Lore - Lore 263: Elementary

Episode Date: September 23, 2024

When we talk about the intersection of history and folklore, few individuals in history sat themselves so firmly on that target like well-known one man. The lesser known elements of his life, though, are the most fascinating. Narrated and produced by Aaron Mahnke, with writing by GennaRose Nethercott, and 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: 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. Squarespace: Head to Squarespace.com/lore to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using the code LORE. SimpliSafe: Secure your home with 24/7 professional monitoring. Sign up today at SimpliSafe.com/Lore to get 20% off any new SimpliSafe system with Fast Protect Monitoring. 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.

It was the height of World War II, and a terrifying new danger threatened the lives of Navy soldiers. No, I'm not talking about torpedoes or underwater mines. These sailors were afraid of sharks. And to be fair, they had good reason for that. In the first three years of the war alone, there had been 20 shark attacks. That number only rose with each new ship taken down by enemy fire, stranding hundreds of bleeding men in the water. As if the dangers of battle weren't enough to worry about, right? Eventually, the U.S. military decided something had to be done, and luckily, they had just the person to fix it.

Her name was Julia McWilliams. She had wanted to join the war effort, but at 6'2", she had been deemed too tall to join the Women's Emergency Corps. So instead, she joined the OSS, a newly formed American spy agency. Soon, her superiors noticed that 29-year-old Julia was no ordinary volunteer. She had a creative brilliance that they believed would be perfect for solving the shark problem.

And so Julia was put on a task force with a very specific mission, invent a shark repellent. After a year of research and over 100 tested substances, Julia and her team finally succeeded. The solution, it turned out, was to create cakes made of copper acetate and black dye. Apparently, it created a smell that, to the sharks at least, resembled dead shark. And to the military's relief, the sharks absolutely hated it.

Clearly, Julia McWilliams had a promising career ahead of her and she went on to create countless more recipes but not for the military. You see Julia McWilliams who when married took on her husband's last name became none other than Julia Child. It just goes to show that sometimes even the most famous and beloved entertainers can have a secret past fit for a horror story. I'm Aaron Manke and this is Lore. Victor Frankenstein, Dr. Moreau, Oppenheimer. History and fiction alike are full of creators who go on to despise their creations.

And in December of 1893, there was one author who decided to take that hatred to the extreme and kill off his main character. Except it didn't go exactly as planned. The public revolted, demanding that he bring the beloved protagonist back to life. Even the author's own mother pushed him to change his mind. And so, bullied into complying, the poor guy was forced to resurrect him. And let's just say he wasn't happy about it. He had more important things to do than write detective stories. And so, in a begging letter to the public, the author wrote,

Stop writing letters to me about Sherlock Holmes. Ask me, please ask me, about spiritualism and what really matters. Yeah, that's right. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle didn't want to talk about Baker Street. He wanted to talk about ghosts. Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was born on May 22nd of 1859 in Edinburgh, Scotland. His childhood was not easy, stilted by his father's drinking problem, but by the time Doyle came of age he became a sharp and driven young

man. He was fascinated by science and medicine and so when the time came Doyle enrolled in medical school. After earning his degree, he married a woman named Louisa Hawkins, and the couple would go on to have two children, Mary and Kingsley. He also dove into practicing medicine, and for a while the man was truly a voice of reason. He wrote fierce pro-vaccine articles, he lobbied for the cold hard facts of science, and the importance of academic rigor. By the way, it was during this time in medical school that he studied under a professor by the name of Dr. Joseph Bell, a man whose wild

observational skills would later become the inspiration behind the character of Sherlock Holmes. The first story featuring that legendary detective was published in 1887, all while Doyle continued to build his medical career. Oh, and in the midst of all of this, he was also chucking himself full throttle into just about every sport in existence. A family man, an author, a doctor, an athlete. It's hard to imagine he had much time for extracurriculars, and yet he somehow made time for one final hobby.

You see, in the very same year that Sherlock Holmes made his debut, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle began attending seances. Now, I know what you're thinking. Surely a man of logic like Doyle would scoff at the idea of chatting with the dead. That thick velvet, the tarot cards, the mediums and talking boards and parlor tricks. But then again, he was a curious person. It was worth seeing what all the hubbub was about, right? Then again, he was a curious person. It was worth seeing what all the hubbub was about, right? The room was dim, wavering with candlelight and smoke.

Doyle watched as the medium slipped into a trance. She put pen to paper and using automatic writing, delivered a message directly to Doyle. Sure, it wasn't anything particularly otherworldly. She merely told him not to bother reading a certain book, a book that Doyle was indeed planning to read, a fact that he had very much not mentioned to this medium. It doesn't seem like much, but still, the event absolutely blew the young doctor's

mind. And that was that. In one single moment, Arthur Conan Doyle became a true believer. Doyle later wrote, After weighing the evidence, I could no more doubt the existence of the phenomena than I could doubt the existence of lions in Africa. Meanwhile, readers were loving Sherlock Holmes. Doyle became a literary superstar. Soon he quit medicine and dedicated himself to writing full-time, or at least to writing whenever he wasn't busy attempting to contact the great beyond, a skill that, unbeknownst to Arthur, was about to become devastatingly useful.

First, in 1893, his father died. Then his wife Louisa was diagnosed with consumption, eventually succumbing to her illness in 1906. And that wouldn't be the last tragedy in Doyle's life. Far from it, actually, because 1914 brought a wave of death unlike any mankind had seen before. World War I had begun. Mothers and fathers, siblings and wives watched in horror as the war swallowed an entire generation. It didn't make sense. How could so many vibrant young lives, all their passions and memories and souls, simply stop existing. And if they didn't, then where had they gone? All the world is asking, Doyle wrote, where are our dead boys?

And Doyle believed that he had the answer to that question. They were safely in the afterlife, just waiting for someone to reach out, which is exactly what he began to do. Doyle became deeply involved with the British Society for Psychical Research, which he had joined back around the time of his father's death. And he also conducted experiments in automatic writing with his second wife, Jean, and her best friend, Lily.

And this wasn't a game for the trio. A single battle had claimed not just one, but three of Lily's brothers, and she believed that she was speaking to one of them now. Doyle lost his brother-in-law and several nephews in the trenches, some of whom seemed to communicate through Doyle's new wife. His own son Kingsley now faced the German machine guns. No, this wasn't a Ouija board at a slumber party. It was a desperate attempt to push back against a world on fire. Having a child on the front lines is a parent's worst nightmare.

And yet in a letter to his own mother, Doyle wrote, I do not fear death for Kingsley, for since I became a convinced spiritualist, death became rather an unnecessary thing. And the war raged on. All the while back home, Doyle was fighting a war of his own. He had set out on a speaking tour. But this wasn't a Sherlock Holmes book tour. No, it was more like a missionary trip. He saw himself as a soldier fighting for the cause of spiritualism. One lecture at a time, he attempted to sway all of Britain into belief.

It was just before taking the stage during one such engagement that he received the horrible news. His daughter had telegrammed, Doyle's son Kingsley was dead. In shock, Arthur Conan Doyle ascended to the podium. Then instead of his planned speech, he read his daughter's telegram out loud to the entire assembly. The crowd gasped in horror. But despite it all, Doyle stood tall. Not to worry, he said.

But then he hesitated, as if the truth began to sink in. Not to worry, he said, but then he hesitated, as if the truth began to sink in. Not to worry, he repeated, and then he locked eyes with someone in the crowd, and boldly, desperately, he leaned into his belief and announced with conviction, My son survives. The Lost of Life Grief can do strange things to a person. And even for a man of science like Doyle, the loss of his wife, his father, his son, and a generation of young men sent off to war was too much to accept at face value. There had to be life after death. There just had to be. And so he dedicated his time to championing his favorite mediums.

For one, he was an absolute fanboy of the OG spiritualists, the Fox Sisters, so much so that in 1926 he even helped fund a 25-foot tall obelisk in their honor. It still stands in Rochester, New York today, and sports the words, There is no death, there are no dead. Which brief side note would make a pretty metal tattoo. Then there were the Zanzigs, a husband-wife duo famous for an act called Two Minds with But a Single Thought. First, the couple would face away from each other on opposite sides of a room.

Next, audience members would hand various objects to the husband, Julius Zanzig, and his wife Agnes, or later his second wife Ada, would then miraculously announce what each thing was, without ever looking, of course. Over the years, these objects included, and I quote, the toe of an ostrich, wood from Napoleon's coffin, the petrified finger of a man, a glass eye, and a live snake, among other cheery delights. Agnes and Ada would also recreate drawings or read from books that Julius held, all without a glance.

For Arthur Conan Doyle, well, this was just about the coolest thing that he had ever seen. He believed that Julius Zanzig was a bona fide psychic. How was he so sure? Well, Doyle insisted that if it was a trick, he, with his high level of intelligence, certainly would have caught it. Yeah, funny thing about that though. In 1924, Julius published a series of articles in a London paper titled, Our Secrets, Greatest Stage Act Mystery Solved at Last.

There Julius revealed the complex secret codes that he and his partners had been using to communicate. The Zanzigs were frauds. The Fox sisters too, by the way, eventually admitting to being frauds later in life. But if you think that that would have swayed Doyle's belief in spiritualism, well, you'd be very, very wrong. In fact, in 1922, he challenged the editors of Scientific American Magazine to hold a little contest, hunting for a true blue medium.

The winner would have to demonstrate actual psychic ability in front of a scientific jury. Doyle was positive that this would prove spiritualism's legitimacy once and for all. And the winner would earn a healthy chunk of change to boot. And Arthur, well, he had the perfect candidate in mind. Her name was Mina Crandon. And buckle in, folks, because this lady was something else. A Boston-based medium, she was a bit of an all-star in the 1920s. And I'm sure her looks didn't hurt either.

She was pretty and charming after all. And I imagine the style of her se looks didn't hurt either. She was pretty and charming after all. And I imagine the style of her seances didn't hurt either. You see, she performed naked and covered in glitter. Or on her more modest days, draped in a loose kimono that had a pesky habit of slipping off while she was in a trance. And then there was the, um, goop. You see, Mina's most famous skill was producing ectoplasm, a substance thought to be the physical manifestation of spirits.

And given the general tone of her performances, I bet you can guess what part of her body this ectoplasm came from. Now, as risque as all of this sounds, Mina's ectoplasm act was actually pretty grotesque. Assuming she wasn't actually oozing ghosts, the stuff had to be made of something earthly, right? Theories of what that substance actually was ranged from the very gross, think animal organs, to the utterly macabre. Once Seance Attendee even touched a tiny ectoplasmic hand that Mina had produced and with revulsion realized that it must have come from the corpse of a child.

Now I know what you're thinking. That sounds too gruesome to be true. Except for one small detail. Mina's husband was a prominent surgeon with more than enough access to corpses. Mina Crandon may seem like an unconventional candidate for a scientific study, to say the least, but she was Arthur Conan Doyle's champion, and so she was set before the contest committee. She performed over 90 seances for them. And at first, it seemed like she would win the jury over. There was one holdout committee member, though, who was absolutely furious at the idea of her winning the prize. He knew that she was a

fraud and even published an entire pamphlet of diagrams showing just how she must be doing her tricks. And the truth is, this man knew a thing or two about tricks. You see, his name was Harry Houdini. Houdini and Conan Doyle were friends, by the way, but their disagreement over Mina Crandon and spiritualism in general ruined their relationship forever. At the end of the day, Mina did not win the prize. In fact, not one of the candidates was deemed worthy, and the competition was simply canceled. Certainly, now Doyle must have started to come around, right? After all, some of the greatest minds of the 19th century had failed to find any evidence of spiritualism's legitimacy.

But still, his grief wouldn't let him rest. And yet, he kept defending Mina even as her star fell. When the father of parapsychology, J.B. Rhyne, called her supposed powers, base and brazen trickery, Doyle wrote a scathing retort in the Boston Herald, accusing Rhyne of colossal impertinence. He also allegedly took out a blackboarded newspaper ad in the same paper, containing only six large words. J.B.

Rhyne is a monumental ass. On the subject of Mina, Doyle later wrote, In all America I can see no nobler, braver work. I can't help but feel that siding with the lady with ghosts in her vagina seems an odd hill to die on, but hey, when Arthur Conan Doyle believed in something, he did not back down. Speaking of hills to die on, though, shortly before Mina Crandon died of complications from alcoholism in 1941, fan-favorite paranormal investigator Nandor Fodor attempted to get

one final confession out of her on how she did her tricks. She was weak, and although she tried to talk, her voice was faint and brittle. So Fodor leaned close to hear her. And then Mina spoke, I said, all you psychical researchers can go to hell. She smiled then and tried to laugh. Why don't you guess? She said to him. You'll all be guessing for the rest of your lives. He was right out of a storybook. Nine-year-old Frances Griffiths and 16-year-old Elsie Wright had a childhood that was right out of Anne of Green Gables.

The cousins lived next door to each other, their homes nestled into a woodland valley near a stream known as Cottingley Beck, and they spent their summer of 1917 exploring the lush forest around the water. You could say that it was almost like a fairy tale. One night, Frances came home with her shoes sopping wet. Her mother began to scold her for playing in the stream, but Frances blurted out a bizarre defense. I go up, she said, to see the fairies. Shockingly, Elsie came to her young cousin's defense. It was true, Elsie insisted.

Not only was Francis being honest, but Elsie had seen the fairies as well. Unsurprisingly, no one believed them. And so Elsie borrowed her photographer father's camera, traipsed through the woods with Francis in tow, and returned half an hour later with proof that would change the world. In the first of the two black and white photographs, little Francis rests on the forest floor. Her chin leans on her hand and her eyes are soft with

dreamy wonder. But that's not the strange part, because there, right in front of her, are four winged fairies. And look, these aren't camera flares or tricks of the light, though each fairy can be seen in stark detail, from the patterns on their wings to the pointed toes of their dancing feet. One has her hand raised in revelry, another plays what looked like a tiny clarinet. The second photograph was just as shocking, too. Elsie, this time, appeared to shake hands with a wing and gnome. Now Elsie's father was certain that it was all a trick. He figured they

must have staged the photographs using cutout paper fairies and to be honest one look at these with the modern eye and it's obvious that's exactly what happened. Seriously look them up we aren't talking about CGI here. But this was 1917 and although Elsie's father was skeptical, her mother was more gullible. In fact, she was so amazed by the photos that in 1919, she showed them to a group of esoteric philosophers called the Theosophical Society. And from there, they worked their way into the hands of one of the most prominent members, a man named Edward Gardner. Inspired by it all, Gardner eagerly began lecturing on the existence of fairies, using

the Cottingly fairy photographs, as they came to be called, as his evidence. And you know who happened to catch one of those lectures? That's right, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. As soon as he saw the fairy photos, Doyle knew. This was it, the evidence that he'd been looking for all his life. Finally, he had found the miraculous, unimpeachable proof that there was a world beyond our perception. In fact, he wrote that the photographs had the potential to, and I quote, mark an epoch in human thought.

If he hadn't been about to leave on an Australian speaking tour, he would have rushed right over to Cottingley Beck and staged a full-blown investigation. But hey, if we've learned anything about the guy, it's that he wasn't one to let something like this go. So he sent Edward Gardner to interview Francis and Elsie in his stead. And not just interview them. Doyle wanted more photographs. In August of 1920, he received just that.

Using a camera that Gardner had provided for them, Elsie and Francis delivered not one, not two, but three more fairy photographs. And they received something even more powerful in return. A loud and fearless cheerleader, who also happened to be one of the world's most famous authors. Doyle started writing and publishing articles about the Cottingley photographs with titles like The Evidence for Fairies and Fairies Photographed. He published an entire book about them called The Coming of the Fairies, which included not just his own theories, but some of Edward Gardner's fairy theories as well. Theories like the idea that fairy wings had been the inspiration behind Native American

headdresses and that fairies gave plants their colors. Now you think that the public would have laughed all this off, but remember Doyle was a highly respected physician and one of the most well-known minds of his time. Not just that, but readers tended to, well, have a bit of trouble telling fact from fiction. They assumed that the author must be just like his detective, as brilliant and trustworthy as Sherlock Holmes himself. And so, when Doyle set his sights on the fairies, it triggered a craze all across Britain. You think the Beanie Babies were popular?

They had nothing on England's obsession with the Cottingley fairies. Many, many years later, in 1983, Elsie and Francis sat for an interview with a publication called The Unexplained. And there, just like Doyle's other beloved spiritualists before them, the girls, now old women, finally admitted that the photographs had been a hoax. They had used paper cutouts, just as their father had guessed. Cutouts that they had snipped from a collection of children's poems and stories called Princess Mary's Gift Book, which they then decorated with wings.

Oh, and it's worth mentioning, one of the stories in Princess Mary's Gift Book was actually about an elaborate deception, a deception that involved costumes and false identities and visual trickery, until at last the protagonist realizes that he's been fooled all along. And the author of that story? Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The world can be a frightening place. There is disease and famine, violence and death. The hard truth is that no matter how we try, we can't always protect the people we love. For Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, that was a truth he refused to accept. But why spirits?

Why fairies? Why did he decide that those were keys to reclaiming control in a chaotic world? Well, a clue might lie deep in his past, with that very first loss. That is the death of his father in 1893. Because, you see, it was not a natural death. Charles Doyle died in an insane asylum, plagued by alcoholism-induced psychosis. And yet, even there in captivity, Charles never stopped doing the thing that he loved the most—creating art.

He was actually an incredibly talented painter, so much so that Arthur filled his home with his father's work and even published it alongside his own writing. And these paintings, they weren't landscapes or portraits. No, Charles Doyle had a very particular speciality. He painted the visions that he saw during his psychotic hallucinations, visions of witches, spirits, and most especially, fairies. Perhaps it's for the best that Arthur died in 1930, many decades before Elsie and Francis admitted to their hoax.

He was able to go to his grave believing in something magical, believing that his father was not simply a very ill man, but a talented medium communing with another realm, believing that his son and wife weren't gone, but simply elsewhere. A belief that made the senseless, death-torn world he had lived in seem a little softer, a little more forgiving. Or then again, maybe all of it was true.

You see, although Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths did admit that the photographs were fake, there's one thing that they insisted on until their deaths. Both women claimed that all those years before, when Frances had first run home with sopping wet shoes, they really had seen something strange by cutting Lee Beck. So strange, in fact, that they knew that no one would believe them without photographic proof. So they made it themselves. What exactly had they seen?

Why fairies, of course. Dancing in the woods. Fiction and the fantastical often go hand in hand, and while the life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle clearly demonstrated that on many levels, he was far from the only famous writer with a taste for the occult. To really make today's journey complete, I would like you to meet one last author with a penchant for magic. Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about it. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Kids are always learning and growing, but as adults, sometimes we lose that curiosity. What's something that you would like to learn? Gardening, a new language, or maybe how to finally beat your best friend in chess? Well, believe it or not, therapy can help you reconnect with your sense of wonder because

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Rediscover your curiosity with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com slash Lore today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash Lore. This episode is also sponsored by Squarespace. As a creative professional for the past decade, I've had a problem. I am not a web designer and yet having a solid professional, good looking website has been absolutely essential to my career. So when I launched Lore back in 2015, I took a chance and I made the choice to go with

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to Newsweek. Protect your home with 50% off a new SimpliSafe system, plus a free indoor security camera when you sign up for FastProtect monitoring. Just visit simplisafe.com slash lore. That's simplisafe.com slash lore. There's no safe like simply safe. It was a simple spell and the poet had performed it perfectly. He burned a flower to ash, then placed those ashes in a bell jar and brought it outside to soak up the moonlight. He monitored it all through the night and then the next, waiting for the flower's ghost to appear and hover above the ashes. At least that's what the 18th century astrology text outlining the ritual had promised.

But to his disappointment, after all these efforts, nothing happened. Well, not exactly nothing. News of the poet's magical experiments infuriated his fellow members of the Theosophical Society, that same group to which Elsie's mother had first shown the Cottingley fairy photos, and so they kicked him out of the club. Alas, it seemed like William Butler Yates would have to find other like-minded friends. Today, W.B. Yates is known mostly for his lyrical poetry, but next to his writing, magic

was the most important thing in his life. In 1892, he wrote, The mystical life is the center of all that I do, and all that I think, and all that I write. And rest assured, being booted from the Theosophists wasn't going to change that. Lucky for the Irishman, though, he had another society to fall back on. Yeats, you see, was a loyal member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The recently founded Golden Dawn was a top-secret magical movement dedicated to studying occult traditions like alchemy, kabbalah, astrology, and tarot. Members wore long matching robes, they conducted elaborate theatrical rituals, rituals like fake hangings or sealing someone inside a tomb.

They also, like the masons, had a ranking system for their members with titles like Zellator, Theoricus, and Practicus. In short, these were exactly Yeats kind of people. In fact, Yeats even helped write some of the Order's ritual texts, and eventually rose to the rank of Imperator, or Grand Wizard. And he wasn't the only famous writer in the bunch, either. Algernon Blackwood was a member, and there are rumors that Brom Stoker, and yes, even Arthur Conan Doyle, may have been involved as well.

Although there is some debate on this. Pixie Coleman Smith, the illustrator of the famed Rider-Waite Tarot deck, was a prominent part of the gang. Pixie and Yates even teamed up on creative projects together, with Pixie painting set dressings for Yates' plays. Yes, it was one big spooky family. That is, except for when it wasn't. In your family, maybe it's your aunt's rude husband

or that one mean older sister you never got along with. Every family has one after all, that person that everyone would rather not invite to Thanksgiving. And for the Order of the Golden Dawn, that person was a fellow named Alistair Crowley. And it's easy to understand what made him so unpopular. Crowley, while a devoted occultist like the rest of the group, had a few opinions that

made him hard to get along with. For example, he was fascinated by the Nazis and referred to democracy as an imbecile and nauseating cult of weakness. He considered women second-class citizens and, I quote, moral inferiors to men. Throw in Crowley's tendency to toss around anti-Semitic slurs and his general air of racism and, well, you get the picture. He also viewed a cult ritual as a tool for gaining personal power, while the others saw it as a more holistic spiritual practice.

And if all that weren't enough, Crowley was also a very bad poet. In short, no one liked this guy, and no one hated Crowley more than very good poet William Butler Yeats. It all came to a head in the year of 1900, when the order decided that enough was enough, and it was time to kick Crowley out of the society. Which, surprise surprise, didn't go over too well. Crowley stormed into the Golden Dawn headquarters wearing a Highlander's Tartan and a Black Crusader's Cross on his chest, ready for battle. Then he began charging up the stairs.

If they wanted to banish him, fine, but he was going to take their secret papers with him. As he ascended the staircase, though, Yates and two other members blocked his path, and then the grown men launched into a full-blown magic duel. Imagine that fight scene with Gandalf and Saruman on the tower roof, but with less real sorcery and more awkward yelling. Crowley started screaming spells at Yates. Yates and some of the other members screamed spells back. Crowley made the sign of the inverted pentacle in the air.

And, okay, I assume that none of these spells were actually doing anything because eventually Yates resorted to a different tactic. William Butler Yates kicked Alastor Crowley down the stairs. And that was that. They called the cops on Crowley and he was escorted off the premises forever. The event would go down in history as the Battle of Blythe Road. It's a near perfect story, feuding sorcerers, famous writers, secret societies, and even a slapstick pratfall as the cherry on top. But it didn't end there. After that event, Crowley started prowling for disciples of his own, and Yates continued to thwart him. Not with kicking though. No, he kept tossing magic at Crowley from afar, and allegedly even tried to send a vampire

to attack Crowley in the night. Yeats remained a devout occultist until his death in 1939. He spent his life poring over esoteric texts and conducting endless magical experiments, not to mention dabbling in spiritualist communication. And hey, as a fellow writer, I can't blame him. After all, if a poet needs to know anything, it's how to spell. This episode of Lore was narrated and produced by me, Aaron Manke, with writing by Jenner Rose Nethercott, research by Cassandra de Alba, and music by Chad Lawson. Don't like hearing the ads?

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