Lore - Trick or Treat 2016: Set 1

Episode Date: October 11, 2016

A Halloween treat to add a bit of spook to your week. Each Lore “Trick or Treat 2016” episode is a collection of two of my favorite “shorts” in one place. Perfect for a rainy day, a walk in the dark, or a campfire gathering. This episode includes “Peg & Button” and “Behind the Door”. * * * Official Lore Website: www.lorepodcast.com Extra member episodes: www.patreon.com/lorepodcast Access premium content!: https://www.lorepodcast.com/support

Last October, I released weekly episodes as sort of a Halloween gift to all of you. It was a blast, but the workload was pretty brutal. This year, with the TV show on my plate, plus a handful of live shows, I just couldn't swing two more full episodes. That doesn't mean I'm leaving you empty-handed. To help you get into the Halloween spirit, I've gathered some of my favorite shorter tales for you to enjoy. Each of these stories is a personal favorite, and each one cuts right to the chase.

Two chilling tales today, and two more in two weeks. So settle in, turn the lights down low, and the volume up, because boy, do I have some stories to tell you. I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore. In 1758, the northeast corner of North America was at war. Two years prior, conflict had broken out between British and French colonists. A French being vastly outnumbered, leaned heavily on an alliance with the Native American tribes of the region.

Today, we call the conflict the French and Indian War, but no matter what you call a war, it's always political, it's always violent, and always has a way of trickling down and affecting the powerless. So maybe that's why the young men from Gloucester, on the rocky coast of Massachusetts, went out and got drunk that night before they were supposed to ship out to the front lines in the north. There were five of them, Jack Coase, Job and David Stanwood, Thomas Ayers and Jim Parsons. All part of a larger battalion of 40 men were about to follow one Captain Biles north into

Canada. These men hadn't been conscripted. They volunteered, looking forward to the glory and honor of battle. We don't know why, but these five men did their best to make the most of their last night of freedom. They visited the local tavern and had more than their fair share of the local brew. And then, with the night still young, they stumbled out and began looking for trouble. Let's be honest, young drunk men are always looking for trouble, no matter what century

we're talking about. While walking through town, the young soldiers to be encountered Peg Wesson. Now, you need to know some details about Peg. First, she was old and widowed. Second, she was tiny. Most records say she was a mere 99 pounds, and they call that number the witch's weight. Because in the 1750s, you were apparently a witch if you were tiny. It claimed it helped to be light if you wanted to ride on a broomstick.

I know, don't try to make sense of it, just roll with it. Peg also had a reputation as a troublemaker. She had a quick temper, she loved to voice her opinion, and had a tendency to cause trouble in town. Maybe it was the alcohol driving their decisions, or that night before deployment feeling of invincibility. But for some reason, these young men decided to walk over to Peg's house on Backstreet, knock on her door.

When she answered the door, they let themselves in, and then they mocked her while searching her house for a broomstick. It was a horrible invasion of her private space, and most people would feel violated. Peg, however, knew how to fight back. She cursed them. The legend says that Peg forced all of them out of her home by promising them a violent death in battle. Specifically, she claimed that the men would meet their ends outside Fort Lewisburg in

Nova Scotia. Months later, so the story goes, all of the men from Gloucester, part of a battalion from their hometown, found themselves outside the very walls of the fortress Old Peg had mentioned in her curse. They were pinned down by French riflemen who were perched to top the massive walls of the fort, and were doing the best to stay out of sight. That's when a large crow appeared in the sky. It was larger than any crow they'd ever seen before, and it flew in a large circle around

the scene of the battle. Then, without warning, it began to swoop down and attack the young men who had visited Peg's house months before. Each time, the men were forced from their hiding place and put at risk of being shot by the enemy. Frustrated and frightened, the men fired at the bird. The legend says that some of the shots even struck the bird, but the bullets just seemed a glance off of it.

Convinced the bird was a devil or some supernatural being, these men regrouped and discussed their options. And while doing so, they came to one horrifying conclusion. The crow was not a crow. It was old Peg. Jim Parsons was the son of a minister, and they say he had some knowledge of the supernatural. So he proposed a new idea. Silver, he said, was the only metal powerful enough to bring down the devilish bird.

So he took the silver buttons off the sleeve of his military uniform and loaded them into his musket. And then, they waited for the bird to return. When it did, Parsons fired, and he struck his target. The bird stopped in midair and then spiraled to the earth, many yards away from the men. That was the end of their trouble. The battle for the fortress was won by the men of Gloucester a short while later, and all of the men soon returned home.

They were heroes, and a town welcomed them back. Their return sparked conversation, though. They told their stories over and over, and as they did, someone in town noticed a detail that no one else did. The date of their battle outside Fort Lewisburg, the day they fired the silver button at the ominous crow, was the same day that someone from Gloucester had taken a deadly fall. Old Peg, it seems. It stumbled just outside her home on Backstreet that very same day.

When she did, she had apparently injured her leg. Of course, she was an elderly woman, and it's common for older folk to take a fall and hurt themselves, but something was unique about Peg's story. The people of Gloucester told the soldiers that the fall had actually killed Peg Wesson, and that after she was found and brought to a physician, he examined her leg to see what the cause of her injury was. When he did, he found a curious wound, a wound, they say, that resembled something caused by a gunshot.

When the doctor inspected further, he found a bullet lodged in her bone. He pulled it out and placed it on the table beside her body, and then grabbed a clean rag to wipe the blood off. When he did, he held his breath. It wasn't a bullet. It was a silver military button. What about streaming a podcast or watching an episode instead of downloading a head? Nice to have, right?

When something's nice to have, more people should have it. That's why you can get Rogers 5G mobile plans now for less. Visit rogers.com slash plans for more. And count on more value to come, because we're with you all the way. Guests who visited 1140 Royal Street in the 1830s dined off of the most exquisite China available. They sat next to social elite from all across the city. There was polite laughter and the gentle ring of pure silver as it tapped against the dinnerware.

And nothing could top the hostess herself who presided over these gatherings. Delphine LaLaurie was beautiful, intelligent, successful, and powerful. Her daughters wore only the best dresses from European cities like Paris, dresses that had been carefully packaged up and placed on a ship, and then sailed across the Atlantic around the coast of Florida and up the Mississippi Delta. Delphine's husband was a prominent surgeon, and together with her wealthy French family roots, they had arrived in New Orleans to an almost immediate air of respect and awe and power.

And we shouldn't forget, this couple was the wealthy elite in the pre-Civil War South. Their social gatherings, their extravagant meals, and the operations of their stately mansion were all powered by slaves, dozens and dozens of them forced to work against their will. It was a beautiful façade, a hiding, a darker truth though, and sometimes shortly after their arrival in New Orleans, that façade showed its first crack. According to the local legend, Madame LaLaurie was having her hair brushed one evening by a young slave girl named Leah.

Everything was going well enough, the story says, until Leah hit a tangle in the woman's hair. Madame Delphine let out a cry of pain and then spun around on the girl. She beat her right there in the room, they say, so badly that Leah, despite her upbringing as a slave, turned and dashed out the door. Delphine gave chase, some say with a whip in her hand, and the girl ran all the way to the third floor of the mansion. Cornered in a room, the girl climbed out onto the balcony, slipped, and plummeted to her

death on the pavement below. That sort of tragedy attracts attention, but Madame LaLaurie managed to talk her way out of the situation. She escaped punishment and received nothing more than a $300 fine. Her reputation, though, was stained. In April of 1834, just two years after their spectacular arrival in New Orleans, the fire broke out in the mansion. Neighbors called the firefighters who entered the house to fight the blaze.

Following the smoke, they entered the kitchen and then stopped. There was a woman chained to the stove. She was bloody, with cuts all over her body, and she was slumped on the floor as if dead or unconscious. When they released her from the chains, she told her story to them. She had upset the LaLaurie's that morning, and after brutally beating her, they had locked her to the stove. Out of desperation for her situation, the slave woman had lit the house on fire in hopes

of killing herself and destroying the mansion, but she'd failed. Not entirely, though. In fact, she still managed to bring the mansion down around her owners, if only in a figurative way. She told the firemen of a room on the third floor, where other slaves had been taken after disagreements with the LaLaurie's, slaves who had never returned. The men went looking for this room, but when they found it, the door was locked, bolted shut from the outside.

Beyond the door, though, they could hear sounds, cries for help, moans of pain, the rattle of chains. Armed with axes and pry bars, they tore the lock off the door and pulled it open. I'm not sure what they had expected to find. I think we tend to hope for the best in general, and maybe that's what they'd done. But when the overwhelming smell of decay and rot and death washed over them from the open doorway, they stumbled back. Some of them vomited right there in the hallway, others muttered prayers or curses.

Inside the room, there were bodies. Some were dead on the floor, flies buzzing around their decaying limbs, and some were still alive and hanging from the ceiling by chains. All of them, though, had been tortured. Bones had been broken and reset. Flesh had been cut and stitched. Fingers and limbs had been removed. It seems that the LaLaurie's had been experimenting on their slaves.

Anyone who defied them, who disobeyed them or failed to serve in an appropriate manner would be brought to this room and punished, and none who entered the room ever came out. Local legend goes into horrible detail about the extent of those experiments, although there's little documentation to support the claims. One story tells of how the fireman found a young woman in the room, whose limbs had been broken and reset at odd angles, causing her to walk like a crab on all fours. Their story mentions a man still living when they found him, with a hole in his skull that was full of maggots.

But even without the sensational stories, the core truth was horrifying enough. The LaLaurie's possessed such a low regard for the lives of their slaves that they treated them like laboratory animals. No sane, caring person could have been capable of what these two social elites had done. And when the city caught wind of it, the public was outraged. The LaLaurie's hadn't been home when the room was discovered and somehow managed to slip out of town before the consequences could catch up with them. Stories tell of how the family fled to Paris.

Others say they changed their names and blended into the land outside of New Orleans. But while the criminals might have escaped, the scene of the crime remained behind. And it kept telling its story over and over again. Bodies continued to be found in the floors and walls of the house for nearly a century. Some historians have put the death toll in the neighborhood of 300 slaves, although that seems like a bit of a stretch for a highly public mansion in the middle of the busy French Quarter. But death did take place there, and it's left its mark.

Today, there are still reports of sounds from inside the house. Some have heard painful moaning, while others claim to have heard cries for help. Those who have lived there speak of the sound of chains and the smell of fire. And some have even seen things. Specifically, people inside and outside the house have seen the same ghostly image over and over throughout the past century and a half. It's the vision of a girl dressed in the rags of a slave, falling to her death from the third floor over and over again.

This episode of Lore was researched, written, and produced by me, Aaron Mankey. 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, Twitter, and Instagram. Just search for Lore podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button. When you do, say hi. I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening.