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[Assistant] Now, just because that first show went off without a hitch, it doesn't mean that they were all so smooth. She suffered her fair share of injuries over the years. But none of that slowed Zazzle down. This was her art form, her passion, and nothing would stop her.


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[Assistant] Until, well, it did. In 1891, while on tour in New Mexico, the unthinkable happened. But it wasn't her beloved cannon that betrayed her. No, after performing her cannonball act successfully, Zazzle fell from a tightrope. She survived, but she broke her back, ending her career in the circus forever.


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[Assistant] Almost like a fairy tale, we start with seven brothers. Their names were Albert, Otto, Alfred, Charles, John, Henry, and Gus. But don't worry, there won't be a quiz at the end. Their father, August, a German immigrant, raised the boys on the road, along with their one sister, Ida.


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[Assistant] Together the family moved from city to city, town to town. But there was one spot that always seemed to draw them back. A little place called Baraboo, Wisconsin. And in 1875, the family landed there for good.


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[Assistant] Now, Baraboo was an industrial hub. Or rather, it had been ever since white settlers had forcibly removed the indigenous Ho-Chuk population. The land was on a river, you see, and the settlers wanted to build mills, which is exactly what they did.


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[Assistant] Baraboo was soon producing wool, lumber, flour, and more, shuttled all over the country via a robust railroad system.


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[Assistant] But it wouldn't be the wool or flower or lumber that would really put Baraboo on the map. It would be those seven brothers.


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[Assistant] By the mid-1880s, most of the brothers were grown up. So like any enterprising young people, they decided to start the business. And their business just happened to be show business.


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[Assistant] The eldest brother, Albert, had worked as an acrobat, juggler, and tightrope walker in circuses before, so they decided to start a circus of their own. They named this new endeavor after themselves. Sure, their surname changed a little, switching from the Germanic version into English, a U with an umlaut replaced with an I, but the pronunciation stayed the same. Ringling.


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[Assistant] That's right. Together, these men were known as the Ringling Brothers.


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[Assistant] And each had their own role to bring to their fledgling circus life.


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[Assistant] Before long, the Ringling Brothers had become one of the biggest circuses in the United States, and it was only getting larger. They started buying up and absorbing other shows, including the legendary Barnum and Bailey, which the brothers acquired in 1907.


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[Assistant] And for a while, they kept those shows all touring separately. But when audiences started to dwindle during World War I, they merged into one whopping super circus.


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[Assistant] And let me tell you, this was a fever dream of a show. The massive circus boasted 1,100 people, 735 horses, and almost a thousand other animals. It took 90 to 100 brightly painted train cars to transport everything from place to place. The age of Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey had arrived.


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[Assistant] Now, just imagine being a farm kid out in the rural Midwest and seeing one of these spectacles chug through town. A seemingly endless train flashing with gold leaf and red paint.


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[Assistant] Maybe you'd even catch a glimpse of a lion's paw or an elephant's trunk poking out from between the silver bars. And then, tents billowing up in an open field. The smell of roasting peanuts, knife throwers, and trapeze artists, and strongmen. It must have seemed like something from another world.


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[Assistant] And to many people, it was another world. One that provided an escape from their daily lives and worries. So much so that running away to join the circus has basically become shorthand for running away from your problems. Running away from your ghosts.


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[Assistant] But the thing is, not even the circus can run forever. Every winter, Ringling Brothers returns home to its off-season base for rest, training, and preparation for the year ahead. For the first 36 years of their existence, that base was a massive circus enclave called Ringlingville, located right in the heart of the city where it all began. Baraboo, Wisconsin.


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[Assistant] And trust me, although the brothers are long gone by now, Baraboo hasn't forgotten them. And neither have the ghosts.


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[Assistant] The circus is a magical place. A place where the impossible is made real. And so it makes sense that for a spectacle as larger than life as the Ringling Brothers Circus, some of their ghosts were larger than life too. And I mean, a lot larger.


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[Assistant] The Ringlings got their first elephant in 1888, just four years after their circus began. And the animal quickly became a symbol of, well, the circus itself. They would continue to tour with the gentle giants until 2016, when animal rights activists won a long battle to remove animal acts from the circus.


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[Assistant] And yet, according to legend, some of those elephants never quite escaped the circus, even after they died.


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[Assistant] According to a popular Baraboo legend set in the winter of 1930, one family became plagued by an elephant ghost right on their own property. Allegedly, Baraboo residents Alice and Patrick Green, along with Alice's widowed mother Rose, awoke one night to a strange thumping noise, so loud it made the house shake. And it only got stranger from there.


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[Assistant] A few days later, a neighbor came over for tea and asked the Greens about the horse they were keeping in their garage. Which would have been standard small talk, if not for one problem. The Greens didn't own a horse. Or any animals for that matter. But apparently the neighbors had spotted a giant hulking animal there in the night.


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[Assistant] Things reached a fever pitch when, one morning, the Greens awoke to find the very same garage had been flattened to rubble. At that point, they called the cops. Four officers kept watch from dusk till dawn, only to be terrified by smashing windows, loud bangs, and the house shaking so hard that everyone was knocked to the floor.


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[Assistant] After that, the police chief did some detective work. It turns out Rose's late husband had been the head elephant trainer for the circus. And that flattened barn on the property? Well, it seems like it had been made with wood salvaged from none other than the old elephant barn where he had worked.


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[Assistant] And with this information in hand, the police chief believed that he had solved the case. Clearly the family was being tormented by the ghost of an angry elephant. Come to seek vengeance on the widow of the man who had mistreated it.


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[Assistant] It's a good story for sure, but I have to admit that all of these details appear to originate from a single article in a December 1953 issue of Fate magazine. And in fact, the police chief cited in the story a guy named August Marlowe doesn't even seem to have existed. So, take the whole story with an elephant-sized grain of salt.


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[Assistant] But while the story is likely fiction, that hasn't kept it from spreading. Not to mention the fact that some residents still claim to hear the trumpeting of elephants near the former site of Ringlingville to this day. And of course, the phantom elephant isn't the only ghost in Baraboo.


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[Assistant] Take, for example, the very haunted Al Ringling Theatre. Named for Albert, not Alfred, if you're keeping track. Al had built the place himself. Or rather, paid exorbitantly to have it built as a gift to the city where he got his start.


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[Assistant] The theater is lavish, too, with 874 seats, including 17 box seats. An iron and glass canopy hangs over the entrance with a triumphal arch above and hand-painted murals all across the ceiling.


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[Assistant] But here's the thing, the theater's beloved founder barely got to enjoy his creation. He died, you see, on New Year's Day of 1916, just six weeks after opening night. But hey, while Al never spent much time there in life, legends claim that he more than made up for it. In death.


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[Assistant] Now, if the stories are true, Al Ringling's ghost has been seen lingering in the theater in one particular spot. Box 17. As the story goes, a set designer at the theater brought his three-year-old daughter to work one day. The young girl began smiling and waving up to Box 17. She told her father that she was waving at a man. But when the designer looked up, the box was empty.


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[Assistant] Later that same day, as the little girl and her father left the theater, a photo in the lobby caught the child's eye. Excitedly, she pointed and told her father that that was the man she'd been waving to. And I think you already know what comes next. It was a photograph of Al Ringling.


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[Assistant] But he's not the only ghost in that theater. Far from it. There's a little girl in a poofy dress, a little boy in suspenders, a woman in white searching silently for her lost baby. A baby, according to the tales, who fell to its death from the theater balcony years before. And can still be heard crying through the audio equipment.


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[Assistant] And then there's the violent Shadow Man, who haunts the theater's leftmost box seats, and according to the story, once plunged his hand right into a cleaning woman's abdomen and squeezed her organs. Talk about a stomach ache. And believe it or not, all of these accounts are just scratching the surface.


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[Assistant] Speaking of scratching, one story claims that a group of boys went adventuring in the rooms below the theater, but got lost and died there. Their ghosts are still scratching on the walls trying to get out to this very day. Is there any historical evidence to back this story up? No. No missing boys are on record, but that doesn't keep the whispers from spreading.


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[Assistant] Oh, and one last theater ghost. But this one isn't a person. Not a whole one, anyway.


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[Assistant] Allegedly, a workman unloading steel for construction back in 1915 accidentally severed his own finger.


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[Assistant] But rather than go quietly, this finger, and I quote, took on a life of its own, flicking the lights on and off, and even poking theatergoers. And even today, when musicians in the orchestra get their notes wrong, they often blame it on the ghostly finger, reaching out from beyond the grave, to tap the wrong note.


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[Assistant] Ringling Brothers, Barnum, and Bailey were, without a doubt, the biggest act in town. But they were far from the only one. By the nineteen teens, there were around a hundred American circuses traveling the country. And while many did still travel by wagon, nearly one-third of those traveled, like the Ringling Brothers, by rail.


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[Assistant] The American railroad was heavy with coal and lumber for sure, but it also rattled with bright, glimmering circus trains, all sharing the same routes. Unfortunately, some of those trains were hurtling toward tragedy.


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[Assistant] In 1918, a show called Hagenbeck Wallace was America's third largest circus, employing some 600 people, including 60 aerialists, 60 acrobats, 60 riders, 50 clowns, and 100 dancers. Not to mention lions, tigers, zebras, elephants, camels, trick ponies, and even a hippopotamus.


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[Assistant] And understandably, this required a heck of a long train, or rather two separate trains of 28 cars each.


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[Assistant] By all accounts, June 22nd of 1922 was a warm night. The Hagenbeck Wallace Circus was heading from Michigan City, Indiana to Hammond, Indiana. A 45-mile journey. For the first train, that trip was a breeze, and they arrived just fine. The second train, though, had to stop around 4am to deal with some light mechanical issues.


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[Assistant] And so, they pulled onto a side track for repairs, leaving five cars on the main track. Five cars, mind you, that contained many of the circus performers, asleep in their bunks. Little did they know, some of them would never wake up again. Disaster was already speeding toward them.


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[Assistant] You see, in an empty passenger train a ways up the track, the engineer had fallen asleep at the controls. Unmanned, the train rocketed forward, blowing past signals warning of the stopped cars ahead, and charging right for Hagenbeck Wallace.


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[Assistant] It was the circus's brake man, Oscar Timm, who saw it first. He ran toward the oncoming train, waving his lantern and even throwing things at the window to get the engineer's attention. But it did no good. Oscar was forced to watch in horror as the passenger train flew by and smashed into the five cars on the main track.


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[Assistant] The sound was so loud that those who lived near the crash site first thought that a steel mill had exploded. Sparks flew, the earth shook, and what followed was nothing short of chaos.


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[Assistant] The train from hell split the sleeper cars right down the middle. Performers were trapped between broken boards and twisted wreckage.


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[Assistant] The luckiest of them were flung from the heap, but some were shoved forward along the track, dragged by the still moving train. Some were even crushed beneath the wheels. Others tangled into warped piles of bedding, beams, and metal. And then came the fire.


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[Assistant] Cries rang out through the night as people burned alive inside the wreckage. In just one of dozens of stories, a clown named Lon Moore and an acrobat named Mary Ennis had escaped the wreckage only to dive back in to dig Mary's unconscious husband Eugene from the pile of debris. They succeeded in pulling him free, but many weren't so lucky.


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[Assistant] All in all, 86 people were killed in the wreck. Another 127 were injured. It was the deadliest circus train disaster in history.


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[Assistant] And yet, despite that, only three days later, the Hagenbeck Walla circus performed in Beloit, Wisconsin as scheduled. This was a job, after all, and the cast and crew had mouths to feed and debts to pay. They couldn't afford to skip shows.


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[Assistant] All but one of their 25 acts were affected by the wreck, and so other circuses, Ringling Brothers included, banded together to help replace what had been lost, lending equipment or performers, or sometimes both.


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[Assistant] The day after this Beloit show, on June 26th of 1918, 56 victims of the train crash were buried in a cemetery plot known as Showman's Rest.


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[Assistant] It's a plot in the Woodlawn Cemetery in Forest Park, Illinois, reserved for circus performers and carnival workers. The founders of the plot had a simple goal in mind, for no showman to ever be buried in a pauper's grave. And for the victims of the Illinois Circus wreck, that would be true. They were the first burials in the newly purchased plot.


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[Assistant] 1500 mourners turned out to the mass funeral, and the coffins were laid to rest with reverence in a huge shared grave.


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[Assistant] These coffins contained some of the most celebrated circus artists of their time, and yet only 13 of those 56 bodies had been identified. Many of the dead were simply too badly burned to be recognized.


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[Assistant] Others, due to the transient lifestyle of that line of work, have never been known beyond a nickname to begin with. Many stones bear words like unknown male or unknown female. Others, just simple monikers like Baldi or Smiley. Some list an occupation alone. So many names and lives, all lost to history.


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[Assistant] And yet perhaps the victims aren't as far gone as they seem. With such a legacy of tragedy, it's no wonder that many believe showman's rest is haunted.


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[Assistant] Visitors there claim to have heard the disembodied laughter of clowns on the wind, echoing throughout the cemetery. And trust me, I hate that idea just as much as you do.


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[Assistant] Others have heard circus music in the air. Ghost hunting groups claim that the batteries of their electronics have mysteriously drained in the area, or that the equipment has malfunctioned or jammed. Some visitors have even smelled smoke, as if the train that took so many lives is still relentlessly burning.


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[Assistant] I love the circus. There's something about that tension between its dreamy childlike magic and its seedy underbelly that makes it endlessly fascinating. A place, much like folklore, where fear and wonder intersect.


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[Assistant] From the Ringling Brothers' mythic rise to Hagenbeck Wallace's tragic crash, the circus has birthed plenty of its own folklore.


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[Assistant] And these days, with the golden age of the circus train long behind us, even the art form itself is a bit of a ghost. So really, can you blame the nameless souls at Showman's Rest for calling out, practically begging to be remembered?


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[Assistant] But here's the thing. The most often reported haunting at Showman's Rest? Well, it isn't actually human at all. Instead, countless visitors have reported hearing the spectral midnight trumpeting of elephants.


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[Assistant] A brief disclaimer for all of you animal lovers, just to ease your mind.


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[Assistant] All of the animals traveling with the Hagenbeck Wallace Circus were on the first train, safely away from the crash. So no elephants are actually buried at Showman's Rest. But that said, the plot does have a pretty special set of guardians. Five elephant statues, their trunks lowered in mourning.


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[Assistant] One explanation for the strange animal sounds is that people are hearing nothing more than real elephants trumpeting in the nearby Brookfield Zoo a little over a mile away. A logical solution to a haunting mystery, except for one small problem. The Brookfield Zoo doesn't have a single elephant.


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[Assistant] Clearly the circus is a place of magic, and not always of the innocent kind. The darkness hidden beneath the big top has a way of leaking outs into the rest of the world. As ghosts, or something else. But sometimes, it really all is just an act.


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[Assistant] Because as one last story will help you see, some circus ghosts are nothing more than illusion.


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[Assistant] Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about it.


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[Assistant] Close your eyes and imagine it. The heyday of the circus is in full swing. As you purchase your ticket, you can glimpse the big top lights glimmering in the distance. But you aren't here for the main show. No, you're heading for a smaller one, off to the side, more classically known as a sideshow.


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[Assistant] The tent you step into is dark inside. But as you jostle in among your fellow spectators, a light rises on the stage. There, right before you, stands a beautiful woman. But this performer seems sort of


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[Assistant] Well, Feral. Her clothes are tattered and her hair is wild. And soon, a presenter steps out and spins a yarn of the wild jungle lady, recently captured in some remote region of the world.


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[Assistant] Tonight, before your very eyes, you will watch her morph from a girl into a raging beast.


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[Assistant] And with that, she begins to change. Hair sprouts from her skin, and fangs appear where her teeth had been. Within minutes, she's transformed entirely into a massive gorilla.


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[Assistant] But of course, none of this is real. It's only a clever illusion. An illusion made possible by Pepper's Ghost.


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[Assistant] For those that don't know, Pepper's ghost is named after the 19th century British chemist John Henry Pepper. But the origins of the invention are much older, stretching back into the mid 16th century.


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[Assistant] And then, in 1858, engineer Henry Dirks presented a paper on a version of the allusion to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, which was all well and good. Except that, well, it apparently wasn't well and good enough to make much of a stir.


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[Assistant] Enter Pepper. He improved on Dirk's design and popularized it, taking the name and the glory for himself. Which Dirk's obviously wasn't thrilled about, but look, we all love a pair of dueling illusionists, don't we?


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[Assistant] So, what exactly is Pepper's Ghost? Well, it's quite literally a trick of the light. Basically, it uses a pane of glass to make an object that's in one place appear to be in another. Usually, an object behind the audience made to appear as if it's actually in front of them.


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[Assistant] I know it's hard to grasp without seeing it, but think of it this way. It's similar to the effect of looking out through a dark window at night and seeing the fire in your fireplace reflected in the glass in front of you. So, for a moment, it looks like there's a fire dancing out in your yard.


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[Assistant] And Dirk's innovation was to basically imagine this commonplace phenomenon as a theater technique. He proposed creating a concealed compartment under the audience where an actor would stand illuminated by a strong light. And that light would then be reflected off the actor landing on a large pane of glass in front of the audience.


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[Assistant] And the result? It would appear that there was a human hovering translucently in the air. In other words, a ghost.


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[Assistant] Now, to be fair, Dirks never actually made this happen. But Pepper did, with some choice technical improvements to boot. Most notably, he proposed that the illusion would work better if the glass were at a 45-degree angle, tilted toward the audience, with the actor lurking at a similar angle in the orchestra pit. And he was right. The effect was a success.


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[Assistant] This contraption made its debut in a performance of Charles Dickens' The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain on Christmas Eve of 1862. Pepper had watched nervously to see how the trick would go over. After all, no audience had ever seen anything like this before. Would they even buy it?


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[Assistant] So Pepper waited and hoped, and at last the ethereal skeleton appeared on the stage, hovering before the unassuming crowd. But he needn't have worried, because that skeleton, it absolutely blew the audience's mind. That was all it took. Immediately Pepper's ghost became a theatrical sensation all throughout Victorian London.


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[Assistant] Eventually though, the novelty of the illusion wore off for London theatergoers. But like any good ghost, Peppers wasn't done haunting the stage. Another branch of showbiz carried on the tradition, one that was no stranger to gimmicks and trickery. That's right, the circus.


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[Assistant] Which brings us back to that shape-shifting woman in the tent. Girl 2 Gorilla was a popular sideshow event, made possible by none other than Pepper's Ghost.


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[Assistant] Well with some of that same setup as before, with a pane of glass placed directly in front of the woman, along with a handy little dimming switch. By slowly dimming the light on the woman, while increasing the light on the hidden actor in a gorilla costume, it would appear as though the former were transforming into the latter.


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[Assistant] Pretty cool, right? Almost makes you wish that you could go back in time and see one of these sideshows or Victorian theater performances in person. But lucky for us, we don't have to invent a time machine to see Pepper's ghost in action. In fact, you probably already have, and didn't even know it.


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[Assistant] For one, it's the way Disney is able to conjure a ballroom full of dancing ghosts in their popular Haunted Mansion. It's also the technology behind hologram performances of late celebrities like Tupac and Michael Jackson.


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[Assistant] But that's not all. The Pepper's Ghost Delusion is responsible for one more thing that you've definitely seen.


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[Assistant] Teleprompters. Yep, the same technology that allows broadcasters to read scripts while staring straight into the camera lens has been frightening everyone from Victorian theatergoers to circus crowds for more than 150 years.


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[Assistant] This episode of Lore was produced by me, Aaron Manke, and was written by Jenna Rose Nethercott with research by Cassandra de Alba and music by Chad Lawson. Don't like hearing ads? I've got a solution. There's a paid version of Lore on Apple Podcasts and Patreon that is 100% ad-free.


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[Assistant] Plus subscribers get weekly mini-episodes called Lore Bytes. It's a bargain for all of that ad-free storytelling and a great way to support this show and the team behind it.


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[Assistant] Lore is much more than just a podcast. There's the book series available in bookstores and online, and two seasons of the television show on Amazon Prime Video. Information about all of that and more is available over at lorepodcast.com.


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


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[Assistant] Competition, as they often say, is good for business. It can inspire a company to improve its products or lower their prices or even break into new product categories.


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[Assistant] Competition helps both sides grow. At least, that's what the experts say. All I know is that it can often give us some very entertaining battle of the brands. And at the risk of dating myself, I have to tip my hat to my personal favorite product showdown. The Cola Wars.


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[Assistant] The first shots were fired in 1975, when Pepsi started their Pepsi Challenge, involving blind taste tests that showed that a lot of people actually preferred their soda over Coca-Cola's classic recipe. And the results frightened Coke into some pretty bold decisions. First it was Diet Coke, then Caffeine Free Coke,


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[Assistant] But nothing beats the mess they made in 1985 when they ditched a classic and introduced new Coke.


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[Assistant] How bad did it go over? In a massive game of chicken with their loyal customers, it took Coca-Cola less than three months to flinch and bring the old recipe back.


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[Assistant] Thankfully, the only real thing at stake in the whole situation was money. But looking back at history, there have been moments when the competition was literally a matter of life or death. If not in this world, then at least in the next.


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[Assistant] Conflict is a breeding ground for folklore. It always has been. In the same way that a dry woodland is a forest fire waiting to happen, when people take sides and fear and hatred grow, folklore is just around the corner.


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[Assistant] Take witchcraft as an example, since just about everyone has heard of it.


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[Assistant] In most places in Europe, witchcraft was ignored for centuries. The Catholic Church even refused to acknowledge that it even existed. But then, people started taking sides during the Reformation in the early 1500s. And, like the Cola Wars of the 1980s, all of a sudden there were two competing brands in town. Not one.


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[Assistant] The witch trials that came out of that change could be seen as a sort of marketing war. Witches are totally real, they would tell people. They're dangerous and evil and only my side can save you. Belief in and fear of witchcraft became a tool in the hands of religious leaders to leverage public opinion in their own favor.


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[Assistant] But not always, because there are always exceptions, right? And one big exception can be found in Spain.


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[Assistant] That part of Europe had originally been conquered by the Romans. And if you remember your ancient history, it was right at the tail end of their empire that Rome converted to Christianity. So when their rule of Europe collapsed, they left a patchwork of Christian and pagan communities scattered all over.


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[Assistant] Then, in the year 711, the Muslim Moors invaded from North Africa, disrupting the status quo. Eleven years later, the people of Spain began to take back their land in a period known to historians as the Reconquista.


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[Assistant] But it wasn't a quick victory. Instead, it took almost 800 years, thanks to the complications of having so many competing religious groups in one place. Muslims, Christians, and even Jews, all battling for a place to live.


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[Assistant] In 1492, the Reconquista was considered over and King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella set about unifying their kingdom. And since their common enemy, the Muslims, had been defeated,


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[Assistant] They needed a new boogeyman. Because remember, fear and infighting keeps people focused on each other, rather than challenging the leaders at the top, so they aimed the spotlight on non-Christian communities.


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[Assistant] Over the coming years, more and more restrictions would be implemented, forcing Jews and the remaining Muslims to either convert to Christianity or be forcibly expelled from the country.


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[Assistant] But the fear was that these new converts were really still practicing their true faith in private. So Ferdinand and Isabella kicked off something that would sound familiar to any fan of Monty Python. The Spanish Inquisition.


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[Assistant] But if you weren't expecting that, don't worry. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. Their chief weapon, after all, was surprise. Well, and fear.


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[Assistant] Fear of God, fear of the Church, fear of the powers of the crown that guided the hand of the Inquisitors. So naturally, people became very, very afraid. Especially when the list of crimes they were looking for were all things that were easy to make up or misinterpret. Blasphemy, Freemasonry, Bigamy, and of course, Witchcraft.


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[Assistant] But there's one other catch. You see, the Spanish Inquisition didn't answer to the Pope way over in Rome. It was run by a group in Spain called the Tribunal of the Holy Office, set up by the King and Queen, not the Vatican. And the way it operated was highly authoritarian.


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[Assistant] Any case that was considered under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition could be taken over at any moment by members of the Tribunal.


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[Assistant] In theory, this meant that local authorities wouldn't have the power to engage in those marketing battles to stir up local communities into hotbeds of fear.


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[Assistant] It centralized the power and punishment and put every decision in the hands of trained professionals. Sure, a lot of these accusations would be investigated locally, but at some point the tribunal would find out and their representatives would swoop in and take over.


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[Assistant] It was a system that was designed to prevent local fear and those wildfire witchcraft panics that would come in the decades to follow. The sort of trials that you know all too well from stories we've covered here. And that's good, right? We want to avoid those tragedies whenever we can.


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[Assistant] But for the people in the Basque village of Zugaramundi, that safety net wasn't enough.


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[Assistant] In fact, it was the very people tasked with protecting them that led to a horrific surprise.


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[Assistant] Maria de Chamildegui had been away for just three years, but she returned a little different from how she left. She'd spent that time in a French city just a little bit north of the Spanish border, so it wasn't really that far geographically. But in 1608, the cultural gap was huge.


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[Assistant] And she came back with stories. She spoke of a man back in France who was holding violent witchcraft trials and she knew this because she had become a part of one of the covens there. She told her friends and family that she had renounced her Christian faith and had participated in secret witch gatherings known as a Sabbath.


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[Assistant] And, most importantly, that gave her the ability to spot witches anywhere she went, including there, back home in her own village.


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[Assistant] Naturally, Maria started to point fingers. The first person she accused was another Maria, Maria de Jurataguilla. But local authorities didn't like the stories that Shamil Daghi was spreading or the accusations, so both women were brought in for a casual interview.


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[Assistant] It was too late, though. The people in town were fully bought in, and they pressured Chamille Deguy to confess.


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[Assistant] When she did, she also named a third woman, another Maria, I'm afraid, named Maria Chapia de Baranachea. In fact, Maria number three was the aunt of Maria number one, and according to the younger woman's claims, the reason she had become a witch in the first place.


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[Assistant] Between December of 1608 and January of 1609, the panic spread. Ten people in the village, a mix of men and women, were all accused and forced to confess. And from all accounts, the situation truly began to spiral out of control.


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[Assistant] Maria number two, the first young woman who had been forced to confess by the town, started to fear that the devil would show up and take her away, thanks to her new association with witchcraft. So she and her husband went to her father's house, along with a bunch of other friends and family, to hold vigil throughout the night. Safety in numbers and all, right?


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[Assistant] But people who were there that night actually claimed to see the devil outside. Other witches were spotted too, trying to break into the house to find Maria number two. In a scene straight out of a historical thriller, Maria's family saved her by praying over her with rosaries and declaring her allegiance to God, not the devil.


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[Assistant] But moments like that didn't help the public feel any safer. People started actively breaking into their neighbors' houses looking for signs of witchcraft so that they could accuse them. Dozens of people started getting dragged to local priests and were forced to confess under threat of torture.


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[Assistant] And just as the village was about to put a stop to it all and give everyone one last chance to confess, find forgiveness, and be pardoned, the Inquisition showed up.


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[Assistant] Two men rode into town in January of 1609, one an inquisitor and the other his notary. They conducted interviews, wrote up a report, and then sent it all off to LaGronia for the tribunal there to read.


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[Assistant] The report astounded the tribunal for one particular reason. It seems that rumors of a witch coven had surrounded that little village for almost a century. For a long time, the tribunal had assumed that they were just that, rumors. But this new episode had made them wonder. So they assigned two new inquisitors to the case to learn the truth.


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[Assistant] These men though, Becerra and Vaya, didn't come in with an open mind. They were fully, 100% convinced that the witchcraft rumors were true, and they were going to find the evidence to back that up. None of that's innocent-until-proven-guilty stuff. These men were out for blood.


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[Assistant] Ten women were brought before the inquisitors, and all of them were interrogated. Did they go to church? Did they go to confession? Could they recite the Ave Maria and the Creed? Were they baptized and confirmed? These men pushed hard, looking for answers, looking for signs of the devil.


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[Assistant] The picture started to come together for Becerra and Via. The witches were worshipping the devil at gatherings called acaiare. One of the accused described the devil as half man, half goat. Then all of them admitted to heinous acts, such as killing crops and livestock, vandalism, and causing disease and death.


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[Assistant] In response, the High Council of the Inquisition, La Suprema, issued instructions to hold an auto-defe, a sort of community-wide gathering where everyone would be allowed to confess, be sentenced, and then receive either punishment or pardon depending on their individual status.


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[Assistant] Due to an illness that had already swept through the jail where most of the accused were held, though, 13 people had already died, leaving only 12 left to be tried. That didn't stop the public from getting excited, of course. On November 6th of 1610, the Otto de Fe kicked off in LaGronia, in front of a crowd of over 30,000 spectators.


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[Assistant] The result was the conviction of eleven individuals, five of whom had already died in jail. So the six living and the five dead were paraded through town and handed over to the secular authorities for execution. Later that same day, all of them, the living and the dead, were burned at the stake.


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[Assistant] And that's the end, right? We've all been conditioned over the years to see the typical witchcraft panic flow in the same predictable manner. Accusation, trial, and execution. The community then moves on and, over time, hopefully starts to regret it.


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[Assistant] But Basara and Vaya just couldn't let it go. They were receiving letters from other towns in the area with stories of their own. Children who were being recruited into the coven. More people in livestock were being bewitched. The devil was still in power, and they hated that.


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[Assistant] By May of 1611, the Inquisitors had collected fresh confessions from over 500 witches, and another 2,000 people were being interrogated as possible additions.


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[Assistant] But to some, it sort of felt like the uptick in Supernatural Reports was a bit unusual. Convenient, almost. In fact, there was a growing number of skeptics who found themselves at odds with Becerra and Vaya, both sides refusing to give an inch to the other.


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[Assistant] That's when an inquisitor named Salazar Frias, who sat on the LaGronia Tribunal, stepped in to do a bit of research on his own.


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[Assistant] From April to June, witnesses were reexamined by new investigators. Becerra and Vaya, of course, fought against it, but they were just two players in a much bigger machine. And, truth be told, Salazar did not like what he was finding.


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[Assistant] All of a sudden, the Inquisition had a skeptic in their midst. Salazar had become an ally to these secular skeptics as well, and priests who had already doubted everything from the start began to come out of the woodwork and approach him.


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[Assistant] Well, he got La Suprema to issue what's known as an Edict of Grace, where everyone would sort of have carte blanche freedom to come forward, confess, and get lighter sentences or even a pardon. No torture was allowed. No one was asked about accomplices or asked to name names.


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[Assistant] It was light and easy compared to the methods that Becerra and Vaya wanted to use.


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[Assistant] The result was a flood. Salazar and his team would enter a province, read out the Edict of Grace, and then sit down for a one-on-one interview documenting everything along the way. There were so many people coming forward that he worked from sunrise to sunset every day and started to fear that he would never complete them at all.


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[Assistant] And he noticed something. When asking people to identify the location of which coven meetings, their collective answers didn't line up. One person would name one particular field or clearing in the woods, while another would point to a different spot. How, he wondered, could these meetings be true if no one could agree on where they took place?


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[Assistant] Physical evidence was disproved. Stories of individuals failed to align. It was all pointing to a total and complete lack of proof that anything supernatural had ever taken place.


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[Assistant] I have not found a single proof, Salazar wrote in a letter to La Suprema, nor even the slightest indication from which to infer that one act of witchcraft has actually taken place.


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[Assistant] And Becerra and Vaia? Well, they did the only thing that a pair of frauds can do when their lies are called out and proven false. They pointed their fingers directly at Salazar, claimed that for him to make this sort of statement was utter proof that he was in league with the devil himself, and then waited confidently for the Inquisition to take the bait and arrest him. La Suprema, however, simply ignored them.


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[Assistant] It could have been worse. It's the optimist's favorite way of approaching bad things. There's always a darker possibility, a more tragic path for events to follow. I know that history doesn't always make us feel that hopeful, but in a lot of cases, it's true. Things could have been a whole lot worse than they were.


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[Assistant] In the world of European witchcraft trials, we've seen worse. The numbers from Scotland alone could make anyone stop and shake their head with grief. We humans are exceptional creatures, but sadly one of the things we're most exceptional at is being horrible toward each other.


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[Assistant] Villifying one another over slight differences in worldviews, letting hatred and suspicion take the wheel instead of caution and common sense. We see it time and time again today, and it's been like that for centuries, probably even thousands of years. People are just really bad at being good.


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[Assistant] So for as painful as the Basque witch trials were, they really could have been worse. And we really do have Salazar to thank for how quickly the show was shut down. He found himself in a bus full of thousands of people approaching a massive cliff, and instead of speeding ahead, he pumped the brakes.


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[Assistant] After the trials were over, Salazar went on to climb the ranks of the tribunal in Valencia, eventually reaching a seat on the council in 1631. Becerra and Valle seemed to have disappeared from the record, and so many of the accused faded back into the shadows, probably grateful for the spotlight to have moved on or switched off.


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[Assistant] And look, I know things weren't perfect. People still lost their lives because of fear and finger pointing.


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[Assistant] Between its start in 1609 and its ending in 1614, the Basque witch trial saw at least 7,000 people accused of witchcraft and examined by the authorities. Some spent time in jail. Most, however, did not. And the six living victims who were burned alongside those five who were already dead


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[Assistant] Witch trial stories are pretty common to anyone who reads enough history, and I know that many of them can start to melt together in our minds. That's why many people assume that burning at the stake was a universal punishment when, in fact, it was quite rare. The commonness of the story just sort of creates one homogenous tale.


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[Assistant] So I hope today's tour through Spain's dark past and the Basque trials in particular help show how different some stories can be. And to that end, we have one more unexpected panic and trial to share with you. Stick around through this brief sponsor break and I'll tell you all about it.


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[Assistant] When I think of medieval trials in Europe, with people shouting in the center of town for the execution of their neighbors and former friends, I think of witches. You probably do too, considering how many witchcraft panic stories there are to read about and discuss.


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[Assistant] But putting your money on witches every single time is not the safest bet, because some towns, especially those in what is today Germany, sometimes buck the trend and put a different sort of supernatural threat on trial.


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[Assistant] Longtime listeners will know that we've covered a few of those here in the past. Of course, there was Peter Stubb, sometimes known as Peter Stump, who was put on trial in 1589. His crimes? Well, it seems that he was a real-life serial killer who blamed his actions on his ability to transform into a wolf-like creature.


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[Assistant] A number of people died, but thankfully Shtub was caught and put on trial. His sentence was execution, although it was almost as brutal as the crimes he committed. He was nailed to a large wagon wheel, and his skin was ripped from his body with red hot tongs, before his limbs were broken and his head was removed.


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[Assistant] Then, as if that weren't enough, his body was burned and his head was put on display. Clearly, the people of Bedberg didn't approve of his actions, supernatural or not, but despite this, werewolf trials continued to be common for a very long time.


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[Assistant] Sometimes the victims were violent criminals, but often they were nothing more than scapegoats to a town looking for a reason behind a recent famine or a plague. In those cases, the accused were typically from an easier class of people to arrest and punish. Beggars, social outcasts, and immigrants.


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[Assistant] I would like to say that we treat the poor, immigrants, and the marginalized a lot better today. I really, really wish I could. But sadly nothing has changed, except maybe the way in which we vilify them.


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[Assistant] Like I said earlier, a lot of the trials that used werewolf folklore as the focal point seemed to occur in Germany, but there were some that happened elsewhere.


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[Assistant] In France in 1521, for example, two shepherds, Pierre Bergot and Michel Verdun, were accused of similar crimes to Peter Stubb. And just like him, their dirty deeds seem to have been nothing more than that of serial killers.


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[Assistant] According to Burgow, he had encountered three dark riders almost twenty years earlier during a thunderstorm that showed up at the end of the Polonyi Fair.


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[Assistant] When one of the mysterious riders asked Bergot if he would like to spare his sheep from dying in the storm, Bergot agreed to do whatever the man asked. And what he asked for him was to renounce God and give his loyalty to the horsemen.


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[Assistant] Oh, and rub a magical ointment on his body that would transform him into a werewolf. Burgaux would go on to share this ointment with Verdun, and the pair claimed that they would use their wolf shapes to travel to gatherings of evil men, as well as to hunt and kill local people.


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[Assistant] That was their story. Although it must be said that when Burgow and Verdun were captured, it was after being caught red-handed, quite literally mind you, while viciously attacking someone in human form.


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[Assistant] Like so many criminals before them, Burgaux and Verdun tried to take one more person down with them. They claimed that they had a third accomplice, a man named Philibert Montot, who got him arrested and tried with them.


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[Assistant] Pierre Bergot told one particularly horrifying story during his confessions. He told the authorities that he had leapt over a garden wall into someone's yard and came upon a little girl, maybe seven years old. He caught her by surprise as she was weeding the garden beds and she dropped to her knees to beg Bergot not to kill her.


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[Assistant] Bubber Goh didn't listen. Instead, he claims that he snapped her neck and left her body lying among the flowers. As you might imagine, it was confessions like that which led to their terrible sentence, death by burning. And although that third man, Philibert Manteau, refused to confess as the others did, he too was tied to the stake and set on fire.


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[Assistant] This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Manke, with research by Ali Steed and music by Chad Lawson. Lore is much more than just a podcast. There's a book series available in bookstores and online, and two seasons of the television show on Amazon Prime Video. Check them both out if you want more Lore in your life.


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[Assistant] Information about all of that and more is available over at LorePodcast.com. And you can also follow this show on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Just search for Lore Podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button. And when you do, say hi. I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening.


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[Assistant] Welcome to Lore Legends, a subset of lore episodes that explore the strange tales we whisper in the dark, even if they can't always be proven by the history books. So if you're ready, let's begin.


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[Assistant] Go outside on a clear night and look up. There, among the blackened skies, are dying balls of gas that have been there since the beginning of time. They're just stars, of course, but to us they are magical. A billion points of light that fill up the night sky. But it gets even better.


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[Assistant] Floating in between them are planets, moons, and other celestial bodies scattered across endless galaxies. Because outer space is a vast expanse and has no boundaries, it's possible that somewhere, beyond the reach of our rovers and telescopes, there exists life.


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[Assistant] It could be a small animal of some kind, or perhaps a microscopic bacterium, or even a species of plant that lives off something other than sunlight. Or maybe it's something else, like a creature capable of thinking, learning, and evolving.


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[Assistant] And if such a being exists, it's entirely possible that they might have even paid us a visit.


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[Assistant] Which of course is where one particular branch of folklore enters the picture that these otherworldly visitors have been kept from us by mysterious gatekeepers.


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[Assistant] We've all seen the movies. We remember the song. But what's the truth at the center of this legend? That there are clandestine people out there with one job and one job only. To hunt down the little green men who visit our planet.


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[Assistant] These individuals aren't just science fiction characters. They're part of our overall folklore. They lurk in the background, orchestrating and scheming, so we remain happily unaware of what's really going on. But while they might hide in the shadows,


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[Assistant] They're a lot older than you think. We actually have to go back hundreds of years to find the first recorded UFO sighting. There's one legend from ancient Egypt that claims that the sun god Ra lived on Earth and ruled over its people until they rebelled, ambushing him as he sailed up the Nile.


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[Assistant] Ra's son Horus then took the form of a bright flying disc and launched an attack on the rebels, until Ra stepped in. He refused to allow all the humans to be killed before retreating from Earth entirely, choosing instead to sail the Celestial Nile.


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[Assistant] There was also a report from China around the year 235 AD, when the emperor's army saw a red object with pointed rays flying overhead, passing over them three separate times.


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[Assistant] Its presence was recorded in a compilation alongside meteors and shooting stars, although it's unlikely that a meteor would fly in such a formation that many times.


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[Assistant] But one of the most peculiar reports of a UFO being seen took place in October of 1492. And that date might actually hint at who the witness was. That's right, Christopher Columbus.


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[Assistant] He'd set sail from Spain on a voyage financed by Ferdinand and Isabella, Spanish monarchs looking to expand their empire. And Columbus was going to be their meal ticket, laying claim to any lands in his path.


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[Assistant] Now, one thing that a lot of folks don't know about Columbus is that he was a meticulous note-taker and kept a comprehensive journal during his trip, although the original journal was eventually lost. Thankfully, a Spanish historian made a copy, giving future scholars and historians a glimpse of what the explorer encountered in his travels.


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[Assistant] On October 12th of 1492, Columbus and his crew made landfall on one of the Bohemian islands referred to by the locals as Guanahena.


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[Assistant] Columbus unsurprisingly renamed it to the more Spanish-friendly San Salvador. But there are a lot of islands out there, and exactly which island it was remains a mystery to this day.


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[Assistant] Anyway, the night before landfall, around 10pm, one of the sailors spotted something in the darkness. An admiral aboard one of the ships noticed something strange as well. It was a light, described in the log records as appearing like the light of a wax candle moving up and down.


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[Assistant] Now, some have suggested that it might have been a luminous squid, and naturalist Lynel Rutledge-Crochet believed that it was bioluminescent worms known to live in the shallow coastal waters there.


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[Assistant] Apparently they live on the ocean floor, but surface to mate just before each quarter moon. But the most exotic theory, of course, was that Columbus' men saw a UFO. In fact, UFO scholars argue that because the incident defies explanation, it must be extraterrestrial in origin.


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[Assistant] Almost 150 years later, another unidentified object appeared over the skies of Salem, Massachusetts, long before the word witch was on anyone's tongue. It was recorded by an Englishman named John Winthrop who had come to North America with the Massachusetts Bay Colony.


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[Assistant] In March of 1638, Winthrop noted how three men in a boat on the nearby muddy river spotted a light in front of them. According to his records,


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[Assistant] When it stood still, it flamed up and was about three yards square. When it ran, it was contracted into the figure of a swine. It ran as swift as an arrow towards Charlton and so up and down about two or three hours.


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[Assistant] And these men were so drawn to the light that they followed it until it vanished. When it was finally gone, all three of them found themselves right where they had started, with no memory of rowing against the tide or dropping anchor.


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[Assistant] And it's a story that should sound really familiar to any of us today. An encounter with a mysterious light, lost time, and a lack of awareness of where they were or how they got there. Strip away the 17th century names and places and we could be talking about an episode of The X-Files.


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[Assistant] Which has left a lot of people wondering. Does this entry in Winthrop's journal contain something darker than just a bunch of guys in a boat following a light?


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[Assistant] What if it's actually one of the first times in recorded history that someone documented an alien abduction?


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[Assistant] There was no question about it. June 24th of 1947 was an eventful day for Kenneth Arnold of Boise, Idaho. He split his time working as both a fire control equipment salesman and an experienced pilot. In fact, he had at least 4,000 hours of flight time under his belt.


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[Assistant] So, he didn't think much of it when he took off in his single-engine airplane from Chehalis, Washington to an air show in Oregon. He had clear skies above and a light wind blowing.


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[Assistant] According to the story, just before 3pm, he was 20 miles west of Mount Rainier when he saw a bright flash of light out of the corner of his eye.


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[Assistant] Curious, he started looking around for the source, and that's when another flash beamed straight into his eyes. According to him, the light had come from nine objects flying in a diagonal formation a short distance away.


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[Assistant] Eight of them looked like flattened disks, but the ninth looked like a crescent with a point in the middle. Like something that Batman might throw at the Riddler's henchmen. And in Kenneth Arnold's own words, they were,


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[Assistant] His testimony was the first time that anyone had used the term flying saucer, a phrase that would become standard for UFO sightings going forward. Oh, and their speed? Arnold measured it at a rate of somewhere between 1200 and 1700 miles per hour.


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[Assistant] He ended up refueling in Pendleton, Oregon where he gave his statement to reporters. Pretty soon, news of his encounter was spreading all over the world. In less than a week, other witnesses started coming forward with their own stories too.


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[Assistant] In fact, out of the 20 or so sightings on June 24th alone, all but two of them had come from the Pacific Northwest. One newspaper even reported flying saucers had been seen as far away as Texas and Canada. But little did Kenneth Arnold know, an even darker encounter had taken place earlier that same week.


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[Assistant] That witness was Harold Dahl. He too was a resident of Washington State, where he did conservation work in Puget Sound, out near Maury Island. And it was while he was out there on his boat, along with his son, his dog, and two other men, that something strange happened.


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[Assistant] At two o'clock that afternoon, just off the island's eastern coast, Harold looked up to see six objects floating in the sky above his boat.


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[Assistant] They were around 2,000 feet off the ground, shaped like donuts, and made of some kind of reflective metal. According to Harold, each one measured around 100 feet in diameter and featured dozens of small round windows with a larger observation window along the bottom.


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[Assistant] But Harold couldn't understand how they stayed in the air, and to be honest, I would probably be scratching my head as well. No visible engines or propellers, and no noise that hinted at a hidden motor. And as he watched them, one of the objects dropped down and hovered over the water near his boat.


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[Assistant] So, Harold took out his camera and snapped a series of photographs. Suddenly, a loud thud rang out, just as the ship expelled several tons of a mysterious metallic substance into the water. And whatever it was, when it hit the ocean, it hissed and steamed.


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[Assistant] In the process, Harold's boat was damaged and his son's arm was burned. Even worse, his dog was killed by some of the falling fragments. And then the craft slowly rose up and drifted out over the Pacific.


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[Assistant] Later on, he told his boss, Fred Christman, what had happened, and gave him the camera as evidence. But Harold didn't know the truth about his employer. You see, Christman was actually an intelligence agent, formerly part of the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS.


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[Assistant] So, when Christman had the images developed, his keen eye spotted two things. First, the objects in the sky were right there, clearly visible. But so was something else. Spots on the film that he recognized as signs of radiation exposure.


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[Assistant] Intrigued, Crispin traveled to Mori Island to investigate for himself, and that's when he noticed one of the airships overhead.


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[Assistant] So, that's the story so far. Simple enough, right? But the rest of the story is a lot more chaotic. It began with a strange man in a black suit who interviewed Harold and then threatened to harm him if he ever shared the story with anyone else.


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[Assistant] Harold, though, apparently ignored him and sent some samples of the metal from the spacecraft to a paranormal publisher in Chicago who noticed the location and connected it to that first story I told you about Kenneth Arnold. So the publisher put the two witnesses in touch and Arnold, it turns out, had some friends in the Air Force.


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[Assistant] Now, when those friends, Air Force officers no less, flew out to interview Harold in person, they found the story credible, so they took some samples of the strange metal to study further. After that, these officers boarded a plane to head home,


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[Assistant] Only to die when that plane mysteriously exploded mid-flight. Oh and the pilots? They somehow parachuted to safety.


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[Assistant] Ever since, the rumors and unanswered questions have left a lot of people suspecting some sort of conspiracy. Although, truth be told, people are very good at creating elaborate, imaginary explanations for situations they don't understand.


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[Assistant] But fiction or not, those theories went on to inspire the folklore that you and I take for granted today. A mysterious, earth-shattering secret. A government-driven cover-up. And field agents who use threats and lies to keep the rest of the world from catching on.


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[Assistant] Born in Pennsylvania in 1921, Albert Bender served in the army during World War II. Later in life, he relocated with his mother and stepfather to Bridgeport, Connecticut, where he moved into their attic. He turned it into a space that was truly his own, where he could collect and display the things that represented who he was. But who was Albert Bender?


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[Assistant] Well, for one, he was an enthusiast of the supernatural. Something that most of us would probably say about ourselves, right? But he also filled his room with twenty chiming clocks, along with a grim collection of monstrosities. Things like shrunken heads, fake skulls, and bizarre artwork.


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[Assistant] But after reports of UFO sightings started to come out in the 1940s, Bender saw an opportunity to do more than admire the otherworldly. He put himself directly in the center of it all.


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[Assistant] In 1952, he formed a new organization called the IFSB, or International Flying Saucer Bureau. He and his global team of 600 investigators started looking into the UFO reports being published in the papers.


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[Assistant] The group was spread out across the United States, Great Britain, and Australia, and even produced a quarterly magazine called Space Review, which was distributed to every member of the organization. According to the stories, Bender started experiencing some odd symptoms shortly after forming the IFSB.


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[Assistant] His physical and mental health began to deteriorate, prompted in part by frequent anonymous phone calls to his home.


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[Assistant] On the night of July 30th of 1952 he picked up one of those calls and held the receiver to his ear. Whoever the caller was, they were completely silent, but still, Bender knew someone was listening.


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[Assistant] Then, as he held the phone to his ear, he began to feel a pain bloom deep inside his head.


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[Assistant] With the pain came the sensation of spinning as if the room itself were rotating quickly around him. Assuming he just needed a bit of rest, he hung up the phone and climbed into bed, where he quickly fell asleep.


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[Assistant] He awoke the next day feeling much better and returned to life as normal. A few days after the strange phone call, he even walked to the local movie theater to catch a sci-fi film. I don't know what the name of the movie was, but this being the early 1950s, I'm guessing the special effects were absurd and delightful in equal measures.


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[Assistant] Walking home after the movie though, his mood changed. He couldn't shake the feeling that someone was following him, hunting him almost. So Albert sped up, hoping to get home as quickly as he could where he might finally be safe. But when he arrived and mounted the stairs to his attic apartment, he stopped before going inside. There, emanating from below his door, was an eerie glow.


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[Assistant] Cautiously, he stepped inside. The first thing that struck him was the pungent scent of sulfur. In fact, it was so strong that it burned his nostrils. But that wasn't the strangest thing he experienced, because right there, hovering in the center of his room, was a strange, shimmering object.


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[Assistant] Frightened by what he saw, Albert reached over and flipped the light switch, and instantly the mysterious object disappeared. But as he looked around the room for it, he noticed something else. His IFSB files were not where he had left them.


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[Assistant] It wouldn't be the last encounter like that either. During another visit to the movie theater, Albert claimed that he was stalked by a man with dark clothes and glowing eyes, and experienced more of that same dizziness.


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[Assistant] To outside observers like us, it's easy to think that Albert Bender was losing his mind. And as time went on, his actions and beliefs would only reinforce that idea.


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[Assistant] Take for example, World Contact Day. A project that he and others in his IFSB group worked toward.


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[Assistant] Basically, it involved memorizing a welcome letter of sorts that he and the others would recite over and over mentally on the appointed day, March 15th of 1953. They believed it would act like a sort of psychic broadcast that would let extraterrestrial visitors know that they were watching for them and that they wanted to make contact.


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[Assistant] What happened next, though, was described in a book by one of the other members of his group, Gray Barker, called They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers. It seems that months after their mental broadcast, Albert heard a knock on his door, and when he opened it, he found three men standing outside, each dressed in crisp black suits.


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[Assistant] These men push their way inside, and then, according to Barker, something strange happened.


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[Assistant] They floated about a foot off the floor, he wrote. They looked like clergymen but wore hats similar to Hamburg style. The faces were not clearly discernible, for the hats partially hid and shaded them. The eyes of all three figures suddenly lit up like flashlight bulbs.


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[Assistant] Now, who they were is up for debate. Albert Bender was convinced that they were aliens, maybe drawn to him because of his World Contact Day message. Gray Barker, though, had a more domestic view of the encounter. He believed that they were government agents sent to put a stop to Albert's work.


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[Assistant] But regardless, Baker's book gave the world the prototype for what we know today as the Men in Black. Elusive, intimidating figures that can vanish at will, who travel in groups of three, wearing black suits, white shirts, sunglasses, and hats.


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[Assistant] And who they are is something that folks will probably never stop debating. Human or alien, friend or foe, these figures have become central players in UFO mythology over the past 70 years. And the fiction that surrounds them like a cloak only continues to grow.


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[Assistant] The truth, though, is probably a lot more simple. They're just a rumor that became a legend, eventually transforming into a key part of pop culture. And they are an incredible example of the true power of folklore. They might not have existed prior to the 1940s, but their story feels like it's as old as time.


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[Assistant] Conspiracies, aliens, intergalactic intrigue. It's easy to see why people have spent decades obsessing over stories and reports that seem out of this world. Honestly, who can blame them?


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[Assistant] And I totally get that futuristic tales of hovering spacecraft and strange beings in modern black suits don't really have the same feel as the folklore we typically cover here. But beneath their unique veneers, the core of these stories is all the same.


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[Assistant] People went looking for answers to questions that eluded them and when they couldn't find the truth, they invented something that at least gave them hope.


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[Assistant] And as far as the men in black are concerned, pop culture has fallen in love.


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[Assistant] Back in 1976, the rock band Blue Oyster Cult mentioned them in their song Extraterrestrial Intelligence. And again in 1983's Take Me Away. The British rock group The Stranglers also name dropped them in their 1979 song called Men in Black, all one word.


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[Assistant] Outside of the billboard charts, they started appearing in films, like 1979's The Alien Encounters. And several years later, another movie called The Brother from Another Planet featured an alien fugitive who was pursued by two men in black suits.


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[Assistant] And of course, we can't forget the X-Files, with agents Mulder and Scully investigating a deep government cover-up that often involved mysterious people who fit that men-in-black archetype so well.


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[Assistant] But everything changed in 1997, when director Barry Sonnenfeld adapted a cult comic book published in 1990 into a feature film.


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[Assistant] In it, a pair of government agents known only by their code names, J and K, kept the public in the dark about everything paranormal, including extraterrestrials, zombies, demons, and werewolves.


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[Assistant] But the film took a different approach. It removed the strange creatures and focused only on the aliens, who lived mostly quiet, secret lives on Earth. And the subject matter got a much needed injection of comedy. It took those mysterious agents out of the shadows, and into the mainstream.


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[Assistant] The film, Men in Black, spawned a franchise that now includes four movies, a theme park ride, an animated series, a new comic book, and even that hit Will Smith song, which I'm sure you're humming right now.


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[Assistant] And in a way, they've become a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. These stories about mysterious agents lurking in the shadows all around us have become so popular that those stories themselves are, in a way, lurking all around us.


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[Assistant] Most of the time, legends do nothing more than offer a bit of entertainment. Other times, they answer our questions and feed our fears.


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[Assistant] But sometimes it seems, they go one step further, they leap off the pages of history, and come to life.


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[Assistant] I hope you've enjoyed our tour today through some of the foundational stories at the heart of the Men in Black legend. Clearly there's something powerful about these characters. And whether you believe that they're fact or fiction, it's hard to deny how attractive their mythology has become.


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[Assistant] But we're not done yet with the world of Alien Encounters because I have one more otherworldly tale to tell. Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about it.


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[Assistant] It was going to be a great trip. Back in August of 1976, twin brothers Jack and Jim planned a two-week camping excursion in Maine, along with their friends Chuck and Charlie. The four young men started by hiking up Mount Katahdin before chartering a plane to Shin Pond, where they set out by canoe on the Allagash Wilderness Waterway.


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[Assistant] After a long couple of days of climbing and paddling, they set up camp in an area called Mud Brook. It was a clear night with a sky full of stars, which is why they didn't think twice when they spotted a bright light across the water. They figured it was just another celestial body on beautiful display.


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[Assistant] But Jim later said that this star displayed a strange quality of light. He grabbed his binoculars and aimed them at it, which turned out to be only a few miles away. According to Jim, it hovered about 200 feet above the tree line. Clearly, this was no star. And then, without warning, the light blinked and vanished.


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[Assistant] The four friends went back to their conversation and didn't think about the odd light again for the rest of the night.


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[Assistant] 48 hours later, they had moved camp to a new spot, and this time in an area known as Smith Brook. They built a bonfire to mark their camp, and then pulled their canoe out into the water to do some night fishing. But it wasn't long before Chuck had the feeling that he was being watched.


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[Assistant] When he turned around, he spotted a glowing sphere of light nearby, several hundred feet in the air. It made no sound, but colorful lights pulsed from it. And pretty soon, the others were watching it as well.


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[Assistant] Charlie picked up his flashlight and pointed it at the object, blinking out the signal for S.O.S. The sphere immediately reacted, moving quickly toward them and then hovering 50 feet above their heads.


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[Assistant] A moment later, a cone shaped beam of light appeared that seemed to scan the water like a spotlight. Not wanting to be seen, the four friends grabbed their paddles and quickly headed back to shore. By the time they made it back to camp, the sphere was gone.


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[Assistant] Upon reaching the bonfire though, they realized something strange. They had only been gone for about 20 minutes, and yet their massive bonfire had been reduced to red coals, as though it had been burning for hours.


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[Assistant] The rest of their trip was uneventful, with no further sightings of the mysterious ball of light. And that was it. Life moved on, and things went back to normal. That is, until one night in 1988, 12 years later, when Jim and Jack both had a nightmare. And then another.


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[Assistant] And in each of these dreams, all four of those hiking buddies were together and sitting naked on a bench feeling afraid. And while it was strange to share a nightmare with someone else, they didn't know what it meant.


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[Assistant] They sought help of a UFO researcher named Ray Fowler who agreed to look into their dreams as well as the events that had happened 12 years before. All four men were interviewed by Fowler one on one and even participated in regressive hypnosis where they walked through their memories of that night in the canoe.


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[Assistant] After the sessions were over, one key detail jumped out. It seems that there was a period of missing time, somewhere between spotting the light and their return to shore. And in that gap, each man now remembered being taken up and into the hovering craft.


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[Assistant] And you can probably fill in the details of their story from here, right? Inside a clinical-looking exam room, they were stripped naked and samples were taken from them through various methods. Some strange, others normal.


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[Assistant] Ray Fowler would spend the next two years investigating their experience, and when it was over, the men started to speak more openly about it. They even appeared on television, and were featured in an episode of Unsolved Mysteries.


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[Assistant] But after the TV shows and book deals and even convention appearances, Chuck eventually recanted his testimony, although he did still claim that he saw the spaceship. The others held firm, though, fully committed to their story of abduction.


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[Assistant] Was it a hoax, like some people have claimed over the years, or were they simply influenced by pop culture and entertainment?


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[Assistant] It's hard to say for sure, but if you ask the men themselves, there is only one explanation. And it's the one that keeps people up at night, looking toward the stars.


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[Assistant] This episode of Lore Legends was produced by me, Aaron Manke, with writing by Aaron Manke and Harry Marks and research by Jamie Vargas. Don't like hearing the ads? I've got a solution. There's a paid version of Lore on Apple Podcasts and Patreon that is 100% ad-free.


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[Assistant] Plus, subscribers get weekly mini-episodes called Lore Bites. It's a bargain for all of that ad-free storytelling and a great way to support this show and the team behind it.


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[Assistant] Lore is much more than just a podcast. There's the book series available in bookstores and online, and two seasons of the television show on Amazon Prime Video. Information about all of that and more is available over at lorepodcast.com.


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


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[Assistant] Welcome to Lore Legends, a subset of lore episodes that explore the strange tales we whisper in the dark, even if they can't always be proven by the history books. So if you're ready, let's begin.


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[Assistant] The woods can be one of the most peaceful and tranquil places you'll ever find. The sounds of songbirds and squirrels going about their life overhead. Invisible creatures in the underbrush. The rustle of leaves in the wind. You get the idea. It can feel almost magical, as though the world around you just melts away.


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[Assistant] In the woods, there are no bills, no groceries, no commutes, no traffic jams. There's only the quiet contemplation that arises when nature replaces all distraction.


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[Assistant] But when night falls and the moon casts its pale glow, those trees can loom tall, like monsters, complete with gnarled arms and sharpened claws.


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[Assistant] In the dark, the woods feel a whole lot different. They take on a more sinister color in the absence of light, where every animal scurrying in the shadows and every cracked twig could mean your demise.


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[Assistant] As Robert Frost once wrote, the woods are lovely, dark and deep.


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[Assistant] But in those depths are things we cannot see. Sounds we can't explain. Our ears and minds play tricks on us. Was that simply the cry of a fox? Or the scream of someone being murdered a hundred yards away?


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[Assistant] The forest at night is where our imaginations run wild with thoughts of what could be lurking in the shadows. Yes, the woods can be lovely, dark, and deep, but after hearing the next four stories, I doubt you'll ever sleep again.


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[Assistant] In the woods of Slavic countries, like Russia, Slovakia, and Poland, there is a spirit. He's been called many things over the centuries. Les Pravadni, which means Righteous One of the Forest, or Mishko Velnias, the Forest Devil.


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[Assistant] But most commonly he goes by a simple five-letter name. Leshy, which translates as, he from the forest.


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[Assistant] Leshy is something of a Russian Lorax, who protects the forest and its animals. He's often spotted alongside gray wolves and bears, and tells the birds when it's time to migrate for the season.


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[Assistant] Those who wish to do harm to the forest or its denizens have been met with his wrath. Loggers and hunters have either gone missing or been unsuccessful in their hunts because they have not appeased Leshy, who does not ask for much.


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[Assistant] Hunters, for example, must promise not to kill more than Leshy has allowed, and they can only hunt on specific days. Leshy's punishments for deviating from those rules can vary, from being whipped with the tops of the trees to being stricken with a severe illness.


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[Assistant] These peasants sometimes believed the hunters and herdsmen who did so wielded occult powers over the forest as well.


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[Assistant] According to folklorists, some forests are home to multiple leshies that will fight over their domains, and the effects of these battles can be seen in felled trees and frightened animals. Wind storms and hurricanes have also been blamed on such leshy fights, with activity much higher in the spring.


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[Assistant] But not all leshy activity is destructive. Some say they hibernate in the winter, while others believe that they die each autumn. After winter, as the ground thaws, they are reborn. Some who have encountered him in the forest claim to have heard him singing, laughing, or whistling among the trees. And he has a reputation among many as a prankster. Just don't anger him.


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[Assistant] He carries with him a weapon to let the other woodland creatures know that he is in charge. It's been said that a mushroom's wrinkles are the result of Leshy whipping at its cap.


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[Assistant] Now, if the stories are true, Forest visitors who have angered the Leshy have not fared well against him, with some not even living to tell the tale.


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[Assistant] He's been known to lure unsuspecting trespassers, usually children, in a few different ways. One is by mimicking the voices of their parents and siblings. Another is by shifting into a different form entirely, like that of a tree or a mushroom or an animal, or even a half-human, half-plant hybrid.


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[Assistant] His true form, though, varies depending on the tale and who is telling it. In some versions, he has horns on his head and cloven feet with shoes that are worn on the wrong feet. And no matter where the sun casts its rays, he never casts a shadow.


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[Assistant] Others say that he bears a more human appearance, with no eyebrows or eyelashes. In this form, he is old and withered with a pointy head and no right ear. He may also have long green hair or fur all over his body. Oh, and his eyes occasionally glow.


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[Assistant] And still, there is a legend that paints the Leshy as a giant, who is so large that his eyes are like the stars, and he tromps through the forest causing the wind to blow.


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[Assistant] To touch him is to feel skin like a tree's bark, dyed blue because of the color of the blood flowing through his veins. And once he leaves his domain, he shrinks back down, no taller than a blade of grass.


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[Assistant] Now, after all of that, you might think that the Leshy is a solitary creature. His only friends the flora and fauna around him, right? But he's said to have a wife, named Lesha Chica, and children as well, called Leshanki.


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[Assistant] Leshychika may be a cursed kidnapped or a fallen woman who has gone to live with the Leshy. And their children, on the other hand, might be their own or they could be the children of locals who have wandered into the forest, never to be seen again.


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[Assistant] Some of those children could be unbaptized babies that have been plucked from their parents by the leshy. But there is a way to get someone back. All a person has to do is leave food at a crossroad in the forest. It must be wrapped in cloth and tied up with a red string.


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[Assistant] And still, even those who have been taken by the Leshy can escape if they refuse to eat what he offers.


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[Assistant] All of this sounds terrifying, although it's possible the stories of the Leshy were designed to keep children from wandering into the woods unattended. But the spirit isn't all bad. He can even be friendly, sharing the secrets of forest magic with those who befriend him.


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[Assistant] And if that's your plan, you've got some work cut out for you. Summoning Aleshi, it seems, requires the cutting down of young birch trees and forming a circle with their tops pointing toward the center.


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[Assistant] Then you must remove any Christian symbols you might be wearing, stand in the center of the circle, and call out for him. Once he arrives, offer him eggs, salted pancakes, or pipe tobacco.


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[Assistant] Things you might have on you, and you might find yourself on the receiving end of some gifts of your own.


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[Assistant] The Leshy is, according to the stories, a cunning spirit, capable of great generosity or vicious retribution. So, if you want my recommendation, it's probably best to stay on his good side if you dare to enter the woods. And when you do, make sure you bring a snack.


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[Assistant] Monsters are everywhere. In the United States, for example, there is another kind of spirit. One that has continued to plague the people living in the hills of Frederick County, Maryland for generations. And its reputation can be summed up with one frightening word. Snallygaster.


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[Assistant] It's a name that supposedly comes from the German phrase Schnellgeist, meaning fast ghost or quick spirit. Frederick County was a major destination for German immigrants dating all the way back to the 1730s.


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[Assistant] Many scholars, though, think that the Snallygaster legend is more of a hybrid, comprised of both Native American and Pennsylvania Dutch elements, with a dash of mountain man lore for good measure.


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[Assistant] Now, if you find yourself wandering around Frederick County, you might see hex signs, such as a seven-pointed star, placed on barns and in the area. These are allegedly meant to ward off the beast. But what exactly is a Snallygaster?


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[Assistant] Although descriptions vary, it's most commonly said to be part reptile, part bird, and according to one article in the Evening Sun back in 1909, as big as a dirigible. Its wingspan can stretch up to 14 feet wide, and it's said to have a metallic beak with razor-sharp teeth inside.


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[Assistant] On the ends of its feet are talons made of hot, glowing metal, and in the center of its forehead, a single red eye.


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[Assistant] The Snallygaster has also been depicted with tentacles protruding from its mouth, like some eldritch horror from the pages of Lovecraft. Its keen sense of smell is only matched by the unpleasant odor emanating from its hulking body.


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[Assistant] Now it's said to be as old as the Jersey Devil, both of them born in 1735, if you're keeping track. Although the earliest newspaper reports on the Snellegaster only date back to 1909.


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[Assistant] And one eyewitness reported that they spotted something yellow and roughly the size of a barrel nestled in the hills and believed that it was a snally gaster egg.


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[Assistant] Sightings of the creature were quite common, with witnesses unafraid to talk about their interactions with it.


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[Assistant] Oh, and the Battle of Chickamauga. That was a massive Union defeat during the Civil War. A battle that had taken place over 600 miles away.


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[Assistant] Another report claimed that a group of men had engaged in a heated battle with the Snallygaster outside the Emmitsburg train station in March of 1909.


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[Assistant] Stanley Gaster's sightings quieted down for a while after that, until November of 1932, when Maryland newspapers began publishing sensational and mildly sarcastic articles about it.


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[Assistant] Baltimore's Evening Sun newspaper ran one tongue-in-cheek reports claiming the creature had been seen wearing water wings and riding a bicycle. That same paper also published what they advertised as the Scoop of the Decade, the first published close-up of the Bovalopus Snellygaster.


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[Assistant] Bovalopus, if you're curious, is a nonsense word, often associated with the Snallygaster, meant to add a scientific flair to the reports. And as for the photo they published, it depicted what looked like a dragon riding a penny farthing, not as menacing as the eyewitness statements would have you believe.


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[Assistant] By December of that year, reports of the Snallygaster's demise were everywhere. One paper reported that it had been shot down, when in reality all that had been injured was a large owl.


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[Assistant] Another account claimed that the Snallygaster had been attracted to the smell of a 2,500 gallon vat of moonshine in the small town of Frog Hollow. Upon flying over its alluring fumes, the creature was overcome by the scent of the alcohol and fell out of the sky and into the vat where it drowned.


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[Assistant] Conveniently, prohibition agents had been tipped off about the moonshining operation and arrived on the scene not long after. They found that the Snallygaster was nothing more than a skeleton, its flesh having been eaten away by the high quantity of lye in the illegal hooch.


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[Assistant] Of course, these articles and reports were not simply about a wild-flying reptile run amok. They'd also been written with a strong political undercurrent. The very first Snallygaster article didn't mince words. It stated that the so-called vampire devil only attacked people of color.


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[Assistant] Were these articles trying to frighten African Americans out of Maryland?


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[Assistant] Well, quite the opposite, actually. They were more of a warning that politicians were working against their best interests, hence the slang term used to describe unscrupulous politicians at the time, snollygoster.


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[Assistant] Like I said, monsters are everywhere, and I challenge any of you to find one that seems more American than the Snallygaster. But with that said, I'm not sure what's scarier, the vampire devils in the sky, or the next one on our list, the Hodag.


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[Assistant] Nine hundred miles away in the dense forest of Wisconsin's North Woods is a special kind of cryptid. It's local to the town of Rhinelander in the northern part of the state, and its story grew from the tales told around the fires at the area's many logging camps.


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[Assistant] The creature is known as the hoedag, and according to legend it was born out of the ashes of a cremated lumber ox. This hoedag was the same color as the ox it had come from and possessed its strength, along with attributes from other forest animals as well.


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[Assistant] It was as cunning as a fox and savage as a bear. Not something to be trifled with in the forest on a dark night.