Lore - Episode 69: Wide Open

Episode Date: September 18, 2017

The sky is full of mystery. It’s big, expansive, and—despite a century of powered human flight—outside our realm of control. Which is why, for centuries, humans have expected things to come down from the sky and harm us. It might sound crazy now, but the possibilities are wide open. And that might not be a good thing. * * * Official Lore Website: www.lorepodcast.com Extra member episodes: www.patreon.com/lorepodcast Official Lore Merchandise: www.lorepodcast.com/shop Access premium content!: https://www.lorepodcast.com/support

Louis-Juliet and Father Jacques Marquette were most likely the first Europeans to sail down the Mississippi River from the Great Lakes. It was a mapping expedition that began in May of 1673, and by the time they were done, they'd made their way down to modern-day Arkansas, but it was something they saw earlier at the intersection of the Mississippi and Illinois rivers that stood out to them. Marquette wrote that they had been navigating some large rocks in the river when they passed a series of tall limestone cliffs. When it was safe to glance up, they were surprised by what they saw.

Two enormous paintings covered the surface of the bluff. With vivid greens and reds, the local Native Americans had drawn a pair of enormous, other-worldly, monstrous creatures. In his description, Marquette said that the creatures were sort of a hybrid of a number of other animals, a chimera, so to speak, and they were so detailed and masterfully done that he had a hard time believing that these savages, as he ignorantly called the indigenous people of the area, could have ever painted them. And yet here they were.

It was old, too. By the time Marquette and Joliet saw it, it had most likely been there for centuries, having been painted by the Native Americans who lived in the Cahokia settlement to the immediate east. They'd been there since at least the 9th century, and according to archaeologists, they'd probably been painted as a warning to visitors. Local legend tells us the creature was called the Piasaw, a name whose meaning is still up for debate.

Some believe it was derived from the word Piasaw, which refers to a race of supernatural dwarf-like people, but others hold to a different, more sinister meaning. According to them, Piasaw actually means the bird that devours men. I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore. For as long as there have been humans wandering the earth, the sky above them has been a source of mystery. And it's understandable, isn't it? You can control much of what is on the ground around you, but the sky, well, it's off

limits to most of us. It's the realm of the gods, the heavens, the firmament above us. Medieval cultures built whole models of thought around this mystery, trying to contain everything known inside a sphere comprised of layers. The higher up the layers went, the less and less we knew about them. So it's no surprise that cultures around the world have stories about things that come from the sky. It's the perfect qualifier for marking something as an outsider or an intruder.

Things from the sky are dangerous, they're unpredictable and uncontrollable. We fear them. One branch of this visitors from the sky genre of folklore is centered around large birds. To borrow from the Princess Bride, these would be birds of unusual size, and they pop up in folklore all over the world. Creatures that are just close enough to normal to be believable, yet so extraordinary in their descriptions that they inspire fear and wonder. In the ancient Persian mythology of the Middle East, they spoke of the rock, an enormous

bird of prey similar to the giant eagles of Tolkien's Middle Earth. Iranian culture has the Simurgh and the Egyptians told stories of the Bennu. In South Central Africa, there are tales of a flying reptile known as the Kanga Moto, the breaker of boats. And of course, many of the Native American tribes of North America told tales of the Thunderbird. But not all of the stories are ancient. Some of the most bizarre and frightening stories come from more modern times, yet their contents

seem to line up so nicely alongside these ancient legends that it makes it hard to separate out the fact from the fiction. And a great example of this comes from the American state of Maryland. On a cold February afternoon in 1909, a man named Bill Jefferson was out walking along a country road, past the farms and homes that made up the outskirts of town. Someone inside one of those homes reported looking out the window to see Bill, and something else, something coming down from the sky. Like a hawk dipping low to grass at a field mouse, something unusually large swooped out

of the gray winter sky and caught hold of Bill, lifting the man high into the air as it sped away. Whoever it was that claimed to see the attack also managed to see where the creature took Bill, a nearby hill. According to their story, Bill was then attacked by the creature, who appeared to stab its beak into the man's neck. How the witness managed to see all the details is unclear, but according to them, this monstrous bird, drained Bill of all his blood, tossed him down the hill, and then flew off into

the night. The creature was sighted again by a local hunter in nearby Hagerstown. The man, George Jacobs, managed to fire a shot at the enormous bird and claims he even hit it, but it simply flew off for a moment. It turns out Jacobs might have made the thing angry, because after a few minutes it turned around and flew straight back toward him, chasing him into a neighbor's barn. That's when the rumors really began to spread. One West Virginia man claimed to have found one of the creature's eggs in his barn.

Another man, Dan Shorb, claimed he pulled into the Emmitsburg Railroad Station to see the giant bird trying to take off with Bill Snyder, one of the employees there. Shorb managed to grab Snyder's foot and pull him free. Then it vanished from public record for more than two decades. It wasn't until 1932 that another pair of locals, driving along a road north of Middletown, Maryland, saw something enormous in the sky above their car. As quickly as it arrived, though, the creature disappeared. The community gave it a name, though, the Snally Gaster.

It's a mangled English version of an old German word, Schnellegeist, which means quick spirit. The Pennsylvania Dutch had used the word for decades to place blame on their missing livestock, claiming they had been swept up into the sky by some invisible spirit. But if we believe the final chapter of the Snally Gaster story, this thing also had a taste for illegal prohibition-era alcohol. You see, the local legend claims that the creature headed north again, back toward Hagerstown. Where it spotted a large moonshine distillery.

They say that the fumes drifting up from the still were so powerful, the creature passed out and fell right in. Like the final scene in an action film, this was the exact moment that two federal agents were pulling into the distillery complex, ready to put an end to the illegal operation there. Yes, they saw the Snally Gaster fall from the sky. And yes, they were shocked, but they had a job to do. So only after arresting the criminals, they placed dynamite beneath the still, and detonated

it. The Snally Gaster is one of those local legends that seems to have put down shallow roots, despite the local fervor. With only a small handful of witnesses, and nothing more than a crater where the monster's body once rested, it's a story as flighty as its subject. Some tales go deeper, though, and a great example of that comes to us from a small Midwestern town. Six years before the Snally Gaster, something else hunted from the skies.

It's a tale with more eyes, more clues, and more evidence to consider than most. But rather than making the tale less entertaining, all of that depth gives us something to truly be afraid of. It was one of those cool September nights that makes you think of campfires and dry leaves, but the man couldn't see any of that. It was the middle of the night, and he was returning from an out-of-town business trip. Ulysses Griffith sold farm equipment in the surrounding community, and it kept him very busy, even by 1903 standards.

As he was passing through town, exhausted, and ready to climb into bed after such a long day, he studied the small village he called home. I think we've all done this before, when we're given the chance to see our community through a new lens, while all the hustle and bustle is asleep, and the lights have all flickered out. Griffith was probably reveling in it, and that's when he saw something out of the corner of his eye. It was dark out.

The moon was only a quarter full, after all, but he swore he saw a shape moving on one of the nearby rooftops. He turned to look, expecting it to vanish, but no. There was something out there, climbing from building to building like an animal. An animal with a light. At least that's what he thought, but it was also 1am, and he was dead tired. So after chalking it up to exhaustion, Ulysses Griffith continued on his way and went home. The following day, Tuesday the 29th, he got up, went to work, and during the course of

his day, he mentioned his experience to a few people. All of them seemed taken aback. Griffith was a well-respected member of the community, then everyone knew that nothing exciting or unusual ever happened in their sleepy little town, so they dismissed it and went on with their lives. But someone else was about to have their own encounter later that evening. Only theirs would be a lot more difficult to dismiss. Dr. Alcott was the town physician, serving a community of roughly 400 people, which meant

he had gotten very good at sleeping lightly. He never knew when someone might need him, and he couldn't even begin to count the number of times he'd been pulled from sleep to go stitch up a farmer or set a broken leg. So he wasn't startled when something woke him up late Tuesday night, close to 1am. He wasn't even concerned about the sounds he heard. What was weird to him, I think, was the bright light shining into his bedroom window. A window on the second story of his house. So Alcott grabbed his pistol and carefully crept downstairs to the front door.

When he opened it, though, he nearly dropped the gun, because standing right in front of him, right there on his front doorstep, was a huge inhuman shape. Alcott described it as almost like an enormous bat, except with human characteristics as well. It stood on two hind legs, and large dark wings hung at its side like a dark leathery cloak. The head was the most puzzling, because it seemed to have a long horn that protruded from its forehead, mimicking the shape of its long beak-like snout. Dr. Alcott lost his cool.

He pulled the pistol back up and leveled it at the thing on his doorstep, and then pulled the trigger. Five times the gun went off at nearly point-blank rage, and yet nothing happened. No cries of pain, no blood, no violent reaction or attempts to flee. So Alcott did what any of us would have done in his situation. He stumbled backwards as fast as he could, and then slammed the door shut. He closed and locked the windows, and probably turned off the lights and retreated into the cellar, just like the townsfolk in M. Night Shyamalan's film The Village, hiding from

those we don't speak of. Like Griffith, Alcott told others about his experience the following day, and like Griffith, his own story was received with a bit of confusion. The town doctor, a respected member of the community, wasn't supposed to lose his mind like that, but he apparently had, because nothing like what he had described could even remotely be possible. But rumors always spread, don't they? The story always finds a way to go knocking on doors, and there's always someone willing

to let it in. Clarence Dunne was one of those people. He was a teller at the local bank, and while he didn't believe the fantastical elements of the story, he did think something sinister was going on. Specifically, he believed the town was being targeted by a burglar. Concerned that the bank he worked at was possibly next on the burglar's list, he returned to work that Wednesday night and locked himself inside. He sat in the dark with a shotgun across his lap, and waited.

Wonders went by, and then, just after the church bells struck one, a bright light flashed through the bank window. Dunne didn't mess around, he grabbed his gun and fired right at the light from inside the bank, and in doing so, shot out one of the windows. Glass reigned to the floor, and then the light went out. Now Dunne, he was confident in his aim, and assumed that he'd struck his target, so he exited the bank to take a look around. There was nothing there, standing right outside the shattered window.

He could see where the burglar should have been, but there was nothing there. No body, no discarded flashlight, not even blood. The dirt was just empty. Except, that wasn't true. By the light of his own flashlight, Dunne could see something in the dirt there. An impression of some kind. So he returned in the morning with plaster, and made a cast in hopes of getting a better look at the criminal's boot print.

When it dried and he pulled it up, though, it wasn't what he'd expected. It was an enormous animal trek, comprised of three long toes. Like a bird. Dunne wasn't the only citizen of the town to have an encounter that night. Sometime after he fired the gun and shattered the window of his own bank, another resident was waking up in his own place of business. O.V. White was yet one more person concerned about the sightings in town, and like many others,

he assumed there was a logical explanation for it all. So he camped out that night to guard his general store. The front window of his upstairs apartment made for the perfect view of the street outside, so he sat down in a chair to wait it out. The trouble was, the White fell asleep. It's not easy to stay awake through the night if it's not something you do all the time, so let's cut him some slack. But that's where he was late Wednesday night, dozing in a chair beside a window in a dark room.

Then something woke him. There was a noise coming from the street outside, rather than in the store below as he would have expected. White stood up and peered out the window, his gun ready. And then he saw it. There was a utility pole across the street, standing in the darkness like a narrow wooden cross. But White noticed something odd about its silhouette. There was a shape perched on top of it. Not wanting the burglar to get away, White carefully slid his window open and fired at the shape.

Rather than tumble to the ground as he expected it to, the dark figure stayed on the pole. A heartbeat later, a bright light flooded his window, nearly blinding him. At the same time, he began to notice a smell. It was nauseating and overwhelming, and after a few shaky moments, White passed out, toppling backwards into his room. But the story doesn't end there. You see, the gunshot woke another nearby shopkeeper, a Mr. Gregg, who actually came outside to see what was going on.

As he exited his shop, his eye was immediately drawn to the same dark shape, because it was climbing down the pole toward him. This of course gave Mr. Gregg a much better look at the odd figure. According to him, it was animal-like, and it was crawling down the pole like a bat, head first. When it reached the pavement, the thing stood up and looked down at him. Gregg said that it was at least 8 feet tall, had enormous, leathery wings, and stood on powerful back legs.

I can only imagine what Gregg was going through at that moment, face to face with a monster in the middle of the night with no one around to help. And then, like a ray of light breaking through the clouds, the daily mail truck pulled onto the street, cutting the darkness with its headlights. Frightened, the beast scrambled off on all four legs before leaping into the air and flying away. According to Mr. Gregg, it flew in the direction of the town's old coal mining complex. So naturally, when the rumors began to spread the following morning, they were laser-focused.

A giant bird creature had gone into hiding in one of the abandoned mineshafts outside of town. The mine had actually closed years before, but the land had been purchased by a tile and brick manufacturer who built their facility right there beside the old mineshafts, which were still wide open. And it was some of the workers there who began to notice sounds. They claimed something was inside the old mine, and that the noises sounded as if, and I quote, Satan and a regiment of imps were coming forth for battle.

Finally, a facility manager named J. L. Platt decided that enough was enough, and he grabbed a lantern and headed into the mine. He stepped inside and began to carefully explore. An old mine isn't a safe place to be, otherworldly creature or not, so he made his way methodically. But before he'd gone too far, another light appeared from deeper in. Two lights, actually. A moment later, both the lights seemed to float toward him until finally he could hear the beating of wings.

Platt ducked as two large shapes flew out of the mine and into the night air. And according to him, all of this took place at 1 a.m. The townsfolk didn't wait for another sighting. Word spread, and they flocked to the mine with loaded guns, camping out in front of the old entrance to wait for the creatures to return. It rained that night, soaking them all as they sat there, hour after hour. And then, just as the glow of the sun was beginning to bleed up over the eastern horizon, two dark shapes appeared in the sky.

As they approached the mine, every single person with a firearm pulled the trigger. Bullets tore through the air like angry bees. One witness said the reception received would have sunk the Spanish fleet. And yet, nothing happened. The shapes kept coming. As the two enormous creatures slipped over the heads of the angry townsfolk and back into the mine shaft, the plan quickly changed. Working fast, everyone there began moving piles of debris and rubble into the mouth of

the mine. It took them hours, and men stood guard with rifles in hand, ready for the creatures to return. In the end, though, they succeeded. The sun was up. The rain was gone. The hole in the ground that served as a nest to their darkest nightmare had finally been closed for good.

For what it's worth, no one ever saw the creatures again. The skies above us contain a lot of mystery. Whether or not that means it's full of literal monsters is open to debate. But at the very least, some of our deepest nightmares seem to drift down upon us from above. Possibilities, it seems, are wide open. From angels to aliens, and everything in between, the skies hold power, danger, and just about every other emotion we can experience.

We've spent over a century conquering it with our technology, and yet it's still a place that seems to sit on the edge of the unknown. Which is why we have stories like the Piasa legend, that gigantic flying bird man creature painted on those Mississippi River cliff walls all those centuries ago. Although, that's where things get tricky. You see, the earliest known instance of the name Piasa in print actually comes from a map published in 1778, a century after Marquette's account, an account, by the way, that makes no mention of wings.

That detail, along with a rich backstory full of battles between the monster and the local Native Americans, is a complete work of fiction, written by a man named John Russell in 1836. As it stands, the best way to see the true creature, whatever it might have been, is to take a stroll along the banks of the river there in Alton, Illinois. That's where you can see those ancient paintings in full color once more. They're modern recreations, of course, but they're based on Marquette's original sketches, and they certainly do a good job of bringing something so unknown and mysterious to life. For those people in 1903 in Van Meter, Iowa, the unknown and mysterious came down to dwell

among them. In later years, the creature, whatever it actually was, became known as the Van Meter Visitor, but whether or not it was a hoax is still a hotly debated topic. Griffith, Dunn, White, and Greg, apart from sounding like a law firm, were all well-respected members of their community, and they all clearly saw something, as did the men who participated in the final ambush in the early hours of October 3rd. As far as I can tell, though, no one has ever tried to reopen those mines and look inside for the creatures.

Perhaps they're scared they'll find nothing but an empty cave, or maybe they're afraid of letting something out. Of course, there have been attempts to bring answers to the conversation. Some people think the creature was a pterodactyl, a large flying reptile from the Mesozoic era, which ended roughly 66 million years ago. Others believe it was a pterotorn, an enormous, vulture-like bird of prey that went extinct just 10,000 years ago. That sounds like a crazy theory, until you remember that the once-extinct fish known

as the celacanth was rediscovered in 1938, alive and swimming in the waters off the coast of South Africa. It's given some people hope that the van meter creature is yet one more relic from the past, perhaps just hanging on by a thread. But it's local folklore that seems to hold the most compelling notion of them all. The Native American tribes of the van meter area are said to have their own version of the legend of the Thunderbird. In their tales, the Thunderbird is part bird, part man.

It makes its nest among the stones, and it does one other thing that sounds eerily familiar. It shoots lightning from its forehead. This episode of lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research help from Marseille Crockett. Lore is much more than a podcast. There's a book series in bookstores around the country and online, and the second season of the Amazon Prime television show was recently released. Check them both out if you want more lore in your life.

I also make two other podcasts, Aaron Mankey's Cabinet of Curiosities, and Unobscured, and I think you'd enjoy both. Each one explores other areas of our dark history, ranging from bite-sized episodes to season-long dives into a single topic. You can learn about both of those shows and everything else going on all over in one central place. The World of Lore.com slash now. And you can also follow the show on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Just search for Lore podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button. When you do, say hi. I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening.