Endless Thread - Encore: Angel's Glow

Episode Date: May 26, 2023

In the aftermath of the Civil War's Battle of Shiloh in 1862, something strange happened. Some soldiers' wounds started to glow.  Stranger still, those with glowing wounds seemed to have better rates of survival. In 2001, a teenage Civil War buff embarked on a science project to explain this so-called "Angel's Glow."

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WBUR Podcasts, Boston. What is up, endless thread, homies? Hope you're doing all right. And sliding into this holiday weekend. It is Memorial Day weekend in 2023. And to celebrate that fact, we have a myth. It's an episode from our archives, and it's called Angels Glow. I hope you like it.

We'll be back with you next week. Take a listen. All sorts of legends start on the battlefield. Stories of fighting prowess, of cunning, of heroics. But it's rare that a legend from the battlefield comes from what happened in the battle's aftermath. This legend comes from the aftermath of a battle in the Civil War, the Battle of Shiloh in Tennessee, April of 1862. Yeah, this is one of these great stories of the Civil War

that have kind of passed down through folklore. Shiloh didn't quite fit the Civil War battle stereotype, not according to the experts, like historian Jake Wynn. Now, you think about the Eastern Theater of the Civil War, If you think about Gettysburg or Antietam, many of the major battles in the eastern theater of the conflict in the vicinity of Washington and Richmond are fought on farmland, an open ground.

That in many cases in the Western theater is not going to be the case. Many of those battles are going to be fought in woods. They're going to be fought in dense thickets. They're going to be fought in swamps. And Shiloh is going to be one of those cases. This is about a year into the war. So far, most of the fighting has been on a smaller scale. But Shiloh is different.

Each side in the conflict has amassed huge armies to take control of the so-called Western Theater of the War. The Union Army is more than 60,000 soldiers commanded by Ulysses S. Grant. The Confederate Army is 40,000 under Albert Sidney Johnson. The United States Army's goal, along with the U.S. Navy, is to try to take control of the Mississippi River, which Abraham Lincoln called the Father of Waters. And the Mississippi River in controlling its tributaries was incredibly important because if the U.S. Army and the U.S. Navy could control it, they're going to basically cut the Confederacy into. If you control the Western Theater, you basically get to say when and where the fighting happens.

A huge advantage. And so that's going to set the scene for this particular engagement at Shiloh, which is going to be on a scale way above anything that had preceded it during the Americans of War. This carnage that the horrendous casualty figures and the ferocity of the fighting in these two days in April of 1862 are going to be unlike anything that had been seen before in this war and are going to be, as it turns out, it's going to be one of the deadliest battles of the conflict. The aftermath of the Battle of Shiloh is Grizzly. Thousands of wounded soldiers lying in the swampy woodland in peach orchards on a riverbank. And out of this grisly aftermath comes our legend. It's almost more of a ghost story, because when night falls,

a strange bluish-greenish glow emanates from the darkness. The glow is coming directly out of the soldier's open wounds. Reports of these glowing wounds echo through history, from 1862 all the way to 2001, when one man, a teenager, actually, set out to find answers. This may be a strange question, but like, do you, are you still into ghost stories? Yes, I still collect them, not with the frequency I used to. This is Bill Martin. Bill's 37, lives in Maryland, works for UPS during the day, and writes fiction at night.

Why do you like ghost stories? I like the fact that it can lead you down little forgotten byways of history. Bill is pretty shy, even by his own admission. But a while back, he had a brush with fame, a brush with fame that was connected to one of his obsessions. As a kid, Bill was very interested in the Civil War. Going to see Civil War reenactments with his family. They went to like every Civil War battlefield near where his family. lived in Maryland. Because

when you're a kid, it gets into something that's kind of what you do. You get super into it. You soak up everything you hear, especially if it has a whiff of the paranormal. I believe I originally heard it from a surgeon reenactor who was doing presentations at a

battlefield in Virginia one summer. It was just one of those things where it's like, wow, that's oddly specific and weird. It's one of those stories that everybody has heard from, you know, a friend of a friend. If you're a teenage Civil War buff, you may have heard it from a friend of a friend, but we didn't know about it at all until it was posted on Reddit. Which, admittedly, when things are going right, can feel like a bunch of stories told by friends of friends. But the story stuck with us, too. Not just because a bunch of soldiers had wounds

that glowed in the night. But because the soldiers with those glowing wounds, a lot of them got better. And for 150 years, nobody knew why, until Bill got involved. I'm Amory Sievertson. I'm Ben Brock Johnson, and you're listening to Endless Thread.

The show featuring stories found in the vast ecosystem of online communities called Reddit. We're coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR station. Today's episode, Angels Glow. Emery, I know you and I both have the historical reenactment gene in our own way. Seems like more of a larping gene for you, but yes, I also went to a lot of Civil War battlefields as a kid. I was really into like medieval history and Arthurian legend and I had zero interest in the Civil War.

And these days are really no different, but here's the thing. Civil War history buffs, they get you, man. You get talking with them and their interest is infectious. Exhibit A. Jake. My name is Jake Wynne. I'm the Director of Interpretation at the National Museum of Civil War Medicine. What does that mean, Director of Interpretation? I like to say that I'm in charge of the history. In charge of the history, specifically the medical history.

But if you ask him about a big battle in the Civil War, for instance, the Battle of Shiloh, Jake's got you covered there too. By this point in the war, many of these soldiers have put down the smoothbore muskets that were being used in the war. first year of the conflict, and they're picking up rifled muskets, which have longer range, are more accurate at those longer ranges, and are also more deadly when they strike home. These new guns have bullets that actually flatten out when they strike something, making for more damage. And what that means is that it cracks bone, it fractures bone when it strikes.

It also is moving slow enough that it can carry bits of clothing from the soldier, what he's wearing and take it into the wound. And in some cases, if action was close enough, it could carry that bits of clothing and dirt from one soldier and put it into the soldier behind. So this is going to help to lead to more infection in those wounds in the days that followed a battle. It's a battle that will see over 23,000 casualties.

During the heaviest fighting, thousands of soldiers are shot in just a matter of a few hours. When you look at the map of this battle, the one showing where all the different forces are set up. It's complete chaos. Little blue and red lines of Union and Confederate soldiers look like they've been scattered at random. There's no clear delineation between the two sides. It's like all these different companies and regiments were thrown in a blender and dumped out on the land.

Jake says, along with this battlefield chaos, it's important to know some things about his area of focus, Civil War medicine. So the Civil War is really kind of a watershed moment for American medicine. It's really a transition period. During this time, doctors are starting to figure out how the body works. Surgeons know about anesthesia. They're using chloroform and ether to knock out the wounded. And that's helping them with things like amputations on the battlefield. They can take their time with their work. But only if they can get the wounded to the surgery tent. And at Shiloh, because of the chaos and a shortage of doctors, they can take. can't. The evacuation of the wounded was a mess, a hot mess. They did not do a very good job. Both of these armies, Union and Confederate, did a very poor job of collecting their wounded. Which meant the wounded were left on the battlefield for days, dealing with something doctors didn't understand yet. Infection. And this connects to the bigger story of the Civil War and an estimated 750,000 people who died. Two-thirds of them didn't die from bullets.

So that means that disease is going to be the number one killer of soldiers during the Civil War, and infection after battlefield injuries or really any injuries are going to be very severe, and there's no way for doctors of the era to manage that. Thousands of soldiers torn up by the latest weaponry and stuck in the woods on a massive, confused battle zone that stretches for miles through woods and swamps and peach orchards, no clear path for pulling casualties out of the fighting. This is the backdrop for the beginnings of a legend that would come out of the fog of battle and last for generations. In the cold, dark April night, under the trees, and far from the candlelit tents of

surgeons, some of these soldiers, their bodies vibrating with pain, started to see things. And so these soldiers, some of these wounded soldiers are going to experience these wounds, these ghastly wounds, beginning to take on a bit of a bluish, greenish glow in the dark of night. The glow isn't super bright, but it's visible to the naked eye, and it's all around the actual wound openings of the soldiers stuck out in the cold. I'm trying to put myself in the position of these soldiers, where I'm sure I would be in too much pain to think, wow, this is so cool, my wound is glowing.

But I feel like I would be terrified that something horrible or alien had invaded my body if my wound was glowing. So I'm sure that some of these soldiers probably thought they were losing their minds. And that was an understandable thing, especially when we think of what a gunshot wound would do if you're left untended. And there's no medical attention coming. No pain killers for you. The shock alone is warping the mind. Warping the mind, maybe, but the stories that came off the battlefield of these glowing wounds would be repeated again and again.

And not just because the soldiers had ghostly glowing wounds. The soldiers with those glowing wounds on both sides, they supposedly got better faster than the fighters whose wounds didn't glow, which is apparently how this got the name, Angels Glow. Jake takes great care to point out that in a war that had a lot of record-keeping, This story isn't really in the official record. It's passed along from soldier to soldier. It's retold in newspaper accounts of the battle after it happens.

But there's not a lot of what we might call in journalism triple sourcing. It really is a legend in the truest sense, supposedly historical, but not proven out. Yes, on this whole story, I think it is important to tread lightly. This is one of those examples of where history is really murky, because this story gets passed down. But again, it's hard to go back to the source material to say yes or definitively no on these kinds of stories. Here's the thing, though. Angels Glow stories popped up on multiple battlefields during the Civil War.

There are also accounts of similar things happening to British soldiers in Crimea. Always happening in similar situations. Soldiers caught out on the battlefield in the cold, open wounds, blue-green green, glow. These legends were never explained. Until in 2001, teenage civil war buff Bill Martin started a science project. In fairness, he had help from his mom, who has done a bit of science herself. And like in the laboratory, you'd have to go into a dark room before you could actually see the glow. There's a whole lot of things that had to happen to find it. Finding the glow in a minute. Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry.

But, but we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing or politics. Country music. Hockey. Sex. Of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully make you see the world anew.

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Reach new audiences. Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. Like we said in the beginning, Bill Martin, the teenager who was embarking on a very ambitious science fair project back in 2001, was a really shy kid. Or as his mom, Phyllis, describes it. March to the beat of a different drummer. How so? That's basically it.

He, okay, very early on, we knew that Bill was gifted, but he also has a learning disability. As Phyllis tells it, Bill was a learning disability. As Phyllis tells it, Bill was sometimes hard to motivate. Other times, he excelled beyond expectations, especially with things he got super interested in. The question about Angels Glow was one of those things. Maybe in part because it was such a challenge. But it was a challenge Bill and his science partner project Jonathan

were well prepared to tackle, because Bill's mom had some relevant credentials. Phyllis Martin, I'm retired USDA, Department of Agriculture, I worked in insect biocontrol for 32 years. Insect bio-control? It's controlling insects without the use of chemicals. So what I actually did was control insects using bacteria. I started out in bacillus therangensis, which is, you know, what?

Oh, yeah, Bistillus therangensis, of course, yes. Oh, yes, okay. Basically, it kills gypsy moss. This is wild stuff. So you're basically, you're talking about using bacteria to kill insects. Right. Essentially, I'm trying to cause a pandemic among insects. Amazing.

Why does the government want to do that? Why does the government? Because these bacteria affect only insects and they don't affect people. So essentially, when you have a, in an agriculture system where you have a field that's overrun my insects, so what you want to do is you want to get rid of them quickly. So if they eat a little bit of the bacteria that's on the plants, then they die. I basically just want to hang out with you because this is like the coolest thing. I've heard about in weeks, and I'm very excited to learn.

It is. We are excited to learn because, yes, all of this does have something to do with the Battle of Shiloh and Angels Glow. So one day, Phyllis's son, Bill comes home. He has to do a science project. He's not that psyched about it, but his project partner, Jonathan, is into it. So he can be convinced. You know, it's one of those things that, hey, if I've got to do it, let's make it interesting.

One way to make the science project interesting was to get some help from Phyllis, who had access to a lab and a new bacteria she had just started working with called photorabdis luminescence, which, as you might imagine from the name, is a bacteria that glows. Really, the bacteria creates the glowing stuff just by living its life, doing its thing. It's one of the byproducts of the bacteria's existence. Photo-rabdis luminescence is a bacteria that is associated with nematotes. So it doesn't really live in soil per se, but it lives in a nematode in the soil. And that's like a nematode, for lack of a better description, is a worm.

A little, yeah, a little worm. Emery, how much do you know about nematodes? About as much as could fit on a nematode, probably. Same until just recently, which is funny because one thing I learned, nematodes, if we are talking population biggest animal on the planet, more nematodes than any other multi-celled organism on Earth. For every human, there are 60 billion nematodes. And Phyllis was working on this bacteria that lived inside of nematode worms and had bioluminescence, similar to other animals, certain kinds of deep sea creatures, plankton, and...

Fireflies. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Has glowing bacteria been around us for a long time and we just haven't noticed it? Or is this really a very special thing? No, they've been around for a long time. You'd have to be around, you know, where they are.

Like the photorabdis bacteria are associated with nematodes, and some of the nematodes are associated with plant pathogens. So one day, Phyllis comes home, and she's talking about her work with this nematode inhabiting glowing bacteria. And Bill perks up. We're talking about bacteria at the dinner table, and he would, you know, he would say, Mom, what about this glowing wounds? You know, what about that?

What do you, what could cause that? His dad is a scientist too, so, you know, we talk about these things at the dinner table. Phyllis, Bill, and Bill's science project partner, Jonathan, all thought it could have to do with photorabst luminescence, but they had to try and prove it. And that was going to be no small task. First of all, they were trying to answer a question about something that had happened a century and a half ago. They also couldn't get soil from the battlefield to look for the right kinds of nematodes

because there were restrictions about taking soil across state lines. The official Shiloh Battlefield people were like, eh, you give one kid some battlefield soil, you got to give every kid some battlefield soil. So instead, the kids said about re-quitle. creating the right conditions in Phyllis's lab. This was something her lab did for a lot of kids working on science projects. Bill and his partner Jonathan's first discovery, photorabdis luminescence doesn't grow at human body temperature,

which not a great sign. But then... They went and looked at what happened at Shiloh. Okay, what made Shiloh different? Well, Shiloh was in the spring. It was cool. It was wet. aha, people were laying on the field for a long period of time.

So they took an infrared thermometer and went outside and, you know, pulled up their pants and took a look at what the temperature on their exposed limbs were. This has got to be the weirdest Civil War reenactment that has ever happened. And so they found out that extremities, okay, it's not. not in the torso. The torso, even if you exposed your torso, it really didn't cool down very, very quickly. But, you know, legs and arms, you know, if you expose them to, you know, cool outside temperatures, would definitely be a temperature that the bacteria could grow on. Wow.

All right. There was no way we could really conclusively prove it, but it's like, okay, we need to show that it was possible. Nematodes don't like body heat, but if you go out in the spring, does your extremities get down to a temperature where they can live for a little bit? And it's like everything is working. So nematodes like the cold. Remember what else, Phyllis told us nematodes like? Plants. One of the plants that these nematodes affect are peaches.

And Shiloh had a peach orchard, which had very heavy fighting. The Shiloh Battleground was covered in. peach trees. More validation that Bill and his partner, Jonathan, were really onto something here. Back to the lab. So now we got the bacteria growing. So, okay, but can these bacteria, you know,

prevent organisms that cause infection from growing? So they looked at the organisms that would cause infections in Civil War wounds. Okay. Basically gangrene. Okay. I said, you're not working with gangrene. But bacillus, you know, is a sporeformer like clustridium.

Okay, sure, sure, obviously. We can use it as a safe, as a surrogate for that. Okay. Jonathan and Bill found that photorabdisluminousinscence did inhibit infection from bad kinds of bacteria. They also found hints that its byproducts might create antibiotics. So why might the bacteria have gathered around soldiers' wounds? They found a possible explanation for this, too. Photo-Rabdis luminescence was the best at killing off other bacteria when it was around blood,

maybe drawing some strength from the blood itself. Wow, this is vampire, glowing vampire bacteria. Only vampire bacteria, well, yeah. Bill says he never expected their crazy hypothesis to bear out. You have a specific, like, checklist of all the criteria it has to meet, and you're running down, through it and just be like, oh, it's going to fail at some point, and then it just never did. So quick recap, Bill and Jonathan, with Phyllis's lab lending and guidance, proved that a luminescent bacteria commonly found in tiny worms that are themselves commonly found in peach orchards,

like the ones at Chiloh, could live on the surface of skin. As long as it was cold enough, it can also fight infection, especially when it's close to blood, and maybe, just maybe, could play a role in creating antibiotics. All of this for a high school science project. All thanks to Bill hearing a battlefield legend and connecting the details to his mom's work at the USDA. He must have been pumped, like he couldn't have dreamed up a better science fair project. He could not. Bill, Jonathan, and Phyllis had something.

Pretty quickly, they were flown to Pittsburgh by Siemens for a science competition, which they won. Then they went on to be a winning team at the Intel Science Fair, which if you're on the science fair circuit, it's one of the big ones. Jonathan presented the lab work, Bill dressed up as a civil war medic, they crushed it. Bill ended up having to repeat his senior year of high school since the project took up so much time.

But it was worth it. You can find references to Angels Glow and Bill and Jonathan's project all over the internet. In the same way that the legend was passed down, a story told over and over. It echoes in posts across Reddit, popping up again and again, the military subreddit. Today I learned, the Civil War subreddit.

And it's also come full circle into the remarks of the kinds of civil war experts who first told Bill about Angels Glow. Except this time, people like Jake at the National Museum of Civil War Medicine are telling Bill's legend. There's this fantastic study that is done by two high sports, students who heard this story, this story from the Battle of Shiloh in 2001, and they had resources available to them. One of their mothers worked for the federal government and studied... One of the interesting things about this story is how it's almost a story about folding time.

It took modern-day science to fully discover the thing that happened, but it never would have been discovered in the first place if it had happened in modern day. Surgeons in the Civil War didn't know about bacteria and disease. If they did, soldiers might have wrapped their open wounds. And at the same time, today, we might never have observed bacteria like this. For one thing, we live in a world full of light pollution. My memory is that to even see the glow for ourselves, we were like sitting in a closet for 10 minutes waiting for us,

just to see it with the door closed and like total blackness. The soldiers at the Battle of Shiloh experienced something they couldn't explain. And here we are, explaining something will likely never experience. So in that sense, maybe the legend of Angels Glow lives on. We'll never know for sure if we have the answer. But there's also a potential evolution for this legend. According to Bill and Phyllis, a lot of antibiotics aren't as effective as they used to be, because bacteria are becoming resistant to them.

So could bacteria itself, like photoraptist luminescence, be part of an alternative? We don't really know. Yet. Maybe someday, someone will do a science project. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR, Boston's NPR station, in partnership with Reddit. Josh Swartz is our producer, who thinks bioluminescence is like... Design porn. For the natural world.

Mix and sound design this week by Matt Reed. and when he heard about the glowing wounds, the peach orchard, the nematodes, the cold temperatures, he just threw up his hands and said, Never tell me the odds. Michael Pope is our advisor at Reddit, who once had an opportunity to do a science fair project, but was just like, fuck you, I'm a toddler. Our editor on this episode was Catherine Brewer, and a big shout out to Nill House from the Ask Historian subreddit. Nailhouse, thank you for sharing your expertise with us.

On Reddit, we are endless underscore thread. If you want to contribute art for an upcoming episode or give us a story tip so we can tell it like we did today, hit us up there. My co-host and producer is Amory Sieverton. My co-host and senior producer is Ben Brock Johnson. We'll let ourselves out.