Lore - Episode 207: Flesh & Blood

Episode Date: September 12, 2022

Our family and where we come from are often core elements of our identity. But as folklore and tragic real life events have made clear over the years, not everything is as simple as it would appear. ���——————— Lore Resources:  Episode Music: lorepodcast.com/music  Episode Sources: lorepodcast.com/sources  All the shows from Grim & Mild: www.grimandmild.com Access premium content! ©2022 Aaron Mahnke. All rights reserved.   To advertise on our podcast, please reach out to [e-mail], or visit our listing here.

He only ever wanted to give them what they were looking for. There had been rumors in the art world for a very long time that the Dutchmaster Johannes Vermeer had painted a series of biblical scenes, but no one knew where they were, so Henry helped them find them. The painting he sold them in 1937 called The Supper at Emmaus was hardened and cracked with age, but it was beautiful, and it came with the sort of price tag you'd expect from a rare lost masterpiece, something close to $4.5 million today. All of a sudden, Henry was a very rich man.

Over the next few years, he earned even more money, roughly $30 million today, all from selling long-lost Vermeer paintings he had found, but the truth was harder to believe. Somehow this man had painted all of them himself, imitating the style of a mirror so closely that the experts had been tricked. Then he treated them with chemicals and heat to add what three centuries of aging should have done. Henry van Meegeren's deception came to light only after selling one of his paintings to a well-known Nazi leader.

After World War II ended, the art world assumed that he had sold a national treasure to the enemy and he was tried on conspiracy charges. The only way to prove his innocence was to come clean and reveal his scam. History is full of people getting fooled. Honestly, I feel like daily life for us is often a lot like that, dodging one tricky headline after another or attempting to not step in yet one more steaming pile of rumor on our way to work. Life, it seems, is just one long exercise in avoiding deception.

But at the intersection of folklore and real life, some events have taken place that force us to ask a most uncomfortable question. What happens when the one who fools us also happens to be the person we trust the most, ourselves. I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore. In 1910, Francisco received a diagnosis that frightened him. It was tuberculosis and his prognosis was grim. So he visited a healer who lived and worked in his community there in Spain, hoping for

a cure. That healer referred him to another man who told him of the perfect remedy, but it was going to be a hard one to swallow. You see, the healer's cure involved drinking the blood of a child and then rubbing their body fat on his chest. And while you'd think that no one would even consider a deed like that as an option, Francisco was desperate. The murder they would go on to commit in June of that year would become known as the crime

of Ghidor. In fact, it became so widely known in Spain that people everywhere began referring to Francisco Ortega as the Spanish sac man, a nod to a very old, very common branch of folklore. You can find the stories all over the world, and all of them share some eerily similar details. In Quebec, they whisper about the seven o'clock man, who comes to steal children who refuse to go to bed on time, stuffing them into a sack and taking them away. In Haiti, he's called Uncle Gunny's sack.

Again, he's a man with a sack who steals misbehaving children. And in the Bahamas, we have stories of Roland Kart. What does he put in his cart? Stolen children, of course. In Europe, the sac man folklore is everywhere. In Russia and Belarus, there's the Babayka. And in Poland, it's known by many names, including the Babak, Babak and Bobak. There, the creature arrives with a full moon atop a wagon pulled by cats.

And of course, it has a sack for the children. In Hungarian and Transylvanian folklore, it's known as the Mumu, sort of a gaunt, zombie-like creature that carries, you guessed it, a sack. Oh, and who could forget the child-stealing monster known as the Rez Faso Bagov, which roughly translates as the copper penis owl? I'll let you make of that what you will. In the list goes on and on. All of them perfect entries in the world of sac man folklore, the Bori Baba of India,

the Baba Roga of Croatia, the Ami Ona of Japan. All of them feature a person who arrives to steal your child, and nearly all of them use the same tool. A sack. But then, standing nearby, but looking slightly different, is a creature from folklore that most of us have heard of, the changeling. It's common to the cultures of the British Isles, and is one of those folktales that has found its way into real-life actions and misfortune, mostly because of the prescriptive

nature of the stories. You see, a changeling was believed to be a young fairy that had been swapped out for a human baby. At some point when the parent wasn't looking, fairies had arrived, taken their child and replaced them with a look-alike. But while the casual observer might never notice a difference, it was hard to fool the parents. And naturally, they wanted their real children back, so there was a long list of things one might try to frighten the changeling off and initiate the return of their own flesh and

blood. All you had to do was make the changeling uncomfortable. Some believed you could set the changeling down on a pile of dung, while others thought that placing it at the shoreline just before the tide came in would do the trick. In some places, it was even believed that the changeling should be placed in a basket and dangled over a burning fire. The assumption was that the fairy child would leap out of the basket and fly up the chimney, and then your own real child would return shortly after.

As you can imagine, that led to a lot of tragic endings. One side note, it's clear from the physical descriptions of changeling babies throughout history that those small differences were really the outward signs of congenital disorders, things like Down syndrome, hypercalcemia, progeria, and others. Life has always delivered unexpected challenges to parents over the centuries. To some, it seems, folklore was the easier way to process it all. Taken as a whole, though, these stories from around the globe illustrate a belief system that was designed to explain the unexplainable.

The whys and hows were answered with story, and then those stories spread. What's clear throughout all of them, though, is that they shared one specific, common, primal fear. The fear of losing a child. There's was a normal middle-class family. Husband Percy worked as an insurance salesman and real estate agent in the Louisiana town of Apollousis. He and his wife, Lessie, were busy with work, life, and raising their two boys, four-year-old

Robert and his younger brother, Alonso. But like so many other families before them, and since, they needed a vacation. So in late August of 1912, they gathered up their camping supplies and headed out to Swayze Lake in St. Landry Parish. Although to think of it as a normal lake might be a stretch, picture it more as a swamp, with some large patches of water all surrounded by thick woods. It was August, and even that far into summer back then it could still break 100 degrees during the day.

So I can imagine having the water nearby was lovely, and it was some time after arriving and getting all set up that Percy and Lessie took their eyes off Robert, who had been walking around and exploring the camp area. And that's when little Robert, who they just called Bobby, disappeared. Now there's a lot about this case that quickly took on the look and feel of a folk tale. Reports on some of the key moments vary wildly. Some say Bobby disappeared just before lunch, after a trip to the water for some fishing. Others claim it happened as darkness was settling over the woods.

But while those differences might impact the scene we imagine, all stories agree that the boy was just gone. Naturally they immediately started looking for him, shouting his name, beating the bushes and scouring every inch of the forest and water they could see. But it quickly became clear that he wasn't there. So the authorities were called and a search effort was organized at once. Hundreds of volunteers showed up. The Dunbar family was well loved and everyone wanted to help out.

But when it became clear that the boy wasn't hiding behind a tree like some kind of game, it began to assume the worst. Maybe he had drowned or even been eaten by one of the many local alligators. They even went as far as to kill and cut open a number of them just to check their stomach contents. Through that they tossed explosives in the water, hoping to dislodge any bodies that might be trapped below. But even after all that, nothing.

Searchers did notice that there were railroad tracks near the campsite, though. Tracks that had small bare footprints near them. And that sparked another theory. What if little Bobby had wandered off in that direction? And what if a drifter had been around, following the tracks and had taken him? With nobody in the swamp and the mysterious footprints near the tracks, a different picture was beginning to take shape. Bobby Dunbar hadn't been killed in the wilderness.

He had been stolen by a stranger. Which meant their search area had just become bigger than anyone else could have imagined. Soon after returning home, the family had postcards printed up with a photo and description of the boy on it. Four years old, dark blonde hair, rosy cheeks, and a burn scar on his big left toe. It wasn't much, but this was 1912 and they didn't have a lot to work with back then. Thankfully, the family was able to mail the cards out to a massive area, though, all the way to Eastern Florida, in fact, and they offered a sizable reward.

And when that's done, all they could do was wait and not give up hope. But the trouble with hope is that it can often lead to the unexpected. Eight months later, they found him. Actually, it wasn't the family who tracked him down, but helpful strangers in Mississippi. It seems that someone spotted the boy in the company of a man named William Walters, and they put the pieces together. Walters did fit that drifter description, and the press did a good job of painting him as a bum, traveling the railroad and just getting by.

But what they glossed over was that he worked as a piano tuner, and that wasn't the sort of job that allowed for setting up shop and having customers carry in their items. No, by nature of the work, he had to spend most of his time out on the road. Now William claimed the boy was his nephew, Bruce Anderson. His brother and the boy's mother weren't married, but he said she had asked him to care for Bruce for a while, which is why they were in Mississippi together. And you can probably understand how this story was taken, seeing as how everyone assumed that he was just a wandering beggar, right?

Bobby was taken away from Walters and brought back to Apollosis to be reunited with his family. And again, here's where the story veers into fairytale territory. Some say his mother, Lessie Dunbar, was allowed to see him while he was asleep, and that when he opened his eyes and asked, mother, she fainted instantly. Other newspaper accounts claim that she saw the boy by the light of a dim lantern and was unsure if it really was her son at all. At this point, he'd been gone so long it was probably easy to be unsettled, but her

hope and joy won out, and she brought him home to his father and brother, a brother he apparently knew by name. The town rejoiced with them. In fact, a parade was held in Bobby's honor, and the day of his return was declared a holiday for everyone. It was a happy, joyous occasion, as any reunion like that should be. But there were dark clouds on the horizon. Because while a lot of people smiled and welcomed him home, some of the Dunbar's close friends

whispered that Bobby wasn't the same. He was different somehow, changed. And knowing what we know about the folklore of stolen children, I can even see shadows of the changeling story in this experience. It's easy for our minds to go in that direction, right? That's when Julia Anderson arrived. She was the mother of the boy William Walters was supposed to have been caring for and had come as part of the trial for the strange man, who was up on charges of kidnapping.

Charges, mind you, that came with the death penalty at the time. Remember, that's the narrative that almost everyone assumed was the truth. William Walters had come across Bobby Dunbar by the campsite, taken him and then kept the boy with him under an assumed name as he worked his way through Mississippi. Julia Anderson's boy Bruce, if he ever existed at all, was somewhere else, missing and gone. The trial lasted two long weeks. Witnesses were called on both sides, and details about how well Bobby was settling back into his home were used as evidence that he really was the missing Dunbar boy.

But there were problems with the trial. For one, everyone involved, from the jury to the judge, came from the Dunbar's community. You know, the same community that threw them a parade and held a city-wide holiday in their honor, and the people sharing those stories of his well-adjusted return home were his family and their close friends. I guess my point is that there was a lot of bias going on, and William Walters didn't really stand a chance. The man was found guilty of the charges and sent straight to prison.

Thankfully, his sentence was reduced from execution to life behind bars because an appeal two years later found his charges reversed and he was allowed to go home. Two families, two missing children, and a firestorm of opinion and controversy. It's no wonder that people still talk about Bobby Dunbar today. No one likes to imagine having one of their children taken away, but if it happened, everyone would wish for a happy ending. While both families clearly suffered the tragedy of a lost son, only one of them seemed to have their prayers answered.

Bobby Dunbar was alive and well. And he was finally home. As a parent, I need to say this up front. The fear of losing a child, of having them taken away by some nefarious individual and removed from our care is a fully understandable, totally natural thing to feel. I hope that our journey through this specific branch of folklore, along with tragic real-life events, made that clear. Our fear is normal.

But it can also be preyed upon. Back in the 1980s, a decade I remember better than a lot of you, I'm guessing, the concept of stranger danger really clawed its way into the forefront of current events. The kidnapping and murder of young Adam Walsh, for example, not only gave us America's most wanted, hosted by his father, but it also helped fuel movements like putting photos of missing kids on milk cartons and public service announcements from McGruff the crime dog. But the fear was also misrepresented by the press. Child abduction advocates claim that upwards of 50,000 children were taken by strangers

each and every year, a staggering number that would make any parent nervous. But that figure included runaways, and a 1984 FBI report listed the number of actual child kidnappings that year at just 67. Yes, it was 67 more than anybody would want, but a far cry from 50,000. For the Dunbar and Anderson families in 1912, though, the odds were not in their favor. Both families lost a child, and only one welcomed theirs back. And for decades afterwards, their family and descendants began to ponder what a lot of others had already been thinking, had the boy known as Bobby Dunbar really gone to the

right home? And this is where it gets wild, because about 20 years ago, a few key people began to crack the case. First, Margaret Dunbar cut right, the child's granddaughter, started investigating the events. It was a journey that led her to the home of William Walters' defense attorney and a conversation with that man's granddaughter, plus over 900 pages of documents about the case. Then Margaret teamed up with a woman named Linda Travers, granddaughter of Julia Anderson, and they realized that thanks to a century of medical advancement, they had all the tools

necessary to settle the matter for good. So after taking a DNA sample from Margaret's father, Bobby Jr., and one from the son of Alonzo Dunbar, Bobby's biological brother, they compared the results. The boy who had been pulled from William Walters' custody and then handed over to Percy and Lessie Dunbar was not, in fact, a Dunbar. He was the son of someone else. Most likely, Julia Anderson. Julia, by the way, went on to have seven more kids, and for decades that family told stories

of the brother who was taken from them. At the same time, the Dunbars told their own tales of how Bobby had once disappeared, only to return again, almost like a miracle. Two families with two similar tales, both stories of love and the difficulty of letting people go, both stories of stranger danger, abduction and loss, and none, it turns out, who actually got what they wanted. The story of Bobby Dunbar might sound like a modern-day changeling tale. A panicked mother and a child that didn't quite look like the one she'd lost, along

with a community who surrounded her with everything she needed to convince herself it would be okay. It's tragic and bittersweet and deeply connected to folklore, but it's not the only one. I have one more story to share with you about the power of belief and personal identity, and if you stick around through this brief sponsor break, I'll tell you all about it. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp Online Therapy. I'll be the first to admit, over the past couple of years, I've found it difficult to shift my focus away from problems and onto solutions.

It's not an easy thing to do in the best of times, and I think you probably feel the same way. It can honestly be tough to train your brain to stay in problem-solving mode when faced with a challenge in life, but when you learn how to find your own solutions, there's no better feeling. And a therapist can help you do that, to become a better problem solver, making it easier to accomplish your goals, no matter how big or small. And if you're thinking of giving therapy a try, BetterHelp is a great option.

It's convenient, accessible, affordable, and entirely online. You'll get matched with a therapist after filling out a brief survey, and you can switch therapists anytime. When you want to be a better problem solver, Therapy can get you there. Visit BetterHelp.com slash lore today to get 10% off your first month. That's B-E-T-T-E-R-H-E-L-P dot com slash lore. This episode was also made possible by Native. Your shower routine.

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first three pack of Native body wash. Nativedeo.com slash 2-0 lore or use promo code 2-0 lore. And finally, this episode was made possible by the good people over at Squarespace. A couple of years ago, I had an idea. I was making more podcasts than just lore and had begun to hire people. Heck, I was even thinking of renting an office space, so I decided to bundle it all together under one big production label, Grim and Mild. But to make it official, the company needed a digital home, a place to list all our amazing

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When they pulled her body from the canal in Berlin, the authorities feared the worst. Witnesses had seen her jump from the bridge above, and everyone assumed she had taken her own life. But it turns out, she was still alive. She wasn't, however, in a talkative mood. In fact, her demeanor was so distant and unresponsive that they were left with no choice but to take her to the nearby Daldorf Asylum. That was 1920, and the young woman with no voice and no name, let alone any papers or

items that could help identify her, would spend the next two years there, waiting, hoping. At some point during those two years, one of the other patients staying at the hospital there, saw something familiar in the mysterious young woman's face. After she was discharged, this woman started telling others about the woman she met in the Daldorf Asylum, and some of those people included former residents of another country. Russia One person who caught wind of the woman's description and plight was a former guard for the Russian royal family.

When he showed a photograph of those royals to the mysterious young woman, she reportedly became angry and red in the face. Soon after, through much trial and error, those who were caring for her determined that not only was she connected to the Romanov family, but that she was very likely the youngest daughter of the dead Tsar, Anastasia. The Romanovs, if you remember, were the family that had ruled over Russia for three centuries. But in the lead-up to World War I, tensions in the country began to ramp up into outright revolution, and in 1917, the Tsar was forced to abdicate.

Then on July 16th of 1918, the entire family, along with a number of their servants, all found themselves gathered in the basement of the house they were being held in. Under the guise of having their photograph taken, gunmen opened fire, killing all of them in cold blood. But the trouble was, two bodies were not found with the rest, Crown Prince Alexei and his sister, Anastasia. There were tests, of course. This woman's handwriting was compared to known examples of Anastasia's script, and

they seemed to match. An old childhood friend, a son of one of the servants of the Romanov family who had died with them, visited her and instantly recognized her. In fact, he was so convinced that Anastasia had returned that he helped fund a legal battle with the German court system to regain her portion of the Romanov fortune. And as a side note, that case would stay open for 32 years, and to this day, it's the longest running court case in German history. After her identity came out and she was freed from the hospital, this young woman spent

a few years living in a number of different luxurious homes, manors, and castles throughout Europe. She was royalty, after all, and a bunch of different fellow royals wanted to make sure she was given the lifestyle she deserved. I imagine she enjoyed it. Honestly, who wouldn't? In 1928, though, she traveled to New York City where she used an unusual name to check into a hotel, Anna Anderson.

She said that it was to avoid the attention and that her real name, at least the name she had chosen for herself, was still Anastasia. But there, for that moment, she was yet another Anderson for us to bump into. As so often happens, she met a man, fell in love, and settled into life as the person everyone assumed she was. Anastasia, long-lost daughter of Zarnikolas II, miraculously returned from the dead. Except for one problem. It seems that Anastasia's uncle, the Grand Duke of Hesse, was still alive and he wasn't

buying any of it for a minute. He went as far as to hire a private investigator to uncover the truth. And what he discovered was shocking, well, depending on how gullible her associates really were. Anastasia was, in fact, Francesca Sienkowska, a Polish woman who had disappeared around the same time this young woman was pulled from the waters of a canal in Berlin back in 1920. Her former co-workers remembered her as having a history of mental illness, and her own family, a family who I assume missed her all those years, quickly confirmed that, yes, she was

one of them. The woman who called herself Anastasia lived a long and eventful life, passing away in February of 1984 at the age of 87. All the way to the end, though, she fought to prove her identity as the lost Russian princess. But after her death, a DNA test of some tissue removed from her intestines in 1979 settled the matter for good. She was not, and never had been, a Romanov.

But the story has been told for so long because we love a good mystery, and we love when lost children are reunited with their former lives. We watched that play out with the Bobby Dunbar events, and it's been the hope of countless other families over the years. Who we are and who the world around us wants us to be are challenging stories to wrestle with. But it's clear that, for those who desperately want to believe, the evidence will always be clear and obvious.

It just might not always be the truth. This episode of lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, the research by Jenna Rose Nethercotts 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. I also make and executive produce a whole bunch of other podcasts, all of which I think

you'd enjoy. My production company, Grim and Mild, specializes in shows that sit at the intersection of the dark and the historical. You can learn more about all of those shows and everything else going on over in one central place, grimandmild.com. And you can also follow this show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Just search for Lore podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button. And when you do, say hi, I like it when people say hi.

And as always, thanks for listening.