Beneath Your Bed Podcast
Beneath Your Bed Podcast
Mercy Brown and Black Aggie
In tonight’s episode, we’ll be travelling back to the 19th century to explore the sometimes bizarre ways people have reacted in the face of illness, loss, and grief – reactions that remain haunting to this very day.
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Email: beneathyourbedpod@gmail.com
I'm Jenna Olivan and I'm Jen Lee. And we'd like to welcome you to beneath your bed, a podcast where we drag out all those fears that lurk beneath our beds from the paranormal to true crime, to the simply strange along the way, we'll be drinking cocktails and sharing stories from our Appalachian upbringings. In tonight's episode, we'll be traveling back to the 19th century to explore the sometimes bizarre ways people have reacted in the face of illness, loss, and grief reactions that remain haunting to this very day. Hey Jen, it's it's going all right. It's all right. It's been a long week. Once again. It's Friday zooming. How do you feel about all the zoom meetings? Oh gosh. Yeah, the zooming is getting old, you know, I guess it's preferable to being actually in the office, but it's getting old for sure. How's it going for you after having about four or five meetings have had as many as six meetings in a day, it just gets exhausting. But I think that's just something that we all share. It's a special type of fatigue. It is last week. I don't know if I told you, but I was in a meeting and I was looking, busted that day anyway. And instead of wearing leggings, cause I know a lot of people like, Oh, I'm wearing black leggings and I'll just put a nice shirt on. Well, I had a particular meeting I wanted to look halfway respectable for. So I went and I put on a nice shirt and I came back, started the meeting and then towards the end, probably the last five minutes, my phone rings and I get up to answer it, forgetting that I have plaid pajama bottoms on. I mean, you cannot mistake that they were, did they have, do they, do they have, uh, the frozen characters on them? No, no they didn't. I actually, I would prefer the frozen characters to like this lumberjack. Oh, I was going to say, what do these look like? They look like a lumberjack, a lumberjack shirt, but pants. So I was hoping that nobody saw it. So after we got off the zoom meeting, I was trying to use the camera and trying to see if I can replicate what I did and thinking, you know, hopefully nobody saw me well, you know, I do it. I do. I dislike. I, I did in the meeting and I could see myself. So I was still thinking, I was still thinking, okay, maybe, maybe no one saw it. So I, yeah. I mean, it was embarrassing. So I call someone who is on the meeting that I'm friends with. And I said, did you happen to see that I was working at the jump in? Did you happen to see I was wearing my, my pajama bottoms? And she's like, yes I did. And she was trying to make me feel better saying, well, you know, I got mine on. And again, they were like, they were black leggings or capris. It's like, no, that's, that's not the same thing. So yeah, that's one of my stories.
Speaker 2:I love it. I just want to remind you though that you have a pair of leggings that I gave you. And I believe that they, they're not black, they're green and I think they have pink kangaroos on them. So I, I think you should wear those next week. It's peacocks. It's not Kingery okay. Why would I thinking cake?
Speaker 1:So what are you, what are you having to drink tonight? I'm here
Speaker 2:Having, um, what's called a tin Lizzie and um, but it's, it's kinda my take on it mostly because I didn't have sham bores. So I had to substitute creme to Cassie's. Um, so I threw some vodka in my cocktail shaker and I threw in some Saint Germain, some creme de Cassius and some ice and then shook it up, poured it in my, my nice little glass here and then topped it off with Prosecco. It should have a, a lemon garnish, but I didn't have a lemon either. So that's what I'm drinking. Sounds good. It is good. What do you have?
Speaker 1:I'm having a Berry smash. So it has strawberries in it. Blueberries vodka. Of course it has lime juice and topped off with some ginger beer.
Speaker 2:Oh, that sounds really good. I mean, did you, you modeled the,
Speaker 1:You have to muddle the fruit sounds so good. It's really good.
Speaker 2:You're really good at making those drinks that have a lot of ingredients. You like, you're just good at putting them together. No, it's a lot of fun
Speaker 1:And doing is that I've been doubling up on the alcohol or the cocktail. I make two instead of one. So I don't, we don't have to stop recording. I don't have to go downstairs. So last week I kind of got ahead of myself and before I knew it, I was a little lightheaded and it made editing a real, um, real disaster. After that, trying to find her,
Speaker 2:I heard the tape that you edited and I was really sad to hear that you took out the part where you said, Oh my God, John, I think that was the best part. You took it out. I'm so unhappy.
Speaker 1:I might've left it in, but it was all the meandering that followed that I felt like I should remove it.
Speaker 2:Well, I don't know. I feel like that's, you know, do all podcasters drink. I feel like it's part of what you're supposed to do. And you know, but I'm feeling a little pressure. Like every week I have to come up with a drink to try to outdo yours or at least live up to yours. And the podcasting gig doesn't work out for us. At least we will we'll know a lot of drinks. We can be bartenders or something.
Speaker 1:There's something really fun and relaxing going through, you know, really hard stressful week and then mixing a drink, surprise in each other, hopping on here. And you know, we kind of do this for a hobby anyway, with cocktails and making our own simple syrup. And so we've been doing this for, for a while before. It was cool,
Speaker 2:But anyway, I'm so excited. Yeah. I look forward to these Friday nights when we talk about scary, creepy stuff. Um, we're both totally into that and it's dark right now. I'm looking out. I can't see, there could be some point somebody outside on my deck looking at me and I wouldn't know it. So hopefully there isn't, there's someone waiting
Speaker 1:Beneath your bed
Speaker 2:Beneath my desk right now. There's probably a cat beneath my bed. At least you have a husband. That's true, but he's in the other room. I mean, what could he do if somebody broke in and tried to ravish me? So anyway, that's neither here nor there. This is not a story about deflowering, but I am going to tell, I'm going to ask you, I'm going to tell a story, but before I get to it, I kind of have some something I want you to, I want you to kind of go along with me and imagine something. So I'm going to ask you to imagine that you are living in a time of a terrible disease, sweeping the land. It's a terrible deadly disease, and it's like an out of control bonfire. That's just catching from person to person. Um, you don't know who's going to get sick and you're really scared. Can, can you imagine anything like that?
Speaker 1:Just like present day COVID in the U S
Speaker 2:Well, a little bit more than that. Imagine, imagine that this disease with COVID, at least you might get it and do really poorly and maybe die, or you might be okay with this disease that I'm talking about getting it is a virtual death sentence. So you're probably going to die if you get it. And there is no doctor file tree to tell you what you can expect or what you should do, that you should mask up and social distance and all of that good stuff. There's no CDC to make recommendations. Um, you're pretty much on your own and against this invisible fo that, that you don't know what to do with. So can you imagine that, like what would you do? What do you think you'd do? How would you react?
Speaker 1:You think I would react, trying to do what I'm doing now is just staying holed up in the house as much as I, you know, as much as I can, but
Speaker 2:Even in modern day, it's difficult
Speaker 1:To do that. So I can only imagine years ago what it was like trying to avoid getting sick, maybe in a more rural area. Maybe it was possible if you didn't, if you weren't around that many people, but otherwise, you know, you had to go somewhere, you had to physically be somewhere to work you had to.
Speaker 2:Right. Yeah. And I really can't imagine. I think I would just be so frightened. You know what I mean? It's scary enough right now in the wake of COVID, but at least we have some modern medicine, some modern knowledge of germs and how they work and all of that. Well, the disease I'm talking about people, you know, you may have guessed already the disease I'm talking to any guesses by the way, tuberculosis. Yes. Why did you guys tuberculosis
Speaker 1:Either that, or it was the, it was the flu of 1918. And I thought maybe in 1918 it would be too obvious. So
Speaker 2:Yeah, that was a good guess. Yeah. Tuberculosis or the other name of it. You may have heard his consumption. So especially in the 19th century and earlier people people talked about it as consumption, um, because it was, it was a disease that literally seemed to consume you, you know, you'd be really pale and fatigued and, um, it was just, I'll talk, I'll talk more about it later, but it was just a really awful, awful thing to have.
Speaker 1:I had never heard that term used before.
Speaker 2:Really. It used to be considered like a very romantic illness to like all the poets were dying of consumption. Um, you know, in Puccini's opera Labo, I'm like the heroin Mimi is dying of consumption and it's just so poetic and romantic because of course like the death of a beautiful woman is the most posed it as the most romantic thing there is. But I, from all accounts, it was not a beautiful way to go. So we're going to talk, we'll be talking about tuberculosis tonight, but we're also going to be talking about vampires, which are like one of my faves. I really like vampire.
Speaker 1:I used to be terrified of them when I was child. Where are you?
Speaker 2:Like, where did you, did you see movies on TV or,
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think I saw I'm sure I saw a movie. I didn't read about it. I saw a movie and also this is ridiculous, but which is, which is okay from the wizard of Oz. Oh, I was afraid of the flying monkeys. They were terrifying to me. Pretty scary too, but the, which is what got me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, she was pretty creepy, but Glenda was
Speaker 1:Good. Glenda was hot back in the day.
Speaker 2:Just thinking that in her voice was like so, so high and in her beautiful pink dress. Well, that's that's yet again, another podcast about how hot Glenda was. So we'll move on. I can't think of any other transition for that. So we're gonna be talking about vampires, but very curious for my vampirism. Um, and I'm going to tell you the story tonight of mercy Brown. So I'm going to start just with a really bare bones version of the story taken from Wikipedia. But I first heard about this story, Oh God, I don't know. 20, 20 years ago I was working for a little new England travel magazine and my state happened to be Rhode Island that I was covering. So I did a press trip and stuff up there. And I got this little book of ghost stories of like Rhode Island, new England ghost stories. And there was this tale in there about mercy Brown. And, but there's a story. I was just thinking about it recently. Um, and I remember like vampire mercy, Brown, like gravestone. And so I thought I have to look this up. So I look the story up on Wikipedia. So I'm just going to start with that version. So in the 1880s, there was a family living in a little tiny town in Southeast Rhode Island called Exiter and there was the mom and some children. And then the father, well, mercy Brown, who we're going to be talking about. I believe she was the youngest, the youngest of the family, but her mother, whose name was Mary Eliza. They have these great 19th century new England names. So she dies in 1884 of tuberculosis. And just two years later, Mercy's older sister, whose name was Mary olive. She dies also of tuberculosis. So by 1891, just five years later, poor mercy, both her and her brother Edwin are really sick with this disease. Um, her brother ed, when he's 24, I think around this time, Mercy's 19. So he he's about five years older than her. He and his wife. They decided to go out to Colorado and he's going to take the rescuer. This is one of the things that people believe would actually sometimes cure TB, you know, getting fresh mountain air and just living in a healthy environment. It was thought to be very bracing and that you could overcome it. So they went out there with high hopes that, that he would get better. He didn't, and I believe while he was out there, mercy died. So she sadly died in, um, in 1892. So Edwin and his wife, they come back, they take the train cross country in, come back to their little village of Exeter. And their father is really the only person left at home. And he's just feeling absolutely at his wit's end. He doesn't know what to do. So as some, some stories go, he was convinced to have the bodies of his wife and his two daughters zoomed. Um, so they decided to do this because there was a folk belief in new England at that time that with TV, it was not just a physical illness, but it was also kind of a spiritual illness. And that those who had died particularly of TB would kind of turn into these vampires and they would be feasting on the blood and the flesh of the living and taking their vital part of their vital energies. And so as a result, they would die of TB as well. They never really explain whether it's, you know, whether they come as spirits or if they actually come out of the grave or talk about that. I'd like to know more about that. So they dig up Mary olive and the mom, and they're looking pretty and busted, I think is the word, you know, their, their corpses. They're not looking too hot. So they then exume mercy. And when they open up the casket, like she looks, you know, she looks really good. She for a corpse, right. She looks kind of rosy and you know, she's not decomposed or at least not overly. So, so she almost looks like she's alive, but keep in mind. So she died in January and they're doing the excavations in March. I think it's same st. Patrick's day. I don't know why it just happened to be March 17th. And so she hadn't been in the grave that long and it was also cold. So that probably preserved her body, but they thought like, okay, so we need to cut out her heart, obviously. Cause that's what you do. Right. So they cut out her heart and they decide that if they find evidence of blood in her heart or in her liver, some sources say they also cut out her liver. If they find blood, then clearly she's a vampire and she must, her heart must be destroyed. So they decided mercy was the vampire in. And it was she who was, who was killing her, her brother. It also, when you're talking about this, it sounds really wacky. But again, if you think about what's going on today and people, the disregard for science and, you know, we can go to church and have
Speaker 1:A massive ceremony and not wear a mask, you know, Jesus will save us.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Or we can drink hand sanitizer or bleach. Right. That's going to protect us or yeah. You know, crazy, crazy ideas. I think when people
Speaker 1:We'll get scared, they want to have some type of control and in a bizarre way, at least then I think that was a way of having some control. And even now I think with, you know, really rabid conspiracy theorist, I'm a little bit of a conspiracy theorist, but I think that's trying to find some semblance of
Speaker 2:Control. No, I think that it's a really true in a strange way because I get so angry about everything that's going on now. Right. And people denying what's going on and the president even touting these ridiculous cures or whatever. But I guess it's, I don't know a reminder that human nature is always human nature maybe where we don't change as a species that much so, but the mercy story would actually, it doesn't pour mercy, like what she went through. Well, I guess what her dead body went through, but it didn't stop with just taking out our heart and her liver. So they burned them and then they took the ashes and they mix it with water and they make a tonic. And so Edward poor Edward has given, or Edwin, Edwin has given this tonic to drink with the belief that this is going to cure him. It's a weird kind of thinking, but it's almost to me like vaccine thinking. Right. Which I mean, we all know to be correct, but you take a little bit of like this bad thing and ingest it and somehow that's going to do okay. Or protect you. So whatever, whatever the belief that's what they did, but it didn't work prize to hear that. And Edwin died just a few months later. So that's the story of mercy Brown. Um, at least according to Wikipedia, one interesting side note is that, um, it's, some people have suggested that Bram Stoker, you know, who wrote the novel Dracula that he based his character of Lucy Western raw on mercy, which if that's true, that's really interesting. I'm actually taking this vampire course through the Rosenbach museum in Philadelphia. And I have class on Tuesday. Um, and I think I'm going to ask that question, like, did he, you're taking what I'm taking a class on vampire literature. It meets every month for the next five months, I guess. Um, so we're, we're doing Dracula this Tuesday and then we're doing like the folklore of empires and we're doing actually, this is cool. So the last one we're doing Carmella by Sheridan[inaudible], which is a lesbian vampire story from the 19th century. It's awesome.
Speaker 1:I was just going to say that I didn't even know you were taking this course and I didn't even know there would be such a course. Are there, how many people in your class?
Speaker 2:25. So, um, I signed up, you could sign up for, you should do it. You can sign up for just, um, one of the, I think they're five courses in all. So you can sign up for one or you can sign up for all five. I
Speaker 1:Wonder what the breakdown would be, you know, along gender lines.
Speaker 2:I wonder too. I've been, so the Rosenbach museum there, I mentioned there in Philly, they have a lot of, um, like literary manuscripts, especially from like early 20th century, late 19th, century 70, where they have Bram. Stoker's like his notes that he compiled and writing Dracula, um, like his plot outline and all these really cool things. But anyway, they've been doing these things. They're free. They're called Sundays with Dracula. And so every Sunday they, they do like a zoom is a zoom thing. You get the link and you talk about a new, like a different chapter of the novel and the course you have to pay for it, but it's, it's not much. And it supports the museum, which is awesome. So I'd really recommend it
Speaker 1:Fascination with so many people with vampires, especially, was it true? Blooded didn't really watch it that much, but what was that on for a good seven, eight years maybe. And people were really into that. I don't know if you remember it.
Speaker 2:It was that the sh was it Charmaine Harris? I think she wrote those. Is it set in Louisiana? Is that the one I'm thinking about
Speaker 1:It is and what always got me more so than the vampires were the werewolves, because before they turned into a werewolf, they would take their pants off. Oh, why? I guess it was sexy. I have no idea. It was ridiculous. So,
Speaker 2:I mean, I want to know more like, did they take their underwear like that way? Were they just men or were there women too? I remember the men
Speaker 1:And as I said, I didn't watch it that much. And my wife was really, really into it. So I would give her a really hard time about, yeah, there was one where a Wolf I remember in particular was this really handsome guy. And I'm like, you just want to watch this for this, this dude to take his pants off. I ruined it. I think I ruined it,
Speaker 2:But I think you're right. I think like we're, people are just so fascinated with vampires and they are kind of sexy. You know, I think that this, or they've been portrayed that way in lots of ways. And they're so mysterious and this idea of kind of immortal life and, you know, feasting on blood. It's just, it's just, I don't know, timeless, I guess, but anyway, back to mercy. So, um, I was really interested in this story and I thought there has to be more surely there's more than this poor little Wikipedia article. So I found this book by a guy named Michael Bell. It's called food for the dead on the trail of new England's vampires. I thought it was going to be kind of like, I don't know what I was expecting, but I wasn't expecting that Michael Bell is actually a folklorist, he's an academic. And he's writing actually really seriously about new England vampires of which mercy Brown. Some people say that she has the distinction of being the last person to be zoomed as a vampire in new England. So to me, that's, that's funny. And in the sense that, you know, first of all, who knew there were all these vampires roaming around new England. So I was reading Bell's book and I've read a few chapters of it. And he talks about, he goes into some of the folklore, but he also interviews some of the people and he interviews people who were connected to the family in some way. So he interviews this named Louis Everett pack. And this is back in the eighties and Peck is a descendant of mercy Brown. And he also, he still lives in Exiter where mercy lived. He's a farmer. He's like this old salty new England guy. And he can really tell a story. So he talks to pack. And one of the things Peck tells him that I haven't read anywhere else is that when they dug up mercy, they found that she had actually turned over in her grave. I know isn't that creepy? So Belle asks PAC like, Hey, what do you think about this? And he's like, well, you know, it could have been that she wasn't quite dead when they put her in the coffin. So that's, that's awful. I hope that that really didn't happen cause that's horrifying. But the other thing that Peck talks about, which is really interesting. He remembers that as a kid, they used to have church picnics and like family gatherings and things at this church adjacent to which there is the graveyard where mercy is buried. She was buried somewhere different after she was exude. So he can remember his mom and his grandmother telling him and the other kids like, Hey, whatever you do, like don't play on those rocks over there because something bad happened over there. And apparently the rocks are where they took out her heart and her liver and burned them that those rocks are still standing. But Picasso says, he says to bell, he says, you know, years ago you didn't have medicines. You didn't have nothing. And you had to figure out everything on your own. They were self-independent people, everybody that lived here. And I thought that was really interesting. Like he seems to have some, some sympathy and understanding for these people who did something that looks so horrific on the surface. But if you, you know, kind of what you were saying before, they were really just trying to save a life. You know, they were trying to have some control over a situation that was really, really difficult. Bill also asks Peck. If he believes that mercy was a vampire and if Peck believes in vampires and he says, well, I believe my mother, I believe the family did what they did. Do I believe in vampires? No, no. I don't believe in that. I'm not sure they did, but they had to come for an answer and it turned out that maybe that was the answer. And some of them old people probably died with that in their mind that they did the right thing. I wasn't quite sure what to make of that. Like, you know exactly what he meant, except maybe like, even though Edwin died, they felt like they had done what they had to do. I don't know if they needed to answer. Yeah. Like whether it was a good answer about answer and pick. Also one of the things bill asks him, he's like, well, when did they start calling it vampire? Because it seemed like a lot of, a lot of the people at that time who were actually doing these kinds of practices, they didn't use that word. It was outsiders who used that word. And in Peck says that. He said, I don't even know. He said, my grandmother, my mother never mentioned the word. And he said, he'd never used or never heard anybody mentioned the word vampire in relation to this until people started writing articles about it, like in the 20th century. So I thought that was interesting that it was, it was really outsiders, like, so people in the cities who heard about this strange practice that use the word vampire. So in Michael Bell's book, he, he shares an article from the Providence journal. And I had mentioned earlier that they exude mercy and her family, family members on March 17th. Well, this article appears two days later on March 19th, um, of the same year. And it's on the front page. And what I'm going to read to you is in all caps, as it appears in the newspaper. So here it goes, exude the bodies testing, a horrible superstition in the town of Exeter bodies of dead relatives taken from their graves. They had all died of consumption. And the belief was that live flesh and blood would be found that fed upon the bodies of the living. So like when you hear that, what do you think?
Speaker 1:I think of immediately the national Inquirer. I think of page six.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It's just, it's so salacious. And so kind of accusatory look at these, look at these crazy, you know, country people and what they're doing.
Speaker 1:I don't think I ever shared with you how I got into, I was really into Bigfoot or to Yeti never shared that with you. No, I've never heard that. Well, my uncle, he owned this, um, country store and he used to go up there and work with my cousin, just hanging out with them. There's hardly anybody that ever come in, but they had all these magazines and they had one magazine. It wasn't the national Enquirer, cause it wasn't even that classy. I mean, it was in black and white and the headline was something to the effect of a Yeti. Yeti comes down and I think even use rape or sexually assaults this Chinese man. And at that time, I, I don't know. I just became really big into two Bigfoot. Anyway, I digress
Speaker 2:W we're going to have to do, do one on big foot, big foot seems to be really popular. Do people where your family was from? Did they believe like that big foot could be in the woods? No, not really.
Speaker 1:Really. It was just a running joke. Okay. It was a Bigfoot because at the time my cousin became fascinated with it as well. And my brother, so, you know, it just became a big joke. It's still a running joke today. We always talk about, did they try to scare you? Yeah, we would try to scare each other. And we would talk about Getty, your big foot being in the woods. And you're surrounded, you're in this holler and this cold town and you're surrounded by nothing, but, but woods in the mountains. So it can get pretty creepy out there. Pretty scary, real quick.
Speaker 2:My brother, he used to go camping with this family in West Virginia, way up in the mountains. And I think they used to tell, you know, tall tales about big foot and stuff there too. Um, all right. So I want to back up from the mercy story for just a minute and talk about the elephant in the room, which of course is tuberculosis because it plays such a, such a, you know, it looms really large in this story. And Belle writes in his book, you know, he says, if you set out to invent a baffling disease, you could hardly do better than tuberculosis. And he goes on to talk about how it was really hard to diagnose. Um, it was often confused with other diseases and it was just, it was not well understood. It was actually Robert Koch, um, German bacteriologist who discovered the microbe that causes TB. He discovered in 1882, which, you know, that's 10 years before mercy is dead. But the thing is that science in germ theory and all of that, it didn't really kind of penetrate, I think, into popular culture. You know, certainly like maybe if you were educated, you would know something about it, but the regular person kind of living out in the country really wouldn't have known a lot about that. But, um, TB, it was an awful illness to have, and it was, you know, you would cough, there would be like these racking coughs, um, where you just couldn't catch your breath. And over time, like first he'd be coughing up sputum and mucus. And then as the D as the disease got worse, it's like your lungs would almost, for lack of a better term, they would almost kind of start to digest themselves and you would be coughing up like all this blood. Um, and it could, it would just look really, really, as you can imagine, really awful, the person would be very pale, although towards the end, um, they said in the, like in the last, I guess days, weeks of the disease, you could appear flushed. But, but mostly before that you were very pale, a be very tired. Like you couldn't, you couldn't get out of bed, you couldn't do anything. I mean, just like the constant coughing would wear you out. So obviously the disease was bad, but kind of keep in mind. Um, bill talks about, you know, medicine was also kind of scary during this time. And he, he has this quote from a surgeon that I think is really interesting from 1840. I mean, that's a good 50 years before mercy is dying of this disease, but I think it still tells you something about how some people may have felt about medicine during this time. So the surgeon says medicine was heroic and it was murderous. I did not know anything about it, but I had enough common sense to see that physicians killed their patients. The medicine was no exact science that it proceeded empirically and that it was preferable to put one's confidence in to nature and not in the dangerous skill of physicians in the 19th century. It's like, there was this culture of like folk medicine that had grown up too. And I think people really, especially country people really believed in that a whole lot more than, um, than they believed in, you know, like going to the doctor. I don't know. Did any of you ever hear people talk about that where you were from?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I did. I heard, you know, different remedies that were, you know, ridiculous. I also own a few of the there's a series of books is called FOXFIRE. I believe I sent you one. I can't remember if it was, was it on folklore or was it on, I think
Speaker 2:Before I know there was something about probably cause you know, that I'm more been in like morbid stuff, but there was something about maybe ghosts and like burying rituals and things like that. I'm going to have to dig it out. Paints. Yeah. The one you sent me,
Speaker 1:I think I have one of the books from Fox fire that covers that topic about full medicine remedies. And you know, if you're bleeding, you know, tie a string around, I guess, close to where the wound is. And then I think you read a passage or you know, something from job. If I remember correctly, I think it was job kind of makes sense. I think there was something else I heard of, Oh gosh, I'm trying to think of drinking water with minnows in it. That's yeah.
Speaker 2:That's I wonder what that was supposed to cure.
Speaker 1:I'll have to ask my mom because she was the one who did it. She was made to do it.
Speaker 2:My mom used to eat ants off of a tree and I asked her why she's like, well, they were delicious. They taste like fried chicken. I'm like, mom,
Speaker 1:At least her parents didn't tell her to do it.
Speaker 2:Well, I don't know. Maybe the minnows helped, you know,
Speaker 1:I'd rather eat the I'd much rather eat the ants then. Um,
Speaker 2:Like they're in the water and you're going to swallow them down. And before, you know, I don't know. They're kind of little aren't they?
Speaker 1:Yeah, but it's like dirty, funky water. I'll take the answer.
Speaker 2:I take the minnows. My mammo used to talk about some folk medicine stuff too. And there was something about like, if you had a ward, my cousin Stacey used to get warts and she'd say something about like tying, I think it was also had to do with the string and like you put it under a rock and the Moonlight or something like that. And then she had this, this black SAB that she called her drawn SAF. And so if I got, um, do you have that too? So like if I got a cut, I would go to mammals and she would put her drawing salve on it and a bandaid and it was supposed to draw out the infection or maybe it, you know, I don't know what was in it.
Speaker 1:It actually works because they call it black salve. Interesting. And you know, my grandmother and my family used it quite a bit. If you had a splinter, it would draw that out. If you had a boil, it would bring a boil to the head. And I tried to find it and you can't really find it anymore. Probably has some really caustic, harmful chemical in it. So that's probably why I can't find it, but there is something that's called PRID and it's supposed to be similar, but it does not work like the black SAB did that blocks out what was in it, you know, I'm sure we could, we could find out
Speaker 2:It would be interesting. We should do an episode on folk medicine. There's this drugstore, it's kind of like a hippie drug store where I'm from like one time I went in and I saw this pretty purse and then like somebody pointed out to me, it had like a big marijuana leaf. Then I was like, Oh, I thought it was just a pretty flower. But, but anyway, they have a lot of weird stuff there. So I'm going to next. How old were you? I was like a couple of years ago. I thought you were going to say like, Hey, I was like a few years ago. I don't know. Two or three. Yeah. So anyway, getting back to tuberculosis and the field, I think we were talking about folk medicine, but you know, new England, like out in the country, like they have this rich tradition of folk medicine. So I think, you know, it made sense for people to turn to, to that, I guess, but getting back to tuberculosis and just what an awful disease it was. So it was just really prevalent too. So in the 18 hundreds, I think by 1,801 out of every 250 people in the Eastern United States was dying, like actively dying of TB. And it accounted for 25% of all deaths. I mean, I don't know of any illness that the counts, I mean maybe cancer, but I don't know, 25%. And it remained the leading cause of death throughout the 19th century. Well, into the 20th, I don't remember if I've ever told you this, but my own grandmother, my mom's mom died of TB in 1951. So my mom was nine at the time. And you know, I've never, never known her. I've always felt really close to her, but I think that's one of the reasons why I find the disease just so, so fascinating. And just so
Speaker 1:For it to be around so long before it could be effectively treated. I mean, that's a long time.
Speaker 2:It is a long time. And you know, I don't think certainly the death rates were like in 1951, weren't what they were in the 19th century. But you know, this was also an Appalachia. So I kind of wonder, and this is something I want to find out is like why to somebody in 1951 dive TB, you know? Cause I think it wasn't, it wasn't the same illness, you know, it was the same illness, but it wasn't prevalent. So, um, the, the kind of TB that mercy had, they called it, the galloping consumption. They thought it was actually, I guess, a different form of the disease, but really because it w it seemed to come on so fast that, you know, like she went, she was okay, and then she seemed to go downhill. But in fact it wasn't really a different form of the disease. It was just the fact that she was diagnosed kind of too late, kind of like getting a stage four diagnosis versus a, a stage one if we're talking about cancer nowadays. So, you know, she had probably been sick for quite a long time, considering her mother died about five years before she did.
Speaker 1:I wonder if they dug up men too, during that time, if it was mostly reserved for women,
Speaker 2:That is a great question. And actually one that I wish I knew the answer to if I find that out, because I haven't finished this book yet, but if I find out I will report back and let you know, one of the things that I thought was interesting is they had all kinds of explanations for why a person might get TB. Cause there's always been this tendency to blame the sick, right? It must've been something you did that, you know, that that's what you're sick. So they said, if you've got consumption, it might've been because you were having too much sex or you were indulging in too much rich food and drink. They even said that a passion for dancing could, could maybe lead to consumption. So it was kind of acquainted, um, at least in some circles with this, you were living this immoral lifestyle or you just, weren't a straight and narrow kind of person. So you got sick.
Speaker 1:It sounds like very Baptist or Pentecostal.
Speaker 2:It does like very puritanical. Doesn't it like? And it's interesting that you say that because mercy, um, when she was exude and later buried a few, I guess later that day or a day or so later, she was actually buried in the Baptist church yard. Um, which is where she is today. And the church, the church is still there. Does she have a headstone? She does actually. She does have a headstone. I've seen a picture of it. I haven't gone there, but if we ever do a new England road trip, I think we should go, we should go and take a look at it. And apparently it's, it's been kind of popular. So you remember the old guy I was telling you about Everett Peck, who was interviewed the old farmer back in the eighties. So he told Belle that on Halloween night, he actually goes out and hangs out by her gravestone to protect her from people who would come and, you know, vandalize it and things like that because it is kind of a, it's become kind of a tourist destination bell. Um, he also talks in his book about this other, this other book by Paul Barber, which I just added to my Amazon wishlist, but he wrote this book on vampires and he talks about the sheer terror that prompted people to seek and find vampires as their friends and neighbors were dying in clusters by agencies. They did not understand. So again, like, they're just trying to, they're just trying to solve a problem. Well, I want to talk about just a couple more people that Bella mentioned in his, in his book, cause they have slightly different takes on the story. Um, one is this gentleman named Oliver Stedman, um, who was in his nineties when bill interviewed him around 1981. And he was apparently this treasure trove of Rhode Island lore and you know, local history at first bell tries to get him talking and he doesn't really want to talk about it. He says, it's too gruesome. But finally, you know, he kind of like a good folklorist. He gets them going. And so Steadman says those people back up at Exeter, then you didn't get around the same as we do. Now. It wasn't too much populated up there. So they got away with that. All right. But yeah, they really believe that in later he brings up the word vampire, which is notable because most people did not really use the term vampire. So the people who were practicing this thing of exhuming bodies and looking for blood in the heart and all of that, they didn't call it vampirism. But people from the outside, like people from the cities kind of saw it in that way. And it seems like it was a really shameful thing to, you know, nobody knows for sure how many people were exude, you know, under the belief that they were a vampire, but bell thinks that I think he found one source that said there were at least 10 and maybe a lot more. And like I said, I haven't finished the book. So I don't know if he's going to come up with a total number, but apparently people were kind of ashamed of it. I mean, it's nothing you want to go around announcing like, Hey, I just dug up my, my dead daughter and it turns out she's a vampire, you know? So people kept it pretty hush hush, and it it's really not in the historical record. You know, he looks for other, um, sources trying to find out some of this stuff
Speaker 1:Crazy to think that there could have been a lot more of that going on. It wasn't recorded.
Speaker 2:And that makes me, it really does make me wonder if they were men, if they were children, just how widespread and or was it like only geared towards women? So in an unattributed, um, article called the vampire tradition, bell quotes from this, and it says that until a score of years ago, this guests sleep belief was so firmly held in Western Rhode Island that occasionally the dead was disinterred and the heart and soul associated parts of the cadaver removed to be burned as the dwelling place and the shape of the vampire, because nobody cared to spread the view that such an evil power had appeared in the family, then the least noise made about the performance the better. Um, so again, that kind of goes along with what I said, that it wasn't, wasn't often found in the historical record. Um, but that's the story of mercy Brown, who seems like she may have been the tip of the iceberg. There may have been a lot of other people who sadly suffered the same fate as she did.
Speaker 1:It's just fascinating how there's so many parallels to today and what's going on and you listen to some of it and you're like, Oh my gosh, it's just so crazy. But what's going on today is
Speaker 2:Can you tell me in your family, um, you have tell you have some, um, like some written family history about the 1918 influenza epidemic.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah. I have some that was written by my grandmother because she was an infant at the time. She was 10 months old and her mother and her aunt passed away and her, her grandmother was carrying her on her hip and trying to tend to people as they were dying. And with some kind of miracle, my grandmother being baby, she did not get sick, but in her account of it, people died very, very quickly. Once it onset it, just people seem to die in a matter of days. So it came a point in time where there was hardly enough people to bury everyone.
Speaker 2:It reminds me of what stories I've heard of the black plague, you know, when they would just throw the dead bodies outside of the house. And these carts would just cart them away into this common grave.
Speaker 1:You have people, you know, they had to have refrigerator trucks in New York city because there's no place to put the dead. So there's just so many similar.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So many parallels there was the cemetery and I forget what it's called. I think it's on Staten Island maybe, but I don't know, March, just, you know, kind of when the coronavirus thing really started blowing up, um, I read an article about it. And so people who, um, who could not be buried fast enough were actually buried in kind of in an orderly fashion, but it was still basically a mass grave, but they're, they're buried in such a way that if the families want to, you know, take them in, bury them in their own, um, a different location, I guess there'll be able to find them, but you know, this is like still happening. And I, you know, I guess like when, when you're in times like that, like you just lose the niceties of civilization. You don't have, you don't have the time to have all those funeral rights that we're used to, but yeah, the parallels are really, they're really amazing. Um, and I think it's a reminder that, you know, when we're faced with things like that, we, we all, we all just want to find something that works like we want to live. We want the people we love to live in. That's just human nature.
Speaker 1:So I'm going to tell you the story of black Aggie. Yay. Marianne Hooper Adams was also known as Clover Adams to her friends and she was a wealthy socialite. And she was also the wife of author, Henry Adams, who was in turn also the great grandson of president John Adams and the grandson of president John Quincy Adams Clover was interesting person. She had taken up photography when she was 40 and she became really good in it. She was kind of renowned at that time, but in two short years, she died through suicide by drinking potassium cyanide. It was reported that she struggled with depression and became increasingly depressed after the passing of her father. And this is what they felt led to her taking her life through suicide. And if I remember correctly, which is an interesting link to mercy Brown is that her mom had died earlier. I don't know when, but she had died earlier from tuberculosis. Henry Adams was reportedly grief stricken so much that he later traveled to Japan. And there've been all sorts of reports that after her death, that he wouldn't speak of her name. He wouldn't write about her. This proves not to be true later on. So when he returns to the U S he enlists or commissions, I'm a sculptor named Augustus Saint Golden's to create a statue to Mark her grave and the sculpture, it has no name or date or inscriptions. And that was done at the request of her husband, Henry and a 2000 article in the American art journal. He asked a sculpture to quote design an ideal figure, embodying ideas, similar to the Buddhist concept of Nirvana release from the cycles of life and death, desire and pain and extinction of passions leading to the inner quietude. Her headstone was replaced by this enormous hooded sculpture that looks in androgynous. It's beautiful. And it's frightening at the same time. As I was saying before in popular accounts, Adams never spoke of her death. However, in 2010, when settling an estate, there was a find of 13 letters written by Henry Adams. And he had written a letter to a friend one month after her death. And I'm just going to read a portion of the letter. Even now, I cannot quite get rid of the feeling that Clover must sooner or later come back. And that I better wait for her to decide everything for me. The only advice I have for you is to get all the fun that you can out of life. The only moments of the past that I regret are those when I was not actively happy, that's so poignant. It really is all of these things that happen 150 years ago. They are still the struggles that people face today, the same feelings, the same hardships. Yeah. You
Speaker 2:Can feel everything that he's feeling in that letter.
Speaker 1:So the sculpture remains and rock Creek cemetery in Washington, DC. So now to the story of Felix Agnes, and this is where black Aggie comes in because of Felix's last name. And Felix was born in France in 1839. And he was, um, an extremely interesting person as well. He had been a seaman. He had also been a soldier before immigrating to the U S and he later volunteered as a army Sergeant for the union during the civil war, by the end of the war, he left as a Brigadier general later, he became the publisher of the Baltimore American and launched the evening Baltimore star. And he married any Fulton whose father was also a owner of a Baltimore newspaper with Felix. He had purchased a family plot and drew a Ridge cemetery in Pikesville, Maryland. And he found a dealer that said that he had been given permission to create a duplicate of the other famous statue that Henry Adams had erected for his wife Clover. So when the famous copy was erected, what Agnes didn't know was that the dealer really hadn't been given permission to replicate the original famous statue. Agnes, his mother. She was the first to be buried there. He was buried in 1925 and his wife was also buried there as well. So a lot of folklore started to surround the sculpture that is still associated with it to this day. So some of the rumors include that the eyes of the statue with glow red and Moonlight
Speaker 2:Shiver, by the way, and made it shiver, go up my spine
Speaker 1:Bumped against it in the middle of the night, it would scare you. So I could see all of this came about. And some people said that there was a witch buried underneath the sculpture. Some other things that were said that pregnant women are more than to stay far away because they could miscarry. If you sat in her lap at midnight, you would soon die afterward and reportedly, if you sat in her lap at night, you would soon lose your virginity if you had it.
Speaker 2:So I imagine there were a lot of people wanting to sit in her lap at night.
Speaker 1:It became an attraction for fraternities that were hazing pledges. So they would be required to sit in her lap all night long, all night. And another crazy story is that 1962, a Watchman discovered one of Aggie's arms had been cut off during the night. And the missing arm was later found in the trunk of a sheet metal workers car, along with a saw the
Speaker 2:Very wild who would do that. Why did he do it? Well, he told the judge that black
Speaker 1:Maggie had cut off her own arm in a fit of grief and a given it to them. It makes perfect sense.
Speaker 2:It does. Yeah. What was he? I really want to know what he was smoking or drinking. I want someone who knows
Speaker 1:Why he would do something like that. Apparently the judge didn't believe him and the man went to jail.
Speaker 2:Of course. Yeah. If the judge had believed him that that would be a whole other story.
Speaker 1:I think the frat boys would have done something like this, but it didn't make any mention of who this person was or
Speaker 2:Terrified to solve this. You know, the statute sounds beautiful, but creepy, like, you know, you're in this graveyard in the middle of the night. I mean, I would be scared shitless, you know, let alone to stall off an arm. So according
Speaker 1:Two, a 2012 Washington post article by John Kelly, the Agnes family believing the statute to be approved by st. Galton's believing that he approved the replica. And then later they discovered that the replica wasn't approved, they donated it to the Smithsonian and it just lingered in storage for like 30 years.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like they didn't put it on display or no. And it
Speaker 1:Sounds like one of the reasons why, I guess the family donated to the Smithsonian is that, you know, there was just so much vandalism and things associated with it that, you know, maybe they thought that would be a good resting place for it. I'm not sure, but I, I know I wouldn't want to family grave plot to have people running all over it and desecrating that basically the final interesting fact about this statue is that in 1987, the general services administration moved it to the courtyard of the national courts building. Yeah. Which is on the East side of Lafayette square. And I think it's kind of tucked away. You have to look, it
Speaker 2:You'll find it. I need to sit in his lap.
Speaker 1:Are people still do that? You'd probably be arrested by the secret service. No. So I got all of this information from a article, a couple of articles in the Washington post. One was cloaked in mystery by Paul Richard. There was another called black Aggie from Baltimore to Washington. And it was published in the Washington post by John Kelly was author. And that was in 2012. And then of course you can go online and you can find all these different things.
Speaker 2:So the original black Aggie, I guess, is it still in the it's in the cemetery in Baltimore, right.
Speaker 1:Originally? No. The original sculpture remains in rock Creek, cemetery in Washington, DC, the replica that had been a Druid cemetery in Pikesville. That's the one where all the legends surrounded it. And that's the one that was donated by the family to the Smithsonian.
Speaker 2:It'd be interesting to take a little trip and see both though, wouldn't it. And just see like, you know, how similar look and yeah. I don't know.
Speaker 1:No, I mean, I would assume that it looked like they were similar in size from what I could see and it's a beautiful sculpture, but it's also frightening. I mean, if you saw it at night, it would definitely scary.
Speaker 2:I want to see it. I liked what you said about, um, Henry Adams, you know, he, his influence, he was influenced by Buddhism. And what did he talk about? Like kind of the end of passions so that, you know, going into this quietude of Nirvana, like, that's just such a, cause it sounds like his, you know, Clover, she really suffered, you know, is anyone who knows anything about mental illness would understand, like, you know, all of these strong, strong passions and, you know, and then unhappiness. And just like the piece of that I love, I love the way I love that.
Speaker 1:It's beautifully written. As people say over and over again, you know, enjoy the moment, enjoy your life. Try to be happy as you can be. It's very hard to do right now.
Speaker 2:I think it's a hard, I don't know. I think it's something I struggle with all the time, because I don't know just what does that even mean to be happy? You know, what does that mean to you?
Speaker 1:When I think in relation to the letter is to slow down and try to enjoy yourself and try to enjoy the class.
Speaker 2:No, I think that's key. And I think it's, for me, I think happiness is it's about the small moments and it's about noticing, you know, noticing the small things, like the way the cream looks into your coffee when you stir it up or, you know, talking with a friend or it's those little things.
Speaker 1:I was just going to add that there's a beer named after black Aggie and there's also a band or a singer called black Aggie. So if you go on YouTube, the band or the singer will come, we'll have to get the beers in time. Oh. And the, there was one more thing that was said about the statue is that if you sit in front of it with a mirror and repeated black Aggie, she would scratch her face. And what does it sound like to you? Do you remember another legend that is similar to that?
Speaker 2:I'm forgetting the word, but you, you the name, but you stand in front of the, Oh, don't tell me, don't tell me what is it? Tell me, because I can't think of it.
Speaker 1:Bloody Mary, Mary bloody Mary.
Speaker 2:Okay. It was like, I thought it was three. And you had already said it three times. So I think five times, I'll say it two more times, then
Speaker 1:That was scared. The Holy fuck out of me. You ever do then? Oh yeah. At sleepovers we would do stuff like that all the time.
Speaker 2:Something really bad supposed to happen. If you do that, right? Like you're you die? Or she comes
Speaker 1:For you growing up. What the legend was is that she wouldn't scratch your face. She would come out on the mirror and she would stab you did.
Speaker 2:It's funny that we're talking about bloody Mary, because when I was making my drink tonight, you know, I did the tin Lizzie, but I kind of switched it around and I was like, maybe I should call it the bloody mercy. But I didn't. I felt like it was, it was not very nice to poor mercy Brown, but Brian, I did toast to her. We didn't toast her
Speaker 1:Earlier. We can make a cocktail, call it mercy
Speaker 2:Brown. We could, we could also do a black Aggie cocktail. Um, that reminds me that leans back to everything leads back. Right? It's all circular to Jerry Falwell's black drink. Maybe he was drinking a black Aggie. It all connects. That explains his disgusting behavior. He's disgusting on so many levels. Disgusting. That's pretty cool. Serendipity. I love these stories. They're just, um, and I love all the history cause they're all, you know, I think our motivation was to tell creepy, you know, scary stories. But I think part of what's happening is that we're telling a lot of, you know, like historical details are seeping in and that stuff is just endlessly fascinating. And, and it seems like one of the things we're finding is we're talking about human nature and how it really hasn't. It doesn't really change whether we're talking about grief or we're talking about fear. We're all, we're all the same. Yes. For better, for worse. And sometimes I think it's for us, but I don't want to close out on, on such a negative close out on Henry Adams note, write his note that the only regrets he had were the moments he wasn't happy strive for that. Let's give a toast right now to Clover Clover. She's a woman I would like to have known. I imagine her is really beautiful with like flaming red hair, her just that
Speaker 3:She was full of passions. And sadly, partly that passionate nature that led to her undoing. I like passionate people, even if they bring ruin down upon themselves. So here's the Clover to Clover. I'll drink. Thank you to everyone who listens to the best thing you can do to help us grow is to like review and subscribe on iTunes and better yet tweet about us or post about us on Facebook. Tell your friends if you think that they would like us and have a good night.