Lore - Episode 72: A Grave Mistake

Episode Date: October 30, 2017

Humans have a seemingly never-ending list of fears. The dark of night, small spaces, open water…there doesn’t seem to be an area of life that doesn’t come with a few reasons to take pause and be afraid. But the greatest of those fears might just come at the end of our lives, and for over a century, that fear drove people to unimaginable things. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com Access premium content!: https://www.lorepodcast.com/support See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Humans are emotional creatures. And for better or worse, those emotions are deeply connected to our bodies. You might think it's something that's impossible to prove, but the evidence is there, if you know where to look. Dr. Hunter Champion is one of those who's found it. He's a heart failure cardiologist and medical researcher, and over the course of his career, he's documented at least 250 cases of what he would call stress cardiomyopathy. You and I might use another term for it, though, and say that someone has been shocked to death.

Some examples are connected to people who have lost a spouse or a child, while others are simply victims of a sudden event, an armed robbery, a heated argument, or a surprise birthday party. It's biologically simple, too. Hormones like adrenaline and norepinephrine are released into our bloodstream every time we experience a highly stressful situation, enough of them, and it can be toxic for our hearts. And this includes fear. People have been known to literally die of fright, which is troubling because,

if we're honest with ourselves, we all have a lot of fears. Natural disaster, fire, the IRS, and let's not forget spiders, especially those enormous ones in Australia. A brief survey of our most common fears highlights a pattern, though. Almost every list includes the same three things. The fear of small spaces, the fear of the dark, and the fear of death. And it's easy to understand why. Each of those, on their own, is enough to set our pulse racing with acute anxiety.

But for many people, both today and centuries ago, all three of those fears intersected over one very frightening and very real possibility. The fear of being buried alive. I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore. In 1994, the French city of Marseille was preparing to break ground on a new housing development on the former grounds of an ancient monastery when they made a discovery. It was a mass grave dating back almost three centuries. It was one of many, actually, all a product of an illness that swept through the city.

Historians and archaeologists actually know exactly when that outbreak started. May 25th of 1720. That was the day that a merchant vessel pulled up to one of the docks, its cargo hold full of fabric and cotton. Cotton, it turns out, that was contaminated by the bacteria known as ursinia pestis. The plague. When it was finished, the plague of Marseille had taken the lives of over 100,000 people in the region, and it spread so quickly that traditional burial became impossible.

Instead, bodies were piled into large pits and then covered over. And in 1994, one of those pits was dug back up. Inside, archaeologists found exactly what you might expect, hundreds of skeletons. But it was something on one of the skeletons that caught their attention. It was a thin bronze pin, still protruding from the bone of the big toe. And that pin told a horrible story. To understand it, though, we have to go back in time, before the era of modern medical technology, even before the Enlightenment and that explosion in our understanding of the natural world.

In fact, let's start with a man named Pliny the Elder. Pliny the Elder was a Roman philosopher, naturalist, and historian who was active roughly 2,000 years ago. And according to him, it was not always easy to tell the difference between someone alive and someone who wasn't. In fact, back in his day, the best sign of life you could hope for was a strong pulse, and death was best proven by decomposition. A century later, the legendary physician Galen warned his students to be careful when

declaring someone dead, because there were far too many conditions that could make them appear dead when they really weren't. And this unclear distinction wasn't just a challenge for those in the medical profession. Everyday citizens went through life wondering if those who died were really dead at all. It's important to point out that for a very long time, death was a deeply supernatural thing for a lot of people. It was strongly believed that the soul and the body were two separate things loosely tied together.

All of it was very mysterious, of course, but mystery, as we know, has a way of breeding folklore. This ancient belief finally found expression in a philosophy known as vitalism. The basic idea was simple. Our source of life, the thing that animates us and makes us who we are, is something other than our physical form. Life comes from the soul. One contributor to the idea of vitalism was a 17th century German physician named George Stahl. It was his opinion that death was like an invisible pair of scissors,

cutting the connection between the body and the soul. But sometimes, he said, that process can go wrong, trapping the soul inside a person's dead heart, where it feeds off the souls of the living. The solution he proposed was known as therapeutic exhumation. If a town suffered from a plague of illness with no logical cause, Stahl recommended exhuming the earliest victims, cutting out the hearts, and burning them to release the soul. And if that sounds familiar to you, there's a good reason for that.

Because some historians think that when the British forces hired German mercenaries during the American Revolution, those hired soldiers brought German physicians with them. Physicians who held the Stahl's idea. Some of them apparently stuck around after the war and traveled around New England, teaching people about therapeutic exhumation, which gave us the great New England vampire panic, and eventually, Brahms Stoker's Dracula. But let's go back to signs of death, because everyone really wanted to be sure their loved ones had a chance to recover.

For centuries, you see, it was common for people to fall into a deep, death-like sleep and not wake up for weeks, or even months. It was heart-wrenching and confusing, and people wanted better proof. Thankfully, humans are resourceful, so it didn't take us very long to figure out how to get a more definitive answer regarding a person's state of being, because if the body wasn't decomposing, there was a chance, right? Some solutions were bizarre. The French physician Antoine Louis, working from a hospital in Paris,

often used a long pipe to administer tobacco smoke enemas with his mouth. Thankfully, that technology was quickly improved, and bellows replaced the human lips. Other tests for death were a bit more violent. One German doctor invented a device that literally electrocuted the face of the patient in question. A Dutch doctor was known to use a trumpet, placed directly against the patient's ear, and blown as loud as possible. The one French physician, named Dr. Le Borde, invented a device that clamped onto a patient's tongue and pulled it violently back and forth.

Another man took that idea a step further and created a device he called the Pince Memelon, the nipple pincer. It was essentially a pair of forceps with claws that was used to tug a patient back from death. In theory, of course. A favorite tool, however, seems to have been the simple, everyday pin. Sometimes the pin would be driven into a muscle in the arm or leg, while other times it would be plunged directly into a person's heart. Most commonly, though, the pin was pushed under a toenail,

which is how a bronze pin ended up embedded in the toe of a skeleton in Marseille three centuries ago. They were testing for signs of life, and when none were discovered, the patient was added to the growing pile of deceased and placed into a mass grave. It seems like an overly obvious question, but it's worth asking. Why did they do all of this? Well, because for many of these patients, it was literally a matter of life and death. If these physicians somehow got it wrong and sent someone to the grave without being completely

certain, something worse was likely to happen. They might bury someone they thought was dead, when they really weren't. And then that person might do a very natural thing. They would wake up. There's a story from Germany that's worth retelling here, and it's an old one. According to the legend, one of the wealthy households in Cologne in the 1350s was the Wannachtucht family. They had it all, it seems, a big house in the oldest part of town,

a family coat of arms proudly on display, servants, stables, even jewelry. This is the idyllic life that we find our main characters enjoying. The master of the house, Menjunus, along with his wife, Rich Modus, were enjoying their place in life when illness fell upon their house sometime in 1357. Within days, it said, the man's wife was dead. So he did what everyone did with a lost loved one. He buried her. Her new home was said to be a grave in a nearby churchyard.

There was a funeral. The priest officiated and the community mourned. And then everyone went home. After nightfall, though, one solitary figure returned to the churchyard. According to the legend, it was the sexton, the man tasked with the care of the church and its property. He was, most likely, the very same man who had dug the grave for the dead woman just hours before and the one who refilled it after everyone had left. But that didn't explain why he was back, making his way through the gravestones

by the pale light of an old lantern with a shovel over his shoulder. It said that he proceeded to remove the cold earth from her grave once more, slowly digging through the night. When he had finally uncovered her coffin, he climbed down inside the grave and pulled the lid open. And there she was, just as she'd been hours before. Beautiful and pale and unmoving. It was her ring that he'd come for, though.

The large gold band on her finger was valuable and he knew if he sold it, he would earn himself a small fortune. So he grasped her cold hand and tugged at the ring, but he wouldn't slip off. He pulled harder, but it just wouldn't move over the knuckle of her finger. So the sexton reached for his knife and then pressed the sharp edge against the dead woman's skin above the ring. Then, just as he was pressing down to cut off the finger and claim his prize, something miraculous happened.

The woman woke up. In fact, she sat up and then reached for his knife hand to stop him. Startled, the sexton fainted and fell into the coffin with her. Madam Aduked, however, had no intention of staying there. She climbed out from beneath the unconscious man and then scrambled over the lip of the grave. Taking in his lantern, she began the slow walk back to the center of town. But she wasn't well, of course. Along the way to her own home, she knocked on the doors of her neighbors,

crying out for help. But when they looked out their windows, they were frightened by what they saw. She seemed to be nothing more than a pale vision of their dead friend, wrapped in a death shroud, trying to break in and attack them. Because of this, she was forced to walk the entire way back to her own house for help. Once there, she called out for her husband, who came to the window and then stopped in his tracks. Barely dead a day, the ghost of his wife had returned to take him away. He was terrified, as I'm sure any of us might be, so he refused to let her inside.

She begged him, though. She was sick, she told him, and cold, and she needed to come inside. Her husband, though, just couldn't believe it was possible for her to be alive. He shouted down that her resurrection was just as unlikely as both his horses somehow leaving the stable to climb the stairs to his bedroom. A moment later, according to the legend, that's exactly what happened, which obviously served as the proof he needed. He rushed downstairs and opened the door, taking his wife into his arms.

And the two lived happily ever after. Folklore, as I'm sure you've noticed, can be a bit like that carton of milk in your refrigerator. There's a good chance it's bad, but you know you're going to open it up and smell it anyway. The story of the Vanadukes is one of those tales, and has the strong scent of fiction, and yet there's a part of us that wants to look in on it, to experience it, to be told that it's true and accurate. While the details of the story are most likely invented, it highlights a common fear that permeated society for generations.

Versions of this story of the woman with the ring appear in dozens of communities around Europe, spanning centuries and crossing cultural borders. People were deathly afraid of being buried alive. So here they were, an entire culture completely obsessed with preventing one of the oldest medical mistakes in the book, somehow missing the signs of life in a patient and dooming them to premature burial. Naturally, people were concerned, and as the hysteria grew in popular culture, a number of enterprising individuals stepped forward with what they felt were miraculous

solutions. But the best intentions don't always lead to the best results. Like a lot of movements, it all began with a book. Physicians like Jacob Winslow and Jacques Brouillard had been collecting evidence of premature burial for years, but it wasn't until the 1780s that one French doctor put out a call to action. François Thierry, writing in 1878, suggested that communities build something he called a waiting mortuary. It wasn't a unique idea, though. A year later, an Austrian doctor recommended something similar, although his word for it was Totenhaus, a house for the dead. It was, like so many social movements, slow to begin,

but within two years it had picked up enough speed to inspire someone to action. That was the year a German physician named Christoph Hufferland petitioned the German head of state for permission, and he got it. What did he do? Well, let me try to paint a mental picture for you. The idea was to construct a building in town that, at least from the outside, looked just like any other house in the neighborhood. It was only once you stepped inside that the real differences stood out. There was room for staff to live and work, of course, because someone had to be on duty at all times, and their specific task was to watch the inhabitants in the other part of the house, the corpse room. That was a chamber heated by a

steady flow of hot water where a number of stretchers had been arranged. Each stretcher, of course, contained the body of someone who had recently died, or maybe not. That was the problem, after all. The idea caught on and spread. City after city in Germany began to construct their own house for the dead. Business was good, but it was also evolving. Some people felt that the untrained attendants were a bit too inaccurate, so new high-tech methods of detecting life were implemented, like strings and bells. I mean it, they would literally tie a string to the finger of each occupant and then connect the other end to a large bell, and then they would wait. The only problem was that dead bodies have a tendency to move when they're left to rot and bloat in a

hot room, so yeah, that didn't work out too well for them. These houses of the dead also started to fall victim to social pressures. As more of them popped up around Germany, some of them offered separate rooms for men and women. One, built in Munich in 1808, even allowed families to pay for more luxurious accommodations. For more money, your maybe-dead relative could rot in style. But in the end, there were just too many problems with this method for preventing premature burial. On the practical side, good-trained help was hard to find, and the technology employed was full of flaws. Never mind the working conditions involved in sitting around in a room full of putrefying corpses. They would often fill these rooms with dozens of

bouquets, but it was just never enough. Then there was the moral and social side of things. Yes, it was noble to want to be sure about death, to do everything possible to prevent premature burial, but at what cost? Some felt that it was just too disrespectful of the dead to leave them to rot in these public facilities where, in some cases, anyone passing by could look in and watch. Should the search for signs of life in a room full of dead bodies really be something that we crowdsource? Instead, some suggested we should just keep burying everyone, but because everyone was still worried about making a mistake, they began to build devices to help the wrongly buried reach out for help. The security coffin. The first of its kind ever

described in print is attributed to another German, Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick. Afraid of the possibility of being buried alive, he ordered a coffin built that included some unique features. There was a window for light, a vent for breathable air, and a lid that locked and unlocked from the inside. When he was finally buried in it, he asked that a set of keys be placed in his pocket, one to unlock the coffin, and the other so he could exit the tomb. Sadly, I can't find evidence that he ever got up and let himself out, however awesome that would have been to read about. Other inventors jumped on the wagon as well. Long-time listeners might remember Dr. Adolf Gutsmith, who designed a coffin with a feeding tube that extended to the surface of the graveyard,

through which food and drink could be passed to him, and he tested it out himself by literally being buried in the ground in that small box for over an hour. Other industrious inventors added new devices to these coffins. Speaking trumpets that would allow the living occupant to call for help, bells connected to their hands or feet, someone even proposed running a rope from every new coffin in the graveyard to a central bell tower, beneath which someone lived and worked, ready to act if the bell should ever ring out. These security coffins were clearly a noble idea. A bit morbid, sure, but you can't fault these creative thinkers for trying. They were just so many stories about innocent victims

buried before their lives were over that it was hard not to want to help. And naturally, if people were willing to pay for a bit of afterlife security, why not give them what they wanted, right? The irony is, though, that they actually offer the public an even more terrifying possibility to consider. What if you awoke inside a coffin, six feet beneath the surface of the earth, with a supply of fresh air to keep you alive, and yet your tools for calling for help failed you? Rather than hours of suffering that ended in suffocation, someone could possibly face days weeks of slow, agonizing death. Instead, people began to take matters into their own hands. When a loved one would appear to have died, rather than prepare for burial and move quickly,

many people chose to wait a bit. Despite being illegal in most places, families would actually keep the bodies of their loved ones at home just in case they woke up again. In one instance, that doubt was enough to set an entire community against itself. The outcome, though, just might be too horrifying to imagine. They were quite the family. Their father, Joel Howe, had served in the War of 1812, fighting alongside the militia of Massachusetts in the Second Regiment of Infantry as a colonel. He was a smart guy, too, having graduated from Harvard and was a brilliant military strategist. Though smarts apparently ran in the family, too, Joel's younger brother Elias chose a

different path than the military, but he managed to be just as successful. After working in the textile industry in Lowell, Massachusetts, Elias went on to invent the sewing machine and built his career around the industry that it created. After the war, Joel and his wife Patty had nine children, five girls and four boys. And then, seeking a more peaceful life, they moved north to Maine and the quiet town of Damaroscota. When they arrived, they built a stagecoach inn and tavern on Elm and Hodgdon streets and called it the Howe House Inn. A whole family moved in, too, but despite the packed house, the inn became a prime destination for out of towners, and the tavern downstairs

proved to be very popular with the locals. Business was good, family life was satisfying, and the children all showed themselves to be just as smart as the previous generation. Smart, but also a bit eccentric. One of the boys, Edwin, was said to be quite the inventor himself, but he focused his talents on less reputable projects. Projects like minting his own currency and a machine that could run forever. They were certainly things that got people whispering, but I think they were more interested in his bizarre goals than the experiments themselves. But for as odd as Edwin might have been, it was his sister Mary who wore the crown of crazy, and she did so with pride. As a child, Mary was convinced she could fly, so much so that it

said she actually jumped off the second floor balcony and crashed to the floor below. The resulting broken ankle required a visit from the local physician, Dr. Robert Dixon, and quickly put an end to that particular fantasy. There were others, though, don't worry, Mary was full of unusual beliefs, but where the whole flying thing was laughed at by others, these other ideas actually managed to connect with people. It might be that the community around her was an audience primed and ready for Mary's message, or maybe the evidence was just too powerful to ignore. Either way, what happened next set Mary up as a local celebrity. It began with another newcomer. It wasn't a person, though. It was spiritualism.

Remember, spiritualism wasn't a brief fad. This was practically an organized religion by the 1870s. According to a New York Times article from 1897, the movement had more than 8 million followers across Europe and America. Hence of it could be found everywhere, from private homes and churches to theater stages and popular music. While it's said that all of the Howe children had an interest in the world of spiritualism, it was Mary who seemed to have been born for it. During their early seances, it was she who acted as the connection between this world and the next. She had a knack for drifting into trance and becoming a mouthpiece for the spirit world. Even at the height of spiritualism, talents like that were rare, so words spread throughout

town about what Mary could do. And because her home was literally the hub of traffic in and out of Damaroscota, those stories left town with people and reached new ears beyond the borders of Maine. Maybe it was the influx of new travelers, eager to bump into Mary Howe, or maybe it was just an upswing in the economy of the region. But sometime in the 1870s, the Howes were able to move out of the crowded inn and into a new house nearby. And it was there, in their new home, that things really took off. Edwin had given up his dream of being an inventor and became more of a manager for his sister Mary. Together, they would invite friends and travelers to their home and perform seances there for the crowd. The house was sent

to fill with voices and sounds as if the spirit world were breaking through and rushing into the presence of the living. There were skeptics, of course. Spiritualism as a whole had a lot of vocal opponents. Men like Harry Houdini, the famous stage magician, worked tirelessly to debunk the trickery and fraud that seemed to permeate the movement. But there were always edge cases that left people scratching their heads. Cases like Mary Howe. Her status as a local celebrity only grew over the years. Many in town believed in her. Some, of course, didn't. But the seances continued, and those trances had become a calling card for her. Mary would slip into a deep sleep, sometimes acting as a voice for another spirit, and sometimes laying silent and still like a corpse.

But those trances would usually end after a short while, an hour or two at most, some say. Which is why, in December of 1882, at the age of 51, Mary Howe caused quite a stir around town. It was at some point that year that the famous medium laid down on her bed and slipped into another of her trances. But she never woke up. After two whole weeks of deep motionless sleep, people in town began to wonder, was Mary Howe still alive or had she simply died in her sleep? The answer, as it turns out, would quickly become a matter of life and death. It was Dr. Dixon who was finally sent to get an answer. He was the one who had set her broken

ankle years before, and had cared for her over the years ever since. He was the family physician, and that made him the closest thing to an expert on the health of Mary Howe. And that was important when the main question was whether or not she was actually alive. While there were those in town who believed she had simply gone into one of her trances, however long and extended it might have been, there were many who assumed the worst. Mary Howe, they said, had passed away, which meant that her brother Edwin was keeping a corpse at home, and that was against the law. So the local officials reached out to Dr. Dixon and asked him to go take care of the matter. No one should be allowed to let a dead body decompose in a family

home, and they needed him to end this fiasco. So when Dr. Dixon knocked on the door of the Howe residence, he fully expected a fight. Instead, he received a friendly smile and an invitation to step in. Edwin moved aside and let the physician in. After a moment of conversation, the two men went up to the bedroom where Mary was located. What struck Dixon first when he entered the room was just how hot it was inside. There was a fire going in the fireplace, and the air almost felt humid. Mary herself was lying in bed, arms placed over her chest in a manner that suggested a body laid out for burial. She looked peaceful, and Dixon certainly couldn't fault anyone for assuming she was asleep. She even looked flush and full of color, rather than pale and lifeless.

Then he saw the stones. Dixon gave Edwin Howe a puzzled glance. The younger man motioned to the bed and explained that he had wanted to keep Mary warm, so he'd heated up a number of large, smooth stones and placed them around her on the bed. Dixon approached Mary and placed the back of his hand on her cheek. Amazingly, she did feel warm to the touch, very unusual for a corpse. He lifted her arm, which he assumed would still be stiff with rigor mortis, but it was supple and soft. Mary Howe, at first glance, seemed to be alive. And yet, well, there were other troubling pieces of evidence. Pressing his fingertips to her wrist, he could find no pulse, nothing to hint at an active beating heart, and her breathing was

non-existent as well. She was as still as a corpse, but hadn't decomposed like one. In fact, after more than two weeks, two long weeks in a hot room surrounded by warm stones, mind you, she should be swollen and smell to high heaven. And yet, here she was, the very picture of a sleeping beauty. All Dixon could do was trust the medical evidence. No pulse, no breathing, no movement for a fortnight, all of that added up to death. So as he left the Howe residence that day, he informed Edwin that Mary would need to be buried. Of course, Edwin objected to this. Mary was his sister. She was his friend and business partner. They were close, after all, but Edwin also believed the impossible, that she would eventually wake

back up as she always had done before. She would sit up and smile and tell him everything she learned while she was on the other side. It wasn't a battle he was going to win, though. The next day, Dr. Dixon returned, this time with help. The town constable and one of the local ministers came with him, and together they removed Mary's body from the house. There was a graveyard across the street, but Benjamin Metcalf, the man who managed the place, refused to allow the men to bury the woman. He was a believer in her powers, and he wanted no part in helping them bury a person alive. So they left town. They ended up just across the bridge in nearby Newcastle, where the Glidden

Street Cemetery agreed to let them do their business. But they weren't about to help them. Oh no, what if Mary was really alive? How would it look if they helped do something so horrible? But although it was December, one resident later described the weather that day as like July. So with the body of Mary Howe inside a wooden casket, sitting exposed under the blazing sun, Dr. Dixon and the two other men had to work fast. They ended up doing the only thing they could think of. They grabbed a shovel and dug the grave themselves. After a lot of hard labor, and well after the sun had set on them, the three men lifted the coffin and lowered it into the grave. An hour later, the body of Mary Howe, maybe alive or maybe not,

was trapped beneath hundreds of pounds of cold New England soil. For a very long time, humans have been obsessed with the activity and the risks associated with burial. There's something about the grave that calls out to us. It beckons us to step closer, perhaps because it's home to so many unanswered questions. Or maybe, despite the limited space of that human-sized hole in the ground, there's just so much room for error. But we can't discount the human side either, because people hate letting go. We don't like saying goodbye to the ones we love. Maybe that's why we've told stories for centuries about the rare moments in the past when people actually got a second chance, when the grave was not the end. But they're all just stories, right?

Essie Dunbar was a 30-year-old from South Carolina. When she had a massive epileptic seizure in 1915 and failed to wake up, her family assumed the worst. And those fears were realized an hour later when the family physician told them that he couldn't find a single sign of life. Essie was declared dead and prepared for burial. But her sister lived miles away, and the family wanted to make sure that there was enough time for her to travel and see Essie's face one last time before burial. So they decided to wait a day. It was sort of a race against time, though. Bodies decompose quickly when they haven't been embalmed. Sadly, the deadline came and went, and the funeral had to move forward without Essie's sister. The coffin was lowered into the grave.

Services were held there on the wet grass of the cemetery. The first shovel full of soil was tossed back into the hole. And that's the moment when Essie's sister showed up. She was upset they chose not to wait for her. She traveled as fast as she could and wanted nothing more than to see Essie's face one last time. She cried. She begged. Finally, the minister let out a great sigh and then nodded toward the grave diggers standing at the back of the assembly. So they grabbed the ropes and raised the coffin once more. When the lid was open, everyone there received the shock of their life. Essie Dunbar sat up, smiled at the people around her, and said hello. According to one source, her sudden resurrection sent the minister toppling

into the grave while the rest of the gathered mourners rushed away in a panic. Essie Dunbar lived another 47 years, although there were some who couldn't help but cast a watchful eye her way. She'd returned from the grave, after all, which was more than a little difficult to fully understand. I can't blame them, really. Anytime the impossible happens, our brains shift into overdrive to try and explain it away, because there has to be an explanation for the bizarre moments in our lives. Folklore tries to fill in the gap, but what we're really searching for is answers. Some of those answers were uncovered at the house old inn and tavern years after Mary's burial. New owners eventually took over, and when they did, they set about doing a bit of remodeling.

Floors were replaced, repairs were made, and walls were opened up. And that's when they found the pipes. Every building has pipes, I know, and the inn had those, but these were different. They seemed to serve no purpose as far as the new owners could tell. The same could be said for the wires they found alongside them, which were less like electrical wires and more like cables. All of these odd additions seemed to travel through the walls in the same direction, beginning in a room on the second floor and ending in the downstairs parlor. The parlor, mind you, where Mary Howe had conducted her popular and lucrative seances, complete with all their echoey sounds and moving objects.

Mary, it seems, had used tricks to build her experiences. Perhaps her brother Edwin found an outlet for those inventor dreams after all. If you step back and think about it, it's more than a little ironic. In a world where people were leaning heavily on technology and ingenuity to prevent the tragedy of premature burial, Mary Howe might actually have been buried alive in the grave because of it. There are questions as to where that grave is, though. You see, there's no marker over her final resting place, and that was by design. Dr. Dixon and the others were afraid that if they publicized the location of Mary's body, people from town might try to dig her up to rescue her. Her grave, it seems, is lost to time,

but she was buried. The only question left, I suppose, is whether or not the people who buried her actually got it right. Was Mary Howe really dead and left on display by her brother in their house for weeks? Or was her trance just so deep and unnatural that she somehow managed to stay alive despite the medical clues to the contrary? It's a frightening question to face, but one with horrifying answers no matter which path you choose. In the end, it seems, someone made a grave mistake. This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research help from Marseille Crockett and music by Chad Lawson.

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, theworldoflore.com slash now. And you can also follow the show on Facebook,

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