Lore - Episode 209: Thick & Thin

Episode Date: October 3, 2022

Tucked away in one of the most well-known types of figures in folklore is an idea we can all relate to. But at the same time, its implication has played out in some rather horrifying ways. ———��———— Lore Resources:  Episode Music: lorepodcast.com/music  Episode Sources: lorepodcast.com/sources  All the shows from Grim & Mild: www.grimandmild.com ©2022 Aaron Mahnke. All rights reserved. Access premium content!: https://www.lorepodcast.com/support To advertise on our podcast, please reach out to [e-mail], or visit our listing here.

It was the sort of story that all of us live for. In 1967, a building in Chicago needed to go through some renovations, and at some point in the project, the plumber told the owner that an entire brick wall had to come down. Now if you love uncovering mysteries, those are practically magic words. Think about how many times a lost burial has been located in unexpected places, like the time in 2012 when archaeologists found the remains of King Richard III under a parking lot, but this plumber found something entirely different. It was a motorcycle, and not just any motorcycle, but a one-of-a-kind hand-built masterpiece

by a guy named Richard Traub back in 1917. It had features that were years ahead of its time, and when experts got their hands on it upon removal from the wall in 1967, they were blown away. The story about how it ended up behind the bricks, if you're curious, is the stuff of legend. Apparently, the previous owners of that home had a teenage son, and that son was assumed to have stolen the motorcycle. After finding out about his dirty deed, the boy's parents forced him to enlist in the

army, which is why he died in Europe during World War I and never returned. It's a journey, for sure. But the thing I love about this story is that it's one more in a long line of items we've discovered that are connected to something humans have been passionate about for thousands of years. Transportation. From horses to horse power, and everything in between, people love to get around, and the list of options is pretty staggering.

But none of them hold a candle to one device that has become the centerpiece for a ton of popular folklore. It might not have an engine, or even wheels, but if the stories are true, it gave people one hell of a ride. I'm talking, of course, about the broomstick. I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore. Context is always important. Without context, a story has less power, less punch.

Think of it like a massive Gothic cathedral. Yes, those spires are tall and ornate and majestic, but without all these supporting buttresses and columns, it just wouldn't have been possible. And today's story needs some of that sort of groundwork. Painting with a very wide brush, I know, the history of the UK is filled with some dark stuff. And while there are a lot of people to blame for that, right up there in the top five would be a guy named King James VI of Scotland.

Why? Because he was violently opposed to anything that smelled like witchcraft. In 1597, he published a book called Demonology, which was basically a political tool used to convince the uneducated public that fake things were real and that they should be feared. Werewolves, vampires, black magic, necromancy, you name it, he included it. Then once the people were stirred up into a frenzy, he used his power to punish anyone who got called out for those made up things. As king, he was a brutal advocate of bloody witch trials.

But at least he was only king of Scotland, right? Well, all of that changed in 1603 when England's Queen Elizabeth I died childless, passing the crown to James. And while there were more limits on his power as king of England, things like the Magna Carta and a much stronger parliament, there was also a religious community primed for something bigger to fear. And James, along with his demonology, delivered. So there's your context, a powerful ruler instilling fear in everyone in the land and

using superstition and folklore as a weapon, which leads me to one of the most common elements of many stories that popped up in the witch trials that followed. This idea that witches could be anywhere and they could go anywhere. Where might a witch go? Well, it would have to be a really evil place, right? So most of the stories talked about accused witches traveling hundreds of miles away to a secret location to have a dance party with the devil, a gathering they called a Sabbath. And how did they get there?

Well, that's the question, isn't it? Taking a step back for a moment, broomsticks have been an object of folklore for a very long time. In 1324, for example, an Irish woman named Alice Kyteller was accused of using a broom to literally sweep away the good fortune from her neighbor's porch. Investigators searched her house and, wouldn't you know it, she did in fact own a broom. Crazy, right? And they claimed that they also found a liquid that she used to give the broom magical powers.

A pipe of ointment, they wrote, upon which she ambled and galloped through thick and thin. Poor Alice ended up fleeing the country to escape her punishment. A little over a century later, just outside of Paris, a priest was thrown in prison for the rest of his life. His crime? Well, on paper, he was accused of flying around the area on a broom. But in reality, his real crime was speaking out against his own church's obsession with witch trials.

Ironic, yes, but also deeply sad and troubling. After that, the notion appeared more and more in witch trial confessions. By the early 1500s, it was so common that it was just the way people assumed all witches traveled. Sometimes they flew over the village, and other times they flew up or down chimneys or through keyholes. But the broom was always a part of the story. Today we know the truth.

A lot of the stories about flying witches involved a broom because it was a common household object and easy to assume to be in the possession of the accused. But where there are rules, there are also exceptions. Because apparently, one didn't always need a broomstick to get around. Clearly, the broomstick is the gold standard for witch transportation. I don't think there's any question about that. One trip through the Halloween aisle in your local target should make that truth self-evident. But it wasn't the only option available to witches with a taste for road trips.

If you took a survey of European witch trial documents, you'd find a whole assortment of bewitched objects that these folks were accused of flying on. Horses and goats were common, as were other types of sticks. Heck, there are even stories of witches flying on sleeping men. The most common element other than broomsticks was some sort of magical product, like a powder or ointment. It was believed that right before a journey, a witch would strip naked and rub their body from head to toe in some sort of potion they concocted to grant them the power of flight.

And the ingredients list for some of these ointments was quite the botanists' playground. Things like hemlock, nightshade, henbane, and mandrake were common elements. But also, if folklore from the Balkans is any indication, so was pig excrement, giving it a lovely smell, I'm sure. In 1525, a Dominican friar named Bartolomeo Spina documented some of these ointments of flights in a book. One of the stories he tells is about a guy named Lugano who woke up one day to find his wife missing.

After searching the entire house and finding no trace of her, he stepped outside and started to explore his property. He did finally find her, though. She was lying unconscious and completely naked in the pigsty. When she woke up, Lugano asked her what had happened, and she confessed to have flown off to a witch's Sabbath during the night. Perhaps the pig excrement on her body was from laying in the pigsty, or maybe it was part of the ointment she used.

Who knows? And just two centuries ago, in 1813, a woman named Barbara Powers was accused of witchcraft by a nine-year-old girl. One of the charges was that Powers had turned the girl into a horse and ridden her through the air, stealing goods from local businesses as they went. Nothing ever came of the trial, as far as I can tell, but the judge let the process run its course out of pure curiosity. And while a lot of people did believe in the power of these ointments, there were a few

people who called them into question. Way back in 1458, a writer named Abraham the Jew, working in Linz, Austria, documented a fantastic story that helps us peek behind the curtain on this particular bit of folklore. He wrote that he had actually gone to see a witch about obtaining some of this ointment of flight for himself. But after she crafted it and told him how it worked and where to apply it to his body, he told her that he wanted a demonstration before he handed over his money. She apparently climbed onto her table, dabbed the ointment onto herself, and then jumped

off in an attempt to fly. Apparently, gravity proved more powerful than her magic, and she crashed to the floor, knocking herself out cold in the process. You'll have to pardon the pun, but clearly selling magical lotions and ointments was a slippery slope for many people. But it all fed into this idea that witches could fly over your community, causing problems for everyone, which is why there was a good amount of folklore about how to stop them too.

Apparently, church bells were the kryptonite to their magical powers. One woman in Italy claimed that she had been riding home on the back of a demon, just minding her own business when the church below her rang its bells. Instantly, she was knocked off the back of the creature and burned by the sound. It seems that flying, whether on a magical object or through the power of an ointment, was incredibly risky, which is what makes one last story so fascinating because it gets around so many of those limitations in the most creative way imaginable. Because what witch needs to fly when they can teleport?

It's a bit of a he-said-she-said type of story, and there are reasons for that, both cultural and historical, according to 19th century historian William Andrews. But it's also the sort of tale that you just have to experience for yourself, so I think I'll start at the beginning. Derbyshire is a county pretty much smack dab in the middle of England. It's a gorgeous place to live, with green rolling hills and ancient woodlands. And while it's about 150 miles northwest of London, the Peak District National Park has a way of drawing visitors up into that area in droves.

Today you can drive it or take a nice train ride, but centuries ago there were fewer options available, horseback and walking mostly. But that doesn't mean that the roads had fewer travelers. In fact, there was a busy trade route that ran between London and the South and York in the North, with goods and people moving back and forth. And one of those routes passed right through the market town of Bakewell. As the story goes, there was a house in Bakewell along that road. A woman named Mrs. Stafford owned the house, and she worked part-time as a hatmaker, but

together with another woman, quite possibly her sister, they also let out rooms in the house to travelers. And who knows, maybe all of that foot traffic inside their house helped Mrs. Stafford sell more hats. And so it came that one day in the early 1600s, a Scottish man arrived and asked for a room, which the ladies gladly offered. He was there for a number of days, which suggests that he was in no real hurry to be anywhere. But it was what happened on the final night that concerns us the most.

This traveler was upstairs in his room, sleeping in his bed, when the sound of voices woke him up in the pre-dawn hours. They were coming from directly below him, and climbing out of bed, he pressed his eyes against the wide, cracked floorboards. There, in the glow of a bright light, were the two women who ran the house, and they were chanting. Over thick and over thin, they recited, now devil to the cellar in London. London, of course, was London, but chanting to the devil struck this Scotsman as particularly

strange. But before he could do or say anything, both women vanished instantly, taking their light with him. Obviously, the Scotsman was confused, but despite his reservations, he repeated the chant out loud from his spot there on the floor in his room. Well, almost. According to Andrew's account, the man slipped up, and instead of saying over thick and over thin, he said through thick and through thin, which apparently altered the source code in

a dramatic way. The man described a sudden onset of a powerful windstorm, unlike anything he had ever experienced before, and when it was over a moment later, he found himself sitting half naked, battered and torn on the floor of a strange cellar, as opposed to his bedroom, and right there beside him were the two women from Bakewell, who seemed equally surprised at his arrival. They actually didn't see him at first. It seems that they were busy gathering up cloth into bundles, almost as if they were preparing to steal it.

When they noticed him, though, one of the ladies brought him a glass of wine, which promptly knocked him out. He awoke to find a night watchman standing over him, most likely prodding him in the side with the tip of his boot, and as you might imagine, he was hauled off to jail for attempted theft before finding himself in front of a judge where he told his entire story. The judge was understandably confused as to how this man could have traveled from Bakewell over 150 miles away in just one night, and to do so while almost naked, while there had to be another explanation for it, even if that explanation contained some supernatural

elements, which is what they ran with. Clearly, the two women from Bakewell were actually witches, and so investigators were sent to search their house, and wouldn't you know it, the Scotsman's clothing was found in their possession, proving, somehow, that they were guilty. Just how powerful was the folklore surrounding witches and their various methods of transportation? Powerful enough to have those two women arrested and tried for witchcraft. All on the word of a half-naked man, smelling of wine, found asleep in a cellar he shouldn't have been in, and sadly, both of them were hanged.

Folklore is a powerful mechanism for belief. Sure, a lot of the time it's smaller, more simple things like believing in iron horseshoe might keep evil from entering a home, or that finding a rare and special four-leaf clover means you're lucky, but sometimes it extracts a darker price. And as we all know, there are often two sides to every story. There's the folklore, and then there's reality. Remember our friend Abraham the Jew who recorded his shopping experience at a witch's house in 1458?

Well, it seems that after she woke up from her short trip from the tabletop to the floor, she described the most fantastical journey to him, a journey that he knew didn't take place because he'd been with her the whole time. It turns out a lot of the ingredients in those old flight ointments, things like henbane, gymsenweed, and nightshade, can all cause hallucinations. So for centuries, people were crafting ointments that didn't actually gift them with the power of flight, but the chemicals inside them made them believe they were. One story, two sides.

And that's why we need to return to our Scotsman and his encounter with those two nice ladies who ran the boarding house in Bakewell. Because many historians, including William Andrews who documented it in 1892, believe there was a less magical, more sinister tale at its heart. Andrews suggests that the Scotsman most likely just failed to pay for his room and was evicted without his belongings. After making his way to London, he snuck into a shopkeeper's cellar, ditched his clothing, poured a bit of wine on himself, and then delivered his fantastic story to the judge.

And he did this knowing full well how much weight the accusations of a man in England carried for two poor women in a social and political climate that was on high alert for anything evil. He did it with the assumption that they would be arrested, possibly even executed, all in an attempt to get revenge on them for having the gall to charge him for his room. And of course, that's what happened. Both women hanged for their fake crime, and the legends surrounding which transportation received another new story to support its claims.

All thanks to the power of folklore. Today's journey through the wild and dangerous world of which transportation seems to have it all. Weird concoctions, humorous examples, and a deadly turn. But don't think for a minute that we've covered all the corners. In fact, if you stick around through this brief sponsor break, we'll explore one last branch of this well-traveled folklore. Let's be honest for a moment.

Sometimes folklore is a bit like a wish list. Who wouldn't love to find buried treasure, be able to fly, or live in a world where big foot and a wendigo can hang out and hunt together? And right up there with the best of them, I think all of us wish that we could be in two places at once. In technical terms, they call it by-location, the ability to be in two spots at the same time. It's an idea that's been around for thousands of years.

There were rumors that Pythagoras, yes, the Greek philosopher that we all learned about in geometry class, could by-locate once being sited in two cities that were a day's journey apart at the same time. It's an attractive idea for sure, so naturally those sorts of stories persisted over the years. The time England was obsessed with finding witches and putting them on trial, thanks to King James and others, it had even worked its way into some of the confessions of the accused.

A good example took place in the English market town of Barry Sedetmans at the start of the 17th century. It was actually a community that would be well-known for witch trials for tragic reasons, but it seems to have started in 1599 with two women who were put on trial, although no verdicts were recorded. Another group of victims were accused in 1645 with 18 of them executed as a result, and then a generation later the panic was back again. This time it was two elderly women, both widows, both poor, and both unliked by their neighbors.

There was the usual list of accusations, of course, using magic to make children vomit sharp needles and causing property damage and illness among the livestock, but it was when the two women went to trial that something different came up. As people were giving their testimony against the older women, the alleged victims were in the courtroom and began to display signs of being attacked by something invisible. They cried out, swatted at unseen hands or weapons, and even ran around the room to escape the pain they were apparently experiencing. Or at least that's what they said.

Without being able to see the attackers, it's hard to say for sure. Their point, it seems, was to convince the judges that the accused witches were able to send their invisible spirits outside their body to attack others, to be in two places at once. What they were witnessing inside the courtroom that day was nothing short of proof that the invisible attacks were real, and most of the judges fell for it all, hook, line, and sinker. In fact, it seemed that the violence and frenzy exhibited by these alleged victims only made them believe it more.

Yes, there were a few who spoke out against this form of invisible evidence, what folks back then referred to as spectral evidence, but it seems that the majority of those making decisions felt it was admissible. Think about it. A court of law overseeing a case that had deadly repercussions, and all of a sudden it was good and right to pretend to be fighting an invisible witch while expecting no solid physical proof to back it up. I hope you can see how that could be abused by anyone with an overactive imagination.

Sadly, and tragically, both women, Rose Cullander and Amy Denny, were found guilty of all charges and sentenced to death. They both hanged on March 17th of 1662. People talked after that. Of course they did. How could they not? Some whispered hoping that they never fell under the critical eye of the authorities because they now knew that innocence was no guarantee of safety, and some told the tale more boldly

like old war stories to shout with enthusiasm down at the pub. Eventually, the entire incident was written up in a 60-page pamphlet known as A Trial of Witches, and as a printed work, it spread far and wide, which is how, 30 years later, it ended up in the hands of some judges overseeing yet another version of the same sort of community panic. This one, though, took place across the sea, in a land that was supposed to hold so much more promise, so much more hope, and so much more freedom. But the old world had followed them, complete with its fears and its folklore.

In the end, because of this document, these new judges decided that they too should allow invisible spectral evidence to decide the fate of the accused, and in doing so, doomed at least 25 people to their death. The Community, Salem, Massachusetts This episode of lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research by Ali Steed and music by Chad Lawson. Lore is much more than just a podcast, there is a book series available in bookstores and online, and two seasons of the television show on Amazon Prime Video.

Check them both out if you want more lore in your life. 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 these shows and everything else going on over in one central place, grimandmild.com. And you can 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. Bye. Bye.