plans are nothing more than a temporary structure. Time and tragedy will always wear our expectations down. But sometimes, if the stories are to be believed, they leave something else in their place. Shadows of the past.


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[Assistant] Now typically when you encounter a place like the Ohio State Reformatory, all of the legends and tales of unusual activity and unexplainable experiences are set within the building's walls.


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[Assistant] But that's not entirely the case here. It seems that long before the structure was a twinkle in the eye of architect Levi Schofield, there were already stories.


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[Assistant] It's rumored that at least one of the Civil War soldiers stationed at Camp Mansfield had to be discharged from service and admitted to a mental health facility because they claimed to see mysterious figures around the camp.


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[Assistant] Others reported disembodied voices, cold whispers that raked across their skin like a winter wind. Whether or not the rumors are true, no one can say for sure. I'll let you make up your own mind about that.


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[Assistant] Then there's the early days of the prison. It seems that a lot of the land it's built on was purchased from one family, Mr. and Mrs. Wise and their daughter Phoebe. And even after they sold most of their property off and the walls went up,


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[Assistant] They remained in their family home, despite the fact that it sat right across the road from their new neighbors.


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[Assistant] Legends have a way of captivating people, and it became pretty easy for people to assume that the Wise family had become wealthy from the sale of their land. So decades later, in December of 1891, three men set out to see if the stories were true.


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[Assistant] Now by that time the parents had passed away, and only Phoebe Wise was left, living in the house alone, like a hermit. But that didn't mean that those men would have an easy time.


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[Assistant] Yes, they broke in and yes, they tied her up so they could search the house.


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[Assistant] But they failed to find anything of value that might prove the legend. And not only that, but after they were gone, Phoebe untied herself, tracked down the authorities to report the crime, and became an instant celebrity in the process.


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[Assistant] Now sadly, that sort of fame led to a number of stalkers. Mostly men who were obsessed with marrying her. One man even went as far as to break into her house to propose. But he found Phoebe waiting for him there with a gun in her hand.


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[Assistant] It said that the guy demanded, marry me or shoot me, and that Phoebe happily shot him dead. The resulting court case found her not guilty.


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[Assistant] Inside the prison, though, there's a bit less delight. A superintendent's quarters where Helen Glatkey accidentally shot herself to death is rumored to be the home of unexplainable voices and the occasional whiff of rosewater perfume. A few have even claimed to hear a man and woman talking to each other, sometimes even arguing.


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[Assistant] There's a room inside the prison that's known to many as the chair room due to the fact that there's nothing inside it but a single chair. A number of people have reported the presence of some dark spirit there, which seems to focus its efforts on keeping that chair in its place.


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[Assistant] One man, Michael Humphrey, a former inmate who worked in the building later as a tour guide, claimed that he even challenged the ghost by threatening to remove the chair and burn it, only to have one of the people in his tour group knocked to the floor by an invisible blow.


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[Assistant] Then there's the room where James Lockhart burned himself to death. Cell 13.


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[Assistant] Over the years since the prison shut down, many investigators have passed through this area, and always seem to report mysterious voices that show up on audio recordings. Some have felt a dark, oppressive atmosphere there, and a few have even recorded physical touches, as if whoever or whatever still resides there is striking out in anger.


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[Assistant] And finally, there's the hole. If you're the sort of person who believes that traumatic experiences and horrible tragedies can actually leave a mark on a place, like an invisible stain, then this area is for you. Visitors to the hole have noticed a lot of the typical signs of unusual activity, like cold spots and a darkening of their mood.


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[Assistant] Along with that though, some have heard voices when no one else is around.


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[Assistant] Perhaps the cries of desperate men, echoing up from the past. Sometimes they are murmurs or bits of conversation, and sometimes they are screams.


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[Assistant] And fans of the television show Ghost Adventures may remember a visit to the hole that resulted in something a bit more interactive. One of the tour guides who was interviewed for that episode described a lot of unexpected things, like the presence of some dark force in the room and the echo of disembodied footsteps.


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[Assistant] At one point though, he felt as if the invisible entity in the room had stepped right in front of him. So he decided to make a stand.


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[Assistant] I'm not afraid of you, he spoke into the silence, hoping it would push the spirit away.


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[Assistant] The Ohio State Reformatory is no longer in operation. It went through the sort of life cycles that we've come to expect from similar social experiments. It worked as designed for a while, and then, sometime around the 1930s, things started to deteriorate.


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[Assistant] The facility became incredibly overcrowded, with more than 2,200 inmates in a space designed for half that number.


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[Assistant] Lack of space led to more failures in the care of human lives, and by the late 1970s, a coalition known as the Council for Human Dignity had filed a lawsuit to fix it. They wanted, in a sense, to reform the reformatory.


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[Assistant] It took a few years, but that lawsuit was resolved, and by December of 1990, everyone inside was moved to other, more modern facilities. It had operated for nearly a century, seeing over 150,000 young men spend their time there. Most left to move on with their lives, but a good number of them sadly met tragedy instead. The prison hasn't faded away though.


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[Assistant] And believe it or not, most people today have seen it. Although without knowing what they are looking at.


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[Assistant] After all, it's hard to beat that imposing castle-like façade.


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[Assistant] So whenever it's been necessary to find a place that practically exudes that


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[Assistant] The old time prison experience, Ohio State Reformatory usually makes that list. Scenes from Air Force One were filmed there, as were several television shows. There have even been a few music videos shot there from artists like Godsmack and Lil Wayne.


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[Assistant] But the most memorable appearance of the old prison is perhaps the most on point.


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[Assistant] If the very first inmates there were known for constructing the prison's sewer system,


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[Assistant] Then it's more than ironic that most of our memories of the place, again, without being aware of it at all, are related to that part of the building's infrastructure.


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[Assistant] Because it's in the prison's most memorable turn on the silver screen that we get to see a desperate and determined inmate literally crawl through that sewer on his way to freedom. The film? Oh, I'm sure you already know what it is by now.


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[Assistant] It was supposed to be a new beginning. Robert and John had both served time at Ohio State Reformatory, but by 1948, they were both out on parole.


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[Assistant] Not that they were ready to let go though. In fact, it seemed that there were quite a few grudges being held between the two of them.


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[Assistant] Now I won't pretend to understand their experience inside the prison, and I always try my best to avoid assumption.


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[Assistant] But it's also human nature, that desire for clarity, for answers. So I want to believe that their treatment there was less about reform and more about abuse. Honestly, whenever a prison system breaks down, that's the typical path, so it's probably a safe guess.


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[Assistant] Which is why, after a lot of get-togethers where the pair of men shared their frustrations and personal horror stories, they both expressed that sort of desert island idea of what if. Given the chance, would either of them get revenge? Would they return like for like? And if so, how?


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[Assistant] And that's why on July 20th of 1948, the two men headed out looking for one of their former guards, a man named Red Phillips. The trouble was, Red was at home, and they were both already wound up and ready to follow through on their plans, so they fell back on the next best name on their list.


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[Assistant] John Nibel, the Superintendent of the Prison's Farm.


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[Assistant] Later on, Robert would tell the authorities that Nibel had frequently forced him and others to work in the fields under the blazing sun, usually with clubs in their hands.


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[Assistant] Memories of those hard 110 degree days were difficult to forget. When they knocked on the door, Nibel answered,


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[Assistant] Robert told the older man that his car had broken down and asked if he could use the phone for help. Once Nibel let him in, Robert's partner John followed him. In the confusion of multiple people entering the door, Robert pulled out a gun and aimed it at Nibel.


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[Assistant] John went to see if anyone else was home and found Nibel's wife and 22-year-old daughter upstairs and quickly brought them down.


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[Assistant] All three of them were forced to leave the house at gunpoint, climb into the car, and strip naked. Then after a short drive to the outskirts of town, they pulled over and dragged them out.


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[Assistant] It was another dry dusty field. I'm willing to bet that the soil was still warm from the hot summer sun earlier that day. And while I can't find a reason in the records


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[Assistant] And the suffering that he was about to deliver in a similar location.


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[Assistant] The only silver lining that I can point out is that Robert Daniels and John West didn't draw the experience out. Nibel was shot almost as soon as they arrived, right in front of his family, and his wife and daughter followed a moment later. And then the two killers went on the run, hoping to escape not only the local authorities, but leave the state of Ohio far behind them.


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[Assistant] The trouble was they weren't subtle about it. Four more lives would be taken by the pair of men before they found themselves stopped at a police roadblock two days later, on July 23rd. But despite their stolen truck being loaded with all sorts of weapons, only John West stepped out of the vehicle to open fire on the authorities. He was killed a moment later.


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[Assistant] Robert Daniels, for his part, claimed to be asleep during the shootout, but put up quite the act of bravado in the coming days under police custody. He was all bluster and swagger and confident defiance, fully admitting to all of the murders and even taking credit for planning the whole crime spree.


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[Assistant] But Bravado is never bulletproof, and after a very public trial and a guilty verdict, his act started to crumble.


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[Assistant] But it was too late by then. The public saw him as a vicious, cold-blooded killer who would do it again if he were set free, and they cried out for his execution.


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[Assistant] In fact, according to one of the local papers at the time, at least four nearby counties threw their hats in the ring to be considered as the host for Robert's final moments.


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[Assistant] On January 3rd of 1949, Robert Daniels met with a priest one last time, and it's said that all of his bravado was gone. When he died, it wasn't with his fist clenched in defiance, it was with a crucifix in one hand and a rosary in the other. Confidence had been replaced with contrition, if only at the final moment.


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[Assistant] It seems that in the face of death, even the strongest facade has a way of crumbling, breaking down to nothing more than ruins.


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


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


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


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


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[Assistant] In November of 1992, Eric Laws did what we all wish we could do. He put his shovel into the ground and unearthed a mountain of gold and silver.


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[Assistant] Eric was standing in a farmer's field in the village of Hoxham in Suffolk, England. And I don't think I have to paint an elaborate picture for you to catch the excitement, because what he found was extraordinary. Over 15,000 Roman-era coins, loads of silver spoons, and over 200 items made from solid gold.


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[Assistant] From an archaeological standpoint, it was priceless. And because he immediately stopped and reported the discovery to the British government, they awarded him nearly 2 million pounds for his honesty. But here's the thing.


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[Assistant] Eric wasn't actually out hunting for treasure that day in 1992.


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[Assistant] He never stepped into that field looking for gold. He was only trying to do a favor for the farmer who worked that field.


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[Assistant] You see, that man, Mr. Watling, had lost his favorite hammer, and Eric simply offered to help find it.


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[Assistant] The good news is, he did. In fact, it's on display with pieces from the Treasure Hoard. And it's a powerful example of an age-old problem that all of us have faced a few times in our lives. People lose things.


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[Assistant] Call it misplaced. Call it temporarily absent. Call it whatever you want. But the truth is, humans are very good at losing things, and just as good at inventing ways to rediscover them. And sure, the folklore surrounding that might come from a bygone era, but the history of it all is filled with amazing stories. So if you're ready, it's time to do some digging. I'm Aaron Manke, and this is Lore.


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[Assistant] All of us have attachments. That favorite handbag. A pocket knife we've carried for years. Maybe a deck of cards from a lost loved one that you've always kept in a safe place. It's easy to grow attached to certain objects, especially if they're personal in origin. But we're also good at losing things.


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[Assistant] Sometimes it's just the remote control or the car keys, things that can be frustrating but never heartbreaking. But it's at the intersection of those two characteristics, our emotional attachment to certain items and our propensity to lose things, where the real drama begins.


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[Assistant] In the year 1210, a teenager named Fernando Martins left his home in Portugal to join a monastery. Within a few years, he was ordained as a priest and eventually found himself living and working in a Franciscan abbey under the priest the entire order was named for, Saint Francis of Assisi.


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[Assistant] Now one of the jobs Fernando had was guiding all the other members of the Order in their studies. He was a smart guy, and the others learned a lot from him. But one day, his prized copy of the Psalms went missing.


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[Assistant] Now, it's bad enough to lose a book, but this was in an age when books were rare, and this particular copy had all of Fernando's personal notes scribbled in the margins.


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[Assistant] As you'd imagine, he was heartbroken. So he did what any good friar would do. He prayed that God would return the lost book to him. And soon enough, it did.


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[Assistant] It turns out a novice had pocketed it and then quit the abbey, but guilt must have overshadowed the man, and he came back and handed the book over.


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[Assistant] In 1232, Pope Gregory IX canonized Fernando, although that's not his name that people know him by today. His given name in the church was Anthony, and ever since Catholics around the world have prayed to St. Anthony whenever they lose a precious item.


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[Assistant] But religion hasn't been the only tool people have relied on to find lost objects. For centuries, some people have used books of secret knowledge known as grimoires. Oftentimes, it was because these books contained spells and incantations that claimed to reveal the location of lost things.


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[Assistant] Occasionally, though, it was also because someone believed that they could use those grimoires to control spirits who would assist in the finding process.


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[Assistant] In the 18th and 19th centuries in America, these grimoires took on a new life as tools for treasure hunters. It was believed that by using the spells inside them, or by following the elaborate charts drawn on their pages, that everyday people could track things down.


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[Assistant] One thing that I've noticed in my years of research is that during the 1800s, there was a widespread practice in the Pennsylvania area of using a grimoire known as the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses to locate buried treasure. People who owned that book would offer their services for anyone interested in digging for gold.


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[Assistant] Also common in that place and time was the folk magic practice known as pow-wowing. And central to it was a book known as The Long-Lost Friend. In fact, one of the rituals described inside involves breaking a young twig off a tree on the first night of Christmas.


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[Assistant] Over the years that tool evolved into a pair of bent rods, usually made of metal.


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[Assistant] And I think all of us have seen a TV show in our lifetime that includes someone using dowsing rods. I remember them from Unsolved Mysteries back in the 80s, and the practice even makes an appearance on the modern show The Curse of Oak Island. But whether it actually works or not is a topic of discussion that feels like it's never going to go away.


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[Assistant] Back in 1917, the United States Geological Survey actually published a report on dowsing and divining rods, and it's so revealing that it's almost comical. Let me read you a couple of quotes.


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[Assistant] The use of a so-called divining rod in locating mineral or finding hidden treasure is a curious superstition that has been a subject of discussion since the middle of the 16th century and still has a stronghold on the popular mind. And then they add this.


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[Assistant] It should be obvious to everyone that further tests by the US Geological Survey of this so-called witching for water, oil, or other minerals would be a misuse of public funds.


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[Assistant] Clearly, you know a superstition has caught on with enough people when a government agency needs to step in and shoot it down in an official paper.


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[Assistant] Still, the important thing I think we should all walk away with isn't necessarily whether or not dowsing actually works, but that just a century ago, so many people believed that it did, that the government had to step in.


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[Assistant] Sometimes belief doesn't keep up with the facts. And while that can lead to tragic results in the right circumstances, it has also left us with a deep well of surprising folklore. And uncovering that can be more than thrilling.


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[Assistant] No, not peep shows, and these little stones have an enormous story to tell. But let's begin with how they work, and the best way to explain that is through a story.


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[Assistant] Back in the early 1900s, there was a pair of sisters living in Utah, in the town of Tooele. And according to the story, one day they were both out on a mountain in the area when they found two unusual stones.


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[Assistant] Each sister took a stone, and both of them noticed that if they brought the stones up to their eyes, they could look through them and see things that weren't actually there. And when one of the sisters claimed to see a horse that her brother had recently lost, she told him about it and described the location visible through the stone. Later that same day, he went to that spot. And wouldn't you know it, there was his horse.


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[Assistant] And stories like these pop up all over Utah. In another tale, a woman from the city of Logan claimed to be able to see the location of drowned bodies in a nearby lake simply by using her peepstone. And when a family wants nothing more than to know where their lost loved ones are buried, you can see why her guidance was so valuable.


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[Assistant] But the relationship between peepstones and Utah seems to go much deeper. In fact, they both share a common, recurring connection. Mormons.


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[Assistant] You see, there's apparently a description in the Book of Mormon about God touching a number of stones and then handing them over to his people to guide them. These stones were described as white and clear, almost like rounded fragments of broken glass.


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[Assistant] And some historians think this goes back to the state of New York, where Mormon founder Joseph Smith lived for a decade or so in the early 1800s. And at that same time, people all over western New York were obsessed with what they called money digging. Basically digging for the possibility of finding buried treasure.


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[Assistant] Now of course, treasure is a complex term. You have to think about what would have been valuable to people in the 1820s. And while gold and silver are on that list, so are things like salt, fresh water, and the welfare of their livestock. And it seems that Joseph Smith participated in that early money-digging fad.


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[Assistant] For example, he and his father, Joseph Sr., were hired often to help locate fresh water and sink wells for it, and they apparently became popular as water wizards with locals. And in 1825, the Smiths were approached by someone who claimed that there was an old mine near them with gold coins inside.


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[Assistant] But they needed help finding it. Sadly, that search never turned up the goods.


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[Assistant] And the secret weapon in Joseph Smith's arsenal? He claimed to have been given a pair of seeing stones at the same time as the golden tablets, what the Book of Mormon is said to be based on.


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[Assistant] Stones that were said to give him the ability to view those tablets in a special way, and to translate them.


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[Assistant] Smith himself even referred to these two clear stones as spectacles, highlighting both their physical nature and their purpose. Clear, glass-like stones through which the user peeps at hidden secrets. In other words, peepstones.


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[Assistant] As far as historians can tell, these stones, or at least the idea of them, eventually traveled across America to what is now the state of Utah. In fact, in 1841, just three years before his death,


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[Assistant] Joseph Smith is reported to have shown off his scene stones to a group of 12 individuals, one of whom was Brigham Young, who would go on to found Salt Lake City.


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[Assistant] And one can't help but wonder if that sort of folklore, a belief in magic stones that reveal hidden things, just sort of climbed onto those wagons as they headed west. All we know for sure is that stories of peepstones are now scattered all throughout Utah history.


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[Assistant] For some though, no tool was necessary. All they needed was their mind and a special gift to find the things their clients were looking for.


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[Assistant] Luvia was born in 1902 in the little town of Plainfield, Vermont. From everything I've read, there wasn't anything special about her early years. But somewhere in her teens, all of that changed.


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[Assistant] At first it was nothing more than a fun thing that she did for classmates, helping them find things they had lost.


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[Assistant] But as she got older, that ability matured into something more powerful. She could look at a friend, and tell them that a letter was on its way to them, who it was from, and when to expect it. She could even predict visitors to the homes of her friends, days in advance.


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[Assistant] In 1922, Lluvia married George Laferrira, and they settled into life together.


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[Assistant] But life with Luvia was never normal, however much it might have seemed like it was at first glance. Yes, her house was neat and tidy, and it looked nothing like Hollywood depictions of a fortune teller's shop, but magical things are said to have happened there.


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[Assistant] Luvia explained how her abilities worked to anyone who asked. She didn't use props like seeing stones. No, all she had to do was close her eyes and feel for an answer. I get impressions, she told the reporter in the 1960s, which are very much like a memory in pictures and sounds.


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[Assistant] Honestly, the more you read about her, the more Luvia sounds like the psychic in that classic Exiles episode, Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose. She distanced herself from the public trappings that are usually associated with psychics who search for things, and spoke out against the charlatans who abuse that trust.


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[Assistant] At the same time though, her track record backed up her own humble claims.


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[Assistant] For example, Luvia once received a telephone call from a woman in Montpelier, Vermont, who was desperate to find her missing son. Without even visiting the mother in person, Luvia had one of her impressions and described what she saw.


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[Assistant] The child she said was near water, sitting beneath something feathery to the west of their home.


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[Assistant] After heading in that direction, the distraught parents found him in a wide creek huddled for warmth beneath the branches of a pine bush.


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[Assistant] So good was Luvia at finding lost people and objects that, for decades, the police in the area returned to her when things became hopeless.


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[Assistant] One state trooper told the story of reaching out to her for help when a local man went missing from his home near the railroad line.


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[Assistant] Walk down the tracks near his place, she told the police. And when you come across an object that he dropped, he's going to be nearby to the side of the tracks, laying by something round.


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[Assistant] And sure enough, after finding a matchbook on one of the railroad ties, the police stepped into the field beside it, and that's where they found the man's body. And nearby it, a large wooden spool that had once held some sort of cable.


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[Assistant] While some people came to Luvia for help with a lost loved one, the most common requests were about missing items. One woman who wrote an article about Luvia in the 1960s said that she visited the psychic to find a coat she had misplaced.


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[Assistant] Not a matter of life and death, for sure. But when you love something, you want it returned, right?


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[Assistant] Lovia told her what she saw. That the coat was left on the back of a black chair. But that didn't sound right. She had looked at all of her chairs at home, but the coat was nowhere to be found.


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[Assistant] But finally after asking around, she found the neighbor who remembered finding it and putting it in the back of a closet to hold for her. And where had she found it? Over the back of a black chair. One last story.


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[Assistant] A local man named Paul Heller published an article a few years ago about an experience he had with Luvia when he was a boy.


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[Assistant] His father had been keeping an eye on one of their cows, Daisy, who was pregnant and close to giving birth. But one day, she went missing.


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[Assistant] Paul and his father looked high and low, but couldn't seem to find the cow.


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[Assistant] So when a neighbor suggested Luvia Laferrera, they decided to take a chance.


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[Assistant] She answered the phone, listened to their problem, and then paused for a moment before telling them about her impression.


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[Assistant] Daisy, she told them, was in a ravine nearby that was littered with boulders, and she seemed to be stuck and in trouble.


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[Assistant] Paul's father knew exactly where that spot was and rushed over. Sure enough, there was Daisy, caught in a barbed wire fence and unable to walk away.


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[Assistant] Luvia Laferrera passed away in 1977 at the age of 75. And with her departure, Vermont lost a unique individual who helped countless people for over five decades. People who believed there was an answer to their troubles. Even when they couldn't see it for themselves.


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[Assistant] All of us probably have a powerful memory from childhood about a precious toy we lost. Maybe it was a pet that ran away and never returned.


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[Assistant] Or that feeling you get in the basement when you stand in front of that mountain of boxes and you know the thing you're looking for is in there... somewhere?


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[Assistant] I'm willing to bet that humans have been misplacing things for about as long as we've been picking objects up and setting them down. So it isn't unreasonable to assume that we've been looking for ways to find them for just as long.


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[Assistant] From holy saints to forbidden books of magic, people have been willing to do just about anything for a shot at being reunited with whatever it is they've lost.


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[Assistant] And while the superstitions that have grown up around that notion might seem like they are from an old bygone era, they've done a pretty good job of hanging on. Right up to today.


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[Assistant] Luvia Laferrera is a great example of that. Her life and career spans that journey from the days before automobiles were in every garage, all the way up to the space age, and it seems that the demand for her services never really faded away.