Before we begin, a quick content warning: Paranormal Pajama Party is a podcast about scary stories and legends, but there’s nothing scarier than the patriarchy. When discussing tales in which women are often the villains, we'll have to unpack some stories in which women are the victims.
This episode is a doozy. It mentions physical and sexual abuse, including incest; kidnapping; extreme violence, including murder, torture, capital punishment; and brief mentions of suicide. Please be advised.
And speaking of tortured, how's this for an uncomfortable segue? If you're enjoying the show so far – except for the segues – please leave Paranormal Pajama Party a rating and review on your favourite podcast app.
Picture this: it’s a beautiful early September evening and you’re in Rome, strolling down a shining white bridge that spans the Tiber River. It’s gorgeous when it’s lit up at night like this but also a little spooky – at regular intervals along the walls of the bridge, 10 imposing statues of angels pose with intimidating props. One holds whips. One carries a lance. One dangles a crown of thorns.
These are the Instruments of the Passion – objects associated with the final days of Jesus’ life, which were, of course, marked by his torture and eventual execution.
Beneath the angels are Latin inscriptions:
“In aerumna mea dum configitur spina,” says one. “I am twisted in my affliction, whilst the thorn is fastened upon me.”
“Aspicient ad me quem confixerunt,” says another. “They shall look upon me whom they have pierced.”
The late-summer weather may be lovely, but you can’t help but shiver.
Your eyes are drawn to the towering fortress at the end of the bridge, the Castel Sant’Angelo. Originally built as a mausoleum for the Roman emperor Hadrian, the massive building has had many lives. It’s been a castle for popes, and a refuge for them when St Peter’s Basilica was sieged. It’s also been a prison – and the site of papal-ordered executions.
You look up as you pass another angel. They seem to have taken on new, sinister qualities.
Between each angel, the shoulder-high bridge walls are broken up by empty columns with flat tops, the perfect size to set something for display. And of course, that’s how the papal executioners used to use them: as displays.
For centuries, Roman officials used the Ponte Sant’Angelo to exhibit the bodies of executed criminals – a warning to anyone else who might be considering breaking the law.
You steal a quick glance at the other tourists ambling down the bridge, wondering if they know about its grisly past. They seem mostly unbothered, enjoying the evening air, but one particular woman walking away from you in the distance catches your eye. Something about her isn’t quite right. She’s acting strangely, walking with her head down and her arm at her side. Something’s heavy’s swaying gently from her fist, back and forth… back and forth.
You squint, trying to make it out. She turns.
And that’s when you realise what’s swinging from her hand.
It’s her own head.
“Vulnerasti cor meum,” an angel says. “Thou hast ravished my heart.”
[MUSIC]
Hi! I'm Steph, and this is Paranormal Pajama Party, the podcast that brings you classic ghost stories and legends featuring female phantoms and femme fatales. Together, we’ll brush the cobwebs off these terrifying tales to shed some light on their origins and learn what they can tell us about the deep-rooted fears society projects onto women.
Grab your teddy bear tight, because tonight we're going to Italy to meet one of Rome's most famous ghosts and a 16th-century feminist icon, Beatrice Cenci. She woke up like this: headless.
Sorry, that was really dark.
Also, I need to apologise to all of Italy up front. I am going to butcher the names and pronunciation in this episode, and we are all just going to have to be cool about it. All of us. Even the uptight perfectionists among us. (Me. That's… that's me.)
Tonight, our ghost is based on a very real woman, Beatrice Cenci was a 22-year-old noblewoman who was executed alongside every member of her family but one. Oh, and the one she'd murdered – her father.
Beatrice was born in 1577 in the Palazzo Cenci in Rome. You can still visit her home today, although the house has been divided into smaller apartments. From the top floor, you can even get a peek at the Castel Sant'Angelo, where she'd meet her end.
Beatrice was the daughter of Count Francesco Cenci and his first wife, Ersilia, who died early, maybe just to get away from her horrible, horrible husband.
Francesco was known for his violent and vicious temper. I think that's saying something, too, because the artist Caravaggio was a contemporary of theirs, and we'll get more into his whole deal in a minute. But he was regularly getting into brawls and occasionally murdering people and getting banished and then being welcomed back to Rome to paint more nativities.
I'm going to assume that Caravaggio's behaviour wasn't necessarily par for the course at the time. But it seems notable that people remember him mainly as an artist, and not as a multi-murderer, and remember Francesco Cenci mainly as violent and vicious. I think he was probably a pretty awful guy – a garbage human, as my friend Ali would say.
The worst thing about Francesco was that everyone knew he was a garbage human. He kept getting arrested for awful things, including starving servants and appalling violence against women. But he was also rich. And you bet your boots he used that money to play the justice system to his advantage.
One source I found said: “His youth was stormy and was marked not only by amorous adventure with the women of Rome but also by signs of perversion and a strain of violence that found frequent release in street brawling and attacks on servants and tenants. He was often imprisoned, but fines and monetary damages won him freedom. Most of his sons grew up in his image of violence, but he liked them no better for the resemblance. Ironically bearing a surname meaning ‘rags’, Cenci kept his sons in a state of destitution until three of them obtained a papal decree ordering him to provide them with maintenance.”
Yeah. The Pope had to order him to take care of his crappy sons.
Around 1597, the Cenci family left Rome for the family's remote castle, La Petrella. The move was probably partially so Francesco could escape circling creditors, partially to escape some legal trouble with the Catholic Church, and partially to escape some other legal trouble with one of his sons, Giacomo. Francesco thought Giacomo was trying to poison him, but no one believed him. They probably should have.
Anyway, he took Beatrice, his second wife, Lucrezia, and his youngest son, Bernardo, with him.
How's this for some patriarchal bullshit? To escape her awful father. Francesco's oldest daughter, Antonina, had to petition the Pope for permission to either marry without Francesco's consent or to join a convent. The Pope consented to her marriage, and as a sort of screw-you to Francesco, stuck him with a big dowry.
Greedy Francesco was not going to play that game again with his second daughter. And so at La Petrella, he imprisoned Beatrice and her stepmother in a room, bricking up the windows until all that remained were air vents. He beat them for trying to defend Bernardo from his attacks, and for writing to Giacomo in Rome for help. He caught scabies and forced Beatrice to treat it by scraping every inch of his body. And I mean every inch.
There were also rumours of even worse mistreatment for poor Beatrice. Although this was never proven, and has likely been embellished over time as her story is told, her lawyer argued at her eventual trial that Beatrice was either in imminent danger of an incestuous attack by her father or she was already being raped by him.
Fuck Francesco. Seriously.
This whole time Beatrice and Lucrezia had been trying and failing to procure help. The only higher authority than Francesco, unfortunately, was the Pope. And getting a message to him, and then getting him to believe the plight of two mere women over one shitty man was a whole other kettle of spaghetti. The only guaranteed escape for them was death – either their own or Francesco’s.
Meanwhile, back in Rome, Giacomo had been getting more and more fed up with his father's greed. It was ruining his financial future, too. I'd like to think that he was also worried about his siblings and his stepmother, but I think it was mostly the money.
At some point, Beatrice began a secret relationship with a man named Olimpio, one of her father's vassals. I think a vassal is like a bannerman in Game of Thrones. (And yeah, Game of Thrones is where I get all my old-timey knowledge. This story would have gone much differently if Beatrice had had a dragon.)
Eventually, Beatrice took the lead and she, Lucrezia, and Giacomo hatched a plot: Just like Earl in the 1999 classic Dixie Chicks song “Goodbye, Earl”, Francesco had to die.
Just as Francesco suspected, Giacomo was ready to supply his family with poison. Unfortunately, Count Cenci was too suspicious, and they couldn't administer it as planned.
But on the evening of September 8th, 1598, Beatrice and Lucrezia somehow managed to sedate Francesco once he was asleep. Lucrezia unlocked the door to her husband's chambers and let Olimpio and another man, Marzio, inside.
The next morning, locals, including Olimpio's wife, Plautilla, heard screams coming from La Petrella. Francesco Cenci had met the bad end everyone had predicted for him.
It appeared – at first, anyway – that the greedy count had been out on his balcony when the boards beneath his feet had given way. On the balcony, a hole. In the castle's refuse pile several stories below, the man himself, dead of an apparent head injury. A garbage pile for a garbage human.
But the balcony story began to unravel as soon as Francesco's body was being cleaned up for burial. There were three large gashes on Francesco's head, and the fatal blow was so extreme that it had destroyed his right eye. But they weren't the kind of wounds you'd expect from a fall – it was clear that the injuries had been caused by a sharp object of some kind.
The biggest clue that his death was no accident, however? Usually, people who fall through balconies don't leave enormous pools of blood in their beds first. In actuality, Olimpo and Marzio had pinned the drugged Francesco down, then hammered an iron spike into his skull.
After that, things happened quickly. The two assassins had gone on the run, but Marzio was soon apprehended and Olimpio, Beatrice's lover, was killed by a bounty hunter.
Although many, many, many people – just so many people – had very good reasons for wanting to kill Francesco Cenci, his immediate family members, Beatrice, Lucrezia, Giacomo, and even little Bernardo had the greatest motive of all, and were shortly arrested and taken to Castel Sant'Angelo to await papal justice. And by “await papal justice,” I mean, “be subjected to severe torture.”
I don't want to go into details because they're brutal. Suffice it to say that it's incredible that Marzio, who died while being tortured, never once snitched. And it makes perfect sense to me that Giacomo – who did not die while being tortured, but later almost certainly wished that he had – sang like a bird. That whole torture thing is also why some of the details of the murder plot should be taken with a grain of salt. People will say anything if the pincers are hot enough.
Except for Beatrice, that is. Throughout her cruel interrogation, the 22-year-old maintained her innocence, swearing that she had no motive to kill her father. It wasn't until the end of her trial that her lawyer presented the argument – based on conflicting statements from two maids – that she'd been a victim of incest. There is no other mention of this crime throughout the entirety of the trial.
Eventually, the whole Cenci family confessed to the murder, were found guilty, and were sentenced to death.
Their trial was a big deal. One of my sources (an Antiques Roadshow episode, believe it or not) called it “the OJ Simpson trial of its day.” And public opinion was strongly in their favour. Have I mentioned that Francesco was a true garbage person? Friends and supporters appealed to Pope Clement VIII to show, well, clemency.
In later tellings of Beatrice's tale, which we'll get to, narrators accused the pope of wanting to conveniently dispose of the whole family to get his hands on the late Count's estate. But there had also been a recent and worrying uptick in families killing each other in Rome, and Pope Clement was probably concerned that letting the Cencis off the hook would look weak and set a bad precedent.
So unfortunately for the Cencis, Clement did not live up to his name, and on September 10, 1599, about a year to the day after the murder, the four were brought to the Piazza Sant'Angelo, just at the end of the bridge, for the execution of their… well, of their executions.
Luckily for 12-year-old Bernardo, the Pope did decide to let him off the old capital punishment hook. Unluckily for him, he still had to serve as a galley slave for a year and watch his entire family be killed in front of him, along with a huge audience, including bad boy painter Caravaggio.
And it wasn't, like… nice. Giacomo had the worst fate of the group. His head was smashed with a hammer before his body was drawn and quartered. Google it if you have a strong stomach for that kind of thing, I'm not going to explain it. Lucrezia and Beatrice were each beheaded quickly with an axe.
Support for the beautiful Beatrice, who died defending her virtue, was so great that girls laid garlands of flowers on her head before her body was taken away to be buried. And now, every year, on the eve of the anniversary of her death, poor Beatrice walks the Ponte Sant'Angelo Bridge, holding her head in her hand.
So that's brutal as hell, and not in a cool death metal way, just in a really sad and intense way. It's hard to believe that that was someone's life. But Beatrice Cenci has had a long life after her death.
In 1819, Mary Shelley went on vacation to Italy. She'd earned it. The previous year, she'd invented the entire genre of science fiction with the publication of a little book about a mad scientist and a monster. You may have heard of it: Frankenstein?
Anyway, Mary brought her husband along with her, and boy, do I have a bone to pick with Mr Mary Shelley, perhaps better known as Percy. (Fine, he's very famous. I just wanted to talk about his wife first.)
Beatrice's story and the debate surrounding the ethics of her actions were still going strong, even centuries after her execution. The question was, can you be legally guilty and still morally innocent?
After her death, Beatrice became a symbol of moral rectitude and destroyed beauty. And you know who loves to objectify women by turning them into symbols? Male artists, baby. They love that stuff. Can't get enough of it.
Beatrice’s tragic story had a big resurgence in Italy around the same time as the Shelleys’ trip there. Talking about her was all the rage, and so it made perfect sense for some art gallery shyster who wanted to boost their cachet to claim that a beautiful portrait in their collection was none other than Beatrice Cenci herself.
The portrait features a pretty young woman wearing a white turban, staring gently back at the viewer. It's a very compelling painting. That same Antiques Roadshow expert claims it's one of the most famous portraits in the world. I'll put a picture of it on Instagram (the podcast handle is @ParanormalPJParty), and you may recognise it when you see it.
Sometime in the late 18th century, this painting became attributed to a male painter named Guido Reni, and its unknown subject was identified as Beatrice, fresh out of a torture session, or maybe on the way to her execution.
The only problems are that a) Guido Reni wasn't even in Rome until almost a decade after Patridge's death, b) Even if he had been around, no one would have let her sit for a portrait, and c) Yeah, it was painted by a woman: Ginevra Cantofoli, whose contributions to art during the Baroque period have been pretty much forgotten. Yeah, sounds about right.
Incidentally, in a fun callback to episode one of the podcast, the young woman in the portrait is dressed in the style of a sibyl. So she's also a symbol, but perhaps one of women's power.
Again, it's a really beautiful painting, and Percy Shelley couldn't get enough of it. In fact, neither could Charles Dickens, or Nathaniel Hawthorne, or Stendhal. There was Beatrice, the perfect symbol: the beautiful murderess and the innocent sinner.
But a symbol is an object, and I think that's what bugs me about Beatrice's story. She was a real person who really lived through horrible abuse at the hands of her father, received no assistance from the men who society said were there to keep her safe, and then, when she took her future into her own hands and took the only path open to her that wasn't suicide, she was tortured by the male officials of that same society. That happened to a real woman.
Beatrice Cenci’s story has been told and retold, turning into more of a myth than the story of a life and adapted into poems, plays, movies, radio shows…
Even Alfred Nobel – you know, inventor of dynamite, namesake of the Nobel Prize – wrote a play about her. It's only had one stage run ever. His family destroyed most of the copies of it after his death. The director of that single run described it as “a lurid parade of torture, rape and incest that features a drug-induced vision of the Virgin Mary, a conversation with Satan, and ends in a 40-minute torture scene.” So it sounds like Alfred should have stuck to dynamite.
A whole bunch of those retellings focus on the innocent sinner angle, and that's another thing that rubs me the wrong way. Whether innocent is figurative or about her literal virginity, it seems to place a lot of value on Beatrice's virtue.
And even though her father was a true monster and abusive in a whole number of awful ways, the story that's been passed down, and what makes it so salacious, is the incest stuff. Would she lose some of her shininess as a symbol if she [GASP] wasn't a virgin?
Because here's a little something that those adaptations leave out: Beatrice made a will before her death (which, incidentally, also seems to undercut the greedy-Pope-after-the-Cenci-fortune angle. I'm not sure he would have been keen to let Beatrice give her fortune away).
She left a lot of money to charities, but she also made a provision for the ongoing care of a very young boy living with her widowed friend. Why would she do that? Well, because he was her son, probably fathered by Olimpio, one of Francesco's murderers.
So Beatrice wasn't a virgin, and perhaps the reason her family took her away from Rome and hid her in a remote castle had more to do with attitudes towards unwed mothers at the time than getting out from under the pope's thumb to better get away with a crime like incest.
There is, however, one possible example of Beatrice being used as a symbol of the oppressed standing up to their oppressors that I can get behind.
Remember how I said Caravaggio was probably present at her execution? In 1950, the art world discovered a long-lost Caravaggio painting, “Judith Cutting off the Head of Holofernes”.
Judith is a deuterocanonical Bible character, which means she's not included in the Protestant version of the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible. I grew up Protestant, so she didn't make it into my Sunday school lessons, and that's too bad because I definitely would have paid more attention to Judith.
She was a beautiful widow whose homeland was attacked by an Assyrian general, Holofernes. To save her people, she flirted her way into his tent, got him so drunk he passed out, and decapitated him. And that's exactly the moment that Caravaggio chose to capture in his painting.
I'm going to quote from a fabulous essay about Beatrice by Charles Nicholl now:“In the expression of Judith, resolute but disgusted by the sheer messiness of the operation; in the fountains of blood spurting over the bed-sheets; in the scarcely veiled eroticism – her hardened nipple is painted with great specificity beneath the white gown – one might see an entirely different reading of Beatrice Cenci: not sweet and mournful like the young Sybil, but steeled to a necessary, or perhaps merely expedient, act of butchery. There is no provable connection between Caravaggio’s Judith and Beatrice, but it is by no means impossible. Caravaggio was working in Rome at the time of the trial and execution and the painting is broadly datable to this period. Perhaps it contains a vein of comment on the Cenci case; it is rather more likely to do so than the dubious Reni portrait, which caused so many flutters beneath the frock-coats of the literati.”
Caravaggio's Judith is unlike the woman in the white turban in another important way. Rather than sitting quietly as a gentle object of beauty, waiting to be gazed upon, Judith is taking action. She's saving her own life and the lives of the people around her. She's making a choice. And even though it's a repugnant one, it's necessary for her self-preservation.
So I'd like to think that Caravaggio was thinking of Beatrice when he painted Judith. Not at the moment of her beheading, however. But the moment she took control.
[MUSIC]
Once again, it's almost time for lights out at the Paranormal Pajama Party.
To learn more about Beatrice Cenci, her life, and her afterlife, check out the sources linked in the show notes.
Follow @ParanormalPJParty on Instagram to see visuals from today's episodes, including the not-actually-Beatrice portrait and Caravaggio's depiction of Judith. Fingers crossed her nipple gets past the Instagram censors. Hashtag male gaze, am I right?
I'll see you next week for more spine-tingling tales and critical discussion. In the meantime, don't forget: Ghosts have stories. Women have voices. Dare to listen.