Lore - Lore 260: Ghostwriter

Episode Date: August 12, 2024

Our deep desire to connect to the world of the dead has taken humanity down some fantastic roads, but few compare to the stories that came out of the early 1900s in America. Narrated and produced by Aaron Mahnke, with writing by GennaRose Nethercott, research by Cassandra de Alba, and music by Chad Lawson. ————————— Lore Resources:  Episode Music: lorepodcast.com/music  Episode Sources: lorepodcast.com/sources  All the shows from Grim & Mild: www.grimandmild.com Sponsors: Stamps: Never go to the Post Office again. Get a 4-week trial, free postage, and a digital scale at Stamps.com/LORE. Quince: Premium European clothing and accessories for 50% to 80% less than similar brands, at Quince.com/LORE for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. BetterHelp: Lore is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at BetterHelp.com/LORE, and get on your way to being your best self. To report a concern regarding a radio-style, non-Aaron ad in this episode, reach out to [e-mail] with the name of the company or organization so we can look into it. To advertise on our podcast, please reach out to [e-mail], or visit our listing here. ————————— ©2024 Aaron Mahnke. All rights reserved.

When Vladimir Lenin died in 1924, thousands of mourners poured into Moscow to pay their respects, and to see the Soviet Union founder's body lying in state. It was January, and although the fallen leader was originally to be displayed only briefly, the frigid temperatures kept him preserved for a good two months. And in all that time, the flow of visitors never slowed, which gave Lenin's more rabid followers an idea. What if, they wondered, we could preserve Lenin forever?

Now the Soviets were not interested in mummifying Lenin. No, they wanted him to remain exactly as he was, lifelike even. Hundreds of scientists worked day and night on this common goal. First they injected the corpse with embalming fluids, which sounds fairly normal. But then they also stuffed him into a rubber suit filled with more fluid to keep him perpetually moist and elastic. And that's not all. Every other year, the body would spend a month and a half in various cocktails of glycerol, formaldehyde, potassium acetate, and other ingredients, essentially turning the man

into a human pickle. They re-sculpted parts of his face, they replaced his eyelashes one by one, and continuously altered the coloring and texture of his skin due to the fact that too much contact with that chemical formula tended to turn the body the color of, and I quote, canned tuna, a description that I will never get out of my head. All in all, whatever they did worked, because today, one full century later, Vladimir Lenin's meticulously preserved body is still on full display and open to the public. Throughout history, humans, it seems, have shared a peculiar impulse. We refuse to let go of the dead, And as it turns out, we've come up

with some pretty creative ways to call them back. I'm Aaron Manke and this is Lore. They're a beloved institution at middle school slumber parties. The modern Ouija board is a toy, and even has the Hasbro trademark on it to prove it, marketed alongside products like Nerf guns and Furbies. And sure, it has a spooky reputation, but at the end of the day, Ouija boards are all fun and games. Right? Except here's the thing.

They didn't start out that way. In fact, the original spirit boards were serious esoteric tools used not by children, but by adults. In other words, this was no game. Spirit boards, or talking boards, have their origins in the spiritualist movement of 19th century America. Now, many people will be familiar with spiritualists like the Fox Sisters and their contemporaries, people who claim to have regular, cheeky little chats with the deceased.

Okay, chat might be too strong a word. You see, for the most part, ghosts seem to communicate by rapping. And not like Tupac or Biggie. I mean, rapping as in knocking. Spirits might answer a medium's questions by rapping once for yes and twice for no. Or if they had something more specific to say, a medium might call out the letters of the alphabet one by one and wait for a rap on the appropriate letter, slowly spelling out a word.

Unsurprisingly, it took forever to say, well, anything at all. So it's no surprise the folks started inventing devices to help speed things up a bit. Take the planchette, for example, a small board with a pencil affixed to the bottom onto which seance-goers would place their hands as supposed spirits gently nudged it around on a piece of paper. Or the less popular psychograph,

a sort of clock-like circle with letters around the outside and a spinning pointer in the center. But none of these could hold a candle to the talking board. That is, a flat board sporting the letters of the alphabets over which a planchette would rove while pointing to one letter at a time.

Sound familiar? I thought so. Of course, the question is, was it real? Could a talking board actually contact the beyond? While true believers and slumber party tweens say yes, the boards actually relied on something called the idometer effect. Basically, automatic muscular movements outside the user's conscious control make it feel like the planchette is moving by itself.

And suffice to say, the effect was convincing enough that the talking board became the go-to secret Santa gift for that pesky spiritualist who has everything. To be clear, you couldn't pick one up at the mall. They weren't mass-produced. Not yet, anyway. In fact, most were homemade, a sort of spiritualist folk art. But still, by the mid-1880s, talking boards were all the rage, used by everyone from hobby occultists to grieving mourners desperate to speak to their lost loved ones.

But hey, if there's one thing even more American than apple pie, it's to take a creation born from art and grief and find a way to capitalize on it. Which in 1890 is exactly what a few industrious fellas did. On May 28th of that year, a patent attorney named Elijah Bond filed the first patent for a little item called a Ouija or Egyptian Luck Board with rights given to a Charles W. Kennard and William H. A. Maupin. Now, I imagine you're wondering where they got that name Ouija from. After all, up until now, the tool had been referred to as a talking board or spirit board. But these men weren't spiritualists.

They were capitalists. And they knew that any trendy product needed a catchy name. There are a few theories on how they landed on Ouija. According to some historians, Elijah Bond's sister-in-law, Helen Peters, was a medium who received the name from consulting the board itself. Others claim it's a combination of we and ja, the French and German words for yes,

or that it was an Egyptian word for good luck. My favorite theory, though, is that Helen Peters named it after an author named Weida, spelled O-U-I-D-A. Weida was the pen name for Maria Louise Ramian, an eccentric female author adored by forward-thinking women and famously hated by men. In fact, Helen was said to wear a locket with her name on it, a sort of talisman, which inspired the talking board's title. Whatever the true origin, though, the Ouija board had officially arrived, and now it was

time to let the money roll in. And the product was a hit from the start, but it was always more popular during times of war. Think about it, war means more lost loved ones, which leads to more grieving parents and sisters and wives desperate to speak to their beloveds. During both World Wars and Vietnam alike, sales boomed. But in times of peace, well, the Ouija Board became a party game, a fortune-telling phenomenon used to reveal crushes and spill secrets. In fact, through the roaring 1920s, the Ouija Board was barely associated with the dead at all. And as use of the board involved huddling close together and overlapping hands in a dim room,

it was used less for flirting with death and more for regular old flirting. Granted, some religious leaders weren't too stoked on the gadget, issuing dire warnings against the board's satanic potential. But overall, they weren't widely associated with evil and the occult until a certain 1973 film dropped. That film, of course, was none other than The Exorcist. From a homemade spiritualist tool and parlor game to a demonic portal, the Ouija Board has lived many lives. And

if its devotees are to be believed, many lives have lived through the board. Some spirits popped in for a quick hello or to deliver an ominous warning. And others, it seems, had enough to say to fill an entire book. Pearl had no business talking to the dead. Sure, she had briefly played piano in her uncle's spiritualist church, but she had always hated it. Plus, all that was back when she was a teenager. Now Pearl was pushing 30, living in St. Louis with her husband John.

She was a housewife, not a medium. But all of that changed in 1912, because that was the year when Pearl first used a Ouija board. As the story goes, she, her friend Emily Grant Hutchings, and Pearl's mother all decided to give the latest trend a try and hold a séance. The trio set a talking board on the table, sat in a circle, and logged onto the 1912 equivalent of a ghost chat room. And there, they started

talking with none other than Pearl's dead grandfather. He told the women that Pearl's father would soon die, which, okay, wasn't that far-fetched since he was already quite sick. But even so, when the man's death did indeed come to pass, Pearl and her mother were spooked enough to take a break from the board. Except they couldn't seem to stay away. Soon enough they were back and on July 8th of 1913, a new voice came through Curran's board or rather a very, very old one. Many moons ago I lived, the spirit spelled out letter by letter. Again I come, Patience Worth, my name.

Patience Worth went on to reveal her life story. She had been a 17th century Puritan girl, born in the south of England in the year of 1649. Later, she immigrated to New England, only to be killed by Native Americans in 1694. The next time Pearl returned to the board, Patience was there again. And the next.

Pearl began spending more and more time hunched over the Ouija board, talking with her new friend, often for hours at a time, up to four days a week. Before long, Patience Worth had begun to dictate poems, stories, and plays to Pearl through the Ouija board, yes, but also projected right into Pearl's mind in the form of elaborate visions, which Pearl would then transcribe word for word. And okay, sure, Patienceworth's use of language wasn't exactly accurate to the period she claimed to hail from.

Apparently, it was a lot closer to how characters in historical romance novels talked, with a little King James Bible thrown in. In other words, she sounded a whole lot like what a 1912 housewife with minimal education would think a Puritan girl sounded like. But that didn't keep this literal ghostwriter from becoming a literary sensation. Because you see, in 1915, Pearl and Patience started publishing. For whatever reason, an editor at the St. Louis Globe-Democrat became enamored with Patience and published a series of flattering articles

about her, along with several of her dictated short stories. This editor's name, by the way, happened to be Casper. You seriously can't make this stuff up. Anyway, the starting gun had been fired, and Patience Worth the author was unleashed. In 1916, her first book dropped, a collection of poems and stories called Patience Worth, a Psychic Mystery. And she was an immediate sensation. The ghost had her own magazine full of her poems and witticisms.

Her poetry was put into anthologies alongside famed writers like Amy Lowell and Edna St. Vincent Millay. In 1917, Patience Worth's debut novel was published, a whopping 640 page doorstopper called A Sorry Tale. It takes place in the time of Christ and features biblical characters. To be honest, it reads a bit like Bible fan fiction, but people ate it up. After all, how can you not love a book written by a Puritan ghost? In 1918, Patience's second novel, Hope Trueblood, hit the stands.

And while not as popular as her first, it still garnered solid reviews. And three years later, yet another novel arrived called The Pot Upon the Wheel. All in all, in the course of her literary career, Pearl transcribed a staggering four million words of Patience-worth dictations. Words that, had they been penned by a mere housewife, would likely have been dismissed by the publishing world. But coming from Patience, a ghost, rather than Pearl? Well that was a different story.

But their relationship wasn't strictly professional either. Pearl Curran was able to use Patience Worth as a sort of proxy in her own personal life. Patience, the ghost, often scolded Pearl's overbearing mother on Pearl's behalf. And it went further. In the midst of one Ouija session, Patience Worth made a startling proclamation. She wanted the Kearns to adopt a child. And that child, according to Patience, they should name it Patience Worth. The Kearns took this advice and adopted a baby who they referred to as Patience Wee. They viewed Patience Worth as Patience Wee's spiritual mother, and she often gave advice

for the child's care. She also instructed the Currens to dress Patience Wee in Puritan-style clothing, with a cross around her neck, which they did. And if all of that sounds a little creepy, well, yes, it is. Once Patience, speaking through the board of course, even referred to the baby as, and I quote, "'The wee fleshy that be mine, mine, mine.' Yeah, no thank you.

But creepy or not, Patience Worth had a foothold, and as long as she had Pearl to speak through, she was there to stay. She was there to stay. It seemed like everything was coming up patience. The press loved her. The readers loved her. Pearl and her family loved her. But behind the scenes, there was one

woman whose patience for patience was running thin. That is our old friend Emily Grant Hutchings, Pearl's original seance buddy. You see, Emily felt like she'd been pushed out of the patience worth orbit, and that some of Pearl Curran's success was deservedly hers. Think of it like Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin in the social network, but with more ghosts. Emily had been there at the start, after all, and had been just as instrumental in tapping into Patience's voice as Pearl

had been. In fact, it had been her idea to publish a book of Patience's writings in the first place. But Pearl didn't like that Emily would take those transcripts home with her and edit them to her liking. And so soon, Pearl started conducting the Ouija sessions alone, refusing to let Emily join in.

The thing is, though, between the two of them, it was Emily and not Pearl who was the experienced spiritualist and writer. Cosmopolitan and the Atlantic Monthly had both published Emily's work, and as a freelancer, she had extensively covered the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. Unlike Pearl, she was college-educated, and she cared about spiritualism from a scholarship angle, not as a mere parlor game. Initially, she had been drawn to the Ouija board in search of answers to grand questions about the universe, and claimed to have had contact with numerous spirits, including celebs like Walt Whitman, Christopher Marlowe, William James, and Titanic victim John Jacob Astor.

She also claimed to have been able to contact patients worth completely on her own, without Pearl even there. Suffice to say, seeing Pearl raking in money and accolades while she got nothing made Emily furious. She even wrote a letter to the President of the American Society for Psychical Research, accusing Pearl of being, and I quote, vain, untrustworthy, and profit-minded. But hey, forget Patience Worth. Emily Hutchings could do one better.

She began channeling her own book via Ouija, and this time it wasn't coming from some no-name Puritan girl. No, Emily's new collaborator was none other than the ghost of Mark Twain. That's right, Mark Twain was apparently writing a new book over a decade and a half after his death. Transcribing this book was a tall task, and so Emily enlisted backup. She had help from a medium friend named Lola V. Hayes, whose hands joined hers on the board, while Emily's husband transcribed the words that she called out. Oh, and also, just for the

sake of historical accuracy, they technically weren't using a Ouija board, but a knockoff brand called the Oriole board, but I digress. Less than a year later, their labor paid off. Twain, and I put that in severe air quotes here, had dictated two stories and a novel, the latter of which was published in 1917. Its title? Japp Herron, a novel written from the Ouija board. The novel takes place in Missouri and follows a poor young boy's journey to manhood and

success as the editor of a newspaper. And I know what you're thinking. Was it good? Well, I'll let this book review from the New York Times speak to that. If this, wrote the reviewer, is the best that Mark Twain can do by reaching across the barrier, the army of admirers that his works have won for him will all hope that he will hereafter respect that boundary. Brutal, right?

As an author myself, let me tell you, a review like that is scarier than any ghost. Oh, and also not a fan of the novel was Mark Twain's daughter, Clara. And with the help of Twain's publisher, Harper & Brothers, she sued Hutchings Publisher for copyright. Now, don't misunderstand me here. They weren't trying to claim the book for themselves. The reasoning was that this dubiously authored book was so dang bad that allowing it to circulate would sully Mark Twain's reputation. Before the case could go to trial though, Hutchings and the publisher agreed to pull the book from the shelves.

Emily would go on to publish several more books under her own name after the Jab Heron failure, but none of them were great either. In fact, when all was said and done, the only real attention her work ever received was in comparing it to patience worth. That's right, all that labor, all those years, and still, her nemesis Pearl came out on top. Emily Grant Hutchings died in 1960, with barely a legacy left behind. But despite it all, she insisted until her death that she had indeed corresponded with Mark Twain. And, well, she wasn't exactly lying. Because you see, far before Twain's death, Emily had actually shared a brief letter correspondence

with the author. They were both from the same town of Hannibal, Missouri, you see. And so Emily had reached out. And let's just say that Twain was not exactly impressed. On an envelope containing a letter from her, Twain had scrawled a little note to himself. He'd written, and I quote, "'Idiot, preserve this.'"

The story of Patience Worth has everything that we love. Ghosts, bitter rivalries, seances, and famous authors. Friends becoming enemies. You would think that Emily in Pearl's tale must be a rare one, right? Well, not exactly. It turns out Patience Worth and Mark Twain were only two of many wraith-like writers seeking publication from beyond the grave. Take the 1919 book Shakespeare's Revelations, a 480-page tome allegedly dictated to medium Sarah Taylor Shatford by none other than the bard himself. I know, I know, there's a Stratford-Shatford pun in there somewhere, but let's let sleeping dogs lie. Then there was Hester Travers Smith, whose Ouija-channeled bon-mots by Oscar Wilde were

published in 1926. Two years later, a woman named Geraldine Cummins published a text called Scripps of Cleophas, supposedly on behalf of a spiritual messenger from New Testament times. In the words of one literary reviewer, the Ouija board has evidently solved the problem Cleophas supposedly on behalf of a spiritual messenger from New Testament times. In the words of one literary reviewer, the Ouija board has evidently solved the problem of what to do with our dead. Call them up and put them to work writing books. On the surface it seems, well, a little kooky. But if you think about it in its historical context, the phenomenon actually makes a lot

of sense. This was a time when women couldn't vote. They couldn't make many of their own financial decisions. Often couldn't have careers. The literary industry itself was run by and dominated by male gatekeepers. Just imagine how those gatekeepers would have responded to Pearl Curran without Patience as a shield. Just a silly housewife with dreams of being a writer.

But with Patience, now she was an oracle whose writings tapped into the great beyond. In other words, the Ouija board provided disempowered people, primarily women, with power and control over their lives. With nothing but a piece of wood and a planchette, they could break out of society's chains. But there's one final illuminating detail about Pearl Curran that I want to share. In 1919, Pearl published a story in the Saturday Evening Post,

but this wasn't one of Patience's. No, this was a rare story that Pearl claimed as her own. It was titled Rosa Alvaro Entrante. The story follows a Chicago shop girl named Mamie Ladd, who is existentially bored with her job and her life. Until that is, she becomes overtaken by a spirit. This spirit, Rosa Alvaro, is the ghost of a Spanish dancer who was murdered in Madrid.

And she is everything that Mamie isn't. Rosa is vibrant and confident, passionate and colorful. As Rosa, Mamie goes dancing and even takes a lover. Her boredom falls away and she truly begins to live life. At the end of the story, though, Mamie makes a shocking admission. It turns out there had been no spirit. She had made the whole thing up. But there was something else in her, the character insisted.

It was my fight for life. Every rusty hope in me broke loose. This it seems was the closest thing to a hoax confession that Pearl Curran would ever give us. Patience Worth's final published novel, Telka, an Idol of Medieval England, appeared in 1928. Pearl passed away nine years later. And as far as I know, neither she nor Patience has been heard from ever since.

Iconic and embedded in pop culture, the Ouija board is one of those objects that just about everyone has heard of. So I hope you enjoyed today's exploration of its origins and uses, especially when it comes to literal ghost writing. But the Ouija board isn't the only way that deceased authors have allegedly continued their work. Sometimes it's regular old reincarnation. I have one last story for you, in which a beloved poet comes back for round two.

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Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. Never skip therapy day with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com slash LORE today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp.com slash lore. In the fall of 1920, a story circulating in the nation's newspapers introduced America to a very unique Greenwich Village resident. Her name was Juanita Clavette, although she became better known by a different name, Little Sappho.

Juanita was born in 1907, and at the age of five, allegedly asked her mother who Sappho was. Little Juanita supposedly said, I know her name, but not who she was. Why did you and father name me Juanita? I should have been called Sappho, for that is who I really am. Naturally confused, her parents asked her if she had ever heard of Sappho or learned about her, and the child said no. And so her parents answered her question.

Sappho, they said, had been a woman from ancient Greece, a poet from a long, long time ago. According to the newspapers, she also told her mother that she remembered the name Phaon and said, I know that I loved him and I think that I killed myself because he did not love me. Now, OK, I know what you're thinking. Wasn't Sappho very famously a lesbian? Well, apparently, back in the early 1900s, the public juggled two very different narratives about Sappho.

On one hand, queer women of the time heavily identified with Sappho and made pilgrimages to the island of Lesbos where she lived. The use of the word sapphic to denote a woman who loves another woman actually dates all the way back to the 1890s. But on the other hand, a narrative popularized by the Roman poet Ovid had Sappho madly in love with a man named Phaon. In this version, Sappho takes her own life by throwing herself off a cliff after Phaon rejects her.

And evidently, this was the version that little Juanita went with. At the age of 12, Juanita announced, by the time I am 24, I will be united to Feon. But not here. It will be in another world, where he will give me all the love he denied me centuries ago. And after that, I will never come back to this earth. And if all that uncanny knowledge of Greek history weren't enough, Juanita was also a poet.

At the tender age of just six years old, she started writing poems that she said were inspired by her past life as Sappho. One of those early poems ended with the haunting lines, The sea is deep and fearful. In its depths I see. I see the drowned clay body that once belonged to me. An honorary tortured poet for sure. It wasn't long before Juanita became a Greenwich Village celebrity. The kid even had business cards emblazoned with the words, Juanita, the inspired child of light, Sappho of Greenwich Village. Her poems even received some acclaim, with one article declaring that they were, and I quote,

as admirable as any the original Sappho ever wrote. Eventually though, Juanita left childhood behind and entered her teen years. And like any teenager, she was eager to start dating. While her peers were looking for boys with cute hair or a fancy car, Juanita had something else in mind. She was looking for the reincarnation of Feon. And in 1925, it was that very search

that landed Juanita back in the newspapers. According to the articles, after several failed romances with a well-known New York lawyer, a famous portrait painter, a rich banker, and a dashing naval officer, she believed that she had finally found her faeon in an artist named Emile Groupe. And Emile must have agreed, because on the very same night that they met, they went to Juanita's mother and announced their plan to get married. In a quote for the ages, her appalled mother allegedly responded, You are too young to marry anybody, even the reincarnated Feon.

Juanita's retort was absurd. What is age to me, who am eternal? Unfortunately for her, though, while Sappho may be ancient, Juanita was still under 18 and couldn't get married in the state of New York without her parents' permission. Permission that they, very understandably, did not give. So what exactly was going on here? Was this a genuine case of reincarnation? A dissociative personality disorder?

A classic all-American hoax? Well, a clue might lie in the source of all these stories. Because here's the thing about Little Sappho. It seems like everything that we know about her comes from the same place, or rather the same person. That is, Juanita's father, Merton Clivet, who both provided stories to the paper and circulated his daughter's reputation around town. And Merton? Well, he wasn't exactly the stoic strict parent the papers reportedly imply. No, Merton Clivet was actually a magician, hypnotist, and vaudeville performer. Oh, and he also owned a junk shop where he assigned outrageously fake histories

to the objects on display. In other words, Juanita's father was a known charlatan. But hey, who knows? Sure it's likely that Juanita was simply a money-making scheme for her old man. But then again, there certainly have been cases of children knowing things from a past life that they couldn't possibly have witnessed. She could have been the genuine article. Whatever the case, the truth is out of our reach. Unless of course, you own a Ouija board.

This episode of Lore was produced by me, Aaron Manke, with writing by Jenna Rose Nethercott, research by Cassandra Day Alba, and music by Chad Lawson. Don't like the ads? I've got a solution for you. There is a paid version of Lore on Apple podcasts and Patreon that is 100% ad-free. Plus, subscribers also get weekly mini episodes called Lore Bites.

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