Lore - Trick or Treat 2017 - Set 2

Episode Date: October 23, 2017

In this second Lore Trick or Treat 2017 set of stories, we explore the power of folklore and fate. A Head of Steam takes us on an eerie trip through the graveyard, while A Deadly Past shows us how sometimes our actions have a way of catching up with is. Access premium content!

What in the world is a lore trick-or-treat episode? Well, I'm glad you asked. You see, every October I try to help lore listeners experience Halloween all month long. And so, only in October, I release extra episodes in between the full, regularly scheduled ones. That means that every Monday this month is going to have something fun for you to hear. Today, you'll hear two different stories. In between them is a brief sponsor break, and there you go. Now pull up that blanket just a little bit higher, and keep your eyes on the door.

I have some dark tales I want to tell you. I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore. Just to the north of Boston is a city nearly as old. Maldon, Massachusetts was settled just a decade after Boston was, all the way back in 1640. Thanks to the Mystic River that separates it from Somerville and Boston to the south, Maldon locals referred to it for a very long time as simply the Mystic Side. The sandy bank burial ground right there next to the Maldon River welcomed its first long-term resident around 1648, and many followed after that.

People were dying to get in, I guess you could say. But if you try to picture the graveyard in your mind, don't arrange it in neat and tidy rows, like the cemeteries of our modern world. It's a little bit crooked, a little bit ancient, and a little bit creepy. And maybe that's to be expected for a graveyard situated on the Mystic Side. According to local legend, at least one of the burial grounds occupants had trouble staying put. In the 1700s, there was apparently a man in town who loved to experiment with chemicals in his home laboratory.

Neighbors often complained of a noxious steam that drifted out of his windows, and more than few passers-by choked on the fumes. As neighbors are so very good at doing, they complained about the chemist. Not that the man himself cared, mind you. In his view, he was doing true scientific work, and all that effort had finally paid off. So when his last moments of life came a few years later, he made a chilling prediction to the few who had gathered around his deathbed. In my life, he told them, I have differed from other men, and by the foul fiend I will

continue different after I am dead. My flesh is not common flesh like yours. I will never rot." It was a cryptic thing to say because there are so many possible meanings. He could have been suggesting that he would never truly die, or maybe that his corpse would refuse to rot and decay like the rest of humanity. Either way, it was a bold declaration from a man that everyone wished would just go away. In his own way, he was telling them all not to hold their breath.

But he did die, and was soon buried in his family tomb. It's the sort that you might imagine in an old horror film, where a stone chamber is built into the side of a hill, buried in soil and accessible only by an iron door. This coffin was placed inside, and the neighborhood released a collective sigh of relief. It was nice to breathe easy again, after all. The legend doesn't give a reason, but some years later, a medical student crept into the cemetery and broke into the old man's tomb. He'd heard the stories from others in town, and that made him wonder, had the old man's

prediction really come true? And if so, how? When he got inside, he found that the old man's corpse had indeed refused to decay. No rot, no peeling flesh, no putrefaction. It had, though, turned brown, and, according to this medical student, rather hard, whatever chemicals the old man had exposed himself to, they'd done the trick. His body had refused to rot. Wanting to know why, this medical student is said to have taken a bone saw from his

bag, and then slowly, methodically, removed the old man's head. With the pale light of the flickering lantern behind him, he gripped his trophy by the hair and began to lower it into a sack, and that's when he heard the voices. It was as if someone else was in the cold chamber with him, whispering softly in the corner. He turned toward the sound, but nothing was there. That is, except for the other coffins. But rather than fade away, the sounds grew, the whispers became moans, and then wails,

and then horrific cries. Shadows began to swirl through the chamber, around and above him. Some black as night, others a sickly green color. All of it was enough to frighten the man out of his mind. He tossed the head on the floor of the chamber and bolted through the open door into the night, heading home as fast as his legs could carry him. And with that, the episode ended. Months passed.

Sometimes neighborhood children would cautiously push the iron door open slightly and then squeal at the vision of the severed head sitting on the chamber floor. Even by the light of the noonday sun, it was a frightful experience, one that was hard to forget and even harder to keep private. As a result, word spread. That's the power of folklore, after all. It spreads like a low-burning fire, consuming rational thought, and filling a community with a feeling of wonder, or horror, or dread.

It rarely lets go once it's taken a hold of you. In fact, given enough time, folklore can build up quite ahead of steam, and the story of the old chemist is one of those tales. One last bit of the legend. According to the story, a local man was bathing in the Mulden River in 1825, just west of the graveyard near the Medford Street Bridge. While he was there, buck naked in the cold water, he glanced up the eastern bank where he could see the edge of the Sandy Bank burial ground and the front door of the old chemist's

tomb. And that's when the door moved. It opened, and then, as if stumbling slowly between one world and the next, a man walked out. The bathing man was horrified, and he bolted out of the river with a cry. He didn't even bother to grab his clothes. He simply ran as fast as he could, straight into town, and down the streets in full view of the public.

I doubt it's the first historical record of a streaker, but I'm sure it made quite the impression nonetheless. The figure who had stumbled out of the tomb, however, was just a man. No ghost, no undead corpse, no vengeful spirit looking for his head. Just a local drunk who had found his way inside the night before and curled up in a corner to sleep it off. Whether or not the tale of the chemist was true, it's hard to ignore a story with the power to send a man screaming naked down the street.

Sometimes folklore is significant for the history it preserves. Other times, with a mark, it leaves behind. And that, my friends, is the Naked Truth. Let's be clear before I tell you this story. I have very little evidence that it's real, but sometimes we have to entertain the possibility that odd things can happen and that folklore can carry it forward like a scrap of paper on the wind. This, I think, is one of those scraps.

The story tells us that Henry lived in a small Texas town located northeast of Dallas, up near the Oklahoma border. Today, Honey Grove, Texas is a small town, but it was even smaller in 1893. It's 800 citizens or so, and Henry was one of them. We don't know the source of the split, but according to the legend, Henry ran out on his girlfriend. Maybe he left her for another woman. Perhaps he had an argument, and this was one of those heat-of-the-moment things.

We don't know the reasons. We just know that Henry left her, and it broke her heart. Some versions of the tale say that this unnamed woman killed herself over the loss. Some assume she moved on and found happiness later, but it was the act of breaking up of Henry leaving her, abandoned and alone, that drives this tale, because this unnamed woman had a brother, and he wasn't very happy about what Henry had done. And so it was that one day, Henry was outside his house in Honey Grove when the brother arrived to give Henry a lesson.

I would like to believe that he didn't come with the intent to kill. That line between crimes of premeditation and passion is pretty wide and tall, and it takes a lot of planning and resolve to cross it. It's hard to say if this man had that sort of dedication in him, but at the very least, he had a gun. They argued. They shouted. The brother demanded Henry make amends and set things right to fix his sister's broken

heart. And when Henry failed to cooperate, the brother pulled his gun out. He held it straight out in front of him, hand trembling with rage and fear, and pointed it at Henry's head. And then he fired. Blood sprayed from Henry's head and his body fell backward, landing in a lifeless heap on the lawn near the large tree. And that's when Panic washed over the brother and he bolted.

Later when he had locked himself up at home, the panic was joined by regret and distress. Fearing for what he had done and for what it might mean for his future, he took the same pistol and turned it on himself. It's a tragic story and not a fun one to listen to if it ended there. But it doesn't. You see, Henry got back up from that spot on the lawn near the tree. He pressed his hand to his head and felt pain. There was indeed blood, not as much as he'd expected, so he went to the doctor who patched

him up and sent him home. 20 years went by. Two decades of life that Henry probably viewed as a gift. He'd been shot in the head after all, but the bullet had somehow only grazed him and then disappeared. So here he was, healthy, older, and enjoying his life in Honey Grove, Texas. One day in the summer of 1913, Henry walked outside to take care of an old problem. The large tree in his front yard had grown too close to the house and the shade was causing

troubles. Today was the day to remedy that by getting rid of the old tree. Now we have to lean into the story here and trust the details. We're told that Henry didn't have an axe or a saw or anything that might help him take the tree down in the usual manner and we have to believe that. I know not having an axe would indeed be unusual, but then again, most folklore is born out of unusual moments, isn't it? So Henry grabbed the next best thing, a stick of dynamite.

He took a piece of rope and tied the explosive to the trunk of the tree, low to the ground, opposite the house, and then he lit the fuse and ran for cover. And it worked. The explosion went off and the tree toppled to the ground away from the house. But as the tree was slowly falling, Henry was doing the same. And both of them hit the ground at the same time. Neither would move again. I have to assume a neighbor found Henry's body, someone did at least, and they took

him to the doctor to find out what the cause of death had been. The carnage in the yard seemed to suggest that a piece of the tree had perhaps pierced Henry's skull. There was certainly enough blood to validate that theory. But they were wrong. When the doctor opened Henry's skull to find the source of the fatal wound, he found something unusual, something very much unlike a piece of wood. A bullet.

In fact, it was a bullet from a pistol. The bullet, you see, that had been fired at Henry two decades earlier. After grazing his skull that fateful day in 1893, the bullet had embedded itself in the tree behind him. And there it had waited, motionless and benign, left to slowly vanish into an ever-expanding prison. It would have stayed there, too, if it hadn't been for the dynamite. Sometimes our past has a way of tapping us on the shoulder and reminding us that it's

still there. We think we're clear that we made it out or got away, and then, with a sudden flash, it all comes rushing back into our mind. Or in the case of poor Henry, back into his head. 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. The World of Lore.com slash now.

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